Hollywood Blockbusters: The Anthropology of Popular Movies

191 Pages·2009·2.88 MB·English

by  David Sutton

HOLLYWOOD
BLOCKBUSTERS

HOLLYWOOD
BLOCKBUSTERS
The Anthropology of Popular Movies
David Sutton and Peter Wogan
Oxford • New York
English edition
First published in 2009 by
Berg
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First Floor, Angel Court, 81 St Clements Street, Oxford OX4 1AW, UK
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© David Sutton and Peter Wogan 2009
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form
or by any means without the written permission of Berg.
Berg is the imprint of Oxford International Publishers Ltd.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 1 84788 486 2 (Cloth)
978 1 84788 485 5 (Paper)
Typeset by JS Typesetting Ltd, Porthcawl, Mid Glamorgan
Printed in the UK by the MPG Books Group
www.bergpublishers.com
Disclaimer:
Some images in the original version of this book are not
available for inclusion in the eBook.
For Beth,
You always managed to convince me to watch that movie that I wouldn’t
have gone to otherwise, and you were always right
— DS
For my sons, Zach, Liam, and Peter
You wanna’ have a catch?
— PW

CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ix
1 Introduction 1
2 The Godfather: The Gun, the Pen, and the Cannoli 23
3 Field of Dreams: Foul Balls and Blurry Lines 47
4 The Big Lebowski: Bowling, Gender, Temporality, and Other
“What-Have-You’s” 71
5 The Village: Egalitarianism and the Political Anthropology of
the Possible 95
6 Jaws: Knowing the Shark 117
7 Conclusion 141
References 157
Index 173

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
“We’re gonna’ need a bigger boat.” “That rug really tied the room together.” “Bonasera,
Bonasera, what have I ever done for you to treat me so disrespectfully?” These and
other movie lines have become so interwoven into our conversations over the past
ten years of writing this book that, like a transformative fieldwork experience, they
have become part of who we are. We barely imagined when we first presented a
short conference paper on The Godfather in 1999 that we would spend the next
decade engrossed in the anthropological analysis of blockbuster movies, but we’re
glad we did. Though the joys of collaboration are underrated and underreported in
academia, we are grateful to have had this opportunity to work together so closely
on our joint passion for interpreting American culture and applying anthropological
ideas in novel contexts. We will argue in this book that blockbuster movies are like
enormous, collective dreams, touching on the psyches of millions of people at the
same time. Certainly writing about these movies has fulfilled a dream of ours, and
we owe thanks to a number of colleagues, friends, and relatives for their faith in this
project.
Berg editors Anna Wright and Tristan Palmer, as well as the anonymous Berg
reviewers, deserve special thanks for their help in conceptualizing this project and
seeing it to fruition. For their astute observations and helpful suggestions about
specific chapters, we’re also deeply grateful to Lee Drummond (The Godfather),
Michael McKernan (Field of Dreams), Elizabeth Bird and Bahram Tavakolian
(Jaws), and the audience members that responded to our presentations at Southern
Illinois University, the American Culture Association meetings, and the American
Ethnological Society meetings (The Godfather, Field of Dreams, The Big Lebowski, and
Jaws). Sutton presented an early version of our Godfather chapter at the University
of Michigan, and would like to thank Carol Bardenstein and the Humanities Center
participants for taking the time to read and comment in detail on it.
Others helped, too. Our mothers, as always, were guiding influences. Nancy
Wogan proofread the entire manuscript with her usual sharp editor’s eye (and