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Overview
In its march to becoming the world's first hyper-power, the United States has been as dependent on its soft power - the allure of American lifestyles and culture - as it has been on the hard power of military might. In Weapons of Mass Distraction, Matthew Fraser examines the role of American pop cultural industries in international affairs.
Fraser focuses on the major areas of soft power - movies, television, pop music, and fast food - and traces the origins, history and current influence of these on U.S. foreign policy. He describes how the American film, television, and music industries enjoy a ubiquitous global presence that has made them indispensable to the U.S. government, which has often gone so far as to fund them directly, including the White House-sponsored radio station in the Middle East launched with the hopes of winning over Muslim youths with American pop songs.
A Coca-Cola lobbyist once famously declared that "The best barometer of the relationship of the U.S. and any other country is the way Coca-Cola is treated." Fraser proves this claim isn't to be taken lightly. He charts the global spread of the fast food industry, the role of Coca-Cola and McDonald's in American foreign policy and the recent rise of their opponents: the anti-globalization movement.
Do things really go better with Coca-Cola? Fraser's answer is a resounding yes. While American soft power remains a contentious issue, he believes it promotes values and beliefs that are ultimately good for the rest of the world. Still, what are the future implications of American soft power? Will national identities decline as the world order is transformed into a state of "electronic feudalism" where there is no central power? Weapons of Mass Distraction provides an engaging, enlightening, and provocative look at the future of American foreign policy and popular culture in the 21st century.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466865440 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 03/04/2014 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 429 KB |
About the Author
Matthew Fraser is Editor-in-Chief at the National Post. Previously he was a professor at Ryerson University and a faculty member in the York-Ryerson Joint Programme in Communication and Culture. His book, Free-for-All: The Struggle for Dominance on the Digitial Frontier, was a Donner Prize runner-up for best book in Canadian public policy. He lives in Toronto.
Read an Excerpt
Weapons of Mass Distraction
Soft Power and American Empire
By Matthew Fraser
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2003 Matthew FraserAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-6544-0
CHAPTER 1
Movies
The Power and the Glamour
Planet Hollywood. The name says it all: Hollywood going global, ubiquitous Tinseltown, promoting the American way of life through an extravagant network of gastronomical theme parks. On the menu: California nosh, movie memorabilia, and the cult of global celebrity.
The first Planet Hollywood restaurant opened in Los Angeles in 1991. Its original investors boasted a clutch of American movie icons including Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger. What better Hollywood symbols — Rambo and Terminator — to spearhead Planet Hollywood's global expansion. Planet Hollywood restaurants attracted millions of tourists worshipping at the commercial temple of American movie stardom. As new Planet Hollywood restaurants opened around the world, Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, Whoopi Goldberg, Demi Moore, and other superstars were flown in for movie-premiere-like galas that attracted throngs of adoring fans. By the late 1990s, Planet Hollywood had opened nearly 100 outlets in far-flung locations including Cannes, Munich, Dublin, Dubai, Kuala Lumpur, and Cape Town.
But Planet Hollywood, like other American icons, soon became a victim of its own global success. Its name, logo, and allure of international celebrity culture transformed Planet Hollywood into a neon sign for America itself. And Planet Hollywood quickly discovered how American pop culture and global geopolitics can become dangerously intertwined.
In late August 1998, a terrorist bomb blast devastated the Planet Hollywood outlet in Cape Town. Two people were killed and 25 others were seriously injured. When a group calling itself "Muslims Against Global Oppression" claimed responsibility, the origins and motives of the attack were obvious. The Islamic terrorist group declared that the bombing had been a "fire-against-fire" reprisal against America. A week earlier, the United States had launched cruise missile strikes against suspected Islamic terrorist targets in two countries, Afghanistan and Sudan. The U.S. military strikes had been retaliation for terrorist bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. More than 250 people had been killed in the attacks against the U.S. diplomatic compounds. These bombings had been masterminded, ominously, by Osama bin Laden, who at the time was a little-known, Saudi-born billionaire driven by a deep-seated hatred for America. Bin Laden's terrorist agents had not selected a Planet Hollywood restaurant at random. The word "Hollywood" powerfully evoked America's global cultural domination. Bin Laden had chosen Cape Town because President Clinton had recently visited South Africa.
The U.S. reprisals provoked a groundswell of anti-American hysteria throughout the Moslem world. Its targets included McDonald's restaurants and movie theatres showing Hollywood movies. In the Islamic world, Hollywood was feared not only as a massive commercial juggernaut, but also as a global conveyor of values that threatened regimes whose power was based on political ideologies and religious doctrines profoundly antithetical to American values of individualism, capitalism, secularism, and cosmopolitanism.
For the enemies of the United States, Hollywood and America were interchangeable targets of their wrath.
Motion Pictures and American Power
Hollywood has been a powerful instrument of U.S. foreign policy from the birth of motion pictures. Fortuitously, cinema was born — circa 1900 — at precisely the moment America was emerging as a major power on the world stage. And it did not take long for motion pictures to become a myth-making extension of America's global ambitions.
Many believe Thomas Edison, the famous American inventor, invented motion pictures. It is true that, at the end of the 19th century, Edison devised a peephole contraption called the Kinetoscope. But it was France's Lumière brothers who invented the first machine, called a Cinématographe, that projected moving pictures onto a screen. Movies were born in France, not America.
After giving their first Cinématographe demonstration in their hometown of Lyons in 1895, the Lumières took their invention to Paris to sponsor a public projection in the French capital. The first showing took place in the basement of the Grand Café on the Place de l'Opéra. Enormous crowds were soon lining up and waiting for hours along the boulevard des Capucines to get a glimpse of the marvels of motion pictures. The conservative-minded Louis Lumière was skeptical about the future of cinema. He called motion pictures "an invention without any commercial future."
The Lumières nonetheless were shrewd enough to take their newfangled contraption to America. On June 29, 1896, the Cinématographe enjoyed a spectacular commercial debut at a New York vaudeville theatre. The New York Times ecstatically hyped motion pictures as the "sensation of Europe" and "the greatest marvel of the 19th century."
While New Yorkers were dazzled by motion pictures, the Cinématographe arrived in America at an inauspicious time for commercial relations with France, which in the late 19th century had become tense. France, it was true, had offered America the Statue of Liberty as a fraternal gift in 1886. But the two great republics remained mutually suspicious rivals. The emergence of photography, in particular, had exacerbated U.S.–French trade tensions. In 1890, the McKinley Tariff — named after future president William McKinley — imposed high import duties on French photographic equipment and other products in order to promote America's infant industries.
When the Lumières arrived in America with an invention even more compelling than photography, crafty American businessmen instantly saw the commercial potential of motion pictures. One of them was an associate of Thomas Edison who hastily invented a U.S.-patented projector called the Biograph. Another U.S.-made camera was developed by the Vitagraph company. French ingenuity had created movies, but American commercial savvy would harness their mass-audience appeal.
In its earliest days, the American motion picture industry was grafted directly onto vaudeville theatres to attract working-class audiences seeking popular entertainment. The first American movies were thus shamelessly sensational. When the Spanish–American War broke out in 1898, early motion picture cameras followed the lead of "yellow" newspaper journalism by stirring up patriotic emotions during America's first imperial war. In New York, movie audiences clapped and cheered at brief images of the U.S. battleship Maine sailing off for Cuba — where, in fact, it later sank in the Havana harbour. Other early American movies, such as The Great Train Robbery, appealed to mass audiences with simple and sensational plots.
Yet, America was a mere colony of the French movie industry in the early years of cinema. In France, pioneers such as Charles Pathé and Léon Gaumont, backed by major French banks, were churning out hundreds of exportable films. In the United States, French movies were sweeping the country by 1905. The most lucrative venues for motion pictures were no longer vaudeville theatres, but storefront screening rooms called "nickelodeons" — so-named because a nickel was the price of admission and "odeon" evoked ancient Greek amphitheatres. Some 3,500 nickelodeons had sprung up all over the United States. Many of Hollywood's future movie moguls — Harry Warner, Marcus Loew, Adolph Zukor — were getting their start as nickelodeon owners importing most of their celluloid product from France.
Since early motion pictures were "silent," there were no linguistic barriers to imported movies. At the time, the United States — with its recent explosion of European immigration — boasted a huge ethnic population with a popular taste for motion pictures. Pathé Frères, the leading producer of French motion pictures, became so successful in the U.S. nickelodeon market that its studio was selling more films than all its American rivals combined. Pathé Frères' so-called "Red Rooster" movies — named after the company's logo — were the driving force behind the so-called "nickel delirium" sweeping through America. In the first few years of the 20th century, if there was cultural imperialism in the movie industry, it was French imperial annexation of America.
But French cultural imperialism wouldn't last on American movie screens. Thomas Edison, determined to end Red Rooster's quasi-monopoly in the U.S. market, came up with an idea that would have a lasting impact on the American movie industry.
"The French are somewhat in advance of us," Edison told Variety in 1908, "but they will not long maintain their supremacy."
The same year, Edison banded his American rivals together to form a cartel, which was baptized the Motion Pictures Patents Company. The Edison-led trust's main ambition was to drive foreign competition — especially French motion pictures — from the U.S. market. The Edison cartel was not adverse to dirty tricks. The most effective tactic was a well-orchestrated smear campaign to stir up fear and hostility towards European films as "alien." The scheme proved timely and successful in an era when xenophobia was growing in America as a reaction to massive immigration from European countries. In the trade press, magazines like Motion Picture World pointed out that owners of movie theatres were "foreigners who are not citizens." Protestant clergymen referred to the "rapidly increasing Hebrew element" in the burgeoning movie exhibition business. And French films, in particular, were condemned as morally dubious and offensive to American tastes.
The combination of immigrant Jews and French movies was sufficient to evoke strong negative emotions vis-à-vis a perceived alien invasion of America. Yet in truth, home-made American movies — featuring gangsters, hoodlums, and hussies — had little to commend them when judged by the same standards. From the earliest days of motion pictures, working-class audiences in America were attracted to movie theatres by violence, crime, and sex. In Edison's How They Do Things in the Bowery, for example, the lead characters were a collection of thieves and loose women. French movies were, by comparison, culturally sophisticated. So-called films d'art from France included Mary Stuart, based on a Victor Hugo work, and a movie version of the Balzac short story, La Grande Bretèche. Other typical European motion picture themes of the era were Queen Elizabeth, starring Sarah Bernhardt, as well as Italian movies based on Dante's Inferno and Homer's Odyssey.
But Edison's anti-Red Rooster campaign proved devastatingly effective. The American trade press, especially Variety, vilified French movies as effeminate and immoral while lauding American movies as red-blooded and manly. In 1909, newspapers such the Mirror and World were calling for movies that featured "Anglo-Saxon" models of youth and "clean, good-looking actors." In 1910, an American movie company called Thanhouser Film took out an advertisement in Moving Picture World that confidently claimed: "The American People Prefer American Pictures." The ad was flogging Thanhouser's latest release, an "all-American" motion picture called Her Battle for Existence.
At the American box office, xenophobia proved lucrative. American motion pictures deliberately exploited patriotic themes that would be certain to appeal to domestic audiences. The "western," in particular, quickly became a classic genre that invariably portrayed the U.S. cavalry heroically putting down violent Indian revolts. Like Indians, Mexicans were usually featured as swarthy villains. The Japanese, too, were portrayed as belligerent, untrustworthy, and anti-American in movies with alarmist titles like The Japanese Invasion.
Pathé, now on the defensive, frantically attempted to Americanize its product by releasing its own Wild West movies. By 1910, however, Pathé's domination of the American movie market was coming to an end. A lethal combination of monopoly market practices, American patriotism, and virulent xenophobia had conspired against the once-proud Red Rooster brand. At the apogee of Pathé's glory circa 1905, European films had accounted for 70 percent of the U.S. box office. By 1912, however, roughly 80 percent of new releases in the United States were American movies. In 1915, U.S. anti-trust authorities busted up Edison's Motion Picture Patents Company as a monopolistic cartel. But it was too late for French movies. The Red Rooster's once-alluring plumage had faded forever in America.
The American movie industry got another boost from the First World War. When war broke out in 1914, national film industries throughout Europe ground to a halt and shut down. But in the United States — which was neutral until 1917 — movie producers kept churning out motion pictures. Thus, war-ravaged Europe quickly became a captive export market for American movies. As Moving Picture World noted: "Within the next year or so the demand for American movies in Europe will be large enough to justify a greater 'invasion' than Europe has ever known before."
It was during the First World War that America's first movie moguls — most of them immigrant Jews from New York — moved to California to build motion picture factories in the Los Angeles suburb of Hollywood. One of the first to arrive was Carl "Lucky" Laemmle, founder of Universal Film Manufacturing Company. Adolph Zukor, the Famous Players boss, merged his production company with the Paramount distribution outfit to integrate the two businesses. Under Zukor — who famously asserted that "the public is never wrong" — Paramount rapidly became a Hollywood giant producing more than 100 motion pictures a year.
Hollywood was becoming a political force, too. American politicians were now taking an interest in the movie mania sweeping the country. In 1915, D.W. Griffith's classic Civil War epic, The Birth of a Nation, was screened at the White House for President Woodrow Wilson. The movie had been produced with the assistance of West Point engineers, who served as technical advisors on the Civil War battle scenes. Although President Wilson apparently enjoyed Birth of a Nation, he was forced to distance himself from the film due to concerns about its anti-Negro racism and positive portrayal of the Ku Klux Klan. Wilson nonetheless understood that movies could be used for propaganda purposes, especially as America prepared to join the Great War. The National Association of the Motion Picture Industry made this explicit in a memo to the White House: "The motion picture can be the most wonderful system for spreading national propaganda at little or no cost," President Wilson agreed. An idealist, Wilson was convinced Hollywood could serve as a vehicle for American values to take hold throughout the world.
"The film has come to rank as the very highest medium for the dissemination of public intelligence," Wilson declared in a wartime speech. "And since it speaks a universal language, it lends itself importantly to the presentation of America's plans and purposes."
An official partnership between Washington and Hollywood was consummated when President Wilson authorized the creation of a congressional Committee on Public Information. Its mandate was to sell the war at home and spread the "Gospel of Americanism" abroad by promoting American culture and values via motion pictures. Wilson hand-picked well-known journalist George Creel to head the committee, which was quickly dubbed the "Creel Committee." Creel recruited battalions of advertising executives, journalists, filmmakers, and playwrights to promote the Wilsonian vision of world peace and liberal democracy.
President Wilson's global celebrity owed much to the Creel Committee, which feverishly distributed photos and speeches of Wilson in many foreign countries. While criticized in America as a crass propaganda instrument, the Creel Committee successfully spread the image of America as a prosperous and peaceful model for all the nations of the world. To proselytize the gospel of the American Dream, Creel created a government-run wire service, Compub, to relay American "news" stories to foreign publications. Creel also launched a film division that produced a combination of short documentary tributes to the American way of life and feature-length films such as America's Answer and Pershing's Crusade. The latter was a tribute to the U.S. military hero, General John Pershing, whose name later would become famously associated with U.S. missiles. At the same time, the U.S. government created a Foreign Film Service, whose staffers were dispatched to foreign countries to promote the spread of American movies in local cinemas. In Europe, their mission was to drive German films from local movie houses. In America, the U.S. government hired "Four-Minute Men," so-called because they delivered four-minute patriotic speeches in American movie theatres during projection-room reel changes.
George Creel also exercised tremendous power over Hollywood movies. Through the U.S. War Trade Board, he could approve, or refuse, export licences for all American motion pictures. Empowered to impose export conditions on Hollywood movies, Creel insisted that film shipments contain 20 percent of "educational matter" — namely, propaganda footage. Any movie that portrayed "false" American values, or that conveyed negative impressions of the United States, were banned for export. One film singled out for censorship was Jesse James, about the infamous American outlaw. To keep German movies out of international cinemas, Creel threatened to withhold all American films from any foreign movie exhibitor who screened German motion pictures.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Weapons of Mass Distraction by Matthew Fraser. Copyright © 2003 Matthew Fraser. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Preface,
Introduction,
one Movies The Power and the Glamour,
two Television Lotusland as Global Empire,
three Music Pop Goes the World,
four Fast Food Coca-Colonization and McDomination,
Conclusion,
Endnotes,
Selected Bibliography,
Index,
Copyright,