Original scientific paper
American Capitalism Abroad: Culture and Cash in Billy Wilder’s One, Two, Three
Borislav Knežević
; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
As the Berlin wall was about to go up in 1961, Billy Wilder was shooting a film called
One, Two, Three about a multinational company executive on location in Berlin. The film
contains an interesting discourse of commentary on cultural changes in American and
global society in the early 1960s, that is, in the middle of the Cold War and at the outset
of a new stage in the development of American capitalism, its transnationalization.
While hardly a well-crafted work of art, the film’s vigorous engagement with a whole
range of contemporary cultural trends is particularly interesting for its perception
of an increasing ability of capital to affect cultural production. The essay is designed
as a close reading of the film with a focus on its representation of American culture
and of emerging transnational capitalism, but it also provides an examination of the
generic choices rehearsed by the movie, and in particular, the film’s parody of what
Stanley Cavell called the comedy of remarriage.
Keywords
American film; culture; capitalism; genre
Hrčak ID:
61575
URI
Publication date:
15.4.2010.
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