Imperial Screens: The Illusion of Cosmopolitanism in the Netflix Documentary Genre

Abstract

This essay investigates the worldly parameters of the Netflix documentary genre. While Netflix on the surface communicates a rhetoric of a truly global vision for media production and circulation, data analysis shows that the documentary genre is still predominantly U.S. American. I use Raymond Williams’ 1975 caution that “genuinely open skies” would be almost impossible to materialize to interpret the implications of this in today’s global landscape. A close analysis of the 2019 Academy Award-winning documentary American Factory, a text that takes the cultural clash between the U.S. and China in the wake of globalization as its subject, reveals the geopolitical stakes of such documentary mediation and imbalance. Combining quantitative and qualitative readings ultimately offers a window onto the tensions between cultural imperialism and globalization in both form and content within the Netflix documentary genre.