摘要：The Hollywood film is a key commodity of American imperialism today, and its favoured genre is the 'action film'. Of course, films of action and spectacle have always been central in film history, but never so dominant as in the last twenty years of Hollywood's revitalization. The blockbuster can of course be 'polygeneric', mixing horror, fantasy, sci-fi, spy and police thrillers, war films, melodramas into the action film, making it a sort of metacategory for the dominant form of film today, with simple narratives and concise themes--quests, chases, revenge, war--and simple characterization, with plenty of occasions for stunts, fights, battles, and effects of all kinds, and clear resolutions. Globalized Hollywood can also organize itself around plots that skip from one cheap exotic location to another, from one diminished or dismantled national industry to another. Naturally, this is also a terrain of fierce critical debate. Rarely have film critics so forcefully announced the death of the cinema, or so routinely denounced films as trivial products of an industrialized system Adorno could hardly have imagined. Some critics defend action films with populist connoisseurship and textual tracking of its vast repertoire, and some film scholars analyze action films as the latest in a lineage of films that have always indulged the pleasures of spectacle, thrills and 'attractions'; for them, America is once again simply entertaining the world with what the people want. But what this essay seeks to emphasize is the way the action film by its very nature reflects the might of American capital, corporate organization and technology, all aimed at ensuring that this is indeed what the people want; and what its narratives and ideologies then embody and personify so forcefully--the celebration of American individualism and heroes, and of America itself, the resolution of good over evil, the repetitive crushing of the country's foes.
