There’s an interesting article in the June issue of The Atlantic about the increasing globalization (now there’s a loaded word) of American movie-making, not just financially, but artistically (“Offshoring the Audience”). We all know that the juggernaut that is the American movie industry reaches far and wide, and has done so for decades, but in a market dominated by studios trying to sell to a global audience, what does that leave us here at home? An excerpt:
Inevitably, the pervasive Hollywood question “Is there an international end to this?” has consequences for what sorts of pictures get made in America. Many countries, France most loudly, have condemned incursions by American culture, lamenting all the film and TV bookings lost by indigenous creations. Probably they’re right. Every bit as alarming, though, is what this tendency is doing to Hollywood films. If France makes movies for the French, and America makes movies for the world, who’s left to make movies for America? Would masterpieces like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, played against a background of Washington senatorial skulduggery, and His Girl Friday, with its muzzle-loading, too-fast-to-translate comic dialogue, even get produced nowadays?
Here, alas, is the virus laying waste to modern Hollywood movies. What do, say, the Batman and Matrix pictures have in common, besides banality? Just for openers, insipid, infrequent dialogue. Why take the trouble to bang out good lines—supposing one can—if they’ll only be mistranslated for their real target markets, abroad? Both these movies could have been silents if they weren’t so loud. They’re overbearing, carelessly told, and gang-written into incomprehensibility. Small wonder they were tepidly welcomed in the United States. Americans at the movies are guilty of the same mistake in the early twenty-first century that grown-ups made at the movies in the 1980s: supposing that the pictures are made for them.