For one the entire 70s movie with archetypical corrupt military figures thing would probably not occur
To a certain extent. However the seventies paranoia genre was itself partly a continuation of post-McCarthyite paranoia, a pop cultural form which had seen
Dr Strangelove,
Fail Safe,
The Manchurian Candidate and
Seven Days In May all released before most Americans had even heard of Vietnam. Of course those movies tended to pull their punches compared to the movies that were made a decade later, but there was certainly a real anxiety creeping to the surface in Hollywood in the early sixties.
The assassination of JFK was also a major factor in this popular anxiety that Hollywood was keen to explore/exploit.
(Also, I wonder if it's even possible that
The Quiet American and
The Ugly American would have still been made in a TL where the US was never going to escalate in Vietnam?)
Mutually Assured Destruction is still going to exist in this world, and I assume there is still a broad Western economic deterioration in the seventies when OPEC flexes its muscles. Plus the Civil Rights movement and the conservative backlash to it will still take place. There's also urban decay, White Flight, Roe v. Wade. In general, if it looks like America is in decline there'll still be dissent bubbling to the surface in American pop culture, it's just it won't include a 'Vietnam Syndrome'.
For example, my favourite movie of all time,
Godfather II, with it's themes of the corruption of the American dream, there's no reason it can't be made in a Vietnamless world. I take it for granted that Coppola and Puzo were concerned by this stuff going back to before Vietnam.
that would definitely be more trust and faith placed in authority figures like the movies you see after 2001.
I don't follow. Are you talking about pre-Iraq invasion or post-Iraq invasion?
As there has certainly been an upsurge in anti-war or anti-security-state productions at the big budget level since 2003. I just don't see how all this would've happened if Operation Iraqi Freedom hadn't been undertaken...