Of Hollywood's Golden Age, and the Fortunes of Great Powers

Looking back it can seem plausible that Hollywood's centrality within the film world in the twentieth century reflected America's centrality within the world economy in the same century--the country's having been the scene of a techno-industrial-commercial revolution that had it accounting for a third (and for some decades, even more) of the world economy, its productive methods a model for even those most skeptical of America's social model, its wealth a source of unprecedented power in the world for its businesses and its government, and its people, if far from fully sharing in the gains, still to a significant extent having a standard and way of living that fascinated the rest of the world. (Consumer culture as we know it, the auto-subtopian existence that Americans equate with a decent living standard--this was where they all began.)

It is commonly the case that when a country enjoys a "golden age" in the material ways it also enjoys a golden age culturally--great art, alas, that much less likely to appear in a time of stagnation, decline, poverty--and the American century was no exception. The fascination of many in the Old World was tinged with anxiety and even repulsion as they contemplated what seemed to them the "land of the future," with many thinking it a comparatively cultureless place--but then they tended to think in terms of old forms and old standards, with little receptivity to the new (like upper class, Eton-and-Balliol College-educated Briton Aldous Huxley sneering at modernity, progress, egalitarianism in the all too often uncritically taken Brave New World). The comparative vastness of the American film market afforded filmmakers prospects for resourcing their filmmaking greater than were to be had anywhere else in the world, with all that meant the technical potentials of American film, and the fascination of the rest of the world with American cultural products inextricable from America's more material strengths, had their part in bringing Hollywood films a world market, and drawing to Hollywood talent from far afield (with alongside the "push" effect of the interwar and Second World War years the "pull" of Hollywood enriching Hollywood with a generation of Central European talent in particular).

Amid all that, in an era in which America was in spite of the snobs making its mark within the high culture of the Western world, but "high culture" was increasingly taking on a decadent cast in its flight from contemporary reality and its challenges--a flight in which it continues a century on--such that one may argue for Hollywood having been to America's golden age what those nations' output in literature and the more traditional visual arts had been for Renaissance Italy, the Spanish, the Dutch and others in their periods as leading powers, all as the decline of Hollywood can seem in respects to track the decline of American power. Riding high in the years after World War II the decline of the studio system can seem to parallel the decline of the Bretton Woods-based world economic order, with an air of decadence setting in this cultural milieu as well about the time the country went off the gold standard, and the end of the "New Hollywood" and the onset of the crass high concept/blockbuster era going hand in hand with the ascent of neoliberalism, deindustrialization, the hollowing out of an economy living on speculation fueled by central bankers giving away free money to "investors." Indeed, reading Daniel Bessner's great article in Harper's last year, Hollywood can seem a microcosm of the larger economy in the age of short-termism and "shareholder value" and merger and acquisition games run amok, of traffic in old brands rather than the building up of new ones as the taking that is speculating edges out making, of global arbitrage in labor and other costs, declining prospects for the many as compensation explodes for a handful of "winners," and the general crapuleux idiocy and vulgarity that is the norm at the top in such times.

After decades of all that few would think either Hollywood or the American economy in a particularly healthy state--as those disheartened by the situation and desirous of regeneration find few grounds for hope in a scene where the self-satisfied elite thinks that it need only "stay the course," and the only alternatives that seem to ever get a mainstream are no alternatives at all. They offer just the same old thing in a rather thin new guise, a sequel no one ever asked for to a movie that wasn't worth seeing the first time.