Global Hollywood 2

Toby Miller, Nitin Govil, John McMurria, Richard Maxwell, Ting Wang

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781838715946
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Filmgeschichte & Filmkritik

Substantially revised and updated, this book highlights how Hollywood has transformed itself to attain ever global clout and reach and the material factors underlining Hollywood's apparent artistic success. Takes into consideration recent events affecting Hollywood such as 9/11, US foreign policy and developments in consumer technology.

1

Globalisation + Hollywood History + Cultural Imperialism + the GATT and Friends = Laissez-Faire Hollywood or State Business?

If I could control the medium of the American motion picture, I would need nothing else to convert the entire world to Communism.

(Joseph Stalin, quoted in Trumpbour, 2002: 2)

Exposure of the multi billion-dollar gravy train enjoyed by media executives would be a shock to stockholders and the public. All would see that the inflated production costs are not due solely to a few highly paid actors. Raking money off the top, bouncing revenues and expenses between TV stations, cable channels, ancillary markets and numerous overseas machinations would be open to question. Enough slack exists to allow for creative bookkeeping practices that would baffle even Arthur Anderson’s successors. Hollywood Creative Bookkeeping is a picture they hope will never be made or shown.

(Haskell Wexler, 2002)

What happens when Hollywood and Bombay meet, Siva only knows.

(‘Movies Abroad’, 1959)

We inhabit a moment popularly understood, in Eric Hobsbawm’s words, as ‘the global triumph of the United States and its way of life’ (1998: 1). From a very different perspective, Henry Kissinger (1999) goes so far as to say that ‘globalisation is really another name for the dominant role of the United States’. His consulting firm, Kissinger Associates, advises that this era must see the US ‘win the battle of the world’s information flows, dominating the airwaves as Great Britain once ruled the seas’, not least because ‘Americans should not deny the fact that of all the nations in the history of the world, theirs is the most just, the most tolerant, the most willing to constantly reassess and improve itself, and the best model for the future’ (Rothkopf, 1997: 38, 47).

For all the misery within the US (in 2000, even as 74 per cent of college students expected to become millionaires, 44 million people had no medical coverage), it has international influence beyond the reach of other regimes, with the military and popular culture a key. And the speed with which its culture can spread around the world is accelerating. Whereas radio reached 50 million homes after forty years, it took television just thirteen years, and the Internet attained that figure in four years (International Labour Office, 2000a). In addition, the thirteen largest Internet companies in the world in 2003 were based in the US (Rice-Oxley, 2004). With ever-increasing homogeneity of ownership and control, and rapidly developing economies of scale, the capacity to dominate the exchange of ideas is strengthened. The NICL is central to that mission, as we demonstrate in chapters to come.

The source of Hollywood’s power extends far beyond the history of cinema, to the cultural-communications complex that has been an integral component of capitalist exchange since the end of the nineteenth century. In the second half of the twentieth century, Third World activists, artists, writers and critical political economists nominated that complex as cultural imperialism. By the late twentieth century, it became fashionable to think of this power in terms of globalisation, a maddeningly euphemistic term laden with desire, fantasy, fear – and intellectual imprecision (Jacka, 1992: 5, 2; Jameson, 2000). ‘Hollywood’ appears in nearly all descriptions of globalisation’s effects – left, right and third ways – as a floating signifier, a kind of cultural smoke rising from a US-led struggle to convert the world to capitalism.

Cultural diffusion has always been international, but the velocity and profundity of its processes seem to be on the increase (Mann, 1993: 119). There is an indissoluble link that ties and even mixes the ‘ideology of corporate globalization’ with the ‘ideology of worldwide communication’ through five decades of European and US government and corporate funding for intellectuals who have assiduously cultivated the mythology of communications technologies as signs of freedom, even as these innovations enabled ‘a world ruled by the logic of social and economic segregation’ (Mattelart, 2002: 591–92, 596–99). Tony Blair’s vision of politics positions the media at the centre of global economic success: ‘Free trade has proved itself a motor for economic development, political co-operation and cultural exchange. The development of modern global media will intensify this process’ (quoted in Freedman, 2003a: 27).

For this reason, theories of globalisation put space and speed at the centre of both analytic and business concerns. Capital moves at high velocity, alighting on areas and countries in a promiscuous way, and the manner in which materials and people are exchanged simultaneously across the globe is profoundly asymmetrical (Sankowski, 1992: 6; Rockwell, 1994: H1; Frow, 1992: 14–15). Put another way, the military domination of empire suffered by First Peoples is now experienced – in milder form – as corporate domination by former colonisers and colonised alike – the ‘Americanisation’ that Charles Baudelaire referred to as a ‘vast cage, a great accounting establishment’ (quoted in Grantham, 1998: 60). For Hollywood both animates and is animated by globalisation. And what distinguishes Hollywood from other industries in the present stage of capitalist expansion, but also makes the organisation of film and television crucial signs of the future, is the industry’s command of the New International Division of Cultural Labour. We prepare the way here for a description in subsequent chapters of how Hollywood reproduces and regulates the NICL through its control over cultural labour markets, international co-production, intellectual property, marketing, distribution and exhibition. The goal is to expand existing theories of global Hollywood’s power, and modify current thinking about cultural policies that both enable and resist it. We start with an account of globalisation, proceeding from there to examine Hollywood’s global history, resistance to it via cultural-imperialism critique and contemporary debates over screen trade, culminating in an evaluation of the claim that Hollywood exemplifies private enterprise.

Globalisation

[T]he US enters the 21st century in a position of unrivalled dominance that surpasses anything it experienced in the 20th. . . . America’s free-market ideology is now the world’s ideology; and the nation’s Internet and biotechnology businesses are pioneering the technologies of tomorrow.

(Alan Murray, 1999)

Early capitalism predated the existence of states, and cultures were usually organised by other points of affinity, such as religion or language. Networks of information and trade connected the Pacific, the Mediterranean, Asia and Africa through the fifteenth century, but the slavery, militarism and technology of imperialism wiped out these routes. Intra-continental communications came to rely on Europe as a conduit, and new ideologies followed, such as racial supremacy and the conversion mission of Christianity (Hamelink, 1990: 223–24). Eurocentric networks circulated the assumptions of social evolutionists, not only in their narcissism, but in their search for a unanimity that would bind humanity in singular directions and forms of development. This discourse enabled its owners to observe themselves in an earlier stage of maturation, by investigating life in the southern hemisphere, and to police and co-ordinate what they found there, in keeping with a drive towards uniformity and optimality of human definition, achievement and organisation (Axtmann, 1993: 64–65).

Big Bad World by P. J. Polyp

SOURCE: New Internationalist 337, 2001

The coordinates for compressing space and time under contemporary globalisation derive from three key imperial events: the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 and the Washington and Berlin Conferences of 1884. The Tordesillas Treaty acknowledged the emergence of empire, as the Pope mediated rivalries between Portugal and Spain through a bifurcation of the world – the first recorded conceptualisation of the globe as a site of conquest and exploitation. The Washington Conference standardised Greenwich as the axis of time and cartography, while the imperial division of Africa was outlined at the Conference of Berlin in the same year. These developments effectively marked out the world as a site of interconnected government and commerce (Schaeffer, 1997: 2, 7, 10–11), with Western Europe and the US as its domineering epicentre.

Capitalism’s uneven and unequal development has paralleled the violent cartographies of Tordesillas, Washington and Berlin. The mercantilist accumulation and imperialism of 1500 to 1800 were followed by the classical era of capital and its Industrial Revolution, founded on the use of natural resources for manufacturing copper, steel and fuel. Northern industrial development and agrarian change were partnered by European emigration to the Americas (to deal with population overflow) and the division of Africa and Asia (to obtain raw materials and enslaved labour) (Amin, 1997: 1, x; Reich, 1999; Chase-Dunn, 2002). These transformations had their utopic corollaries and contradictions via religious, imperial, economic and revolutionary ideologies that promised truth and beauty (Mattelart, 2002: 594–95).

Cinema technology and narrative emerged around the same time, at the turn of the twentieth century, when the US invented and appropriated a vast array of culturally significant machines – the airplane, the typewriter, electric light and the telephone. These devices made the nation the very image of a mechanical dream or nightmare, depending on where you stood (Grantham, 2000: 13). There were also transformations in colonial politics: the US seized the Philippines and Cuba, the European powers ran Africa, and Native American resistance was crushed. While First Peoples’ rights were being trampled under foot, commercial cultural export and sovereign authority were synchronising (with an array of genocidal stories enacted on-screen). A key economic shift also occurred between 1870 and 1914: average annual global output and exchange increased by more than 3 per cent – an unprecedented figure (Hirst, 1997: 411). Not surprisingly, Bahá’u’llah coined the phrase ‘New World Order’ in 1873 (quoted in Calkins and Vézina, 1996: 311).¹ In response to these governmental and business developments, European and US socialists, syndicalists and anarchists formed large international associations of working people (Herod, 1997: 167).

Up to the Second World War, international trade focused on national capitals, controlled by sovereign-states. In the First World, the period from 1945 to 1973 represented an ‘interregnum between the age of competing imperial powers and the coming of the global economy’ (Teeple, 1995: 57), based on US military and diplomatic hegemony, articulated to the expansionary needs of its corporations. As other economies grew, so did interdependence between nations, and between companies within nations. After 1950, world trade was dominated by the triad of Europe, Japan and the US, ‘each with their immense hinterland of satellite states’ (Jameson, 1996: 2). Between 1950 and 1973, total trade increased by almost 10 per cent annually, and output by more than 5 per cent, most of it between the triad (Hirst, 1997: 411). Whereas modern manufacturing techniques had been restricted in the nineteenth century to Europe and the north-eastern US, they came to proliferate across the world, as applied intellect and science deterritorialised (Hindley, 1999; Reich, 1999). Politically, the Cold War constructed a polarised world of two totalising ideologies that struggled for control, just as empires had done over the previous century. This totality, which obscured other differences, encouraged the view that the future would see the triumph of one pole (Bauman, 1998: 58). Hence today’s mavens of laissez-faire celebrating the supposed demise of the state – the sense that the US’ anti-Soviet security policy of ‘Containment’ has been displaced by ‘Entertainment’, that ‘MTV has gone where the CIA could never penetrate’ (Gardels, 1998: 2).

The back-story to this division of the world is complex, and it need not have gone the way that it did. Starting in 1945, two historic promises were made by established and emergent governments: to secure both the economic welfare of citizens and their political sovereignty. At the end of the Second World War, the promise of economic welfare in the First World seemed locally workable, via state-based management of supply and demand and the creation of industries to substitute imports with domestically produced items. The promise of political sovereignty in the Third World required concerted international action to convince the colonial powers (principally Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Portugal) that the peoples whom they had enslaved should be given the right of self-determination via nationalism. The latter became a powerful ideology of political mobilisation as a supposed precursor to liberation. When this second promise was made good, the resulting post-colonial governments undertook to deliver the first promise. Most followed import-substitution industrialisation (ISI), frequently via state enterprises or on the coat-tails of multinational corporations (MNCs) that established local presences. MNCs had first appeared in the mid-sixteenth century, when the first ever joint-stock company financed an English expedition to Moscow. They were effectively granted shareholder-immunity from direct responsibility for their failures with Britain’s 1855 Limited Liability Act, which restricted investors’ responsibilities to the value of their shares. By the 1880s, the US was dominated by such entities, which quickly looked to overseas profits, in keeping with their origins (Ferguson and Henderson, 2003). Following decolonisation in the middle of the twentieth century, MNCs were well placed to expand their involvement in the global South.

Despite the bright promise of self-determination that had accompanied their successful movements of national liberation, post-colonial Third World states suffered dependent underdevelopment and were mostly unable to grow economically. Their formal political post-coloniality rarely became economic, apart from some Asian states that pursued Export-Oriented Industrialisation (EOI) and service-based expansion. The ISI of the 1950s and 1960s was progressively problematised and dismantled from the 1970s to today, a tendency that grew in velocity and scope with the erosion of state socialism.

With the crises of the 1970s, even those developed Western states that had a bourgeoisie with sufficient capital formation to permit a welfare system found that stagflation had undermined their capacity to hedge employment against inflation. We know the consequences: ‘the space of economic management of capital accumulation [no longer] coincided with that of its political and social dimensions’ (Amin, 1997: xi). Today, governments are supposed to deliver the two promises to voters via ongoing formal sovereignty and controlled financial markets, but neoclassical orthodoxy and business priorities call for free international capital markets. This amounts to what the Economist calls an ‘[i]mpossible trinity’ (‘Global Finance’, 1999: 4 Survey Global Finance).

The corollary of open markets is that national governments cannot guarantee the economic well-being of their citizens. The loan-granting power of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has forced a shift away from the local provision of basic needs. The original task of the Fund was to sustain demand at the same time as it allowed employment to remain stable. Suffering nations could turn to it instead of deflating their economies or erecting trade barriers ...