Friend of mine told me a story the other day. His neighbor was a professor, British-Canadian, cynical of empire and it's effects on the world. He invited one of his Liberal American colleagues over.

The argument overheard was one of American culture, how it subsumes and overbears expression around the world, especially in places like Canada where it bends their filming system to it's will to become a kind of Hollywood North to the detriment of local content.

This Liberal American's response was "Because we've earned the right". This was shocking to my friend. How someone who viewed themselves as progressive could still fall into the trap of nationalism.

And it extends to our own belief that nothing can exceed that which is done by Americans even when foreign films frequently have better technical execution than our own domestic industry. It extends to East Asian fight choreography getting dismissed in favor of the American Model

And it creeps into the mentality that American writers cling to. That the American Model is the only thing they can pull from. That American TV and Cinema will always be superior to foreign film.

There was a TV writer I talked to on here once. And his steadfast belief in the inherent supremacy of American film was due to his belief that as Americans we had invented the format. That simply isn't true. The Australians made the first Narrative Feature in 1906.

Hollywood as an institution wouldn't start becoming a thing until well into the 1910s. Fueled partly by the destruction of the First World War upon Europe. Many directors and actors came here after the war due to devastation.

And it would grow yet again as Europe and Asia burned to the ground in the 1930s and 40s. Throttling domestic film production outside some notable exceptions.

But over time we convinced ourselves that it was the quality of what we made, not the fact that we were often the only game in town as American troops and American companies rolled into postwar Italy, Japan, and Germany.

They had their own content sure. But we could drown it out by buying out screens on what for us was "on the cheap".

We produced good film and television, but our dominance in the cultural space was largely due to inertia. We survived two world wars without widespread devastation, coming back from them with a booming economy and enough money to establish a foothold in a devastated world.

In the 1960s Japan started an uptick in becoming a cultural superpower, by the 1980s they dominated the space of video games after the crash of '83. In the 1990s and 2000s they were doing things with animation that the Walt Disney Company was no longer capable of.

We forget that it's not always talent. It's where you live, and the legacy bequeathed to you. We simply inherited a system created out of a post World War II economic boom. We weren't necessarily doing anything the Japanese or the French or the British weren't doing.

If we grow complacent. If our economy tanks and our stature falls apart, there's not gonna be a premium on "American Made" film and television. It's a product of a dominance on the world stage that has been tenuous going into the 21st Century.