Abstract
This chapter traces the pre-eminence that American sf continues to enjoy within a European context, arguing that, counterintuitive though it may seem, no study of European sf cinema can hope to claim any sort of authority while ignoring the largest player in the European market. Blending industrial and filmic analysis, the chapter seeks to quantify the extent of Hollywood sf dominance within EU cinemas and to examine its potential repercussions. To facilitate this analysis, specific focus will be ascribed to the film 28 Weeks Later (Juan Carlos Fresnadillo 2007), which, it will be argued, pointedly retools the mechanics of its predecessor 28 Days Later (Danny Boyle 2002) to present a version of Britain that is almost entirely shaped by US cultural conceptions of Europe.
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Notes
- 1.
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Interstellar, for example, was co-produced by Paramount and Warner Bros. as well as by Legendary Entertainment, a California-based media company that was acquired by the Chinese-owned conglomerate Wanda in 2016. It achieves its British co-production status by dint of the involvement of Nolan’s own company Syncopy Inc. Inception followed a similar arrangement, albeit without the presence of Paramount. Like Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and Gravity (Sandra Bullock, George Clooney), both films feature American stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Matthew McConaughey in starring roles and were marketed as Hollywood productions.
- 3.
As mentioned in Chap. 1, the list of all-time highest-grossing films changes significantly when adjusted for inflation, yet between them Avatar , Star Wars: The Force Awakens , and Jurassic World are estimated to have grossed close to $7 billion (Box Office Mojo).
- 4.
In general, I have found the Lumiere database to be a useful tool that provides a valuable, free public service. A disclaimer on its homepage, however, should serve as a large enough caveat emptor to caution users from adopting its findings verbatim: ‘the sources of information it has selected are generally considered trustworthy by experts in the respective countries. However, the Observatory, whose tasks do not include monitoring ticket sales in its member states, is unable to verify or vouch fully for the accuracy of the information provided by the various sources used’ (‘Database on Admissions of Film Released in Europe’).
- 5.
During the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) negotiations of 1993, the French government sought out measures to counteract the dominance of American film and television on European screens, by arguing that culture should be exempt from free trade agreements. Specifically, it introduced the idea of a ‘cultural exception’ (essentially protectionism for Europe’s audio-visual industries) in a bid to restore some balance to a market where, by 1992, ‘the U.S. share in the top five European markets (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Great Britain) had risen to 83 per cent’ (Buchsbaum, Exception Taken: How France Has Defied Hollywood’s New World Order 91). Today, Article 207 of the ‘Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union’ states that ‘The Council shall also act unanimously for the negotiation and conclusion of agreements [in] in the field of trade in cultural and audiovisual services, where these agreements risk prejudicing the Union’s cultural and linguistic diversity’ (‘Consolidated Version of the Treaty’).
- 6.
A number of films were released which restaged the attack on New York, albeit through surrogates such as monsters, aliens, or zombies. In many instances, taglines in the films’ advertising gives a clear indication of the subtext: Cloverfield (‘Some Thing has Found Us’), War of the Worlds (‘They’re Already Here’), and I Am Legend (‘The Last Man on Earth is not Alone’) being some of the more obvious examples.
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Writing in the New York Times, Micah Zenko, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, points out ‘Whereas President George W. Bush authorized approximately 50 drone strikes that killed 296 terrorists and 195 civilians in Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia, Obama has authorized 506 strikes that have killed 3,040 terrorists and 391 civilians […] A technology developed and matured shortly before 9/11 to kill one individual, Osama bin Laden, became the default tactic for a range of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism missions outside of traditional battlefields’ (‘Obama’s Embrace of Drone Strikes Will Be a Lasting Legacy’).
- 8.
Amidst rising inequality in American society at large, Reuters reported in November 2017 that ‘U.S. stocks climbed to record highs on Monday, helped by optimism about merger activity and as investors bet that a Republican plan to cut corporate taxes would bolster earnings’ (Randewich, ‘Wall Street Hits Record High as Investors Eye Mergers’).
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Backed by Rogue Pictures, then a subsidiary of Universal, Doomsday , despite opening in 1936 screens across the United States (as opposed to 28 Days Later’s 1260), recouped just $11 million of its $30 million budget in an indifferent US market (Box Office Mojo).
- 10.
Clause IV, which was written into the Labour Party’s constitution in 1918, pledged support for ‘common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service’. Influenced by Professor Anthony Giddens, who argued that class-based divisions of left and right had become redundant in a globalised world, Blair’s revision of the clause was calculated to avoid marginalising the party in the eyes of the right and to appeal to the political centre.
- 11.
Weighing up the influence of Thatcher and Reagan’s economic policies, David Harvey writes that ‘the alliance of forces they helped consolidate and the majorities they led became a legacy that a subsequent generation of political leaders found hard to dislodge. Perhaps the greatest testimony to their success lies in the fact that both Clinton and Blair found themselves in a situation where their room for manoeuvre was so limited that they could not help but sustain the process of restoration of class power even against their own better instincts’ (A Brief History of Neoliberalism 63).
- 12.
Building upon Jean Starobinski’s 1990 article, ‘Les cheminées et les clochers’, which sought to locate modernity at the site where the past exists in a present that, nonetheless, simultaneously lays claim to it, Augé argues that if places can thus be defined as ‘relational, historical and concerned with identity’, then a space which cannot be defined in these ways must thus be a ‘non-place’. Such non-places, Augé suggests, are by-products of supermodernity, a state of being that seeks to reconcile the transience of contemporary society: one defined by time spent in places in flux, such as supermarkets, road networks, and hospitals, a world ‘surrendered to solitary individuality’ (Non-places: Introduction to an Anthology of Supermodernity 78). Hotel chains, theme parks, and airports constitute for Augé examples of non-places, locations where people pass through without engaging in meaningful interaction.
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Britain received $3176 million in aid, considerably more than the next highest recipient France, which received $2706 (Vickers, Manipulating Hegemony 44).
- 14.
In Who Rules the World?, Noam Chomsky describes NATO as a ‘US intervention force’ arguing that as the United States contributes up to 75 per cent of NATO ’s annual budget, the distinction between US and NATO forces is negligible (45).
- 15.
Since his inauguration, Trump has persistently sought to portray Britain as crime-ridden and overrun by migrants, most saliently in his retweeting of spurious anti-Muslim videos posted by the far-right group Britain First in November 2017 (one of the few occasions that May has saw fit to demur with her US counterpart, a reaction that in turn earned her a stern rebuke from Trump ) (‘Trump Hits Out at UK PM Theresa May after Far-right Video Tweets’). Following the 3 June 2017 terrorist attacks on London Bridge and Borough Market which led to seven deaths and up to fifty injuries, Trump —wilfully misrepresenting Khan ’s appeal for calm amidst an intensified police presence—criticised the London mayor for perceived timidity in the face of terror and labelled his response to the attacks as ‘pathetic’ (Krever, ‘Timeline: How Trump’s Relationship with the London Mayor Grew so Heated’). In May 2018, to give a final example, Trump claimed that knife crime had become an epidemic in Britain, describing an unnamed London hospital as a ‘war zone’ (Smith, ‘Donald Trump says London Hospital is Like “War zone”’).
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Power, A. (2018). European SF and Hollywood. In: Contemporary European Science Fiction Cinemas. Palgrave European Film and Media Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89827-8_8
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