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Abstract
The concept of transnational cinema, in increasing use over the last decade, remains one whose sense and significance in the context of production, thematic organization and reception remains fuzzy, eliciting similar debates as the concept of globalization more generally did before it. The paper attempts to re-specify what the concept of the transnational could mean for film and to locate in the process some distinct variants or modalities of the transnational. The paper does this through an exploration of the production and aesthetics, politics and narrative structure of three Hollywood blockbusters, locating each within distinct global configurations of the contemporary political order, and identifying their isomorphism with wider public discourses and policies. The ‘transnational’ in these specific films describes, not merely a cross-national mix of production locales, actors, narrative elements and distribution venues, but a narrative imaginary that, conjoined with Hollywood’s global reach – its economy of pleasure - can engender a dynamic through which diverse audiences may be drawn into the perceptual and affective space of the neo-colonial or imperial order.
Notes
* An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Perspectives on Transnational Film/Media Studies Conference, NYU Abu Dhabi, May 2014.
1. Though the political and economic processes that engendered globalization are said to have begun in 1944 with the Bretton Woods Conference, the term began to be used in the 1970s and only came into scholarly usage in the mid-1980s, taking off in the 1990s. See Fiss and Hirsch (Citation2005) and Osterhammel and Petersson (Citation2005).
2. Choi (Citation2012, 4–5) makes a similar point.
3. Much discussions that rely on this category overlook and elide issues of ‘class’ for example, whilst some imply or assume the unproblematic inclusion of ethnic and racial collectivities (among others) that co-inhabit the ‘national’ space.
4. Though Hollywood remains dominant, there are increasing challenges to its hegemonic hold- even the label ‘Hollywood’ has become slippery in the era of co-productions and expanding non-US media empires that have a stake in the US film industry (O’Regan Citation1992). Nevertheless, there remain deep foundations for Hollywood’s dominance (see the interesting discussions by Scott Citation2002, 2004) and indeed, by some accounts, it has an opportunity to maintain and expand its dominance through the new digital formats that are transforming production and distribution (Dixon and Foster Citation2011).
5. I use the term neo-colonial advisedly to signify the new relationship of dominance- subordination that emerges in the wake of formal independence from colonial rule. The term ‘post-colonial’ is usually used to refer to cultural production and criticism which addresses the continuing legacy of colonialism, discursively, psychically, and culturally, particularly in and for formerly subject societies and cultures. However, the concept of the neo-colonial specifically identifies a continuing but reshaped colonial relationship, with its continuing dynamic of economic dominance, resource extraction and political power, and thus highlights both parties to the asymmetric relationship equally. The term post-colonial, by contrast, remains referentially fuzzy in relation to both periodization and institutional dynamic– see Ella Shohat’s (Citation1992) critique of the use of the concept, with which this author is in agreement.
6. Shohat and Stam’s splendid work (Citation1994) examines the imperial imaginary in Hollywood film in great detail. See in particular their discussion of Raiders as a representative of this (146–152). They also discuss the intersection of gender in the film with colonial imperial tropes. See also Jack Shaheen’s (Citation2001) work on the representation of the Arab in Hollywood, including in Raiders.
7. When the museum director early on in the film communicates to Indiana Jones the fact that US military intelligence has given him the mission of going after the ark, he says: ‘Well, I mean that for nearly three thousand years man has been searching for the lost ark. It's not something to be taken lightly. No one knows its secrets. It's like nothing you've ever gone after before’. (italics added).
8. The Department of Defence and the US Marine Corps cooperated in the production of the film. It is noteworthy that throughout the first decade and half of the twenty-first century, wide swathes of Yemen were subjected to constant US drone attacks in which civilians were routinely killed.
9. This also valorises and privileges the discourses about the necessity of walls that are increasingly taking centre stage in global politics: walls against migrants in Europe; the Mexico US border wall; the walls set up and justified in Iraq between different religious communities etc. All these are an amplification and realization of the logic of counter-insurgency that was originally used by the US in Indo-China.