Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [62]
In general, American filmmakers do not leave home to make movies. Rather, the best and most successful of filmmakers elsewhere traditionally emigrate to Hollywood.26 Chen Kaige, for example, the celebrated Chinese director of Farewell My Concubine who is often referred to as an example of how filmmaking can thrive outside Hollywood, followed his film to America where he said in an interview that making an American film is “what I want to do,” and cited The Godfather as the sort of film he could make.27 Paul Verhoeven should be a model for Kaige: a foreign auteur gone Hollywood big time with an assiduously nonauteur corpus that includes Robocop, Total Recall, and Basic Instinct. And so Michel Ciment complains in vain about the “moronic/sophomoric movies churned out by Hollywood for their teenage audiences and tossed like garbage on hundreds of French screens in the dry summer season,”28 while European auteurs journey to Hollywood to get rich and famous.29
There are apparent exceptions to the growing American hegemony. Mexico is enjoying a modest film renaissance for which the success of Like Water for Chocolate serves as a token. But much of its industry is occupied with making soft-porn violence for East L.A. barrios and soap operas for the private network TELEVISA as well as for the burgeoning Spanish-language outlets on American cable. And, as in France and other nations that have preserved a local industry, Mexico’s film business depends on strong government support (from the Instituto Mexicana de Cinematográfica [IMCINE])—an innovation of President Gortari that may or may not survive and presumably goes against the ethos of free trade. But among strong national film industries, Indonesia’s rather than Mexico’s is the norm. There, the local industry is dying, “squeezed out,” according to critic Philip Shenon, “by the U.S. giant.”30 In October 1992, sixty-six of eighty-one Jakarta movie theaters were showing foreign films. Domestic gems like My Sky, My Home, which won awards in Germany and France and (ironically) even in America, cannot find a domestic outlet in Indonesia. “The presence of so many American films,” writes Shenon, “has led an entire generation to believe that Indonesia is incapable of producing great movies.” According to one twenty-nine-year-old Indonesian (Franky Boyoh), “my friends and I always see American films. There are no good Indonesian movies.”31
To demonstrate that American films exercise an increasingly mortal hold on the world market’s cinema jugular is of course not yet to predict a particular set of cultural consequences: market omnipresence is not the same as determinative influence. Still, American films are everywhere—on global television even more overwhelmingly than on the world’s movie screens.32 They have the status of amusements but they are also likely to inspire a vision of life and to affect habits and attitudes.33 Hollywood is McWorld’s storyteller, and it inculcates secularism, passivity, consumerism, vicariousness, impulse buying, and an accelerated pace of life, not as a result of its overt themes and explicit story-lines but by virtue of what Hollywood is and how its products are consumed. Stories told to a tribe around the campfire, whatever their content, knit people together and reflect a common heritage. Stories that pass through the magic lantern and reappear on a movie or television screen are conditioned by their own particular media context. Disney movies and Disneyland are tied together by gossamer threads that weave mythic stories around cartoon identities that seem to celebrate multiculturalism even as they eradicate