Jihad vs. McWorld

by Benjamin Barber

  Recognizing the power inherent in these forces, corporations from the parallel worlds of publishing, of telecommunication hardware, transmission and software, and of entertainment are fighting for the right to swallow one another up, converging, merging, and buying each other out as fast as financing can be found and stockholders bribed. The courts step in not to preserve a public good nor to impede a developing monopoly but only to assure that stockholder profitability will be the only criterion of a deal (as happened when the Delaware high court insisted Paramount reject a lower “friendly” bid from Viacom and entertain a higher unfriendly bid from QVC). Under the banner of synergy, which is how Mickey Mouse strong-arms the competition, they are doing and spending whatever it takes to secure monopolistic control over what they now see as a single, integrated high-tech mediological package that can dominate the global economy and all of its once diversified markets. While the megacorporations fight, governments (including the government of the United States) sit it out making small clucking noises about free markets, as if no public interests were involved or as if the radically skewed markets of McWorld would resolve matters judiciously all on their own. They cannot and they will not.

  Who exactly is to represent the public interest or the common good in this Darwinian world of corporate predators that just happen to control the defining symbolic essentials of civilization remains moot. Few even raise the question. The multiplicity of broadcast and cable spectra has made the old fairness doctrine obsolete and just about put the F.C.C. out of business. A modest regulatory bill cognizant of the new technologies was left twisting in the wind (along with a lot of other legislation) in the 1994 Congress. Even that bill, sponsored by Senator Ernest F. Hollings, was as much about curtailing as initiating regulations pertinent to the establishment of the new information highway and even the Baby Bells (local phone companies) who would have been subject to its regulations were disappointed in its failure since they were depending on it to legitimize their entry into the cable television and long-distance business.

  Yet legislating on behalf of the public weal in telecommunications has become almost impossible. The change from earlier years is palpable. When New York’s classic music radio station WNCN tried to convert to rock in the 1970s, enraged listeners found a friend in the F.C.C. and the station was constrained to retain its classical format. When in 1993 it again jettisoned the classics, the F.C.C. was nowhere to be found, and WNCN’s proprietors were able to make the absurd argument that two classical stations in a city with scores of stations and millions of listeners “saturated” the market, and that one alone would serve. What then will take the place of the F.C.C. or government oversight or democratic regulation and accountability?15 Is there any hope for what Fred Friendly a dozen years ago called an “electronic bill of rights” in an era where a new Republican Congress is moving to abolish or privatize public broadcasting and dismantle what remains of the federal regulatory apparatus? How can the public be represented by markets that privilege individual consumption, taken consumer by consumer, but have no way of representing public goods—what individuals share and thus what makes them more than consumers? Where are the market incentives to protect public interests?16

  These questions suggest that, after looking at the four distinctive elements of film, television, books, and theme parks and how they have become at once both internationalized and Americanized, we will need to take notice of the new merger and acquisitions frenzy in the information sector—a vertical integration frenzy in the name of free choice and free markets that could result in a monopoly more perilous to liberty than any dreamed of by mineral and durable goods megamonopolists like John Rockefeller, Sr., or Andrew Carnegie.17

  6

  Hollyworld: McWorld’s Videology

  TO WHOM OR to what belongs this expiring century? Is it the American century? Perhaps. The century of world wars and holocaust? Certainly. The science century? Undoubtedly. But I nominate celluloid and its baby cousin videotape: for more than anything else this has been the Movie Century, an epoch in which film and video and the images they mediate have replaced print and books and the words they once brokered as the chief instrumentalities of human communication, persuasion, and entertainment. Information has been digitalized and computerized and the pace of communication has been accelerated, but sound and pictures are how what passes as “knowledge” gets “communicated” to most people around the globe. The news has moved from print to video so that even newspapers emulate television formats. USA Today, for example, is television in tabloid form while even the venerable New York Times has gone to color in its advertisement-laden Sunday edition. And many magazines today are available on the Internet.

  The table for McWorld has been set by Hollywood. If movable type (along with gunpowder and navigation) brought the medieval world of status, hierarchy, and popular ignorance crashing down in a colossal Re-formation of the human condition and propelled humankind over the threshold of modernity, movable photographic frames (and, in time, scanning ion beams) have challenged the world of print, propelling us out of the modern and into the postmodern. The formats and packaging have changed (television, videos, and computer screens), the content has evolved (music videos, advertorials, and infomercials), and the conduits have developed (cables, satellites, switched phone lines, and fiber optics), but the payoff still comes as moving images that pass before human eyes. These images, reinforced by recorded sound, take the place of words, numbers, and other ciphers with which humans have traditionally communicated. The abstraction of language is superseded by the literalness of pictures—at a yet to be determined cost to imagination, which languishes as its work is done for it; to community, which is bound together by words; and to public goods, which demand the interactive deliberation of rational citizens armed with literacy.

  As with the other contributing elements to the culture of McWorld, movies and videos are ever more unitary in content as they become ever more global in distribution. More and more people around the world watch films that are less and less varied. Nowhere is American monoculture more evident or more feared than in its movies and videos. Moreover, as distinctions between phone companies, cable carriers, broadcast media, and software producers melt and elephantine communication corporations mix and merge, monoculture is enhanced, diversity yielding to uniformity and competition giving way to monopoly. With a few global conglomerates controlling what is created, who distributes it, where it is shown, and how it is subsequently licensed for further use, the very idea of a genuinely competitive market in ideas or images disappears and the singular virtue that markets indisputably have over democratic command structures—the virtue of that cohort of values associated with pluralism and variety, contingency and accident, diversity and spontaneity—is vitiated.

  Technology experts like Jeff Miller who ask “Should Phone Companies Make Films?” and then, on grounds of efficiency or specialization, answer no, miss the point.1 Mergers are driven not by coequal interdependency but by the reality of the absolute primacy of programming: the sovereignty of content over the manifold forms it can take in the age of McWorld. Rockefeller bought up the railroads and the distribution network in order to guarantee the flow of oil, the black gold of its time. McWorld’s black gold is information and those who own the information “pipes” are rightly drawn to bid for the stuff the pipes deliver. This is no small matter in an economy where the audiovisual industry is the second largest export sector after aerospace—$3.7 billion to Europe alone in 1992, which may hint at why the Europeans (especially the French) were sufficiently alarmed to put the 1993 GATT agreement at risk in order to get audiovisual materials exempted from the new free-trade regulations.2 “Cinema used to be side salad in world commerce,” comments a French observer, “now it’s the beef.”3

  With or without resistance, nations with proud traditions of filmmaking independence like France, England, Sweden, India, Indonesia, and Japan are in fact gradually succumbing to the irresistible lure of product
that is not only predominately American but, even when still indigenous, is rooted in the glamour of the seductive lifestyle trinity sex, violence, and money, set to a harmonizing score of American rock and roll. Where it survives in other countries, domestic filmmaking is thus mainly devoted to low-budget imitations or blockbuster replicas of Hollywood fare. The new universalism turns out to be little more than an omnipresent American parochialism dubbed into various languages and funded by multinational coproducers. Privatization diminishes state support for filmmakers and leaves them more vulnerable to foreign films at the very moment that free trade leaves fragile domestic film industries unprotected. Local filmmakers cannot begin to compete with the monopolistic international giants that have control over production, distribution, and movie houses (the new multiplex theaters) throughout the world. Coproduction, which permits financial and creative forces from several nations to work together, was once seen as a savior of local film industries. In fact, it has only hastened the liquidation of truly indigenous films. Financing of The Piano by French television independent CIBY 2000 hardly makes Jane Campion’s award-winning film French.

  The Hungarian film industry, traditionally Eastern Europe’s most fecund market and still active even in the financially pinched post-Communist era, has discovered that Hungarian audiences will not support local filmmakers. Dozens of domestic films are made but only a handful are shown in a few small “art” houses in Budapest; the main screens in the large houses are entirely devoted to American product; hence, in Hungary the top eight grossing films of 1991 (as in the preceding several years) were all American (see Appendix B). American filmmakers conveniently conclude that the market has spoken; competitors fear they have been silenced by money and market muscle and the way in which markets and money privilege universal (read: bad) taste.

  Even countries with aggressively protectionist cultural policies like Indonesia or France have been unable to stem the American tide. For both political and cultural reasons, Indonesia has tried to protect its cinema. The film industry has been a pawn in wider trade negotiations, however, and was recently sold down the river (or out into the Pacific Ocean) by the government in Jakarta in order to assure continued textile exports to America.4

  The French have been driven to distraction by American inroads into French cinema audiences, their ire boiling over in 1991 when American films not only led domestic fare in the mass cinema sweepstakes, but—led by the Coen brothers’ Barton Fink—also managed to completely dominate the Cannes Film Festival, adding the high-culture critics’ sublimest prizes to their spoils. In desperation, the French film industry successfully campaigned to have films placed in the same category as fruit and vegetables as a vital national industry in the hope that, as with agriculture, it might be exempted from the free-trade provisions being forced on it both by the Uruguay round of GATT talks and by the Common Market. Former Culture Minister Jack Lang proclaimed all-out “war” against Hollyworld’s cultural depredations and rules were established in the early nineties requiring that 60 percent of all video programming on French television be European and 40 percent of music played on French radio and television be of French origin. Why the protectionist panic? Almost into the eighties, American films had managed to secure a purchase of no more than a third of French cinema revenues and were actually lionized by auteur critics who still revered the black tones of earlier gangster melodramas and the vaudeville antics of comedians like Jerry Lewis.

  Today although the French still make 150 films a year (versus about 450 for Hollywood) almost 60 percent of revenues go to America and there is little tolerance left. America now controls well over 80 percent of the European market, while Europe has less than 2 percent of the American market.5 On its opening weekend, the American blockbuster Jurassic Park took over nearly a quarter of France’s eighteen hundred movie screens in larger towns and cities, provoking an outcry from defenders of local culture such as Lang’s successor, Culture Minister Jacques Toubon.6 Lang had prohibited non—French-language films from competing for the French Oscars (the “Césars”) even though this had meant that many French directors who made English-speaking films were shut out (including Jean-Jacques Annaud with his film of Duras’s The Lover and Louis Malle, with Damage). He declared war on American trade representatives and again got audiovisual “products” into the GATT round at the end of 1993. France won the GATT skirmish at the eleventh hour, preserving its quotas and its state film subsidies of $350 million a year. However, with EuroDisney settling into a long run just outside of Paris (despite a very shaky financial start) and with American films and television programs the staple of powerful new “French” pay networks like CANAL PLUS and CIBY 2000, there is unlikely to be an easy way back to the glory years of the fifties and sixties for French filmmakers.

  With its 150 films a year, of which perhaps two dozen are exportable, France still has one of the world’s great cinema cultures; indeed, it still controls nearly half of what appears on its own screens, and still makes films that are both parochially French and globally distributed as well as universally acclaimed. Compared with Berlin or Budapest, where Hollywood rules, Paris cinemas still screen a great many French films.7 But major studios are closing and for all the rancorous expletives no one knows how to stop the American tidal wave. A group of European directors wrote an open letter to “Martin” (Scorsese) and “Steven” (Spielberg) imploring them to recognize that the Europeans were “only desperately trying to protect European cinema against its complete annihilation.” If films are not exempted from free trade, they predicted, “there will be no more European film industry by the year 2000.”8 Jack Lang must have seen the writing on the screen, however, because even while he was doing battle in the name of culture against the American celluloid colossus, he was decorating Sylvester Stallone with a Legion of Honor.

  Vincent Malle, Louis Malle’s brother and a producer, has also seen the future: surveying the success in France of the juvenile film that turns Beethoven into a pet Saint Bernard, he sighs: “What works in Chattanooga now works in the Sixth Arrondissement of Paris; it’s a little sad.”9 It may be as Charles Grassot, another French producer, says, that “one has to admit that American movie audiences are infantile.”10 But as a potential audience for American pop culture, the rest of the world seems bent on growing backwards into the universal childhood of Hollywood and Vine.11 Infantilism is a state of mind dear to McWorld, for it is defined by “I want, I want, I want” and “Gimme, gimme, gimme,” favorites from the Consumers Book of Nursery Rhymes. And that is not just “a little sad,” it is a lot sad.

  Surveying the wreckage of Europe’s once proudly independent cinema, critic David Stratton observed bitterly that the excitement and discovery of the 1960s, when Bergman, Antonioni, Visconti, Truffaut, Godard, and Buñuel were busy at their craft in nations that possessed vibrant indigenous film industries, were gone with the wind.12 He lamented that “although probably just as many people are going to the world’s cinemas today, they’re more likely to be seeing mainstream American films than attending new works by the descendants of Bergman, Godard and the rest.”13 What remains is “the American juggernaut,” which manages to overwhelm not only local film industry but rival competitors from abroad. Thus while in 1972 only 86 or one-third of the 255 foreign films shown in West Germany were American, by 1991, 162 or nearly two-thirds of 262 foreign films were American.14 In Europe today, American films account for about 85 percent of the revenue—about $1.7 billion of the $2 billion in box office receipts.15 Europe tries as best it can: with French leadership, it passed an E.E.C. regulation requiring all national television stations to maintain 50 percent domestic programming (including movies and series). Pay TV and satellite television has paid little attention, however, and while the measure survived the 1993 GATT round it will eventually yield to market forces via satellite or home video or other new technologies. The time is not so far off when there will be one single image—an American image of America, something like Ronald Reaga
n’s opening shot in his celebrated It’s Morning in America video, or a burger sizzling on the desert-baked enamel of a Chevy V-8—an image so generic, so affecting, so ubiquitous, and so empty that it will no longer be recognized as American, it will just be.16

  The dismal story of film in Europe can be duplicated over and over again around the world. In India in 1991, despite its stalwart local film industry, 78 of 124 imported films were American.17 In revolutionary Iran, where zealous censors banish most imports and encourage “banal, opportunistic, psuedo-revolutionary films, full of pompous political language,” Dances with Wolves and Driving Miss Daisy nevertheless were admitted and found a large audience.18 Innocuous enough, one might surmise, but in a country where “even the people in charge were confused about what Islamic cinema is” (according to Iranian director Bahram Bayxai), a foot in the door may be the beginning of a kick in the rear end for an insular Islamic culture trying to preserve itself politically and culturally against the West.19