ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 emphasized the complex network of copying engineered in and associated with the loosely defined New Asian Cinema, demonstrating how transcultural (mis)understanding is made possible by different politics of copying. In this chapter I shift to Hollywood, and I would like to investigate how transcultural copying is also fundamental to Hollywood’s movie industry. Despite the prevailing view that Hollywood creates and exports while other countries import, modify, or pirate these productions, I want to demonstrate how Hollywood also copies Asian films on different levels. This putative transnationality in the end conjures up a unified national identity. The discourse of copyright helps us to link Hollywood’s (trans)national structure to its global hegemony: the “Americanness” of Hollywood film as a representation and as a commodity is often constructed through the exploitation and repression of its transnational components, making it accessible to world markets while maintaining its national brand. This chapter, therefore, also attempts to explicate the complex mechanism of copying in today’s global cinemascape by examining not only the film’s text but also the context of its global circulation. But here I want to shift my attention to Hollywood’s indebtedness to Asian cinema. In a way, it is naïve for Hollywood and the copyright discourse serving it to believe that cultural products and legal discourse are universally applicable and culturally neutral; however, Hollywood’s global domination is built precisely on this deliberate ignorance of cultural difference.
