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Politicians may debate whether America, in the post-cold war era, will continue to hold center stage. But no one can doubt that it fills the world's screens -- cinema and television -- as well as its VCRs, bookshelves, record stores and CD players. The dominance is especially pronounced on movie marquees. In most foreign countries, the most popular films are from Hollywood: brain-bashing action epics from Schwarzenegger and Stallone, to be sure, but also fantasy romances like Pretty Woman and Ghost. If we make it, they want it -- and lately, if they are Japanese, they want to buy the American companies that make it. Foreign investors realize that in the chancy business of manufacturing popular art, Hollywood has an ever tighter grip on the world's pulse. Since 1985 the overseas take from U.S. films has doubled. Movies represent a robust portion of an entertainment industry that registers an annual $5 billion or so trade surplus.
But Hollywood did more than make money with its product; it minted, and then exported, the nation's cultural ideology. From the first years of this century, with flickering images of cowboys and comic tramps, the movies were America's most glamorous way of advertising itself to the world. The bustling genius of the American system ensured that to a Peruvian or a Perugian, "the movies" meant Hollywood. And the stars bred within that system sold the movies' myth about America. A Manhattan penthouse became the top of the world when Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers danced through it; the canyons of Arizona were the promised land as long as John Wayne patrolled them.
As Hollywood touched the world, so it lured the world's talent to Southern California. Most of the men who built the studios were Jewish immigrants from Germany and Eastern Europe. Writers, directors, designers, cinematographers would make their names in Europe, then stow away to the States. And co-opting like crazy from the start, Hollywood made foreigners its greatest stars: Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford, Cary Grant and Greta Garbo. So it is only fitting that the torchbearer, the sword wielder, the giant of American movies, should be an overgrown Austrian with a face and body out of a superhero comic.
Like a Ninja Turtle conceived in disaster and destined for greatness, Schwarzenegger was born in the rubble of the Third Reich's defeat, in the Austrian village of Thal. His father was a policeman, his mother a housekeeper, and they lived in a house that had no toilet or refrigerator until he was 14. Could it have been such mean circumstances that gave Arnold an edge? He thinks so. "Today in America," he says, "I see kids comfortable, getting everything they want, peaceful minds, no hang-ups. And I realize that stability will never create the hunger it takes to go beyond the limits where others have been. For that, you have to be a little off. Something has to happen in your childhood that you say, 'I'm going to make up for this.' You don't even know what it is. Maybe I was competitive with my brother or trying to prove something to my father. But it doesn't really matter. Something was there that made me hungry."