The country that worships Jerry Lewis as a cinema genius has been inspired to build its multimedia policy in his image. Bonne chance!
Blending hard bargaining with fabled Gallic arrogance, France successfully managed to carve itself a cultural exception to the GATT treaty that allows it to continue its policies of special quotas and taxes on foreign (i.e., American) movies and television shows. Those moneys, in turn, go to subsidize French auteurs desperately struggling to preserve a truly French cinema amid the crush of such imported media merde as Remains of the Day, In the Name of the Father, and Schindler's List.
Vive la France!
Of course, when US trade negotiators, from Mickey Kantor on down, failed to persuade the French to budge one centime from their protectionist posturing, Jack Valenti - the silver-haired, silver-tongued honcho of the Motion Picture Association of America - bitterly complained that Hollywood and America's entire media community would suffer horribly as a result.
Chill out Jack, baby! French intransigence is the best possible thing that could happen to Hollywood and San Francisco's Multimedia Gulch. In exchange for just a few million a year, a nation with a rich tradition of creativity (remember Lumiere's early light shows?) has effectively chosen to eliminate itself as a meaningful contender in the multibillion-dollar global multimedia market. By suckling the teat of government subsidy, French media artistes will undeniably be preserved - but at the terrific cost of being crippled in their ability to compete in the pop culture marketplace.
That's a pretty good deal for the US of A - which now enjoys a huge multibillion-dollar export balance in the pop media business. American pop culture succeeds worldwide not because it is trash designed for the least common denominator (although much of it undeniably is) but because, as a nation of immigrants, our media are designed to appeal to diverse audiences.
By contrast, French media are too busy being French to care what anybody else thinks. So let France have Quebec and Francophone Africa - we'll take the rest of the world, merci beaucoup! France's Jerry Lewis multimedia policy assures that - far from expanding French cultural reach - its media will be as ghettoized and appealing as, say, Euro Disneyland. What an irony for the country that gave us the word "entrepreneur."
Indeed, as digital multimedia evolves and emerges as both a business and creative opportunity, France's culture of subsidy guarantees that it will always be more important for the artistes to be French first and creative second. As industrial policies go, that's hardly a recipe for success. Doubt that? Are you aware that, for the past several years, France has actually had a deputy cultural minister in charge of funding development of French rock 'n' roll? Non? But American AOR and Top 40 stations needn't worry about the French Invasion any time within the next decade. ...It's only a matter of time before the French appoint a minister for video games to fend off Le Defi Sonic-the-Hedgehog.
The French have already poured billions of francs into Groupe Bull - the state-supported computer company - in a desperate bid to keep France in the forefront of digital hardware and software systems. But guess what? Bull does OK in France; in the rest of the world - in the global marketplace - it has failed miserably. Why do the French think the results will be any better with their cultural policy? The answer is simple: arrogance and a total misunderstanding of market forces.
What really galls the French elite, of course, is that while the bourgeoisie and proletariat always choose with their ballots to preserve French culture, they always overwhelmingly vote for American pop culture with their francs. American television shows consistently kick the stuffing out of shows like Apostrophe in terms of popularity. Steven Spielberg does better box office than Jean-Jacques Beneix.
Consequently, the government kulturcrats from L'Ecole Normale and L'Ecole Polytechnique must protect and defend the French people from their own choices, lest tomorrow's Truffauts go off to direct Porki's Sept: Le Chacon de L'Amour. Therefore, France has no choice but to insist on protectionist tariffs and state funding to preserve the future purity of French media expression.
Somehow, a Truffaut (didn't he once appear in a Spielberg film?) could see thousands of foreign flicks, admit to being overwhelmingly influenced by a Hitchcock, and yet direct films that were undeniably French. Somehow, an actor like Gerard Depardieu can manage to help make commercial successes of films like Jean de Florette even as he stars in cutesy American comedies. In fact, truly creative French auteurs and artistes can consistently get the best of four worlds: French and American, commercial and artistic. But the French bureaucracy, soaked in the brine of cultural xenophobia and socialist paranoia, sincerely believes that market forces will always overwhelm French culture in a fair fight. (Of course, Michael Eisner might beg to differ. ...)
But let the French have their way, s'il vous plait. Let them build their multimedia trade barriers, quotas, and tariffs. Let them subsidize their budding young artists and doddering old ones with the monies that come from the foreign media successes in Paris, Lyon, and Nice. The French will lock themselves in a vicious downward spiral: The more money France takes in from foreign media, the more dependent - and expectant - on subsidy its artists will become. Fights will break out in the new media community about whose art is more French and which has been tainted by American or - sacre bleu - Japanese influence. Their media creations will be the Frenchiest of the French precisely at the time when global pop culture is becoming more hybrid than ever before.
Of course, the French intellectuals - the wonderful folks who gave us existentialism and deconstruction - will whine and moan about the declining appeal of French culture even as they spend more and more on protecting it. They still won't understand why that happens. For Americans, that's got to be an even better gift than the Statue of Liberty.
