In ten years, globalization won't feel like Americanization—thanks to the movies!
■"What Is a Foreign Movie Now?" by A.O. Scott, New York Times Magazine, 14 November 2004, p. 79.
This is a big theme of mine: in ten years time it will be impossible for the world to keep pretending that globalization equates to forced Americanization (otherwise known as that dumbass McWorld theory—as is the case of most diagnoses, it arrives on scene just as it becomes obsolete). Our cultural content dominated Globalization II (1945-1980) because we were number 1 without a doubt in the scrawny West that existed through that time period. Our cultural content still seems dominant through Globalization III (1980-2001), because the biggest players were still getting their acts together in terms of internal integration (Europe) and joining the global economy (e.g., China, India).
But in Globalization IV (2001 and counting), we will witness the rise of numerous key cultural content pillars, such as the European lifestyle (or dream, as Jeremy Rifkin calls it), Japanese cool (check out what your kids all seem naturally drawn to, and you'll find it's overwhelmingly Japanese in origin), and Chinese hipness (isn't China becoming the center of damn near everything on the go-go?).
Hollywood supposedly dominates the global marketplace for movies, just like the NBA dominates global basketball (and yet seems to be full of more foreigners than you can count), but that chimera is rapidly disappearing thanks to rising competition from the world over. Today, it's getting really hard to define exactly what is a foreign film?:
It is not hard to imagine a future n which an American suburban marquee will boast a Chinese martial-arts picture, a Korean action thriller, a Mexican cop drama and a French romantic comedy.
Actually, that future is pretty much already here, depending on the taste of the movie house you may frequent.
Among the harbingers of that future are the domestic box-office successes of movies like "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," "Amelie," and last summer's "Hero." Of course, if you count remakes, homages and rip-offs—retooled versions of Japanese pictures like "The Ring" and "The Grudge," say, or even Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill" movies—then that future has long since arrived.
And yes, I do count all these films, most of which we already own on DVD.
What is the emerging theme of this global cinema?
A defining modern mood—one that is often evoked but hasn't been adequately been named—is the anxious, melancholy feeling of being simultaneously connected and adrift. In a recent essay in Salon, the film critic Charles Taylor identified this condition—"being in a world where the only sense of home is to be found in a state of constant flux"—as a central motif in movies ranging from "Lost in Translation" to the films of cinephile cult figures like Tsai and Wong Kar-wai [two up-and-coming Asian filmmakers].
To me, these are the movies that ask the question, "How fast is too fast or not fast enough?" The answer to that question is what will constitute the emerging "third way" between America's Go Fast ideology on globalization and Europe's Go Slow.
I look forward to all the movies still to be made on this subject.