A New Kind of Public
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A New Kind of Public <UN> Studies in Critical Social Sciences Series Editor David Fasenfest (Wayne State University) Editorial Board Chris Chase-Dunn (University of California-Riverside) G. William Domhoff (University of California-Santa Cruz) Colette Fagan (Manchester University) Matha Gimenez (University of Colorado, Boulder) Heidi Gottfried (University of Bremen) Karin Gottschall (Warsaw University) Bob Jessop (Lancaster University) Rhonda Levine (Colgate University) Jacqueline O’Reilly (University of Brighton) Mary Romero (Arizona State University) Chizuko Ueno (University of Tokyo) VOLUME 69 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/scss <UN> A New Kind of Public Community, Solidarity, and Political Economy in New Deal Cinema, 1935–1948 By Graham Cassano LEIDEN | BOSTON <UN> Cover illustration: © Marotistock | Dreamstime.com Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cassano, Graham. A New kind of public : community, solidarity, and political economy in New Deal cinema,1935-1948 / by Graham Cassano. pages cm -- (Studies in critical social sciences) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-27519-5 (hardback : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-90-04-27696-3 (e-book) 1. New Deal, 1933-1939, in motion pictures. 2. Motion pictures--Political aspects--United States. 3. Motion pictures--Social aspects--United States. I. Title. PN1995.9.N47C37 2014 791.43’65873917--dc23 2014016756 This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, ipa, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1573-4234 isbn 978-90-04-27519-5 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-27696-3 (e-book) Copyright 2014 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Global Oriental and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper. <UN> For Dad ∵ <UN> Contents Acknowledgements xi Introduction: A Sociological Approach to New Deal Cinema 1 The Problem 1 Symbols, Experience, and Overdetermination 5 Interpellative Intention 7 Context 11 The Force of Imagined Things 13 A New Kind of Public 15 Working Class Community 18 The Hollywood Cultural Apparatus 22 Plan of the Work 26 1 Black Fury (1935) and RiffRaff (1936) 30 Radical Paternalism and Labor’s Solidarity 32 Black Fury and the Construction of Whiteness 34 Black Fury’s Paternalism 38 RiffRaff 40 Women’s Exploitation in the Household 41 Women’s Exploitation in the Cannery 44 Anti-Marx 47 Race, Wealth, and Desire 49 Responsible Unionism 51 Cinematic Contradictions 55 2 My Man Godfrey (1936) 60 Cinematic Corporatism 62 Forgotten Men 66 Two Communities 69 Responsibility and Recognition 70 Mastery and Servitude 75 Captain of Finance 79 Mask as Mark 82 3 Swing Time (1936) 84 Recognition and “Schemes of Life” 86 The Power of Fashion 88 <UN> viii contents The Political Economy of Desire 90 Swing Time’s Realism 92 Immigrants and The Shadows of Blackness 96 Culture and Barbarism 102 4 The Hurricane (1937) 105 Popular Front and Labor Affiliations 105 Colonial Order and Pacific Passions 108 “I’m Just the same as a White Man” 110 Two Communities 113 “Look at them Dance. There’s the Island’s Answer to your Law” 115 De-Colonized Independence and Enslaved Servility 117 “You’re all Guilty” 118 Contradictions and Paradoxes 120 5 Ginger Rogers and the (Hollywood) Proletarian Imaginary, 1939–1941 123 5th Avenue Girl (1939) 124 Bachelor Mother (1939) 134 Kitty Foyle (1940) 135 Tom, Dick, and Harry (1941) 144 6 John Ford, From Radical Critique to the White Garrison State, 1940–1948 152 Radical Traditionalism in The Grapes of Wrath 152 Symbolic Domination as Traditional Compensation 154 The Language of Patriarchy 156 Allegories of Race 157 Narrating Trauma as Radical Critique 160 Capital, Class and the Charmed Circle of the State 164 Workers’ Control 167 The Paradoxes of Radical Representation 168 Two Voices 169 From Class Conflict (Back) to Corporate Community 171 All I can See is the Flags 173 We’ll have no more Grapes of Wrath 176 Epilogue: Psycho (1960) and the New Domestic Gaze 183 The Gaze 183 <UN> contents ix Interpellating Community 184 The Loss of the Collective Spectacle 189 References 193 Films Cited 201 Index 203 <UN> Acknowledgements First, and most important, I must acknowledge the intellectual companion- ship of my partner, Rosalind Hartigan. Thank you, Bia, for listening and for teaching me a few things about movies. In addition, I have received intellectual support, critique and advice from too many comrades, readers, and colleagues to name. A partial list must include my editor, David Fasenfest, a constant resource and a good friend. Thank you to David Roediger, Jennifer Klein, and Rick Wolff for their support and encouragement over the years. Conversations with my friends and colleagues Troy Rondinone, Jim Berger, Brian Schuth, George Sanders, and Mark P. Worrell, helped me develop the ideas in this monograph. Melina Lescoe provided editorial assistance. Amanda Nichols Hess of Oakland University’s Kresge Library provided important research assistance. Brian Schuth and Denis Wall provided proofreading and editorial assistance. Joyce Goldenstern helped assemble the index. While I am grateful for all the assistance I have received, any mistakes or missteps within these pages are the author’s responsibility. Finally, I need to thank Jay Meehan, Jo Reger, and all my Departmental colleagues and students at Oakland University for their kind support over the years. Introduction A Sociological Approach to New Deal Cinema The Problem For twenty five years I’ve had a movie on my mind…. Let me begin with my experience of the problem. A late 20th century movie house in Cambridge, sitting in the balcony. I’d seen Hollywood westerns. I knew what to expect. And those expectations left me entirely unprepared for the projections about to unwind. Fort Apache1 (1948) is told from a variety of points of view. What struck me at the time, however, was the voice its director, John Ford, gave the Apache. They weren’t represented as children. They weren’t represented as savages. Instead, they were an aggrieved people battling the twin forces of colonization and corruption. And, as John Wayne’s Captain York argues throughout most of the film, the Apache were in the right. But more startling than the sympathetic representation of the Apache, the film’s final scene has Captain York con- sciously whitewashing the genocidal image of American imperialism the pre- vious scenes had so convincingly evoked. After spending the first two acts of the film speaking to American power for the Apache, in the final shot Captain York leads his cavalry to hunt down Cochise. York turns his dead, imperious commander, Colonel Thursday (Henry Fonda), into a falsified legend, and, more important, a martyr for American nationalism. Anticipating the final lines of Ford’s later film, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (1962), York would have the press conceal reality, and for the sake of the nation, “print the legend.” Fort Apache recognizes the power of propaganda, explains its uses and operation, and, yet, at the same time, seems to participate in the very pro- cess it critiques. In fact, I couldn’t understand the film’s conclusion. But my mystification provoked a series of questions that have since driven my research: Was Fort Apache a critique of imperialism? An endorsement? What made York shift identities at the end, becoming the very thing he’d despised through- out the picture? What does it mean that the picture itself deconstructs York’s 1 For clarity’s sake, I use small capitals to designate film titles within the body of this work. In the table of contents, chapter titles, and subtitles, I use italics. When film titles appear in quotations from other works, I use italics, small capitals, or quotation marks, following the style employed by the cited text’s author(s). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi 10.1163/9789004276963_002 <UN> 2 introduction transformation? And how would its original audience understand that internal deconstruction? The films of the 1930s and 1940s are all too familiar to twenty-first century audiences. The commercialization of certain styles (think of marketed imagery from Casablanca (1943) or film noir), the popularity of certain directors from the period (Hitchcock, Welles, Kazan), and the influence of these commodified tropes upon contemporary forms of entertainment, all lead to a situation in which the twenty first century viewer understands early twentieth century film through contemporary forms of thought and experience. While I do not mean to denigrate the commercial afterlife of early cinema, nor the identity tropes its marketing produces, such an anachronistic viewpoint conceals the more diffi- cult and contradictory moments in individual films. In order to break the spell of contemporary experience, this study acknowledges the fundamental estrangement between the society and practices of the twenty-first century, and the society and practices that gave birth to early sound cinema. But to complete the circuit from familiarity to estrangement to understanding, I argue that the cinematic product, like any cultural artifact, can be situated within the field of cultural, historical, and social forces that gave it original force. In other words, by understanding Fort Apache as a discursive contes- tant fighting for position in the field of its times, its final scenes begin to make sense.