Does Hollywood have a negative impact on the world?

Yes

5 of 65

by Aldo Bonincontro

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Hollywood means "The great industry of American cinema"; it produces I don't know how many hundreds of films, cartoons, fictions, serials and so on every year and distributes them in all the world.
So, hundreds of millions of people of all continents, if they have money enough to pay a ticket and go to the cinema or buy and watch a DVD at home, have the chance of knowing the "heroes" and the "great stories" of American films.

It's surely a good thing that cinema can circulate across the world because cineme is culture, but there are, at least, two great problems: the first, is that not only American cinema should circulate and be distributed worldwide, but also the productions of the other Countries of the world, surely, not worse than American movies.
Unluckily, in this wicked world, good quality and equal opportunities seem not to agree with profits in too many cases.

The second problem is the average quality of all these American films and just this has the greatest impact in the worldly public.
Nothing to argue if American cinema were full of masterpieces, like 40-50 years ago; instead, the largest part of American movies are of scarce quality, even trash-movies, made in series like those of "James Bond", "Rambo", "Rocky", "Mission Impossible", "Indiana Jones", "Stars Wars" and many others.
Any good and original idea is absent and we must see always an infinite "cooking again" of the same soup.

In addition, many American films are full of violence, about war or crime and this violence is the absolute protagonist, with great attention to show well the blood from bullet wounds, the fightings with tens of blows, each one could crash the head of a buffalo while, instead, our American heroes survive and win, "making the right thing", of course.
Also the famous "The Passion", by Mel Gibson, is a carnage, with a careful and realistic attention to all the wounds and injuries suffered by Jesus during his Passion.
Too little, in my opinion, to communicate whatever moral message.
All this violence and blood makes absolutely secondary the plot, the recitation and deeper feelings to communicate and make arise in the public.

But violence is not enough, alone, to catch the public; special effects created by computer, impossible to imagine only 20 years ago, are absolutely the rule, to make even more impressive and spectacular all this violence and adventures, with the usual rough fight among the "good" and the "wicked".
These special effects cost a huge of money and, today, this is Hollywood cinema; a glittering, spectacular box, but nearly totally emptied of content.

So, American soldiers are always described as the generous heroes against Islamic terrorists (the "fashion" of the moment); the problem is that the U.S. can win their wars only in these "patrioctic" movies and American people dream,... dream...and dream watching them, while reality (in Afghanistan, Iraq, MO and elsewhere) is really depressing.

All this stuff has surely a negative influence on wordly public, because it makes circulate too much violence, lies, exaggerations and prejudices, also racial.
Another writer on HK, writing on this issue, underscores also the subtle racism present in various Hollywood films against Black people, always depicted as criminal, violent, unreliable or ridiculous and grotesque.
Furthermor e, very few are, still today, the Black actors who were allowed to reach the success like White actors and Hollywood remains a particularly difficult environment for Black actors.
I agree with this writer and I add that, in many of these movies, Black characters are usually the first or the easiest to be killed for some reason.
All those films are scarce, but they cost always a fortune; only the efficiency of marketing activities performed by the majors save them from a total commercial "flop".

This reality seems known in the world and causes negative reactions in public, making it believe that cinema, today, is only a commercial mass-product.
This is not true, and, to demonstrate it, it's enough to make you remember the best Italian cinema since 1946 until the 1970's, that produced splendid, unforgettable films, often more beautiful and original than those made in Hollywood, spending 100 times less for every film.
Italian actors are often great artists but nobody of them is as rich as a medium American actor, protagonist of serials or fictions.
Today, also Italian cinema produces few good films, for the same commercial trend at the expense of quality and creativity, but it keeps on not having anything to learn from Hollywood, about quality.
I can see this, not only because I'm Italian; so, I invite all of you to watch Italian films (of the present and of the past), in the English versions, if you don't believe me.

Also too many American actors of the last generations, in every genre, seem to play all in the same way, with the same words, faces and expressions, always following the same cliche'.

All this mediocrity (in the best cases) is negative because it makes get public out of cinemas equal to what it were before, giving them nothing good.
Even American films dealing with hot and delicate social or political problems, too frequently can't do without an excess of spectacularity and superficiality, trying to run after easy incomes for the pressure of their production managers on film directors.

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