Politics & Power Quote by Edward Zwick

National myths are less about history than about casting: who gets to be the hero, who’s stuck as scenery, who isn’t allowed on screen at all. When director Edward Zwick talks about “a segment of the American population” excluded from the myth, he’s naming a problem Hollywood knows intimately and often helps maintain. The phrasing is deliberately institutional and bloodless; it avoids saying which group, which is part of the point. Exclusion becomes a systemic habit, not a single villain’s choice. Myth-making is framed as an editorial process with consequences.

The word “myth” does double work. It admits that the story America tells itself is curated, simplifying, sometimes self-congratulatory. But it also concedes myth’s power: people don’t mobilize around footnotes; they mobilize around narratives. Zwick’s intent isn’t just representational fairness in a moral sense. It’s an argument for narrative repair: if national identity is built on selective memory, then broadening the cast changes what the country imagines it can be.

“Redressed” is the key tell. It’s not “recognized” or “included,” but a term that suggests wrong, injury, restitution. That aligns with a late-20th/early-21st century cultural moment when film and TV became battlegrounds for historical visibility: whose wars, labor, families, and losses count as American. Coming from a director associated with prestige historical drama, the subtext is also self-indictment. The industry that sells the myth is being asked to rewrite it, even if that means undermining its own most profitable traditions.