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K A Z A A A M! SPLAT!PLOOF!This Page Intentionally Left BlankK A Z A A A M! The American Impact on European Popular Culture since I945Edited by Sabrina P. Ramet and Gordana P.
CrnkovidROWMAN & L I T T L E F I E L D P U B L I S H E R S, INC. Lanharn Boulder New York OxfordFor Marijan GubiL and Andrea FeldmanROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS,INC.Published in the United States of America by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
A Member of the Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group 4720 Boston Way, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowmanlittlefield.comPO. Box 317, Oxford OX2 9RU, United Kingdom Copyright 0 2003 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kazaaam! Ploof!:the American impact on European popular culture since 194.5 / edited by Sabrina P.
Ramet and Gordana P. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7425-0000-4 (a.
Paper) -ISBN 0-7425-0001-2 (pbk.: alk. Europe-Civilization-American influences. Ethnic attitudes-Europe. National characteristics, European. Popular cultur-Europe-History-20th 5. National characteristics, American.
United States-Relations-Europe. EuropeRelations-United States. Ramet, Sabrina P., 1949- 11. Crnkovit, Gordana.
D1055.K39 2003 33-dc2 7The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSUNIS0 2.ContentsviiPreface and Acknowledgments Part One: Introduction 1 Americanization, Anti-Americanism, andCommercial Aggression against Culture: An Introduction Sabrina E! Ramet 2 “American”Utility vs. “Useless” Reflection: On Possible Futures on Both Sides of the Atlantic Gordana I?
CrnkoviC39Part Two: Western Europe Does Mickey Mouse Threaten French Culture? The French Debate about EuroDisneyland Marianne Debouzy Culture versus Commerce: Europe Strives to Keep Hollywood at Bay C.
Anthony Gifiard Fear and Fascination: American Popular Culture in a Divided Germany, 1945-1968 Uta G. Poiger The Pendulum of Cultural Imperialism: Popular Music Interchanges between the United States and Britain, 1943-1967 Laura E. Cooper and B. Lee Cooper The Coca-Cola Co.
And the Olympic MovementGlobal or American? Steinar Bryn -v-15375569 83Contentsvi8 The Impact of the American Myth in Postwar ItalianLiterature: Modernization, Postmodernity, or Homologation? Giulia Guarnieri 9 American Missionaries to “Darkest” Europe Rodney Stark102 112Part Three: Eastern Europe 10 Appropriation of the American Gangster Film and theTransition to Capitalism: Poland‘s Dogs and Russia’s Brother Herbert J. Eagle Two Cheers for the Red, White, and Blue: Hungarian Assessments of American Popular Culture Beverly James Have a Nice Day: From the Balkan War to the American Dream and the Things That Shape the Way We See Each Other Gordana l? CrnkoviC Shake, Rattle, and Self-Management: Rock Music and Politics in Socialist Yugoslavia, and After Sabrina F!
Ramet UFOs over Russia and Eastern Europe Sabrina l? Ramet GmigrC-zation: Russian Artists and American Children’s Picture Books Beth Holmgren73 198219Afterword, Uta G. Poiger235Names Index244Subject Index249About the Editors and Contributors26 1Preface and AcknowledgmentsTHIS IS THE SECOND VOLUME ina two-volume set dealing with U.S.-European Interactions in the postwar era. Volume 1 (Coming in from the Cold War) was published in December 2001, with a copyright date of 2002.
In an effort to ensure that the chapters would be of the highest quality and that the chapter authors would have the occasion to read each other’s chapters, discuss them, and exchange ideas, and in the process obtain a clearer sense of the direction and spirit of the project as a whole, the series editors considered that it would be well advised to endeavor to bring the contributors together for an intense period of mutual consultation and interaction. This was accomplished at the University of Washington, 16-17 April 1999, thanks to the generosity of the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, the International Studies Center, the Center for West European Studies, the Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies Program, and the European Union Center. The chapters by Debouzy, Giffard, Poiger, Stark, and Holmgren were originally presented and discussed in the course of this event. We would also like to thank Jere Bacharach, ReSat Kasaba, John Keeler, and James West for their support and Katherine Kittel, Phil Sheckleton, Melinda Rice, Kurt Engelmann, Jane Meyerding, Phil Lyon, and Vjeran PavlakoviC for their hard work, contributing to the success of the period of intense interactive mutual consultation. We are also deeply grateful to David Hahn for critical assistance at the final stages of the preparation of this manuscript.
Chapters 6, 11, and 14 were originally published in the Journal of Popular Culture. We are deeply grateful to the authors of these articles and to the editors of the journal for permission to reprint these articles here. The chapter on UFOs (chap.
14) appears here in a revised and updated form. Chapter 13 was first published in East European Politics and Societies in 1988 and reissued in a revised form - VII.VlllPreface and Acknowledgmentsin Rocking the State: Rock Music and Politics in Eastern Europe and Russia, edited by Sabrina P. Ramet (Westview, 1994).
We are grateful to the University of California Press, copyright holder for East European Politics and Societies, and Westview Press for permission to reuse this article here. Chapter 13 appears here in a revised and updated form.I INTRODUCTI0NThis Page Intentionally Left BlankAmericanization, Anti-Americanism, and Commercial Aggression against Culture: An Introduction Sabrina l? RametATELEVISION COMMERCIALshownon American television in July 1999 showed the Eiffel Tower sailing into New York harbor on a barge, the Statue of Liberty, an earlier French import, having been fully assimilated. The viewer was thereby invited to muse that America would soon obtain a taste of Paris, as it were. But at another level, one saw Paris reduced to its best-known symbol, even to kitsch, and one wondered whether Paris itself could be made as “American”as the Statue of Liberty. Not all of Europe reaches America as kitsch, just as America does not have to be reduced to kitsch in order to make its presence felt in European culture. But in cultural interactions, there are always processes of transformationwhether of adaptation to local milieux, simplification, syncretic mixing, creative modification, or just plain “kitschification.” In the case of American ingestion of European cultural artifacts and commodities, the most potent vehicle for cultural transformation is commercialization, which exaggerates whatever is seen as potentially profitable and minimizes or eliminates everything which cannot be translated into profits.
But when Disneyland, Starbucks, McDonald’s, and Pizza Hut open franchises in Europe, the products they offer, although of European inspiration and derivation, are so distorted as to be incomprehensible except either as “American” or as “vulgarizations” of “authentic” European artifacts. This, in turn, accounts, at least in part, for the ferocious resistance against American cultural imports as manifested, for example, in violent attacks on McDonald’s franchises in the 199Os, in Antwerp, Athens, Copenhagen, London, St. Petersburg, and Millau, a town in France. The last of the aforementioned cases elevated JosC Bove, a French sheep farmer, to hero status in France, after he led a group which demolished a McDonald’s still under construction and delivered speeches denouncing “lousy food.”’ The same anger at -3-4Sabrina F! Rametperceived American cultural vulgarity emerged also in the French debate about Euro-Disney, as Marianne Debouzy documents in her chapter.
This anger also appears as the apparent anti-Americanism in the semifictional works of Dubravka UgreSid, as Gordana Crnkovid explains in her contribution to this book. The relationship may also be reversed, as illustrated by the so-called “spaghetti westerns” of Italian manufacture, in which Clint Eastwood and others, under Italian direction, offer a simplified, even cardboard, portrayal of heroics in the Old West. Some influences are transitory-such as the coonskin cap craze in England in the 1950s (associated with Fess Parker’s “Davy Crockett” films)-while others show signs of greater durability-such as the long furation on Levi’s throughout Europe (and perhaps especially in Eastern Europe) or the proliferation of cheese shops and coffeehouses in fin de sikcle America. It has become commonplace to speak of the emergence of a global culture and to highlight the role presumably played by American television, American films, and the allegedly resplendent Internet in fostering this anticipated result. What is important to realize is that this global culture cannot be expected to displace preexisting cultures, only, at the most, to coexist alongside them. Moreover, to the extent that the new “global culture” is porous with those cultures which most actively contribute to it, those cultures will, by the same virtue, remain the most receptive to “foreign” artifacts already assimilated into “global culture.” Perhaps the chief impact of the globalization of culture is to accelerate the transformation of and cross-cultural penetration of diverse cultures and cultural mediums.
Indeed, when speaking of globalization, one needs to avoid exaggeration. As Me1 van Elteren has argued, “the idea of a global cultural homogenization under the hegemony of American popular culture.is untenable.”2Not that European governments from the French3 to the Soviet4 to the Bulgarian5have not worried about American cultural or ideological influences which might be purveyed via certain cultural artifacts. But the entire process of cultural diffusion is reciprocal, selective, mediated, translated, and sometimes reinterpreted (whether through conscious adaptation or unconscious assimilation of unintended possible or alternative meanings) and undergoes ongoing processes of hybridization and “creolization,”so that the contents may change, even where the “vessel”may appear to be the same.6 Coca-Cola bottled in Germany, for example, even tastes different from the home brew.’ On the other hand, at least some American cultural artifacts may function as conduits for direct cultural influence. Mattel’s Barbie doll, for example, may well be the vehicle for promoting the American “gospel of ‘conspicuous consumption”’ in which even her assigned “mate,” Ken, is no more than an “accessory.”s Between 1951 and 1975, the number of U.S.-foreign joint ventures increased by 64 percent annually, on the average? Producing a quantum increase in the number of contact points at which reciprocal influence and reciprocal artifact assimilation could occur. Ironically, though not surprisingly (given the more powerful marketing of American cultural artifacts, the larger home market for American artifacts,Americanization, Anti-Americanism, and Commercial Aggression against Culture5the increasing dominance of English as the global lingua franca, and the lack of interest in many European societies in the products of other European societies), American popular culture has “conquered” Europe in a way in which no local European popular culture could have done.
Thus, the films of George Lukas and Steven Spielberg or, in an earlier era, of Alfred Hitchcock have commanded audiences across the European continent in a way with which no European directors can compete. The result, as Christine Ockrent has said, albeit with some exaggeration, is that “The only truly pan-European culture is the American culture.”1° Europeans have always been ambivalent about American culture, including popular culture. That ambivalence is only reinforced by an element of fear, prompted by the suspicion that America may be charting the future for the rest of the world, or at least for Europe. Ironically, where American pop cultural artifacts and advertising alike celebrate the “brave new future” being fashioned in hyperindividualistic America, the European response has ranged from “anticipation of progress” (embodying also a sense of marvel at America’s prodigious output of commodities and fashions) to “cultural pessimism” (as Europeans face their fears of cultural homogenization and effacement).” The absorption of cultural products or symbols may, of course, involve very deliberate irony. Former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev’s appearance in a 1997 Pizza Hut commercial intended for the Russian market’. is an example of such “strategic irony.” Another such example comes from Seattle, Washington, where a mammoth statue of Lenin, standing amid flames, symbolizing the destruction he had wrought on capitalism, now stands in front of a local Mexican fast-food restaurant. In this way, Lenin, the archenemy of capitalism, is recast as guardian of a local capitalist outlet, possibly even as a (would-have-been) fan of American fast food.
The statue was brought to Seattle from Bratislava by a local enthusiast. When absorption is completely successful, of course, it ceases to be seen any longer as “foreign.” It comes to be seen, understood, and experienced as a completely indigenous cultural artifact-at least by the younger generation.
Comic books are a case in point. Take, for instance, the Norwegian translation of the comic book adventures of “BE Tonya” (Blue Tanya). In the fifty-three pages of a recent BlH Tonya adventure (no. 3,2001), some forty-six sound-bite splash words were used, including “SHRAKKOOM,” “FWUMPH!” “PROOMP!” “SHKLKK,” and “BLADDAM!” Comics have their own universal jargon. But there is always some room for local innovation; hence, in the course of BlH Tonya’s triumph over a menacing Goliath-like Viking villain, the Norwegian translator (Jens E.
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RasHsen) pens in the splash word “RBSK!” This volume brings together essays on American cultural impact on and influence in both Western and Eastern Europe, with individual chapters devoted to cultural contexts and genres in France, Germany, Britain, Italy, Norway, Poland, Hungary,Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav successor states, and Russia. The division of the book into distinct sections on Western and Eastern Europe reflects profound differences in their experience of American influence.Western Europe was clearly in the American6Sabrina P. Rametsphere of influence in the years after 1945,with the transfusion of funds via the Marshall Plan and the stationing of American troops across the western half of the continent only facilitatingAmerican cultural inroads. In Eastern Europe, by contrast, the early communist years saw the region effectively sealed off from American influence and subjected to systematic sovietization.Already by the 1960s,however, a shift was under way, as Western Europe became ever more concerned about American cultural inroads, while ordinary Eastern Europeans, fed up with Soviet political and cultural hegemony, increasingly looked to the United States with admiration, interest, and genuine, if not always well-informed, attraction. Thus, in some regards, the ways in which Western and Eastern Europe have reacted to American cultural exports have been entirely opposite to each other. Only now, in the years since 1989,with processes of “mellowing”in Western Europe and increasing exposure to diverse influences in Eastern Europe, is the old divide gradually being overcome.
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No doubt some differences will remain, but with the end of the continent’s political division, these differences are ever less likely to be defined by region and cultural polarization as such is increasingly a thing of the past. Some chapters look at the formative role of American policies (such as the chapter by Uta Poiger on postwar Germany), while others focus on the reception of American culture by Europeans (such as the chapters by Marianne Debouzy, C.
Anthony Giffard, Steinar Bryn, Herbert Eagle, and Beverly James) or the interaction of European and American popular culture (such as the chapter by Cooper and Cooper on popular music in Britain and the United States). Debouzy cites Emmanuel de Roux’s characterization of Disneyland as “the slaughterhouse of dreams,”underlines the passivity reportedly induced in park visitors by the highly mechanized rides, and concludes with a warning that American mass culture is tending “to weaken, homogenize, and even eradicate Europe’s original cultures, impoverishing the cultural heritage of nations.” Giffard examines another arena of American cultural penetration of Europe: television programming and films. He charts European efforts to restrict the importation of American films and television programs and to encourage local film industries and television program development, tying the ensuing Euro-American debate to broader issues connected with the World Trade Organization. Chapters by Steinar Bryn and Herbert Eagle analyze the marketing of Coca-Cola in Norway and the emergence of gangster films in Poland and Russia, respectively.
Eagle analyzes the action in the Polish film Dogs (1992) and the Russian film Brother (1997) and argues that “the American gangster film and its recent transformations in Russian and Polish contexts provide an illuminating example of the flexibility of a genre’s textual structures and their adaptability in the service of different kinds of messages.” As Eagle notes, the ambivalence in American gangster films has been carried over to Poland and Russia, so that film gangsters are simultaneously censured and admired within the context of the films. Beverly James, for her part, reports the results of interview research in Hungary, noting that Hungarian responses to American cultural artifacts such as Dairy Queen have been characterized by ambivalence (liking the physical plant but remaining critical about the food quality, in this exam-Americanization,Anti-Americanism, and CommercialAggression against Culture7ple). Her Hungarian intervieweesalso criticized American films for presenting a false and oversimplified image of American life but expressed admiration for American “determination.”My chapter on Yugoslav rock bands shows that while the earlierYugoslav rockers aspired to nothing more than to mimic and replicate the top English and American hits, the Yugoslav rock scene gradually acquired its own voice, emerging from its American cocoon, as it were, and drawing its inspiration increasingly from local idioms, though not without taking note of new ideas coming from the United States. My other chapter, on UFOs over Russia and Eastern Europe, treats reports of UFOs and visiting extraterrestrials as a cultural phenomenon, tracing similarities between reports in Central and Eastern Europe and those in the United States and suggesting that this may constitute evidence of the diffusion of popular culture concerning the extraterrestrial. Rodney Stark, in his chapter on American missionaries in Europe, shows how religious entrepreneurs based in the United States are challenging the religious balance in Europe, citing recent actions taken against Americanbased groups by the German and French governments in support of his contention that the challenge is a serious one. Finally, chapters by Giulia Guarnieri, Gordana Crnkovid, and Beth Holmgren on literary influences round out the book.
As Guarnieri notes in her analysis of the “American myth” in postwar Italian literature, America is simultaneouslysupremely attractive and supremely repugnant for many European intellectuals.America is, in the eyes of Italian writers such as Umberto Eco, the quintessential embodiment of “the postmodern opposition of truth and fakeness, vacuity and values, superficiality and culture.”America is the most paradoxical and inscrutable of all countries, at least to Europeans.