American Blockbuster: Movies, Technology, and Wonder

Sign, Storage, Transmission

by Charles R. Acland

Ben Hur (1959), Jaws (1975), Avatar (2009), Wonder Woman (2017): the blockbuster movie has held a dominant position in American popular culture for decades. In American Blockbuster Charles R. Acland charts the origins, impact, and dynamics of this most visible, entertaining, and disparaged cultural form. Acland narrates how blockbusters emerged from Hollywood's turn to a hit-driven focus during the industry's business crisis in the 1950s. Movies became bigger, louder, and more spectacular. They also became prototypes for ideas and commodities associated with the future of technology and culture, accelerating the prominence of technological innovation in modern American life. Acland shows that blockbusters continue to be more than just movies; they are industrial strategies and complex cultural machines designed to normalize the ideologies of our technological age.

Genres: Pop Culture, Technology

400 pages, Paperback

Published August 14, 2020

About the author

Charles R. Acland is Associate Professor of Communications Studies at Concordia University, Montreal.

Reviews

[William · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great book about Hollywood blockbuster films. It's a subject which has been written about by many others, but Acland brings new insights. Most notable was the middle section, where he writes about the origins of the term "blockbuster" and how its meaning solidified (which took over ten years). The word "blockbuster" (or "block-buster") was actually the name of a bomb in WWII, supposedly big enough to destroy an entire block of apartments. Over the years, the culture's interest in WWII (and society's investment in pro-war propaganda) allowed the term to slide into hip pop culture usage, where movies, books, even musical theater productions were called "blockbusters" because of their quality, profitability, or simply war-related content. The origins of the term actually provide a surprising amount of insight into what blockbusters today are and how they function in our society. Acland's main point by the end of the book is that blockbuster films, by always pushing the boundaries of size and advancing new and exciting technologies (wide-screen, CinemaScope, TechniColor, 3-D, IMAX, etc.) are a major contributor to American society's view that technological progress is by definition good, whether or not new technologies advance human interests. Bigger, or so we've been taught, is always better, no matter the fact that our streets are still filled with homeless people in need, and children around the world are starving to death. New technologies are often a distraction rather than an attempt to improve the lives of the people on this planet. Similarly, the American public happily ate up the news reports of blockbuster bombs, fawning over the technological prowess and impressive size of it, without a care in the world for the fact that this was a device designed to murder innocent civilians. It's right there in the name. Block-buster: a bomb big enough to destroy a residential apartment complex.

Overall, the book is very well written and other than a little bit of cultural theory (especially in the first two chapters) is relatively accessible to a lay audience. A true pleasure.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

An impeccably theorized, comprehensively researched, and compulsively readable analysis of the pivotal role American blockbuster movies have played in our relationship not just to cinema, but to technological modernity. A must-read!!

[Mike Goemaat]

Research material before the Blockbuster Futures conference in October.