Global Hollywood
By Toby Miller, Nitin Govil, John McMurria, and Richard Maxwell.Indiana University Press, 240 pages, $27.95
Those who contend that Hollywood and Washington are twobranches of the same cultural conglomerate will find ample evidence in GlobalHollywood. The relationship between these two company towns has been volatile at times, but the so-called Washwood alliance has remained intact.
Even before Hollywood was dubbed the "little State Department" in the 1940s,it was in league against Capitol Hill's bogeymen--whether they were communists,fascists, Mafiosi, or superpredator gang members. And it has often advanced U.S.products and industrial practices abroad. In return, policy makers have givenAmerica's dream factory some dreamy advantages, from monopolistic camera,projector, and film-stock patents early in the last century to more-recentAmerican-tilted intellectual-property mandates in trade negotiations. Suchclauses are no empty legalisms, either: A DVD bootlegging factory outside Bangkokwas raided in October by representatives not only of the Royal Thai Police but ofthe Motion Picture Association (MPA).
Global Hollywood, written by four sharp New York academics--Toby Miller, Nitin Govil, and John McMurria of New York University, and Richard Maxwell of Queens College, City University of New York--is a well-researched critique that is insightful in portraying the U.S. film industry as a sort of Frankenstein that has high-concepted itself into a weird, ugly blandness while stomping on fragile cinematic cultures worldwide even as it attempts to befriend, co-opt, and sometimes imitate them. Previously published in the United Kingdom by the British Film Institute and newly released in the United States by Indiana University Press, the jargony and stylistically off-putting study is politically predetermined along neo-Marxist lines, emphasizing the movie industry's labor over its product in sometimes tunnelvisioned and simplistic ways. But the authors justly lay waste to Hollywood's pretensions to free-market allegiance and shatter the notion that America's cultural diversity has blessed Hollywood with a unique, universal storytelling magic that the world finds simply irresistible. The authors also slap down those film theorists who have been so suckered by auteurist paradigms that they have lost sight of the mightiest auteurs of them all: distributors, marketing firms, and banks.
To their credit, the authors don't just rehash cultural-hegemony argumentsthat pit ugly Americans against the world. Their villain, rather, is "NICL," theso-called new international division of cultural labor--a sociological buzzphrase that describes the system of international co-production and rulesgoverning cultural labor markets, intellectual property, marketing, distribution,and exhibition. They dismiss twentieth-century leftist notions of Hollywood as "afloating signifier" of globalization, "a kind of cultural smoke rising from theeconomic fires of a successful U.S.-led crusade to convert the world tocapitalism." That "thin description," they scold, "fails to acknowledge thatglobal Hollywood's imperatives are crucial to the contemporary political economy,both animating and being animated by it." Hollywood is different from otherindustries, the authors claim, in its masterful control over the internationalsystem of cultural production. In this framework, Hollywood does not equal theUnited States but instead represents international moneyed interests. WithHollywood studios and--more important--distributors becoming multinationals, theBurbank gaffer who loses his job to "runaway" production in Toronto receives asmuch sympathy from the authors as does the exploited Prague set painter workinglong days at under $3 an hour.
The authors offer, as an instructive example of NICL at work, the 1992 releaseof 1492: Conquest of Paradise. Under British-born director Ridley Scott, the Frenchman Gérard Depardieu plays the Italian-born Spanish explorer Christopher Columbus. Co-produced by the venerable French company Gaumont, distributed by the foreign-capitalized, U.S.-based company Paramount, the film was shot in Spain and Costa Rica (the latter location boasting 170 Indians who worked for $35 a day, plus six Waunanans brought in from Colombia who had acted in Roland Joffé's film The Mission). The Costa Rican locale might also have been pushed by the executive producer's husband, head of Costa Rica's newly formed film commission. "The co-production protocols that brought 1492to the screen are among more than 135 bilateral and multilateral treaties between over eighty-five countries outside the US," the authors report. "Designed to combat Hollywood's domination of screen culture, they frequently enable the very NICL that ratifies it."
Clearly, foreigners are not simply innocents in this scenario;increasingly, they are prime players. "Twenty integrated media conglomerates inJapan and Europe have pushed foreign financing for big-budget Hollywood films to70 percent," according to Global Hollywood. The most recent player, Germany's Neuer Markt, a new-media stock exchange in Frankfurt, poured 1.9 billion into 13 German film-licensing companies in 1999 and 2000, 1.3 billion of which went to Hollywood pictures. Moreover, the big screen is just the revenue pump-primer for the small screen. Pay TV is the jackpot--and government-aided giants like Canal Plus in France are scoring big, pouring some of the windfall back into French film production, and making exclusive broadcast arrangements with U.S. outfits like Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope Studios.
The authors generally champion this regional backing of producer-conveyorpowerhouses like Canal Plus, arguing, in essence, that to fight Washwood's firewith fire, the world's media corporations must band together in collective might.But the book seems a little ambivalent on the point, noting that such efforts canalso produce European blockbusters like Asterix and Obelix vs. Caesar, a sort of Disneyesque film "event" in the Gaulish mode. If responding to Hollywood means spawning a half dozen Hollywood counterparts as commercially fixated as the archrival they're imitating, then cultural hegemony is only replaced by cultural oligarchy--not much of an improvement.
Global Hollywood, the authors persuasively argue, has become pathologicallyaddicted, since the 1970s, to Orwellian marketing gurus like the NationalResearch Group (NRG)--which is not part of some American accounting giant, mindyou, but of a Dutch conglomerate, VNU, that owns several dozen U.S. subsidiaries,products, and services. Savvy marketing strategists like NRG spy on consumers inreturn for "free" or "discount" services such as phone film-directory services,computer games, or gadgets that block out TV commercials. So pervasive are suchtactics, the authors contend--especially in the United States, where privacyprotections are weaker than in Europe--that one begins to reimagine Big Brothernot as the governmental thought-controlling bully of utopian fiction but as acagey suit who will know before you do what bikini style you want nextseason's Survivor contestants to wear.
Hollywood is, no doubt then, on the rampage. Its proportion of the world filmmarket is "double what it was in 1990," the book tells us, and "the European filmindustry is one-ninth the size it was in 1945." Together, trade muscle andmarketing costs have essentially excluded foreign pictures from screens in thiscountry. In the 1960s, foreign films constituted 10 percent of the U.S. market;by 1986 they made up 7 percent, and today they are a sad three-quarters of 1percent. But it's not clear exactly what we are to make of all this, sinceHollywood, through corporate conglomeration and co-production, has for almost ageneration been an ever more international concern. Cultural imperialism,perhaps--but by whom?
While Miller and his coauthors conscientiously describe thehomogenization of big-budget filmmaking, they don't seem to know what to do aboutit. "We can imagine," they write,
cultural workers seeking points of alliance with marketing,for example, to amplify the presence of labor in public discourse, to help bringattention to working conditions and the process of alienation, and to draw onmarketing expertise to revitalize the relation between filmmaking andfilm-going. Such a policy converts the currently one-way surveillance offilmgoers into a mode of sociality that raises awareness of the differencesbetween values invested by film workers in making movies and those values thatpeople derive from the film-going experience.
Well, it's good that the authors can imagine that, because this reader surecan't. Film workers of the world unite: You have nothing to lose but yourgrosses.
Similarly not quite of this planet is the authors' discussion of howentertainment interests should waive copyrights in recognition of creative"ownership" by film viewers. That seems like a truly laughable application ofcinema-studies jargon to a decidedly un-touchy-feely business. Sure, studio execsmight want to choose their copyright and trademark battles more carefully, andthey certainly look like idiots when they go after kids for posting unsanctionedHarry Potter fan sites and the like on the Web. But when MPA producers, in 1997,lost $66 million in revenues to movie piracy in India, should they really, as theauthors suggest, have taken solace in bootleg-viewers' "reception practicesrecognised as forms of creative labour"? If we didn't know better, we might thinkthat Miller and his pals were just having a little fun with us.
In light of this book, it has been predictable but in some ways perplexing tosee Karl Rove and fellow Bush-administration emissaries huddle with MotionPicture Association of America President Jack Valenti and other screen honchos todevise pro-U.S. and antiterrorist messages. It also twists the brain to seemilitary brass consulting with screenwriters at the University of SouthernCalifornia in an effort to anticipate terrorist scenarios. Superficially, suchdevelopments are understandable. But while Hollywood and Washington may stillwalk hand in hand, we're a very long way, Global Hollywood makes clear, from the Frank Capra Why We Fight era. It's hard to tell nowadays whether film is a product that the U.S. government is helping to place or whether America is just another entertainment brand name whose stock global backers are intent on propping up.
