Los Angeles. Venice Beach, past its novel best, is still a good place to lounge and experience – a vital word, that, experience – an outgrowth of and commentary on nearby Hollywood. It is sumptuous: in its leisure, in the profusion of cafes, in the omnipresence of the Santa Monica police force, cruising in their shiny cruisers through the ruins of hippie culture by the boardwalks. And when, in disdainful European fashion, you want to write it off as an obese swamp, you are slapped awake by its striving for excellence: in the dedication to the body at the open-air gym on Muscle Beach, in the panting, competitive spirit of miniature tennis and basketball around the gym.
Most of all, as with Hollywood’s offerings, you are taken aback by the sheer work that produces the grace of many of the boardwalk artists. One, a mime, does a robotic act built around the reason for his presence: to beg for money, pouting when ignored, switching on a brilliant rictus when rewarded. Another balances his partner, seated on a plastic chair, on his chin.
The Los Angeles experience, at the start of the 21st century, is complete, totalitarian. The city does have other cultures: in particular, a turbulent and inventive labour movement, whose fiercer spirits organised a janitors’ strike as well as a unique protest of bus passengers, following which the Superior Court forced the city to add 300 extra buses to the vehicles on its impoverished routes. (The city is now appealing the decision.) Yet none of this comes through in LA’s official, sanctioned culture.
Los Angeles is entertainment. Entertainment’s most important root is the Latin tenere, “to hold”. The Los Angeles you are invited, dragooned, to see is designed to hold, to not let go. Here, the imagination cannot be allowed to work: it must be fed, with helpings as big as the grossest gross-out on cheeseburgers, washed down with a strawberry milkshake to stun the senses.
In his book Life: the movie, Neal Gabler tells us that the notion of “fun” did not really exist before the 20th century. By the end of the 19th century, working men and women began to have a little free time – something “of their own” between finishing work and dropping on to their beds. The cinema enfolded them. The sensation was partly in revenge – revenge through figures such as the Keystone Cops and Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton, and above all Charlie Chaplin – on the moneyed and cultured elite. Some of it was transformation: living, if only for a couple of hours, in a dream. The way of watching was important, too. The stillness of the bourgeoisie’s Verdi or Shakespeare was replaced with popcorn-crunching, Coke-draining, shouting at the screen, aahs of pleasure or tension.
Entertainment is not neutral; it has narratives, and these narratives respond to imperatives set by the political culture, just as they shape it in return. That narrative is now, crucially, about American power.
American power is not just Hollywood. In an essay (“Who’s Afraid of Mr Big?”) in the current issue of the US journal National Interest, Josef Joffe, the editor of the German weekly Die Zeit, remarks that America is Harvard as well as Hollywood – where Harvard “stands for America’s towering intellectual dominance, where the Sorbonne and the University of Gottingen once ruled the roost. Now Europe’s best and brightest would rather go to Stanford and the California Institute of Technology than to one of those faceless mass universities that have replaced the Continent’s ancient centers of excellence.”
In philosophy, literature and the teaching of morality, American authors dominate, leaving spaces for the Europeans (especially the Brits) in fields such as history or sociology or postmodernism.
Hollywood culture cannot be escaped. If it doesn’t get you – let us say you have a generational or eccentric predisposition to print culture – it will get your kids, and already has your neighbour and friends. Like the maple pancakes and the popcorn cartons as tall as a small child, it demands consumption. Hollywood culture is no longer, except palely, the escapism of an oppressed class, although shards of that old culture show through here and there. Ken Loach’s Bread and Roses, which anticipated the great LA janitors’ strike, did, after all, get made and shown. It doesn’t matter much. The dominant strain is contained in the name of Steven Spielberg’s production company, DreamWorks. The dream works: even when, indeed most of all when, life does not.
And thus, in this season’s comedies, which will arrive in Europe over the next couple of months, the dream is all. Legally Blonde shows a rich airhead who cannot bear to be jilted by her intellectual boyfriend. She follows him to Harvard Law School, does brilliantly and gets the guy. Dr Dolittle 2, Eddie Murphy’s latest film, shows the vet who can talk to the animals enabling a citified zoo bear to win the rugged but beautiful forest she-bear, in order that the species may breed and multiply, and thus stop an evil deforester.
The films teach that you can do anything you want, an idea that has its good side: like caffeine in the morning, it can raise the spirits. But when transmuted into the motto for a people, or for a state, it becomes something else again. And in the serious films of the summer – and of certain summers past – we can see that transmutation.
The one thing that was notable about the dismal Pearl Harbor was the way in which the script legitimised both the Japanese and the British through their recognition of American greatness. The Japanese admiral saw that the attack would “rouse a sleeping giant”; the comically posh English squadron leader, putting one hand on a US volunteer flier’s shoulder, intoned: “Are all Americans like you?”
That question raises the curtain on Planet of the Apes, the hit remake of the 1968 Charlton Heston vehicle: the hero is again a US Air Force flier, who saves the planet by achieving a reconciliation between the dominant apes and slave humans when he takes out the apes’ evil general. Fidel Castro, Salvador Allende and Saddam Hussein all come to mind as Tim Roth’s over-the-top crouchback hisses his way through to his inevitable come-uppance.
The sheer power and talent with which the Hollywood medium presents such messages resembles the Venice Beach boardwalk artists: but there, they are at the service of nothing more than their own craft. Increasingly, Hollywood celebrates the themes of American virtue as an underwriter of American power. For the visiting European, it inspires awe and derision – both reactions of the powerless.
And so to DreamWorks. Steven Spielberg’s AI: artificial intelligence seems in a different league. It begins, after all, in a world whose coastal cities are already under water because of global warming, and quickly passes to a fairly high-level, if stagy, academic seminar about fashioning computer robots, exact simulacra of human beings, who can love. The central questions – can a soul be built? If so, what is soul? – are unusual merely in that they are posed.
But sentiment takes over: Haley Joel Osment’s robot boy loves so sweetly, so eternally, that he engineers his dead mother’s return to life to be reconciled with her for a last, ineffably sweet day. You can be anything you want. The pious references to the downsides of American technological, military and commercial power are shredded in a celebration of exactly that power: we can engineer anything we want!
In a thoughtful piece in the New York Times magazine of 15 July, Michael Lewis describes Marcus Arnold, the 15-year-old son of two recent immigrants from Belize. Arnold, still in high school, was recently voted the leading law expert on an internet service called AskMe.com – picked from among more than 100 qualified lawyers who advertised their wares on the service by answering queries about the law. Given that in Marcus’s parents’ house, where he lived and worked, there were no books of any kind, Lewis asked him how he knew what to advise. Did he listen to or watch educational tapes on the law? Get the answers off the internet? Phone lawyer acquaintances? None of these. He watched Court TV (the edited broadcasting of actual legal cases). And “I just knew”.
Marcus Arnold’s culture is the opposite of Matthew Arnold’s culture. It is explicitly non-literary, non-academic, non-rational. Entertainment, in Marcus’s world, provides everything – even specialised legal knowledge. You can feel and fun your way into any state you want. Behind the scenes, people who do still read and write and count engineer the narratives that say, America can do anything it wants! Ain’t it so, folks!
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