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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2014
This article examines how Hollywood blockbuster movies made since the 1970s have commonly presented a distorted and conventional narrative of American history, in respect both to domestic incidents and to engagements abroad. Equally distorting is the image of America as a highly homogeneous society projected through popular television shows. These patterns are investigated in the following way. First, the article presents an overview of how early Hollywood movies dealt with the country's immigrant and racial diversity. Secondly, the effect of mobilization in both the Second World War and the cold war in inducing a narrow sense of national identity in movies is examined. Thirdly, these two sections provide a prelude to the analysis of historical distortion and ideology in selected major Hollywood blockbusters.
This article is one of an occasional series on Politics and Culture. The author wishes to thank Michael Comber, Harvey Feigenbaum and the referees and Editor of Government and Opposition for comments on this paper.
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4 For an account of the distinction between classical Hollywood and modern blockbusters see Bordwell, David, Staiger, Janet and Thompson, Kristin, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985 CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Neale, Steve and Smith, Murray (eds), Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, London, Routledge, 1998 Google Scholar. I discuss only those Hollywood big budget movies consciously taking historical subjects about America and ignore the host of blockbusters designed mainly to bring teenage audiences into the cinema.
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6 Of course, not all such movies succeed commercially, though profit-making is their makers' intention. By the 1990s there were more cinema screens available in the US than at any period since 1920.
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16 This theme is examined by Hughes, Robert in American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America, London, The Harvill Press, 1997, especially pp. 194–205 Google Scholar.
17 Government Information Manual for the Motion Pictures, June 1942, quoted in Novick, Peter, The Holocaust and Collective Memory, London, Bloomsbury, 1999, p. 28 Google Scholar. (Emphasis added.)
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24 Quoted in Cripps, Thomas, Making Movies Black: The Hollywood Message Movie from World War II to the Civil Rights Era, New York, Oxford University Press, 1993, p. 105 Google Scholar.
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26 Quoted in Steven J. Ross, Working Class Hollywood, op. cit., p. 249.
27 Both quoted in Higson, Andrew, Waving the Flag, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1995, p. 19 Google Scholar.
28 It is this narrative of inclusion which increasingly dominates American historians' sense of the nation. For instance, in an influential essay, ‘The Historian's Use of American History and Vice Versa’, David Hollinger writes that, ‘a defensible focus for a national narrative in our own time, I believe, is the notion of a national solidarity committed — but often failing — to incorporate individuals from a great variety of communities of descent, on equal but not homogeneous terms, into a society with democratic aspirations inherited largely from England’ (in Bender, Thomas (ed.), Rethinking American History in a Global Age, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2002, p. 392 CrossRefGoogle Scholar).
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33 A theme captured in Stacey, Jackie, Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship, London, Routledge, 1994 Google Scholar.
34 For an excellent account see Kuisel, Richard, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1993, pp. 52–69 Google Scholar.
35 Mirroring the Second World War movies, several of these films had a group of recruits drawn from diverse backgrounds, though a notable exception is the all-white The Deer Hunter (1978).
36 Even less military-centred movies such as Reisz's, Karel Who'll Stop the Rain? (1978)Google Scholar, which examines the moral damage visited upon American society by the Vietnam War, or Noyce's, Phillip new adaptation of The Quiet American (2001)Google Scholar, fail to present the Vietnamese as more than one-dimensional presences. Noyce's film concludes with a montage of news stories from 1954 to 1965 which freezes a frame of a wounded American soldier, making this the lingering image of the film not the havoc wreaked upon Vietnam and its people.
37 Cimino's, Michael undervalued Heaven's Gate (1978)Google Scholar had a huge budget, breaking the studio, and he used it to provide a superb picture of the millions of immigrants reaching end of the nineteenth century America. Its challenge to the myth of frontierism provoked savage reviews and patriotic condemnations in the American press.
38 Bernstein, Alison R., American Indians and World War II, Norman, Okla., University of Oklahoma Press, 1991 Google Scholar.
39 Ang Lee's, Ride with the Devil (1999)Google Scholar, a Civil War epic about two confederates' hatred diluted and redeemed through friendship with a former slave and experience of war, offers a model of filming American history without sacrificing detail or comprehensiveness. On Native Americans' experience, Mann's, Michael movie The Last of the Mohicans (1992)Google Scholar is among the best recent engagements.
40 Cripps, T., Making Movies Black, op. cit., pp. 110–11Google Scholar.
41 The complexities of audience-film relations are intelligently discussed in J. Stacey, Star Gazing, op. cit., ch. 6, particularly in relation to how British women viewers used movies as a source of information about consumption and lifestyle in the 1940s and 1950s.
42 Rogin, Michael Blackface, White Noise, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1996 Google Scholar.
43 See the scintillating essay by Rogin, Michael, Independence Day, London, BFI Publishing, 1998 Google Scholar. There are still some portraits of traditional internal enemies such as the David Mamet scripted bio-op of union leader Hoffa, Jimmy, Hoffa (1992, Danny DeVito)Google Scholar.
44 For which the reader might turn to the fifteen-part New York Times series, in 2000, on ‘How Race Is Lived in America’.
45 Feigenbaum, Harvey B., ‘The Production of Culture in the Postimperialist Era’, in Becker, David and Sklar, Richard (eds), Postimperialism in World Politics, Westport, Conn., Praeger, 1999 Google Scholar.
46 This pattern has one unintended but ironic consequence: because Hollywood concentrates on sponsoring multiplexes during peak seasons, these outlets are available to independent film-makers at other times (autumn and spring), to a greater extent than previously, when their owners anticipate lower audiences and reduced profits.
47 Box office revenues for 2002 set a 10% increase on the previous year, reaching $10.1 b, while DVD sales have grown from $6b to $11 b in 2002. ‘America's armchair film fans boost the box office’, Financial Times, 16 November 2002.
48 Gabler, Neal, ‘The Illusion of Entertainment: Just Like a Movie, But It's Not’, New York Times, 4 08 2002 Google Scholar.
49 Ross, Steven J., Working Class Hollywood, op. cit., p. 6 Google Scholar.
