Hollywood Studio Visions
The breakthrough of sound not only radically changed Hollywood industry structures and production operations. It also gave rise to a number of new genres that occupied what we have come to understand as the cinema of the classical studio era. The coming of synchronized sound enabled Busby Berkeley’s backstage musicals, the wisecracking vernacular of Warner’s gangster dramas, the sonic effects of Disney animation features, and the witty dialogue of the screwball comedy. Sound enhanced cinematic illusionism, yet it also made possible a new kind of realism, which gave film a new footing on the material contexts of Depression-ridden America. But even though sound gave the movies unprecedented possibilities to articulate social messages, explicit political references or interventions were seen throughout the 1930s as antithetical to the task of cinema. As Will Hays, the first president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), put it in 1938, “Entertainment is the commodity for which the public pays at the box-office. Propaganda disguised as entertainment would be neither honest salesmanship nor honest showmanship.”1 Hollywood films of the 1930s by and large concealed economic distress and social discord from their audiences, implying that even if they existed at all they had no impact on people’s real lives. It is therefore no exaggeration to say, as David Cook has pointed out, that “with regard to the social, sexual, and political dimension of human experience, the American sound film throughout the thirties remained quite effectively ‘silent.’”2
Solicited by the studios themselves, the PCA (Production Code Administration) regulations of 1934 defined entertainment as a moral undertaking,
“rebuilding the bodies and souls of human beings.”3 Sound film was understood as an inherently universal art form that transcended given social divisions. Unlike music, literature, or drama, sound cinema—the authors 137
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of the PCA code argued— can and must speak to both the cultivated and the uneducated, and consequent to this popular task sound films carry a higher moral responsibility than other art forms. But this universalist mission of popular entertainment, according to the PCA code, not only called for respect for religious feelings, for the sanctity of marriage and the home, and for the integrity of law and social order. It also demanded the “fair” representation of the “history, institutions, prominent people and citizenry of other nations.”4 In spite of the universal nature of sound film, it was not seen as the task of Hollywood cinema to pass judgment on nationally particular ideologies or political practices. One predictable result of this was Hollywood’s stunning silence on current events in Europe during the 1930s, a silence that fitted well with the industry’s desire to keep international markets open and secure global hegemony. It took not only the beginning ero-sion of studio control and the influx of innovative talent around 1939 but also the outbreak of World War II in Europe and the final closing down of the important German export market in 1940 to convince Hollywood studio bosses to reinterpret the code and make European fascism an explicit theme in American narrative film.
No longer driven by commercial imperatives to please German censors with “fair” representations of contemporary Germany, Hollywood commenced its first series of anti-Nazi movies with Anatole Litvak’s Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939). As Jan-Christopher Horak has shown in ample detail, the primary impulse of Hollywood’s engagement with German realities around 1940 was less to draw a realistic picture of Nazi domination than to delineate the enemy and—particularly after Pearl Harbor—win American audiences for the war effort.5 Hollywood cinema depicted Nazi Germany as a totalitarian society in which military dictates coordinated all aspects of private life. Anti-Nazi films valued American democracy as a bulwark of bourgeois freedom (freedom of speech, trade, religion, passion, and fear). Nazi Germany, by contrast, was seen as a revolutionary state destroying traditional social structures, dissolving family bonds, annihilating the possibility of romantic love, eliminating universal moral principles, and thereby doing away with the very notions of individual agency and psychological accountability that defined the cornerstones of classical Hollywood cinema.6 According to Hollywood circa 1940, Nazism aimed at mind-numbing discipline at home and imperial warfare abroad, but it also leveled the ideological foundations on which the studio era based its character-centered narratives. American cinema, one might therefore argue, declared war on Germany in 1939, not only because fascism could simply no longer be ignored but also because Hollywood finally came to see in Hitler its own
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antithesis. Anti-Nazi features of the early 1940s aspired to the impossible.
They represented the unrepresentable in the hope of overcoming the neme-sis of Hollywood entertainment with the means of American mass culture itself.
Hollywood anti-Nazi features of the early 1940s clearly served their function to assist the American war effort on the home front. In their pre-dominant reading of Nazism as a totalitarian militarism, however, films such as Confessions of a Nazi Spy, The Mortal Storm (1940, Frank Borzage), The Cross of Lorraine (1943, Tay Garnett), Hitler’ s Madman (1943, Douglas Sirk), Hitler’ s Children (1943, Edward Dmytryk), or The Hitler Gang (1944, John Farrow) missed some of the most provocative aspects of the Nazi state. By explaining Nazi domination simply as an extreme offspring of Prussian authoritarianism, these films ignored the curious modernity of Nazi society: its devotion to technological progress, commodity consumption, and mass entertainment. Hollywood Nazis yelled and howled, but they hardly ever forged sounds and sights into compelling objects of mass cultural consumption. Neither the Nazis’ prewar passion for things American—for speed, fashion, and cosmopolitanism—nor Goebbels’s attempt to outdo Hollywood with a self-consciously German culture industry were part of the picture anti-Nazi movies extended to American audiences. The anti-Nazi film genre instead followed an uncompromising Sonderweg thesis of German history.7 Anti-Nazi features read the Hitler state as a peculiarly German product of preindustrial traditions that had blocked the development of democratic institutions and modern consumer culture. Accordingly, Hitler became possible because eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Germany had not witnessed the emergence of an active bourgeoisie powerful enough to sustain parliamentary institutions and a liberal civic culture. Hollywood anti-Nazi features, in other words, understood the rise of Nazism not in terms of a disastrous dialectic of modernization but rather as a full-fledged revolt against modern life. With their naive belief in the linearity of progress, early anti-Nazi features thus ironically granted Nazi propaganda a second triumph. Rather than examining how modern tools in Nazi Germany reproduced older meanings and captured disparate longings, Hollywood reiterated the Nazis’ many attempts to deny the heterogeneous nature of Nazi ideology and society, its structured confusion.8 As it ignored the role of industrial culture in Nazi society, the Hollywood anti-Nazi film silenced the very echoes American mass culture had found in contemporary Germany.
The most striking exception to the rule is Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940). Chaplin’s Tomania is a state of archaic ideologies and pre-
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modern social structures, but it is also one of eminently modern technologies that penetrate all aspects of public life and private expression. In the role of dictator Adenoid Hynkel, Chaplin speaks German double-talk, yet the Chaplin gibberish aspires to do more than simply poke fun at Hitler’s Austrian accent and warped intonation. Instead, what Chaplin’s idiosyncratic idiom brings to the fore is a language of power that replaces rational communication with performative effects, a language that acts directly on the listeners’ hearts and minds. Theatrical through and through, Hynkel’s voice is prosthetic. It reflects conditions in which speeches in front of large crowds have become the norm and in which microphones have turned into extensions of the vocal chords. Chaplin’s gibberish in this way draws our attention to the many ways that Nazi Germany appropriated the cinematic apparatus to silence the articulation of concrete experience. What sounds like primal murmur is exposed as mediated by modern machines.
Although shot more than a decade after the introduction of synchronized sound, The Great Dictator was Chaplin’s first real talkie. It seems as if the outbreak of World War II in Europe finally prompted the master of silent comedy to acquire a voice and speak out against Nazi Germany. Unlike the majority of anti-Nazi features, The Great Dictator challenges Nazi media culture on its own grounds. To do so, however, the film defies some of Hollywood’s most sacred conventions. In the film’s final five minutes Chaplin inhabits Hynkel’s stage in order to step out of his role and speak directly to the film’s audience. Poised in front of two microphones, Chaplin proposes a humanist critique of instrumental reason that hails modern technology as an organ to bring people together: “We have developed speed but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical, our cleverness hard and un-kind. We think too much and feel too little. . . . The airplane and radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the good in men, cries out for universal brotherhood, for the unity of us all.” Chaplin in his final address celebrates the space-contracting force of modern media as their very message. Fascism turns technology against itself. It enslaves the communicative substance of mechanical reproduction in order to rule over people’s inner and outer nature. Chaplin, on the other hand, wants to overturn this enslavement of humanity and technology from within. He literally learns the art of sound onscreen so as to take the talkie away from the fascists and actualize film’s potential to foster solidarity and re(de)fine, not assault, human sensuality.
The final sequence of The Great Dictator suggests a powerful alternative to the Wagnerian aspirations and anaesthetic fantasies of Nazi cinema.
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Strangely enough, however, at the apex of the speech, the film takes recourse to Wagnerian sounds themselves in order to intensify Chaplin’s message: the overture to the first act of Lohengrin. Wagner in this instance is meant to extend utopian impressions of unity and sensual integrity. The delicate lyricism of Lohengrin is used to underscore glimpses of a right life amid a wrong one. Chaplin’s musical choice might seem surprising at first, in particular if we recall that the same music is also used to capture Hynkel’s desire for imperial domination during the famous globe ballet.
How can Wagner at once help emphasize a progressivist vision of human individualism and a fascist preview of absolute domination? How can the master’s music simultaneously signify a desire for lost emotional integrity and for authoritative grandeur?
Chaplin’s dual use of Lohengrin points toward unsettling junctions of Nazi culture and Hollywood entertainment. Similar to Adorno, Chaplin in The Great Dictator understands Wagner as a signifier of both: the birth of fascism out of the spirit of the total work of art, and the origin of modern mass culture out of the spirit of the most arduous aesthetic program of the nineteenth century.9 Unlike Adorno, however, for whom American mass culture and fascism were virtually identical, Chaplin wants his audience to make crucial distinctions between the competing Wagnerianisms of his time. Both the fascist spectacle and Hollywood rely on the driving force of utopian desires, on mass culture’s Wagnerian promise of self-transcendence and authentic collectivity, but they channel these mythic longings in fundamentally different directions. Although The Great Dictator exposes the puzzling modernity of Nazi politics, Chaplin is unwilling to write off either Wagner or industrial culture. In fact, Hollywood sound film, Chaplin suggests, needs Wagner as never before in order to at once condemn the abuse of fantasy in fascism and warrant the utopian possibilities of industrial culture.
Walter Benjamin wrote as early as 1934 that “Chaplin shows the comical aspects of Hitler’s serenity; whenever he plays the refined man we know the whole story about the Führer. ”10 Premiering only a few days before Benjamin committed suicide in the Pyrenees, Chaplin’s The Great Dictator tried to tell the whole story about how Nazi culture summoned industrial means to consecrate modern power as an auratic presence. But in denounc-ing Hitler’s media dictatorship the film at the same time drew attention to the role of German sounds and cultural traditions in contemporary Hollywood mass culture. A tale about a doppelgänger and mistaken identities, The Great Dictator pointed toward the uncanny relationship between Hollywood filmmaking and the aestheticization of politics in National Socialism,
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between the Americanist elements of Nazi Wagnerianism and the Wagnerian syntax of American popular culture. It is the task of this chapter to follow Chaplin’s lead and set the stage for a more detailed discussion of Wagner’s ambivalent function and the uncanny role of “Germany” in Hollywood filmmaking from the 1930s to the disintegration of the studio system in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The point, however, is neither to write a comprehensive history of German exile work in Hollywood nor to trace the various representations of German culture and history during this time.
Rather, what is at stake is to think through how Hollywood studio filmmaking absorbed selected German sounds and cultural traditions into its universal ambitions, how studio films drew on German exile talent and an imaginary sense of Germanness to warrant product differentiation, and how in turn both exile film composers and directors—although often asked to playact what they had left behind—used studio filmmaking as a means to bridge different cultural codes and renegotiate Wagner’s legacy to twentieth-century mass culture.
s ta n d a r d a m e r i c a n a n d i t s d i s c o nt e nt s The story of how the breakthrough of sound ended the career of many Hollywood film stars has often been told. Synchronized sound upset a number of dominant conventions concerning acting styles and gesticulation patterns. It put actors out of work who did not live up to the new and more naturalist performance codes, but it also opened new roads to stardom for performers trained in theater, vaudeville, and burlesque. Norma Desmond’s declaration in Sunset Boulevard (1950, Billy Wilder) that it was the films rather than the stars that became small with the transition to sound ignores, therefore, at least half the truth. Desmond, however, clearly has a point, even though the “shrinkage” of Hollywood movies after 1930 may have had less to do with the dwindling aura of silent film stars than with the way sound induced the studios to level former representations of ethnic specificity and social diversity. Synchronized sound triggered a process of industrial standardization that reflected the kind of cultural homogenization that characterized the post-Depression era and New Deal at large.
