Franco Moretti—Planet Hollywood

Franco Moretti
Planet Hollywood

in the 1920s American films were already enjoying a worldwide hegemony: what brought it to a halt was the invention of sound, which elevated language into a powerful barrier, supporting the quick take-off of the various national film industries. The abrogation of language in action films is a powerful factor in turning the tide around.

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relatively speaking, comedies do not travel well. ...since jokes and many other ingredients of comedy rely heavily on short circuits between signifier and signified, they are weakened by translation—and indeed comic films reached the apex of their world diffusion long ago, before the age of sound.

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we usually associate the national spirit with the sublime (et pour cause: unknown soldiers, torn flags, battlefields, martyrs . . .) yet, what makes a nation laugh turns out to be just as distinctive as what makes it cry. If not more distinctive, in fact: the same sublime objects reappear relentlessly from one culture to another, whereas the targets of comic aggression seem to be much more idiosyncratic, more variable.

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In the mid-fifties, not a single film for children made Variety’s top twenty for the year, with the only possible exceptions of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Around the World in 80 Days: both children’s films in a very dubious sense (and both drawn from nineteenth-century French novels...

Today, the top twenty routinely includes four or five children’s films, and the reason, I suspect, is quite simple: money. These films are more successful because much more money is spent on children’s entertainment. But this extra income is not available everywhere, and the result is the skewed distribution of Figure 4, where the (relative) absence of the genre tends to overlap with the poverty of each given country. ...

‘Children’s films’ is a sloppy definition, of course: it points to the audience, not the film—and to an audience which is moreover quite problematic. Children, after all, don’t usually go to the movies by themselves and, as adults must take them, a little generic paradox ensues: whom should the film be for—the adult, or the child? Faced with this problem, the fifties offered either straightforward fairy tales...or those Jules Verne novels I mentioned earlier (which were much more successful than the fairy tales: another sign of a market directed at the adult). But today the two forms have converged, blending into a hybrid which appeals to children and adults alike...—these are stories designed for a new human species of savvy children and silly grown-ups (Homo puerilis). Their god is Steven Spielberg...

In one film after another...Spielberg has not only chosen stories in which children and adults are somehow involved together, but where the ambiguities so typical of (adult) life are defused by the (child’s) desire for polarization so well described by Bruno Bettelheim.