3 - “Foil, Toothpaste, ID4”: Ideology and Global Appeal in the Films of Roland Emmerich

Summary

Roland emmerich, like Wolfgang Petersen, is one of the world's most commercially successful directors, dealing primarily in high-concept movies. Since his U.S. debut in 1992, his works (a total of six films as of 2005) have grossed about $2.235 billion globally: Universal Soldier (1992), Stargate (1994), Independence Day (1996), Godzilla (1998), The Patriot (2000), and The Day after Tomorrow (2004). In 2005, Independence Day was thirteenth on the list of the all-time top money makers worldwide with box-office earnings of almost $900 million, The Day after Tomorrow was thirty-sixth with around $528 million.

Emmerich is also, like Petersen, one of just a handful of Hollywood directors who have gained the right of final cut due to their commercial success. Yet, Emmerich's works push the conflation of culture and economics much more radically toward the cinema's globalized commodification than Petersen's, and they do so in part by avoiding national-cultural specificity. The point of reference for Emmerich's U.S. films is the two-dimensional world of Hollywood cinema as opposed to the empirically-existing nation of the United States of America. As American film scholar Michael Rogin puts it in a comprehensive analysis of Independence Day, “Devlin [the co-writer of the film] and Emmerich locate their ‘collective unconscious’ entirely within movies.” In fact, it is Emmerich's reliance on cinematic clichés and stereotypical notions of “Americanness” that betrays the director's outsider perspective.

The “Cinema of Attraction”

To become successful on a global scale it seems that contemporary directors have two options. They can be oriented toward one national culture with respect to their audiences and their frame of reference, but must then be narratively and aesthetically original. Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, 1994), for instance, details political, social, and cultural developments particular to the history of the Unites States in a unique manner. The movie became an international success more by word of mouth than by its marketing campaign, yet it ranks twenty-second in the worldwide box-office charts as of 2006 with a total gross of about $680 million.