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Americans in the Dark? — Recent Hollywood Representations of the Nation's History*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2014
Abstract
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.
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- Copyright © The Author(s) 2003.
Footnotes
*
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.
References
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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.
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44 For which the reader might turn to the fifteen-part New York Times series, in 2000, on ‘How Race Is Lived in America’.
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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.
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