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My New Year’s resolution for 2026 is to take care of my physical and mental health. No, I’m not going to therapy. I haven’t picked up a new workout routine either. Instead, I resort to a method that I believe is both more effective and easier to maintain: not seeing a single new American film.
For a culture writer, it may sound like a foolish proposition. How can I “keep up”? But after leaving the theater angry during the first hour (of three!) of Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, I realized that desperate times call for radical action.
So cultural radicals.
But it’s not really primarily political reasons why I’m turning my back on Hollywood now
For about a year Then, just as Trump was entering his second term, a series of campaigns were launched to boycott American goods. According to a new survey by Novus, the number of Swedes who would consider giving up products from the US has since increased from 78 to 83 percent.
But it’s not really primarily political reasons why I’m turning my back on Hollywood now, but rather aesthetic ones. The US cultural industry appears increasingly helpless when it comes to presenting and analyzing its own political reality.
The PTA’s completely pointless interpretation of Pynchon is just the latest in a series of examples of this: a dramatization of what we see every day in the news that adds nothing new, challenges neither the viewer nor the authorities, but reduces human tragedies to boring plot narratives.
I would like to flatter myself by presenting this boycott as a kind of anti-imperialist protest à la Bande in Lukas Moodysson’s “Together”. But the fact is that it is quite light when you consider that the USA is hardly a cultural empire anymore. It seems less and less obligatory to appear in American films, series and even music just to “keep up”. American popular culture is well on its way to becoming a local affair.
“Heated rivalry” and Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl appearance are just two recent events that point to this. Of course, the fact that the Super Bowl continues to be relevant in Sweden is more of a sign of the opposite. But the fact that Benito’s actually politically insignificant performance was entirely in Spanish and ended with him blessing America – and a list of every country on the continent including Cuba, Venezuela and Canada really says everything you need to know about the US’s decentralization on the cultural world map.
The country’s loss of soft power has been a hotly debated topic in recent months
The country’s loss of soft power has been a hotly debated topic in recent months. DN’s Martin Gelin has published an entire book on the subject. In an essay in the New York Times in November, Canadian Stephen Marche writes about how his compatriots have begun to distance themselves from their neighboring country in the consumption of culture and goods.
But active boycott and spontaneous avoidance are, as I said, actually two different, interrelated phenomena. The fact that the whole world is currently talking about a series about the love between a Russian and a Canadian hockey player is not an act of activism. But it has to do with the fact that the new entry in the “Game of Thrones” universe “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” doesn’t succeed so well in captivating the audience’s imagination.
Have here at home There’s also been a lot of buzz about Zara Larsson finally being able to come to the US – and presumably the world. But the timing couldn’t have been worse. She’s set to begin her first North American solo tour in Portland in exactly two weeks, but Zara’s fearless comments about ICE on social media could potentially put an end to it.
If I were your management, I would cancel the tour and start practicing my school Spanish yesterday.
Read more chronicles and other texts by Saga Cavallin
Read more:
Kajsa Haidl: Bad Bunny’s Spanish became the star’s protest against Trump
“It means everything a Spanish-speaking artist can do on this stage”
