Hollywood Killed the American Dream

Michael Medved writes in his essay "That's Hollywood?" that Tinsel town created anti-Americanism. If this is true, how did it happen and can it change? If you think about it, the kinds of movies that perform well in the box office are full of drama, violence, sex, and action. These kinds of movies do well because it is something we never see in our day to day life. As Medved puts it, it is the movie's National Inquirer appeal. These films inject some excitement in to our lives, which for the most part are predictable to a fault. The message these dramatic, violent, sexually loose films portray to international audiences, however, is that American life is the same way. If people believe that America is violent, dramatic, godless, and seedy, then it is more than obvious that they wouldn't see it in a good light. The imagined culture goes against every positive value ever taught.

Historically, the film industry was founded by Eastern European Jewish immigrant families who worked to gain acceptance in their new country by expressing their love for America through film. Americans have never had an easy time accepting new cultural groups, from Native Americans to the Irish, from African Americans to Asian and Latino cultures. With the mass media at their disposal, along with other market factors, studio heads created many pro-America classics, which portrayed a virtual utopia overseas. When the next company heads came to power in the 60's and 70's the United States was in the midst of the Vietnam War and the never ending cold war. Protest and policy hatred was a big part of youth culture, the audience Hollywood catered to then and continues to now.

What this says to other countries is that Americans only like America because they are as immoral as movies portray them, and that you should only want to be American if you agree with that. But Hollywood's America isn't the real America. Medved cites a speech President George W. Bush made to students at a university in Beijing to point out one example; that Hollywood doesn't portray Americans as religious, and yet 95% of Americans believe in a higher power and 40% attend some form or weekly religious gathering. He later uses an example of an American traveler in Indonesia who could not convince a local boy that they did not carry a gun. Because the boy had seen so many violent American movies, he believed that all Americans were violent and owned guns. In reality, the numbers are not as high as this boy believed, since only 50% of American households have guns.

So is there anything that can be done to reverse this media trend? After the 9/11 attacks, Medved points to Hollywood's sudden desire to promote a positive image of Islam to Americans and sudden efforts to work with Washington to promote positive American images overseas as an indicator of possibility for change. At the same time he explains how the government went to the film school at USC to understand how terrorists think and how to counteract them, a implicit acceptance of the anti-social, demented and violent thinking that characterizes Hollywood. If the industry is capable of accepting the fact that Hollywood portrays American poorly and then take action to change that fact, then it is possible that the media could change international sentiment towards America.

Bibliography

Meedved, Michael. 2004. That's Entertainment? Hollywood's Contribution to Anti-Americanism Abroad. In E. Wittkopf & J. McCormick (Eds.) The Domestic Sources of American Foreign Policy, pp. 43-54