Economy and Society Volume 32 Number 1 February 2003: 74-89 The bureaucratic beyond: Roger Caillois and the negation of the sacred in Hollywood cinema Gary Genosko Abstract In a short paper written in the early 1950s, 'The representation of death in the American cinema', Roger Caillois theorized the representation of the afterlife in America through the Hollywood cinema of the late 1930s and 1940s. Caillois main- tained that the American afterlife is fundamentally bureaucratic and represents a prolongation of the world of the living. This prolongation is understood as a negation of the separation of the sacred and the profane domains in favour of a desacralized, profane pan-bureaucracy. Caillois's essay is read in the context of a sociology of the sacred in the tradition of the College de sociologie, with special attention given to his descriptions of how the sacred tends to wane in ordinary life and to his hybrid methodological strategies. The films Caillois used as evidence are critically reviewed and the Hollywood invasion of French film markets in the 1940s and 1950s is devel- oped as a critical historical context for grounding Caillois's claims about American 'originality': the negation of the sacred dimension of the afterlife, the power of cinema to replace oral tradition in collective life, and the consequences of a powerful, 'exported' mythology that negates the sacred. Keywords: American cinema; representation of death; sacred sociology; post-war French film policy; funeral rites. Roger Caillois's short study 'La representation de la mort dans le cinema ameri- cain' (Caillois 1964 [original publication 1951]; all further references to this essay are given in the body of the text by pages number only) is a theoretical analysis Gary Genosko, Department of Sociology, Lakehead University, 955 Oliver Road, Thunder Bay, Ontario P7B 5E1, Canada. E-mail: [email protected] Copyright © 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd H Routledge ISSN 0308-5147 print/1469-5766 online S\ T.yior6.F,.nd,G™ DOI: 10.1080/0308514032000045771 Gary Genosko: The bureaucratic beyond 75 of one way in which American culture represents death and the afterlife to itself Caillois studied the American afterlife through the lens of the Hollywood cinema of the 1930s and 1940s, in addition to relying on the French translation of Evelyn Waugh's (1903-66) novel The Loved One (1948) (translated into French as Le Cher disparu in 1949), for a description of the Forest Lawn Cemetery in Los Angeles and Californian funeral rites, which Waugh had researched for his novel. Caillois also introduced a few French films into the mix, as well as select American cultural ephemera as points of contrast and comparison. Taken as a whole, the resource materials he used for this study were remarkably diverse. Critical consideration of Caillois's argument is greatly aided by screening the films at issue since these were the texts through which he wanted to discover, at least in the first instance, the 'originality' of the American self-representation of death and the afterlife. A critical review of the films from which Caillois derived his key examples is also necessary because of his extremely selective use of these cinematic materials. Any reader of his essay may be left wondering not only about the content of the films in question but also about the many neglected, yet relevant, dimensions of them. Only the first half of Caillois's essay focuses on select Hollywood films. He then turns his attention to Forest Lawn and uses Waugh's novel and undocumented journalistic and advertising sources as tools of interpretation. Caillois used these cultural products to support what he discovered in his film studies: the American afterlife is bureaucratic and represents a prolongation of the world of the living, just as the representation of death in the Californian mortuary cult is accomplished by means of signs of life, a prolongation of life by semiotic means. Together these factors negate the separation of the sacred and the profane worlds in favour of a profane pan- bureaucracy. Caillois's little essay may be profitably read in the context of a sociology of the sacred. Inspired by both Durkheim and Mauss, Caillois published his import- ant statement on the sacred, L'homme et le sacre, in 1939, with two subsequent editions. The question Caillois posed was inspired by the classical sociological tradition. Following Durkheim (1912: 37), Caillois (1939: 20) recognized that the two worlds of the mutually exclusive domains of the sacred and profane do not mingle in unmediated ways, that is, in the absence of collectively recognized rites of passage and acknowledged risks of admixture. Caillois took great care to outline how the profane needs the sacred, and the regulation, through rites, of the process of consecration in the passage into the sacred from the profane; likewise, he also explained expiation in the process of desacralization in the passage from the sacred to the profane. One of Caillois's most significant accomplishments in L'homme et le sacre was to trace the extent to which the sacred could survive in complex, modern societies under pressure of the liberation and independence of the individual. In a classic statement of this thesis from a key text from the College de sociologie, Caillois (1988: 282ff, originally published 1939) repeated Durkheim's distinc- tion between festival as a sacred sphere of excess in opposition to an ordinary, secular life of labour and moral prohibitions. But in subsequent rewrites Caillois 76 Economy and Society lamented that the collective ferment of festival had given way to individualized, isolated vacations (1940 version). Ten years later, in 1950, he found this old alternation replaced by periods of peace and violence. The festival, as a rite marking a passage from the regulated everyday to the paroxysm and excess of the sacred, has a tendency to wane under the pressure of ordinary life: Social existence in its entirety slides towards uniformity. More and more, flood and drought are channeled into a regular and even flow. The multiple necessities of the profane life less and less tolerate the simultaneous reserva- tion of the same time to the sacred. (Caillois 1939: 170) Caillois examined the fragmentation of the sacred in the eclipse of a distinct alternation between the two domains. The sacred 'appears to become abstract, interior, subjective, attached less to beings than to concepts' (ibid.: 172). The sacred, in short, becomes conceptual. It persists, but in new forms, and its persistence is based in part on negative criteria: for example, the incomplete liheration and independence of the individual. Although Caillois sought, in the successive editions oiL'homme et le sacre, to discover new examples of festival (for example. Carnival in Rio, total war as the paroxysm of modern society), he did not detect the absence of the sacred. The little essay under consideration here presents a finding that expresses one possible result of the trend toward uniformity in modern societies, noted above, under the demands of profane life. In the USA, as Caillois shows, these pres- sures have carried the profane into the otherwise sacred dimension of the after- life. And the Hollywood cinema shows that it is no longer the case that the sacred is death's door: 'the sacred is always more or less "that which cannot be approached without dying"' (Caillois 1939: 19, citing in the quote the words of a Dakota Indian). This is precisely the feature that makes Caillois's paper signifi- cant for a classical sociology of the sacred. Continuity between the two domains or the failure of alternation, as it is represented in the films in question, disables the seminal distinction between sacred and profane. The United States of America is allegedly a society without a sacred, a thoroughly profane country. The consequences of this absence of the sacred are somewhat unclear since Caillois ends his paper with a series of ques- tions. Still, there is no mistaking the claim that this is an 'original' condition. It would be difficult to predict, Caillois noted (128), that this trend in popular cine- matic imagery would continue. Still, the power of the Hollywood cinema as 'the privileged expression of collective sensibility' (128) is not in doubt. The essay's Durkheimian framework will be familiar to readers of the early Caillois of the College in the 1930s. But the mixture of Durkheim, Hollywood, Waugh and death arouses curiosity. As Denis Hollier (1997: 94) has observed of Caillois, 'his work is hard to categorize' because of his preference for 'the theor- etical'; yet, it is a preference that in addition makes it hard 'to situate ... within the typology of theoretical writings' (Hollier 1997: 95). The 'seamlessness', to use one of HoUier's felicitous expressions, in Caillois's Gary Genosko: The bureaucratic beyond 11 article between American cinema, British novelistic parody of America used as ethnographic evidence and a sociological categorization of the representation of the afterlife as a bureaucracy familiar to the living is a strange hybrid typical of Caillois. Through this strangeness, Caillois posed a classical sociological question: do certain myths of Hollywood cinema, especially the representation of the afterlife, contribute to social cohesion, even if they do so paradoxically by demonstrating the continuity between profane and sacred worlds? In the 1940 rewrite of the College text on 'Festival' cited above, Caillois remarked: 'Is a society with no festivals not a society condemned to death? While suffering from the gnawing feeling of suffocation vaguely provoked in everyone by their absence, is not the ephemeral pleasure of vacation one of those false senses of well-being that mask death throes from the dying?' (Caillois 1988: 302). Caillois's implicit answer was yes on both accounts.