Creating the Couple

Love, Marriage, and Hollywood Performance

Virginia Wright Wexman

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780691015354
  9780691069692
• eBook ISBN:
  9780691238180
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Who decides how, when, and where Americans fall in love and get married? Virginia Wexman's acute observations about movie stars and acting techniques show that Hollywood has often had the most powerful voice in demonstrating socially sanctioned ways of becoming a couple. Until now serious film critics have paid little attention to the impact of performance styles on American romance, and have often treated "patriarchy," "sexuality," and the "couple" as monolithic and unproblematic concepts. Wexman, however, shows how these notions have been periodically transformed in close association with the appearance, behavior, and persona of the stars of films such as The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, Way Down East, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Sunset Boulevard, On the Waterfront, Nashville, House of Games, and Do the Right Thing.


The author focuses first on the way in which traditional marriage norms relate to authorship (the Griffith-Gish collaboration) and genre (John Wayne and the Western). Looking at male and female stardom in terms of the development of "companionate marriage," she discusses the love goddess and the impact of method acting on Hollywood's ideals of maleness. Finally she considers the recent breakdown of the ideal of monogamous marriage in relation to Hollywood's experimentation with self-reflexive acting styles. Creating the Couple is must reading for film scholars and enthusiasts, and it will fascinate everyone interested in the changing relationships of men and women in modern culture.

ROMANTIC LOVE, CHANGING MARRIAGE NORRIS, AND STARS RS BEHAVIORAL MODELS

Undirected by culture patterns—organized systems of significant symbols—mans behavior would be virtually ungovernable, a mere chaos of pointless acts and exploding emotions, his experience virtually shapeless.

—CLIFFORD GEERTZ, The Interpretation of Culture

The deployment of sexuality has its reasons for being, not in reproducing itself, but in proliferating, innovating, annexing, creating, and penetrating bodies in an increasingly detailed way and in controlling population in an increasingly comprehensive way.

—MICHEL FOUCAULT, The History of Sexuality

Are not two loves essentially individual, hence incommensurable, and thus don’t they condemn the partners to meet only at a point infinitely remote? Unless they commune through a third party: ideal, god, hallowed group . . .

—JULIA KRISTEVA, “In Praise of Love”

IN THEIR MONUMENTAL STUDY The Classical Hollywood Cinema, David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson have calculated that 85 percent of all Hollywood films made before 1960 have romance as their main plot, and 95 percent have romance as either the main plot or a secondary plot. This empirical data corroborates a commonly held perception: in most Hollywood films, romantic love is a major concern. As in contemporary American culture generally, romantic love in Hollywood has traditionally been seen as properly culminating in marriage; thus, these movies are overwhelmingly preoccupied with what received Hollywood wisdom knows as its most reliable formula: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl. Raymond Bellour has called this convention “the creation of the couple” and has identified it as a pattern that “organizes, indeed constitutes, the classical American cinema as a whole” (“Alternation” 88).

Hollywood’s emphasis on courtship and romantic love is a function of the movies’ place within American—and indeed world—culture as a commercial enterprise based on the concept of mass entertainment. With its orientation toward box-office receipts and elaborate promotional strategies, Hollywood has positioned itself as a social institution. In the past, scholars have sometimes defended film as an art by celebrating the survival of the director’s personal vision in the face of these commercial demands. Creatively ambitious filmmakers have often fostered this view by arguing that the “love interest” in their films is the result of the influence of crassly commerical producers and studio executives, who have thereby compromised the development of more “significant” themes.¹ However, such an opposition between “art” and “commerce” need not form the basis of critical interest in popular cinema, for it can also be claimed that Hollywood film is important because it constitutes a significant cultural practice, the conventions of which are related to the way we live. A close reading of filmic texts can be carried out against the background of American social history.

Raymond Williams has distinguished this approach to art as a practice from the more traditional view of it as a set of cultural objects. “The relationship between the making of a work of art and its reception is always active, and subject to conventions which in themselves are forms of (changing) social organization and relationship,” Williams writes, “and this is radically different from the production and consumption of an object” (389). Terry Eagle ton expands on this description of art as cultural practice when he defines it as “forms of activity inseparable from the wider social relations between writers and reader, orators and audience, [filmmakers and spectators,] inseparable from the wider social purposes and conditions in which they [are] embedded” (Literary Theory 206). Such an approach understands Hollywood filmmaking as an activity that occupies a position in contemporary culture analogous to the place that ritual occupies in more primitve societies. Anthropologist Victor Turner has characterized such ritualistic functions as follows: “When we act in everyday life we do not merely re-act to indicative stimuli, we act in frames we have wrested from the genres of cultural performance” (From Ritual to Theatre 122).

In a society in which the choice of marriage partners is, in theory at least, completely free, marriage patterns will be influenced by cultural institutions. As Pierre Bourdieu has argued: “The constraints surrounding every matrimonial choice are so tremendous and appear in such complex combinations that the individuals involved cannot possibly deal with them consciously, even if they have mastered them on a different level.” Bourdieu’s term for this largely unconscious level of social patterning is habitus. “[Marriage] strategies are the product of habitus,” he writes, “meaning the practical mastery of a small number of implicit principles that have spawned their own pattern, although they are not based on obedience to any formal rules” (“Marriage Strategies” 141). Hollywood film, which has traditionally been addressed primarily to young people, can be seen as an institution that aids in the formation of such a habitus by modeling appropriate courtship behavior.²

Theories of Marriage and Romantic Love

To point to Hollywood’s obsession with stories of romantic love tells us little if we are unable to specify a more precise meaning for the concept of love itself. Romantic love has, in fact, been the subject of widely diverse discussions conducted by philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists, among others. I will not attempt to digest the vast outpouring of material on this topic that has been produced by scholars in all these fields—not to mention the thousands of popular books on the subject. Instead, in what follows I will confine myself to considering a representative selection of diverse arguments about love so as to define my own approach in relation to some of the major traditions that now prevail.

Though philosophers from Plato onward have been fascinated by the subject of love, their concerns are typically both too abstract and too judgmental to be of much use for the kind of sociologically oriented investigation that I have engaged to undertake here. To cite a recent example, in The Modern Age, the last book of his trilogy The Nature of Love, Irving Singer distinguishes between a number of philosophical definitions of this phenomenon. He concludes that romantic love can be compatible with marriage in the modern world if it comprehends “falling in love,” “being in love” and “staying in love,” assuming that “human beings who develop properly . . . will be able to achieve a satisfying and desirable completion to love” (372). Whatever the merits of such discriminations, a normative procedure like this one, which is typical of the approach followed in most philosophical considerations of love, is of little use when dealing with a social formation that involves great numbers of people, both “proper” and “improper.” A view of the subject of romantic love that accommodates itself more readily to actual social practices must be sought.³

Probably the most widely accepted theory of romantic love today is that of Freud, who focused his attention on the process by which children learn to direct their ability to love through their early experiences within the nuclear family. Freud distinguished between two kinds of object choices: the anaclitic type that results when children successfully resolve the Oedipus complex and learn to look outside of their immediate families in search of long-term sexual relationships with partners of the opposite gender, ordinarily in marriage arrangements; and the narcissistic type that results when children’s libidos become fixated at an early stage in their sexual development and they fail to achieve this ideal of long-term heterosexual coupling.⁴

Freud’s theory has been a particularly fruitful one for film analysis. However, its ahistorical model of social development within the nuclear family, its exclusive focus on sexuality conceived as a drive, and its idealization of love in relation to monogamous marriage make it an inadequate explanation of the role played by romantic love in organizing a variety of social arrangements in different times and places—arrangements that do not always emphasize connections among love, sexuality, and marriage. As Lawrence Stone has observed, “romantic love—this unusually brief but very intensely felt and all-consuming attraction towards another person—is culturally conditioned, and therefore common only in certain societies at certain times, or even in certain social groups within those societies—usually the elite with the leisure to cultivate feelings” (“Passionate Attachments” 16).⁵

Anthropological accounts of love and marriage in other cultures emphasize its role in organizing social and economic arrangements rather than its capacity for providing the kind of emotional fulfillment specified by the Freudian model. Sherry Ortner and Harriett White-head, for example, have stated: “The erotic dissolves in the face of the economic, questions of passion evaporate into questions of rank, and images of male and female bodies, sexual substance, and reproductive acts are peeled back to reveal an abiding concern for military honors, the pig herd, and the estate” (24). Explanations of romantic love that rely solely on Freudian psychology have no way of accounting for the kind of social and economic factors implied in descriptions such as these.

A more culturally relativistic account of romantic love is offered in Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, which conceptualizes erotic desire as a modern ideology whereby social control is exercised by organizing the ways in which the body experiences pleasure. Foucault’s emphasis on the changing meanings of the body and his understanding of the idealizing tendency of romantic love as a mask for strategies of power relations is a valuable concept. However, as Jürgen Habermas points out in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Foucault’s approach lacks a Utopian dimension. Though Foucault advocates the study of the socially marginal as a way of overcoming power differences, the concept of social equality is inimicable to his theory because he comprehends social organization solely in terms of shifting power relationships. Where there is only power, there can be no justice. An approach to romantic love that seeks to encompass the notion of social progress must therefore expand its theoretical horizen beyond Foucault.

Habermas himself has put forward a concept of communicative action as a way around the nihilism he finds in Foucault and other modern theorists who have denied the possibility of subject-centered reason. Habermas writes, “If we assume that the human species maintains itself through the socially co-ordinated activities of its members and that this co-ordination is established through communication—and in certain spheres of life, through communications aimed at reaching agreement—then the reproduction of the species also requires satisfying the conditions of a rationality inherent in communicative action” (397). Though there is cause to doubt that the notion of communicative action finally does away entirely with hidden agendas of power that thinkers since Nietzsche have attributed to subject-centered reason, by focusing on the potential for reciprocity in human relationships Habermas’s approach does provide for the possibility of social systems that can be held up as superior to others because they are more egalitarian. I will briefly explore the implication of the utopian dimension of Habermas’s formulation and its relationship to romantic love in the epilogue of this study; for the moment, however, it is important to note that his concept opens up the possibility of cohesive human interaction that is not determined solely by motives of power and narrow self-interest.⁶

In order to define an avenue of approach to the ways in which romantic love has been used as a social ideology in a variety of cultures, a theoretically oriented history of the subject is helpful. One such history has been put foward by the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann in his book Love as Passion. Using imaginative literature as his main evidence, Luhmann conceptualizes the history of romantic love in the West as a series of discursive formations, noting the different role such formations have played within different national traditions. He argues, “We assume that the thematic choices and guiding principles informing literary, idealizing, and mythicizing portrayals of love are not arbitrary, but rather represent reactions to the respective society and the trends for change within it” (20). These systems rely heavily on a network of established symbolic discourses through which they can be organized and regulated. Luhmann writes, “Taking a chance on love and the correspondingly complicated, demanding reorientation of everyday life is only possible if one has cultural traditions, literary texts, convincingly evocative linguistic patterns and situational images—in short, if one can fall back on a timeworn structure of semantics” (39). In the modern world Hollywood cinema may be construed as constituting such a semantic structure.⁷

Luhmann analyzes shifts that occurred from one system of romantic love to another as a function of shifting class and gender relations, focusing especially on the contradiction between the concept of romantic love as an intense, all-consuming passion that is by its nature short-lived and its status in the modern world as the cornerstone of lifelong monogamous marriage. Hollywood film has elided this contradiction through the convention of representing weddings (or the promise of weddings) as the culmination of its romantic-love fantasies; thus, romantic love after marriage need not be portrayed.

Luhmann sees contemporary culture as having fostered an ideology of romantic love centered on the ideal of sexual fulfillment and characterized primarily by notions of freedom and individuality. Here his insights need to be qualified, however, for our society is not as free as he implies. Anthropologists Ellen Ross and Rayna Rapp have pointed out that “[a]lthough the movement toward self-conscious sexuality has been hailed by modernists as liberatory, it is important to remember that sexuality in contemporary times is not simply released or free-flowing. It continues to be socially structured” (68).

The models of courtship and marriage put forward in Hollywood cinema make a significant contribution to the process of structuring the modern social habitus regarding romantic love. Sex researcher John Money has referred to the development of such a habitus on the individual level as the creation of a “love blot.” When falling in love, he claims, “the person projects onto the partner an idealized and highly ideosyncratic image that diverges from the image of the partner as perceived by other people” (65). This image is tied to the proceptive phase of sexual arousal in which “imagery . . . is not only perceptual but also Active” (76). Hollywood has traditionally supplied a steady stream of such fictions.

To account for the changes that the concept of romantic love has been subject to over the years it is necessary to consider the changing role of marriage and the family. Two influential accounts of the social origins of the family are associated with the names of Claude Levi-Strauss and Friedrich Engels. In The Elementary Structures of Kinship Levi-Strauss argues that the original mode of social organization centered on the use of women as objects of exchange. Like the exchange of gifts, the exchange of women between families ensured a social network of rights and obligations. According to Levi-Strauss, the need to exchange women among different families in order to create a social network accounts for the ubiquity of the incest taboo. He writes, “The prohibition of incest is less a rule prohibiting marriage with the mother, sister, or daughter than a rule obliging the mother, sister, or daughter to be given to others. It is the supreme rule of the gift” (481). Although Levi-Strauss concerns himself only with primitive cultures, his theory can be extrapolated to apply to more complex societies in which the concept of exchange can be used to promote a social network in groups with similar interests within the larger society. As Gayle Rubin states the matter: “The incest taboo imposes the social aim of exonomy and alliance upon the biological events of sex and procreation. . . . Specifically, by forbidding unions within a group it enjoins marital exchange among groups” (113).

The nature of such group interests and their role in promoting an ethic of endogamy as well as one of exogamy has been explored by Engels in his book The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. Engels argues that female subjugation within the family unit originated as a function of the ownership of private property.⁸ He claims that the concept of private property induced men to enforce a division of labor in which they would be owners while women labored under their domination. By thus controlling women, men could devote their attention to acquiring more property and, by means of social strategies such as the institution of monogamous marriage, they could also ensure that their property would remain with their heirs. He writes, “Monogamy arose from the concentration of considerable wealth in the hands of a single individual—a man—and from the need to bequeath this wealth to the children of that man and of no other. . . . The man took control of the home . . . ; the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude; she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of children” (138, 121). As one anthropologist recently stated the implications of Engels’s theory: “Husbands are import...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I: Introduction: The Movies as Social Ritual
• Part II: Patriarchal Marriage and Traditional Gender Identities
• Part III: Companionate Marriage and Changing Constructions of Gender and Sexuality
• Part IV: Epilogue: Beyond the Couple
• Illustrations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index