Detailed reading
Hardly anyone is exempt from the force of American images and sounds. French resentment of Mickey Mouse, Bruce Willis, and the reset of American civilization is well known. Less well known, and rarely acknowledged by the French, is the fact that Terminator 2 sold 5 million tickets in France during the month it opened - with no submachine guns at the heads of the customers. The same culture minister, Jack Lang, who in 1982 achieved a moment of predictable notoriety in the United States for declaring that Dallas amounted to cultural imperialism, also conferred France s highest honor in the arts on Elizabeth Taylor and Sylvester Stallone. The point is not hypocrisy pure and simple but something deeper, something obscured by a single-minded emphasis on American power: dependency.