Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [61]
The dismal story of film in Europe can be duplicated over and over again around the world. In India in 1991, despite its stalwart local film industry, 78 of 124 imported films were American.17 In revolutionary Iran, where zealous censors banish most imports and encourage “banal, opportunistic, psuedo-revolutionary films, full of pompous political language,” Dances with Wolves and Driving Miss Daisy nevertheless were admitted and found a large audience.18 Innocuous enough, one might surmise, but in a country where “even the people in charge were confused about what Islamic cinema is” (according to Iranian director Bahram Bayxai), a foot in the door may be the beginning of a kick in the rear end for an insular Islamic culture trying to preserve itself politically and culturally against the West.19
These general trends are confirmed in almost every country around the world that makes and shows films in theaters or on television. They define major markets like Japan and Germany that have strong indigenous cultural traditions and define markets that remain closed to Western films like China and Cuba where, although unable to import American trash, they produce trash of their own that imitates the very American obsession with sex, violence, and soap opera, which their own propaganda condemns and their censorship is designed to exclude. Americans notice talented films like Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine (the first Chinese film to win the Palme d’Or in Cannes, 1993) and Zhang Yimou’s Raise the Red Lantern. But neither of these films was seen in China in its original cut, and the censors seem harder on serious local fare than on Hong Kong kickboxing films or bloody American suspense melodramas, which are being reproduced and sold in pirated versions in collusion with a Chinese government that has risked heavy American trade sanctions rather than acknowledge the practice. Chinese filmmaker Chen is not optimistic: “A quarter of a century ago, we were crazy about politics. Now we are crazy about making money. Our thinking has not really changed. I am afraid one day we will become money hooligans, without culture.”20 Since McWorld follows economic prosperity, they are unlikely to be entirely without culture: only without their own culture. In its place will be the culture of the money hooligans.
American films dominate the world market in a manner that far outpaces its leadership in any other area. In the new Russia, complains Peter Shepotinik, the editor of a leading Moscow film journal, “it’s cheaper to buy and distribute some unknown third-rate American film than it is to make a Russian film these days.”21 The table of top-grossing films in twenty-two countries for 1991, which is reproduced in Appendix B, speaks for itself. Either Dances with Wolves (nine first-place slots) or Terminator 2 (six first-place slots) are in first place in fifteen of the twenty-two countries surveyed. One or the other is in second place in another eight countries. Five other first-place films are also American, including Robin Hood and Home Alone, which also are favorite second-and third-place choices in many countries. Of the top three grossing films in each of the twenty-two countries (66 films in all), fifty-eight are American. Of the 222 top ten slots in the survey, 191 are American.
Nothing changed in 1992, when Basic Instinct, Beauty and the Beast, and sequels like Lethal Weapon 3 and Home Alone 2 were (in different slots) in the top five places in all the same countries where anywhere from seven or eight to all of the top ten were Hollywood productions.22 In monopolizing local markets, America has helped annihilate other exporters and hence has contributed to the troubles of competitors in their domestic industries. Coproductions are supposed to have blunted the American impact, but have had the opposite effect.23 Would anyone really be expected