[lit-ideas] American Culture
- From: "Andreas Ramos" <andreas@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "Lit-Ideas" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 17 Jun 2006 09:30:02 -0700
The fast-fading luster of the American story
Nathan Gardels and Mike Medavoy
Tribune Media Services
June 14, 2006
LOS ANGELES The publication of cartoon depictions of the Prophet
Mohammed in a Danish daily earlier this year inflamed the pious and
mobilized the militant across the Muslim world.
The American casting of Chinese actresses in "Memoirs of a Geisha"
stirred the considerable ire of Japanese nationalists when it was
released.
At a recent Rolling Stones concert in Shanghai, the Chinese
government prohibited the aging rockers from singing "Let's Spend
the Night Together."
Indonesian Muslim activists are in an uproar over the launch of a
local version of Playboy magazine - even though there is no nudity.
These are but the latest episodes of a clash that is a result of
the globalized media crowding cultures with incommensurate values
into the same public square.
They suggest that, unlike past moments in history, the main
conflict today is less about armies and territories than about the
cultural flows of the global information economy.
The core of that system is America's media-industrial complex,
including Hollywood entertainment. If culture is on the front line
of global affairs, then Hollywood, as much as the Pentagon or
Silicon Valley, has a starring role.
The reasons for Hollywood's power, which projects America's way of
life to others as well as to ourselves, are clear.
Long before celluloid and pixels were invented, Plato understood
that "those who tell the stories also rule." Philosophers tell us
that images rule dreams, and dreams rule actions. And if music sets
the mood for the multitudes, the warblings of Sinatra and Madonna
are surely the muzak of the world order.
This vast influence of American culture in the world is what
Harvard professor Joseph Nye has called "soft power."
Now, however, we are witnessing a mounting resistance, particularly
from Asia and the Muslim world, to the American media's libertarian
and secular messages.
There is also resistance to the mere fact of America's overwhelming
cultural dominance. Josef Joffe, the publisher-editor of the German
weekly Die Zeit, has put it directly: "Between Vietnam and Iraq,
America's cultural presence has expanded into ubiquity, and so has
resentment of America. Soft power does not necessarily increase the
world's love for America. It is still power, and it still makes
enemies."
If, as Nye has said, politics in the information age is about whose
story wins, America's story, which has won for so long, is losing
its universal appeal.
Fewer and fewer are buying into the American narrative. Needless to
say, that has big implications for America's storyteller -
Hollywood - as well.
America's soft power is losing its luster for several reasons.
Though projected through movies and music, that power has been
based fundamentally on ideals more or less realized in practice -
individual freedom, the rule of law, social and economic opportunity.
In foreign policy it has meant the defense of human rights, the
just use of force against fascism and the containment of Soviet power.
Certainly the unilateral invasion and occupation of Iraq has fueled
intense anger at America, eroding the natural sympathy after 9/11.
But perhaps more disturbing to those who once held up America as a
model has been not only Guantánamo, the Abu Ghraib prison abuse and
the Haditha massacre but the White House defense of torture, its
dismissal of the key aspects of the Geneva protocols on treatment
of prisoners of war and the government wiretapping of its own
citizens.
The Katrina catastrophe in New Orleans not only exposed anew
unsolved racial issues, but revealed to a shocked world the
burgeoning inequality that has crept back into American society as
the welfare state has withered.
The rise of the Christian right has made many, in Europe in
particular, doubt whether a majority still shares America's
founding commitment to the secular principles of the Enlightenment.
Seized by the marketing machine, Hollywood entertainment has, with
ever fewer exceptions, hewn to the blockbuster formula of action,
violence, sex and special effects. A masterful drama like Orson
Welles's "Citizen Kane" would be impossible to make in Hollywood
today.
In a recent Gallup Poll of 8,000 women in Muslim countries, the
overwhelming majority cited "attachment to spiritual and moral
values" as the best aspect of their own societies while the most
common answer to the question about what they admired least in the
West was "moral decay, promiscuity and pornography" that pollsters
called "the Hollywood image."
This is also the view of many parents in the United States, no
doubt including those who swell the megachurch congregations on
Sunday morning and then mysteriously morph into the audience for
"Desperate Housewives" on Sunday night.
Too often Hollywood has also succumbed to a Ramboesque parochial
populism that displays naïveté, ignorance and arrogance in its
portrayal of the rest of the world.
In short, what once gilded the American experience in the eyes of
much of the world now tarnishes it.
Finally, the new civilizational confidence that comes along with
growing prosperity, notably in Asia, means audiences increasingly
want to be entertained by their own myths and stories, not those
from America.
The digital distribution revolution, which is shifting power from
the producer to the consumer, will hasten this trend.
To some, of course, America's image remains appealing, even a
magnet for migration across scorching deserts or in the holds of
rusty cargo ships.
But to others it incites hatred, if not terrorism against the Great
Satan; to most it is a mixed picture that elicits a bit of love and
loathing.
Iranian or Chinese teens, as is commonly cited, may embrace
American pop culture, but patriotically reject U.S. policies.
Movies, like politics, are a communal experience. In a democracy,
the voting booth and the box office share the same public.
Political scientists have long understood that in modern America
the media, including movies and pop music, constitute the "public
square." With globalization, that is now true for the world as a
whole.
To recapture its winning story in this new global politics of
culture, to recover its waning soft power, America has to once
again close the gap between its ideals and their practical
realization at home and abroad, starting with changing our policies
and getting out of Iraq.
And America's storytellers need - as some indeed have - to stop
seeing the world as a crowd of "extras" with turbans, burkas,
slanted eyes or sombreros but no depth of character or central role.
Since globalization has moved us all into the same neighborhood, a
sense of propriety with respect to the cultural norms of others
would seem a wise idea.
For an industry whose future relies on the global market, that is
an economic as well as moral imperative.
The John Wayne-era assumption that America alone can write the
script for the whole world has been forever foiled, both in
Washington and Hollywood.
. . .
Nathan Gardels is editor of NPQ and Global Services at Tribune
Media Services International. Mike Medavoy, chairman and chief
executive of Phoenix Pictures, has been involved in the production
of scores of films, including "Apocalypse Now," "Platoon" and the
soon to be released "All The King's Men."
Full text at:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/06/14/opinion/edgardels.php
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