Module C35: Hollywood                                                                              Notes to Lecture 1                               Introduction: Dismantling the Apparatus     Term 1 prog.

"Hollywood, America’s greatest modern contribution to world culture, is a business, a religion, an art form, and a state of mind" (Camille Paglia. ‘Elizabeth Taylor: Hollywood’s Pagan Queen’ in Sex, Art and American Culture. Vintage, 1992).  Back in the 1940's however, the Frankfurt School critics, traumatised by American culture, claimed that Hollywood could never aspire to the status of art. In their 1947 attack on the intellectual poverty of western capitalism (The Culture Industry : Enlightenment as Mass Deception, 1947), Adorno and Horkheimer, claimed that art could not exist in a regime where creative potential is harnessed by the selfish interests of economic gain.

Adorno and Horkheimer observed, for example, that in America, "the dependency of the most powerful broadcasting company on the electrical industry, or of the motion picture industry on the banks, is characteristic of the whole sphere, whose individual branches are themselves economically interwoven." Thus, they complained that all the efforts of cultural production were identically tainted by the smear of money and profit. More damning than this, they argued that far from being content to label products, the Culture Industry under capitalism reduces citizens themselves to units of consumption:

"Marked differentiations such as those of A and B films, or of stories in magazines in different price ranges, depend not so much on subject matter as on classifying, organising and labelling consumers. Something is provided for all so that none may escape … The public is catered for with a hierarchical range of mass produced products of varying quality, thus advancing the rule of complete quantification …"

These conditions, they claimed, applied to everything produced under capitalism. Its system prevented any medium from aspiring to the status of Art. This was because great works of Art in the past "transcended reality" in as much as they articulate the human condition. In so doing, great works achieve a sort of self-negation – are able to step outside - and resist the dominant ideology of their day. Under capitalism however, potential art has to be obedient to the social hierarchy and thus it is reduced to the status of product: whether mass-produced like a car or singular like a movie, the cultural object’s relation to power compromises its identity as art. Further proof of this is provided by the fact that a cultural object’s value in industrial society is calculated only in monetary terms:

"How formalised the procedure is can be seen when the mechanically differentiated products prove to be all alike in the end. That the difference between the Chrysler range and General Motors products is basically illusory strikes every child with a keen interest …The same applies to the Warner Bros and MGM productions … The universal criterion of merit is the amount of conspicuous production, of blatant cash investment. The varying budgets in the culture industry do not bear the slightest relation to factual values, to the meaning of the products themselves."

(We might perhaps think about this summer’s movies here: The Phantom Menace? The Blair Witch Project?) Clearly, then, using Adorno and Horkheimer’s criteria, it is impossible for a Hollywood movie to approach the status of art. By definition the Hollywood text is a mere product, a property targeted at a market for profit. This is the only reason for its existence.

But the fact is that Hollywood movies CAN acquire the patina of art, and exhibit some of its major qualities. According to Art Historian, Mark Sagoff, the Fourth Principle of art states that, "Art objects have no practical function or use." Certainly Hollywood products conform to this principle! Sagoff’s Fifth Principle states that, "Enduring artworks, with few and special exceptions, cannot be created directly; they have to be ‘found’ or ‘discovered’ long after they have been rejected or thrown out." This lecture will be concerned with one such text, that not only can be seen to have been discovered (by other texts, for example), but which itself approaches a form of self-negation - in that its own narrative almost demands a dismantling of its own apparatus.

a) The Writer in Hollywood. Reference text: Sunset Boulevard.

We have chosen to start with a screening of Sunset Boulevard because, of all the classic films that reflect on the Hollywood machine, this one offers possibly the most compelling and resonant critique – indeed offers a resistance which I believe approaches even Adorno and Horkheimer’s stringent requirements of Great Art. Its tale of the screenwriter who is seduced and then murdered by an ageing film star has passed into the consciousness of the 20^th century, conforming to Sagoff’s Fifth principle of art. Its narrative has even been adapted into a successful stage musical, playing in both the West End of London and on Broadway.

In Robert Altman’s The Player (a savage satire on the mentality that had infiltrated Hollywood by the 1990’s), a self-centred Hollywood producer, Griffin Mill, characteristically looks down on all screenwriters (Barton Fink does an excellent job of describing the writer’s position during the 1930’s). In The Player though, not all Mill’s fellow producers go so far as to murder a writer. In one scene, paranoid about being caught for the murder, Mill is told by his secretary that one Joe Gillis has called. He is un-nerved to learn that Joe Gillis is William Holden’s scriptwriter character murdered by star, Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard.

It is fitting that The Player should use this reference in a context that is both comic and tragic. For while it has been claimed that Sunset Boulevard is a comic tale (being narrated by a corpse!), yet it is also profoundly tragic for both protagonists.

First Joe Gillis: the question of who ‘owns’ a picture (in the sense that an artist ‘owns’ his painting) has been problematised since the auteur theory gained wide currency. Every time we think about going to see a Scorsese film or a Tarantino film, a Spielberg film or an Oliver Stone film, we are buying into the auteur theory. As William Goldman has pointed out (in "Adventures in the Screen Trade"), every time a movie poster appears with the director’s name above the movie title, we are being suckered into the idea that the director is responsible for everything up there on the screen. As Goldman says, all we have to do is stay at the end of the movie and watch hundreds – perhaps thousands - of names go up in the credit sequence to realise that a movie is a collaborative effort. But Goldman would say that wouldn’t he: he’s a screenwriter responsible for such hits as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (who knew?!). And as Joe Gillis points out, "Audiences don’t know somebody sits down and writes a picture. They think the actors make it up as they go along."

Joe Gillis is indeed a Ghost in the machine of Sunset Boulevard, for his voice-over guides us through a convincing narrative, even though we know he is dead and therefore an unreliable narrator. And yet the film we are watching represents his success: this is the screenplay he finally got accepted and which reached the light of day – how else could we be watching it? But it is also Norma’s success for, as Joe’s voice-over informs us, the cameras were finally rolling for her at last. The film closes with her ‘come-back’ … or ‘return’, as she prefers to call it. So let’s turn to Norma:

b) The Star System

Norma Desmond’s identity as a star of the silent era allows the text to open up into a historical discussion of the importance of the star system to the rise of Hollywood. When Norma drives through the gates of Paramount Studios after so many years and is not recognised by the young guard, she tells Jonesy, the older guard, to teach his young friend some manners: "Tell him without me he wouldn’t have any job, because without me there wouldn’t be any Paramount Studios."

This cuts to the very foundation stone of the American film industry, which from 1910 was built on the idea of stars. Indeed one of the earliest and enduring studios, United Artists, was founded by stars (and one director): Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. This attests to the extra-ordinary power of the star in the American film – quite different to almost any other national cinema.

But there is something else about the star that this film examines. There is an acknowledgement here that the star system itself arose out of public demand; that the relationship between the star and the audience is a unique and dangerous one. That the fame of the film star can be more destructive and tragically consuming than any other kind of fame. That in the case of the star what is at stake is the very identity of the individual: since so much is invested in the star persona, an entity that endures across the boundaries of several texts, a delicate balance is struck between the real self and the celluloid self.

Norman Desmond’s tragedy is that this balance is out of kilter. Her real self has disappeared into an other, that she can never reach – just as we can never become the star who we are content to identify with for the duration of a film.

c)  Hollywood-on-Hollywood: self-reflexivity

Of course there is another level of the apparatus being dismantled here also, which concerns the seemingly obvious matter of Cecil B. de Mille playing himself. This mechanism has been employed in a number of recent films – notably in The Player, where Burt Reynolds and a host of other actor/stars play themselves -alongside Whoopy Goldberg, who plays a detective. The effect can be humorous, though in Sunset Boulevard I would argue that the comedy is overwhelmed by the appalling tragedy of Norma Desmond.

Further intertextuality arises out of the fact that Norma is played by Gloria Swanson, whose film career began in 1916. She first appeared under de Mille’s direction in Don’t Change your Husband (1919), a story of the New Liberated American woman, who finds that her husband cannot keep up with the jazzy pace of post war America. The success of this audacious drama of the emancipated wife was followed in a 1920 sequel, Why Change you Wife?, in which the husband finds his wife not keeping up. Swanson’s transition from frumpy wife to gorgeous femme fatale in order to keep her husband’s interest, delighted audiences. By 1924 she was the foremost American star in another de Mille hit titled Manhandled.

But the most telling intertextual irony of Sunset Boulevard lies in Max being played by Eric von Stroheim. When Max confesses that in the early silent era there were only three names; de Mill, Griffith and himself, he is not lying or merely playing a part. Eric von Stroheim’s excesses were legendary in the 1920’s, shooting longer and longer epics such as Blind Husbands (1921) and Foolish Wives (1922), culminating in the seven hour Greed in 1923, which the studio cut to a standard feature length, rendering it all but incomprehensible and released the following year.

In 1928 Swanson was romantically involved with Joseph Kennedy, who agreed to finance her latest production, Queen Kelly. The venture was to prove a disaster, coming just before the advent of sound pictures but also - and not least because -Swanson wanted the most notoriously extravagant director then operating – von Stroheim. It is a fragment of this film that Norma and Joe Gillis sit and watch in Sunset Boulevard, where the great director has been reduced to a projectionist!

But there is more: Queen Kelly tells the story of a wicked queen in a fairy tale land, who keeps a handsome army captain as her sexual slave. When the captain meets and falls in love with an innocent little irish convent girl, Kelly (played by Swanson), the queen’s sadistic wrath gives some indication of why von Stroheim’s reputation was so outrageous. The queen horse-whips the young Swanson, while foaming at the mouth like some demented monster. What Wilder has done in Sunset Boulevard is allow Swanson’s little Kelly to indeed become the monstrous queen now transmuted into Norma Desmond. Thus the text of Sunset Boulevard references Queen Kelly much as The Player references Sunset Boulevard.

d) Silent Cinema vs. Sound Cinema - warring aesthetics

3. e)  The ontology of the image : dismantling the apparatus

Both these points can be hit at the same time by considering the way in which the characters of Joe and Norma actually symbolise the warring aesthetics of Silent and Sound Cinema. I would stop short of calling the text of Sunset Boulevard a Brechtian text (i.e. using a form that openly references its own artifice), since it strives so effortlessly for a mode of realism. And yet here is a text that is open to multiple readings – including one that posits its form as its content – quite an avant garde practice. And all the more remarkable in that it is contained within a straight narrative format.

Wilder deliberately chose the excessive acting style of Swanson because he wanted to bring these ideas of silent vs. sound to the screen. If we look at the extract from the film in which Joe first reads Norma’s script we see in this sequence the very essence of the two styles. Joe is wooden, evasive. We would not know what he is thinking without the Voice-over on the soundtrack. While Norma’s expressive qualities are literally spectacular. At one point she says, "I can say anything I want with my eyes," and whips off her sun-glasses (even though it is 11pm! Wilder never loses sight of the comedy). Her eyes bulge and narrow throughout his scene and reflect her thoughts and emotions. We read every nuance in them, when they narrow and ask his star sign, and then whether he is married. Furthermore, the framing, lighting and editing of this sequence are designed to emphasises their barter by having them battle for screen space. He is trying to trick her into giving him some work; she is trying to get those hooked claws into him and keep him as a replacement for her monkey. It has the atmosphere of a horror movie – a genre engendered during the silent era - while the stylistic features such as the voice-over are pure Noir - a sound era genre. The last shot of this sequence, before he is shown up to the room above the garage demonstrates how

Joe = Sound = Hearing = Noir = Normality

Norma = Silent = Sight = Horror = Monstrous

That it was capable of sustaining an oppositional reading (i.e. a reading that resists the dominant ideology of its day was not lost on the VIPs invited to the back-lot screening at Paramount in 1950. According to Hollywood folklore, when Louis B Meyer, feared head of MGM, saw Sunset Boulevard at the guest screening he and his yes-men were outraged. Wilder heard him complaining that here was this Billy Wilder, a foreigner who comes to this country for work! Hollywood gives him a job, allows him to support a family and he makes this film that bites the hand that feeds him. Wilder parted the crowds in the screening room and announced, "You can go fuck yourself! I’m Billy Wilder. I made this movie and I’m very proud of it."

Needless to say it was a long time since anyone had told L. B. Meyer to go fuck himself. But this was a very important moment in the history and development of Hollywood; the crowd was on Billy’s side and did not hold with Meyer’s view.

What this incident announced was that finally the writer/ producer/ director - creative people like Billy Wilder had taken charge of this particular culture industry.