Beauty, Pie and Sniper: why Hollywood loves making things American
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Version 0 of 1. American Sniper, Clint Eastwood’s adaptation of Chris Kyle’s bestselling autobiography, exceeded all expectations last week by earning an obscene amount of money at the US box office: $105m over the Martin Luther King long weekend. Americans went in their droves to watch a film that US conservatives, and red state audiences in particular, have already claimed as their own. “Hollywood leftists,” wrote Sarah Palin on Facebook, “just realise the rest of America knows you’re not fit to shine Chris Kyle’s combat boots.” Clearly, patriotism has significantly contributed to the film’s success, and the presence of “American” in its title will have helped tremendously. American filmmakers have been using the power of the word since the birth of cinema in 1896. Between then and 1970, according to the American Film Institute, 191 of the country’s films had “American” in the title, while a further 63 had “America”. It began with travelogues boasting footage of the Niagara Falls (such as the 1896 opus American Falls from Incline Railroad), while 1903’s short silent movie Life of an American Fireman, made for the Edison Manufacturing Company, treated viewers to a woman and child being rescued from a burning building. Things escalated with Frank Capra’s 1932 film American Madness, about a banker tied up in a robbery scandal. That came armed with the tagline “The Great American Picture of Today”, and in the last few decades titles such as American Graffiti, American Beauty and American Hustle have been used to make salient points about the US, with films often retitled to get the message across in the second it takes to notice a billboard. George Lucas’s original title for American Graffiti was Another Quiet Night in Modesto; Ridley Scott’s American Gangster was initially called Tru Blu; the American Pie screenplay was called East Great Falls High before the filmmakers opted to allude to both Don McLean’s song and the pie molested by Jason Biggs. “These films have underscored their role in interpreting and constituting ‘America’ by announcing themselves as titulary ‘American’,” writes Mandy Merck in her book America First: Naming The Nation In US Film, which traces it all back to 19th-century French historian Alexis de Tocqueville’s description of the country as “exceptional”. “Madness, beauty, graffiti, tragedy, romance, splendour and, of course, (apple) pie,” continues Merck, “all of these and many more have, at different historical moments and through the agency of filmmakers with widely various artistic, cultural and political agendas, found themselves rendered definitely ‘American’.” Whether these films celebrate or damn their own culture and history, they all trade on the country’s brand in true US fashion: loudly and proudly. And with that box-office return, American Sniper won’t be the last. |