Hollywood Blockbusters and the Universalisation of American Values
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AMERITOCRACY: HOLLYWOOD BLOCKBUSTERS AND THE UNIVERSALISATION OF AMERICAN VALUES BY RICHARD MARK LANGLEY A thesis submitted to The University of Birmingham for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of American and Canadian Studies College of Arts and Law University of Birmingham September 2011 ©Richard Langley University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract 1 Acknowledgements 2 A Note on the Production of an Audio-Visual Thesis 3 Introduction 6 Chapter 1: Ameritocracy: The Proof and Projection of Primacy Introduction 11 Ameritocracy in Context 19 Ameritocracy and American Exceptionalism 24 Ameritocracy and Americanism 27 Defining Ameritocracy 30 Ameritocracy begins with (and in) America: the ‘city on a hill’ 32 Revolution and Independence: Crying Out for the Creed 38 The Frontier and Manifest Destiny – Testing the Boundaries of the Universal 43 Ameritocracy and Wilsonian Internationalism: All Roads Lead to the New Rome 47 Chapter 2: Ameritocracy, Hollywood and Americanisation Introduction 51 Forms of Americanisation 55 Americanisation and Globalisation 60 A Brief History of Hollywood 65 Primacy and the Political Economy of Movie-Making 66 Appealing to Mass Markets 68 Hollywood and the Potential for Propaganda 70 National Cinema and National Identity: Selling ‘America’ 75 Universality, Polysemy and Narrative Transparency 82 Chapter 3: Ameritocracy and the Blockbuster A Brief History of the Blockbuster 86 Ameritocracy on Screen 92 Case Study: the Universality of Roland Emmerich 97 Conveying Universality: Symbolic Signposting 104 Conveying Universality: One World 108 Conveying Universality through Genre: It’s The End of the World, As We Know It. 111 Conveying Universality: New Worlds, New Frontiers 114 Conveying Universality: Deploying the Jeremiad 122 Conclusion 128 Bibliography 131 Filmography 150 Digital Video Discs Attached Abstract The thesis contends that there is a dominant strand of thinking driving the prevailing metanarrative of American global hegemony. This strand, constructed here as Ameritocracy, taps into three interconnected and fundamental principles concerning the nature of America: that American values are universal, terminal and providential. However, this notion of American universality is contradicted by a troubling parochialism, one that reveals religious, racial and cultural particularities generated from American identity, and from the mythic, providential origin story of America. The thesis expands on the theory of Ameritocracy, its historical derivation and theoretical antecedents, and its application within the soft power realm of Hollywood film. Ameritocracy finds its apotheosis in the popular blockbuster films of the unipolar era. The global aspirations of the blockbuster conflate with the universality of the medium, and thereby function as the perfect conduit for expounding the presumed universality of the American nation, promoting and proselytising on behalf of American primacy, using Ameritocratic arguments to legitimise and normalise U.S. hegemony. Analysis of blockbuster texts reveals that the notions of universality they embed are often partial and particular, featuring an obfuscation of definitions, between ideals and interests, between ends and means, and between the universal and the American. 1 Acknowledgements Since starting this thesis in 2005, I have received invaluable help from several individuals without whom this project would not have come to completion. Firstly, my tutor, Professor Scott Lucas, whose academic focus, intellectual vigour and sense of humour has inspired me since I was an undergraduate. Secondly, Professors Neil Campbell and Geoff King, whose candid interviews added a vibrancy to the documentary film. Thirdly, thanks must go to Tim Fornara, Duncan Kilty, Michael Buckman and others, who gave advice, lent equipment and generally helped to point me in the right direction. Lastly, I have to acknowledge the incredible influence and help of two family members. My wife, Kate Langley, whose patience over the last seven years has been nothing short of Herculean and who has punctuated the PhD process with many moments of love, grace and beauty. The final nod, however, must go to my late grandmother, Francis Dimmick, with whom I spent most of my childhood: Nan, if you hadn’t loved TV so much then I wouldn’t have fallen in love with the moving image and none of this would have happened. Thank you. 2 A Note on the Production of an Audio-Visual Thesis There is considerable literature devoted to determining the core of American identity, much of which references notions connected to the universality of the American idea. However, given that the primary concern of this thesis is the role and function of audio-visual media in expressing this idea, it seemed logical to adopt an audio-visual approach that could engage directly with much of the material being analysed. Such an approach has obvious shortcomings. Firstly, the size of the written component placed a natural limitation on the depth of possible analysis, in comparison to a conventional written doctoral thesis. Consequently, parts of this component introduce the dynamic of Ameritocracy and ground the concept in historical precedents and theoretical antecedents, but stop short of a deep and full analysis; this enabled this thesis to cover a broader terrain than might have otherwise been possible, whilst also leaving much scope for further, and fuller, study in future. Secondly, and perhaps primarily, it is well recognised that audio-visual material generates a semiotic excess which written work can easily avoid through prolonged explication. However, this excess also enables the filmic part of this thesis to be more open to criticism and creative interpretation; Ameritocracy still has a primary narrative that attempts to link Hollywood film production to notions of American universality and global hegemony, but (through inclusion of non-hegemonic movies, and through playful juxtapositions of images, text, voiceover and music) allows space for negotiated and oppositional readings, and in that sense mimics the sort of processes audiences engage with when watching Hollywood movies. The written thesis advances the same argument as the audio-visual component, although its tone and content is more scholarly and less ‘open’ as a form; where appropriate I have made reference to oppositional texts and to the polysemic possibilities of Hollywood film. 3 Ameritocracy does not have a leading voiceover that guides the narrative. I initially experimented with such a voiceover, largely inspired by the documentary work of Adam Curtis (The Century of the Self (2002), The Power of Nightmares (2004) and The Trap (2007)), whose combinations of interview footage, archive imagery and polemical voiceover seemed to suit the development of an ‘academic’ audio-visual narrative. However, I found that the voiceover made the documentary excessively didactic and with a tendency to too readily slip into diatribe (criticisms which can also be levelled at Curtis’s work), whilst also distracting from the filmic texts themselves. Instead, elements of Curtis’s approach were used, with inspiration also being drawn from documentaries that dispense with narration entirely in the construction of their argument, including The Atomic Café (1982) and Baraka (1992). Consequently, the narrative thread of Ameritocracy is composed of interview footage with academics and individuals working in the film and culture industries (both filmed and sourced from other media), intercut and overlaid with extensive material from Hollywood movies, American television, Presidential addresses, popular music, quotations from relevant texts and a variety of other sources. The documentary film presented both intellectual and creative challenges, particularly in regard to how to express this thesis in an audio-visual format that would retain academic rigour without becoming a dry and boring film. How to present historical ideas – for which there is no documentary footage – using fictional film? How to condense a theory with pretensions to a relationship with something as vast, rich and diverse as American identity, in just one hour of documentary film? How to articulate an analytical concept in what is, predominantly, a creative medium? These queries, amongst others, informed much of the editorial decisions behind Ameritocracy and, whilst open to criticism, interpretation and development, hopefully form the basis of an emerging audio-visual academia. The structure of the documentary component of this thesis loosely matches the three-chapter structure of the written component. The first section of the film serves to explicate 4 Ameritocracy and place it within a historical context; section two moves on to analyse Hollywood as an industry, its relationship to processes of Americanisation and the various ways in which it intersects with notions of American universality; the third and final section of the film