In 2003, a US-led coalition invaded Iraq, and much of the American public perceived the act not as aggression but as liberation. This article asks which semantic apparatus made such a meaning possible. The dominant answer, that media transmit state ideology, is accurate but insufficient, because it presupposes a political reality that exists in advance and that cinema merely translates or legitimizes. The article challenges this presupposition by treating cinema as a Foucauldian "regime of truth": an apparatus that does not simply represent social reality but participates in producing it, together with the political legitimacy attached to it. Its central question is which discursive mechanisms Hollywood cinema used between 1990 and 2005 to construct "the Other" and to consolidate modern power.



The period is analytically exceptional because two ruptures in the international order bracket it. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 removed the old Other and left the "we" without a defining adversary. The attacks of September 11, 2001 then accelerated the construction of a new one. In between, Hollywood searched for an enemy. The article argues that the rapid acceptance of the post-2001 Other, reflected in very high initial support for war in Afghanistan, indicates that the cognitive ground for recognizing this figure had already been prepared.



The literature falls into three approaches. The mirror approach, rooted in positivist epistemology, treats cinema as a reflection of an independent reality and cannot explain why the reflection matters. The ideological approach, developed through Althusser, Baudry, Mulvey and Žižek, treats cinema as an apparatus reproducing ideology, yet still assigns it a secondary position as a carrier of meanings originating elsewhere. The postcolonial approach, inspired by Said, shows that the Other is made rather than discovered, but often stays at the level of representation instead of asking how the category itself is constituted. The article's contribution lies in the gap between reproduction and construction.



To fill this gap, the study develops a three-layer framework. Foucault's regime of truth supplies the ontological level, . Teun van Dijk's ideological square, with its strategies of emphasizing positive traits of "us," emphasizing negative traits of "them," mitigating negative traits of "us," and mitigating positive traits of "them," supplies the micro-analytic tool. Gramsci's cultural hegemony supplies the political logic, explaining why the construction is effective: it works through consent rather than coercion.



the study applies van Dijk's critical discourse analysis to two complementary cases: the Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–2003) and Black Hawk Down (2001). They were selected for mass reach, explicit engagement with the discourse of the enemy and intervention, and release around September 11, and they differ sharply in genre and claim to reference. Analysis proceeded through four stages: identifying key sequences in which at least three of the four ideological strategies operate together; describing visual, auditory and narrative signs; interpreting the preferred mental models they propose; and explaining these historically and politically. The study analyzes the models texts propose, not audience reception.



The findings identify two principal mechanisms. The first, essentialist othering, appears in the trilogy. Through a moral geography placing goodness in the west and evil in the east, the Council of Elrond sequence, light-dark contrasts, ominous choral music, and faceless orcs, the Other is defined as inherently threatening and denied identity, motive and choice. When the Other has no face, killing it carries no moral cost and appears necessary. The second mechanism, the naturalization of violence, appears in Black Hawk Down, whose claim to simply show what happened becomes a tool of the regime of truth. Handheld cameras, close sound and rapid editing simulate the soldiers' bodily experience, so the logic of "us" and "them" is activated affectively before it is processed rationally. Eighteen American soldiers receive names, histories and pain, while the far more numerous Somali dead remain an anonymous mass. The film never argues for intervention; it makes intervention common sense.



the mechanisms form a logical chain: because the Other is inherently dangerous, military intervention is necessary and moral. The main argument is that this chain created an epistemic condition that made the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq conceivable before they began. Cinema thus acted less as a justifier after the fact than as an enabler beforehand. If cinema merely legitimized war, counter-justifications afterward would suffice; if it contributes to a regime of truth, critical attention must turn to ordinary cultural consumption before political events occur, and critique must move from correcting content to examining the formal structures that make what is said appear self-evident.



Audiences are diverse, and many read these films resistantly, as Hall's encoding/decoding model anticipates. Hollywood is also a commercial industry, so ideology alone cannot fully explain the pattern. Finally, two films alone cannot represent all of Hollywood. Future research could test whether similar mechanisms operate in non-Hollywood cinemas and on streaming platforms.