the new hollywood

I rely heavily on trailers these days. Overwhelmed with choice, I use them to make an informed decision on what to watch. I've been stung too many times before — hours wasted on shows and films poisoned by the same stale, exposition-heavy dialogue that's become commonplace today. If the rumours are to be believed, studio execs no longer trust us to follow a plot. Too distracted by our phones, they think. And so writers are ordered to have characters state the obvious, to make it easy for our addled brains to keep up. I'd argue that the reason we're reaching for our phones in the first place is because the dialogue has made the plot so painfully obvious.

My extensive trailer-watching has led me to an observation: the most popular shows at the moment are all set in London — The Gentlemen, The Agency, Slow Horses, Bait, MobLand, The Runner, Fuze, the list goes on. And this got me thinking about soft power.

Broadly defined, soft power is a country's ability to influence without force or coercion — in contrast to hard power, where military force and economic intimidation are the tools of the trade. Culture, reputation, a way of living: these are the vessels through which a country influences softly.

Italy. Think of the desire we all possess for a life lived La Dolce Vita. The love we have for Italian food. The aspiration and desirability created by brands like Armani and Ferrari. This is Italian soft power.

France. Think of the romanticism evoked whenever we picture Paris. The dreams we've all harboured, at some point in our twenties, of living in the City of Love. Afternoons spent outside a café, cigarette in one hand, Dostoevsky in the other. The aspiration and desirability of brands like Chanel, Saint Laurent, Dior. This is French soft power.

The UK also exerts considerable soft power. But it wasn't always soft — it was once very hard, and thrust into territories across the globe, allowing it, at the height of Empire, to control 24% of the world. But the Empire crumbled, Britain's hard power turned flaccid, and soft power became the modus operandi.

In music, we gave the world the Beatles, Elton John, the Spice Girls. In literature, Shakespeare, Orwell, J.K. Rowling. In fashion, Alexander McQueen, Vivienne Westwood, and the tailors of Savile Row. And lest we forget our most important cultural export: the Royal Family.

A fact for the Republicans among you — every £1 spent on the monarchy is estimated to generate about £12.80 of economic value, a return of roughly 1,180%. Still not convinced? Consider then the political benefit of a constitutional monarch — of having a non-partisan figure more powerful than the elected leader, someone to keep in check the ego that power inevitably stokes. For proof of the peril in not having one, I point you to America.

And last but not least: Bond. James Bond. Frankly, Britain has no greater ambassador — the personification of strength, style, confidence, and military prowess. Even as our power on the world stage has dwindled over the decades, you'd never know it watching a Bond film.

But while the UK has worked hard at influencing the world over the past few decades, America worked harder. It gave the world a masterclass in soft power. The global pull of brands like Nike, McDonald's, and Apple; the sheer volume of musical talent, from Sinatra to Beyoncé and everyone in between; sitcoms like Friends and Seinfeld that made New York feel like the centre of the world; films like Independence Day and Top Gun that flexed American military strength in a way that warned the world that it was not a country to be fucked with.

But no more. America's cultural decline arguably began in 2017, the year it elected a convicted felon to its highest office. Donald Trump has eroded the image of the US in the eyes of the world. Years of heavy hairspray use have clearly permeated his skull, eroded his prefrontal cortex — and with it, logic and common sense. There are those who insist he's cunning — a man who knows exactly what he's doing. But they are wrong. Cunning requires foresight: a long view of how things will play out. Trump possesses no such thing. He is as surprised as anyone by the words that spew out of his mouth.

Film and television have always been among the most effective tools of PR and propaganda. The Bond example illustrates the point neatly enough, and celebrities now commission their own documentaries, lest the public form an opinion without their supervision. In Nazi Germany Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda, understood that cinema could shape morale. Newsreels showed Germany as the Reich wanted it seen: powerful, prosperous, and winning — even as they were losing the war. A grim reminder that the power to control the story is, sometimes, more valuable than the truth. Look at the United States v Iran.

The power to mould and influence was, for decades, held almost exclusively by the suits in Hollywood. Studio heads were the cultural gods. But their power has waned in recent years. Content has been democratised — everyone has a camera, and everyone now has the means to broadcast and build their own soft power. A recent article in Variety detailed how parts of the Warner Bros. lots are being turned into padel courts in a joint venture with Ryan Reynolds — a man who seems to be running out of fingers to stick into pies.

Meanwhile, in the UK, the physical infrastructure of film-making is expanding fast. Pinewood, Shepperton, and Leavesden already host the beating heart of American blockbuster cinema. Every Marvel Studios production since Disney's 2012 acquisition of Lucasfilm has used Pinewood.

Soft power has always followed where stories get made. Hollywood's dominance was because it controlled the machinery of narrative. That machinery is now fragmenting: partly because streaming has scattered production budgets across the globe chasing tax incentives, and partly because the old studio system's monopoly on distribution has been broken by anyone with a phone and a following.

Britain finds itself an unlikely beneficiary of both trends. Whether that turns into genuine soft power remains to be seen. Renting out your stages to tell somebody else's story is not quite the same as telling your own. Real soft power was never just about where the cameras roll — it's about whose values end up on screen. America won the twentieth century not because films were shot in Burbank, but because those films exported an idea of what it meant to be American, and the rest of the world, for a while, wanted to buy it.

We don’t have much going for us in the UK. We can’t keep up with American and Chinese industry, our economic growth is uninspired, we have no skin in the A.I game, and American billionaires sully our name at any given opportunity. Maybe our fast-developing entertainment infrastructure will be our saving grace. From the ashes rises a New Hollywood, and we would be wise to take advantage of this.