Hollywood at the Intersection of Race and Identity

Delia Malia Caparoso Konzett

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780813599311
• eBook ISBN: 9780813599335
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Hollywood at the Intersection of Race and Identity explores the ways Hollywood represents race, gender, class, and nationality at the intersection of aesthetics and ideology and its productive tensions. This collection of essays asks to what degree can a close critical analysis of films, that is, reading them against their own ideological grain, reveal contradictions and tensions in Hollywood's task of erecting normative cultural standards? How do some films perhaps knowingly undermine their inherent ideology by opening a field of conflicting and competing intersecting identities? The challenge set out in this volume is to revisit well-known films in search for a narrative not exclusively constituted by the Hollywood formula and to answer the questions: What lies beyond the frame? What elements contradict a film's sustained illusion of a normative world? Where do films betray their own ideology and most importantly what intersectional spaces of identity do they reveal or conceal?

PART 1 HOLLYWOOD FORMULAS

Codes, Masks, Genre, and Minstrelsy

1 • DAYDREAMS OF SOCIETY

Class and Gender Performances in the Cinema of the Late 1910s

RUTH MAYER

Intersectional theory’s insistence that the structures of social distinction and identification are entangled and overdetermined not only has left its mark on social and cultural analyses but also has affected the debates of film and media studies. Obviously, the insight that race, class, gender, age, ability, and other categories of inequality draw upon each other in complicated ways and cannot be reduced to the logic of binary distinctions bears promising implications for any approach concerned with social and cultural meaning making. With regard to the history of film, the conceptual metaphor of an expansive network of distinctions and interactions that organizes intersectional theory not only reverberates with the productivity of genre, as Janet Staiger has pointed out,¹ but may also serve to identify the ways in which difference and diversity are being enacted visually and spatially. As this essay shows, in the late 1910s, at a key period of industrial and mass-cultural mobilization, films envision class and gender negotiations in settings and plots that highlight very concrete crossings in space and time. They use visual and narrative structures of coincidence, simultaneity, parallelism, or correspondence to explore the possibilities that contemporary conceptualizations of class and gender yield.

To focus on such structures may also help to contribute to a reinterpretation of the period itself. The 1910s, the so-called transitional era between early film and the Hollywood system, have been traditionally seen in terms of linear direction and technical, formal, and narrative progression. In keeping with such a directed reading of history, film studies tended to approach the late 1910s as the end of transition and the beginning of a long period of stylistic consolidation and perfection that the cinema of the teens prepared and envisioned. More recently, this idea of a smooth development from early to classical film has been contested.² Ben Singer characterized the transitional period in terms of “a complex dynamic process in which disparate forces—competing paradigms and practices—overlap and interact.”³ He is thus taking recourse to a set of markers that also feature prominently in the lexicon of intersectional theory—and this conceptualization of film history in terms of competitive trends, dead ends, loops, and parallel tracks seems to capture the dynamic of development beyond the 1910s much better than the image of the ascending (or descending) line. The films of the late 1910s that I discuss may be more sophisticated than earlier films in their narration and technical realization, but they by no means abandon the spirit of trial and error that has been made out as the dominant principle of the transitional period.

This feature manifests itself on the level of style as well as in the films’ plots and character mapping. While cinema has always been a vat filled with a highly volatile and instable mix of ingredients, by the late teens its capacity to juggle narrative formulas, viewer expectations, ideological agendas, and technological innovation has reached an unprecedented momentum. By then, what James Snead has identified as cinema’s “polymorphic perverse oscillation between possible roles, creating a radically broadened freedom of identification” had become a refined mechanism, particularly with respect to the invocation and cross-referencing of ideologically precarious categories of social distinction.⁴ I take my cue from recent critical observations on how such categories inadvertently change their shape and function through the indirect and allusive usage of genre conventions, formulaic storytelling, or the star system.⁵ All of these frames impact on the ways in which narratives are received and interpreted, but their processing and recognition in turn depend heavily on factors of personal or social identification. How an instance of genre crossing, the employment of a narrative convention, or a casting decision is recognized and read hinges heavily, after all, on a spectator’s cultural horizon, value system, degree of information, and awareness of all sorts of subtle implications, submerged messages, or unacknowledged biases.

This mode of reception corresponds with Siegfried Kracauer’s assessment of the films of a slightly later period of time as the “daydreams of society, in which its actual reality comes to the fore and its otherwise repressed wishes take on form.”⁶ The daydream expresses a particularly pregnant reflection of possibilities, disclosing options and opportunities, figurations and formations next to, above, or underneath the real. The daydream is about things that might have been or may still come about, about variations and versions, roads that were not taken, decisions that are still open, hunches that were ignored or misinterpreted. These are the worlds of the cinema, and in the films of the late teens they tend to be displayed in their fictional and fictionalizing character: as stories told from the vantage point of the “what if.” In what follows I focus on the popular narratives of masquerades of class in the films of the late 1910s. What if he was the master and not the butler? What if they were our servants rather than our friends? What if one could just disappear? Of course, none of these stories can be told on the grounds of a symbolic repertory of social status, financial assets, habitus, and class conditioning alone; they call up, inadvertently or explicitly, the conceptualization of race and ethnicity, of sexuality and gender, of ability and age.

The cinematic ecology of the late 1910s in the United States seems to exemplify the intuition of intersectionality that the processes and principles of identification and identity formation overlap and interfere with each other. In particular, the assumption that categories of exclusion and distinction take effect simultaneously but unevenly resonates strongly with the filmic enactment of difference and diversity, as we shall see. With regard to film, the simultaneous operation of all sorts of identifying factors and forces has to be addressed in the context of other features of temporal organization: duration and instantaneity, routines and ruptures, regularity, acceleration, belatedness, and, perhaps most importantly, given the predominance of the daydream mode, the mise-en-abîme that figures forth simultaneous but bracketed events that reflect a larger order brokenly, as inversions or miniatures or distorted reflections. The fantasy of a time out is particularly pertinent for a cinematic system that responded to “the mastery of time and space by new technologies” by establishing “flexible but systematic spatial and temporal relations” in its own right, as Tom Gunning writes about the transitional era.⁷ In the films that I analyze, the interlinkage of larger temporal regimes and smaller framed temporal orders is addressed when exceptional situations effect the temporary inversion, suspension, or rupture of regular routines and social relations. During the time out, categories of identification and distinction are no less entangled than in their routine operation, but they enter into either disturbing or exhilarating new combinations that highlight their constructedness—although not necessarily their changeability.

I argue my case with close attention to three films: All Night (dir. Paul Powell, 1918), Male and Female (dir. Cecil B. DeMille, 1919), and The Whispering Chorus (dir. Cecil B. DeMille, 1918). All three films engage with the implications of social mobility and fluctuation of status and identity as means of coming to terms with change. In all of them particular attention is afforded to a subject position that is often assumed to be the least affected by intersectional dynamics: the white male middle-class perspective. Male and Female and The Whispering Chorus are social dramas, while All Night is a comedy, which gives me a chance to explore a range of generic procedures and techniques. Like many others of the period, these films enact identity performances as a means of reflecting their own medial status and with close reference to the larger transformations characterizing modernity.

TO BE LOOKED AT: ALL NIGHT

If one goes by the plot synopses of All Night and Male and Female, the films seem to address and expose the regimes of class. All Night enacts the scenario of a surprise visit of a potential financier to Maude and Bill Harcourt, a society couple with money problems, who just happened to have fired all of their servants. They decide to have a couple of (unmarried but courting) friends take over their role as master and mistress, and to pose as their own servants (“Since we know the house, we can manage easily!”). Male and Female tells a similar story in the guise of social drama: here the master/servant constellation is turned around when a family of British aristocrats on a yachting trip gets stranded on a lonely island together with their servants. In this wild and uncultivated world, the butler quickly becomes the master and king of the community, to whom all others are eager to cater. The film ends in the shipwrecked party’s rescue and the restitution of the old order—which prompts the butler and maid to emigrate to the American West.

Clearly, these stories gesture to the vagaries of social rank and the arbitrary distinctions of power and submission imposed by class. It is all the more surprising, then, to see that neither film makes much of this theme. While All Night is much more concerned with generational difference and sexuality than with class, Male and Female projects the issues of class difference onto a complicated matrix of historical and geographical references. In consequence, differences are not so much effaced or suspended but rather shifted around, transposed. Especially gender and sexuality flare up as issues of contention in a manner that inadvertently highlights these factors’ interlinkage in an intricate layout that is made out as horizontal, spread out rather than hierarchical. As an effect, social roles are enacted in close conjunction and interdependence—as part of an expansive grid of interlinked factors. If you change around one, everything else shifts in accordance. But eventually, this brings about stability, not disruption.

All Night stars Rudolph Valentino before his stellar career in the 1920s—and as an ethnically nonmarked character. The part also differs starkly in other respects from Valentino’s later signature roles: he is a comedic figure, characterized as shy, sexually inexperienced, and easily cowed. The film’s title refers to the exceptional and bracketed situation that is brought about when the visiting sponsor spontaneously decides to spend the night rather than just staying for dinner. It also signals to a second story line that explains the friends’ presence in the Harcourts’ home: Maude Harcourt (Mary Warren) had arranged a dinner party for her friends Dick Thayer, played by Valentino, and Beth Lane (Carmel M...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: Hollywood Formulas: Codes, Masks, Genre, and Minstrelsy
• Part II: Genre and Race in Classical Hollywood
• Part III: Race and Ethnicity in Post–World War II Hollywood
• Part IV: Intersectionality, Hollywood, and Contemporary Popular Culture
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Index