Going to the movies: The U.S. is the world's primary exporter of cultural violence

"Ya know, a man ain't a man without a gun!"

Hollywood films account for 60% of the box-office in Europe.  European films account for 4-5% of the U.S. box-office.

The importance of films like "The King's Speech" or the television series "Downton Abbey" is not just that they feed on nostalgia and anglophilia but that they eschew the elements of Hollywood's reigning genre, the action film.   No CGI effects, colossal budgets, super-fast editing, ear-splitting soundtracks, AND mega-violence, which, unfortunately, has become the staple of most U.S. box-office hits, from "The Terminator" to "Django Unchained" and "The Departed."   ("Django" supposedly had a "social" theme but it turned the theme of the brutality of the worst of slavery into a boomerang revenge blood-lust directed at white people).

The exceptions are the "family" Disney-spin-offs or the occasional comedy-romance.

The Europeans cannot compete with Hollywood budgets.  Even so, they do attempt weak imitations of American "action" films.  Von Damme had to be another Sylvester Stallone to become a "star."  Forgot about being an actor (leave that to the antediluvian stage).

How many Americans would have the attention span necessary (more than 15 seconds) to sit through an Eric Rohmer film or be interested enough to see a film such as "Central Station"--films actually about human relationships--one set in a different time and place than their own with a different cultural assumptions?    (Even with a film is ostensibly set in such a situation, it has to invariably have the non-stop fight-to-the-death action scenes, e.g., "Gladiator" or "Crouching Tigers and Hidden Dragons").

Why see the starkly realistic French-language film about the end of life "Amour" when you can see one more vastly violent and escapist ("X-men")?   

Cars speeding down highways, crashing, and bursting into flame; gunfights, explosives, and fists; gore-and-blood spectacles:  we are addicted to violence even as we protest that we don't approve of it.

And we certainly are willing to pay for it at the flicks.  And when we discover that our young people think nothing of a shootout at school, for that's exactly what they're being taught to think of as "awesome" and entertaining when they see a movie.

It's when the wall breaks down between the movie-plex and the street that our denial starts to crumble.

None of this excuses the political violence of repressive governments such as those found in Syria, Zimbabwe, or Cuba, but it is a curious feature that while the U.S. at least nominally supports democratic movements around the globe, culturally speaking, at any rate, it exports mass violence, consciously or not.

And, to tell the truth, I would have to say that in our "global village" (a cliche, but I'll use it anyway), violence in the movies is to be found across the globe now, with everyone trying to "get in on the action."  But "nobody does it better" than American cultural factory (Hollywood, the NRA, U.S. military, game manufacturers, the black macho admirers...).

"Ya know, a man ain't a man without a gun?"

In a different world, people would not be entertained/enthralled by violence nor would others make money from selling it in any form.