On the prevalence of US tropes in storytelling

[KatG]

And following from this very good point, I would assert that those "real" folk heroes within a culture define the basic circumstances of heroism for later productions of fictional heroes. Cultural mythology being what it is -- storytelling -- the two are pretty much the same thing.

No, they're not the same thing. They're quite a bit different.

Correct -- and the culture defines a) the qualities a person needs to become the hero, and b) the kinds of circumstances that may require a hero.

The qualities are old and cross-cultural. This is why your thematic approach where you try to attach themes to cultures becomes problematic.

And in the case of a capitalized market for fiction, the hero is often someone who c) embodies the sensibilities of the consumer who will determine commercial success.

In written fiction, the market factors are symbiosis, browsing and variety. There are no set sensibilities for determining commercial success. You're trying to set up an idealized consumer for each culture. But the point is that each country has a full spectrum for consumers. Distribution -- which is not dictated by theme but by need for a full varied line -- plays a role in size of sales, and there the U.S. has a limited advantage for now, mostly in film. Trying to link cultural themes to distribution the way you want to do so requires you to ignore large amounts of distribution data.

I've never said heroes aren't varied. I've only said some are more common than others in a particular culture's offerings.

I already acknowledged that you said this, several times. But you haven't really defined what's "more common" in any workable sense for any country and neither has de Bodard. You're basically saying that every type of hero and anti-hero is an American favored character that is common in film, t.v., books and comics.

See c) above. The film & television industry in particular, with its emphasis on test audiences and focus groups, very specifically tailor many of their works to what the audience will accept.

Ah, there you go again with the one audience thingy. They don't tailor all the stuff to one audience; they tailor different stuff for specific audiences that are subsets, and they rely on doing so for multiple subsets for different products -- variety. Further, again, film targets international audiences, for the parts of its products that you are concentrating on, not American ones, for the last twenty or more years. This was another reason the PG-13 rating bar was so successful -- it works better for international audiences than the R ratings bar.

And audience tolerances are what define a show that gets a good Nielsen rating and one that doesn't,

It's not nearly that simple. Advertisers largely determine what shows will get on the air and get what marketing promotion and get a good Nielsen rating or not. Then there are viewing habits (recording, the Web, younger versus older,) international broadcasting restrictions, national, regional and local broadcasting restrictions and requirements, how Nielsen is skewing the data with their sample people, distribution of the channel the show is on, and so on and so forth. As marketing people will be happy to tell you, the Nielsen rating is not a reliable indicator of television audience, but we have path dependence regarding advertisers with it. And it is again the need to get revenue from the advertisers -- international companies often not based in the U.S. -- that causes the American remake tendency in t.v. to have a new product for which advertisers will pay more, along with the need for franchising and merchandising income which requires more direct control of the property, less sharing of money.

and what defines box office success or not, all versus critical success.

And again, not that simple. Again, you're making the peasant argument. The mass audience are peasants and peasants only like certain things and so commercially must be catered to, leading to formulas that automatically produce the bulk of commercial success. This requires ignoring loads of data that don't fit the scenario.

The common line for such changes typically has something to do with the "sensibilities" of the modern audience -- which is to say, in this case, the palatability of the hero.

Yes, that's the common line, but it's often not the reality. It's part of the marketing technique used when complaints are made -- well the test groups didn't like it. It's the peasant argument. The reality is usually that studio executives didn't like it. Sometimes it's the star that didn't like it -- Robert Redford made major changes to Indecent Proposal for instance to make his character look better. The possibility of doing a sequel can cause changes that don't have to do with potential audience reception of a storyline, or the creation of a video game. And in the case of I Am Legend, the movie was looking at the international audience as paramount -- and it got over 50% of its revenues from that audience. It was unlikely Smith would star in a sequel, should there be one, so killing him off a la Aliens' marine sacrifice was a logical choice for that particular remake.

The assumptions made are based on the notion of what the peasants want as a mass. So the marketing for the film triumphed the "risk" the filmmakers were taking having the movie be just Will Smith and a dog for the first hour of the movie as a selling point: see elites, it's "challenging," it's breaking the formula, those peasant audiences will have to try hard to accept it, so you should praise us and see it. In reality, audiences were fine with it and have had stories like that before. I've seen the alternate ending to that film, which still alters significantly from the book, but is a bit more in keeping with it thematically, and it would have been fine with audiences as well -- it's actually a more traditional one in some ways.

What we know about test marketing and targeting demographics -- which written fiction largely doesn't use although there are ham-fisted attempts now to do so thanks to Nielsen -- is that sometimes they use it and sometimes they don't in making a movie, that quite often the audience reaction is different than what is expected to be whether it's used or not, that the international audiences are paramount for Hollywood in any movie with big action and special effects, that despite the limitations of the movie theater first run distribution system Hollywood invests in a variety of product to hit all audiences, that films are these days produced by multiple companies and studios that are often a mix of American and European, Asian, etc., that DVD plays an unusual role in shaping some films. In other words, it's again complicated, not culturally simple and not thematically simple in terms of commonalities either.

What we also know is that this movie made the book an international bestseller again, with top positions on the three different print format bestseller lists in the U.S. for months. I'm sure Europeans saw it all over their bookstores for the rest of the year. So which part are we going to say is dominating book writers here?

Which brings me again to Starship Troopers, which likewise failed because the otherwise Ra! Ra! Ra! uber-American characters are shown to ultimately turn into Nazi's who shove probes into the vaginal faces of the now-humanized enemy -- "It's afraid!" cries Doogie Howser. Audiences couldn't take it -- though they blame all sorts of other foibles of the film, the two greatest controversies that arose from the film were a) the mixed-gender shower scene (offending the audience's sense of propriety) and b) the film's conclusion which turns the heroes in Nazis.

It depends on what you mean by "failed." The film -- which also altered from the novel considerably -- was a Verhoeven interpretation, and American audiences often like his films, despite his being Dutch and despite Total Recall being ridiculous. Like RoboCop, which was a hit and has become part of U.S. and international culture, the film satirizes fascism and is seen by some as doing that and others as endorsement of it. Starship Troopers the original film advanced special effects, for which it got awards and nominations, and by changing some of the fighters to women, introducing romance plotlines and having a woman chose career over romance, helped influence improvements for women in group action stories. (In this V was grabbing at a trend -- the television show Space: Above and Beyond, for instance, just slightly before it, was putting males and females together in a SF military unit and many other stories doing the same -- taken from written SF and thrillers which had been doing it far longer. The recent The Thing remake now has women characters on the Arctic research team, for instance.) The film did not do that well internationally and so basically broke even at the box office. But it has spawned a profitable to DVD film franchise with two sequels and a third one on the way, several video games that have been successful, several comic book series, various bits of merchandising, and is far more in the U.S. and world cultural lexicon than the I Am Legend film is ever going to manage (not including the book which is in the cultural lexicon and thus has been made into film three times plus routinely inspired numerous zombie and vampire films, books, etc.) Verhoeven's films seem to be carefully designed for video games adaptation, which is again international for the audience, but popular in the U.S. as well.

 

[KatG]

Group writing practices may indicate a variety of intellects that go into generating the story content, but that process is importantly product-based for a capital market usually within a specific culture.

Again, big budget movies are done for an international audience, not one country's culture.

That's why dudes like Roland Emmerich can make some of the most blatantly Americana-style films (like Independence Day) and find such success in doing so.

Blatantly Americana-style films again simplifies lots of different business factors into it all being supposedly about American audience psyche -- i.e. that we're supposedly addicted to David and Goliath war stories. It ignores that the big budget films are written for the international audience, not an American one -- including the caricature of Americans for that audience in this particular film. Independence Day was not a hit for its themes; it was a hit because they blew up New York and had cool looking aliens (admittedly borrowed in design from Alien.) It was a hit because the special effects were supposed to be impressive. This spectacle factor has worked internationally and in the U.S. for Avatar, Titanic, Lord of the Rings, Terminator 2, E.T., King Kong, I Am Legend, War of the Worlds, Pirates of the Caribbean, The Matrix, Transformers, The Day After Tomorrow, 2012, etc. Spectacle -- the circus factor -- seems to be perennially tossed away in these thematic arguments based on box office, as does distribution issues for getting box office revenue, and the fact that kids animated movies are overall more successful than action films at box office. Inception had more box office than Independence Day and again, spectacle of special effects was part of that. And Independence Day again got well over half of its revenue from the international box office. Spectacle is a major factor in Marvel and less successfully D.C. Comics to be able to get superhero movies out there. People will go to see movies that in storyline are ridiculous because of spectacle, because they don't care that much about dialogue or logic, which is what the big budget sector of film relies on -- and which may be hurting it some in the end -- fewer Americans go to the theater. Which is again why the linking of films with written books in the way you're trying to do it is problematic. A book cannot be visual spectacle.

It's not simply about story value, but about cultural palatability. Who is doing the writing often matters less than who it is being written for.

At the moment, that would be China, Japan and Europe for big budget action films. And when it comes to written fiction, insisting that the palatability to the audience is all is not consistent with how people buy fiction and how writers tend to write it.

Over the past 95-odd years, the majority of the most successful films in each year are classically American hero-type stories (and I'm even including Canadian James Cameron in that pile). And plenty of Disney.

So you are just going on total box office success? And not long-lasting cultural impact, which does not necessarily coincide with box office success? And ignoring the impact of international audiences on that success and film production? The majority of the most successful films are action stories which best lend themselves to visual spectacle, and action stories have basic structures. The majority of these action stories are animated or other kid movies which provide entertainment spectacle for kids, often over the long term, and because they are for a juvenile audience, are more limited in the range of action story structures.

Since the beginning of film, America has been the one to produce most of the big budget spectacle films and to be able to distribute them more widely. Therefore, it would be exceedingly strange if the top movies were not big budget action spectaculars and kids spectaculars at least partially made and distributed by American studios (who are often foreign owned.) The issue you are making is not what sort of films get the most revenues -- we know this whatever the country involved, and that therefore they will be American films on worldwide stats. It's the idea that there is a type of hero distinct from other types of heroes that everyone favors for the big budget spectaculars because American audiences (the peasants) prefer it psychologically. And so far, you and de Bodard have defined that type of hero as encompassing everything from Hannibal Lecter to Michael Corleone to Bugs Bunny to Aslan.

So here is the nail to be hit on the head: when enough people see something that looks like a straight line, is it there or not?

Often not; that's why we have cultural myths and not-SF SF. That's why people claim with a straight face that a novel acclaimed for its literary writing is never a bestseller. That's why we have large groups arguing that SFF has gotten impossibly savage, dark and grim because the majority of the audience wants sensationalism, and another large group arguing that dark, grim, savage stories never do as well because the majority of the audience wants sunshine and no sex. That there is a view -- both inside and outside of America -- that the bulk of American people are peasants with commercial, plastic, jingoistic tastes is quite clearly evident. That people in any population have vastly different views of what is cool and what is plastic is also clearly evident. But to look at cultural intermingling, we have to look at all the structures, not just claim that everything is theme and that it's a matter of one theme emerging and/or dominating over all.

No one is saying monoculture. That's how you're reading/reacting to what she had to say, and I don't think that's an accurate description of what she is saying.

Again, I'm aware that you and de Bodard are saying it's a tendency not the only culture going. But when you say that certain sets of culture are "particularly American" in their frequency, then it's establishing those patterns as American (a monocultural influence,) even if a foreigner is doing it. You're not just identifying a particular pattern in storymaking. You're trying to label it as symbolic of a culture and of being their influence if it's used a lot by others.

Consequently, no matter what a non-American does with a story structure, theme, etc., you can claim that's an Americanization. Apparently anti-heroes who die are American. Anti-heroes who live and build an empire or slaughter women are American. Rogues who are neither quite anti-hero or hero are American. Heroes who live are American. Heroes who die are American. If they are young, naive and inexperienced, or experienced, cynical and seeking redemption, if they seek out action and thrills, or they don't like it but it's their job or it's not their job nor inclination but action is thrust upon them, they're American. If the enemy is made a figure of evil free to be mindlessly destroyed like Sauron or zombies, it's American. If the enemy is sympathetic, still American. If the opponent is natural forces, still American. If the hero is dedicated to serving his country without question -- U.S. or something else -- it's American. If the hero rebels against his country and questions it, still American. If the hero morally doubts what he is doing or is uncertain about what to do, this is still American. If the hero takes action and has skills, that's American. If the hero is hapless and it's more the allies he picks up on the way who have skills, it's American. Is there a pattern or detail that isn't American? Can we show that pattern with such frequency that we call it a classic French trope?

I don't really think that this is easy to do. I think you can talk about the French New Wave movement, for instance, and look at the elements they chose to play with, the stylistic techniques they used, the themes that interested them, and you can look at how they were influenced by other movements and storytellers and how they influenced other groups with their films, but that does not mean that pattern of storytelling is now classic French and that the French are simply being aped when that pattern pops up elsewhere. The patterns are too basic and cross-cultural since ancient times to do it. Stylistic flourishes with things like lighting are more traceable.

The substantial weight of America in the film industry and the predominance of the English language as the world language means that American films do influence and are often the reference point. It means that the big spectacle films are going to be American, at least until India achieves higher world expansion. But the increasing internationality and cultural history of the film business, the use of video, festivals and limited runs, changes in merchandising, and many other factors have changed the business significantly since just the 1980's. To say that many foreign filmmakers are all trying to pander to the American audience is to miss a lot of what's going on, I feel, and seems rather dated to me. And again, t.v., books and comics all have a host of other factors involved there and much less American dominance of the world market of the first two.

Basically, she's against the implications of conformity that go along with "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em."

She believes in the dominance dog eat dog model rather than the expansion and riffing model, even though she herself benefits from expansion and riffing. But while film again has some dog eat dog due to the theater system, it still has a large expansion and riffing component. And books have nearly no dog eat dog and are reliant on expansion and riffing. Books are juiced by attention to any type of book (symbiosis) and it ripples outward in browsing and variety. And that's why SFF authors, whether they are American or not, whether they are bestsellers or not, are now more able to get foreign sales than they were before, whatever type of story they are doing.

And again, once she started throwing in serial killers, superheroes, action movies, and all mediums, she basically loses a coherent thread. If all stories are included, how can any author avoid conformity? If she herself seems to be following an action pattern in her books, isn't she conforming? So it then becomes a very "American" rant by her own sights: "those other authors should have more guts and stick to their guns."

 

[KatG]

Oh my, I just looked at how long this thing was. I apologize for my total lack of succinctness this evening -- partly due to other stuff going on at the same time -- and appreciate everyone's patience, especially poor Fung's. Don't try to answer it point by point, Fung; that requires more head banging into wall than we need to have you do.

 

[Dawnstorm]

Just reposting the original link along with its live journal mirror, as I might want to go back and look at the comments threads one day.

[Notice how on live journal the post's mood is expressed by Disney, while she herself has an anime avatar? Anyone know how live-journal works? Are these standard offers, or do you have to import your own images?]

 

[Fung Koo]

Yeah, not gonna go point by point...!

This spectacle factor has worked internationally and in the U.S. for Avatar, Titanic, Lord of the Rings, Terminator 2, E.T., King Kong, I Am Legend, War of the Worlds, Pirates of the Caribbean, The Matrix, Transformers, The Day After Tomorrow, 2012

By country of production, with director's nationality: American (Canadian), American (Canadian), American (Kiwi), American (Canadian), American (American), American (Kiwi), American (American), American (American), American (American), American (American), American (American), American (German), American (German)...

So, I'm not exactly sure what your point is, other than that the American Spectacle film -- all of those above featuring classically American-style heroes -- are successful domestically and on import.

I disagree that a book cannot be a spectacle or attain spectacle status. Harry Potter and Twilight are two recent examples of the Spectacle in written fiction. John Grisham novels, in the less recent past. Even Tolkien.

And on the theoretical side:

The notion of "The Spectacle" is a Marxist economical postulation about the production of art that says the artist will, in a capitalized market, a) give the mule what he wants and b) come to define the terms of the discussion.

For a): Market demands come to define the production of art over its artistic merit. Each art-object takes up the position of being the best possible version of what it is (typically exemplified by The Summer Blockbuster or Oscar Hunter films). The consumer consumes the New And Improved! spectacle because it claims to be even better, even more Newer and Improveder!, than their last spectacular meal.

For b): The production of media defines the cultural conversation, creating the acceptable modes of communication and limiting the voice of dissent. The terrorist is them who challenge the terms of the discussion and/or its assumed value. For example, the death of rationalism in American News Media in favour of sensationalism. The Spectacle is all, and rationality is non-spectacular. (Hence the new uber-ironic "Militant Centrist" political position who shouts "BE REASONABLE!" as if reason were an extreme.)

All of which only supports my entire point completely...

America is by no means the only Spectacle-based capitalized economy, but it is certainly the biggest. But since it is regarded as "free expression" it is seen as legitimate, whereas in other countries with significantly higher levels of top-down censorship it is regarded as illegitimate. In the terms of de Bodard's rant, what she is reacting to is that the vehicle of commercial success in the art world (typically through creating a successful new Spectacle) is the American system of "free expression" which does not specifically require conformity so much as systemically and institutionally expect it.

In other countries that also value free expression and enjoy limited top-down censorship, the economic powerhouse du jour is understandably regarded as The Adversary -- the force of conformity, the limiter of freedom, the strong arm of hegemony.

This is basically the entire reason behind counter-culture.

In a globalized market, all cultures that do not conform economically to the powerhouse become counter-cultures -- they must define themselves as "against" the powerhouse (which includes "being different from" it) -- and therefore adopt the terms of the terrorist. Because, after all, the producer of the successful spectacle defines the terms of the conversation.

The Spectacle is basically the exact specific thing that de Bodard is on about. American tropes are often collected and exemplified by Spectacle films. Action-Adventure Hero Stories, and no one makes em like America do.

 

[KatG]

Oh great flying spaghetti monster, not the Marxism! I suppose it's my own fault for using the word peasants a lot.

So, I'm not exactly sure what your point is, other than that the American Spectacle film -- all of those above featuring classically American-style heroes

My point here was multifold: 1) that you're saying the American audience shapes what goes into the spectacle and action films -- that it's American cultural values that picks the types of heroes. And what we've been pointing out first off is that they are going for an international audience, that the audience in other countries for the last twenty years has been more important to Hollywood than Iowa. So by your argument, it's the international audience that shapes what goes into spectacle and action films and international values that react to main characters in film. You keep saying the audience decides (the mob,) but then seem to insist that it's just America or that the international audience has values that you decree American.

2) The "heroes" or for that matter anti-heroes who headline the films are not very important in spectacle films. They can be, and be endearing and enduring from that, but it's not required. What's important are the effects and action sequences and whether the audience finds them entertaining enough or not. It's not that stories can't also be fascinating in film, but it's film's visual abilities that makes the medium and packs the punch.

3) Third, you keep rolling out the "classically American-style heroes" phrase. They aren't classically American. They are classical heroes that fit action plots. You're saying that America makes most of the spectacle if not action films and therefore the protagonists in those films must be mostly that sub-set that you decree American, but then that subset -- the list of "chosen American" heroes -- keeps growing to include basically every type of main character, heroic or non, that you can have in a high action film. That was the point. You have not consistently defined a sub-set of heroes -- and anti-heroes since you want those too -- that are "American" and types who are not and favored by European action film makers (and repressed by the commercial system.) Everything is simply framed as American. And de Bodard is even less coherent about it. One minute it's G.I. Joe good guy jingoism, the next it's pervy serial killers.

4) The constraints on the medium of film -- the kid and teen audience issue for spectacle film and ratings systems; the movie theater distribution system, etc. -- that books don't have, de Bodard refuses to even acknowledge. She simply lumps SFF and films together as the same in what shapes them. This is the main problem everyone is having with finding much value in her rant.

I disagree that a book cannot be a spectacle or attain spectacle status. Harry Potter and Twilight are two recent examples of the Spectacle in written fiction. John Grisham novels, in the less recent past. Even Tolkien.

You're misunderstanding me. You're talking about marketing spectacle -- red carpet premieres, book launch parties and general sales buzz (which the movies of those books further.) I'm talking about the visual imagery spectacle within the film that film is able to do that books cannot. Books can describe wondrous scenes, but they are print words on a page that the reader must then imagine. Film shows the viewer the image on a giant screen -- they don't have to imagine it, they can see a liquid Terminator easing through jail bars. Film and t.v. have the ability to deliver visual and auditory images -- spectacle; written books do not. Films have constraints because they are limited to what you can show and hear; books can go anywhere in time and space and have the ability of language, which for films is more limited. Each medium has its aspects, and film and t.v. are in showing images to viewers in many ways more passive mediums than books. And big budget spectacle films draw people, especially to the theater, to see those big visual images. That's why almost every big budget spectacle film is now in 3-D -- people will pay the mark-up to see it, though it's loosing its novelty. (I.e. the meal.) So saying it's all the theme of the hero is not accurate.

a) give the mule what he wants

That's the notion of the audience as low class, brain dead mobs -- mules -- with mono-intent and tolerances. It's also a domination dog eats dog view that does not allow for expansion and riffing.

For a): Market demands come to define the production of art over its artistic merit.

Sigh. The nobles think the peasants have poor taste.

Each art-object takes up the position of being the best possible version of what it is (typically exemplified by The Summer Blockbuster or Oscar Hunter films).

That's not how fiction works. And to a lesser degree, it's not always applicable to film either. A lot of films are not trying to be either blockbuster or Oscar bait. We have more films coming out from more sources than we've had since the 1930's. We have documentaries and small films that make up part of American and other country cultures, etc. Insisting that spectacle films are the reference point for all films doesn't work. It can work to look at what Europeans are doing on spectacle films versus American bigger budget spectacle films, but again, this is more about visual style than hero theme -- lighting, effects, camera cuts. And de Bodard isn't really interested in looking at that.

This is basically the entire reason behind counter-culture.

You mean the grim, broody, nasty main characters aren't mainstream people? (Should I point out that culture and counter-culture is a two box system for lumping or will that cause blood-letting?)

In a globalized market, all cultures that do not conform economically to the powerhouse become counter-cultures

That's a big notion of counter-culture. The entirety of French culture is counter-culture? And if France is the counter-culture, then they are going against America, so why is she screaming that they aren't? So again, this is a you're selling out while I write about my Aztec blood priests rant. The problem with defining yourself as the counter-culture terrorist against the Man, like de Bodard is doing, is that it usually has very little to do with the actual works, much less any nuances therein.

Action-Adventure Hero Stories, and no one makes em like America do.

Sure they do. They just don't necessarily have as big a budget for films and marketing. And yes, bigger is better is a cultural value that produces economic gain, but it's not always the measuring stick and goal in action. Resident Evil is a Japanese designed and written video game made into a movie by a German production company, distributed by Sony, a Japanese international media company, written and later directed by an Englishman and they aren't expecting to be Avatar, but they make a nice profit and are quite popular in American culture. Monsters is a British SF film and it's looking at U.S. culture, but it's not expecting to be Independence Day. District 9, etc. And demoting Cameron's Canadian identity is fun, but again there's that data sliding. Rick Baker has had probably the most cultural impact on spectacle film, more than Cameron, and he's American, but is it commercial repression that he sets or inspiration of art of effects?

Again, what she's really railing about is superhero movies. She doesn't like them. They're the Man because she does not find value in them. They are also Marvel desperately trying to shore up revenue as the comics industry collapses by dragging out characters fifty or eighty years old because their names are vaguely familiar to international audiences. And people go for the visual effects and smart alec dialogue.

And again it's got little to do with SFF written fiction and the range of that fiction. Superheroes do pop up in SFF -- usually explored in a very different way from comicbooks -- but there is not a huge rash of superhero SFF going on. Serial killers also sometimes pop up, especially in contemporary fantasy suspense or SF spy stories, but again, it's not a big theme in written SFF (and it hasn't been a big theme in film since the 1980's really.) Mindless killing of the de-humanized enemy can occur in written SFF, since you can have living non-human symbols of evil power, etc. in non-real fiction, but usually written authors are going deep into characters' heads, into their doubts, guilts, mistakes, desires, etc. -- in a way that film again is not really set up to do.

And again, if she wants to consider her own work "counter-culture," she's barking up the wrong tree. Why am I supposed to find her scolding SFF authors over superhero movies interesting? Why am I supposed to find her assertion of cultural coercion of European writers effective? Why am I supposed to care if she disdains certain types of stories she labels as America imposing on the rest? The notion of domination and dog eats dog is, as you note, that the Man culture, by default, because the mobs of peasants like it over the discernment of the intellectually elite nobles, oppresses and wipes out others, shutting down avenues of expression that supposedly used to exist unless the nobles stand up and with moral certitude, take action to heroically advance the cause of alternate art and individualistic rebel views in at least a small way -- like the heroes she's calling American tropes. (Some of them; there are also pervy serial killers, gangster anti-heroes, and pretty much everybody.) Or conversely, some have the view that the counter-culture elite nobles are oppressing the peasant culture and they don't know nothing anyway. It's a people like things I don't don't like and this annoys me rant. There are some interesting ideas in the midst of that which might have been interesting to look at. But she's too busy being Zorro condemning Zorro.

 

[Laer Carroll]

Examining a country's culture through the way it portrays its heroes, its exemplars, is a valid way to do it. However, there are some complicating factors of which we must be wary if we are not to be superficial and overly simple.

Film fictions provide a limited channel. They are audiovisual arts which cannot easily and naturally give a look inside people. I took a whole course in how to overcome these limits when I was working for a degree in film and TV direction. (I got it but by then I was a father and making way too much money as a software engineer.)

Literary fiction can. It has also been around a lot longer than films. And it can successfully portray heroes who win by mental superiority, not because of their muscles and reflexes. We must examine literature to get a fuller assessment of American (or any national) culture.

An average of 60% of the Hollywood film revenue is international. Tinsel Town themes and characters must necessarily portray universal virtues and evils, not uniquely American ones. Hollywood romantic comedies are often flops when they go international. They routinely earn about 90% domestically. The blockbuster "Sex and the City" was an exception, but it succeeded most as a broad comedy.

Regardless of what art we sieve for heroes, there are many varieties of heroes. And many audiences for them. America is a complex country of many rivers of extra-national cultural traditions. What works of fictional and other arts satisfy some American audiences are almost guaranteed to fail to satisfy other audiences.

And this just scrapes the surface of the problem of assessing any country's culture. I doubt if any of us in this venue can do it at all well.

 

[KatG]

Well again, in her rant, de Bodard raised some interesting issues and one of those, that Fung has sort of been concentrating on, is authors feeling pressured about sticking to the sorts of things in broadly dispersed, broadly successful projects from American things like Hollywood and Americans being prominent in written SFF. That's really what she's sort of ranting about, or ranting about non-American authors giving in to the pressure? But that again is the competitive domination view of art, rather than the expansion and exploration view. Data seems to me to be going the other way, albeit not always as fast as one might like.

 

[Hereford Eye]

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Hero
House of Flying Daggers
How do these films - I assume they merit the 'spectacular' label - fit into the notion that American spectacles are the only game in town? And which of the protagonists in these films is an American trope? And when Hollywood copies them - all spectacle fight sequences since using the wire acts for the violence ballets - does that transmogrify the Chinese-originated characters, photography, and choreography into American tropes?

 

[KatG]

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Hero
House of Flying Daggers
How do these films - I assume they merit the 'spectacular' label - fit into the notion that American spectacles are the only game in town? And which of the protagonists in these films is an American trope? And when Hollywood copies them - all spectacle fight sequences since using the wire acts for the violence ballets - does that transmogrify the Chinese-originated characters, photography, and choreography into American tropes?

I don't think Fung is saying American spectacles are the only game in town. He's talking about them dominating the market and racking up the biggest bucks for their big budget (and kids) spectacles, and that's true, Hollywood does. And that this effects and influences things in other countries and I agree with that too. But we differ about the effects, what to call them and how they are framed, and what sort of impact they have.

Stylistically, it is easier to track influences -- we can see the Asian influence with the choreography and imagery in Hollywood and European action films and some special effects films. We can see the European funky camera angle and lingering image techniques. We can see American jump cuts in foreign films, and so forth. But Fung and de Bodard are talking about the big dog at the top -- which happens to be America -- exerting pressure on everyone creating down below that, and in terms of an Americanized view of heroes. But I have a lot of problems with how de Bodard attempts to do this.

 

[Fung Koo]

You can track the influences, certainly, but you also have to track the economic reality of the film industry.

Basically, at the outset of the development of the film platform itself (the advent of the media form), you had a lot of international participation. Edison had his nickelodeons, the Lumiere brothers had their travelling cinema, and there was a back and forth series of inventions that gave rise to two different audiences -- the short and the feature.

The feature won with audiences worldwide. But then the events leading up to WWI hit and the film industry in the rest of the world quite literally disappeared for 40-odd years. In that time particularly the entertainment film industry was supplied almost exclusively by the American film industry, which had centralized in southern California and was producing a very specific and rigorously controlled story form.

The result of this fact is that the American industry defined the common, universal storytelling modes available for film for two generations of the planets population.

This has had a lasting impact on the film industry the world over. If experience and familiarity are the first essential steps to knowledge and understanding, then we have to bear in mind that the story form itself that is being experienced and is familiar is already very particularly American, and very particularly Hollywood.

The features of that form are the Star system, the marketing package, the gossip rags, and a tendency toward producing Action-Adventure Hero type stories.

The Hollywood fully-integrated production model quite literally made up 90% or more of all feature films watched throughout the world. The Hollywood decline, post-WWII, resulted in a fragmenting of the system for the "chaff" films (special, niche audience -- aka, independent cinema) and that's where the bulk "critical success" films have come from since that time. It is also the farm league for the Hollywood core -- it's a hedging system: by supporting low-budget indie and subsuming them in the Hollywood controlled distribution model, Hollywood can turn profits of as much as 1000% of some popular independent or low-budget films.

Because there was Jaws.

The core Hollywood component remained active and became the Spectacle -- and Jaws was arguably the first fully-functional modern-Hollywood Spectacle film.

With a budget of $4 million that ended up costing $9 (with about 1/5th of that extra money being added for advertising and promotion), it grossed over $400 million at the box office.

Thus, the great modern-Hollywood Spectacle-hunt began. The Spectacle needs to outdo itself in every instantiation. It needs outside influences to generate "New and Improved!"-ness. Thus the "influence" process we see (not that it isn't genuine influence, but economics must also be considered).

The entire commercial strategy in general of the 1970's-2000's-ish has been spectacle based in most industries. The search is for the break-out runaway success. It is the entire function of the Hollywood economic.

Measuring what that means in real terms, through to the '70s most European nations had introduced protectionist legislation to try to deal with the American film juggernaut. Only in the strictest regimes did domestic film industry profits get above 40%. To this day, the majority share of the film market consumed in the world outside the US, which is dominantly Spectacle based, is 65% American produced (and about half of that figure is split these days between the American-British conglomerates like Channel 4). Foreign domestic market are typically 30-40% in those countries.

By contrast, in the US market, only 7% of all films consumed are foreign produced. 93% of all films watched in the US are American, triple the success of domestic film compared to just about any other country.

Economically, this factors in largely. Hollywood-America makes its films hedged against the American domestic audience (Canada and US) -- they expect the North American audience to at least cover production cost. These films, that aren't expected to garner international success, are "seeders" for rising stars in acting, production, and direction. Then they get sucked up in the core Spectacle market production (your summer Blockbusters and Oscar hunter films) that get Laer's aforementioned 60% profits accruing in the international market.

But the film is made for the America domestic audience first, because they supply the economic backbone. We're the leverage. The rest of the audience is a relative unknown (although, to be accurate, Hollywood had a greater-than 80% success rate [range is 65% - 90% per film] in forecasting profits in the international audience -- which is better than anyone else in any industry anywhere).

The Spectacle is the American film. It's the one made "for international audiences". And it relies on the fact that American film has been the primary experience/familiarity of the entire world's audience for the majority of the film industry's existence. Everyone is used to it and knows what to expect. Its hallmarks are Action-Adventure Heroics with a touch of romance, comedy, and drama. Individualist, freedom-seeking heroes battle nefarious yet vaguely defined villains that seek to impose their will over us -- whether that's a big shark, a vast Empire, or a Perfect Storm.

----

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was an American produced film generated for and hedged against a domestic American audience -- believe it or not. It was subsumed into the Spectacle market, marketed appropriately, and fared extremely well.

Hero is different, acquired from a foreign market for distribution in America 2 years after its first release. Jet Li was already a star in America and it had the success of Tiger Dragon to follow on.

Flying Daggers is sorta half-way between, but production was leveraged against the American domestic market which recouped about 98% of its budget (love that Hollywood machine), but about 80% of its profits were international (the domestic audience was growing tired of the Asian spectacle by then, its share dwindling).

All three are wuxia in terms of genre, which lends itself well to an American domestic audience. Also, they actually have American cultural precedent in the American market. Generally speaking, the long run of success of martial-arts based films in American lead to their being leveraged against the US market, with the huge success of The Matrix as primary precedent (all of these films are considered "market explanation" [*cough*market exploitation*cough*] following from The Matrix).

 

[A. Lynn]

The result of this fact is that the American industry defined the common, universal storytelling modes available for film for two generations of the planets population.

I truly think that between Fung Koo and KatG, I could now recieve a Masters in Storytelling Principles and Film History. Anyways..


Fung Koo I feel that you are still forgetting the fact that films have borrowed from the theatre, which in turn borrowed from ancient playwrights, which in turn borrowed from troubadours and other fanciful story tellers of bygone eras. These were of course around well-before America was even a gleam in the settler's eye. So I still feel it quite inappropriate to dub this a "U.S. Story-Telling Trope" and I agree with KatG that it's not strictly an American thing. Call it the "Meat-Head" trope if you will, and say that America has an unusually large population of "Meat-Heads" perhaps (that's a joke of course) but do not say such story-telling tropes were born on this soil.

Although my college cannot by any means represent a good sample for study, truth is that majority of my fellow American-born Creative Media film students could not stand features such as G.I. Joe and many of us have been ragging on the latest Transformers installments. That's in one corner of the room. In the left corner we have a large group of foreign students including some Canadians and some Mexicans who are tired of hearing about Shawshank Redemption and The Bucket List and actually like works such as Snakes on a Plane. Go figure.

 

[Fung Koo]

Fung Koo I feel that you are still forgetting the fact that films have borrowed from the theatre, which in turn borrowed from ancient playwrights, which in turn borrowed from troubadours and other fanciful story tellers of bygone eras. These were of course around well-before America was even a gleam in the settler's eye ... but do not say such story-telling tropes were born on this soil.

No, not born -- tailored, refined, adapted.

Just as an organism must adapt to a new environment to survive, and therefore evolves, stories adapt to the cultures they find themselves in in order to survive. They evolve to/with the culture. Some story types have their population reduced, others thrive -- stories undergo a speciation process, if you will.

One of the lesser discussed aspects behind the American revolution is the standardization of English. In 1770 England set out to force the colonies to speak the motherland's language the "proper" way. Before this time, no such effort of standardization was considered to be particularly necessary, but over the course of a few hundred years of colonization regionally culturalized dialects were emerging in the colonies. This was giving rise to populations who were identifying themselves as "different" from the culture of the motherland. So when the English set out to standardize the language, this prompted the publication of the American Dictionary of the English Language -- it was a counter-cultural text, designed to set Colonial America apart and distinguish it from the motherland. It proved the language had evolved and that there was distinct culture that existed in America. It served to legitimize the rising conflict and push for independence.

This is the basic process of languages -- it's why there are so many of them and why there are common ancestries in language than can be traced and patterned. It's why Australians, Kiwis, Americans, South Africans, and Canadians all have a different common accent despite the language we all speak having originated in the same place and around the same time.

Culture, likewise. We have the same language, basically, but we all use it a bit differently, and we have different cultures despite having a great deal in common. We, as people, adapted to our new environments and evolved into different cultures -- and continue to evolve.

My position is that the same things happens with stories. There are only a handful of basic story types, really (definitions range from 2 to 20-odd "master" stories, depending on your source). A culture takes that handful of stories and wraps them up in itself and gives them distinct qualities, in turn making them distinct from another culture's distinction of that same handful of stories. Cultures -- that is, us -- we define our stories and they define us. We define how we usually tell them and what we usually tell them about.

When you add the new film technology of the storytelling medium into the question, you have both the effect of culture and the effect of that culture developing the language of the medium -- its syntax. Syntax on its own, as we know in languages, can be highly cultural. In the case of film, this means things like the progression from establishing shots to close-ups, the use of low-angle and high-angle to convey dominance and submission, over the shoulder as sympathetic PoV, hand-held as action-immersed, etc. The American film industry was the dominant force in defining the current standards of formal and syntactic elements of the film storytelling medium. Culture is part of that process that shaped that syntax, too.

Other cultures had quite different syntactic arrangements in film before their industries crashed -- they was no global standard. American film provided that.

Nowadays, for the most part, when others cultures (particularly in Europe) make a film they use the American-developed syntax. They do make their own spin on it, though, but at their peril. When they alter the normative syntax, they run the risk of speaking with too strong an accent -- like speaking Pidgin in a room full of Scouse, or Cockney in a room full of Manitobans. When Apu speaks, we know the syntax being employed to make that joke, but when that stereotype was developed it sounded odd and was difficult to understand. Using a non-Hollywood syntax is to speak in a broken or foreign language. Or worse, in foreign, untranslated poetry!

As to the stories themselves, you're right -- they come from other places and histories. But each culture tells their differentiated stories from the usual handful that probably got started back with those original humans who began crafting fictions. When a story goes together with a syntax, those two elements give you a firmly cultural take on those stories.

Film is arguably the American art form. That's where film did most of its growing up. Right now, film is like a university kid taking an occasional weekend backpack or road trip to elsewhere, affecting new styles to try them out, but still getting and allowance and going home to do laundry at mom and dad's.

 

[Hereford Eye]

Uh, Oh! The world is changing!

 

[KatG]

The Spectacle is the American film. It's the one made "for international audiences". And it relies on the fact that American film has been the primary experience/familiarity of the entire world's audience for the majority of the film industry's existence.

Okay, got it, see what you are saying. And actually have not denied it as I've regularly agreed about American juggernautiness. But this is where it gets dicier:

Individualist, freedom-seeking heroes battle nefarious yet vaguely defined villains that seek to impose their will over us -- whether that's a big shark, a vast Empire, or a Perfect Storm.

This is where you're making the umbrella, and putting everybody under it. The stories are not differentiated because you don't hold to any of the actual narrowing of your words, just give the stories a core value of Americanism whether they have a vaguely defined villain of natural forces, gangster opposing other gangster, etc. or not, or whether their heroes are technically really individualist or "freedom-seeking." There is literally not a film story a European, non-American can come up with that would be differentiated from the umbrella definition, which is essentially a protagonist or main characters in conflict with something else. It's not a differentiated theme because you're constantly stretching it. It doesn't matter how the film starts or ends, who might win or lose or tie, or what doubts characters may have or choices they make, whether they work together or rebel, etc. Even a surreal film would fit under the umbrella you're making. Because you're not really talking about a type of hero. You're not even talking about heroes.

So there's no spin, no alteration of syntax because you've already placed it at the atomic level. There's no way for them to alter it because it is all things.

And then when we move away from film, to books, where it's not the same as film, not under the same structures and constraints as the film industry, it gets even weirder.

In the first book of DeBodard's series, her MC is a priest elevated to leadership role because of his exceptional abilities even though he goes against the herd, and because of top level political maneuverings. He must deal with the disappearance of a priestess, her room covered in blood, and his own brother who is in the room and is the main suspect in her presumed murder. Supernatural forces are also after his brother's life. He has to solve the mystery, stop the forces, and make a bargain with the gods to do it that will cost him. How is this changing syntax?

In the second book, the MC must solve a murder of a top political official, magically killed to effect a vote, and save the empire from a dangerous supernatural force even though it means helping his rivals because it's his code. How is this changing syntax?

In the third book, the MC has to investigate the magically caused death of a prisoner of war meant to be a sacrifice for the new Emperor's coronation and save that dratted Empire again with his brilliant supernatural interaction and detection skills. How is this changing the syntax?

And if it is changing the syntax because the main character is such and such a way, why isn't this courtesy being extended to other SFF main characters and even films where it's relevant? Instead, everybody over there is shoved under that stretchy umbrella, be they an amoral, slaughtering gangster or the Canadian Dudley Do Right. Or is DeBodard hating what she writes and feeling she has to write it that way?

As you and I both noted, spectacle film plays well visually and requires the biggest budgets to do it, though it can be made for some stories for less, and thus has been an American juggernaut. As you and I both noted, American spectacle films have been heavily influenced by other cultures for source material, style, theme, etc., like wuxia. While these films do attempt to break even domestically, they often fail to do so and are saved by the international audience who, in 2011, still seem to enjoy and support visual spectacle, to have a connection to it that is rather simplistic to say that it is simply them being deeply overwhelmed by familiar American values, especially when the values involved are mainly that visual effects look cool. As you noted, the American film industry is geared toward maximum profits and uses spectacle films to hope to achieve large global profits and to float cash for other projects. As you and I both noted, the American film industry does not just do spectacle film but does a wide spectrum of films, including co-producing with foreigners or taking in foreign films, to get in as much of all potential audiences as possible. Often, the non-spectacle films have a big impact on film-making and American culture, even if they are not huge profit generators, and it ripples outward.

When we move to books, it gets much older and broader. There are not the constraints that film has, as books are language and narrative text. There is no visual spectacle with books that can be passively watched because they are printed text. The U.S. puts out a lot of books and is a major market for English books (and a smaller market for Spanish books, etc.,) so they have a major impact, but it is not the same as film and movie theaters. Sales success is not built on visual spectacle. Fiction publishing doesn't do marketing and demographic research and has no way of guaranteeing failure or success. The audiences for even big selling books are much smaller and less in cultural communication than that of films. The dark horse that no one expected to pop and which got little support is a rarity in film and non-existent in t.v.; it's business as usual in fiction publishing. In SFFH, it is true that suspense reigns because unreal elements are introduced to a world setting, effecting it, and this will produce MC's in conflict with something. But to say that foreign authors have adopted American syntax and to say that American superhero films prove this is not something that seems to fit the data to me.

Unless of course we have the stretchy umbrella which says that all stories are American in theme.

 

[Steven L Jordan]

I'm glad a few people are recognizing that: As the world's Melting Pot, the "tropes" of American culture are in fact the tropes of worldwide culture, not just of Americans; that those tropes were brought to America by the various peoples who settled here; that there was a people, and a culture, here before them (which has largely been buried, hidden away in reservations or drowned in booze), whose tropes are nothing like those brought to these shores; and that there's no reason to blame America for the bad ideas that the world pretends not to know it imposes upon us.

 

[KatG]

I'm glad a few people are recognizing that: As the world's Melting Pot, the "tropes" of American culture are in fact the tropes of worldwide culture, not just of Americans; that those tropes were brought to America by the various peoples who settled here; that there was a people, and a culture, here before them (which has largely been buried, hidden away in reservations or drowned in booze), whose tropes are nothing like those brought to these shores; and that there's no reason to blame America for the bad ideas that the world pretends not to know it imposes upon us.

I don't think anyone was disputing the multiculturism, including DeBodard. It's not a matter of these elements being original to America. It's a matter of them being the favorite selected ones out of various options by Hollywood and American storytellers, and thus becoming an icon of American culture and its world view. In particular, the aggressive, living by my code, destroy the bad guy ethos of many spectacle movies, which are almost all produced by America. And that these movies are widely dispersed domestically and abroad, and successful, and so how does that impact the entertainment culture, impact foreign films and foreign authors, etc. We can't claim that Hollywood blockbusters have no cultural impact anywhere.

My gripe with some of what Fung's arguing is not that America doesn't have lots of impact in film, but that when we're concentrating on the movies, the inclusiveness of that Americana as a definition gets continually expanded -- every code (world view) is apparently included, not just the, let's call it the cowboy ethos for now. And the layers of these movies that differentiate their approaches gets ignored in the urge to jam Michael Corleone and Duddly Do Right together as the same thing, to say that a massive storm and the Joker are the same as nefarious antagonists. That reaches a level of vagueness that I don't think provides a lot of meaningful cultural value.

DeBodard, though, isn't really even trying to at least identify a common approach in a type of movie. DeBodard is making much broader claims about the preferences of American produced stories in multiple mediums and their impact on foreign cultures. She is not reflecting the actual circumstances in the SFF written fiction market and what authors do there, for me, which is by and large not aping spectacle movies. So the attempt to set the cowboy ethos apart in stories and discover how much it's shaping/writing over other cultures because America does superhero films and American SFF authors get reprinted internationally would seem to not really go anywhere.

Essentially, you can look at many of the cultural issues that DeBodard brings up and it does not require a "don't blame America" response. But the way that she's doing it, for me, doesn't really look at the actual cultural issues and goes in loop de loops. As Dawnstorm says, she's just having a rant, and it may be that I'm being a typical legalese, scientificese Americanese about it, but a rant about X-Men: First Class and everything else she throws in, in regards to foreign and American SFF writers really doesn't have much relevance for me. The major themes in written SFF, American or no, are not really about the cowboy ethos, in my view.

 

[Steven L Jordan]

It's also important to point out that American movies' being "successful" globally says a lot about the audience. If American films, with "American tropes," were being distributed globally and bombing, American filmmakers would have a reason to make other kinds of movies. Obviously, they don't, because the movies aren't bombing.

So this rant needs to be directed, not at American moviemakers, but at all the people who shell out money to watch American movies... including those in her country.

Although plenty of written SFF doesn't follow "the cowboy ethos," there's plenty of it that still does; so the rant applies to written as well as cinematic material. But again, the point applies that if the audience wasn't buying it, the producers wouldn't be producing it to the extent that they are. When the audience passes up Star Wars and buys Solaris, in print or film, we'll see more intellectual American content.

 

[KatG]

It's also important to point out that American movies' being "successful" globally says a lot about the audience. If American films, with "American tropes," were being distributed globally and bombing, American filmmakers would have a reason to make other kinds of movies. Obviously, they don't, because the movies aren't bombing.

So this rant needs to be directed, not at American moviemakers, but at all the people who shell out money to watch American movies... including those in her country.

Although plenty of written SFF doesn't follow "the cowboy ethos," there's plenty of it that still does; so the rant applies to written as well as cinematic material. But again, the point applies that if the audience wasn't buying it, the producers wouldn't be producing it to the extent that they are. When the audience passes up Star Wars and buys Solaris, in print or film, we'll see more intellectual American content.

Well the rant was directed at those in her current country, France, and others. (Again, she's American.) She was not saying American moviemakers should change, although she clearly doesn't like a lot of what they are doing much. She was saying that the American movies -- and books and et al -- had sort of taken over and not deliberately but unconsciously, as a brand, discouraged and limited alternate spins from other cultures and that foreign authors should get more cowboy and go in a different direction (that was highly unspecified, in my view.)

What Fung was trying to say is the premise that foreign audiences do like the American spectacle films because they've had two generations or more of those films coming at them -- they are familiar, comfortable, etc., and they don't challenge it in other filmmaking and their voices don't get heard as much in the face of America's juggernaut of big budget and big marketing budget spectacle.

There are some aspects of that you can definitely look at. But I think that's a reducing of a lot of the films coming at them, a lumping of a lot of things under the banner of the American brand -- a banner that keeps getting broader so that differentiations start to become meaningless because you can't differentiate. The assumption that audiences don't like tragic endings shapes a lot of the product that does go out there -- and thus is a cultural influence; but the need for variety does not make it a stricture in the culture and the reality is that audiences like tragic endings fine.

For me, a Star Wars versus the last film version of Solaris comparison does not work on numerous levels and just continues myths about how the audiences are working. Solaris is a major story in the U.S. SF cannon that has been adapted dramatically a number of times and remained in print for 50 years, the best known novel of a Polish SF writer, Stanislaw Lem who is believed to be the most widely read science fiction writer in the world. So this is where we get into a lot of problems with umbrella cross-medium arguments. If Marvel's last ten years of superhero films are supposed to be influencing SFF writers, American or other, we're not really seeing that. And the cowboy ethos -- if we go with the set definition instead of DeBodard's bouncing around -- with its lack of moral doubt, etc., is not really very prevalent in written SFF, in my view. Even in very military SFF, it's limited, and the concept of the superhero has had numerous layers that clearly DeBodard is not interested in.

But I don't want to be seen as trashing DeBodard. I like what DeBodard is doing in her fiction. They sound interesting as political thrillers with a good historical and mythic component. I just don't share the view of the arts as chiefly culturally predatory rather than expansionist and I don't think the cross-medium complaints made a great deal of sense, so that post, as I said at the beginning, did not have a lot of meaning for me. Clearly it did for others.

 

[Fung Koo]

I want to add the other half of what I was trying to get across -- that Americans watch 93% American-produced film.

I doubt there is any entertainment industry anywhere in the world that has such a high powered domestic market. We know that this is not for a lack of options -- these days world cinema, overall, produces far more films per year than American cinema. America has a lot of movie houses that play foreign cinema, but they don't get the attendance. Most other countries watch about 75% foreign film -- about three quarters of those being American and the other quarter being other foreign films -- and 25% domestic.

This is a staggeringly large difference. Isn't it? Surely it suggests that something deeply cultural is happening here. As we know it's not for lack of options then it must be something about the films themselves that speak to the American audience. About the stories.

...

I understand why there is reservation about defining a general description of an "American type" of story -- you're right, the danger is that it's simply too broad. But what I would propose is that this is not a unique situation in history, and that despite the variety you see in American film perhaps it is simply the case that most film stories are covered by the umbrellaic "American Canon" (so to speak).

We have an historical analogue in the rise of English-language literary entertainment. In the Late Medieval period you have a very, very small number of dudes like Chaucer writing stories in English -- but even being written in English, the stories were largely retellings of Greco-Roman stories. Very slowly, stories that dealt with the concerns of an English person began to emerge. This continued into the Early Modern period. It took a few hundred years for a sufficient canon of truly "English" material to develop (largely slowed down by a low rate of literacy in general and, of course, the authority of Rome), but eventually there was enough there that one could look at Greco-Roman literature and English literature and notice that there was a gulf between them.

As literacy ramped up throughout history, the process got a little faster. For example, Americans got their own dictionary, but also developed their own storytelling modes. Dark Romanticism is very much an American tradition -- it takes a different form in English literature, where it is more in the vein of Gothic Romanticism, which has whole different aesthetic, focus, mode, etc. It's much more circuitous to find the commonality of American Dark Romantic literature with the Greco-Roman tradition (though of course it's still there) than it is to find commonality in English Gothic and Romantic literature with the Greco-Roman tradition. For American Dark Romanticism, you have to go through English Gothic and Romantic to the Greco-Roman Tragedy and Epic.

Film's history is similar, but is proceeding much faster thanks to technology and literacy. Because of the conflicts in Europe through the early 20th century, film flourished in one culture much moreso than in all the others. Everything from the syntactic questions of how the camera and sound are used to the kinds of stories that are told and how they are told were developed within that cultural frame. This level of dominance is very similar to the effective cultural monopoly of the Greco-Roman tradition in mid-second-millenium Europe.

So when we talk about Bollywood, we come back to the American Musical. When we talk cinema du look, we come back to the American Action film. Few other genres in film are quite so specific as those two, so its a more complex discussion for other sorts of movies. But like Late Medieval through Enlightenment Era English literature where the ghost of the Greco-Roman tradition was a huge part of nearly everything written, so too with world cinema.

American film is the spectre behind virtually every film in the world quite literally up until about a decade or two ago. The protectionist measures installed by many other nations required about a generation or two of domestic film production to inform a local, cultural mode of story telling in film, and that includes stock character types, standard plot lines, and value-based film that explore issues relevant to those local cultures. Today, a Bollywood director in India can look at domestic Bollywood film and quite possibly forget or ignore the relevance of the American Musical in its history -- it is now its own beast, and is a step removed from its root. You have to go through a history of Indian cinema to get to the American Musical now.

The difference, of course, is that the Roman Empire had gone away and was no longer producing material. Its influence was nostalgic -- a hearkening back to the glory days, at the height of what was possible. For cinema, America is still producing film. It's somewhat of a parent competing with its children.

Which, I think, partly explains the 93% figure. Other world cinema often is not as distinctly cultural, being a somewhat young endeavour. British cinema is well along the curve and has a mature, cultural industry and strong exports. France, too, and India and Hong Kong. They all enjoy strong domestic markets and good export value. But most other countries have quite underdeveloped film industries, don't enjoy strong domestic markets, and likewise don't have very strong exports.

If there was a major crash in the film industry in America, world cinema would fill much of the void, and the landscape would be forever changed. This is what has happened in the music industry, largely thanks to the advent of the internet. It killed the domestic industry, in one sense, promoted the immediate-local industry of independents, and then the internet fuelled those immediate local independents and sent them around the world. The film industry has been weathering the internet fairly well. But we'll see how that evolves.

Theoretically, as world cinema "grows up" and becomes more competitive with American cinema, the internet platform will help with the sort of widespread international influence process you're suggesting exists in American film -- frankly, it really doesn't have much of an effect right now. Only 7% of the market watches foreign film. The audience prefers the American mode. Even though many directors are cinephiles and bring those influences into their own work for the American audience, to me its the difference between watching The Office and watching The Office. That degree of removal from the primary source tells you what you need to know -- for widespread appeal, the American way wins with the American audience. It's not "international" -- it's adaptation. The same is true of influence. An American move-maker makes an American-movie, even if they watch a lot of Hong Kong kung fu. The Matrix was still an American movie told the American way.

I know the umbrella sucks, but maybe it's because the umbrella is really there.