Richard Maltby
Harmless Entertainment:
Hollywood and the Ideology of Consensus
(1983)
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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
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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.
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*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."
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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
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*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.)
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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
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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 .
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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INTERLUDEAn 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 BullittThe 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.
