Cultural Empiricism

The observation that U.S. culture dominates world culture is so obvious and oft-repeated as to have become a cliché. Still, there's nothing like a little time in Western Europe to demonstrate that making this observation, in a bar, say, is very different from actually observing a big billboard--the biggest in the quaint Belgian city of Ghent--for Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life plastered on the side of a 500-year-old building standing beside dozens of other 500-year-old buildings (as I just did).

The sight of Angelina Jolie's cantilevered hero shot--also prominent in subways and on magazine covers across four countries--was a small slap of recognition that no matter how ugly those ads might be at home, they will always be far uglier abroad. Not to suggest that Europeans are strangers to trash--they make plenty, and advertise it twice as garishly. You just get the sense here that every billboard for Lara Croft (or Terminator 3, or AmericanWedding, or Pirates of the Caribbean, or Finding Nemo--just to name all the movies playing at the only movie theater I saw in Amsterdam) is a kind of ambassador. An ambassador who says: "I have far greater resources than you ever will, and this is the best I can come up with."

Given the pervasiveness of American entertainment in every visible sphere of urban and suburban Europe, it shouldn't be surprising that the alternatives are largely American as well. Since I've been in Benelux, I've had conversations with four different people who have mentioned Bowling for Columbine. Not just mentioned--extolled it, revered it, wanted to know what I, as an American, had to say about it. The guy whose house I'm staying at, in a small town called Hasselt, owns the newly released DVD and watches it all the time. Michael Moore's observations about America's violent heart have obviously sounded a deep note in European audiences. As my Belgian host put it, "It makes us to know what already we are knowing."

Which is valuable, but it's also the problem I had with the film when I saw it to begin with. The insights are tremendously compelling, but the argument is undercut by a smugness that permits cheap laughs at the expense of people who have already hung themselves. It makes the audience to know what already it is knowing, and in doing so, it runs from the very complexity it so brilliantly reveals.

But the fact that the movie keeps coming up, in cities and villages across the world, and always in reference to our despised president, and always as a kind of litmus test for what kind of American you are (broadly: Can you honestly defend the Bush administration?), forces the recognition that Moore's troubling/troublesome documentary has become a very important ambassador--to a population that is bombarded with American images on all fronts, and still wonders if we have any clue how cheap we allow ourselves to look.