The leisure empire

Carl Bernstein

The worldwide popularity of American films, television programs, and recordings has made mass entertainment products the nation's second-largest export during the last quarter of the twentieth century. In the following selection, Carl Bernstein examines the economic and political ramifications of our popular culture's apparent international hegemony — its effects on the growing ranks of consumers in the world market as well as on the producers in U.S. media industries.

Bernstein teamed with Bob Woodward to break the Pulitzer Prize — winning Watergate story for the Washington Post, where he also was the newspaper's rock music critic. He served as Washington Bureau Chief and senior correspondent for ABC Television, before joining the staff of Time as a contributor in 1990. His articles also have appeared in the New Republic, the New York Times, Playboy, Rolling Stone, Newsweek, and der Spiegel, among others.

Just outside Tokyo 300,000 people troop through Japan's Disneyland each week, while 20 miles outside Paris a new city is rising on 8 square miles of formerly vacant land. Once Euro Disney Resort opens for business in 1992, forget the Eiffel Tower, the Swiss Alps, and the Sistine Chapel: it is expected to be the biggest tourist attraction in all of Europe. In Brazil as many as 70 per cent of the songs played on the radio each night are in English. In Bombay's thriving theater district, Neil Simon's plays are among the most popular. Last spring [1990] a half-dozen American authors were on the Italian best-seller list. So far this year [1990], American films (mostly action-adventure epics like Die Hard 2 and The Terminator) have captured some 70 per cent of the European gate.

America is saturating the world with its myths, its fantasies, its tunes and dreams. At a moment of deep self-doubt at home, American entertainment products — movies, records, books, theme parks, sports, cartoons, television shows — are projecting an imperial self-confidence across the globe. Entertainment is America's second-biggest net export (behind aerospace), bringing in a trade surplus of more than $5 billion a year. American entertainment rang up some $300 billion in sales last year, of which an estimated 20 per cent came from abroad. By the year 2000, half оf the revenues from American movies and records will be earned in foreign countries.

But the implications of the American entertainment conquest extend well beyond economics. As the age of the military superpowers ends, the United States, with no planning or premeditation by its government, is emerging as the driving cultural force around the world, and will probably remain so through the next century. The Evil Empire has fallen. The Leisure Empire strikes back.

"What we are observing," says Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan, "is the increasing leisure hours of people moving increasingly toward entertainment. What they are doing with their time is consuming entertainment - American entertainment — all over the industrialize world."

For most of the postwar era, hard, tangible American products were the measure of U.S. economic success in the world. Today culture may be the country's most important product, the real source of both its economic power and its political influence in the world. "It's not about a number, though the number is unexpectedly huge," says Merrill Lynch's Harold Vogel, author of the 1990 book Entertainment Industry Economics. "It is about an economic state of mind that today is dominated by entertainment".

What is the universal appeal of American entertainment? Scale, spectacle, technical excellence, for sure: Godfather Part III, Batman. The unexpected, a highly developed style of the outrageous, a gift for vulgarity that borders on the visionary: a Motley Crue concert, for example, with the drummer stripped down to his leather jockstrap, flailing away from a calliope riding across the rafters of the Meadowlands Arena in New Jersey. Driving plots, story lines, and narrative: a Tom Clancy hero or one of Elmore Leonard's misfits. Indiana Jones's strength of character, self-reliance, a certain coarseness, a restless energy as American as Emerson and Whitman.

"People love fairy tales," observes Czech-born director Milos Forman, "and there is no country that does them better than the United States, — whatever kind of fairy tales, not only princesses and happy endings. Every child dreams to be a prince; every adult has a secret closet dream to be Rambo and kill your enemy, regardless if it's your boss or communists or whoever."

Donald Richie, the dean of arts critics in Japan, sees a broader appeal. "The image of America radiates unlimited freedom, democracy, a home of the people," says Richie: "This certainly appeals to the Japanese, who live in a very controlled, authoritarian society." Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, concurs, * arguing that American entertainment — particularly movies, television, and rock — was a primary catalyst in the collapse of communism in Europe and the Soviet Union.

On a recent visit to China, David Black, the supervising producer for Law and Order, watched young Chinese sell bootleg copies of Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis tapes in Shanghai. "In Hollywood," says Black, "we are selling them the ultimate luxury: the fact that people don't have to live the life they're born into. They can be a cowboy, a detective, Fred Astaire — and that's what America is selling now. The hell with cars. Cars are just wheels and gears. People want to be able to play at being other people more than they want transportation."

The process exacts a spiritual cost. At work sometimes in the iconography of American popular culture is a complex nostalgia for the lost American soul. Madonna is not Monroe, Stallone is not Billy Wilder. But they are cultural forces with an authority and resonance uniquely American. Such gilded presences radiate signals of material success and excess on a scale heretofore unknown in popular entertainment. Perhaps more important, their influence — as models for imitation, objects of media attention — far outweighs that of the traditional heroes and heroines in what may have been an earlier and more accomplished age. The very adulation that the global stars receive simultaneously diminishes and trivializes them, as if they were mere image and electricity.

Money, lavish production, the big-budget blockbusters that only the American movie studios are willing to finance — these are part of the appeal. And of course the newness of it all, whether in music or film or TV. Only in the United States does popular culture undergo almost seasonal rituals of renewal.

Giovanni Agnelli, the Italian automobile industrialist, adds another factor: quality. "What is unique about American movies and popular music and television?" asks Agnelli. "They are better made; we cannot match their excellence."

Nor, it seems, can anyone else on the world stage right now. Matsushita's purchase of MCA, like Sony's ownership of CBS Records and Columbia Pictures, signals a recognition of the value of integrating the yin and the yang of leisure economics, the hardware of VCRs and DAT [Digital Audi Tape] and the software of music and programming. "Our entertainment is the one thing the Japanese can't make better or cheaper than us," says David Geffen, the largest single shareholder in the recent MCA-Matsushita deal. "That's why they are buying in. But they will have zero influence in the product. Companies don't decide what gets made; the content of American entertainment is inspirationally motivated."

Michael Eisner, chairman of Walt Disney Co., and other industry executives argue that the unique character of American entertainment is the result of the polyglot nature of the society itself — and the clash of cultures and races and traditions within it. The United States is the only country in the world with such a heterogeneous mix, uniquely able to invent rap music, Disney World, Las Vegas rock’n’roll, Hulk Hogan, Hollywood, and Stephen King.

A whole school of traditional economists is worried, however, that infatuation with the entertainment business and its glitzy success is symptomatic of a self-indulgent, spendthrift society deep into self-deceit. "The pre-eminence of entertainment is illusory success," warns Alien Lenz, economist for the Chemical Manufacturers Association. "It’s no substitute for manufacturing. We need balance in оur economy, not just the goods of instant gratification. The future of America is not in Michael Jackson records, $130 Reeboks, and Die Hard 2. The fact is, you can't make it on Mickey Mouse."

Or can you? Disney's Eisner is part of a powerful cadre of modern-day Hollywood moguls who have acquired what their predecessors only hoped to have: real global power - economic, social, political. They exercise it through their stewardship of global entertainment conglomerates in the midst of a communications revolution that has changed the nature of the world. Eisner, Fox's Rupert Murdoch, Paramount's Martin Davis, Steve Ross of Time Warner (which owns the parent company of Time), Ted Turner of Turner Communications, record executive Geffen, super-agent Michael Ovitz, and others have an astonishing influence on what the world sees, hears, reads, and thinks about.

"The most important megatrend of the century is the availability of free time," maintains Italian Foreign Minister Gianni De Michelis, who is working on a book about the new dynamics of global economy. "This is the reason the United States will remain the most important economy in the world — because its GNP is increasingly geared to entertainment, communications, education, and health care, all of which are about individuals 'feeling well,' as opposed to the nineteenth-century concept of services intended to protect the workplace and production."

De Michelis's notion illustrates another aspect of today's entertainment business: the lines [among] entertainment, communications, education, and information are increasingly blurred, and the modern U.S. entertainment company is uniquely positioned to provide software in all four areas.

Just as the auto industry determines the basic health and output of a host of other industries (steel, plastics, rubber), the American entertainment business has become a driving force behind other key segments of the country's economy. As a result of this so-called multiplier effect, the products and profits of dozens of U.S. industries are umbilically tied to American entertainment: fast food, communications technology, sportswear, toys and games, sporting goods, advertising, travel, consumer electronics, and so on. And the underlying strength of the American economy, many economists believe, has a lot to do with the tie-in of such businesses to the continued growth and world dominance of the American entertainment business and the popular culture that it exports.

"The role of entertainment as a multiplier is probably as great as, or greater than, any other industry's," observes Charles Waite, chief of the U.S. Census Bureau of Economic Programs. "Unfortunately, there's no exact way to measure its effect." But if the American entertainment industry's boundaries were drawn broadly enough to include all or most of its related businesses, some economists believe, it could be credited with generating more than $500 billion a year in sales.

Though the business is increasingly global, the domestic entertainment industry is still the backbone, and it is still thriving. The enormous profits of the '80s are being reduced by the recession. But the amount of time and money the average post-adolescent American spends in the thrall of entertainment remains astounding: 40 hours and $30 a week, if industry statistics are to be believed. By the time U.S. culture goes overseas, it has been tried, tested, and usually proved successful at home.

Americans this year [1990] will spend some $35 billion on records, audio- and videotapes, and CDs, almost as much as they will spend on Japanese hardware manufactured to play them. In the air-conditioned Nevada desert, the opening of two gargantuan amusement centers dedicated to gambling and show business — the Mirage and Excalibur hotels —is leading Las Vegas toward its biggest year ever. In Nashville the country-music business is keeping the local economy afloat amid a tide of regional recession. Felix Rohatyn, the fiscal doctor, says the only hope for New York City, laid low by the collapse of the boom-boom Wall Street economy of the '80s, is to turn it into a tourist attraction keyed to entertainment. But the industry is also undergoing profound change in its essential financial and cultural dynamic: moving toward the European and Asian customer as a major source of revenue while moving away from American network television as the creative and economic magnet. Rambo III earned $55 million at home but $105 million abroad.

Another effect of globalization: rather than waiting months or years before being released outside the country, American movies and television programs are beginning I enter the foreign marketplace in their infancy and even at birth — and boosting profits. Universal opened Back to the Future II in the United States, Europe, and Japan simultaneously. The film made more than $300 million and the receipts were available months earlier than usual, accruing millions of dollars in interest.

The pervasive American presence is producing a spate of protectionist measures around the world, despite vigorous protests by American trade negotiators. The twelve members of the European Community recently adopted regulations requiring that a majority of all television programs broadcast in Europe be made there "whenever practicable." Leading the resistance to the American invasion has been France and its Culture Minister, Jack Lang, a longtime Yankee basher who has proclaimed, "Our destiny is not to become the vassals of an immense empire of profit." Spurred by Lang, who has gone so far as to appoint a rock-'n'-roll minister to encourage French rockers, non-French programming is limited to 40 per cent of available air time on the state-run radio stations. But even Alain Finkelkraut, the highbrow French essayist and critic who is no friend of pop culture, concedes, "As painful as it may be for the French to bear, their rock stars just don't have the same appeal as the British or the Americans. Claude Francois can't compete with the Rolling Stones."

In Africa, American films are watched in American-style drive-in theaters to the accompaniment of hamburgers and fries, washed down with Coca-Cola. One of the biggest cultural events in Kenya in recent weeks has been the' national disco-dancing championships. But in Nairobi last month [November 1990], two dozen representatives of cultural organizations held a seminar on "Cultural Industry for East and Central Africa" and concluded that something must be done to roll back Western (primarily American) dominance of cinema, television, music, and dance. "Our governments must adopt conscious policies to stop the dazzle of Western culture from creeping up on us," Tafataona Mahoso, director of the National Arts Council of Zimbabwe, told the gathering.

In Japan too, where the influence of American entertainment is pervasive, the misgivings are growing. "Younger people are forgetting their native culture in favor of adopting American culture," says Hisao Kanaseki, professor of American literature at Tokyo's Komazawa University. "They're not going to see No theater or Kabuki theater. They're only interested in American civilization. Young people here have stopped reading their own literature."

Though movie admissions cost about $12 in Japan, customers seem willing to pay that to stand in the aisles for American films. "To the Japanese, American movies are hip and trendy, and Japanese audiences would rather die than be unfashionable," says William Ireton, managing director of Warner Bros. Japan.

Aside from the Islamic world, where laws based оn fundamentalist strictures often forbid access to any entertainment, there seem to be very few places where that is not the case. Even in secular Iraq, teenagers jam the half a dozen or so little shops in downtown Baghdad that sell pirated copies of American rock-'n'-roll tapes and where the walls are covered with posters of Madonna and Metallica.

The exponential growth of the American entertainment industry since the late 1970s has taken place in an era of extraordinary affection and goodwill toward the United States in the industrialized world. In Europe, Asia, and even Latin America, anti-Americanism is lower than at any time since the Vietnam War. The phenomenon is in part self-fulfilling: to a large extent that goodwill can be traced to the projection of America as seen through its popular culture rather than to the nation's actual political or social character. If anything, there is an increasing dissonance between what America really is and what it projects itself to be through its movies and music.

"Even in Nicaragua, when we were beating their asses in the most horrible way, they had this residual love for us," observes author William Styron, who visited the country during the contra war. "They love us for our culture our books, our heroes, our baseball players, our sports figures, our comic strips, our movies, everything. They had this consummate hatred of Reagan, but underneath was enormous love and affection for us as a kind of Arcadia."

The American entertainment business captures much that is appealing, exuberant — and excessive — about the American character. The fantasies and limitless imaginations of Americans are a big part of who they are. It is also, ironically, the source of America's moral authority. For it is in the country's popular culture — movies, music, thrillers, cartoons, Cosby — that the popular arts perpetuate the mythology of an America that to a large extent no longer exists: idealistic, rebellious, efficient, egalitarian. In the boom time of their popular culture, Americans have found new ways to merchandise their mythologies. This is what America manufactures in the twilight of the Reagan era.

Christopher Lasch, the social historian who wrote The Culture of Narcissism, sees the development of an entertainment-oriented economy as the final triumph of style over substance in the United States. Lasch believes the most singular American psychological characteristic — the desire for drama, escape, and fantasy — has come to dominate not only American culture and politics but even its commerce. "It's all of a piece. Its effect is the enormous trivialization of cultural goods. Everything becomes entertainment: news, political commentary, cultural analysis," he says. "The most significant thing about the process is that it abolishes &Ц, cultural distinctions, good and bad, high and low. It all becomes the same, and therefore all equally evanescent and ultimately meaningless."

Is the imperialism of American popcult smothering other cultures, destroying artistic variety and authenticity around the world to make way for the gaudy American mass synthetic? "It's a horrible experience to go to the most beautiful place in the world only to turn on Crossfire," says Leon Wieselthier, the literary editor of The New Republic.

"I've always felt that the export of our vulgarity is the hallmark of our greatness," says Styron, who lived for many years in Paris and whose books always sell well in Francev "I don't necessarily mean to be derogatory. The Europeans have always been fascinated by wanting to know what's going on with this big, ogreish subcontinent across the Atlantic, this potentially dangerous, constantly mysterious country called the U.S. of A." American popular culture fills a vacuum, vulgar or not. "French television is a wasteland; ours is a madhouse. But at least it's vital," says Styron. "'Dallas' and 'Knots Landing' and the American game shows are filling a need in France."

Susan Sontag, whose 1964 essay "Notes on 'Camp'" broke new ground in interpreting American popular culture, expresses doubt that the vitality of European culture will be extinguished by America's onslaught. "The cultural infrastructure is still there," she says, noting that great bookstores continue to proliferate in Europe. Rather than regarding Americans as cultural imperialists, she observes wryly, "many Europeans have an almost colonialist attitude toward us. We provide them with wonderful distractions, the feeling of diversion. Perhaps Europeans will eventually view us as a wonderfully advanced Third World country with a lot of rhythm — a kind of pleasure country, so cheap with the dollar down and all that singing and dancing and TV."

How long will the American cultural hegemony last? "I think we are living in a quasi-Hellenistic period," says Chilean philosopher Claudio Veliz, a visiting professor of cultural history at Boston University, who is writing a book on the subject.

"In 413 b.c, Athens ceased to be a world power, and yet for the next three hundred years, Greek culture, the culture of Athens, became the culture of the world." Much as the Greek language was the lingua franca of the world, Veliz sees the American version of English in the same role. "The reason Greek culture was so popular is very simple: the people liked it. People liked to dress like the Greeks, to build their buildings like the Greeks. They liked to practice sports like the Greeks; they liked to live like the Greeks. Yet there were no Greek armies forcing them to do it. They simply wanted to be like the Greeks."

If America's epoch is to last, the underlying character of American culture must remain true to itself as it is pulled toward a common global denominator by its entertainment engine. But danger signals are already present: too few movies characterized by nuance, or even good old American nuttiness; more and more disco-dance epics, sickly sweet romances, and shoot-'em-up, cut-'em-up, blow-'em-up Schwarzenegger characters; rock’n’roll that never gets beyond heavy breathing and head banging; blockbuster books that read like T-shirts. The combination of the foreign marketplace and a young domestic audience nourished on TV sitcoms, soaps, and MTV may be deadly.

The strength of American pop culture has always been in its originality and genuineness; Jimmy Stewart and Bruce Springsteen, West Side Story and The Graduate, Raymond Chandler and Ray Charles, the Beach Boys and Howdy Doody, James Dean and Janis Joplin. It would be a terrible irony if what America does best — celebrate its own imagination — becomes debased and homogenized by consumers merely hungry for anything labeled "Made in the U.S.A."

Another American century seems assured, though far different from the one now rusting out in the heartland. The question is. Will it be the real thing?