Richard Maltby—The Cinema of the Consensus

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

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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

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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

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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,

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*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 .

Again, this is "conservative" only in the consequentialist sense of tending on the whole to leave things as they are. In the absolute sense, meanwhile, it can serve any ideology which has managed to achieve consensus ("hegemony"?).

Hence it may just as well be said of the nominally "progressive" entertainment of today that,

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 .

This certainly can be entertaining! But otherwise it is not too helpful.

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.

You mean...it's not only that damned "high art" that performs such a separation ?!

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.