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By Root 1452 0

and popular ignorance crashing down in a colossal Re-formation of the human condition and propelled humankind over the threshold of modernity, movable photographic frames (and, in time, scanning ion beams) have challenged the world of print, propelling us out of the modern and into the postmodern. The formats and packaging have changed (television, videos, and computer screens), the content has evolved (music videos, advertorials, and infomercials), and the conduits have developed (cables, satellites, switched phone lines, and fiber optics), but the payoff still comes as moving images that pass before human eyes. These images, reinforced by recorded sound, take the place of words, numbers, and other ciphers with which humans have traditionally communicated. The abstraction of language is superseded by the literalness of pictures—at a yet to be determined cost to imagination, which languishes as its work is done for it; to community, which is bound together by words; and to public goods, which demand the interactive deliberation of rational citizens armed with literacy.

As with the other contributing elements to the culture of McWorld, movies and videos are ever more unitary in content as they become ever more global in distribution. More and more people around the world watch films that are less and less varied. Nowhere is American monoculture more evident or more feared than in its movies and videos. Moreover, as distinctions between phone companies, cable carriers, broadcast media, and software producers melt and elephantine communication corporations mix and merge, monoculture is enhanced, diversity yielding to uniformity and competition giving way to monopoly. With a few global conglomerates controlling what is created, who distributes it, where it is shown, and how it is subsequently licensed for further use, the very idea of a genuinely competitive market in ideas or images disappears and the singular virtue that markets indisputably have over democratic command structures—the virtue of that cohort of values associated with pluralism and variety, contingency and accident, diversity and spontaneity—is vitiated.

Technology experts like Jeff Miller who ask “Should Phone Companies Make Films?” and then, on grounds of efficiency or specialization, answer no, miss the point.1 Mergers are driven not by coequal interdependency but by the reality of the absolute primacy of programming: the sovereignty of content over the manifold forms it can take in the age of McWorld. Rockefeller bought up the railroads and the distribution network in order to guarantee the flow of oil, the black gold of its time. McWorld’s black gold is information and those who own the information “pipes” are rightly drawn to bid for the stuff the pipes deliver. This is no small matter in an economy where the audiovisual industry is the second largest export sector after aerospace—$3.7 billion to Europe alone in 1992, which may hint at why the Europeans (especially the French) were sufficiently alarmed to put the 1993 GATT agreement at risk in order to get audiovisual materials exempted from the new free-trade regulations.2 “Cinema used to be side salad in world commerce,” comments a French observer, “now it’s the beef.”3

With or without resistance, nations with proud traditions of filmmaking independence like France, England, Sweden, India, Indonesia, and Japan are in fact gradually succumbing to the irresistible lure of product that is not only predominately American but, even when still indigenous, is rooted in the glamour of the seductive lifestyle trinity sex, violence, and money, set to a harmonizing score of American rock and roll. Where it survives in other countries, domestic filmmaking is thus mainly devoted to low-budget imitations or blockbuster replicas of Hollywood fare. The new universalism turns out to be little more than an omnipresent American parochialism dubbed into various languages and funded by multinational coproducers. Privatization diminishes state support for filmmakers and leaves them more vulnerable to foreign films at the