YANK at Cultplex

How do you begin to reckon with the nebulous weight of American moviemaking? Nowhere projects its own visions of itself out into the world quite like the United States of America. If you’ve grown up on Hollywood product — and who hasn’t — then you’ll no doubt be familiar with the experience of American high school, with the rough shape of New York City or the sight of a car roaring down a desert highway. In fact, the idea of America and the movies are so intertwined that it took us a minute to get our head around the idea of a season of film screenings dedicated to exploring the country.

But that’s exactly what Cultplex have come up with in YANK: a programme of films that shows the USA through its own lens. Across thirteen movies, audiences can expect to travel the breadth of the country, from a Miami mall with Chuck Norris in Invasion U.S.A. (Sat 12 July), to the Georgian wilderness in John Boorman’s terrifying Deliverance (Wed 16 July), to the Californian oil boom with Paul Thomas Anderson’s monumental There Will Be Blood (Sun 13 July). There’s hippies and b-boys, alongside marines, cheerleaders, hillbillies and serial killers — YANK doesn’t always paint a flattering portrait of its subject, but there’s entertainment aplenty on offer.

From the feel-good bombast of High School Musical (with bottomless drinks on Sat 5 July) to the feel-bad excesses of Super Size Me (burger-a-long on Sun 6 July), the films on show highlight some of the USA’s biggest institutions and a variety of approaches to depicting them on screen. Nowhere is that more evident than in the pairing of 80s classics Commando (Sat 12 July), the explosive action extravaganza starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Full Metal Jacket (Sat 5 July), Stanley Kubrick’s gnarly anti-war Vietnam picture. Each tackles America’s preoccupation with firearms and armed foreign intervention, and yet the modes of filmmaking are strikingly different.

If one genre stands out in the programme, it’s the road movie. The smell of gasoline and the freedom of the open road, the road movie is quintessentially American, and there are three distinct examples scheduled as part of YANK. Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda helped usher in a new age of filmmaking with 1969’s era-defining Easy Rider (Fri 25 July). Susan Sarandon and Gena Davies blaze a trail across the desert in Ridley Scott’s potent, exhilarating Thelma & Louise (Sun 20 July). While David Lynch slows things down, subverting the image of a convertible tearing towards the horizon, as Richard Farnsworth chooses a ride on lawnmower for his 200-mile journey in The Straight Story (Fri 11 July).

Cultplex says YANK’s aim isn’t to ask what America is, but how it sees itself. Spike Lee’s landmark 1989 Do the Right Thing (Sun 27 July), racial tensions are brought to the boil when Giancarlo Esposito’s character asks why Sal, the Italian-American owner of a pizza joint in the predominantly Black neighbourhood of Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant, only has photos of other Italian-Americans on the wall. Just as Buggin’ Out questions Sal’s decision to exclude Black faces in the curation of his wall of fame, there’s something to be learned from asking what Hollywood is excluding from our screens.

Of course, the American film industry is more than Hollywood. Between the studios and the independents, the industry has its own contradictory agenda, built out of a strange concoction of impulses that include naked commerce, executive ego, artistic expression and soft power. What makes American cinema so compelling is that it isn’t all propaganda, the satirical Idiocracy (Sun 6 July) or the nihilistic House of 1000 Corpses (Sat 5 July) prove as much. No, American movies are like all movies, filled with the revealing fantasies, anxieties and ideas of the people who make them. They just have bigger budgets in the United States.