ABSTRACT
Nationalism is often seen as a force-characteristically, as a disease-that affects others. Gellner’s very sophisticated theory, for example, defines nationalism as the struggle of a cultural group to establish its own political roof (Gellner 1983; Hall 1998). This will not do. The nationalisms which most affected the historical record were those of France and of Germany-that is, the nationalisms of large and established states rather than those of peoples struggling to secede from larger polities. In our own time the nationalism which matters most for world affairs is that of the United States. If this is one justification for the focus of this chapter, another background consideration must be that the United States is the leading producer of film. But the story to be told here is complex, certainly far less simple than views of an all-encompassing and confident American cultural imperialism would allow. Bluntly, while American citizens are strongly patriotic and nationalistic,1 overtly political films have never been popular. As Phillip Gianos has recently remarked: ‘The United States has developed over the years a richer film vocabulary for gangsters, cowboys, and mummies raised from the dead than it has for citizens and presidents … ’. In the world of Hollywood, ‘politics is not consequential; politics is not interesting; happiness is purely an individual matter; things will be all right. This is what virtually all American films tell their audiences’ (Gianos 1998:4, 7).2 So our subject must be that of the curious case of an anti-political national identity.
