The United Nations (UN) has been portrayed in various works of popular culture, involving the organization, its bodies and agencies, its headquarters, peacekeeping activities, and UN workers. Modern works often portray it in a bureaucratic and sometimes ineffective light.
Films
Early years: 1945–1960
Hollywood established an early relationship with the UN during the latter's inception. Meeting in San Francisco in 1945 at the United Nations Conference on International Organization, several prominent Hollywood personalities, such as Darryl F. Zanuck, lobbied the conference for "world freedom of the screen, along with radio and the press". In February 1946, the United Nations General Assembly voted to establish the United Nations Department of Public Information and its Film Division, on the grounds that the UN could not achieve its goals "unless the peoples of the world are fully informed of its aims and activities". The Film Division sought to stimulate the production of films involving the UN at "little or no cost to the organization" by giving Hollywood and European film centers ideas, research materials, and scripts for potential movies.Sluga 2020, p. 146.
The early connection between the world of cinema and the UN gave rise to several films where the organization was integral to the plot. In Mister 880 (1950), Dorothy McGuire portrayed a UN interpreter at Lake Success, the temporary first home of the UN. According to the producer, her role had been switched to the one of a UN interpreter "to show the inner workings of the United Nations General Assembly".Sluga 2020, p. 147. In George Pal's disaster film When Worlds Collide (1951), an emergency meeting of the UN is portrayed as the world faces destruction. This was possibly the result of UN "Hollywood ambassador" Mogens Skot-Hansen urging the producer to feature the UN convening to address the disaster, as it would have done in the real world. In Andrew Marton's Storm Over Tibet (1952), the protagonist leads a UNESCO expedition to the Himalayas to return a precious religious artifact to its rightful owners. In The Glass Wall (1953), refugee Peter Kuban seeks to avoid deportation by looking for the only person who can prove the legality of his situation. The film prominently features the aesthetic of the newly constructed glass UN building, where the film culminates, and where Kuban pleads his case and the ones of all refugees in front of an empty auditorium, with the glass wall of the UN building symbolizing both the hope and the obstacle to the protagonist's freedom. In Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), antagonists Lucy and Edward Drayton claim to be UN workers while in reality being agents of an Eastern European country.Sluga 2020, p. 148.
The UN headquarters and organization were also prominently featured Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959). In the film, protagonist Roger O. Thornhill travels to the UN building to meet with a UN official named Townsend who works for the fictional "UNIPO". Townsend is assassinated on UN premises and Thornhill is framed for the murder, setting the film in motion. Hitchcock was not allowed to film inside the UN building, and therefore the scene where Thornhill is seen traversing the lobby is a model shot in the upper part and a studio shot in the lower part. Some sources claim he was not allowed to film outside the UN building either, and that the scene featuring Cary Grant approaching the building was shot using cameras hidden in a van parked in the vicinity; however, according to assistant director Herbert Coleman, UN security interrupted the filming from the van, and so the scene outside the UN was secretly filmed from a building on the opposite side of the road. At any rate, the advent of the Cold War and rising skepticism against the UN by the United States and the Soviet Union help explain why United Nations secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld denied permission to film on UN premises, preferring not to tie the increasingly gridlocked institution to a murder plot.
Pushback, gridlock, and Cold War: 1960–1991
Already by the late 1950s, the Cold War and the Red Scare had left their mark on the popular representation of the United Nations in film, severely curbing it. Hollywood actress Myrna Loy, who helped found the US chapter of the UNESCO national association in 1948 and was a key internationalist figure in Hollywood circles, had to publicly protest in 1955 due to the difficulty of obtaining a passport, which she attributed to anti-UN sentiment and the accusation of being a communist fellow traveler.Sluga 2020, pp. 149–150
The depiction of the UN in the 1960s significantly impacted the United Nations television film series. Set to be aired to an American audience, the series comprised four television films which portrayed the United Nations in a positive light and where the UN was at the center of the plot: Carol for Another Christmas (1964), Who Has Seen the Wind? (1965), Once Upon a Tractor (1965), and The Poppy Is Also a Flower (1966). Several months after the initial announcement of the series, thousands of protest letters from members of the right-wing John Birch Society flooded Xerox, the sponsor of the series, accusing the UN of being a communist front. CBS declined to participate, citing that it would violate their policy of not airing "propaganda for a particular viewpoint", and NBC imposed strict oversight on the content and postponed the release date, ultimately only leaving ABC to air the series in the United States. All four films received mixed reviews; The Poppy Is Also a Flower won one Emmy Award for best supporting actor, and the film was released to theaters in Europe. The spy story follows UN narcotics agents on a worldwide hunt for a heroin distributor.
Some superhero films of this period also feature the United Nations. In Batman (1966), the Joker, the Riddler, Penguin, and Catwoman kidnap the entirety of the United Nations Security Council. In Destroy All Monsters (1968), Godzilla, while being mind-controlled by the Kilaaks, swam to New York City and unleashed his atomic breath at the United Nations Headquarters. In Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987), starring Christopher Reeve, Superman enters the United Nations to make a speech denouncing nuclear weapons as a threat to peace and declaring his desire to eliminate them. The assembly subsequently erupts in applause. In a review, The Christian Science Monitor belittled the speech at the United Nations by comparing it to superheroes wanting media attention.
The influential 1970s and 1980s Christian apocalyptic horror film series A Thief in the Night, beginning with the 1973 film of the same name, prominently features the United Nations. After Jesus Christ raptures all born-again Christians, the UN—a tool of the Antichrist—institutes the United Nations Imperium of Total Emergency (UNITE). UNITE forces everyone left behind, including new Christians, to take the mark of the beast or be executed. Fears of globalism and big government are prominent themes, with "the Antichrist...literally a branch of the United Nations claiming control over the entire world." Among the Christian right, particularly the Protestant right, globalism is an umbrella term which includes perceived secular aspects such as environmentalism, feminism, and socialism; it is believed to underlie the expansion of the New World Order—a prophesied enemy attempting to thwart Christianity – through organizations such as the UN, as well as the European Union and World Trade Organization.
Post-Cold War: 1991–present
The end of the Cold War was accompanied by unprecedented activity from the United Nations, ranging from reinvigorated Security Council activity to post-conflict peacebuilding.
The 2000s, in particular, saw a multiplication of films depicting the UN. Of note is the first film ever allowed to film on UN grounds, Sydney Pollack's political thriller The Interpreter (2005). The film notably casts a UN interpreter, played by Nicole Kidman, who becomes entangled in a murder plot of an African leader set to deliver a speech at the United Nations. Pollack convinced UN secretary-general Kofi Annan to allow filming to happen on weekends after a 30-minute meeting, with Annan even contributing to the script. The United Nations setting earned broadly positive reviews: Rolling Stone noted that "it's the United Nations building, pushing sixty, that turns on the charisma in its film debut — a smashing one — in The Interpreter", with Variety similarly describing the UN setting as "a spectacle to behold". Two reviews from The New York Times were more critical of the film, with A.O. Scott deploring that ethnic conflicts and geopolitical alliances were not touched upon by the film, preferring instead to limit the exposition of the UN to its architecture, and with Caryn James questioning why the UN was needed in the first place, as it adds "little except self-importance" to the film, and further pointing to "a bizarre lack of UN security". Other reviewers echoed "the lack of disappointingly slim grasp of UN life", and the fact that the movie was "so lofty as if it were made to be screened at the United Nations". The representation of the UN in the Interpreter also divides academics: French law professor Serge Sur believes that one of the facets of the UN proposed by the film is "the UN's indifference towards dictatorships", whereas for the Belgian international law professor Anne Lagerwall, the film "embodies a faith in international institutions and particularly in the United Nations, which is certainly that of Sydney Pollack".
Not all movies were granted the same access, however. Sacha Baron Cohen, producer and protagonist of the political satire The Dictator (2012), for example, declared in an interview that the UN had prevented him from filming on UN premises. According to the UN, however, a scene outside the UN featuring protestors was facilitated by the organization.
The role of the UN in the Rwandan genocide and Bosnian genocide, where the UN deployed "blue helmets" but failed to prevent the violence, has also been portrayed in several films of the 2000s. In the Oscar-winning Bosnian film No Man's Land (2001), UN peacekeepers and UN officials serve as major plot drivers, which the New York Times called a "savage portrait of nervous bureaucratic wheeling and dealing that has little regard for the lives being gambled". UN peacekeepers are also featured in the Academy-nominated Hotel Rwanda (2004), where their force withdraws in the face of escalating violence, although the UN commander's representation has been criticized as historically inaccurate. The British film Shooting Dogs (2005) similarly denounces the abandonment of Tutsi refugees by the ill-equipped, outnumbered UN peacekeepers. The Canadian war drama Shake Hands with the Devil (2007) depicts the genocide from the perspective of blue helmet Roméo Dallaire, head of the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda. According to one reviewer, the film contrasts the impotence of Dallaire with the unused potential that the UN had in affecting the genocide and saving lives, among other actors. More recently, the Bosnian film Quo Vadis, Aida? (2020) sheds light on the trauma of a Bosnian UN translator during the Srebrenica massacre, which, according to The Intercept, portrays the "cowardice of UN commanders", among other themes.
UN field workers and peacekeepers have also increasingly become the protagonists of their own films beyond genocide. Netflix released The Siege of Jadotville (2016), a war film that depicts the Siege of Jadotville during the Congo Crisis from the perspective of an Irish peacekeeping unit engaged there. The biopic Sergio (2020), also from Netflix, follows the life of United Nations humanitarian Sérgio Vieira de Mello in East Timor and Iraq.