The weekend before last was something of a post-coronavirus reawakening for cinema. The release of Tenet at last gave mass audiences a new Hollywood blockbuster to queue up for, albeit in a masked, socially distanced, hand-sanitised way. Its healthy $53m opening weekend was as much cause for celebration as the movie world has been able to muster in 2020, but conspicuously absent from the party was Hollywood itself.
Tenet opened in 41 countries but the United States was not one of them. Owing to the country’s shoddy handling of the pandemic, cinemas remain closed in most regions, including the key markets of California and New York. So much for “America first”. Another development compounded the US’s humbling: Tenet was not actually the highest-grossing movie in the world that weekend; that was The Eight Hundred, a lavish, patriotic Chinese war movie. In contrast to the US, most of China’s 70,000 movie screens are back open, which helped The Eight Hundred chalk up $69m. Rarely has the world’s cultural superpower looked weaker.
For the past century or so, in terms of pop culture, America was the party. If it wasn’t happening in the US, it was barely happening at all. Whatever home-grown movies or TV programmes or music other countries produced, they usually paled in comparison to America’s output in terms of sophistication, glamour and influence. Other countries might occasionally muster a world-beating movie or band, an Amélie or an Abba – and the UK has benefited from the common language like no other country – but these were always mere drops in an ocean of American pop culture that lapped every shore.
Many are wondering whether the era of US dominance is coming to an end, with the coronavirus pandemic the final nail in the coffin. “Covid has reduced to tatters the illusion of American exceptionalism,” wrote the anthropologist Wade Davis in Rolling Stone last month, observing that Americans “found themselves members of a failed state, ruled by a dysfunctional and incompetent government largely responsible for death rates that added a tragic coda to America’s claim to supremacy in the world”.
On top of its out-of-control pandemic, today’s United States is a place of economic decline, rampant inequality and racial animosity. It is a place where culture is now discussed primarily in the context of warfare. In 2015, Donald Trump famously declared the American dream dead, and since he became president, you could say that’s one promise he has fulfilled.
Even before Covid, the tide was already turning. Sticking with the movies for the moment, the distant, carefree days of early 2020 provided another jolt to US supremacy: for the first time, a non-English language movie won the Oscar for best picture: Parasite. Needless to say, Trump was not happy: “The winner is a movie from South Korea, what the hell was that all about?” he complained, “Can we get, like, Gone With the Wind back please?” More prophetic was Bong Joon-ho’s comment at the Golden Globes: “Once you overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.” Those floodgates are open, and not just for films. Globalisation is a two-way street, and the US now finds itself receiving as well as transmitting.
On the small screen, the rise of streaming services has given global audiences more access to the non-American stuff they have been missing, and the language barriers are coming down. Take Money Heist, originally a hit on Spanish TV. In decades past, a US network might have bought the rights to it and remade it in New York with American actors. Instead, Netflix provided a platform for the original, and it became a global smash. There are still reams of quality US fare being made, but now it’s in direct competition with German sci-fi (Dark), Israeli spy thrillers (Fauda), Indian crime sagas (Sacred Games), even British teen comedies (Sex Education). Then there are ostensibly “American” series, such as Narcos, that sneakily lure audiences over the one-inch subtitle barrier: Netflix’s semi-fictional account of the US’s drug wars in Latin America has more dialogue in Spanish than English. Key to Netflix’s success has been its strategy of producing shows regionally, rather than simply pumping out American content. As a result, local industries have been reinvigorated.
In the music industry, the streaming revolution has had a similar levelling effect. In decades past, the US was the gatekeeper: it owned most of the major record labels, it had MTV, and it was the market you had to crack before you could really say you’d made it (sorry, Oasis). When it comes to the biggest acts in the world today, though, you could be talking about Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny, who was judged “the world’s biggest pop star” by Bloomberg. Or Korean boyband BTS, who have had four No 1 albums in the US charts in the past two years and who pack out stadiums to adoring American and British fans, many of whom have started learning Korean to understand the lyrics. In August BTS released their first English-language single, Dynamite, which went straight to the top of the US charts. The most-watched music video on YouTube, now at 7bn views, is Luis Fonsi’s Despacito – the Spanish-language original, not the English version with Justin Bieber. Thanks to the internet, what were once regional genres, such as K-pop or reggaeton, are now part of a global conversation. And people who might have been local stars, such as Colombia’s J Balvin, Spain’s Rosalía, Nigeria’s Burna Boy or France’s Christine and the Queens, are now international ones. US performers now queue up to collaborate with them.
It usually follows that centres of political and economic power also rule the cultural sphere. But the US was primed to become the world’s cultural exporter, says Lane Crothers, professor of politics at Illinois State University and author of Globalization and American Popular Culture. “If you think about when the movie and music industries developed, they were periods of enormous economic growth and enormous cultural diversity in the US, as vast immigrant populations were arriving,” he says. “If you were going to produce something that was going to be popular in, say, New York in 1907 you were going to produce it for an audience that was already globally diverse, at least in the European, western hemisphere sense of that word, and so you had to figure out a way to make programming that was accessible to people across cultural and linguistic traditions. So when the opportunity emerged, post-second world war, to sell globally, US culture had already had plenty of practice.”
After the second world war especially, the US was mindful of pop culture’s soft-power applications. It had a pretty clear idea of the image it sought to project: leaders of the free world, the land of prosperity, opportunity, health and happiness. Even supposedly “anti-establishment” rock music was viewed as a strategic asset during the cold war – all the better to contrast with the boring Soviet alternative. Which would you prefer? Communist folk music or Prince and Guns N’ Roses? Soviet propaganda films or Beverly Hills Cop? The American dream was both a national glue and an export commodity.
As economies have grown around the world, the US has had more consumers to export to, but this has entailed certain compromises. In terms of cinema, for example, international box office now makes up 60 to 70% of Hollywood’s income. As China has grown into the world’s second-largest cinema territory over the past decade, Hollywood has been watching with dollar signs in its eyes. But as well as casting Chinese actors in bit parts to whet local appetites, Hollywood has been increasingly careful not to offend the country’s ruling Communist party, which controls which foreign movies get released and for how long. That has meant cutting out all references to locally contentious matters such as LGBTQ+ rights, Tibet, Tiananmen Square, Xinjiang, Taiwan (even Tom Cruise’s forthcoming Top Gun: Maverick quietly peeled the Taiwanese flag off his aviator jacket) – basically anything political. As a result, Hollywood content is no longer dictated by American-style free expression but Chinese-style self-censorship. As PEN America put it in a scathing report on Hollywood last month, “Chinese censors are playing a role in determining the content or message of movies that are released worldwide.”
All of this is, potentially, to little avail anyway. While Hollywood has been abandoning its American values, China has been getting better at making its own blockbusters, no less sophisticated and far more relatable to the home crowd, as the success of The Eight Hundred underlines (fittingly, it is the story of a brave band of Chinese fighters resisting foreign invaders). In 2019, for the first time, four of the top 20 highest-grossing movies worldwide were Chinese. They played almost entirely within China, and the country is not particularly set on spreading its influence abroad, yet, but it could only be a matter of time. Last month, the government issued a document encouraging the development of homegrown sci-fi movies as a patriotic imperative, though the call for “implementation of Xi Jinping Thought” could be a barrier to export appeal. As with other film cultures such as India, South Korea and Japan, the growth of the local industry is hitting Hollywood’s share. The coronavirus pandemic hasn’t helped with that.
Now, as China reopens ahead of the US, Hollywood is still looking to cash in. Next up is Disney’s live-action remake of Mulan, a $200m fantasy squarely aimed at the Chinese market. Again, conceding to the pandemic, Disney is not releasing Mulan in US cinemas and instead putting it out on streaming platforms. Mulan is getting a release in China, though, and it will doubtless do well there, despite regional pro-democracy movements campaigning for a boycott on account of lead actor Liu Yifei’s expressed support for Hong Kong’s police. Although as a Chinese story, directed by a New Zealander (Niki Caro), entirely cast with Chinese actors, and set in China but largely shot in New Zealand, it bears asking how American a movie Mulan really is.
You could ask the same of much of “American culture”. Even before Parasite, only one American has won the best director Oscar in the past decade (Damien Chazelle for La La Land); the rest are Mexican, Taiwanese and European. Ostensibly American stories in film and TV are often set in sci-fi and fantasy worlds (Star Wars, Game of Thrones), or they’re nostalgia trips to America’s 20th-century golden age, such as Stranger Things.
The only vibrant areas of contemporary US culture seem to be those that have been traditionally under-represented: African American and female-led storytelling, for example, from Barry Jenkins to Greta Gerwig, Ryan Coogler to Ava DuVernay. Or those that directly critique the country, from horror movies such as Get Out and The Purge to Joker’s dystopian drama, Childish Gambino’s conscious hip-hop This Is America, to true-crime series such as Making a Murderer. Genuinely aspirational showcases for the American dream are hard to find. Does Keeping Up With the Kardashians count?
It is a little early to be making predictions of America’s demise. Let’s not forget, the US still has a virtual monopoly over the means of production and distribution. As well as movie studios, that includes most streaming platforms and social media: Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, HBO, Apple TV+, Disney+, YouTube, Facebook and Spotify (Swedish-owned but headquartered in the US). If the US can continue to pool the world’s talents and use them to make great art – as it often does – that could still be a good thing.
But if insularity, nationalism and ruthless opportunism are America’s future, the rest of the world might well decide it can live without it. If America has stopped believing in the American dream, why should the rest of us?
