Politics & Power Quote by Debi Mazar

Mazar’s line lands because it punctures the smug fantasy that America is culturally ignored while also skewering the smug fantasy that everyone else is too sophisticated to care. She’s describing a familiar European posture - affectionate disdain for American excess - and then flipping it with a grudging admission: the gossip still travels. “They make fun of Americans” isn’t just a casual observation; it’s a social ritual. Mocking the U.S. functions as a kind of cultural self-definition, a way to say we have taste, we have history, we’re not that. The punch is that the same people performing that distance are still tracking “what’s happening in LA,” as if Hollywood were a global news desk.

The subtext is less about Italy than about the mechanics of attention. Hollywood operates as a shared reference point across borders because it’s an export designed to be legible everywhere: faces, scandals, premieres, divorces. It’s narrative content, not civic information, and it moves faster than politics because it’s lighter to carry. Mazar, a working actor with one foot in the industry and one outside it, speaks with the credibility of someone who’s seen the myth from both sides: LA as a punchline and LA as a magnet.

The “part time” detail matters, too. She’s not pontificating from a hotel lobby; she’s describing a lived, repeatable pattern of conversation. The intent isn’t to brag about Hollywood’s power so much as to expose its weird inevitability: even when people resent American cultural dominance, they still participate in it, because the world’s appetite for spectacle has become a kind of lingua franca.