Of all the ironies in Tinseltown, none is richer than this: Hollywood is a big business that, on the screen at least, loathes and despises big business.
A trio of recent and upcoming films – the reprise of Gordon Gekko in the Wall Street sequel, the plight of laid-off execs in The Company Men, a documentary account of systemic greed in next week’s Inside Job – merely continue a business-bashing trend whose roots stretch all the way back to the silent era. As James Surowiecki has pointed out in a New Yorker piece, even ol’ D.W. Griffith himself, in 1909’s A Corner in Wheat, was wagging a righteous finger at the big bad money-men.
That piece goes on to catalogue a whole litany of pictures that, ever since, have extended and broadened the condemnation of capitalism’s evil ways. But what it doesn’t do is address the question that cries out: Why?
Yes, why does Hollywood hate what it essentially is?
Well, the answer is that Hollywood is really two businesses in one: It’s a profit-obsessed industry but it’s also a dream factory. What the factory manufactures is myths, and, typically, there’s no dissonance between the industry and the product, between (to use today’s parlance) the “core values” of the manufacturer and those inherent in the myths it creates. But the whole issue of capitalism is a huge exception. Capitalism throws a spanner in the factory’s works, for the simple reason that its values are often directly at odds with Hollywood’s dominant myth – the Great American Dream.
Of course, the Dream is all about freedom, mainly the freedom of the rugged individual to climb the ladder of success and, thus, get rich. But capitalism is about free enterprise which emphasizes a different sort of gain, not the growth of the individual but the growth from the individual to the corporation, from small to big, from rugged David to mighty Goliath.
Already, you can see the tension brewing. Capitalism fits into the Dream, but only up to a point, when it gets inflated and messy. In that sense, capitalism is to American movies what marriage is to Shakespeare’s plays. The Bard ends his comedies with the wedding and never ventures into the murky marriage beyond – otherwise, he’d have a tragedy on his hands.
Accordingly, in the battles between the “isms” – capitalism versus communism or fascism or terrorism – Hollywood (not to mention the politicians who either hail from Hollywood or emulate it) likes to frame the conflict as a war between freedom and tyranny. Alas, back on the home front, capitalism has a slippery habit of morphing from friend to foe, of changing from democracy’s smiling cousin into an anti-democratic, hierarchical, non-egalitarian behemoth. There, these corporate Goliaths aren’t tyranny’s enemy but tyranny itself – in Depression-era films, for instance, they’re the assembly line that crushes souls in Chaplin’s Modern Times, or they’re every faceless bank that forecloses on yet another poor homeowner.
Naturally, since no one roots for Goliath, the movies trooped out a continuing parade of Davids fighting the good fight against the evil giant. David comes in many guises – the plucky union activist (Norma Rae), the brave whistle-blower (The China Syndrome, Silkwood, The Insider), the emboldened justice-seeker (Erin Brockovich, Michael Clayton), the cheated inventor (Flash of Genius), the political crusader (The Constant Gardener), the little entrepreneur (Other People’s Money). As for Goliath, whether Big Auto or Big Energy or Big Tobacco or Big Pharmacy, he’s always the same polluting, penny-pinching, deceitful, destructive, even murdering titan.
That way, both the necessities of drama, and the rugged individualism inherent to the American myth, are better served. And, generally, the audience delights in the typecasting. Sure, many of us work for and owe our livelihoods to those same corporate giants, but who on occasion doesn’t see their employer less as benefactor than oppressor? Here, Hollywood is everybody’s loyal accomplice in the time-honoured practice of biting the hand that feeds them.
