Entertaining cinema: Hollywood, globalization, and the geography of cultural value

This dissertation examines the geography of cultural value from the perspective of popular culture rather than from the more common orientation of high culture and prestige Importing the sociological frameworks of Pascale Casanova and Pierre Bourdieu to the study of popular film, this study exposes the hidden symbolic economies that maintain Hollywood's commercial machinery. This project examines historically significant films that demonstrate that the profound structural antipathy between Paris and Hollywood—which is to say, between high and popular culture—is precisely the mechanism through which each enables the other to consolidate their respective structures of power.;The introductory chapter traces the mutually constitutive categories of high and low culture and the place of film among these categories; the following two chapters analyze the economic geography of Hollywood's cultural dominance from its early years to the present day. The first focuses on Erich von Stroheim's Greed and Sunset Boulevard, setting the stage for discussing the evolution of the high-low distinction and its geographical implications in specifically cinematic and industrial terms. The second chapter, on Ernst Lubitsch's Design for Living and Ninotchka, illuminates the flip-side of the symbolic antagonism between European culture and American commercialism, demonstrating how the geography of cultural value can be mobilized and brokered in strikingly different ways. I argue that the cinematic reproductions of European high culture in the work of both of these directors are ultimately mediated projections of Hollywood itself, symbolic transactions without which Hollywood's cultural economy would cease to operate. A final chapter on Peter Jackson's King Kong (2005) looks to the current geography of Hollywood's global infrastructures, arguing that new trends in runaway production and outsourced labor have consolidated Hollywood's global dominance. Whereas earlier chapters point to the mediated constitution of both Hollywood and Europe against the screen of the other, the uneven geography of New Hollywood suggests that such antagonistic posturing is giving way to new, more insidious forms of economic and cultural power.