Consumer Identities

Agency, Media and Digital Culture

Candice D. Roberts, Myles Ethan Lascity, Candice D. Roberts, Myles Ethan Lascity, Candice Roberts, Myles Ethan Lascity

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781783209811, 9781783209811
• eBook ISBN: 9781789380460
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Étude des média

This edited collection explores the notion of agency by tracing the role and activities of consumers from the pre-Internet age into the possible future. Using an overview of the historical creation of consumer identity, Consumer Identities demonstrates that active consumption is not merely a product of the digital age; it has always been a means by which a person can develop identity. Grounded in the acknowledgement that identity is a constructed and contested space, the authors analyse emerging dynamics in contemporary consumerism, ongoing tensions of structure and agency in consumer identities and the ways in which identity construction could be influenced in the future. By exploring consumer identity through examples in popular culture, the authors have created a scholarly work that will appeal to industry professionals as well as academics.

Chapter 1

Branding Desire: Strategies of Consumer Affectation in Early Classical Hollywood Film

David Blanke

Commercial mass culture serves as one of the defining features of modern societies. Taking root in the United States around the turn of the nineteenth century, its influence spread through the rapid growth of new mass media, transit, and urban electrification. While few today doubt the radical changes wrought by these new communities of consumption, there is less agreement over the dominant modes of cultural production. This division is typically rooted in scholars’ particular research methods — how they approach cultural producers, consumers, or artifacts — and this can cause problems for an interdisciplinary dialog. As a result, even a conventional term like “modern” conceals substantive analytical distinctions. For example, modernization refers to the material processes that transformed labor and capital, established new networks of power, and undermined traditional assumptions about work and leisure that fostered a widespread crisis in group identity. Modernity, by contrast, touches on the social aspects of this structural makeover, highlighting the distinctive experiences common to groups of people within a world now segmented by time and space. Finally, modernism emerged as a cultural aesthetic about the meaning of modernization. First identified as an artistic and literary trend, by the end of the nineteenth century modernism welcomed new cultural opportunities for personal self-expression and pleasure, particularly through the consumer marketplace that linked these broader economic, social, and political changes to the tangible satisfaction of new products, experiences, and services. Accordingly, the sources one studies largely determine the nature of cultural production they find.

This challenge was magnified as Americans struggled to understand the ideological consequences of modernization. Both conservatives and radicals fixated on the threat to personal freedom posed by the growing influence of commodity culture. Derisively labeled “mass culture” by the right and the “culture industry” by the left, critics feared a passive, “feminized” citizenry too willing to cede their fundamental liberties to satisfy fleeting desires for novelty and pleasure. The semantic makeover offered by terms like “popular culture” and “consumer agency,” which gained traction in the second half of the twentieth century, largely ignored these ideological questions by concluding, logically, that studying mass culture made it somewhat pointless to rue the wholesale commodification of culture. Rather than “Other-ing” one of the two perspectives, today most take on assumption that, in the words of Michael Denning, “there is no mass culture ‘out there,’ rather, it remains ‘the very element in which we all breathe’” (1990: 17).

The growing interest in the study of consumer culture, beginning in the 1970s, offered something of a neutral meeting ground. Given its focus on all three modes of cultural production — by producers, consumers, and artifacts — the discipline placed interpretive limits upon the ideological powers of industrial capitalism and the totalizing assumptions within literary theory. Linking the social and material changes of modernization and modernity to the individual perceptions and pleasure of modernism, scholars found that early consumer culture offered “acceptable” means by which participants could negotiate and, for a nominal fee, claim their place within an increasingly atomized world. It did this through obviously ideological means — by the commodification of culture and the development of new work patterns that validated consumerism (i.e., Fordism) — but also by legitimizing subjective assessments of personal fulfillment as the measure of a just society. As historian Gary Cross argues, through consumer culture an individual’s material “acquisition and use of mass-produced goods” far more “concretely expressed” these beliefs than the traditional political ideologies of both the right and left (2000: vi, 2). This new aesthetic relocated ideals of democracy and independence within the marketplace, where “the taste, feel, and comfort of manufactured objects, designed to maximize physical satisfaction and to intensify pleasure and excitement, created new understandings of personal freedom” (Cross 2000: vi, 2).

Admitting to these contingencies neither validates nor nullifies one particular analytical method. It does, however, magnify the need to acknowledge that multiple modes of cultural production act concurrently within commercial mass culture. This indeterminacy played a particularly important role in the re-examination of commercial cinema. Reflecting the low regard typically granted to early consumers, initial assessments of commercial film demonstrated a pattern that held throughout much of the twentieth century. Both sociologists — such as those involved in the Payne Fund Studies — and neo-Marxist scholars — like those comprising the Frankfurt School — generally avoided efforts to discern the perverse reception of film by consumers to focus on capitalists’ desire to position the mass audience along lines deemed suitable by producers. Preliminary efforts to identify the linguistic structure of film — begun by the Russian Formalists — were equally biased in privileging the progressive qualities of an artifact over consumer affectation.

Beginning in the 1980s, after nearly half a century of scholarly inquiry into film, a more nuanced appreciation for cultural production sought to address this methodological segregation. David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, for example, found that while “classical” Hollywood cinema (c. 1917–60) remained remarkably stable, its production methods were neither monolithic nor the product of a unified culture industry. Production of popular film, they concluded, was rooted in a “set of widely held stylistic norms sustained by and sustaining an integral mode of film production.” These conventions were practiced by real people, not a deterministic ideology, through their “assumptions about how a movie should behave, about what stories it properly tells and how it should tell them, about the range and functions of film technique, and about the activities of the spectator” (Bordwell et al. 1985: xiv, 13). Acknowledging the divided functions played by cultural producers, consumers, and artifacts, the authors loosened the strict application of theory to show how all three modes affected the historical construction of popular motion pictures (Bordwell et al. 1985: xiv, 13).

Corresponding with the rise of cultural studies, film scholars like Tom Gunning and Mariam Hansen redoubled efforts to locate the empirical motion picture audience. Driven by their own aesthetic appreciation of a film’s visual performance and the intertextual appeal of stardom, genre, and plot, the “real” fan pushed back against the theorized passivity of the positioned spectator. Significantly, both scholars shared an interest in “primitive” cinema — a period predating the dominant narrative practices characteristic of the classical era. Gunning famously termed this phase the “Cinema of Attraction,” driven not by narration but rather by the “monstration” (or acting out) of spectacle (1986: 63–70). Hansen wrote for a growing cadre of scholars when noting the dynamism of cultural reception by early film audiences — which she found to be “profoundly intertwined with the transformation of the public sphere, in particular the gendered itineraries of everyday life and leisure” — and that further undermined claims regarding their passivity and subjectivity (1991: 11–13).

The combined effect of these intellectual trends in film, peaking just as scholars re-examined modern consumer culture and other forms of mass media, was to highlight not only the historical contingencies affecting producers and artifacts but the equally provisional experiences of cultural reception. The affectation by an audience, in this guise, revealed an observable agency keyed to an emerging worldview (modernism) and driven by individualism. Patrons brought their race, gender, sexuality, and distinct intertextual understanding of film plots and stars with them into the theater. The appearance of product branding reveals the way that the studios and leading directors sought to authenticate these feelings through means that legitimized these producers’ role in cultural production (for example, by highlighting early film’s ties to the “legitimate” stage as a means to consecrate their work as “art”). Coinciding with the rise of fandom studies, by the end of the twentieth century scholars no longer felt the need to justify the value of aesthetic forms — soap operas were as “valid” as Giuseppe Verdi — but looked instead to the many ways that an audience could take meaning from commercial culture.

Mindful of these contingencies, this essay examines the early career and popular films of Cecil B. DeMille as a case study to explore these conflicting modes of commercial cultural production. More specifically, the analysis looks to the divergent ways that DeMille and his employer — Famous Players-Lasky Company (FPL), later known as Paramount Pictures and headed by Adolph Zukor — appealed to the affectations of the early motion picture audience. By highlighting these methods and the historical context in which they appeared, the chapter reveals surprisingly divergent assumptions made by producers about the relative agency held by the consumer of mass culture. This distinction certainly proved meaningful to DeMille. The director’s unwillingness to follow the developing corporate order of the young studio system — specifically in the ways he sought to address the perversity of his patrons — led Zukor to fire DeMille, disdainfully concluding “Cecil, you have never been one of us” (Zukor cited in Koury 1959: 107–08).

While most know DeMille, if at all, through the late-career excess of his Biblical epics, like Samson and Delilah (1949) or The Ten Commandments (1956), his films of the 1910s and 1920s proved to be far more interested in exploring aspirational consumption and the social significance of modernity. His first pictures (1914–15) were largely photographed stage productions, but their commercial success and his growing confidence behind the camera convinced him to begin filming original works. For the next decade, all but three of the 30 feature films he released addressed the promise and perils of modernity. This consistent thematic focus produced a popular DeMille “brand” that goes a long way toward explaining both his sudden success and the inevitable conflict with his employer.

DeMille’s early cinematic brand was rooted in three distinct qualities, each deeply influenced by the historical circumstances accompanying the rise of modern mass culture. The first was his linkage of the supposedly lowbrow appeal of commercial film to the “legitimate” theater. DeMille’s father and brother each found success and critical acclaim as progressive playwrights of the New York stage, most notably through their collaboration with David Belasco, the famed “Bishop of Broadway.” While Cecil did not share in their good fortune — indeed, he was unemployed and financially distressed when he arrived in Hollywood, in December, 1913, to begin filming The Squaw Man (1914) — he used the public’s knowledge of his family’s reputation to legitimize middle-class movie-goers’ interest in the new visual media. Hiring Belasco’s stage manager, Wilfred Buckland, and then acquiring the rights to ten of Belasco’s most popular stage productions, his first feature films were branded to convince exhibitors that they too could attract the same upscale audience as that of Broadway. The strategy worked and by late 1915 cinema magazines like Photoplay could report that “for more than a generation the name of DeMille has been closely linked with that of Belasco, both synonymous with high attitudes of dramatic art,” confident that this distinction mattered to their readers (Photoplay cited in Higashi 1994: 11).

A second feature of DeMille’s brand, and in keeping with Belasco’s oeuvre, was the director’s reliance on melodrama as his preferred dramatic genre. The unabashed sentimentality and romanticism of melodrama strike many today as a dated format, but this ignores how the style’s origin was entrenched in the sensibilities of the professional and administrative classes just then emerging within industrial capitalism. Moreover, after fully tapping Belasco’s catalog DeMille’s original films recentred these melodramatic plots on questions related strictly to modernity and modernization, like the rise of consumerism and conspicuous consumption or the appearance of the “New Woman” and her effect on romance and marriage. His bourgeois audience’s aesthetic drove a powerful sense of verisimilitude within his films, embracing their stark division between the forces of good and evil, the inevitability of moral justice, and a subjective authenticity as problems his audience faced in their own lives were now acted out on the screen. DeMille also employed recurring plot conventions — like the reversal of fortune, how moral characters supersede the privileges of birth, and personal redemption through social reform — that further solidified this brand. These films were wholly modern, yet, Janus-faced, addressed the lingering anxieties of a new urban middle-class still uncertain whether traditional values retained their social relevance.

Finally, and most importantly, DeMille’s marque drew upon the powerful affectations of a modern visual culture attuned to novelty, excitement, and popular tastes. These feelings worked well with the melodrama’s appeal to the “emotional intelligence” and “melodramatic imagination” of the motion picture audience. DeMille’s clear talent with cinematic spectacle, mise-en-scène, and his use of familiar tableaux (often copied from popular lithographs, now widely distributed through monthly periodicals) not only drew upon his patrons’ expectations for high production standards but also allowed — even encouraged — them to read his work perversely through their own eyes. As he explained to the New York Record, in February 1915, his pictures pursued “narratives which reaches [sic] the mind and heart through the eye […] the most sensitive of all the senses” and “the quickest [for his audience] to grasp and understand” (DeMille cited in Louvish 2007: 76). This last point underscores just how fully the director’s brand relied on the agency of his audience and the intertextual appeal of modern consumerism to justify his style. While commercial mass culture demanded certain technical proficiencies and economies of scale on the part of producers, it remained the novel experiences of consumption that captivated most Americans. The DeMille brand embraced this perversity. His sets were lavish and, like a department store, encouraged audiences to consume with their eyes, knowing that their wallets would soon follow.

Significantly, DeMille developed these filmic qualities just as his personal circumstances were transformed by his success in Hollywood. His works justified his own move from the stage to motion pictures and the “reversal of fortune” he enjoyed as a widely recognized and popular director. While dunning notices followed him to California, three years later he joked with his friend and FPL studio manager Jesse Lasky that their correspondence read “much like a letter from one fat millionaire to another.” Moreover, his personal pleasure with consumption made him the ideal spokesman for America’s initial encounter with modern opulence. He collected rare books, old fire-arms, uncut precious stones and jades, and boasted “the largest private collection of phonograph records in existence.” DeMille was “tactile,” biographer Scott Eyman concludes, “a sensualist, intoxicated by beautiful things: fabrics, jewels, women, the natural world.” The wardrobe artist Adrian summarized DeMille’s visual hunger in modern consumerist terms, noting he “was hypnotized by beauty and demanded it with an almost vicious desire” (Adrian cited in Eyman 2010: 225).

Vicious desire and branding was certainly evident in The Cheat, an original motion picture released in December 1915. Filmed just as the director began to acquire his wealth, The Cheat represents a more ambiguous response to modern consumerism than what would soon follow (Figure 1.1). Fannie Ward, a comedic actress known then for her own extravagant consumption, stars as Edith Hardy, an impatient society woman frustrated by the frugality of her loving and hard-working husband, Dick (played by Ward’s real-life husband Jack Dean, an additional intertextual element that helps to drive the narrative). Unwilling to abide by Dick’s calculated accumulation of wealth, Edith habitually overspends and mismanages her household ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Section I: Introduction
• Chapter 1: Branding Desire: Strategies of Consumer Affectation in Early Classical Hollywood Film
• Chapter 2: The PushmiPullu of Fandom
• Chapter 3: MySpace Music’s Pivotal Role in the Digitalization of Music Culture
• Section II: Emerging Dynamics in Contemporary Consumerism
• Chapter 4: A Qualitative Comparison of Mad Men Fans in New Zealand and Italy
• Chapter 5: “This Is so Bad, We Have to Watch It”: Acquiring Subcultural Capital through Oppositional Viewing Strategies
• Chapter 6: The Cannibals: Consuming Celebrity through Digital Mourning
• Chapter 7: Brick by Brick: De/Reconstructing the Children’s Animated Film Genre
• Section III: Ongoing Tensions of Structure and Agency in Consumer Identities
• Chapter 8: I Protest! A Postcolonial Critique of Media Fan Activism in a Globalized World
• Chapter 9: Big Data and Twitter: Finding the Stepping Stones in Consumer Communications
• Chapter 10: Ethical Consumerism in the Emerging EU Digital Contract Legislation
• Notes on Contributors
• Notes on Editors
• Index