Why Hollywood Holds the World In Its Thrall

To call Hollywood “a world all its own,” as one actress once did, is to factor in the fact of America’s ascendancy among nations around the planet. Given the military and economic context of America’s dominant status, the shadow of the eagle—the symbol of Uncle Sam’s might and its flight of fancy where it wishes to land—unavoidably influences not only the reality of international affairs but also the fantasy of people across an array of climes and cultures.

Along with the systemic spread of colonialism, America has inevitably expanded its imperial power, which foments the perception—shaped by the ideology of supremacy—that creates a consciousness of awe steeped in subservience among citizens all over the globe. That America is almighty—with its ethos of democracy and conquest against all odds as embodied by the epic taming of the frontier by its early settlers—has also lead to the mythic presumption that everything it does is not only a function of might but also a fool-proof validation of its appropriation of what’s right. The assumption that America is invincible in its abilities and indisputable in its virtues is rendered even more marketable to people in other nations who buy the ideal of America as “the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

For those who are struggling with nightmares of Third-World circumstances and totalitarian regimes, nothing is more transcendent than the idea of individual salvation wrapped around high-minded notions about the star-spangled banner. Such subliminal conditioning, conveniently sustained by the market forces controlled by America, has spelled the success of America’s multinational enterprise and its export-oriented goals. To the extent that it has harnessed Hollywood’s machinery in fast-tracking and spreading the international appeal of American sounds and images, Hollywood’s messages and its West-centric rhetoric of power will continue to be a force to reckon with. Then again, as the impulse of multiculturalism persists to resist America’s one-size-fits-all vision of the world, this question is quite resonant enough to drive American executives out of dreamy stupor of its complacency: "Will Hollywood continue to thrive in today’s competitive global marketplace?"

While Hollywood and its formidable dream factory remain irresistible for many, marginal voices are raising the stakes for a reality check:

Globalizing the local, localizing the global

"We don't want to be all the same, but we do want to understand each other." So says Sheikha Al Mayassa of Qatar. A cultural worker on behalf of painters, storytellers and filmmakers, she affirms the role of culture and art in communicating a country's identity, making it possible to connect and share its uniqueness with the wider world.

Clarifying the concept of contra-flow

Trite but true: There’s nothing more constant than change. This process of transformation, of course, redefines the notion of the status quo as something infused with a fluid characteristic, whether in the realm of government, media or cultural establishment.

To the extent that the coordinates of influence are shifting in a state of flux, the power of media to shape perceptions and subjective interpretations of social reality stemming from a complexity of interactions—self and society, the nations and the world, etc.—can be described as dynamic and hardly monolithic. This way, meaning can be multi-layered and polysemic. In this paradigm, therefore, the concept of control as unilateral and unleashing a politics of monoculture would entail an overhaul.

In my Sociology lessons, glocalization is among the theories I find fascinating. This neologism obviously reflects the crosscurrents of globalization and localization, implying a cyclic continuum pretty much like the movement of the tides. As defined by George Ritzer, glocalization means “the integration of the global and the local resulting in unique outcomes in different geographic areas.” In this regard, glocalization indicates the way communication—a function of power—can create identities and communities as cultural spheres marked by hybridity or heterogeneity.

Thus, Ritzer’s glocalization can be deemed as a conceptual reiteration of Thussu’s “contra-flow.” These intertwined ideas pack the potential of disentanglement from the tentacles of cultural imperialism that occurs wherever and whenever “authentic, traditional local culture…is being battered out of existence by the indiscriminate dumping of large quantities of slick commercial and media products, mainly from the United States,” according to Jeremy Tunstall in his book The Media Are American: Anglo-American Media in the World.

As an example of contra-flow, in the context of upheavals in geopolitics, the phenomenon of “people power” revolution (in the Philippines, Romania and other communist nations in Europe as well as the recent events in the Middle East) offers an astonishing example how their media had inspired and energized the people into consolidating their collective strength against their despotic regimes.

Where a considerable segment of the American press is plagued with tawdry sensationalism, their counterparts in other parts of the world have shown how democracy as well as meaningful and peaceful change can be achieved and vouchsafed through vigilance and advocacy for the truth, regardless of the risk to liberty and life. Indeed, American media can also learn how to become agents in enlightening the citizenry—like providing more nuance to the news about the Occupy Wall Street protest—by taking their cue from the courage and enterprising spirit of journalists in other nations.

Waking into wholeness

How do we widen the scope of our awareness beyond the borders of a West-centered world, especially in this era of high-tech transformations that impacts our notions of identity and destiny? This website called Worlds of Difference may provide us with a clue as it "presents stories of people facing critical decisions about who they are and who they want to be."

There's more than meets our myopic perception, indeed. Here are three voices worth mulling over to make us more sensitive and sensible as mediators/communicators in a planet where progress as an idea often cramps our capacity for enlightenment:

"I am caught within a circle from which there is no escape: the less human societies were able to communicate with each other and therefore to corrupt each other through contact, the less their respective emissaries were able to perceive the wealth and significance of their diversity."
—Claude Levi-Strauss, from Tristes Tropiques

"The ideal of a single civilization for everyone implicit in the cult of progress and technique impoverishes and mutilates us. Every view of the world that becomes extinct, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of life."
—Octavio Paz, Mexican poet

"It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences."
—Audre Lorde, American poet

Globalization blues

Unity ought to be a foregone conclusion in light of the universality of the human condition and the common fate of peoples regardless of diversity. Especially with the innovative and transcendent capacity of digital technology, cutting-edge communication should have rendered it convenient for nations and races to understand, to empathize with each other, and to forge a fellowship that breaches the borders/walls of stratification along sociocultural and economic fault lines. The dark ages of intolerance should have been passé, and the tragedies of the past should no longer cast a long shadow of ideological disquiet.

Then again, though science has cracked the codes of the human genome and has propelled a conquest of outer space, the earthlings remain shrouded in the smoke of prejudice. It’s a no-brainer how the news continues to broadcast the pall of ethnocentric ignorance and arrogance. Even the blind can see how ideological divisiveness persists in driving a wedge across the world.

To the extent that ideology influences both the shifting tide of geopolitics and the crosscurrents of market forces, the reports have rendered it obvious ad nauseam how power packs a tidal wave of repercussions. Consider how the beliefs of Wall Street executives—steeped in selfish materialism and the culture of consumption that could hold water to sharks’ cold-blooded appetite—continue to have far-reaching effects beyond the shores of a recession-riddled America. Consider, too, how the economic values of the US-controlled International Monetary Fund (IMF) have long been imposed on exotic-sounding countries at the expense of their own ingeniously indigenous agenda for development.

Consequently, this ideology of greed has spawned problems in the local setting where disastrous levels of inequity have risen on a global scale. Think of the effect of ecological exploitation in the Amazon forest or the ocean around Japan, for instance. Truly, it’s staggering to contemplate the fallout from a depleted ozone layer—not to mention the unquantifiable loss of pharmacological possibilities—due to trees and shrubs reduced to ashes. The scarcity of marine resources has become a headache not only for hungry local fishermen but also for the rest of us dying to have a healthy diet of seafood.

Where discontent arises, so does violence. Similar to environmental horror, the heartbreak caused by terrorism definitely demands international cooperation. More than a sleepless issue of homeland security for Americans, it is also a nightmare for people elsewhere. Who’s to say, for instance, that an air raid that bombs a whole generation of Afghan villagers to extinction is less harrowing than planes slamming against buildings?

No man is an island, one poet stated while another echoed an unsettling conclusion why we’re all in this plagued planet together: “Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.”

Essential texts in exploring the whole new world of media

Edited by Daya Kishan Thussu, these three books provide a comprehensive cartography for everyone out to learn the complexity of modern communication in a global order:

International Communication: A Reader

In addition to the core academic readings, key policy documents are also included to demonstrate the development of the political, economic and technological infrastructure that underpins the global system of media and communication.Readings are drawn from an international range of scholars and organized to reflect the growing internationalization of the field, with clearly defined sections covering key aspects of global communication.

This comprehensive Reader brings together seminal texts in media and communication from both traditional as well as more recent scholarship."

Internationalizing Media Studies

"The explosion of transnational information flows, made possible by new technologies and institutional changes (economic, political and legal) has profoundly affected the study of global media. At the same time, the globalization of media combined with the globalization of higher education means that the research and teaching of the subject faces immediate and profound challenges, not only as the subject of inquiry but also as the means by which researchers and students undertake their studies.

Edited by a leading scholar of global communication, this collection of essays by internationally-acclaimed scholars from around the world aims to stimulate a debate about the imperatives for internationalizing media studies by broadening its remit, including innovative research methodologies, taking account of regional and national specificities and pedagogic necessities warranted by the changing profile of students and researchers and the unprecedented growth of media in the non-Western world."

International Communication: Continuity and Change

"This comprehensive survey charts the recent developments of technology and geo-politics and the way they affect media and communications studies. It explores their significance for the established domains of institutions, texts and audiences, drawing on a rich and genuinely international range of case studies."

To begin with: Not only Spidey said "with great power comes great responsibility."

Because some reminders are meant to be worth repeating:

"It cannot be forgotten-- the great possibilities of mass media in promoting dialogue, becoming vehicles for reciprocal knowledge, of solidarity and of peace. They become a powerful resource for good if used to foster understanding between peoples, a destructive 'weapon' if used to foster injustice and conflicts."

-- Pope John Paul II

"Whoever controls the media--the images--controls the culture."

-- Allen Ginsberg