Richard Maltby
Harmless Entertainment:
Hollywood and the Ideology of Consensus
(1983)
[182]
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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