The cultural politics of contemporary Hollywood film

Power, culture, and society

Chris Beasley, Heather Brook

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780719082986
• eBook ISBN: 9781526135759
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Adopting and developing a 'cultural politics' approach, this comprehensive study explores how Hollywood movies generate and reflect political myths about social and personal life that profoundly influence how we understand power relations. Instead of looking at genre, it employs three broad categories of film. 'Security' films present ideas concerning public order and disorder, citizen–state relations and the politics of fear. 'Relationalities' films highlight personal and intimate politics, bringing norms about identities, gender and sexuality into focus. In 'socially critical' films, particular issues and ideas are endowed with more overtly political significance. The book considers these categories as global political technologies implicated in hegemonic and 'soft power' relations whose reach is both deep and broad.

1
Introduction: the cultural politics of popular film

Going to the movies and mulling over power and politics are usually understood to be mutually exclusive activities. Movies are often thought to be escapist entertainments specifically removed from the world of power, politics, and social analysis. Yet even though movies may well be experienced as enjoyable flights of fancy, they are also thoroughly implicated and invested in power relations – they are part of the cultural and political landscape that both constructs and reflects social life. Movies and politics are in fact deeply enmeshed. Taking movies seriously does not have to mean forgoing their pleasures or limiting what we watch: indeed, understanding the cultural politics of film may even add to our appreciation of them. We aim in this book to provide a particular contribution to the field of ‘cultural politics’. This field investigates popular cultural forms not simply as entertainment or art, but rather as ‘political technologies’ – a term that will be defined shortly.¹ We focus on one cultural form as especially illustrative: popular movies. The global dominance of film as a cultural form throughout the world (Hodge, 2015: 36), particularly amongst young people (Aubrey, 2009: 42; Chandler and Munday, 2011: 148), and the global dominance of Hollywood filmmaking and distribution (Prince, 1992: 16; Balio, 2002; Silver, 2007; inter alia), mean that we focus on a large subset of mainstream popular films – namely, films which are made in the United States for a global mass audience. These are usually referred to as ‘Hollywood’ movies.

How are mainstream Hollywood movies ‘political’? Movies are sometimes overtly political – some, for example, are focused on political figures, events, or themes. Movies about presidents, for example, have obviously political connotations (Primary Colors, 1998; Frost/Nixon, 2008; Lincoln, 2012). Similarly, where real-life events such as the Boston marathon bombing (Patriots Day, 2016), or the capture/killing of Osama Bin Laden (Zero Dark Thirty, 2012) are fodder for film plots, political weights are clearly attached to how those events are represented. Less directly, political themes that extend beyond an individual story or character study (Thank You for Smoking, 2006; There will be Blood, 2007; Swing Vote, 2008) nevertheless exhibit strong connections to the recognisably political world. Where there are clear and familiar political references in popular movies, we label these ‘capital-P’ political.

Hollywood films may also be ‘political’ in the related sense of being closely aligned with or, alternatively, dangerously removed from American government agendas. Similarly, movies which are controversial in some way, or subject to direct or indirect political/military pressure – over classification, objections to content, or the timing of their release, for example – can be readily understood to be ‘political’. Relations between the United States and North Korea were tested by The Interview (2014), for instance – a comedy in which two American journalists are recruited to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. The controversial nature of religious representations in movies like The Passion of the Christ (2004) or The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) also arouses public-political interest (as do movies featuring explicit or unusual sex scenes, or drug use). Much more often, however, the political character of movies is more diffuse. To use Michel Foucault's (1977) terminology, a culture industry like Hollywood film is not strictly a ‘disciplinary’ political technology like medicine or psychiatry – that is, movie entertainment is not a field strongly shaped by supervision, examination, and punishment. Nevertheless, Hollywood can be understood as ‘a system of signs’ completely enmeshed in ‘relationships of communication’ which ‘can have as their objective or as their consequence certain results in the realm of power’ (Foucault, 1982: 217). In this sense, Hollywood films may be identified as a form of ‘political technology’, or practice which produces and manipulates ideas, identities, bodies, and relational ‘flows’ (Burke, 2008: xxxiii–iv).

Even uncontroversial movies that seem to have few or no connections to the kind of politics we hear about in news and current affairs can be understood as political technologies. When we conceive of politics in this broader way, we see that seemingly unlikely films repeat socio-political ideas and assumptions on an almost infinite range of topics – justice, love, disability, shame, courage. It is this intersection of power relations with popular culture (in the form of Hollywood movies) that we understand as ‘cultural politics’. Political inflections are not limited to any particular genre or narrative categories. Cultural politics abide in all kinds of movies – including romantic comedy, westerns, horror, and children's animations. Whether we watch movies about politics (with a capital ‘P’) or films that seem far removed from formal politics, we see the invocation of themes that are repeatedly disseminated globally, and thus have significant socio-political implications. In fact, if we understand ‘politics’ as, broadly, operations of power including government, all movies are political (see Comolli and Narboni, 1971: 30).² In this sense, popular film is by no means simply entertainment, leisure, diversion, or escapism, even though movies may offer any or all of those things as well. Rather, Hollywood films precisely generate and manipulate identities, bodies, and flows by giving cinematic flesh to certain characters and narratives. On these grounds, it is neither desirable nor possible to cocoon culture from power and the political.

Cultural politics, ‘soft power’, and hegemony

The cultural form of popular Hollywood film is ‘political’ in ways that resonate with Joseph Nye's (1990) account of the dynamics of state power expressed in foreign policy, including the state power of the United States. State power is not merely tied to military force or economic coercion (‘hard’ power), but also strongly linked to co-option and attraction (‘soft’ power). Nye coined the term ‘soft power’ to describe modes of advancing national security, including foreign aid and diplomacy, by means that are indirect, and that encourage other countries and their peoples to admire, emulate, support, and acquiesce to such advancement (Nye, 2004). Soft power is the power to win ‘hearts and minds’ as well as wars (Ikenberry, 2004). The critical resources of soft power lie beyond the direct control of national governments and may have their impact precisely because they seem to occur at a distance from naked state self-interest. As Nye notes, one of the main frames for soft power arises in relation to culture, and is of particular importance for the United States. In this context, Carnes Lord outlines the political significance of promoting the appeal of the USA:

[s]oft power has been a strong suit for the United States virtually from its inception—certainly long before the country became a recognized world power in the twentieth century. American ‘exceptionalism’—the nation's devotion to freedom, the rule of law, and the practice of republican government, its openness to immigrants of all races and religions, its opposition to traditional power politics and imperialism—has had a great deal to do with the rise of the United States to its currently dominant global role. (Lord, 2008: 61)

Hollywood film is an important site for American soft power. It promotes the attractiveness of American perspectives and values to other nations, cultures, and peoples (Nye, 2002/03). Sometimes this link between national soft power agendas and Hollywood film is overt, as in the case of government-embedded funding to support the development of nationalistic films or films which offer a particularly American perspective (Alford, 2016). The movies Top Gun (1986), Pearl Harbor (2001), and Black Hawk Down (2001) are prime examples of this: all were filmed with the support and approval of the military (Robb, 2004: 95). This kind of direct collusion between Hollywood and the US military is not uncommon but neither is it necessarily typical. More frequently, it is simply that the point of view adopted in a film, along with the lifestyles and assumed values presented, are tied to conceptions strongly associated with the United States. We see this, for example, in the pointed emphasis on individualism in any number of children's movies. Disney films often reiterate the desirability of self-belief and individual determination, as scenes from Toy Story 2 (1999) and Ratatouille (2007) illustrate. In Toy Story 2, Rex the toy dinosaur urges ‘You just got to believe in yourself’, while Gusteau the chef (in Ratatouille) insists that ‘Your only limit is your soul’. Similarly, in the Disney film The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996), ‘taglines’ for the film include ‘Believe in yourself’ and ‘Dreams do come true’.³

American individualism is championed, while other countries and cultures may be caricatured as strange. In The Siege (1998), for example, American CIA operatives and the FBI are represented in strongly positive ways, while Arabs are associated with excessive religiosity and terrorism. The same kind of partisan vision is revealed in The Hurt Locker (2008) in which the viewpoint is that of elite American soldiers engaged in bomb disposal during the Iraq War in 2004. The Iraqis are barely registered as present, let alone given any ‘voice’ – they are simply part of the dangerous landscape. In these movies and countless others, an American way of life or American viewpoint is self-evidently centralised and normalised. These representations have effects. They contribute to the establishment or strengthening of some religions and cultures as ‘extremist’ or ‘radical’, while others are excused or endorsed.

While this focus on soft power is consistent with at least some aspects of a cultural politics orientation to Hollywood films, cultural politics is itself much broader than Nye's specific approach. Soft power tends to presume a reasonably straightforward fit between national agendas, national interests, and cultural forms. While this notion certainly forms part of our theoretical armoury in this book, cultural politics can also be connected to Antonio Gramsci's (1992) broader conceptualisation of ‘hegemony’ (Howson, 2005; Howson and Smith, 2008). Gramsci uses the term to describe how rulers secure the complicity of those they subjugate. His approach offers a means to consider how social assemblages of dominant or emerging power relations contrive to achieve widespread consensus, rather than relying upon force or coercion for the maintenance of ongoing political control and stability.

There are clear connections between Nye's soft power and Gramsci's notion of hegemony. Both conceive of power as working at a distance from direct government control, and as not simply about dominating through violence or force. Moreover, Nye's concern with power as intimately linked with making particular agendas attr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: the cultural politics of popular film
• 2 Frames
• PART I: SECURITY
• PART II: RELATIONALITIES
• PART III: SOCIAL CRITIQUE
• PART IV: GLOBAL AGENDAS
• References
• Filmography
• Index