10.5937/kultura1442153m = Declining of political culture in Hollywood

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to show a trend in which, by the 1990s, American media became more and more depoliticized. In that light, historical trend of media depolitization finds its expression in contemporary Hollywood filmmaking, as well as in other areas of cultural life. The paper states that the vast majority of studio executives, altogether with directors, want little to do with projects that might be called political. Declining of political culture has become one of the most important features of contemporary Hollywood cinema. Even films that engage in politics usually do that in unhistorical and incorrect manner, vastly using irony. The major problem is the fact that when Hollywood deals with social problems such as class struggle, racism and poverty, it perpetuates the myth that hurdles in life can be overcome by means of either luck or hard work. Hollywood cinema fails to deal responsibly with today's important social and political questions. On the other hand, we are facing the situation where most of the new films neglect political issues. Postmodern cinema represented in the works of Tarantino, Rodriguez, Coen Brothers, Stone, or many other film makers, take as their essential point the references from other films, using their images and recycling them. The images in those films function as the interchangable signs, with meanings of their own, a closed world of media-based references. The Baudrillard and Jameson theory of simulation is used to explain the process where signs lose any relationship with reality in contemporay media. Politics, if it exists in the cinema at all, becames more than ever a part of the entertainment culture, a sign with no meaning. The postmodern turn in culture enables us to encounter the spirit of antipolitics in the most developed form so far. While New Hollywood directors largely celebrated the liberal democratic legacy during the 1960s and the 1970s, postmodern pictures show tendency toward declining of political culture.