From Hollywood Movies To Study American Cultural Hegemony

The mass media has made an unprecedented development because of the fast development of economy and high technology. With the advance of science and technology and the innovation of mass media, movies have touched every aspect of our life and have influenced us tremendously. As one of the pillars of the cultural industry, the U.S. media has become a strong driving force and a powerful tool for the implementation of the expansion of culture and cultural hegemony.Hollywood’s movies, representatives of American popular culture, play a very significant role in its power expansion. Based on Gramsci’s cultural hegemony and the cultural imperialism theory of Edward W. Said, the author tries to analyze the expansion of America’s culture through the construction of the image of the United States to the world and promoting American values and ideology by means of movies. There are mainly three kinds of images which are portrayed in Hollywood movies: the image of the savior of the world, the image of the mythical country and the image of the scientific and technological overlord. This thesis has shown that the United States promotes American culture through high-tech means in the films, the high-tech community in the films and the values of freedom and democracy advocated by the United States in the films and so on, which reveals its real purpose of American cultural hegemony.