Hollywood, and the rest of the American film and TV industry, has never been just about entertainment. It’s a values machine. Domestically, it reflects the nation’s dominant political mood, and internationally it’s an arm of soft power exporting American standards overseas.

I grew up in the heyday of American post-war liberalism. The abiding message of most of the American movies I watched as a kid was this: ain’t suburban consumerism just dandy?

Think of Elliott, the child hero of E.T., playing with his Star Wars toys and riding his bike past white picket fences.

Politically, the movies promoted values like anti-racism. A few years before I was born Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, mocked white bigotry and showed a young black man and white woman falling in love. It won Oscars. When I was six, All the President’s Men warned of the overweening power of right-wing president Richard Nixon.

Consider the movies which dominated cinema from my birth until now: the anti-war MASH; the pro-LGBT Cabaret; One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest - a sympathetic portrayal of mental illness; Salvador - attacking American foreign policy; The Colour Purple - denouncing racism; Rain Man - about a man with autism; the anti-establishment Dead Poets Society; Dances with Wolves - which honours native American culture; Zero Dark Thirty - critiquing the War on Terror; Brokeback Mountain - about a gay love affair; the harrowing 12 Years a Slave; Dallas Buyers Club - about HIV; Moonlight - about a gay black man; Don’t Look Up - which satirises climate denial.

In earlier decades, though, Hollywood was more conservative - reflecting the political culture of the time. The 1950s were filled with movies bristling with anti-communist paranoia - especially in science-fiction like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and the in-your-face Red Planet Mars. Equally in your face was The Red Menace drama.

American westerns were one huge paean to conservatism. John Wayne was right-wing America made flesh. He hated High Noon. To Wayne, it wasn’t a classic western but commie slop.

So American culture........

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