The Evaluation of Hollywood as a Global Success - Essay Example

Running Head: HOLLYWOOD GLOBAL SUCCESS Hollywood Global Success [The Writer’s Name] [The Name of the Institution] Hollywood Global Success Hollywood film studios have been making historical movies for more than 90 years; so in this respect they can count themselves as a success in the field of making historical films and recreating historical events. Some films that are made, those being the ones that contain all the correct elements for a good film, can stand on their own as quality pieces of work and can also earn their way in a cutthroat business, purely because they have got every part of the construction of the film correct. Hollywood has been successful in recreating historical events if not in the quantity of films made, then at least in the quality of the rare few. Also it can be seen that even if filmmakers do not have a responsibility to the cinema patrons to make films as accurately as they should, they should at least try to do their best as sometimes it will mean a film that will hit every button for everyone involved from studio through to audience. But to measure success does depend on where you are in the role of films. A studio executive would have the likes of The Patriot over and over again, as films that earn money ensure that more films will be made in the future. Of course there will be a few flops, those that do poorly at the box office despite how well the director and producers feel that they have crafted their work of art. However there will also be the blockbuster, with Tom Cruise as George Washington and Sylvester Stallone as Benjamin Franklin; it won't be historically accurate, but at least it's going to make a fortune for the studios and keep it in business for the next decade. But, for the cinema film purist, those who demand everything in a movie that make it a superbly crafted piece of cinema classicism, every once in a while a film like Glory will turn up and make you feel that your faith in the movie industry has been re-affirmed and those in the studio system really are trying to be responsible for the content that they release unto the world. Since the emergence of the global dominance of the Hollywood film industry in the 1920s, if not before, the political economy of Americanization can be viewed as a process in which American-based capital has exerted increasing worldwide control over mass communication industries, and thereby over the financing, production and distribution of popular culture. This process may not have unfolded in an even or uniform manner or followed the same pattern in all societies; nor will it have carried on without being resisted, sometimes successfully: but whatever qualifications need to be made, its historical power as an economic force is undeniable. Even authors who have been sceptical of the ‘media imperialism’ thesis have provided sufficient evidence to chart its course. (Giovacchini, 1998, 21-30) There are many example, provides ample evidence of the increasing worldwide power of American communication industries in the post-war period, even though he disputes what he calls the stronger versions of the thesis because they do not take account of any of the countervailing forces to American hegemony, including the resilience of local cultures, and the competition of other media imperialists like Britain in the exporting of TV programmes. (Strinati, 1992, 57) In 1948 American films accounted for 68 per cent of exhibited films, and domestic films for only 23 per cent, while the UK has remained a highly lucrative market for Hollywood since the 1960s and 1970s in terms of the global profits it makes on the export of its films. No doubt the fact that Britain and America share a common language must make the UK market more open to imports of American films, but this relative uniqueness must to some degree work both ways. In turn, this is relevant to the content of such imports and exports of films and TV programmes in that Americanization may also take the form of Britain selling to Americans ‘Americanized’ representations of itself, and buying back American produced and validated versions or constructions of ‘Britishness’.(Strinati, 1992, 58) From the start, commercial TV in Britain found it profitable to import American TV programmes because they could ensure high audiences (they were usually among the most popular), and their costs were relatively low, although overall they took up a small proportion of total screen time, and their popularity opened up opportunities for comparable British programming. (Crook 1986, 11-13)Interesting here are the questions of why American programmes should have proved to be popular with British audiences, and how far such British programmes betokened Americanization of a more pervasive and subtle kind in that they were often domesticated and anglicized versions of American programmes. Even the BBC made more use of American programmes, supposedly as ready-made time fillers, than its Reithian-inspired rhetoric may have implied, though less than its commercial rival before the more intense and open competition of the late 1970s and the 1980s (Bartlett 1986, 137-39). Whether we are concerned with ownership or the placement of advertising expenditure, the global power of America can be observed. This is accentuated by the way the assumed superiority of America in this area has fed into, and benefited from, its dominance in other areas like commercial TV and marketing. This dominance has been embedded not only in the direct provision of advertising for particular transnational clients, and thus in the internationalization of advertising under the hegemony of America, but also in the business advantages which accrued to American agencies due to their presumed superior know-how in dealing with commercial TV, and in their more general ability to influence consumption patterns, to sell commodities to the public. As such, American advertising has been at the forefront of the increased market and commercial orientations of the modern media. (Strinati, 1992, 60) America seems to have retained its hegemony as the most powerful global cultural and mass media force; it does not appear to be sinking into a decentred, geo-politically ambiguous, and structurally fragmented postmodern world. This conclusion should come as no surprise, even if it partly reflects the lack of more up to date information. The nature, pattern, and direction of the world economy more or less parallel and depict the directionality of world information flow. America is still strategically central to the direction of this flow, from more to less advanced capitalist societies, from north to south, and from west to east. However, America is now having to compete more seriously with European and Japanese rivals—Japanese companies, after all, are now buying up Hollywood—and is having its position in global cultural and media relations challenged by spatially distinct advanced capitalist societies.( Strinati, 1992, 63) Adorno points out that the situation of the rising bourgeoisie that developed Culture, at the time of the Enlightenment, contrasted greatly with the cultural situation of the proletariat that it brought into existence. Even in a society that was formally governed by relations of equality, the dominant social classes retained a monopoly over culture. Marx had developed the model of the superstructure to account for the cultural ascendancy of the ideas developed by the economically dominant class in society. The lower classes were denied the leisure necessary to develop Culture. (Huyssen, 1983, 16-43) Their historical role was deduced by socialists from their real economic situation and not from their spiritual condition, which was subjectively much less advanced than that of the bourgeois classes. In theorizing the cultural situation of the working classes in the twentieth century, Adorno was dealing with a changed situation in which the growth of leisure and of mass culture had reached the point where the lower classes were inundated with cultural goods and were provided with ready access to what had formerly been the cultural monopoly of the rich. He set himself sharply against the ideological conclusions that were drawn from this expanding access to cultural goods, that it was in some sense an enrichment of cultural life; that it was liberating people. He insisted that the growth of leisure in a capitalistic society does not provide working people with the freedom to develop Culture; it opens a space that is almost entirely colonized by the very commercial forces that disseminate pseudo-culture, weakening and undermining resistance in all those who are subject to its 'toxic' effects. (Adorno, 2002, 85) The entire practice of the culture industry transfers the profit motive naked onto cultural forms. Ever since these cultural forms first began to earn a living for their creators as commodities in the market-place they had already possessed something of this quality. But then they sought after profit only indirectly, over and above their autonomous essence. New on the part of the culture industry is the direct and undisguised primacy of a precisely and thoroughly calculated efficacy in its most typical products. (Adorno 2002: 86) Ultimately, the culture industry no longer even needs to directly pursue everywhere the profit interests from which it originated. These interests have become objectified in its ideology and have even made themselves independent of the compulsion to sell the cultural commodities that must be swallowed anyway. “The expression 'industry' is not to be taken too literally. It refers to the standardization of the thing itself - such as that of the Western, familiar to every movie-goer - and to the rationalization of distribution techniques, but not strictly to the production process. Each product affects an individual air; individuality itself serves to reinforce ideology, in so far as the illusion is conjured up that the completely reified and mediated is a sanctuary from immediacy and life.” (Adorno 2002: 87) Adorno insists that the loss of tradition through the disenchantment of the world ultimately leads to the condition of culturelessness, to the atrophy of spirit through its instrumentalization. All such instrumentalization is incompatible with any idea of Culture proper: In an age of spiritual disenchantment, the individual experiences the need for substitute images of the 'divine'. It obtains these through pseudo-culture. Hollywood idols, soaps, novels, pop tunes, lyrics and film genres such as the Wild West or the Mafia movie, fashion substitute mythologies for the masses. (Adorno 1993:27) It is possible to conceive of an 'apology' for the culture industry that seeks to argue that culture is itself freely and (self-expressively) made by talented and created innovators and that the vast organizations of cultural producers such as the Hollywood film companies or the major broadcasting corporations, together with their complex systems of marketing, advertising and distribution, are merely instrumental in connecting a disparate mass of consumers to the cultural products of free creative individuals. The concentration of capital and size, in such a view, is only what is necessary to master the material conditions so that the consumers can enjoy what has been independently produced. Adorno's attitude towards film was ambivalent and some of his most interesting remarks on media are to be found both in his criticism of the realist tendency of film and in his later insights into the potential of film to become serious art. 'Transparencies on Film' offers some intriguing and insightful reflections that point to more positive possibilities and conclusions concerning mass media and its evolution than were present in the original analysis of the culture industry (Adorno 1991: 154-61). Film, after all, can resist and overcome its characteristic false immediacy and pseudo-realism. In the first reflection, Adorno acknowledges that cinema is not always the polished Hollywood model of the culture industry. The latter always exploits to the full the technological means available. Not all films are made by the Hollywood machine, however. Some are low-budget movies that convey the rough and accidental character of life. If this merely indicated that they were made by poor relations and suffered a deficit as a consequence, they would be inconsequential. Adorno argues, however, that in their stark, unglossed immediacy they hold out the possibility of something serious and good. The technically polished standard of the typical Hollywood movie betokens its utter standardization, its planned, predigested and already integrated character. Authentic life, which is always open, and which continues without the certainty of what is going to happen next, has been drained from the product. Film productions in which this technical closure is foregone, films which are often made on a shoe-string budget and which surrender to the possibilities of the uncontrolled and the accidental, hold out the hope of a liberating transformation of mass culture. 'In them the flaws of a pretty girl's complexion become the corrective to the immaculate face of the professional star' (Adorno 1991: 154). The re-evaluation of masculinity came into its own through the influence of postmodern theory on cultural practice. The master discourse of 'Manhood' could no longer be taken seriously. In response Hollywood began to make films in which the hero could only be seen as a parody of classic notions of masculinity. Actors such as Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger played heroes who were so pumped-up that they could not be taken seriously; they assumed a comic-book style of machismo which provided ironic comment on the traditional belief in the hero as a giant of a man, a man among men, a man who would always defeat the forces of evil and restore law and order to the world. One Melbourne critic went so far as to describe Arnie as looking like a condom stuffed with walnuts.( Marris, 1996, 393-403) The film explores, aesthetically, a number of contradictions that are central to Adorno's treatment of movies and cultural goods generally. It brings into direct confrontation the ideological material manifest in the actual content of movies - the heroes with their middle-class decency, their moral code and their freedom from the marks of toil, care and distress - with the drab and seedy world of downtrodden Depression America. Tom is fitted out with the cultural values of a typical Hollywood cinema hero, obedient to the rules of that code of bourgeois decency that Adorno identified as the soft core - a defunct and sentimental romanticism - of every glossy Hollywood movie. Allen's device brings the code into direct confrontation with the society that supposedly subscribes to it. What is made clear throughout, and with real humour as well as pathos, is not simply that reality is not like films but that people are conscious of this difference between art and life; they experience it as a loss, the sense of which they find reassuring or comforting as though it was proof of their ultimate human value. This again is similar to Adorno's analysis of the idolization of film stars referred to above. Adorno's modernism was not one that was prepared to abandon the subject's responsibility for the object world. The impossibility of the subject expressing its life-process in the world in a positive sense resulted in the effort to do so negatively. This is essentially the solution proffered by Adorno's 'negative dialectics'. In that way subject and object are held together through acknowledging the rupture between them, through making the subject's resistance - its refusal to fill out such a world - into the content of art works. It is not difficult to credit Adorno's viewpoint concerning the triviality and inauthenticity of much of what passes for popular culture. It is more important, however, to consider the criterion of truth-value operating in popular culture such as the Hollywood film and to ask whether there are films, made in what to him would be a 'feature-rich, structure-poor' format, that possess truth-value and whether we can formulate criteria that are relevant to determining its presence or absence. In the movies of Woody Allen that I have discussed above, the draining of dialectical process at the level of interaction is replaced by a development of the intra-actional structuration of art works that can also be described as 'structure-rich' in a sense that is not acknowledged by Adorno's perspective. References Adorno, T. (1993) 'Theory of Pseudo-Culture', Telos 95: 15-39. Adorno, T. (1991) 'Transparencies on Film', in J. Bernstein (ed.) The Culture Industry, London: Routledge. 154-61 Adorno, T. (2002) 'Culture Industry Reconsidered', in J. Bernstein (ed.) The Culture Industry, London: Routledge. 85-89 Bartlett, K. (1986) ‘British television in the 1950s: ITV and the cult of personality’, paper presented to the 1986 International Television Studies Conference, London. 137-40 Crook, G. (1986) ‘Public service or serving the public: the roots of popularism in British television’, paper presented to the 1986 International Television Studies Conference, London. 11-13 Dominic Strinati, Stephen Wagg;1992. Come on Down? Popular Media Culture in Post-War Britain Routledge, 56-63. Huyssen, A. (1983) 'Adorno in Reverse: From Hollywood to Richard Wagner', New German Critique 29: 16-43. Giovacchini, S. (1998) 'The Land of Milk and Honey: Anti-Nazi Refugees in Hollywood', Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 21-30. Marris, Paul (Editor), Sue Thornham (Editor) Media Studies: A Reader Edinburgh Univ Pr (September 1996) 393-403 Read More