Hollywood takes over the world

Hollywood takes over the World

Two of America’s biggest channels of cultural influence are its film industry and its television networks. They are the quintessential manifestation of the American culture. They also onstitute the greatest marketing enterprise history. American movies are broadcasted in movie theatres all around the world, and they are having a tremendous impact on national cultures. Television has become America’s best friend and is telling the world that it should be like America. When I think of America and its might what first comes to my mind are American movies and television shows.

Hollywood has seduced the world, but national cultures are now afraid of what the outcome of this romance might be. National governments are aware of the cultural force of cinema, and measures like screen quotas have been introduced in many countries such as Mexico and South Korea. Screen quotas is a legislated policy that enforces a minimum number of screening days of domestic films in the theater each year to protect the nation’s films. When Mexico abandoned this system in 1994 its film industry collapsed. On the other hand, when South Korea adopted this policy in the 1990’s the quality of its cinema was dramatically increased by an inflow of new capital into the Korean film industry.

Although around the world different political ideas make up large-scale ideological clashes (democracy/totalitarianism, liberalism/authoritarianism, capitalism/socialism, secularism/fundamentalism), and people follow different religions (Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, etc), our “global village” is united by a constant and uniform inflow of movies and television shows that portray one dominant culture. Television and more recently Internet are the portals through which American movies and television shows penetrate foreign cultures eventually dominating and changing them. These movies and TV-shows are the carriers of an American way of living that includes liberal and democratic views, English as the spoken language, a consumerist life-style, American fashion, American Fast-Food and everything else that makes up American culture.

Globalization is not Americanization but in today’s world there is little difference between the two. The fundamental differences that divide the peoples of the world still exist, and these are probably going to be the fuel for the wars of the future, but Americanization is nevertheless imposing its culture worldwide through a steady flow of cultural output. In the modern world people spend a great deal of time in front of televisions and computers and whenever they do so they enter an American world. While the real world is multi-polar because there are so many different identities that descend from ancient cultures, the virtual worlds of Television and Internet have only one hegemonic core which is Hollywood’s America.

In the same way, while people were once shaped by books now they are shaped by movies, songs and TV-shows. The world’s youth is growing up in front of a TV that broadcasts American shows and movies. Teenagers of all over the world listen to the same rock bands, either British or American. New singers in non English-speaking countries sing in English because that is the language of the arts. It has become so.

America’s power is not only based on its military or its economy, it is equally based on the cultural influence it has over foreign cultures. Societies around the world are being modeled after the American, where movie stars, rock gods and professional athletes have reached the top of the social pyramid. We have developed a culture of celebrities where artists and athletes have become close to being divine and all the society spins around this circus. This is not American anymore, it is global. Consumerism has become the zeitgeist of our times and cultural production has become professionalized, industrialized and put to serve a decentralized, economically motivated, cultural imperialism. This dynamic has not been planed or is actively supported by the American government, but is a product of one of the biggest and most profitable markets in the world, the market of culture, in which the goods are not refrigerators or cars but music albums, movies and TV-shows. This is the world we all live in, this is who we are, and each day that passes we become more americanized.