Some countries resent the American cultural juggernaut. The French periodically campaign to rid their language of invading English terms, and the Canadians have placed limits on American publications in Canada. Many Americans, too, complain about the media's tendency to pitch programs toward the lowest common denominator.

And yet the common denominator need not be a low one, and the American knack for making entertainment that appeals to virtually all of humanity is no small gift. In his book The Hollywood Eye, writer and producer Jon Boorstin defends the movies' orientation to mass-market tastes in terms that can be applied to other branches of American pop culture: "In their simple-minded, greedy, democratic way Hollywood filmmakers know deep in their gut that they can have it both ways -- they can make a film they are terrifically proud of that masses of people will want to see, too. That means tuning out their more rarefied sensibilities and using that part of themselves they share with their parents and their siblings, with Wall Street lawyers and small-town Rotarians and waiters and engineering students, with cops and pacifists and the guys at the car wash and perhaps even second graders and junkies and bigots;...the common human currency of joy and sorrow and anger and excitement and loss and pain and love."