Theory and Method Hollywood The theoretical and methodological background to this research is wide ranging and daunting in complexity, but before outlining this background it is necessary to explain the term ‘Hollywood’ as used in this paper. This may seem somewhat preposterous, for as Richard Maltby points out, ‘who needs to be introduced to anything so familiar, so much a part of the world’s daily life, as Hollywood?’ (1995, p.xii) Yet, Hollywood has changed in one respect: while still located in America and still thought of as an intrinsically American phenomenon, Hollywood ‘is presently losing its all-American status’ (Hayward, 1996, p.173). The US film studios, such as Twentieth Century Fox, Colombia and United Artists, which dominated the postwar global film industry are today relatively small parts of massive transnational corporations. These include Rupert Murdoch’s communications empire News Corp.; Philips the entertainment and electronics group; and Sony, the electronics giant (companies with Australian, Dutch and Japanese origins, respectively). Herman and McChesney (1997) argue a strong case for western and US dominance of the wider media environment, but caution that the dominance of the US should not be exaggerated:
It is also no longer so easy to separate ‘Hollywood’ from other entertainment forms, including satellite TV, video, DVD, music, books and magazines, and also a bewildering variety of other consumer items. ‘Synergy’ was the buzzword of the entertainment industry and marketing world in the 1990s. George Lukas’ promotional deal with PepsiCo. to promote the rerelease of the Star Wars trilogy was typical. All of PepsiCo’s global properties, including Pepsi-Cola, Frito-Lay snacks, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell were committed to the massive promotion to hook in an audience who missed the films on their first release. In some cases as Herman and McChesney show the entire process is kept ‘in-house’. They describe how in 1997 Universal began a heavy promotion of drinks produced by the giant Canadian liquor company Seagram’s, which happened to be its parent corporation. The benefits of vertical and horizontal integration for powerful transnational corporations are immense. A previously minor studio such as Disney, for example, is a colossal enterprise today controlling a television network, theme parks, publishing and merchandising interests as well as a number of film production studios, with profits that dwarf anything its founder Walt Disney was able to achieve (3). Balio (1988) describes how the globalization of Hollywood in the 1980s and 90s dictated that the studios develop long-term strategies to build on a strong base of operations at home while achieving `a major presence in all of the world’s important markets’. This meant expanding ‘horizontally’ to tap emerging markets by controlling foreign distribution and exhibition outlets where possible and ‘partnering’ with foreign investors to secure new sources of financing: ‘Achieving these goals led to a merger movement in Hollywood that has yet to run its course’ (p.58). While refering in this paper to ‘American’ or ‘western’ films therefore, ‘Hollywood’ is in one sense, at least, a transnational enterprise. In spite of this qualification, however, Hollywood remains a distinctively western, north-American phenomenon. Hollywood can be contrasted in countless ways with cinema from the ‘developing world’, which as Shohat and Stamm (1994) remind us, is far from being a marginal appendage to ‘First World’ cinema, but actually produces most of the world’s feature films. It is important to note here that the films of India and Egypt are also very popular with Arab audiences in the Gulf and might easily have been the focus of research for a similar, less Anglo-centric study. As I mentioned earlier, my research highlights that of all the western media available in the Gulf, it is films (shown at cinemas, on video and on television) that are most popular with Arab audiences. Straubhaar supports this conclusion: ‘From the brief reviews we have made of empirical trends in film, television, and new television technologies, such as cable and satellite TV it seems clear that while flows in these media are strong at the global level, they by no means overwhelm the regional and national levels. Evidence for monopolization of the flow at a global Ievel by a few producers is strongest in movies, where the U.S. does tend to dominate global cultural markets’ (1996, 294). Theoretical Background The approach taken in the analysis embraces diverse research traditions within the alternative paradigm, which, as McQuail (1994) explains, foregrounds structural inequalities and determinants. These include various areas of focus within both political economy and cultural studies. The research rests on debates relating to cultural imperialism, audience resistance, globalisation, the role of the nation state, media effects, representatation and stereotyping, ethnographic research and reception analysis. Religion, language, family, community, tradition and identity are also considered. Any survey of these myriad theories and forces can only remain at an impressionistic level within the limits of this study. Political Economy Political economy is concerned, as Golding and Murdock (1996) suggest, with the whole ‘cycle of communication’, from production to reception. Unlike effects-centred research within the dominant paradigm, for political economy the importance of the media cannot be reduced to linear, causal, stimuli-response theories (Boyd-Barratt, 1995). The distinguishing feature of critical political economy is its focus on: ‘the interplay between economic organisation and political, social and cultural life’ (Golding and Murdock, 1996, p.14). The focus on economic dynamics in defining mass communications means that political economy is particularly suited to analysing the growth of terrestrial and satellite television, video and cinema in the Gulf region. The extension of western or transnational corporate interests; commodification, commercialisation and the changing role of the state and government intervention are also particularly open to a political economy analysis. Structural and institutional concerns including government regulation and educational policy, globalisation and cross media links, also form a part of the explanatory framework that I will develop. Media and Cultural Imperialism Closely associated with the political economy approach to mass communications research is the idea of cultural and media imperialism. Briefly, this idea implies that modem world media systems have provided an important and strategic means whereby dominant nations have attempted to extend and develop their economic, political and cultural forms of control and power in the global arena. (O’Sullivan and Jewkes, 1997, p.345) Leading theorists in this area include Armand Mattelart, Herbert Schiller and Dallas Smythe and various contributors to the NWICO debate including Nordenstreng, Pasquali and Beltrán. Useful summaries of, and contributions to, this considerable body of research have been produced by Roach (1997), Mohammadi (1995), Hamelink (1995) and Boyd-Barrett (1977), amongst others. How does the notion of cultural imperialism apply to the study of ‘Hollywood and Arab Identity’? For McPhail (1987): ‘the global extension of the new means of communication creates a form of ‘electronic neo-colonialism’ that seeks the mind and consent of those in the core and periphery alike.’ (p.544) Does such consent exist? Cees Hamelink argues that integrating the communications systems of the developing and developed world ‘eliminates the spaces’ in which people in developing countries can imagine or construct alternative paths to development, and thus contributes to a pattern of ‘cultural synchronization’. The result is:‘a loss of autonomy and cultural difference, and a hierarchical ordering of the world into dependent and exploitative relations.’ (Hamelink summarised in Servaes 1995 p.544) Is there evidence for such cultural erosion? In Herbert Schiller’s earliest work ‘Mass Communications an American Empire’ (1969), he states: `Mass Communications are now a pillar of the emergent imperial society. Messages `made in America’ radiate across the globe and serve as the ganglia of national power and expansionism.’ (Tracey, 1985, p.352) Is this how Arab audiences feel about the messages flowing across their borders? Certainly there is evidence that Hollywood’s power has grown in global markets (4). What of Gulf markets? Finally, as has already been suggested, cultural and media imperialism theories are closely linked to the promotion of global consumerism and the generation of a culture conducive to wider western corporate interests. Ramonet sums up the argument in somewhat rhetorical terms:
The sense here that Hollywood is ‘a Trojan horse’ for the promotion of consumerism is a notion that is, of course, almost impossible to prove empirically. What can be ascertained is the degree to which Gulf Arab audiences and society in general feel this is the case. A more straightforward, but equally important task is to find actual evidence of ‘Hollywood’s’ economic impact on Gulf markets and Arab audiences, evidence for which I will show later. New Audience Research While examining contemporary processes at a macro-economic level is important, an examination of how Hollywood cinema impacts on the lives people in the Gulf region must also draw upon some of the approaches developed within cultural studies. ‘New audience research’ is a title sometimes given to the increase in qualitative audience studies which began in in the early to mid 1980s. The move is also referred to as the ‘ethnographic turn’ and is shown to have its origins in, and is associated with, intellectual developments of multi-culturalism, feminism and postmodernism. New audience research is also considered to be substantially informed by interpretative ethnography and empirical sociological research within the dominant paradigm. The ‘ethnographic turn’ and the cultural studies tradition with which it is associated have dignified particular issues and concerns (previously disregarded or dismissed) as worthy of detailed research. ‘Popular culture’, ‘routine pleasures’, the social context of ‘everyday’ media use, marginal and minority ‘readings’ and the significance of gender, race and sexuality in consumption patterns and interpretative frameworks have been brought more sharply into focus and explored in a non-pejorative manner. For Fiske (1989), the value of ethnographic study in understanding television lies in its shift of emphasis away from the textual and ideological construction of the ‘subject’ to socially and historically situated ‘people’: The methodology adopted within new audience research is suited to the financial and logistical realities of small-scale research. In-depth open interviews and taped ‘focus group’ discussions are preferred to the questionnaires of earlier ‘effects research’ as being more democratic and revealing. They provide, as Clifford remarks, ‘a means for different peoples to form complex, concrete images of one another’ (1988, p.23). However, there is also research within the ethnographic field that employs social scientific methodology. The work of Katz and Liebes (1986), for example, is much closer to the rigorous tradition of qualitative media research established within the dominant paradigm. As Hermes (1995) points out, new audience research even turns to quantitative data, on occasion, as a means of strengthening a case by means of a technique called ‘triangulation’. This eclectic approach to audience research, owing to a variety of traditions and drawing upon both quantitative and qualitative data, is applied in this study. Reception Studies and Audience Resistance Research techniques developed within reception studies are employed in this research. Reception studies, according to Hoijer (1998) deal with audience interpretations, decodings, readings, meaning productions, perceptions or comprehension of media texts: ‘The terminology varies as a result of the researcher’s academic and theoretical anchoring.’(p.168). John Corner suggests that there are three main aims which have been pursued by reception researchers. These are: firstly, confirmation of the effective transmission of dominant political and cultural values; secondly, the `counter-evidencing’ to this of levels of immunity and for resistance among audiences; and thirdly, the indication of complexity and variety in the production of mediated meanings. (1996, p.284)
Reception studies include cultural studies perspectives, semiotic perspectives, ethnographic and sociopsychological perspectives and some studies that are a mix of some or all of these approaches. Concepts from these different perspectives that may be useful to this study include: ‘polysemy’ (originally Hall, 1973), ‘tactical resistance’ (Fiske, 1989), ‘reading formations’ and ‘interpretative communities’ (Corner, 1996), ‘investment’ (degree of involvement) (Barker and Brooks, 1998) and ‘cogntive schemas’ (Hoijer, 1998). Corner (1996) has shown how many of these concepts are problematic. For example, the ‘diffuse’ meaning of ‘interpretative community’, is so relative ( being defined by age, income, class, gender, race, interests etc) as to lose virtually all purchase on the ‘social determinants of reception’ (p.290). If we abandon altogether the search for ‘determinants’, however, it becomes much easier to make reference to these concepts. Once again, the search for ‘water tight’ theories that can be applied to audiences is a fruitless one that I shall not undertake. ‘Resistance theory’ and ideas about ‘active audiences’ developed within cultural studies often provide useful qualifications to the findings of the media and cultural imperialism schools. A major strength of new audience research and reception analysis is its attention to actual viewing practices, an area which industry analysts complain, is almost completely unresearched in the Gulf states. By drawing upon research norms and procedures developed within both cultural studies and political economy different research ‘tools’ will be employed in this study without reference to a single organising metatheory. However, Anthony Gidden’s (1979, 1984, 1991, 1994) theory of structuration provides an overarching theory which can accommodate the (possibly contradictory) findings revealed by both political economy and cultural studies analyses. Global versus Local Globalisation is another theory that this research draws on. For Giddens, ideas of time-space distanciation are central to understanding the term ‘globalisation’. In structuration theory it is the ‘dematerialisation of space in communications’ (Harvey, 1995) wrought by the ‘information revolution’ that is key to grasping globalisation’s far reaching impacts. However media imperialism theorists, such as Schiller, Hamelink, Herman and McChesney, suggest that globalization should be understood primarily as a strategy of corporate capitalism. Shohat and Stam (1996) argue that ‘globalisation’ is not a new development, but should be seen as part of the much longer history of European colonialism. For these writers the essential character of globalisation is colonial: ‘Globalisation theory, in this sense, goes back to what J.M. Blaut calls the "diffusionist" view of Europe spreading its people, ideas, goods, and political systems around the world.’ (p.151) Yet, as Finnstrom (1997) notes the focus on colonialism can become problematic, if it implicitly reduces actors to passive objects of imposed change: ‘The heterogenity of local traditions and ongoing identity formations is homogeneously understood. The stereotypes of the dominant traditions and fixed categories are fortified.’ (p.5) What does seem to be agreed by all the contributors to the debate on globalization is the importance of communications media and cultural production. For Wilson and Dissanayake (1996) a telecommunications revolution in media is one of the driving material forces behind globalisation - in addition to the rise of transnational corporations and the changing role of nation-state to manager of the new ‘borderless interlinked economy’ (p.312). Another point of agreement amongst theorists is the way in which the ‘global’ and the ‘local’ are linked or considered mutually constitutive. Sreberny-Mohammadi (1995) argues that globalisation and localisation are two (sometimes parallel, sometimes contradictory) tendencies happening together, ‘indeed are only thinkable together’ (p.369). The debates around globalisation are key to this research. Globalisation is thought to have far reaching consequences for identity formation in the contemporary world. Morley writes how communities are transformed: ‘Living physically near to others is no longer necessarily to be tied into mutually dependent communication systems; conversely, living far from others is no longer, necessarily, to be communicationally distant’ (1992 p.376). Experience (and, by implication, ‘identity’) is unified beyond localities and fragmented within them according to this view. For Negus (1993) globalisation does not imply a cosy ‘global village’, but signifies attempts by capitalist corporations to expand by overcoming geographical and political boundaries. The idea of corporate capital ‘constructing’ identities is introduced here: ‘Modern companies seek to operate in all markets simultaneously rather than sequentially, targeting and actively constructing consumers in multiple regions on the basis of demographics and lifestyles, rather than national identities’. (p.271) It is not, however, a totally passive picture of international audiences that is painted within this media imperialism perspective:
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