8.3 Movies and Culture
Learning Objectives
- Recognize how movies reflect cultural attitudes, trends, and events.
- Indicate how movies influence culture.
Movies Mirror Culture
The relationship between movies and culture involves a complicated dynamic; while American movies certainly influence the mass culture that consumes them, they also represent an integral part of that culture, a product of it, and therefore a reflection of dominant concerns, attitudes, and beliefs. In considering the relationship between film and culture, keep in mind that, while certain ideologies may prevail in a given era, American culture represents a diverse population that constantly changes from one period to the next. Mainstream films produced in the late 1940s and into the 1950s, for example, reflected the conservatism that dominated the sociopolitical arenas of the time. However, by the 1960s, a reactionary youth culture began to emerge in opposition to the dominant institutions, and these anti-establishment views soon found their way onto the screen—a far cry from the attitudes most commonly represented only a few years earlier.
Some characterize movies as America’s storytellers. Not only do Hollywood films reflect certain commonly held attitudes and beliefs about what it means to be American, but they also portray contemporary trends, issues, and events, serving as records of the eras that produced them. Consider, for example, films about the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks: Fahrenheit 9/11, World Trade Center, United 93, and others. These films grew out of a seminal event of the time, one that preoccupied the consciousness of Americans for years after it occurred.
Birth of a Nation
In 1915, director D. W. Griffith established his reputation with the highly successful film The Birth of a Nation, based on Thomas Dixon’s novel The Clansman, a pro-segregation narrative about the American South during and after the Civil War. At the time, The Birth of a Nation stood as the longest feature film ever made, at almost 3 hours, and contained huge battle scenes that amazed and delighted audiences. Griffith’s storytelling ability helped solidify the narrative style that would go on to dominate feature films. He also experimented with editing techniques such as close-ups, jump cuts, and parallel editing which helped make the film an artistic achievement. The Birth of a Nation would go on to make more money than any other film in the silent film era (though Griffith would lose a hefty portion of it making his next film, the box office flop Intolerance).
Griffith’s film found success largely because it captured the social and cultural tensions of the era. As American studies specialist Lary May has argued, “[Griffith’s] films dramatized every major concern of the day (May, 1997).” In the early 20th century, fears about recent waves of immigrants had led to certain racist attitudes in mass culture, with “scientific” theories of the time purporting to link race with inborn traits like intelligence and other capabilities. Additionally, the dominant political climate, largely a reaction against populist labor movements, reflected the viewpoints of conservative elitism, eager to attribute social inequalities to natural human differences (Darity). According to a report by the New York Evening Post after the film’s release, even some Northern audiences “clapped when the masked riders took vengeance on Negroes (Higham).” However, the outrage many groups expressed about the film serves as a good reminder that American culture does not behave monolithically. Strong contingents in opposition to dominant ideologies can and do exist.
While critics praised the film for its narrative complexity and epic scope, the film outraged others and even started riots at several screenings because of its highly controversial, openly racist attitudes, which glorified the Ku Klux Klan and blamed former slaves for the destruction of the war (Higham). Many Americans joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in denouncing the film, and the National Board of Review eventually cut a number of the film’s racist sections (May). This reflects the cultural attitudes of the early 1900s, a time when the divided nation enforced Jim Crow laws and segregation. In 1992, the Library of Congress classified the film among the “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant films” in U.S. history.
“The American Way”
Until the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, American films after World War I generally reflected the neutral, isolationist stance that prevailed in politics and culture. However, after the United States entered the war in Europe, the government enlisted Hollywood to help with the war effort, opening the federal Bureau of Motion Picture Affairs in Los Angeles. Bureau officials served in an advisory capacity on the production of war-related films, an effort with which the studios cooperated. As a result, films tended to feature patriotic themes designed to produce feelings of pride and confidence in America and to designate it and its allies as forces of good. For instance, critically acclaimed Casablanca paints a picture of the ill effects of fascism, illustrates the values that heroes like Victor Laszlo hold, and depicts America as a place for refugees to find democracy and freedom (Digital History).
These early World War II films sometimes became overtly propagandist, intended to influence American attitudes rather than present a genuine reflection of American sentiments toward the war. The U.S. Army developed Frank Capra’s Why We Fight films, for example, first produced in 1942 and later shown to general audiences; they delivered a war message through narrative (Koppes & Black, 1987). As the war continued, however, filmmakers opted to forego patriotic themes for a more serious reflection of American sentiments, as exemplified by films like Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat.
Youth versus Age: From Counterculture to Mass Culture
In Mike Nichols’s 1967 film The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman, as the film’s protagonist, enters into a romantic affair with the wife of his father’s business partner. However, Mrs. Robinson and the other adults in the film fail to understand the young, alienated hero, who eventually rebels against them. The Graduate, which brought in more than $44 million at the box office, reflected the attitudes of many members of a young generation growing increasingly dissatisfied with what they perceived as repressive social codes established by their more conservative elders (Dirks).
This baby boomer generation came of age during the Korean and Vietnam wars. Not only did the youth culture express a cynicism toward the patriotic, prowar stance of their World War II–era elders, but they displayed a fierce resistance toward institutional authority in general, an antiestablishmentism epitomized in the 1967 hit film Bonnie and Clyde. In the film, a young, outlaw couple sets out on a cross-country bank-robbing spree until they’re killed in a violent police ambush at the film’s close (Belton).
Bonnie and Clyde’s violence provides one example of the ways films at the time tested the limits of permissible on-screen material. The youth culture’s liberal attitudes toward formally taboo subjects like sexuality and drugs began to emerge in film during the late 1960s. Like Bonnie and Clyde, Sam Peckinpah’s 1969 Western The Wild Bunch, displays an early example of aestheticized violence in film. The wildly popular Easy Rider (1969)—containing drugs, sex, and violence—may owe a good deal of its initial success to liberalized audiences. And in the same year, Midnight Cowboy, one of the first Hollywood films to receive an X rating (in this case for its sexual content), won three Academy Awards, including Best Picture (Belton). As the release and subsequently successful reception of these films attest, what at the decade’s outset had started as countercultural had, by the decade’s close, become mainstream.
The Hollywood Production Code
When the MPAA (originally MPPDA) first banded together in 1922 to combat government censorship and to promote artistic freedom, the association attempted a system of self-regulation. However, by 1930—in part because of the transition to talking pictures—renewed criticism and calls for censorship from conservative groups made it clear to the MPPDA that the loose system of self-regulation did not offer enough protection. As a result, the MPPDA instituted the Production Code, or Hays Code (after MPPDA director William H. Hays), which remained in place until 1967. The code, which according to motion picture producers concerned itself with ensuring that movies remained “directly responsible for spiritual or moral progress, for higher types of social life, and for much correct thinking (History Matters),” became strictly enforced starting in 1934, putting an end to most public complaints. However, many people in Hollywood resented its restrictiveness. After a series of Supreme Court cases in the 1950s regarding the code’s restrictions on freedom of speech, the Production Code grew weaker until its replacement in 1967 with the MPAA rating system (American Decades Primary Sources, 2004).
MPAA Ratings
As films like Bonnie and Clyde and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) tested the limits on violence and language, it became clear that the Production Code needed replacement. In 1968, the MPAA adopted a rating system to identify films in terms of potentially objectionable content. By providing officially designated categories for films that would not have passed Production Code standards of the past, the MPAA opened a way for films to deal openly with mature content. The ratings system originally included four categories: G (suitable for general audiences), M (equivalent to the PG rating of today), R (restricted to adults over age 16), and X (equivalent to today’s NC-17).
The MPAA rating systems, with some modifications, still function today. Before release in theaters, studios submit their films to the MPAA board for a screening, during which advisers decide on the most appropriate rating based on the film’s content. However, the MPAA does not require studios to have them screen releases ahead of time—some studios release films without the MPAA rating at all. Commercially, less restrictive ratings generally provide more benefits, particularly in the case of adult-themed films that have the potential to earn the most restrictive rating, the NC-17. Some movie theaters will not screen an NC-17-rated movie. When filmmakers receive a more restrictive rating than desired, they may resubmit the film for review after editing out objectionable scenes (Dick, 2006).
The New War Film: Cynicism and Anxiety
Unlike the patriotic war films of the World War II era, many of the films about U.S. involvement in Vietnam reflected strong antiwar sentiment, criticizing American political policy and portraying war’s damaging effects on those who survived it. Films like Dr. Strangelove (1964), M*A*S*H (1970), The Deer Hunter (1978), and Apocalypse Now (1979) portray the military establishment in a negative light and dissolve clear-cut distinctions, such as the “us versus them” mentality, of earlier war films. These, and the dozens of Vietnam War films produced in the 1970s and 1980s—Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989) and Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987), for example—reflect the sense of defeat and lack of closure Americans felt after the Vietnam War and the emotional and psychological scars it left on the nation’s psyche (Dirks, 2010; Anderegg, 1991). A spate of military and politically themed films emerged during the 1980s as America recovered from defeat in Vietnam, while at the same time facing anxieties about the ongoing Cold War with the Soviet Union.
Fears about the possibility of nuclear war felt very real during the 1980s, and some film critics argue that these anxieties manifested not only in overtly political films of the time but also in the popularity of horror films, like Halloween and Friday the 13th, which feature a mysterious and unkillable monster, and in the popularity of the fantastic in films like E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Star Wars, which offer imaginative escapes (Wood, 1986).
Movies Shape Culture
Just as movies reflect the anxieties, beliefs, and values of the cultures that produce them, they also help to shape and solidify a culture’s beliefs. Sometimes the influence is trivial, as in the case of fashion trends or figures of speech. After the release of Flashdance in 1983, for instance, torn T-shirts and leg warmers became hallmarks of 1980s fashion (Pemberton-Sikes, 2006). However, sometimes the impact can lead to profound social or political reform or reshape ideologies.
Film and the Rise of Mass Culture
During the 1890s and up until about 1920, American culture experienced a period of rapid industrialization. As people moved from farms to centers of industrial production, urban areas began to hold larger and larger concentrations of the population. At the same time, film and other methods of mass communication (advertising and radio) developed, whose messages concerning tastes, desires, customs, speech, and behavior spread from these population centers to outlying areas across the country. Early mass-communication media attempted to wear away regional differences and create a more homogenized, standardized culture.
Film played a key role in this development, as viewers began to imitate the speech, dress, and behavior of their common heroes on the silver screen (Mintz, 2007). In 1911, the Vitagraph company began publishing The Motion Picture Magazine, America’s first fan magazine. Originally conceived as a marketing tool to keep audiences interested in Vitagraph’s pictures and major actors, The Motion Picture Magazine helped create the concept of the film star in the American imagination. Fans became obsessed with the off-screen lives of their favorite celebrities, like Pearl White, Florence Lawrence, and Mary Pickford (Doyle, 2008).
American Myths and Traditions
What does it mean to live like an American? This country’s citizens formulate their identity based on the commonly held beliefs or myths about shared experiences, and the media often disseminates and reinforces these American myths. One example of a popular American myth, one that dates back to the writings of Thomas Jefferson and other founders, emphasizes the value of individualism—a celebration of the common man or woman as a hero or reformer. With the rise of mass culture, the myth of the individual became increasingly appealing because it provided people with a sense of autonomy and individuality in the face of an increasingly homogenized culture. The hero myth finds embodiment in the Western, a popular film genre from the silent era through the 1960s, in which the lone cowboy, a seminomadic wanderer, makes his way in a lawless, and often dangerous, frontier, as in 1952’s High Noon. From 1926 until 1967, Westerns accounted for nearly a quarter of all films produced. In other films, like Frank Capra’s 1946 movie It’s a Wonderful Life, the individual triumphs by standing up to injustice, reinforcing the belief that one person can make a difference in the world (Belton). And in more recent films, hero figures such as Tony Starks (Marvel cinematic universe), Furiosa (Mad Max: Fury Road), and John Wick (John Wick) have continued to emphasize individualism.
Social Issues in Film
As D. W. Griffith recognized nearly a century ago, film has enormous power as a medium to influence public opinion. Ever since Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation sparked strong public reactions in 1915, filmmakers have produced movies that address social issues, sometimes subtly, and sometimes very directly. Recent examples include Parasite (2019), which offers a scathing critique of class inequality, and The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020), which examines the political turmoil of the 1960s. Additionally, the rise of streaming platforms has made it easier for audiences to access documentaries like I Am Greta (2020), which highlights the climate crisis, and Collective (2019), which investigates a corruption scandal in Romania. These films have the potential to shape cultural attitudes and drive social change.
In the 2010s and 2020s, documentaries continued to enjoy significant cultural and commercial success. Films like Fyre (2019), which exposes a fraudulent music festival, and Free Solo (2018), which documents a daring rock climbing feat, have demonstrated the power of documentary filmmaking to capture audiences’ attention and spark conversations. Moreover, the growth of streaming platforms has allowed for the distribution of a wider range of documentaries, including those with niche or politically charged topics
Michael Moore remains a prominent figure in documentary filmmaking, known for his politically charged films that often criticize corporate power and government policies. His 2007 film, Sicko, offered a scathing critique of the American healthcare system, sparking debates about universal healthcare. While some critics have accused Moore of producing propagandistic material under the label of documentary because of his films’ strong biases, his films proved popular with audiences, with four of his documentaries ranking among the highest-grossing documentaries of all time. Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), which criticized the second Bush administration and its involvement in the Iraq War, earned $119 million at the box office, making it the most successful documentary of all time (Dirks, 2006). Other filmmakers, such as Ava DuVernay and Raoul Peck, have also used documentaries to address important social and political issues, demonstrating the ongoing power of this medium to shape public opinion.
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