Dear Mass Culture Workshop,

I could start by thanking you for reading this, and then apologizing in advance for the same thing. But who would do that? Unprofessional and disingenuous to say the least! Unbecoming of a soon-to-be-PhD-defender. I won’t have it!

What you are about to read is a weird little thing. It’s on its way to being the introduction to my dissertation, which I’ll be defending next month. It used to be, many years ago, my dissertation proposal. I have, out of consideration for you, modified it by deleting the truly stupid things that were in it and adding all new stupid things for us to laugh about and marvel at my ineptitude.

In all seriousness: I’ve finished all the chapters of my dissertation and have only my intro and conclusion to write. I don’t know how to do that. The dissertation chapters total roughly 200 pages. How does one bookend that? Starting from this document, what do I add, what do I subtract, what do I amplify, what do I ease up on? I’ve done my best to remove the things that were in the proposal that just didn’t end up happening in the chapters, with the glaring exception of the section on Chapters 2 and 3, which don’t resemble the description I have here very closely at all. (It’s only three pages but you can skip it if you’re desperate.) I’ve also added, under the heading “MORE STUFF” at the end some quotations, thoughts, fragments that I have culled from a number of documents that I’ve collected as I wrote the chapters that seemed more like introductory material than chapter material. Do they seem interesting? Worth expanding? I particularly like the Variety piece.

Oh, one thing I would love to talk about: my title. I’m usually really good at coming up with titles. But the title of this whole shebang is something I’ve never been satisfied with. If anyone has a cowboy phrasebook handy, maybe you could bring it and we could find something catchy to go before the colon.

Mercifully, this is only 20ish pages. Don’t say I never did you any favors.

As always, I look forward to our discussion, thank you again for reading this, and please don’t distribute to anyone without running it by me.

Best, Matt MASS CULT - DO NOT DISTRIBUTE Hauske—Proposal 2

[Let’s talk about my title…] Contexts of the Postwar Hollywood Western, 1946-1964

Matt Hauske

The western must possess some greater secret than simply the secret of youthfulness. It must be a secret that somehow identifies it with the essence of cinema. Andre Bazin, “The Western: or the American film par excellence”

This dissertation traces the cultural contexts of Hollywood westerns in ways that extend and enrich interpretive frameworks for understanding the genre’s impact and place with postwar

American modernity. The choice of the western helps approach cinema in a way that is not bound to authorship and the individual deployment of generic tropes for the purposes of self- expression or allegory. However, neither does my approach banish the director’s influence.

Rather I want to situate the directors and filmmakers in their appropriate place the complex contexts in which westerns existed as the most prolific and popular genre of the postwar years.

By de-emphasizing the films’ narratives and the intention of their authors, I hope to move away from sociopolitical readings of westerns as allegories for American foreign policy or race relations (for example). When narrative and cognitive elements are de-emphasized, the unconscious elements of the genre and are allowed to come to the fore. This is where my interest lies: what role did the western have in engaging with the dimension of cinema that

Walter Benjamin postulated as the medium’s ability to uncover the world’s “optical unconscious”? Because westerns are essentially historical fantasies, in which control over the image is paramount in order to ensure a convincing portrait of a time before automobiles, jet planes, and other conspicuous markers of modernity, how might westerns unconsciously register and reveal attitudes toward and practices of leisure, looking, and play? MASS CULT - DO NOT DISTRIBUTE Hauske—Proposal 3

This dissertation addresses the question of the Hollywood western’s relationship to the conditions of postwar American modernity by examining the novel aesthetic possibilities for registering those conditions made available to the cinema through new technologies, and altered relations to landscape. I argue that, though most frequently analyzed through its narratives, the postwar western can productively be examined through its non-narrative generic affordances and characteristics, that is, aspects that are more or less integral to the genre. In ways that are unique among the other genres, westerns engage practices of tourism and travel; landscape aesthetics; toys, play, and childhood; and the omnipresence and persistence of fate, chance, and contingency in the face of official discourses of logic, rationality, positivism, progress, management, and control. In addition, these discursive categories manifest themselves in the western not exclusively through overt narrative themes but also through the specific conditions required to make a western movie.

I also show that the western’s specific generic affordances created a field of engagement with postwar American modernity and modernization in ways either unavailable to or underutilized in other genres. Here I follow on the work of Richard Abel and Peter Stanfield who in recent years have demonstrated the importance of modernity and modernization to an understanding of the western in the 1910s and the 1930s, respectively. In two books on early cinema and the “Americanization of the movies,” Abel shows the importance of the early western for understanding, in Miriam Hansen’s words, “the ‘new sensibility’ of ‘Americanism’ or American modernity” during the early 1910s.1 Abel has shown that westerns from the early

1910s articulated a new, modern sensibility of Americanism that helped secure the domestic

1 Richard Abel, Americanizing the Movies and “Movie-Mad” Audiences, 1910-1914 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006), p. 283, fn 8; see also p. 62. Abel draws from Miriam Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism,” in Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams, eds., Re-inventing Film Studies (London: Arnold, 2000), 339-44. MASS CULT - DO NOT DISTRIBUTE Hauske—Proposal 4 market exhibition for American film companies. Movie audiences in Europe and in eastern

America, composed predominantly of children, women, and immigrants, viewed the western as a distinctly modern genre. The films’ protagonists—cowboys, cowboy-girls, and Indians—were seen as avatars of modernity, as, in a sense, the avant-garde of Western civilization. In turn, they provided models of assimilation to heterogeneous audiences attempting to foster a burgeoning sense of twentieth-century Americanism and modernity.2 The American West represented in the western offered not only cheap (if not free) land and the Jeffersonian promise of yeoman farming; it depicted, for large immigrant audiences around the turn of the century, the possibility of a complete reinvention of the self, the establishment of a new way of life unburdened by the past, and a radical break with history.

In the same vein, Peter Stanfield has argued persuasively that the serial westerns of the

1930s starring Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers, and, especially, Gene Autry constitute a significant if ambivalent mediation between traditional ways of life and New Deal modernization, and that they do so on the vernacular level. Examining westerns in the 1930s,

Stanfield argues that low-budget B-westerns directly confronted the changes occurring as a result of the modernization of the New Deal, describing the films as “complex allegorical narratives, which articulate issues of national cohesion, American identity and experiences of modernity.”3

Films such as those of Gene Autry, Stanfield argues, “were not just star vehicles, but also addressed the difficulties that his audience confronted in making the socio-economic change from subsistence farming to a culture of consumption, from self-employment to industrial

2 Abel, Americanizing the Movies, pp. 61-123. 3 Peter Stanfield, Hollywood, Westerns, and the 1930s: The Lost Trail (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2001), p. 12. MASS CULT - DO NOT DISTRIBUTE Hauske—Proposal 5 practices and wage dependency, from rural to urban living. In short, Autry’s films represent a confrontation, magnified by the Depression, with modernity.”4

My intention in this dissertation is to ask how after World War II the western continued to respond to the changing conditions of modernity, and to determine the nature of the conceptual space it created for dramatizes modernity’s inherent contradictions. The question is whether and how westerns of the postwar era (roughly 1946-1962, called by some scholars the

“long 1950s”) registered the further changes brought by modernization and provided an imaginative, conceptual space for playing out its contradictions and ambivalences. I consider not only the ways this occurred on a thematic-narrative level, but also on the level of form, in the way developing technologies, modernist aesthetics, and contemporaraneous modes of lived experience influenced and were reflected in the look, construction, and reception of these films.

Here, we must keep in mind the specifically cinematic qualities of the western, qualities which allowed the genre (including both its mythology and its iconography) to circulate across media and in the public sphere. In other words, we must bear in mind and take seriously Andre Bazin’s claim that serves as the epigram for this introduction: “The western must possess some greater secret than simply the secret of youthfulness. It must be a secret that somehow identifies it with the essence of cinema.”5

In addressing the question of the western’s relationship to postwar modernity, this dissertation resituates the Hollywood western within the field of cinema and media studies and in the wider terrain of postwar discourses on modernization and modernism. It is my project to show that westerns offer an unexplored terrain in understanding the cinema’s place in mid- twentieth century aesthetics and leisure, and to develop tools with which to map that relationship.

4 Ibid, p. 81. 5 Andre Bazin, “The Western: or the American Cinema par Excellence,” in What Is Cinema? vol. 2, Hugh Gray, ed. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005), p. 141. MASS CULT - DO NOT DISTRIBUTE Hauske—Proposal 6

Further, I will address specific examples in context with contemporaneous artworks and movements, shifts in cultural and social practices, and alterations in lived space and experience, particularly emerging and expanding regimes of play. These include abstract expressionism; the emergence of television both as a cultural force and a key postwar example of moving image practice; the rise of the suburbs; and the construction of the interstate highway system and the consequent rise of automobile tourism as a middle-class leisure activity.

My method follows Walter Benjamin’s concept of the cinema’s ability to tap into an

“optical unconscious,” whereby aspects of the world are revealed that escape the intentionality and narration of the film’s makers. (Adorno, too: “If one decides to take self-censors more or less literally and confront films with the context of their reception, one will have to proceed more subtly than those traditional content analyses which, by necessity, relied primarily on the intentions of a film and neglected the potential gap between such intentions and their actual effect.” (Transparencies on Film, 201)

Westerns of the late 1940s through the early 1960s provide a different perspective on the ways in which the genre, though set in a rural past, reflected on changes related to modernization in contemporary fields of human experience.

The western’s hold over audiences and the scope of the genre’s dominance over the entertainment industry from the 1910s through the 1960s may be difficult for us to fathom today.

By some estimates, as much as 25% of all films made during the period of classical Hollywood cinema (from the teens to the 1960s) were westerns.6 According to another estimate, westerns

6 Edward Buscombe and Roberta E. Pearson, “Introduction,” in Back in the Saddle Again: New Essays on the Western, Edward Buscombe and Roberta E. Pearson, eds. (London: BFI Publishing, 1998), p. 2. Also J. Hoberman, “How the Western Was Lost,” The Western Reader, Jim Kitses and Gregg Rickman, eds. (New York: Limelight Editions, 1998), pp. 90-91. MASS CULT - DO NOT DISTRIBUTE Hauske—Proposal 7 comprised as much as half of all production during the postwar years.7 Often, scholars have attributed the transmedial appeal and longevity of the western to the notion that it rehearses

American myths.8 While I would not dismiss this claim, it also must be true that audiences did not flock to western films, tune in to western-themed television shows, and read western novels exclusively to have their national mythology reaffirmed and recounted. The attraction of the western in the cinema must also be attributed to the ways it appealed to the human sensorium during a period not only of continuing change and increasing uncertainty and anxiety, but also of historic abundance, prosperity, and possibility.

The relationship between the cinema and modernity has been explored extensively.9

Primarily, studies of this relationship seem to have focused on three broad categories of films.

The first is mainstream genre films that include slapstick, film noir, the detective film, melodrama, and the musical. 10 These films tend to confront allegorically the most immediate changes associated with modernity, especially new metropolitan experiences and changes to the sensorium of the city dweller. The second group includes films set or shot in urban centers. This group overlaps slightly with the first, but also includes the “city symphony” films of the 1920s and 1930s as well as the earliest actualité films of the Lumière brothers (1895 to roughly 1908).

The third group (which overlaps with the second) includes self-consciously modernist films that

7 Lary May, The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics of the American Way (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000) p. 206. 8 See, for instance, Jim Kitses, Horizons West: Directing the Western from John Ford to Clint Eastwood (London: BFI Publishing, 2004); Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950); and Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth- Century America (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992). 9 A partial list of such work includes, for instance, Dimendberg (2004); the essays included in Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz, eds., Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Murray Pomerance, ed., Cinema and Modernity (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006); James Naremore and Patrick Brantlinger, eds., Modernity and Mass Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); Tom Gunning, The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity (London: British Film Institute, 2000); Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contents (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); and Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991). 10 For example, see Dimendberg, 2004, and Gunning, 2000. MASS CULT - DO NOT DISTRIBUTE Hauske—Proposal 8 were in direct dialogue with avant-garde art movements, such as cubism, German

Expressionism, constructivism, Dada, and surrealism, as well as the various New Wave movements that emerged in the 1960s. The western genre presents a challenge to our understanding of the cinema’s appeal to modern subjects and its relationship to the dynamics of modernity and the forces of modernization because it does not fit neatly into any of these familiar categories.

Despite its proflicacy, the western mostly seems to have fallen through the cracks of the study of the intersection of the cinema and modernity. I would speculate this neglect is the result of a misprision regarding the western’s setting in a historically and geographically distant world.

First, the western’s physical setting in agrarian communities and rural locations causes an assumption that its world is somehow divorced from the processes of modernization and the conditions of modernity. We tend to forget the uneven developments of modernity and capitalism, and the fact that these locations serve(d) as a vital periphery supplying raw materials to the urban core more closely associated with modernity. The existence of an urban core is predicated on this symbiotic (some would say parasitic) relationship with the agrarian periphery that transcends the city/ country divide—the former cannot exist without the latter. Likewise, though the suburbs represented a utopian alternative to the crowded urban center, the process of suburbanization could not exist without the modernization of the food production system.

Almost all new developments of housing tracts that emerged beginning in the early twentieth century entail a concomitant destruction of arable farmland, increasing the need to modernize

(i.e., make more efficient) farms in the Midwest and Central California, finally resulting in today’s factory farming. Though films with contemporaneous and rural settings—Dovzhenko’s

Earth (1930), Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath (1940), Griffith’s A Corner in Wheat (1909)— MASS CULT - DO NOT DISTRIBUTE Hauske—Proposal 9 sometimes stage this relationship, the picture becomes obscured when the story is removed to the past.

The immediate response to this combination of rural characters and locations with an historical setting is that such depictions have less to do with modernity than do depictions of city dwellers contemporaneous to the film viewer. This, it seems to me, represents a conception of modernization as a process that 1) happens mainly in urban settings, rather than an overall alteration in the way of seeing the world as open to change through scientific-technological endeavor (figured along a continuum ranging from improvement to exploitation) and 2) that is only happening now rather than being a continuous process that started long ago and has no end in sight. In addition, it privileges narrative over the film’s specifically cinematic dimensions related to editing, camerawork, and the attraction of spectacle. In short, this combination of physical setting with historical period has prevented scholars from considering westerns in relation to modernity. We know films set in the rural present can confront and reflect modernity, and we can imagine films set in an urban past that would do the same. A film about the

Hausmannization of Paris in the 1860s, for example, would take place prior to the typical historical setting of a Hollywood western yet would be easily recognizable as representing a key moment in the history of modernity.

The spatial-temporal combination of the rural and the past that is constitutive of westerns somehow banishes them to the realms of myth and allegory. In westerns, we find an

“undeveloped,” “uncivilized” locale that predates the rule of law, incorporation into a national unit, and material signs of technological modernity like cars, planes, and telephones. Yet, the western contains the imagined seeds of the contemporary present, including the epochal and mythological victory of law and civilization over chaos and savagery (Liberty Valance); the birth MASS CULT - DO NOT DISTRIBUTE Hauske—Proposal 10 of the American cattle industry (Red River [Howard Hawks, 1948]); the origin of U.S. colonialism and imperialism, coupling the mechanisms of the repression and annihilation of indigenous peoples with those of the exploitation of natural resources (The Indian Fighter

[André De Toth, 1955]); the conflict between the private and public good (High Noon [Fred

Zinnemann, 1952]); naked speculative capitalism (Johnny Guitar [Nicholas Ray, 1954]); and the complexities of assimilation into a national identity (The Last Frontier [Anthony Mann, 1955]).

In this light, we would do well to consider the western as depicting not the foundations of

American society, but rather an iterative re-founding of civilization in an attempt to avoid the mistakes of the past, to resolve the internal contradictions of a modern democratic system predicated on capitalism and imperialism. This fictional re-founding is continual and compulsively repetitive; it never seems to tie all the loose ends together, despite the often pat endings the exigencies of Hollywood storytelling dictate, and, at least until the mid-1970s, formulaic iterations proved attractive to both filmmakers and audiences.

The continual re-founding of civilization represents a distinctly modernist project that profoundly engages with play, exhibiting the ludic logic of “once is as good as never,” that, according to Walter Benjamin, characterizes the operation of second technology, working “by means of experiments and endlessly varied test procedures.”11 Here, the industrial mode of production actually generates the playful possibility of (re)creating society over and over, where all rules can be discarded and new ones established on ad hoc bases according to necessities of either the market or the individual film, with relatively little reverence for history. The rules of

11 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility,” Selected Writings, vol. 3, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, trans. Rodney Livingstone et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 107. Here I am retaining Miriam Hansen’s literal translation of the German proverb Einmal is keinmal, which she gives in her seminal essay, “Room-for-Play: Benjamin’s Gamble with Cinema,” October 109, Summer 2004, p. 17. MASS CULT - DO NOT DISTRIBUTE Hauske—Proposal 11 genre take precedence over the facts of history. The constraints of genre are used to create new configurations of characters and outcomes.

The western provided a space for playing out the anxieties and hopes that accompanied the set of technological, industrial, social, legal, and cultural changes that constituted postwar modernization, standing as a complex critique of modernity and its seeming inevitability, positing alternative pathways to address the problems and the promises of modern life. In this sense the western can be productively analyzed through a broader understanding of modernist aesthetics that encompasses not only high modernism but also a range of cultural practices that reflected and registered the experience of modernity. Here I am following on Miriam Hansen’s understanding of modernist aesthetics that includes “the mass-produced and mass-consumed phenomena of fashion, design, advertising, architecture and urban environment, of photography, radio, and cinema,” and adding children’s toy culture and gambling, an activity with atavistic and anti-modern characteristics that also reflects the dominant structures of the modern system.12

Table of Contents

1. So You Want to Shoot Westerns: The Touristic Gaze and Location Filmmaking in the Postwar American West 2. America’s New Horizons: Wide Screens, Big Canvases, and the Great Outdoors 3. Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch House: Toys, Play, and the Western on Television 4. Hard Work, Hard Luck: Poker, Chance, and the End of the Western

12 Miriam Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism,” in Reinventing Film Studies, ed. Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams (London, Oxford University Press, 2000), 333. MASS CULT - DO NOT DISTRIBUTE Hauske—Proposal 12

With the economy booming in the aftermath of World War II, tourism by automobile saw a rapid increase.13 Growing symbiotically with the suburbs and what by the late 1950s would be called the Interstate Highway System, Americans became more mobile than ever before. During this time, the movie industry also went on the road. Location shooting, particularly of big- budget westerns in national parks and other undeveloped regions and exotic locales, became far more widespread than in the two preceding decades. This chapter will take up the confluence and coincidence of these phenomena to understand the ways in which westerns reflected a self- critical touristic mentality and simultaneously promoted tourism and settlement in areas that were sparsely populated and that (supposedly) had never been photographed before. The topic of this chapter, So You Want to Shoot Westerns: The Touristic Gaze and Location

Filmmaking in the Postwar American West, is the symbiotic relationship between the parallel image industries of tourism and cinema, a relationship that ultimately proved parasitic in relation to the land and landscape, contributing to the disappearance of the western itself as a result of the loss of places to film.

The importance of finding areas and scenery that had never been used in a Hollywood film is evident from trade publications such as Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, and American

Cinematographer. The fetish of producers and directors for finding new places with never- before-photographed scenery to shoot films had always existed, but in the postwar period it took on a renewed energy and urgency. Often, the shooting location was hundreds of miles away from where the film was set. Monument Valley, John Ford’s location for The Searchers (1956), for example, is hundreds of miles from the film’s setting in West Texas cattle country. This insistence on new vistas for filming harkens back to the history of the early western, when, in the

13 John A. Jakle, The Tourist: Travel in Twentieth-Century North America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985). MASS CULT - DO NOT DISTRIBUTE Hauske—Proposal 13

1910s, American production companies gradually gained dominance in their domestic markets by shooting westerns in the “real” West of Colorado and California. The genuine western settings of American companies like Bison-101 and Biograph contrasted markedly with the films of the then-dominant French company Pathé-Frères, whose westerns were filmed in New Jersey and often could not help but include visual evidence of the civilized East.14

The new impetus to shoot on location and away from major urban centers resonated with and fed into trends in tourism, both deploying advertising strategies that promised the customer an experience they could not get at home watching television. Films often began or ended with title cards thanking or acknowledging national parks, local and federal governments or agencies, and chambers of commerce for their cooperation and generosity. As is the case today, municipalities provided production crews with special incentives to film in their area, the logic being that any tax breaks or favors given would be recuperated in jobs and revenue within the town as well as mass exposure of the area’s tourist attractions.

Thus, postwar westerns shot on location frequently address the spectator through at least two broad modes: first as a moviegoer, second as a potential tourist. This chapter examines how westerns split their modes of address between the spectator and the tourist, and how this divided address also reflects conceptions of the ontology of the cinema as not merely a vehicle for narrative but as a medium of display. Were landscape and the theme of travel aestheticized differently in films than in tourism advertisements? In what ways did westerns promote or influence a specific way of looking that the tourist could employ on his or her travels?

Three films made in a span of two years will provide the primary materials for this chapter: The Indian Fighter (Andre De Toth, 1955), The Searchers (John Ford, 1956), and The

14 Nanna Verhoeff, The West in Early Cinema: After the Beginning (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 213. MASS CULT - DO NOT DISTRIBUTE Hauske—Proposal 14

Last Wagon (Delmer Daves, 1956). Each film was shot in a different location and each engages with the dynamics and uncertainties of location shooting and the theme of travel. Combining formal analysis, reception study of advertising and contemporary reviews, and production history, I will discuss the ways these films thematized travel and tourism and engaged with touristic mobility. These films significantly pit white heroes, figured as somehow neither civilized nor savage, against the forces of both barbarism and modernity, which exist in dialectical tension between whites and Native Americans. The ambiguity of the white hero in westerns is indeed a common and well-worn trope, dating back to Cooper’s Leatherstocking,15 but here, in juxtaposing the westerner with the figure of the tourist, I shed new light on both the westerner and the origins and operations of the tourist gaze as it was constituted in the 1950s.

Chapter 2 - America’s New Horizons: Wide Screens, Big Canvases, and the Great Outdoors Chapter 3 - Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch House: Toys, Play, and the Western on Television

The next two chapters form somewhat of a diptych, addressing film scholar Mary Ann

Doane’s recent assertion that today’s cinema seems to be experiencing a “schizophrenia of scale,” divided as it is between the extremes in size of the iPod and IMAX. 16 It is important to remember, though, that this schizophrenia of scale is nothing new in the field of image production and consumption, and can be traced back at least to the nineteenth century, when enormous and elaborate panoramas co-existed with handheld picture postcards. Dichotomies of scale were also operative and important in art and mass culture of the postwar years, most

15 See Smith, Virgin Land (1950). 16 Mary Ann Doane, “The Close-Up: Scale and Detail in the Cinema.” Differences 14:5, 2005, pp. 89-111. Indeed, this schizophrenia would stretch back at least to the nineteenth century with panoramas and picture postcards— images that were alternately overwhelming or that fit in the viewer’s hand. MASS CULT - DO NOT DISTRIBUTE Hauske—Proposal 15 conspicuously in Hollywood’s major investment in widescreen cinema formats in an effort to attract audiences back into movie theaters and away from television. In Chapters 2 and 3, I try not to explain the logic of Hollywood’s widescreen response to television’s incursion, but rather to describe the coextensivity of these “schizophrenic” (or, simply, divergent) practices of moving image production against the background of two other major cultural phenomena of the late

1940s and early 1950s: the birth of abstract expressionism, figured in the large action paintings of Jackson Pollock, and the rapid growth of the suburbs. Each term (widescreen, television, abstract expressionism, and suburbanization) represents a radically new direction in the aesthetics and experience of landscape in the years following World War II.

The American West and what we might call the ideology of the westerner figure prominently in these very different cultural forms and experiences. I have already discussed the importance and prolificacy of the western in mainstream, Hollywood cinema. The shift to widescreen and color increased the importance of landscape in these films in which landscape was already a key element. In television, from the late 1940s to the early 1960s and beyond, westerns figured as prominent subject matter for obvious economic reasons, relating to both their popularity and efficiency of production. Serial westerns from the 1930s starring the likes of

Gene Autry, Hopalong Cassidy, and Roy Rogers were bought by television companies and broadcast to fill air time. Based on their success, Autry, Cassidy, and Rogers were given their own original shows, for which they produced episodes in an economical manner similar to that used in the 1930s. In the field of American high modernist painting, Pollock’s macho persona has been attributed to his Western roots and upbringing, and his large paintings sometimes have MASS CULT - DO NOT DISTRIBUTE Hauske—Proposal 16 been compared to landscapes, especially because of their size.17 In the suburbs, ranch-style houses, tapping into both the terminology and the middle-class ideals of home ownership at the core of the postwar western, became the primary architectural style associated with tract housing.

These chapters will consist primarily of formal analysis of westerns that engage significantly with novel possibilities of landscape aesthetics afforded by new technologies in film production, including widescreen formats such as CinemaScope, VistaVision, and Cinerama, and photographic color techniques (especially Technicolor). The depiction of landscape and its thematic significance will be compared to similar examples from popular television shows in an effort to determine the specific appeal of westerns in film versus television. In addition, a reception history will provide a sense of the ways in which the films were marketed to audiences that privileged landscape. This discussion will also keep in mind the two cultural backgrounds of lived experience and high art, figured in suburbanization on the one hand and abstract expressionism on the other. I do not mean to align the cinema with conceptions of high culture by pairing it with abstract expressionism, nor to mechanically equate television aesthetics with life in the suburbs, but rather to keep in mind that each may resonate with any of the other terms in ways that we cannot anticipate. Nevertheless, it seems clear that the field of landscape aesthetics and lived experience underwent a significant change in this period and was expressed in these four forums.

Chapter 4 – Hard Work, Hard Luck: Poker, Chance, and the End of the Western

The postwar years constituted an “age of anxiety” for many (a phrase coined by W.H.

Auden for his “baroque eclogue” of 1948).18 Fear, weariness, and uncertainty characterized the

17 For instance, John I.H. Baur, Nature in Abstraction: The Relation of Abstract Painting and Sculpture to Nature in Twentieth-Century American Art (New York: Macmillan, 1958) and Irving Sandler, Abstract Expressionism and the American Experience: A Reevaluation (Lenox, MA: Hard Press Editions, 2009). MASS CULT - DO NOT DISTRIBUTE Hauske—Proposal 17 period, in parallel to the official discourse of optimism, tranquility, and progress. The shadow of genocide, the destruction of European cities, and nuclear war, both as a reality in Japan and as a persistent threat by the time of the Soviet Union’s first successful nuclear test in 1949, created a sense of precarity and uncertainty that ran against the official culture of optimism. At the same time, Americans were increasingly trying their luck out West, moving especially to California for the promise of cheap land, good weather, and plentiful jobs, in the booming aerospace industry. While Los Angeles may have represented paradise for citizens who hoped to enter the middle class via the Protestant work ethic, another major western city, Las Vegas, promised an express train to wealth and happiness through legalized gambling.

The tension between the impulses to work hard for one’s money on the one hand and to get rich quick on the other found fertile soil in the imaginative terrain of the western immediately after the war. The gambler had long been a common figure in westerns, but in the postwar years, almost immediately, he gained a new prominence. In three films made in 1946, the theme of gambling, the role of the gambler, and their status as alternatives to market capitalism became important thematic elements that helped set the agenda of the western for years to come. Jacques

Tourneur’s Canyon Passage, John Ford’s My Darling Clementine, and Howard Hawks’s Red

River (filmed in 1946 but not released until 1948) all deal with chance and contingency as important elements of their narratives and also allow us to examine the role of chance in the production process itself. The role of contingency in the act of filmmaking relates strongly to the nature of location shooting, so this chapter will have occasion to refer back to chapter 1.

The act of gambling helps us consider the colonization of Western America as a kind of go-for-broke game of civilization, where civilization will either be saved or meet its doom as it pushes farther west. The inherent risk in gambling, in capitalism, and in the act of moving to the

18 W.H. Auden, The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (New York: Random House, 1947). MASS CULT - DO NOT DISTRIBUTE Hauske—Proposal 18

West with nothing but a wagon and a bull, as Tom Dunson does in Red River, also reminds us of the conception of America as a “great experiment,” open, in the ideal sense, to change, reason, and argument, but also haunted by the possibility of failure. The question of America is the question of political modernity and mass culture: can a public sphere be formed not through a common past, but out of the idea of a shared future?

Gambling stands as an atavistic alternative to the modern ideal of success through work

(the Protestant work ethic), the modern myth of an equal playing field where one can pull oneself up by one’s own bootstraps.19 Holding a mirror up to market capitalism, gambling reveals the inherently risky nature of capitalism itself, as a system built somewhat paradoxically on managed uncertainty, and serves to cloud the distinction between those who work in the official system and those who try to “get rich quick.” There is a strange morality to the gambler that dialectically shadows that of the capitalist, and may, in a certain light, prove superior. Whereas the capitalist’s wagers put others at risk, the gambler remains isolated. While the capitalist ruins other people’s lives, the gambler destroys only himself.

If we take a macro-view of history, the discovery of America and colonial expansion into the continent is one massive, extended example of land speculation. Many westerns, both before and after World War II, have land speculation at the core of the narrative. After the war, the plot of the speculator and the figure of the open-range cattle baron each took on new, imperial connotations. Land speculation and acquisition in westerns is usually conducted with the expectation or direct knowledge, often through collusion with corrupt politicians, that a railroad will be going through the territory or that valuable minerals are present.

19 See Jackson Lears, Something for Nothing: Luck in America (New York: Viking, 2003) for a discussion of gambling in the context of an alternative to the official culture of the Protestant work ethic. MASS CULT - DO NOT DISTRIBUTE Hauske—Proposal 19

This chapter will proceed through 1) formal analysis and reception study of select films with plots or themes that foreground gambling, gamblers, and corrupt capitalism, 2) production histories of location-westerns the production of which featured, at least in official stories about the production, major moments of good or bad luck; and 3) a brief discussion of the importance of the dichotomy of luck and hard work present in postwar America, focused through a discussion of the contrast between two major and booming western cities, Los Angeles and Las

Vegas.

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Variety December 26, 1956, Page 2 “Worse than Moscow” “Dallas, Dec. 25 “Six Hungarian refugees interpreted a ‘cowboy and Indians’ movie as current conditions and said, ‘No, thanks,’ to an offer to come to Dallas. “Dick McDonald, executive director of the Dallas Hungarian Freedom Committee, said he had been notified by Camp Kilmer, NJ, that six substitutions had been made in a list of 86 Hungarians slated to come to Dallas after they were treated to a Western film. Witnessing scenes of fighting between cowboys and Indians of the Wild West era, the refugees believed jokes that such things still went on in Texas and asked to be sent elsewhere.”

ABSTRACT (For the actual Chapter 2). This chapter suggests a rubric for understanding the coexistence in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s of three disparate cultural practices: widescreen Hollywood filmmaking, “big canvas” abstract expressionism, and outdoor leisure activities like camping and hiking. These phenomena constitute a constellation of practices I call immersive horizontality, and in which I locate the 1950s western, situating it in the intersection of these discourses. Immersive horizontality, I argue, was a prominent way of experiencing and conceiving of space in America during the postwar years. A masculinist discourse in reaction to the perceived feminized confinement of postwar suburbanization, organizationalism, white-collar labor, and modernization in general, immersive horizontality was felt, sought after, described, purchased, and sold by a wide range of artists, authors, and critics, as well as everyday American citizen-consumers. Articulating a Cold War patriotism as well as a mid-century modern manliness, immersive horizontality found a rich field for expression in widescreen westerns throughout the 1950s and at least into the early 1960s.

GLEDHILL, “RETHINKING GENRE”

238 – “Genres construct fictional worlds out of textual encounters between cultural languages, discourses, representations, images, and documents according to the conventions of a given MASS CULT - DO NOT DISTRIBUTE Hauske—Proposal 20 genre’s fictional world, while social and cultural conflicts supply material for renewed generic enactments. Heteroglossia and dialogism are built into the genre product’s need both to repeat, bringing from the past acculturated generic motifs, and to maintain credibility with changing audiences by connecting with the signifiers of contemporary verisimilitude, including signs of struggles to shift its terms in the name of the real, of justice, of utopian hope.”

The Cheese and the Worms, pp 77 – “Only in periods of acute social change does an image emerge, generally a mythical one, of a different and better past—a model of [78] perfection in the light of which the present appears to be a deterioration, a degeneration… The struggle to transform the social order then becomes a conscious attempt to return to this mythical past.”

This dissertation is really about the nature of experience in the postwar period and its effect on the cinematic image. The argument behind the chapters that follow is that, while classical Hollywood film style persisted throughout the 1960s, the cinema itself was adapted to keep pace with the world around it. Another way of putting this is to say that phenomena and experiences outside of or peripheral or adjacent to the cinema effected the cinema on the level of form and material, and thus content. Television is perhaps the most accessible example. Cinematic form and style certainly changed as a result of the rise of television, both because filmmakers were trained initially in producing television and also because the television image was seen as more impactful than the cinematic image. But cultural phenomena related to the television revolution also had an effect on the cinema image. The rise of television cannot be disassociated from the massive increase of children, specifically middle class children, as a result of the baby boom. These affluent kids opened a market for thousands of new toys, and the toy industry in turn took advantage of material and technological developments in the aftermath of World War II, specifically plastics. Thus toys became more malleable, more uniform, more plentiful, and more affordable than they ever had before in the history of human civilization. Plastic toys could be molded that perfectly resembled kids’ television and big-screen heroes. The power and attraction of the toy market thus had a formal influence on the way movies, especially westerns, were conceived, shot, marketed, and presented. Other cultural forms and practices also influenced the shape and appearance of the cinematic image, and still others marked similar cultural and aesthetic shifts in the postwar years.

MASS CULT - DO NOT DISTRIBUTE Hauske—Proposal 21

This dissertation is about ways that the moving image invites the viewer into itself on the one hand and exerts its influence on the material world on the other. It focuses on the western in the United States in part because that genre was so dominant in the cultural imagination for an extended period of time

RAY, AVANT GARDE FINDS ANDY HARDY On ordinariness of movies: 3 – “Because film history concentrates on masterpieces, we forget that when the studios were releasing almost five hundred movies a year, most of them had far more in common with the Hardy pictures than with Citizen Kane. Thus, if we want to try to understand the Hollywood Studio System… we might do well to start with its average product.”

Not simply Hollywood’s penchant for cynically exploiting what’s new in popular culture but the way “what’s new”—what’s modern—affects what we see on screen. Not an apologia for trendiness but an explanation of how the material worldinflects and affects film form, as cinema uses material reality to create its effect.

Bringing the western into the conversation of film aesthetics and the cinema as a modern art form, i.e., inserting it into a conversation it is conspicuously absent from, that conversation between the likes of Kracauer and Benjamin, and other critics and theorists who tended to see modernity only unfolding in the cities and not in the countryside, only in the present and the future and not in our (imagination of) the past.

Eisenhower inaugural: “Everybody ought to be happy every day—play hard, have fun doing it and despise wickedness” – Jon Lewis, “1955: Movies and Growing Up… Absurd,” in Pomerance, American Cinema of the 1950s: Themes and Variations, p. 135, quoting Leuchtenberg, Troubled Feast: American Society Since 1945 (1979).

There are practical problems with making a western that the critic who’s focused on political ideology and “content” will miss. These practical problems can tell us about both the western and the nature of the moving image. These practical problems constitute the material conditions, limitations, and affordances of shooting a western. No less than films noir or gangster films, but MASS CULT - DO NOT DISTRIBUTE Hauske—Proposal 22 in a different way, westerns represent the essence of the cinematic, the modern, and the American. They represent different aspects of these three ideas, ones that are equally important for understanding them as genres that are more commonly studied and conceived of as essentially cinematic or paradigmatically modern.

The questions I pursue through the western (using the western) are questions that concern the cinema, that come out of cinema studies, and are central to the stakes of the medium. In addition, because I pursue these questions through the western, my pursuit inevitably ties the questions about the medium to questions about Hollywood (and capitalist production and consumption more generally) and America (especially its evolving place on the world stage and in world history. (See Hansen, Cinema and Experience, 107) One question I might ask, for instance: How do westerns (despite and because of their status as commercial genre films) generate “the tiny spark of contingency with which,” in the words of Benjamin, “reality has (so to speak) seared the character of the image” (“Little History of Photography, SW 2).

Have to talk about inherent self-reflexivity of the genre in the introduction because it informs a lot of what happens in each of the chapters. The photography section in Chapter 1; the figure of the tourist who hates tourists; gambling as critique of official culture, that exists within official culture in the form of the stock market and capitalist speculation in general/ venture capitalism. The western’s inherent self-reflexivity means that it’s also critical of the project of modernity, because it tells the origin story of how the modern regime of law and order came to be.