In 1970, an American visiting Paris or Tokyo would have seen few signs of U. S. culture—perhaps only Coca-Cola and a few Ford autos. But over the last decades of the twentieth century, national cultures were transformed by globalization, the emergence of networks of influence that tightened the ties among all countries and their citizens.
Perhaps the most apparent sign of the trend was the prominence of multinational corporations, from Exxon and IBM to Toyota and Benetton. Multinational corporations created regional subsidiaries, bought smaller firms, and entered into joint ventures with other multinationals. Before the 1980s, mergers and acquisitions across national borders were fairly rare, but waves of deregulation encouraged transnational enterprises in banking, the automotive industry, information technology, and telecommunications. In many cases, the creation of intellectual property—brands, logos, and “content”—became more important than the manufacture of products, which might take place anywhere. Nike’s shoes were assembled from components made across Asia, but the product was defined by a casual swoosh and the hard-driving slogan “Just Do It.”
Globalization became evident in other ways. When worldwide financial markets were deregulated in the late 1980s, they began to play a crucial role in national economies. People became more mobile, through migration and tourism. All these changes created new worldwide regulatory agencies, such as the World Bank, as well as transnational social organizations, such as Greenpeace and Doctors without Borders.
The West, plus some Asian-Pacific nations, led globalization, announcing it as the dawning of a new age of free-market capitalism and universal democracy. Its effects, however, were varied. Corporations could subcontract production to countries with low wages, and then, when those
Countries raised their standard of living, pull out and head for cheaper labor markets—the “race to the bottom.” A fluid global market often disrupted communities, while the demands of the International Monetary Fund made poorer nations, typically in Africa and Latin America, even more dependent on richer ones. In most countries, real wages declined over the 1980s and 1990s. The disparity between rich and poor sharpened: in 1996, the combined income of the world’s 400 richest people exceeded the total income of 45 percent of the earth’s population.
Globalization was not a completely new phenomenon; from 1850 to 1920, western European countries’ overseas empires had bound together nations and peoples in a similar way. The international spread of cinema was one sign of this process (see Chapters 1 and 2). Penetrating virtually every society, movies became the first globalized mass medium. Still, after World War II, and especially after the 1960s, globalization intensified, based not on colonialism but rather on social and economic ties. Popular culture spread via new technologies. Television (which became global in the 1970s and 1980s), communications satellites (1970s), audio cassettes (1970s), CDs (1980s), videotape (1980s), and digital media (1990s) sent music, television, and films throughout the world. During the 1980s and 1990s, cinema became more widely available than it had ever been before.
Globalization’s effects on film can be examined from several angles. Most evident was Hollywood, which created a global cinema. As a counterthrust, regional impulses responded to Hollywood’s international power. At the same time, filmmakers living outside their place of origin created a “diasporic” cinema that linked new homes to old. All of these tendencies were visible at film festivals, which emerged as an alternative distribution network to that of the U. S. Majors. In addition, new, globally dispersed subcultures of viewers began to appear. Further, film played a central part in the worldwide convergence of digital media.
Try on earth. Between 1970 and 1980, Hollywood received about 40 percent of its film rentals from foreign countries. In the 1980s, over half of the Majors’ theatrical income began to flow in from overseas.
In part, Hollywood globalized by becoming a wing of foreign corporations. As we have seen (p. 682-683), the Australian firm News Corporation acquired Twentieth Century-Fox, and Sony bought Columbia. Universal was absorbed first by the Japanese electronics firm Matsushita, then by Canada’s Seagram, and finally by the French company Vivendi. These acquisitions were part of a larger general trend. Throughout the 1990s, companies outside the United States spent hundreds of billions of dollars buying American firms. Daimler-Benz of Britain bought Chrysler, and British Petroleum bought Amoco.
In addition, all the Majors routinely drew financing from foreign sources, ranging from large companies like France’s Canal Plus to investment circles formed for the purpose of speculating in movies. As wings of multinational conglomerates, the studios attracted high-powered international investment. In 2000, 98 percent of film funds raised by German tax shelters went to finance Hollywood pictures, and about one-fifth of studio pictures drew on them.
Always international, the Majors depended more than ever on their standing as the main source of popular cinema. Since the 1970s, U. S. films routinely won over half of box-office receipts in western Europe and Latin America. Some countries held off total defeat through protectionist legislation or through canny maneuverings of the local industry, but, in the 1990s, Hollywood gained the edge. It won supremacy in Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan, while Japan became the Majors’ biggest overseas national market. Although Hollywood produced only a small fraction of the world’s feature films, it garnered about 75 percent of theatrical motion picture revenues and even more of the video rentals and purchases.
World History
