Jihad vs. McWorld

by Benjamin Barber

  15. Even the first time around, in the 1930s, the public interest ultimately was undercut by the compromises won by commercialism: see Robert W. McChesney, Telecommunications, Mass Media, and Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

  16. This is not exactly a new story. As William Leach tells it in his Land of Desire: Merchants, Power and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), the rise of consumerism from the 1890s through the Depression more or less parallels the rise of American capitalism.

  17. The absence of government interest in America is startling, given the implications of the new media merger mania for freedom of information, equal access to knowledge, and issues of monopoly. A private coalition of sixty nonprofit, consumer, labor, and civil rights groups has convened a Telecommunications Policy Roundtable that hopes to provide public debate about the public interest in these new technologies, but it is unlikely to be an adequate counterbalance to the multibillion-dollar deals currently being struck by private corporations.

  Chapter 6. Hollyworld: McWorld’s Videology

  1. Jeff Miller, “Viewpoints: Should Phone Companies Make Films?” The New York Times, January 2, Section 3, p. 11.

  2. Roger Cohen, “Europeans Back French Curbs on U.S. Movies,” The New York Times, December 12, 1993, Section I, p. 24.

  3. Cited by Roger Cohen, “Aux Armes! France Rallies,” The New York Times, January 2, 1994, p. H 1.

  4. Marselli Sumarno, “Indonesia,” in the Variety International Film Guide (Hollywood: Samuel French Trade, 1993), p. 210. The United States demanded easier access for American film exports to Indonesia in return for guaranteeing it would not encumber Indonesian textile imports into the United States.

  5. Roger Cohen, “Europeans Back French Curbs,” p. A 24.

  6. Alan Riding, “French Film Industry Circles the Wagons,” The New York Times, September 18, 1993, Section I, p. 11.

  7. Thus, a local hit like Les Visiteurs can still outearn a megahit import like Jurassic Park.

  8. Bernard Weinraub, “Directors Battle Over GATT,” The New York Times, December 12, 1993, Section I, p. 24.

  9. Paul Chutkow, “Who Will Control the Soul of French Cinema?” The New York Times, August 9, 1993, Section 2, p. 22.

  10. Roger Cohen, “Barbarians at the Box Offices,” The New York Times, July 11, 1993, Section 9, p. 3.

  11. In a piece of doggerel called “The GATT in the VAT,” Stuart Elliot captures the mood of ridicule with which Americans view the French anxieties:

  They note with delight GATT’s roiling the French,

  The folks who make teeth around the world clench.

  The French claim our movies, TV and such,

  Will put their own film makers in Dutch.

  They clamor their culture’s in peril, The French,

  Terrified Spielberg will make them retrench.

  Overshadowed by “Jaws” and “Terminator 2,”

  How will Gerard get his Depar-dieu?

  Stuart Elliot, “GATT in the VAT,” The New York Times, December 12, 1993, p. E 5.

  12. Germany is more typical of Europe than France. It has offered much less resistance to Hollywood. In the late 1950s, it had over seven thousand screens available and sold over 750 million tickets, with German films counting for nearly half of the business done. America took in only one-quarter of the revenues, while French and Italian films were each earning 10 percent of the market. Germany offered its people a genuinely diversified, culturally heterogeneous culture market. By 1975, however, television and rising prices had driven ticket sales down to only 128 million, while the number of screens available had been reduced to around thirty-two hundred. Meanwhile, the American share had crept up to over 41 percent while the German share of revenues was down to only 13 percent. During the 1980S the German share skidded erratically to and fro between 10 and 20 percent of the market, but American imports climbed inexorably through 53 percent in 1981 to 66 percent in 1984 up to 83 percent in 1992, a year in which nine of Germany’s ten top-grossing films were American, with Basic Instinct, Hook, Beauty and the Beast, Home Alone, and JFK occupying the top five spots. (All figures are from information provided by the Statistical Department of the Spitzenorganisation der Filmwirtschaft e.V. in a letter dated June 28, 1993.) As in other countries, Germany still is home to a great deal of filmmaking, as many as three thousand productions each year. But only 10 percent of these represent serious productions with real budgets and a far smaller percentage actually find their way to a commercial screening.

  13. David Stratton, “Gone with the Wind,” Variety International Film Guide, p. 14.

  14. Figures from the Statistical Department of the Spitzenorganisation der Filmwirtschaft e.V.

  15. “Sleeping With the Enemy: Europe’s Film Industry,” The Economist, October 26, 1991, p. 91. Limiting the number of American films cannot prevent the successful megahits from reaping disproportionate percentages of overall revenues.

  16. French film director Alain Corneau warned “Think of a world in which there is only one image.” Cited in Riding, “French Film Industry.”

  17. Uma de Cunha, “India,” Variety International Film Guide, p. 205.

  18. Deborah Young, “Iranian Cinema Now,” in Variety International Film Guide, p. 30.

  19. In Dances with Wolves, Kevin Costner documents the conquest of Native American Indians by the new Americans; will Islam fare any better against Kevin Costner? Dances with Wolves turns out to have made more than half its revenue from foreign screenings. This is true for more and more American films, including such seeming “American” hits as JFK, Pretty Woman, and Robin Hood.

  20. Quoted in David Hansen, “The Real Cultural Revolution,” Newsweek, November 1, 1993, p. 74.

  21. Cited by Andrew Horton, “Russia,” Variety International Film Guide, p. 324. What is getting made in Russia is tawdry genre films with titles like The Little Giant of Big Sex, Violence, Whorehouse, and everybody’s favorite, Even KGB Agents Fall in Love. For the rest, traditional studios like Mosfilm and the Gorky Studio are now principally engaged in servicing foreign productions like the American-made Russia House to earn foreign currency.

  22. Hollywood’s domination of the global market is evident not only in its revenues and ticket sales, but also in its increased share of imports in every importing market. A survey of the “Best Ten” list of foreign films in Japan published by Kinema Jumpo starting in 1924 offers a revealing picture of the growth and decline of national cinema in countries like India, Sweden, France, and Italy that once supplied Japan with high-quality imports. After an early monopoly by Hollywood in the late twenties and thirties when (from 1924 through 1934) 77 (or 73 percent) of the top 106 foreign films were American, America became only one among many importers. From 1935 to 1940 only 27 (or 45 percent) of 60 top imports were American. After the war, from 1948 through 1968, 59 (or just 28 percent) of imports were American. In 1960, for example, only Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator made the top ten, while three Italian, four French, and two Russian films completed the list. As late as 1967 only In the Heat of the Night was on the list, the other nine top foreign films coming from a variety of Swedish, Soviet, and other European coproductions. But starting in 1969, between four and seven of the top ten imports were American (70 or 54 percent of 130 top films between 1969 and 1988), and in the last five years the American lock has meant eight or nine of the top ten imports as well as top-grossing films measured against domestic production. All statistics are from the Japanese film magazine Kinema Jumpo Best Ten: 1924–89.

  23. Coproduction makes it harder to identify product by a single national culture, but it has been more about financing films internationally than creating them that way artistically, and although coproduction has certainly given an international flavor to films like The Crying Game and The Lover, its main impact has been to regionalize and thus denationalize what were once specifically French or Swedish or Indonesian or Chinese pictures.

  “Th
e ‘new democracies’ of East Europe are learning some bitter lessons as the air is let out of the cushion of state funding, driving them into unlikely partnerships which threaten ‘national character’; in East Asia, long time enemies China and Taiwan are both depending on the dominant Hong Kong film industry to pump life into their own film cultures; and in Scandinavia, multi-Nordic co-productions have all but obliterated the concept of a film’s ‘nationality’.” David Stratton, “Gone with the Wind,” Variety International Film Guide, p. 20.

  24. As Derek Elley, editor of Variety International Film Guide, has written, coproducing a film in Italy and Yugoslavia probably means planning the film in a Roman bistro, a cheap and quick shoot in what was Yugoslavia, and then … “An American star who hasn’t worked in Hollywood for some months is signed up for a male lead, a British character actor who has been holidaying in Rome agrees to play the ‘heavy’ for modest terms … an Italian actress who can mumble a few words of English … An American director who is in-between TV series is signed on as director, though it is vaguely explained to him that he will not be credited as director in Italy. The producer now books his studio and pays the expense to Yugoslavia. The Yugoslavs will pay the expenses there and probably leave a lot of the company with useless dinars in their pockets.” Derek Elley, “Coproductions: Who Needs Them?” Variety International Film Guide, p. 19.

  25. Another French strategy is to call for the dubbing of French films into English (imitating the dubbing of American films into French, which has helped Hollywood capture French audiences), but dubbing has the side effect of slightly “Americanizing” French films and enhancing the sovereignty of English. The French resort to the strategy to prevent the even more destructive Hollywood habit of remaking French films—as happened with Three Men and a Baby and Point of No Return, originally La Femme Nikita.

  26. Germany’s Volker Schlöndorff, Australia’s Peter Weir, Canada’s Bruce Beresford, and Holland’s Paul Verhoeven are only a few of the directors who have taken their big talents to Hollywood where those talents have been tailored to its diminutive needs and tastes. Along with Wim Wenders and other European directors, England’s David Puttnam, who tried Hollywood and went home, is calling for an extension of French quotas and French-style subsidies to all of Europe. But if there is any venue from which “you can’t go home again” it is probably Hollywood, and most directors from abroad are trying to figure out how to make the journey the other way.

  27. See Philip Weiss, “Hollywood at a Fever Pitch,” The New York Times Magazine, December 26, 1993, p. 22. He auditioned (interviewed) for a job with people like Scott Rudin, the equally celebrated young producer of the Sister Act and Family Values movies.

  28. Report on France, Variety International Film Guide, p. 163.

  29. Movies are about marketing and marketing means deferring judgment to the DAT—the digital audiotape of audience response at the special previews producers arrange to test-market their films. When forced to choose between a Chen Kaige insight and a DAT report on audience response, producers like Scott Rudin will tell you that DAT wins every time.

  30. All Indonesian figures and quotes from Philip Shenon, “Indonesian Films Squeezed Out,” The New York Times, October 29, 1992, p. A 19.

  31. For all the fears abroad, America’s global film sovereignty is still just gearing up. As John Marcom, Jr., notes in his Forbes essay “Dream Factory to the World,” “Hollywood is already one of the world’s most powerful suppliers of consumer products. Yet it has scarcely begun tapping foreign markets.” John Marcom, Jr., “Dream Factory to the World,” Forbes, April 29, 1991, p. 98.

  32. Despite their success, American producers actually complain that the world is radically underscreened. Although half of American film revenues now come from abroad, constituting a $3.5 billion surplus, the United States still has a movie screen for every 10,333 people (24,000 screens for 250 million people), while Japan has only one screen for every 61,500 people. Italy’s film houses are not air-conditioned, and most of the world has not yet seen the lucrative magic of multiplex cinemas—although they are on the way, with Time Warner, for example, scheduled to construct thirty in Japan alone in 1993–94. Alan Citron, “American Films Boffo Overseas,” International Herald Tribune, March 31, 1992.

  33. Not literally, of course. There are limits to the direct influence of films. Bosnian and Serbian assassins wear Adidas, sport Walkmans, and know all about Michael Jordan but still manage to slaughter their neighbors with brutal zest. Saudi Muslims watch Western consumer films without seeming to give up their religion. Both Hitler and Stalin were notorious film buffs while P.L.O. chairman Arafat apparently is enamored of American Westerns, but this is not to suggest that High Noon or Gunfight at the OK Corral either deterred him from or led him to his fateful handshake with Israeli Prime Minister Rabin in Washington in 1994.

  Chapter 7. Television and MTV: McWorld’s Noisy Soul

  1. For background on the role of television and advertising in American life see the older books by Marie Winn, Plug-In Drug (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1977); Frank Mankiewicz and Joel Swerdlow, Remote Control: Television and the Manipulation of American Life (New York: Ballantine Books, 1979); Jerry Mander, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980); and Todd Gitlin, Inside Prime Time (New York: Pantheon, 1983).

  2. Geraldine Fabrikant, “Bell Atlantic’s Acquisition,” The New York Times, October 14, 1993, p. C 7.

  3. I will not try here to rehearse the thoughtful critique of television that has been offered by social critics such as Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, or Todd Gitlin. But, as an encapsulation of our themes here, John Berger’s comment that “publicity turns consumption into a substitute for democracy” is worth citing. Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, 1972), p. 149.

  4. Steven Daly, “London Is Dead: Invasion of U.S. Pop Culture,” The New Republic, June 14, 1993, p. 12. Daly cites Morrisey’s lyric “We look to Los Angeles for the language we use/London is dead/London is dead.”

  5. Miklos Vamos, “U.S. Cultural Invasion: Hungary for American Pop,” The Nation, March 25, 1991, pp. 11–12. This was more than three years ago: things have hardly improved.

  6. Other fare includes a Steppes version of The Dating Game called Love at First Sight and two hundred episodes of the Mexican American-soap-rip-off The Rich Also Cry. Nadeshda Azhginkhina, “High Culture Meets Trash TV,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, January/February 1993, p. 42.

  7. The Poles comprise the seventh largest number of cable viewers in Europe with 400,000 more than the French. Jane Perlez, “Poland Exercises the Right to Channel Surf,” The New York Times, November 14, 1993, p. E 18. These numbers have presumably grown considerably in the last several years. Poland’s first legally approved commercial channel Polsat initiated its “indigenous” programming in 1993 by broadcasting Hollywood director Michael Cimino’s Oscar-winning film The Deer Hunter (it has Central European ethnic pretensions) along with hard-core soap opera classics like General Hospital and Dallas.

  8. Patrick E. Tyler, “CNN and MTV, Hangin’ by a Heavenly Thread,” The New York Times, November 22, 1993, p. A 4.

  9. Philip Shenon, “Star TV extends Murdoch’s Reach,” The New York Times, August 23, 1993, p. C 1.

  10. Seabrook continues, “The promotions department is often said to be the core of MTV. Everything on MTV is a promotion for something, and the promo department’s mission, in a sense, is to promote that.” Says one of MTV’s employees, “You’re selling a feeling about what it means to be … God I don’t know.” John Seabrook, “Rocking in Shangri-La,” The New Yorker, October 10, 1994, pp. 64-78.

  11. In Prague high schools today, official reading materials for the high school graduation exam include the Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” John Lennon’s “Woman,” Metallica’s “Enter Sandman,” and Pink Floyd’s “Happiest Days of Our Lives.” Harper’s, June 1994, p. 22. But then Eric Segal’s Love Story was once on France�
�s vaunted university examination!

  12. When MTV started, the average age of management was twenty-five; today, it is closer to twenty-nine. Redstone thinks guerrillas are kids: “By the way,” he adds, “this is also why freedom fighters all over the world associate themselves with MTV”! Cited by Seabrook, “Rocking,” p. 76.

  13. Steve Clarke, “Rock Conquers Continent,” Variety, November 16, 1992, p. 35.

  14. Helmut Fest, “MTV Europe Ignores Local Acts,” Billboard, March 7, 1992, p. 8.

  15. Uma de Cunha, “India,” in Variety International Film Guide (Hollywood: Samuel French Trade, 1993), pp. 205-210.

  16. In his Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), Peter Manuel thus describes how portable cassette players created cultural shock waves in Northern India, with traumatic effects on Indian popular culture. With cassette players, there was at least some listener choice: with satellites, the monopolies control taste, even while affecting to respond to local markets.

  17. Cited by Peter Waldman, “Iran Fights New Foe: Western Television,” The Wall Street Journal, August 8, 1994, p. A 10.

  18. See Elisabeth A. Brown, “Music Television Turns 10,” The Christian Science Monitor, August 6, 1991, pp. 10-11.

  19. Clarke, “Rock,” p. 199.

  20. Celestine Bohlen, “Russia Parties Subdued by Early Vote Returns,” The New York Times, December 13, 1993, p. A 6.

  21. Cited by Azhginkhina, “High Culture,” p. 193.

  22. Nor is MTV really to be taken seriously when it plays bad boy, as the group Public Enemy does. The mischief starts with the group’s name (so too with N.W.A. [Niggers With Attitude]) and continues in song titles such as “Fight the Power,” which black filmmaker Spike Lee used in his Do the Right Thing. A good deal of rapper rage is all posture: impotence as porn with the volume turned up so that hard decibels and fierce scatology cover the softness underneath. Most viewers around the world do not understand English anyway, and for them the point is the sound, the style, and the feel, not the words.