Cosmopolitanism and "Around the World in 80 Days"

Vanessa Schwartz, in her essay on Around the World in 80 Days, finds that “Cosmopolitanism in cinema was not simply Americanization through film. It was instead a key moment in the construction of film as a global cultural practice.” (159) 80 Days was not just part of a film cycle, but part of an overall adjustment of practice in Hollywood cinema—a more intensified pursuit of “global” audiences. Cosmopolitanism “transcended national idioms.” (161) In trying to appeal across cultures, it attempts to appeal to all cultures. Schwartz immediately complicates the definition, placing the postwar cycle of “travel” films from Hollywood in a context that already includes Hollywood’s debt to European talent and narratives. The difference with films like 80 Days is the self-conscious marketing of non-American talent and locales. Exposed to more and more images of foreign lands via television and photography, American audiences were becoming disenchanted with traditional studio-backdrop sets that were ostensibly filling in for non-American locations. 80 Days director Michael Todd believed that “the more knowledgeable and well traveled the audience became, the more location shoots would replace studio fabrications, as the audience’s greater knowledge of the world would produce an inability to see ‘the real’ in studio settings.” (quoted in Schwartz 171) 80 Days was “geared for a worldwide audience.” (176) It intended to celebrate both the vastness and variety of the world, but also its increasing contraction. Schwartz: “The big scale of production matched the notion that the world itself was big (all those people and places), but it also suggested that film would make the world not so much smaller as more accessible.” (178)

In the film, there is Fogg, the pilot/financier/instigator of the round-the-world mission, and there is Passepartout, the assistant/tagalong/audience identification figure. Both Kate and Stephanie noted that while Fogg gives scant attention to the cultural offerings of his journey, Passepartout truly enjoys the landscape. If we think of cosmopolitanism in terms suggested by Mike—that it is in many ways bound by commerce—which of the two characters would be the truer cosmopolitan: the one who finances the mission or the one who dives into the local scenes? As Lefebvre may suggest in his essay, for Fogg place is “setting,” whereas for Passepartout, place is “landscape.”

Schwartz arranges the “point of view” of the film around neither Fogg nor Passepartout per se, but around director Todd and his origin culture, as she would for any film of this type: “These films [were] commercially driven to create the globe as a whole in order to establish it as a marketplace. The view itself is not global but is very much attached to an Occidental culture that posed identity as potentially enigmatic and thus up for question.” (196) Schwartz’s statement here is akin to Richard Peet’s complication of postmodernism as an essentially “Western” concept that, in its specificity of regional origin, somewhat undercuts its premium value of individual agency. (83) To believe in cosmopolitanism as a value is to glorify non-hegemonic culture, and yet postmodernism asserts itself in hegemonic fashion (that is so threatening to David Harvey and others). The idea of cosmopolitanism as a “value” as opposed to cosmopolitanism as an embodied trait came up, and indeed it is something not only valued in the ethical sense but in the capitalist sense.

Its capital value ties to cinema of the 80 Days sort, as well as to individual talents. Alex commented on the worldwide celebrity of Omar Sharif as a sort of “floating signifier”; Sharif’s construction of self has both the value and the capital worth of cosmopolitanism. His cross-appeal also relates somewhat to the Marxist (and Harveyist) notion of the worker who must adapt and reform his/her skillset to remain viable in a changing production landscape. A worker must erase segments of his/her background and identity via re-training and re-education. As with the cosmopolitan figure, a “relevant” worker is one whose origin has been partially if not completely erased or modified. Our fascination with figures like Sharif (and perhaps Obama) is very much in line with the valuation of a cosmopolitanism that is, yes, commercial, but also populist. The person of many (or no) origins has an undeniable contemporary appeal, however much we recognize the “veil” of erasure.