Politics & Power Quote by Roland Emmerich

Emmerich is naming a cultural glitch that Hollywood has learned to monetize: the difference between resenting American power and craving American spectacle. The line lands because it’s blunt in the way a director can be blunt; it’s not a policy lecture, it’s a box-office observation. He frames “Hollywood movies” as a global habit, almost an addiction, then spikes it with the provocation that “everybody hates the Americans” anyway. The friction is the point. Anti-Americanism becomes, in his telling, compatible with - even fueled by - constant consumption of American mythmaking.

The subtext is less “people are hypocrites” than “soft power works even when hard power backfires.” Hollywood doesn’t need you to like the U.S.; it needs your attention, your money, your emotional investment in its pacing, its heroes, its image of what triumph looks like. The movies function like a lingua franca: you can reject the politics and still speak the language of explosions, romance, and redemption. Emmerich, a German filmmaker who built a career inside the American blockbuster machine, is also implicating himself. He’s both beneficiary and witness, someone who knows the apparatus from the inside but still sees the weirdness of its reach.

Context matters: this is the worldview of the disaster-movie auteur, a genre that sells global catastrophe as shared entertainment. When the world is the audience, “America” becomes less a nation than a franchise - criticized, memed, envied, imitated, yet endlessly streamed.