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Bloodbath: New Hollywood, Television, New Right, and the Carnography of Power, 1940s to 2010s

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How did the Hollywood motion picture and television industries contribute to the shape of world power in the late 20th century?  By unleashing a real geopolitical bloodbath that still feeds upon itself cinematically, distributed in a global ecosystem of broadcasting airwaves, narrowcasting cable, and the billion-sized publics of the Internet.  The impact of post-World War II media on the shape of US and global society is nearly incalculable, but it can be grasped by the classic categories of the live stage, from which it descends: comedy, drama, satire, and tragedy.  Comedic, because the vast majority of commercial media has been consumed to entertain, so every serious discussion of its real impact must begin by recognizing how unserious the intent has been since cinema's origins in vaudeville and slapstick.  Dramatic and melodramatic heroes and villains have filled the large and small screens as role models and as despised "others" to shape a century of social structure.  During the long period of censorship, until the 1960s, the melodrama of Cold War propaganda typified this mediascape.  After the fall of censorship, satire and tragedy moved to center stage.

The tragedy of Hollywood is that it's emancipation from censorship and the limits on free expression have produced a most terrible outcome: a global  "carnography" in which the public order of ruling regimes consumes bodies visually as carnage in the reproduction of social power. ​Leaders leverage bloody images to inflict bodily harm; and cinematic industries feed on violated bodies to make bloody images that turn profits in the marketplace of thrilling fear.  The rise of "terrorism" in geopolitics is the result of carnographic power.  This type of power is a distinctive product of Los Angeles.

The "Old Hollywood" was dominated by the eight "major" studios of Los Angeles, which produced and distributed the vast majority of motion pictures worldwide from the 1920s to the 1960s.  The "New Hollywood" emerged from a financial "bloodbath" that left the major studies near bankruptcy, from the fall of censorship, and from the global upheavals at the end of the Cold War.  Television, broadcast by airwaves and then narrowcasted by cable, played a central role in this drama, by remaking the public sphere, by undercutting the market for movies, and by shaping the public discourses on race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality.

This essay focuses on the emergence of the "New Hollywood," which was the hinge of the overall transformation, and argues that the rise of the New Right and the rise of the New Hollywood, from the 1960s to the 1980s, were deeply intertwined., and the anti-authoritarian uprisings of the 1989-1992 period were mass-mediated movements impossible to understand without witnessing Hollywood's contributions.

 

This page has paths:

  1. Shadows: Visual Cultures and Mass Media of a Regional and Global Power Phil Ethington
  2. White Shadows : Eros, Race, and Power of Global Hollywood [NEW STRUCTURE] Phil Ethington

Contents of this path:

  1. "Bloodbath": Recasting Mass Media in the Postwar Decades, 1945-2000
  2. The Paramount Decision, 1948
  3. Television, 1948-2018
  4. The Fall of American Censorship, 1953-1973
  5. Corporate Origins and Destination of the New Hollywood, 1966-1980s
  6. Orson Welles, Peter Bogdanovich, and the Artistic Apotheosis of the New Hollywood, 1971-1980
  7. The LA and New York Rebellions in Cinema, 1969-1994
  8. Sex, Violence, and Sexual Violence in the New Hollywood, 1967-1991
  9. Scarface, Wall Street, and Cinema in Reagan's 1980s