Hollywood Planet

Global Media and the Competitive Advantage of Narrative Transparency

Scott Robert Olson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 1999
• ISBN:
  9781135669560
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Scienze della comunicazione

The popularity of American television programs and feature films in the international marketplace is widely recognized but scarcely understood. Existing studies have not sufficiently explained the global power of the American media nor its actual effects. In this volume, Scott Robert Olson tackles the issue head on, establishing his thesis that the United States' competitive advantage in the creation and global distribution of popular taste is due to a unique mix of cultural conditions that are conducive to the creation of "transparent" texts--narratives whose inherent polysemy encourage diverse populations to read them as though they are indigenous. Olson posits that these narratives have meaning to so many different cultures because they allow viewers in those cultures to project their own values, archetypes, and tropes into the movie or television program in a way that texts imported from other cultures do not, thus enabling the import to function as though it were an indigenous product. As an innovative volume combining postcolonial and postmodern theory with global management strategic theory, Hollywood Planet is one of the first studies that attempts to account theoretically for numerous recent ethnographic studies that suggest different interpretations of television programs and film by a variety of international audiences. Relevant to studies in media theory and other areas of the communication discipline, as well as anthropology, sociology, and related fields, Hollywood Planet contains a powerful and original argument to explain the dominance of American media in the global entertainment market.

1 Seeing Transparency

American mass culture did not even feel like an import…

—Richard Pells (1997, p. 205)

Ours is becoming a Hollywood planet.

Tunstall (1977) proclaimed 20 years ago that “the media are American.” Now, Tunstall (1995) is backing off a bit, seeing the possibility for other na-tions to be successful in the global media marketplace, but if anything, his earlier claim was somewhat timid: It is not that the media are American, but something much broader and more profound. Hollywood has conquered the world.

The evidence is staggering. Seventy-five percent of movie tickets sold in Europe in 1995 were to films made in the United States. This is up 34% from l0years earlier. Thanks to the proliferation of satellite and cable, 70% of the movies shown on European television were also American (“Hollywood conquers Europe,” 1996). Trends in other parts of the world are similar. Hollywood is everywhere, and there seems to be nothing outside of Hollywood, so “one question in every mind must be whether the geographical source of an individual’s or country’s media any longer matters” (Smith, 1995, p. 1). Even media made outside Hollywood have grown to have a Hollywood quality about them.

Swartzenegger, Stallone, Willis, and their coinvestors certainly call attention to this phenomenon by having named their successful restaurant chain Planet Hollywood. In its emphasis on the veneration of movie and television artifacts and the marketing of its brand name (rather than its menu), these restaurants claim to be little microcosms of a global obsession with media. They underestimate their own significance. The world is not a solar system of little Planet Hollywoods, but one Hollywood Planet. Hollywood is not a microcosm but the cosmos.

What does a Hollywood Planet mean? The traditional notion of global media, of course, is that if the planet is Hollywood, then a global monocul-ture—an American one—is taking root. This may be far too simple a con-clusion, however. Among media theorists, a consensus is growing that this most fundamental assumption about transnational media is wrong. It may not be true that when the media from one culture are introduced into an-other, they force indigenous values and beliefs more in line with those that the media portray. The corollary of this assumption, and the source of its power, is that this infusion of nonnative values can be measured. This assumption and its corollary have guided academic research in this area for many years, and yet the results have been disappointing and inconclusive. The major failing of this approach is that it ignores essential work being done in postmodern and literary theory.

Examples of this mistaken approach to global media are easy to find. Kang and Wu (1995) and Kapoor and Kang (1995) are in good company. They wonder why it is that despite their elaborate methodology and attention to detail, they can find no changes in attitudes and beliefs among young people in India and Taiwan in spite of their recent introduction to extensive American television broadcasting. They wonder if they have selected the wrong sample or somehow asked the wrong questions: How could the effect of this new programming be so dramatically missed? In a sense they have asked the wrong question, just not at the level at which they suspect. They do not recognize their paradigm is in fact a theory that does not fit the evidence or that it is time for a new theory.

Why is it, then, that the television programs and movies produced in the United States are so dominant throughout the world, in places culturally similar to the United States as well as places that are vastly different, and so much so that many countries feel it necessary to severely limit their import, but measuring the media often shows that television and movies have little or no effect? American film and television “can be and are exported almost everywhere” (Dennis & Snyder, 1995, p. xii), so why is it that in Japan, for example, where they are voracious consumers of American cultural products, they consume them in a way that is entirely Japanese (Tobin, 1992; Yoshimoto, 1994), and audiences stay Japanese in the process? Indeed, although “the attractions of Western media at first seem overwhelming and transforming…people easily swim back to the surface of their lives” (Smith, 1995, p. 4). If the existing theory is wrong, a different theory should replace it by demonstrating more explanatory power with the data that has been gathered.

Perhaps the efFect the media bring is of a type that has not been widely considered, one outside the dominant epistemology. Joseph Yusuf Amali Shekwo (1984), late social mobilization official from Abuja, Nigeria, told the story of how his people, the Gbagyi (often called Gwari), watched “Dallas” (CBS TV). He was intrigued by the popularity of this American program in such a different land, and knew that the traditional explanation for it—that people in the developing world were attracted to Western media because they emulated the Western lifestyle (e.g., Lerner, 1977; Schramm, 1964; de Sola Pool, 1977)—was naively incomplete. In talking to Nigerians who watched “Dallas,” Shekwo came to the conclusion that although what was on the screen was more or less identical to the program that aired in the United States, they were not really watching the show in the same way that Americans were. Because of the way they watched it, they were watching a different show.

How could this be true? They were bringing to their understanding of American television a completely different set of cognitive assumptions, taxonomies, and background narratives. It became clear to Shekwo that what the Gbagyi saw in “Dallas” was not anything particularly American, but something more personal and more proximate—something indigenous. For example, his analysis revealed that the character of J.R. Ewing, the unscrupulous oil magnate played on the show by Larry Hagman, was perceived by the Gbagyi as having the same specific traits as Gbagwulu, a trickster worm from Gbagyi mythology. In a sense, J.R. acted as an archetypal surrogate for Gbagwulu.

Hardly any Americans and perhaps none of the “Dallas” production staff thought of J.R. in association with Gbagwulu (of whom they were no doubt unaware), so why is it that the Gbagyi make that connection? There are three possibilities. First, through some long forgotten act of diffusion, Gbagwulu has actually affected the evolution of American villain archetypes, just as African American slaves retained traditional African tales by evolving them into Brer Rabbit (Faulkner, 1977), so that J.R. is really a descendant (of sorts) of Gbagwulu. Second, the narrative archetype that J.R. embodies is so sufficiently encompassing that more particular archetypes and characters from other cultures can be projected into him, even if he did not descend from them. Last, there has been a little of both, a mix of diffusion and suffusion. In any case, the “Dallas” that the Gbagyi watched was theirs. There is an important difference, however, between the indigenous tale and “Dallas”: The traditional stories existed primarily to satisfy spiritual and social needs; imported media may serve this need, but their raison d’Être is commercial, what Schiller (1989) called the market criterion (p. 75).

The J.R.-Gbagwulu story is not an isolated phenomenon. Punjabi Hindu and Sikh families living in Southall, England see in the character of Mrs. Mangel, on the soap opera “Neighbours” (Australian TV) an embodiment of their cultural tradition of izzat, which is concerned with preserving honor and name through extensive familial control of social relationships (Gillespie, 1995a). Television watchers in Trinidad see in the soap opera “The Young and the Restless” (CBS TV) a manifestation of a defining national characteristic, bacchanal (Miller, 1995). Audiences everywhere see themselves reflected in films such as The Lion King (1994) or television shows such as “Walker: Texas Ranger” (CBS TV).

Consider the projective reception of Titanic (1997), a film that roared past the small list of films with revenues over $1 billion, earning at least $1.5 billion, and becoming the highest grossing film of all time, even adjusted for inflation. It was a different film to each interpretive community that viewed it. Japanese audiences reported an attraction to the cultural virtue of gamen—the ability to remain stoic in the face of adversity (Strom, 1998)—that they saw in the film. The film prompted such grief in Russian audiences that a national contest was devised for audience members to write a new, happy ending (Bohlen, 1998). The Chinese used the film as a challenge todevelop the indigenous film industry (Eckholm, 1998). French cultural elites saw their own political consciousness reflected in the film (Riding, 1998). Titanic reminded Turkish audiences of their indigenous film Bandit (Kinzer, 1998). One Egyptian fan of the film declared to The New York Times that “it is not an American movie” (Jehl, 1998, p. AR 29). The Brazilian soap opera “Por Amor” incorporated scenes from Titanic (Sims, 1998). In short, Titanic was not one film but many depending on the inteirpretive community that watched it. One reporter covering the phenomenon said simply, “different countries have viewed the phenomenon of Titanic in their own ways” (Riding, 1998, p. AR 1).

To put it more theoretically, Jameson (1986) argued that all Third World novels are “national allegories,” and Burton-Carvajal (1994) described certain first world cinematic texts as “allegories of colonialism.” Given that texts lend themselves to a multiplicity of meanings and that particular readings of a text are privileged primarily through externally coded values and norms, is it possible that consumers in the developing world interpret im-ported American cinematic and televisual texts as national allegories too? This is a position somewhat consistent with Bhabha’s (1994) and other postcolonial work, yet one commonly ignored in the study of media across cultures.

The dominant argument about the effect of global media on culture ignores the subtleties of Bhabha’s observations, and instead goes something like this:

Major premise: Indigenous cultures are disappearing.

Minor premise: The reach of electronic media is now global.

Conclusion: The global media cause indigenous cultures to disappear.

This argument has several unexamined assumptions and consequently suffers from a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. The following questions need to be asked:

• Are indigenous cultures really disappearing, or is something else happening to them?
• Are the media really causal in the process? If so, are they the primary causal agent that they are assumed to be?
• If they are the primary causal agent, what is the mechanism and effect of that agency?

Perhaps, despite alarms to the contrary, the world is not being melted down into a single, hegemonic, more-or-less American monoculture, even though American cultural products dominate the world. On the one hand, other production and distribution venues are developing (Tunstall, 1995). On the other hand, when one looks closely at the way that texts are read in specific cultures, rather than becoming overwhelmed by the astonishing magnitude of cultural exports alone, a multitude of differences and otherness emerges. György (1995) described the particular case of Ukrainians watching American media and noted that without an American cultural context, they are not watching the same program. Naficy (1996) showed how Iranian audiences made Hollywood films into indigenized hybrids. In both cases, imported media perpetuated rather than extinguished the Other. Despite its attempts, universality does not vanquish particularity (Yoshimoto, 1994), a claim generally borne out by history. Although readers around the world are increasingly gaining access to the same materials to read, they do not have access to the same ways of reading.

It is the thesis of this text that, due to a unique mix of cultural conditions that create a transparency, the United States has a competitive advantage in the creation and global distribution of popular taste. Transparency is defined as any textual apparatus that allows audiences to project indigenous values, beliefs, rites, and rituals into imported media or the use of those de-vices. This transparency effect means that American cultural exports, such as cinema, television, and related merchandise, manifest narrative structures that easily blend into other cultures. Those cultures are able to project their own narratives, values, myths, and meanings into the American iconic media, making those texts resonate with the same meanings they might have if they were indigenous. Transparency allows such narratives to become stealthy, to be foreign myths that surreptitiously act like indigenous ones, Greek gifts to Troy, but with Trojan citizens inside the horse. For better or worse, the transparency phenomenon facilitates the fragmented and incoherent beginnings of postcolonial culture. Hollywood studios have learned to profit from transparency and increasingly exploit it in the production of television programs and feature films.

The design of those media texts is driven, wittingly or unwittingly, by transparency. Consequently, as Smoodin (1994) pointed out, it is not nearly so important to understand what particular texts mean, as to ask “‘who are these meanings available to?’ and, related to this, ‘how does meaning vary from audience to audience?’” (p. 17). By enabling different readings, by allowing and even encouraging subaltern perspectives, transparent media increase their market share. Paradoxically, however, in earning those additional revenues, they perpetuate indigenous culture in hybrid form. It also does not mean that transparency is bereft of cultural consequences, that the revenues, they perpetuate indigenous culture in hybrid form.

It also does not mean that transparency is bereft of cultural consequences, that the global media have no effect. They do, but in a manner that differs from dominant assumptions in two ways: The process of cultural change is slower than generally assumed because it involves the accretion of new, transplanted images and consequently memories, and the process is causally the reverse of what is generally assumed—the indigenous culture actively reaches out, haggles (Naficy, 1996), and does not merely absorb in hypodermic, magic-bullet fashion some set of injected cultural values. The readings of a transparent text are indigenous, but the images and sounds are transplanted. Over time, these new images become familiarized, naturalized, and “real,” just like those they replace. The result is something new, something interstitial, but not something American or Americanized.

PREMISES

Five premises lead to the conclusion that something like transparency must be present in the American media and that it can and ought to be observed and categorized. The first premise is that American media exports domi-nate the world media market. This initial premise stipulates, rather uncontroversially, that American movies and television programs are phenomenally successful internationally by almost any measure. The international market is a huge share of American movie and television profits, and more emphasis is being put by Hollywood into developing foreign markets. In fact, entertainment is the second largest U.S. net export, after aerospace (“The entertainment industry,” 1989; Olson, 1993). Although other countries are also significant entertainment suppliers, the magnitude of America’s dominance of this huge and important market is widely recognized and is almost beyond debate:

From the point of view of competition, hegemony, and ‘imperialism’, [America] has certainly lost ground, but from the exponential point of view, it has gained some: take…the worldwide success of Dallas. America has retained power, both cultural and political, but it is now power as a special effect...It used to be a world power; it has now become a model (business, the market, free enterprise, performance)—and a universal one—reaching as far as China. The international style is now American…. America has a sort of mythical power throughout the world, a power based on the advertising image…(Baudrillard, 1988, p. 107, 116)

“Dallas” is a good example. As Ang (1985) pointed out, “Dallas” was viewed in 90 countries. With its huge volume and substantial economic significance to both the domestic and international media market, it is clear that the American media industry must be considered the major supplier of world entertainment.

A second premise is that the most common explanations for American media dominance and for the way audiences receive the media are incomplete. Frequently proffered explanations of U.S. television and film success are reducible to three basic perspectives:

1. The materialist explanation that American media dominate by sheer economic hegemony. In this model, the threat of U.S. media is primarily economic because it subverts the development of a domestic production capacity (see Mattelart et al, 1984; Schiller, 1969, 1989, 1995; Tunstall, 1977).
2. The traditional development model, which makes use of Lerner’s (1977) want-get ratio (see also Lerner & Schramm, 1969), and which contends that American movies and television are popular because other cultures emulate the American lifestyle presented there. Although for Lerner and Schramm (1969), and other traditionalists, the emulation of U.S. culture was desirable because it led to economic development and modernization, for cultural preservationists, it was undesirable because it subverted, even colonized, indigenous cultures.
3. The reader-response or reception approach theorized by Iser (1980) and Jauss (1982) and applied by Ang (1985) and others. It argues that audiences are capable of active and empowering readings of mass communication.

These three explanations are ultimately unsatisfying in explaining what has facilitated the American media’s increasing dominance in world media because they fail to recognize what Bourdieu (1993) called “the objectivity of the subjective.” Mattelart et al.’s (1984), McChesney’s (1998), and Schiller’s (1989) critical-materialist explanation was that the expanded presence and international role of multinational corporations and new media technologies that enable rapid and widespread dissemination of information lead to American dominance. Although these are certainly major factors, this explanation does not seem complete. Mustn’t the success of the American media exports have something to do with the programs themselves? The materialist explanation is unfinished because it ignores the pleasure that American media certainly bring to many people (see Ang, 1985) or what Barthes (1977) and then Fiske (1987) called jouissance. Although it is true that American media are in many ways imperialist and hegemonic, most of the audience chooses to watch them. Governments would not have to regulate to limit their import unless there was sufficient domestic demand to warrant doing so; clearly, American culture “fascinates those very people who suffer most at its hands” (Baudrillard, 1988, p. 77). Ameri-can media dominance cannot be explained, then, by simple imperialist models, and this approach is guilty of treating a complex human process in purely objective, material terms (see Bourdieu, 1993; Johnson, 1993). In more recent writing, Schiller (1995) recognized the need for incorporating audience behavior into his formulation of U.S. hegemony, describing an in-ternational “culture of contentment” whose attitudes and belief shape po-litical and economic behavior (p. 469), a significant modification to his view of substructuration.

The traditional development explanation that the international community emulates America also fails to explain the global popularity of American media. On the one hand, it can scarcely be argued that the American media reflect any real American culture to emulate; “Dallas” or “Baywatch” are not representative of American norms and attitudes. On the other hand, cultures that are enamored with American media may be otherwise indifferent, or even repulsed by, the United States; it is possible to love certain things about American popular culture but be critical of Amer-ican culture in general (e.g., the French relationship with the American cinema might fit such a description; the vacillations of their Ministry of Culture on this matter are documented in Schiller, 1989). Traditional development explanations underestimate the ability of persons within a culture to pick and choose and treat a complex human process in purely subjective terms (see Bourdieu, 1993; Johnson, 1993), ignoring the extent to which subjective and objective factors affect each other.

Although personal agency is important, it must be considered within its context. Cultural Studies is somewhat able to bridge the gap between objectivity and subjectivity by examining “the ways in which the culture industry, while in the service of organized capital, also provides the opportunities for all kinds of individual and collective creativity and decoding” (During, 1993, p. 30).

The third approach to international media popularity is also incomplete, but encouragingly focuses on audience reception of television and film. Most reader-response criticism and reception theory (Ang, 1985; Ba-co-Smith, 1992; Fiske, 1987; Jenkins, 1992) does not systematically look at what viewers themselves are saying. Those scholars generally form the theoretical basis for which later experimental methods ...