More Than Meets the Eye: Movies in American Studies

Movies in American studies should always be about more than what meets the eye: the power and function of cinema within larger spheres of cultural power are central to any particular vision or analysis of American culture at home or abroad.But, when it comes to movies, the central struggles about conflict and power often taken for granted in other arenas of cultural analysis become clouded in emphasis on individual films as representative texts of their times.American studies may have embraced cinema and the mass media in general, but movies in American studies scholarship have consistently and predominantly served as mere textual symptoms of past ideologies.In the 1960s and 1970s, American studies increasingly incorporated movies as popular expressions of American myths.While we now regularly pride ourselves on how far we have come methodologically since the height of those "myth and symbol" days, changing American studies approaches have not significantly altered the way movies are understood within the discipline.Movies "began" as popular cultural myth providing affirmations of consensus.1 With Marxist and post-structural theoretical influences in the 1980s, movies transformed into objects of ideology for manufacturing and winning popular consent. 2 By the 1990s, identity politics created a climate for considering how movies serve a counter-hegemonic practice of refusing and resisting stereotypes.3 But, these evolving theoretical approaches to cultural critique and politics, while