A New “Marshall” Plan: Terrorism, Globalization, Blockbusters, and Air Force One

Abstract

In 1994, Hollywood reached a milestone: global box office revenues topped the domestic take for the first time. Certainly much of this success is due to the worldwide popularity of blockbusters-and the success of the studios' advertising of their most mass-market product (Balio; Klady). 1 In this paper, we will use this most global of film forms to help us understand the nation, nationalism, and the place of the United States in the contemporary globalization era that began in the 1990s at the end of the Cold War. I argue that these films present, as much as they help to initiate, a post-national US nationalism that is very much focused on the US as a world police force. That is, these films are part of a larger process that reframes US cultural nationalism for a global audience and a global regime in which the pinnacle of sovereignty is no longer the nation-state. 2 Fredrick Buell sees the development of postnational nationalism as an ambiguous narrative that seems to "blend conservative nationalist and radical-postnational positions together into a new kind of nationalism for a global era" (553). As he argues, "This new identity is one that is, much more transparently than ever before, produced with global forces and a global audience in mind; it is much less a narrative of [national] self-identity and much more transparently the fruit 'I would like to thank Joseba Gabilondo for pointing out this research to me and helping me to develop some key points in this essay by letting me sit in on his "Globalization and Cinema" graduate course at the University of Florida. 2 The nation-state obviously remains powerful, but it shares that power in new ways with many other sovereign entities such as the World Trade Organization, the European Union, and the International Monetary Fund, to name but a few.