America on Film. Sean Griffin
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characters some audiences and critics found stereotypical, the new film maintains the hegemony of patriarchal rule, by retelling the central story of a father passing his power down to his son. This is often what happens with remakes in Hollywood; instead of telling new stories (as Disney did in films like Frozen [2013] and Moana [2016]), remakes frequently make concessions to some aspects of diversity even as they also retain central ideological messages from the original film, an excellent example of hegemonic negotiation.
This book hopes to provide its readers with the tools and encouragement to become active decoders – to help students develop the skills needed to examine media texts for their social, cultural, and ideological assumptions. Throughout this book, specific films will be decoded from divergent spectator positions, pointing out how the context of social and cultural history can and does influence different reading protocols. Furthermore, one will see that judging textual images as merely “positive” or “negative” vastly oversimplifies the many complex ways that cultural texts can be and are understood in relation to the “real world.” This textbook itself is part of American culture, and thus meshes in its own way with the dominant and resistant ideologies within which it was forged. Its ultimate aim is not to raise its readers somehow out of ideology (an impossible task), but to make its readers aware of the ideological assumptions that constantly circulate through American culture, and especially through its films.
Questions for Discussion
1 What labels do you apply to your own identity? What labels do other people apply to you? Ultimately, who has the right to name or label you?
2 Can you think of other cultural artifacts (like rap music or tattoos) that have been developed in a specific subculture and then incorporated into dominant culture? How was the artifact changed when it went mainstream?
3 What is your own ideological positioning? What are some of the ideologies you may have internalized? Do any of them clash with your own self‐identity?
Further Reading
1 Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971.
2 Barker, Chris. Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice, Third Edition. London: Sage Publications, Inc., 2008 (2000).
3 Bordwell, David and Kristin Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction. New York: McGraw Hill, 2001.
4 Collins, Patricia Hill and Sirma Bilge. Intersectionality. Malden, Massachusetts: Polity Press, 2016.
5 Dyer, Richard. The Matter of Images, Second Edition. New York and London: Routledge, 2002 [1993].
6 Gray, Ann and Jim McGuigan. Studying Culture: An Introductory Reader. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
7 Hall, Stuart, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, and Paul Willis, eds. Culture, Media, Language. London: Unwin Hyman, 1980.
8 Hancock, Ange‐Marie. Intersectionality: An Intellectual History. New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.
9 Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen, 1979.
10 Morley, David and Kuan‐Hsing Chen, eds. Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, 1996.
11 Turner, Graeme. British Cultural Studies: An Introduction. New York: Routledge, 1996.
12 Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.
13 Williams, Raymond. Problems in Materialism and Culture. London: NLB, 1980.
Chapter 2 THE STRUCTURE AND HISTORY OF HOLLYWOOD FILMMAKING
This chapter examines what Hollywood film is and how it developed. Hollywood film can be identified by a specific set of formal and stylistic structures as well as by a set of historical, industrial, and economic determinants. These underlying structures affect how Hollywood films represent America, and how they conceive of issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability. Because Hollywood film is so prevalent in American culture (and world culture), many people think that the way Hollywood makes movies is the only way to do so – that there are no other possible methods for making films. However, there are many types of movies and many different ways to make them. As we shall see throughout this book, these other, non‐Hollywood movies often present different representations of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability than do Hollywood films, partly due to the (comparatively) greater opportunities for women, people of color, homosexuals, and differently abled individuals that exist outside the Hollywood system. Both Hollywood and non‐Hollywood films have evolved since the beginning of the twentieth century, in conjunction with the broader social, political, and cultural events of American history. This chapter broadly addresses those concerns, and will lay the basis for future chapters’ more detailed analyses of how these issues relate to specific cinematic representations of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability.
Hollywood vs. Independent Film
Hollywood film refers to movies made and released by a handful of filmmaking companies located in and around Hollywood, California. The names of most of these companies – Universal, MGM, 20th Century‐Fox, Paramount, Warner Brothers, etc. – have been recognized as cinematic brand names around the world since the 1920s. These companies have produced and distributed tens of thousands of films, films that have found long‐term success at the box office, and often make it seem (especially in other countries) that Hollywood film is American film. Hollywood’s global predominance obscures its historical development, and in effect works to naturalize the structure and style of its films. This is itself another example of ideology working to erase the socially constructed nature of a specific cultural institution: Hollywood gains strength and power by making its form and practice seem to be basic common sense. This tends to hide the fact that Hollywood form and practice developed over time in response to specific socio‐political factors, and it also works to erase awareness that there are other ways of making (and understanding) film as a cultural artifact.
Hollywood films so dominate American theaters (as well as cable programming schedules and streaming services) that US citizens have relatively little access to other types of films – films often made by minority filmmakers that tell stories and express viewpoints and that are ignored or underexplored in Hollywood movies. These non‐Hollywood films are sometimes broadly referred to as independent films. For example, avant‐garde or experimental films explore the multiple formal possibilities of cinema (not just storytelling), and they are often tied to specific movements in the other arts, such as Surrealism. Documentaries are films that use actual events as their raw material – they are usually made without actors or fictional stories, and attempt to convey these events as realistically as possible. (For many of the groups discussed in this book, documentary films were one of the first ways that minority filmmakers could and did challenge Hollywood stereotypes and misrepresentations.) Americans classify films made outside the United States as foreign films. They can be fictional films that look more or less like Hollywood films, or they can be avant‐garde or documentary films. Finally, the term “independent film” also describes fictional feature films that are made in America, but outside the usual Hollywood channels. Broadly speaking, independent, foreign, avant‐garde, and documentary films tend to represent a broader spectrum of humanity than do Hollywood films, which tend to be made and sold as merely “entertainment.”
Sometimes, to audiences weaned solely on Hollywood films, these other types of films can seem weird, boring, or badly made. If avant‐garde films (for example) were trying to play by the rules of Hollywood film, such judgments might have merit, but these films have consciously decided to use other rules. These types of films make formal choices (in mise‐en‐scène, montage, sound, and narrative design) that often differ vastly from those used