In reading the “are things dumbed down for American audiences” thread in GQ, I noticed how readily American posters accepted the notion American audiences are so much lowbrow than foreign audiences. As an occasional reader of Variety and Billboard, I haven’t noticed that foreign audiences are more sophisticated than American audiences. True, stuff like classical music might be more available to foreign markets due to government run broadcasting and cultural quotas; but when given the choice the public’s more likely to pick the mass market product (especially American films). Yet both inside and outside the forums you’d think Europeans watch art films and listen to Captain Beefheart all the time. Why do you think Americans are so likely to believe that foreign audiences are so much more cultured?
If Europeans think Captain Beefheart is highbrow, I’m more cultured than yogurt. 
Not entirely true - American blockbusters usually do quite well world wide, so obviously the “dumbing down” of films seems to work in most markets. Those 12 to 18 year old boys all like the same action adventure films, be it in the US or anywhere else in the world. And teenage girls around the world still flock to see cute boys in love films, no matter how flimsy the plot.
Few foreign film companies can compete financially with the Hollywood budgets, and so most of them opt for more plot-oriented stories with smaller casts and perhaps a more high-brow audience in mind. We in the US get those American and foreign films around Christmas for the Oscar nomination season.
The French still revere Jerry Lewis, don’t they?
Because it’s real easy to prop yourself up by tearing other people down. Many folks (in general) who will talk about how stupid their countrymen are, are doing it in order to point out how smart they are for being above the masses. So it isn’t that Americans feel culturally inferior, it’s that some Americans like feeling culturally superior to other Americans.
Don’t judge a group of 300 million people by what you read on a message board.
I’m not saying this is a good or bad thing, if it really is even a factor, but could the comparative youth (as a nation) of America be a factor? Many other nations have historical records, traditions, architecture, etc dating back thousands of years - this could (perhaps quite unreasonably) make the cultural background of places like America seem - perhaps - a bit makeshift - as if they haven’t really been doing anything long enough to have properly settled into it.
I think it’s also because Europeans are a bit more classist than Americans, which affects their perceptions. When an Englishman or a Frenchman refer to English or French culture, they invariably mean high culture, because what their lower-classed countrymen chose to consume is beneath their notice. On the other hand when people - including Americans - refer to *American * culture they include everything, from Phillip Glass to Larry the Cable guy. In addition, any form od European cultural product that actually manages to cross the Atlantic and the lanhguage barrier is probably going to be better than average, giving Americans the impression that all European culture is like that.
In other words, it’s a form of selection bias.
I think it’s because we’re always told we are, even thought it’s not true. I used to date an English girl when she was in grad school in the U.S., and I went to meet her parents in Stratford Upon Avon. We stayed with a friend of hers that lived just outside of London.
I had to hear how Americans aren’t “cultured” and we are all yokels, so to speak. One evening I picked up the remote, tired to mute the freakin’ X-files and ended up getting Baywatch on channel 4, fer Chrissakes. Just swimming in culture for the visual arts, there. Only four damn channels and their “cultured” selves are using a quarter of them to watch Pamela’s titties bounce. I found the button to change it to the CD, which was Miles Davis by the way, and in my southern accent explained to her that almost her entire bookcase consisted of American authors. I think I remember saying “Darling, you do realize that Hemingway is not a Spaniard?”
They judge us by our crap. It’s our fault for listening, and believing everything we produce is on par with Deuce Bigalow. Any idiot knows that a Dean Koontz novel ain’t Shakespeare, but it still gets read across the English speaking world. Her bookshelves also had Twain, Fitzgerald, Harper Lee, and a bunch of more “pop” novelists like Steven King and Elmore Leonard.
I think as far as how Americans perceive things, much of it has to do with the fact we don’t usually see what, for example, the British are really watching on TV, or in their movie theaters. We tend to see a limited selection of things provided to us courtesy our own high brow outlet, the PBS. We don’t see everything on the BBCs stations, to say nothing of their independent networks. So, with that limited slice of understanding, we assume that they are all into cultured things.
Personally, I don’t find Coronation Street or Eastenders any more highbrow than American soap operas. And that’s just a very limited slice of British TV; here is tonight’s listing for the BBC. Note the showing of Bruce Almighty. Cultured, yeah, right. <snicker>
What I find hilarious is when PBS shows “cultured” British programs like “Are You Being Served?”, which, while funny, is about as “high brow” as “My Mother the Car”.
Well, first of are we are to a certain extent, depending on how you define “culture”. Have you ever been to Paris, Barcelona, Prague, or Amsterdam? These cities have a history that’s hundreds of years older than our oldest American city. They are much richer architecturally than many of our modern automobile-centric sprawling urban areas.
Plus, we Americans have a natural aversion to pretentiousness, except when it’s in the form of a gaudy nouveau riche keeping up with the Jones kind of way. We tend to not be as class conscious as the Europeans, not having a history of aristocracy of our own.
But pick up a Brittish tabloid and you will find thay they are as classless and unsophisticated as the rest of us.
It’s easy to ignore what you’ve got yourself, though. My favourite random fact along these lines is that the Chicago Symphony Orchestra is older than any London orchestra. (I’ve had people who should know better simply refuse to believe it.)
I was thinking along similar lines. American culture on goes back a couple hundred years, any further back and you’re into British culture or French culture or any other number of cultures. It’s quite easy to feel somewhat inferior when other major cultures of the world have so many more centuries of experience, art, architecture and the like to draw on.
There’s another factor which works in reverse a bit, and this may offend some Euros on the board, but it’s true. Europeans have a bad habit of judging American culture by what they consume.
For example, Europeans actually tend to consume more fast food and especially McDonalds per capita (though Americans, I believe, do eat out more at restaurants in total). However, there’s a perception that Americans are all fast-food junkies.
Likewise, Europeans tend to think of America by what they see of it (but without putting any effort in it), which tends to come from a handful of cities and our own American news and media. Thus, they tend to get a skewed version of events. I’ve heard of Europeans seriously thinking that Americans deal with gunfigfhts on a daily basis, apparentlyfrom watching waaaay too many movies. Or they’ll form opinions about our politicians and leaders based upon what some other American (who may have his own agenda) said about the topic. And of course, our news programs leave out things which any American would know; the background is assumed. A European would not necessarily know that, and probably won’t ask. In the long run, I highly doubt Europe is any more highbrow than America, but it’s a little easy for them to believe that if they want to engage in self-deception.
It’s sort of like those Otaku who think that the Japanese are teh kewl because they watch anime. They form an opinion based upon what they see, without ever really asking what Japan is really like.
It’s a bit mystifying to us lot that AYBS and Benny Hill seem to be reasonably well known in the US! I guess the repeat fees are really low or something.
My take on all this is that you lot don’t have any need to any kind of cultural cringe* w.r.t. to Europeans or anyone for that matter. With such vital and dynamic film, music and literary scenes you really, really don’t need to. Sure, there’s a load of rubbish, but there’s a lot of gold in there too. The US television industry, for one, has been hitting it out of the park on a regular basis recently.
My favourite TV comedy ever - Frasier
First TV drama to blow me away completely - Hill Street Blues
Pretty much the only novel guaranteed to always be in my top five - For Whom the Bell Tolls
Don’t get me started on music or movies…
- “cultural cringe” - I’m Scottish - we know what cultural cringe means. Our relationship with England seems very similar to that between the US and Europe. By far the most vocal opinions doing down your own culture come from within that very culture, but the blame is shifted externally. Don’t get suckered into that, Americans! It’s very corrosive and wrong. IMO.
More interestingly, the French revere Clint Eastwood.
I think the impression that Americans are culturally lowbrow comes from the strength of the marketing departments in our film studios. We shove our lowbrow crap down the whole world’s throat, while in general, other countries’ lowbrow crap stays within their borders (or is exported without much fanfare). For example, the only mainland Chinese movies that manage to be even somewhat high-profile across the Pacific are the critics’ darlings like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The schlock that I see every day on TV movie channels here just don’t play anywhere else.
I’ve got to ask for cites. And for a definition of ‘fast food’, which can easily encompass a valid part of a non-American culture.
Bit out of date but