The French have found a particularly vocal ally in Canada, which has long been terrified of being swamped by its closest neighbor. Ninety-six percent of the films shown on Canadian screens are foreign ones, primarily American. Four of five magazines sold at newsstands and six of every ten books sold are foreign ones, again primarily American. The American influence is so pervasive that, in a poll taken in 1998, a quarter of Canadians identified “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” as a Canadian constitutional slogan. Canada has plenty of protectionist measures on its books. Television stations must offer 60 percent Canadian content, radio stations must devote at least 35 percent of their playlists to Canadian music (whatever that is), and the Heritage Ministry is pushing for a measure that would force cinemas to show a fixed share of Canadian films.
In 1998, Canada organized an international meeting in Ottawa to discuss the problem of American cultural dominance. Representatives from nineteen countries attended, including Britain, Mexico, and several other close allies of America; the United States was pointedly excluded from the meeting. The delegates discussed ways to exempt cultural goods from international treaties aimed at lowering trade barriers. They argued that things such as films, books, and magazines were too important to be governed by the same rules as the trade in turnips.
Less Than Total Recall
p. 187 In a world in which Titanic has replaced Les Enfants du Paradis as the most successful film in French history and in which Saddam Hussein chose Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” as the theme tune for his fifty-fourth birthday, it is not hard to worry about American cultural imperialism. But is it right to do so? Is Hollywood as powerful as its enemies imagine? Is there really such a thing as “American culture”? And does American dominance extend to every corner of popular culture?
The resistance is certainly right to think that America dominates world cinema. American films are the only ones that reach every market in the world (the highly successful film industries of India and Hong Kong barely travel outside their regions), and they dominate almost all of them. Around the world, lists of the top-grossing films are essentially lists of Hollywood blockbusters, written in slightly different orders and with one or two local products thrown in for the sake of variety. In the European Union, the United States has around three quarters of the film market; in Japan, more than half. Even in tiny Bhutan, a Himalayan nation that only five thousand people visit a year, street peddlers hawk illegal videos of Hollywood’s latest blockbusters.[6]
Hollywood’s empire also appears to be expanding by the year. Tinseltown now gets roughly half its revenues from overseas, up from just 30 percent in 1980; indeed, entertainment is now America’s second largest export, after aerospace. At the same time, few foreign films make it big in the United States, controlling less than 3 percent of the market.
Symptomatically, dubbing American films into native languages is a huge industry worldwide. In Italy, there are more than eighty dubbing companies and one thousand professional dubbers, and the local equivalent of the Oscar has a category for the best dubber of the year.[7] In Hong Kong, the people who translate the titles of American films into phrases that will entice the locals are held in similar respect. The Cantonese version of Nixon was simply The Big Liar, As Good As It Gets became Mr. Cat Poop, The Full Monty became Six Stripped Warriors, and, even more memorably, Boogie Nights became His Powerful Device Makes Him Famous.[8]
But Hollywood’s success is as much about attitude as structure. We will return to the subject of subsidies in Europe later, but it cannot be entirely coincidental that Britain’s unsubsidized rock-music and book industries compete well with their American equivalents, while its film and television industries, founded on the BBC and generous tax breaks, have failed miserp. 188ably. Hollywood is quite simply the most profit-driven film industry in the world. Many of the immigrants who built Tinseltown and who “stole” the film industry from France’s intellectuals sprang from cut-throat businesses such as textiles and music halls; they may not have been to college (indeed, several were semiliterate), but they knew the importance of giving the public what it wanted, which was good stories and pretty faces. The French had some appreciation of the latter, too little of the former.
A focus on “butts on seats” has made Hollywood into one of the world’s great business clusters, a center of excellence that is every bit as successful as Silicon Valley or Wall Street. This image may be a little difficult to square with the Academy Awards, at which Tinseltown struggles hard to give the impression that it is run by sentimental narcissists whose only concerns are designer clothes and the latest way to demonstrate political correctness. But it has all the attributes over which management gurus swoon: It is flexible, networked, virtual, innovative, and hypercompetitive.
Rather than controllers of the system, the studios are essentially the bankers and distribution arms of an entrepreneurial network of small firms. Only a handful of film companies have more than one thousand employees. The vast majority—an estimated 85 percent of firms connected with the industry—have fewer than ten workers, and these small firms do battle with astonishing ferocity. Their employees work grueling hours, take huge risks, and strike deals with anybody who is willing to make them, regardless of national origins. And they are constantly finding new places to apply their technology, from theme parks to video games.
Hollywood has another important quality that sets it apart from its rivals: It is a global operation, drawing capital, ideas, and talent from all around the world. Many of the key figures in Hollywood history, from Charlie Chaplin and Alfred Hitchcock to Arnold Schwarzenegger and (in his Paltrowized incarnation) William Shakespeare have been imports. Hollywood is so full of British actors, screenwriters, electricians, and costume designers that there are several cricket teams in the area. Three of the major studios, Columbia–Tri-Star, Fox, and Universal, are owned by foreign media conglomerates. Plenty of films and television shows are derived from ones made overseas.
It is at least arguable that it is not so much Hollywood that is corrupting the world as the world that is corrupting Hollywood. The more Hollywood becomes preoccupied by the global market, the more it produces generic blockbusters that are designed to play as well in Pisa as in Peoria. Such films are driven not by dialogue and plot but by special effects that can be appreciated by people with minimal grasps of English. Their characters are cartoonish, their appetite for fine-grained cultural analysis minimal; they focus p. 189 instead on universal subjects that most can identify with, regardless of national origin. There is nothing particularly “American” about boats crashing into icebergs or asteroids that threaten to obliterate human life. From this perspective, the barbarian at the gate is not Walt Disney; it is the teenager in Shanghai.
Is This America?
In fact, many Americans question the easy identification of Hollywood with American culture. From the right, Michael Medved, a Hollywood screenwriter turned cultural commentator, argues that, far from popularizing traditional American values, Hollywood is bent on undermining them. “America’s long-running romance with Hollywood is over,” he argues. “Tens of millions of Americans now see the entertainment industry as an all-powerful enemy, an alien force that assaults our most cherished values and corrupts our children.”[9] Terry Teachout, a music critic, points out that educated Americans might be just as quick as their Parisian counterparts to applaud if an earthquake were to reduce Hollywood’s soundstages to a pile of smoking rubble. If a school massacre occurs in the United States, Tinseltown is the first suspect after the National Rifle Association.
Whenever French protectionists and American neoconservatives agree on anything, it is always worth taking a closer look. In fact, American culture is much more diverse and, dare we say it, interesting than they think. In September 1998, The Wall Street Journal produced an impressive list of facts that suggest that high culture was hardly declining in the United States More than 110 American symphonies—including the Louisiana Philharmonic Orch
estra in New Orleans and the Northwest Symphony Orchestra near Seattle—have been founded since 1980. The number of nonprofit professional theater companies has grown from fewer than sixty in 1965 to more than eight hundred today. Opera attendance, spurred by the use of computerized supertitles that provide translations of lyrics above the stage, rose during the 1990s. There are now 110 professional opera companies in the United States, thirty-four of which have been founded since 1980.[10]
Book sales are at unprecedented levels. The biggest book market in the country is now greater Los Angeles, the very heart of the beast according to the French intelligentsia. The annual Los Angeles Times book fair attracts more than one hundred thousand visitors and draws speakers from all around the world. On television until recently, Oprah Winfrey recommended a serious book to her viewers once a month, increasing sales by hundreds of thousands of copies. In virtually any medium-sized town in America, you p. 190 can walk into a store such as Barnes and Noble and browse through a book while sipping a latte.
Nor are books the only high point. Wherever you live in America, cable television offers ways around the diet of cop shows and sitcoms that the networks serve up. Americans can watch classic movies on The Movie Channel or American Movie Classics or recent independent releases on Bravo or the Sundance Channel; they can brush up on their education with The History Channel or the Discovery Channel or overdose on politics with CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, or Fox News.
The most important face of cultural diversity, however, is ethnic. The 1980s and 1990s saw the biggest surge of immigration into the United States since the turn of the century. On a typical Saturday night in New York City, you can visit dozens of different national celebrations, from Jamaican reggae parties to Chinese operas. But it is Los Angeles that seems like the Ellis Island of the late twentieth century, with more than fifty languages spoken at Hollywood High School and a population that is now 40 percent Latino.
Accordingly, rather than imposing cultural uniformity, the media is increasingly reinforcing diversity. At a time when people were announcing the death of networks, two Spanish-language networks managed to add plenty of viewers throughout the 1990s. In Los Angeles, one Univision station, KMEX, is the most popular channel in the region at some times of the day. Los Angeles also boasts channels that broadcast exclusively in Korean, Cantonese, and Japanese, and others that rent airtime to Yiddish and Russian broadcasts. The Internet has taken this even further. During NATO’s bombing of their homeland, many Serbs in California evaded the “lies” of the American media and relied on their motherland’s impartial coverage. Even in the shadow of the Hollywood sign, ancestral loyalties are proving more powerful than American popular culture.
Outside the Door
Culture ministers outside America might scoff at this analysis, pointing out that the inroads that Spanish and Korean television have made into the United States are as nothing compared with the progress of American television into their countries. Once again, this is true, but it shows only part of the picture.
Most countries in the world have now deregulated their television industries. Meanwhile, technology has made it possible to squeeze many more channels into the spectrum. From Budapest to Bombay, viewers have finally p. 191 been given alternatives to dire state outfits such as India’s Doordarshan and Hungary’s Magyar Television (whose MTV call sign had proved misleading in the past). As channels have multiplied, so has demand for content. American television producers have not been the only people to profit from this desperation. Brazilian soap operas, for example, have proved so popular in Russia that trendy Muscovites have taken to calling their dachas fazendas.[11] But the Americans have profited more conspicuously than anybody else. Indeed, in many cases, people have imported not just individual American programs but whole American channels, such as CNN, Nickelodeon, and MTV.
It is this as much as anything else that seems to have got under the skin of the cultural elite. Yet the Americanization of commercial television looks increasingly like a short-term phenomenon. As the market matures, stations have to build their brands and appeal to audiences that still have marked preferences for the homegrown. That means making more of their own programs and leaving American pap for the times of day when few sane people are watching. For instance, Nova, the Czech Republic’s first private channel, began in 1994 by showing mostly American shows because its only competition came from state-run stations of the sort that considered square dancing a hot program. But as the market grew, so did the appetite for local programming. Within three years, ratings for Nova’s American shows had dropped by 45 percent and it was pouring money into the production of local soaps, sitcoms, and so on.
Nowadays, the most popular television program in each European country is nearly always a local production. In 1998, each of the main western European markets had no American series among the top ten programs.[12] Three quarters of all the programs launched are now local productions. The most successful of these owe their appeal precisely to the fact that they are rooted so clearly in their local cultures. Julie Lescaut, a French police drama, is no less quintessentially French than Inspector Morse is intrinsically English. Global giants are bowing to this preference for the local. There are now twenty-two different versions of CNN, including one in Turkish and two in German. The percentage of programming on the English-language version of CNN International that might be described as American has fallen from 70 percent in 1996 to 8 percent in 2002.
The strength of local ties is even more apparent in pop music, long supposed to provide the sound track to America’s cultural hegemony. Ever since four mop-haired Liverpudlians appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, the United States has been obliged to share the music market with Britain, which has a pop cluster that is nearly as vicious as the visual one in Hollywood. But now this Anglo-American hit machine has begun to sputter. In the past, it was p. 192 relatively easy to launch a global pop star. But as the attention spans of audiences contract and markets fragment into tiny niches, from rap to techno, this is getting more difficult.
In Europe, few self-respecting teenagers would once be caught dead listening to local groups. Now French groups such as Air and Daft Punk and Swedish groups such as the Hives and Sahara Hotnights are decidedly cool. In Germany, France, and Spain, local groups account for around half the sales.[13] Challenged by local language channels, MTV has responded by producing different programs for different regions. In the United States, Spanish-speaking Latin American bands are commanding ever higher shares of the market. And Continental bands are battling their way into America (sometimes with unfortunate results: One of the favorite groups of the schoolboys who massacred their fellow students at Columbine High School was Germany’s Rammstein). Even Iceland has a global star in Björk.
Turning to the theater, the British have made a growing impression on the most commercial end of that particular art—the popular musical—since the appearance of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and Jesus Christ Superstar in the mid-1970s. Andrew Lloyd Webber and the producer Cameron Mackintosh revived what had become a geriatric art form with catchy tunes, occasionally clever lyrics, sumptuous sets, and relentless marketing. The Phantom of the Opera has been seen by more than fifty-two million people and done better box office than the movie Titanic. Basel built a theater specifically for Phantom; Bochum, Germany, has one for Starlight Express. Indeed, were it not for the success of Disney’s The Lion King, one might argue that, with musicals at least, the British dominate the mass market and American shows cater to sophisticates.
The “American” book- and magazine-publishing industries that so worry the Canadians also seem something of a paper tiger. The most influential magazine editor in New York in the past decade has been an Englishwoman, Tina Brown, who, depending on whom you talk to, either revived or DiCaprioed both Vanity Fair and The New Yorker before founding the short-lived Talk. America’s tabloids are run largely by Britons. Foreigners own half of America’s top twenty book-publishing houses. America’s big
gest firm, Random House (the publisher of this book), is now owned by Germany’s Bertelsmann. The pied piper of America’s media industry for the past two decades has been the Australian-born Rupert Murdoch.
In fact, at a time when American teenagers seem almost as besotted by (Britain’s) American Idol as their younger siblings are by (Japan’s) Pokémon, you might wonder why Washington has not set up some protective ministry of its own. In fashion, the great houses of Milan and Paris still gaze down on p. 193 middle-of-the-road Americans. Walk down Los Angeles’s Rodeo Drive, with its outlets for Gucci, Valentino, and Armani, and it is America that looks like the cultural colony, not Europe. In kitchens across America, Asian and Latin American dishes are gradually supplanting national staples such as meatloaf and hamburger. Nor is it just a matter of human cuisine: Corina’s Biscuits, a pet-food company based in Athens, Ohio, produces ethnically flavored dog treats, including Mongolian beef, Korean barbecue, and chicken taco.[14]
The most popular sports in America—football, basketball, and baseball—are hardly the most popular elsewhere. Attempts to export football have made little progress. By contrast, soccer, the only sport that deserves the adjective global, seems finally to be colonizing the United States. An advocate for the homeless in Los Angeles, Ted Hayes, has enjoyed so much success in importing cricket to South Central (his team, which features former gang members, was invited to play at Lords) that he has now begun to introduce the Gaelic sport of hurling.
A Future Perfect: The Challenge and Promise of Globalization Page 28
