Politics & Power Quote by Fredric Jameson

American power shows up here not as a flag but as a contract. Jameson’s sentence is doing the critic’s favorite trick: taking something that looks like a technical policy story - “binding agreements” after the war - and reframing it as cultural conquest by other means. The verb choice, “forced onto the defensive,” matters: European cinema isn’t simply outcompeted; it’s positioned like a nation under siege, reacting rather than initiating, making films in the shadow of a market arrangement that was never neutral.

The context is the post-World War II order, when US economic leverage (Marshall Plan-era aid, debt renegotiations, trade access) often came bundled with the opening of European screens to Hollywood product. Jameson’s point isn’t nostalgic protectionism; it’s structural. Cinema becomes a battleground where “free trade” quietly doubles as a distribution pipeline for American narratives, genres, star systems, and the consumer fantasies that travel with them. Cultural imperialism, in this framing, isn’t primarily about propaganda. It’s about habituation: what audiences come to expect a movie to look like, how stories should move, what counts as “quality,” even which accents sound like authority.

France “stands out” as the exception because it built an ideology and a bureaucracy around resistance - quotas, subsidies, auteur prestige, the idea of cinema as national patrimony. That parenthetical aside is a sly acknowledgment that resistance is possible, but also rare enough to be noteworthy. The subtext is bleakly contemporary: culture doesn’t get colonized only through censorship or conquest; it gets colonized through deals that make domination feel like choice.