Featuring revenge, decapitation, gore, incest, palace intrigue, strapping blokes in leather mini-skirts and a glance at the republic versus monarchy debate, Gladiator hauled in five Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Actor. Both a throwback to Hollywood's age of sword and sandal epics and a $100 million example of contemporary cinematic high-tech, it's undeniably an entertaining yarn. It's entertainment, not art, and as such, it is a quintessentially Hollywood movie - grand in scale, lavish in visuals, meagre in meaning.
Fair enough, it's not meant to be art and it would be idiotic to damn it for not being what it never intended to be. But the aggregation of Hollywood's movies, whatever about its individual ones, is not mere entertainment. It is, in fact, among the greatest collections of propaganda in human history. Hollywood stars become known worldwide, its stories simplify - questionably and, arguably, dangerously - notions of morality and its moguls and assorted loot-lizards routinely become fabulously wealthy. In short, Hollywood endorses nothing as much as it endorses itself.
The annual Oscars "ceremony", often self-congratulatory not just to the point of embarrassment but to the point of obscenity - the public masturbation of fame - is always received with more scepticism and even cynicism in Europe than in the US. Watch the parading, preening and posing on TV in the US and the portentous, pretentious pomp of it all is generally considered to be legitimate, even uplifting showbusiness. It's just American razzmatazz. What's the problem, dude? Lighten up.
Problem is, dude, that it's not just American razzmatazz. It is also American propaganda. Not that we should be unduly moralistic about this. If Europe or Asia or Africa were the world's dominant producer of mass entertainment films, the inevitable propaganda would reflect the underlying ideology of Europe, Asia or Africa. This might or might not result in propaganda even more insidious than is currently exported from the US. Who knows? But the fact is that the US rules at present - so that's where consideration must focus.
In an age when US economic beliefs have never been more dominant (in Ireland as much as anywhere else) Hollywood's unavoidable endorsement of such founding and funding beliefs, albeit often under the spurious guise of examining them (capitalists can be criminals too - wow!) is practically totalitarian. Aimed at a world population, but always extra-sensitive to US tastes they share and have helped to mould, Hollywood movies don't simply, as is often charged, underestimate the taste and intelligence of audiences, they regularly undermine them too. It's McEntertainment.
It's a huge industry, of course, and because cinema can't afford the unpredictable, it is far less an art than it might be. Let's be reasonable about this: if you are going to gamble tens of millions of dollars, it's inevitable that you will seek the security of highly profitable, tried-and-tested stars and formulas. So we live with the industrialisation of film-making. Some of its product we enjoy too, and being honest, arthouse-only cinema-goers sound even more boring than, say, adult devotees of Arnold Schwarzenegger films.
However, it's not just the well documented industrialisation of film-making which is alarming. The industrialisation of images themselves can be treacherous. It's close on 50 years since Roland Barthes wrote his essay, `The Romans in Films'. In it, he focused on the insistent fringes of the male characters in such films, identifying the fringe as "quite simply, the label of Roman-ness". Bald Romans, though they are many in Roman history, lack this little forehead flag of "historical plausibility" and, unless very old, are consequently excluded.
Sure, Roman fringes are, on many levels, a fringe issue. (Mind you, Russell Crowe as the hero Maximus in Gladiator conforms to convention with no less than four dubious, itsy-bitsy, Caesarean fringe locks caressing his forehead.) But the sum total of stereotyping is not a fringe issue - ask any group which routinely gets a bad press - and Hollywood, simplifying the mental landscape for us, has been arguably the world's main agent of visual and character stereotyping in the past 80 or 90 years.
FORGET the Romans in films and consider the Irish in films - the general treatment which Irish characters and themes have historically received from Hollywood. Priests, drunks and New York cops, presented predominantly as whimsical codgers, used to be our lot. More recently, with Irish writers, directors and actors getting a greater chance to tell our own stories (albeit still severely limited by the dictates of entertaining contextually-challenged, often downright ignorant, teenagers in the American mid-west) there has been some improvement.
And that's just us: English-speakers with an established and potent lobby within US culture. How about other foreigners? Russians, Germans, Japanese - at various times formidable enemies of the Americans? Muslims today? Blacks, Hispanics, Asians within the US itself? Surely the problem with such stereotyping, whether plausible, half-true (the really dangerous stuff) or completely false, is that it can survive even disproof by experience. Naturally, we grow comfortable with stereotypes - like cliches, they deliver us the suss without the turgid trials of thinking.
Like convenience phrases and convenience foods, convenience thoughts are attractive. But they are part of the price of Hollywood entertainment. And sure, life is hard enough without being rigorous about something that's supposed to transport you away from the tedium and the rigour. So we all indulge, and Hollywood produces the transporting thrills, telling us all to lighten up as it fattens the wallets of its biggest players and fattens our minds with daft and sometimes dangerous notions of ourselves and the world.
Mind you, there are talents, skills and expertise in Hollywood which are superb. Its film industry is often splendid at what it does but the pity is that what it does best is to make money. Look at the marketing, the merchandising, the PR, the hype, the full-force, blitzkrieg assaults on young minds which its mega-expensive "blockbusters" generate. If you feel, perhaps justifiably, that you're impervious to all that nonsense, look at your kids. They're not impervious - and neither were we, when we were kids. As well as being a magnificent organ of propaganda, Hollywood is a very skilled seducer.
WE know that the French, a people who had global ambitions as regards their own language, resent the global role of English. Hollywood, as part of US big business - the visual entertainment part - has helped hugely in universalising English. For us, this may be no bad thing, but it is not without a cost either. Part of that cost is that continental Europeans routinely learn English alongside their native language. (So, it might be argued, do we. But Irish is not thriving like French, Italian, German, Spanish, Greek and Portuguese and overall, we lag well behind most European countries in foreign language acquisition.)
No doubt Hollywood English is a subject all of its own. But after almost a century of image-dominated entertainment, it's difficult not to believe, in spite of generally rising educational standards, that literacy standards have not been diminished. The attitude which Hollywood adopts towards its writers - dismissive in the name of populism - appears to have seeped into mainstream society. The grammar of the camera is sacrosanct - directors will shoot a scene as often as they wish - but the grammar of simple sentences is just for pedants and cultural neanderthals.
Then again, all technological change - in this case, from printed words to screened images - involves a trade-off. In its time, the printing press killed the oral tradition which preceded it. But more important perhaps is the reality that all great technologies have embedded prejudices. Screen, of course, favours the spectacular and the handsome, where print had favoured the thoughtful and the articulate. Both types have their merits and attractions but Hollywood, seeking bums on seats, promotes image at all costs.
The result of this is that US movies, like US television, practically hijacked a magnificent technology. It developed its technical and entertaining aspects, created a captive audience, saw the function of the technology to make as much money as possible and thereby limited the whole enterprise. Pulp celluloid is no bad thing - is Gladiator not more entertaining than Beckett on Film? - but a massive preponderance of pulp celluloid in a few favoured movie genres is the reality of Hollywood.
It has long since seen itself as America's "dream factory". And fair enough, occasionally Hollywood has created great dreams on screen. But given the financial, technical and artistic resources of the film industry, Hollywood represents the outright victory of the market which underpins the American Dream. In that sense, its films are the celluloid representations of the American Dream itself. Its ideal hero is an all-American regular guy unafraid to battle for justice against the odds. Yet that's not how it works in Hollywood itself.
To believe otherwise is not just to be dreaming but to be deluded. And that, really, is the sum-total of almost nine decades of Hollywood films: individually they may provide dreams but collectively they provide a delusion. The delusion is that the primary role of film is to make money, when in truth, that's only a part of much bigger picture. It's also the delusion which has led us to Hannibal, a disgusting piece of schlock, which might prompt audiences to ask just whose brain is being eaten by Hollywood's fixation with profits.