Richard Maltby
Harmless Entertainment: Hollywood and the Ideology of Consensus
(1983)

PART 1

THE CRAP-GAME

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CHAPTER 1

TAKING HOLLYWOOD FOR GRANTED

...

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...

"MOVIES ARE YOUR BEST ENTERTAINMENT"

(Industry promotional slogan of early 1950, hastily with-
drawn when it was pointed out that its initials spelt
M. A. Y. B. E.)

What do you go for, go see a
show for?"--lyrics to Dames

entertainment is a type of
performance produced for pro-
fit, performed before a gener-
alised audience (the "public"),
by a trained, paid group who
do nothing else but produce
performances which have the
sole (conscious) aim of pro-
viding pleasure.

Richard Dyer

The American cinema was a commercial institution, and its films were commercial products. Any assessment of those products must acknowledge this economic fact of

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life, and not merely because Hollywood took an industrial attitude to its own activities. Film, by its very nature, proposes a symbiotic relationship between the commercial and the aesthetic . It exists simultaneously in two states. Materially, it is a roll of celluloid, wound onto a metal spool and stored in a tin can. In use, it is a progressive series of "moving pictures, " evanescent shadow images projected onto a blank white screen. Unlike books or paintings, film undergoes a material transformation when it is viewed or experienced. This transformation is engineered by a combination of mechanical and optical processes needing complex projection equipment as well as a large space across which the magnified image is thrown. The economics of these material prerequisites forcibly encourage film to project itself before as large an audience as possible. The evolution of viewing apparatus, from the Kinetoscope and peepshow to the nickelodeon, picture palace and Cinerama, traces a history and an economic logic of larger pictures projected in front of larger audiences. The institution of the cinema is first of all a physical institution of the buildings in which it takes place.

In its inert, tin-can state, film is purely a trading commodity of no intrinsic value or use. As an economic entity it depends on its potential existence as a spectacle offering its consumers an aesthetic experience. It can only perform both its commercial and aesthetic functions when being exhibited to an audience. While showing a film need not involve a financial exchange between customer and exhibitor, the cost of projection, and for that matter of production, must be borne by someone. In capitalist practice, the consumers have conventionally paid for their experience, binding the material requirements for cinema's existence to a commercial system of exchange.

We might, however, consider what it is the spectator actually buys in the cinema. It is nothing tangible or permanent. Film offers the illusion of motion by projecting an uninterrupted flow of sequential images, and the temporal continuity of their projection is essential if the illusion is to be maintained. Each image has a place in this flow, but is of necessity only on temporary exhibition, replaced in a traction of a second by the image that follows it. The temporary nature of the cinematic experience, which is a material condition of film's existence, again differentiates it from stable aesthetic forms such as books or paintings. The spectator does not actually buy anything in the sense that he

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or she leaves the cinema with a material object at the end of a screening. He or she merely rents a seat in the cinema for the duration of a performance, a process we might call buying time. The aesthetic experience that has been purchased ends with the expiry of the commercial transaction that has predicated it. You leave the cinema behind you when you leave the movie theatre.

This transitoriness is a quality common to aesthetic experiences commonly described as "entertainment" ; for example, the circus, vaudeville, or playing a pinball machine. It is, of course, an inevitable condition of any performing art, since the act of performance itself is impermanent. But it may also be seen as a determining condition of entertainment as a sub-species of leisure. Sociologically, leisure can be approximately defined as a non-work activity that is relatively self-determined; that is to say, leisure time is segregated from time spent at work, and is occupied by activities undertaken voluntarily. Such a concept of leisure is a product of an industrial gociety which segments work as separate from other activities. Within a capitalist economy, leisure time can be regarded as a possession , purchased through the expenditure of time at work. At the same time, however, an industrial society turns the provision of leisure into a commercial activity , and what is categorized as leisure for one section of the population becomes work for another : professional sports or the theatre, for example. Leisure thus becomes an activity of consumption--consumption of time if nothing else--and, in consequence, is attached to production.

Leisure is therefore a type of activity which can be recognised through its dependence on commodities, the audience is entertained through the objects it chooses to possess. In the sense of conspicuous consumption this process is easily recognised, it is less easy to grasp in relation to the complementary sense of "spending time."

[Chaney, Fictions and Ceremonies]

In an economic system which treats time as a commodity (the eight-hour day, leisure-time, etc.), the buying and selling of time are normal activities, constantly expressed in the economic metaphors of "spending time," "time-consuming" and so on. Nineteenth-century industrialits regarded their labor force as simply a necessity for production, but in the early twentieth century it was recognized that capitalism must put labor to work as consumers

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as well. One mechanism of this process was to reduce working hours and increase leisure time. In 1926 Henry Ford argued, "It is the influence of leisure on consumption which makes the short day and the short week so necessary." Terms such as Show Business and "the entertainment industry" make semantic associations between amusement and commercial activity and describe entertainment as a subject of economics. Historically the development of commercial mass entertainment--preeminently the cinema--and consumer capitalism are closely related.

Hollywood's self-description as "the entertainment capital of the world," and its happy acceptance of its goal of producing "escapist entertainment," acknowledged that its function was to amuse and distract. The American cinema was, indeed, legally defined as both a business and entertainment by the Supreme Court in 1915, which declared films not to be vehicles for ideas . For fifty years Hollywood acquiesced in this opinion of itself, and provided the primary example of an industrial system devoted to what Lasch describes as "the organisation of leisure as an extension of commodity production." From its establishment as an industry (at the latest by 1922 with the founding of the MPPDA), the American cinema committed itself absolutely to the business of entertainment. Throughout the Classical Age of Hollywood (which lasted until the 1950s) the industry saw itself as manufacturing and merchandising a non-durable consumer commodity, which was the experience of "going to the movies," rather than the specific articles it produced. The picture palaces of the 1920s, the development during the 1930s of longer programs including newsreels, Screeno and other participant activities, indicate that what was being proffered by the cinema was a way of spending part of the "leisure dollar." Individual films were simply the principal manifestation of the mode in which it provided entertainment, but show business embraced such other forms of leisure as fan magazines, fashion and children's toys, as well as promoting consumerism and offering stars as celebrities for public consumption.

The debates over "Mass Culture' arose from the occupation, by commercial enterprises such as the cinema, of territory previously segregated from economics by its appellation as "Art." The cultural distinction between art and entertainment is far from precise: we may not know what entertainment is, but we recognize it when we see it. Its determining characteristics are negative: that which fails to

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be art is entertainment, as is that which lacks a socially or politically significant meaning. "Mere entertainment" is an idea frequently implicit in the term's use, and its connotations are triviality, ephemerality, and an absence of seriousness. Unlike art, entertainment is not "about" something outside itself, but is self-enclosed. Ernest Lindgren suggests entertainment is

In the form of fiction, at least, ... the use of representation to create make-believe situations which are designed to arouse emotion for its own sake, and for the mere pleasure of having it aroused. It is not intended that the emotion shall be carried forward into the practical affairs of life. The emotion is both aroused (titillated is perhaps a better description) and satisfied within a self-contained framework.

[Lindgren, The Art of the Film]
["summarizing ideas" in Collingwood, The Principles of Art]

This self-contained quality, with its inevitable connotation of a lack of seriousness, is the most frequent charge by which entertainment is indicted. Even though their language and their political precepts are at odds, both the elitist critics of "Mass Culture" and the theorists of the Frankfurt School argue the existence of what Dwight MacDonald termed "Gresham's Law in Culture, " in which mass entertainment drives out Art by mimicking and debasing its forms. Mass culture, it is alleged,

pre-digests art for the spectator and spares him effort, provides him with a short-cut to the pleasures of art that detours what is necessarily difficult in genuine art.

[Greenberg, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch"]

At the same time, it forces Art to compete on its vulgar economic terms, or else encourages its ghettoization into an Avant-Garde protected in one way or another from market forces. For Adorno and Horkheimer, who saw this process not simply as a matter of cultural debasement but as an ideological instrument for repressing the difficult, subversive qualities of art, the shallowness of entertainment reduced it to a commodity of consumption which reinforced the exploitative pattern of bourgeois systems of production. "Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work."

These analyses investigated the function of entertainment and, however they phrased it, generally agreed that entertainment was an ideological commodity. But definitions

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of entertainment have, in the main, tended to be affective rather than formal , and describing entertainment as that which is not art in a society which professes pluralism gets you nowhere . One man's meat is still another man's poison. As a function of leisure, entertainment is "deliverance from boredom." As a particular kind of leisure activity, however, entertainment must be defined by its specific formal features. Kaplan distinguishes between entertainment and Johann Huizinga's view of play by suggesting that play involves the subject actively, while entertainment is passive and controlled by others. Such a definition fails to elucidate distinctions that exist in ordinary usage about the relative cultural value of different forms of leisure.

Among the arts of performance, there is a broad, commonly assumed distinction between the performances of High Culture, consisting in performances of musical or dramatic texts which exist independently of any production of them, and the performances of entertainment, in which the text does not have the status of a fixed referent but may be infinitely revised with cultural impunity. Clearly, this distinction between "official" and "unofficial" cultural forms can only be regarded as a tendency, and not as in any sense absolute. However, the sacredness of a "text" by Shakespeare or Tchaikovsky bears on any particular production of it in a way quite different from the responsiveness a stand-up comic brings to his performance of routines before any particular audience.

Implicit in the contrast are distinctions related to the durability of the "text" and between two understandings of the concept of performance. Theatrical performance, in the Grand Tradition of the English theatre from Kean to Olivier, is essentially a matter of interpretation and convincing imitation. In discussing Olivier's Hamlet, there is an implicit assumption that "Hamlet" is a fixed entity, inscribed in the words on the pages of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. In this sense, performance is primarily a matter of inflecting a given object. Kaplan illustrates both this point and the absence of a sociological distinction between entertainment and art when he says,

The entertainer does respond to his audience, but fundamentally it is a one-way communication; no serious violinist would cut Bach's "Chaconne" in half because of a restless audience.

[Kaplan, Leisure: Theory and Policy]

The stand-up comic, on the other hand, is obliged to respond to his audience in exactly the way Kaplan suggests

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the violinist does not. To carry on regardless would be, in the vernacular of vaudeville, to "die" before the audience.

We can, then, distinguish between two types of performance: that of the actor, whose primary relationship is with a pre-existing text , and that of the entertainer, whose primary relationship is with the audience . Where the actor performs the text, what the entertainer does is to perform himself, to enact himself as a fiction constructed in collaboration with his audience. The theatrical actor attempts to disguise his presence in the act of performance, immersing his own existence and the audience's suspended disbelief in the character he portrays rather than his portrayal of that character. The entertainer , by contrast, asserts his presence in the act of performance, constantly reminding his audience of his actuality , whether it be in the spectators' knowledge of the tightrope walker's physical vulnerability (if she falls she will break her neck) or in the comic's asides directly addressed to his audience. It is this latter sense of performance as self-assertion that I shall employ from now on.

The cinema might seem to occupy an ambiguous position in this typology of performance. It is in itself a fixed text, which appears to deny it the flexibility of response possessed by audience-related performances, while at the same time it does not provide the opportunity for variable interpretation provided by theatrical performance. To clarify its position, it will be necessary to examine the relationship the cinema posits between a film and its audience. Before doing that, however, it is worth pointing out that two conditions of entertainment are particularly appropriate to the material form of film. First is the idea of transitoriness, which is implicit in the ephemeral nature of the cinematic image. The other is the proposition that entertainment is self-contained: "going to the movies" is an event, marked off from other activities by a sustained set of segregations. It takes place in a separate building, which conventionally has this exclusive function and a unique architecture. Its accommodation and lighting are arranged to reduce extraneous sensory perception to a minimum, while the film itself is formally isolated by the strong caesuras of the house lights going down at the beginning and coming up at the end, and the internal device of its opening and closing credits. This experience was, of course, intensified by the grandiose decor of the picture palaces, which impressed even more forcefully on audiences the sensation of being in another world, but the formal devices that insulate the spectator are the same in any cinema. However well-worn the metaphor of the Dream

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Factory may be, the dreaming state remains the most evocative analogy to the cinematic experience, suggesting as it does the contradictory position of the spectator as participant witness to a fantasy not under his or her control. What is perhaps most important about the familiar cinematic sensation of being awake in the dark is the way that it is separated off from other activities, protecting both itself and its spectators for a while from the world outside. This separation, which V. F. Perkins describes as a "public privacy," constitutes it as a self-contained event, formally immune to and removed from events outside the cinema.

David Chaney suggests that

There is a recurrent paradox that as metropolitan provision swamps regional variation, so that we seem to live more in a world of shared forms, there is an increasing emphasis upon retreating from public civility to private individual experience.

[Fictions and Ceremonies]

The formal arrangements of the cinema serve to insulate the audience from each other at the same time that they expose them to an identical apparition. When compared to the audience's experience of theatre, these arrangements precisely chart Chaney's paradoxical movements towards shared forms and private experience. Television, of course, extends both movements even further.

THE CINEMATIC CONTRACT

"The Cinema exists in the
distance between the audience
and the screen."
Jean-Luc Godard

Recent critical theories of film, developed out of the rarified atmosphere of Marxist semiotics and Lacanian psychoanalysis, have proposed a model of the cinema that locates the spectator as an essentially passive figure acted on by the film. The individual subject (the spectator) is deprived of his or her centrality by a theoretical assertion that he or she is constituted in a prior existing system,

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which may be identified as "a linguistic system," "the imaginary," or "ideology." The integration of these theoretical discourses by their originators and disciples suggests that we can take these various terms to apply to different aspects of "the system of ideas and representations which dominate the mind of a man or a social group." The individual subject, deprived of such false bourgeois attributes as free will by his or her restriction within a system of language which determines his or her consciousness, is seen as a receptacle for the various manifestations of this pre-existent and determinist system. The correlative of such a theoretical construction is that the primary object of study is seen to be the language system rather than any particular language event. Despite its immense complexities as a theoretical and analystical discourse, such an approach to the cinematic experience seems to be somewhat simplistic , reducing the audience to a passive amalgam of individuated but not individual receivers of pre-determined messages.

This approach has two weaknesses, which ultimately derive from its origin as a theoretical systemic model. Firstly, it discards Chaney's paradoxical relationship between shared form and private experience by describing the form as a system and singularizing the audience into separate spectators, to whom the system is applied . This singularization is the exact reverse of the cinema's optical process. The camera records a field of vision from a singular point of view, which is itself spatially contiguous to the space it records. In projection, however, the camera's point of view is abstracted from its original spatial context and universalized for the audience, who, wherever they are sitting in the cinema, see the field of view from the same, by now abstracted, point of view. By this process of spatial abstraction and universalization the camera/projector does not so much constitute the spectator as its subject as indicate the difference between perception inside and outside the camera. The single perspective is pluralized by its presentation to a plural audience.

Unmistakably, reproduction as offered by picture magazines and newsreels differs from the image seen by the unarmed eye. Uniqueness and permanence are as closely linked in the latter as are transitoriness and reproducability in the former.

[Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"]

In the third quarter of the seventeenth century, Samuel van Hoogstraten, a Dutch painter and theorist of perspec-

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tive, constructed a peepshow in which the spectator, looking through a hole in the side of the box, would see a three-dimensional view of the interior of a room. The painting, on five of the interior surfaces of the box, presents its illusion of monocular perspective only from the point at which the peephole is cut, and the box is designed so that it can be viewed from that point alone. Such an artefact, perhaps the archetypal product of the optics of bourgeois individualism, can precisely be said to constitute the viewer as its subject, since it obliges the spectator to adopt a precise geographical position in relation to the image. The cinema, on the other hand, does the very opposite in the way it establishes the spectator's spatial relationship to the screen. The camera records the scene before it from a unique optical position, which the projector then pluralizes and makes equally available to every spectator in the theatre. This pluralization of the image in part accounts for the experiential differences between cinema and theatre, and also emphasizes the distinction between the spectator's perceptions within the cinema and those he or she experiences outside it. The result is to mark a distinction between the fiction of the image and the corporeal, material reality of the spectator, which, Walter Benjamin suggests, "permits the audience to take the position of the critic, without experiencing any personal contact with the actor."

One example of this distinction is an audience's reaction to point-of-view shots taken through car windshields in chase sequences, or the switchback ride sequence in This Is Cinerama. The audience will react physically to such scenes, jumping up and down in their seats as the car hits bumps. But at the same time that they are most obviously viscerally associating with the image before them, the spectators are most concretely aware that they are watching an illusion . The motion might make them sick, but they do not think themselves in danger of falling off the rollercoaster. Chaney describes this "feature of the spectacle" as fulfilling the audience's "desire for vicarious authenticity," and providing "an opportunity for a member of the audience to participate in and yet be distanced from someone risking his life crossing the Niagara Falls, an organization spending many millions of pounds, and Christians actually being eaten by lions." It is not a matter so much of the camera/projector's imposing a point-of-view on the audience as a question of their adopting the camera's perspective. The distinction is between a diktat and a voluntary agreement, but the distinction is essential. If the individual spectator

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is irredeemably fixed in position by the image, then the possibilities of his or her relation to its signification are at best limited to what Stuart Hall describes as "preferred," "negotiated" or "subversive" decodings or readings. If, on the other hand, the audience's role of participant witness is a voluntary one, then their relationship with the image is open to much wider, polyvalent, interpretations. I am suggesting that such polyvalence is implicit in the pluralized nature of the cinematic image as presented to the audience, and that attempts to describe the cinema as constituting its subject misinterpret the nature of the exchange between the audience and the screen .*

To this description of the audience's relation to the image as polyvalent it might be objected that they in fact have no choice as to what they look at. The film preexists its audience in its selection and ordering of images. But in that selection and ordering, it also offers the audience a multiplicity of fictional perspectives. Within any sequence of the most conventional Hollywood fiction the camera may cut among half a dozen distinct spatial placements and provide as many different viewpoints on the events. The cut, for which there is no literary or linguistic equivalent, is an even more obvious instrument to distinguish between the process of cinematic and non-cinematic perception. Only in the cinema can we move our viewpoint without moving physically. The task of the spectator--which is an active task, and a necessary one for even the most basic comprehension of film--is to correlate the separate visual viewpoints, comprehend their spatial relationship, and construct a fiction out of their juxtaposition. Those who propose that the cinema constitutes its subject are in a sense giving no more credit to the audience's capacity than the producers who objected to the introduction of the close-up because the spectators would be confused as to what had happened to the rest of the character. Rather than convert it into a determinist relationship between film cause and spectator effect, we should try to preserve the paradox that the camera's presentation encourages the view-

__________
*It is worth noting that detailed analyses of the proposition that the film constitutes its audience subject have concentrated almost exclusively on the atypical visual rhetoric of the direct point-of-view shot. Even from its own theoretical position, this approach has a great deal more of the image stream to account for than it has yet done.

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er's participatory identification with the performances it presents at the same time that it demonstrably reveals itself as artificial.*

It might be more useful to offer a model of the film-audience relationship based on a model of contractual relations. There is, of course, a legal contract established between spectator and exhibitor by the sale of an admission ticket; that is why box offices display notices announcing that "the management reserves the right to..." The obligations under this contract are, however, limited: try demanding our money back on the grounds that you didn't like the film! However, the broader notion of a contractual relationship between film and audience serves first of all to make the point that the audience's commitment to the film is a voluntary one, particularly since they have already fulfilled their part of the contract by paying the price of admission before seeing the film.** In one sense, the cinematic contract may be taken to be the arrangement by which the filmmakers consent to provide the sequential materials necessary for the construction of a fiction, and the spectator consents to undertake its construction, remaining free to determine significance wherever he or she may choose to locate it. David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson's distinction between plot and story may make the point clearer:

__________
*Walter Benjamin concisely expresses the paradox of the camera: "In the studio the mechanical equipment has penetrated so deeply into reality that its pure aspect freed from the foreign substance of equipment is the result of a special procedure, namely the shooting by the specially adjusted camera and the mounting of the shot together with other similar ones. The equipment-free aspect of reality here has become the height of artifice; the sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the land of technology."

**We can distinguish two levels of performance participation (negotiation). The first is those social skills displayed in buying tickets, finding one's seat, observing the conventions of attention and applause and managing exiting. The second level is only analytically distinguishable from the first, but it relates to the development of identity involved in attending performances of a distinct style... By patronizing a certain type of performance an individual is asserting a conception of self with distinctive aesthetic tastes and communal commitments.

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The story, then, is a mental reconstruction we make of the events in their chronological order and in their presumed duration and frequency. The plot is the way in which these events are actually presented in the film.

[Bordwell and Thompson, Film Art]

I will elaborate on this distinction and add other terms to it later, but for the moment it is enough to observe that it is obviously possible to construct a wide variety of stories from one plot, simply by varying the emphasis placed on different plot events . Anyone who has ever tried to tell someone else the story of a film, or, even worse, tried to explain "what's happened so far" to someone who has come in late, will know what I mean. The process of constructing a fiction is formally retrospective : it requires a distance between the fictional events and the spectator who puts them to use. In practice, the audience construct the fiction as they go along, relying on their individual powers of memory and observation to locate the material the film provides them with in the overall pattern of the fiction they construct.

Two things should by now be clear. First, the spectator is not a passive recipient of the film . He or she is assigned a task which must be performed if he or she is to elicit any meaning from it. The audience, then, have to work at their entertainment; they have, in fact, to entertain themselves from the material provided on the screen.*

The work involved may not be very hard, and a knowledgeable spectator performs it as unconsciously as he or she might perform a simple task on a factory production line, but the fact that the cinematic contract does provide the spectator with a task to perform if the fiction of the film is to be brought into being is empirically demonstrated every

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*They may, for example, choose to do this in "deviant" ways quite contrary to the filmmakers' expectations: the Camp appreciation of B-movies is one example; the repeated viewings of cult films like The Rocky Horror Picture Show, in which audiences dress up as their favorite characters in the film and recite the dialogue with them, is another; tearing up cinema seats during screenings of Rock Around the Clock is a third; and adolescent sexual experimentation in the back row or the drive-in is obviously an extreme possibility in constructing your own entertainment in the cinema.

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time a cinematic convention is ruptured and the spectator has to negotiate a new spatial or character relationship.*

My second point is that an alternative description of the audience's activity is to call it a process of performance. Entertainment is not a system or a material object, it is an activity. The product the American film industry sold in its movie theatres was entertainment, but that commodity was a process in which the audience was contractually obliged to perform a function. Kaplan's distinction between play and entertainment does not, in this analysis, hold. Applying my earlier definition of performance as an act of self-assertion the audience becomes not simply an active presence in the process of cinematic articulation, but necessarily a self-conscious presence. I shall argue later that the cinema of the consensus (which to some extent coincides with what is now commonly, if vaguely, called "the classical Hollywood narrative") seeks to construct a mode of articulation in which the self-conscious role of the audience is reduced to a minimum so that its cinematic fictions may be consumed with as much ease and as little work as possible. To a degree this makes my empirical interpretations of the effects of the consensual mode on fictional construction similar to the conclusions of the theorists I am criticizing. But there are, or at least there seem to me to be, several crucial points of methodological difference, which reveal themselves in terminology. I shall argue that the cinema of the consensus effectively restricts its products to a unilateral mode of communication, in which the spectator is encouraged to construct the fiction intended by the filmmakers because of the conventional arrangements of the fictional material. But I emphatically do not accept that such a procedure is inherent in the cinematic process, or within the Hollywood cinema. The Interludes on Dissent exist precisely to make this point: that it was and

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*Recent developments in the theory of motion perception have invalidated the idea that the cinematic illusion results from persistence of vision, and suggest that the spectator is involved in a much more complex unconscious process. "Just as film theorists have supplanted naive notions of cinema as a simple copy of the world with an attempt to come to grips with the medium as a system of representation and signification, so too must the naive notions of persistence of vision and of direct perception be replaced with an effort to understand visual perception itself as a transformational and representational process."

[Joseph and Barbara Anderson, "Motion Perception in Motion Pictures"]

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is possible to make films that contest the assumptions of the consensus by questioning, breaking or exposing its conventional arrangements--and still remain within the Hollywood system.

My second point of disagreement with the systematizers is a discrepancy in the objects of our inquiry. I am much less concerned with the language system of cinema than I am with the language event; that is, with the film as experienced by its audience and as located in its specific historical and ideological context. I am unconvinced that the cinema is either a language or a language system because its production of meaning is both too mimetic and too connotative to be systematized. A science of connotations strikes me as an inherently contradictory proposition. I do not deny the value of a great deal of recent semiological analysis, and it will, I hope, be clear that my own methodlogical techniques have been influenced by formalist and structuralist approaches to film. But I am inclined to think that the study of the cinema is at the moment more in need of historical and textual research than it is of further theoretical speculation.

Finally, I disagree with the assumptions about ideological intention and effect in much recent theoretical writing. European presumptions about ideology cannot be imported unproblematically into the analysis of a culture which has so steadfastly refused to acknowledge their existence. Of course, American society can be subjected to class-based European modes of analysis, but in the process, some acknowledgment should be made of the fact that American institutions do not recognize themselves in these terms. The concept of a dominant ideology fits more readily into a society that consciously operates class divisions than it does in one which propounds its egalitarianism. America's Great Refusal of Marxism is a curious cultural fact the ramifications of which go far beyond the scope of this book. But while the English or French cinemas can clearly be seen to be operating class-based ideologies, I am less convinced that such assumptions can be readily recognized in Hollywood. Equally, the conventional structures of Hollywood which determine its unilateral mode of communication cannot automatically be regarded as hegemonic in purpose even if they achieve that effect. The evolution of the mechanisms of consensus cinema was not concerned with the establishment of an ideological hegemony or the imposition of a particular, ideologically conditioned perceptual system. It was rather a

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technological evolution geared to the production of more efficient entertainment.* Hollywood sought to minimize its audience's effort both because it was economically more effective for it to do so, and because that was what it presumed its audience wanted. Within the contractual framework I have proposed, there is good reason for thinking that it was correct in its presumption. The development of Hollywood's fictional conventions was a gradual process, conducted progressively in film after film, and took the form of an economic dialogue between filmmakers and audience at the box-office. Innovations in form or content were negotiated by their financial success or lack of it; a crude mechanism of consultation, no doubt, but a mechanism nevertheless.**

My proposition, then, is that while the American cinema of the consensus may have established itself as a hegemonic and unilateral system of communication, it did so not out of a conscious or unconscious desire to impose a dominant ideology on its audience, but with the active participation of that audience, which was also maintained through its products. If Hollywood films governed the perception of their audiences, they did so with "the consent of the governed."

__________
*In contrast to Europe, the private business sector in American history has been a more and more important factor in affecting activities, attitudes, and tastes for leisure... education or quality are not primary goals of business. The leisure dimension of American life, inasmuch as a portion of it is dominated by goods or services provided for financial, profit, is efficiently served instead of purposefully elevated.

[looks like a quotation whose marks and endnote have accidentally been omitted]

**I am, of course, making certain assumptions about the legitimacy of capitalist procedures that many Marxist critics would dispute. This seems to me exactly the problem in much critical analysis of the American cinema. I do not seek to defend monopoly capitalism as an economic or ideological institution. I merely intend to acknowledge that that was the condition within which the American cinema operated. Any analysis of its products must place it within that condition rather than insisting against history that it ought to have operated under different conditions.

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THE CANNING BUSINESS

"After all, pictures are shipped
out in cans. We're in the can-
ning business."
Sammy Glick

... "There is ever present the obligation to entertain those who pay the price for what they believe will be entertainment." [Joseph] Breen's job was to ensure that Hollywood produced "entertainment which tends to improve the race, or at least to recreate and rebuild human beings exhausted with the realities of life."

As well as this prescription, the movies were also expected to contain a number of known or anticipated ingredients, which can be characterized in several ways. In fulfilling its "obligation to entertain" the Hollywood movie had, like any other non-durable consumer product, to meet certain standards of quality. Predictable quality was indicated by the same criteria as might be employed by a manufacturer of canned food: the reputation of the producing company's brand name (MGM, Warner Brothers), and the quality of the product's ingredients (starring Cary Grant and Jean Arthur, [etc.]...) Commercially, film, like canned food, required that its customers could anticipate enjoying it by contemplating the mixture of known and reliable ingredients.

On the other hand, while one can's contents should taste exactly like another's, a film needed to present at least the illusion of being distinct from every other film. Even the most formularized B-film entailed a separate act of production and had to supply its spectator/consumers with an element of novelty to keep them engaged in its consumption, as well as the predictable ingredients which would initially lure them to the cinema. Advertising slogans often sought to make this joint appeal. ...

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... Campaigns mounted around a star... offered the audience a novel experience from a familiar, reliable source, an idea perhaps most concisely expressed in the advertisements for Ninotchka, which simply announced, "Garbo laughs."

According to legend, Brian Foy, "The Keeper of the Bs" at Warner Brothers, kept a large pile of scripts permanently on his desk. A completed film's script would go to the bottom of the pile, and after it had worked its way up to the top, it would be remade with a different cast, setting, period, or alteration of other details. Whether or not the story is apocryphal (and Foy did once boast that he had made the same film eleven times), it illustrates an important aspect of Hollywood production techniques: the development of archetypal structures through industrial pressures . The most common criticism of the American cinema, that it is repetitive and formulaic , is in a sense an acknowledgment of its effectiveness as a commodity , as well, of course, as being a tacit declaration in favor of a particular bourgeois individualist notion of art. The operation of such archetypal structures is most clearly visible in B-features because they operated under the most stringent economic restrictions. A typical Republic budget of 1951, for one of its cheapest "Jubilee" category of films with a total production cost of $50,000, shows an expenditure on story and script of $1,800, less than the cost of the unprocessed film to shoot the picture. Operating within such tight financial limits, the cost of developing new material was prohibitive. It was cheaper to keep a stable of contract writers to revamp familiar plotlines. The pressure of a fixed budget exerted similar influence at all stages of production, encouraging the employment of stock companies and stock shots, existing sets and pre-arranged lighting and camera set-ups.

While most acute in B-features, such economic pressures existed in all areas of Hollywood production. The system, as Harry Cohn explained to Robert Parrish, was geared to volume production.

Now, let me give you some facts of life. I release fifty-two pictures a year. I make about forty and buy the rest. Every Friday, the door of this studio opens and I spit a movie out onto Gower Street....  If that door opens and I spit

[28]

and nothing comes out, it means that a lot of people are out of work--drivers, distributors, exhibitors, projectionists, ushers, and a lot of other pricks.

[Parrish, Growing Up In Hollywood]

Standardization was as much an economic necessity in film production as in any other industrial process , and it appeared in the form of conventional or formulaic structures. Warner Brothers, which prided itself on its cost efficiency, was the studio most inclined to remakes. It produced, for example, three versions of The Maltese Falcon in ten years. Throughout Hollywood a standardization of budgeting, scheduling and casting (two stars per A-feature) was the norm.*

This standardization was the means by which predictable quality could be guaranteed to the audience. Its effect was evident in the two most advertised mechanisms of its operation, the film genre and the star system. Both functioned as practical and prior operating indexical systems upon which the audience could base their consumption decisions. A knowledgeable audience would have expectations of a film starring Clark Gable or of a gangster movie, and would decide to go to it or not depending on their past response to identifiably similar products. Although much less considered either by audiences or, in the main, by subsequent criticism equivalent mechanisms operated within the film itself, to provide conventional patterns by which the audience decoded the representation of plot, character, movement, space and time. These various mechanisms, examined in more detail later, formed a matrix of conventional structures within which a fiction comprehensible to its audience could be constructed. Although not immutably fixed, such fictive conventions provided the predominant source of predictability in a Hollywood film, while the equally necessary element of novelty was supplied by the particular story the film narrated.

The audience's principal activity in the cinema is the construction/ consumption of the story the film is telling.

__________
*Jeanne Thomas Allen argues that "Standardisation is primarlly the outcome of the interchangeability of parts made possible by the development of precision tools to replicate identical component systems," and suggests that it might be possible to extend this notion beyond its application to technological development into "the standardisation of film products for marketing efficiency."

[29]

That this is so can be empirically demonstrated by looking at the volume of film criticism that concerns itself only with examining story and theme, as easily as it can be done by asking an audience what the film they have just seen is "about." (Not many people will tell you that it's "about" the dialectical relationship between sound and image track, although every film is "about" that.) This is partly the result of the functional system of film production: the story is the simplest and cheapest ingredient to change and therefore the cheapest form of novelty . Partly, it is simply a matter of societal habit: the ritual consumption of particular, frequently repeated stories is an activity largely reserved for children. The elderly woman who went to The Sound of Music more than 200 times was regarded as such a freak phenomenon that the cinema she patronized took her out of the economic system by giving her a free pass! While the movies clearly do supply frequently repeated fictions describing the same social arenas and presenting the same moral/ideological conclusions, the details of their stories vary. The audience is always buying a new product. The primacy of the story as the object of consumption is also, however, guaranteed by the nature of the fictive conventions used to present it. The mechanisms of these conventions seek to efface themselves, allowing the audience to assume their operation without taking particular notice of them. Eyeline matching is one convention the audience is likely to take for granted, the iconography of a Western is another. The process by which conventions are assumed and disregarded concentrates the audience's attention on the story. It is, in the main, the superstructure of a film that we observe, while the continuity of its deep structures are taken for granted.

"I hope you realize that you're making a perfect
spectacle of yourself," Katharine Hepburn to Cary
Grant in Bringing Up Baby.

If a binary opposition between novelty and predictability, the familiar and the original, can be proposed in the Hollywood product, an overlapping opposition, between narrative and the spectacle of performance, can also be argued for.* While the primary object of consumption is a film's

__________
*In film and literary criticism, "narrative" tends to be used in two senses, corresponding to its adjectival and noun forms. Bordwell and Thompson define a narrative as "a  (cont.)

[30]

story, a second, and sometimes competing, source of audience pleasure is in witnessing spectacular events or the performances of favorite stars. The star system not only provided its audience with commodities other than films to consume, it also provided them with an alternative way to consume the films. The "star vehicle," as Frank McConnell says, existed "primarily, if not solely, for displaying its leading players in as many of their postures as possible." Sneak preview questionnaires asked their audiences to comment on the principal performances separately from the story. The audience's consumption of film as spectacle was accepted by Hollywood's production and advertising alike, as an alternative to engaging the narrative.

...

This tension between narrative and performance is a constant, and perhaps determining, feature of the American cinema. In its largest terms a consensual Hollywood fiction is engaged in both activities at the same time. It

__________
chain of events in cause-effect relationship occurring in time," which is straightforward enough and overlaps considerably (as the dictionary definition of the noun permits) with story. As an adjective, however, narrative refers to the activity of telling a story, rather than that which is told. This ambiguity is inconvenient, and I shall try to keep my use of the term to its second, adjectival, meaning. It should then be clear that narrative refers to something distinct not only from "story," but also from "fiction," which is a larger entity which will encompass both narrative and performance structures .

[31]

performs its conventional articulations--of genre, star persona, space--in the process of narrating its story. They are closely related by separable activities, and the audience can selectively direct its attention towards either or both. While consuming the story spectators may also admire and later imitate) the gestural codes of their favorite performers, or the other codes of spectacular performance that the film offers, such as dress codes in fashion. The codes of the film's performance, both internally (the conventions of the film's construction) and externally (the film's references outside itself to performance codes in the everyday world), operate as a framework in which the act of narration can take place. But the individual spectator may choose to concentrate his or her attention on the conventions themselves: there is an inevitable sense of ritual in watching The Oklahoma Kid's operation of Western conventions, which is inextricably bound up with their effect on the narrative. It is clear from very early on that the film will climax with Cagney shooting it out with Bogart; it is clear that Bogart will be killed, and it is also clear that either Cagney or his brother (Harvey Stephens), who are both in love with the Girl (Rosemary Lane), must die to leave the way free for a romantic resolution. It is not, however, clear which brother will be killed, since the various conventions at work conflict with each other. Cagney is quite used to giving up the Girl to someone more respectable and dying at the end of the picture (The Roaring Twenties, Angels with Dirty Faces), but an outlaw hero can get away with more reprehensible conduct than a gangster, since the frontier offers more possibility than the city for redemption by a good woman. The spectator can be interested in how the story turns out, or in how the film solves the problem of its conflicting conventions. Equally, he or she may view the individual image as a unit of the story, concentrating on the narrative relationships between objects in the frame, or as a spectacle in itself, looking at the objects within the image as separable elements. Neither of these modes of audience behavior is aberrant; both are sanctioned by the way the film is constructed, although different films will find different points of balance. Ultimately the choice of emphasis, for film, audience and critic, is political, since to stress the performance of a film is to signal its artificiality, while privileging its narrative affirms its continuity and holistic nature.

Some generic conventions allow performance to interrupt or fracture narrative more readily than others; musicals and comedies, for example, expect the disruption of

[32]

their narrative progression by separable acts of performance where epics contain their spectacle within the larger narrative framework. A particularly schematic distinction between narrative and performance takes place in the Warner Bros. musicals of the early 1930s: 42nd Street (1933) and Gold Diggers of 1933 divide rigidly into straightforward backstage narratives interrupted by separate musical spectacles which, as Richard Dyer has pointed out, operate different conventions of spatial presentation. This explicit bifurcation of space into separate areas for narrative and performance, work and play, practiced as rigorously by Chaplin in Modern Times (1936) as by Busby Berkeley and his co-directors, is not necessary for performance to be disruptive. Gene Kelly's roller-skate dance in It's Always Fair Weather (M.G.M., 1955), for example, provides a transformation of space by performance, rather than by the perceptual conventions through which it is depicted. Instead of being passively integrated into a narrative space as he has been in the previous sequences, Kelly forcibly asserts himself against it, insisting, by his movements, that the audience's comprehension of the space and the object relations within it be revised. He glides along the street singing to himself, unaware either of the peculiarity of his movement or of his being an object of attention for passers-by. His performance of the song, essentially a private act shared with the film audience, creates a safe performing space free from narrative pressures (he is at the time being pursued by three thugs). Once Kelly becomes aware of his performance, he celebrates the safety it provides by dancing on the skates, drawing a crowd and even stopping the traffic, whereas his narrative identity would insist that he try to be as inconspicuous as possible. As long as he is dancing, in an arena made safe by his performance, he cannot be affected by narrative forces: the three thugs will not find him.

Within the consensus, tradition performance, although always available for consumption, is normally subordinated to and contained by narrative. M.G.M.'s 1936 production San Francisco provides a number of illustrations. Within the framework of a linear narrative built around a triangular relationship involving Clark Gable, Jeanette MacDonald and Jack Holt there are two kinds of suspending performances. McDonald sings a number of songs and arias, presented as events within the narrative (by devices such as intercutting between her singing, audience reaction, and one or both of the men), which propose a narrative development continuing at the same time as the performance, although

[33]

such developments are never in themselves sufficient to justify the songs' duration in the fiction. They supply a separate kind of audience pleasure while remaining firmly placed within the narrative. The other performance is more disruptive of the narrative, since, like the Berkeley numbers, it operates a different set of spatial codings. The spectacle of the earthquake is introduced at a climactic moment of the plot: McDonald has just renounced Holt for Gable (establishing this by performing a song), and Gable has rejected her. At this level the earthquake has the conventional melodramatic function of the external, natural manifestation of the characters' tempestuous emotions (more frequently signaled by a thunderstorm). But the sequence of the earthquake itself is performed in a manner stylistically quite at odds with the rest of the film. The soft-focus quality of the narrative image is exchanged for a hard-edged, sharp-focus clarity, the previously exclusively eyeline-height camera level is replaced by extreme low and high angles and canted shots. Objects, rather than people, occupy the frame, with a concentration on selected details, such as the detached wheel of a crashed carriage, which is photographed spinning to the ground in three shots. The editing tempo is radically increased. It is not simply a montage sequence, nor a performance of special effects, although it is, obviously, both of those things. It is a sequence constructed along lines of expressive articulation quite different from the rest of the film, based on concepts of composition and rhythm, recognizable to the contemporary spectator as influenced by Eisenstein, and in fact the work of Slavko Vorkapich. In much the same way as the other sequences I have mentioned, this three-minute episode self-assertively marks itself off from the rest of the film, and claims a separate existence for itself within the fiction so long as it lasts. The end of the earthquake produces a reassertion of the narrative , which is then concerned with its own resolution as Gable searches for MacDonald. The fiction , however, has not been unaffected by this sequence, and the presentation of spectacle competes with the Gable-MacDonald narrative for fictive centrality during the remaining fifteen minutes of the film--to the extent that in occasional shots Gable, who is the narrative guide through the second earthquake and its aftermath, is abandoned both by the soundtrack suppressing his dialogue in favor of incidental figures (usually screaming), and by the camera's retreating from its usual distance of medium or full shots of him to a repeated placing of him as one among several figures in a long shot.

[34]

There is, then, an inherent tension within Hollywood fictions between the activities of narrative and performance . Supplying a range of commodities from which the audience could, within limits, construct its own entertainment , the American cinema potentially allowed for a considerable diversity of political expression. That, in practice , it promulgated a consensual conservatism was the result not of its formal conventions so much as of its social function . But the containment of performance within narrative by most Hollywood film neither eliminated the possibilities for formal experimentation nor prevented the audience choosing the objects of its consumption within the fiction on offer. Those critics who argue that Hollywood film is essentially a realist narrative form conflate the dialectical relationship between narrative and performance into a unilateral emphasis on story, and restrict the polyvalent possibilities of the film-audience relationship. In terms of a political analysis, such a diagnosis assumes that ideology has a prior existence external to the film, whose operation of it can be seen as a hegemonic activity by the dominant bourgeoisie. If, against this, we see both film and audience as active,

if we see representational force as deriving from the process of becoming , being made, rather than from our contemplation of an object of accomplishment , then this has major implications for the relevance of a vocabulary of communication.

[Chaney, Fictions and Ceremonies]

If we see the film as an enactment , rather than a container , of ideology, then the process of inscription becomes central to the comprehension of ideology within any given film/text. For the critic to presume the existence of an ideologically preconditioned perceptual system--whether derived from a literary or a psychoanalytic aesthetic--is to drastically restrict the possibilities for the act of inscription.

CHAPTER 2

THE BUSINESS OF FANTASY

THE CONDITION OF CRISIS

...

[51]

THE SEAT OF HARRY COHN'S PANTS

The industry as a whole needed the stability of predictable box-office earnings to guarantee the production and advertising pattern of large-scale short-term investment. This was a division of interests which corresponded to the requirements for novelty and predictability of the films themselves. Movie economics resembled those of the fashion industry in their dependence on stable consumption of a product which was constantly being modified, and in their ambiguously determining and dependent relationship with audience "taste." Many of Hollywood's moguls had worked in clothing trades early in their careers and may have acquired the particular skills which entrepreneurial success in both industries required: in particular, "the ability to suspend one's own tastes and calculate the desires of others."

The promotion of fashion as a mechanism for the superficial alteration of a fundamentally consistent product was as important to the workings of the film industry as it was to the garment business, because it attached unnatural limits to the durability of the product in question. Films, like clothes, went out of fashion before they were worn out. This imposed an attitude towards the product on the part of the producers that influenced their manner of distribution. The felt need to be fashionable reinforced the notion of the product having a short commercial life, and being worthless after expiry. Fashion had to be latched on to quickly; producers, like dress designers, had to stay one step ahead of public taste, anticipating it by at least a year in order to have product ready for the market.

The studio heads' claim to control over production was in part based on the assertion that they had unique intuitive abilities to gauge and predict audience reaction to the individual films their companies produced. In their interventions over story development, characterization, casting or costume design, all the moguls insisted on their mediating role as arbiters of the Common Taste, though few were as terse in expressing their peculiar gift for judgment as Harry Cohn:

When I'm alone in the projection room, I have a foolproof device for judging whether a picture is good or bad. If my fanny squirms, it's bad. If

[52]

my fanny doesn't squirm, it's good. It's as simple as that.

The claim to insight, whether exercised in Cohn's manner of demanding nineteen minutes cut from a completed print because his fanny started to squirm nineteen minutes from the film's end, or in the extensive and detailed control over productions maintained by Thalberg or Selznick, was a crucial element in the moguls' power over their employees. It provided a rationale one step short of naked authoritarianism for their intervention in creative matters, and served as a constant reminder to writers and directors that their objective was to produce profitable entertainment, not art.

The moguls' claimed abilities to predict audience taste were also central to their relationship with their financial overlords in New York. It amounted to a justification of autonomy for production, by providing a further mechanism for stability. Industry economics dictated that films should be designed to appeal to the widest possible audience as the most reliable guarantor of profitability. The mythology of Hollywood constructed by the moguls insisted that audience taste was inherently unpredictable and that, as a result, film could not be subject to simple financial expedients. Film production did not require conventional accounting abilities so much as a capacity to manage the irrational and the unpredictable, skills to which the moguls laid an exclusive claim. Rather than encouraging programs of audience research which might undermine their claims the studio heads promoted their own image as predictors of the public taste as a means of securing their independence from East Coast financial pressure. The effectiveness of this strategy, and the extent to which it was endorsed by their parent companies, was confirmed by the enormous salaries the studio executives were paid.

The moguls made themselves the men who gave the public what the public wanted. What the public wanted was in large part revealed by what they went to see, but the studio heads secured for themselves the vital position of determining what it was about any successful film that had appealed to audiences, and that could therefore be capitalized upon in later productions. The moguls' mediating role was, therefore, not only between their companies' creative employees and New York executives, but also between audience reaction and subsequent product. Their attitudes permeated everything Hollywood produced, and those attitudes

[53]

were chiefly influenced by a commitment to short-term profitability which geared production to the repetition of successful ingredients via generic formulae and the star system, and by an equal commitment to the ideal of "harmless entertainment" which structured the expression of ideology in the American cinema.

Hollywood's existence as a major industry, and its need for long-term economic stability to provide a secure base for its short-term financial adventurism encouraged its acceptance of the existing status quo. The moguls defined their activity as responding to audience tastes rather than formulating them, and hence saw their product as reactive, not innovative. This essentially conservative definition of the cinema's ideological function allowed films to reflect changes in social and political attitudes by fitting them in as topical, novel elements in basically stable patterns . A new idea introduced as a superficial variation on an established theme or plot structure no more disturbed the overall ideology of the combined studio product than a new star disturbed the mechanisms of the star system. A superficial and topical radicalism was always permissible if it could be bracketed into a stable and already comprehensible narrative structure. The attitude was neatly summarized by Darryl F. Zanuck, head of production at Twentieth Century-Fox, in a memo of May 1940 to Ernest Pascal, a writer working on the script of How Green Was My Valley:

This is a revolutionary type of story; therefore, our treatment should not be revolutionary. Now it fumbles around and I get the impression that we are trying to do an English Grapes of Wrath and prove that the mineowners were very mean and that the laborers finally won out over them. All this might be fine if it were happening today, like Grapes of Wrath, but this is years ago and who gives a damn? The smart thing to do is to try to keep all the rest in the background and focus mainly on the human story as seen through Huw's eyes.

[Gussow, Zanuck: Don't Say Yes Until I've Finished Talking]

The conservatism of this attitude blended perfectly with the entertainment ethic, to which the studio heads adhered until, at the earliest, 1940. Under the questioning of their political impartiality by the 1941 Nye-Clark Senatorial Investigating Committee, a few members of the Hollywood community, including Zanuck, proposed a defense of such

[54]

cinematic social comment as there has been by arguing that the cinema's social responsibility obliged it consciously to enter contemporarv political debates. But, among senior studio personnel, this opinion was held only by a small minority, and its influence over production was slight, even for Zanuck, who managed without difficulty to combine it with a wholehearted endorsement of the entertainment ethic:

If you have something worth while to say, dress it in the glittering robes of entertainment and you will find a ready market ... without entertainment no propaganda film is worth a dime.

Zanuck did not question the extent to which making a political statement correspond to the requirements of entertainment as understood by the studio formulae might distort its message, any more than the question bothered him during the supervision of The Grapes of Wrath and How Green Was My Valley:

In The Grapes of Wrath we had to make a very vital decision ... whether to tell the story of the Okies as a whole or the story of one isolated family. This meant the elimination of the flood ... the elimination of the fights with the police ... the dropping of certain characters very important in the book and writing an entirely new last act.... When I think what I got away with [on How Green Was My Valley] ... and won the Academy Award with the picture, it really is astonishing. Not only did we drop five or six characters but we eliminated the most controversial element in the book, which was the labor and capital battle in connection with the strike.

In both cases, Zanuck was effectively taking potentially controversial material and rendering it safe by placing it within an established context for a socially conservative Hollywood narrative. Both films endorsed the stabilizing influence of the family as a cohesive unit, and presented the tragic element of their stories as being the fragmentation of the family, without digressing into a consideration of the underlying causes of that fragmentation. While Zanuck did not strip the films completely of a political context, he nevertheless drastically altered their political implications by fitting them into a narrative that depicted "nice people involved in heartbreak," defusing their radical potential.

[55]

This was less the deliberate imposition of a conservative viewpoint than ideological censorship by default. The Grapes of Wrath was nevertheless sufficiently "political" to earn the condemnation of Martin Quigley, the influential editor of the Motion Picture Herald and co-author of the 1930 Production Code. While Zanuck argued that the movies could educate through pleasure, Quigley firmly maintained the extreme conservative version of the entertainment ethic: "The entertainment motion picture is no place for social, political and economic argument."

The entertainment ethic provided for social and political conservatism in two ways. Firstly, it proscribed an area of human activity, going to the movies, as being detached from political significance. Movies were, according to the accepted wisdom of their manufacturers, mere "harmless entertainment," at most influencing only fashion and such inconsequentialities as whether or not men wore undershirts. They might aspire to "Art" so long as it was defined along the narrow middle-brow lines of Goldwyn's adaptations of "the classics of literature." In discussing the Production Code, Joseph Breen maintained:

Entertainment, then, is the keynote of the Code, in its practical application to the production of motion pictures. With the artistic character of pictures the Production Code Administration is not seriously concerned. But it is concerned with the attempts to justify immoral themes and indecent scenes by the sophistry of the excuse of beauty.

[quoted in Moley, The Hays Office]

Similarly, the Legion of Decency did not concern itself with "art," but with "immorality," even if its definition of that term was rather broad.

But this definition of films as mere entertainment required that the range of human activities presented by the movies must be taken as devoid of any political consequence. In 1938 the Institute for Propaganda Analysis criticized common value-judgments in motion pictures:

1.   That the successful culmination of a romance will solve most of the dilemmas of the hero and heroine.
2.   Catch the criminal and you will solve the crime problem.
3.   War and preparation for war are thrilling,

[56]

heroic and glamorous.
4.   The good life is the acquisitive life, with its emphasis on luxury, fine homes and automobiles, evening dress, swank and suavity.

What they objected to was what the industry and the majority of its critics regarded as the beneficent conventions of an escapist entertainment. Moreover, industry heads presupposed that such value-judgments accorded with the contemporary consensus. Their reactive cinema reinforced attitudes that were presumed already to exist, while also providing a mechanism by which these attitudes could be permitted to reflect upon topical issues or subjects of debate.

Secondly, the entertainment ethic, bolstered by the economic necessity the studio heads saw in appealing to the mass audience, encouraged the tendency, implicit in the idea of entertainment as it was then understood, to appeal to the lowest common denominator of public taste. This did not necessarily mean appealing to the spectator's baser instincts; rather, it proposed that the films it produced should be as inoffensive as possible in order to keep them available to the largest possible audience. Since the righteous were more vocal, if not more numerous than the prurient or the permissive, once the industry had begun to seek respectability in the early 1920s, it expressed a more or less consistent willingness to cooperate with the most morally conservative elements of society.

CHAPTER 3

MIXED ECONOMIES

...

[65]

TELEVISION AND THE NEIGHBORHOOD THEATRES

It is not possible to attribute the subsequent developments in the American film industry wholly to the effects of the Paramount decrees, but their influence was of greater consequence in the restructuring of the industry in the post-war period than any other single factor. By comparison, the impact of television on the studios has been exaggerated . Undoubtedly, the main reason for the decline in audience attendance over the period from 1947 to 1962 was the availability of television as an alternative form of entertainment. But during those fifteen years the methods of American production underwent a major reorganization which was only in part the consequence of falling attendance. It is more accurate to suggest that the effects of the Paramount decrees were exacerbated and accelerated by the immediate financial pressures imposed on the studios by audience defections.

[66]

The initial decline in audience attendance in the immediate post-war period had little to do with television. After the peak attendance year of 1946, a fall to pre-war levels was perhaps to be expected, independent of other influences. That natural fall in audience numbers was aggravated by the post-war restructuring of the national economy, as wartime production resources were diverted into the manufacture of consumer goods. Returning servicemen married, started families, and acquired consumer durables, which both reduced the amount of money available for leisure-time spending and tied families to their homes. When box-office receipts began to decline in the 1947 season, there were fewer television sets in America than there were cinemas. Television, indeed, was one of the major beneficiaries of this redirection of the economy into the production of consumer goods, as the movies suffered from its concomitant concentration of financial resources on the nuclear unit, the suburban family home. The growth of television sales, television's enormous penetration of the American market in the ten years after 1948, and the nature of its content intensified the already existent tendency of the family audience to find its entertainment at home rather than going out to the movies to find it. That this tendency was, however, independent of television itself can be seen in the rise of book sales and the growth of the magazine industry in the immediate post- war period.

Most of the misconceptions about the relationship between the American film industry and the society in which it operates stem from the widespread acceptance of the myth of the undifferentiated mass audience. In the discussion of television's effect on audience decline this myth has been particularly important in imposing a simplistic causal relationship where in fact a much more complex process of interaction was taking place. By 1957, the "mass audience" had ceased to exist. An Opinion Research Corporation survey in that year found that only 15 per cent of the American public attended the cinema as often as once a week, and that this group accounted for 62 per cent of total admissions. But if the audience was no longer a mass, it still seemed to be socially heterogeneous. Apart from establishing that 72.2 per cent of cinema-goers were under 30, the survey failed to find significant variation in attendance on the basis of income, education or sex. However, even without precise demographic statistics to locate exactly which sections of the audience stopped going to the cinema, conclusions can be drawn from, for example, the pattern of theatre closures.

[67]

Viewed from a distance, the statistical evidence would appear to indicate a severe general decline in film attendance and in theatre seating in the first post-war decade. There was a drop in seating capacity of 18 per cent, from 12.5 million seats in 1948 to 10.6 million in 1954. In the decade after 1946, 4,120 theatres closed altogether. Another 5,200 theatres were operating at a loss by 1956, while 5,700 were breaking even. Of the 19,000 cinemas operating in the United States, 56 per cent were failing to make a pro-fit, and it was estimated that, as a whole, the exhibition sector was making a net loss of $11.8 million.

Frederic Stuart argues cogently that television was responsible for 80 per cent of the decline in audience attendance between 1948 and 1956, basing his conclusion on a state-by-state study of box-office receipts and theatre closures. While the evidence he presents would appear overwhelming, his statistical data conceal the extent to which the theatre closures constituted a structural reorganization of the exhibition industry, and the way the production companies' response to the Paramount decrees and the threat of television exacerbated the initial decline in overall attendance. The vast majority of the theatres that closed, and a very high proportion of those doing poorly, were small, late-run houses in neighborhood areas, used to changing their programs at least twice a week and gaining their support from a small proportion of the local community who attended regularly. These were the theatres that had made two staple Hollywood products--the family film and the B-feature--profitable concerns. They catered to the middle-class family audiences who had "gone to the movies" once or twice a week, rather than specifically going to see an individual film. But despite their numbers and the size of their audiences, these theatres had not, even in the 1930s, comprised a particularly important source of revenue to distributors, because of the relatively low rentals they were charged. In the post-war economic atmosphere, their share of the market was steadily diminishing. In 1951 the 8,000 small theatres at the bottom of the exhibition ladder produced only 20 per cent of gross domestic rental income.

Even the demise of the small neighborhood theatre cannot be attributed entirely to television. Rather, it was the result of a set of interlocking and cumulative pressures--of which television was one--and has to be seen in the light of other developments in exhibition. ...

…

[86]

INTERLUDE

An American definition of a
first-class intelligence:
The ability to hold two opposed
ideas in the mind at the same
time, and still retain the ability
to function.
F. Scott Fitzgerald:
The Crack Up

"PRODUCTION FOR USE"--HOWARD HAWKS

You work your side of the
street, I'll work mine.
Steve McQueen in Bullitt

The imperatives of Hollywood production set strict limits on both the possibilities and the need for thematic sophistication in its individual films. These commercial restrictions are the first and largest hurdle confronting the auteur critic, desperately trying to convince himself and others that the apparently simple is secretly, subversively profound. Howard Hawks is a test case.

Hawks' films may be the models of thematic density that Robin Wood and others take them to be. But if they do reveal a consistent morality through their plot development and dialogue, it is no less rooted in nineteenth-century precepts than Ford's or Chaplin's. More importantly, earnest discussions of the high moral tone of Rio Bravo, dotted with caveats about the film's unpretentious and relaxed good humor, miss the point. The self-evident fact that Hawks' films whole-heartedly accept that their goal is to entertain is the first observation that must be made about them. For

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Hawks, working within the limitations of that perspective--acknowledging the film as product and accepting the status quo of the production system--is not a necessary evil but a positive virtue. It is his very recognition of these limited objectives which gives his practice of cinematic entertainment an emphasis so significantly different from that of his more orthodox contemporaries.

As practiced by Hollywood, entertainment relied on a balance between the familiar and the novel, the familiar being provided by the audience's recognition of conventional characters, situations, and so on. The idea of genre, as providing a stock of this familiar material, is thus central to an understanding of how the American cinema worked. It may be more useful to consider Hawks as a genre rather than an auteur, even if only briefly; the Hawksian hero and Hawksian woman have distinctive qualities that set them apart from other, conventional figures in much the same way that the generic archetypes of the Western are set apart from those of the crime film. Rio Bravo is more a re-make of Only Angels Have Wings than it is a Western. The Bogart-Bacall relationship in The Big Sleep presumes on their previous relationship in To Have and Have Not. Hawks' films repeat themselves, both inside and outside the single narrative, and this repetition provides a sense of enclosure within conventional modes of expression that informs the reactions of characters and audience alike. Looking at the dead Thomas Mitchell's meager possessions in Only Angels Have Wings, Cary Grant says: "Not much to show for twenty-two years." It is the second time he has said it in the film, and it is a line already familiar from Ceiling Zero which will be used again in Air Force. Hawks knows it, and Grant knows it, and he says it as if he knows it, so the audience know it, too. The scene, which makes a point about the necessary limitations of expressing emotion, is--like a generic configuration--transposable from film to film as a substantially intact block.

In keeping with this pattern of construction, the pleasures for the audience in a Hawks film are all incidental ones: whether they be the delights of unlikely engineering achievements (Pocket's rocket in Hatari!), the game-playing of characters within a scene (Bogart and Bacall all the time, Wayne and Clift in Red River, Martin and Brennan in Rio Bravo), or the enforced realization of the irrelevance of the linear plot (the song sequence in Rio Bravo). They are incidental in several senses. They are tangential to the plot.

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They are separate incidents in themselves, whose entertainment value derives from their performance-- how they happen, not why they happen . They are, like the cinema itself, transitory: they give immediate pleasure, and then they're over . In Hawks' narratives, the scene itself, and what happens within it, are more important than the scene's contribution to a developing plot. As a result, there is no imperative for his plots either to make sense or to progress.

If it mattered who killed Owen Taylor, The Big Sleep would collapse. The implausibilities of the story are accepted because attention is diverted elsewhere. The situation simply exists. The town in Rio Bravo is completely cut off. Statement. Narrative fact. This is the point from which the film tees off. The coincidence of Richard Barthelmess' arrival at Barranca in Only Angels Have Wings is not up for examination, it is simply the means of engineering the situations Hawks wants to make his film about. There is no need to explain why Carmen Sternwood walks into Joe Brody's apartment pointing a gun at him when Marlowe and Vivian are already there. Her entry is justified by the new elements she brings to the scene and by what happens after she arrives. Hawks plays on the immediacy of the audience's experience of film in his narrative construction, replacing plot logic with the pressure generated by one piece of film coming after another. The Big Sleep is sustained only by the passage from incident to incident, a completely internal narrative pressure which has no point of reference outside the film itself. The spatial tension of his framing or the a-temporal pacing of his scene transitions substitutes for exegesis. Because each scene works independently as a dramatic set-piece, we always seem to be where we ought to be, and never mind how we got here or where we're going next. With Hawks, you do not suspend your disbelief, you entirely disengage the faculty, because plausibility is not a requirement or an ingredient in his narratives. The plot is the final construct, built from the characters and situations that inhabit it. It comes last, not first , and its development is determined by the situations Hawks wishes to explore, not by a continual narrative pressure towards resolution. It may be more (Rio Bravo) or less (The Big Sleep) coherent, but the plot is never of primary importance. We are never in doubt of its outcome, only of the route.

Hawks' films are not progressive. They are self-contained exercises, and Hawks is a volunteer inside his

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own limitations. As a result, his aims are always limited and tactical. Scenes are frequently about the tactics of the situation they describe (Martin's entry into the Burdett saloon in Rio Bravo. It is not just that Hawks shoots in a deceptively simple visual style in which the camera rarely deviates from the eye-level shot of several characters forced into narrative relationship by their spatial proximity. Nor that this style of shooting emphasizes the claustrophobia of his interiors, establishing a pattern of tension and release between them and his fluid exteriors, where the capacity for expansive movement becomes a celebration of action and performance as their own rewards. Nor is it merely a matter of the way characters relate to each other, relying on conventions of cinematic narrative that allow their relationships to be presented in a form of shorthand, an indexical system of gesture and monosyllabic dialogue that permits the complicit audience to flesh out these skeletal figures.

Within any given scene, Hawks makes his audience work harder than any of his contemporaries . Whether it is a question of keeping pace with the machine-gun dialogue of His Girl Friday, or picking up on the sexual innuendo of Bogart and Bacall, or following the dual illogic of a Grant-Hepburn conversation in Bringing Up Baby, or interpreting a sentimental motive into the rigidly unsentimental action of Only Angels Have Wings, the spectator has to work to keep up and must participate in the scene if it is to function. It is one half of Hawks' dual approach to the question of his audience's passivity. He makes them work to read a second, unstated, layer of meaning within each of his scenes, and achieves their complicity by never making this process of participation explicit through explanation. Either you get the joke or you don't.

This, I take it, is what Hawks meant when he suggested that the director's primary skill was the ability to tell a story. But telling a story (narrative) is not the same as the story itself (plot). One of the things that makes Hawks such a supreme manipulator of narrative is his fluency in persuading the audience to ignore plot incongruities. It is by the very artificiality of his plots and settings that he operates the second, suitably contradictory half of his narrative equation, which emphasizes the passivity of the audience. Their inability to affect the passage of the film is stressed by the illogic of the plot development , by the refusal of Hawks' stories to make sense, to explain them selves, or even to progress.

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Hawks endorses the limited aim of entertainment, but by his practice of it he not only provides a different basis for entertainment and a different narrative model, he also negotiates a different relationship between film and audience. Like the most thoughtful of genre directors, he substitutes economy for realism--a point which should be obvious from the first five minutes of any of his films. The real world outside the cinema does not intrude into the artificiality of his entertainments. Hawks accepts the idea of the film as product, and the status quo of the production system, but he does so overtly, never purporting to present his films as anything other than a diverting illusion. This acknowledgment of limitation makes both the balance and the effect of his narratives differ from those of consensual directors who seek to offer their audiences an illusion of reality.

Instead, Hawks presents us with a fixed artifact, held together by the arbitrary juxtaposition of pieces of film of the same set of characters in different situations, and allows us to engage it at whatever level we choose. The option of presuming that the plot makes sense, even the option of presuming that His Girl Friday is about The Lure of Irresponsibility, is left open to us. By himself acknowledging the arbitrary nature of the film as closed text, and by permeating his films with that acknowledgment (embarrassing his characters by abandoning them in the middle of a two-shot for longer than they can comfortably find a reason to be there), he provides a text which thereby becomes open for the audience to manipulate for themselves. That acknowledgment comes through Hawks' acceptance of the status quo as the initial fact; he accepts the conventions of the cinema because that is a requirement of his industrial position. As he is interested in professionals because he regards competence as more interesting than incompetence, he sees his competent acceptance of convention as no more than the required professionalism of his job. But as a professional, he doesn't make films for amateurs. He does not disguise those conventions or seek to beguile his audience into believing in his films and characters as anything but fictions whose existence is limited to the spectator's experience of the film. Hawks dissents from the consensus by embracing the artificiality of the American cinema, and thus permitting his audience to acknowledge this artificiality at the same time that they acquiesce in the arbitrary nature of his narrative.

With Hawks as a starting-point, it is possible to propose a distinction between two strands of the American

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cinema: the Cinema of the Consensus, and the Cinema of Dissent. That dissent is sometimes, but by no means invariably, overtly political, but that is never its defining quality. What categorizes the Cinema of Dissent is its renegotiation of the relationship between film and audience, as the Consensus is categorized by its failure to do so. That process of renegotiation must always begin with the director's acceptance of the limitations of his position, both in relation to the system of production and in the nature of the unilateral communication he practices with his audience. That is why these Interludes on Dissent will consistently deal with directors who exploit the conventions of Hollywood cinema as a starting-point for their subversion.

…

PART 2

THE LINE OF LEAST RESISTANCE

...

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CHAPTER 4

SENSE AND SENSORSHIP

CHIEF INVESTIGATOR STRIPLING: Mr Menjou,
if a picture is produced, as for example Mission
to Moscow, which gives a false portrayal or which
has propaganda in it, who do you hold responsible
in your own mind as a veteran actor in the motion-
picture industry?

MR. MENJOU: Well, I believe that the manufac-
turer of any product is responsible in the end for
the quality of his product.

MR. STRIPLING: In other words, the producers
should be held responsible?

MR. MENJOU: They should be.

House Committee on Un-American Activities,
October 1947.

The producers, the studio executives, never attempted to deny their public responsibility for the quality of their product, nor for its content. Their films, of necessity, existed in the public domain, and were therefore subject to the critical comment not only of their audiences, but also of the socially opinionated. As a pervasive mass entertainment, the cinema was exposed to a more intense examination of its social implications than either more conventional non-durable consumer goods or forms of expression generally seen to operate independently of commercial pressures and the responsibilities of the mass audience. The unique position of the film industry made it vulnerable to a particular kind of public threat. ...

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...

In dealing with those who took an undue interest in their merchandise, the producers invariably placed a premium on their own financial interests. The crucial threat to the majors' interests came from the raising of the anti-trust issue; compared to the maintenance of their economic hegemony, questions of the political or artistic freedom of the screen dwindled into insignificance. The only threats industry leaders took note of were financial ones. Nothing else could persuade them to act in concert, and nothing would make them acquiesce so fast as a threatened boycott. Equally, they saw no purpose in challenging a status quo which worked to their financial advantage. ... since both the most severe restriction of the cinema's freedom of expression and the greatest opportunity to expand that freedom took place at times of financial crisis in the industry, the majors' preference for their short-term economic interest was never revealed so clearly.

WILL H. HAYS AND THE PRACTICE OF BETTER BUSINESS

The constitutional position of film as a medium of expression was defined by the Supreme Court in a ruling on the case of Mutual Film Corp. vs. Ohio in 1915. ...

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... The movies were entertainment, not vehicles for ideas, but because of the particularly affecting nature of the medium, they were deemed to have a peculiar capacity for evil influence. Not only, therefore, did they not qualify as constitutionally protected speech; those responsible for the maintenance of public order and morality were bound to regard them warily because of their potential for harm.

The producers had to don a cloak of respectability not as a direct result of this decision, but because of its consequences: the rapid proliferation of state and local prior censorship boards,... The studios' consciences were reached through their pockets,... The production companies' eager response to the opportunities for more permissive subject matter provided by the dawning of the Jazz Age in 1921 lent weight to the reformers' demands for a system of federal censorship in the name of public morality. The Arbuckle and Taylor scandals exacerbated the public's increasing hostility towards Hollywood's decadent extravagances in a period of economic recession. ... To maintain their business freedom the companies needed a cosmetic gloss that would make them appear as conventional businessmen.

It might be argued that the company heads, as individuals, felt a similar need. The studio moguls were almost all of extremely humble origins, and had little or no formal education. None of them were White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, the majority being immigrants or the sons of

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immigrants, and further hampered in their strivings for the trappings of social respectability by being Jewish in a period when anti-Semitism was a common business practice and a respectable belief. ...Loew, Mayer, Zukor, the Schenks and the rest may well have comprised the most socially disadvantaged group of industrial magnates in the economic history of America. By 1921 the industry was moving out of its initial phase of meteoric expansion, in which business ethics were a polite irrelevance, into a period of consolidation, stabilization, the formation of vertically integrated companies and the establishment of the film factory. But corporate respectability was not yet theirs.

Business generally looked down a sensitive nose at its new companion. The world of banking sniffed at it. The royalty of industry regarded it as something faintly unsavoury, untoward, hooliganish, though it could not be brushed aside as unimportant.

[[citation]]

When they founded the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America in March 1922, the industry leaders chose as their figure-head the most respectable man their money could buy. ...he became "the spokesman for the Association in all communications to the public," but he was also in a position from which he could, to a degree, impose his political outlook upon the producers. ...Hays worked to implement his maxim ["more business in government and less government in business"] with the ultimate intention of converting the film industry into a model of business self-regulation.

Initially, at least, he was considerably more successful in restraining external opposition ... than he was in controlling the internecine disputes of his employers. The evident failure of Prohibition, Republican policies of minimal government implicit in the return to "nor-

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malcy," and the semantic hostility the word "censorship" aroused (particularly in Hays' persistent use of the phrase "political censorship') weakened the reform lobby. The producers, however, were reluctant to accept even self-imposed limitations on their freedom of content. Their rhetorical interest in freedom of expression failed to disguise their principal objection: the assumption that the most obviously censorable content was also the most profitable . Frequently during the 1920s they passed what amounted to good resolutions promising

to establish the highest possible moral and artistic standards of motion picture production

and

to prevent the prevalent type of book and play from becoming the prevalent type of picture ...

but they never required themselves to take more than token notice of these resolutions.

It was this failure on Hays' part that led the reform groups to link the questions of censorship and antitrust legislation in the proposals they brought before Congress. [e.g.] In 1928 the Brookhart Bill... The Hudson Bill, first introduced in 1930 (and re-introduced several times thereafter),... The Neely-Pettingill Bill of 1936 (revived as the Neely Bill of 1938, and introduced for a third time by Senator Harvey M. Kilgore in 1943)...

The legislative relation of antitrust and censorship questions, however, provided Hays with evidence to support the strategy he was attempting to impose on the M. P. P. D. A. It involved accepting the validity of public concern over content, but avoiding interference by the adoption of a code of

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self-regulation as stringent as that which the moral conservatives in the vanguard of the reformers would themselves wish to implement. ...if the M. P. P. D. A. companies could be seen to be enforcing a respectable code of conduct in their choice of content, they could claim not only that they were providing adequate evidence of self-regulation; they could also argue that block booking helped to keep films of dubious moral quality, made by non-affiliates of the M. P. P. D. A., out of the theatres . The loss of creative freedom was a small price to pay for the enormous advantages of monopoly profit.

Hays' strategy received its first articulation in the list of "Don'ts and Be Carefuls" adopted in June 1927 by the Association of Motion Picture Producers.* ...the list was based on material about which objections had been received by the M. P. P. D. A. Department of Public Relations, or which had been cut by local censors. The determining principle behind the inclusion of each item was not a consideration of morality or public taste, but the practical application of Hays' argument. ...

The working abstract of the 1930 Production Code made the rationale behind Hays' actions even more apparent. As originally written by Martin Quigley and Father Daniel Lord, S.J.,** the Code was an argument in Catholic moral philosophy which contained no specific catalog of material deemed unsuitable for the screen. When the Code was adopted as binding by the M.P.P.D.A. in 1934, what Quigley and Lord had written was designated as "The Reasons

__________
*A West Coast organization of the major producers, established in 1924, the A. M. P. P. was a separate body from the M. P. P.D. A., but in practice had much the same member ship. Policy seldom varied between the two Associations.

**Martin Quigley was the staunchly Catholic editor and publisher of the Motion Picture Herald. Father Lord was Professor of Dramatics at the University of St. Louis.

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Supporting the Preamble of the Code," and was, for all practical purposes, ignored. The Code itself was Hays' compilation of the prohibitions in Quigley/Lord together with those of the A. M. P. P. "Don'ts and Be Carefuls" that they had omitted. It was dominated less by a specifically Catholic moral stance than by Hays' requirement that it should preclude the necessity of any further censorial controls.*

It was not an easy strategy to sell to a group of men who had made their fortunes in exploitation. Neither their own good resolutions nor the threat of legislation gave it the force to become more than a paper policy. ... M. P. P. D. A. members successfully resisted attempts to have the Production Code included in the 1933 National Recovery Administration Code of Fair Competition for the Motion Picture Industry, which would have made violation of the Code subject to the punitive clauses of the N.R.A. code.** Their reluctance to accept self-regulation gave support to charges that the industry would not and could not control itself in the public interest, and to Senator Brookhart's allegations that

Mr. Hays has done nothing towards improving the

__________
*For example, nothing in Quigley/Lord required a prohibiion on the depiction of miscegenation, which was carried over from the "Don'ts and Be Carefuls," since it would obviously be excised by local censors in the Southern States.

**The NRA Code merely acknowledged the existence of the Production Code in terms reminiscent of the industry's prevous pledges of good behavior:

The industry pledges its combined strength to maintain right moral standards in the production of motion pictures as a form of entertainment. The industry pledges itself to adhere to the regulations made within the industry to attain this purpose.

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moral tone of the movies.... The truth is that Hays was employed primarily as a "fixer" to protect the industry against any sort of regulation through public action.

The companies' refusal to adopt the Code in the early 1930s was based on economic circumstance. While the post-sound expansion had carried the industry over the first years of the Depression, it had involved them in expensive conversion of facilities, and had doubled production costs. The industry's slump came in 1932-1933, when both Universal and R. K. O. were in receivership and Paramount was near bankruptcy as annual audience attendance figures declined for the first time in the industry's history. ... Hays recognized their financial problems and relaxed his internal campaign for self-censorship for the duration of the crisis. But if he was forced to accept this situation, others, less concerned with the economic well-being of the movies, were not.

In particular, the Catholic Church reacted strongly to the industry's failure to observe the Catholic-composed Code. During 1933 there were a number of moves by Catholic clergy threatening boycotts of films and theatres,... ...the formation, in April 1934, of the Legion of Decency, whose members were pledged "to remain away from all motion pictures except those which do not offend decency and Christian morality." The threat of mass boycott, which gained additional support from Protesant, Jewish and other voluntary organizations, was astutely timed. It came at a period of economic insecurity, when movie stocks were at their lowest, and it reached its peak of activity... while plans for the new production season were being made. The producers capitulated immediately. ... On July 1 [1933] the Studio Relations Committee was replaced by the Production Code Administration, which would vet all script drafts and

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release prints of every film produced, distributed or exhibited by the member companies of the M. P . P. D. A., who contracted not to distribute or exhibit any film not bearing the P. C. A. Seal of Approval. ...

KINDER CUTS

...the M. P. P. D. A. members ...took to the Code not because they believed, as Hays claimed to, that audiences had been gradually educated to accept higher moral standards in their entertainment, but because of the threatened boycott. And in giving in to a threat, they also accepted the principle by which Hays had constructed the Code's working abstract. The strength of the entire system of prior censorship was that it operated on the basis of a series of undefined relationships, rooted in the producers' acknowledgment that the P. C. A. was a necessary intermediary to give them protection from the undesirable assaults of organizations more morally scrupulous than they themselves might care to be. The P.C.A. in practice operated as a mechanism for the maintenance of a necessary predictability in the subject matter of movies and the manner of its handling, in much the same way that the formulae of genre pictures did. ... Concern about the movies went well beyond the merely censorable, and Hays frequently had to deal with protests from trade associations over a film's representation of their business. The industry's response to such complaints was strongly related to the amount of economic pressure the complainant might exert, either directly or through influence in Washington. ...

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... Above all the industry wished to manufacture an acceptable product: since its audience was undifferentiated, and since the product had to achieve mass consumption before it became profitable, it seemed to make economic sense to pitch film content fairly consistently at the lowest common denominator of its audience, and equally, to adopt the line of least resistance in dealing with protests about content, insofar as these were compatible with successful corporate economics.

In such circumstances , it would have been naive to expect the M. P. P. D. A. to challenge governmental prior censorship institutions. The Production Code was one element of a diffuse censorship system... To challenge the legitimacy of one element in that system was to challenge the whole construct. Since that construct came to serve the economic interests of the majors, challenging it would serve neither their short- nor their long-term interests. ...they wanted to appear both responsible and responsive to pressure,... This attitude reaped its rewards in the form of a greater reciprocal co-operation from the censors in their dealings with the major distributors. The preferential treatment afforded to the majors made up for the occasional inconvenience brought on by erratic censorship decisions. Equally, the Legion had at least a tacit interest in the preservation of oligopoly. In his 1945 thesis on the Legion, Paul Facey observed,

The Department of Justice has tried to break up the monopoly of the film industry. Should it carry its attack to the point where it would force the dissolution of the Hays Office, the Legion of Decency would face a situation fraught with real problems. Instead of a single focus for its pressure, the Hays Office, it would have as many as there are producers.

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... The system of control was enhanced by the practical operation of the Code, which was frequently accused by independent producers and distributors of showing a greater leniency in its decisions over the content of films produced or distributed by the major companies than in cases involving independent productions. Since provisional P. C. A. approval was a vital factor in obtaining the outside financing necessary for independent production, this alleged bias helped ensure that the independents were unable to compete on equal terms with the studios.

The majors also found the P.C.A. Seal of Approval a useful additional tool in maintaining their effective exhibition monopoly.** It was, for example, helpful in restricting the

__________
*The coincidence of the Production Code's implementation shortly after most of the major companies were taken over by Wall Street interests has not yet been examined in any detail. Although evidence to establish a direct causal relationship would be almost impossible to obtain, the Code's standardization and neutralization of film content would be likely to appeal on both economic and ideological grounds to Morgan and Rockefeller interests. It is also the case that, in the later stages of their negotiations with the M. P. P.D. A., the Legion of Decency abandoned their dealings with the producers and concentrated their attention on the executives in New York. On June 15, 1934, Variety reported,

Switch of all moral problems from the West to the East is revealed to have been motivated by an understanding that the crusaders have lost patience with the studio heads, but still believe in the judgment and good intentions of the Eastern executives.

**Prior to 1948, films distributed by M. P.P.D.A. companies, all of which had to have a P. C. A. Seal, accounted for 97 per cent of films obtaining releases in the United States.

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import of foreign films. The distribution companies, reluctant to handle product that was partially outside their economic control (and hence less profitable), used the Code as a weapon with which to question their suitability for American audiences. Though not originally responsible for associating European films with dubious subject matter, they were content to allow the relationship to permeate the public consciousness. Raymond Moley, in his laudatory account of the Hays Office, published in 1945, concluded his final chapter by emphasizing Hays', and the M. P. P. D. A. 's, intention of adhering to the standards laid down in the Code:

There will, of course, be critical questions of enforcement to meet, since the present standards prescribed by the Code are the highest in the world. These high standards are now so completely taken for granted by American public opinion, in fact, that little or no public pressure is any longer exerted to support them.... Of course there will be demands from some countries for more piquant entertainment than the Code allows, but as far as present prospects indicate, these countries will have to supply their own spice.

...

A LIMITED EXPRESSION

"It is therefore evident, gentle-
men, that there never was a
real issue in this controversy."

Government mediator at the
end of Black Fury.

The Code enshrined in its prohibitions the common

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wisdom of Justice McKenna's 1915 ruling that film had a special capacity for evil. It stated, in "General Principles. 1.":

No picture shall be produced which will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience shall never be thrown to the side of crime, wrong-doing, evil, or sin.

That regulation, more than any other, controlled the nature of the subject matter, plot and characterization available to the filmmakers. In practice, Breen and his staff would analyze stories primarily in relation to their theme.

For such evaluative purposes , the theme of a picture can be determined by asking what problem confronts the leading characters and stating how the problem is solved . If the characters find their answers in moral ways, the theme of the picture is usually acceptable. If the characters find it necessary to steal or commit adultery or break some other social taboo or law, the story is unacceptable unless proper and compensating moral values and element of punishment are present.

"Compensating moral values" were defined by Breen in a letter to Hays in March, 1936:

Time and again there occur in the decisions of the P. C. A. the words: "Compensating moral values." The Code demands "that in the end the audience feels that evil is wrong and good is right." To satisfy this requirement of the Code, stories must contain, at least, sufficient good to compensate for any evil they relate. The compensating moral values are: good characters, the voice of morality, a lesson, regeneration of the transgressor, suffering and punishment.

The bulk of the P.C.A's activities was concerned with the detailed administration of the Code, which operated on the principal of judicial precedent, cases being filed by subject, from "abdomen" to "zipper." But since none of the correspondence or decisions of the P. C.A were published, the Code was open to re-interpretation, and special dispensations might always be granted, as in the case of Clark Gable's last line in Gone with the Wind, which specifically contradicted Part V of the Code, as amended November 1, 1939.

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There was, further, a large peripheral area of the P.C.A.'s work which involved making suggestions about material not specifically forbidden by the Code itself, but liable to incur the displeasure of either local or foreign censors (such as the British Censor's persistent practice of deleting the Lord's Prayer from any film), or of interest groups. It was in this context that comment about the overtly political content of films might occur. Such advice was not infrequent among the potentially socially controversial films of the 1930s, at least. Colin Shindler cites the case of the drastic altering of the story line of Black Fury (1935, Warner Bros.; dir. Michael Curtiz), from an indictment of working conditions among Pennsylvania coal miners to a gangster melodrama about an innocent's exploitation by racketeering union leaders. Walter Wanger, producer of Blockade (1938; dir. William Dieterle) was advised that it might be as well not to identify his characters with either side in the Spanish Civil War, and that even to identify the locale as Spain was dangerous. ...

Ruth Inglis quotes from a letter from Breen to Samuel Goldwyn regarding Dead End (1937; dir. William Wyler):

We would like to recommend, in passing, that you be less emphatic, throughout, in the photographing of this script, in showing the contrast between the conditions of the poor in tenements and those of the rich in apartment houses. Specifically, we recommend you do not show, at any time, or at least that you do not emphasize, the presence of filth, or smelly garbage cans, or garbage floating in the river, into which the boys jump for a swim. This recommendation is made under the general heading of good and welfare, because our reaction is that such scenes are likely to give offense.

Inglis' conclusion, borne out by Shindler, "that, upon occasion, the Production Code Administration does try to exert a conservative influence,"* would almost certainly not

__________
*"The tribulations of Black Fury, Gabriel Over     (continued)

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have been contested by Breen. Moley quotes him as saying:

Without going into the philosophical discussion of whether or not revolution or violence are ever desirable, and without raising the question of the role which the arts may or may not have played in the dissemination of political ideas, the Code Administration maintains that it is unwise for any producer to expose the industry to the charge of fomenting political and social unrest. It emphasises the point that when this is done by a book, the reader who takes violent exception to the content is merely outraged at the author, not at the publisher or at the entire art of the printed word. But the motion picture spectator, when he is annoyed, is annoyed at "the damned movies," and, likely as not, at the theatre where he saw the offending picture.

He defended the P. C. A. against charges that its moral, social or political conservatism interfered with the artistic potential and social responsibilities of the American film by claiming that it was protecting the industry and its workers as a community because it prevented them damaging their own public esteem. Its rigid standards were necessary because large forces of articulate and powerful opinion threatened economic sanction if they were not adhered to. Because the industry was particularly vulnerable, it had to take particular care. The Code Administration was merely the industry's mechanism for establishing the exigencies, restrictions, and conventions within which the medium's artists might legitimately operate. If the limitations on narrative development imposed by the system of "compensating moral values" prevented the forceful articulation of explicit social criticism, it merely reflected the public will of Justice McKenna and the Legion of Decency that the cinema should ensure that its mass entertainment was "harmless."

Despite its predominantly conservative effects, the Code was a rich source of contradictions. Its impact on the crime film was immediate. Gangster films, which had

__________
the White House, of Dead End and Blockade, are clear indicators of the political bias and crucial deployment of the power of the Hays Office."

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been one of the principal objects of the reformers' criticism, had been closely modeled on the genre's first success, Little Caesar. They depicted the flamboyant rise and abrupt fall of a figure usually modeled on Al Capone, usually of Italian or Irish extraction, usually deriving his income from bootlegging, and always limited in his area of operation to a city, usually a thinly disguised studio version of Chicago or New York.* Despite their inevitable morally compensating violent death in the streets, the films' protagonists were presented as heroic in their assertiveness and determination to get to the top, offering an attractive if left-handed version of the myth of Success. By its stipulation that

Crimes against the law ... shall never be presented in such a way as to throw sympathy with the crime as against law and justice, or to inspire others with a desire for imitation.

the Code obliged the studios to convert their individualist outlaw heroes into equally heroic embodiments of benevolent federal authority, but it failed to remove the moral ambiguities of the genre. Warners remodeled Public Enemy James Cagney as a G-Man, but left his behavior unmodified: despite a specific prohibition in the Code against the law resorting to unlawful means to gain the ends of justice, Cagney's previous violence against the law was simply replaced by an equal violence in the name of the law. A 1935 amendment to the Code, that

Crime stories are not to be approved when they portray the activities of American gangsters, armed and in violent conflict with the law or law- enforcing officers,**

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*It is, however, worth noting Capone's personal hostility to gangster movies. "They ought to take them and throw them in the lake," he declared. "They're doing nothing but harm to the younger element of this country. I don't blame the censors for trying to ban them. These gang movies are making a lot of kids want to be tough boys and they don't serve any useful purpose."

**In large part this Amendment was designed to prohibit films about Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, and the Public Enemies of J. Edgar Hoover.

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directed against G-Men and its sequels, appears to have been less than strictly enforced as the cycle continued into 1937, to both praise for its responsible presentation of governmental power and condemnation for its devious circumnavigation of the spirit of the Code.

The contradictions inherent in the studios' solution to the prohibition on gangster films were most concisely indicated in a title change by which Warners' second G-Man film, Public Enemy's Wife, was renamed G-Man's Wife for its British release. The depths of the contradictions, however, emerged with their next film, Bullets or Ballots, in which "Edward G. (Little Caesar) Robinson moves in on the modern mobs." The Robinson character, Johnny Blake, is a New York detective who joins a crime syndicate in order to discover who its secret bosses are. The film manages to follow closely the established plot structure of the gangster film, depicting Robinson's rise in the criminal hierarchy and his battle with Humphrey Bogart for control of the rackets. It even provides him with the archetypal gangster's ending: fatally wounded by Bogart, he staggers out of his last meeting with the bosses to die in the street. At a plot level, the contradictions are apparent. As a cop, Robinson denounces racketeers and declares, "I don't like to see decent people pushed around." As a gangster, he introduces the numbers racket to New York. There is, too, a contradiction between the moral fervor with which the film denounces the rackets and the corruption that permits them and its generic impulse to provide an individualistic , heroic solution to the problem it poses . On the one hand, Robinson is depicted as a thoroughly honest man, made very uncomfortable by the duplicity of his role as undercover agent where he has to "double cross" criminals rather than give them the "even break" he has always done in the past. His moral qualms are made a central issue by the presence of Joan Blondell, who loses faith in him when he takes the numbers game away from her. In tension with the film's foregrounding of Robinson's conscience is the strident attack on the racketeers contained in the imitation March of Time documentary with which the film opens, and expressed with particular clarity in an early script treatment:

The purpose of the picture is to arouse public indignation and to stop public support of every racket chronicled herein, for without public support, the rackets will die!... Besides presenting entertainment the picture's mission will be to

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leave a flaming question mark in the minds of American audiences. What can be done to stamp out rackets and racketeers as effectively as Repeal stamped out bootleggers and rum-runners?

In its advertising the film avowed the educative purpose which came with its acquisition of a documentary mode of expression. One ad declared,

Watch the cops crack down on the Secret Friends of the Public Enemies ... the higher-up Dictatorship of Modern Gangdom that's still sticking up America to the tune of $15,000,000,000 a year!

But having proposed a factual basis behind the story, both the advertising and the film itself abandoned documentary for the individualist moral concerns of its plot. The same ad asked,

Will "Little Caesar" rat on this secret Syndicate of Crime? ... can he save his own skin by turning in the Big Bosses?

Although the individualist narrative was Hollywood's conventional mode of expression it was rarely placed in such direct tension with an explicit use of the documentary form, even in "social consciousness films."

Bullets or Ballots is clearly a fissured film, in the category that Comolli and Narboni argue should be examined because their cracks expose the ideology they express. What is noteworthy about it is that the film's internal tension is directly attributable to the operation of the Hays Code: from the visual details by which a man firing a gun and the man he shoots are not presented in the same shot, to the underlying stress between the objective of entertainment and the claim to social consciousness, the film's contradictions are products of its obligation to abide by the Code rather than arising from any creative tension in its production . Its presentation of its principal villains is particularly revealing.

The film's Secret Syndicate of Crime is actually run by a Wall Street banker, an ex-Senator, and a third man unidentified in the film but described in the script as young millionaire, socialite and clubman. This elite triumvirate appears in evening dress, and there is a clearly

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generic convention, community responsibility and individual direct action, social consciousness and entertainment, that permeate Bullets or Ballots and leave it open in detail to a wide range of ideological interpretations are largely present because of its conformity to the Production Code. [sic] The ambiguity of Robinson's status, in particular, was revealed by the ending. He dies, as a gangster must, in the street, but in doing so he contravenes a Code regulation that "law-enforcing officers should not be shown dying at the hands of criminals."* The Code provided a restrictive framework for film narrative that was not only in tension with the generic impulses of much of Hollywood's product but itself contradicted its conservative purposes. The conflicting elements within individual narratives can in retrospect be used to point up the films' implicit ideologies, while the Code itself can be seen as the source of Hollywood's confused solutions to such problematic areas of content as crime, sexuality and ethnicity. In having to avoid offending any group and compensate for immorality, Hollywood perpetrated stereotypes and made a fetish of "glamor" that corresponded only obliquely to the world outside itself.

__________
*An alternative ending, in which Robinson survives, and is rewarded by Blondell's attendance at his hospital bedside, was filmed but apparently not used.

CHAPTER 5

DOUBLE MEANINGS

...

[129] The definition of "controversial" grew broader as blacklisting procedures became more institutionalized.* The appearance of one's name in a list published by the Legion's Firing Line, Counterattack, the publications of AWARE, Inc., or any of the even more obscure Red-baiter groups was all that was needed. Figures without studio protection who had past "controversial" allegiances found it increasingly difficult, and finally impossible, to obtain work. The studios were careful to avoid providing grounds for any possible charges of conspiracy, so that there was never an industry-wide "blacklist" as such. There were almost certainly minor variations in policy between studios, with less pressure on independent producers. These inconsistencies as well as the lack of written evidence on the subject, the general pattern of declining employment in the industry, and the reluctance of any but the victims to discuss the issue, make it almost impossible to determine accurately how many people were affected by blacklisting, or the resulting impact on film production.

The studios' adoption of blacklisting practices can, however, be explained, and largely in non-political terms. The economic crisis provoked by falling audiences and the

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*By 1952 the "controversial" category covered not only the 324 names cited by cooperative witnesses at the H.U.A.C. "mass hearings, " but also brief membership of the 194 organizations deemed "subversive" by Counterattack, or a listing in the notorious Appendix IX of the 1945 H.U.A.C. report, which even the Committee had ordered destroyed on the grounds of its inaccuracy.

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Paramount decrees left the majors anxious to avoid any further criticism that might have repercussions on their financial position. They conceded to the anti-Communist lobby for the same reasons that they had conceded to the Legion of Decency in 1934, and if the influence of the anti-Communists was disproportionate to their numerical strength, the financial crisis facing the industry was more severe. Moreover, the increase in relative authority that the crisis had given distribution executives in New York encouraged the timid solution. After 1947 the position of the studio production heads was seriously and permanently weakened. Louis B. Mayer was forced out of M. G. M., Darryl Zanuck was pressured into resigning from Twentieth Century-Fox, and two of the Warner Brothers sold their interest in the company. Hughes' sale of R. K. O. to a branch of the General Tire and Rubber Co. in 1955 may have predated by ten years the submergence of other film companies in disparate conglomerates, but it did indicate in dramatic terms that the era of the all-powerful production head was over, and that the dominant voice in studio policy would from now on belong to those in charge of distribution and finance.

The changed nature of the right-wing attack on liberalism in the early 1950s also encouraged the institutionalization of blacklisting. Earlier attempts to rescind hated pieces of New Deal legislation through Congress or the courts had failed, and the enormous success of the Alger Hiss case had shown the reactionaries that the most effective way to destroy Rooseveltian influence was through victimization of individuals. This policy was applied to Hollywood in the "mass hearings" of 1951 and 1952. The Committee's new line of attack permitted the industry the face-saving rationalization that they were not abandoning the freedom of the screen, which had been the primary issue during the 1947 hearings. The situation in the early 1950s, it was argued, was that certain specific individuals were no longer acceptable to sections of public opinion because of their private politics. The more stringent policies adopted by radio and television companies and their sponsors in the name of the political purity of their consumer products forcibly affected the employment policies of the majors. A studio employing an actor too "disloyal" for television would be bound to come under heavy fire from the anti-Communists who had secured his original unemployment. And, as ever, but particularly as in any period of financial crisis, the industry executives were unwilling to alienate any section of the public who might decide to boycott, picket, or refuse to show their product .

...

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...

In spite of the commercial triumph of innocuous entertainment signaled by The Sound of Music in 1966, the M. P. A. A. in that year conceded that the existing Production Code was unworkable, and abandoned it for a much shorter and less specific formulation that could be adapted to changing circumstances, in the legal definition of obscenity, for example. In itself, the redrafting of the Code was more significant symbolically than materially: it evidenced the industry's final and reluctant acceptance that it could no longer profitably purvey a specified form of harmless entertainment to an undifferentiated mass audience. In one particular, however, the 1966 revision made that acceptance concrete. It specified that some films should be labeled as "suitable for mature audiences," and thereby introduced a system of classification which the majors had consistently resisted much more vehemently than they had opposed censorship. Film classification had been the main issue of dispute between the M. P. A. A. and censorship boards since 1952. Boards had taken more and more to restricting certain films, including some of the majors', as unsuitable for children. Their right to do so had been upheld by the Supreme Court, and some boards were operating exclusively on this practice, rather than attempting to enforce bans. The industry had fought any attempt to restrict audiences, particularly in the light of its knowledge that a large and growing proportion of movie audiences were under

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17. As before, the producers accepted classification only in the face of a growing censorship lobby, pressure from exhibitors who were concerned that they might again fall prey to community protest, and the forceful arguments of M. P. A. A President Jack Valenti that such a system was in their long-term self-interest. Even so, the system introduced in 1966 was, at best, half-hearted. It went no further than requiring that some films carry the label "Suggested for Mature Audiences" (abbreviated to S. M. A.) on their first- run advertising. This minimalist system did not quell the censorship lobby either inside or outside the industry, and was replaced in 1968 by a four-category classification sys- tem that finally abandoned the Code altogether.

The revisions of the Code during the 1960s amounted to a belated and reluctant acknowledgment by the member companies of the M.P.A. A. that a significant change had taken place in the composition and tastes of the movie audience. The classification system represented the institutional abandonment of the myth of the undifferentiated mass audience. But the tardiness and hesitancy with which these changes were implemented indicated even more clearly the extent to which distributors and major producers clung to a conservative economic definition of their product. The P. C. A. was replaced by the Code and Rating Administration (C.A.R.A.), but the philosophy with which the new organization operated did not differ from that of its predecessor. Instead of excising material by declaring it prohibited, the new administration achieved the same result by threatening producers with an X rating, which the major companies were not prepared to have attached to their product. Although some independent producers consciously pursued the publicity value of an X rating, the majors, committed as they were to blockbuster economics, continued to ensure that with very few exceptions their films were accessible to audienes under eighteen. Despite the increasing evidence to the contrary, they persisted in practicing the restrictive and conservative attitude to their product that the classification system appeared to have breached. That attitude continued to predominate because neither the political nor the economic events of the post-war period, disturbing as they were for the industry, caused the majors to alter their fundamental assumptions about the nature of film as a commercial commodity.

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INTERLUDE

I WAS A COMMUNARD FOR THE F. B. I.:
GENRE AND POLITICS--ANTHONY MANN

"There's a revolution going on.
Don't stay out late."
Arnold Moss (Fouché) in Reign
of Terror

What constitutes a political cinema? A dissenting film within the commercial cinema may choose to make statements about politics as a force outside the institution in which it operates (plot politics), or it may expose the mechanisms of manipulation and exploitation within its economically determined forms (political narrative). In Hollywood these possibilities have consistently functioned as alternatives, obliging a conventionality in one discourse in order to permit opportunistic subversion in another. The limitations of a superficial radicalism in content are apparent: Jack Warner and Louis B. Mayer were quite justified in their claim that no Communist propaganda had ever sullied their studios' output, although it is perhaps debatable whether that was entirely due to their unceasing vigilance. The possibilities of formal subversion are more ambiguous, since such a strategy involves a side-step into areas not normally recognized as political. A challenge to conventional modes of representation is, however, a prerequisite for a politically subversive cinema, particularly in Hollywood where highly developed narrative codes circumscribed and recuperated the radical elements of a film's subject matter. To succeed in either political or aesthetic terms a dissenting film was obliged voluntarily to subjugate itself to the immediate demands of its status as a commercial product. By, for example, accepting the conventions of genre and plot development, a subversive film might create a free space for itself through its overt

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conformity. Working below the surface level of plot percepton is exactly what makes such films subversive; they genrate a tension between plot event and its performance, which offers the audience a choice as to the level on which it wishes to read the film. Manny Farber's description of these movies as "Underground Films" captures their essential quality precisely.

The generic puritanism of Budd Boetticher's Westerns, for example, so emphasizes the ritual in the patterning of plot events that the conventional moral lessons of those events, so evident in Ford, cannot be drawn except by an unreflective reading of the plot as sole text. Rather, this rigid, ruthless adherence to generic conventions uses irony to turn the usual implications of the plot on their heads. The sympathetic villain is hardly unique to Boetticher's miniaturist approach, but rarely has evil been more personably personified than by Claude Akins in Comanche Station, nor has righteousness, the central tenet of Randolph Scott's performance, seemed more absurd.

Thus the paradox: in order to create a political cinema, you have to create a non-political cinema . Which is to say, you have to create a cinema which expresses its politics in terms other than those already labeled political. The divisions within Hollywood over H.U.A.C. in a way defined this contradiction. Those people who took positions on either side of the issue were accepting the terms of the debate, even if they denied the existence of common ground between them and their opponents. Both groups were, in a sense, more fundamentally in opposition to those individuals attempting to define the political in a new manner than they were to each other. An alternative politics was not to be defined through positions on issues as such; rather, it was bound into films by their makers' attitude towards the act of filmmaking itself. For those who wished to practice an existential politics, specific issues were irrelevant. Their films contained an implicit acknowledgment that narrative cinema could not democratically present a political content before it had redefined the political implications of its style. The first task for filmmakers of Dissent was to reorganize their attitudes towards the narrative conventions within which they were obliged to work.

To make an overtly political film--a film which took politics as its subject matter--in 1949, two options were open. Either choose a contemporary subject matter in which good and evil could be readily identified, and didactically

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bludgeon the audience with the dramatic logic of the central character's corruption (All the King's Men) or redemption (I Married a Communist). Or eschew message cinema through the use of generic and stylistic conventions to create a political cinema. Reign of Terror practices what it preaches: in describing the unstable realpolitik of the French Revolution Anthony Mann employs a barrage of film noir techniques and gangster movie conventions to present his audience with a cinematic world they can comprehend. Reign of Terror is a conscious exercise in displacement: gangster archetypes in eighteenth-century dress--Robespierre the grotesque homosexual city boss making a show of opulence ("I didn't know such prosperity went with the Revolution," says DuVivier to him on their first meeting); St. Just the brutal dandy whose spiritual corruption is measured by his physical beauty; Fouché the deformed sardonic intellectual who plots to kill his master; Madeleine the film noir fatal woman (kissing DuVivier, she murmurs, "I could kill you"); DuVivier himself, the hero who is a double agent--exchange the dialogue of a hundred crime movies: "Fouché, why don't you go take a walk?" "Don't tempt me, I still have a gun."

All the stylistic devices used to create the insecure urban landscape of the film noir are employed to endow eighteenth-century studio Paris with an instability of circumstance and morality: cross-lighting; the threatening use of extreme close-ups; the expressionist play with shadows (several characters talk to shadows); persistent composition against the natural balance of the subject; the definition of space as solid and three-dimensional through the use of high-or low-angle shots, but still capable of sudden distortion by a cut to an unexpected camera position. Mann carefully sculpts his space, using deliberately positioned people and objects to establish depth in detail and precisely define the space in any shot--frequently to prove to the audience how deceptive appearances are: mirrors conceal doors, a book which turns out to be hollow then turns out to be no more than a container for dog food. His use of camera movement stresses his ambiguity; violence is directed either at or from the camera, implicating the audience or threatening it. In beginning the film with an extreme high-angle long shot, which pans down to a direct overhead shot of the first scene, and cutting occasionally to similar long shots throughout the film, Mann establishes a distance between himself and the audience. He reserves the power to withdraw from the action when he wishes, but forces his audience into participation, bewilderment and suffering with the characters.

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Mann' manipulation of the audience parallels Robespierre's and Barrat's manipulation of the crowds. "I created the mob ... where else would they find a leader?" declares Robespierre. This is a world of realpolitik, where the issue at stake is the control of the elements of power (here the mob, but also an object, the Black Book). What makes Reign of Terror's politics so distinctive is that it assertively defines the difference between good and evil as lying not in tactics but in purpose. The Barrat faction manipulates the mob at the Assembly to destroy Robespierre at the end of the film in precisely the same manner as Robespierre manipulated it to destroy Danton. Mann reinforces the point by the similarity with which he shoots the two scenes, in the same set with the same lighting, using the same camera setups.

Hero and villain are closely related: at one level of the plot, Barrat and Robespierre; at the other DuVivier and Fouché. At one point the latter are paired in a two-shot, facing each other in profile on either side of the frame, making a partnership by their mutual occupation of space, their mutual acceptance of each other's role and their mutual respect for each other's competence. They share the same aim, to find the Black Book and use it for their own ends. They share the same willingness to discard the other when he ceases to be useful. And they share the same duplicity: neither intends to fulfil the bargain they have just struck. By the end of the scene they are trying to kill each other. The moral distinction between them is offered to the audience only on a purely iconic level: DuVivier (Robert Cummings) is the film's ostensible hero because of his physical stature, because of his involvement in the romantic subplot, and because the plot draws us into his conspiracy--we can comprehend its motivation as well as its purpose. Fouché (Arnold Moss) is the villain because of his appearance--crooked, beak-nosed, invariably dressed in black--and because he is a natural dissembler. But almost the first thing we see DuVivier do is to murder a man with his bare hands. Significantly, Fouché has others perform all his butchery.

Mann's political methodology thus involves taking a conventional form and displacing its conventions. But in displacing them he does not violate them--unlike, for example, Abraham Polonsky in Force of Evil, where film noir criminal protagonist John Garfield turns renegade in the final scenes, reneging on his relationship with the audience and perhaps providing a model for the ex-Communist witnesses to H.U.A.C. Reign of Terror uses its generic

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and stylistic borrowings to create a world which is familiar enough for its unfamiliarities to be disturbing. The sets are made familiar by their lighting, the costumes by their inhabitants. What is unfamiliar is the extent of the film's realpolitik ambivalence. By making its hero a political assassin who will, at the film's end, compromise in a balance of power with its personification of evil, it persistently denies that a fixed morality of action exists. That denial is made generically possible by the film's position, at the same time inside and outside the conventions of the film noir.

Reign of Terror's narrative fits the pattern of Mann's later Westerns. The action of the film is a neutralizing movement towards compromise and control. But it is more explicit in its discussion of power as morally ambiguous than the Westerns were to be. They assume the territory Reign of Terror travels, and employ more independent reified symbols of the ambivalence of power--the rifle in Winchester 73. They also seek resolution at a different point. By concentrating on the obsession or dilemma of a single character, they articulate the politics of an introverted individualism, and at the plot's conclusion leave the central character a good deal less interesting than he was at its beginning. Reign of Terror, because it is not so clearly focused, can abandon its characters in the middle of a balance of forces no more stable than that with which it began; the untenable joint governance of Barrat, the "honest man," and Fouché, the "disloyal, unscrupulous, deceitful, treacherous, cunning" embodiment of studied malevolence. It is an apt enough commentary on the two worlds of Hollywood politics it describes.

PART 3

"I'D RATHER HAVE MANDRAKE FALLS"

...

---

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CHAPTER 6

THE AMERICAN WAY:
THE EVOLUTION OF A POPULIST ARCHETYPE

"It is not the easy way, but the
American Way, and it was Lin-
coln's way."

Herbert Hoover, radio broad-
cast, February 1931.

"Hip Hooray, The American
Way"--lyrics of "That's Enter-
tainment"

THE DREAM FACTORY

The industry leaders, and in particular the first- and second-generation studio heads, accepted the limitations imposed on their product by the Production Code in large part because they could accommodate these limitations within their own vision of the commodity they dealt in. That vision was the product of three factors which conveniently knitted together and reinforced each other: their attitude towards their audience; their conception of their own role as mediators between that audience and the filmmakers who worked for them; and the set of social and political assumptions which they, as a group, had in common.

The "movie moguls"--the small group of men who brought "Hollywood" into being and dominated the studio system from the 1920s to the beginnings of its decline--shared a narrow perspective on the expectations of their audience. The commercial nature of their product dictated that they seek to appeal to the widest possible spectrum, and in attempting to do so they assumed that there existed a broad consensus of taste little affected by regional or class varia-

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tion. Part of their marketing conservatism was the result of their low estimation of their audience's flexibility. Commercial experience, however, confirmed the validity of this assumption. Although Sticks might occasionally Nix Hick Pix, box-office failures and successes did not, in the main, vary greatly from region to region, while the available surveys indicated that movies attracted all socioeconomic groups. The economic need to appeal to the undifferentiated mass audience was reinforced by the profitable success of that appeal and, once established as a credo, it became almost impossible to challenge. The studios conducted little research into the composition of their audience because there seemed no need for it.

Such research would in any case have questioned the security of the role the moguls had defined for themselves. Expanding from their assumptions about the audience, they prescribed their product as being socially and politically reactive, a mirror reflecting attitudes already in common currency, not a beacon guiding its public to new opinions. Their own role was to angle this two-way mirror from behind it; as mediators between the creators and their public, they made sure the public got what they thought it wanted. Their apparent ability to predict the erratic taste of their mass audience guaranteed that their decisions would determine the nature of their studio's content, and that as a result they would define the personalities of the studios they ran. Only by asserting their own opinions and preferences on their product could they be seen to be doing their jobs. The function of the studio executive was to make decisions about what films were to be made, who would write, direct, and act in them, how their plots would be shaped, and so on. These decisions, which were the practical applications of their role as mediators between public opinion and creative activity, at the very least set the limits on the potential for political expression available to the creative personnel, and arguably exerted a much more determining influence on their films' political sentiments.

Yet it was rarely their individual political opinions that influenced their actions. Certainly Zanuck was more likely to make The Grapes of Wrath than California State Republican Party Chairman Louis B. Mayer, but the populist sentimentality that infused Zanuck's vision of Americana in the late 1930s would not have been out of place in Mayer's own small-town idyll of American perfection, the Carvel of the Andy Hardy films. Privately, most of the moguls were Republicans, antipathetic to the policies of the

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later New Deal. But publicly their industry was a beneficiary of Rooseveltian liberalism , at least until the enactment of the Paramount decrees. As Business Week put it in 1935,

Though not all of them favored the reelection of Roosevelt, his social program, so they say, plays right into their pockets. The President seeks higher wages, shorter hours, unemployment insurance and old age pensions. Wrap that into one small capsule and it means to the motion picture mentality more money to spend on movies and more leisure in which to spend the money.

The divisions of conventional party politics had little effect on the way the moguls ran their studios, and there is little to suggest that they deliberately and consciously attempted to influence their audiences' party political preferences through the films they produced.*

__________
*The one clear exception to this general rule was the notorious campaign against Upton Sinclair and his EPIC (End Poverty in California) program in the 1934 gubernatorial election. The studios' anti-Sinclair propaganda and other actions, including compulsory contributions to the Republican candidate's campaign fund, were probably more important in providing an impetus to unionization and other forms of political activity among resentful employees than they were in influencing the outcome of the election. Certainly the experiment was not repeated.

The Cahiers du Cinéma editors' suggestion that Young Mr. Lincoln was a piece of Republican propaganda does not stand up to detailed examination. Their contention that Lincoln was, in the context of the 1940 election, a specifically Republican mythic figure is dubious, to say the least. Although Zanuck was involved in the 1940 election campaign in support of Wendell Wilkie, Wilkie had not announced his candidacy at the time of the film's release, let alone at the time of the project's inception. Moreover, Wilkie was not the choice of the conservative business hierarchies of the G. O. P.; he secured the nomination substantially because the Republicans were almost certain to lose. The film was released on June 9, 1939, 19 months prior to the election. At the time of shooting, John Ford was a vocal member of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, which had already been accused by Martin Dies (then Chairman of H.U.A.C.) of being a "Communist front," and which can hardly be seen    (cont.)

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Indeed, political activity was only exceptionally a matter of consequence to them, normally seen as external to their real world, and little more than an alternative form of glamour. They wore their politics as they wore their suits, aiming to produce a public image of restrained respectability, occasionally marred by their tendency to garish overstatement in their choice of ties, their private opulence, or their public protestations of belief in the American War. From their political affiliations they sought a confirmation of their social status:

[Harry Cohn] became a Republican--not out of any political conviction, because he was completely apolitical. All rich men were Republicans, hence, Harry Cohn became a Republican.

[Thomas, King Cohn]

From their associations with politicians, they sought public acknowledgment that they belonged with the rich, the influential, the powerful. The attraction of power, the recognition of apparently similar personality, and the lack of direct competition drew the moguls to the politicians as their publicity value and the Hollywood mystique drew politicians to them. Prestige was at least as important as business self-interest, and much more important than the allegiance provided by shared opinions.

__________
as the natural residence of a propagandist for the Big Business interest. Rather nearer the election date, Ford and Zanuck produced The Grapes of Wrath (released March 15, 1940), which, however compromised a version of Steinbeck's novel it might be, can hardly be called a pro-Republican film. Zanuck was shortly to encounter hostility from right-wing isolationist Senators Nye, Clark and Vanderbilt in their investigations into Hollywood's interventionist bias. He was a liberal Republican who held himself in high esteem for his liberalism and the way it manifested itself in his films. When, in 1944, he did make a film explicitly intended as a statement of his political beliefs, it was a biography of Woodrow Wilson (Wilson, Twentieth Century-Fox; dir. Henry King). At the time of the making of Young Mr. Lincoln, Zanuck was a frequent visitor to Roosevelt's White House. The Cahiers editors suggest "it would ... be wrong to ex aggerate the film's political determinism." Not so. It is just that the film's political determinism has very little to do with what they suggest.

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Zanuck has always been politically aware, and at least behind the scenes he has usually been politically active. But he has no political philosophy, except that he usually votes Republican, and likes Presidents whoever they are.

[Gussow, Zanuck]

He saw no anomaly in frequently visiting the White House at the time he was actively campaigning for Wilkie in 1940. Most telling of all, perhaps, was the cupboard in Jack Warner's office in which he kept two sets of autographed portraits of leading politicans--one of Democrats, one of Republicans. Whichever was appropriate could be exhibited for visiting dignitaries.

Such curiously anachronistic attitudes to politics echoed many of the business practices of the film industry, which were not merely out of step with those of other business concerns, but lagging a generation behind them .* The moguls saw themselves as benign but autocratic fathers to their companies. Their hostility to organized labor seemed to be as much because the existence of the unions questioned the benevolence of their despotism as because they might demand better pay and conditions. This paternalist self-image fitted closely the pattern of first-generation capitalist entrepreneurs, as initially modeled by the founders of the English Industrial Revolution. The moguls' lack of education, the underlying feeling of inferiority implied by their desire to avoid personal publicity, their frequently brutally autocratic behavior towards their employees, and the depth of personal animosity they exhibited towards each other (best exemplified, perhaps, by Goldwyn allegedly attending Mayer's funeral "to make sure he was dead"), present a retrospective image that appears to have more in common with characters out of Trollope than with the expected behavior of twentieth-century industrial magnates.

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* The idea that one man should alone make major policy decisions had been abandoned by the automobile industry by the 1930s , for example. Henry Ford's refusal to relinquish sole control of his company is commonly cited as the principal explanation for its relatively poor performance during that decade. And it is worth remembering that the Paramount decrees enforced on the motion picture industry regulations passed under the Sherman Act of 1890 and the Clayton Act of 1914.

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In any orthodox sense, the studio heads were almost without exception poor businessmen: their unwarranted extravagance was one of the causes of the mutual antagonism between them and the men, frequently their relatives, on the East Coast, who might more fairly be called the true entrepreneurial force in the industry. But the moguls were more showmen than businessmen , and perhaps more salesmen than showmen . They conjured up the myth of unpredictable public taste which it took a special ability to prejudge, and reinforced it with each of their successes. Even more importantly, they created something amounting to a private, enclosed world, that in the complexities of its internal relationships resembled some strange tribal society, of which they were "czars" and "emperors." Then they sold that creation to the rest of the world. Hollywood the Dream Factory, acknowledged and to a degree reflected on by almost every writer on the American cinema, was the deliberate creation of a small, often personally as well as professionally interrelated group of men, who fabricated a world and sold it to the rest of America. That their creation grew in large part to be out of their control, and that it attracted others who came to specify and define the myth, is undoubtedly true, but Hollywood, as an empire, as a mythical entity, as an institution, and as a concept governing audience responses to the films it made, was fabricated by the men who founded and ran its studios.

In retrospect, they have acquired an ambivalent commercial heroism, partly because of their improbably anti-social and anachronistic behavior. Neither quite the last entrepreneurs nor the last showmen, the movie tycoons resembled Hughes or Hearst in being fantasists on a grand scale, and more than that, enacting their fantasies in such a way as to make others adopt them as their own. In this none was perhaps more successful than Walt Disney , who, in dominating American film animation, built an empire on the periphery of Hollywood. Not satisfied with that, he built a magical kingdom, Disneyland, and at the time of his death had begun to build a better world--Disney World--in the wilderness of the Florida swamps. Most impressively imperial of all is the fact that his grandiose schemes have survived him, because, like the less enduring creations of the other moguls, his fantasies of innocence were rooted in the commercial reality that, whatever they might signify ideologically, their American Dreams were a salable commodity.

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The moguls embedded into the conventions of American film production a trait common to American immigrants: the need to demonstrate oneself as more American than native Americans . Privately, it encouraged them to political conservatism; elsewhere it led them to change their stars' names, disguising their ethnic origins by nominally absorbing them into the dominant Protestant culture. The specifications of the Production Code against giving offense to any group, race or religion reinforced a concomitant tendency, implicit in the rationale of entertainment, to offer the audience a vision of a perfect America, in which the assumptions of its fundamental political doctrines were enacted, while social problems were skirted by invariably couching them in individual terms. Even Warners' "social conscience" films did not so much portray a divided society as one seen to be in the process of achieving harmony through the resolution of invididual conflicts. Here was more than a simple preference for harmless and escapist entertainment. There was, lying obscurely behind the nostalgic and benevolent community fabric of Mayer's Carvel, Zanuck's Old Chicago, and most explicitly Capra' Washington and Shangri-La, an idealistic vision--perhaps not greatly understood and certainly hardly ever articulated--of an essentially unified society, devoted, above all, to the pursuit of spiritual peace through material acquisition and good neighborliness.

By insisting on simple narrative constructions which above all exploited the devices of sentiment, the moguls restricted the range of emotional experience the American cinema might provide its audience. They also limited its possibilities for political expression to the narrow range which they, as first- or second-generation immigrants, saw as being consensual. In embedding their assumptions so deeply in the structures of their narratives, they could at the same time ruthlessly operate an unacknowledged ideology, and systematically deny its existence by insisting that their preference for happy endings was never any more than a concern to give the public what it wanted. Their cinema's conservatism of theme and content was the fulfilment of its social role as reactive affirmation for its consumers' beliefs. As speculative mediators, the moguls presumed on their intuitive understanding of what those beliefs might be. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the virtues of America they thought Hollywood might most profitably celebrate were those reflected by its most persistent tradition of political thought.

...

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CHAPTER 7

UNITED WE STAND:
THE CINEMA OF THE CONSENSUS

The social condition and the institutions of democracy impart, moreover, certain peculiar tendencies to all the imitative arts, which is easy to point out. They frequently withdraw them from the delineation of the soul, to fix them exclusively on that of the body; and they substitute the representation of motion and sensation for that of sentiment and thought: in a word they put the Real in place of the Ideal."--Alexis de Tocqueville

Tain't what you do, it's the
    way that cha do it,
'Tain't what you do, it's the
    way that cha do it,
'Tain't what you do, it's the
    way that cha do it,
That's what get results.
  Sy Oliver and James
      'Trummy' Young

THE INVISIBLE POLITICS OF STYLE

An ideology which refuses to distinguish between the good of the individual and that of society discovers democratic compromise not in the resolution of conflict between opposing interest groups, but in the achievement of a con-

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sensus among the body of enlightened individuals.   Populist ideology inclines towards status concerns against interest politics as consensus transcends compromise. While the progression to a consensus over issues through compromise is a common democratic activity, once again the individualist orientation of a populist democratic sentiment

!!

militates against so simple a development. Rather, the consensus appears at a mediated level, that of the terms in which issue-related political debate can take place. The consensus forms not at the level of opinion over issues, but at the level of the manner in which that opinion is presented--the style and rhetoric of political discussion. This mediated consensus over political style affects more than the manner of political discourse. By determining the ways in which politics may be discussed , it also determines the areas of political discussion , enabling some subjects to fall within its parameters of tolerable disagreement, and restricting others from doing so. Welfare provision was a permissible political topic in the 1930s, the institution of the family was not. A consensus over political style thus allows the maintenance of the dual illusion on which American democracy is based. The fiction of the unity of individual and social interest is upheld by the uniformity of political style, but that uniformity also permits the man of goodwill to disagree over specific issues.

A consensus of style is central to the American political tradition, since only in such circumstances can these two primary fictions of American democracy be maintained. Everyone has pledged allegiance to a rhetoric of unity that at the same time grants the individual the right of dissent and precludes him or her from institutionalizing that right of dissent in a political program . Populism practices "a moderate anarchy" perfectly embodied in the Vanderhof household of You Can't Take It with You. Asserting the absolute freedom of the individual, the film is nevertheless committed to a purely apolitical protest. Grandpa demoralizes the tax inspector by denying the need for an income tax, but later announces, "I was only having fun with him, I don't owe the government a cent." The individual's assertion of his individualism commits him to political ineffectuality, since it restricts the ready emergence of easily identifiable group loyalties and deprives the individual of the ideological means of locating himself in relation to others. *

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*In the American cinema, the particular preoccupa-    (cont.)

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The result is to decrease the importance placed on those areas of disagreement, and emphasize those of already established consensual opinion --in other words to exacerbate the problem by formalizing and institutionalizing it. Emphasis drifts away from a politics of issues toward a politics of style. Such a tendency has been recurrent in American political history, and this argument would go far to explain the severity of the collapse of political stability when it has occurred. Consideration of divisive issues within the institutions of political debate has been postponed until they reached extreme points of crisis, when the consensus of style was destroyed, overwhelmed by the force of events which carried the arguments outside the normal political arena, and generally into violent forms of expression.

Since the mechanisms of consensus emphasize status over interest politics, the maintenance of consensus becomes most difficult when a change in the balance of economic power is not matched by a change in the balance of political power. The consensus is assailed--and may or may not collapse--either by groups who fear for their political or social position as a result of their economic decline , or by groups whose economic circumstances are improving without a concomitant improvement in their political power or their social prestige . The largest and most conspicuous example of this phenomenon in American history is the Civil War, but the rise of Populism and the radical protest of the 1960s can be seen as having origins conforming to a similar pattern. Since the consensus model is particularly incapable of dealing with economic issues (because its tenets were framed before social analysis in economic terms became the norm), it is predictable that the crises of the consensus should most frequently occur during alterations in the economic balance of society: the rise of the Northern industrial states, the agricultural depressions of the 1880s-1890s, the economic elevation of the young and the minorities. But once the consensus is upset by the appearance of these economic factors for which it has not catered, and which assail particularly the maintenance of the myth of men of goodwill, the main

__________
tion of the film noir genre. Bogart's alienated and paranoid hero in Dark Passage (Warner Brothers, 1947, prod. Jerry Wald, dir. Delmer Daves) is an archetypal example of such a characterization, but the presentation of urban settings in crime films has always tended to stress the element of personal dislocation from the social environment.

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force of the assailing movement is commonly directed into an issue which is only peripherally related to its principal grievance : slavery, free silver, the Vietnam war.* This process makes possible the survival of the consensus ,** because it permits the ratification of new patterns of production and consumption , and thus allows the absorption of the dissenters .

If American history may be seen as a series of attempts to establish a consensus in which the divergent forces of interest politics can be veiled over by agreement as to political style, then the re-emergence of an adapted consensus of political style constitutes the re-establishment of political stability. Agreement over the areas and manner of political discourse places restrictions on the extent to which disagreement over specific issues is possible within the system operating under the consensus. Such disagreements may no longer be extreme enough to threaten the disclosure of the fictions upon which the consensus is based. Invisibility is essential. The consensus over style must pass unnoticed, so that neither it, nor the fictions which it sustains, are available for discussion. In the practical operation of the consensus, its function is to divert political analysis away from a consideration of its own workings and towards a consideration of specific issues which do not present a threat to its continuation . To ensure its own survival, the consensus prefers to deal only in the small change of political controversy. However, it must also amplify the importance of those issue-related debates it can accommodate, to route attention away from its concealed influence. When stable,

__________
*Maurice Zolotow comments with a somewhat surprised air on the level of acceptance that John Wayne's films--with the exception of The Green Berets--found among young radical groups of the 1960s. What Wayne and his young audience had in common was not , clearly, their positions on issues , but the style of their approach to those issues . Since Wayne's structural position in The Green Berets--and the political assumptions underlying that position--are actually no different from those in, say, The War Wagon (1967; dir. Burt Kennedy), True Grit (1969; dir. Henry Hathaway) or The Alamo, this unexpected example indicates the potential inaccuracies liable to result from a simple process of labeling by content.

**With the exception of the Civil War, which is the only occasion on which the consensus has collapsed completely.

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it operates as a closed system, determinist in so far as it can restrict the areas of controversy it permits. Moreover by reinforcing its basic assumptions through the mechanisms by which it functions, it can separate off those areas of controversy from each other , and more importantly, detach them from itself. The fact of its determinism is concealed by the flexibility it allows itself over the range of political questions it has deemed permissible.

What, above all, it determines is the relationship individual citizens perceive themselves to have with political institutions. Issues of controversy are , indeed, vital to the persistence of that perceived relationship, since they make it seem active and mutable. Furthermore, the prospect of their successful resolution reinforces the primary fictions of consensus politics. During the New Deal, Roosevelt's use of committees of experts with widely divergent and even opposing views on the issues for which they were supposed to determine policy served less as a useful means of discovering solutions to problems than as a device to present the appearance of unified activity in search of those solutions. It was a precise and shrewd application of the myth of men of goodwill, and its failure to be of practical assistance was less important than its partial success in rehabilitating the myth for the government.

The effect of a closed and individualized narrative structure in films of as varied overt political persuasion as The Green Berets and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? is similar. The affirmation of the myth of men of goodwill, and the embodiment of the possibility of a solution in the individualist terms of that myth by the specific resolution of the film's narrative, permit the films to avoid an engagement with the issues which their plot situations raise . The film's theme is stated rhetorically in generalized terms, by characters who can resolve its individual formulation in the story. By a concealed but false logic, it moves from the statement of a general issue to a particular manifestation of it, and from the resolution of that manifestation to the proposal of a general solution--a proposal that is never more than: if only we were all as much men of goodwill as Spencer Tracy, Sidney Poitier or John Wayne, the problem would disappear .

The issue such films purport to discuss is, by the mechanisms of its discussion, as entirely detachable from the film's narrative as is the message of goodwill with which we are meant to leave the cinema. In relation to the notion of consensus politics, the consistency

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of both films' stylistic approach to their subject matter is of greater import than the superficial differences political stances.

PERFECT REPRODUCTION

The primary fiction that the Hollywood cinema of the consensus--to whose aesthetic strategies The Green Berets and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? both adhere--requires its audience to accept is that they should think of the story a film is telling them as if it were a real event . That is not to say that they are intended to regard, say, the story of The Wizard of Oz as having actually taken place in front of a fortuitously-placed camera. But they are expected to operate a particular suspension of disbelief in which the mimesis of the photographic image reinforces the circumstantial and psychological "realism" of the events those images contain, so that they can presume upon those normative rules of spatial perception, human behavior, and causality which govern their conduct in the world outside the cinema . Thus they may respond to the characters as if they were real people, and regard the story that is told through the characters as if it were unfolding before them without the mediation of cameras or narrative devices. Obviously, this illusion of actuality is a carefully fabricated construct, in which the narrative is a closed, predetermined structure unavailable to the audience's direct manipulation . But there has arisen a consensus between filmmakers and audience which agrees to sidestep those tortuous questions of what constitutes a "realist aesthetic," which so delight and befuddle film theoreticians and critics, by the presumption: as if.

In attempting to come to terms with the nature of cinematic realism, we must first confront, and deconstruct, part of the critical legacy of Andre Bazin, the Myth of Total Cinema. Describing the goals of Nièpce, Muybridge, and the other precursors of cinema, he argues,

In their imaginations they saw the cinema as a total and complete representation of reality; they saw in a trice the reconstruction of a perfect illusion of the outside world in sound, colour, and relief.

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... The guiding myth, then, inspiring the invention of the cinema, is the accomplishment of that which dominated in a more or less vague fashion all the techniques of the mechanical reproduction of reality in the nineteenth century, from photography to the phonograph, namely an integral realism, a recreation of the world in its own image, an image unburdened by the freedom of interpretation of the artist or the irreversibility of time.

The aim accords with the ideology of nineteenth-century science: the pursuit of objective descriptions of phenomena. Bazin does not, however, comment on the content of this objective realism, or describe what reality it sought to reproduce. The reality of microbes photographed through a microscope is of a different kind to the reality reproduced in a Hollywood studio , but Bazin was less than precise in distinguishing between the technical goal of accurate visual (and aural) recording, and the aesthetic pursuit of a convincing illusion. The influence of the myth of total cinema has sustained this confusion between mimesis and narrative in much of the "Realist debate."

The cinema's central mechanisms, the camera and the sound recorder, are products of nineteenth-century scientific inquiry, and demonstrate its quest for objective recording. As a result, they reproduce the perceptual conventions dominant in the societies in which they were invented: monocular perspective, for example. Sound technicians in the early 1930s were obliged to evolve such a perceptual convention in the development of sound perspective. Limited by the technology of omni-directional microphones, early sound films tended to present dialogue at a uniform volume regardless of the closeness of the shot. During the early 1930s, a compromise between intelligibility and distance perception was developed. Technical improvements created an illusion of depth, adjusted to the scale of the image, without losing sound clarity. The evolution of sound perspective is a paradigmatic example of Hollywood's technical concerns. While the rhetoric of such research consistently described its aim as greater "realism," it used the term in an imprecise and indefinite sense. By one criterion, upheld since Bazin as fundamental to cinematic realism, the change from orthochromatic to panchromatic stock was a move away from a realist aesthetic, since the new emulsion was less sensitive to light and so restricted the depth of field in the image. By another criterion, the sensitivity of panchromatic

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film to the whole color spectrum produced a more accurate reproduction of reality, with a greater sensitivity to tonal variation. In the films of the 1930s the "realism' achieved by the addition of sound was in some sense offset by the further reduction in depth of field necessitated by the use of silent incandescent lights in place of the brighter but noisy carbon arc lamps used for silent filming. If the motivation behind technological improvements in Hollywood is to be labeled as an impulse towards a greater "realism," that term cannot be ascribed a fixed meaning in terms of a particular constitution of the image. Most certainly, "realism" cannot be equated, as Bazin sought to, with an increased depth of field.

On the other hand, technical development was not an independent objective unrelated to the broader aesthetic strategies that Hollywood practiced. The myth of total cinema as a driving force behind technological innovation is confounded by Hollywood's delayed and reluctant acceptance of the possibilities offered by color and 3-D. The technical processes the studios did research (back projection systems, for example) and the improvements, in areas such as film stock, which they readily accepted, were geared towards the more efficient manufacture of a seamless illusion . The more sensitive Kodak Plus-X stock introduced in 1938 resulted in a reduction in set lighting levels, and hence production costs, rather than an increase in depth of field. The development of effective large-screen back-projection systems in 1932 greatly increased the amount of material that could be shot in the controlled conditions of a studio sound stage rather than on location. Economy, clearly, was one motivation for technical change. Another, at least as pervasive and certainly more evident, was the desire implicit in the ideology of entertainment to conceal the artifice of production. Sound technicians rapidly adopted the practice of "Blooping"'--painting a diamond-shaped area over a sound splice to transform an abrupt and potentially disruptive sound cut into a smoother and less noticeable rapid fade. The mechanics of the sound track's construction, and the heterogeneity of its sources, were concealed behind the apparent naturalness of its continuity.

In this, of course, the sound track was following the practice of Hollywood continuity cutting. The evolution of continuity editing codes --the 180° rule, eyeline matching, angle-reverse angle cutting, and so on-- is again conventionally explained as subservient to some vague aesthetic of

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"realism,"   but it can more satisfactorily be accounted for in terms of Hollywood's preference for narrative and its pursuit of as invisible a technical style as possible. Continuity cutting is above all an efficient way of ordering images into an immediately comprehensible narrative. The 180° rule, for example, ensures that characters maintain consistent spatial relationships within a scene, and allows the spectator to assume the relative position of figures not included in any particular shot. He or she can therefore concentrate more readily on the story being revealed, since the mechanics of its narration can be taken for granted. "Realism," in any sense that implies the reproduction of reality, is a less obvious objective for such a system than effortlessness and ease of comprehension. The elimination of work for the spectator is encouraged by a definition of entertainment and leisure as being non-work activities. The invisibility of the work of production is determined both by the privileging of narrative which directs the spectator's attention away from the mechanics of a film's construction and toward its primary product, the story, and by the logic which dictates that for an audience to be effortlessly entertained, its entertainment must itself appear effortless. Continuity cutting facilitates the audience's willing suspension of disbelief, and disguises the fact of the closed, predetermined narrative, by molding the series of discontinuous events in time and space from which the film is constructed, into a perceptually continuous whole. Through its various codes, editing makes the cut as unnoticeable--as "invisible"--as possible, by cutting, in Bazin's phrase, "according to the material or dramatic logic of the scene."

Such procedures assume the existence of an unstated agreement between film and audience about the nature of the cinematic experience as being primarily to do with the creation and consumption of palatable dramatic narratives whose formal structures were not the object of the audience's attention. The invisibility of the cinematic apparatus, from sound editing to the projectors' reel changes, was part of "the magic of the movies." But the manufacture of a seamless narrative was not bound up with the reproduction of external reality . Hollywood's cinematic contract left the audience aware of the illusion, and aware of its complicity in the creation of that illusion. What it strove to do, through the invisible mechanics of its "realism," was to make the illusion as benevolent, and as effortlessly available, as possible .

Continuity cutting reached its first phase of full

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development in sound cinema in the mid-1930s, along with the image of the star as the perfected common man. Both can be seen as responses to the "realistic' imperatives of the new sound technology which, as Peter Wollen suggests, had renegotiated the contract between film and audience. With the introduction of sound,

the role or place of the spectator changes, ... from being a spectator watching the action to being in the role of "invisible guest."

with this increase in the spectator's complicity in the act of cinematic narrative, the silent cinema's quest for the exotic was replaced by Lionel Atwill's goal as the mad sculptor in Mystery of the Wax Museum (Warner Bros, 1933; dir. Michael Curtiz)--"perfect reproduction." The phrase harmonizes the technical pursuit of more convincing illusions of actuality with the representation of society offered in narratives of the consensus. Presenting the personalized drama as if it were a real event served to link the central character--the star--and his audience emotionally, at the same time that it separated them by the star's perfection.

It was a perfection not only of appearance, but also of physical abilities, wit, and most of all timing, which came from the concealed manipulations of the architects of his narrative. In precisely the same way that Hollywood cutting was obliged to effect the invisibility of the expertise that produced it, so the expertise that went into the processing of a star as the glamorized representative of his audience was also required to be self-effacing. "Perfect reproduction" channeled audience response towards an unquestioning acceptance of the star's emotional, moral, and ultimately ideological authority by providing spectators with a matrix of references to behavior and circumstance in the external world which they would validate through their own experience. The cinema of the consensus thus became a place like the real world, only better. Perfect illusion spoke to imperfect actuality as product to consumer. Cosmetic disguise limited the spectator's self-awareness during the film, and stressed his or her direct relation, as receiver, of the film as an organic entity and of the message that was the film's story. Indissolubly linked with this process, perfect reproduction emphasized the unilateral system of communication that resulted from diverting attention away from technique and concentrating it on plot or theme.

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"WHAT IS REAL?" ... PART ONE: COHERENCE

"Can I tell you a story, Rick?"
"Has it got a wow finish?
"I don't know the finish."
Bergman and Bogart in
Casablanca

The dual sense of "perfect reproduction" describes both the intent and the effect of the industry's operation of technology. The strictures of the Production Code, the obligations imposed by the duty to entertain, and the idealist nature of Hollywood's adopted ideology meant that it represented the world not as it was, but as it should be. To describe an aesthetic so committed to illusion, artifice, and idealism as "realist" seems a perversity sanctioned only by tradition. To call The Wizard of Oz a "realist" film seems bizarre. The aesthetic strategy employed by the cinema of the consensus was not concerned with the philosophical or perceptual presumptions behind its imitation of life, only with the technical expedients necessary to sustain its illusion. In its presentation of perspective, for example, it was opportunist and inconsistent. Set design in the 1930s assumed

That the Long Shots would be taken with a 40mm lens. For closer shots a 50mm lens was ... the usual choice, and of course for Close-Ups something like 75mm.

The quite visible variation in apparent object relationships between the foreground and background of shots taken with lenses of such different focal length fell within the tolerance levels of a loosely-defined normative perspective, but hardly suggested that Hollywood cameramen recognized realism as a perceptual system governing their work.

However awkward a term it may be, however, realism cannot be altogether discarded. Perfect reproduction engineered a style which concealed its mediation of the narrative it presented. However conventional and codified it may have been, it offered itself as natural because it assumed, as part of the cinematic contract, a fixed relationship between film and audience, and did not seek to question that relationship. If a text and its consumers share the assumption

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that a fixed and mutually known set of conventions represent external reality, and neither seeks to challenge the efficacy of those conventions of representation, then we may describe the text as "realist," regardless of what perceptual systems it operates. The conventions of representation that Hollywood's consensual cinema employed provided its audiences with the means by which they could treat what they saw as if it were real, and order their emotional responses accordingly. Hollywood's realism operated at two levels. Perfect reproduction effaced the techniques by which it produced a seamless flow, and concentrated the audience's attention on the contents of that flow, the narrative. The spatial construction of narrative placed the spectator in the film, while the ordering of events attached the spectator emotionally to its characters as benevolent sources of meaning and significance. Despite the opportunism of its techniques, the cinema of the consensus was committed absolutely to the maintenance of continuity as the primary ingredient of its realism. As a result it was firmly attached to the articulation of a coherent narrative structure.

The narrative of Casablanca (1943, Warner Bros.; dir. Michael Curtiz)--which may indisputably be regarded as "classic Hollywood text" of the consensus--is constructed to support and clarify the story of the film, aiming at a coherence in the revelation of the plot in order to concentrate attention on the story as it is revealed. The audience is attached to the film by the process of the revealing of the story , not by the facts of the story's revelations . One example among many is the introduction of Ingrid Bergman, and the establishment of her previous relationship with Bogart. Up to this point the film has concentrated on establishing its locale, Bogart's cynical isolationism ("I stick my neck out for nobody"), and the apparent major plot device of the theft of the letters of transit and the arrival of Resistance leader Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid). Henreid and Bergman first appear entering Rick's Cafe in a long medium tracking shot, which takes them past Sam (Dooley Wilson) at the piano. Wilson and Bergman seem to recognize each other, and Wilson looks worried and shakes his head. A signal to the audience's attention has been provided, but it is not immediately pursued. Henreid and Bergman are joined first by Berger (John Qualen), a member of the Resistance, and then by Captain Renault (Claude Rains), in conversations about Henreid's situation. Bergman asks Rains about Wilson--"'somewhere I've seen him"--a remark whose significance is signaled by its delivery in extreme close-up. Rains

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supplies an enigmatic description of Bogart, and its impact on Bergman is again shown in close-up when the group is joined by Major Strasser (Conrad Veidt). However, the subject is not pursued and conversation returns to Henreid's politics and future. But the disruptive influence of Bogart's presence is registered by the repetition of close shots of Bergman, detaching her from the men's conversation. When Rains and Veidt return to their table, a female guitarist begins a song, during which Bergman and Wilson exchange looks of recognition, and Wilson repeats his concerned expression. Once more, the cue is left hanging while Henreid joins Qualen at the bar. Bergman calls Wilson over to her table. Wilson tries to convince her Bogart has another girl, but she tells him "you used to be a much better liar, Sam." He replies, "Leave him alone, Miss Ilsa, you're bad luck to him." In its ordering, her next line encapsulates in microcosm the mechanism of the narrative:

Play it once, Sam, for old times' sake ... play it,
Sam, play, "As Time Goes By."

The audience are inveigled into a process of revelation, without discovering, until the end, what the object of that revelation is. The spectator is cued to anticipate an event, the content and meaning of which has not been disclosed. Wilson's playing of a song whose significance is never explained is made important by its presentation over an extreme, melancholic, close-up of Bergman that lasts for 20 seconds, much longer than any previous shot. The song brings Bogart to the table, and the existence of a mutual bond is again established by the intercutting of extreme close-ups of their faces (the first close-up of Bogart in the film), reinforced by the sudden introduction of violins on the soundtrack. At this point, with the nature of their involvement completely unstated by the same means that it has been declared central to the narrative, Rains and Henreid appear to once again change the subject, and the couple spend the rest of the scene exchanging looks and reminiscences of their last meeting ("The Germans wore grey, you wore blue") which provide the spectator with no more explicit information.

The process of revelation is continued, at a broader level, throughout the narrative. The audience witness Bogart's remembering his time with Bergman in Paris, while her marriage to Henreid, her intention to leave Henreid for Bogart, and Bogart's final decision to send her to America with Henreid are all revealed by similar constructions to

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that of her introduction. The plot is presented as a linear causal chain, each event located by a relationship of cause and effect to those which precede and follow it, but it only functions if it is correctly placed in the chain. Bogart's memory of Paris is, obviously, chronologically misplaced--it happened before all the other events of the film. But it is, more importantly, placed at the point in the plot when its partial vision of events (Bergman's explanations will qualify it later) is most emotionally affective.

The linear causal chain of the plot leads inevitably to a point of resolution, but because the spectator is engaged in the process by which the story is revealed, he or she can ignore the determinist causality of such a structure and the restrictions it places on possible interpretations of an event. There is, inevitably, a tension between the plot's determinist pressure towards a resolution of events, and the "realist" objections to an idealist simplicity in the tidy end-stopping of events at the film's conclusion. This structurally insoluble tension in narrative realism (the force that draws realism towards melodrama) is dissipated by the consensus cinema's mode of construction. Guided through the plot by the revelatory narrative, the audience is encouraged to feel unconcerned about the conflict between determinism and normative, unresolved reality by the coherence of what they see and hear. Their acceptance of the story comes not from what they are told, but from the way it is told to them. They can accommodate the contradictions of realist narrative by seeing the events of the film as amounting to a crisis which determines the course of the lives of the characters in it. The typical film of the consensus ends at the point at which another film might begin : in Casablanca, for example, Bogart's adventures with the Free French in Tangiers, or Bergman and Henreid in America.

What holds for narrative structure also holds for scene construction. Because the coherent narrative locates an individual scene at one point in its causal chain, an element of the scene must be reserved for the elucidation and justification of that process of causal linkage. Each scene in Casablanca advances the plot by confirming the knowledge the audience have derived from previous scenes, and adding further information to it. The process of confirmation is enacted through the consistency with which the scenes are presented, a consistency which can be regarded as a form of psychological and circumstantial realism. Consistency of

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character motivation projects a believable psychology: when Bogart rejects Bergman on her first night-time visit to the cafe the audience recognize that his drinking has exposed the sentimentality beneath the cynical exterior. When he meets her in the market the next morning and asks for the explanation he turned down the night before, the audience understand that the cynicism ("after all, I got stuck with a railway ticket, I think I'm entitled to know") is only a defensive veneer. Bogart's psychology, along with that of the other characters, is being gradually revealed to the audience, who have to construct it from the information the film provides. Circumstantial realism, similarly, is provided by the consistency with which the film describes and relates its locations and the creation of the seamless illusion hinges, at a level more basic than psychological characterization, on the two fundamental areas of perception most immediately available to cinematic manipulation: the depiction of time and space.

A cinematic narrative is temporally composed of a set of ellipses; it is a distillation of a series of significant events. The presentation of time within a narrative is more immediately apparent than the presentation of space, since the periods not included in the narrative are evident by their omission. We may, for example, see a man getting into his car and driving off, and then cut to his arriving at his destination. The coherent narrative, however, attempts to disguise the elliptical nature of its temporal construction by subordinating both the actual time of a depicted event and the real time experienced by the spectator in the cinema to the artificial, perceived time presented by the narrative. For this purpose, it uses a number of devices to create a continuity in perception of two narratively linked discontinuous events. The most simple device is a passage of "linking" music, which, by its rhythmic or patterned management of the passage of time, provides a suitable vehicle for the presentation of the narrative's temporal continuum. Appropriately enough, the opening bars of "As Time Goes By" have this function in Casablanca. The same purpose, the subordination of external time to the narrative continuum, may be served by the use of "linking" shots, the content of which is unimportant save for their function of relating two consecutive scenes by an association of ideas. For example, one scene may end with a tilt up off the characters onto blue sky, followed by a cut, perhaps imperceptible, to blue sky, which tilts down to the same characters in a different location, different characters, or whatever. The plane to Lis-

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bon serves this purpose on more than one occasion in Casablanca, transferring attention from one group of people looking at it to another, or to the scene of its arrival. The same effect can be achieved by the use of fades or dissolves, which have their own connotations as accounts of elapsed time, or, in the extreme assertion of narrative control over plot events, by a montage sequence. In each case the linkage device establishes a chain of causality which is stylistically asserted by the film, subordinating other perceptions of time to that of the narrative. The arbitrariness of all these devices is contained by their conventionality. The attribution of a distinctive connotation to each of them (a fade implies a longer ellipsis than a dissolve, while a wipe suggests spatial rather than temporal alteration) covers their presence as techniques by emphasizing their function as meaning. The coherent narrative cinema requires that the scene-to-scene linkage should be as unobtrusive as possible, since the main intention is to persuade the audience to assume the connections of linear causality, in order that they focus their attention on the plot or theme. The technical devices of the cinema of coherence aim to divert the spectator's attention away from themselves as mechanisms of the illusion, and to concentrate it the more on the illusion they create--that is, to divert the spectator's attention away from the film as ob ject to the subject of the film.

A similar argument may be advanced in relation to the depiction of space within the scene. A coherent narrative aims to present space in terms which are immediately recognizable to its audience. This requirement encourages the construction of images which do not distort conventional perspective relations, implying that most images will be recorded by lenses in a relatively narrow range of focal lengths. Equally, it encourages the development of conventional patterns for the juxtaposition of shots: the pattern of establishing long shot, medium shot, close up is one example; angle-reverse angle cutting is another. When these conventions of the image are disrupted, the audience is being signaled: for example, the close up of Bogart when he first sees Bergman not only takes the camera closer to him than it has been before, breaking a convention of distance, but is also shot with a wider angle lens than is used for other close ups, and taken from an angle above, rather than level with, Bogart's eyeline. All this communicates surprise and discomfort without articulating them explicitly, or markedly disrupting the image stream. Unless aiming for a particular extraordinary effect such as shock, the coherent narrative

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requires the audience to understand the way the space in a scene works (e.g. the area in which a character can move), in the same way that it aims for an unconscious awareness of the temporal ellipses in the narrative. They share the same purpose of convincing the audience of the film's stylistic benevolence in presenting the most readily comprehensible depiction of events. We understand by a simple time ellipsis that nothing important has happened in it, and this process is made easier by a stylistic device that is self-effacing and allows us to ignore it. The normal perception of spatial relationships similarly allows us to take them for granted as comprehensible. Thus it is possible for us to divert our energies towards comprehending the events of the plot, rather than the manner of their presentation.

"WHAT IS REAL?" ... PART TWO: BENEVOLENCE

Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the
world, she walks into mine.--Bogart in Casablanca

Because it is a system of conventions, the parameters of realism change. The depiction of time and space within the consensus cinema at any particular historical moment is governed by codes of presentation which determine what is to be regarded as normative perception. The evolution of such conventions is, in turn, governed by the technological developments in recording equipment and by the filmmakers' assessments of what the audience can unproblematically comprehend. The introduction of the close-up was once resisted by producers because they were concerned that audiences would not understand what had happened to the rest of the actor's body. Off-screen music in early sound films was similarly opposed on the grounds that spectators would demand to know where the orchestra was. The emergence of consensual conventions has consistently been a process of experimentation, originally causing a perceptual dislocation (and frequently being exploited for that effect: Citizen Kane being perhaps the most notorious example), but being gradually accommodated into a readily-understood code of practice. The re-introduction of deep-focus photography in the early 1940s and the extensive use of telephoto and zoom lenses in the 1960s confronted audiences with unfamiliar images that were initially difficult to comprehend. Repeated exposure, however, acclimatized viewers to

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the adjustments of perception the images require them to make, and subsumed these technical strategies within accepted, consensual conventions.

A similar observation presents itself with regard to the depiction of time within the consensus narrative. Increasing familiarity with the conventions of cinematic presentation reduced the length of time assumed necessary for the audience to locate themselves within a scene. Thus the signaling devices of scene change have progressively evolved from fade to dissolve to direct cut, as the audience have been deemed gradually more capable of following a quicker presentation of events. This, indeed, applies as much to speeds of cutting within a scene as it does to inter-scene changes. Contemporary audiences find films of the 1930s interminably slow by comparison to more recent pictures. The gaps between dialogue are longer, the camera position changes much less frequently and according to a more rigid pattern, and the story, in consequence, appears to be evolving more slowly. The story itself may well seem simpler as a result. What contemporary viewers experience is the gap between the normative perception they have acquired from films of their own period, and the conventions of presentation operative at the time of the film's creation. Beneath the superficial difference in appearance, films of the consensus are united by the attitude they share toward their audience through the operation of whatever contemporaneous conventions of spatial and temporal delineation are in existence at the time of their production.

Similar conventions operate with regard to performance. The acting styles of the consensually coherent narrative cinema concentrate attention on the characters rather than the performer, and consequently psychological realism becomes an important factor in convincing the audience of the validity of the characterization. Although approaches to performance may vary, from the inherently conservative "reaction" technique of John Wayne's recreation of his political archetype to the Method school of a psychological understanding of the character seeking to obliterate the actor as performer, the principal objective of both is to provide an unselfconscious performance, the creation of a character whose existence the audience can accept as readily as they can accept the depiction of his or her spatio-temporal arena.* For the audience, the plausibility of a characteri-

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*"The simplest examples of Stanislavsky's ideas are    (cont.)

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zation must equal the plausibility with which they regard a room or other location, in order that they can assume the psychological basis of the character as a set of limitations on his possible actions, as they assume the spatial basis of the room as another set of limitations. With this assumed knowledge, they may then concentrate their attention on the events and themes of the film, which will generally be expressed through the development of emotional relationships between characters.

What the film will have established through its employment of these conventions of acting manner and of presentation is the emotional relationship the audience should have with the film's characters, and above all with the star Capra has defined the goal:

You can only involve your audience with people ... you give them something to worry about, some person they can worry about, and care about, and you've got them, you've got them involved ... because my main objective is to involve the audience, to get them when what they're seeing up there ... when they begin to believe it, and they become part of it and they become interested in what's going on up there on the screen.

The audience must identify the hero as one of Us, and thus accept his problems vicariously as their own. The typical coherent narrative presents a personalized drama, in which the story is told to us through the central character. As instigator or victim of events, he or she is the story's protagonist, the reason we are seeing the story unfold in the pattern that it does. To make sense of the story, we must recognize the characters for what they are supposed to be, and allocate our sympathies accordingly. Our entrée into this process is most commonly provided by the star (hero/heroine), who acts as our benevolent guide to the story's

__________
actors such as Gary Cooper, John Wayne and Spencer Tracy. They try not to act but to be themselves, to respond or react. They refuse to say or do anything they feel not to be consonant with their own characters." (Lee Strasberg) Whether or not Strasberg's interpretation of Stanislavsky was correct is an interesting but peripheral issue; it was Strasberg's Method, not Stanislavsky's, which was the pervasive influence on screen acting from the 1950s onwards.

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emotional value-system, by encouraging us to align our character sympathies and antipathies with his.

The complex mechanics of this alignment may be sufficiently illustrated (though not exhaustively analyzed) by drawing attention to two areas in which a given film plays on prior audience knowledge and expectation. The "star vehicle" operates a double-bind on the audience, by which it ties the spectator to the narrative by making star and character interchangeable. The behavior of the star's character is sufficiently close to the public image of the star himself for the star to become credibly absorbed into the story; a point well enough illustrated by the tendency among critics to use actors' names as often as character names when describing plots. The function of a great deal of Hollywood star publicity was to establish an archetypal persona which would refer interchangeably to the actor and to the parts he played; Margaret Thorpe cites the example of William Powell, whose urbane comedy roles at M. G. M. meshed perfectly with a publicity image that emphasized his sophistication and intimacy with "the world of books." There was sufficient variety of archetypes to provide each member of the regular audience with a close approximation of his or her perfected self-image, which in turn served as the basis by which he or she could transfer his or her allegiance from star to character. A star whose roles corresponded to his or her public image did not seem to be acting, but merely playing out on the screen a possible variation of his or her real life.

Casablanca provides an example. The audience, lured into the story by the process of its revelation, recognizes archetypes and identifies, in Bogart and Bergman, its guiding protagonists. Both enact themselves: Bogart the crumpled isolationist whose verbal cynicism imperfectly conceals his honorable sentimentality, Bergman the mysterious insecure woman wary of her own passion ("I don't know what's right any longer. You'll have to think for us."). They are separated by their emotional depth from the other characters, three of whom are named after European cars, and all of whom enact stereotypes which are not their own possession. (One might perhaps argue for the individuality of Sidney Greenstreet and Claude Rains, but they are closer to inflecting a stereotype than establishing their own archetypes.) The initiative of the narrative oscillates between Bergman and Bogart; the other characters do no more than establish its circumstances, and then behave according to

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the predictable patterns of their stereotypes. Only Bogart and Bergman are uncertain, and that uncertainty provides the narrative momentum, since plot development and outcome are dependent upon the choices they make, to an extent that simply does not apply to the actions of any other characters. At the same time, the larger ideological significance of the story is tied to their actions. Bogart is explicitly identified as a representative of American attitudes ("It's December 1941 in Casablanca, what time is it in New York?... I bet they're asleep in New York. I bet they're asleep all over America"), and both, but particularly Bogart, sacrifice their personal desire for a greater cause whose moral force they finally recognize. The viewers, then, attach themselves to them (importantly, to both of them) to find in their performances an emotional and a political depth of sentiment not provided by the rest of the film. They are obliged to believe in Bogart and Bergman as Richard Blaine and Ilsa Lund if they are to accept the fiction of Casablanca and the abandonment of American isolationism.

The form of believability provided by the star system is reinforced by another mechanism, by which the sentimental significance commonly invested in objects in the external world is dwelt upon in the movies as a means of realizing their material existence, and hence that of the characters who handled them. In Casablanca this function is implicitly supplied by the nostalgic force of Dooley Wilson's music. In John Cromwell's more explicit sentimental tour de force, Since You Went Away (1944; prod. David O. Selznick), a series of sentimental transactions takes place in which inanimate objects are invested with an emotional value by their past associations. In the opening scene, Anne Hilton (Claudette Colbert), returning from seeing her husband leave for the war, wanders numbly about their empty house, touching objects we can see to be full of emotional significance now that they are deprived of their familiar context by her husband's departure. This principle of substitution, by which emotional attachments between characters are distilled into the sentimental significance of objects, is clearest in the transactions around Bill Smollett's (Robert Walker) watch, which was originally given to him by the Hiltons' boarder, his estranged crusty old grandfather Colonel Smollett (Monty Woolley). Bill gives it to Jane Hilton (Jennifer Jones), his sweetheart, as a keepsake when he goes off to war. After his off-screen death in action has belatedly made clear to the Colonel the depth of his affection for his grandson, Jane

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gives him Bill's watch for Christmas. By this stage, almost the conclusion of the film, audience and characters have invested so much emotional capital in the watch as symbol of lost possibilities in the past and in the future that the final transaction, by which it is returned to its original owner, requires no dialogue explanation for its emotional effect. The watch distills the relationships among the three characters and serves to signal that emotional matrix by its every appearance. The cumulative effect is here less important, however, than the symbolic displacement that is involved for the audience. We are engaged in the characters' problems by their distillation into objects onto which we can project our own emotional responses. The mechanism opens the narrative to our participation, but only along the closed and directed lines of the plot. We either cooperate with the mechanism, or we refuse to be affected. We cannot select our own moments of significance, because the film signals our expected responses too clearly for us to ignore them. By building on a common emotional experience, the sentimentally evocative power of objects, the film ties us to the characters. We identify with their patterns of emotional response; hence, we identify with their emotions.

"WHAT IS REAL?" ... PART THREE: SIGNIFICANCE

It seems that destiny has taken
a hand. --Claude Rains in
Casablanca

Realism in the cinema should not be seen as a perceptual system, but rather as an idiomatic tendency, a means of providing an opportunity to dramatize. Since the rejection of the Expressionist strategies of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the perceptual conventions of the cinema have been assumed as being naturalistic: object relations are presented as inflexible and normative to our experience outside the cinema. Science fiction films like The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) in fact rely on such perceptual conventions for their effect: there is only a distortion of size, not of the perspective which governs the audience's understanding of spatial relationships . The establishment of a normative Perspective is an important initial objective for any film.

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It provides a spatial context, a framework within which the audience can view the narrative events. Perspective is established by the consistency of object relationships which define the space within a shot, and particularly by the movement of objects (including characters) through that space as a means of determining its boundaries. The sequences in Rick's cafe in Casablanca generally begin with a shot of the exterior or the sign, identifying the locale, followed by a general shot of the interior before narrowing the field of view to a particular group of characters. What these "establishing" or master shots establish is less the locale of the scene (which is equally recognizable in closer shots) than the spatial borders within which that scene will be enacted. The purpose of such shots is to define for the audience the limits of the scene's possibilities; characters may enter or leave this space, but for the duration of the scene events of narrative importance will take place only within its parameters, and within those parameters objects will obey the normative conventions of perspective.

Since the narrative provides its own causality, it ascribes significance to any event it presents, and makes itself "maximally meaningful." By locating everything it presents in a causal sequence, it makes everything it depicts important to the provision of a context for understanding what happens. This applies not only to the content of a shot, but also to the shot as an act of presentation in itself. The need for normative spatial relations, as a means of reducing the possibilities of interpretation, becomes apparent. If the audience is to understand a sequence as causal, they must be able to connect the events of that sequence through the similarity of their technical presentation. One shot follows another in a causal and significant chain, but the continuity of that chain must be sustained by a consistency of presentation. The structure of a sequence thus becomes dependent upon its gradual focusing on its most important narrative constituent. The pattern of cutting from the establishing shot, which provides the arena for action and locates the characters, to a medium shot, relating the characters to each other, to close-ups related by their viewpoint (e.g. reversed over-the-shoulder shots) is diagrammatically typical of the conventional construction of a dialogue scene. The spatial relationship between the protagonists must be established in order to provide a context within which the audience can place the action. Not only is it significant that a particular line of dialogue be delivered in close-up, but also that that close-up be located

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within an arrangement of shots providing a spatial continuum that can be immediately understood.

The regular employment of patterns of sequential shots establishes the pattern as a means of understanding the film's manipulation of space, independent of its original purpose of providing a continuity of perspective while allowing the cut to take place. Through their awareness of the pattern the audience can accept shots which distort normative perspective. It is, indeed, this ability on the part of the audience that finally undermines the validity of realism as a perceptual system. The spectator is not baffled by a wide-angle, telephoto, or even a zoom shot: not baffled, that is, to the point where he or she can no longer comprehend the narrative information presented by the shot or integrate it into the story. This achievement is brought about principally by conventional cutting procedures which make it possible to locate a shot independently of its presentation of space, while nevertheless ensuring that that presentation does not lose its significance. A close-up, for example, is spatially the simplest kind of shot because it involves the greatest degree of spatial isolation. Its impact is commonly intensified by emphasizing that isolation by shooting it in telephoto, which by condensing perspective and reducing depth of field can deny the character so presented any spatial relationship with his or her surroundings.

The mimetic power of the film image obviates the necessity for most of the strategies of a literary realism. The need for film to provide an explanation of events, and thus a demonstration of causality, in spatial terms requires instead the development of codes of camera behavior which are comprehensible to the viewer. Such codes, however, comprise only a skeletal aesthetic--a set of common reference points for communication from film to audience. For an individual film, they do not in themselves amount to an aesthetic of intention or an aesthetic of process. They are rather the means towards an aesthetic end, that of convincing the audience that the story being told is a plausible fiction--is, in that sense, "real." While an appreciation of the mechanisms of spatial articulation in the cinema is essential to an understanding of its objectives, including its political objectives, the presentation of spatial relationships cannot be offered as the central tenet of the consensus aesthetic. That lies rather with the cementing of the relationship between film and audience via the establishment of plausible characters in a plausible setting.

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To return to the example of the telephoto close-up, the technique of spatial isolation must be employed towards a psychological end in the creation of the spectator's understanding of the character concerned. That isolation occurs in relation to a specific piece of information we are provided with, for example through dialogue, and amplifies it. The close-ups of Bergman, which are commonest at Casablanca's moments of crisis, present her as an object of the audience's emotional attention, detached from her material surroundings, and often from the group of people she is with. Such close-ups oblige the audience to respond emotionally, since they are offered no alternative object for their attention. The significance of any particular spatial articulation cannot be understood outside of its specific narrative context, even if in itself it may be independently recognizable as part of an aesthetic strategy. But that recognition is only useful to the extent that it can be integrated into an interpretation of the narrative as a whole.

The conventional codes of realism primarily comprise a narrative device which provides the story with an implicit guarantee of causality. Its skeletal aesthetic simply offers an opportunity to dramatize within the confines of a comprehensible framework. The spatial logic of conventional scene construction, such as that outlined above, is to present characters in a space in order to isolate them within it, and then to explore their emotional relationship, partly through the scene's manipulation of space. The establishing shot sets the borders, the medium shot further narrows them down in order to define an area of meaningful interaction, in which the characters dominate the space between them and the space between them and the audience. The close-up eliminates space by focusing on an object presented in non-spatial terms (or at least terms which do not seek to relate it to other objets through the way in which they both fill space). The progression from shot to shot produces an expectation in the audience of a dramatic or psychological progression in the characters' actions or relationships. Although the creation of a normative perspective initially serves the purpose of providing the audience with a recognizable system for comprehending the images it is offered, that purpose is bypassed by the process of focusing on smaller spatial units which seek to locate the spectator's interest not in the character as a figure defining himself by movement through space, but in the character as a reactive psychological object whose response to situations is the chief subject of the audience's concern.

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Ford, for example, is little interested in the physical relations between men and objects, or between men and men, except as they signify their psychological relationships, their morals or their relative status. Objects exist as unconsidered props to the depiction of their state of mind, symbols with a shared meaning for characters and audience (e.g., the cactus rose in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance). Attention is diverted from image to significance, and from action to consequence, a device again clearly established by the narrative construction of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. What makes Ford's work so distinguished within the traditions of the consensus is his ability to generate a more intense identification between characters and audience than any other filmmaker.* This he achieves principally by creating areas of shared significance, which, while not necessarily being explicitly stated (the symbolic implications of the cactus rose are never spelled out), are nevertheless readily apparent. Ford's characters appear always to have read the script in advance of their performance, to be aware of their destiny to the extent that their fates are prefigures in the nuances of their performances. Ethan's inability to reintegrate himself into the community at the end of The Searchers is determined by his inability to pass through any doorway when shot from inside looking out. Determined, that is, not only for the audience reading the shots as psychologically symbolic, but also for Ethan, who approaches each such shot warily and reluctantly, thereby implying its significance for the audience because of its significance for him. For Ethan, and thus for the audience, doorways become moral spatial signifiers.

These "realist" mechanisms of the coherent narrative can be seen as no more than a logical choice for the rapid presentation of a quantity of information which the film requires the audience to assume. They provide the common ground between filmmaker and spectator, working to this end in the same way as generic codes, of which the "realist" idiom is ultimately only an example, albeit a very large and complex one. As a code, it has two effects on the comprehension of the information it transmits. Firstly, it serves

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*This I take to be the answer to Godard's question, "Mystery and fascination of this American cinema ... how can I hate John Wayne upholding Goldwater and yet love him tenderly when he abruptly takes Natalie Wood into his arms in the last reel of The Searchers?"

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to divert the audience's attention away not only from the mechanics of the film's constructions, but more broadly away from the action of the film to the significance attached to that action. This is particularly noticeable in its attitude to violence, where the physical nature of the action, the dynamics of one man striking another, for example, is not the subject presented for consideration. Rather it is the consequence or significance of violence which is considered. In the opening scene of The Train Robbers (1973; dir. Burt Kennedy), John Wayne has gathered a group of gunmen together for a purpose which as yet only he knows. When one of the younger men, Christopher George, demands to know what they're going to do, Wayne turns around and unexpectedly punches Rod Taylor, the veteran who brought George along. Before any can ask the obvious question, Wayne growls at the prostrate Taylor, "I thought I told you to find men who could take orders." The violent action dramatizes Wayne's attitude, which is explained after the event. The explanation provides the action with a meaning it lacks in itself. *

In such areas of physical presentation, in which the coherent narrative displaces significance from the events depicted to the meaning of those events, it necessarily works towards a conclusion, a resolution that takes place not within the film, but for the audience after the event. In a perfect coherent narrative (such as Casablanca) the final scene colors previous events, allowing us to tie up the loose ends of the plot and to understand why all the characters behaved as they did. The neatness of this conclusion is inescapable, because the constructions by which events have been depicted have worked throughout to eliminate possibilities for the audience.

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*This is in clear contrast to the manner in which Clint Eastwood, for example, punches people. As a hero, Eastwood is never one of Us, but is rather, in McConnell's terms, like Keaton and Cagney in "the state of grace," separated from close audience identification by his complete mastery of space through movement. When Eastwood punches another character, it is not to make a narrative point; invariably, he punches downwards, not as an act of assertion. Anyone punched by Eastwood is already discredited; the punch serves only to portray the dynamic of their relationship. Since the violent action is not burdened with a meaning external to itself, and is therefore redundant to the plot, it can carry its own significance as a purely physical statement.

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The film has, for example, consistently employed the visual device of tracking in on characters for significant reactions or lines of dialogue. Bogart's explanatory resolution ("Inside of us we both know you belong with Victor") is cued by an extreme version of this device, a rapid track in from long medium shot of him and Bergman to a tight close up of their faces. The momentum of the movement confirms Bogart's decision. The spectator functions in relation to a coherent narrative purely as a recipient of a given meaning, offered a preexistent, received method of approaching the events of a film, a method determined by the manner of their presentation. Because of the style's tendency to concentrate on the emotional significance of those events, the spectator is offered only a pre-existent moral or political interpretation of the film, via a process designed to make him or her as little aware as possible of its determinist effect.

Such a unilateral channel of communication can only be established if the film succeeds in inducing the spectator to acquire or sustain an involvement in the primary product, the story. This engagement with the unfolding plot is clearly an effect of the tightly constructed coherent narrative. But it is predicated on the presumption, established through convention, of a resolution. The spectator's uncertainty about how the story will conclude is bracketed within the certainty that a conclusion will draw together the various strands of the plot, thus validating the plot's construction. The bracketing devices in The Wizard of Oz (1939, M. G. M. ; dir. Victor Fleming) present an explicit example of the attitude underlying the consensus view of the political function of the cinema. The film is overtly a populist piece about self-discovery and self-realization, but, crucially, this process of self-realization is only ratified by the presentation of a symbol: the Straw Man gets a diploma for a brain, the Lion a medal for courage, the Tin Man a watch for a heart. And while the presenter of the symbols, the Wizard of Oz himself, is a phony wizard, he is nevertheless the architect of the benevolent synthesis, dispensing a solution. For if his magic is mere mechanics the arguments supporting his non-magical symbolic gifts demonstrate that wizardry is not necessary, since the three characters had in themselves what they wanted him to give them by magic. Dorothy's (Judy Garland) realization of this, that

If I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't go looking any further than my own back yard,

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because if you can't find it there, then you probably never lost it in the first place.

allows her to achieve her goal, to get back to Kansas, to escape from the colored fantasy world of the cinematic dream to secure monochrome reality. The benevolent resolution links self-realization to an incitement to stasis in the discovery that "There's no place like home," and in Dorothy's expressed intention never to go away again. For both Dorothy and the audience, the film's bracketing scenes function as a means of locating the film as a dream, and its events as an intensified experience from which a moral lesson may be gained, but whose excitements and dangers can be enjoyed because they are located within a framework which defuses them and makes them safe by explicitly removing them from actuality.

…

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...

REASONABLE BELIEFS

***covid--science//technology***

The mechanisms of displacement, by which liberalism avoided debating itself by always accepting the terms of others, were a reflection of the implicit concession it made to technological improvement. Liberals' commitment to material progress necessitated that technological advance be regarded as, in itself, a social goal . The tension in the liberal perspective was that the mechanics of technology were ideologically required to work for the betterment of man in society, and yet the imperatives of professional expertise and "pure research" insisted that they remain free from social control --for the simple reason that the machine was progressing at an ever-increasing rate towards a goal that could only be presumed, not guaranteed. It was comforting in 1950 to read Asimov's three laws of Robotics, but there was other, more tangible evidence of the dangers of technological progress. Atomic weaponry questioned the benign potential of technology, but, perversely, required the ever more fervent assertion of that article of faith. The danger was again displaced: it lay not in the technology of nuclear destruction itself, but in man's capacity to employ it. Fear

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was diverted from the fact of the Bomb, which, of course, no rational man would ever use, to the possibility of that crazy finger on the button. The existence of such totalitarian weaponry gave credence to the need for eternal vigilance, and the need to compromise liberal idealism with the realism that accepted totalitarian forms of debate. Locked into their technological ideology, liberals located the threat as coming not from the Bomb, but from the fact that someone, specifically the Russians, might use it. The ascending helix of complex technological development was based on the assumption, which did not permit of questioning, that the machine was good for man. The problem, as seen by the liberal technocrat, was whether man was good enough to control the machine.

Perhaps nowhere did the liberal technocracy express its inherently schizoid nature so tellingly as in its attempts to resolve this fundamental dilemma. One solution, covertly practiced much more than it was openly articulated, was the adoption of a behaviorist psychology, which proposed applying the principles of a mechanistic, "objective" rationality to the study of man. This was a model of displacement at its most assertive: if man could be understood as if he were a machine, then the question of control became mechanically answered. Man was rendered redundant by default. Yet while this solution was to all practical purposes adopted in the automation of industrial processes and the application of military technology, it remained philosophically unacceptable to liberal idealists.

Instead, they sought perversely to assert man's supriority over the machine by stressing his irrationality or at least his capacity for irrational action. The unpredictability of human behavior became, for many liberals, a necessary, if somewhat uncomfortable, virtue.

But such a fundamental contradiction required some mediating device to disguise and displace it. To counteract its insecurities, liberalism instituted the humanitarian concept of understanding , a word whose meaning crucially blurred the distinctions between compassion and comprehension. Understanding could, at the same time, accommodate a behaviorist model of mechanistic comprehension and an assertion of human uniqueness through a capacity for shared emotional response. Understanding is perhaps the most important single term in the liberal lexicon; a catch-all word whose semantic ambivalence can cover a multitude of inexact expressions in a haze of sentimental rhetoric.

Understanding was an emotional quality

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rather than an intellectual process. To understand people meant to identify sympathetically with them; it was a form of emotional acquisition of them, or of their problems. Understanding was a sentimental placebo for all ills and all problems, for to be understood was to be absorbed into the benevolence of the liberal consensus, and to be understanding was to be an active part of that consensus. Understanding was not an analytical activity; it was the very opposite, a substitute for it which avoided the difficulties analysis might reveal in a benign harmony of the rational and the emotional. The liberal employment of the word played with the dualistic meaning it gave "understanding" so that the rational basis of human understanding could be asserted at the same time that its emotional nature could be exploited. The process of understanding aimed to be all-inclusive, since the understood object or person became predictable and consequently harmless , because that predictability permitted it to be incorporated within the system of understanding that maintained the liberal status quo. In exchange for this emasculation, the understood object was afforded a compassionate concern that revealed the centrality of a sentimental paternalism to the understanding liberal elite--that paternalism itself being a consensual inheritance from the fundamentalist tradition.

Certain areas of concern were, of course, more problematic than others. Those groups or individuals who refused to correspond with the liberal myth of men of goodwill had either to be forcibly placed within the orthodoxy, or to have their unorthodoxy "understood" and explained. In coming to terms with Nazism, McCarthyism or the psychopathic personality, liberalism most clearly revealed the mechanisms it employed to sustain its humanistic vision, and exposed their inadequacy. Liberal understanding wanted not merely to answer the question of how such irrational political movements or personality traits had come about, but also the question of why they had arisen, a question to which no complete answer could be provided . Answers to the question "how?" were available through the compilation of sufficient data, but the question "why?" was much more problematic, because it required the explanation of motive in terms of a rationalist psychology that could not encompass the irrational. For the liberal, the question "why?" was invariably rhetorical. When liberal historians asked how was it possible for the Nazis to exterminate nine million people, they were not primarily concerned with an explanation in terms of the mechanics of execution or the bureaucracy of the concentration camps, but with seeking to understand an

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attitude to humanity and a psychology radically and frighteningly different from the premises of their own.

The narrow limits to comprehension which their idea of understanding as a process of emotional subjugation and control afforded them inevitably prevented their coming to terms with such aberrations as Nazism except by resolving them in terms of individual psychopathology. Liberal explanations could bracket off the psychopath from "normal" society and declare him an aberration, but so long as he remained unintegrated and beyond control--so long, that is, as he evaded a rationalistic understanding--he threatened the total system of that understanding. A behaviorist psychological model might offer an explanation of irrationality and propose medical means of removing the dysfunction, but such a solution brought the liberal once more up against a central dilemma in his philosophy: attempting to establish some valid distinction between man and machine, even if only on the level by which each was treated.

This individualization of the problem was, however, the best practical solution liberalism could advance as a way out of its dilemma. It adhered to the consensual requirement of being all but all-embracing, and of labeling those it excluded as being demonstrably "different," sociopathic, less than completely human. Having philosophically rejected the idea of absolute evil, it strove all the more to accommodate, or at least explain, the psychopathic "personality disorder" in terms which denied individual responsibility and spread the blame in rhetorical gestures of sentimental sympathy. Here as elsewhere liberal orthodoxy found a precarious balance between individualism and determinism, which purported to grant free will to those who fell within the benevolent conventions of its consensual framework , and denied it to those who demonstrated an anarchic free will by rejecting the restrictions of that framework .

THE INVENTION OF STANLEY KRAMER

If Stanley Kramer had not ex-
isted, he would have had to
have been invented as the most

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extreme example of thesis or
message cinema.

Andrew Sarris

The psychopath proved as essential a figure to the post-war cinema as he was to the anti-ideologues of liberal realism. The popularization of psychiatry in the 1940s promoted the dramatic status of a character who could embody unregenerate evil in a fictional framework which sought to avoid populist conventions. Genre films might still resort to stereotypes for their Manichaean villains. For them the matter was relatively simple: just point to the nearest group of Mexican bandits, notorious gunfighters or monsters from outer space, have a couple of scenes in which they dispose of innocent civilians for their own amusement, and you have objective evil personified. But for the urban realist cinema, trading in images of paranoia it sought to explain but not to dismiss, there was a greater problem and a solution with much less precedent. The psychopath was created to avoid acknowledging a metaphysical notion of absolute evil that would have been contrary to the principles of understanding. The psychopath neatly provided an answer in being capable of irrational action in a rational society, and subject to a glib compassion for his inadequate humanity after he gets his just deserts in the last reel. The Adrian Scott/Edward Dmytryk tract on anti-Semitism, Crossfire (1947, RKO), ends with Robert Young looking down on the body of rabid bigot Robert Ryan. When someone asks if Ryan is dead, Young replies, "He's been dead a long time, only he didn't know it." Understanding has become contempt for a character whose crime has been his contempt for others.

The psychopath personified liberalism's anxieties about its own rationality. In the immediate post-war period these anxieties revealed themselves mainly in the urban melodramas of film noir, but in the late 1950s the ideological function of the cinematic psychopath became increasingly clear as the cinema of social messages reached its zenith. Stanley Kramer, whose independent productions in the years around 1960 made him the arch-exponent of the film with the detachable theme, and won him the Irving Thalberg Award "for consistently high quality in filmmaking" in 1961, returned repeatedly to the psychopathic personality as a trigger for the liberal conscience. Kramer sought to elevate the cinema through its social significance, and while his relent-

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less promotion of "meaningful" content over form has ensured the rapid demise of his critical reputation he is nevertheless a figure central to the emergence of the liberal consensus, both in its thematic preoccupations and in its acquisition of industrial power.

Kramer's habitual technique is to present an issue in terms of an individual confrontation of characters the film determines to be representative of opposed viewpoints, at the same time purporting to dramatize a social problem and tell a story. Pressure Point, produced by Kramer for United Artists in 1962 and directed by Hubert Cornfield, exemplifies this process in its handling of Kramer's recurrent topic of racial conflict. Inside a framing device in which Peter Falk plays a young prison psychiatrist unable to communicate with a black prisoner, Sidney Poitier points a moral of goodwill by narrating in flashack the story of his wartime failure to cure an imprisoned Nazi racist, played by Bobby Darin. While Darin is not reduced to a position of complete inarticulacy, this is no more than a device to conceal the film's Manichaean characterization of good and evil. Darin's speeches may well work to make white audiences uncomfortable by their closeness to their own unarticulated attitudes. But by putting them in the mouth of an overtly unsympathetic character, the spectator is not led to a position in which such ideas can be openly raised and confronted. On the contrary, they must be dismissed because they are depicted as part of the intellectual property of a man persistently described and pictured as a psychopath. The film posits a few individuals as representative of general social positions, and then individualizes their problems, so that they no longer function satisfactorily either as representatives of social groups or as individuals in their own right. This form of audience involvement operates as a kind of emotional blackmail; a sympathetic Negro and an unsympathetic white are presented in order to make the white liberal audience for whom the film is presumably designed readjust their thinking on the subject emotionally, not intellectually. Pressure Point reveals its thematic opportunism more clearly than other films of the liberal consensus because it matches it with an equal opportunism towards spatial relationships.

Pressure Point is filmed theatre. This much is apparent in the contrived use of sets, and in the dissolution of the boundaries of spatial delineation. Sidney Poitier's office, for example, can contain an elephant ridden by the twelve-year-old Darin. Darin's fantasies are acted out in a non-

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naturalistic manner designed to emphasize the fact that they are fantasies, which reinforces Poitier's plot role as psychiatrist and narrative role as interpreter of the action for the audience. The sets are constructed to make it possible to pan from Poitier's psychiatrist's room to Darin's father's butcher's shop through a pool of darkness, a proposition of theatrical space that echoes Arthur Miller's design for Death of a Salesman. Composition, too, becomes a functionary of the drama, which is concentrated, through the use of deep-focus low- or high-angle medium close-ups, on the actors' delivery of dialogue. This emphasis on the actors, together with the artificiality of the settings, stresses the theatricality of the film, as well as its intention to make a significant statement. In the scene in Darin's cell, where the walls disappear with the ease of theatrical flats, the film most clearly reneges on the contract it has established with its audience over the presentation of space. Our guarantee of normative spatial perception is established by the conventional perspective in which we view recognizable objects like desks, walls or people, as delineators of space. Pressure Point offers us this guarantee, through the solidity of such objects, and then rejects that solidity while continuing to depict space under the terms of that guarantee. The contractual relationship between film and audience applies only when it is convenient for the film. The unilateral nature of the film's negotiation with the audience over the terms of its depiction of space precludes the possibility of the democratic presentation of a theme.

The crux of that presentation is Poitier, not only because he is the central figure in the narrative, but also because he is the narrator, and the interpreter of the events we are shown. He is, further, proven right in his analysis by the end of the story, when we learn that Darin was finally hanged for an ostentatiously psychopathic act. In placing Poitier in the position he occupies in the plot, fundamental aspects of the question of race relations have already been side-stepped, for here, as ever, Poitier represents the small minority of blacks who have escaped from the socio-economic oppression of their race to be accepted on a professional level with whites. The conflict has, by Poitier's education, been reduced purely to one of color, to the fact that he is black. This is to avoid, as blatantly as Kramer does in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?, the question of Poitier's racial heritage. The social context to which the film refers is only that of the white world, and the racial problem is seen as entirely one-sided, a question of white men

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accepting Negroes as their equals,* because, as portrayed by Poitier, they self-evidently are.

By placing the Darin story in the Falk framing device, the film asserts that the important element in the racial problem is merely one of skin pigmentation. Falk is dealing with a Negro who hates all whites because his mother was a prostitute who brought whites home, and his father was lynched by whites for killing one of his mother's tricks. The framing device presents this as being a parallel situation to Darin's, whose hatred of Negroes is based on a set of political assumptions which Poitier is allowed to define as psychopathic. Focusing on racial hatred rather than its cause obliges the audience to assume, with the film, that all causes are equally valid, or invalid, because of the reduction of the issue to the level of individual manifestation of the effect. Thematic causality is reversed on the assumption that the causal logic of the narrative will sustain the thematic argument through its logical weaknesses. The solution Falk proposes to adopt towards his Negro patient is to put on blackface, and Poitier agrees, announcing that all human problems are simply ones of communication, thereby asserting the myth of the man of goodwill and retaining the liberal analysis within an optimistic interpretation of bourgeois individualism. There is no irony in Poitier, or in his proposed solution in terms of individual personalities. For while he fails with Darin, it is only because Darin is an extreme case.

Darin is a Nazi in 1942, in prison as a subversive, and psychopathic. Thus anything he says is not only wrong but dangerous to the fabric of American ideals, which Poitier is forced to defend without context and in terms so vague as to be meaningless:

There's something so great about this country that you don't even know about it.

This does not engage Darin's argument that the ideal America is created on, that "all men are created equal," is a self-evident lie. Poitier's response, and the ideology he asserts (which applauds success, family, and the intellect),

__________
*In Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? the same question is given slightly different expression; that of a Negro accepting that white men can accept Negroes as their equals.

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wins by default--a default made possible by the framework of the debate, which individualizes out of the general, and then generalizes out of the individual, allowing two stages for the omission of problematic areas, and a complete divorce from social context. By placing Poitier in a position in which he may analyze Darin's racism on the individual level of the film's dime-store psychology, he is reinforced and Darin is undercut.

More than I wanted to kill you, I wanted to help you, and that makes me more than a good man, that makes me a doctor.

Poitier is a black white liberal, whose ideal is that of the doctor, the saver of lives without regard to his personal feelings. But because he is speaking from a position of historical confidence, telling the story which is in the past, the danger and the physical confrontation that might be involved are circumscribed by our knowledge that Poitier lived to tell the tale. The film uses history to its own ends. By imposing its analytical chronology on the events it depicts, it dictates the audience's attitude to those events. He who controls the present (presentation) controls the past (history), and he who controls the past controls the future (audience response).

Poitier is the mediator of the film's paternalist analysis in his position as narrator, and its beneficiary in the plot, from the prison doctor, Carl Benton Reid. "I fought hard to get you this job," says Reid, "don't let me down." It is Poitier who adds, "Because you're a Negro," a statement which he can reverse at the end of the film to Falk, on the film's presumption that there is no difference between their situations. But Poitier has been appointed prison psychiatrist not only by Reid in the plot, but in his casting by the makers of the film who, in common with Reid, are white liberals making the Negro in their own image. Poitier's analysis of Nazism, couched in terms of an individual psychopath manipulating others, is reinforced not only by Darin's characterization, but by the film's inclusion of newsreel footage of the Nazi entry into Paris. His social analysis goes only so far as to refer to "The discontented--socially, economically, or psychologically," returning to an emphasis on the problem as lying with individuals rather than with social institutions, whose values are asserted throughout. In this context it can be noted that the only act of violence in the film is violence against property: the

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Tick Tack Toe scene in the bar, where the violence perpetrated against the hostess is humiliation, not physical injury, a violation of her being rather than her body. However, the film regards what happens to her as an outrage of greater significance than any act of physical violence which Darin commits. Not only is it emphasized by the amount of screen time given to it, but also by the script. After it, Poitier narrates,

That's when I realized that this man was not only sick but dangerous.

This emphasis given to an act of personal and not political violence serves again to individualize and depoliticize a problem whose roots have initially been determined as political by the film; Darin is in prison because he is a menace to society.

In the American cinema, the problem of dealing with political questions has consistently been one of the manner of the individualization of the issue. Kramer's approach posits a universal truth that may be individually exemplified, but such a method requires a predetermined definition of what constitutes a political subject. The political subject is distinguished as separate from the individuals whose story presents an attitude towards it. The film exists as a linear development of the predetermined attitude which has governed its construction. An aesthetic split in the film's structure, between the determining but independent attitude and the dramatic logic which derives from the narrative individualization of that attitude, emerges. The attitude appears as a detachable message--in Pressure Point that the racial prob- lem is soluble through the application of the myth of men of goodwill, which is tantamount to saying that it doesn't exist--located in the speeches the characters make to each other. Political attitude may become a mechanism by which to examine personality, but it can only function as such within the framework of an assured political perspective. Both inside the cinema and in its wider manifestations, liberalism secured that framework by defining itself as an idealist, pragmatic reaction to situations it claimed to deplore, and by insisting, as a result, that it could never be more than a compromise with imperfection.

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MARTYRS TO COMPROMISE

The notion of compromise was as central to the functoning of liberalism as the concept of understanding. Those mechanisms of displacement by which liberalism avoided confronting itself were geared to producing a compromise solution, the best result possible in unfavorable circumstances. Compromise disguised the real location of power, even from those who held it. It preserved the appearance of an effective democratic political system, whose checks and balances could be seen to operate because no one was getting his own way. It gave authority to the voice of moderation. But as a political objective, compromise was of more fundamental importance than merely being the sum total of its superficial effects. Liberal realism sought compromise as a means of avoiding a confrontation with its insoluble fundamental dilemma: the opposition between individualism and determinism expressed in the technological terms of man's relationship with machines. To continue functioning, liberal realism required both forces to be in play at the same time; hence it required that they not confront each other. Ultimately, the liberal had to seek the liberal compromise not because of his humanitarian beliefs, but for his own preservation, since his sense of self-identity was founded on the notion of ra- tional understanding which gives a human being dominance over the machine. The preservation of that non-mechanistic, non-determinist illusion became in effect the liberal definition of peace, for war was the subjection of humanity to the destructive logic of the machine. To slip from the knife-edge balance of the liberal compromise was to destroy the illusion of independence from technology.

Progress and balance were the aims of the liberal consensus; understanding and compromise were its tools; failure was both its prime mover and its unconscious goal. Compromise inherently acknowledged the failure of idealism; Liberal Realism postulated it as an initial premise. Because liberalism refused systematically to define its goals, it could not hope to measure its success except in the already compromised terms of its "limited objectives." Failure, on the other hand, was much more readily quantifiable, since it could be determined by the success of others. Liberalism sought failure as a protective cloak; it maintained the illusion, necessary to its political preservation, that it was not in possession of political power. In needing failure as its final, covert goal, liberalism acquired for itself the

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role of permanent underdog. It is, for example, the success of this defeatist strategy that has prevented recognition of the dominance of the post-war liberal consensus in Hollywood. As pursued by liberal directors, producers, stars or politicians, liberalism practiced martyrdom as fervently as Christianity ever had, and by doing so it secured its rationality as being beyond dispute. Through its martyrs and through its eager annexation of hopelessly lost causes liberalism sentimentally registered its faith in a vision of rational humanity at the same time that it protected that vision from scrutiny.

Any system of consensual politics seeks stability as its primary goal. The predominant post-war liberal consensus sought stability through the institutionalization of its own inactivity , whether it chose to call that refusal to take assertive action "containment" or "consolidation." In asserting its own rationality , liberalism elevated the notion of debate to the point where it substituted for action . For the liberal, debating an issue became sufficient in itself; open-mindedness came to replace decision-making , while events might be allowed to run their course. The tensions within liberalism thus never needed to be resolved. Contemplating the irrational served at the same time to validate liberal social analysis and to provide a way out of liberalism's greatest dilemma; it accommodated what it could not encompass within its rationalist vision by endlessly debating it , thus formulating it in its own terms. What could not be accommodated in practice was displaced into theory in a quintessential liberal movement, a shifting of the pieces around, like castling in chess, which preserved the appearance of activity witnout accomplishing anything that was positive in itself. The particular was always referred back to the general, which was never precisely defined, but rather assumed as common ground.

Most importantly, this process served to reinforce and validate that acquisitiveness which liberalism displaced from the material world into the world of sentiment. Liberalism strove to "understand" any attitude outside itself, in order to include it within its accommodating world. What was "understood" was not just rendered harmless, it was acquired and thus made available as an alternative position within the diverse liberal perspective. The goal was to pour oil on troubled waters, to calm issues down so that they could be acquired by men of goodwill for rational debate, and if pollution ensued, that, too, had its advantages, since the energy and pace of anger or ideological confrontation

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were slowed down and slurred in the thicker waters of procedural, theoretical, or semantic disputation. Displacement of confrontation was the liberal objective; like an octopus it spread its tentacles to enclose and suffocate any fundamental set of oppositions.

It delighted most of all in revising the past. History was subject to its sentimental acquisitiveness, serving to reveal the benefits of liberal management to the present generation by comparison, and also permitting liberal rhetoric to maintain in its tone a sense of lost innocence, a regretful nostalgia for a past presumed simpler. Liberals could in this way see themselves as martyrs not only to the terminology of others, but also to their own rationality, which prevented them adopting the simplistic viewpoints their opponents survived with, and which had also been available to earlier generations not burdened with the administration of such complex social institutions. Isolationism had been replaced with a reluctant eternal vigilance, which required that the innocent optimism of earlier American dreams be sacrificed to the continuing need for self-protection. The blue skies of Carvel were now never without the vapor trails of B-52s--just in case. The liberal professional guardians were aware of their own unwanted but necessary protective role.

The emphasis in American foreign policy from 1941 onwards was on the necessary sacrifice of American isolationist self-interest to the preservation of fundamental ideals and the inalienable human rights upon which American democracy had been postulated. Liberal paternalists, who could not recover their own innocence, sought to preserve it elsewhere, above all in their image of the apolitical Vietnamese or South American peasant who wished only to till his land in peace, while benevolent humanitarians made his political decisions for him. The self-validating circle of liberal martyrdom completed itself in this ideal image of simple men pursuing a happiness no longer available to the technocratic elite who sacrificed their own contentment in order to provide the stability these simple men required. Government was a heavy burden willingly shouldered in hopes of a better future for all.

Thus liberalism concentrated its efforts on understanding the past and providing for the future, while paying as little practical attention as possible to the distasteful problems of the present, which were always seen in a perspective provided by some other viewpoint. This pervasive

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nostalgia permitted those practical problems to be solved through the application of a technological solution, whose moral virtue was always predetermined and which could always be retrospectively justified by its expedient effectiveness, and the inevitability of the compromise with imperfection. Whether intentionally or not, the liberal political perpspective was perfectly equipped to justify the assumptions of the technological imperative, and the applications of a technocratic solution, whether in the development of atomic energy or the Vietnamese defoliation program. Liberalism comprised a series of interlocking, mutually validating self-definitions which secured its own ends by admitting of its ultimate ineffectiveness, and martyring itself to its own unquestioning belief in the rationality of compromise.

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CHAPTER 9

RHETORIC WITHOUT A CAUSE:
THE LIBERAL CINEMA

...

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...

JUST DESERTS

"I'm a realist. I don't believe
in coincidence. Especially when
it happens more than once."

Hume Croyn (Humsey) in Brute
Force (1947; dir. Jules Dassin)

The perverse consequence of the liberal cinema's emphasis on character over action was that liberal "realist" narratives found themselves even more firmly attached to melodramatic structures than the populist consensus had been. The necessity for the manipulation of plot events to be conducted without disrupting the surface plausibility of the narrative--that is to say, that the characters must appear to function as independent entities and not as symbols, so that the story can be read as "realistic" and not as allegorical--enormously increases the importance of coincidence as a plot device. Coincidence is an inevitable tool of film narrative, if for no other reason than the structural limitations provided by the temporal abbreviation of any film plot. But it can be used in a variety of ways, particularly with regard to the extent to which it is emphasized as plot device. Hitchcock, for example, relies heavily in his plot construction on the most unlikely of coincidences to express both his determinist outlook and the arbitrary nature of cinematic narrative. By his equally arbitrary use of coincidence, Sirk produces in his audience an awareness of generic convention as manipulative, and offers a critique of melodrama through his

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practice of it. The liberal filmmakers, however, begin with different intentions, and consequently employ coincidence to different ends. For them coincidence is elevated to the level of moral inevitability, and in conjunction with the identification of character as the embodiment of attitude it forms the final confirmation of the system of closure which their narrative model operates. In Between Heaven and Hell, Broderick Crawford signals that he has regained sufficient self-knowledge to recognize his previous corruption by putting on his Captain's uniform. He is, of course, immediately shot by a sniper.

The moral inevitability of coincidence functions at its crudest in a film like Arena (MGM, 1953; dir. Fleischer). In the liberal tradition by which the hero becomes an adult during the film, while his best friend dies a moral adolescent, Arena belongs to the Western sub-genre of rodeo films. Its central character, Gig Young, is in the conventional generic position of aging rodeo star being challenged for his position of preeminence by a younger man, and being offered the choice between a declining career in the rodeo and a stable and prosperous life ranching. His best friend, Harry Morgan, is a former star now working as a clown and suffering from a knee injury that occasionally immobilizes him. Despite all the evidence the film provides, Young is unable to decide to retire until aided by coincidence. He arranges to ride the toughest Brahma bull--the conventional climax of the rodeo film--seeking proof of his continued ability. The bull throws him almost immediately, but that in itself is insufficient. Morgan, the clown, draws the bull away from Young, but as he does so his injured knee lets him down and he cannot escape from the bull's charge. In keeping with his pathetic stature in the plot, he is gored and killed, dying in order that Young, and the audience, should get the message.

Arena presents an obvious example of coincidence as the implement of resolution and the tool through which morality will assert itself to provide plot and audience with the "correct" conclusion. Morgan's knee fails him at the crucial moment because his life is wrong--the reverse of Robert Wagner's ability to assert himself at the crucial moment of Between Heaven and Hell because his life is now right. The operation of melodramatic coincidence is just as essential to liberal films of greater superficial complexity.

The crucial plot device of The Boston Strangler takes

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place in a lift. Henry Fonda and George Kennedy are leaving the hospital after interviewing the victim of the Strangler's most recent attack, having gathered two pieces of information: that her attacker left a plastic ruler behind, and that she bit his hand. The lift stops; enter an attendant and Tony Curtis, with bandaged hand and complaining of having lost his ruler. Without exchanging looks, Fonda and Kennedy get out of the lift and walk out of the hospital. Only when they have got to their car does Kennedy look at Fonda and say, "My God, I'm afraid to breathe."

The reaction of the two characters is vital to the suc- cessful operation of the scene. Only by registering their incredulity at the coincidence, and prolonging it as they silently walk through the hospital can the film convince the audience of the scene's plausibility. That plausibility is essential not only to the film's status as a fictional reconstruction of actual events, but also to the narrative function the scene has in moving the film's preoccupation from the details of police procedure to the character study of a psychopath. The coincidence is still an inevitable moral judgment on Curtis, but its construction seeks to disguise the extent to which the narrative hinges on its arbitrariness.

A CERTAIN INSECURITY

In their hostile revisions of generic structures, liberal filmmakers criticized the forms of previous American cinema without attacking the central institution on which they had been based; the relationship between film and audience. In fact, by emphasizing their own "realism," they strengthened the unilateral nature of that relationship, and did no more than substitute a new set of dramatic conventions for the earlier generic ones. Three variants of the liberal hero, open to multiple combination, emerged from this emphasis. The first, exemplified by Fonda in The Best Man, was the hero as victim and martyr, sacrificing himself for a larger principle. The second type, like Wagner in Between Heaven and Hell, became a moral adult through his education in the course of the film. The third variant of the liberal hero was the professional, the expert figure marked out by his specialized skills. In all three types, the impulse to psychological realism in the central character did more than simply distance him from the supporting

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figures. As the fundamentalist man of integrity was revised into the liberal man of principle, his natural bonds to the small community he protected changed into moral obligations to a larger society and to abstract ethical beliefs--an alteration indicated by the drift away from the Western to the contemporary urban location in the late 1940s.

The principled professional hero began to emerge in the wartime propaganda films, in which his relationship to the society for which he was fighting was necessarily distant, while his involvement with the mechanisms of warfare was emphasized. In the immediate post-war period he was frequently a newspaperman, seeking either an abstract notion of truth or a more concrete act of social justice. James Stewart in Call Northside 777 (1948, Twentieth Century-Fox; dir. Henry Hathaway) is for the first half of the film in a dilemma of responsibility between his professional practice, which brought him to the story in the first place, and his growing conviction that Frank Wiecek (Richard Conte) is innocent. His loyalties, good copy and the principles of justice, find resolution in his newspaper's crusade for Wiecek's pardon, finally brought about through the agency of a newly developed technology.

Elsewhere in the semi-documentary movement, the professional hero assumed a corporate identity, being embodied in an institution rather than a crusading individual. The movement's obsession with technology encouraged this corporatism, almost always (The House on 42nd Street, Walk East on Beacon, The F.B.I. Story) attached to a federal law enforcement agency. If there was not a typical semi-documentary plot, there was at least a typical plot resolution, dependent upon the combined activities of professional guardians employing a superior technology to protect society from those who would harm it, and to defend or uphold an abstract social principle in a particular case. The role of guardian was always emphasized. The plots' representative citizens were unable to protect themselves, while the larger society was ill-defined. The city replaced the small town as principle replaced integrity, and the individual or corporate hero no longer required a generalized sense of moral justification for his actions, but rather specific skills he might employ for an accepted notion of the general good embodied in the welfare of the film's oppressed and helpless victims.

The consensual formulation defined itself with increas-

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ing clarity in the process of being constantly restated. By the time of its complete articulation in The Magnificent Seven (1960, United Artists; dir. John Sturges), for example, the hero had been replaced by a group. Bound together by their profession of mutually necessary skills and combating a force either numerically superior (in Westerns) or previously uncomprehended (in science fiction films), they could defeat it only by the application of a technological prowess--a know-how--unavailable to their opponents and incomprehensible to their audiences. Moreover, they were acting in defense of an explicitly political principle, most commonly the right to self-determination. Armed with principle, they could operate a stricter moral absolutism than the optimistic resolution of the fundamentalist consensus had ever required. The theme of lost innocence which Andrew Dowdy remarks on in the anti-Communist films of the early 1950s was pervasive. The "realistic" abandonment of Capraesque all-inclusive happy endings now meant that redemption or reform were options seldom open to the Manichaean villains of the post-war world, while professionalism by itself was an insufficient heroic quality. Those characters who most clearly understood the principles for which they were fighting were the ones most likely to survive the final denouement, along with those who most completely represented the ideals for which the battle was being fought.

In The Magnificent Seven the purely professional figures (Brad Dexter, Robert Vaughn, James Coburn), who have their own motives for fighting profit, proving their courage, or an escape from aimlessness) are killed, while the characters who understand the villagers' situation (Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen) survive the battle with their knowledge reinforced, along with Horst Buchholz, who learned the necessity of some purpose greater than professional display during the film. All the professional figures are aware of having lost a sense of community they could not recover. McQueen describes their situation as "Home, none; wife, none; kids, none; prospects, zero," and Charles Bronson explains to the village children that it takes more courage than he has to work a farm. Buchholz receives his moral education and decides to stay with his girl in the village, while Bronson's death both represents the sacrifice required of professional guardians and sentimentally exemplifies Brynner's melancholic liberal conclusion, "Only the farmers won. We lost. We always lose."

With the advent of a superior technology as an aid to

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heroism, the need for the perfection of physical abilities diminished. The elder generation of populist heroes could be allowed to grow old more or less gracefully--a development from which Stewart, in particular, benefited. His amiable bumbling became an increasing asset as he was allowed to demonstrate a shrewd mind behind it. In Call Northside 777 he spends much of his time searching through his pockets in an apparently absentminded fashion for pieces of paper, displaying a physical vulnerability--except in moments of extreme tension--that was to be the defining characteristic of the new liberal heroes of the 1950s. This element of physical insecurity was an important ingredient in the justification of the new hero. It suggested that he was capable of some self-doubt, both about his physical capacity and his moral rectitude, which served to intensify his achievement when he was successful, reinforce his moral decision when he chose to make a stand, and provide grounds for sympathy when he failed.

CHAPTER 10

MERE ANARCHY: THE CINEMA OF DISINTEGRATION

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...

PACKAGING CONCEPTS

The fragmentation of production coincided with the merger of the major distribution companies with larger corprate groupings. The period from 1966, when Gulf and Western took over Paramount, to 1969, when Kinney National Services merged with Warner-Seven Arts, saw an upheaval in company ownership more substantial even that that of the early 1930s. The majors diversified, predominantly into other media, or were absorbed into conglomerates attracted by their undervalued stock, their film libraries and their real estate. However, the reorganization of the industry that followed diversification was a less fundamental change than that provoked by the Paramount decrees. By and large, it extended the effects of divorcement. The merger with other media concerns, particularly the record industry, was in a sense only an extrapolation of the majors' post-

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Paramount commitment to a power-base in distribution rather than production, and the growth of independent production completed a process begun in the early 1950s.

Hollywood's acquisition by conglomerates has, to a degree, merely been the swapping of one set of distant masters for another. The new landlords of the Dream Factory, like their predecessors, have pursued the primary motivation of profit; on occasion obtained by slum clearance projects like Kirk Kerkorian's sale of M. G. M. assets to build a Las Vegas hotel, or the urban renewal program of Century City on the back lot of the Fox studios. But if Hollywood has shrunk physically under corporate ownership, with its volume of production declining from 196 features in 1969 to 106 in 1978, its business remains much the same, and in one respect only have the new patterns of ownership made a significant difference to the way it conducts that business. The role of the mogul has been abolished: Hollywood's recent studio executives are men under different influences from those of Warner or Cohn. They share a trait common among corporate management, of frequent mobility of employment. Where Mayer ruled M. G. M. from 1924 to 1951, the studio saw six different studio heads in the years between 1968 and 1979. Only Warner Brothers and Universal had the same management team throughout the decade, while career structures like that of David Picker are increasingly the norm. Picker became President of United Artists in 1969, left to go into independent production in 1973, became head of production at Paramount in 1975, and returned to independent production for Lorimar in 1977. This pattern of short tenure in senior management helped to remove the last vestiges of any identifiable studio styles. By the mid-1970s the post-Paramount attitude of regarding each production as a one-off event had reached a point where none of the majors any longer possessed a recognizable identity either in its personnel or its product.

The corporate acquisitions and the economic crises of the late 1960s occasioned the removal of the old guard. Box-office failures combined with the spectacles of the counter-culture (Haight-Ashbury, Chicago, Woodstock) to offer further evidence that Hollywood's liberal consensus was no longer adequate to the demands of a more youthful and volatile audience. The accepted explanation was that the industry had lost contact with its audience because there were too many old men with too much control over production to encourage the right material. In response,

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Hollywood engaged in an unparalleled wave of parricide. Its most conspicuous victims were the last surviving moguls. Jack Warner sold his interest in the studio in 1967 to embark on a notably unsuccessful career in independent production. Darryl Zanuck lost the last in a series of proxy fights at Fox, and retired in 1971. Between 1966 and 1973 all the majors acquired new, much younger production heads, drawn as often as not from outside the immediate confines of Hollywood. The more public search for the kid genius director concealed a more enduring palace revolution giving power to a younger generation of executives whose previous careers were most likely to have been in television, talent agencies or "creative management."* If the personnel changed, the professional ethos remained the same. Heads of production continued to insist on their ability to gauge an unstable public taste, and to argue that the nature of the industry militated against predictable profit margins.

In other areas of its financial operations, the new Hollywood was more susceptible to corporate influence. The long-term response to the financial crisis of the late 1960s was for the majors to withdraw further from direct involvement in production, concentrate on financing and distribution, and find more ways of hedging their bets over investment. Tax shelter finance became an important source of production funding in the early 1970s when bank capital was more cautious about investment in films, and it probably saved Columbia from collapse. Occasionally two companies would jointly finance a large-scale production, sharing distribution rights. Of greater significance was the practice of pre-selling films to exhibitors by demanding non-refundable guarantees in advance of screenings, passing the loss on unsuccessful blockbusters like A Bridge Too Far (1977) and 1941 (1979) onto the owners of the empty theatres. In mid-decade the majors began to recognize and capitalize on the value of ancillary markets to the point where television sales in particular were commonly negotiated in advance of production, and their revenues taken into account in calculating budgets. Such mechanisms of distributor protection

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*e.g., James Aubrey, former head of CBS-TV, who became President of MGM in 1969; Ted Ashley, former agent at William Morris and founder of the Ashley Famous Agency, who took over production at Warner Bros in 1977; David Begelman, co-founder with Freddie Fields of Creative Management Associates, who became Columbia's production chief in 1973.

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meant that, at least for them, a film might show profit without drawing audiences. Their regular distribution fee, of 30 per cent of rentals, guaranteed them healthy windfall profits on "supergrossers," while also delaying the point at which every film was deemed to have broken even, after which the distributor would have to pay the film's producers a percen- tage of the profits.

Distributors negotiated from a position of strength to ensure their own stability, if necessary at the expense of exhibitors and producers alike. Theatre owners and television companies might have to carry the can for occasional unexpected box-office failures, but producers were more consistently penalized by overhead charges, punitive deductions for going over budget and interest charges while the film was recouping its costs. Although the commonly accepted notional figure for a film breaking even is 2.5 times its negative cost, on occasion distributor manipulation of figures prevented a film declaring profit up to a point well in excess of its notional break-even level. In December 1979 Fox declared that Alien, with a negative cost of $11m, had so far earned $48m in worldwide rentals and was still $2.5m in deficit. The net result of these distributor practices has been a pattern of broadly stable and increasing profitability for all the majors during the decade. By 1980, Ned Tanen, President of Universal Theatrical Pictures, was confident enough in both the certainty of profit and the uncertainty as to how it would be earned to declare,

the business projections we make for each year usually end up correct within one or two percentage points. We end up where we thought we were going to be, but we never, ever get there the way we thought we were going to get there.

Stabilized distribution economics and a mobile corporate bureaucracy are the real legacies of the crisis of the late 1960s, not, whatever Francis Ford Coppola's good intentions, greater freedom for the individual filmmaker.

The dominance of the major distributors suggests that the influence of the smaller production or production-distribution companies has been exaggerated by writers in pursuit of critical genealogies rather than economics. In itself, the Hollywood Renaissance of 1969-71 was an inconsequential event: in search of the profitable youth film and uncertain where to find it, the studios floated independent

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production companies with radical intentions (in particular BBS and Pressman-Williams) by agreeing to distribute their product, and themselves backed a few small-budget first features by young directors. After Easy Rider, these were almost uniformly unsuccessful: the few "anti-Establishment" successes at the turn of the decade were either large-budget productions such as Little Big Man or Carnal Knowledge, or, like Midnight Cowboy and M*A*S*H, were made by older and more established directors.

The illusion of the Hollywood Renaissance has, on the other hand, been of more consequence in formulating the received history of the 1970s, largely because of the allegedly crucial influence of one man, Roger Corman, in sponsoring the first efforts of the majority of directors who attained critical prominence in the rest of the decade. Michael Pye and Linda Myles, in particular, have promoted Corman's centrality to the American cinema of the 1970s, in their book The Movie Brats. His record of success is not to be denied: Bogdanovich, Coppola, Scorsese, Kershner, Nicholson and Wexler all got their breaks via Corman, while his company, New World, was the prototype for Coppola's American Zeotrope, which itself sponsored Lucas. But Corman is (in almost any terms, but particularly economically) a peripheral figure in the film industry. Whatever claims to critical attention he may have, the nature of Corman's low-budget operation inevitably places it outside the orbit of the major companies, on whose omissions and miscalculations it is to a large degree dependent. Like his mentors Sam Arkoff and James B. Nicholson of American International Pictures, Corman's stock-in trade has been the exploitation of otherwise unrequited demand, whether that be as producer of biker movies or as American distributor of Cries and Whispers. His reasons for employing young talent have equally always been economic. Untried directors, actors and crew eager to make their first film are cheaper than seasoned and unionized professionals. AIP, New World and their imitators have largely taken over the function of B-features as the training-ground for talent the majors will later absorb.

Corman's historical importance stems from his commercial success in the period of the majors' greatest insecurity. But his working procedures were not a solution to Hollywood's economic problems, because they did not provide the majors with substantial enough product. In the early 1970s they were prepared to employ anyone, even Russ

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Meyer, who might provide a clue to audience taste. By mid-decade, they had abandoned their scruples and committed themselves to producing and distributing the kind of overtly sensationalist material they had previously avoided, and independents like Corman could not compete in production values with the likes of The Omen and Carrie (both Fox, 1976). With the decline of low-budget production, Corman's critical cultism and his commercial reputation began to ebb.

It may be that the most significant legacy of the brief rise of the exploitation movie in the Hollywood Renaissance was the majors' adoption of exhibition patterns that independents like AIP had been pioneering earlier in the decade. Saturation booking, the simultaneous release of a film into a large number of theatres at the same time, was a standard practice among exploitation filmmakers, whose economics required the rapid recoupment of investment. The majors began experimenting with it in the late 1960s, shortly before they started to use national television advertising. Strategies of this kind greatly increased distribution costs by expanding publicity budgets and print costs. Where in 1960 a maximum of 350 prints of a film might be made, by the late '70s a movie given blockbuster treatment might require as many as 1000 prints. Expenditure on publicity now regularly exceeds a film's negative costs (Fox spent $10. 8 million making Alien, and $15. 7 million advertising it). Such marketing mechanisms, available only to a limited number of films at a time, inevitably reinforce the distributors' blockbuster mentality. The new economics revealed themselves clearly enough in 1971, when the year's top-grossing film, Love Story, earned more money in domestic rentals than the next three highest-grossers combined.

As James Monaco has pointed out, what is notable about this economic strategy is that it is an essentially conservative response to a situation of limited audiences. The increased expenditure on publicity, with its tacit acknowledgment that it is possible to sell a film to the public, provides a further mechanism of distributor control. A low-budget production like American Graffiti may produce phenomenal profits when measured by the ratio of rental income to negative cost (in this case of 5000 per cent). But the decision to sell the film vigorously enough to make such earnings possible lies with the distributors, whose preference remains for the reliable investment. American Graffiti's success bought George Lucas a fourteen-fold increase in budget for his next film, Star Wars, the most remunerative movie in Hollywood

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history. By comparison to American Graffiti, it yielded a mere 1855 per cent profit on investment. But it was a product more satisfactorily geared to the logic of a corporate economics seeking market stability than the much less predictable earnings of Lucas' earlier film. Despite the enormous cash-flow figures of individual films, the blockbuster approach to marketing is, like all distributor mechanisms, designed to guarantee commercial stability rather than maximize profits. In this respect, it is in the grand tradition of Hollywood economics, where a superficial extravagance conceals a fundamental conservatism.

In contrast to the calamities of 1969-71, relatively few blockbusters have failed to cover their negative costs in the later 1970s, given the protection for the distributor provided by exhibitors' advance guarantees. On the other hand, blockbuster economics have a peculiar and apparently cyclical habit of getting out of control. At the outset of the cycle, unexpectedly large profits accrue to one or more films, provoking a wave of imitations formulaically repeating the successful film's attractive "elements." Production and marketing budgets expand in the attempt to produce more of the same, to a point where investment in production exceeds any possibility of recoupment, and companies suffer heavy losses as a result of overproduction. Retrenchment, in the form of limitations on budgets and a drop in the number of films produced, follows until the cycle repeats itself with another spectacular financial success provoking imitation. From the crash of Cleopatra in 1963 the cycle has repeated itself twice, reaching its critical stage in 1969-71 and 1980- 81. The most recent crisis, involving films such as Hurricane (1979), Raise the Titanic (1980), and most notoriously Heaven's Gate (1981) has not, however, been nearly so severe as the previous decade's, because the major distributors have maintained a firmer grip over expenditure, on occasion simply deciding to write off a $22 million investment in the production of Sorcerer (1977) rather than plough an equivalent amount into its promotion. The losses on individual films in 1980-81 were, in any case, occurring in a broadly buoyant market. The crisis was provoked rather by a degree of laxity in the supervision of a number of substantial projects and the box-office failure of a cycle of disaster movies, rather than the complete breakdown of producers' ability to predict public taste. The conservative blockbuster approach, with its commitment to marketing rather than production, remains fundamentally sound.

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To some extent, the differences between the production methods of exploitation movies and the packaging of blockbusters is merely a question of scale. In 1955 AIP was pioneering a process of commodity packaging by constructing a film around a title and an advertising campaign. The Beast from 10,000 Leagues has mutated into American Gigolo, initially constructed around a title and John Travolta (replaced, with a drastic cut in the budget, by Richard Gere). The essential change has been the mutation of the idea ("You bring me an idea, " said Jack Berners. "Things are tight. We can't put a man on salary unless he's got an idea.") into the concept ("That notion of the gigolo as a metaphor for the man who can't receive pleasure hit me and from that moment I had a metaphor that was uniquely representative of that problem.") The heavy emphasis on marketing strategies, combined with the absorption of distribution companies into multimedia conglomerates, has elevated the concept to a central place in contemporary Hollywood construction. Movies no longer exist as autonomous industrial products, but are increasingly manufactured as one item in a multi-media package. Star Wars, with its toys, games and bubble-gum spin-offs, is only the extreme version of the conventional packaging of a concept as film, record, "novelization," and so on. The use of pre-sold source material, in novel or play form, was hardly new in Hollywood, but producer Robert Evans set a precedent when he persuaded the publishers of Love Story to print 25,000 copies of the book by offering $25,000 for its promotion. Integrated and jointly financed promotion campaigns became increasingly the norm in the late 1970s, by which time the hype had become almost an art-form in its own right. The carefully orchestrated publicity campaign for Jaws ensured that the film's release just happened to coincide with widespread reporting of shark sightings around the American coast. Timing in such complex campaigns could be crucial in other areas, too. The disaster for Star Wars had nothing to do with the film. It was in not having the children's toys in the stores in time for Christmas.

This process of multi-media packaging has effectively substituted for the studio in the placement of an individual film. Instead of being part of a balanced cluster of films produced out of the same studio, it has become one of a group of products occupying different places in the media web. Likely to be the most profitable individual element, the status of the movie has nevertheless been diminished by a need for formal compromise with the demands of other

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products. In its construction, its producers have been obliged to consider the possibilities for its exploitation as a series of linked but separate commodites, and to compile their package accordingly.

As Hollywood terminology the package has a more specific meaning relating to the assembly of a production. Stars, script (or concept), and less frequently a director or producer, are "packaged" by a talent agency or an independent producer, and this package is then offered to one of the majors for financial backing or a distribution deal. Apart from its tendency to de-emphasize narrative, such an assembly procedure is no more novel than the pre-sold source, but it is another function formerly performed by the studios and now dispersed among a more amorphous body. Packages can be initiated by a wide variety of sources, and it is contemporary Hollywood folk wisdom that more time and effort is spent in the arrangement of the packages than in the resulting film, the process being made more complicated than previous systems of production by the competing interest of the various individuals involved. As Joan Didion put it in her essay "In Hollywood,"

... to understand whose picture it is one needs to look not particularly at the script but at the deal memo.

She provides an acute analysis of the aesthetics of the deal:

The action itself is the art form, and is described in aesthetic terms: "A very imaginative deal," they say, or, "He writes the most creative deals in the business." ... The action is everything, ... the picture itself is in many ways only the action's by-product.

The deal mentality is the result of uncertainty; many more films obtain money for development costs than go into production, and each individual, to stay in reasonably frequent work, needs to be involved in several projects at the same time in the expectation that one of them will come to fruition. This is particularly true for independent producers, whose income generally comes from profits rather than project development money, and who must therefore gamble on as many deals as he or she can keep going. Deal psychology has also facilitated--as well as in part being caused

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by--the predominance of agents in contemporary production. The speculative and negotiating skills needed by the producer as deal-maker have much more in common with those of the talent agent than they do with the organizational and financial abilities required by a studio producer. Since the deal was inaugurated by Arthur Krim and Robert Benjamin of United Artists in 1951, the dividing line between agent and producer has become ever thinner, and the occasions on which the agent has become the producer more common. The most grandiose version of this occurred in 1962, when MCA was forced by the Department of Justice to abandon its talent agency activities and took over Universal, but the list of former agents who have become producers or heads of production is almost endless, and it is these figures who supply and maintain the deal mentality, and the insecurity it breeds.

While Didion's recognition of the substantial irrelevance of the final product to the processes of its packaging is further evidence of the New Hollywood's narcissism and incoherence, it should not in itself be seen as evidence of a decline. Packaging is no more detrimental to film production than the modes of organization it has replaced; those, like James Monaco and Pauline Kael, who insist on seeing it as such have essentially failed to recognize that Hollywood never existed to make films, but rather to make people go to the movies. Like the studio system, the goal of packaging is the production of entertainment; like the studio system, packaging functions as an arrangement for reducing emphasis on the role of the content in what is being sold. The logic of media conglomeration has widened the marketplace in which the product is sold. It is now as tangibly on offer in book- and toy-stores as it is in movie theatres. In the process, its nature has changed.

The aesthetics of the deal have combined curiously with the critical enhancement of the director's status to produce, in the work of Spielberg, Lucas, De Palma and Milius, films which at the same time demonstrate a "personal cinema" through their mannerisms and operate the mechanistic structures that James Monaco has aptly identified as those of an "entertainment machine," much less concerned than earlier movies with telling their audience a story. Repeated assertions that the story is seldom a central element in deal-making indicate the extent to which narrative has been dethroned. Steven Spielberg suggests,

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What interests me more than anything else is the idea. If a person can tell me the idea in twenty-five words or less, it's going to make a pretty good movie.

But it is unlikely to be a film in which narrative reaches any great level of complexity, something which is clearly true of all Spielberg's films, which comprise situations allowing for plenty of spectacle but little plot development.

The speed with which narrative declined as a force in the movies in the 1970s may be indicated by looking at the decade's one contribution to Hollywood's repertoire of genres, the disaster film. Disaster movies are contemporary, debased epics, but more importantly they represent the archetypal package vehicle, the instrument the majors found for spending their money on predictably appealing spectacle. As a genre, they share neither an iconographic nor a narrative consistency, but rather an assembly of elements: stars in emotional conflict, sustained in crisis by a physically restricting situation. Airport, the first success of the disaster cycle, established a conventional pattern by which the audience is attached to the narrative by its concern for individual characters. Later variants overtly dislocated the competing elements that Airport successfully held in tension. Airport and its sequels maintain a linear (if circular) narrative: the survival of its characters is attached to the fate of the aircraft. All of them survive or perish together, however big or small their billing. The Poseidon Adventure (1973) is much more selective. Not only does its situation manage to dispose of all the minor characters (they are drowned en masse minutes into the film), but it also permits spectacle to be detached from any plot obligation. Random incident determines the fate of individual characters: Shelley Winters has a heart attack, Stella Stevens falls into a burning oil slick. Since the plot itself cannot develop--either some or all of these characters will survive or they won't--relations between characters are required to fill in the gaps between the film's spectacular occurrences. Because the situation supplies them with so little to sustain dialogue ("how do we get out of here?", "Where do we go next?") and the need to make the right choice to stay in the movie, they have to talk about something else. Hence the amount of time given over to discussing how fat Winters is, and the unprovoked belligerent exchanges between Gene Hackman and Ernest Borgnine.

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The result is an overt and unintegrated application of sentiment, most apparent in Winters when for no good reason she remarks to her husband, Jack Albertson, "Manny, how long is it since we told each other I love you?" At her death she repeats the same function with a more explicitly symbolic purpose, as she gives Hackman the Jewish sign for Life she has brought for her grandson. Separable incidents such as these provide an arbitrary and imposed meaning for the action, which otherwise remains spectacularly independent of significance.

Irwin Allen's next production, The Towering Inferno (1974, Fox and Warner Bros, a package assembled by Creative Management Associates), carries the process further, eliminating narrative altogether and substituting a game pattern of random incident and problem-solving for its characters. The film's introduction establishes a number of potentally complex character relationships with a thematic issue, mainly revolving around the complicity of William Holden and Richard Chamberlain in the breaching of safety codes. These are hastily abandoned once the fire breaks out, and are used instead to confirm characters' positions. Chamberlain becomes the film's bad guy, Holden's moral ambiguity is simply forgotten in the confusion. Where in The Alamo the survivors represent the hope of the future, the best Holden can offer by way of moral summary at the end of The Towering Inferno is, "All I can do is pray to God that I can stop this from ever happening again." The film operates the mechanisms of earlier narrative forms--Jennifer Jones' cat becomes a sentimental object embodying loss when O. J. Simpson gives it to Fred Astaire at the end--but operates them detached from a continuous narrative. The film is a series of disconnected exchanges between characters interrupted by the spectacle of the fire. Its packaging revolves round its situation and its consortium of stars. Characters are paired off in the introduction, offering a multiplicity of separate stories which the film may or may not choose to develop. The quantity on offer permits the film to dispose of some of them at random: Robert Wagner's clandestine affair with Susan Flannery ends abruptly when they become the first victims of the fire; Jennifer Jones arbitrarily falls to her death. Any character or story is available for sacrifice without disrupting the spectacle, and the only guarantee for survival is star status. By the same token, individual

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scenes operate as separate and complete units in themselves, unconnected to the rest of the film. Paul Newman, Jones and two children spent ten minutes negotiating a demolished staircase, an incident quite detached from events occurring elsewhere and getting them, literally, nowhere. Immediately after wards they discover their route down is barred, and have to climb up again.

The film revolves around creating incidents engineered by an arbitrary chance, such as the cement which blocks the door into the party room. No adequate explanation is offered for its presence, no justification required except that it provides grounds for another scene. Its placement is as fortuitous as that of the wall-light which Newman uses as a foothold to climb up to the pipeshaft in the same scene. Instead of seeking narrative continuity, the film is constructed like a set, with each group of characters isolated in their own area. What provides its coherence is not any sense of continuity or character development (the characters actually get simpler as the film progresses, and moral status is finally reduced to how well each character behaves when he or she stands in line for the bosun's chair, but the performances of its stars. Richard Dyer has commented on the importance of the stable camera and the stars' charisma in making the audience secure as they witness a disaster, but the stars' performances have another function as well. They--particularly Newman and McQueen, but also Holden--are the only sources of coherence in a film whose content is concerned with collapse, destruction, and deconstruction. Against this, the stars fulfillment of their industrial, commercial function directs the film away from a concern with loss, death, pain and money to a celebration of its performers, whose presence is necessary to justify and explain away everything else in the film. The audience witness performance as they witness spectacle, and since neither proposes causal relationships between consecutive events, they must accept arbitrariness in the film's plot progression.

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The impression of arbitrariness in the reporting of disaster reinforces the arbitrary quality of experience itself, and the absence of continuity in the coverage of events, as today's crisis yields to a new and unrelated crisis tomorrow, adds to the sense of historical discontinuity--the sense of living in a world in which the past holds out no guidance to the present and the future has become completely unpredictable.

Although Christopher Lasch's remarks are primarily directed against the news media, they apply equally to the narrative structures of packaged blockbusters. A variety of psycho-sociological explanations for the disaster movie phenomenon have been offered, and they can readily enough be identified as part of a larger conglomeration of films (including the science fiction packages which replaced them and horror films) which explore the bourgeois American hero's confrontation with the Unknown. This general emphasis seems at first sight almost too easy to identify as a significant cinematic response to the circumstances of the 1970s. Specifying what provokes such heroic insecurity is, however, rather more difficult, particularly in a critical climate dominated by psychosexual interpretations (the shark in Jaws as both phallus and vagina dentata). What has been less frequently pointed out is the aptness of the disaster movie as a metaphor for the film industry's own situation. Faced, at the beginning of the decade, with economic catastrophe and un- certainty about audience demand, Hollywood responded by abandoning the structures of narrative continuity that had previously served it so well, and inaugurating a cycle of speculative investments in disaster in which the only security, for audience and industry alike, came from star performances. The Unknown in these films is not merely contained in their content, but also in the way they are put together out of separable elements. Later variants of the package took the phenomenon to even greater extremes. Close Encounters of the Third Kind makes no attempt to connect its scenes or explain itself. As a narrative it is incomprehensible, as a story it spends two-and-a-half hours getting to the point at which a 1950s science fiction movie would begin. The Unknown in the American cinema of the 1970s is, more than anything else, a matter of narrative structure, a question of what commercial cinema should do if it is not to tell stories. Both the initial problem and its apparent solution came from the new instrument of consensus, television.

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[357] American Graffiti might more conventionally be described as nostalgic, but nostalgia is only a form of fantasy. Nostalgia consists in a particular relation to history, in which objects are displaced from their material context in time and relocated in another framework detached from their original position. American Graffiti is no more set in 1962 than Star Wars is set "In a distant galaxy long long ago and far far away." It is set in 1973, fixed there by the style of its images and performances, and creates a fantastic version of Modesto, California by its nostalgic consumption of objects loosely belonging to the period it claims to represent. Nostalgia collapses into sentiment in the film's last shot, when it arbitrarily attempts to revise itself by entering history with a deterministic account of its characters' subsequent lives. The nature of the film is suddenly and drastically changed. Instead of remaining within the safe space of the fantasy movie, where privileged characters can produce non-causal performances, it suddenly claims that this night has been a formative experience, a dramaturgy which will lead to change in the external world. Curt escapes the closed world which will kill John and stifle Steve (Ron Howard) by going to college and becoming a writer in Canada, presumably to escape the draft. In a vestige of the liberal tradition, Terry the Toad (Charlie Martin Smith) is killed in Vietnam because he is physically inept with a motor scooter.

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Nostalgia has pervaded the American cinema of the 1970s as a leitmotif of narrative uncertainty. In the films of Dick Richards, for example, it seems as if the authenticity of the costumes and the labels on the tin cans is used as a substitute for coherent story development. The Culpepper Cattle Company (1972) resolves itself by a familiar device in films which make some initial attempt to reconsider the presuppositions of their genre. It collapses into generic conventionality, with the bad guys developing consciences and saving the wagon train. The same strategy of collapse can be found in Coma's (1978; dir. Michael Crighton) abandonment of its assertive heroine (Genevieve Bujold) and in the gradual conversion of Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974; dir. Martin Scorsese) from a film about Ellen Burstyn's independence into a "woman's picture." At the beginning of the film, she and her neighbor fantasize about Robert Redford. At the end, she gets Kris Kristofferson.

Another of Richards' contributions to the decade's generic nostalgia, Farewell My Lovely (1975), offers an alternative response in employing the insecurities of film noir. The investigative narrative and its archetypal heroes, the private eye and the journalist, emerged in 1974 as figures for post-Watergate fictions. Their heroic status was compromised by their inability to bring their narratives to a successful resolution (Chinatown, The Parallax View); instead, the films beguiled their audiences with the notion that the central characters were as confused about the plot as they were. The employment of noir fixtures was a self-conscious justification for narrative confusion. The audience was presented with a recognizable terrain inhabited by objects and lighting codes remembered from earlier films, and this evocation of displaced objects directed attention away from plot to the image and the central performances of bewilderment and uncertainty.

The resort to nostalgic conventions and the unconvinced re-enactment of generic patterns is indicative of the more general collapse of temporal coherence in films of the 1970s. Wherever else in American culture the sense of historical continuity has come under attack, Hollywood has measured its deterioration in the growing failure to construct coherent linear narratives. Temporal connection, the primary tool of narrative causality, has been increasingly abandoned in favor of structures that declare their incoherence. Dog Soldiers (1978; dir. Karel Reisz) is in many respects (its presentation of space for example) notable for the old-

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fashioned conventionality of its construction. But it makes no attempt to place its characters in time, either historically (the film might be set in 1971 like the book on which it is based, or it might not), or in their movements from scene to scene. Instead, there is an assumption of simultaneity: the audience is forced to assume that the disparate events affecting the two principal characters occur at more or less the same time if it is to construct a comprehensible narrative sequence--a task which the film passively declares is not its responsibility. As it progresses, Dog Soldiers degenerates into a chase movie and its central conception of splitting the post-Vietnam American hero into two individually inadequate and mutually dependent characters collapses. By the climax both have become capable of heroic action, the motivation for which remains inaccessible to the audience, since neither character has previously offered a rationale for his actions. Ray (Nick Nolte) declares at one point, "I don't always have to have a reason for the shit I do," and the unmodulated performances of both Nolte and Michael Moriarty provide the spectator with no evidence of their motivations.

Where the American cinema of the consensus developed its mechanisms of construction around a requirement to produce narratives that were rigid in their linear determinism, the cinema of disintegration has commonly abandoned the attempts to tell stories at all, providing rather a sequence of events arbitrarily connected by the fact of their being edited together. From this the audience may construct as much of a story as they feel capable of. This loss of confidence in the ability to construct a sequential narrative time reveals itself most clearly in a reluctance to provide an ending. Star Wars does not just announce that it is not set in the conventionally remote future of science fiction but in the distant past. At its end it declares that it is the fourth episode in a series of nine.

More normally, Hollywood's recent products have refused to provide a sense of resolution in their conclusion, and have abandoned their central protagonists to an ambiguous fate. Gene Hackman seems particularly prone to this discomfiture. In Night Moves (1975; dir. Arthur Penn), he is left wounded in a disabled boat which describes circles in an otherwise empty ocean. The Conversation (1974; dir. francis Ford Coppola) closes with him playing the saxophone in the apartment he has just demolished. While the conclusion of Penn's film is clearly open to metaphorical interpre-

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tation, the end of The Conversation is merely ambiguous, available to signify anything. Coppola is notorious for the difficulty he has in ending his films, Apocalypse Now (1979) being merely the most spectacular and extravagant example. But the reluctance of Hollywood's contemporary self-conscious auteurs to provide endings which locate the meaning of their films is remarkably consistent. One might argue that the ambiguity of the final "God Bless America" sequence of Michael Cimino's The Deerhunter (1978) is an economic necessity, since a film which refuses to declare its attitude to American involvement in Vietnam is a safer box-office bet than one which does. One might argue that it allows the audience a choice of interpretation, or that it reflects the ambivalence of American response to the war. What it undoubtedly does do is to leave the film open as a text for an endless critical game-playing over its ideological implications, which may well guarantee Cimino's dubious status as an auteur simply by the weight of paper devoted to him. As part of a more general tendency, the contemporary emphasis on an aesthetics of performance would suggest that, since "Robert De Niro is The Deerhunter," whatever Robert De Niro does has the support of the film.

The privileging of performance which is so consistent a feature of the Hollywood product in itself disrupts the temporal continuity of a causal narrative. In performance structures, what a performer does at the end of his or her routine is no more significant than what he or she has done at any other point. The openness of Altman's (or, to a lesser extent, Coppola's) films to almost infinite restructuring is evidence of this, and endorses the argument that a fixity of meaning simply is not present in these inherently incomplete texts. By not telling a story (but rather offering several incomplete stories for the spectator to choose from), such films cannot be said to occupy narrative time. It is, then, hardly surprising that so little of the American cinema of the 1970s has concerned itself with an investigation of temporal structure, preferring instead to abandon time as a fictive concern either by the resort to nostalgia or by making narrative construction entirely the responsibility of the audience.

One of the few consistent exceptions to this general practice has been Sam Peckinpah's reassessment of the primary cinematic myths of America. Peckinpah's critical neglect during the decade has been curious: dismissed for his apparent political conservatism and misogyny and condemned for his depiction of violence, Peckinpah has never-

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theless conducted the most complex revision of cinematic temporal structures since Welles (or perhaps Griffith), and provided a functioning solution to the problem of joining inside and outside while operating firmly within the new post-television aesthetic. Peckinpah's films, however pessimistic their thematic conclusions might be, present some of the few coherent discussions of the pervasive phenomenon of incoherence in the contemporary American cinema and, contrary to most critical assumption, reconsider the problematic nature of heroism in a universe where morality can no longer be straightforwardly attached to physical decorum.

His early films (up to The Getaway, 1972) play on the extent to which their central characters exist as heroic outsiders because of their opposition to temporal progress. One advertising slogan for The Wild Bunch (1969) was, "The land had changed. They hadn't." It was equally applicable to the two gunfighters in Ride the High Country, Tyreen in Major Dundee, Cable Hogue and Junior and Ace Bonner. Usually aging men running out of space in which to act because time (progress) has made them redundant, Peckinpah's early heroes engage in some futile, romantic, and usually fatal gesture of rebellion, a sub-Hemingway stance which has clung as firmly to Peckinpah's public persona as it once did to John Huston's.

His later films, however, have questioned the traditional mechanisms of heroism. His central characters lack moral certainty, and they are also deprived of the guarantee of heroic status their performances might bring them elsewhere. Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) does not concern itself primarily with Billy, whose mythic status is secure before the film begins, and who has nothing to achieve except its confirmation by his death. Instead Peckinpah concentrates attention on Garrett, who falls victim to the moral incompatibility of his desire to survive to be "rich, old and grey" and his need for individual independence. As a mythic force, Billy remains immune from narrative pressure, a situation reinforced by the industrial status of Kristofferson's performance. His physical movement is unaffected by the events of the film, and he relaxes into a separable activity of role-playing which represents both Billy the Kid and Kris Kristofferson, country-rock star. By contrast, James Coburn demonstrates his entrapment within the narrative, and his vulnerability to historical processes by becoming stiffer and more pained in his movements as the film progresses. Garrett's tragedy lies in his gradual discovery that a pro-

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fessional commitment to a linear course of action guarantees neither the loyalty and respect of his corporate employers nor the moral endorsement of the film and its spectators.

Peckinpah's subsequent films all assume the moral vacuum Garrett discovers. Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974), The Killer Elite (1975) and Cross of Iron (1977) occupy an anarchic terrain in which betrayal is endemic and heroism is inevitably compromised. Their central characters all function within a framework which assumes that their personal objectives will prove incompatible with those of the larger external forces which have determined the circumstances the film presents. For the protagonists, any action is permissible in the quest for survival, from the mutilation of a corpse to the murder of a child, but such figures can no longer hope for the sympathy of their audience. Nor, increasingly, do they seek it; Steiner (James Coburn) has no attachments to anything outside his platoon, and no rationale for his behavior except survival in what he describes to the Russian boy they take prisoner as No Man's Land. None of the characters in Cross of Iron enact positions which the audience can endorse, since the conventional yardsticks of morality by which they might be judged are not contained within the film. Steiner's brutal laughter, which closes the film over images of dead children, is an acceptance of the arbitrariness of the war the film depicts, and of the film's depiction of it.

Peckinpah's films match their deconstruction of moral certainty with an equally deliberate deconstruction of the spatial and temporal certainties within which such a moral certainty might exist. The films realize the condition of arbitrariness rather than merely depicting it, and force the audience to experience the condition of their characters by paralleling the characters' moral situation with the physical, perceptual situation of the audience. At its broadest, this process is signalled by Garcia's beginning and ending on a frozen frame: cinematic time is displayed as an arbitrary construct, which the film is free to play with as it wishes, and which the audience must simply endure acceptingly. Where, in his earlier films, Peckinpah employed slow motion to render ambiguous the spectator's response to a brutal action by revealing its grace, his later films employ it to reveal the arbitrariness with which the film travels through the gate of the projector. Slow motion ceases to indicate a significant event, as it did in The Wild Bunch, but rather to divert the audience's attention to incidental

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physical trajectories, such as the arc described by the spent shells ejected from a sub-machine gun. Peckinpah repeatedly demonstrates the moral incompatibility of cause and effect; Cross of Iron returns again and again to intercut shots of explosions and artillery shells being ejected. This is a description of process, established by a kind of angle-reverse angle cutting, but one which is only made possible by the recognition that the cinema constructs its space according to unique laws which enforce a relation between two consecutive images.

As juxtaposition constructs significant space, it also enforces temporal progression. The tank battle in Cross of Iron enacts in microcosm the narrative process of Garcia. The sequence begins with a series of static shots of the Russian tanks, cut together in an accelerating montage which animates the tanks themselves into movement. The film constructs not only its own moral landscape, but also its own momentum, which arbitrarily obliges or interrupts the movement of its characters. Peckinpah's aesthetic is constructed around the acknowledgment that the American cinema of the 1970s can place any two shots together and create an arbitrary meaning through the creation of an arbitrary space and time. It is an aesthetic that makes no concessions to the audience, who are offered fewer and fewer positions they may comfortably adopt, either spatially, temporally, or ethically. In Cross of Iron, the spectator becomes a redundant witness to a process completely out of his or her control.

In Peckinpah's films, the audience's only recourse is to a morality external to the film itself. In this deliberate anarchy is the most coherent statement of the endemic incoherence of contemporary American cinema. The collapse of consensual structures has led the American film into an apparently unavoidable oppositional stance to the primary source of consensus, television. The best hope it has offered has been the suggestion that it is possible to survive a disaster movie, but the heroic status of survivors, from Travis Bickle to Rolf Steiner, is uncertain to say the least. Even the most closely argued of these films oblige the audience to keep a distance from the screen which threatens them. The juvenile attempts at consensus via a conservative engagement in fantasy have merely produced a reactionary cinema of escapism that re-enacts Hollywood's simplest generic and heroic archetypes without the context that once gave them meaning. The more complex articulations of Coppola or Altman limit them

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selves by their exclusion of the audience, and their refusal to offer a fixed meaning. The nihilism of this response achieves its most deliberate formulation in the anarchy of Peckinpah's world

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INTERLUDE

THE MULTIPLE REVISIONIST AND THE DETACHED
NARCISSIST: DON SIEGEL AND CLINT EASTWOOD

The increasingly provisional nature of cinematic structures in contemporary Hollywood in many respects echoes the practices of the filmmakers of Dissent. In interviews, Scorsese is fond of declaring that his tracking shots borrow from Fuller's. But the disintegration of consensus has eliminated the context in which Fuller might register his dissent through his mobile camera, leaving only the empty form for Scorsese to imitate.