The Power and Promise of Hollywood Classicism

In his unfinished last novel, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote of Hollywood, “Not a half dozen men have been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their head.” The force and dominance that the studio system of that time represented is both tremendous and complex. A good part of that complexity is due to its very own invisibility – the control that it asserted over its audience without them even knowing. Therein lies the genius of Classical Hollywood. Down to the very audience it proposed to serve, the entire system was organized and controlled with almost maniacal efficiency. Hollywood as a system imposed on the industry economic, moral, artistic, and spectatorial standardization. Over these four interrelated areas, those half-dozen men had almost dictatorial control.

Hollywood as we know it owes its existence to the rebels who came west to make films without abiding by the strict laws and regulations in New York. However, while they may have had the studios and the talent in California, the huge amounts of capital needed remained east and Hollywood retained major ties to Wall Street. In addition to the pressure from investors, Hollywood during its “golden age” was a model of absolute control, vertically integrated so that all aspects of the industry – production, distribution, and exhibition – fell under the same roof. The result was a rigid factory-like economic standardization which attempted to control the artistic production to yield the greatest possible profit, even, ironically, in the midst of the Great Depression~The control that executives had in Hollywood went far beyond purely financial. The impulse that led the first studios to avoid the laws of New York and establish themselves in California was a need for total control over their product. Rather than the government-made laws, they wanted their own. This same issue came up in 1933 as the threat of government censorship loomed near. In the loose environment of the 1920s, producers learned that sex, violence, and sensationalism sell. In the 30s, with the depression in full-swing, they began to resort to using these tactics more overtly and more often to guarantee their profits even in such a dangerous economic climate. Protest from conservative groups soon surfaced and the industry was forced to establish a mode of self-censorship to avoid the interference of government in production. The resulting Production Code specifically outlined what was and was not permitted in American films and was enforced and monitored by the Production Code Administration (PCA).

Economic and moral standardization begat artistic standardization. At this time in Hollywood, the movies were a producer’s medium more than a director’s medium, and what they believed was ‘good’ was determined more by what sold, and abided by the moral proscriptions of the Code, than what might be good art. In his essay, “The Whole Equation of Pictures,” Thomas Schatz notes that those Hollywood directors that did have a great influence, like John Ford, Howard Hawks, Frank Capra, and Alfred Hitchcock, were also producers, and he said that their artistic control was “more a function of their role as producers than directorsâÂ?¦authority came only with commercial success”(653). Indeed, the executives in Hollywood needed only to look back at UFA, the German film association which gave its directors almost total control and eventually folded in economic ruin. Hollywood made sure to avoid this mistake, and directors were merely craftsmen in a larger system of production.

The artistic control employed by these studio executives, as well as its connection to the financial control studios yielded, is evident when comparing the “styles” of different studios. For example, MGM was the biggest and most prosperous studio and MGM films were opulent and magnificent looking, made with the greatest directors, cinematographers, and stars that money could buy. In contrast, Warner Bros., because of its history as a minor studio in the silent era, had less money and so specialized in gritty, social realism and reflected the values of the working class, even in the directors and stars they hired. Clearly it was the executives and not the directors who were in charge of ‘artistic’ decisions.

Perhaps the most important standardization to look at in order to understand the “whole equation” of Hollywood is spectatorial standardization. The success of Hollywood movies relied entirely on its recognition and delivery of audiences’ desires. In many ways, Classical Hollywood cinema can be seen as a psychoanalytic cinema because of the ways in which it addresses the subconscious needs of its spectators and while doing so, disguises itself as ‘real.’ To this day, many will defend the ‘realism’ of these movies, despite the fact that it is, perhaps, the most manipulated cinema of all. The narrative and formal techniques it employs give its spectator a sense of total control and a vision of wholeness that promise complete psychological satisfaction~Jean-Louis Baudry wrote about the ideological effects of the cinema and the ways in which the technological and narrative apparatus of the cinema process causes an almost irresistible identification. Between the objective reality, the site of inscription, and its on-screen representation, the site of projection, lies the entire work of cinema for which the camera is only a metonym (356). In more recent decades, this work has been exposed through self-reflexivity and experimentation, producing, instead a knowledge effect. However, in Classical Hollywood, it remained concealed, producing instead an ideological effect~Unlike cubism’s multiple perspectives, or the Greek tradition of “discontinuous and heterogeneous” space, cinema uses the Renaissance construction of perspective (357). There is ideology hidden in the very idea of ‘normal’ perspective, then, he argues. For example, he notes that the use of wide-angle or telephoto lenses is laden with ideology in the very fact that they are considered a departure from “normal” perspective, where “the [normal] dimensions of the image itself, the ration between height and width, seem clearly taken from an average drawn from Western easel painting”(357). The camera gives us the single, centered perspective of the Renaissance. We identify with the camera’s gaze as if it is our own.

The camera serves as the “transcendental subject,” an eye liberated from the body and the laws of matter and time which govern it. When we identify with the camera as subject, we too become unfettered by physical laws and this implies a certain omnipotence of vision which we, as spectators, allow ourselves to delight in. The fact that our gaze upon ‘reality’ is controlled by the frame and by selection of that frame is suspended in a sort of disavowal so that we may enjoy the impression of our control over reality~Film theorist Andre Bazin tells us that the “guiding myth”(21) of cinema is the pursuit of a “total and complete representation of reality”(20). In “The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema,” Daniel Dayan discusses the ways in which Hollywood produces that reality. Like Baudry, he notes the ideology inherent (but hidden) in classical cinema which is found, he says, in the coded semiology of the fiction. The “tutor-code,” he says, is the “system of suture” necessary for our complete identification with the camera’s point-of-view (106). Filmic enunciation, he writes, is “built so as to mask the ideological origin and nature of cinematographic statements” (106).

Dayan applies Jean-Pierre Oudart’s study of classical painting to classical cinema as well, noting, as Baudry did, the relationship of film to historical models of representation. Classical Painting, Oudart found, is a “discourse produced according to figurative codes [that are] directly produced by ideology.” They define the role of the subject and use it to mask the presence of those codes by means of a system of “representation” which “exerts a tight control” over the relationship between the painting and the subject (111). Classical cinema, Dayan says, is founded upon this same system of representation~Dayan also discusses the various points of view that the camera portrays. Narrative cinema presents itself as a “subjective” cinema, representing primarily the points of view of various characters. There are times that the camera is not representing a specific point of view, but they are brief and seen only “during the intervals between its acting as the actors’ glances” (114). Also, even when functioning as a certain character’s point of view, it does so subtly. Dayan compares this function to “novelistic descriptions which use ‘he’ rather than ‘I'”(114). Shifting constantly between different points of view and perspectives, the camera functions like a novel’s omniscient narrator. The viewer identifies with the camera as such and “may perceive himself (in relation to this space) as fluidity, expansion, elasticity” (114).

Any disruption of this function disturbs completely the viewer’s “possession” of the film. For instance, when the viewer first discovers the frame, he questions it – why it is placed where it is, what it is not showing, and who placed it there. He find that his possession was “only partial, illusoryâÂ?¦He discovers that he is only authorized to see what happens to be in the axis of the glance of another spectator, who is ghostly or absent” (115). Oudart calls this “the absent-one.” The shot/reverse shot structure of classical cinema is effective because it hides the perception of the frame from the spectator, thereby securing the “ideological effect” (115). The second shot, he notes, is not just that which comes after the first, but that which is signified by the first. The shots are joined by the absent-one. The absent-one further disappears when its presence is inhabited by a character. Thus the subject signified by shot one is shown in shot two as a character (shot one was that character’s glance), and so the process of the production of the image disappears almost entirely.

While Baudry and Dayan help us understand the ideology of the images produced, we must look further into classical narrative practice to fully understand the artistic and spectatorial control exerted. So deep was Hollywood’s understanding of the spectators’ desires that classical cinematic narrative followed an almost formulaic projection. A goal oriented protagonist struggles to achieve certain ends, and in the end, he does. It is, without exception, a linear narrative governed by a guaranteed causality. We know that all loose ends will be tied up and that everything that we are shown happens for a reason. No questions are left unanswered, and we end the film with a feeling of total knowledge~When these narrative practices were being established in the 1930s, audiences in the midst of the Great Depression looked to films for a release from the isolation and fragmented experience of reality. This need for closure and for a spectacle that promised escape from the harsh realities of life, along with the moral standards of the Production Code, meant that audiences wanted happy endings. Especially in pictures that exposed controversy or questionable morality, films promised spectators a complete and moral resolution – a picture of the world that was whole and satisfactory~We can see how some of these ideas play out by looking at the 1933 Warner Bros. musical, 42nd Street. This backstage musical revolves around a group of dancers and the production of a new Broadway musical. By integrating the musical numbers into the actual plot, the singing and dancing numbers do not threaten the flow of the narrative and require less suspension of disbelief than most musicals. There are numerous problems and conflicts in the production, but we know throughout that things will work out in the end. We identify with one particular dancer who seems lost and struggles to find a place in the cast, but at the end – our hero – she takes over the lead in the production.

In the midst of the Depression, this film shows insurmountable obstacles seem easier to overcome and the American ideal of working your way to the top is exploited to its fullest. It is a fulfillment of audience fantasy to leave ordinary, everyday life and become a star. Whereas earlier musicals, like the German Three Penny Opera promise social chaos, this classical musical promises order and happy endings. Where later musicals like Godard’s A Woman is a Woman, expose the manipulations of cinema, 42nd Streetencourages its spectator to go along for the ride and produces the ideological effect Baudry explains.

Hollywood Classicism plays on the sense of loss that modernism brought us by promising a recovery of that loss, and an escape to a better reality that makes sense to us. If modernism tells us that our we spend our loss trying to recover from the trauma and the chaos of the world, Classical Hollywood narrative, by promising causality and resolution, is the antidote~Anything which may have disrupted this illusion was forbidden from classical cinema because it would have led to what Baudry terms a ‘knowledge effect,’ exposing the manipulation and catapulting audiences back into the modernist chaos from which they sought reprieve. With the guaranteed causality and resolution that the narrative promises and the illusion of control which both Baudry and Dayan explain is inherent in the ideology of cinematic construction, Hollywood was able to achieve an illusion of reality while manipulating its audience to an almost unprecedented degree.

Works Cited

Baudry, Jean-Louis. “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus.” Film Theory and Criticism. 6th ed. Ed. Leo Braudy and Marshal Cohen. New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 2004. 355-365.

Bazin, Andre. “The Myth of Total Cinema.” What is Cinema? Vol.I. Trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967. 16-22.

Dayan, Daniel. “The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema.” Film Theory and Criticism. 6th ed. Ed. Leo Braudy and Marshal Cohen. New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 2004. 106-117.