Summary—“Politics”

· Despite its promise of "escape" from the everyday world, Hollywood remains a social institution, and its movies describe recognizable social situations in their plots and themes. Hollywood's engagement with "the other America out there in reality" is most often indirect; issues of class, nationality, and sexuality are more likely to be embodied in characters and action than to be expressed as themes.

· Although the industry's representatives have always denied that Hollywood is a political entity, the industry has often constituted an object of ideological anxiety, both at home and abroad. This has been expressed in censorship, quota legislation and other legislative controls, and complaints about the Americanization of other national cultures.

· Debates over the censorship of the movies, like those over the regulation of other forms of popular culture, were actually debates over the exercise of social control. Although they focused on the content of the entertainment form, their real concern was with its effects on consumers. This was most commonly expressed in fears about the influence of entertainment on children and adolescents, but these apprehensions also concealed ethnic- and class-based anxieties about the effects on social behavior that might result from the democratic mixing of the audience.

· A 1915 Supreme Court ruling which denied the cinema First Amendment protection encouraged the industry to avoid political controversy in its products, but this position also made commercial sense, as it protected the industry from the disapprobation of politically influential sections of the community. Hollywood's cautious political stance was institutionalized by regulatory mechanisms introduced by its trade association (the MPPDA).

· Despite Hollywood's refusal to engage in serious political discourse, since World War II it has tended to subscribe to "conscience-liberalism," a broad commitment to racial and social equality unattached to any specific political program. This is not to suggest that all Hollywood movies were liberal or free from racism, but rather to argue that when Hollywood movies overtly asserted a political position they declared to be political, that position belonged to the liberal center.

· Hollywood's acquiescence in the anti-Communist witchhunts of the 1950s' reflected the industry's timidity as well as its consistent desire to avoid political controversy, but it failed to destroy Hollywood's liberal consensus.

· Postwar Hollywood's attitude to politics has continued to combine a pragmatic concern for political influence to secure its business interests with a desire not to damage the profitability of its product with undue controversy. Since 1960, however, its representation of politics has reinforced the disillusionment of its audiences with the political process, and the incidence of "social problem” movies has increased.

· Mississippi Burning is an example of Hollywood's approach to a contemporary political and social problem. An analysis of the movie reveals the ways in which its "conscience-liberal" message is consistently rendered subservient to the movie's essential entertainment purpose, which is expressed less through the story (concerning institutionalized racism) than through action, spectacle, sub-plots, character relations, music, and cinematography.

· To examine Hollywood as a political institution we must look beyond the ways in which it engages with the politics of Washington to consider its ideology: the terms of its validations and condemnations, its inclusions and exclusions, its enthusiasms and its silences. Ideological analysis of entertainment seeks to bring to consciousness the power relations and politics implicit in its representations.

· Ideology pervades culture; culture is both a site and an instrument of ideology. Far from being completely outside ideology, entertainment is an ideal location for the process of ideology - the maintenance of consent to the existing social formation - to take place.

· Hollywood's politics are equivocal because Hollywood's commercial interests are best satisfied by maximizing its audiences and allowing for the satisfactions of as many specific audience members as possible.