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"I've always felt that the export of our vulgarity is the hallmark of our greatness," says Styron, who lived for many years in Paris and whose books always sell well in France. "I don't necessarily mean to be derogatory. The Europeans have always been fascinated by wanting to know what's going on with this big, ogreish subcontinent across the Atlantic, this potentially dangerous, constantly mysterious country called the U.S. of A." American popular culture fills a vacuum, vulgar or not. "French television is a wasteland; ours is a madhouse. But at least it's vital," says Styron. "Dallas and Knots Landing and the American game shows are filling a need in France."
Susan Sontag, whose 1964 essay Notes on "Camp" broke new ground in interpreting American popular culture, expresses doubt that the vitality of European culture will be extinguished by America's onslaught. "The cultural infrastructure is still there," she says, noting that great bookstores , continue to proliferate in Europe. Rather than regarding Americans as cultural imperialists, she observes wryly, "many Europeans have an almost colonialist attitude toward us. We provide them with wonderful distractions, the feeling of diversion. Perhaps Europeans will eventually view us as a wonderfully advanced Third World country with a lot of rhythm -- a kind of pleasure country, so cheap with the dollar down and all that singing and dancing and TV."
How long will the American cultural hegemony last? "I think we are living in a quasi-Hellenistic period," says Chilean philosopher Claudio Veliz, a visiting professor of cultural history at Boston University, who is writing a book on the subject.
"In 413 B.C., Athens ceased to be a world power, and yet for the next 300 years, Greek culture, the culture of Athens, became the culture of the world." Much as the Greek language was the lingua franca of the world, Veliz sees the American version of English in the same role. "The reason Greek culture was so popular is very simple: the people liked it. People liked to dress like the Greeks, to build their buildings like the Greeks. They liked to practice sports like the Greeks; they liked to live like the Greeks. Yet there were no Greek armies forcing them to do it. They simply wanted to be like the Greeks."
If America's epoch is to last, the underlying character of American culture must remain true to itself as it is pulled toward a common global denominator by its entertainment engine. But danger signals are already present: too few movies characterized by nuance, or even good old American nuttiness; more and more disco-dance epics, sickly sweet romances and shoot-'em-up, cut-'em-up, blow-'em-up Schwarzenegger characters; rock 'n' roll that never gets beyond heavy breathing and head banging; blockbuster books that read like T shirts. The combination of the foreign marketplace and a young domestic audience nourished on TV sitcoms, soaps and MTV may be deadly.
The strength of American pop culture has always been in its originality and genuineness: Jimmy Stewart and Bruce Springsteen, West Side Story and The Graduate, Raymond Chandler and Ray Charles, the Beach Boys and Howdy Doody, James Dean and Janis Joplin. It would be a terrible irony if what America does best -- celebrate its own imagination -- becomes debased and homogenized by consumers merely hungry for anything labeled MADE IN THE U.S.A.