I use this term in a generic sense (that is, not necessarily referring to the Hollywood film studios) to refer to that archetypical cinema that was invented first by such big studios as MGM, Warner Brothers, Universal, etc. in the 1930s and 40s and that has today become the dominant entertainment medium throughout the world—leaving aside television. It is cinema that is characterized by, among other things, high production values; commercialism at the expense of art in which sex and violence reign supreme (voyeurism); a readily identifiable categorization of film output into genres (e.g. thrillers, Westerns, drama, comedies, etc.); both textual and subtextual ideological messages that reinforce hegemonic Eurocentric values laced with racism, sexism, and classism; and of course mass-marketing. It is cinema that rests on big budgets, the creation and voyeuristic marketing of the celebrity “star,” the unending quest for verisimilitude through technology, and, today, its finance and distribution by what I call the TMMC (the transnational multimedia conglomerate). In other words, my use of the term “Hollywood” must be understood in the sense of a perversion of the edificatory and consciousness-raising potential of cinema (even as it entertains) in the relentless quest for profits—the latter achieved by pandering to the lowest common denominator in the values and tastes of the ignorantsia. (Guys, remember my formula of frustration (with the masses): masses – m = ignorantsia. You still don’t get it? What are you left with when you remove the letter “m” from the word “masses?”) Note: Even those films that appear to subvert, at least on the surface, the basic cultural ethos of the Hollywood film by challenging some of its racist, sexist, etc. values, in the end fall in line with the dictates of the TMMC mass marketing machine—symptomatic of which is the simultaneous denial (usually subtextually) of the possibility of challenging the system through collective action. That is, from the perspective of social change, the dominant motif is one of anarchy (to be understood here in its ideological sense and as a synonym for chaos). A good example of such a film is Crash.