Does Hollywood have a negative impact on the world?

Yes

4 of 65

by Christopher Kendalls

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Hollywood portrays society in a very limited light, taking a very narrow, insular approach in a way that can have a negative impact upon individuals that are impressionable and do not or are not willing to take a look into how people live for themselves. In part it can be very entertaining but too much exposure to it can warp your opinion of reality, just like anything else. Someone in a small town can have a warped opinion of what life in the big city is like because producers typically show the same few cities on screen; New York City, which is like 90% of the movies out there, Chicago, L.A. and perhaps Atlanta or Miami. On a rare occasion, like in Jason's Lyric, you get to see Houston or a city off the beaten path; at times some of the more interesting movies you see is when Hollywood is showing something other than mainstream urban America, when cities like Detroit, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh are shown, as it was when Cleveland was shown in the movie Antwone Fisher. That movie showcased a realistic portrayal of the city I had grown to love coming up, another great movie in which the city is as much of an actor as the cast is Four Brothers, a gritty display of inner city Detroit at it's best (though it was actually shot in Canada).

On the other hand, Hollywood often shows a very biased, ignorant portrayal of rural American, particularly Appalachia. Though movies like North Country often highlight the gritty, hard working rural America (which is a realistic view) there are always the same shallow stereotypes that exist in regular films. The best, more realistic three-dimensional portrayals of individuals often come form independent filmmakers that create films for the pure art of it, as opposed to monetary concerns. These films are often difficult to view and enjoy because they are not a linear in their approach and do not develop the plot for the audience; they tend to be abstract and leave it up to interpretation. These films share a lot in common with foreign films because those audiences are acculturated to appreciate such work, as opposed to American audiences that often like the plot to be "good enough", yet "dumbed down" for them. American cinema doesn't leave a lot of room for experimental filmmakers to create a truly profitable film; what American cinema does do, is provide a lot of room for cinematographers and art directors to create a technical masterpiece, which often hides and sublimates a lot of the inferior acting and poor plot devices that a lot of the formulaic films employ.

Hollywood cannot be fully to blame for it's impact on the world, because for the most part audiences have not responded favorably to some of the more experimental stages that it has went through. Audiences were very gritty and rough in the seventies as a direct response to the fluff that had existed in earlier decades, for a number of reasons, and films were very counter cultural, which was probably a good thing for Hollywood at that time. What occurred was that some of the best films of that time were created by directors such as Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen and others that laid down the groundwork for nineties directors like Spike Lee to come into their own. When Steven Spielberg ushered in the Blockbuster era in the eighties audiences quickly forgot about that whole era and were caught up in a different artistic movement we had enjoyed under directors like Stanley Kubrick. Many of the values changed as well because Hollywood was infatuated over the money they were making in the eighties, and did not want to take a chance on incurring losses. By the end of the nineties movies such as American Beauty and Magnolia began to show a more artistic side to film making that was desperately needed for years; the time was right and the nation needed to evolve from the emptiness that was on the big screen at that time.

We weren't ready to see ourselves through that lens however; when movies began to explore controversial themes that showcased values outside of the Judeo-Christian ethos that asked those tough questions reminded us of how godless some of us had become it was a bitter pill to swallow. I was out there myself psychologically and far removed from God or anything else that was positive in my life and found the entertainment to be magical, compelling and disturbing at the same time. On some level the films were outright depressing, which is how I feel about a film like Prozac Nation. The movies were too real and failed to offer any real escape from regular life and began to fail for good reason; it wasn't that they weren't good, but became too weird. So yes, Hollywood has a negative impact on society, one that we have a love/hate relationship with because it is a convenient, yet terribly expensive, way to pass the time. We could have a more positive Hollywood, but do we truly want one ..

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