Steven Spielberg's America / PALS-Polity America Through the Lens series (ePub)

Steven Spielberg is known as the most powerful man in New Hollywood
and a pioneer of the contemporary blockbuster, America's most
successful export. His career began a new chapter in mass culture.
At the same time, American post war liberalism was breaking down.
This fascinating new book explains the complex relationship between
film and politics through the prism of an iconic filmmaker.

Spielberg's early films were a triumphant emergence of the
Sunbelt aesthetic that valued visceral kicks and basic emotions
over the ambiguities of history. Such blockbusters have inspired
much debate about their negative effect on politics and have been
charged as being an expression of the corporatization of life. Here
Frederick Wasser argues that the older Spielberg has not fully gone
this way, suggesting that the filmmaker recycles the populist
vision of older Hollywood because he sincerely believes in both big
time moviemaking and liberal democracy. Nonetheless, his stories
are burdened by his generation's hostility to public life,
and the book shows how he uses filmmaking tricks to keep his
audience with him and to smooth over the ideological
contradictions. His audiences have become more global, as his films
engage history.

This fresh and provocative take on Spielberg in the context of
globalization, rampant market capitalism and the hardening
socio-political landscape of the United States will be fascinating
reading for students of film and for anyone interested in
contemporary America and its culture.