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CounterPunch Exclusives

When the World Stops Dreaming in American

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

I was in a low-key New York bar on Seventh Avenue in the mid-80s when I became aware of the steely eyes of American playwright and actor Sam Shepard—who didn’t know me from Adam—watching me buy a drink. I was stuffing the change into my wallet when he slapped a hand on my arm.

“Not like that,” he said. “Like this.” He took the cash back out and placed it on the bar. “That way your barman can dip in whenever you want another.”

It was a small but memorable lesson in trust from someone best known for reshaping deeply American myths—of family, masculinity, the West and success—into edgy psychological drama.

Maybe Mr Shepard’s influence was already at work: I would soon write an Off-Broadway play myself. Though the fact that he’d played Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff may have been the real bourbon in the birthday punch.

Today, the relationship between the rest of the world and Hollywood is more complicated. Hollywood flourished in the postwar decades not just because of the films it made, but because of the momentum America projected. To much of the outside world, America meant economic growth, technological ambition, cultural openness and a dizzying sense that the future was being invented there—and nowhere else.

It would be simplistic to suggest that today’s anti-American sentiment explains Hollywood’s recent struggles abroad. Once-dominant Hollywood formulas, including the superhero cycle, no longer command the automatic international enthusiasm they once did—though spectacular exceptions remain.

Meanwhile, non-American entertainment industries and traditions are finding increasingly global audiences—from Chinese cinema and Squid Game to RRR and Japanese anime franchises. Audiences are increasingly embracing stories rooted in local and regional cultures, and no longer need Hollywood to serve as the centre of their popular culture.

In some pockets of the Middle East and Latin America, anti-American sentiment has also evolved into subtler forms of cultural distancing—not necessarily organised boycotts, but a waning appetite for American visions of male heroism and moral authority.

Recently, I was eating fish and chips with a Buddhist on a boat on the River Thames. We were moored opposite the London Eye, between Westminster and Embankment. As we watched the river darken, my companion said: “You know, with everything going on in America right now, I’m not so sure I want to sit through another American action movie. Not one where they get to save the world.”

I remember feeling saddened that those of us who had once lived so happily in the United States should now find ourselves encountering so many people—even Buddhists—who no longer wished to buy what America was selling, including its films.

If anti-American sentiment becomes more organised, institutional or state-driven, I suspect Hollywood’s influence will weaken further. Markets will close,........

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