American Imperialism

Few cultural or economic monopolies even come close to rivaling Hollywood’s stranglehold upon the world film industry. As a result, virtually every major Hollywood production that finds its way to audiences – be they in New York, London, Sydney, Shanghai, or Irvine, California – has a certain indelible Americanness to it. It will inevitably be labeled American, but truly, what makes a movie American, as opposed to American-British, American-Australian, American-Chinese, or some other combination? That is the very question at hand here, and its answer reveals some rather profound truths and phenomena about America and the English language’s complex roles in this increasingly globalized, postnational world.
The simplest answer to this fundamental

question is that, for better or worse, there exist six studios – all of them American – who produce and distribute the overwhelming majority of each year’s highest-grossing movies. Known informally as “The Big Six,” they are: Disney, Sony, Universal, 20th Century Fox, Warner Bros., and Paramount. These are the corporations that primarily fund and support the making of the biggest blockbusters in any given year, and their collective domestic market share is very nearly 100%. And make no mistake; the domestic market is still by far the world’s (and therefore these studios’) largest market. Although, curiously, and in a decidedly postnationalist way, the umbrella term “domestic” (vis-à-vis movie grosses) actually includes Canada as well as the United States. Such an odd inclusion keenly reflects Arjun Appadurai’s thesis regarding “the production of locality,” as outlined in his article of the same name. The act of categorizing Canada as a domestic territory in this context can be seen as a macrocosmic fulfillment of Appadurai’s theory of the “neighborhood,” i.e. a well-established locality. This new domesticity between otherwise separate sovereign nations is a tangible, contemporary embodiment of a cultural “neighborhood,” as it were.
But how was this accomplished?

In a word: cultural colonization by American films – a colonization that in fact made this unique recategorization as organic as it possible could be. Going by Appadurai’s theory, though, this eventuality was something not only probable, but perhaps even inevitable. That is to say, that the construction of this new supranational paradigm is the necessary and logical conclusion of American culture – embodied by Hollywood cinema – colonizing Canada so as to create a new locality between the two sister nations. Or, as Appadurai puts it: “All locality building has a moment of colonization” (Appadurai, pp. 183) – even though the exact moment in this case is difficult to specify. Still, Hollywood’s production of a neighborhood between the U.S. and Canada aptly suits Appadurai’s overall characterization. This is especially true for the line wherein Apparadurai posits that such production “is inherently colonizing, in the sense that it involves the assertion of socially (often ritually) organized power over places and settings…” (Appadurai, pp. 184). And after all, moviegoing is nothing if not a social and ritualistic expression of American cultural power, which has subsumed Canada in its omnipotent grasp. All that said, the fact that the major studios are all American, while certainly contributory, does not alone account for the monopoly America enjoys over world

cinema.
A second and likely just as common answer is that these movies still largely have Americans both in front of and behind the camera. The actors/actresses, writers, producers, directors, editors, cinematographers, etc. are all American, right? So naturally the culmination of work done entirely by American casts and crews would be considered American. Again, there is definitely some truth to that line of reasoning, but its degree of truth is diminishing day by day. Take, for example, the 2017 Marvel film Thor: Ragnarok; one might logically presume that this is an American movie, if going by the measure that it has a predominantly American cast and crew. But surprisingly, that litmus test fails in this instance. To take a brief roll call of the film: Taika Waititi (the director) and Karl Urban (Skurge) are both New Zealanders; Chris Hemsworth (Thor) and Cate Blanchett (Hela) are both Australians; and Anthony Hopkins (Odin), Tom Hiddleston (Loki), and Idris Elba (Heimdall) are all Englishmen. Indeed, of the major characters in the movie, only three – Mark Ruffalo (Hulk/Bruce Banner), Tessa Thompson (Valkyrie), and Jeff Goldbum (The Grandmaster) – are actually played by American actors. Moreover, Tessa Thompson’s character is given a British accent, leaving only two easily discernible American-played characters in the entire film. So why is the film still considered American?
True enough, the film is a production of the quintessentially American comic book company, Marvel (a subsidiary of the even more quintessentially American company, Disney); and its source material and writers are also American.

But like aforesaid, the production companies being American is only accounts for part of why these films are considered singularly American. Furthermore, it’s unlikely – especially in foreign countries – that audiences even know or necessarily care who produced and wrote these movies, let alone their nationalities. Despite the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) being the single most financially successful movie franchise of all time, and Kevin Feige being the executive producer of every single film therein, chances are that the average person going to watch Thor: Ragnarok or Avengers: Infinity War has no idea who he even is. In that sense, then, these movies’ Americanness is not necessarily entwined with the identities of those in front of and behind the camera. Therefore, that answer, though valid, is again insufficient in explaining this phenomenon, just like the first. The key answer, and probably the one among these three that people are likely to list last, is that the movies are written and filmed in

English.
English is of course the world’s lingua franca and predominates in business, politics, science, but particularly media – and that is doubly true for movies. English is everywhere; a fact which Jamie Shinhee Lee openly acknowledges in her article, literally entitled, “Everywhere You Go, You See English!” Therein, she focuses on the growing prominence of English specifically in Korea, and the sociocultural and socioeconomic implications of that growth. But crucially for the purposes of this paper, she mentions a Romanized Korean term, “segyehwa,” which denotes an increasing national interest in globalization (“Everywhere You Go, You See English!”, pp. 321). What’s most interesting about this term is that it, as Lee explains, is virtually synonymous with what she describes as “an increasing use of English in many domains of Korean society” (“Everywhere You Go, You See English!”, pp. 321). In other words, Koreans, according to Lee, conceptualize English as being inextricable from the inexorable ascent of globalization, which is itself a product of postnationalism. That Korean perception is only further reinforced in Ingrid Piller and Jinhyun Cho’s own article, “Neoliberalism as Language Policy.” Critically, they note that “the global spread of neoliberal free-market doctrines naturalizes the use of English as the language of global competitiveness” (Piller and Cho, pp. 24).