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Wen 丨 eco new trend, author 丨 fluttering, editor 丨 too white
A recent incident in which a movie star was killed by mistake has pushed Hollywood to the cusp of the storm.
The outside world lamented the chaos on the set and also found that Hollywood has not produced popular works for a long time. Including "Dune" and "007: No Time to Die", which have recently appeared on the screen, they are suspected of fried cold rice and overdraft classics.
In fact, Hollywood blockbusters have gradually withdrawn from the top ten of The Chinese box office in the past decade, and many "blockbusters" have even been cold just after their release.
Stills from 007: No Time to Die
For example, "Wonder Woman 1984" only grossed $120 million in China in its first weekend, even worse than "Emergency Rescue" in the same period. "Mulan", which was used as a grand finale move, also followed the street, and the word-of-mouth box office was a mess.
It should be known that in 1998, "Titanic" was just released in China at the box office of 360 million yuan, and in 2012, on the centenary of the sinking of the Titanic, the 3D version of "Titanic" was re-released in China, and it was 970 million.
In the end, it is not the decline in Hollywood's strength, but the gradual discovery of Hollywood's "cattiness" by Chinese audiences.
For example, in all blockbusters, the United States always plays the savior in a uniform way;
When the world is in chaos and human beings are facing unsolvable dilemmas, there will always be mechanical séance, and there is a high probability of being an "American god";
The eternal reunion ending, the eternal individualistic excitement, the eternal sense of superiority at the level of consciousness...
It can be said that hollywood scripts are like the protagonists in anime - changing the hairstyle for a full length.
Some people may ask, why can Hollywood's crazy "eating the old" still stand?
This starts with the beginning of Hollywood.
Between 1905 and 1907, cinema became a regular form of entertainment, and "nickel theaters" began to flourish in the United States. The prosperity of an industry will inevitably lead to fierce competition, and the prevalence of nickel theaters also makes people see business opportunities.
During this time, Edison joined forces with Myotoscop and Am&b to form a community of film patent companies, MPPC, which wanted to monopolize the American film industry through patents for cameras, projectors, and film films.
The independent filmmakers were so disgruntled that they rebelled against MPPC in 1909-1915.
The U.S. government, including the U.S. government, supports similar actions, arguing that MPPC is a trust.
The enemy of the enemy is the friend, and that's when independent studios start to form alliances. What people did not expect was that the "dragon slayer warrior turned into a dragon", this group of production companies that began to "anti-monopolize" began to create a new and more stable monopoly, so that the equipment monopoly became a cultural hegemonic monopoly, and slowly formed the later Hollywood film industry.
Until 1912, American studios were still focused on competition in the domestic market, and the outbreak of World War I became the most powerful driver of the expansion of American films to the world.
The outbreak of the war directly led to the stagnation of the film industry in France, Italy and other countries. Many film processing plants shifted to the production of munitions, studios became barracks, and the number of films in most countries was drastically reduced.
Hollywood just seized the gap of the war and took the opportunity to expand overseas markets.
Facts have also proved that this wave of Hollywood's expansion has indeed been very successful. For example, 60% of the films imported from Argentina in 1916 came from the United States, and 95% of the big screens in Australia and New Zealand were Hollywood films.
In fact, how much money a film is expected to make also determines its budget to some extent.
At this time, Hollywood took the road of small profits and high sales, and estimated the cost according to the sales at home and abroad.
Sales are getting bigger and bigger, making more and more money, and the budget of each film is also rising, and producers are beginning to spend huge sums of money on luxurious costumes, grand scenes, and star cultivation, so that it is difficult for other countries to compete with the value of Hollywood film production, and low-budget movies can no longer compete with Hollywood luxury.
Buying an American movie is even cheaper than investing in a homegrown movie.
The famous Keith East Studios, founded by Mike Senat, was also founded at this time, marking the establishment of a unique film production system in the United States, that is, a model of industrial film production in the 1920s: a studio system characterized by a producer-centered system and a star system.
There is no doubt that the studio is the hub that connects the financial power and the film production process, and is also the key to realizing the commercial value of the film, while the star is the core of the standardization of film products, and the assembly line production method provides a rich source of films, giving birth to classic genre films, such as Westerns, song and dance films, comedies, war films and so on.
The studio once brought Hollywood into a golden age and launched an unstoppable cultural dumping with the film and television industry as the carrier.
But as the economy gradually stabilized and the film industry continued to develop, technology also spawned progress in other industries, and television, the competitor of film, began to enter every household.
The impact of television once brought Hollywood's business path into a trough, and at the end of the 20th century, there was an innovative movement in Hollywood in the United States, and classical Hollywood entered the new Hollywood era.
New Hollywood borrowed, assimilated and absorbed European films by means of the aesthetic means of the traditional style of old Hollywood, injecting new vitality into American films that had stagnated aesthetically and economically.
At this time, Hollywood creation was mainly divided into two types, one was the "author director" represented by Coppola, Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, etc., who integrated the thinking of European films into their creations, paid attention to culture, rebelled against tradition, and strived to make Hollywood the center of art films.
The other, represented by George Lucas and Spielberg, is a traditional genre framework plus high technology to create audiovisual spectacles and box office miracles, such as the well-known "Star Wars", "Jaws", "E.T. Aliens", "Jurassic Park" and so on.
Stills from Star Wars
We can't compare who is good and who is bad between these two types of movies, but there is no doubt that the audience of "blockbusters" and "cool films" that constantly bring people audiovisual feasts is much wider and more popular than "author films".
The inspired works controlled by the "author" are gradually marginalized, and only a small number of fans and film students are willing to take them out one by one to ponder, while Hollywood films under the framework of traditional genres divert people's attention from their clichés through technological innovation, and eventually achieve commercial success.
Once upon a time, for most viewers, Hollywood meant nothing more than thrilling scenes, ups and downs, engaging stories, and highly skilled stars, and did not link it to the ideology that the United States has historically used to spread and promote political strategies and tactics around the world.
But in fact, Hollywood movies are in a sense "wolves in sheep's clothing", and under the beautiful shell is a naked "cultural invasion", because political rights have long begun to infect Hollywood.
First, from the moral censorship of the Hayes Code, to the political censorship of McCarthyism, to the economic censorship of the post-1968 film rating system, censorship has never disappeared in American cinema.
Over time, this "norm" of film has been internalized into all aspects of film production, and gradually become an invisible self-censorship mechanism for film producers, and those players who do not abide by the rules of the game in the system are excluded from the market, which is also the most direct embodiment of American political rights in Hollywood movies.
In addition to this, the CIA actually exists within Hollywood.
During the Cold War, the CIA was directly involved in the planning of highly representative and subversive scripts, the selection of screenwriters, the hiring of directors, etc. at all stages, and from the beginning of planning to entering the theater line, it would use a variety of flexible strategies and tactics to comment and publicize relevant films in various fields such as radio, television, newspapers, and books to achieve the purpose of ideological dissemination.
Compared with the directness of the first two aspects, another means is more hidden - the Oscar system.
On the surface, it seems to be just a reward for a good movie, but in fact, it is in a very clever way to prompt and induce the audience to like what the film should like, what the filmmakers should make, and use the invisible hand to control the overall direction of the film.
In addition, as we all know, Hollywood has always been a Democratic vote bank, and international superstars such as Jennifer Aniston, Lady Gaga, Kim Kardashian, and Scarlett Johansson are almost all hardcore supporters of the Democratic Party. The so-called "freedom and equality" of the democratic parties needs the influence of the entertainment industry, and the spiritual opium of Hollywood stars and the money-making weapon of the entertainment industry also come from the liberal ideas of the Democratic Party, and the two are inseparable.
So, if you're going to say that finding a black actor to play Snow White isn't for political correctness, I don't believe it.
No matter how much political control is imposed, whether the audience is willing to accept it is another matter. Hollywood has exactly this magic, allowing the audience to unconsciously accept the American way of thinking.
Paulina Kyle once said that "Hollywood is the only place where people die of inspiration."
In most Hollywood movies, reality is always glorified and whitewashed, and it is a cradle woven by the "American Dream", which makes the audience indulge in it and the reason is sleeping.
The so-called optimism is reduced to "Ah! It's good to live in America! Thus diverting attention from reality, the audience is "entertained."
In addition, the reunion ending is also the unified paradigm of Hollywood movies. Delving deeper into such a model effectively dispels the audience's doubts about the ruling system, and represents a return to order.
Hollywood's most reprehensible is the celebration of individualism, the countless stories of self-made and hard work to reach the pinnacle of life, and the story of a hero saving the planet, which is extremely beneficial to capitalist ethics.
This Darwinian view of individual success, which rationalizes inequality in society, implies, on the other hand, that unsuccessful people can only attribute the cause to themselves.
So, under the deceptive appearance of innocence, behind the illusion of "pseudo-political neutrality", mainstream Hollywood movies continue to promote a stubborn, conservative, and orthodox ideology.
Stills from The Marvelous Gatsby
Of course, we can't jump to the conclusion that Hollywood movies are "bad" and beat them to death. If we insist on this logic to the end, our position will become radical and extreme, and we can only expect the death of the "movie".
After all, all movies are ideological carriers, and Hollywood movies are not completely devoid of merit, it also has some "films that make the audience change from a kind of cajoled fanaticism to an active understanding attitude", such as films that reveal some subversive films such as racial discrimination, patriarchal oppression, and economic exploitation. But the proportion of these non-mainstream content has become less and less, replaced by assembly line "dream movies".
Unfortunately, young people now "don't eat that set".
Resources:
Why Hollywood Stars Cast Biden on Sisyphus's Sword and Bowl
Hollywood– Film and Ideology by Regis Dubois
A History of World Cinema by David Podwell