Isn’t it wonderful that in America, or at least those parts where a demotic lingo still rules, the words “hostel” and “hostile” are pronounced the same way? Two antonyms, for hospitality and hatred, are joined by a mischievous assonance. Nothing better encapsulates the ambivalence with which US movies have looked at Europe for 100 years, or the edgier-than-ever blend of love and hate with which they regard it today.

Think of The Good German. Think of Hostel I.and II Think of The Illusionist and The Prestige (Europeans as sinister conjurors and necromancers). Think of Matt Damon, a one-man envoy for conflicted US/EU entente, roaming Europe as the talented Mr Ripley or the multi-talented Mr Bourne. And think of Hollywood’s latest venture into Europe, which tops everything off as a tale of New World innocence ambushed in the Old.

Here’s the story. A film star and his wife barely arrive in Germany before vicious authority figures surround them. They bundle them away from their proposed destinations – historical research sites for a planned film about a plot to kill Hitler – and turn them over to the dreaded SS: the Scientology Scourgers. The star, one Tom Cruise, is heard screaming at injustice one moment, the next fleeing to Madrid to find sanctuary with a veteran English soccer player and his wife. The story hasn’t been filmed but it should be. (Pitt and Jolie as the Beckhams?) For it proves that when fiction fails in proving Europe a weird place, at least for Tinseltowners, fact comes along to help.

Yes, they do things differently in Europe. They have done, with intervals for optimism, ever since The Third Man. Today, as then, Hollywood’s rapprochement with the old continent can be diagnosed as a case of paranoid split personality: a disturbed yet fascinating condition. It is paranoid because Americans always believe that Europe is out to get them. It is two-minded because sometimes Americans like to be “got”. They believe that the ancient culture might sometimes, having entrapped them, educate and refine them rather than torture and kill them.

So for every Hostel, there is a Before Sunrise, for every Hostel: Part II, a Before Sunset. Richard Linklater’s two Euro-romances sat back and purred while Ethan Hawke was seduced by lovely Julie Delpy. Hawke discovered he possessed not only a heart – all Americans have that (or think they do) – but a brain also. That brain learnt, in turn, that it was capable of interacting with French dialogue, literary references and nonstop causeries du coeur. In some sectors of Hollywood-goes-to-Europe, all roads lead to Rohmer.

It was similar with Holly Martins and Anna (Joseph Cotten and Alida Valli) in The Third Man, moviedom’s greatest tale of innocence abroad in Europe. Yet that film caught more ambiguity – which is why it is greater, and why it makes a perfect template for the story of the European-American relationship on the big screen. Martins receives an education of the heart in Vienna, even of the mind, but it is a sinister education. He is being manipulated – set up to be let down. The dark shadows of an old city outwitting foreign intervention – its hidden wholeness laughing at political partition – cages him, humiliates him, finally lets him go vanquished and emasculated. (It is the same story as Hostel, with spiritual not physical cruelty.)

During and after the second world war, it was hardly surprising America shivered at the thought of Europe. A race of barbarians had messed up the world. Whether German, Italian or French, they were all villains or cowards. (The British were OK; they were on the edge of Europe, trying to save it. They could be played by Leslie Howard and David Niven.) So mainland Europe was a potent force for peril, whenever 1940s film noir caught a dose of wanderlust. Journey Into Fear (1942), masterminded by Orson Welles, was a virtual dry run for The Third Man, throwing Americans into jeopardy in the eastern Mediterranean. Consider also Foreign Correspondent, The Mask of Demetrios, Confidential Agent.

In the 1950s and after, came hope, affluence, togetherness. A more optimistic polish was applied to the postwar – and increasingly pro-American – landmass. Hollywood started celebrating the appeal of Old Paree (An American in Paris), or tourist Italy (Roman Holiday, Three Coins in the Fountain). Gigi proved that Parisians were just Broadway-style troupers with weird accents. Even when Europeans were not people you wanted on your side, they could be funny and endearing. Inspector Clouseau was the new face of the French police force, 20 years after the cynical duplicity of Claude Rains in Casablanca.

It didn’t last. It may have ended with the decline of the cold war. (No more need to be cuddly with western Europe.) Then came the common market, sounding like an eastern Atlantic exclusion zone. And Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (1973) was a low blow to a very sensitive area. It portrayed a middle-aged American – played by Marlon Brando, once US cinema’s icon of noble animal primitivism – spiralling into a lower-depths passion with a French moppet-temptress (Maria Schneider). Filmgoers in the puritan west gasped at the candid language, butter-lubricated sex and psychosexual exposures, all showing Europe at its decadent worst. Nonconformist critics such as Pauline Kael lauded Last Tango, calling it the most exciting artistic event since The Rite of Spring. For other Americans it was a trauma and turning point. Europe slouched back towards the doghouse to be reborn.

It was clear that this continent could not be trusted. Even comedies (National Lampoon’s European Vacation) presented Europe as the place where Americans came apart, individually or as a family or tour group. And then, horror of horrors, Britain became identified with the enemy. We in the UK seemed, to the US, to be merging and melding with the Great European Project: unforgivable. With a new prolixity, English actors were cast as Hollywood villains. Alan Rickman (upper-class English Sheriff to Kevin Costner’s surfer-accent Robin Hood), Charles Dance (Last Action Hero), Ian McKellen (X-Men). An English actor (Christian Bale) was even cast, with a cod Upper West Side accent, to play the vilest American in modern fiction, Patrick Bateman in American Psycho.

A growing Europe was gulping up new countries, including one that had a supposed special relationship with America. (The hand-of-history matiness between Bush and Blair made little difference. English actors are still rent-a-baddies for Hollywood.) What was this continent – friend or competitor? America’s longtime inferiority complex in matters of class and history – put simply, Europe was classier and more historical – was compounded by uncertainty as to its former ally’s intentions.

Today a schism has opened up among US filmmakers, a political faultline dividing liberals from conservatives. Though the latter, including new recruits to genre traditionalism such as Eli Hostel Roth, are still suspicious of Europe, today’s more countercultural US auteurs either embrace the continent – such as Michael Moore, showering kisses on England and France in Sicko (for their culture, humanity and welfare services), or Woody Allen, now virtually resident as a filmmaker in the European Union – or exhibit a fascinated, ambivalent fondness.

David Lynch’s Inland Empire is the locus classicus. It is all about Europe as the engine of Hollywood. Largely shot and partly set in Poland, its near-three-hour maze of mind riddles ends by conflating two countries and two continents. In and around a plot about the making of a Hollywood movie (a production saddled with a flaky English director, Jeremy Irons, and a gypsy curse), beats the heart of an epic puzzle poem about identity. Not an individual’s identity but a culture’s. Poland itself seems to exist behind the housefronts on the soundstage. In some scenes, Hollywood Boulevard appears to extend into eastern Europe. Lodz is part of Lotusland. Lynch is saying that the inland empire of the New World’s dream industry was and still is the Old World, delivering many of its writers, artists and creative messiahs.

Who can argue? Where would Popcornworld be without J.K. Rowling, J.R.R. Tolkien, Ian Fleming, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Ridley Scott ? These Europeans make Americans feel – sometimes – that they merely stand and serve a higher creative order and momentum. No wonder they demonise or totemise Europe whenever possible.

There is a flip side: European films depicting America as the great “other”. The cheekiest are Danish director Lars von Trier’s homemade movies about a fabulated USA: Dancer in the Dark, Dogville, Manderlay. Trier never goes to America. He handstitches his visions from diverse threads and fabrics – William Faulkner, Tom Paine, Mark Twain, cowboy movies, race melodramas, TV soaps. He makes no pretence that this is a documentary-real portrait. His America-of-the-mind is a pantomime land where extremes clash: freedom and slavery, justice and injustice, wealth and poverty, idealism and cynicism.

Yet Trier’s America looks to me peculiarly like the real one. The US psyche it depicts, a blend of dotty utopianism and brute Manichaeism, explains in turn the perspective America has on Europe, that bewildered condescension, sometimes disdainful, sometimes intimidated and uncomprehending. Trier incurred the wrath of several critics in the US who asked (in essence), “How dare a European make films set in America, and presuming to sum up America, without going there?”

This shows the US at its battiest. What has Hollywood done, for much of its 100 years, but make films about Europe without going there? – at least whenever austerity demands that France be done with an Eiffel Tower back-projection.

But if America wants to be regarded as a real country, it reserves the right to treat others as mythologies, theme parks or virgin colouring-books to be filled in at will. Paris must forever be romance, cobblestones, fine food and loquacity. (All four items were satirically checked off by the lampooners of Team America.) The eastern Europe of Hostel is a place where darkness and despotism still keep their lair, long after Vlad the Impaler and Ceausescu.

If Europeans protested at being coloured or colonised like this, if they presented an equal and opposing desire for self-determination, it would be tantamount to a declaration of war. Hollywood would glower at the ungrateful fiefdom. Casting calls would go out for more English actors to play villains. And Europe would be further confirmed, in US films, as that sinister place where nightmares await innocent American dreamers who lose their way.

Nigel Andrews is the FT’s film critic