The Concept of Sentimentality in Critical Approaches to Film and Its Cultural Antecedents
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Charles Adam John Burnetts Ph.D candidate - Media Arts Department, Royal Holloway, University of London Ph.D degree thesis The Concept of Sentimentality in Critical Approaches to Film and its Cultural Antecedents Declaration of Authorship I, Charles Burnetts, hereby declare that this thesis and the work presented in it is entirely my own. Where I have consulted the work of others, this is always clearly stated. Signed: Date: 22nd February 2011 Abstract This thesis examines how sentimentality, as a term central to film criticism, has been mobilized, denigrated, quarantined or ignored over 300 years of aesthetic debate. It responds to the often vexed question of what the sentimental means, by unpacking the concept’s intellectual and artistic history, tracing a transition from the Enlightenment use of sentimentality as a positive concept denoting pedagogy and moral feeling, to its entrance into the modern vernacular as a term connoting its own excess, as a function of its alleged appeals to indulgent or unearned pathos. A key question of the research concerns whether the sentimental can be recuperated within contemporary moving- image culture once we are re-familiarized with its early (lesser known about) critical applications. I contend in such a vein that the unpacking of such positive aspects of the sentimental very much colours our critical understanding of such cinematic figures as Charlie Chaplin, Steven Spielberg and those in their wake, both in terms of their films and the reception of those films. I argue that the early, classical and post- classical periods of cinema can be significantly differentiated in terms of how sentimental cinema fares critically, providing new insights into such intellectual spheres as naturalism, modernism and postmodernism in relation to the cultural reception of cinema. Theories of emotion (especially in relation to spectatorship and film theory) are also examined closely up to what I argue to be a now established, and indeed, valorised melodramatic ‘mode’ of contemporary mainstream cinema, as applicable to Hollywood and beyond. As a theoretical tradition that both validates ‘feeling’ in its pedagogical and idealist aims while remaining problematic ideologically, I show how the sentimental demands to be understood alongside the most contemporary of critical positions, not least in terms of the critical turn towards affect and the body. i Acknowledgements This project has benefited greatly from the help and support of a number of different people and organizations. I would first like to thank my thesis advisor Barry Langford for his invaluable advice and attentive support. I would also like to thank Daniella Berghahn for her assistance throughout my doctoral studies. I would also like to thank countless other members of the Royal Holloway Media Arts department for their help and advice at away-days and at the odd tea-break down the road from the BFI Library. The latter of course has been an invaluable resource for me while in London; recent plans notwithstanding, long may it remain exactly where it is. I would also like to thank Mandy Merck, who has offered much of her time in advising me on the foundational chapters of this study. I would also like to extend my gratitude to the members of the Communication and Culture department at Indiana University, particularly those that attended a dissertation writing group that met every fortnight or so, for accepting me as one of their own and providing me with some great advice on the project. I would like to thank Joan Hawkins in particular for her patient and generous contributions to various chapters. Finally, I would like to thank my family for their kind patience and support throughout this process. My wife Chaya, in particular, has always been there for me, helping me through the tough times and assisting me in this project in incalculable ways. ii Table of Contents Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………ii Introduction………………………………………………………………………... 1 Chapter One The Rise and Fall of Sentimentalism in the 18th Century………….……………….28 Chapter Two The Dickensian Meets Modernity: Sentimental Cultures in the 19th Century……...74 Chapter Three The Sentimental and Cinematic Modernism……………………………………….114 Chapter Four Chaplin, Sentimental Tastes and the Biopic………………………………………..177 Chapter Five Redemption amidst Trauma: Spielberg’s Sentimental Pedagogy………………….220 Chapter Six ‘Sympathy for a Kitsch Devil’: Postmodern Sentiment……………………………264 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………….320 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………..333 iii Introduction SCOTTIE – You both hid behind there, mmm?... 'til everything was clear... then sneaked down and drove back to the city. And then? You were his girl. What happened to you? Did he ditch you? Oh, Judy!! When he had all her money, and the freedom and the power... he ditched you? What a shame! But he knew he was safe. You couldn't talk. Didn't he give you anything? JUDY – (faintly) Some money. SCOTTIE – And the necklace. Carlotta's necklace. That was your mistake, Judy. One shouldn't keep souvenirs of a killing. You shouldn't have been that sentimental. At the denouement of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958, USA), standing with Judy (Kim Novak) at the top of the bell tower, James Stewart’s Scottie delivers his final judgement concerning Judy’s conduct, now that he has finally gathered together the details of the murder for which he was unwittingly set-up as witness. Judy has taken pity on him for the part she played in impersonating the now-murdered wife of Gavin Elster and encouraging Scottie’s adoration and obsession for her depiction of a vulnerable, psychologically troubled Madeleine. Agreeing to be dressed up once again as the woman she had already impersonated in the film’s first act (before the real Madeleine’s murder) allows Scottie to unravel the mystery, the key clue constituted by her putting on the necklace that belonged to Madeleine without Scottie having instructed her to do so. But what does Scottie mean here when he accuses Judy of sentimentality? Is it merely an experienced detective’s advice that an accessory to murder should never have kept incriminating evidence of their criminal act? Or does this judgement carry more valences? It might suggest for instance that Judy should not have participated in an 1 impersonation that was otherwise so stringently overseen by Scottie himself. Or that she should not have felt the feelings of care or even love towards the distraught Scottie that allowed her to assist him in this way, motivated as much by pity for him as genuine love. Equally, perhaps she is admonished here for the poor moral character she exhibits for ever wearing a dead woman’s jewellery and certainly for wearing it after the latter’s death that she herself has caused. Finally, Scottie may in fact be addressing himself more than Judy with these words, rueing his ever allowing himself to be emotionally drawn into a web of lies and murder, of allowing a detective’s aptitude for reasoned, shrewd deduction to be clouded by his vulnerable emotional needs (love for Madeleine) and psychological frailties (his recently acquired fear of heights). In such respects, the ‘sentimental’ represents a diverse set of questions and concerns that relate to moral character, to the emotions and to the visual in contemporary aesthetic discourse. Now widely used to connote a sense of its own excess, as in the attribute of the ‘grossly sentimental’ deployed by so many critics, such a term is also ‘over- determined’ by its having had key pertinence to a wide set of aesthetic questions. The use of the term in the above scene for instance reveals a tension inherent to theories of the sentimental that will be examined in detail below – that between reason and emotion. Scottie is presented to us at the beginning of Vertigo as the ideal Enlightenment subject, an eligible bachelor and well-meaning private detective whose all-American charm and common sense are marred only by an unfortunate police accident that has left him with profound vertigo. Madeleine is presented as a quintessentially sentimental paradigm of female virtue in distress, lost in melancholic nostalgia for a long-dead ancestor (Carlotta Valdes) and seemingly 2 emotionally unequipped for survival in the rationalized metropolis of San Francisco. Yet ironically it is Madeleine (or rather Judy) that belongs to and serves the calculating menace of the city and Scottie that enters a lovelorn reverie and obsessional melancholia the minute he has seen her, the tragedy of the film resting indeed on a fundamental non-coincidence between their two subject-positions throughout. The final scene represents a moment that sees the two characters swap roles in relation to reason and emotion, where Scottie is finally allowed to resume his long-lost role of reasoned, sanguine detective and Judy reveals for the first time an affection for him uncompromised by pity or an ulterior motive of monetary gain. However, a relationship between them is just as untenable owing to an impossible contradiction between Judy’s sentimentality and Scottie’s hard-won rationality. If their love depends throughout the film on mistaken identities, false communication and fantasy, reality at the film’s end delivers repugnance and recrimination, and delivers the film’s second deathfall from the bell tower. A sentimentality that seemed throughout the film to be connoted by images of love, sadness, romance and the sublime (red sequoias, bell tower, the Golden Gate Bridge) turns out to be marred by the uncanny presence of death, doubles and repetition, signified by the blood-red ruby necklace worn by three dead women. Yet what would Vertigo be without its thematization of distortion, lies and emotional manipulation? If the sentimental becomes the underpinning for much of the fantasy, desire and tragedy of the film, it is because its philosophical ideals, and its failures, resonate with those of aesthetics writ large.