There is little doubt that cinema—Hollywood cinema in particular—has played a foundational role in shaping much of our national identity. The only meaningful question remains how large that influence has truly been.
Consider, for instance, the idea of America as a bootstrapping, self-reliant nation, a land claimed by bold men on a still-untamed frontier, and how that image has been burned into our collective imagination by the Hollywood Western, the genre that began to command screens in the 1930s.
