The Cinematic Tourist

Explorations in Globalization, Culture and Resistance

Rodanthi Tzanelli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9781134160822
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Recent years have seen a radical transformation of conventional tourist marketing and experience. The use of exotic locations in Hollywood films has allowed global audiences to enjoy distant places. Simultaneously, Hollywood screening of potential 'tourist paradises' has generated new tourist industries around the world. This book takes a closer look at this new phenomenon of 'cinematic tourism', combining theory with case studies drawn from four continents: America, Europe, Asia and Australasia.

The author explores audiences' perceptions of film and their covert relationship with tourist advertising campaigns, alongside the nature of newly-born tourist industries and the reaction of native populations and nation-states faced with the commodification of their histories, identities and environments.

1 The world of signs

Production as consumption/ consumption as production

Film and tourism

The Colosseum rests at the heart of collective European memory as a site associated with the greatness of Roman antiquity. Its international fame has compelled travellers equipped with travel guides and historical treatises to visit the monument and modern tourists to immortalize it with their cameras. At the turn of the new millennium a crisis began to brew amongst its glorified ruins: when the Italian state was repeatedly criticized for not providing the basic tourist facilities for its visitors – such as cafés, fast ticketing arrangements and museum options – the culture minister Giuliano Urbani supported its privatization (Daily Telegraph 2001). It seems however that the pledge to modernize the country’s heritage industry has also been embraced by other Italian entrepreneurs, who have decided to exploit the monument’s tourist potential in other ways. These are the modern ‘gladiators’ of Rome, who pose outside the Colosseum for tourists in their shiny costumes with baroque swords and other accessories from the realm of kitsch souvenir fantasy. The business of these ‘warriors’ picked up after the global success of Gladiator (2000), a Hollywood blockbuster directed by Ridley Scott and starring Russell Crowe as the gladiatorial hero who defeats the evil emperor Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix). Legions of tourists, who would normally spend time roaming the archaeological site and its museums, started visiting the monument just to be photographed with such colourful characters and take home evidence of their Roman experience.

Unfortunately, this enterprise acquired the infamy of an ‘Italian job’ when the costumed men were faced with numerous tourist allegations that they charge exorbitant prices for their services. The final blow was dealt when waves of complaints made their way into the press. Tourists reported that the gladiators’ uniforms were cheap, their helmets plastic and ‘they’re not exactly Russell Crowe’ (BBC News 2002a). As the saying goes, the customer is always right and it is fair to expect good value for money – as long as demands do not turn into an occupational hazard. Inevitably, accusations of shabbiness and lack of authenticity put immense pressure on these Italian men, forcing them to take extreme measures to respond to the challenge. In March 2002 the police arrested a gladiator who carried a real sword to look ‘more authentic’ to foreign crowds; traffic wardens repeatedly drove his colleagues off their patch to protect Rome’s visitors from extortion; and, eventually, the city of Rome coerced these new businessmen to form a professional association and adopt a proper dress code that would appeal to their customers’ tastes. Through these measures the authorities wanted to respond to comments that stereotyped the gladiators as ‘just a group of men hanging around smoking’, even if ‘at a first glance [they] are very nice’ (ibid.). This organized attack resulted in street conflicts, ‘with tearful centurions claiming that they have families to feed’ (Daily Telegraph 2003) and protesting that they have no money to buy fancy costumes for the benefit of foreigners. Such despair hardly fits the macho image of Crowe killing imperial villains.

The temptation to follow the gladiatorial episodes that ensued is great, but this would divert our attention from more important observations. These are: the tourists’ urgency to secure the efficient performance of an act that reproduces a cinematic narrative which was never true to the historical record; the mobilization of the narrative by local entrepreneurs for economic reasons; the authorities’ intervention in the controversy in order to regulate the provision of tourist services; and the city’s overwhelming concern about the Italian cultural image abroad. To these obvious issues one could add some less obvious ones: what happened to those film viewers who never visited the Colosseum? How and what did they enjoy from the film? Did their desire to visit Rome lead them to learn more about its history? This book embarks on an investigation of these themes, exploring the impact that cinematic representations of place and culture have on the formation of the virtual tourist experience; the interplay between virtual and corporeal tourism following an exposure of audiences to cinematic representational apparatuses; the connections between cinematic production and the establishment of tourist industries on filmed locations; and the types of response that this phenomenon induces in host countries.

The title of the book encapsulates these themes, albeit in a rather condensed way. ‘Cinematic tourism’ and the ‘cinematic tourist’ are not uniform conceptual tools, but theoretical models internally differentiated by the moves and motions of travel through and after film, as well as the cinematic production of travel and tourism. To invoke Barthes (1993), the cinematic tourist is a Hollywood myth, a construct that emerges out of a decontextualization of the actual touring experience. The Hollywood model of the tourist exists within cinematic texts, in the movies that we watch: it suggests ways of consuming places, enjoying and ‘investing in’ (for educational purposes) our holiday time. At the same time, touring through cinematic images produces a second type of tourist who uses the power of imagination to explore the world. This version of the tourist corresponds to the movie viewer, who ‘reads’ and consumes film. The surplus meaning of a film enables audiences to travel virtually, to experience the filmed locations at a distance: thus the impulse to visit these locations originates in the imaginary journey on the screen. A third version of the ‘cinematic tourist’ is created when a tourist industry is established in filmed locations, through the products that tourist industries offer when they exploit the film’s potential to induce tourism. There is also a fourth type of cinematic tourist that completes the imagined journey of movie watchers. This is the tourist in the flesh, who visits places because they appeared in films, and whose experience of travel may be influenced by film and the attractions that the tourist industry has to offer. The interdependency of these types is not fixed: filmed locations are also visited by tourists who never watched movies and watching a movie will not necessarily result in visiting the filmed place. However, the bonds between these types of touring and the tourist are unmistakable and command analysis.

Tourism and the media: an overview

Tourism is an established subject area in the disciplines of sociology and anthropology, with research stretching back to the 1960s and 1970s or even earlier (see for example Norval 1936). Theoretically, scholars concentrated on the nature of tourism as a quintessentially modern phenomenon (MacCannell 1973), discussing tourist (Cohen 1974, 1979; Leiper 1979; Gottlieb 1982; Pearce 1982) and tourism (Boorstin 1962; Graburn 1977; Nash 1981) typologies, the relationship between hosts and tourists (MacCannell 1973; Hiller 1976; Pearce 1980) and the structure and cultural impact of tourism as a socioeconomic system (Greenwood 1977; Nash 1977). A synthesis and critical evaluation of some of these early perspectives that transformed the subject area has been John Urry’s (1990) book The Tourist Gaze. Drawing on Foucault’s concept of the gaze, Urry maintains that there are systematic ways of ‘seeing’ tourist destinations, which have roots in Western occulocentric practices, central to debates that envelop modernity. Urry already acknowledges the role visual culture has in the construction of the tourist experience and tourism as an organized system of leisure, a conviction that he carries forward in his more recent research (Urry 1995, 2000). It is precisely the centrality of the visual that this book aspires to analyse from a cinematic perspective.

The literature on cinematic tourism is surprisingly thin, given the growing importance of the phenomenon in the construction of the tourist experience and the representation of identity and culture. An interesting contextual analysis is provided by Fruehling Springwood (2002), who has argued that cinematic and televisual culture has equipped Japanese tourists with preconceptions of ‘America’ and a desire to visit specific locations. Fruehling Springwood stresses that the process of signification is culturally embedded and that it takes place prior to visiting the filmed location. An edited volume by Crouch, Jackson and Thompson (2005), with contributions from both media and tourist studies, places more emphasis on the role of imagination in tourism. In the introduction to the book the editors stress that ‘the media are heavily involved in promoting an emotional disposition, coupled with imaginative and cognitive activity’ (Crouch, Jackson and Thompson 2005: 1) that carries the potential to be converted into actual tourism. However, they also argue against conflating the mediation of tourism through television, newspaper and film images with the actual tourist experience, stressing that the former retains a utopian unboundedness that may be challenged by actual tourism, resulting in ‘acute consumer dissatisfaction’ (ibid.: 5). This argument has various ramifications, but here I wish to concentrate on two important ones (included in the volume) that I have integrated in my analysis. The first is developed by Fish (2005), who maintains that the process of ‘viewing’ is constituted by media producers through notions of touring. Televised images reflect tourism because they operate as escapist techniques, although their reception is not fixed. Fish implies that media producers generate ideal types of viewers, a notion which corresponds to the first type of cinematic tourist of my analysis.

The second dimension of the argument that I want to present comes from Edensor’s (2005) research. Edensor focuses on the Hollywood blockbuster Braveheart to debate the ways media representations of history can affect understandings of national heritage. For Edensor film has an active role in the social construction of place and culture, not simply its marketization for tourists. Cinematic narratives are inscribed in historical landscapes, but the ways they are appropriated or contested by visitors/ tourists may differ. The theme of manipulative creation of cinematic narratives also concerns Parsons (2000) who argues that aesthetic media images are able to manipulate myths of national identity powerfully, but can also create new forms of popular identity. Like Edensor, she maintains that such representations of culture can be consumed by visitors at the destination. Edensor and Parsons highlight the shift from the first to the second, third and then fourth version of the cinematic tourist: from the film’s ideal viewer to the real viewer and then the actual tourist. Other relevant studies do not stay within the ambit of ‘cinematic tourism’ as defined above, but explore more general connections between visual culture and tourism. For example, an edited volume by Crouch and Lübbren (2003) debates both how images inform tourist practices, form referential networks within them but are also constructed from actual tourist experience. The role of bodily presence, of ‘corporeal bonding’ with the new environment, is crucial in this experience (see also Crouch et al. 2001: 260–1). To make this observation applicable to the cinematic tourist thesis I want to suggest that film and tourism form a dynamic relationship of interaction which often has unpredictable outcomes. Unfortunately, little room is spared for an exploration of the actual tourist experience of filmed locations in this book; a few reflections are provided in Chapters 3 and 4.

Analytical differentiations of actual and virtual tourisms may be useful, but they bear the potential to obscure other important questions about the tourist experience as such. Following the trail of colonial studies, Strain (2003) identifies in tourism a romantic pursuit for authenticity that divorces the encounter with ‘other’ cultures from its political context. According to Strain, visual technologies have always been at the heart of these romantic pursuits, from the nascent steps of anthropology to the present endeavours of Internet, ‘virtual’ tourists. Cinematic technologies and the ‘travel mystique’ share ‘the illusion of demediating mediation’ (2003: 3; emphasis in the text), the idea that certain types of experience have the power to erase the mediation of reality altogether. Travel to foreign lands is replete with demediating mediation, as it allegedly involves contact with unspoiled otherness, ‘a cleansing process that renews perception’ (2003: 3). Although she traces parts of her argument back to various classical anthropological and sociological studies of tourism, she concentrates mainly on the work of MacCannell (1989), who identifies in travel a search for authenticity stripped of the marketing discourse of tourism. Strain’s understanding of film viewing as demediating mediation is based on the medium’s power to manufacture a version of authenticity while simultaneously blocking and filtering the mechanisms of exoticization employed in the construction of cinematic imagery and narrative. Film has, in short, the power to simulate authenticity while denying that it engages in simulation (Strain 2003: 18–20). This enables the viewer to engage fully with image and narrative like a traveller who deludes themself that they have reached the core of ‘other’ cultural realities when they have, in fact, simply hit upon the wall of yet another representation. I agree with Strain that the demediation of representation is inherent in the cinematic experience, and I maintain that it can be marketed or sought after (by virtual or actual travellers) as ‘the real experience’.

Interesting though they are, these works do not have much to say about the communities or nations used in destination images and narratives. The centre of attention is the viewer, the tourist or consumer or alternatively the producer, rather than the ‘consumed’ host. I would like to discuss a different approach that integrates community responses to the general picture of tourist production and consumption. This comes from Film-Induced Tourism (2005), the only existing study of tourist development through film by Beeton. For Beeton, film-induced tourism includes ‘visitation to sites where movies and TV programs have been filmed as well as to tours to production studios, including film-related theme parks’ (Beeton 2005: 11). This definition is rather broad for the purposes of the present study, but does not deviate from Strain’s basic argument. Beeton recognizes the roots of contemporary tourism in the eighteenth-century Romantic movement that promoted the picturesque, idealized versions of landscape for consumer gratification. Drawing on Seaton (1998), she sees the picturesque as the predecessor of the ‘tourist gaze’ that idealizes nature and otherness (peasantry, noble savagery) (Beeton 2005: 5–8), a point I will reiterate in some case studies of this book. According to Beeton, contemporary media representations of place share this idealization with eighteenth century literary creations and can induce the desire to visit places and cultures. To support this thesis she has recourse to MacCannell’s (1989) argument that mediated versions of tourist locations generate ‘markers’ of places in the form of images. Film has precisely this function: it ascribes meaning to locations through imaging, making them desirable destinations.

Beeton is concerned about the impact that tourism can have on a location and its environs. ‘Tourism carries with it the seeds of its own destruction’ (Beeton 2005: 12) because it can lead to environmental destruction and community disintegration. Debating the problem from a destination-marketing point of view, Beeton argues for organized sustainable development strategies. Her commitment to this community development project is admirable. Although her methodology draws upon other disciplines, mainly psychology and market studies, it also incorporates Marxist sociological and anthropological approaches to tourism, largely forgotten in contemporary research that celebrates consumerism but brushes aside its pitfalls. My approach in this book differs on one point from Beeton’s: I am concerned less with the economic and more with the cultural impact of cinematic tourism (or their relationship), especially the consequences of host–guest interaction for local and national identities. But before I discuss the politics of this interaction, it is necessary to be clear about the minutiae of relations between Hollywood film and tourist industries.

The ‘sign industry’: from film to tourism (and back again)

The terms ‘film’ and ‘tourist industries’ take us back to the radical critique of mass consumption pioneered in the 1930s and the 1940s by a number of Frankfurt School theorists, among them Theodor Adorno (1991) and Max Horkheimer (Adorno and Horkheimer 1993). In an era of European totalitarian politics, the rise of mass media in democratic countries such as the USA was regarded as a demagogic tool that might divert collective consciousness from sociopolitical problems. Consequently popular culture – music, film, magazines – was viewed by Frankfurt School theorists as a force that could destroy the potential for a social revolution. Especially in the light of an increasing success of Hollywood musicals, Adorno and Horkheimer expressed the fear that the recipients of cinematic messages could become consumers in abstracto – that is, consumers who have lost their particularity and become interchangeable and quantifiable. As Kellner (1989) recently clarified, according to Adorno and Horkheimer’s version of critical theory, this reification can be detected in capitalist societies in general. Quantifiability, interchangeability and abstraction may also point to what Marx described as a shift from use value (value as such, exemplified in the use of things) to the exchange value (value acquired in and through the act of exchange) in capitalist systems. This shift applies both to the consumers themselves and the products that they consume.

Compelling though this sociological model may be, it tends to underestimate the complexity of production, because it considers the manufacturers of cultural goods mere participants in a conspiracy against collective consciousness. But as Hesmondhalgh (2002: 4–6, 232) has explained, the manufacturers of cultural goods in global industries are involved in a creative manipulation of symbols to such an extent that they should be considered agents of sociocultural change. Creative manufacturers often derive non-economic satisfaction from their involvement in production processes, even though they remain dependent on basic economic planning (e.g. advertising of products) (Caves 2000: 2–4). The relationship between creative arts and commerce seems to have become closer as sectors within creative industries that were not commercial in the past (e.g. performing arts, broadcasting) have become commercial. For some scholars, most modern economies are consumption-based, and ‘social technologies that manage consumption derive from the social and creative disciplines’ (Cunningham 2005: 293). Pushing this argument further, Castells (1996) and Lash and Urry (1994) inform us that symbolic creativity permeates contemporary socioeconomic life, as more industries fashion themselves on the cultural model. This invites us to examine the social relations (see also Urry 1995: 129) of creativity, that is, the ways in which cinematic images of tourism are produced by Hollywood companies and exploited by tourist providers. There is an implicit interplay of artistic creation and market production that cannot be ignored, because it is central to the innovative aspects of commodification (Hartley 2005: 5–6; Miège 1987). These reflections point in one direction: production modes have their own culture (Zelizer 1983, 1988: 618) that needs to be understood before it is condemned.

The modes of contemporary production must correspond, or respond, to those of consumption. To coordinate the analysis of film and tourist industries we must, therefore, question exactly what film viewers and potential tourists consume. In films and film-induced tourist practices potential tourists never seem to consume specific objects, but clusters of signs: they are tempted to buy holidays to filmed spots because of their Hollywood aura; they are invited to relive the film through tours ‘on location’; and they are enticed to buy souvenirs that refer to the mythical figures of the cinematic plot. Tourist production is made possible through film consumption only because film produces meaning in the first place (Ateljevic 2000: 381), but these cinematic messages do not develop in a sociocultural void: they comprise representations of existing consumer experiences that circulate in the realm of contemporary culture. It may be more correct to argue that mythical (Rojek 2000: 54; Shields 1991), socially constructed images and experiences of place and culture are not directly the product of tourist industries, but are over-determined by a variety of ‘non-tourist practices, such as film, TV, literature, magazines’ (Urry 1990: 3; see also Taylor 2001) and other consumption objects and processes. The interconnectedness of all these different phases and sectors of the culture industries confirms that tourism begins with cultural ‘signification’ (Culler 1988; MacCannell 1989; Urry 1990: 12; Lash and Urry 1994; Wang 2000).

This demands a re-evaluation of the analytical distinction between the film and tourist industries, as they both participate in the circulation of what Jean Baudrillard (1973) has termed symbolic ‘sign values’. Debating the postmodern condition, Baudrillard observed that the relationship between the sign and the signified has loosened so much that all textual and visual meanings became arbitrary. The absence of a stable relationship between signifier and signified leaves the sign vulnerable to what Best and Kellner have called ‘manipulation in coded differences and associative chains’ (1997: 99). This manipulation refers both to producers and consumers, with grave consequences relating to the destruction, deconstruction and creation of social realities. Baudrillard is very pessimistic when it comes to these consequences, arguing that since images and representations simply succeed each other in arbitrary ways, we can talk about the ‘death of the real’ (Baudrillard 1983: 53) and the rise of a society that lives through simulations. His theory radicalized the analysis of the impact that the mass media have on the construction of reality, and questioned the ways in which ‘dominant codes’ of meaning rise and fall in Western liberal societies (Baudillard 1991; Porter 1993: 2). His approach clearly transcends the classical Marxist distinction between production and consumption (see Lash and Urry 1994: 123) on which Adorno and Horkheimer based their thesis, as the two modes become interchangeable in what I will term global sign industries. The term is pertinent for many reasons: first, because it does not deviate from the classical argument that we do deal with industries that trade in images and ideas, the intangible aspects of culture; second, these industries are global, because they thrive on their economic and political interconnections – a point to which I return below; finally, they are sign industries, because they generate, manipulate and market cultural signs. Central to the operative forces of these industries is a game of endless hermeneutics: by filmmakers (of novels on which films are based), by audiences (of films) and by holiday providers (of audiences’ film readings). Even tourists engage during their holidays in the collection and appropriation of signs (Urry 1990: 12) that som...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The World of Signs
• 2 Pitfalls of the ‘Tourist Gaze’
• 3 ‘National elf services’
• 4 Corelli Goes to Hollywood
• 5 ‘Welcome to the Land of Salsa’
• 6 Farewell to Authenticity?
• Bibliography