Just outside Tokyo 300,000 people troop through Japan's Disneyland each week, while 20 miles outside Paris a new city is rising on 8 sq. mi. of formerly vacant land. Once Euro Disney Resort opens for business in 1992, forget the Eiffel Tower, the Swiss Alps and the Sistine Chapel: it is expected to be the biggest tourist attraction in all of Europe. In Brazil as many as 70% of the songs played on the radio each night are in English. In Bombay's thriving theater district, Neil Simon's plays are among the most popular. Last spring a half-dozen American authors were on the Italian best-seller list. So far this year, American films (mostly action-adventure epics like Die Hard 2 and The Terminator) have captured some 70% of the European gate.
America is saturating the world with its myths, its fantasies, its tunes and dreams. At a moment of deep self-doubt at home, American entertainment products -- movies, records, books, theme parks, sports, cartoons, television shows -- are projecting an imperial self-confidence across the globe. Entertainment is America's second biggest net export (behind aerospace), bringing in a trade surplus of more than $5 billion a year. American entertainment rang up some $300 billion in sales last year, of which an estimated 20% came from abroad. By the year 2000, half of the revenues from American movies and records will be earned in foreign countries.
But the implications of the American entertainment conquest extend well beyond economics. As the age of the military superpowers ends, the U.S., with no planning or premeditation by its government, is emerging as the driving cultural force around the world, and will probably remain so through the next century. The Evil Empire has fallen. The Leisure Empire strikes back.
"What we are observing," says Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan, "is the increasing leisure hours of people moving increasingly toward entertainment. What they are doing with their time is consuming entertainment -- American entertainment -- all over the industrialized world."
For most of the postwar era, hard, tangible American products were the measure of U.S. economic success in the world. Today culture may be the country's most important product, the real source of both its economic power and its political influence in the world. "It's not about a number, though the number is unexpectedly huge," says Merrill Lynch's Harold Vogel, author of the 1990 book Entertainment Industry Economics. "It is about an economic state of mind that today is dominated by entertainment."
What is the universal appeal of American entertainment? Scale, spectacle, technical excellence, for sure: Godfather Part III, Batman. The unexpected, a highly developed style of the outrageous, a gift for vulgarity that borders on the visionary: a Motley Crue concert, for example, with the drummer stripped down to his leather jockstrap, flailing away from a calliope riding across the rafters of the Meadowlands Arena in New Jersey. Driving plots, story lines and narrative: a Tom Clancy hero or one of Elmore Leonard's misfits. Indiana Jones' strength of character, self-reliance, a certain coarseness, a restless energy as American as Emerson and Whitman.