Pop Goes the Culture

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Television and movies reassuringly confirm foreigners' preconceptions of America and Americans. Such notions tend to be superficial and overdrawn, just like pop. The U.S. is violent; just look at Miami Vice. The U.S. is amazingly rich; look at Falcon Crest. The U.S. is zany--and rich and violent; look at Beverly Hills Cop. It is telling that Vanessa Redgrave defends Dynasty and Dallas on Trotskyist grounds. These portrayals of American ruling-class mischief, she says, are politically correct.

Exporters of pop pander to foreign stereotypes of Americans. "The Japanese have very firm ideas about what they think we should be," says Jim Chriss, marketing vice-president of Levi Strauss International. Real Americans, in other words, are cowboys and sexpots and raucous young hunks--Steve McQueen, Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift. It seems that Europeans and Japanese are especially fond of the American icons that provided their first pop jolt 20 or 30 or 40 years ago--pop that now has patina. The French intelligentsia still swoons for American movies of the '40s and '50s. Levi's is using images of James Dean and John Wayne in its advertisements in Japan, music by Marvin Gaye and Sam Cooke in Europe. "We're selling not the America of today but the America they imagine," says Chriss, "what they'd like America to be."

On the other hand, consuming American pop is not necessarily a kind of pro- Americanism. The Rambo look is all the rage among guerrillas in Beirut. The Sandinistas are American baseball nuts. Says Peruvian Writer Augusto Ortiz de Zevallos: "You see Marxist-Leninists with T shirts that say COCA-COLA." In the view of Marc Pachter, a historian at the Smithsonian Institution, foreigners may turn to the left precisely because they like American pop so much. At least in Europe, argues Pachter, youthful political anti-Americanism is a way of "justifying their enormous thirst for American pop culture. As long as they can bad-mouth the society that produces the stuff, they don't feel so bad about indulging in its exports." But even then, apolitical American targets are not always off limits. After the U.S. bombing of Libya in April, a mob in Barcelona stoned a local McDonald's. Last year Peruvian Marxists sprayed graffiti and burned tables at three of Lima's five Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants.

In countries where American pop is officially discouraged or limited, however, playing a Huey Lewis tape or wearing Jordache jeans can be an implicit political gesture, a tiny, tinny blow for individual liberty. One young Czech puts it bluntly: "Coke equals America. America equals freedom." In the Soviet Union, VCRS and audiocassette players are inherently democratizing devices. "The new communications technology has changed things completely," says one Moscow father of teenagers. "Tapes can be played over and over, exchanged, copied." In the '50s American moral vigilantes sometimes claimed that rock 'n' roll was the creation of Communist subversives out to undermine U.S. youth; today Pravda could make the counterclaim a lot more persuasively. Says U.S. Information Agency Director Charles Z. Wick, a former talent agent: "I would hope that American pop culture would penetrate into other societies, acting as a pilot parachute for the rest of American values."