Films and their ideology

In his latest book, One Summer: America 1927, Bill Bryson writes about the U.S. film industry (among many other things). He states that the dominance of Hollywood in world film market meant that everywhere else people were watching U.S. films. This, on the other hand, meant that people got accustomed to U.S. sense of humour, way of speaking, way of seeing the world.

This is probably the case, but how uniform would the world view of mainstream Hollywood films actually be? Griffith's classic Birth of a Nation (1915) is very pro-KKK. Many films produced during the New Deal were almost pro-socialist (see Watson's book The Modern Mind).

Luckily, we can study this question in the light of The Pervert's Guide to Ideology. There, the philosopher Slavoj Žižek inspects a couple of dozen (mainly U.S.) films from the point of view of their contents as ideology. Can it be taken seriously? I'm not sure.

Let's take a look at the most obvious thing about films: they have to please the audience to make money. Thus, these films certainly did. But what kind of ideology or message do they actually convey? Avatar (and Star Wars, and maybe Lord of the Rings) tell us that a group of fanatic spiritualists with old-fashioned weapons and a lot of faith (or supernatural support) can wage a war successfully against a vast, technically superior army. Emm, that sounds familiar. Moreover, really many of the highest grossing films* have an element of a heroic journey in them. Harry Potter, Alice in Wonderland and many Disney films are probably about being different but finding one's self-esteem. All of that sounds like fun, but a bit generic, too: there might not be anything thoroughly American about it.

Maybe one could find more ideological content in bad or mediocre low budged films. Lately I have been thinking of a forgotten Finnish film called "Meiltahan tama kay" ("We ace it" or "This is our game") that I saw around 1980. I would recommend it to cultural anthropologists.  The content is .. random. The main character is a happy-go-lucky workman with wit and a good sense of humour. The opponents are sleazy, uptight or greedy. It seems to be important that the main character is rural and the opponents are from big cities (in this context: a big city is a town of 100 000+ inhabitants). There's some romance and music. In the end of course the good guys win.


* I have not watched Transformers nor Avengers nor Skyfall and probably won't watch them so I don't know about their contents.