cultural imperialism

Chuck Grimes cgrimes at rawbw.com
Fri Nov 16 00:05:02 PST 2001


``I think it really started when I was in Essen in February. The signs of American pop culture - movie ads, snippets of overheard music - amidst the dreariness of the streetscape made me think for the first time that there was some positive ideal in its appeal that the standard stories of economic might didn't capture...

Why was Titanic a massive underground hit in Iran? Why did the Afghan slip a video of Titanic into his freshly unearthed VCR? Maybe other Afghans slipped copies of Triumph of the Will into theirs while whistling the Horst Wessel Lied and the NYT didn't see fit to cover it. Maybe not...'' Doug

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Nathan mentioned craft and thematic LCD as the attractions of Hollywood over regional film or other cultural productions. But this doesn't answer the implicit questions that surround the above observations.

Craft is another way of saying that one thing Hollywood can do is creat a seamless alternate reality. In fact that is its primary assignment, since it is tantamount to its entertainment value. Titianic was good because it created a believable, imaginary world without seams, fault lines, sequential or historical mistakes. Most people have no idea what turn of the century NYC/London or steam ships were like. I don't either, although I am certain they were a lot more filthy, noisy, smoky, ugly, rundown, dangerous, crowded, and chaotic than anything a Hollywood production would dare to portray. Nevertheless, Titanic took us there (cleaned up simulacra) and made us believe it looked like what we saw. But The Last Emperor and Gandhi did a better job, as did Alien, Terminator, and Matrix. Judging from this summer's previews, most likely Harry Potter will also.

So the universal appeal of Hollywood blockbusters is their ability to creat or craft another world. This is something like the appeal of the big 19c novel, say War and Peace, Sentimental Education, Madame Bouvary, Anna Karenina, Moby Dick, Brothers Karamazov, Les Miserable, Oliver Twist, Germinal. I read them precisely to live in them---live in them as an escape from the bland, featureless morass of LA. And it is the same reason I have a willing tolerance for almost any sci-fi that manages to escape the outright banal and camp.

There is another reason for Hollywood's appeal as well, but it is much more difficult to express in short form. It is the emotive reality or concreteness of romanticism---its ability to find registers of resonance and timbre with all those child-like aspirations of interiority---the worlds of pretend feelings---what we imagine it might have felt like to be there---wherever there was.

Although it doesn't seem related, I asked Ravi why he liked Vermeer and Matisse (MIME 1.0). What I was looking for was some indication of how these painters function in his imaginary visual world. It's a very complicated matter, and I assumed from the name that Ravi is Indian or maybe Pakistani, so the point was an indirect way to gauge some kind of east-west spectrum of visual sensibilities. What characterizes Vermeer and Matisse (for me) in particular is their extreme refinement, taste, craft, elegance, and articulation of a well cultured bourgeois world. So asking why they are liked, is to ask what is appealing about their refined worlds of taste and design. Both managed to raise depictions of a domestic life into the realm of almost metaphysical proportion principally through light, space (Vermeer), shape and color (Matisse).

I can't develop this much at the moment, as I wrote to Greg S on the pull-down menu thread this morning. But I think this is a direction that provides a richer answer to Doug's original query. The glib answer is of course there is much more to human life than money and material security---and of course the leverage that the loss (or failure to achieve) these exercises on us all. It isn't an accident of nature that probably most places (outside selective urban areas) in the world are bereft of any viable cultural alternative to the US mass production media (since five hundred years of western qmaterial imperialism has virtually created this result)

So, against that bleak background, the lush color, score, and sweeping romantic themes in the Hollywood spectacle must seem like the promised land. Nevermind that this cultural imperialism, like its material correlative is a swindling fraud. Like the neoliberal NOA, what else is there?

Chuck Grimes



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