 Introduction: Hollywood and Cultural Imperialism
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Welcome to Disneyland
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The United States has remained the dominant influence on world eulture throughout the century, and this position has hardly been challenged. It has been by far the largest exporter of eultural commodities - larger than the rest of the world combined.
Every national cinema has defined itself in relation to Hollywood, even when that self-definition has been a conscious rejection of American commercial practice, for the United States has exported not only the products of its popular culture, but its forms, too.
Japanese movies in the 1930s were composed and edited in accordance with Hollywood conventions; Brazilian or Nigerian advertisements, soap operas and game shows have been written to the formats of American practice, with which their audiences were already familiar.
The content might take on a local coloring, but the shape of the media package changed far less from country to country, and the overwhelming source for the model has been the United States. In large part the dominance of American popular culture throughout the world is simply a manifestation of raw economic power. But it also reflects decisions made within the importing countries.
Few governments have regarded culture as an economic comınodity. By comparison with trade in raw materials or manufactured goods, the global trade in culturalcomınodities is not especially large, although satellite and computer technology have produced dramatic increases in its volurne in the 1980s. !ts relatively smail economic importance is one reason why few Third World countries have made a priority of controlling American imports, or develaping national culture industries based on models other than imitations of American practice.
But, as the American film industry has argued almost from its infancy, cultural products play a crucial role in opening export markets for other goods and the way of life they promote. On the other hand the very existence of American dominated popular culture has been responsible for the development of national styles in fashion or media, as govemments try to resist the encroachment of a homogenized "world" culture, whether it emanates from New York, Hollywood, Paris or Tokyo.
In Europe, popular culture has been derided not only as "feminine" and as the inferior cultural goods of the working class, but alsa as "American". The word has implied an excessively democratic society where classes do not know their proper place in a hierarchy of social order. European experience has made clear that the crucial difference between high culture art and popular culture is that high culture is saId to a smail elite audience.
European film and television reflect specifically middle-class values and are directed much more firmly toward an elite audience than the products of Hollywood and the networks. The middle classes, used to paying higher prices for their cultural commodities, have always seen their purchases as qualitatively superior to those available to the masses.
This is ultimately not an argument about esthetic quality, but a demonstratian of real cultural, social, and finaily economic power. Since the cultural elite in European societies has corresponded closely to the economic and political elite, it has been able to dictate the terrns of the debate. This has, for example, been a powerful influence on British broadeasting, whose patrons insist, against ail evidence except cultural prejudice, that it provides the "least worst television in the world".
The adaptations and documentaries which give British television its envied reputation for "quality" reproduce the "worthiest" remnants of British culture. As in Gerrnany, television has absorbed writing and directorial talent which might have contributed to a cinematic renaissance. Innovation has been contained within the hierarchies of television. Elsewhere in Europe the forrnal experimentation of the avant-garde and international Art Cinema has been rendered harmless by being kept within a cultural ghetto of smail metropolitan theaters for a middle-class elite, where its power to disrupt or subvert has been reduced to an untroublesome minimum.
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Hollywood dominance
Fast growing Hollywood of 1920 it made sound commercial sense to protect their interests.
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On occasion, as in the Cinema Nova mavement in the 1960s in Brazil, cultural resistance has been linked to opposition to the political and economic dominance of the United States as well as to its cultural influence. Cinema Nova used the history, mythology and imagery of traditional Brazilian culture as the basis on which to revive a national culture free of North American domination. Much Third-World cinema has derived its impetus from an opposition to the cultural colonialism of Westem countries, which has often dominated distribution and thus hindered or prevented the emergence of an indigenous film industry.
The most enduring forrns of cultural nationalism have been those able to integrate imitations of American media forrns with a culturally specific, preferably traditional content: the martial arts films of Hong Kong; Japanese "home dramas"; or, largest and perhaps most spectacularly successful of all, the Indian cinema.
Curiously, the American film industry is required to be most sensitiye to the demands of audiences outside its own cultural boundaries, since it is dependent on foreign sales for more than half its income. This heavy dependence on foreign markets is one explanation for the continuing ability of American popular cultural forms to absorb and assimilate almost anything.
Polish filmmaker Andrej Wajda caught the other basic ingredient of their success: "The paradox is that because the American cinema is so commercial, because the pressure of money is so strong, everything in a film has to be the very best. That means the most expensive, but it alsa means the most authentic, the most honest. No half measures, everything on the edge of excess.... The amount the Americans are prepared to spend on making their films is in a way a sign of resped for the audience."
Essentially the argument has changed little in substance, only in scale, from the complaints against Hollywood's influence in the 1920s. As the mass audience for the electromic media began to decline and fragment in the West, broadcasting became increasingly internationalized through coproduetion arrangements, seeking its audience in many countries simply to pay the bills.
The media have been important forces in maintaining Western influence and interests in Third World countries after independence from colonial rule: into the 1980s the majority of joumalistic and technical staff continued to be trained by American or European agencies, and, partly as a result, to adopt Western values in regard to media content Equipment and programs have enabled broadcasting services to be established, but have inhibited local production because of its high cost by comparision to American programıning of much more ostentatious production qualities.
The revolutions in information technology in the 1980s have made the media more immediate - when American marines in Beirut were killed by a bomb in 1983, a CBS producer proudly exclaimed, "this week we have brought grief into American homes - fast" The escalating cost of satellites and other hardware has concentrated ownership of the means of media distribution in fewer and fewer hands.
This phenomenon is not limited to single media or separate countries: we all now live in the "Global Village" which McLuhan predicted in 1964. It is not like a real village: we can see and enjoy the camival colors of our different cultures, but only a very few can speak, and the rest must merely listen. The power of the media - political, economic, cultural - now belongs to a handful of multinational corporations, who colonize the rest of the world, sometimes benignly, sometimes not. Throughout the century, Western popular culture has caused intense social disruption in the Third World, inculcating new patterns of behavior, new desires and new dissatisfactions. The pervasiveness of the electronic media increases the efficiency of this process.
Many analysts argue that only the pursuit of international mass audiences can sustain the investrnent in both equipment and programıning, and envisage with dread a diet of Least Objectionable Programming, sport, music videos, news and reruns. What is undoubtedly dear is that a central feature of the Third Age of Broadcasting will be that, however increased the range of choice available to consumers may be, fewer organizations will own the means of distribution and determine what is offered to consumers.
For most people in the industria!ized countries, the consumption of media has come to occupy more time than any other activity except sleeping and working - on average six hours per day in the United States, four hours in Europe.
Home video recording, video games, remote-control television, cable and home computers have increased the amount of media available for consumption in the 1980s exponentially. But, contrary to the claim of a cable television company to provide "over 70 hours a day" of programming, the proliferation of media sources did not increase viewing times significantly.
Time spent in front of a home computer screen tends to be at the expense of television time - saturation was reached in the mid-1970s. So far the fantasies of futurologists who predicted the electronic home, where people would shop, bank and work through interactive video, or the paperless office where all data would be computerized, have remained fantasies, like earlier overenthusiastic predictions of the changes new communications technologies would bring. As one television executive put it, "I have seen the future. And it's still in the future."
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Introduction
