Modernist America Art Music Movies and the Globalization of American Culture
Richard Pells,Modernist America: Art, Music, Movies, and the Globalization of American Civilization, New Haven and London, 2012, ISBN-thirteen: 978-0300181739, 498 pp, in paperback edition $24
"The best history books do one of ii things: they alter one's mind or they tell a terrific story." So says Theodore K. Rabb, a distinguished Princeton Academy historian. *
Unfortunately, the volume under review fails on both these counts. In a tome of almost 500 pages, far longer than it demand be, Richard Pells, a University of Texas professor emeritus and frequent Fulbright program grantee who specializes in twentieth century American cultural history, has produced neither a groundbreaking report nor an engaging historical narrative.
The main point of Pells's opus is that "the Usa was, and continues to be … a consumer of foreign intellectual and artistic influences." Merely this self-evident assertion, according to Pells a refutation of the notion "that America was once a cultural backwater and is now a cultural behemoth," is common sense to nigh people, fifty-fifty without a doctorate, who have suffered indigestion from a Domino's pizza. Harping on the obvious, Pells falls victim to intellectual misdirections that don't persuade the reader, for several reasons.
Outset, Pells — stressing how twentieth-century American civilisation was shaped by strange influences to an unmatched extent but not comparing the cultural impact that outsiders (except Americans) had in other countries — suggests that cultural "borrowing" is uniquely American. But in fact cultures have borrowed from other cultures throughout history. The Romans were influenced by the Greeks and created a civilization of their own that defined (at least for historians) the Mediterranean world for centuries. Renaissance writers imitated the classics. In more contempo times, transnational cultural interactions have taken identify among many countries, with numerous states (as a upshot of such exchanges) creating their own "special" culture.
Pells underscores that modernism — vaguely defined by him every bit "the try — beginning in the early twentieth century — to invent a new language to describe the scientific, political, and social upheavals of the modern world"— uniquely influenced today's American culture, including when introduced in the U.South. by the strange-born. But America was certainly not alone in its "willingness to ignore cultural boundaries" by "intermingling elements from high and depression culture," to cite Pells on what modernism entailed. Only consider, as one instance of a modernist-influenced country, post-revolutionary Russia, some other nation-continent on the "cultural periphery" of Europe: thanks in role to its non-Russian cultural contacts, information technology likewise absorbed and remade its vision of modernism, turning information technology into as a course of Russian culture which had a worldwide impact (east.one thousand., the poems of Mayakovsky, the films of Eisenstein).
Second, Pells is incapable of coming to terms with an essential tension: betwixt modernist art (for the nigh function intellectually challenging and unsettling) and American "popular" amusement (much of it all as well ofttimes mind-numbing and kitschy). Citing Hollywood outsider Orson Welles'south work, he claims that "wedding modernist artistic techniques with pure entertainment" is "archetypically American."
But few would disagree that the success of Hollywood/Broadway blockbusters such asThe Sound of Music (dismissed as "The Sound of Mucus" past its screen-version star Christopher Plummer) is due non to a "modernist" perspective, in style or substance, but to the evocation of an ersatz traditional, "safe," wonder bread manner of life that modernism repeatedly challenges.
Pells, even so, contends that "In that location is no unified and distinctively 'American' set of values promoted by Hollywood or the creators of Broadway musicals." And elsewhere he claims that Hollywood films traditionally don't have a message, quoting Samuel Goldwyn's advice to his writers, "If you want to send a bulletin, telephone call Western Union."
But, describing the Titanic, one of the highest grossing (and saccharine) films in history, Pells gushes about the optimistic message of tinseltown entertainment:
On 1 level,Titanic was a archetype American movie in which nosotros are told — as if nosotros had not heard the message a grand times before — that people are gratis to live their lives notwithstanding they chose, that course divisions don't matter, and that happiness is preferable to wealth and ability.
3rd, Pells repeatedly displays a kind of USA-all-the-manner triumphalism — could this have something to do with his getting so many Fulbright grants? — that triggers flashbacks to the at present-discredited U.S. breast-pounding about Western Common cold-State of war triumphs culminating in a so-called "end of history."
Early on in his book Pells dismisses U.S. writers who don't share his gung-ho view about the global supremacy of American culture as "peculiar" because of their "lament that American history and society lacked complexity." He castigates universally admired literary masters such equally Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Adams, Henry James, and T.Southward. Eliot, because they "complained that American life lacked density."
Pells does pooh-pooh, as stated to a higher place, the notion that "America is a cultural behemoth." And he admits that, "by the first decade of the new century, American films were losing some of their market place share in Europe and Asia," noting that "The cinema, and civilisation in general, were becoming more international." But Pells leaves piffling doubt that the USA, thank you to what he considers its unequalled cultural recycling is, and remains, culturally no. 1.
Hollywood directors, proclaims the University of Texas professor like a Roman centurion, take produced "a popular civilization that conquered the world." In less military terms, he declares further:
America remains the cultural elephant in everyone's living room. … Simply the dread of Americanization has likewise been an implicit tribute to America's success in adopting and transforming the art and ideas from overseas, before sending these back in forms that were more than mesmerizing for the masses.
And he ends his book with the post-obit hymn to the Republic:
Americans have converted what they inherited from others into a culture which audiences everywhere could comprehend and embrace — a civilisation that is, much of the time, both emotionally and artistically compelling for millions of people all over the globe.
In its paean to the worldwide influence of American civilization, arguably benign, Pells's book lacks a serious, scholarly examination of why, in many parts of the world today (and in America itself) this culture, for all its achievements, is not ever seen every bit "emotionally and artistically compelling" — one of the central questions of our post-9/11 era.
Pells'due south failure to take upwards this result is the chief drawback of his book.
Finally, permit's consider the quality of Pells's volume every bit historical narrative.
In thirteen chapters and an epilogue covering painting, architecture, music, and (most of all) film, he provides detail after detail on how the U.Southward. transformed foreign modernist influences into widely accustomed American cultural items for domicile consumption and export.
Despite a chronological approach in some individual capacity, there simply is no discernible intellectual management/movement in his book. It consists, far besides often, of a dull (I can't resist writing pell-mell) listing of data and endless summaries of moving picture plots that belong more properly in Wikipedia entries than in a Yale University Press publication. It gives u.s.a. facts, not a story.
While ploughing through his book, I could not help keeping out of my mind the admission past this much-published bookish in his preface that, as an undergraduate at Rutgers — the State Academy of New Bailiwick of jersey, he didn't know the location of the Guggenheim Museum in New York. "Only I figured," he writes, "I'd better find out if I hoped to exist 'educated' at a time when a academy education meant displaying (or at least faking) some cognition nearly fine art, music, literature."
Occasionally a few intriguing tidbits practice emerge from Pells's motionless, bottomless, factoid sea. Among these aperçus is the professor asking: "Was it possible that Pablo Picasso and Louis B. Mayer shared similar ambitions and sensibilities?" And in that location are a few unconventional, if arguably off the mark, Pells pronouncements: "No single person in the twentieth century was more than responsible for shifting the cultural residue of ability from Europe to America than Adolf Hitler." (Note that, for Pells, culture, at least in this passage, is an musical instrument of "power" rather than something worthy in and of itself).
The one memorable chapter in the book — on the influence of the Stanislavski Method on American cinema — shows how the Method's focus on an thespian's inner feelings, rather than on his reciting lines, led U.S. motion-picture show stars such as Marlon Brando, famous for his silent facial insinuations, to mumble on the screen. This is useful in understanding why, every bit noted by the Australian-born Daniel Day-Lewis (the star of the recent Spielberg hitLincoln), that (every bit quoted by Pells), "In America the articulate apply of language is frequently regarded with suspicion."
U.Southward. diplomats might exist interested to know that the volume covers (superficially) American "cultural diplomacy" in connection with Country Department and USIA (Us Information Agency) cultural programs during the Cold War. But CIA covert back up for such programs during the U.Southward.-USSR ideological conflict, not widely known, is non mentioned by Fulbrighter Pells, possibly because focusing on this rather sad spooks' episode is non the most glorious way of presenting American cultural triumphalism in action to readers both at home and away.
The book'south index is quite thorough, and there is a useful bibliography, however narrowly based on English-linguistic communication works.
* The Times Literary Supplement (November 30, 2012), p. 12.
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Source: https://americandiplomacy.web.unc.edu/2013/01/the-globalization-of-american-culture/
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