Jihad vs. McWorld

by Benjamin Barber

  These general trends are confirmed in almost every country around the world that makes and shows films in theaters or on television. They define major markets like Japan and Germany that have strong indigenous cultural traditions and define markets that remain closed to Western films like China and Cuba where, although unable to import American trash, they produce trash of their own that imitates the very American obsession with sex, violence, and soap opera, which their own propaganda condemns and their censorship is designed to exclude. Americans notice talented films like Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine (the first Chinese film to win the Palme d’Or in Cannes, 1993) and Zhang Yimou’s Raise the Red Lantern. But neither of these films was seen in China in its original cut, and the censors seem harder on serious local fare than on Hong Kong kickboxing films or bloody American suspense melodramas, which are being reproduced and sold in pirated versions in collusion with a Chinese government that has risked heavy American trade sanctions rather than acknowledge the practice. Chinese filmmaker Chen is not optimistic: “A quarter of a century ago, we were crazy about politics. Now we are crazy about making money. Our thinking has not really changed. I am afraid one day we will become money hooligans, without culture.”20 Since McWorld follows economic prosperity, they are unlikely to be entirely without culture: only without their own culture. In its place will be the culture of the money hooligans.

  American films dominate the world market in a manner that far outpaces its leadership in any other area. In the new Russia, complains Peter Shepotinik, the editor of a leading Moscow film journal, “it’s cheaper to buy and distribute some unknown third-rate American film than it is to make a Russian film these days.”21 The table of top-grossing films in twenty-two countries for 1991, which is reproduced in Appendix B, speaks for itself. Either Dances with Wolves (nine first-place slots) or Terminator 2 (six first-place slots) are in first place in fifteen of the twenty-two countries surveyed. One or the other is in second place in another eight countries. Five other first-place films are also American, including Robin Hood and Home Alone, which also are favorite second-and third-place choices in many countries. Of the top three grossing films in each of the twenty-two countries (66 films in all), fifty-eight are American. Of the 222 top ten slots in the survey, 191 are American.

  Nothing changed in 1992, when Basic Instinct, Beauty and the Beast, and sequels like Lethal Weapon 3 and Home Alone 2 were (in different slots) in the top five places in all the same countries where anywhere from seven or eight to all of the top ten were Hollywood productions.22 In monopolizing local markets, America has helped annihilate other exporters and hence has contributed to the troubles of competitors in their domestic industries. Coproductions are supposed to have blunted the American impact, but have had the opposite effect.23 Would anyone really be expected to think of Total Recall, the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle of a few years back, as a French-financed movie made by a Dutch director and an Austrian star? Foreign money, immigrant talent, a non-American distribution company are invisible threads in a garment that, to the wearer, looks and feels wholly American.24 Hollywood on the Seine may bring Europe some California-scale megaprofits, but it will extend rather than contain the ambit of McWorld.25

  In general, American filmmakers do not leave home to make movies. Rather, the best and most successful of filmmakers elsewhere traditionally emigrate to Hollywood.26 Chen Kaige, for example, the celebrated Chinese director of Farewell My Concubine who is often referred to as an example of how filmmaking can thrive outside Hollywood, followed his film to America where he said in an interview that making an American film is “what I want to do,” and cited The Godfather as the sort of film he could make.27 Paul Verhoeven should be a model for Kaige: a foreign auteur gone Hollywood big time with an assiduously nonauteur corpus that includes Robocop, Total Recall, and Basic Instinct. And so Michel Ciment complains in vain about the “moronic/sophomoric movies churned out by Hollywood for their teenage audiences and tossed like garbage on hundreds of French screens in the dry summer season,”28 while European auteurs journey to Hollywood to get rich and famous.29

  There are apparent exceptions to the growing American hegemony. Mexico is enjoying a modest film renaissance for which the success of Like Water for Chocolate serves as a token. But much of its industry is occupied with making soft-porn violence for East L.A. barrios and soap operas for the private network TELEVISA as well as for the burgeoning Spanish-language outlets on American cable. And, as in France and other nations that have preserved a local industry, Mexico’s film business depends on strong government support (from the Instituto Mexicana de Cinematográfica [IMCINE])—an innovation of President Gortari that may or may not survive and presumably goes against the ethos of free trade. But among strong national film industries, Indonesia’s rather than Mexico’s is the norm. There, the local industry is dying, “squeezed out,” according to critic Philip Shenon, “by the U.S. giant.”30 In October 1992, sixty-six of eighty-one Jakarta movie theaters were showing foreign films. Domestic gems like My Sky, My Home, which won awards in Germany and France and (ironically) even in America, cannot find a domestic outlet in Indonesia. “The presence of so many American films,” writes Shenon, “has led an entire generation to believe that Indonesia is incapable of producing great movies.” According to one twenty-nine-year-old Indonesian (Franky Boyoh), “my friends and I always see American films. There are no good Indonesian movies.”31

  To demonstrate that American films exercise an increasingly mortal hold on the world market’s cinema jugular is of course not yet to predict a particular set of cultural consequences: market omnipresence is not the same as determinative influence. Still, American films are everywhere—on global television even more overwhelmingly than on the world’s movie screens.32 They have the status of amusements but they are also likely to inspire a vision of life and to affect habits and attitudes.33 Hollywood is McWorld’s storyteller, and it inculcates secularism, passivity, consumerism, vicariousness, impulse buying, and an accelerated pace of life, not as a result of its overt themes and explicit story-lines but by virtue of what Hollywood is and how its products are consumed. Stories told to a tribe around the campfire, whatever their content, knit people together and reflect a common heritage. Stories that pass through the magic lantern and reappear on a movie or television screen are conditioned by their own particular media context. Disney movies and Disneyland are tied together by gossamer threads that weave mythic stories around cartoon identities that seem to celebrate multiculturalism even as they eradicate real difference; seem to turn active engagement into a new kind of virtual spectator sport; seem to transmute what is supposed to be sharp curiosity into blunt and reactive consumption. At the end of 1993, with great promotion, Warner Brothers Films opened a New York Warner Brothers Studio Store where one could “discover New York’s newest entertainment shopping experience.” Now studio stores are everywhere. McWorld is an entertainment shopping experience that brings together malls, multiplex movie theaters, theme parks, spectator sports arenas, fast-food chains (with their endless movie tie-ins), and television (with its burgeoning shopping networks) into a single vast enterprise that, on the way to maximizing its profits, transforms human beings.

  Many people, the great majority in developed countries, a minority climbing toward the majority in developing countries, spend far too much of their time each day in one of the commercial habitations of the new world being “imagineered” (as the Disney people like to say) in Hollywood and its satellites—in front of a TV screen or at a mall or in a movie theater or chewing on fast food while contemplating a promotion for a tie-in movie or buying some licensed piece of bric-a-brac; much more time than they spend in school, church, the library, a community service center, a political back room, a volunteer house, or a playing field. Yet only these latter environments elicit active and engaged public behavior and ask us to define ourselves as autonomous members of civic communities marked by culture or religion or other public values. As words
miths yield to imagineers, literate private readers and deliberative public citizens alike are made to feel like endangered species. Speaker Gingrich is working hard to get government off the back of the private sector, but who will get the private sector off the back of civil society?

  McWorld calls on us to see ourselves as private and solitary, interacting primarily via commercial transactions where “me” displaces “we;” and it permits private corporations whose only interest is their revenue stream to define by default the public goods of the individuals and communities they serve. NAFTA—McWorld’s global strategy in its North American guise—serves American business as well as world markets and is unquestionably a policy geared to the future: but it does not and cannot serve American or global public interests such as full employment, the dignity of work, the creative civic use of forced leisure, environmental protection, social safety nets, and pension protection. McWorld’s advocates will argue that the “market” does “serve” individuals by empowering them to “choose” but the choice is always about which items to buy and consume, never about whether to buy and consume anything at all; or about the right to earn an income that makes consumption possible; or about how to regulate and contain consumption so that it does not swallow up other larger public goods that cannot be advanced in the absence of democratic public institutions. In McWorld’s global market, empowerment lies in the choice of toppings on a baked potato: the rest is passive consumption. When profit becomes the sole criterion by which we measure every good, every activity, every attitude, every cultural product, there is soon nothing but profit. In the empire of the market, the money hooligans are princes and largesse is king.

  Films are central to market ideology. Watching them reveals a sameness pervading McWorld that seems as suffocating as the invisible “ether” that was once thought to have suffused the entire cosmos and to have given it the invisible infrastructure that made Newtonian physics plausible. Go into a Protestant church in a Swiss village, a mosque in Damascus, the cathedral at Reims, a Buddhist temple in Bangkok, and though in every case you are visiting a place of worship with a common aura of piety, you know from one pious site to the next you are in a distinctive culture. Then sit in a multiplex movie box—or, much the same thing, visit a spectator sports arena or a mall or a modern hotel or a fast-food establishment in any city around the world—and try to figure out where you are. You are nowhere. You are everywhere. Inhabiting an abstraction. Lost in cyberspace. You are chasing pixels on a Nintendo: the world surrounding you vanishes. You are in front of or in or on MTV: universal images assault the eyes and global dissonances assault the ears in a heart-pounding tumult that tells you everything except which country you are in. Where are you? You are in McWorld.

  Go to a live theater and within a few seconds of the curtain rising you will know exactly which region, which city, which culture you are in. Watch television for days at a time and you still may not have a clue as to what planet you are on—unless it is Planet Reebok. There are stylistic differences between McDonald’s in Moscow, in Budapest, in Paris, and in London by which they can be distinguished from the original McDonald’s franchise opened by Ray Kroc in Des Plaines, Illinois, back in 1955. But squint a little and all the small differences vanish and the Golden Arch is all that remains, a virtual ghost haunting our retinas even on the Champs Élysées in Paris, where its actual display is no longer permitted. Director Alain Corneau’s prophetic “world in which there is only one image” has come to pass.

  Of course inside a fast-food establishment or even a movie theater, cyberspace is a metaphor. But when it comes to television, cyberspace is virtually the reality—that is to say, is virtual reality.

  7

  Television and MTV: McWorld’s Noisy Soul

  FILMS ARE MCWORLD’S preferred software, but television rather than the cinema is its preferred medium; for with television, McWorld goes one on one, the solitary individual and cyberspace confronting one another in exquisite immediacy—with the screen as the perfect nonmediated (im-mediate) medium.1 Where cinema is limited in time and place, television is a permanent ticket to ceaseless film watching anytime, anywhere. It is a private window on McWorld—providing personal access via computers, satellites, cable, and phone lines to information sources, data collections, shopping centers, banking facilities, and the now almost notorious Internet—that welter of interlinked computers and interactive bulletin boards and video games and information banks and video-marketers and ordinary users that will one day (we are told) replace more or less every other kind of interaction in our lives. We think of the information highway as a way to get from one place to another. But the industry aims at displacing the rigidity of electronic trains with the versatility of cars. Bell Atlantic President Ray Smith thus told reporters at the news conference announcing his failed takeover of T.C.I., America’s largest cable operator, “We are providing the flexibility of the automobile. You will be able to go anywhere you want when you want.”2 But like vagrants and adventurers and robbers of old, many of us may not know exactly where we want to go and may end up living on the road, content to ride the highway like solitary bikers once rode Route I, crisscrossing America to nowhere in particular. Or, to take an adjacent metaphor, a movie screen is to a computer monitor hooked up to the electronic highway as an airplane is to a bird. The airplane does one thing well: it flies from point A to point B and you have to know exactly where and when you want to go. The bird does that too but it can also build a nest, sit on eggs, search for food and feed its young, alight on any surface anywhere, soar, dive, chirp, peck, and scratch. And it doesn’t have to have a particular destination. Movie screens show films, period. Television is a portal on the information superhighway and in its own peculiarly electronic manner it soars, dives, chirps, pecks, and scratches.

  Projected onto a movie-house big screen, films reach only a small percentage of the world’s population for specified and quite limited periods of time. The new interactive systems will permit users to dial up films—entertainment and informational, hard data and hardcore, funny and functional—all on demand so that anyone can watch anything, and buy anything, any time she chooses. Through television, films thus speak potentially to every person on earth twenty-four hours a day.3

  As movies and television have pursued common programming strategies, Hollywood’s creative monopoly over material has increased: indeed, the Americanization of global television is proceeding even faster than the globalization of American films. In England, where football (soccer) and cricket once dominated weekend sports broadcasting, viewers can now watch the NFL Game of the Week, and even in France there is an American football jeu de semaine, complete with an American-born announcer whose breathless French description of plays, rendered in an intentionally atrocious American accent, runs on with a gritty Yankee charm along the lines of “alors, quelle finesse! Regardez le quarterbacksneak de Dan Marino, ça marche vraiment parfaitment, n’est-ce pas?! Tiens! Touchdown! Eh, oui, je suis étonné! Quelle jeu! Quel grand show!”

  The Anglophilia that characterizes so much of American high culture is reciprocated by the British in low culture. On the tube, Hollywood is the template, with imitations of Gladiators and Oprah (in the person of Crystal Rose) joining Brighton Belles (a licensed version of Golden Girls) and the goofily Amerocentric youth magazine show The Word, which features personalities like basketball superstar Shaquille O’Neal, the porn star Jeff Stryker, and a policeman from Albuquerque who had his penis enlarged (though, regrettably, not on camera).4

  Eastern Europe is chasing its neighbors to the West in the race to catch America in television along with everything else. According to Miklos Vamos, a Hungarian journalist, “Hungarians, Czechoslovaks and Bulgarians try to imitate everything that is American—and I mean everything…. [T]he state-run financing system of culture doesn’t exist any longer, but neither does any network of foundations and other private funds that can be used, as in the West, to support the arts. East European films and lit
erature cannot compete with their American counterparts. If we keep going on like this, our small countries will gradually lose their national cultures.”5 In Budapest they are watching The Cosby Show on reruns—though in a German dub since Magyar dubbing is not yet available. In Yeltsin’s Russia, TV viewers can watch a rip-off of Wheel of Fortune called Field of Wonders on which lucky winners receive Sony VCRs into which they can load their pirated cassette versions of wildly popular American films.6

  Poland does still better, having access to Wheel of Fortune itself (dubbed in Polish) along with its own licensed version Kolo Fortuna, which plays to 70 percent of Polish households on Thursday evenings. Twenty-five percent of Polish households have access to cable or satellite at relatively moderate cost.7 Where Jihad and McWorld collide on television there is little doubt about who wins: the Catholic Church may be reasserting itself in areas like abortion (banned in Poland in 1992) and the Communists may be making a political comeback, but the cultural wars are being won hands down by American television. The Church has conceded as much, and elsewhere in Europe is advertising on VH1 and MTV for converts to the priesthood, which is rendered as a kind of new, AIDS-safe form of cool.

  In Asia, where wiring homes with cable or fiber optics is not yet financially feasible, satellite is making major inroads. Asian (now Murdoch’s) Star satellite network reaches hundreds of thousands of upscale Indians pining for Western fare. Satellite dishes are showing up in China as well, in flagrant disregard of state laws banning their use in keeping with the war on “spiritual pollution.” In 1993, State Council Proclamation 129 prohibited both purchase and possession of dishes. Yet millions of electronic outlaws have installed them and current estimates suggest over a half million “heavenly threads” (the literal translation of satellite antenna into Mandarin) tie 15 million viewers to a side of capitalism the regime is not anxious to promote. Prime Minister Li Peng talks a tough line, but so far no dishes have been removed and it is hard to imagine him winning a war against McWorld, particularly since in other domains of the economy he is working so hard to join it.8 He has good reason to worry, however, for what the Chinese are seeing courtesy of their dishes is unadulterated Western fare including the BBC, CNN, MTV, and an English-language sports network. The communications firms that serve Asia have not been seduced into diversification by the daunting prospects of trying to find appropriate programs for India and China. On the contrary, as the spectator venues and the distribution conduits keep evolving and multiplying and the markets keep expanding, the messages and the products being churned out get ever more homogenous. The commercial purveyors of satellite TV are in any case interested in profits not politics, and Rupert Murdoch was not averse to pulling BBC news-programming from Star Television to placate the Chinese government.