Waiting for the Ratings
So the “Planetized Entertainment” envisaged by Michael Eisner of Disney is not as American as people think.[15] But is there “a global culture”?
The mere phrase has a quixotic feel, calling to mind such doomed projects as Esperanto. More than perhaps any other area of globalization, culture defeats categorization. The same technology that helps to make the world less parochial can also reinforce ethnic identities. The Internet allows students in Beijing to download a Janet Jackson concert at exactly the same times as their counterparts in Heidelberg, but it also allows Chinese Americans to download Cantonese pop.
In some cases, there is genuine intermingling. In the United States, Spanglish, a hybrid of English and Spanish, has become common in Latino communities and magazines such as Latina. Perhaps the dominant trend in haute cuisine at the moment is “fusion”—mixing elements from different culinary traditions to come up with unique mixtures. Kipling’s old line that “East is East” is mocked by authors such as Arundhati Roy and Salman Rushdie.[16] Successful pop musicians have often looked for inspiration abroad. (The Rolling Stones hail from Dartford but their souls are from the Mississippi delta.) But nowadays anybody who does not include a sampling of a Zulu war song or a Tibetan prayer on their latest record looks decidedly passé; indeed, several musicians, including Paul Simon, have resuscitated their careers by mixing different ethnic flavors.
p. 194 This intermingling is likely to increase, if only because people are getting more used to seeing different parts of the world. Americans now make more than fifty million international flights a year, up from 14.3 million in 1975. The number of American college and graduate students studying abroad for university credits has been doubling each decade (82,900 in the 1995-1996 school year). And an increasing number of students are looking beyond such predictable destinations as Britain, France, and Spain to eastern Europe, Latin America, Africa, and the Far East. In 1996, fourteen countries each attracted more than one thousand American students.[17] Such people return to, say, Michigan convinced that their first novel, though set in Ann Arbor, should be a meditation on a Hindu incantation.
However, the idea that culture is inevitably becoming a global goulash, with different flavors mixed into one intoxicating stew, does not stand up for two reasons. First, most people are fairly local in their cultural tastes. Even when different groups enjoy the same experience, they often do so for different reasons. The British warmed to Titanic because of its love story, but some critics complained that the movie’s depiction of the upper classes was unfair and anti-British; some Japanese, on the other hand, were attracted to the film precisely because of the stiff upper lips displayed by the doomed aristocrats.
Second, many “mixed” products are fairly weak. In the literary world, Rushdies are very few. (Would you want to read that first novel based on the Hindu incantation?) The best novelists tend to draw on what they know, which still tends to be local. Culture is becoming not so much a stew as a smorgasbord from which people can choose whatever takes their fancy. An Englishwoman might think nothing of picking up an Australian novel, but she would still expect it to be Australian. Globalization makes it easier for her to get hold of that book and perhaps easier for her to understand bits of it, but she will recommend it to her friends only if she likes it.
This leads to a rather more optimistic definition of the effect of globalization on culture: It is really about leveling the playing field. Suddenly, it is possible for teenagers in Shanghai to have passports to two different worlds: the one of global blockbusters and their own. And suddenly it is also possible for quintessentially British films such as The Full Monty and Bridget Jones’s Diary to top the charts around the world for no better reason than that they are funny. Nor is it just a matter of light entertainment. The level playing field also allows works that might otherwise be deemed uncommercial to be made. The audience for a new recording of a Michael Tippett symphony or for a nature documentary about the mating habits of flamingos may be mip. 195nuscule in any one country, but round up all the Tippett and flamingo fanatics around the world, and you have attractive commercial propositions. The cheap distribution offered by the Internet will probably make these niches even more attractive financially.
There is still a hefty premium for any product that can sell to more than one niche. Everywhere you look, from books to techno, there are plenty of greedy people determined to promote the next big thing. Even the museum world seems to have succumbed to the idea of the blockbuster, with people talking about “mega-exhibitions,” and museums around the world piecing together deals a little like film studios do. This may also increase pressure on those stuck between the blockbusters and the niche products. In an interesting essay in The New Yorker, John Seabrook worried about this “midspace.” He foresaw “an apocalyptic heath, which the mid-list authors, the good but not brilliant authors, and the solid but not spectacular bands, who were once the de facto standard bearers of the culture, haunt like ghosts. It is like Las Vegas at night: a tantalizing, amoral world lit by the sparks of artists, actors and musicians who are in transit between success and failure.”[18]
Yet the no-man’s-land that Seabrook depicts has always existed, and there have always been people who have found themselves stranded in it: “The second novel syndrome” and the “good character actor” are not new phenomena. Moreover, the presumption that only the truly awful will hit the global artistic jackpot seems wrong. Saving Private Ryan and Cold Mountain may not be Citizen Kane and Humboldt’s Gift, but they probably count as art by most reasonable definitions of the term. Even in the world of evil lizards and sinking ships, quality still counts for something. Although they were both given the same amount of hype, Titanic succeeded, but Godzilla did not, partly because Titanic, for all its faults, was a better film.
One cannot go far down this particular road without tripping over the old argument about art and commerce. For many European intellectuals, financial success is so odious that it can only be proof of failure: true artists should die like van Gogh did, penniless and maimed. When confronted by a painting by Julian Schnabel, one is tempted to agree. But the underlying assumption that the audience cannot be trusted is surely wrong. Some rubbish inevitably does better than it should. Some young artists and writers will get praised too early. But, in general, the really good stuff will win out. As one French dramatist wrote, “If they go to see one of my plays, it is probably a good play. If they don’t go, it is probably not a good play.” But then Voltaire would probably not be welcome at the Ministry of Culture.
Wrong Diagnosis, Terrible Remedy
p. 196 It is hard to know whether the culture bureaucrats in Europe really believe their own depiction of Hollywood as some sort of artistic Terminator, as soulless as it is irresistible. After all, those noble guardians of culture in Paris have seen fit to make Sylvester Stallone a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (for his painting or his acting, one wonders) and bestowed a similar honor on Sharon Stone (don’t ask). The men from the ministry seem to enjoy the glitter at Cannes as much as anybody from Hollywood does. As any American mogul will tell you, the same self-righteous young Britons who harp on the need for artistic integrity at the Groucho Club would be the first to jump at the chance to direct Die Hard 23. In fact, it is very tempting to write off the fight against America as just another fairly harmless example of sour grapes and bureaucratic job preservation. But the catch is the quotas and subsidies that emerge as solutions.
The obvious problem with quotas is that they are increasingly easy to avoid. Any European who wants to poison his mind by watching an American television program during prime time can flick through an ever-increasing number of channels or rent a video. (In Greece, you can even tune in to one of fifty unlicensed TV channels that broadcast nothing but American fare, much of it pirated.)[19] Quotas also have the perverse effect of encouraging the production of “quota quickies”—excruciatingly banal local productions that are des
igned to satisfy official mandates.
The case for subsidies is a little more robust but not much. In France, where a film is more likely to get made because the producer has good connections with the ministry rather than because it has anything so boring as a good script, the local industry has lost ground to American imports. In Germany, half the films are so awful that they never even get a commercial showing. Government handouts also tend to go to the people who have least need of them. France’s Centre National de la Cinématographie deliberately hands the biggest subsidies to the country’s most successful film producers, thus encouraging an inefficient, cosseted gerontocracy. (In 1995, one study found that 85 percent of the French film industry’s directors were over fifty years old.) Britain’s national lottery has duly given most of the money to people with good track records (i.e., the ones who could raise money anyway). Anecdotal evidence suggests that much of the “extra” money has gone not into more films but straight into the pockets of “the talent,” whose agents simply upped their prices to reflect the lottery windfall.
The only clear winner from all this is Hollywood. It is not hard to find sep. 197nior people in Hollywood who will admit privately that Tinseltown has “a Detroit problem”: Its exorbitant costs make it vulnerable to competition. Given the importance of the English language and the vibrancy of its other culture industries, Britain would seem to be the obvious rival. But the government’s fascination with subsidies and what one studio chief refers to as “that BBC thing” means that there is no chance that “they are going to do a Toyota on us” and make good, cheap commercial films.
In the meantime, the subsidies often end up supporting the sort of Hollywood fodder that they are designed to combat. Britain’s tax breaks are of most use to films with budgets of ten million dollars or so and thus go to big action movies.[20] The past decade has seen a steady stream of Hollywood producers to Canada—particularly Toronto—in search of government subsidies as well as lower costs. Films and television shows made in Canada—even by foreigners—are eligible for government handouts; Canadian television channels also pay a premium for programs that help them meet government requirements for Canadian content.
Moreau’s Way
Against this background, it is refreshing to discover that the doyenne of French film actresses has very little to do with all this. The real problem of the French film industry, Jeanne Moreau argues, breathing heavily on yet another cigarette in her tiny office, is that it lacks the savoir faire of the Americans. The star of Jules et Jim is now more than seventy years old, but she remains remarkably optimistic about the possibilities for her own country’s film industry. French film producers, she insists, should stop relying on protectionism (“an attitude born from fear”) and should start believing in themselves again. They should realize that the construction of new cinemas and the explosion of television channels provides them with a massive opportunity. (“The beast needs to be fed.”) They should learn from Hollywood’s storytelling skills. And they should form alliances with Hollywood studios in order to turn America’s technical skills and marketing might to their own advantage.
Rather unfortunately, Moreau chooses to call her solution “the third way.” But her answer is a practicable one because it incorporates both technological innovation and the latest thinking in Hollywood. For some time, the big studios have been creating and acquiring independent studios in order to reduce their dependence on extravagantly expensive blockbusters and to reach parts of the audience whose taste extends beyond the juvenile. p. 198 Now, their relentless quest for new ideas and talent—as well as new markets—has persuaded most of the big studios to set up shop in Europe and to convert their offices there from distribution hubs to production centers.
In the end, cultural protectionism simply misses the point. The Full Monty is no more a product of American culture because it was coproduced by Fox Searchlight than a John Grisham novel is a product of German culture because it is published by an imprint of Random House. Far from gaining from insulation, culture depends for its vitality on the ability of people to reach beyond their own societies to embrace different traditions and perspectives; in other words, culture and cosmopolitanism go hand in hand. The greatest cultural movements—most obviously the Renaissance and the Enlightenment—involved the promiscuous mixing of cultures. Elizabethan England was a cauldron of creativity because its artists were discovering the ideas of both their Continental counterparts and their forebears. From Sparta to Singapore, most cultural deserts have been produced by officials trying to preserve “their” cultures from corruption at the hands of aliens. Goethe made the point well in 1827 with respect to German nationalism and literature:
We Germans are very likely to fall too easily into this pedantic conceit, when we do not look beyond the narrow circle that surrounds us. I therefore look about me in foreign nations, and advise everyone to do the same. National literature is now rather an unmeaning term; the epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach.
Globalization is not just preparing the ground for the triumph of American culture and mass-produced trash. It is also opening people’s minds to an unprecedented range of ideas and influences. It is encouraging creative artists to mix ideas from a dizzying variety of sources. And it is encouraging the rapid proliferation of new cultural forms.
The United States will always have a huge influence on the world’s popular culture. America has the advantage of a huge domestic market, a language that is gaining market share, and a genius for selling itself. It is also the country that reached postmodernity first, inventing many trends, from blue jeans to rock and roll, that have since been adopted and adapted by most other cultures. But cultural protectionists err if they think that they can direct the taste of their citizens through subsidies and quotas. And they err even further if they think that, given a free choice, their citizens will automatically prefer poor global rather than good local products. The French Ministry of Culture has much less to fear than it thinks.
Part Five – Winners and Losers
11 – Silicon Valley and the Winner-Take-All Economy
p. 201 THESE DAYS, even envy is interactive. At www.paywatch.org, a site established by American trade unionists, disgruntled employees can tap in their own pay and benefits—they are asked sarcastically whether they receive free country-club membership, a luxury company car, or the use of a penthouse suite—and find out how many times more their boss’s compensation is than theirs. Recent figures from the site show that the average boss took home 531 times what the average factory worker received in 2000. In 1980, the boss received only forty-two times as much.
Bosses are not the only people to be making out like bandits. Sports stars, pop stars, film stars, even, goddamn them, literary stars sign contracts worth tens of millions. These are only the most conspicuous of an enviable group of winners. While median incomes in America are barely two thousand dollars higher in real terms than they were in 1972, managerial pay packets have at least doubled. And this inequality extends to countries as well, with the gap between rich and poor countries widening.
For many observers, these growing gaps have a lot to do with globalization. The global economy is also a winner-take-all economy, they argue, in which the fortunate few amass an ever larger proportion of the world’s rewards, the poor are left with ever fewer crumbs, and society is divided into two ever more distant camps. “For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance,” argues the book of Matthew, “but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.” The same argument can be heard, put rather less eloquently, in almost every contemporary critique of globalization.
p. 202 Capitalism has always been good at distinguishing between winners and losers: That is one of the secrets of its dynamism. But by hugely increasing both the size of the market and the potential rewards for success, globalization puts this process into overdrive. Robert Frank and Philip Cook, two economists wh
o have made their names studying winner-take-all markets, illustrate how this happens in the world of opera. Before the invention of the gramophone, the most talented singers could perform before only a few hundred thousand people in their lifetimes. This had the effect of not only putting a ceiling on their earnings but also ensuring that there was plenty of work left over for their less talented contemporaries. Now that sound can be reproduced so easily, there is no reason to listen to the second-best singer in the world, let alone the local warbler.[1]
Globalization has helped a growing number of labor markets become celebrity markets. The more international markets become, the more desperate the competition for the star salesman or chief executive. The most renowned lawyers or accountants or even academics can now sell their talents across several continents. Meanwhile, globalization also increases what economists call networking effects. If everybody else uses one computer operating system, then it makes sense for you to do so, too: That, they argue, is why Bill Gates is so rich. The same thing in broad terms applies to movies or books: One reason why people see the latest film is to be able to participate in the buzz of social and office life. By increasing the size of the world’s networks, whether cultural or electronic, globalization again increases the rewards of winning.
A different sort of networking also works for individuals. Doing well at school increases your chances of going to an Ivy League university rather than a state college, which in turn increases your chances of being accepted by McKinsey or Goldman Sachs rather than a second-division consultancy or bank, and so on. This law of accumulated privileges works for places as well as people. Places that develop a comparative advantage over their competitors—such as Hollywood in films or Seoul in wig making—tend to pull farther ahead of their rivals as the years go on. They attract more star players and shape the surrounding culture. In Hollywood, the dry cleaners call themselves “celebrity cleaners.”
A Future Perfect: The Challenge and Promise of Globalization Page 29