Hollywood Blockbusters: The Anthropology of Popular Movies (review)

In terms of tackling the blockbuster phenomenon, David Sutton and Peter Wogan's Hollywood Blockbusters: The Anthropology of Popular Movies enters a field that may not be as crowded as the average multiplex during the summer season, but has certainly received a fair amount of academic analysis in recent years. Geoff King's Spectacular Narratives: Hollywood in the Age of the Blockbuster (2000) considered the construction of big-budget studio productions, while Julian Springer's edited collection Movie Blockbusters (2003) considered their appeal to the mass audience and Paul Grainge's Brand Hollywood: Selling Entertainment in a Global Media Age (2007) examined the mass-marketing methods adopted by the major studios in order to ensure that their franchises have sufficient universal appeal. King's study considered the mythic components of the Hollywood blockbuster, finding links between special effects spectacle and the ideology of the American frontier, while Springer's collection considered the cultural context in which such expensive epics are consumed alongside the matters of marketing and international distribution; some of these lines of enquiry recur in Hollywood Blockbusters, but this text is rather unique in the field of film studies in that it sets out to encourage and establish an entirely anthropological analysis of Hollywood's primary product.

While the industrial status of the Hollywood blockbuster is acknowledged through passing reference to significant achievements in terms of box office success, the anthropological stance of Sutton and Wogan entails that they are less interested in hard figures than in how certain films reflect the fears, feelings and foibles that exist barely beneath the surface of America's social-political fabric. They describe such studio juggernauts as The Godfather (Coppola US 1972) and Jaws (Spielberg US 1975) as being, 'like enormous, collective dreams, touching on the psyches of millions of people at the same thing' (x), rather than summarising them in commercial terms, and seek to 'show that these anthropological approaches can provide fresh angles on familiar Hollywood movies, and, more generally, on American society and cultural processes' (2). Building on the anthropological approach suggested by Elizabeth Taube's Dreaming Identities: Class, Gender and Generation in 1980s Hollywood Movies (1989) and more fully developed in Lee Drummond's American Dreamtime: A Cultural Analysis of Popular Movies and their Implications for a Science of Humanity (1995), Sutton and Wogan aim to expand on their groundwork by 'drawing more diversely on contemporary anthropology' (16) and considering blockbuster cinema in relation to 'anthropological topics such as gift-giving, boundaries, egalitarian societies, orality and writing, and knowing the Other' (17). While such a wide-ranging anthropological framework often results in a series of arguments that are more admirably eccentric than they are academically incisive, it certainly ensures that Sutton and Wogan succeed in revitalising some established theories on their blockbusters of choice, while also emphasising the 'methodological challenges and possibilities of audience-response analysis' (153) through their concluding case study of a student project revolving around interpretations of Jaws.

As Sutton and Wogan are examining American cinema — and society — from an anthropological point of view, they consider films that have permeated the cultural sub-conscious in an era when 'most mass media suffer ever-faster spin cycles and increasingly fragmented audiences' (1) rather than those that have shattered opening weekend records. This means that they are able to analyse films that failed to meet commercial expectations, or which were made on the fringes of the studio system. They anthropologically deconstruct The Godfather, Field of Dreams (Robinson US 1989), The Big Lebowski (Coen US/UK 1998), The Village (Shyamalan US 2004) and Jaws, offering defence of their selections almost in anticipation of criticism that only a few of these titles can be considered as genuine 'blockbusters'. The Godfather was, of course, an overwhelming critical and commercial success, while Jaws was the first 'summer blockbuster', a film that redefined the Hollywood model in terms of marketing and distribution. Field of Dreams, however, is a film that, in industry parlance, would...