Not So Follywood

DR ANDREW SHAIL constructs a defence of Hollywood's cultural importance

How could we possibly endorse the institution that brought us Dude, Where's My Car? Or the extreme hypocrisy of Shallow Hal, in which "true beauty" turns out to be outer beauty after all? Although, given the challenging roles that have so far made up Hilary Swank's inventory, it is almost mandatory for a misogynistic Hollywood that she be seen to be reduced to the "kooky" pratfall in the trailer currently running for P.S. I Love You, the institution is not coterminous with its films. There are several reasons to hold off on damning Hollywood.

One indictment of the Los Angeles-based film-making and film-funding institution is that it is a mechanism of ideological colonialism. But might our perception of this not be a product of our own cleverness? Hollywood produces films that bear the markings of their ideological commitments.

In a film that may stand as 2007's exemplary Hollywood product, Michael Bay's Transformers, as incoming rounds carve chunks out of Mission City skyscrapers, teenager Sam Witwicky, commanded by Captain Lennox to get the "All Spark" to incoming evac helicopters while his platoon hold off the attacking Decepticons, protests, "but I'm not a soldier". Lennox replies: "you're a soldier now". In my local Empire cinema, most of the audience laughed audibly.

Even though the biggest exporter of films in the world is compelled to make these products as culturally non-specific as possible, its idea of universality is, like the government's idea of universality, still intensely American. Indeed, because the USA has historically held an idea of nationhood as asserted ("we, the people") rather than spontaneous ("we declare the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland", as in the Easter 1916 declaration), its cultural objects tend to carry either explicit - American Idol, American Gladiators, American Body Shop, American Beauty, America's Next Top Model (try replacing these with "British") - or implicit assertions of Americanness. Americans themselves often do not perceive this specificity, precisely because their "we, the people" is one of the most strident claims to universal humanity.

World-wide, however, Hollywood's viewers can and do appreciate the embedded nature of the products that are offered to them as culturally non-specific. In Stephen Spielberg's The War of the Worlds (2005), Tom Cruise's Ray Ferrier, held in a group of captives in a cage attached to a Martian machine, needs the unarmed soldier amongst them to marshal the other captives into action for his plan to destroy the machine to work, implicitly emphasising a citizen-soldier ideal that many Americans currently see as mere "service".

Yet outside America this ideal is not being subtly inserted into its viewers as a universal truth, it is being vomited on them. (And it is certainly being vomited onto more viewers than are moved to reconsider their world-views by films that are said to "challenge" them.) Therefore while American cinema's world dominance derives from a foothold it gained in the early 1910s because of the peculiarly American trust-based business practices of the earliest rationalised studios, Hollywood film's Americanness also makes it one of the least capable of all national cinemas of appearing to global viewers in the neutral guise it would need to successfully propagandise.

A second charge levelled at Hollywood is that, as the worst expression of capitalism possible, it abandons entirely the artisanal principle at the root of a healthy variety of films. But this principle is not solely American. Recent research by Jon Burrows suggests that the American rise to dominance in the film exhibition market in the UK (which began in the middle of 1909) came about as a result not of American economic imperialism but of an invitation, from an organisation of British distributors and cinema managers, to begin to export to Britain on a significant scale. Threatened by the possibility that the impending formation of a European combine of producers would mean increased minimum prices for films and, committed to open-market principles, this group of British businessmen formed a trust and invited an American trust to supply them with films. If Hollywood product dominates UK cinemas, we did, literally and figuratively, ask for it.

Neither do we need to be automatically ashamed of an institution that, because of its standards for expenditure on marketing equal to that for production, ensures extremely high opening weekend box office numbers (as is currently occurring in the US with Alvin and the Chipmunks) and so does not need to rely on the quality of its films. Lawrence Rainey estimates that 40-60% of the gross sales of the first edition of Ulysses in February 1922 came from book dealers who had no intention of reading the text, yet few, if any, literary historians would argue that Ulysses should not have been written or published.

"Art" cinema itself would not exist without Hollywood. The monopolistic business practices of the US were responsible for the emergence of cinema as an institution, including the steady supply of films that permitted the existence of venues devoted solely to showing films, and so for the resulting emergence of the cinema audiences that could only then stimulate the production of "art" films.

Contemporary Hollywood films may not, as products of a horizontally-integrated and homogeneous capitalist system, be particularly experimental formally, but the formal experimentalism that is valorised amongst the canon of "art" films is rarely anything other than self-referential. King Arthur (2004) may stage a rebarbative flaunting of historical fact, but is this really more insidious than the intellectual self-flattery of Federico Fellini's "reflexive" film about film-making 8½ (1963), the 138 minutes of directorial self-pity that Steven Jay Schneider somehow manages to regard as "one of the most brilliant, imaginative and funny movies of all time"?

A literary historian with whom I was once watching The Matrix had to leave the room for a moment and said "don't stop it, just tell me what happens when I get back". I paused the film, because none of my literary contemporaries would consider being told the plot of a few pages of a literary work an adequate substitute for reading them, for grasping content as mediated through form. As with any film, the formal structures established by factors such as composition, camera movement, editing patterns and shot duration comprise at least half of the meaning of The Matrix. A camera moving slowly sideways and panning to the left while an on-screen sound source moves into off-screen space which then cuts to a static shot of the sound source is the result of formal choices not to take a vast range of alternative paths in articulating this scene.

Nonetheless, form in cinema is invisible. Some understand form to be invisible only in Hollywood cinema, but cinema in general comprises a code which, relative to other forms of language, lacks many of the conventional markers of linguisticity. Hollywood cinema might therefore seem inane in comparison with films that, from outside the Hollywood system, choose to render their formal properties more explicit, but all films are intensely complex mechanisms.

One of the most pleasurable aspects of getting students to analyse film - and I use Russell Mulcahy's Highlander (1986) when teaching to emphasise that this is true of any film - is when students begin to learn the range of choices that are made in rendering even a single shot or transition from one shot to another. American films may also appear to endlessly repeat the same tropes in their content, but, as film theorist Steve Neale has argued, genre is actually a mechanism for limiting sameness. By placing a film within a tradition, genre establishes for new film-makers standards of precisely what has been done before.

A third - and perhaps the most common - problem with Hollywood is that it stops much better films from being made. But "independent" film is under no significant threat from Hollywood's product. Independent cinema tends to be much more successful than Hollywood films, earning more per screening in spite of showing at fewer screens. Nor is art film the opposite of Hollywood. As a means of maintaining their own cultural respectability, the major distributors routinely fund film-makers who establish an artistic profile in independent production. Current "independent" directors who have no problem obtaining funding from the major distributors include Wes Anderson, Todd Haynes, Alejandro Iñárritu, the Coen brothers and Alexander Payne.

What we call "British cinema" as it has resurged in the past two decades also owes much to American distributors: note Sense & Sensibilty (1995), funded by Columbia; The Full Monty (1997), financed by Twentieth Century Fox; and Chicken Run (2000), bankrolled by Dreamworks. Understanding Hollywood cinema as mindless is one of the ways that we define ourselves as European. But the industries (unlike the films) are not distinct. When independent distributors with a prestigious history of art-house successes are bought up by a major Hollywood distributor to comprise their "classics" wing, their films tend to continue to be seen as independent regardless of their source.

The lover of "art" film is also indebted to the institutions of Hollywood. As employing new special or visual effects techniques is a waste of money if these techniques are not noticed by their audiences as new, cinema's "paratexts" regularly draw attention to these techniques. Demystification of its processes is one of Hollywood's processes.

The DVD has culminated an almost century-old tradition of turning knowledge about film-making into a secondary income stream. The specialist knowledge about film demonstrated every time an obscure or under-released film is lauded is simply an elitist refrain of this same industry valorisation of the insider.

Andrew Shail is News International research fellow in film at St Anne's College, Oxford. He specialises in the study of early British cinema culture and the history of the body and teaches film theory at Oxford's English Faculty.