Hollywood's America

Social And Political Themes In Motion Pictures

Stephen P Powers, David J Rothman, Stanley Rothman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367319830
• eBook ISBN: 9780429973352
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

American motion pictures still dominate the world market with an impact that is difficult to measure. Their role in American culture has been a powerful one since the 1930s and is a hallmark of our culture today. Though much has been written about the film industry, there has been very little systematic attention paid to the ideology of its creative elite. How does the outlook of that elite impact on the portrayals of America that appear on the screen? How do their views interact with the demands of the market and the structure of the industry to determine the product that is seen by mass audiences? Hollywood's America is a marvellously rich and careful discussion of these questions. It combines a meticulous systematic content analysis of fifty years of top-grossing films with a history of the changing structure of the industry. To that mixture it adds an in-depth survey of Hollywood's creative elite, comparing them to other leadership groups. The result is a balanced discussion of unique breadth and depth on a subject of national importance.Placing the film industry in the context of American society as a whole, the authors point out that Hollywood's creative leadership impacts the larger society even as it is influenced by that society. The creators of films cannot remove themselves too far from the values of the audiences that they serve. However, the fact that films are made by a relatively small number of people, who, as the authors demonstrate, tend to share a common outlook, means that, over time, motion pictures have had an undeniable impact on the beliefs, lifestyles, and action of Americans.This study contributes to the debate over the role and influence of those who create and distribute the products of mass culture in the United States.The book also contains a devastating critique of the poststructuralist theories that currently dominate academic film criticism, demonstrating how they fail in their attempt to explain the political significance of motion pictures.

1
Studying Hollywood

Assumptions

Any successful moviemaker in America wields a power unmatched by that of other contemporary artists: immediate contact with incredibly large and diverse audiences. Only a small handful of painters, writers, or even pop musicians can hope to reach such immense numbers of people so quickly. The only industry that can compete with Hollywood moviemaking in this respect is television, which is closely allied with the motion picture industry. In fact, the movie industry has been entwined in the development of television since the mid-1950s.

Given this mass audience, Hollywood movies present a particularly rewarding subject for scholars and critics interested in aesthetic objects because of what they reveal about the society that produces them. Such an investigation of the relationship between movies and society is the purpose of this book. We will describe documentable developments in Hollywood film content and style over the past fifty years, the evolution of Hollywood as an industry and social institution, and the way these developments fit into larger patterns of social change. In this chapter, we discuss the premises and the approach we take and briefly contrast our approach with a large body of contemporary film theory that also addresses the relation between film and American society and politics, albeit in very different terms.

Because of our interest in movie content and its relation to social change, we focus our attention on the people who make the movies. Although most movies, particularly those that Hollywood produces, have always been group efforts, the number of creative workers is relatively small. As a result, we argue that they form a definable and relatively cohesive social leadership cadre in America, an elite group that has come to wield increased influence in American society since World War II. We therefore examine the correlations between the backgrounds, attitudes, and beliefs of this Hollywood elite and the style and content of the movies that they make.

In discussing the Hollywood filmmakers as an elite leadership group, we rely upon a strand of social theory that can be traced back to Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) and Gaetano Mosca (1858-1941), as well as to so diverse a group of American social scientists as Harold Lasswell, C. Wright Mills, and Robert Dahl. Beginning in the 1930s, Lasswell and other political scientists and sociologists maintained that American politics involves competition among various elites for the support of the larger public.¹ Other scholars such as C. Wright Mills (1956) argued that a single, hegemonic group dominates American society and compromises democratic aspirations because it holds too much concentrated power. His arguments found support in the writings of such scholars as G. William Domhoff (1967, 1983) and Thomas R. Dye (1983), among many others.² Conversely, following Lasswell's lead, other scholars including Robert Dahl (1961, 1970, 1982, 1989), Dahl and Domhoff (1977), and Suzanne Keller (1963) have argued that American politics are characterized by pluralistic conflict among a variety of elites, none of which has ever fully dominated the social or political order. These theories of elite leadership are useful in that they help us to understand how different attitudes and beliefs in the society bear fruit in group action, whether that be politics, law, or the control of symbols and information.³ The question of how information can be understood as a province of elite leadership deserves elaboration. Many elite theorists have come to think that it is not only economic power or the control of traditional institutions (such as the church) that determines the direction of political and social change. They argue that elites responsible for the creation and dissemination of new cultural symbols now play a more significant role in contemporary American society than at any time in the past.⁴ Whereas traditional elites include such groups as leaders of the military, business, and various religious institutions, the newer information elites include national media journalists, leaders in the television industry, and Hollywood writers, producers, and directors. Most of these new groups derive their authority from the control of cultural symbols rather than from capital, instruments of violence, or longstanding social institutions.

In a society in which electronic communications technology has come to play roles that were unimaginable only fifty years ago, the new elites enjoy a power also, until recently, unimaginable in scope and size. It is not a power affiliated with state or religious authority, so it is more difficult to describe its workings, but it can best be characterized as cultural, in the broad sense. With a number of other elite theorists, we think that the postindustrial cultural elites are often in ideological conflict with the older leadership groups on a wide range of issues, and, like the members of any leadership group, the new cultural elites seek to put their ideas into practice. Battles over the content of Hollywood movies and other mass media thus run along a fault line in the society that represents a conflict among its elite groups. As elite groups have so much to do with the way any society develops, this conflict is of great import.

Accordingly, we take the position that Hollywood films are the product of a highly educated, affluent, and powerful leadership group that is vying for influence in America with other more traditional groups. The Hollywood elites do not seek power (for the most part) as an end in itself. Rather they seek to persuade Americans to create the kind of society that they regard as just and/or good. In short, they seek to propagate an ideology that they believe should be held by all decent people.⁵

As we discuss at length in Chapter 2, developments in the attitudes of the Hollywood elite and in their movies accompanied changes in the structure of the film industry in the 1950s and the 1960s, changes that allowed creative dissent to become established in Hollywood in a way that it could not have, for example, in the 1930s, Although the people who manage Hollywood have always been powerful, within the past fifty years the extent of their power, their notions about how they should use it, and the ideas that they would like to promulgate with it have changed substantially.

Our survey indicates that, far from being conservative or reactionary forces in the society as many academics insist is the case, elite directors, writers, and producers now usually espouse liberal or leftist perspectives that became prominent in the 1960s. Further, our systematic content analysis of a random sample of motion pictures since 1945 establishes that the movies of this creative elite articulate these new attitudes, which stand in marked contrast to those of the majority of the American public (and traditional elite groups) on a wide range of issues. This conies as no surprise. A very substantial majority of moviemakers explicitly affirm their belief that motion pictures should encourage social reform.⁶

Hollywood is not monolithic. Its creative elite contains persons who adhere to a variety of world views. Indeed, the best of the creative elite is often divided against itself as the requirements of the craft individuals practice clash with pragmatic concerns about money or deeply held social views.

Of course, it is not surprising that the social turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s left its mark on this group, although the seeds of change were planted earlier. As we will show, however, the extent of the transformation and its durability, are greater than most people imagine. Since 1980, movies may have relaxed their grasp of liberal ideas in a few instances, but there has been no significant ideological reversal. We do not find that members of the Hollywood elite have rushed to cater to the mass audience, although of course they do aim to entertain. If anything, the pace of change in movie content accelerated in the 1980s, and there has been no subsequent retrenchment since then, either.

Many film scholars believe that Hollywood movies reveal important truths about how America is changing. They tend to approach the study of films from a politically radical perspective (usually anecdotally) and we rarely find their descriptions of trends in representation convincing. Given the long-term changes that have transformed the industry, we believe it makes sense that recent movies are considerably more liberal in terms of character depiction and narrative line than older movies. That is one of the key hypotheses that we tested in our content analysis. Thus, we can provide a large body of evidence to counter arguments like Ryan and Kellner's in Camera Politica:

Our study focuses on the relationship between Hollywood film and American society from 1967 to the mid-eighties, a period characterized by a major swing in dominant social movements from Left to Right. . . . We noticed particularly that Hollywood film, which seemed to us to be gaining in importance as a mobilizer of public energies, was actively promoting the new conservative movements on several fronts, from the family to the military to economic policy.

(xi)

We find that this view of Hollywood leaders' conservative leanings does not accurately reflect the explicit attitudes of the Hollywood elite or the trends in Hollywood movies throughout this period. Both of our sets of data—about the filmmakers and about the movies themselves—support our conclusions.

A standard objection to arguments like ours is that while leaders in the television and motion picture industries may constitute an information elite, they are first and foremost men and women of business, who must follow the market. A number of social scientists who write about media thus find it difficult to imagine that big business, such as companies operating in Hollywood, might be led by an elite group that feels alienated from traditional American institutions, including certain business institutions. As the sociologist Herbert Gans recently argued in a short essay "Hollywood Entertainment: Commerce or Ideology": "Hollywood's products are made by commercial firms for whom profits are prior to ideology ... entertainment caters to a set of specific and fickle audiences, and has to be, virtually by definition, deviant, daring, and even oppositional to the values of these audiences" (1993:151).⁷

But in a society in which communication technology plays an ever more important role, the control of images and stories is by definition a form of power. As any casual observer of the political scene surely realizes, one need no longer be a member of the traditional elite groups to affect even national policy. This has been the case at least since Walter Cronkite broadcast his coverage of the Tet offensive to millions of homes.

Further, the parameters of acceptable storytelling are not as constricted as Gans suggests. Economic arguments about the relation of film to society cannot account for the desire of elite groups to control images and stories without necessarily converting them into monetary advantage.⁸ Indeed, as we show in subsequent chapters, many members of the Hollywood elite feel this desire quite strongly and by their own account try to act on it in their work. This is not to argue for a simple one-way direction of influence. We argue that over time and subtly, Hollywood has transformed its audience, even creating the demand for new products. As we shall note again, the bottom line is profitability. Filmmakers who do not make successful films are not able, in the long run, to raise money. All this means, however, is that filmmakers cannot move too far from their audiences' tastes and preferences. However, provided they create entertaining films that are not too didactic, they can "do good" and make a profit at the same time. Thus, in any given year, one can find popular films that affirm conservative or liberal conceptions of reality.

Just as important, the creators of mass entertainment are men and women who live in a social order that influences them. Their views of reality are affected by the culture of the society in which they live. However alienated they may be from that society, their work reflects it to some extent. Nevertheless, over time and gradually they contribute to the development of audiences that support new views of reality. At one time, for example, watching the presentation of certain kinds of sexual activity would have been avoided by at least some moviegoers who now accept such presentations as appropriate film fare in part because Hollywood's product has gradually changed their view of what is acceptable. The pattern of interaction among the creators of film, public preferences, and the society's culture, therefore, is a fairly complex one. We hope to contribute to a greater understanding of the interaction among these factors.⁹

Our characterization of the attitudes and beliefs which undergird the actions of the Hollywood elite has nothing to do with naive notions of "bias" or conspiracy. Bias only makes sense as an explanation if there is intentional distortion, and that is not our argument. Rather, as we have said, the Hollywood elite shares a set of political and cultural assumptions that it views as natural (as all of us view our own assumptions) and that it seeks, as do others, to put into action. These Hollywood leaders do not do this in a concerted or conspiratorial way; yet because there is general agreement on certain core issues (which we elaborate on in later chapters) the totality of their work suggests a more or less coherent ideology. That ideology is generally left-leaning and highly critical of traditional features of American society.

Our contribution is to study this particular elite group more closely and systematically than it ever has been examined in the past. We focus on the backgrounds, attitudes, and personalities of the Hollywood elite in comparison to other elites and on the types of information that Hollywood produces and disseminates. The purpose is to understand how Hollywood leaders tend to view America and in what directions the Hollywood elite would like to see the society develop.¹⁰

In the remainder of this chapter we describe how we put our own analyses together and justify our approaches in the context of broad theoretical debates about how to comprehend the relationship of mass art to social change.

The Study

To study the motion picture elite, we administered a lengthy questionnaire to a sample of leaders in the industry.¹¹ To examine changing social and political themes in motion pictures, we completed a quantitative content analysis of an extensive random sample of top box office films from the end of World War II to 1995. The purpose of the content analysis was to identify types of representation and to analyze how they have changed over time in order to broaden, but not replace, the interpretation of individual movies and groups of movies from carefully derived empirical data.

Such a systematic study of the social and political attitudes of the Hollywood elite, coupled with systematic content analysis of hundreds of major box office movies and thousands of film characters, has never been undertaken. The reason that no one previously attempted the task of developing meaningful, reliable categories for film content is that the daunting project is plagued with time-consuming methodological and epistemological problems.¹²

The purpose of the random sample was to insure that we discuss a representative sample of films. After all, anecdotal evidence, although compelling, is insufficient to back up claims about the larger industry as a whole and its relation to the rest of society. No matter how powerful the arguments, every anecdotal critic ends up discussing films that are chosen because they support his or her view. What we wanted to do, however, was to provide a different kind of evidence and on a much larger scale.

Obviously, empirical evidence of the kind that we use is valuable only in discussing particular kinds of questions—but in those cases it is quite powerful. It will not help in a lengthy analysis of E. T. or provide useful information about the directorial style of Frank Capra. However, if the question has to do with overall industry trends and their social or political significance—for example, whether Hollywood movies have, as a whole, become more conservative or liberal in the representation of feminist issues or whether they tend to depict the military in a different way than they used to—then the data we have collected become a highly useful tool.

We could have chosen to sample all films produced in Hollywood but opted to sample the ten highest-grossing films for each year. We did this partly for practical reasons. Such films are easier to locate and allowed us to finish within a reasonable time frame. But we also chose to limit our study on theoretical grounds, in order to target films that have reached wide audiences and therefore potentially have had greater impact on large numbers of people.¹³ Each motion picture in our sample was coded by two individuals who, in double-blind tests, agreed with each other on the key variables used in this study a minimum...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Preface
• 1 Studying Hollywood
• 2 Hollywood's History and the Politics of Motion Pictures
• 3 The New Hollywood Elite: A Profile
• 4 Hollywood Views the Military
• 5 Crime, Violence, and the Police
• 6 Religious Decline?
• 7 Hollywood's Class Act
• 8 The Politics of Gender
• 9 A New Deal for Minorities?
• 10 Box Office Hits: 1990-1994
• 11 Hollywood and the Moviemakers
• Appendixes:
• References
• About the Book and Authors
• Index