Echoing a similar sentiment, President Barack Obama pledged in his first TV interview -- with the Arab satellite channel Al Arabiya -- that America under his watch would "listen with respect and not dictate" to the world. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has further announced that this country will no longer just throw around its military might, but would pursue a "smart power" approach by tempering the use of hard weaponry with the "soft power" of persuasion and cultural attraction. Or, as Madame Secretary's husband Bill has put it, America would now lead through the power of example instead of the example of power.
Here lies the connection between Hollywood and Washington as America seeks to refurbish its luster so tarnished during the Bush years.
Though the Connecticut Avenue think tanks might like to believe otherwise, the fact is that, for good and for ill, most Americans see the world -- and the world looks at America -- as much through the prism of our mass culture as through the formal institutions of our foreign policy. Through the Internet, we are all exposed to each other.
Unlike most countries, we are seen not only for what we are and what we do, but through the images we project globally through pop music, TV shows and Hollywood films. The warblings of Sinatra, Madonna and Metallica have been the muzak of the globalizing world order. The Bold and the Beautiful still has viewers in 82 countries. Films like Batman Lives and the Simpsons dominate silver screens across the planet.
From the outside looking in, this Hollywood prism is a double-edged sword. Back in 1986, Regis Debray, the old pal of Fidel and Che Guevara, presciently remarked that "there is more power in rock music, videos, blue jeans, fast food, news networks and TV satellites than the entire Red Army" because they carried the vibes of freedom across the Iron Curtain. Thanks to satellite technology, Oprah has become a subversive presence on the TV screens of shuttered Saudi wives. Yet, the spread of "entertainment values" where anything-goes-for-market-share has made many in the Muslim world wary of Hollywood. Her experiences trying to bridge the gap between traditional Islamic societies and the permissive West have led Queen Rania of Jordan to quip that American women are often seen in the Muslim world as "desperate housewives seeking sex in the city."
Looking out from inside is a similar story. Since less than ten percent of the famously insular and post-textual American public travels abroad annually, we get most of our impressions (and misconceptions) about the world beyond our borders from the image media, particularly from Hollywood films like the Mission: Impossible, James Bond or, god forbid, the Rambo series.
If politics in the information age is about whose story wins, then, given this reality, America's storytellers -- Hollywood -- have a starring role in defining America's presence globally. For that reason, they ought to to be recruited for the new "smart power" campaign, which must be two-fold -- projecting America abroad and projecting knowledge of others to ourselves at home.
The most important image to project abroad is that America is a plural, cosmopolitan society that works; a society in which each individual can write their own narrative despite race, creed or gender. Barack Obama, of course, is the poster child for this American idea. A film like Crash shows our pluralism with all the attendant frictions.
We should, however, toot our horn globally with a good dose of humility. After all, Britney Spears, with her celebrity meltdowns, and John Thain, with his scandalous bonuses, are also poster children for our way of life. To avoid hubris, we best remember the famous dictum of Reinhold Niebuhr that, for all our qualities, Americans are not "tutors of mankind in its pilgrimage to perfection."
Perhaps more important, traditional public and cultural diplomacy, which is aimed at persuading foreign publics of America's merits, should be inverted. In the global age, Americans have become inextricably tethered to others of whom we often have little understanding. As we move into the future, Americans not only need to develop a cosmopolitan capacity for empathy and understanding of those with whom we share this shrinking planet; we need to be educated to embrace the rules of engagement for globalization which require forging common and fair rules of the game.
If there is any singularly poignant lesson from the disastrous course America took after 9/11, it is that any alternative like "smart power" must be sustained by informed public support at home. Every shortcoming, misadventure, misstep or outright catastrophe of American foreign policy can be traced back to the insularity of the democratic public of the world's superpower. The cultural knowledge gap in our time is every bit as much a threat to national security as any military gap during the Cold War.
Imaginative knowledge, whether literature or cinema, is key to closing this gap. "Literature, " Salman Rushdie has said, "can take away that part of fear which is based on not knowing things. " Similarly, Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, says, "The news media is supposed to serve on aspect of our needs -- information. The other aspect must be satisfied elsewhere through imaginative knowledge. Part of the reason people liked my book was because they could experience through reading it what a young girl experienced in a country called and Islamic Republic. And they realized that her desires and aspirations were not very different from their own." Marjane Satrapi's 2007 film Persepolis is a fine example of cinematic insight into others. So, of course, is Slumdog Millionaire.
Clearly, one important component of America's "smart power" strategy must thus involve the storytellers themselves who so influence the world's image of America and America's image of the world -- Hollywood's producers, writers and filmmakers. They themselves must be educated to adopt a globalized mentality, whether through their own efforts or prompting by the State Department.
In this way, Hollywood could become more than the purveyor of amusing distractions in hard times. It could be part of the "deep coalition" to help make the world safe for interdependence, which must be America's global strategy as it moves into an era where it will not always be on top.
In what Fareed Zakaria calls the coming "post-American" era, we will have to compete for hearts and minds just as Chinese epics like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon vie for the silver screen and Mexican, Brazilian and South Korean soaps challenge Days of Our Lives on the global boob tube. The "rise of the rest" wrought by globalization and the spread of technology has changed the equation. The John Wayne-era assumption that America could write the script for the whole world is over, both in Washington and Hollywood.
Nathan Gardels and Mike Medavoy are co-authors of American Idol After Iraq: Competing for Hearts and Minds in the Global Media Age.
If we had foreign directors making movies only about 8 Mile in Detroit, then over to an award winning documentry in East Palo Alto and Compton, a comedy set in New Orleans' Ninth ward, followed by a romantic musical based in Flint, Michigan, at some point you'd go WTF...
a whisper in the Bollywood market.
Shah Rukh Khan, Amitabh Bachchan, Hrithik Roshan,
Priyanka Chopra, Rani Mukherjee, Ashwaira Rai,
and almost anybody named Kapoor,
rule the silver screen there.
Nice try with that " relevance " thing, tho'...
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too hard...
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a whisper in the Bollywood market.
Shah Rukh Khan, Amitabh Bachchan, Hrithik Roshan,
Priyanka Chopra, Rani Mukherjee, Ashwaira Rai,
and almost anybody named Kapoor,
rule the silver screen there.
Nice try with that " relevance " thing, tho'...
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I appreciated Slumdog but also classify it as "poverty porn." We know poverty exists. Some readers might be experiencing it. If you have the means, feed someone today.
Raj Kapoor did not feel it necessary
to use British actors and British directors
in HIS Hindi-movies!
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Pressure from the State Department is scary; having them decide who is naughty or nice has gotten us into this mess, the "Quiet American"?. Any defining of what is to be presented is censorship and makes boring programming. Fine if you want to appeal to a bunch of Prius driving psueds but accomplishes very little. Did Roger & Me, really revolutionize the labor relations in the auto industry?
Hollywood is not the evangelical pulpit of the whole food shopping elite. They make films that sell en mass, for every Slum dog millioniare, there are 100's of DIe Hards and Legally Blonds. People want to go to the movies to be entertained. Life is tough and paying to see a film that tells you this is just plain masochistic, i'd stay at home, look at my 401K, listening to Leonard Cohen if I wanted a downer. You are worried that foreigners will think we are cheez wiz gulping morons, so we should project a more cultured approach? they wont buy em.
You cannot change perceptions of America by making a film featuring Mel Gibson as a Rabbi working for Free Palestine. The "we can win, my god's bigger than yours!" is part of our dna. You don't need a State Department Epic, you need constant open reporting, education and time.