Hollywood's Blockbuster Cultural Colonialism

Aaron Christopher Edwards

World Cinema

Spring 2005

Hollywood's blockbuster cultural colonialism

The corporate Hollywood presence led by international multimedia

conglomerates such as Viacom, Time Warner and Disney not only

dominates moviemaking worldwide, a process capitalized in the 1980s,

but also employs a colonialism-style of storytelling that may aggravate

cultural relations with other nations, rendering the US a further isolated

and internationally non-excepted super power.

Particularly since the days of Ronald Reagan (a former actor and

substantial faction in the conservative political movement) story-lines of

Hollywood movies haven't reflected the contemporary social commentary

of 70’s movies, but a glossy, Americanized work ethic theme. The stories

stress that only hard work produces success with the hidden message that

poverty, instead of being a societal problem, results from laziness and

incompetence. To appeal to many audiences in different countries, most

movie story-lines are now simplified to emphasize action and spectacle

over character development, ignoring or trivializing complex issues.

Historically, Hollywood and foreign film industries have had a

symbiotic relationship since the early days of moviemaking. In the 1930s,

European audiences, even in communist countries, flocked to seek

American films, while at the same time Europe exported large numbers of

producers, directors and actors to Hollywood. Even by the early 1950s,

the big studios sought to cut costs by making many of their movies

overseas and using foreign labor, an early form of global outsourcing. At

the same time, foreign theaters and film companies gained revenues from

the taxes on imported American films and from the showing of these

films.

However, the past 30 years have brought the growth of media

conglomerates that absorbed the old Hollywood studios and merged them

with TV networks, high profile news magazines, movie theater chains,

and videocassette and DVD distribution subunits in a complete reversal of

the U.S. Supreme Court's antitrust Paramount decree of 1948. One of the

principal results has been that Hollywood producers increasingly concentrate on making fewer but more expensive blockbuster films. This

change in turn has had several consequences. Hollywood movies, even

when not intending to, often reflect the American ethic that hard work

inevitably results in worldly success, with the hidden corollary that

poverty must be self-inflicted. Such movies proclaim the growing chasm

between have and have-nots in the global economy.

Blockbuster movies -- which combine the technologies of film and

TV -- have a penchant for reducing debate over crucial social and

economic concerns to mere entertainment. Blockbusters tend to emphasize

spectacle and action over character development, resulting in a flattening

out