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Middlebrow Cinema

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Middlebrow Cinema 1 HOLLYWOOD MIDDLEBROW A dialectical approach to 1940s cinema Chris Cagle Is classical Hollywood primarily a middlebrow cultural form? In his influential taxonomy of high, middle and lowbrow culture for Harper’s Magazine in 1949, Russell Lynes remarks, ‘If the lowbrow reads the comics, the highbrow understands; he is a frequent connoisseur of the comics himself. But if he likes grade-B double features, the highbrow blames that on the corrupting influence of the middlebrow moneybags of Hollywood’ (1949, 25). Tongue-in-cheek, Lynes is nonetheless observing that in comparison to lowbrow culture, even the lower-status genre pictures are too respectable and too sure in their morality to qualify as working- class culture. As Joan Shelley Rubin notes, Lynes’ article fixed the terminology in the popular usage in the United States (1992, xiv). However influential his analy- sis, though, other critics have not shared his assessment of Hollywood. Dwight MacDonald offhandedly states in his famous 1960 essay on ‘Masscult and Midcult’ that in contrast to the middlebrow ‘Midcult’, ‘the enormous output of such new media as the radio, television and the movies is almost entirely Masscult’ (1960, 204). Lynes and MacDonald were two of the most prominent post-war American writers to try to theorize middlebrow culture in response to the widespread emergence of a middlebrow culture over the post-war years. As a later commentator, John Guillory, writes, middlebrow culture is ‘the ambivalent mediation of high culture within the field of the mass cultural’ (1995, 87). As a major mass medium and entertainment form in the first part of the twentieth century, Hollywood cinema undoubtedly provoked a crisis for the status of high culture, but Lynes and MacDonald have opposing appraisals over whether Hollywood represented middlebrow or mass culture. Film Studies has replicated this divide. The prevailing view has seen middlebrow films as occasional exceptions to the mainstay of Hollywood’s popular cinema. Hollywood in its studio years developed a storytelling language that matched the exigencies of industrial production with mass taste. Thus genre played a prominent 16 Chris Cagle role in these years, and even ‘serious’ filmmaking activated the narrative formulas of ‘lower’ popular genres. Andrew Sarris used his categories of ‘less than meets the eye’ and ‘strained seriousness’ as foils for cinema that is properly art (1996, 11). Sarris valued the auteurs who managed to give a vision to lower genres like action films, westerns and thrillers, and was suspicious of prestige or literary material. ‘[W]ho except Huston himself is to blame’, he wrote, ‘for the middle-brow banal- ity of Freud, a personal project with built-in compromises for the “mass” audience’ (1996, 156). Even if film scholars now (usually) have a different stance towards evaluation than Sarris, they often locate the ‘middlebrow’ within films that have a particular aspiration for seriousness: Tom Brown (2013, 119) mentions the biopic, the historical film and the social problem film as privileged middlebrow genres, to which one could add adaptations of canonical novels and plays in genres like the costume drama and heritage film. Whether occurring in particular genres or individual films, the middlebrow would in these models work through a cultural difference from the mainstay of popular cinema. This view of middlebrow films as exceptions to Hollywood’s genre film machine may be so familiar that it can be hard to recognize another, seemingly opposite, view that holds Hollywood in general to be a middlebrow product. Historians of American cinema in the transitional period have charted how a shift from the mostly working-class nickelodeons to the movie palace involved not only the development of classical film language as a storytelling rule-system, but also the hegemony of an absorbed middle-class spectatorship (Uricchio and Pearson 1993). In this account, a film like Birth of a Nation (Griffith 1915) was important not only for popularizing proto-classical storytelling, but also for upgrading the cultural status of cinema and the exhibition space itself. This bourgeoisification of cinema serves as the backbone of what Miriam Hansen formulated as an early cinema-late cinema thesis: both early cinema and postclassical cinema have offered robust public spheres of contestation, whereas classical cinema was a long but finite period of a bourgeois culture grafted onto a popular one (1993, 210). Even accepting the elasticity of the term ‘middle- class’ in American usage, the historical account shows that cinema by the 1920s had consolidated its appeal as a petit-bourgeois entertainment form. In short, one view sees middlebrow as a limited variation of Hollywood’s formula (MacDonald’s thesis), whereas another sees the formula itself as inherently middle- brow (Lynes’). This chapter will not adjudicate between these conflicting views of middlebrow cinema. Rather, it will argue that a critical tension characterizes enter- tainment cinema’s relationship to middle-class culture during the studio era. Like other related critical dichotomies (drama/melodrama, men’s pictures/women’s pic- tures or writer/director), the definitional problems of middlebrow cinema/popular cinema were in fact built into Hollywood’s complicated place in American taste formations. In the 1940s, these tensions became more acute and rose to the surface of the films and their reception. Whereas middlebrow culture had antecedents in earlier decades, as Rubin’s examples of Alexander Woollcott or the book-of-the-month club suggest, in the 1940s there emerged a self-conscious attempt to identify and name the phenomenon. Lynes’ essay itself is an important marker of this shift, but so Hollywood middlebrow 17 too are the f ilms of this period. Although a discourse on the middlebrow is some- times considered to be primarily a phenomenon of post-war and in particular 1950s culture (Staiger 1992, 92; Conroy 1996), already in the 1940s, films were wrestling with the problems of the ‘middle’ of taste stratification. This chapter will use the example of one year, 1947, as an inductive sample, in conjunction with examples from throughout the 1940s. A fuller examination of the decade challenges the static conceptualization that Film Studies often has of popular and middlebrow taste in classical cinema. To reappraise the middlebrow in 1940s cinema is a two-fold opera- tion: first, it connects the critical ambiguity of the middlebrow to the complexity of 1940s cinema; second, it addresses the class self-reflexivity of Hollywood without simply reading past it. It may be difficult to analyse middlebrow cinema without the weight of class condescension the term carries with it, but the complexity and para- doxes of 1940s Hollywood give a good reason to try. Middlebrow/middle-class/moyen One of the greatest difficulties with assessing the role of the middlebrow in Hollywood is the term itself. To proclaim a film ‘middlebrow’ is to invoke a posi- tion of class superiority, and critiques of the term focus on its pejorative baggage. To use the example of Andrew Sarris, ‘middlebrow’ is clearly an insult in much criticism and popular usage, yet even when the analysis of taste is carried out with a more neutral aim, the label ‘middlebrow’ must call out the middlebrow’s cul- tural ‘mistakes’ to analyse them. In his study Distinction, Pierre Bourdieu offers an identification of middlebrow, or, more precisely, petit-bourgeois taste as a ‘cultural allodoxia . the mistaken identifications and false recognitions which betray the gap between acknowledgment and knowledge’ (1984, 323). 1940s Hollywood films even depicted this allodoxia in their narratives. In A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Kazan 1945), for example, Francie Nolan (Peggy Ann Garner) is characterized as a voracious reader who works her way alphabetically through the books in the library, to the bemused surprise of a librarian who eventually gives her guidance. Francie’s desire to read every book represents the limit case of a cultural consump- tion without discrimination, or acknowledgement without knowledge, and the librarian’s guidance figures for the kind of cultural authority comparable to that important middlebrow institution, the book-of-the-month club. As such, Francie could allegorize a film industry itself trying to edify itself through the values of literature. At the same time, the adult spectator recognizes the folly of Francie’s attempt while perhaps sympathizing with her desire for edification. The elasticity of the concept of middlebrow lies in its ability to encompass both the narrowest of middlebrow ‘cultural goodwill’ (Bourdieu 1984, 318) and the earnest desire to ‘correct’ cultural mistakes. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn therefore shows how both the spectator’s and the crit- ic’s superior cultural taste and knowledge constitute the middlebrow. Mistakes are only mistakes to the extent someone can recognize them. For instance, Marianne Conroy considers Tennessee Williams to function as a middlebrow marker in 18 Chris Cagle Imitation of Life (Sirk 1959): ‘The possibility that Lora might audition for a Williams play is no sooner proffered than it is dropped’ (1996, 119). This reading usefully opens up Imitation of Life for a reading as middlebrow culture, but it also invites the scholar to assume a position of superiority in comparison to an assumed lack of knowledge on the part of the middlebrow spectator. The implicit spectator’s first mistake would be to consider Tennessee Williams to be good theatre when in fact this spectator does not really know or prefer the kind of legitimate drama that Williams represents. The second is that Williams himself represents a crowd- pleasing strain in American drama, for which more appropriate reading formations are possibly available – notably camp ones. As Conroy notes, MacDonald and other critics saw Broadway legitimate theatre as one of the worst offenders of mid- dlebrow culture. Critics who seek to read the ‘status panic’ that C. Wright Mills (1956) identified in the mid-century middle classes may simply be reinforcing the status stability of the bourgeois intellectual position.
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