Hollywood Film and U.S. Society: Some Theoretical Perspectives
By Douglas Kellner
Film emerged as one of the first mass-produced cultural forms of the twentieth century. Based on new technologies of mechanical reproduction that made possible simulations of the real and the production of fantasy worlds, film provided a new mode of culture that changed patterns of leisure activity and played an important role in social life. From the beginning, film in the United States was a mode of commercial activity controlled by entertainment industries that attempted to attract audiences to its products. Film production was accordingly organized on an industrial model and manufactured a mass-produced output aimed at capturing a secure audience share and thus realizing a substantial profit. As a commercial enterprise, American film developed as an entertainment industry, rather than as an educational instrument or art form (Horkheimer and Adorno 1972).
Early films were the inventions of technicians and entrepreneurs like the Lumière brothers and Méliès in France and the Edison Corporation in the United States. The first films ranged from the documentaries and quasi-documentary realist fictions produced by the Lumières and Edison to the fantasy fictions of Méliès. The genres that would characterize Hollywood film began to appear during the first decades of the century with Westerns like The Great Train Robbery (1903), the melodramatic social dramas of D.W. Griffith, costume and historical dramas like Ben Hur (the first of several versions appeared in 1899), horror films, and comedies by Mack Sennett, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and others.
Hollywood soon emerged as the capital of the film industry in the United States. Benefitting from California weather that enjoyed good light and a lot of sunshine, and a varied environment that opened onto the sea, desert, mountains, small towns, and a bustling urbanscape, a film colony soon emerged which became the locus of the American and eventually world film industry. The demand for film was great and the early film studios began repeating and reproducing the formulas and types of film that were most popular. Consequently, Hollywood films were divided into the most popular types of genres like the western, melodrama, crime drama, costume film, horror film, and, with the coming of sound, the musical (Schatz, 1981).
Film soon became the most popular and influential form of media culture in the United States (Sklar, 1975; Jowett, 1976). Indeed, for the first half of the twentieth century--from 1896 to the 1950s--movies were a central focus of leisure activity and deeply influenced how people talked, looked, and acted, becoming a major force of enculturation. The number of theaters grew from about 10,000 storefront nickelodeons with daily attendance of 4 to 5 million in 1910 to around 28,000 movie theaters by 1928 (May 1983). In the 1920s the average audience was between 25 and 30 million customers a week, while by the 1930s from 85 to 110 million people paid to go to the movies each week (Dieterle, 1941). Consequently, films were a central form of entertainment and an extremely popular leisure activity.
Moreover, films became a major force of socialization, providing role models, instruction in dress and fashion, in courtship and love, and in marriage and career. Early films were produced largely for working class, immigrant and urban audiences, and some critics of the movies thought that they had negative or subversive effects (Jowett, 1976). For example, the comedies of Charlie Chaplin made fun of authority figures and romantic dramas were attacked by the Legion of Decency for promoting promiscuity. And crime dramas were frequently attacked for fostering juvenile delinquency and crime. On the other hand, films were believed to help "Americanize" immigrants, to teach their audiences how to be good Americans, and to provide escape from the cares of everyday life (Ewen and Ewen, 1982).
Whereas some films from the silent and early sound era presented poverty and social struggle from progressive perspectives sympathetic to the poor and oppressed, many films focused on the rich and celebrated wealth and power, serving as advertisements for the consumer society and the ruling elites. Cecil B. de Mille's comedies and dramas of modern marriage, for example, can be seen as marriage and fashion models, and the romantic films of the 1920s can be read as "manuals of desire, wishes, dreams" for those wanting to assimilate themselves to mainstream America (Ewen and Ewen, 1982: 102). Consequently, films played an important socializing role by mobilizing desires into certain models. In particular, films helped socialize immigrant and working class cultures into the emerging forms of the consumer society, teaching them how to behave properly and consume with style and abandon.
From the beginning, popular movie stars played an important role in Hollywood cinema and became fantasy figures for idealized romance and desire (Dyer, 1979). Female stars like Clara Bow, Gloria Swanson, and Colleen Moore represented the glamour and vivacity associated with the 1920s, while Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish projected idealized fantasies of pure American women. Romantic male idols were represented by Rudolf Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks, John Gilbert, and Clark Gable. Becoming a Hollywood star became the fantasy of countless young men and women who flocked to the film capital in search of fame and fortune, and some of these aspirants succeeded in becoming the stars of the Hollywood firmament.
Although films for the most part reflected mainstream American values, they represented modern and urban social values, and so conservatives began attacking the alleged "immorality" and "subversiveness" of films. Due to pressure from civic groups and the threat of government regulation, a set of censorship boards were established with the cooperation of the film industry, which produced a Production Code that was adopted by the film industry by the mid-1930s. Explicit limits were set on the length of allowable kisses and prescribed that no open mouth kisses could be shown. No nudity or explicit sexuality was allowed, such things as prostitution and drugs could not be portrayed, criminals had to be punished, and religion and the church could not be criticized (the code is reproduced and discussed in Jowett, 1976). The Production Code held sway until the 1960s (although it was challenged in the 1950s) and set firm ideological and social parameters to Hollywood films.
But the crucial determinants of the ideological functions of Hollywood film had to do with control of film production by major studios and the emergence and subsequent dominance of the studio systems from around 1917 into the 1960s (Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson, 1985 and Schatz, 1988). Hollywood film production became dominated early on by big studios, which monopolized the patents necessary for film production and projection, and which primarily produced films for profit. Since films must attract large audiences, they needed to resonate to audiences' dreams, fears, and social concerns, and thus inevitably reflected social mores, conflicts, and ideologies. Consequently, some of the first critical analyses of Hollywood film argued that films reflected American society, providing mirror images of its dreams, fears, and mode of life.
Film and Society
The writings of Siegfried Kracauer provided one of the first systematic studies of how films articulate social content. His book From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (1947) argues that German inter-war films reveal a highly authoritarian disposition to submit to social authority and fear of emerging chaos. For Kracauer, German films thus reflect and foster anti-democratic and passive attitudes of the sort that paved the way for Nazism. While his assumption that "inner" psychological tendencies and conflicts are projected onto the screen opened up a fruitful area of sociocultural analysis, he frequently ignored the role of mechanisms of representation, such as displacement, inversion, and condensation in the construction of cinematic images and narratives. He posits film-society analogies ("Their silent resignation foreshadows the passivity of many people under totalitarian rule" [1947: 218]) that deny the autonomous and contradictory character and effects of film discourse and the multiple ways that audiences process cinematic material.
Against this view, one could argue that the language of film does not find its exact analogue in social events, nor does film discourse exist as a parallel mirror to actual events. Rather, films take the raw material of social history and of social discourses and process them into products which are themselves historical events and social forces. Films, therefore, can provide information about the "psychology" of an era and its tensions, conflicts, fears, and fantasies, but it does so not as a simple representation or mirroring of an extra-cinematic social reality. Rather, films refract social discourses and content into specifically cinematic forms which engage audiences in an active process of constructing meaning.
Sociological and psychological studies of Hollywood film proliferated in the United States in the post-World War Two era and developed a wide range of critiques of myth, ideology, and meaning in the American cinema. Parker Tyler's studies of The Hollywood Hallucination (1944) and Myth and Magic of the Movies (1947) applied Freudian and myth-symbol criticism to show how Walt Disney cartoons, romantic melodramas, and other popular films provided insights into social psychology and context, while providing myths suitable for contemporary audiences. In Movies: A Psychological Study (1950), Martha Wolfenstein and Nathan Leites applied psychoanalytical methods to film, decoding fears, dreams, and aspirations beneath the surface of 1940s Hollywood movies, arguing that: "The common day dreams of a culture are in part the sources, in part the products of its popular myths, stories, plays and films" (1950: 13). In her sociological study of Hollywood: The Dream Factory (1950), Hortense Powdermaker studied an industry that manufactured dreams and fantasies, while Robert Warshow (1970) related classical Hollywood genres like the Western and the gangster film to the social history and ideological problematics of U.S. society.
Building on these traditions, Barbara Deming demonstrated in Running Away From Myself (1969) how 1940s Hollywood films provided insights into the social psychology and reality of the period. Deming argued that: "It is not as mirrors reflect us but, rather, as our dreams do that movies most truly reveal the times" (1969: 1). She claimed that 1940s Hollywood films provided a collective dream portrait of its era and proposed deciphering "the dream that all of us have been buying at the box office, to cut through to the real nature of the identification we have experienced there" (1969: 5-6). Her work anticipates later, more sophisticated and University-based film criticism of the post-1960s era by showing how films both reproduce dominant ideologies and also contain proto-deconstructive elements that cut across the grain of the ideology that the films promote. She also undertook a sort of gender reading of Hollywood film that would eventually become a key part of Hollywood film criticism.
Another tradition of film scholarship and criticism in the United States attempted to situate films historically and to describe the interactions between film and society in more overtly political terms. This tradition includes Lewis Jacob's pioneering history of Hollywood film (1939), John Howard Lawson's theoretical and critical works (1953 and 1964), Ian Jarvie's sociological inquiries on the relation between film and society (1970 and 1978), D.M. White and Richard Averson's studies of the relation between film, history, and social comment in film (1972), and the social histories written by Robert Sklar (1975), Garth Jowett (1976), Will Wright (1977), Peter Biskind (1983), and Thomas Schatz (1988). While this tradition produced useful insights into the relationships between Hollywood film and U.S. society in specific historical eras, it tended to neglect the construction of film form and the ways that specific films or genres work to construct meaning and the ways that audiences themselves interact with film.
More theoretical approaches to Hollywood began emerging in the 1960s, including the ideological analyses of Cahiers du cinema and the extremely influential work associated with Screen that translated many key Cahiers and other works of French film theory, including Roland Barthes, Christian Metz, and others which generated much more sophisticated formal approaches to film (see Metz, 1974 and Heath, 1981). The Cahiers group moved from seeing film as the product of creative auteurs, or authors (their politique du auteurs of the 1950s, taken up by Sarris, 1968, and others), to focus on the ideological and political content of film and how it transcoded dominant ideologies. At the same time, French film theory and Screen focused on the specific cinematic mechanisms which helped produce meaning.
During the same period of intense ferment in the field of film studies during the 1960s and 1970s, the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies was discovering that gender, race, and subculture were also an important element of analyzing the relationships between culture, ideology, and society. Pushed by feminism to recognize the centrality of gender, it was argued that the construction of dominant ideologies of masculinity and femininity were a central aspect of Hollywood film (Kuhn, 1982; Kaplan, 1983). Studies of the ways that Hollywood films constructed race, ethnicity and sexuality also became a key aspect of films studies, and various post-structuralist influenced theories studied the role of film and media culture in the social construction of ideologies and identities.
Studies also began appearing in the 1970s of the business of film, dissecting the political economy of the Hollywood studio system (see Balio, 1976 and 1985; Gomery, 1986; and Wasko 1994). Combining these historical, socio-economic, and theoretical approaches, Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson (1985) provided a comprehensive and systematic approach to analyzing the "classic Hollywood film system" with specific studies of the production process, Hollywood style, and cinematic technology. The authors argue that Hollywood cinema is a highly distinctive economic and artistic phenomenon which blends a unique system of production, film style, and cinematic technology to produce a clearly recognizable product. Offering the concept of "a mode of film practice," they situate Hollywood film in its specific context and analyze the system of production, style, and typical products.
There are now a multiplicity of approaches competing to theorize the relations between Hollywood film and U.S. society. The theory wars of the past two decades have proliferated a tremendous amount of new theories that have been in turn applied to film. Consequently, structuralism and post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, feminism, postmodernism, and a wealth of other theoretical approaches have generated an often bewildering diversity of approaches to theorizing film which join and complexify previous film theory approaches such as the genre theory, auteur theory, and historical-sociological approaches. My own take on the cacophony of contemporary approaches to film is that it is not a question of either/or which forces the theorist to adopt one approach, but rather a variety of approaches can be deployed to engage the relations of film to society (see Kellner 1995 for elaboration of my multiperspectival model).
Consequently, in the following section will discuss the genre approach to analyzing the intersection of film and society, while in the concluding section, I will note developments in contemporary Hollywood film that legitimate the use of auteur criticism and socio-ideological approaches to film. These approaches can be combined, I would argue, with the newer theoretical approaches to provide fuller and richer thematizations of the relation of Hollywood film to U.S. society.
Hollywood Genres
Although much of the best European art film can be interpreted as a result of the creative vision and talent of individual directors, Hollywood film from the beginning was deeply influenced by the dominant genres in its studio system. The Hollywood production system formed an integrated system whose major studios not only controlled film production, but also distribution. This ensured a guaranteed exhibition site for Hollywood product. The system first emerged in the teens, took its distinctive shape in the 1920s, reached maturity in the 1940s, and began to disintegrate in the 1950s due to anti-trust legislation which caused the studios to divest themselves of their distribution and exhibition channels and to competition from other media of entertainment such as television (Schatz, 1988).
The various Hollywood studios had their own distinctive style and favorite genres. Warner Brothers was known for a gritty 1930s era realism, featuring tough gangster films, hard-edged domestic melodrama, crusading biopics, and energetic musicals; Universal was renown for its atmospheric horror films, MGM for its colorful musicals and spectaculars, and David Selznick was associated with big-budget quality pictures, both when he worked for other studios and after he formed Selznick International Pictures in 1935 (Schatz, 1988). Since the main Hollywood studios repeatedly reproduced the types of film that they thought were the most popular, Hollywood cinema became primarily a genre cinema in which popular formulas are repeated in cycles of genres that in turn deal with central societal conflicts, problems, and concerns of its audiences. The western, for example, deals with conflicts between civilization and threats to civilization, whereas the gangster film deals with threats to law, order, and social stability within an already established urban society. Melodramas, social comedies, and musicals deal with conflicts and problems within domestic arenas like the family and romance, whereas war films and adventure genres generally deal with conflicts in the public sphere outside of the private realm.
Genres become established when visual, stylistic, and thematic concerns become formalized into an immediately recognizable system of conventions. Thus the western developed into a generic form featuring conflicts between cowboy heroes and villains in the familiar setting of the West. The plot contains standard conventions of gunfights, chase scenes, and the eventual defeat of forces of disorder; the visual imagery utilized alternates small town or homestead scenes, with chase or action scenes in the desert and the mountain regions of the West. In this setting, the Western pits sets of "bad" guys posed against the "good" townspeople, homesteaders, and cowboy hero in an epic struggle between "good" and "evil." This form in turn generated ideologies of racism and imperialism whereby the "enemies" of civilization (Indians, Mexicans, villains) were portrayed negatively, thus legitimating the "settlement" of the West by (white male dominated) forces of "civilization." In addition, women were stereotyped as either whores or submissive representatives of the domestic order, thus reproducing patriarchical ideologies.
Genres were a preferred type of film for the Hollywood studio system since they were popular, conventional, and easy to reproduce. The studios were set up like factories with big barns, rows of barracks, stock sets, and so forth, in a production process that thrives on formulas and conventions. Thus following the economic imperatives of the capitalist system to produce products as quickly and cheaply as possible to maximize production and profits, the Hollywood cinema became a genre cinema.
In order to resonate to audience fears, fantasies, and experiences, the Hollywood genres had to deal with the central conflicts and problems in U.S. society, and had to offer soothing resolutions, assuring its audiences that all problems could be solved within existing institutions. Western films, for example, assured its audiences that "civilization" could be maintained in the face of threats from criminals, outsiders, and villains of various sorts, and celebrated individualism, white male authority figures, and violence as a legitimate way of resolving conflicts. In the westerns' mythologized vision of American history, it was glossed over that the "villains" in many Westerns were the land's original inhabitants who had their property stolen by the white settlers, presented as being forces of civilization.
Gangster films appealed to people's fear of crime and fascination with criminals; the classical Hollywood gangster films inculcated the message that "crime does not pay" and showed the police and legal system able to contain crime and to deal with criminals. But gangster films also explored cultural conflicts and contradictions central to American capitalism. Gangsters are, in fact, prototypical capitalists who will do anything to make a buck and thus are allegorical stand-ins for capitalist energy and will. Gangster films explore the tensions within American life between making money and morality, between self-interest and legality, and between private and public interests. The gangsters are fantasy characters who act out secret audience desires to get ahead no matter what, although it is still not clear if their repeated punishment (mandated by the Production Code) actually helped prevent crime through dramatizing what would happen if one broke the rules of the game and stepped outside the law, or promoted crime through making the gangsters -- often played by popular figures like James Cagney or Humphrey Bogart -- extremely dynamic, attractive and vital figures.
Melodramas, social comedies, and musicals in turn legitimated male-dominated romance, marriage, family, and moral rectitude as the proper road to happiness and well-being. Musicals followed formulas of boy meets girl, boy loses girl, and boy gets girl to celebrate the desirability of male-dominated romance. Melodramas dramatized what would happen to wayward women or willful men who failed to conform to dominant gender roles. They celebrated hardworking mothers who sacrificed their own happiness for their children, thus projecting the proper role for women (for example, Imitation of Life, Stella Dallas, Mildred Pierce, and others), and intimated that life's greatest happiness derived from marriage and family. And social comedies, too, celebrated marriage and family as the proper goals for men and women (Cavell, 1982). Indeed, David Bordwell claims that in his random selection of 100 typical Hollywood movies, 95 made romance at least one important line of action while, in 85, heterosexual romantic love was the major focus (Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson, 1985: 16).
Hollywood genre films thus tended to promote the American dream and dominant American myths and ideologies. The Hollywood genres taught that money and success were important values; that heterosexual romance, marriage, and family were the proper social forms; that the State, police, and legal system were legitimate sources of power and authority; that violence was justified to destroy any threats to the system; and that American values and institutions were basically sound, benevolent, and beneficial to society as a whole. In this way, Hollywood film, supported by other forms of media culture, helped establish a certain hegemony, or cultural dominance of existing institutions and values to the exclusion of others. As Raymond Williams argued:
I would say that in any society, in any particular period, there is a central system of practices, meanings and values, which we can properly call dominant and effective... what I have in mind is the central, effective and dominant system of meanings and values, which are not merely abstract but which are organized and lived. That is why hegemony is not to be understood at the level of mere opinion or mere manipulation. It is a whole body of practices and expectations; our assignments of energy, our ordinary understanding of the nature of man and of his world. It is a set of meanings and values which as they are experienced as practices appear as reciprocally confirming (1983: 8-9).
Hollywood film is thus implicitly "political" in the way it tends to support dominant American values and institutions. The more explicitly political functions of Hollywood cinema generally emerge in times of social crisis. During both World War One and Two, war films and other genres advocated patriotism and presented the "enemy" in stereotypical terms. During the Cold War anti-communist period, Hollywood produced a genre cycle of anti-communist films that depicted the threat to democracy and the "American way of life" by the "communist conspiracy." Whereas during World War Two, Russians were presented positively as U.S. allies against fascism, from the late 1940s on through Rambo communists are generally presented as the incarnation of evil.
Yet the Hollywood system was flexible enough to allow individual cinematic statements and social critique within the genre system. Hollywood films prized difference and variation within accepted boundaries and allowed a limited range open for artistic expression and social commentary. Filmmakers like John Ford, Frank Capra, Sam Fuller, and Alfred Hitchcock used the genre system to articulate their own specific artistic concerns and visions, finding in the genre and studio system a congenial framework to produce their work. Other artistically-inclined directors like Erich von Stroheim and Orson Welles constantly clashed with their production bosses and found their work edited against their will, eventually leaving the system and giving up filmmaking altogether in the case of von Stroheim, or seeking alternative funding with mixed success as in the case of Welles.
Indeed, it is not certain that the genre films always resolved the social contradictions portrayed and served as ideological advertisements for existing social institutions, discourses, and practices. As noted, the crime dramas often made the criminal's transgressions of societal norms more appealing and attractive than their punishment, and likewise women's transgressions of bourgeois norms in the melodrama often put in question established patriarchal institutions. The Western could also be used to portray the victims of the conquest of the frontier sympathetically and could be used to attack the crimes and barbarism of the "civilizing" forces. Genre films could thus be used to contest ideological norms as well as reproduce them, and thus to provide ideology critique as well as legitimation.
During the 1950s, the studio system which had produced genre cycles as the mode of production of Hollywood film broke up, and the genre system was challenged, opening the ways to new types of films. As we shall see in the next section, although the Hollywood system initially opened up, a new regime of production came to support the equivalent of genre cinema and the desire for megaprofits continued to drive the Hollywood system of commercial cinema.
Hollywood Today; Into the Future
The break up of the studio system in the 1950s forced film directors to find new sources of film-financing. The result was a very fertile period of production in the 1960s with film becoming more varied, diverse, and socially critical than in previous eras. The rise of new directors like Stanley Kubrick, Arthur Penn, and Robert Altman who had distinctive artistic visions and style in the 1960s seemed to give credence to the notion of a "New Hollywood" and provided a boost to auteur criticism that focused on the cinematic style and form of key directors and films, while critics like Andrew Sarris insisted that the classical Hollywood directors also exhibited distinctive aesthetic styles which he canonized in his artistic pantheons (1968).
In retrospect, all one-sided approaches to theorizing the relation between film and society are problematical. Although some "authors" had created distinctive and impressive bodies of work, they were often created within the constraints of a specific genre and studio system, thus to fully understand Hollywood film one needs insight into the production system, its codes and formulas, and the complex interaction of film and society, with film articulating social discourses, embedded in social struggles, and saturated with social meanings (Kellner and Ryan, 1988). Thus, analyzing the connection between film and society requires a multidimensional film criticism that situates its object within the context of the social milieu within which it is produced and received.
It was widely perceived in the 1960s that youth constituted a major audience for Hollywood film and so more youth-oriented films and directors emerged, creating new cycles of films which cinematically inscribed the discourses of the New Left student movements, as well as the feminist, black power, sexual liberationist, and countercultural movements, producing a new type of socially critical Hollywood film. These films transcoded (i.e. translated) representations, discourses, and myths of '60s culture into specifically cinematic terms, as when Easy Rider transcodes the images, practices, and discourses of the 1960s counterculture into a cinematic text. Popular films intervened in the political struggles of the day, as when 1960s films advanced the agenda of the New Left and the counterculture. Films of the "New Hollywood," however, such as Bonnie and Clyde, Medium Cool, Easy Rider, etc., were contested by a resurgence of rightwing films during the same era (e.g. Dirty Harry, The French Connection, and any number of John Wayne films), leading many to conclude that Hollywood film, like U.S. society, should be seen as a contested terrain and that films could be interpreted as a struggle of representation over how to construct a social world and everyday life.
In 1970s films, intense battles between liberals and conservatives were evident throughout the decade in Hollywood film, with more radical voices -- of the sort that occasionally were heard in the late 1960s and early 1970s -- becoming increasingly marginalized. The tremendous success of more generic films like Love Story, Airport and other disaster films, The Godfather films, and The Exorcist and other horror films led Hollywood to search for the blockbuster film, leading to a return to genre cinema. But it was probably the mega-success of Jaws (1975) that set the pattern for the blockbuster syndrome. Released in the summer of 1975, the film was introduced to an unprecedented ballyhoo of advertising and opened in a then-record "wide release" of 464 theaters. An all-time high of 25 million tickets were sold the film's first 38 days of release, soon earning a record $102 million in rentals. Henceforth, "high concept" films that could be clearly described and marketed became a major focus of the Hollywood film industry (Wyatt, 1994) which sought "blockbuster" hits that would turn over a high profit.
In the 1970s, new technologies and cultural forces emerged that changed the nature of film culture. In August 1975, Home Box Office (HBO), a new nationwide movie channel began disseminating an array of films by satellite transmission and cable systems to individual homes. Other movie channels followed and a mushrooming of cable and satellite channels made available a cornucopia of films for home consumption. In addition, the Sony Betamax home videorecorder appeared in 1975, followed by a proliferation of video-rental stores and businesses that made it possible to see the history of film within one's own home. Henceforth, film culture became part of everyday life and the most popular films could be seen via theater, television, or home video systems.
During this period as well, the culture wars that had raged since the 1960s were reproduced in Hollywood films. As the 1970s progressed, conservative films were becoming more popular (e.g. Rocky, Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Superman, et al) indicating that conservative sentiments were growing in the public and that Hollywood was nurturing these political currents. Indeed, even liberal films ultimately helped advance the conservative cause. A cycle of liberal political conspiracy films (e.g. The Parallex View, All the President's Men, The Domino Principle, Winter Kills, and so on) vilified the state and thus played into the conservative/Reaganite argument that government was the source of much existing evil. Other films that took a perspective sympathetic to the working class and critical of business (Blue Collar, F.I.S.T., et tutti quanti), blaming corrupt unions for the working class' problems, while liberal films dealing with race (Claudine, A Piece of the Action, and the like) attacked welfare institutions and celebrated individual initiative and self-help -- precisely the Reaganite position. And even the most socially critical films (such as the Jane Fonda films, Network and other Sidney Lumet films, et al) posited individual solutions to social problems, thus also reinforcing the conservative appeal to individualism and attack on statism. Consequently, reading Hollywood films of the decade politically allowed one to anticipate the coming of Reagan and the New Right to power by demonstrating that conservative yearnings were ever more popular within the culture and that film and popular culture were helping to form an ideological matrix more hospitable to Reagan and conservatives than to embattled liberals (Kellner and Ryan 1988).
On the other hand, even seemingly conservative film genres such as the horror film, or seemingly anti-gay films like Cruising, contain critical moments, problematicizing hegemonic ideologies and putting in question dominant ideologies like the family (Wood 1986). Robin Wood argues that the "incoherent text" is a dominant cinematic mode of the 1970s, full of ideological contradictions and conflicts that reproduce existing social confusion and turmoil. Thus, film, like society, was very much a contested terrain, with the future of society and culture up for grabs.
With the election of Reagan in 1980, the conservative wave of films continued throughout the decade, though they were contested, as was Reaganism itself, by liberal and radical films like Missing, Reds, Salvador, Platoon and other Oliver Stone films, as well as a wealth of films by independent filmmakers like John Sayles. The blockbuster syndrome, however, continued to be the dominant trend and with the teaming up of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas for the Indiana Jones series and with the continued success of Lucas' Star War films and Spielberg's blockbusters, Hollywood went big-time for high tech spectaculars in which the special effects often overwhelmed story and character.
Gender struggles were particularly intense with a return to the "hard-body" masculine hero of an earlier era replacing the more feminized male heros of the late 1960s and early 1970s (Jeffords 1994). As part of the backlash against feminism, there were also a cycle of films that villainized independent women, showing single career women without families being driven into pathological behavior (Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct, The Hand That Rocked the Cradle, etc.). On the other hand, there was also a cycle of gay and lesbian films that expanded the representations of sexuality, and many films written, directed, or produced by women or men wishing more complex, varied, and progressive representations of gender and gender relations.
Moreover, although there was a return to big-budget films, there was also a wave of successes by independent filmmakers like John Sayles, Susan Seidelman, Spike Lee, and others who turned over respectable profits on low-budget films and so Hollywood itself began financing some off-beat films and allowed a new generation of filmmakers to enter the mainstream. Many of these were women, people of color, or more socially critical types, hence more diverse representations of gender, race, and class were produced and circulated. At this time, a multicultural-focused cultural studies emerged as a major approach to film and cultural criticism, and a proliferation of new critical strategies emerged. There was an especially intense focus on audience research, on how audiences produced meanings, on how films mobilized pleasure and influenced audiences, and how audiences decoded and used the materials of media culture. Consequently, a wide range of positions appeared on the relationship between film, media culture, and its audiences (see the discussion in Staiger 1991).
During the past decade, globalization has made Hollywood film an ever more familiar and popular artifact throughout the world. Whereas Hollywood films have dominated the world market for decades, it is even more the case today with American global corporations playing an important role in distributing its products throughout the world. Hollywood films are the most capital intensive and thus have the most spectacular special effects; they are effectively marketed throughout the world and are popular everywhere. In Canada, for instance, about 95% of films in movie theaters are American; U.S. television dominates Canadian television; seven American firms control distribution of sound recordings in Canada; and 80% of the magazines on newsstands are non-Canadian (The Washington Post National Weekly Edition, September 11-17, 1995: 18). In Europe, Hollywood films comprise 75-80% of the box office and the explosion of new TV channels has produced a boom of U.S. television exports, bringing in revenues of more than one billion dollars a year (Time, February 27, 1995: 36 and 40). In Latin America, Asia, and other parts of the world, the situation is similar with American media culture, commodities, fast-food, and malls creating a new global culture that is remarkably similar on all continents.
To some extent globalization=Americanization, and Hollywood film is an effective arm of media culture to sell the "American way of life" (on globalization and cultural identity, see Cvetovich and Kellner, forthcoming). Thus, there are debates throughout the world concerning limiting Hollywood film and other artifacts of U.S. culture to a specific quota and providing government support for national film cultures. The market ideology which has been dominant since the Thatcher/Reagan era, however, has mitigated against government regulation and quotas, hence Hollywood films continue to dominate the world market.
Consequently, the relationships between Hollywood film, U.S. society, and the entire world are quite complex and require a multiperspectival approach that dissects the political economy of the film industry and the production of film; that provides critical and analytical readings of cinematic texts; and that studies how audiences appropriate and use film and other cultural artifacts (see Kellner 1995 for elaboration of this model). Of course, in specific case studies, one might want to focus intensely on single topic or dimension, but to grasp the full range of meanings and effects of Hollywood film one needs more complex and multidimensional approaches.
Finally, we are currently undergoing one of the most dramatic technological revolutions of all time with new entertainment and information technologies emerging, accompanied by unprecedented mergers of the entertainment and information industries (see Wasko, 1994). These new syntheses are producing novel forms of visual and multimedia culture in which it is anticipated that film will appear in seductive new virtual and interactive forms, accessible through computer, satellite, and other new technologies. There is feverish speculation that the Internet and its assorted technologies will create a new entertainment and information environment and currently the major corporations and players are envisaging what sort of product and delivery system will be most viable and profitable for films and other entertainment of the future. Thus, one imagines that the relationships between film and society will continue to be highly significant as we approach a new century and perhaps new era that will supply novel forms of film and new perspectives on the film culture of the past.
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