{"id":3568,"date":"2026-07-04T19:38:25","date_gmt":"2026-07-04T19:38:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/relocationobserver.com\/?p=3568"},"modified":"2026-07-04T19:38:25","modified_gmt":"2026-07-04T19:38:25","slug":"hollywood-movies-have-always-been-about-america-on-the-250th-july-4-are-they-still","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/relocationobserver.com\/?p=3568","title":{"rendered":"Hollywood Movies Have Always Been About America. On the 250th July 4, Are They Still?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n\tA few days ago, the New York Times ran a provocative listicle entitled \u201cWhat Is the Definitive Movie About America?\u201d Their writers came up with a couple of inspired choices, like \u201cDazed and Confused,\u201d along with a handful of head-scratchers (\u201cDisclosure Day\u201d? \u201cThe Florida Project\u201d?). Since no one asked, I thought I would offer five candidates of my own. They are:<\/p>\n

Read more \u2018I Will Find You\u2019 Star Britt Lower on Rachel\u2019s \u2018Spidey Sense\u2019 and Why [SPOILER] as the Murderous Villain Was \u2018Perfect Casting\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n

\nMr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). <\/strong>James Stewart, the quintessential American actor, plays a newly appointed senator who shows up in Washington, D.C., overflowing with schoolboy romanticism, only to learn that the place is a rigged game of corruption. In other words, things haven\u2019t changed much. It\u2019s shocking to see how cynically wised-up a Frank Capra movie could be \u2014 but, of course, the film is all about how Stewart\u2019s fallen idealist goes to the mat and just about kills himself to save the system. The message: Sustaining the greatness of America is always a war.<\/p>\n

\nThe Godfather (1972). <\/strong>In the counterculture era, the wool came off of our eyes about America: how a lot of it really operated, the private values that undergirded our public morality. Francis Ford Coppola\u2019s totemic gangster tragedy was the New Hollywood classic that most deeply channeled the perception of an underworld<\/em> in control. It used the Mafia as a metaphor for the ruthlessness of capitalism, exposing the dark side of those who are pulling the strings.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\nNashville (1975). <\/strong>The greatest movie ever made about what life in America feels<\/em> like. Robert Altman\u2019s \u201970s masterpiece channels the casual tumult of the everyday \u2014 the hype and joy and crowdedness and sense of\u00a0possibility presented by it all. It ends with a song that expresses what may be the single most profound thought about America ever voiced in a motion picture: \u201cYou may say that I ain\u2019t free, but it don\u2019t worry me.\u201d<\/p>\n

\nRocky (1976). <\/strong>Speaking of Capra, Sylvester Stallone\u2019s landmark brought it all back \u2014 not just the corn-dog glory of Old Hollywood, but the mythological value system at work in it, the belief that America was a place where an underdog could rise like a god. As much as \u201cJaws\u201d and \u201cStar Wars,\u201d \u201cRocky\u201d reset the template for what movies would become, but it also helped to pave the way for Ronald Reagan, and for the persistence of dreams as potent as they might be illusory.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\nDirty Harry (1971).<\/strong> In the \u201990s, when I started hearing right-wing talk radio in the back of taxi cabs, I saw that the hosts (Michael Savage, Rush Limbaugh) had figured out how to turn every issue into a Charles Bronson movie. The revenge thrillers of the early \u201970s, at once vicious and demagogic, became the template for talk radio and Fox News \u2014 and for the worldview that grew out of them. And the \u201cCitizen Kane\u201d of those movies was \u201cDirty Harry,\u201d the rebel-urban-cop thriller that made Clint Eastwood a new kind of nihilist icon. It\u2019s a fantastic piece of cinema with unmistakably disturbing political overtones that have carried over, across half a century, to our own era.<\/p>\n

\n\tOkay, on this July 4, I wanted to get those great American movies out of my system. But that\u2019s not actually the point of this column. I could have chosen many other films, as I\u2019m sure you could have. What a \u201cdefinitive\u201d movie about America is will mean different things to different people, because that\u2019s how vast and ever-changing America is.<\/p>\n

\n\tYet when I was pondering the question (\u201cWhat Is the Definitive Movie About America?\u201d), it made me realize how much American movies used to be<\/em> about America. One of the primal definitions of movies is that every one of them, in its way, is a shared dream. And since the American Dream emerges from our shared, conflicting and collective ideas of what that dream should be, movies have always been the perfect larger-than-life arena in which to hash that out.<\/p>\n

Read more Inside Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce\u2019s Wedding: Everything We Learned About the Star-Studded Ceremony at Madison Square Garden<\/a><\/p>\n

\n\tBut the age of movies about<\/em> America may now be fading. Today, the definition of the country is in flux, more so than it\u2019s been in a long time. Are we still a democracy? More to the point: Do we still believe in democracy as a fundamental value \u2014 as the <\/em>fundamental value? I\u2019d argue that increasingly large numbers of people do not. And as \u201cMr. Smith Goes to Washington\u201d demonstrated, you\u2019re not going to have a democracy unless you\u2019re willing to fight for it. If you aren\u2019t, what you might get instead is a \u201cGodfather\u201d nation.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen did American movies stop being about America? In the studio-system era, the movies played a major role in defining what America was. You could say that the original Hollywood moguls created a white-picket-fence America that was more mythology than reality, yet there\u2019s no denying that people strived to achieve it; what you see in so many movies from classic Hollywood is an image of values and behavior that\u2019s very much aspirational. From the clash between freedom and the law that defines the Western genre to the impassioned assertion of fairness in a film like \u201c12 Angry Men\u201d to such profound dramatic examinations of the fight for racial justice as \u201cIn the Heat of the Night,\u201d movies showed us what we wanted America to be.<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd in the New Hollywood era, by dramatizing how far America had fallen from many of those ideals, movies showed us bold new truths \u2014 but they also put us back in touch with the spirit of idealism in a different way. The new films, from \u201cMidnight Cowboy\u201d to \u201cChinatown\u201d to \u201cMcCabe & Mrs. Miller\u201d to \u201cDog Day Afternoon\u201d to \u201cShampoo,\u201d were often shot through with cynicism and despair, and they had wrenchingly flawed heroes and heroines. Yet these movies, too, tapped into American dreams. It was now the disconnect<\/em> between what the characters were living and what they were dreaming that defined the very space of American cinema.<\/p>\n

\n\tToday, more and more, the space of American cinema is defined by one word: fantasy. And without veering into a harangue against fantasy culture, it\u2019s worth noting that the fantasy worlds where our movies increasingly take place add up, in both philosophy and sensation, to a kind of abstract no-man\u2019s land. The films are set in distant galaxies, or in the hermetic jump-scare funhouse of the horror imagination, or in candy-colored animated landscapes designed to be friendly to five-year-olds.<\/p>\n

\n\tOccasionally, you do<\/em> see a deep-dish movie about America, and when that happens it can strike a rich chord. I think audiences experienced that last year with \u201cOne Battle After Another,\u201d which had the daring to be topical in the extreme \u2014 to take a spiritual inventory of what was going on in the country right now, the discord and the oppression and the desperate gulping for the oxygen of freedom. And three years ago, \u201cOppenheimer\u201d was a historical drama that felt like a catharsis, a referendum on what the American invention of the nuclear bomb not only involved but what it meant<\/em>, and what its fallout was.<\/p>\n

\n\tYet it\u2019s hard not to think of these as grand exceptions. When it comes to movies, the disconnect I\u2019m<\/em> feeling on our 250th celebration of July 4 is the one between the extraordinary upheaval America is going through right now, when it seems as if everything that was taken for granted for so long \u2014 the stubborn persistence of the middle class, the values of free speech and democracy \u2014 is up for grabs, and the fact that we\u2019re doomscrolling through all of this, living it each day online, in our conversations, in our families, but not seeing it reflected in the metaphysical mirror the movies have always been. I don\u2019t know if it would even be possible for a Hollywood film to offer a \u201cdefinitive\u201d vision of our tumultuous times. More than ever, though, what we need today is for movies to start looking at America again, so that they can once again give us the big picture.<\/p>\n

Read more Beyonc\u00e9 Drops Unreleased Song \u2018Morning Dew (Donk)\u2019 Ahead of \u2018B\u2019Day\u2019 20th Anniversary Reissue<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On the 250th July 4, is Hollywood still making movies about America? Or has that all been eaten by fantasy culture?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3567,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2934,2935,2936,2937,2938,2939],"class_list":["post-3568","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-film","tag-dirty-harry","tag-mr-smith-goes-to-washington","tag-nashville","tag-one-battle-after-another","tag-rocky","tag-the-godfather"],"yoast_head":"\nHollywood Movies Have Always Been About America. 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