America: The Menace

"Part of it has to do with policy. There was a good deal of resentment against how America treated France after the First World War . There were issues like the collection of war debts. But I think that in Duhamel’s case, the source of trouble was dismay and anxiety about American modernity that he observed when he toured America in 1929 and 1930. The French title of the book is Scenes from the Life of the Future , so what he was writing was a kind of warning to the French that unless they were careful they would likely end up imitating the Americans. In America, he thought, capitalism and mechanisation had run amuck. He likened America to an anthill inhabited by brain-dead workers doing monotonous jobs at machines, convinced by ceaseless advertising that life’s goals were nothing more than acquisition of products like cars and household appliances. Yes, but again the culture theme emerges. Duhamel argued that America lacked culture in a European sense. He claimed that America’s culture centres on entertainment like movies and sports, rather than on art, music or literature. He ends the book asking: Where are the great American artists, writers and composers? The answer he gives is that there are none because this is a mass society of workaholics and conformists. Duhamel’s book is important because it was the most read text about America for two or three generations. French school children were still reading excerpts from it as late as the 1970s. Yes, and to some extent they did come true. Ambivalent. On the one hand they condemned us for exporting American products and practices, but in the end they have learnt how to live with it. I think there is a great deal of ambivalence about accepting so much of consumer society like McDonald’s, Hollywood movies and Eurodisney. Eurodisney has been something of a disappointment to Disney. It never really lived up to their expectations. They had enormous trouble with the park at the beginning, when it almost went bankrupt twice. And even now it doesn’t attract the audience that Disney expected."