Media, Popular Culture, and the American Century

media, popular culture, and the american century Edited by kingsley bolton and jan olsson den här boken är utgiven med en creative commons-licens: Erkännande, Icke-kommersiell, Inga bearbetningar 3.0. media, popular culture, and the american century Edited by kingsley bolton and jan olsson national library of sweden p. o. box 5039, 102 41 stockholm, sweden ©the authors & national library of sweden 2010 designed by jens andersson/www.bokochform.se printed in sweden by fälth & hässler, 2010 issn 1654-6601 isbn 978-0-86196-698-1 MEDIEHISTORISKT ARKIV 20 contents 7 introduction: Jan Olsson and Kingsley Bolton (eds.) mediated america: americana as hollywoodiana part 1: cinema and americanization 35 Jan Olsson, italian marionettes meet cinematic modernity 62 Joel Frykholm, “a red-blooded romance”; or, americanizing early multi-reel feature cinema: the case of the spoilers 101 Meredith C. Ward, song of the sonic body: noise, the audience, and early american moving picture culture 125 Kingsley Bolton, constructing the global vernacular: american english and the media part 2: americans at the margins 155 Esther Sonnet, you only live once: repetitions of crime as desire in the films of sylvia sidney, 1930–1937 185 Peter Stanfield, punks! topicality and the 1950s gangster bio-pic cycle 216 Ann-Kristin Wallengren, importing evil: the american gangster, swedish cinema, and anti-american propaganda part 3: american dreams/american nightmares 227 Corrado Neri, sun yu and the early americanization of chinese cinema 249 Gregory Lee, if america were really china or how christopher columbus discovered asia 270 Michael Renov, civil rights on the screen part 4: america goes digital 285 Lisa Parks, goodbye rabbit ears: visualizing and mapping the u.s. digital tv transition 301 Pelle Snickars, archival transitions: some digital propositions 330 Evelyn Ch’ien, are americans human? 363 afterword: William Uricchio, rethinking the american century 376 contributors 378 bibliography 405 name and title index INTRoDUCTION MeDIATED AMeRIcA: AMeRIcAnA As HoLLYWOODIAnA ------------------------------- JAn Olsson AnD KIngsLeY BoLton “All civilization is the product of fenced-in lack of freedom.” — Haruki Murakami there are no fencings-in here, no ground rules, nor any territorial claims. Instead this volume started out as a road map for exploring ave- nues of shared scholarly interest. In broad terms, we envisioned syner- getic overlaps across fences and unaccounted-for connections between the global spread of American popular culture and the mechanisms for language change in the age of modernity. As an example, a particular case in point that provides an emblematic discursive backdrop is the inventive study of national cinemas—in terms of the vernacular in relation to Holly- wood’s classic idiom—by Miriam Hansen and Zhen Zhang.1 Hansen’s influential essay takes stock of the market value of classic Hollywood and how its domineering storytelling regime has been appropriated, inflected, and negotiated in national film contexts. In her magisterial work on the emergence of Chinese cinema in Shanghai, Zhen Zhang elegantly mobi- lizes vernacular perspectives as the key critical pivot for the celluloid en- counter between West and East. In this spirit, Hollywood’s styles, genres, and codes—linguistic and otherwise—loom large for our project. With different, more consciousness-related emphasis, one could have invoked Roland Robertson’s usage of the original Japanese term, glocalization, when referring to the practices of local embodiments, reverberations, and mise-en-scenès of global templates.2 7 introduction Figure 1: Burlesque poster from 1897. Courtesy of the Theatrical Poster Collection, Library of Congress. 8 introduction UnFENCING AMeRIcAn STUDIES The editors’ academic habitats are Cinema Studies and English, with our respective research interests the consolidation of American film culture in the silent era and the many Englishes in Asia. Stockholm served as the point of departure for our road trip: a crossroads where our travel plans happened to intersect. To be sure, the Swedish academic geography bears some significance in that the study of English in Sweden traditionally pays minimal heed to popular culture, American or not, while Cinema Studies in Stockholm has been somewhat reluctant to fully engage with Hollywood cinema as well as American television. We therefore envisioned opportunities for novel excitements for a new generation of stu- dents and young scholars attuned to and symbolically milk-fed on the many guises and inflections of American popular culture. Our ambition was however not to start up a full-scale American Studies program from scratch in Stockholm, but to organize encounters, events, speaker series, workshop, conferences, and possibly a mobile research center—and to edit this collection as a first draft or travelogue. In order for us to get a grip on the role of Americana and its media and language practices—inside the U.S. as Americanization (a somewhat dated term) as well as in the form of hard and/or soft export—we have elected to invite a select group of both American and non-American scholars as contributors to this volume. Our team comes from a diverse humanities background and offers insightful responses to our call for critical reflections on mediated—as in media-filtered, media-messaged, and media-projected—Americana, American English, as well as current changes in the development of domestic U.S. media. By choice we have included neither historians proper nor political scientists. These two groups are otherwise the most prominent when it comes to an “external” research interest concerning American society in- or outside the banner of American Studies. As a teaser and preamble for a research field in spe, we’ve vouched for a differently pivoted area of expertise and an interna- tional team. On U.S. campuses, and half century or so after Henry Nash Smith’s classic study Virgin Land—in many ways a foundational work—American Studies is still not a clear-cut and fenced-in area of research. It is, instead, a highly productive and malleable field of inquiry traversing vast facets of American endeavors, experiences, and identities across centuries and 9 introduction in the process skirting multiple disciplines.3 In the 1940s and during the 1950s, according to Stanley Bailis’ historiographic sketch, the prime pio- neers of American Studies came from literature and history and many preferred to stay put after occasional forays into new programs and sem- inars. Partly rooted in ideas of American exceptionalism and a realm of putative unique American experiences as a new nation built on immigra- tion, scholars tried to capture salient traces of this special American con- dition, often in studies featuring grand historical sweeps. In the process, a focus on English literature shifted to American letters. Again the most influential studies were animated by the elongated lifespan of myths, im- ages, and symbols for coming to terms with the American mind, imagi- nation or some other broad category.4 Figure 2: Frame enlargement from Alfred Hitchcock’s Saboteur (Universal, 1942). AMeRIcA’s tIMe Emblematic for our approach to Americana in this volume is not only scholarly efforts, but foremost a non-academic text, namely Henry R. Luce’s landmark essay “The American Century” from 1941. H.G Wells, however, probably first used the phrase “American Century.”5 The inter- twined nature of mediated Americana and the role of America’s position on the global political scene resonates with the backdrop for the analysis 10 introduction outlined by Luce, perhaps the most renowned American publisher of the 20th century. Discounting the daily newspapers tycoons, Pulitzer, Hearst, and Ochs, the American Editor-in-Chief was undoubtedly Henry R. Luce. Born in China to missionary parents, educated at Yale and Oxford, Luce became the most prominent publisher of his generation. Time, the first venture, emerged in collaboration with Briton Hadden in 1923, and after Hadden’s death Luce launched Fortune, Life, and Sports Illustrated, and on radio and screen two innovative news digests, both named March of Time. In 1941 Orson Welles effectively parodied the March of Time in Citizen Kane and the style Hadden and Luce had crafted for Time, which seem- ingly effortlessly spilled over to other publications and media. Prior to the opening of Citizen Kane in May and the attack on Pearl Harbor in December, Luce was ready to affix the label “American” onto the 20th century in a classic essay in Life straightforwardly titled “The American Century.” Here Luce waxed poetic on key facets of Americana as the sole common currency across the globe, namely: “American jazz, Hollywood movies, American slang, American machines and patented products.” Thus, he claimed, they are “the only things that every community in the world, from Zanzibar to Hamburg, recognizes in common.”6 To single out Hamburg was of course a calculated move in the middle of the Sec- ond World War, just prior to the American entry that was to come after Pearl Harbor. For Luce, the ubiquitous cultural presence of Americana was a bridgehead and signpost for America’s inevitable political role in the 20th century. Non-visionary American politicians, he maintained, had dodged this role since 1919. Luce prime’s mission at this time was to convince the Roosevelt administration to abandon isolationism and to act according to America’s manifest purpose and bring leadership to a brave new world. The world, Luce argued, was in need of American civilization and values as a bulwark against totalitarianism at a time when Europe and Great Britain had been backed into a corner by tyranny. The attack on Pearl Harbor ten months later was to vindicate his ar- gument, and, during the Cold War that followed, America’s role in the global arena expanded along lines first sketched by Luce. A son of a missionary with both an internal and external perspective on America, Luce’s publications were welcomed by a jazz-age America driven by busi- ness and consumerism and led by a generation of well-educated, young businessmen—tycoon was a term popularized by Time.

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