Cinema, Capital, and the Formation of Postwar American - UR ...

Commercial Moments: Cinema, Capital, and the Formation of Postwar American Identity

by

Rebecca Burditt

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the

Requirements for the Degree

Doctor of Philosophy

Supervised by Professor A. Joan Saab

Program in Visual and Cultural Studies Arts, Sciences and Engineering

School of Arts and Sciences

University of Rochester Rochester, New York

2014

! ""!

Copyright 2014, Rebecca Burditt All rights reserved.

! """!

Biographical Sketch

Rebecca Burditt was born in Seoul, Korea. She attended Williams College, and

graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in art history in 2006. She began doctoral

studies in the Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester

in 2006. She was awarded a Provost’s Fellowship, Dean’s Dissertation Fellowship,

Celeste Hughes Bishop Award, and a departmental teaching fellowship from the

University of Rochester, a teaching fellowship from the Susan B. Anthony Institute,

and a Graduate Student Fellowship from the National Museum of American History.

She received the Master of Arts degree from the University of Rochester in 2010. She

pursued her research in American visual culture, commercial culture, and film under

the direction of Professor A. Joan Saab.

The following publication was a result of work conducted during doctoral study: Burditt, Rebecca. “Baseball and the Bomb: Take Me Out to the Ball Game’s Myth for

Postwar America.” In The Americanization of History: Conflation of Time and Culture in Film and Television, edited by Kathleen McDonald, 61-90. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011.

! "#!

Acknowledgements

The completion of this dissertation would not have been possible without the

support of many people. First and foremost, I would like to thank my committee

members. Since my first semester in Rochester, my advisor, Joan Saab, has inspired

me with her enthusiasm, open-mindedness, and approach to research and object

analysis. Over the years, she has patiently guided me through the process of

researching and writing this project, and has provided crucial feedback on countless

versions of each chapter. I am indebted to her for reading every footnote, for

providing me with both freedom and advice when I needed them most, and for her

faith in this project. Sharon Willis’s courses in feminist film theory and sound cinema

spurred my interest in film studies and introduced me to a new means of theorizing

visual media. Her thoughtful comments on course papers and on chapter drafts have

been essential to the final version of my dissertation, and will surely help guide the

project through future revisions. Jason Middleton has taught me a great deal about

teaching and learning. His classes modeled a rigorous and critical approach to popular

film that shaped the foundation of this project, and his meticulous feedback on

chapter drafts – as well as his insightful questions – enabled me to express my

thoughts more clearly. Joel Burges has generously provided guidance on my project

since joining my committee two years ago. His suggestions, especially on the

incorporation of Marxist critiques, pushed me to think in new ways about my objects,

and to take more chances with my writing.

! #!

In addition to my committee, so many others have contributed to my thinking

throughout my time in graduate school, and I would like to thank them for being such

dedicated teachers and mentors. Seminars and conversations with Rachel Haidu,

Douglas Crimp, Paul Duro, Bob Foster, Eleana Kim, Allen Topolski, Victoria

Wolcott, Vanessa Broussard-Simmons, Fath Davis Ruffins, and Dwight Blocker

Bowers have had a tremendous influence on my work. The Susan B. Anthony

Institute for Gender and Women’s Studies has provided invaluable support in so

many ways: its workshops, seminars, and lectures challenged me to explore avenues

in my research that I had not previously considered, and its generous grants provided

me with the opportunity to complete the archival research for this project. I’m

especially grateful to the Institute for giving me the opportunity to teach courses in

the Women’s Studies Program, and to my students in WST 100 and 200 for their

curiosity and enthusiasm. Honey Meconi, Jeff Runner, Angela Clark-Taylor, Kaitlin

Legg, and Jane Bryant’s hard work has made SBAI one of the highlights of my

graduate school experience.

A number of institutions have supported my studies over the years, and I can’t

thank them enough for their generosity. Dean Wendi Heinzelman’s initiation of

Dissertation Completion Fellowships has helped many graduate students take the

final steps toward their degrees, and I am fortunate and honored to have received one.

This, in addition to a Provost’s Fellowship from the University of Rochester, allowed

me to complete my research and writing. A number of grants from the Susan B.

Anthony Institute, the Graduate Organizing Group, the Woodrow Wilson National

! #"!

Fellowship Foundation, the Hartman Center, and the National Museum of American

History also provided opportunities to explore important archival sources. I would

like to thank the Mellon Mays Foundation, the staff of the Office of Special

Academic Programs at Williams College, the Institute for Recruitment of Teachers,

and my undergraduate mentors, Scott Wong and Erina Duganne, for giving me the

opportunity to engage with research at the undergraduate level and for encouraging

me to pursue a graduate degree. I am so grateful for the Mellon Mays Graduate

Initiatives Program and the Social Sciences Research Council for their commitment

to shaping the next generation of the academy. This dissertation would not have been

possible without their very generous support.

Days (and nights) in the library were such a central part of my graduate

experience. I would especially like to thank the wonderful staff of the Rush Rhees

Library at the University of Rochester, especially Stephanie Frontz, Marc Bollman,

Katie Kinsky, Nora Dimmock, Tom Clifford, Solomon Blaylock, Kim Kopatz, and

Irma Abu-Jumah. They made research a pleasure, and the library feel like home.

Over the past seven years, friends and colleagues have contributed so much to

this project. I would like to thank Nina Rodriguez, Drew Raab, Shira Rosenberg,

Cathy Humphrey, Marty Collier-Morris, Nicole Legate, Rachel Haidu, and Izzy

Haidu Moon for making my life better in so many ways. I would also like to thank

everyone in the Program in Visual and Cultural Studies, especially Shota Ogawa,

Amanda Graham, Alex Alisauskas, Godfre Leung, Ryan Randall, Kyoung-Lae Kang,

Iskandar Zulkarnain, Genevieve Waller, Zainab Saleh, Dinah Holtzman, and Aubrey

! #""!

Anable. My dissertation group buddies, Michelle Finn and Kira Thurman, provided

valuable feedback on many chapters. Lucy Mulroney, Vicky Pass, Nicola Mann, and

Gloria Kim have taught me so much since the day I met them. Their encouragement,

perspective, and humor have kept me on the right path, and their friendship has meant

the world to me.

Finally, I would like to send a huge “thank you” to my family for their

unwavering support. To my sister, Lindsay Burditt, whose approach to life and

fondness of Elvis Presley musicals inspires me every day. And to our parents,

Kenneth and Mary Beth Burditt, for teaching us, by example, the meaning of work,

patience, and love.

!

! #"""!

Abstract

Commercial Moments: Cinema, Capital, and the Formation of Postwar

American Identity examines the ways in which Hollywood films from roughly 1945-

1960 adopted the visual and affective rhetoric of postwar commercial culture. I argue

that, predating product placement and independent of narrative function, these

“commercial moments” reflected the period’s reevaluation of collective and

individual identity. For postwar audiences, advertising language referenced the extra-

diegetic formation of identity politics, recalling class-driven labor disputes and

consumption-based political acts such as boycotts and sit-ins. At the same time, it

also alluded to Madison Avenue’s segmentation of the mass market into age-based

categories (such as children and teenagers) and thus a growing awareness of the

distinct phases of human development. Through films such as Niagara, Pillow Talk,

and Destination Moon, I argue that commercial moments broadened Hollywood’s

classical projection of mainstream identity, forcing popular film to acknowledge

difference within its once-homogenizing representation of the ideal “self” – both

national and personal.

This project looks beyond product placement in order to focus on the cultural

connotations of both the visual language and the material commodities that

commercial moments cite. Since I suggest that the commercial moment represents a

particular postwar visuality (and thus the social, material, and historical elements that

comprise this era’s “way of seeing”), I have organized the dissertation around the

various directions in which postwar Americans trained their sight; four fields of

! "$!

vision that came to signify the politics of collective selfhood while providing a mirror

to the newly distinguished stages of human development. Chapter 1, “Looking In,”

situates the cinematic appropriation of commercial rhetoric in relation to growing

popular focus on one’s mind and body; Chapter 2, “Looking Back,” explores how

commercial moments’ infantilization of grown men provided a template for postwar

Americans to re-imagine collective history; Chapter 3, “Looking Forward,” addresses

the commercialized representation of teenagers and the ways in which a new

emphasis on adolescence served as a metaphor for imminent social change; Chapter

4, “Looking Beyond,” examines how the commercial moment’s articulation of old

age lent form to the era’s fear of an unknowable future.

! $!

Contributors and Funding Sources

This work was supervised by a dissertation committee consisting of Professors A.

Joan Saab (advisor), Sharon Willis, and Jason Middleton of the Program in Visual

and Cultural Studies, and Professor Joel Burges of the Department of English. All

work for the dissertation was completed independently by the student. Graduate study

was supported by a Provost Fellowship and a Dean’s Dissertation Completion

Fellowship from the University of Rochester, as well as Mellon Mays Predoctoral

Research Grants from the Social Sciences Research Council. A grant from the

Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History supported research at

the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, a grant from the Susan

B. Anthony Institute at the University of Rochester supported research at the Rare and

Manuscript Collections at Cornell University, a fellowship from the Smithsonian

Institute supported research at the Archives Center at the National Museum of

American History, and a grant from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship

Foundation supported research at the Hagley Archives.

! $"!

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 | Looking In: Body, Mind, Nation 48

Chapter 2 | Looking Back: Reclaiming History 101

Chapter 3 | Looking Forward: Teenagers and the Look of Rebellion 161

Chapter 4 | Looking Beyond: Old Age and the Limits of Existence 223

Conclusion: Aching to Return 281

Bibliography 287

Appendices

Appendix A | Introduction Figures 317

Appendix B | Chapter 1 Figures 319

Appendix C | Chapter 2 Figures 330

Appendix D | Chapter 3 Figures 340

Appendix E | Chapter 4 Figures 359

! $""!

List of Figures

Figure 1: Bespectacled Strangers in How to Marry a Millionaire 317

Figure 2: American Optical advertisement, c. 1950s 317

Figure 3: Beech-Nut Gum advertisement, c. 1950s 318

Figure 4: Surveying Rose’s “Things” in Niagara 319

Figure 5: Lipstick close-up in Niagara 320

Figure 6: Another lipstick close-up in Niagara 320

Figure 7: Rose’s intrusion (Niagara) 321

Figure 8: The commercial moment (Niagara) 321

Figure 9: Westmore Cosmetics advertisement, 1952 322

Figure 10: Pastel Polly and a colorful Rose in Niagara 323

Figure 11: Revlon’s “Fire and Ice” advertising campaign, 1953 324

Figure 12: Rose’s “colorfulness” draining out of her body (Niagara) 325

Figure 13: Bleeding green (Niagara) 325

Figure 14: Walker’s DeLuxe advertisement, 1955 326

Figure 15: The nameless attendant and the bell tower (Niagara) 327

Figure 16: General Mills Home Appliances advertisement, c. 1953 328

Figure 17: The Cutlers (Niagara) 329

Figure 18: Ford billboard, 1949 330

Figure 19: “Kang Koo Ri and His New Face,” Life, March 17, 1952 331

Figure 20: “The Little Boy Who Wouldn’t Smile,” Life, July 23, 1951 331

! $"""!

Figure 21: Lee Palladino with adoptive father, Vincent Palladino, Life, “A New American Comes ‘Home’” 1953 332 Figure 22: Happy ending of Battle Hymn features Rock Hudson similarly carrying his Korean charges 332

Figure 23: Pillsbury Advertisement, 1957 333

Figure 24: The House of Wax Premiere, Alex De Toth, Phyllis Kirk, and Vincent Price, c. 1953 334 Figure 25: Morris Engel, Children Watching a Puppet Show, c. 1940 334

Figure 26: Pillow Talk opening credits 335

Figure 27: Brad and Jan sing “Roly Poly” (Pillow Talk) 336

Figure 28: “Rex” makes a diorama of his ranch (Pillow Talk) 336

Figure 29: “Manhattan Indians” distracted by a single woman in The Seven Year Itch 337 Figure 30: “Manhattan Island” 500 years later (The Seven Year Itch) 337

Figure 31: Santa Fe System Lines, “Every Inch the Chief,” c. 1952 338

Figure 32: Sylvania televisions “Jamboree,” 1953 338

Figure 33: Betty Garrett in “Prehistoric Man” (On the Town) 339

Figure 34: Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly in “Prehistoric Man” (On the Town) 339

Figure 35: Junior First dresses advertisement, 1946 340

Figure 36: Revlon’s Bachelor Carnation, c. 1949 340

Figure 37: Dorian Leigh for Revlon’s Fire and Ice, 1953 341

Figure 38: “Date Bait” lipstick by Dorothy Gray, c. 1955 341

Figure 39: Judy and her compact at the police station (Rebel Without a Cause) 342

Figure 40: Judy checking her makeup (Rebel Without a Cause) 342

! $"#!

Figure 41: Judy clutching the compact during her interview (Rebel Without a Cause) 343

Figure 42: The compact as a reminder of Judy’s presence (Rebel Without a Cause) 343

Figure 43: Jim finding Judy’s compact (Rebel Without a Cause) 344

Figure 44: Jim’s first interaction with Judy mediated through the commodity (Rebel Without a Cause) 344

Figure 45: Returning the compact (Rebel Without a Cause) 345

Figure 46: Judy and the compact reunited (Rebel Without a Cause) 346

Figure 47: Judy’s touch mirrors Jim’s (Rebel Without a Cause) 346

Figure 48: Celanese jersey advertisement, c. 1946 347

Figure 49: Lee Riders advertisement, 1955 347

Figure 50: Cannon “True Towel Tales,” 1944 348

Figure 51: Pepsi-Cola Boy Scout advertisement, 1955 348

Figure 52: Plato holds Jim’s jacket to his face (Rebel Without a Cause) 349

Figure 53: Cannon towels advertisement, c. 1956 349

Figure 54: Buzz and Jim before the race (Rebel Without a Cause) 350

Figure 55: Phillip Morris advertisement, c. 1951 350

Figure 56: “Who Do We Appreciate?” 7-Up advertisement, 1958 351

Figure 57: Group shot in Rebel Without a Cause 351

Figure 58: “Slumber Party,” 7-Up advertisement, 1954 352

Figure 59: Babe and her peers on a break (The Pajama Game) 352

Figure 60: Pepsi at the union picnic (The Pajama Game) 353

Figure 61: Pepsi during break (The Pajama Game) 353

! $#!

Figure 62: Pepsi as the connection between union and management (The Pajama Game) 354

Figure 63: Coca-Cola advertisement, c. 1943 355

Figure 64: Pepsi advertisement, c. 1940s 355

Figure 65: Don’t Buy Coke Omaha protest, 1945 356

Figure 66: “More Bounce to the Ounce,” Pepsi campaign, 1954 356

Figure 67: “Steam Heat” vertical hat toss (The Pajama Game) 357

Figure 68: Part II of “Steam Heat” (The Pajama Game) 357

Figure 69: “Steam Heat” and its ties to minstrelsy (The Pajama Game) 358

Figure 70: The Jazz Singer publicity poster, 1927 358

Figure 71: Barney and General Merritt en route to Mars (Conquest of Space) 359

Figure 72: A concerned father in Conquest of Space 359

Figure 73: A far more confident son in Conquest of Space 359

Figure 74: “Company’s Here!” 7-Up advertisement, 1954 360

Figure 75: Coffins in space (Conquest of Space) 361

Figure 76: Coffins in space (Destination Moon) 361

Figure 77: Gravity pull and human anguish in Destination Moon… 362

Figure 78: Intercut with close ups of the space ship’s gadgetry in Destination Moon 362

Figure 79: Gravity pull and human anguish in Conquest of Space… 363

Figure 80: Intercut with close-ups of the spaceship’s gadgetry in Conquest of Space 363 Figure 81: “Charm Quite Complete,” Djer-Kiss advertisement, c. 1920s 364

Figure 82: The Commercial National Bank advertising campaign, c. 1930 364

! $#"!

Figure 83: Chase and Sanborn’s Early Morning Angels campaign, 1949 365

Figure 84: Snider’s Catsup advertisement, 1957 365

Figure 85: Pond’s Angel Face advertisement, 1949 366

Figure 86: Rita Hayworth as Terpsichore in Down to Earth 366

Figure 87: Polishing stars in heaven in Carousel 367

Figure 88: The stars in 1944’s Stairway to Heaven 367

Figure 89: Lady Buxton “Sparklers,” 1958 367

Figure 90: Chesley Bonestell, The Surface of Venus, 1949 368

Figure 91: Albert Bierstadt, Yosemite Valley, Yellowstone Park, 1868 368

Figure 92: Scripto Satellite Pens advertisement, 1957 369

Figure 93: Sparton Cosmic Eye Television advertisement, 1953 370

Figure 94: Chrysler GM-Five advertisement, 1958 370

Figure 95: Chesley Bonestell, Touchdown on the Moon 371

Figure 96: Chesley Bonestell, The Mars Expedition, 8,600 Miles from its Goal 371

Figure 97: Miniscule human bodies float toward formidable satellites in Conquest of Space 372 Figure 98: Chesley Bonestell, Assembly of the Moonships 372

Figure 99: A temporary base is established on Mars in Conquest of Space 373

Figure 100: Chesley Bonestell, A Temporary Base is Established on Mars 373

! "!

Introduction

Marilyn Monroe’s Glasses

In 1951 Time ran an article on the rising appearance of brand names in

Hollywood film. “Despite an ailing box office,” it states, “cine-moguls may feel a

compensating sense of power in [the product plug]…They would feel even better if

some way could be found to make the movies plug the movies.”1 Regret seems to

temper the author’s sarcasm here, betraying his longing for a time when popular film

did not have to rely on “plugging” commodities in order to remain financially stable;

a time when cinematic convention and artistry was devoid of what he terms the

“smooth, fast-talking” and “hustling” negotiations of corporate lobbyists.2 In 1951, an

era well before product placement became a formalized practice, Time foreshadowed

a now familiar sentiment: that commercial language reduces films to a lowly product

pitch, and as such, is devoid of greater social purpose and narrative significance.

Was the insertion of commercial language always considered a

“contaminate”? Or could it signify on some deeper level? Certainly, in this era of

Vance Packard’s bestselling The Hidden Persuaders, Americans had many reasons to

be skeptical of advertising. Its glossy veneer and false promises, as well as its

apparent manipulation of human desire and insecurity for corporate gain, all pointed

to the corruption of national principles such as honest work, sacrifice, and modesty –

a kind of gluttony that experts feared would end in America’s downfall (or, at the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1 “The Plug Lobby,” Time, May 14, 1951, 110. 2 Ibid.

! #!

very least, another Great Depression). Nonetheless, in the years following World War

II and preceding the so-called Hollywood Renaissance of the early 1960s, postwar

viewers witnessed a growing presence of advertising’s unique visual language within

Hollywood films. In these instances – what I call “commercial moments” – the

diegeses of popular films dissolve into commodity spectacle, absorbing the visual and

affective registers of commercial culture for a few fleeting seconds before settling

back into the familiar rhythms of classical cinema. While today this union of

cinematic and commercial form may appear to be a precursor to product placement, I

argue that it carried a much different connotation for postwar audiences – one that cut

deeply across contemporary questions of identity, history, and subjectivity.

A scene from the 1953 film How to Marry a Millionaire provides a telling

example. Nearsighted and single Pola Debevoise (Marilyn Monroe) refuses to wear

her prescription because, as she says, “men aren’t attentive to girls who wear

glasses.” An encounter with a stranger on an airplane, however, convinces her

otherwise. After he (wearing glasses himself) persuades her to try them on, he utters

the words that seal her happy ending: “You look better with them on!… You’re

already a good looking girl, you know. If you don’t mind me saying. And those

glasses – that particular type – gives your face a very interesting, eh, difference.”3

Punctuated by the actors’ canned gestures, trifling, product-centric dialogue, and

shots of a stylishly bespectacled Monroe, the scene is strikingly commercial, adopting

a graphic flatness to match the terse “selling points” of the script (figure 1). Once just

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!3 Quote from How to Marry a Millionaire, directed by Jean Negulesco (1953; Beverly Hills, CA: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2001), DVD.

! $!

a negligible material detail, her glasses – that “particular type” – become a privileged

symbol of love, clarity, and closure. Here, the rigidly constructed cinematic world,

with its own conventions of gesture, speech, composition, and editing, briefly

becomes a world of goods; a commercial world.

Commercial moments introduce brief, unsettling ruptures within classical

Hollywood’s formerly seamless visual system. Their noticeable yet spectral parallels

with advertising lend them uncanny force, at once drawing attention to a

commoditized world beyond the narrative while also refusing any facile associations

with an actual product pitch. As such, commercial moments are often diverse in the

aspects of commercial culture they employ: sometimes the stylization of certain

settings or character interactions quote from the hyper-ritualized scenarios featured in

print ads, as in this case; sometimes lighting and framing transforms mundane objects

in the mise-en-scene into desire-inducing commodities; at other times, brand names

appear within the diegesis, slipped into the dialogue or integrated into the visual

rhythms of the frame. Felt before understood, sensed before comprehended, the

commercial moment could only have existed in a period before elaborate contracts

and business agendas dictated the commercial presence in film. The commercial

moment therefore bears out what was left in the absence of a single-minded,

promotional goal: the ideologies, ideals, and social politics implied by capitalist

language.

As subjects of a nation rocked by early civil rights debates, Cold War threats,

and nuclear age anxieties, postwar audiences were uniquely sensitive to the links

! %!

between commercial rhetoric and contemporary political transitions: the ways in

which, for instance, consumer-based acts such as protests and sit-ins reflected

longstanding racial inequalities, or how emerging practices of market segmentation

mirrored burgeoning identity politics (which would come of age with nationally

organized civil rights marches, radical feminism, and Black Power in the following

decades). In all cases, the language closest to capitalism came to represent a new

conception of national identity – one that pulled away from values such as

homogeneity and singularity of purpose in order to acknowledge fragmentation,

diversity, and dissent.

While advertising lay close to the heart of these shifts, Hollywood grew more

and more distant from them. For decades, Hollywood bore the primary responsibility

of projecting an idealized, collective identity to a mass audience. As argued by Judith

Mayne, new immigrants often looked to the cinema as a primer on how to be

American, striving to emulate its standards of beauty, success, and citizenship (ideals

that became even more stringent with the advent of the Production Code and its

systematized restriction of anything – homosexuality, miscegenation, and critiques of

national ideologies – deemed incongruent with the status quo).4 So invested was

Hollywood in organizing its version of “Americanness” around a stable,

homogeneous national standard, that it became less capable of representing collective

identity when this stability had begun to fracture in the postwar era. By introducing

commercial rhetoric into popular diegeses, commercial moments infused these Code-

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!4 See Judith Mayne, “Immigrants and Spectators,” Wide Angle 5, no. 2 (1982), 32-40.

! &!

governed and ideologically conservative films with evidence of the social and

political struggles that were beginning to reshape the national vision of American

identity.

Knowing what motivated this reconfiguration of national selfhood is essential

to understanding how and why commercial moments became such a necessary mode

of expression. Advertising, a visual language devoted to articulating national and

bodily ideals, became such a privileged medium in the postwar period largely because

of the era’s intense desire to know the “self” better, whether on the broadest or most

intimate level. As identity politics brought race, gender, and class to bear on the

formation of national identity, countless self-help books and a new vogue for

Freudian psychoanalysis spurred widespread interest in the individual subject as well.

This fascination with the human psyche grew alongside a desire to know more about

the human life cycle and the varied stages of human development. The publication of

Erik Erikson’s Childhood and Society, countless articles about juvenile delinquency,

and increasing focus on the special needs of the elderly began to frame each stage of

life as a unique social category, and thus position each human being as embodying

the gamut of age-related subject positions.5 This era’s meditation on identity made

Americans newly conscious of the “others” within – not only the broader social body

but within their own bodies as well – complicating consensus-era paradigms of

understanding the “self.” At the same time as advertising evoked national, capitalist

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!5 For more on the cultural impact of Childhood and Society, see Leerom Medovoi, Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 5-10; for more on the postwar understanding of old age, see Thomas R. Cole, “The Prophecy of Senescence: G. Stanley Hall and the reconstruction of Old age in America,” The Gerontologist 24, no. 4 (1984), 364-5.

! '!

principles and reflected the gradual diversification of national identity, it therefore

also interpellated individual subjects, prompting them to contemplate their internal

drives, and reflect on their personal relationship to demographics such as race,

gender, class, and age (postwar advertising characteristically addressed deep-seated

feelings of inadequacy that resulted from the fervent pursuit of “ideal” motherhood,

fatherhood, childhood, or any number of the era’s newly defined social categories6).

By addressing this dual “self,” advertising made its viewers aware of their place in

relation to the nation, as well as the fact that they, as individuals, were inseparable

from it.

Advertising therefore touched on social and political realities in a manner

Hollywood alone did not. Although popular films occasionally addressed the

underside of the “American Dream” in this period – corruption and immorality in

film noir, injustice and bigotry in social problem films – they still reinforced a

mainstream, homogenous standard. Films that did include themes regarding race,

gender, or class continued to vilify, over-sentimentalize, or caricature difference,

thereby undercutting their efforts (if any) to diversify the national “standard.”7 Many

postwar films were more like How to Marry a Millionaire: buoyant, saccharine

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!6 Postwar food advertising, as historian Katherine Parkin argues, played carefully on this theme, implying that women who lacked domestic proficiency also lacked a fundamental aspect of their feminine identity, which only the right product could restore (see Katherine J. Parkin, Food is Love: Advertising and Gender Roles in Modern America [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006]). 7 See Donald Bogle’s analysis of African American representation in social problem films such as Pinky and Lost Boundaries in Toms, Coons, Mulattos, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, 4th ed. (New York: Continuum, 2006), 143-158. As Eric Lott has argued, films noir also often reinscribed the boundaries around race and class through their marginalization of African American characters (see Eric Lott, “The Whiteness of Film Noir,” in Whiteness: A Critical Reader, ed. Mike Hill [New York: New York University Press, 1997] 86).

! (!

comedies that appeared blithely unconcerned with representing social reality. But

while cinematic conventions of plot and character rendered Millionaire

unextraordinary in the eyes of contemporary critics – the New York Times deemed it

“frivolous” and entertaining only because of the “imposing wrapper of [Fox’s] new

wide-screen Cinemascope”8 – the convergence of film and advertising conventions

within the commercial moment recuperates the complexity of identity formation that

classical Hollywood often avoided or actively suppressed.

When viewed as a commercial moment, sequences such as the one featuring

Monroe’s glasses become more than gratuitous visual flourishes or precursors to

product placement. As design historians have noted, the postwar period saw a rapid

rise in the sales of fashion eyewear, with advertising campaigns and the popular press

emphasizing the power of these external accessories to express one’s inner

personality (figure 2).9 By encouraging her to be her “true” self (in this case, someone

who needs corrective lenses) and to recognize her romantic desires toward her new

acquaintance, Pola’s glasses function as they would in a contemporary advertisement,

symbolically offering her insight into who she is and what she wants. Yet it is her

glasses’ intimate reflection of contemporary social and political issues that make this

scene most commercial, with this trope of sharper vision also representing a

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!8 Bosley Crowther, “The Screen: Trio of Stars in Cinemascope: Monroe, Becall, Grable…” New York Times, November 11, 1953, 37, http://proquest.umi.com. 9 Manufacturers in the postwar era began marketing different designs as well as different colors, arguing that consumers (especially women) needed different eyewear for different occasions. As an article in a 1954 issue of Mademoiselle states, wearing the same eyeglasses every day is as dull as “never changing your dress.” The article goes on to add that glasses “can be solely [for] your vision or – they can vary and improve your style, expression, personality, complexion and general attractiveness” (quoted in Kerry Segrave, Vision Aids in America: A Social History of Eyewear and Sight Correction Since 1900 [Jefferson: McFarland, 2011], 46).

! )!

widespread interest in looking more closely at the national body. Advertising’s use of

glasses to connote a sober and trustworthy perspective (even in situations as mundane

as choosing the right chewing gum, as in a 1950s advertisement for Beech-Nut

[figure 3]) reflects the postwar preoccupation with using vision to discern the truth

about the nation, whose politics and threats in this era became increasingly difficult to

see.10 Many of the cornerstones of postwar anxiety, in fact, revolved around visual

indeterminacy: continued hydrogen bomb testing raised concerns over nuclear

radiation (the imperceptible, under-researched “silent killer” of Hiroshima and

Nagasaki), Cold War containment strategies heightened paranoia over communist

threats at home, hidden in plain sight (culminating in the televised Army-McCarthy

hearings, the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and the Hollywood blacklist),

and a range of “experts” argued that perceived threats – such as “deviant” sexuality

and juvenile delinquency – had the chameleon-like ability to blend in with

mainstream culture and destroy the pillars of American identity from within.11 In an

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!10 Such invisibility sat uneasily with Americans, who are products of a western tradition that has privileged vision as the primary way of knowing and situating oneself in the world. According to Martin Jay, “we confront again and again the ubiquity of vision as the master sense of the modern era” (Martin Jay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity,” in Hal Foster, ed. Vision and Visuality, Dia Art Foundation Discussions in Contemporary Culture [Seattle: Bay Press, 1988], 3). 11 The words of British correspondent in Hiroshima express the persistent fear of radiation in relation to nuclear warfare: “People are still dying, mysteriously and horribly…from an unknown something which I can only describe as atomic plague” (quoted in Spencer Weart, Nuclear Fear: A History of Images [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988], 109-111). For more on fallout and radiation, see Steven M. Spencer, “Fallout: the Silent Killer,” in Saturday Evening Post, August 22, 1959, 26, and also Scott Zeman and Michael Amundson, eds. Atomic Culture: How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2004), 3. Americans were so concerned with the “invisible” dangers of communism that many remained complacent, accepting extreme federal measures (such as those imposed in by the Lavender Scare), either because they felt that the sacrifice in personal freedom was necessary to protect against this new threat, or because they feared that their own reputations might be smeared in speaking out. For more information on the Lavender Scare, see Robert J. Corber, “You Wanna Check My Thumbprints? Vertigo, the trope of invisibility and Cold War Nationalism,” in Richard Allen and S. Ishii-Gonzalez, Hitchcock: Centenary Essays (London:

! *!

era in which all appearances could be deceiving and potentially deadly, eyeglasses

adopted new symbolic importance as the layperson’s tool for sound judgment and

concrete truth. Like so many other parts of postwar culture – the popularity of Jell-O

and X-rays, the invention of Saran Wrap, Pyrex cookware, and ovens with glass doors

– eyeglasses were marketed as a means of seeing in order to believe, and pitched to

postwar Americans who desperately wanted to trust their vision again.12

In this scene, Pola’s glasses become more than a prop, and even more than a

plot device to bring two characters together. Here, a mundane commodity opens up

the diegesis to the era’s convoluted investment in individual and collective selfhood.

In doing so, it reveals the extent to which vision – the desire to see, the fear of seeing

too much, and the eventual willingness to see differently – became an essential way

for postwar audiences to make sense of the world and their place within it. In

addressing specific voids left open by cinematic conventions alone, the commercial

moment offers insight into the crises in selfhood that prepared the ground for radical

change in the sixties.

As this example demonstrates, these radiant pauses in Hollywood diegeses

have great potential to yield a better understanding of the postwar era. The process of

mining this potential, however, relies upon overcoming certain analytical blind spots,

engendered by what Kristin Thompson calls a “steady and exclusive diet of classical

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!BFI Publishing, 1999), 302-303; see also Andrea Friedman, “The Smearing of Joe McCarthy: The Lavender Scare, Gossip, and Cold War Politics,” American Quarterly 57, no. 4 (December, 2005), 1105-1129. http://muse.jhu.edu. 12 For more on the rage for transparent commodities, see Beatriz Colomina, Domesticity at War (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 147-149; for more information on X-rays (and the fact that having a visual record of the hidden parts of the body often outweighed the fear of radiation poisoning), see Weart, 111.

! "+!

narrative cinema” that has trained viewers to overlook or ignore these visual

flourishes and their potential connection with other media.13 Pola’s eyeglasses

embody meaning that eluded conventional forms of representation and have thus

escaped conventional forms of analysis, including the business and industry-oriented

approach of product placement studies.14 This project is therefore rooted in a cross-

media, cross-disciplinary methodology that can illuminate how commercial moments

resonated with postwar audiences. As is evident from my brief analysis of How to

Marry a Millionaire, this requires attending to the form of the commercial moment as

a material object – a concrete thing with a distinct social biography outside of the film

text – and then ultimately examining how this object intersects with classical

Hollywood conventions and ideologies.15 Commercial moments force us to

acknowledge the social baggage that an image bears from its original commercial

context, as well as the fact that such an image held special meaning for

viewers/consumers who were immersed in that commercial context on a daily basis.

Just as an understanding of the optical industry’s postwar marketing approach helps

illuminate the relationship between eyeglasses and the era’s investment in self-

exploration, and just as understanding what vision meant to consumers anxious about !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!13 Kristin Thompson, “The Concept of Cinematic Excess,” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 132. 14 Although Charles Eckert and Kerry Segrave’s work has contributed a great deal to this often-overlooked branch of film studies, their emphasis on the history of product placement and commercial tie-ins privileges the contractual agreements between advertising and film industries rather than analyzing this practice in relation to form, style, affect, and politics (see Kerry Segrave, Product Placement in Hollywood Films: A History [Jefferson: McFarland, 2004], and Charles Eckert, “The Carole Lombard in Macy’s Window,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 3, no. 1 [1978], 1-21). 15 Here I draw form the work of Arjun Appadurai, and his examination of material culture in his anthology, The Social Lives of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), and in particular Igor Kopytoff’s essay, “The Social Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” in Appadurai, Social Lives of Things, 64-94.

! ""!

communist invasion and nuclear fallout, grasping the external “life” of the

commercial moment lends richness to our understanding of the postwar period.

Commercial moments, in other words, can offer insight into the cultural experience of

mainstream postwar audiences.

Of course, our ability to recreate the cultural conditions of a historical era that

is not our own remains hotly contested. As art historian Michael Holly argues, our

attempts to study historical objects are inherently melancholic, marked by an effort to

understand “that which came before but is no longer…whose once noisy and busy

existence has long been silenced.”16 Nevertheless, such efforts are necessary even in

their imperfection, and our ability to place ourselves within the objects’ once “noisy

and busy existence” depends largely on the method. While certainly this project will

always be haunted by the melancholic desire to access a moment lost to history, I

argue that a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the postwar era’s

unique visuality – and its relationship to collective identity – can be achieved through

interdisciplinary, object-based inquiry.

The remainder of this introduction will trace in greater detail why such an

approach is necessary and what new insights it can yield. I begin by discussing the

visual form of the commercial moment and the qualities that distinguish it from other

types of cinematic excess. I then discuss the social history of the postwar era: first by

fleshing out in detail what industrial and economic conditions facilitated the formal

crossover between cinematic and advertising conventions, and next by understanding

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!16 Michael Ann Holly, “Mourning and Method,” The Art Bulletin 84, no. 4 (December 2002), 661.

! "#!

the commercial moment as – like all parts of postwar visuality – responding to a

specific audience and shaped by specific political, social, and cultural forces. Such

background will prepare the theoretical groundwork for my chapters, which argue

that commercial moments introduce the messy complexities of their historical milieu

(as well as the anxieties of the culture they serve) into otherwise conservative, Code-

driven diegeses. At stake in this project is what the dialogue between commodified

visual forms can tell us about the negotiation of collective subjectivity during a

moment of social upheaval and fragmentation. In discerning the narratives of social

difference embedded within the glossy uniformity of postwar visual culture, I hope to

provide a theoretical foundation for analyzing the types of cross-medial dialogue that

continues to shape visual culture – and thus, the formation of national identity –

today.

Marginalia

Commercial moments bring the marginalia of the film text – whether in the

periphery of the frame or in the fringes of the narrative action – to the center of

attention, briefly overturning the usual subordination of material detail to plot. As

literary scholar Bill Brown argues, every text has a “material unconscious,” a

“repository of disparate and fragmentary, unevenly developed, even contradictory

images of the material everyday.”17 In Brown’s view, these seemingly insignificant

material details are not merely added in at random to contribute a sense of realism,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!17 Bill Brown, The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane, and the Economies of Play (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 4.

! "$!

but rather are reminders of the history that the main narrative leaves out, the “residues

of phenomena that remain in some sense unrecognizable (if not unrepresentable) in

our existing historiographic genres.”18 Film’s material properties – what Siegfried

Kracauer has called its “redemption of physical reality” – are especially conducive to

the development of a material unconscious. Through shot duration, shot type, and

camera angle, film has the capacity to “alienate our environment in exposing it,”

allowing aspects of our physical and material world that would ordinarily go

unnoticed to emerge from the periphery.19 This, according to Kristin Thompson, is

the very definition of cinematic excess, which makes otherwise negligible parts of the

mise-en-scene visible and compels us to “realize that a narrative function does not

exhaust the material presence of [the] detail.”20

Thompson’s understanding of cinematic excess provides a useful model for

grasping how the commercial moment constituted a material unconscious for film.

Resisting the tendency to justify all of a film’s visual excesses and incoherencies

according to narrative, Thompson’s approach raises the possibility that the

commercial moment references conditions outside of the text.21 In this regard, she

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!18 Ibid., 4. Brown continues, “Within literature the detritus of history lingers, lying in wait.” Brown rejects Barthes’s discussion of material details in terms of their role in producing a Barthesian “reality effect” (ibid., 15). 19 Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), 55. As he elaborates, “In using its freedom to bring the inanimate to the fore and make it a carrier of action, film only protests its peculiar requirement to explore all of physical existence, human or nonhuman” (ibid., 45). 20 For Thompson, excess can take a number of different forms, but most crucial to this study is the formal emphasis generated through lighting, shot selection, color scheme, duration, or repetition (Thompson, 134). 21 Ibid., 141.

! "%!

builds upon a concept that Stephen Heath presented in his 1976 analysis of Orson

Welles’s Touch of Evil:

Homogeneity is haunted by the material practice it represses and the tropes of that repression, the forms of continuity, provoke within the texture of the film the figures – the edging, the margin – of the loss by which it moves; permanent battle for the resolution of that loss on which, however, it structurally depends, mediation between image and discourse, narrative can never contain the whole film which permanently exceeds its fictions. ‘Filmic system,’ therefore, always means at least this: the ‘system’ of the film in so far as the film is the organization of a homogeneity and the material outside inscribed in the operation of that organization as its contradiction.22

For Heath, the materiality of the film does not produce excess, nor is it an end in

itself, but instead is symptomatic of the “material outside” the film briefly defying

their repression, asserting itself before being subdued again by the film’s more

powerful unifying forces. The “whole film” that “permanently exceeds its fictions,”

refers in part to material, peripheral details, but also gestures toward the socio-

cultural, political, and historical forces that are embodied within them.23

Film scholars have, of course, acknowledged the importance of considering

these material details. In his analysis of a scene from For Me and My Gal, for

example, Michael Wood discusses how a newspaper draped across Gene Kelly’s face

as he takes a nap – specifically, its headline reporting the sinking of the Lusitania –

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!22 Stephen Heath, “Film and System: Terms of Analysis, Part II,” Screen 16, no. 2 (Spring, 1975), 100; quoted in Thompson, 130. Although she borrows Heath’s term of “cinematic excess,” Thompson claims that his reluctance to address materiality allows him to “resort” to using the psychoanalytic “return of the repressed” to explain excess rather than accepting it as “perceptual play” that exposes the tensions between unifying and discordant structures (Thompson, 131). 23 For a similar reading of Heath’s notion of excess, see Leo Charney, “Historical Excess: Johnny Guitar’s Containment,” Cinema Journal 29, no. 4 (Summer, 1990), 23-34.

! "&!

alludes to a very real world that runs parallel to the diegetic one.24 Roger Cardinal

similarly discusses how the use of a real newspaper in the 1948 film Passport to

Pimlico “provid[es] the historian with an exhibit in a case for reconstructing the

social actuality of the late 1940s.”25 Like Thompson, both claim that negligible parts

of the mise-en-scene activate meaning outside of the rigid codes that Hollywood films

have trained us to follow.26 Others, such as Jane Feuer and Thomas Elsaesser, have

focused extensively on the symbolic value of the material content in film, examining

the ways in which inanimate objects – including costuming, food, and interior design

– serve as outlets for sentiments that evade the usual forms of expression.27 Yet Feuer

and Elsaesser’s narrative and genre-centric approaches tend to overlook how such

content speaks to pressures outside of the text.28 Likewise, while Cardinal directly

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!24 Michael Wood, America in the Movies, or ‘Santa Maria, It Had Slipped My Mind’ (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), 18. 25 Roger Cardinal, “Pausing Over Peripheral Detail,” Framework 30-31 (1986): 120. As Cardinal asserts, filmmakers could have easily opted to use a fictional newspaper for this fictional and diegetically important headline, but instead opted to “gesture toward authenticity” as a reminder to the viewer of the world beyond the frame. 26 Echoing Thompson, Cardinal argues that “Our competence as readers of film language has established a kind of fixation on congruity which regulates our assessment of detail and ensures that we do not stumble into alternative, incongruous readings. Above all, the coherence we identify tends to reinforce our sense of the intentionality and relevance of the details in question…” (ibid., 118). For him, these peripheral details are material and “occur most readily within the domain of objects,” occasionally interrupting what he refers to as “the unitary message of the work, and…the dominant rhetorical codes which structure that message” (ibid., 113). 27 Feuer’s appropriation of the term “bricolage,” for instance, refers to instances in which performers in musicals incorporate objects from the mise-en-scene into their song and dance routines, affirming that their internal feelings are genuine and derived – like folk art – organically from everyday life (see Jane Feuer, “The Self-Reflexive Musical and the Myth of Entertainment,” in Film Genre Reader III, ed. Barry Keith Grant [Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003], 459-463). Elsaesser takes a similar approach, observing that the props and interiors of family melodramas are charged with the tension and frustration unspeakable between characters (see Thomas Elsaesser, “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama,” in Grant, Film Genre Reader III, 387). 28 For example, Feuer discusses bricolage as evidence of how the musical genre “mythically” resolves the opposition between the necessity of mass art (commercialized, canned Hollywood productions) and the desire for ‘folk’ art (spontaneous, genuine expression derived from everyday objects and gestures). In doing so, she does not address how these objects respond to contemporary social conditions, or how

! "'!

addresses material details outside of diegetic and generic conventions, he localizes all

of the responsibility of de-marginalizing these elements within individual viewers,

overlooking the possibility that such peripheral excesses might be widely

recognizable by a contemporary mass audience.29 And, in spite of his claims that

Hollywood acknowledges a realm beyond the fictions it creates, Wood ultimately

discredits the impact such allusions have on viewers, arguing that “the world of death

and war and menace and disaster is really there, gets a mention, but then is rendered

irrelevant…”30

Communicating with bold visual deliberation and broadly recognizable

rhetoric, commercial moments stand apart from these other forms of cinematic

marginalia, interpellating a mass audience that was primed to recognize the social and

political implications of advertising language. Distinct from previously examined

forms of materiality or excess, the commercial moment’s direct ties to another

medium – specifically, print advertising rather than the newer and more popular

medium of television – added another layer of significance to its presence within

postwar diegeses. Print advertising had something in common with Hollywood that

the new and wildly popular medium of television did not: it was mired in its own

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!they echo commodity culture in their glamorized, rhythmic treatment (a quality exploited many years later by the Dirt Devil television spots featuring Fred Astaire romancing the latest vacuum cleaner model). For other examples of genre- and narrative-based analyses of material objects in film, see Paul Loukides, ed. Beyond the Stars: The Material World in American Popular Film (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Press, 1993); see also Anne Bower, Reel Food: Essays on Food and Film (New York: Routledge, 2004). 29 Drawing on Barthes’s distinction between the studium and the punctum, Cardinal argues that what and when and how audiences notice these material details is completely personal, “impl[ying] a characteristic angle of vision governed by my individual tastes and fetishes” (Cardinal, 119). 30 Wood,18.

! "(!

sense of failure, its own anxious fears of losing its foothold in popular culture.

Enraptured by its novelty, Americans demanded little of television in terms of formal

innovation, while both film and print advertising struggled in an endless loop of one-

upmanship, offering increasingly excessive visual displays in order to retain their

tenuous hold on public affection.31 Television’s treatment of objects, straightforward

and shamelessly promotional, represented a medium too successful and confident to

harbor the era’s insecurities. For Hollywood and Madison Avenue, however, it was

this common sense of failure that enabled them to provide the most honest mirror to

the messy formation of postwar identity.

Timing is Everything

A set of period-specific industrial and economic factors gave rise to the

commercial moment by facilitating its essential dialogue between advertising and

cinematic imagery. The fifties was a notable era for advertising and for film, both of

which were on the brink of major creative transitions. Postwar Hollywood strove to

reclaim its classical heyday, even though it was clear that the studio system had been

severely hobbled by the Paramount Case ruling and that competition from television

jeopardized film’s cultural influence as well as its profits.32 Taylorist modes of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!31 Historian Karal Ann Marling briefly discusses how the occasional fetishization of material items in the cinematic mise-en-scene has a similar material emphasis and flow as television’s commercial breaks (Karal Ann Marling, As Seen on TV: The Visual Culture of Everyday Life in the 1950s [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994]), 3-5. However, the content and form of the commercial moment, I argue, has much more in common with print advertising. 32 The Paramount Case was the Supreme Court ruling that forced the major film studios to divest of their theater chains, breaking up the vertical integration of the industry (and therefore individual

! ")!

production continued to lord over the industry and the Production Code remained in

place despite undergoing frequent revisions to accommodate changing moral

standards. The slickness of cinematic style – aided by an onslaught of technologies

such as 3D, Cinerama, Glamorama, even Smell-O-Rama – therefore smacked of

desperation; an all-too-obvious effort to retain a dwindling audience by pushing

popular film’s once-dazzling multi-sensory appeal to its limit.33 Like Hollywood,

advertising was also on the verge of drastic changes yet not quite ready to relinquish

the safety of tradition. Large firms on Madison Avenue with long histories competed

for the most prestigious accounts, and the tight circle of ivy-league educated white

men (David Ogilvy, Rosser Reeves, among others) continued to dictate form and

copy. Firms that had been operating for many years (J.W. Thompson was America’s

first advertising agency, founded in the 1870s) had a well-established mode of

production that was, like Hollywood studios, built around an assembly-line

coordination of distinct departments (copywriting, art direction, accounts

management). Its output was equally uniform and systematic, employing such

formulaic concepts as the “Unique Selling Proposition,” and often establishing rigid

guidelines for the ratio of image to text, and the types of consumer fantasies

advertisements should address.34 Like postwar genre film and its articulation of the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!studio’s monopolies). Such an act cut further into studio profits, affecting production and eventually fostering an environment in which smaller, independent films could flourish. 33 Widescreen cinema was first introduced in 1952, with the invention of Cinerama, and other processes – such as Cinemascope and Todd-AO – followed (see John Belton, Widescreen Cinema [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992]), 2. 34 Rosser Reeves became known for his “hard sell” approach and for the Unique Selling Proposition (USP), which aimed to transmit information about the product to the potential consumer as efficiently as possible. His style of advertising eschewed humor, aesthetics, and creativity in favor of product-

! "*!

status quo, postwar advertising adhered to formal codes so familiar they had become

cliché.35

In the sixties, both industries would undergo their revolutions: the

“Hollywood Renaissance” saw the demise of the studio system, a grittier aesthetic,

and more realism in subject matter, and the “Creative Revolution” in advertising saw

the rise of smaller agencies, a more integrated creative process, and a more diverse

array of executives who brought the breadth of their experiences to mainstream

copy.36 But in the fifties, both popular film and advertising clung to the last breaths of

atrophying conventions, and to the idea that the only certain way to make financial

gain was to appeal to a mainstream audience using the formulas it knew best. From

this shared perspective grew a shared visual language, characterized by large format,

brilliantly hued, and materially focused compositions. Dramatic aspect ratios and the

widespread use of color technology allowed Hollywood to exploit the cinema’s

special affinity for reveling in the materiality of objects, just as postwar advertising

began to privilege a vivid palette and panoramic framing through its two-page, full

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!centric facts and research-based statistics, and he often privileged a repetitive, straightforward address (for more on his method, see Rosser Reeves, Reality in Advertising [New York: Knopf, 1961]). Reeves’s approach was therefore aligned with the philosophies of David Ogilvy, whose most successful campaigns reflected his reliance on market research and formula. His campaigns were remarkably consistent, with the first 2/3 of the page dedicated to a single image, and the final 1/3 devoted to the descriptive text (see Larry Dobrow, When Advertising Tried Harder: The Sixties, the Golden Age of American Advertising [Eugene: Friendly Press, 1984], 36). For information on both Ogilvy and Reeves, see Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counter Culture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 44-47. 35 As Thomas Frank argues in Conquest of Cool, such visual formulae advanced a very narrow view of ‘ideal’ postwar American life: “Here one will look in vain for anything that deviates even slightly from the Cold War orthodoxy of prosperity, progress, and consumer satisfaction” (47). See also the autobiography of Mary Wells Lawrence, executive of Wells-Rich-Greene, Mary Wells Lawrence, A Big Life in Advertising (New York: Knopf, 2002). 36 See Jerry Della Femina and Charles Sopkin, From Those Wonderful Guys Who Gave You Pearl Harbor: Front Line Dispatches from the Advertising War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970).

! #+!

bleed, four-color spreads.37 In this era, driven by industrial pressures, both mediums

began to embody a similar consumerist ethos within their formal sensibilities – one

that, as historian Michael Schudson argues, “tends to promote attitudes and life-styles

which extol acquisition and consumption at the expense of other values.”38

Postwar advertising and film share a visual aesthetic that is inextricably tied to

capitalist consumption. Drawing from the work of Erving Goffman, Schudson argues

that American advertising exemplifies “capitalist realism,” a style that “simplifies and

typifies…[and] does not claim to picture reality as it is but reality as it should be.”39

Its glossy, idealized form exists on its “own plane of reality,” “highly abstracted and

self-contained,” which may outwardly resemble our own world, but is too selective,

too immaculately coordinated, too sharply focused and too tactile in its display of

people and things to be real.40 A similar idealization characterized postwar film. As

Michael Wood comments with regard to Hollywood’s Golden Age: “we smile

because we feel that whatever life was like [when the film is set] it could not have

been like this; yet we smile mainly because we feel that this is what life is always like

in the movies: stylishly overdone.”41 Genre scholars have discussed at length the

unrealism of films from this period, both in terms of their heavy-handed visual !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!37 For the increase in color production, see Gorham A. Kindem, “Hollywood’s Conversion to Color: The Technological, Economic, and Aesthetic Factors,” in Journal of the University Film Association 31, no. 2 (Spring, 1979), 29-36. 38 Michael Schudson, Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact on American Society (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 210. 39 Ibid., 215. 40 Ibid., 218. Here Schudson borrows from Goffman’s term, “hyper-ritualization.” According to Goffman, advertising introduces a state of idealized non-reality, one in which the usual ritualized performances that we undertake as social beings are exaggerated, and in which only select moments of lived reality (drawn from the welter of mundane or uncomfortable everyday experiences) are represented (Erving Goffman, Gender Advertisements [New York: Harper and Row, 1987], 3, 84). 41 Wood, 4.

! #"!

iconography as well as their morally unambiguous plots and characterizations. Like

the hyper-ritualized idealism of advertising, the rhetoric of genre films invites

vicarious identification with people more perfect than we, and conflicts more easily

resolved than our own.42

Yet as much as the business conditions and stylistic quirks of both industries

anticipated – even invited – the commercial moment’s characteristic cross-medial

exchange, a fundamental cultural reorientation gave it cultural value. I would like to

suggest that a shift in the American episteme – what Foucault identified as the social

practices, modes of representation and interpretation, and means of organizing

knowledge in a given period – allowed commoditized language to become a dominant

form across all media.43 From this perspective, the commercial moment chronicles

the process by which both mediums responded to this broad epistemic turn; a shift

toward a consumer-centric engagement with the world that was itself a response to

the era’s sweeping economic boom. Postwar America, suspended within what

political economist Robert Brenner calls the “long upturn,” reveled in the short-term

effects of Keynesian policies: federal initiatives, such as the Employment Act of

1946, the Serviceman’s Readjustment Act of 1944, and government-sponsored civil

projects (such as highway construction) boosted employment and kept wages

commensurate with inflation, ensuring enough consumer demand to absorb the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!42 As Thomas Sobchack argues, “While we may all live lives of quiet desperation, but genre characters do not…They can do what we would like to be able to do. They can pinpoint the evil in their lives as resident in a monster or a villain, and can go out and triumph over it…Genre characters inhabit a world that is better than ours, a world in which problems can be solved directly, emotionally, in action” (Thomas Sobchack, “Genre Film: A Classical Experience,” in Grant, Film Genre Reader III, 109). 43 See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, First American Edition (New York: Pantheon, 1970), 40.

! ##!

overproduction of the immediate postwar years.44 But, as Lizabeth Cohen has argued,

such unprecedented consumerism functioned on both an economic and on a social

level, defining lived experience to such a degree that national consciousness, and the

basis of citizenship itself, pivoted around a new ability to spend.45 In this era, imagery

celebrating the world of goods became a privileged and ubiquitous mode of visual

expression: plastered on billboards, broadcast on televisions, and larger-than-life on

the Cinerama screen. And as a result, the capitalist ideology coded within this

language – passively absorbed by consumers regardless of the product pitch – became

a naturalized way of imagining the nation and the self.46 As the product of capitalism

(and a hybrid of two of its most influential visual systems), the commercial moment

encompasses the postwar era’s flexing, and ultimately defining, relation to capital.

For many Marxist theorists, this transition signaled a depressing cultural turn

in which the realities of life were replaced by dazzling capitalist illusions – a national

devolvement, in Guy Debord’s famous terms, into a “society of the spectacle.”

According to Debord, the spectacle is not merely the visual noise generated by floods

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!44 Also referred to as the “capital-labor accord” (see Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945-2005 [New York: Verso, 2006], 17). For more on Keynesian government policies, see also Lizabeth Cohen, Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf, 2003), 113-119. 45 Cohen, 127. 46 Part of the reason that commercialized language became so prevalent was because advertising became such a central part of postwar life. As point-of-purchase sales efforts declined steadily (a cost saving measure by many businesses), advertising expenditures skyrocketed, tripling in the years between World War II and 1959 (see ibid., 301-302). For more detail on postwar point-of-sale marketing, see Wendell Smith, “Product Differentiation and Market Segmentation as Alternative Marketing Strategies,” Journal of Marketing 21 (1956), 6. As Schudson claims, the language of advertising has a “sleeper effect” on consumers, guiding them to lead their lives in accordance with its ideals in spite of the fact there is little evidence of advertising’s effect on actual purchasing habits of consumers. In this regard, commercial rhetoric reshapes, as anthropologist Melford Spiro has explained, consumers’ “behavioral environments” if not their brand preferences (Schudson, 228).

! #$!

of advertisements and commodities, but rather a totalizing worldview that transforms

the actualities of existence – memory, history, and social relations – into little more

than flattened, hyper-ritualized surface.47 Few eras illustrate Debord’s critique more

fully than the American 1950s, which embodied in its tacky, Populuxe aesthetic the

gradual organization of society around questions of means and ends.48 As Fredric

Jameson claims, within this type of milieu, objects that once bore cultural and social

meaning become commodities, valued instead for the degree to which they can be

used or exchanged. When commodities eventually pass from material into purely

visual form, they reach the final step of capitalist reification, realizing Debord’s

definition of the spectacle: “capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes

image.”49 Capitalist society looks to these images – which are comforting in the

illusions of pleasure and control they give the viewer – to mediate reality’s many

destabilizations, emotional depths, and relations with others.50 As a result, a new kind

of visual aesthetic ascends – one that no longer serves a political or aesthetic purpose,

but exists only as a vehicle with which to achieve the capitalist-driven desire to

cultivate more images.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!47 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Ken Knabb (Detroit: Black and Red, 1983), 42. 48 Here I use Thomas Hine’s term of “populuxe,” a period he describes as one of gaudy consumer indulgence made visible through the design of everyday visual culture. “Populuxe,” he explains, is “populism and popularity and luxury, plus a totally unnecessary "e" to give it a little class; the word itself as synthetic as the world it describes” (see Thomas Hine, Populuxe [New York: Overlook Press, 2007], 5). 49 Debord, 34. See also Fredric Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” in The Jameson Reader, ed. Michael Hardt and Kathi Weeks (Malden: Blackwell, 2000), 125. 50 As Jameson elaborates, the tourist insists on taking a snapshot of the vast and bewildering landscape because it “graphically transform[s] space into its own material image,” just as one purchases a new model car less for practical needs and more to project a certain self-image to others (ibid., 125-6).

! #%!

With this project, I aim to flesh out a second side to this Marxist narrative, one

that Jameson himself addresses when he discusses the utopian potential of mass

culture. Unlike Frankfurt School critics – who engage, he claims, in the “empty

denunciation”51 of mass culture – Jameson believes that the images comprising

commodity spectacle repress, and therefore embody, the various social anxieties,

aspirations, “ideological antimonies and fantasies” that the capitalist mediascape at

first seems to replace. Following closely the work of art historian Norman Heller, he

claims that, like art, mass cultural objects must balance the divergent impulses of

wish fulfillment and repression in order to protect against the potentially damaging

eruption of desire.52 By claiming that these dual impulses exist within capitalist

imagery assumes that there is something to repress; something that resists the hyper-

ritualized gloss it ultimately presents. As he argues, “we cannot fully do justice to the

presence within th[ese] images unless we are willing to concede the presence within

them of a more positive function as well: of what I will call…their utopian or

transcendent potential – that dimension of even the most degraded type of mass

culture which remains implicitly, and no matter how faintly, negative and critical of

the social order from which, as a product and as a commodity, it springs.”53 Rather

than empty symbols of reification, then, the images that so often represent the very

loss of meaning, become sites of production and reflection again.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!51 Ibid., 142. 52 The struggle is less evident than in art, since the means-ends dialectic compels the reified image to provide – at least ostensibly – a buffer against reality, a replacement for the messiness of actual emotions and interactions. And, in the case of narrative or film images, to raise “present-day social contradictions and anxieties only to use them for its new task of ideological resolution…” (ibid., 142). 53 Ibid., 142.

! #&!

Jameson’s observation lays important ground for understanding the

commercial moment because it allows us to see how this process of becoming image

produces meaning within mass culture, endowing the visual with critical force and

historical insight. The commercial moment is a clear example of this sort of

reification: an instance in which the accumulation of capital is so vast that the

narrative of a film speaks in the language of advertising. Perhaps there is no greater

evidence of Debord’s dystopia: “Not only is the relation to the commodity visible but

it is all one sees: the world one sees is its world…”54 Yet, if we accept Jameson’s

claim that even the most “degraded” capitalist imagery holds within it both the hope

and the anxieties of the society that produced it, what exactly is this language

communicating? To what anxieties is it speaking? Through the language of the

commercial moment, we can privilege the image’s intimate connection to

contemporary viewers, and thus can see commodity spectacle as more than a gauge of

mid-century economic shifts or a superficial replacement for the sharp edges of real

feeling.

This is why it is so important to treat the image as an autonomous, material

object – one defined by its unique history of exchange, use, and value, and inclined to

inflect its new context with the color of its previous “social life.” When understood as

a material thing marked by its own social biography, the commercial moment serves

less as evidence of capitalism’s deadening effects, and more as a reaffirmation of its

responsibility to signify in new and powerful ways.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!54 Debord, 42.

! #'!

The Postwar Period Eye

As bearers of meaning within a broad epistemic shift, commercial moments

spoke intimately to a contemporary, postwar audience. A large part of understanding

the external social lives of the commercial moment, therefore, lies in exploring how

its various components resonated with postwar viewers. Only in making this

determination is it possible to understand what social needs the commercial moment

filled and what otherwise inexpressible tensions it conveyed. Such an objective

requires that the material approach be combined with careful attention to the postwar

era’s unique visuality – what art historian Michael Baxandall defines as its “period

eye,” or the manner in which subjects of a particular historical and cultural context

saw, represented, and interpreted the representations of the world around them. In his

study of quattrocento Italian painting, Baxandall claims that the Renaissance’s

representational conventions as well as its quirks – which may seem opaque or

inaccessible to viewers today – were easily understood by contemporary viewers

whose daily routines and rituals had prepared them to read these systems in highly

specific ways.55 Examining an era’s visual style from this perspective provides

essential insight into the details so often overlooked in more sweeping historical and

analytical narratives.56

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!55 Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 35. 56 Ibid., 45. Other studies of visuality have expanded this approach. Martin Jay argues, for instance, that the emergence of Cartesian perspective during the Renaissance resulted from the fact that business-oriented and mathematically savvy patrons began to drive the market, cultivating a “fundamentally bourgeois ethic of the modern world” (Jay, 9). Jonathan Crary cites nineteenth century philosophical and scientific treatises privileging individual subjectivity as helping to spark a modernized “autonomy of vision,” in which “such experiences that previously had been an expression

! #(!

Commercial moments are in many ways an ideal vehicle through which such

details can emerge. At root, beneath its superficial affirmation of capitalist

abundance, advertising rhetoric represented the fraught realm of postwar

consumerism, which had become a crossing point of politics, resistance, and protest

in an era just on the brink of dramatic social changes. As Cohen argues, Americans

have long conflated commodity culture with the working through of political

tensions: throughout the Depression, for instance, women’s groups organized

grassroots efforts to protect consumers’ rights and used “sip ins” at local cafés

(lingering over one cup of coffee all day in order to slow down business) to speak out

against unfair labor practices; similarly, the NAACP used African American

purchasing power as leverage for economic and political equality with the “Don’t

Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaign.57 The war only strengthened this

connection, with (rationed) consumption touted as a mark of patriotism throughout

the early 1940s. But it was during the postwar era – what Cohen names the

“Consumer’s Republic” – that this concept of the citizen-as-consumer became most

fully realized. Now, Americans understood consumption as a right and a duty that

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!of the frailty and unreliability of the body now constituted the positivity of vision” (Jonathan Crary, “Modernizing Vision,” in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster, 34-35, and also Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century [Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990]). Anne Friedberg argues that mid-nineteenth century innovations – the rise of department store shopping and “proto cinematic” entertainment – fostered a “mobilized and virtual gaze,” turning vision itself into a commodity. This commoditization of vision then set a precedent for a particularly postmodern mode of visuality, in which technology (such as multiplex cinemas, VCRs, and television) packages a mobilized and virtual gaze to sell to the “consumer-spectator” (Ann Friedberg, “Cinema and the Postmodern Condition,” in Linda Williams, ed. Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film [New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995], 60). 57 See Cohen, 38-48. For a case study of the African American protests and boycotts of Coca-Cola due to unfair labor policies, see Stephanie Capparell, The Real Pepsi Challenge: How One Pioneering Company Broke Color Barriers in 1940s American Business (New York: Wall Street Journal Press, 2007).

! #)!

would help to preserve the economic boom.58 Social inequality, while

institutionalized at the levels of state and federal government, was therefore most

searing in the commercial realm, inflicting a double wound on those it excluded:

denying them access to the material acquisition that was so closely aligned with

American identity at the time, as well as preventing them from contributing to the

health of the national economy through what had become a patriotic responsibility to

consume.59 As demonstrated by the many strikes, bus boycotts, and lunch counter sit-

ins throughout the fifties, consumption was at the vanguard of civil rights, supporting

the general fight for equality through the grassroots politicization of consumer

spaces.60

By virtue of its association with the commercial realm, the glossy, hyper-

ritualized language of capitalism could not help but recall the realities of civil

struggle and political division. Yet through its pivotal role in the emerging practice of

market segmentation, advertising rhetoric also reflected a new recognition of social

difference. While the sixties and seventies would see a growing number of

historically marginalized groups rallying publicly around calls for greater pride and

equality, this blossoming of identity politics had its start, I contend, in the Cold War

era – and specifically, within the period’s embrace of market segmentation.61 Market

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!58 Cohen, 119. As Cohen elaborates: “If in wartime the responsible consumer and the good citizen had proved synonymous, reconversion America was reinforcing the link in asking people to tie their own prosperity to the nation’s by mass consuming, thereby buttressing the democratic and egalitarian society for which the war against fascism had been waged” (ibid., 172-3). 59 Ibid., 172-3. 60 Ibid., 182-3. 61 In Rebels, Medovoi persuasively argues that American identity politics – at least as we know them from sixties and seventies movements – were in fact rooted in early Cold War understandings of youth

! #*!

segmentation, which emerged in response to concerns that catering to “the mass” was

no longer profitable in an age of overproduction, relied upon targeting diverse

demographics, and in doing so, foregrounded differences that were not yet speakable

in their own right.62 As Cohen claims, “despite concern among cultural critics of the

fifties that the standardization inherent in mass consumption was breeding social

conformity and heterogeneity, the Madison Avenue that they reviled was moving by

the end of the decade in the opposite direction: toward acknowledging, even reifying,

social differences….”63 In this regard, advertising’s targeted campaigns (Pepsi’s

spreads in Ebony throughout the fifties are a prime example), invited marginalized

groups to identify themselves as unique from the mainstream through their

consumption patterns, eventually helping to cultivate what Lauren Berlant has called

“intimate publics”: spheres in which peoples of “nondominant” groups are commonly

interpellated by capitalist society and thus feel a sense of solidarity and identification

with fellow members.64 Intimate publics turn on a “circularity,” according to Berlant;

a palindrome-like logic in which the capitalist system segments consumers into

various groups based on assumptions about their shared histories, preferences, and

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!and youthful rebellion. While I agree that the postwar era nurtured the philosophies that would eventually develop into the Civil Rights and Women’s Liberation movements, I see this new identity-consciousness as stemming from consumer culture. 62 In this era of overproduction, industry strategists claimed that targeting niche markets would be more profitable and sustainable (Cohen, 293, 295). In earlier generations, mass production was profitable because offering standardized products in large bulk lowered production costs; but by the fifties, the mass market had become too large and unwieldy and the focus shifted from lowering production costs to improving consumption rates (ibid., 306). 63 Ibid., 306. 64 According to Berlant, “What makes a public sphere intimate is an expectation that the consumers of its particular stuff already share a worldview and emotional knowledge that they have derived from a broadly common historical experience” (Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture [Durham: Duke University Press, 2008], viii).

! $+!

experiences, while consumers themselves glean from this prepackaged designation “a

certain experience of belonging and…a complex of consolation, confirmation,

discipline, and discussion about how to live as an x.”65

The intimate publics generated by postwar advertising, therefore, prompted

social and political identification through imagery that often appeared completely

apolitical.66 For postwar viewers who witnessed frequent struggles for civil justice in

their local businesses, who felt themselves interpellated by newly segmented

advertising campaigns, and who began to forge a social identity and a kinship with

other nondominant peoples through shared consumption, commercial language was

indeed political, and served as a powerful site of self-determination.

The Self, in Fragments

Commercial moments brought these discourses to the diegeses of Hollywood

film – a medium long held as the most influential purveyor of a homogeneous and

unified national standard. Through the commercial moment, advertising language

forced popular cinema to represent everything Hollywood had historically refused to

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!65 Ibid. 66 For Berlant, who examines “women’s culture” in her book, intimate publics are “juxtapolitical”: “like most mass-mediated nondominant communities, that of feminine realist-sentimentality thrives in proximity to the political, occasionally crossing over in political alliance, even more occasionally doing some politics, but most often not, acting as a critical chorus that sees the expression of emotional response and conceptual recalibration as achievement enough” (ibid., x). Postwar advertising functioned similarly, with its hyper-ritualized scenarios often masking the political stakes of its visual rhetoric, and with members of its target consumer groups working through their relationship to the national body affectively rather than through direct political action. However, the appearance of more social justice-oriented ads – such as those recognizing companies that practiced fair hiring practices – rendered commercial language at times more consciously political than the objects that Berlant discusses (women’s melodramas such as Now, Voyager). For an example of these advertisements, see the example of anti-Coke, pro-Pepsi ads in Capparell, 203.

! $"!

acknowledge. Close enough to the Cinemascoped, Technicolored style of postwar

filmmaking and yet instantly recognizable for its political implications, advertising

rhetoric inflected film with contemporary social weight just as Hollywood’s own

conventions seemed increasingly incapable of addressing postwar viewers or their

newly fragmented realities.

For generations, Hollywood genre films had expertly communicated with a

mass public, offering viewers escapism and (as previously mentioned) a stable,

idealized national standard to which they could aspire. As scholars such as Thomas

Schatz have argued, Hollywood’s relevance rested upon its ability to provide

audiences with a vicarious sense of calm and control; to create a fictional world in

which conflicts that are irresolvable in real life can be easily represented and

overcome, and ultimately resolved in ways that symbolically maintain the status

quo.67 This approach allowed the film industry to thrive for many years. Astaire-

Rogers musicals, for instance, offered Depression-era audiences a model for working

through the binary oppositions that dogged modern society (work/entertainment,

liberty/commitment, childishness/responsibility), all while projecting idealizations of

American wit, affluence, and racial/ethnic homogeneity.68

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!67 Charged with this task of providing a mythical solution to actual social paradoxes, a genre film maintains a reciprocal – or “ritualistic” – relationship with its viewers. As Schatz continues, this requires genres to “transform…certain fundamental cultural contradictions and conflicts into a unique conceptual structure that is familiar and accessible to the mass audience” (Thomas Schatz, “The Structural Influence: New Directions in Film Genre Study,” in Grant, Film Genre Reader III, 97). For more on how genre films reinforce the status quo, see Judith Hess Wright, “Genre Films and the Status Quo,” in Grant, Film Genre Reader III, 42-50. 68 For more on the operation of the myth in Hollywood musicals, including its formulaic resolution of broad, social paradoxes, see Rick Altman, The American Film Musical (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1987), especially chapters 1 and 2.

! $#!

During the postwar period, as popular genres began to move out of their

classical “golden ages” and into more self-reflexive stages of their development, there

was a growing sense that genres could no longer fulfill this social function.69 As

Schatz argues, during a genre’s classical height, “both the narrative formula and the

film medium work together to transmit and reinforce [the] message – its ideology or

problem-solving strategy – as directly as possible to the audience.”70 Yet as viewers

become increasingly familiar with generic formulae, and as ever-shifting aesthetic

values and socio-historical conditions render classical conventions passé, the methods

that once transparently upheld the myth “gradually give…way to opacity.”71 Postwar

film is famous for its “generic opacity,” its ability to render previously invisible

operations of the genre the central focus of the text: musicals such as Singin’ in the

Rain demystified the process of making movie musicals, westerns began to question

their previously infallible protagonists, and the melodramas of Sirk and Minnelli

called attention to their own melodramatic style.72 Positioned at the end of the generic

life cycle, such self-reflexivity implies that the once direct transmission of ideology

through classical form now falls short of meeting viewers’ tastes and needs.

Yet in noting the failings of classical convention in this era, it is also

necessary to consider the conditions that led to their irrelevance: the fact, for instance,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!69 As a ritualistic cultural form, genres constantly adapt to viewers, and in doing so, must pass through what Schatz calls a “life cycle” characterized by ever increasing levels of self-reflexivity (Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System [Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981], 36). 70 Ibid., 38. 71 Ibid. 72 See Schatz, Hollywood Genres, 39-41; see Jane Feuer, “The Self-Reflexive Musical,” in Film Genre Reader III, 457-471.

! $$!

that the stable sense of unity and identity – once the classical system’s raison d’être –

had begun to collapse. By this time Americans had begun to doubt many of the once-

secure “truths” about national identity. Every argument defending the use of nuclear

weaponry, for instance, was accompanied by a warning of nuclear warfare’s

destructive powers, just as every attempt by activists to highlight the moral

irresponsibility of nuclear warfare clashed with the proliferation of irreverent,

“atomic” themed kitsch (atomic cocktails, atomic-themed comic books, even “atomic

bomb rings” found in boxes of Kix cereal).73 Unprecedented economic affluence,

corporatization, and global authority – evident in the Marshall Plan and the postwar

occupation of Japan – proved equally unsettling, undercutting Americans’ proud

origins in rebellion, humble sacrifice, and plucky idealism.74 Feeling uneasy over its

power and largesse (and the means by which both were acquired), the nation wrestled

with its position as a replacement for the old order, and sensed its own imminent

demise at the hands of groups that could now, as Medovoi argues, “make a

rhetorically stronger claim to the title of the free world….”75 The murkiness of

international policies only contributed to this instability. While World War II

objectives were clear-cut and its efforts participatory (“victory gardens,” rationing,

and volunteering involved the home front directly in the war effort), in this new era of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!73 See Scott C. Zeman and Michael A. Amundson, “Introduction,” in Atomic Culture, 2; see also A. Constandina Titus, “The Mushroom Cloud as Kitsch,” in Atomic Culture, 101-124. 74 See Lary May, “Introduction,” in Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of Cold War, ed. Lary May (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 5. In the past, unity and optimism during difficult times assured the nation that they might be rewarded for their stoic suffering and virtue. As Margot Henriksen claims, “…the suffering and sacrifices of those years seemed to purify the nation, purging America of its sins and excesses” (Margot Henriksen, Dr. Strangelove’s America: Society and Culture in the Atomic Age [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997], 4). 75 Medovoi, 12.

! $%!

global leadership, politics became more abstract, and enemies less clearly defined.

Experts in nuclear physics, legislation, and diplomacy now handled political affairs,

tensions with the Soviet Union transformed former enemies into allies and vice versa,

and the conflict in Korea remained clouded by failure, beginning in confusion and

ending in compromise.76 Perhaps most damaging of all, however, was how social

inequality continued to reveal the contradictions inherent in the nation’s supposed

democratic commitment. While the banner of liberty and equality for all had

bolstered the nation’s fight against fascism in the forties, ongoing discrimination in

legislation and consumer spaces revealed the hypocrisy of such ideals in the postwar

years.

With innocence, confidence, and singularity of purpose now in flux, the stable

“self” that genre films once so ritualistically secured had all but dissipated.

Commercial moments express a cultural attempt to come to grips with this loss; to

cultivate in its place a new manner of defining identity through a new type of

visuality. Invoking the dialogue of identity politics and civil struggle through the

visual language of capitalism, the commercial moment exemplifies postwar

America’s redefinition of its collective selfhood. In doing so, however, it also

encompasses a parallel development of individual selfhood, thereby tracing the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!76 Nations that were enemies during World War II were suddenly allies, as Japan and parts of Germany became democratic nations; conversely, nations that were former allies suddenly became dangerous foes, as Russia became the Soviet Union and China fell to Soviet power in 1949 (see Zeman and Amundson, 3; Henriksen, 18). One of the most startling examples of this political uneasiness is when the U.S. government began to cooperate with Nazi war criminals (such as Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyons,” among others), helping to arrange their freedom in exchange for intelligence on the Soviet Army (Henriksen, 18, 25). For a contemporary discussion of the war in Korea, see “War that is No War and a Truce that Isn’t Peace,” U.S. News and World Report, December 7, 1951, 13-15.

! $&!

complex dialogue between body and body politic that shaped the period’s efforts to

locate a stable identity.

The Body Electric

Just as collective identity began to rupture, a wave of discourse on bodies,

psyches, and personal well being subjected the individual “self” to vigorous and

unprecedented contemplation. During a time in which few things made sense and

national identity seemed irreparably splintered, this internal focus provided a way for

Americans to anchor themselves in an unstable world. Such intense self-scrutiny

offered reassurance that a cohesive identity existed somewhere within, and that

rooting far enough into the human psyche would yield the kind of irrefutable,

concrete truth that proved so elusive in other parts of life. The years following World

War II therefore witnessed in the rise of clinical psychology programs in American

universities, the establishment of the National Institute of Mental Health, and, perhaps

most noticeably, a renewed interest in Freudian psychoanalysis: Hollywood films

such as The Bad Seed (1956) and The Cobweb (1955) mainstreamed concepts such as

repression and dream-work, talk therapy became a staple of the suburban adult’s

weekly routine, and motivational research in the advertising industry aligned

commercial culture with the depths of human desire.77

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!77 For more on NIH and clinical psychology programs, see Lawrence R. Samuel, Freud on Madison Avenue: Motivation Research and Subliminal Advertising in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 10.

! $'!

Dying out in the mid-sixties as quickly as it rose only a decade or so before,

motivational research helped generate a visual vernacular through which postwar

Americans could understand themselves as human subjects. Founded by trained

psychologists such as Ernest Dichter (who would go on to found the Institute for

Motivational Research) and George Katona (head of the Survey Research Center at

the University of Michigan), the practice used Rorschach tests, surveys, and depth

interviews with the aim of discerning the roots of consumers’ unconscious needs and

desires.78 In a commodity culture saturated with different brands of similar products,

advertising agencies looked to motivational research as a guide for how to pitch its

imagery, hoping to gain a competitive edge by tapping into yearnings that average

consumers didn’t know they had. The visual rhetoric of advertising in this era thus

became infused with psychological significance, and some of the industry’s most

influential iconography stemmed directly from motivational research reports: the

period’s female-oriented advertisements for cake mixes, for example, and their visual

trope of “one-slice-removed” (so as to expose the interior) were clearly influenced by

Dicther’s 1955 study, which concluded that “Women’s demand for moistness in cake

reinforced its feminine symbolism…[cake] may represent a projection…of the

woman’s feelings about herself. She wants to be moist and fresh, dewy-eyed and

moist-lipped, not a dried up, barren, old crone.”79 Dresser drawers filled to the brim,

another icon of postwar commercial imagery, were similarly indebted to Dichter’s

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!78 Ibid., 47. 79 Ernest Dichter, “Creative Research Memo on the Sex Life of Rice,” Submitted to Leo Burnett Company, October, 1955, quoted in Katherine Parkin, “The Sex Life of Food and Ernest Dichter: The Illusion of Inevitability,” Advertising and Society Review 5, no. 4, 2004, n.pag.

! $(!

findings in a report titled “Soxology: A Strategy for Stimulating Sock Sales,” which

declared that “an empty sock drawer is a symbol of an empty heart.”80

Like generations before it, postwar commercial culture advanced age-old

promises: that consumption would help individuals control their destinies, reach

future fulfillment, and define themselves at every emotional and developmental

crossroad.81 This capitalist optimism, paired with advertising’s new, psychologically

charged imagery, reflects a culturally specific type of self-contemplation – one that

would prove crucial in redefining both the individual as well as the national self. As

sociologist Eva Illouz argues, as much as Americans embraced Freudian

psychoanalysis, they rejected its presumption that humans are molded by

uncontrollable factors – their family histories, childhood traumas, unconscious drives

– and are passive subjects of history rather than agents of present fulfillment or future

change.82 For this reason, postwar Americans refashioned European psychoanalysis

into “ego psychology,” defining the individual as an autonomous being who navigates

reality with conscious volition. The 1950 publication of Erik Erikson’s Childhood

and Society first championed this ego-centric model, arguing that each person

achieves continual, enlightened development along discrete stages of the life cycle.

According to him, each new moment in our personal biographies – childhood,

adolescence, adulthood, old age – presents unique challenges and opportunities for

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!80 Quoted in Samuel, 152. 81 Such sweeping claims became common in the graphic design of advertising in the 1930s, and set a precedent for advertising today (see Johanna Drucker and Emily McVarish, Graphic Design History: A Critical Guide, 2nd ed. [Boston: Pearson, 2013], 66-70). 82 Eva Illouz, Saving the Modern Soul: Therapy, Emotions, and the Culture of Self Help (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 158.

! $)!

growth, pressing us to engage in a constant process of “becoming” that eventually

culminates in fulfillment and wholeness as an adult.83

As crucial as Erikson’s philosophy was to imagining the individual subject,

however, his basic principles – specifically, understanding the whole by reflecting on

its seemingly disjointed parts – became useful for imagining the nation and all of its

disparate, fragmented realities. Popular efforts to grapple with national identity often

narrativized recent traumas and present dangers as part of a collective biography,

implying that – much like human beings – America could achieve mature completion

with the right management and proper attention to past mistakes. Admonitions to

learn from history, for example, served as the rallying cry for the Atomic Scientists

Movement, in which former Manhattan Project scientists advocated for international

controls on nuclear weaponry.84 The language of personal development similarly

framed the nation’s economic and political ascent, with critics arguing that America

had outgrown its youthful rebelliousness and had become a stodgy, authoritarian

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!83 By the end of the decade and into the sixties, this philosophy would culminate in Abraham Maslow’s now-famous paradigm of self-actualization, which revolutionized the self-help movement by arguing that the goal of reaching one’s highest potential compels all human beings toward constant, conscious change (see ibid., 160). Eventually a flood of self-help literature based on these ideas helped convince Americans that their true self was not only knowable, but within their control, with titles such as The Mature Mind, The Power of Positive Thinking, and How to Live 365 Days a Year topping bestseller lists (see Patricia A. McDaniel, Shrinking Violets and Caspar Milquetoasts: Shyness, Power, and Intimacy in the United States, 1950-1995 [New York: New York University Press, 2003], 46-66, and Irene Taviss Thomson, “Individualism and Conformity in the 1950s vs. the 1980s,” Sociological Forum 7, no. 3 [September 1992], 497-516). 84 See William Dilworth Puleston, “Blunders of World War II,” U.S. News and World Report, February 4, 1955, 106-139; E.G. Brown, “History and Memory,” National Parent-Teacher, February 1, 1957; “In Central Park: Memories of War,” Commonweal, December 23, 1955, 301-303; for more on the Atomic Scientists Movement, see Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 47-106.

! $*!

adult.85 And around the same time, a wave of enthusiasm for space exploration

(especially following the Soviet Union’s 1957 launch of Sputnik) related the greater

cosmos to the afterlife, promising an exhilarating and fulfilling “final frontier.” Thus,

if self-help literature offered a model for continual “becoming” and self-actualization,

if Erikson’s philosophies presented history as a guide toward greater ambitions, and if

the popularization of psychology offered individuals, as Illouz argues, “a narrative

about the process of understanding, working at, and overcoming…one’s problems,”86

then such ideas also offered postwar Americans a means of understanding their

nation’s mistakes and ambitions as critical parts of the collective whole.87

The particular conflation of body and body politic that imbued postwar

advertising’s capitalist sheen was in many ways cultivated by the commercial

culture’s own evolution. That identity politics emerged around the same time as

market segmentation according to race, class, and gender attests to the deep

connection between commodity culture and the national recognition of social

difference; that market segmentation itself began with an explicit recognition of age !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!85 For Medovoi, the surge of popular media that celebrated the teenaged rebel served as evidence of America’s discomfort with its postwar authority and power (Medovoi, 29). 86 Illouz, 196. 87 The fifties’ psychoanalytically driven need to understand the internal “self” may seem to be at odds with postwar society’s characteristic “other-directedness.” “Other-directedness,” first introduced by David Riesman in his sociological study of postwar life, The Lonely Crowd, refers to a state in which individuals look to their peers for approval and personal fulfillment, defining themselves based on the opinions of others rather than on internal motivation. Such a condition is perhaps best demonstrated by the postwar phenomenon “Keeping up with the Joneses” (see David Riesman, with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character, 2nd abridged edition [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001], 23-25). Yet an obsession with the self was the basis of other-directedness, requiring individuals to engage with others not in order to befriend or influence or wield power over them, but rather to understand themselves better. This differed greatly from earlier generations of social relations, including, most famously, Dale Carnegie’s Depression Era advice in How to Win Friends and Influence People, which today is known as one of the first self-help manuals (for a discussion of Carnegie, see Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking [New York: Broadway Paperbacks, 2012], 19-33).

! %+!

demographics (children, teenagers, and eventually senior citizens) demonstrates the

kinship between the varied lives within the individual self and the equally diverse

entities of the collective one.88 In recognizing each stage of development as an

“otherness” that came from within, commercial rhetoric provided a model through

which a national body (still marked by segregation and other civil inequalities) could

understand itself as heterogeneous, and could anticipate a future in which such

diversity contributes to self-actualized wholeness.

The degree to which these two selves were linked, and the role that they

played in securing a new form of Americanness in the postwar years is perhaps

nowhere more evident than in the Museum of Modern Art’s 1955 Family of Man

exhibit, still considered one of the most famous in national history. With large format

photographs by Edward Steichen, the exhibit was a feat in modern curation,

beginning with birth and then leading the viewer through a collection of images

documenting the various stages of life as they are experienced around the world. The

show offered a heavy-handed message about the shared experience of growing up that

links all of humanity. In retrospect, it is likely that the exhibit’s success was due not

only to its warm expression of global togetherness, but also to its broader message:

that if the life cycle is what links Americans to the racial and geographical “other,” it

might also expose them to such “otherness” within their own bodies, minds, and

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!88 As Cohen explains in her discussion of market segmentation, the market’s reflection of burgeoning identity politics pivoted around this new understanding of one’s identity in relation to the human lifespan: “If any kind of segmentation epitomized the hopes and success of the postwar marketing profession, it was segmenting by age, where stages of life, linked to patterns of purchasing, reshaped the mass market” (Cohen, 318).

! %"!

nation. The show encouraged audiences to recognize these distinct stages of life as a

link to difference and therefore as a way of coming to terms with otherness within.

Family of Man’s resounding success and status today as the definitive postwar

exhibit reinforces just how mutually dependent the national and individual bodies had

become since the war. As Americans began the task of rebuilding their identity, these

two types of “self” grew up alongside of each other, radically affecting the era’s

visuality. The commercial moment – a hybridization of the two most capitalistic,

mainstream media forms – best reflects this cultural shift, infusing classical

Hollywood’s projection of the status quo with dissent, difference, and a more open

acknowledgement of both.

***

This project is divided into four chapters, each of which is a case study of the

commercial moment in a select group of films. In an effort to avoid the pitfalls of

conventional approaches to material culture and commerciality in Hollywood, I have

chosen not to divide the sections by genre, or by the campaigns, brands, or

commodities that the commercial moments reference. Dividing the sections along

such lines, I fear, would betray commercial moments’ unique form and social

function, and would also ignore the fact that they responded to similar anxieties and

desires regardless of the media they drew from or the contexts in which they

appeared. I therefore organize chapters around the categories of identity that had

solidified around postwar perceptions of the “self.” The titles of each section follow

the trajectory of the human life cycle, and focus on those stages of life that were just

! %#!

gaining recognition by both society and the market (childhood, adolescence, and old

age). Within each section, I use the commercial-cinematic dialogue to illuminate how

particular age demographics also acted as a means of confronting difference as it

related to the national body: social divisions such as race, sexuality, and class;

existential distinctions between mortality and the divine; and emerging debates about

collective memory and the rifts between past and present.

The first section, titled “Looking In,” prepares the foundation for the rest of

the chapters, focusing not on a particular stage of life, but on the postwar fixation on

the “self.” Specifically, I am concerned with how the commercial moment helped

translate such introspection into a commentary on emerging social differences. This

section will look at the rise in Technicolor production, and how greater use of this

technology facilitated the formal parallels between film and advertising. It will also

discuss how the industry channeled the broader cultural correlations of vibrant color

with sexual and racial difference, and how the commercial moments drew from

color’s both cultural and commercial associations. Using Niagara (1953) as a major

case study, I will examine the ways in which differences located within the individual

self (sex, race, desire) constituted a new danger to the hegemonic vision of a

collective (white, male, straight) self. I situate the cinematic appropriation of

commercial rhetoric in relation to growing popular focus – piqued by the Kinsey

Reports, Playboy, and Freudian-based popular literature – on one’s mind and body. I

argue that films such as Niagara employed the rhetoric of personal hygiene

advertisements in order to complicate themes of “deviant” female sexuality and add

! %$!

elements of racial ambiguity to narratives that seem to suppress both forms of

difference.

The second chapter, “Looking Back,” takes up the American fascination with

childhood in this period, and explores what fantasies of adult regression – played out

most noticeably in commercial moments from films such as Pillow Talk (1959) and

On the Town (1949) – implied about a nation struggling to come to terms with a

traumatic past. The postwar flood of child-centric commodities and ad campaigns

generated a mainstream, formal system for representing lost innocence, with

conventionalized advertising imagery positioning children as reservoirs of the pre-

cultural, pre-atomic, and pre-traumatic wholeness that adults feared they had lost by

the end of World War II. But in a neo-Freudian era that theorized the child as both

racially and sexually indeterminate, such commercialized representations of

childhood also represented a past that was estranged from (though no less essential

to) the present.89 The cultural phenomenon of the bachelor playboy, and the

subsequent trope of the loveable “man-child” in print advertising served as a literal

embodiment of childhood’s postwar significance, demonstrating the adult desire to

regress while also merging the innocence of childhood with otherness, its unwieldy

counterpart.

In this section, I argue that the commercial moment appropriates the era’s

fascination with childhood and uses it as a model for thinking about the place of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!89 In American culture “childhood” and “otherness” became most clearly linked in the postwar era, when Freudian thought rose in popularity (see Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan, or, The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction [London: MacMillan, 1984], 50-56).

! %%!

history in the nation’s process of “becoming.” The bachelor playboy’s return to a

distant part of his personal biography serves as a metaphor for the nation, which

during this time used the figure of the racially othered child to redeem a collective

past riddled with aggression and transcultural misunderstanding. In order to discuss

this dimension of adult regression, I will therefore explore the popular media

representation of Korean adoption in the United States, which began in earnest in

1954 and came to represent the nation’s atonement for past moral and political

wrongs (namely the killing of innocent Japanese civilians with the use of the atomic

bomb). I examine how the raced bodies of transnational adoptees gave visual form to

the otherness of the past, and how commercial moments invoked such representations

to demonstrate this otherness could be assimilated into the national body of the

present.

The third chapter, “Looking Forward,” will examine how the commercial

moment expressed postwar anxieties about the immediate future. Teenagers emerged

in the postwar era as ideal consumers whose behavior, language, and music promised

to blur the race and class-based social boundaries that defined their parents’

generation. This chapter begins by comparing moments from iconic films such as

Rebel Without a Cause (1955) to contemporary advertising campaigns, discussing

how popular film drew from commercialized visual language in order to define

teenagers in all of their promise, ambiguity, and potential threat. Since such visual

codes eventually came to symbolize “teenaged” liminality more generally, I devote

the remainder of the chapter to analyzing how this visual rhetoric operates in films

! %&!

that are not ostensibly about teenagers. I discuss how the presence of Pepsi-Cola in

the 1957 musical The Pajama Game references the brand’s postwar identity as the

beverage favored by working class patrons and communities of color. As market

studies showed, to identify with Pepsi was to identify with its connotations of social

change and the struggle for civil rights, since Pepsi was one of the first major

American soft drink companies to create hiring lines for African American workers,

to advertise in African American publications, and to use its more inclusive business

practices as leverage against its competitors, namely Coca-Cola.90 By associating the

union workers in the film with Pepsi and its politicized history, Pajama Game situates

its protagonists as teenaged rebels, drawing on period-specific commercial language

in order to facilitate an anti-hierarchical, “teenaged” conflation of race, class, and

other forms of social “difference” (an especially deliberate link, given the fact that

there was no contractual obligation to feature the Pepsi brand). This chapter examines

the degree to which advertising – and everything it connoted about the social politics

of labor and consumption – troubled Hollywood’s stable, classical era formulae.

The final section, titled “Looking Beyond,” explores how commercial

moments depicted the limits of human experience through the trope of old age. The

first part of this chapter discusses postwar Hollywood’s representation of the elderly

and the ways in which it echoed contemporary trends in advertising. By examining

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!90 See Ernest Dichter, “Progress Report on the Psychological Study of Sales and Advertising Problems of Pepsi-Cola,” April 1951, Collection 2407, Hagley Archives, Box 6. See also Harvey Russell Interview, November 15, 1984, The Pepsi Generation Oral History and Documentation Collection, #111, Archives Center, NMAH, Box 18, tape 1; Walter Mack Interview, December 16, 1985, The Pepsi Generation Oral History and Documentation Collection, #111, Archives Center, NMAH, Box 18, tape 1; and Bob Stoddard, The Big Nickel Drink (Claremont: Double Dot Enterprises, 2003).

! %'!

advertising’s distinctive mode of representing the elderly during this period, I

demonstrate how old age became a cultural metaphor for the interface between the

earthly self and the “ultimate other” – sublime, unknown, extraordinary – of the

afterlife. In the second part of the chapter, I turn to commercial moments depicting

these extraordinary realms of heaven and outer space. I argue that fifties-era shifts in

religious thought complemented the popular regard for space exploration and travel:

as heaven became a more generalized and secular in Judeo-Christian thought, it also

became characterized – like outer space – by progress and fulfillment as much as it

was by wonder and mystery.91 References to the “other worldly” commercial

language in films about heaven and about space travel emphasized the degree to

which postwar Americans used their personal relationship to the unknown as a means

of grappling with national concerns about the world and the greater galaxy. This

chapter therefore examines one of the most well theorized postwar genres: science

fiction. Yet rather than focus, as many studies have, on its allegorical relationship to

national race relations or international policies, I instead concentrate on its visual

connection to films from a variety of genres.92 By considering how the representation

of life after death in films such as Carousel (1956) is linked through commercialized

imagery to science fiction features such as Destination Moon (1950), I aim to

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!91 See Gary Scott Smith, Heaven in the American Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 164-175. 92 For literature that considers science fiction in terms of race and international politics, see Vivian Sobchack, Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film, 2nd edition (New York: Ungar, 1987), 43-55; Peter Biskind, “The Russians Are Coming, Aren’t They? Them! And The Thing!” in Liquid Metal: The Science Fiction Film Reader, ed. Sean Redmond (New York: Wallflower Press, 2004), 318-324; and Mark Jancovich, “Re-Examining the 1950s Invasion Narratives,” in Liquid Metal: The Science Fiction Film Reader, 325-336.

! %(!

understand how postwar Americans negotiated their individual and collective selves

when faced with the limits of human experience.

This project is based upon the premise that commercial language gradually

began to shift the seamless, unified projection of an ideal “Americanness” that the

cinema had historically offered a mainstream spectator. The commercial moment

therefore has the potential to reveal a great deal more about the period-specific

anxieties to which they were responding, and the conditions of visuality that they, by

their very existence, were radically transforming. We, like Marilyn Monroe’s Pola,

just want to see things more clearly. But as with most of these endeavors, the process

begins with knowing where to look.

! %)!

Chapter 1 | Looking In: Body, Mind, Nation

Introduction

Something peculiar happens toward the end of Henry Hathaway’s 1953

thriller, Niagara. Just after a climactic scene in which the jilted George Loomis

(Joseph Cotten), murders his adulterous wife, Rose (Marilyn Monroe) at the top of a

bell tower, we watch as he surveys the items that fell from her purse during the

struggle (figure 4). As he picks up her now-abandoned tube of lipstick from the

ground and turns it over in his fingers, we see it in close up, gleaming in Technicolor,

catching the dim light of the tower (figures 5 and 6). For a few fleeting moments, this

lipstick emerges from its position as a minor detail within the mise-en-scene to

become a spectacle in itself, compelling audiences to pause – like potential

consumers before an advertising spread – in admiration of its material, desire-

inducing splendor. And then, as soon as it arrived, the moment is over and the action

resumes.

In a classical system that privileged narrative economy, the fact that this

mainstream, big-budget film expends precious screen time – at the height of dramatic

action – drawing out the material properties of lipstick cannot be ignored. What

purpose did this quirky, enigmatic pause serve? How did it produce meaning for

postwar audiences? This chapter takes such questions as its starting point. In it, I

examine the ways in which Niagara employs the formal and affective rhetoric of

advertising at certain narratively charged moments, opening up an otherwise staid

! %*!

classical era text to the broader social realities that began to redefine how Americans

understood themselves, both as individuals and as a nation. I argue that, by

temporarily pausing audiences before a capitalist spectacle, commercial moments

compelled viewers to reflect not only on commodity culture’s material pleasures, but

also on its intimate connection to social and political upheavals. Through an analysis

of key advertising campaigns – particularly Revlon’s notorious “Fire and Ice” – and

popular responses to them, I explore how this visual link to extra-diegetic commercial

culture infused the film with social realities unsanctioned by Code-era Hollywood:

Kinseyan revelations about female sexuality that troubled conventions of feminine

subordination and desire, as well as a new consciousness of social demographics such

as race and gender, which conflicted with popular film’s usual projection of a unified,

homogeneous national identity.

Through its commercialized presence, lipstick named the “other”

(“unspeakable” desires and drives) within the female psyche, while allegorizing the

gradual recognition of difference within the national body. I argue that commercial

moments throughout Niagara serve a similar purpose, and in doing so, forced a

conservative medium built upon the denial of difference to acknowledge

contemporary debates around gender, sexuality, and race – even if the narrative itself

ignored or suppressed them. Commercial moments thus encouraged postwar

audience-consumers to identify with the spaces of difference, and in doing so, to

recognize the other as an integral part of the self.

! &+!

Somewhere in Between

The presence of commercial rhetoric lends Niagara a sense of depth and

complexity that it may at first seem to lack. According to a review in the New York

Times, it was a tepid variation on well-worn formulas, with a “gossamer and fairly

transparent plot,” that is “scarcely a tribute to [the] imaginations” of the writers,

producers, and directors.1 Polly and Ray Cutler (Jean Peters and Casey Adams) are a

happily married couple who travel to Niagara Falls for a belated honeymoon. There,

they meet George and Rose Loomis: George an emotionally distraught Korean War

veteran who was recently released from Letterman (what Ray describes as “an army

hospital…mostly [for] psychos”2), and Rose, his beguiling wife, who, we soon

discover, is planning to murder him in order to elope with another man. Her deadly

plot is foiled however, when George kills her lover, fakes his own death, and later

murders her during their final encounter at the top of a bell tower. The discovery of

her body leads to a frantic police chase across land and sea, ending only when George

– trapped in a stolen motorboat – allows the rapids to carry him over the edge of the

falls to his death. In the film’s final moments, as Polly and Ray walk off arm-in-arm,

the moral of the story becomes clear: the virtuous, faithful couple triumphs, while the

Loomises – mired in unfaithfulness, deceit, and vengeance – are punished

indefinitely.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1 A. W., “Niagara Falls Vies with Marilyn Monroe,” The New York Times, January 22, 1953, 20. http://proquest.umi.com. 2 Quote from Niagara, directed by Henry Hathaway (1953; Beverly Hills, CA: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2006), DVD. All quotes from the movie taken from this source.

! &"!

Despite its narrative legibility, Niagara remains a slippery film to categorize

because it draws heavily from the conventions of two separate genres. On one hand,

its incorporation of film noir elements is literal to the point of cliché: from the

opening voice over (in which George asks, “why should the falls drag me down here

at 5 o’clock in the morning? To show me how big they are and how small I am?”), it

is clear that George – an emotionally fragile man obsessed with an unfaithful woman

– represents the damaged vulnerability of a noir protagonist, who, as Raymond Borde

and Etienne Chaumeton describe, is “an inglorious victim…often enough

masochistic, even self-immolating…who makes his own trouble, who may throw

himself into peril.”3 Similarly, the scheming, murderous Rose Loomis is a predictable

femme fatale who is “intelligent and powerful, if destructively so…”4 and whose

explicitly sexual appearance – tight dresses, bleached blonde hair, prominent jewelry

– also pulls from noir iconography.5 On the other hand, certain points within the

narrative – such as when both main characters meet their deaths – recall the theatrical

flamboyance of postwar melodramas: Rose, strangled to death by her jilted husband

at the top of a bell tower; George, selflessly rescuing Polly and allowing the water to

sweep him to his death. Niagara’s generic indeterminacy is perhaps most evident,

however, in its visual style: at once noirish in its use of dramatic camera angles,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!3 Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton, “Towards a Definition of Film Noir,” in Film Noir Reader, ed. Alain Silver and James Ursini (New York: Limelight Editions, 1996), 22. 4 Janey Place, “Women in Film Noir,” in Women in Film Noir, ed. E. Ann Kaplan, New Edition (London: BFI Publishing, 1998), 47. 5 Ibid., 54. As Richard Dyer elaborates, the makeup, costuming, and jewelry of femmes fatales strike “that combination of artifice and sensuality characteristic of the noir woman” (Richard Dyer, “Resistance Through Charisma: Rita Hayworth and Gilda,” in Film Noir Reader, ed. Silver and Ursini, 116).

! &#!

chiaroscuro lighting effects, and venetian blinds, its is also almost Sirkian in its

Technicolored palette, expressive use of color, and, as James Naremore comments,

“postcard views of Niagara Falls.”6

Such visual inconsistencies have a double significance. The awkward

coexistence of both noir and melodramatic styles in a single narrative suggests that

neither genre alone was able to meet the era’s specific social and ideological needs

(falling short of the all-important mythical function that Thomas Schatz and others

have argued is the primary function of genre film).7 At the same time, the presence of

brilliant color in what seems to be a gritty crime drama fosters a deliberate formal

parallel with other types of contemporary media, such as print advertising. In

Niagara, the commercial moment springs from this apparent stylistic tension,

providing a new mode of representation capable of addressing social transitions that

proved too unwieldy for the conventions of a single genre. Thus, while viewing these

enigmatic moments solely in terms of genre stresses a lack of cohesiveness, viewing

them in relation to contemporary commercial culture allows us to notice the

emergence of a new expressive form.

Color

Niagara’s seemingly melodramatic use of color lies at the heart of its

production of the commercial moment. In her article, “All that Heaven Allows: Color,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!6 James Naremore, More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts, updated edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 189. 7 See Thomas Schatz, “The Structural Influence: New Directions in Film Genre Study,” in Film Genre Reader III, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), 92-102.

! &$!

Narrative Space, Melodrama,” Mary Beth Haralovich discusses the primacy of color

in postwar melodramas, arguing that it serves two primary functions: symbolically,

creating associations between moods, characters, and themes, and also “in excess of

narrative primacy,” acting as a spectacle in itself, interrupting the smooth

development of the plot and “intruding on realist narrative space.”8 Niagara takes

color a step further, however, presenting a range of bright, dazzling colors in ways

that recall the formal energy of advertising campaigns. In Niagara, color functions as

a spectacle, as a “pause” in the narrative that calls attention to itself, but its resonance

with advertising codes produces meaning that can only be deciphered when analyzed

alongside contemporary socio-cultural and technological developments in both

media.

In the early fifties, most films were still shot in black and white, a decision

that was economical – color film was more expensive to produce – as well as

ideological.9 As Edward Buscombe argues, “Economics can explain the necessary but

not the sufficient conditions for innovation…The specific form of this need will be

ideologically determined; in the case of cinema the ideological determinant most

frequently identified has been realism.”10 At this time, only genres that were accepted

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!8 Mary Beth Haralovich, “All that Heaven Allows: Color, Narrative Space, and Melodrama,” in Color: The Film Reader, ed. Angela Dalle Vacche and Brian Price (New York: Routledge, 2006), 151. As Haralovich elaborates: “even while the realist narrative space provides ‘normal’ sources for all of the colors, [the film] also uses the ability of color to function as an emphasis in itself: as spectacle, as excess, and as potentially distractive of the primacy of narrative” (ibid., 152). 9 See Gorham A. Kindem, “Hollywood’s Conversion to Color: The Technological Economic, and Aesthetic Factors,” Journal of the University Film Association 31, no. 2 (Spring, 1979]) 34. As Kindem asserts, color films were more expensive to produce, and the box office returns for color films at the time did not seem to warrant the extra cost. 10 Edward Buscombe, “Sound and Color,” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media no. 17 (April, 1978), 23-25. http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC17folder/SoundAndColor.html.

! &%!

as fantasy (namely musicals and cartoons) readily used color, while anything with

“serious” subject matter (like crime thrillers) called for black and white.11 For fifties

audiences, color still signified the fantastic, the decidedly “not real,” while black and

white evoked high modernist abstraction, art house cinema, and documentary truth.12

Color did not become accepted as “realistic” until television programs were

broadcast in color in the sixties.13 Until then, it remained an aesthetic outcast in

Hollywood, strictly regulated because of its potential power to distract from narrative

action.14 Natalie Kalmus, who served as the chief Technicolor consultant from the

twenties until the late forties, helped devise a set of rules that aimed to corral color

into its proper secondary position, and reminded readers that, “…it is desirable to

have all the colors in any one scene harmonious.”15 Even in the late 1950s, when

color technologies had become more manageable and widespread, the same attitude

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11 As Stephen Neale claims, “Color was still overwhelmingly associated, aesthetically, with spectacle and fantasy. In consequence, color continued to be regularly used in genres like the musical, the western and the adventure film, as well as in Disney’s feature cartoons” (Stephen Neale, Cinema and Technology: Image, Sound, Color [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985], 139). 12 Thus, as Naremore claims, “The black-and-white photographic style that we associate with film noir was therefore given legitimacy by virtue of the fact that it suggested both gritty realism and the highest aesthetic refinement” (Naremore, 173). 13 The major shift toward color television broadcasting occurred in 1965, even though NBC had been experimenting with color since the mid-fifties. It took television’s turn to color to spark an interest in making color films, and the gradual acceptance of color as being “realistic” (see Kindem, 35). 14 As Buscombe remarks: “Color would serve only to distract the audience from those elements in film which carried forward the narrative: acting, facial expression, ‘the action.’ The unity of the diegesis and primacy of the narrative are fundamental to realist cinema. If color was seen to threaten either one, it could not be accommodated” (Buscombe, “Sound and Color,” http://www.ejumpcut.org). 15 As she claims, in a 1935 article, “When we receive the script for a new film, we carefully analyze each sequence and scene to ascertain what dominant mood or emotion is to be expressed. When this is decided, we plan to use the appropriate color or set of colors which will suggest that mood, thus actually fitting the color to the scene and augmenting its dramatic value” (Natalie M. Kalmus, “Color Consciousness,” in Color: The Film Reader, ed. Dalle Vacche and Price, 28). For more on the origins of Technicolor, see Neale, 138.

! &&!

prevailed.16 The 1957 guide Elements of Color in Professional Motion Pictures states

that “Color must be subordinate to the story, and help to tell it. The colors…cannot be

permitted to become ‘eye-catchers’ unless such an effect is deliberately desired, and

so helps rather than hinders the story.”17

Yet color’s ability to distract, overwhelm, and draw formal connections

between different parts of the mise-en-scene were precisely the qualities that print

advertising tried to exploit. For postwar advertisements during a consumer boom,

quick and legible associations and striking visual accents proved an effective way of

communicating a commercial message. For instance, Kalmus stressed the law of

emphasis in color design: “If, for example, a bright red ornament were shown behind

an actor’s head, the bright color would detract from the character and the action.

Errors of this nature must be carefully avoided.”18 By contrast, in print

advertisements, the people, their actions, their facial expressions, and the setting – all

of the elements so privileged in narrative film – are merely secondary to the product

being promoted. This reversal in priorities allows color to play a more prominent role

in print advertisements. As Judith Williamson argues, what in other contexts is

merely a distracting “ornament,” in advertising becomes the central focus: “we see

that the world and the people are actually an accessory of the product, and not the

other way round. Instead of the product being created out of a need in the world, it

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!16 See Naremore, 186. 17 Wilton Holm et. al., Elements of Color in Professional Motion Pictures (New York: Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, 1957), 43. 18 Kalmus, 28.

! &'!

creates its own world, an exaggerated reflection of itself.”19 Similarly, while

filmmakers were instructed to dial back color schemes, contemporary print

advertising embraced the garish palette of the four-color rotogravure process.20

Always aspiring to greater realism in “serious” genres, Hollywood was perpetually

uneasy with the fact that Technicolor was brighter and more saturated than reality.

Advertising, however, thrived upon saturated primary colors, which were crucial to

its construction of an idealized state that, as Williamson asserts, was “too full of

coincidence, of color co-ordination, to be real.”21

There were some exceptions to the cinematic subordination of color, however,

particularly when photographing the female stars that classical Hollywood

conventions routinely objectified.22 As Holm points out in Elements of Color Design,

“The feminine star…must be given undisputed priority…If her complexion limits the

colors she can wear successfully, this in turn restricts the background colors which

will complement her complexion and her costumes to best advantage.”23 Still, as

much as the female body could be the glittering center of attention, it also had a

responsibility, as Steven Neale argues, “of focusing and motivating a set of color

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!19 Judith Williamson, Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising (New York: Marion Boyars, 1978), 22. 20 See Ben Dalgin, Advertising Production: A Manual on the Mechanics of Newspaper Printing (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company), 1946. For more on Technicolor and the artificiality of its palette, see Neale, 147 and Scott Higgins, Harnessing the Technicolor Rainbow: Color Design in the 1930s (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007), 220-221. Naturalism was a top priority in postwar Hollywood film. As the Elements guidebook states, “We might well take a cue from nature, and recognize that the most pleasing color pictures are generally those in which only a limited range of colors is used. Likewise, the use of relatively unsaturated colors will frequently add to the naturalness of a color picture” (Holm et. al., 40). 21 Williamson, 23. 22 See Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Constance Penley, ed. Feminism and Film Theory (New York: Routledge, 1988), 57-68. 23 Holm, et. al., 40-41.

! &(!

effects within a system dependent upon plot and narration, thus providing a form of

spectacle compatible with that system, and of marking and containing the erotic

component involved in the desire to look at the colored image.”24 (emphasis mine)

The stakes of representation were thus high for female stars, who were responsible for

channeling erotic desire while still “containing” that desire through its smooth

integration into a broader visual schema.

Niagara violates nearly every rule when it came to filming its star, Marilyn

Monroe, going beyond mere “emphasis” within an otherwise coherent visual system,

and instead abiding by the very different rules of print advertising. Rather than

serving as the focus of a seamlessly integrated visual system, she is visible to the

point of distraction, pulling viewers outside of the narrative action and compelling

them to consume her image as if she were a commodity herself. In absence of a brand

label, her presence seems to sell the viewer something, even if at first the pitch is

unclear.

The Commercial Moment

The formal “rules” of advertising and film differ so greatly in part because

each medium has different capabilities and limitations, and therefore communicates

meaning differently to its audiences. Print advertisements are restricted by their static

two-dimensionality; unlike film, there is no temporal duration or movement, and

often no narrative trajectory (if there is one, it must be dramatically condensed and

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!24 Neale, 155.

! &)!

simplified). As a result, they must compress highly complex concepts into their barest

and most heavily coded form. In print advertising, the “hyper-ritualization,”

stylization, and forceful links between various figures in the frame must carry the

weight of the message. While in film, meaning may come from within the diegesis,

developed by narrative over time, in print advertising, meaning must come from the

audience’s ability to discern meaning through an incredible economy of form, and

often in a single frame.25

Advertising therefore requires a different level of viewer engagement than

film. As Fern Johnson claims:

The verbal and visual images featured in advertising draw from a knowable world but then rework, magnify, simplify, contort or otherwise reshape and sharpen the salient signifiers. The logic of advertising relies heavily on ellipsis and inference, or the omission of items necessary to complete the text. The ellipsis draws into the ad unstated, complex sign systems that are meaningful in a cultural, ideologically coded context and left unarticulated, and must be inferred by the cultural reader.26

The viewer of print advertising must be able to fill in the gaps of meaning left open

by the text’s necessary schematization, a task only achievable if one is exposed to the

cultural and ideological context that the advertisement references as well as to the

“reading rules” that a lifetime of exposure to advertising rhetoric has conditioned one

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!25 Haralovich’s example of Cary’s red dress in All that Heaven Allows supports this point. Although it is a striking accent within the frame, our ability to understand fully its symbolism still depends upon the broader narrative. Our knowledge of Cary’s more somber (black) attire at an earlier point in the film helps us to interpret her appearance in red as a symbol of sexual awakening, which then foreshadows a later scene, when her daughter Kay wears a similar shade of red to announce her engagement (see Haralovich, 150). 26 Fern Johnson, Imaging in Advertising: Verbal and Visual Codes of Commerce (New York: Routledge, 2008), 2.

! &*!

to recognize and accept.27 Both of these systems are at play in the production of what

Robert Goldman calls the “commodity-sign,” or the commodity that we come to

recognize by its emotional and psychological (rather than simply its functional)

utility.28 The production of this “commodity-sign” is essential to the operation of

advertisements (and often determines its success), and is heavily dependent upon the

viewer correctly interpreting these formal connections so that eventually “we take the

sign for what it signifies.”29 As Sut Jhally summarizes, “…a sign only replaces

something for someone else if it has someone to mean to. The transference requires

the active participation of the viewer of the advertisement.”30

Perhaps the most crucial difference between film and print advertising,

however, lies in their modes of spectator address. In the classical Hollywood

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!27 For Robert Goldman, viewers of advertisements must be familiar with the “ideological codes” and “reading rules” that animate the ad – a knowledge acquired only through adequate exposure to the ideological, social, and cultural context that these ads reference (Robert Goldman, Reading Ads Socially [New York: Routledge, 1992], 5). Importantly, he claims that modern American advertising rhetoric was born in the 1920s, perfected and “streamlined” from 1950-1985, and as a result, there is a “dominant advertising form that has become the standard vehicle for producing signs” (ibid., 6). 28 Ibid., 18. 29 Ibid., 5, 19. 30 Sut Jhally, The Codes of Advertising: Fetishism and the Political Economy of Meaning in the Consumer Society (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), 131. This is not to say that in film, the spectator is resigned to passively accepting whatever is presented on screen. As Judith Mayne argues, although classical Hollywood films are products of ideology often with a very specific message to convey, the spectator negotiates meaning in certain ways based on her own positionality and experiences (see Judith Mayne, Cinema and Spectatorship [New York: Routledge, 1993], 91-93). Many spectator groups have found ways of appropriating Hollywood film conventions or subverting them: for instance, the camp interpretation of certain celebrities such as Judy Garland or Joan Crawford (see Steven Cohan, Incongruous Entertainment: Camp, Cultural Value, and the MGM Musical [Durham: Duke University Press, 2005]). Yet all of these readings are carried out in spite of the ideologically and culturally coded messages that the Hollywood system presents. Activeness in interpretation draws one closer to an oppositional reading in film (reading against the grain of the intended meaning), whereas in print advertising, even the most dominant reading understanding requires a great deal of active participation.

! '+!

tradition, direct address is fairly uncommon.31 Instead, viewers often become

involved with the diegetic world through a secondary identification with one of the

characters, a feat achieved largely through classical editing conventions such as

suture.32 As Daniel Dayan claims, suture provides diegetically motivated explanations

for the properties of the medium (such as the presence of different shots and the cuts

between them) and naturalizes the “codes” of the cinema so that they become

invisible to us, thereby generating, in Jean-Pierre Oudart’s words, an “impression of

reality.”33 While an unsutured shot unsettlingly implies the “Absent One” or the gaze

of the camera alone (thereby exposing rather than naturalizing the mechanisms by

which the “impression of reality” is produced), suturing links this shot to the gaze of a

character within the diegesis, comfortably aligning our vision with that of a subject

already fully articulated in the narrative.34 The spectator of classical Hollywood film

therefore assumes a subject position that exists already within the fictional world,

allowing characters in the film to maintain the “fourth wall,” and to avoid addressing

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!31 One exception is the musical, which often features song-and-dance routines that appear directed toward the non-diegetic spectator. Elaborate justifications are used before “breaking down” this fourth wall so as to avoid the abrupt distanciation that is more common in modernist film and theater: performances, and rehearsals often serve as narrative “excuses” for actors to look/sing/dance directly to the camera, allowing them to appear as if they are performing for viewers in the diegesis, even though they are clearly also performing directly for viewers of the film (see Jane Feuer, The Hollywood Musical, 2nd ed. [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993], 42-47). 32 See Christian Metz’s discussion of secondary identification in “The Imaginary Signifier,” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 252. 33 Daniel Dayan, “The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema,” in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, 5th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 123. 34 Kaja Silverman, “On Suture,” in Film Theory and Criticism, ed. Braudy and Cohen, 140. Silverman discusses suturing as a way in which cinematic codes smooth over “the wound of castration” that is inflicted when the spectator of the film moves from experiencing a shot as “imaginary plentitude” to realizing that it is indicative of a “coercive and castrating other” (cinematic technology and other elements outside of the fiction [ibid., 139-140]).

! '"!

the spectator as a spectator outside of the diegesis.35 In advertising, however, this

complex system of suture does not exist. Direct address is far more common, and

even when there is no direct address by the figures in the frame, there is a strong

sense that we, as viewer-consumers, are being interpellated as spectators: that the

characters in the frame are performing solely for our sake – to have a direct effect on

our future opinions and our actions – rather than for other characters within a broader

narrative.

Certain highly stylized moments in Niagara invite a mode of spectatorship

that is more similar to advertising than cinema. Early in the film, just after the Cutlers

have arrived in Niagara Falls, Rose intrudes on an impromptu party at the motel.

Small clusters of dancing teenagers part and stare in silence as she emerges from her

cabin wearing a revealing pink satin dress, and hands a record to the host, requesting

that he play the song “Kiss” (which we later learn is the “code song” between Rose

and her lover). As she cuts across the makeshift dance floor to sit with the Cutlers,

George – infuriated by her wanton display – storms out of the cabin (where he had

been watching the entire time) and smashes the record to pieces. Throughout this

sequence, there are extraordinary moments of spectatorship, and we watch as other

people watch her (figure 7). However, just after George makes his entrance, there is a

moment in which the camera rests in a medium close-up of Rose’s face. It is clear

that no one is watching her now but the viewers of the film, and as a brief, ambiguous

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!35 Recalling Metz’s discussion of secondary identification, Dayan explains this process: “Note, however, that when this cinema adopts the personal form, it does so somewhat obliquely, rather like novelistic descriptions which use ‘he’ rather than ‘I’ for descriptions of the central character’s experience” (Dayan, 126).

! '#!

smile moves slowly across her face, we are taken out of the flow of the narrative –

transported to a realm in which color can be bolder, gestures more heavily loaded,

and in which we are prompted in new and more demanding ways to make meaning of

what we see (figure 8).

While close ups of Hollywood stars are not unusual (and when they appear,

they are arguably as much for viewers beyond the diegesis as they are for characters

within), what makes this image of Monroe so jarring is its independence from the

gazes of other characters and its deliberate acknowledgement of the spectators of the

film. In some respects, we might compare this shot of Monroe to a similarly striking

shot of Rita Hayworth when she makes her first appearance in Gilda. Both emphasize

the actresses’ erotic power, and both at first acknowledge the gaze of the camera

rather than that of any specific character. In Gilda this is evident in Hayworth’s

startling entrance into the frame from below, which makes us aware that the camera’s

positioning is inconsistent with the perspective of either Johnny or Ballin, the two

male characters who watch her. Yet Gilda immediately sutures us back into the

diegesis, following this visual interruption with a reverse-shot of Johnny and then a

series of shots that comfortably realign our perspective with characters in the film.36

By contrast, Niagara’s moment of rupture does not encourage us to identify with the

conventional male protagonist who would be attracted to Rose’s exhibitionism.

Unlike in Gilda, this brief disruption is not immediately sutured over, but instead left

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!36 As Dyer argues, the series of shot/reverse-shots after her initial entrance assert beyond a doubt that Johnny and Gilda are looking at each other, and that they view each other as objects of desire (see Dyer, “Resistance Through Charisma,” in Film Noir Reader, 118).

! '$!

exposed and unresolved. Within this commercial moment, Rose emerges from the

world of the film, transforming temporarily from Rose to Marilyn Monroe, and

performing not for viewers within the diegesis, but for those beyond it.

What makes this instance most indicative of a “commercial” mode is the way

in which its form references extra-narrative cultural and social factors. In the fifties,

advertisers began to switch from the product centered approach (also called the

“Unique Selling Proposition”), which touted the uniqueness and superiority of a

specific brand, to the “Situation Centered Approach” or “user-centered” approach,

which focused more on associating the product with a desirable lifestyle.37 Rather

than relaying concrete facts about the objects within the frame, this new style of

advertising drew on the broader social context of its target audience, conjuring

associations between the product and certain positive, cultural experiences while

trusting that, as Johnson argues, the reader will “fill in [any] ellipsis with material

from discourses outside the ad.”38 Like “user-centered” advertisements, this moment

in Niagara prompts viewers to make connections beyond the film text. Here,

Monroe’s posture, the framing, hair, and makeup – in fact, the entire “look” of the

shot – prompts viewers to recall her image in advertisements of the era, and thus to

look to commercial culture as a means of understanding this scene’s significance.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!37 Having grown out of increased market segmentation in the postwar era, this “user-centered” approach focused on appealing to the desires, needs, and shared experiences of a specific group, rather than attempting to appeal to a mass audience based solely on product descriptions. Although, according to Jhally, the situation centered approach did not become dominant in the industry until around the mid-60s, by 1950 there were significant shifts away from the product-centered approach. As early as 1945, there was a period of “personification” of products – or, advertisements stressing the ways in which possession of a commodity would magically transform the self and one’s lifestyle (Jhally, 127-128). 38 Johnson, 10.

! '%!

In 1952, when Niagara was being filmed, Marilyn Monroe the icon did not

yet exist. It would take until 1953 for the debut of three films in which she was the

lead (including Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire) for her

star persona to become more firmly established.39 But in a 1952 advertisement for

Westmore Cosmetics, the beginnings of her rather oxymoronic image as both

childlike and hypersexual were well underway (figure 9).40 While her direct look into

the camera, red lips, platinum hair, and curve-revealing contrapposto seems to flaunt

her sexual availability, her smile and gauzy yellow dress also position her as

innocently flirtatious. In this scene from Niagara, we can interpret her hesitation and

facial expression directly within the context of the film: she is purely evil, laughing at

her husband’s embarrassing outburst; or she is scheming, hoping that this display of

insanity will make people believe that his murder (which she is plotting) is suicide.

Yet the moment seems to be asking more from us, referencing her developing

celebrity persona’s embodiment of seductive vamp and a childish ingénue. In this

scene, her smile, the boldness of her clothing and flawlessness of her glowing skin

quotes the Westmore advertisement so clearly that it encourages viewers to engage

with her image in a similar manner.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!39 Here I refer to stardom as defined by Richard Dyer, who claims “A star image consists both of what we normally refer to as his or her ‘image,’ made up of screen roles and obviously stage-managed public appearances, and also of images of the manufacture of that ‘image’ and of the real person who is the site or occasion of it” (Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society, 2nd ed. [New York: Routledge, 2004], 7). 40 Sarah Churchwell argues that Monroe’s childishness heightened her sexual appeal: “She was thus an appropriate symbol for that most childish of decades, the 1950s, when America regressed, and developed a breast fixation. Marilyn’s childishness became the obverse of a fantasy of maternity, a woman who is as infantile as the men around her” (Sarah Churchwell, The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe [New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004], 19).

! '&!

A New Feminine Danger

Such striking formal parallels with commercial culture inevitably added a

layer of complexity to an otherwise one-dimensional character. In this moment, we no

longer see Rose as being just another predictable femme fatale, but rather confront an

embodiment of excess, ambivalence, and contradiction that is dangerous precisely

because it defies concrete definition. By referencing the ways in which Monroe’s

public image responded to postwar concerns over feminine excess and sexual danger,

this commercial moment lends visual form to a “problem” that previous genre

conventions had not yet developed a means of representing.

Emerging in the forties, classical film noir used the figure of the femme fatale

to represent the shifting gender relations brought about by World War II, and the

threat to previous institutions (such as the traditional, patriarchal family structure)

such transitions posed.41 Representation of the femme fatale therefore played into

contemporary fears about female autonomy and the morbid fascination with the

mysteries surrounding female sexuality. Yet in order to fulfill its social function as a

genre film, classical noir ensured the femme fatale’s eventual demise, symbolically

controlling this danger and restoring order through her death. As Janey Place claims:

“the absolute necessity of controlling the strong, sexual woman is …achieved by first

demonstrating her dangerous power and its frightening results, then destroying it.”42

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!41 According to Sylvia Harvey, the very concept of “traditional” families underwent serious changes during and immediately after the war (See Sylvia Harvey, “Woman’s Place: the Absent Family of Film Noir,” in Women in Film Noir, 38). 42 Place, 56.

! ''!

Monroe/Rose is not a conventional femme fatale, as her representation in

these commercial moments makes clear. As Mary Anne Doane argues, femmes

fatales present “a certain discursive unease, a potential epistemological trauma. For

her most striking characteristic, perhaps, is the fact that she never really is what she

seems to be. She harbors a threat which is not entirely legible, predictable, or

manageable.”43 In most films noir, a major characteristic of the femme fatale is this

lack of legibility, and an uneasy sense that there is something sinister inside her,

hidden beneath an exterior that gives nothing away. Barbara Stanwyck’s performance

from Double Indemnity remains one of the most iconic in part because she so fully

embodied this persona. Beneath a slick and impenetrable exterior – emphasized by

her severely coiffed hair, sunglasses, and sharply defined, harshly lit features – she is,

as she admits to Walter Neff in the end, “rotten to the core.”44 Monroe’s danger,

however, stems not from harboring something purely evil within, but rather from the

fact that her sexual power and childish vulnerability are all entirely legible, and all at

the same time. As Grant McCracken notes, “this persona was not like anything

America had seen before. ‘Marilyn’ was about access of every kind: sexual,

emotional, intellectual.”45 With Rose, danger transitioned from the unknowable

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!43 Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1991), 1. 44 Quote from Double Indemnity, directed by Billy Wilder (1944; Universal City, CA: Universal Pictures, 2006), DVD. As Naremore claims, she is “blatantly provocative and visibly artificial; her ankle bracelet, her lacquered lipstick, her sunglasses, and above all her chromium hair give her a cheaply manufactured, metallic look… In keeping with this synthetic quality, her sex scenes are almost robotic, and she reacts to murder with an icy calm” (Naremore, 89). 45 Grant McCracken, Big Hair: A Journey into the Transformation of Self (Woodstock: The Overlook Press, 1995), 84.

! '(!

sinister kernel into hyper-visible, uncontrollable ambiguity – a quality that could only

be expressed through brilliant, gaudy, and therefore, commercial, color.

In this commercial moment, and throughout the rest of the film, Monroe

practically glows in her pink dress and bleached hair.46 In addition to upsetting the

restrictive rules governing the use of color in film, her appearance also references

broader cultural notions that equate color with boundlessness and danger. As artist

David Batchelor describes it: “…color is made out to be the property of some

‘foreign’ body – usually the feminine, the oriental, the primitive, the infantile, the

vulgar, the queer or the pathological; [or] color is relegated to the realm of the

superficial, the supplementary, the inessential or the cosmetic. In one, color is

regarded as alien and therefore dangerous; in the other, it is perceived merely as a

secondary quality of experience…”47 With this, Batchelor outlines the two major

characteristics of color in western culture: a threatening “other” on one hand, and

cosmetic “excess” on the other. Niagara’s use of color designates Rose as both,

distinguishing her from her antithesis, the well-behaved and happily married Polly

Cutler (figure 10). Always dominating the frame with her bright makeup and vibrant,

revealing dresses, Monroe is too visible, too distracting, too uncontrollable; she is

presented as a sexual threat in part because her visual presence is, as Lisa Cohen aptly

states, just “too, too much.”48

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!46 Cinematographers and Technicolor consultants advised against this hair color. Cinematographer Ray Rennahan commented that “platinum blonde is ‘out’ – the most difficult shade of all and useless for Technicolor. It is already going by the board in Hollywood” (quoted in Neale, 154). 47 David Batchelor, Chromophobia (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), 22-23. 48 Lisa Cohen, “The Horizontal Walk: Marilyn Monroe, CinemaScope, and Sexuality,” The Yale Journal of Criticism, 11, no. 1 (Spring, 1998), 259.

! ')!

In a period deeply influenced by Cold War surveillance and obsessed with

shoring up hidden dangers, such overt sexuality might at first seem to be a positive

quality. After all, beliefs that sexuality was a formative and yet invisible part of one’s

identity (that also deeply influenced one’s political leanings) prompted a widespread

interest in, as Dyer explains, “digging below the surface, [based] on the assumption

that what is below must necessarily be more true and must also be what causes the

surface to take the form it does.”49 The explicit parallels between this quest for the

truth of sexual desires and rooting out communist spies are obvious (it is no

coincidence that the “Lavender Scare” coexisted with the red one), and at the root of

both was an anxiety over a perceived threat that could easily be “hidden in plain

sight.”50 Despite being completely on the surface, however, Monroe’s persona

reminded Cold War Americans of those uncontrollable desires that were a potential

threat to the social order. Although a fear of danger’s invisibility structured much of

social and political life, popular reactions to contemporary discourses about sex

proved that full visibility often made their lack of control more apparent and fear

more acute.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!49 Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society, 23. 50 Links drawn in popular discourse between homosexuality and communism proposed that one’s sexuality invisibly drove one’s political choices (and could therefore also serve as a threat to the nation). As Andrea Friedman elaborates, American political rhetoric perpetuated the assumption that “homosexuals were slaves to their passions for other men, communists to their Soviet masters. Members of both groups lacked the masculine autonomy that enabled loyalty to the nation” (Andrea Friedman, “The Smearing of Joe McCarthy: The Lavender Scare, Gossip, and Cold War Politics,” American Quarterly 57, no. 4 [December, 2005], 1106. http://muse.jhu.edu). Eventually, these phobic speculations connecting “invisible” sexuality with equally “invisible” communist leanings culminated in the “Lavender Scare,” which resulted in the firing of hundreds of government employees who were suspected of being gay or lesbian (see Jane Sherron De Hart, “Containment at Home: Gender, Sexuality, and National Identity in Cold War America,” in Peter Kuznik and James Gilbert, eds. Rethinking Cold War Culture [Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001], 124-155).

! '*!

As the second of the Kinsey reports revealed, seeing and knowing all of the

“hidden” details sometimes gave audiences more information than they could handle.

Although The Sexuality of the Human Male was controversial in revealing the extent

to which “average” (white) men throughout the United States engaged in “non-

normative” sexual practices, it made the New York Times bestseller list in 1948 and

was praised for its groundbreaking contribution to the way in which Americans

thought about sex.51 The publication of The Sexuality of the Human Female in 1953

(the same year as Niagara’s release), however, prompted a very different reaction,

even though its findings and methodological process were virtually the same as the

previous study. Congressman Louis Heller insisted that Kinsey “hurl[ed] the insult of

the century against our mothers, wives, daughters, and sisters,” and the American

Medical Association – which had only a few years prior praised Kinsey for these

revelations in relation to men – accused the volume of creating “a wave of sex

hysteria.”52 In detailing the nature of female sexual desire and exposing the extent to

which women engaged in homosexual and extra marital affairs, it unhinged

assumptions about women that were essential to maintaining the era’s domestic

ideals. By offering a glimpse into the “secrets” of female sexuality, the report seemed

to reveal more fully the scope of an unsolvable “problem”: that a disruptive,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!51 See David Allyn, “Private Acts/Public Policy: Alfred Kinsey, the American Law Institute and the Privatization of American Sexual Morality,” Journal of American Studies 30, no. 3 (1996), 418-419. As Allyn elaborates, leading professionals in medicine, social work, and law praised the work and organized conferences to discuss it. The study also received very favorable write-ups in popular magazines such as Life and The Lancet. 52 Quoted in ibid., 423.

! (+!

excessive, sexual threat resided in those who were culturally entrusted with guarding

the private sphere.53

These “revelations” about women were so unsettling in large part because

they could not be easily contained, satiated, or visually represented. Women’s canned

presence in many parts of visual culture (television programs such as Ozzie and

Harriet, for instance) reflected the rigidity of gender roles in postwar domestic

culture, and defined women as reassuringly stable characters unaffected by, or devoid

of, internal impulses. But such representation became inadequate after Kinsey’s study

identified women as messy, ambiguous entities. As Dyer elaborates, this new

awareness of female sexuality required “the visual form it takes [to be],

paradoxically, formlessness, slackness, blur.”54 Monroe was one of the few female

stars able to convey this strange phenomenon in the gratuitous twitches of her mouth,

the breathiness of her voice, and the undisciplined “sideways” step of her walk.55

This close up of Monroe, like the advertisement for Westmore, reminds us of these

unmistakable parts of her star persona, especially in their use of bright, even lighting.

In both instances, the light blurs the contours of her torso and hair (the advertisement

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!53 As Robert Corber argues, “Kinsey’s report on female sexual behavior caused an even greater controversy than the one on male sexual behavior, because it challenged one of the most intractable stereotypes about women in American society, namely, that they do not like sex as much as men and prefer relationships centered on romantic love and emotional intimacy” (“Rethinking Sex: Alfred Kinsey Now,” American Quarterly 57, no. 2 [June, 2005], 466. http://muse.jhu.edu). 54 Dyer, Heavenly Bodies, 52. 55 As Dyer states, “The walk in Niagara is a wiggle, invariably described by the critics as undulating, serpentine, squiggling, squirming, wriggling, a veritable thesaurus of terms connoting movement that cannot be determined (pinned down), that has no edges and boundaries” (ibid., 54). Similarly, he points to contemporary characterizations in the popular press of her mouth – as “moist” as “mobile” and as always half-open – to demonstrate the boundlessness of her body. Compared to the mouths of other female stars (such as Harlow, Bow, and Crawford), Monroe’s mouth had no definite shape or form (ibid).

! ("!

achieves this effect largely through the use of a pale pink background that is only

slightly different from her skin color), which suggests her lack of definition and

inability to be contained, even by the limits of her own body. Thus, for all of her

“childish innocence,” she was still a force that could not be localized, always

threatening to spill over and dissolve the boundaries of representation.

The presentation of Rose-as-Marilyn in this commercial moment therefore

collapses Monroe’s persona in popular and commercial culture into a single frame,

producing a truly dangerous figure that reminded viewers of everything they still

feared about sex. The 1950s may have been a decade in which bodies became a part

of mainstream culture to an unprecedented extent (it was the era of Playboy, after all);

but the fact that sexuality was perceived to be dangerous until exposed and then

tamed meant that this new sexual looseness sat uncomfortably with the contemporary

current of conservative family values. Postwar women like Monroe, therefore, were

newly indicative of an “epistemological trauma” – not because they were “never what

they seem to be” but rather because they were too much of what they seem to be and

therefore out of control.

Death and Lipstick

In Niagara, therefore, commercial rhetoric and all of its own “excessive”

formal elements give shape to new dangers that were situated outside of the limits of

conventional generic representation. Yet the “problem” of this hyper-visible,

uncontrollable, sexual threat still remains. If Niagara aims to provide a resolution to

! (#!

these otherwise-irresolvable social contradictions (as all genre films do), it must

provide a diegetic resolution to this formless and overwhelming evil. Rose Loomis

must be punished somehow, and in the end, she dies at the hands of the husband she

and her lover intended to kill. But unlike conventional femmes fatales who could be

completely expunged (and take their mysteriousness and threat to their graves), such

swift management is no longer feasible for this new type of feminine danger, which

could not be localized or clearly defined, even in death. Even though Rose is dead, we

need more forms of proof that her danger – which always seemed to exceed the limits

of her physical body anyway – has expired as well.

Immediately after George strangles Rose, there is an unsettling feeling that not

everything has been completely resolved. This uneasiness is echoed when George

attempts to make his escape after the murder, but finds that he is locked in the bell

tower and must stay with her body overnight until the attendant comes back the next

morning. Resigning himself to his situation, George climbs the stairs once again,

passing by the landing where the objects that fell from Rose’s purse are scattered

haphazardly across the floor. Here is where we find ourselves once again suspended

in a commercial moment, staggered by commodity spectacle: when he picks up her

abandoned lipstick and we watch in close up as he rolls it between his fingers, we

become aware of his reverent silence, of the stillness that seems to be out of time and

place, and of the lipstick’s dazzling materiality (figures 5 and 6).

Similar to the commercialized image of Monroe earlier in the film, this

moment takes audiences beyond the diegesis, prompting them to connect its formal

! ($!

language to ideas and feelings represented in other cultural texts. These shots of

lipstick make, through visual and temporal emphasis, something that was once merely

an ancillary object into what Lesley Stern describes as a “cinematic thing” – a

quotidian, material item suddenly invested with an affective weight beyond all

narrative motivation. As she elaborates, through lighting, framing, and the duration of

the actor’s touch, “ordinary, functional things are cinematically charged, invested

with drama, histrionically inflected.”56 In these cinematic instances, once-peripheral

objects come to the foreground and “carry affect and an indeterminacy that frequently

derives at least in part from their indexical relationship to the real world.”57 The

effect of this, she suggests, is that things come to “mean” on their own, rather than

being a prop that symbolizes or aids in the expression of narrative meaning.58 Such a

transformation is common to advertisements, in which the associative connections we

make allow the sign to replace what is being signified (diamonds replace romantic

love, for instance).59 Cinematic things therefore adopt the signifying power of a

commodity-sign in an advertisement, requiring a similar form of participation from

the viewer.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!56 Lesley Stern, “Paths That Wind Through the Thicket of Things,” in Things, ed. Bill Brown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 410. This unique way of experiencing or “feeling” cinema is often triggered by the sense of touch: “Cinematic apprehension simultaneously fills the objects with movement and contrives to move the viewer, to trigger a mode of knowing that is somatic, experienced through the duration of touch” (ibid., 411). 57 Ibid., 410. 58 Ibid., 415. 59 As Williamson argues with regard to the DeBeers campaign, “Thus a diamond comes to ‘mean’ love and endurance for us. Once the connection has been made, we begin to translate the other way and in fact to skip translating altogether: taking the sign for what it signifies, the thing for the feeling” (Williamson, 12).

! (%!

With its tight framing and even lighting, this close up of the lipstick recalls a

specific stylistic technique used in print advertising, in which most of the frame is

devoted to depicting the emotional value or lifestyle that advertisers want to associate

with the product, and a smaller frame embedded within this scene depicts the product

in isolation (figures 9 and 12). Although smaller and off to the side, this “boxed

insert” – what Goldman terms the “mortise” – serves a crucial function, offering a

privileged view of the commodity in all of its material splendor.60 Whereas the larger

image promises broader, abstract fulfillment, the mortise promises immediate,

sensory fulfillment; it invites potential consumers to engage in haptic perception, or

what Laura Marks defines as a form of “embodied looking” in which vision acts as a

conduit for sensing the object in other ways, primarily through touch.61 Like the

mortise, this shot of the lipstick is removed from the pace of the narrative, visually

separated from the drama that preceded it. Tightly framed, carefully lit, and against a

dark background, it is eerily outside of the story, precluding secondary identification

with the characters and instead allowing viewers to engage directly with its sensory

and material properties. As Marks claims, this separation from conventional modes of

representation and identification facilitates the “caressing gaze” of haptic perception,

which lingers on the surface of the image so that viewers – of this commercial

moment and of countless advertising mortises – not only see the lipstick, but feel the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!60 As Goldman comments, “The mortise is an encoding practice that conveys decoding instructions to viewers…it is a framing device that guides interpretation of the ad’s content” (Goldman, 63). 61 Marks’s definition is as follows: “Haptic perception is usually defined as the combination of tactile, kinasethtic, and proprioceptive functions, the way we experience touch both on the surface of and inside our bodies” (Laura U. Marks, “Video Haptics and Erotics,” Screen 39, no. 4 [Winter, 1998], 332). Marks specifically discusses video aesthetics in relation to this concept of haptic perception.

! (&!

jeweled surface of the case on their own fingers and the waxy texture of the lipstick

on their mouths (something that is made even more apparent by the teeth marks that

are visible on the tip [figure 6]).62

This type of multisensory engagement with the visual image – registering

taste, smell, and touch through the act of looking – was a technique that advertising

campaigns employed in order to pique consumer desire, and had therefore

conditioned postwar viewers to accept.63 The fact that, for a few privileged seconds,

the lipstick in this scene so strongly recalls a commercial mode of address opens the

film up to extra-narrative influence. Here, the lipstick is no longer Rose Loomis’s

lipstick, but rather a fragment from the quotidian everyday suddenly and jarringly

inserted into the fiction. As Vivian Sobchack claims, our engagement with film

always depends on our “existential knowledge of and social investments in the

context of a lifeworld that exceeds and frames the text.”64 In this brief instance,

lipstick is allowed be meaningful to viewers of the film rather than to characters

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!62 Ibid., 332. Drawing from Alois Riegl, Marks discusses how the invention of perspective and more realistic renderings of three-dimensional space in the late Roman period encouraged identification with the figures (often human subjects) rather than a haptic encounter with the image itself (335-6). For Marks, haptic perception is more possible with video than film, since film generates a more three-dimensional and realistic image (encouraging secondary identification), whereas video offers a flatter, and more abstract visual form. Although in this close-up, the lipstick is not entirely abstracted (and is certainly “represented” in that it bears an indexical relationship to what we have come to know and identify as lipstick), its momentary lack of context and inability to be located for certain in any time or space seems to encourage haptic perception. 63 Vivian Sobchack describes this as a human impulse, a “carnal modality able to touch and be touched by the substance and texture of images…to sometimes even smell and taste the world we see on screen” (Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004], 65; see also 70-71). 64 Ibid., 268. Sobchack argues that when we encounter this insertion of the real into fiction, we sense this transition bodily, before we register changes in style. Referring to the hunting scene from Renoir’s Rules of the Game in which a real rabbit was shot and killed, Sobchack claims that our “extracinematic, cultural, and embodied experience and knowledge” dictates that we respond in a viscerally different way to this moment (ibid., 269).

! ('!

within the diegesis, and to derive its affective power from its function, uses, and

cross-sensory properties in other contexts.

Although there is no product placement in this commercial moment, it is

likely that presenting postwar audiences with a frame filling, sensuous shot of lipstick

prompted them to recall specific advertisements. And at this time, no cosmetics

advertisement was more ubiquitous than the famous “Fire and Ice” campaign from

Revlon, which was launched in 1952 and made lipstick into a cultural symbol of

female sexual boldness (figure 11). Advertising had always been a key factor in

Revlon’s success, and beginning in the 1940s, Revlon took out full-scale color

advertisements in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar.65 None would (or have since) cause

as much sensation as “Fire and Ice,” which featured a two-page spread of model

Dorian Leigh and asked:

What is the American girl made of? Sugar and spice and everything nice? Not since the days of the Gibson Girl! There’s a New American beauty…she’s tease and temptress, siren and gamin, dynamic and demure. Men find her slightly, delightfully baffling. Sometimes a little maddening. Yet they admit she’s easily the most exciting woman in the world! She’s the 1952 American beauty, with a foolproof formula for melting a male! She’s the ‘Fire and Ice’ girl. (are you?)

An accompanying questionnaire allowed women to judge for themselves. The

questions, including “When a recipe calls for one dash of bitters, do you think it’s

better with two?” “Do sables excite you, even on other women?” and “Would you

streak your hair platinum without consulting your husband?” make it clear that the

Fire and Ice Girl was rebellious and sexually mature (not the Gibson Girl), and that

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!65 Andrew Tobias, Fire and Ice: The Story of Charles Revson – The Man Who Built the Revlon Empire (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1976), 115.

! ((!

she embodied Revlon’s new postwar motto that “there’s a little bit of bad in every

good woman.”66

While Sexuality of the Human Female was greeted with intense anger over

what it revealed about American women, the traces of its findings that appear in this

lipstick campaign –such as homoerotic attraction, excess indulgence, unpredictability

and insubordination – were praised as pure advertising genius, and were partially

responsible for making “Fire and Ice” one of the most popular shades in cosmetics

history. Embodied in the very title is a sense of unpredictability that the era found so

troubling about women, and yet this campaign was enormously successful, appearing

in women’s magazines (Vogue even ran a “Fire and Ice”-themed issue that year),

gracing over 9,000 window displays across the country, and winning Advertising

Age’s best campaign award in 1952.67 The accompanying image projects the same

mixture of feminine allure and power: Leigh’s silver sequins dress and red shawl

form almost a protective barrier around her body, and her stance – hand on hip, other

hand to her mouth, lips provocatively parted – suggests sexual confidence and desire.

As consumer responses (and copycat campaigns) indicate, while the most

sensitive issues of female sexuality were terrifying in life, they took on a distinctly

more hopeful quality when celebrated by commercial culture. There was always a

tacit understanding that the promises of advertising – of a better life or a better you –

were in some ways an exaggeration, and that wearing the lipstick “Fire and Ice” did

not necessarily mean that one would embody all of the qualities of a “Fire and Ice

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!66 Ibid., 120. 67 Ibid., 118, 123, 124.

! ()!

Girl.” Bold, sexy women may have been scary in other contexts, but when used

commercially they became by association emblems of prosperity and economic

power. “Fire and Ice” therefore reinforced a crucial aspect of mainstream, normative

culture even while touching its most delicate concerns. It is this quality that gave

advertising rhetoric the freedom to address female sexuality with a frankness that was

inaccessible to a Code-governed cinema, and what lent commercial moments their

political charge.

As the lipstick’s case sparkles in this scene after Rose’s death, it reminds us of

the “colorful” sexual allure, excess, and formlessness that Rose possessed while she

was alive. We remember how she got to this point – dead, lifeless, colorless – and

how, as the film progressed, the brilliant color once associated with her body seemed

to bleed, scene after scene, into her material possessions. In the beginning, she wears

blue suits, red jackets, and satin fuchsia dresses (figures 7 and 10). And then, once

her plan is foiled, her garments, makeup, and jewelry gradually become more muted,

until at the end she wears only a modest black suit with a striking green scarf tied

around her wrist (figure 12). While the brilliant gaudiness of her “colorful”

appearance characterized her representation throughout much of her earlier scenes,

just before her death she becomes a silhouette, perfectly controlled and virtually

colorless. The close up of her lipstick expresses the transference of color from female

body – dangerous, too visible, ambiguous – to a commodity. The fact that her “color”

lives on in this material thing implies that her danger, while perhaps more neatly

contained, may never expire completely. Overturning the closure that the narrative

! (*!

seems to offer, the lipstick’s mischievous, commercial gleam allows the threat that

Rose represents to survive even after her death.

Blonde All Over

Niagara’s attention to women as a distinct demographic, incorporation of new

philosophies governing female sexuality, and willingness to grant agency to such

difference through the commercial moment speaks to a new and more heterogeneous

understanding of the postwar American “self.” The symbolic reach of this lipstick,

however, extends well beyond issues of gender and sexuality, and into the territory of

race. By most accounts, Niagara is not a film “about” race. Race is not an ostensible

part of the narrative, and the entire cast, with few exceptions, is white. And yet

postwar racial ideologies silently structure the film, forming a quiet but powerful

commentary on race relations through the language of commercialism. Throughout

the film, the same commercial moments that speak directly to issues of sexuality also

engage with contemporary concerns over race and its role in reshaping the dominant

sense of collective identity.

In a country that claimed to provide democratic liberty and freedom “for all,”

the virulent racism that divided American society remained a painful reminder of the

contradictions that lay at the root of this celebrated national quality. According to

Toni Morrison, the trope of the black (in her terms, “Africanist”) other established a

series of racialized binaries that have historically allowed white westerners to define

themselves in terms of what they believe they are not. As she claims, “Africanism is

! )+!

the vehicle by which the American self knows itself as not enslaved, but free; not

repulsive, but desirable; not helpless, but licensed and powerful; not history-less, but

historical, not damned, but innocent; not a blind accident of evolution, but a

progressive fulfillment of destiny.”68 Institutionalized racism during the postwar era

maintained this binary, ensuring that the qualities that most proudly connoted

Americanness – affluence, abundance, suburban bliss – remained synonymous with

whiteness. Restrictive FHA lending policies and redlining kept African American

families out of the suburbs, racial discrimination influenced hiring policies, and the

continued segregation of public spaces and popular media meant that popular

representation of the period remained racially homogeneous as well.69 So much was

this institutionalized racism a part of mainstream society that the mechanisms by

which it produced and retained such disparities were rendered natural, invisible. It is

therefore necessary to examine cultural texts in which race seems to be “invisible” so

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!68 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992)., 52. 69 As Stuart Ewan discusses, until the 1960s, advertising media posited the “ideal” lifestyle as being white. “If the commercial culture posed passive consumerism in white terms, those who were unable to participate in this giant barbecue (largely nonwhite people) were clearly left to their own devices. Only in the late 1960s, with the commercial culture under siege from many fronts, did the advertising industry begin to address a black audience, offering a vision of bland consumer culture in different shades” (Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture [New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976], 212). Publications such as Ebony that were geared specifically toward an African American audience still often modeled their advertisements on a Caucasian aesthetic standard until the late sixties (see Laurel Frances Hollowaty, “Achievement, Equality of Opportunity and Equality of Access: Ideology and Aesthetics in Advertisements in Life and Ebony, 1945-1975” [PhD Diss., University of California, Irvine, 1974], introduction). The marginalization of African American actors in classical Hollywood cinema deeply influenced advertising in mainstream publications, which often depicted African Americans (if at all) in unskilled, peripheral service positions (ibid., 24).

! )"!

that we may begin to understand, according to Martin Berger, “the power and

ubiquity of race in conditioning the meaning of American visual culture.”70

The era’s reliance on race as an unspoken means of self-definition, however,

began to buckle under the weight of new social and cultural movements. In the years

following World War II, race came in from the margins in ways that upset the

stringently protected white ideal, with African American aesthetics (particularly in

music) beginning to transform white mainstream tastes, and public sit ins and protests

beginning to transform the look of public space. With the ideologically loaded binary

between black and white suddenly destabilized, Americans feared losing the ego-

reinforcing linchpin that kept their sense of self coherent and secure.71 Once racial

difference became visible and potentially uncontainable, the whiteness that depended

upon its oppression became aware of its own invisibility. Whiteness, as Dyer claims,

is both “everything and nothing” – everything in that its dominance has the power to

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!70 Berger’s own work on this topic examines objects as disparate as American landscape photography, early silent film, and genre painting. That none of these objects are explicitly “about” race, he claims, makes them that much more indicative of how viewing practices are themselves shaped by racial ideologies (Sight Unseen: Whiteness in American Visual Culture [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005], 7). Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark pursues a similar goal, discussing the ways in which the marginalized presence of African/African American characters in literature that scholars have deemed to be “not about race” actually say a great deal about the racial dynamics of the era in which they were written. Carol Clover’s article on Singin’ in the Rain and its co-optation of dancing styles from African American popular culture, applies aspects of these theories to canonical Hollywood films (Carol Clover, “Dancin’ in the Rain,” Critical Inquiry 21 [Summer, 1995], 722). 71 When gender and sexuality threatened the dominant (male, heterosexual) construction of national identity, whiteness quietly reinforced it. The “crisis in masculinity,” for instance, deemed capitalist affluence, suburban life, and the corporate rat race a threat to modern manhood; however, this crisis – defined as such – was only experienced by those who had access to white collar jobs, housing loans for property in suburban neighborhoods, and disposable income. In other words, the crisis of masculinity was a distinctly white crisis, reinforcing a unified racial component to the dominant national “Self” even in its admission of fragility in terms of gender (see the widely publicized article in Look by J. Robert Moskin titled “The American Male: Why Do Women Dominate Him?” February 4, 1958, 77-80; see also the bestselling 1955 novel by Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955]).

! )#!

shape representational practices at the expense of all other “nonwhite” groups; but

nothing, too, because in order to maintain such dominance it must believe itself to be

wholly unmarked by difference or by flaws.72 As Dyer elaborates, “others” are

“particular, marked, raced, whereas the white man has attained the position of being

without properties, unmarked, universal, just human.”73 This state of purity and

privilege has meaning in relation to its opposites, but alone, it implies absence,

invisibility, and “the desolate suspicion of non-existence.”74 Such potential

invisibility – particularly in an era that privileged seeing as a way of knowing –

touched on a great vulnerability of white dominance. Once the “other” that had

historically provided whites with meaning had become more a part of the mainstream,

white culture feared that their privileged, unmarked invisibility might give way to

meaninglessness.

At first glance, there is no question that Rose Loomis is white. But throughout

the film, we increasingly have the sense that her whiteness is conditional, fragile,

precariously maintained, and that this – as much as her excessive sexuality – is what

contributes to her perceived danger. A scene that ultimately has little narrative

importance demonstrates the degree to which Rose’s danger is bound to her racial

indeterminacy. In the minutes before Rose’s dramatic and deadly plot is revealed,

Ray attempts to convince Polly – who is sunbathing in front of the motel – to pose for

a picture. Not long after she awkwardly assumes a “pin up” position, however, a !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!72 Richard Dyer, White (New York: Routledge, 1997), 38. 73 Ibid. 74 Ibid., 45. As Thomas DiPiero claims, “Nobody wants to be white…because there is no particular reason to desire this state of nothingness unless it is not to be black” (Thomas DiPiero, “White Men Aren’t,” Camera Obscura 30 [1994], 125).

! )$!

shadow gradually creeps over her figure, and her startled reaction – accompanied by a

low tremble in the score – warns us of impending doom. Within seconds, however,

Polly’s expression softens and a cut to a wider shot reveals that the shadow belongs to

Rose. By the end of this sequence, Rose is still racially white; yet the overt presence

of a shadow and its ability to unsettle white characters calls upon conventions used

throughout classical Hollywood that used shadows as racial signifiers (in particular,

of African American subordination, and then later resistance, to white oppression).75

Niagara’s use of the shadow in this isolated scene seems to reinforce this symbolism,

with the shadow adopting an ominous power, registered first as if it were a force on

its own before being (safely) attached to a white character.

It may seem to be a stretch to claim that Rose Loomis/Marilyn Monroe is

coded as a “raced figure” throughout the film – especially since, with her platinum

hair and mainstream popularity, she often appeared to be one of the most racially

unambiguous figures in American popular culture.76 And yet, this is not the first time

that a white public figure had been coded as black.77 The postwar period, for instance,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!75 As Elizabeth Abel claims, “the dominant racial rhetoric of the early twentieth century mapped shadow and slave together as the docile reflections and enablers of white masculinity” (Elizabeth Abel, “Shadows,” Representations 84 [2004], 169). New cinematic technology after the 1930s gave directors the freedom to use shadows in more innovative ways, and as a result, the increased mobility and centrality of shadows within film began to “serve…as a phobic forecast of black autonomy....[and] black political and social emancipation…that intimated the potential of black masses to cut loose from a fraying social fabric to coalesce in a radical movement” – a prospect that seemed increasingly possible in the postwar era (ibid., 170). 76 Although as Lois Banner points out, Monroe was also very popular in the African American community, with major African American newspapers, such as the Los Angeles Sentinel and Chicago Defender carrying ads for her films (Lois W. Banner, “The Creature from the Black Lagoon: Marilyn Monroe and Whiteness,” Cinema Journal 47, no. 4 [Summer 2008], 15). 77 As immigration historians have argued, whiteness is historically made, not genetically determined, with new waves of immigrants often considered “not white” only to be accepted as white at a later

! )%!

saw the rise of Elvis Presley, whose crossover musical style, risqué dance moves,

pomaded hair, and colorful clothing positioned him as racially “other.”78 Elvis

provided “a little peek at what [audiences] might have witnessed in a Beale Street

club,” so much so that the new teenage pop stars (such as Frankie Avalon and Bobby

Rydell) who reworked his style to fit more mainstream tastes became known as

“white Elvises,” thereby implying the real Elvis’s link to race.79 As David Roediger

argues, “Presley’s ‘blackness’ famously came from below the waist and below the

skin,”80 and in many respects, so did Monroe’s.

As a difference that lay beneath (rather than on) the skin, this form of racial

coding was profoundly amorphous, making it easier for the tropes indicating “racial

difference” to meld with the signifiers of other forms of difference. This quality

became valuable, as E. Ann Kaplan states in her study of film noir, to a postwar

culture that “fear[ed] difference from itself,” and was therefore heavily invested in

rendering women and people of color “structurally similar.”81 As she elaborates,

“both women and people of color need to be ‘managed,’ and the boundary of each

from the white ‘center’ maintained…Hollywood tends to use a similar structure in

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!point (See David R. Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs [New York: Basic Books, 2005]). 78 According to David Roediger, “His slicked hair looked like processed African American styles, and his electric…outfits came from stores catering to Memphis’s black community” (David Roediger, Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002], 216). As Robert Henry claimed in his memoir, “[Elvis] got that shaking, that wiggle, from Charlie Burse…right there at the Gray Mule on Beale. Elvis, he wasn’t doing nothing but what the colored people had been doing for the last hundred years” (quoted in David Shumway, “Watching Elvis: Male Rock Star as Object of the Gaze,” in The Other Fifties: Interrogating Midcentury American Icons, ed. Joel Foreman [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997], 132). 79 Shumway, 131, 138. 80 Roediger, Colored White, 217. 81 Kaplan, “Introduction,” Women in Film Noir, 9.

! )&!

relation to all kinds of difference. That is, Hollywood puts different kinds of

difference into the same position vis-à-vis the imaginary white center.”82 Race and

gender are therefore often expressed through a single set of tropes in popular media –

since, in the mind of the dominant majority, they represent the same thing.83

The commercial moment capturing Monroe’s unsutured gaze, for instance,

makes explicit references to the star persona of Marilyn Monroe in order to convey a

clear message about Rose’s sexual excess. In doing so, however, it also recalls the

ways in which her broader celebrity identity – in all of its sparkling platinum

blondness – played deliberately on established means of troping race through

assumptions of unrestrained sexuality. In an era heavily influenced by Freudian

psychoanalysis, the conflation of race and gender that was so much a part of popular

visual culture had deep roots. Mary Ann Doane traces this connection back to a

phrase in “A Question of Lay Analysis,” one of Freud’s lesser-known essays: “We

know less about the sexual life of little girls than of boys. But we need not feel

ashamed of this distinction; after all, the sexual life of adult women is a ‘dark

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!82 Ibid. For Kaplan, the merging of race and gender into a single “other” originated in a specific historical period, just after World War II. As former imperialist nations began to divest of their colonies, white European and American nations began to seek out other “dark” continents against which to compare themselves. With this sudden breakup of the colonial system, the connotations of the “dark continent” in the Western Imaginary – primitiveness, backwardness, strange impenetrability – became displaced onto women. As Kaplan points out, “this dark continent of the female psyche never quite lost its links to displaced reference to racial darkness. This was because the differences of both women and ‘dark’ others from the white male center were often collapsed, unconsciously, in an effort for white patriarchy to keep its image of itself” (Kaplan, “The 'Dark Continet' of Film Noir: Race Displacement and Metaphor in Tourneur's Cat People [1942] and Welles' The Lady From Shanghai [1948], in Women in Film Noir, 185-6). 83 As DiPiero argues, “sexual difference, generally posited in psychoanalytic theory as the most fundamental element constitutive of identity, might be seen to obfuscate the work of other forms of difference that are then interpreted and encoded as sexual” (118). It is therefore necessary to revisit the commercial moments that seem to designate sexual difference, and to search them for evidence of other forms of difference as well.

! )'!

continent’ for psychology.” 84 According to Doane, Freud’s reference to the “dark

continent” proposes a link between race and gender through their shared sexual

deviance from the (white, male) norm. Monroe’s commercialized presence and its

links to her extra-diegetic celebrity persona, therefore, reference a long tradition in

western culture of designating the sexual drives as dangerous vices, as irrational and

indulgent, and therefore “dark.”85

One of the most obvious signifiers of race in this commercial moment is the

way in which the commercialized exhibition of Monroe’s body draws upon historical

discourses linking sex, race, and corporeality. As Sander Gilman argues, the habitual

characterization of the sex drives as “dark” encouraged dominant culture to project

sexuality onto nonwhite bodies, and to look for physiological evidence that

designated these bodies as being predisposed to deviant sexual practice. As the

pseudo-scientific study and subsequent exploitation of Saartje Baartman (known in

the nineteenth century as the “Hottentot Venus”) demonstrate, “race” – at least in the

dominant white imaginary – was tied to an unrestrained hypersexuality that was

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!84 Sigmund Freud, “The Question of Lay Analysis: Conversations with an Impartial Person,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 20, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1953), 212; quoted in Doane, 211. In “A Question of Lay Analysis,” Freud attempts to outline what constitutes psychoanalytic knowledge, and who has the right to practice it. As Doane claims, since this essay raised important questions about the limits of knowledge, it is no surprise that it also brought up questions of “otherness” and differences that are perceived to be universally impenetrable. The “trope of the dark continent” conveniently merges race and gender – two eternal “others” in western culture – into one (ibid.). 85 Sander Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature,” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (Autumn, 1985), 209; see also Dyer, White, 27. 85 Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies,” 212-213.

! )(!

inscribed on the body.86 In this formulation, racial “others” are defined by their

“inescapable corporeality,”87 whereas, as Dyer argues, “true whiteness is in the non-

corporeal,” the invisible and transcendent.88 As postwar viewers were well aware,

Monroe was intensely corporeal, and unlike the white majority that feared it was

disappearing into nothingness in the postwar era, she was too visible, a material form

through which unrestrained drives could be pulled completely to the surface. Known

as “The Body” in the popular press, Monroe could not transcend her corporeality.89

Beginning with her earliest films, the excessive female sexuality that she projected

was recognized through her physical form.90 As reviews of Niagara demonstrate, she

became synonymous with her body (“Seen from any angle, the Falls and Miss

Monroe leave little to be desired by any reasonably attentive audience…”91), which

itself became a symbol of her racial and sexual difference.

Such references to Monroe’s particular brand of sexuality in this scene also

point to her unique combination of adult eroticism and childish innocence, which

further aligns her with psychoanalytic formulations of race. According to Freud, it

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!86 In the nineteenth century, “scientific” discourses regarding the body were used in order to justify “empirically” some of the grossest racial stereotypes linking people of color to illicit sex and a lack of civilization (Sander Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies,” 212-213). As Gilman argues, contemporary studies of white female prostitutes claimed that the unrestrained hyper-sexuality implied by their profession was evident in the fact that their bodies were marked in ways similar to Baartman’s (ibid., 229; see also his summaries of the studies of Tarnowsky, Lombroso, and Charpy, ibid., 221-229). 87 Dyer, White, 24. 88 Ibid., 45. 89 For information on Monroe as “the Body,” see Dyer, Heavenly Bodies, 22. 90 An early article in Time even provides her measurements: “She is a saucy, hip-swinging 5 ft. 5 ! in. personality who has brought back to the movies the kind of unbridled sex appeal that has been missing since the days of Clara Bow and Jean Harlow. The trademarks of Marilyn’s blonde allure (bust 37 in., hips 37 in., waist 24 in.) are her moist, half-closed eyes and moist, half-opened mouth. She is a movie pressagent’s dream” (Time, August 11, 1952, 74-82); see also Churchwell, 34. 91 A.W., “Niagara Falls Vies with Marilyn Monroe,” 20.

! ))!

was not that inhabitants of the “Dark Continent” harbored a mysterious sexual threat

that made them so baffling, but rather that their sexuality was too much on the

surface, too “primitively” unrestrained. The colonialist assumption that nonwhites

were less evolved than their white western counterparts was one that Freud supported,

insisting, as Doane claims, “on mapping the difference between the primitive and the

civilized onto a temporal or historical axis rather than a spatial one.”92 To his mind,

the same sexual drives that are “dark” and therefore raced, are “childish” or

“infantile” in their open exposure and accessibility. Without the restraints imposed by

civilization and (western) culture, racial “others” had no depths to probe, nothing that

was repressed or hysterically manifested, no symptoms to examine.93 The coquettish

smile in this commercial moment therefore not only references Monroe’s infantile

star persona, but also cites the psychoanalytic discourses that attributed childishness,

sexual inhibition, and lack of cultural awareness to those it perceived to be racially

“other.” In this regard, the mannerisms and expressions that made her famous can no

longer be attributed to a lack of intelligence. Instead, her “Monroe-isms”94 signify a

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!92 Doane, 211. 93 Ibid., 211-212. See Sander Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 109-127; Gilman points to the evolutionary argument (social Darwinism) that grounded common perceptions of racial difference during the nineteenth century: “Blacks, if both GWF Hegel and Arthur Schopenhauer are to be believed, remained at this most primitive stage, and their presence in the contemporary world served as an indicator of how far mankind had come in establishing control over his world and himself. The loss of control was marked by a regression into this dark past – a degeneracy into the primitive expression of emotions in the form of either madness or unrestrained sexuality” (Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies,” 229-231). 94 “Monroe-isms” are quips that demonstrated her guileless inability to comprehend the double entendres of the ‘adult’ world (see Dyer, Heavenly Bodies, 33). For instance, when asked during an interview what she “had on” during a nude photo-shoot, she replied: “I had the radio on” (Churchwell, 50).

! )*!

“wide-eyed literalness,”95 a childish naïveté in engaging with the world that is

characteristic of someone who is “outside” of culture (despite being on display for its

enjoyment) and who lacks the cynical distance from her encounter with the world to

“get” the jokes.

It comes as no surprise that these sexual excesses found their visual

manifestation in tawdry, “unnatural,” commercial color, because as much as color

came to represent sex, it also remains one of the most potent cultural signifiers of

race. White, the color of museum walls and ivory towers, connotes purity, rational

distance, and the realm of logic and reason. Color, on the other hand, represents the

collapse of rational distance between subject and object, body and mind. Unlike most

other formal properties, colors are often described by how they affect the senses:

“hot,” “cool,” “warm,” “loud,” “muted.” Engaging with color, therefore, makes

viewers aware of their body’s desires and responses, bringing them closer both to

their carnal needs and to the particularities of their own corporeality – two

experiences from which the transcendent white subject is supposedly exempt. The

degree to which color signifies the interrelatedness of bodies, sex, and racial

difference in western culture is evident in cosmetics advertising campaigns (popular

in the 1930s, but continuing throughout the postwar era) that drew on the exoticism of

geographically distant places in order to market bolder shades.96 As these ads assert,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!95 Churchwell, 50. 96 In the thirties, amid a rush of Hollywood films about “exotic” places (Mata Hari, The Painted Veil) and a turn in fashion toward eastern Asian styles, Helena Rubenstein (among others) debuted lipstick, eye shadow and rouge named “Chinese Red,” “Chinese and copper,” and “Dark Nasturtium” (see Sarah Berry, Screen Style: Fashion and Femininity in 1930s Hollywood [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000],134-135).

! *+!

in the process of lending consumers a heightened sexuality – an eroticism that

accompanied popular stereotypes of “The Orient” or “Latin America,” for instance –

the cosmetic color also renders them something other than white. The Freudian

evolutionary distinction between white western culture and “The Dark Continent(s),”

as well as its attribution of “hyper-” sexuality to both gender and race, remained a

guiding principle in western visual culture. As Batchelor claims, color is “…the

mythical savage state out of which civilization, the nobility of the human spirit,

slowly, heroically, has lifted itself – but back into which it could always slide. For

one, color was coded in the feminine; for the other, it is coded in the primitive. For

both, color is a corruption, a lapse, a Fall.”97

As is obvious by its output from roughly 1945-1960, postwar Hollywood’s

casting and narratives privileged a white status quo. But in addition to these glaring

examples of industrial bias, the very technology of the medium also privileged white

skin tones and therefore greatly affected film’s overall visual style. As Brian Winston

argues, making Caucasian flesh tones appear as luminous as possible often came at

the expense of adequately portraying nonwhite complexions, and meant that

Technicolor established its own palette that was far from being faithful to nature.98

With all of the pigments distorted in the service of rendering the whites as white as

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!97 Batchelor, 23-24. 98 Technicolor’s tri-tone filters rendered whites with a slight magenta tint. In order to “repair” the lighter shades (and allow Caucasian actors to appear whiter), the filters had to be adjusted, which distorted the rest of the color palette. As Winston claims, “Increasing the intensity of the red and blue lights or dyes restores the white but at the cost of distortion in the relative chromaticities and intensities—which, as it happens, is psychologically (or, perhaps better, ideologically) less offensive than off-white” (Brian Winston, “A Whole Technology of Dyeing: A Note on the Ideology and the Apparatus of the Chromatic Moving Image,” Daedalus 114, no. 4 [Fall, 1985], 112).

! *"!

possible, other flesh tones and bright colors appeared brighter and more dynamic than

in real life, and stood out in a formal system that strived to keep everything reigned

in. Thus, in addition to color having racial and sexual connotations in popular culture,

in Hollywood, the unconscious “cultural determination” of technology also placed

color and whiteness at odds.99 As Winston claims: “Exact reproduction, a supposed

goal of the photographic and cinematographic project, takes second place to inexact,

culturally determined, ‘optimum’ reproduction. Caucasian skin tones are not to be

rendered as they are, but rather as they are preferred – a whiter shade of white.”100

Thus, color in film that was too vibrant served as a reminder of a racial presence and

the structures that were now failing to keep it contained. As Dyer notes with regard to

the resistance to color film during the Great Depression, “May it not be that what was

not acceptable was escapism that was visually too loud and busy, because excess

color, and the very word ‘gaudy,’ was associated with, indeed, colored people?”101

With this in mind, Rose’s demise and the commercial moments that follow

her death take on a more layered significance. When the color seems to “bleed” from

her and into the things she owns, she loses not only her sexual energy, but her

marked, raced existence as well. The chartreuse scarf that fans out from her wrist as

she falls (figure 13), the lipstick that seems to glow with a life of its own after the

murder – this key postmortem transition confirms that she is now completely

unmarked by feminine excess or by race; that The Body herself has died an empty

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!99 Winston, 121. 100 Ibid. 101 Dyer, White, 94.

! *#!

shell, devoid of everything that once marked her as specific, threatening, and exciting.

In the last moments that Monroe appears in Niagara, her pale complexion and

bleached hair undoubtedly give credence to her famous quip: “I do not suntan

because I like to feel blonde all over.”102 But the commercialized close ups of her

things hint at the continued existence of female sexuality and of race – even though

the narrative has done its best to destroy all traces of both.

Seeing and Believing

What is perhaps most striking about this death sequence, however, is its use of

commercial rhetoric to frame a literal depiction of race. It is only just after Rose’s

death that there is an appearance by a single African American character: the

custodian who arrives at the same time every day to raise and lower the American

flag from the top of the tower. His presence in and of itself is not unique: nonwhite

figures have long populated the periphery of thriller and crime films. In his discussion

of race and film noir, Eric Lott examines how the noir visual style links nonwhite

bodies to the evil of white characters. According to him, these seemingly inessential

(in terms of plot) African American characters appear routinely during moments in

which the white protagonist behaves immorally, mirroring with their raced bodies the

other stylistic conventions (such as shadows and chiaroscuro lighting effects) that

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!102 Quoted in Thomas Harris, “The Building of Popular Images: Grace Kelly and Marilyn Monroe,” in Stardom: Industry of Desire, ed. Christine Gledhill (New York: Routledge, 1991), 43.

! *$!

indicate the protagonist’s turn toward the “dark side.”103 As he claims, “the troping of

white darkness in noir has a racial source that is all the more insistent for seeming off

to the side…Noir may have pioneered Hollywood’s merciless exposure of white

pathology, but by relying on race to convey that pathology, it in effect erected a

cordon sanitaire around the circle of corruption it sought to penetrate.”104 Such

representation in film is consistent with the ways in which western visual art and

culture has used race to signal moral instability. European and American portraiture,

for instance, often used the nonwhite servant to imply moral ambiguity of the primary

sitters, as in Manet’s Olympia.105 Opera made use of similar conventions – the black

page who retrieves the Marschallin’s gloves at the end of Strauss’s Der

Rosenkavalier, for instance, prompts the audience to recall her illicit affair before the

opera’s end.106

Yet the attendant in Niagara ultimately serves a different function. Although

silent and completely detached from the frenetic drama taking place in his midst, his

presence structures the film’s climactic moments. It is his routine that by chance

interferes with Rose’s escape, as he occupies the elevator while she is trying to flee

George; likewise, it is his daily responsibility to lock the door when he leaves that

interferes with George’s plan, forcing him to stay overnight in the tower. When the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!103 As Lott asserts in relation to Double Indemnity, “…the black presence here is an embodiment of the outer darkness to which Neff has traveled and perhaps the visible sign of his guilt returning mid-confession to interdict him” (Eric Lott, “The Whiteness of Film Noir,” in Whiteness: A Critical Reader, ed. Mike Hill [New York: New York University Press, 1997], 86). 104 Ibid., 85. 105 See Peter Erickson, “Invisibility Speaks: Servants and Portraits in Early Modern Visual Culture,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 9, no. 1 (Spring/Summer, 2009), 23-40. 106 See Gillman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies,” 209.

! *%!

attendant arrives the next morning, he is the one who discovers Rose’s dead body,

and who presumably notifies the police, setting off the chase that carries us to the end

of the film. Niagara’s moralizing ending – in which the ethical characters survive and

the bad ones are forever silenced – owes much to him. His presence, therefore, means

something different here than it would in nineteenth century opera and painting;

through a particularly commercial articulation of this marginal character, Niagara

expresses period-specific ideologies about race.

Like other parts of western visual culture, American advertising often isolated

African American figures in the margins of its compositions. However, rather than

symbolizing moral wavering – something that advertising usually attempted to avoid

– they instead helped to reassert white dominance by highlighting a social hierarchy.

Advertisements throughout the postwar period often featured black Americans in

service positions, drawing on the historical prominence of black domestic workers

and reinforcing nineteenth century stereotypes of the servile and nonthreatening

“Mammy” and “Uncle Tom” figures. Such advertisements privileged whites by

idealizing their lifestyle, featuring them prominently in the center of the

compositions, and allowing them an authoritative voice. African American characters,

however, remained on the periphery of the frame and in the service of whites (figure

14).107 The history of American advertising makes clear the kind of binaries that such

use of a raced figure enables: dirty versus clean (especially in soap advertisements),

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!107 The severity of these stereotypes – particularly the use of dialect – decreased throughout the fifties, and began to wane significantly with the coming of the Civil Rights Movement (see William M. O’Barr, Culture and the Ad: Exploring Otherness in the World of Advertising [Boulder: Westview Press, 1994], 109).

! *&!

labor versus leisure, producers versus consumers, body versus mind.108 Unlike

campaigns featuring women, which began to subvert some patriarchal standards

(even while upholding others), advertising including African Americans tended to

reinstate the white center.109 The presence of the marginal black figure in advertising

helped to protect an idealized whiteness by symbolizing the passive servitude against

which the dominant subject may define herself. And for brands such as Uncle Ben’s,

Aunt Jemima, Pabst, and Lucky Strike, such a technique was highly successful.

In Niagara, the black custodian serves as a filmic variation on these

advertising conventions. Never sharing the frame with any of the white characters, he

is always filmed alone, stoically fulfilling his routine duties (figure 15). The film

implies rather than explicitly depicts the points at which he is most active, betraying

an effort on a narrative level to keep him in a muted, peripheral position (on the

morning after the murder, for instance, we watch as the elevator reaches the top floor,

but do not witness his discovery or reaction). In the margins of the narrative action as

much as his advertising counterparts were in the margins of the composition, he is

“history-less” and “context-less,” appearing only when his presence becomes

important in relation to the white characters and ultimately, white viewers.110

Nameless and silent, his sole function is to discover and report the murder and

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!108 See Jan Nederveen Pieterse, White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 190, 195. 109 This difference is in part because mainstream print advertising began to target (white) women and address them and their needs directly. Even though market segmentation according to race was beginning to take shape, mainstream advertising would not be fully integrated until the sixties. In the fifties, the presumed consumer was still white, and as a result, peoples of color were often relegated to marginal and service positions. 110 Morrison, 53.

! *'!

therefore restore tame, mainstream whiteness of the Cutlers while ensuring the

punishment of the raced, flawed, and excessive whiteness of the Loomises. He may

not be working directly for the white figures in the frame, but his presence operates in

the service of their ideals.

But Niagara’s incorporation of commercial rhetoric at this point in the

narrative also subtly critiques the racial hierarchies that it at first seems to reinforce.

In this, the final stage of the plot, commercial moments make another appearance, not

– as in earlier scenes – to keep the “threats” of sex and race alive in a Code-driven

text, but instead to critique the very standards that defined sex and race as “other.”

Through its tactical use of advertising language, Niagara is able to subtly dismantle

the status quo that both Hollywood and Madison Avenue were responsible for

perpetuating, and in doing so, open up a rather conservative narrative ending to a

radical reassessment of the collective “self.”

From this perspective, the attendant bears an alternative meaning. His first

appearance, which coincides with the moment at which Rose loses the raced aspect of

her identity, seems to signal the return of an ever-present yet repressed element in the

film’s text to its actual form. Moreover, however, his living, breathing presence also

acts as a contrast to – and commentary on – the unnatural pallor of Rose’s corpse.

Shot from high above, she is nothing more than a body in her postmortem state,

awkwardly positioned on the bell tower floor and cut by dramatic shadows (figure

13). For the first time in the film, her whiteness – the invisible, assumed armor of

entitlement – is starkly visible, drawing attention to the artificiality of her color as

! *(!

well as of its attendant privileges. Now, met with the impenetrable materiality of the

white body, audiences inevitably recall the regimen necessary to cultivate this

particular shade of white, and the fact that Norma Jean Baker was a natural brunette

who transformed herself into the platinum blonde Marilyn Monroe. As Lisa Cohen

elaborates, “If the mass enjoyment of her intensely white hair and skin means that her

popularity was in part a utopia of racial purity, and if she seemed to obliterate

questions or tensions about race even as she exploded with whiteness, she also seems,

looking at her now, to have made visible the production of whiteness as a desirable

(and actual) quality”111 (emphasis mine). Monroe’s overwhelming whiteness made

apparent how hard she had to work in order to manufacture this image, and bound her

whiteness to corporeality in ways that dominant identity was not. In this scene,

Rose’s whiteness is visible rather than ephemeral and transcendent, contrived rather

than natural, and produced rather than inherited – and therefore something both more

and less than the ideal of whiteness that the film attempts to validate.

This sequence, which directly follows the first appearance of the attendant,

seems to provide a nervous counterweight to the presence of a black character,

offering a desperate build-up of whiteness in order to assert beyond a doubt its

separation from the “other.” This act of overkill gestures toward the fragility and

insecurity of the dominant identity even as it inflates whiteness to the point of

exaggeration. Toni Morrison claims that in early American literature, such an

overbearing presence of whiteness often appears at the end of a narrative, and

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!111 Lisa Cohen, 275.

! *)!

noticeably, after the white protagonist’s encounter with “blackness.”112 As she states,

such a gesture “seem[s] to function as both antidote for and meditation on the shadow

that is companion to this whiteness – a dark and abiding presence that moves the

hearts and texts of American literature with fear and longing.”113 In Niagara an

“impenetrable” and “inarticulate” hyper-whiteness makes a brief appearance after

Rose’s death, and, as in literature, attempts to reinforce the boundaries around

dominance by making the difference between white and nonwhite so extreme.114 But

in doing so, it also makes evident white insecurities about self-definition, revealing

that the construction of white identity – based so much on the comparison to “others”

– can have little meaning on its own.

Coda: The National “Ideal”

As the Cutlers exit the final scene, we become aware of the degree to which

the impenetrable, manufactured, peroxided white of Monroe has been replaced by the

whiteness of middle class American normality. The Cutlers’ whiteness comes not

from a bottle of hair dye, but rather from their average appearance, lifestyle, and

disposition: Polly a demure, supportive, and well behaved housewife, Ray an up and

coming marketing manager for the Shredded Wheat Corporation (“where breakfast

cereal became an institution!” he says), who takes along extra reading on his belated

honeymoon and wakes up early to go trout fishing with his boss. Rather than the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!112 Morrison, 32-33. 113 Ibid., 33. 114 Ibid., 33.

! **!

carnal, deranged Loomises, the Cutlers remain so unmarked throughout the film that

their presence is often easy to overlook (figure 10).

It is this invisibility that allows them to encapsulate white American privilege

so fully, and – as Niagara’s closing commercial moments suggest – to reveal the

pitfalls of fitting in so well. Advertisements from the fifties are rife with happy white

couples like the Cutlers who are using or framing a spectacular array of goods: sitting

in shiny new cars, barbecuing on a brand new grill, placing groceries in a sleek Deep

Freeze or high capacity refrigerator (figure 16). Their banality is acceptable because

their perfection complements the particular commodity on display without distracting

from it. In Niagara, the Cutlers recall these bland, too perfect commercial couples,

but they lack a commodity to market or a point of interest that would make their

idealization seem less flat (figure 17). Thus, in all of its surface-level efforts to

project a unified and homogeneous American identity, the film’s use of advertising

rhetoric reveals the ways in which this notion of the collective “self” is unsatisfying

and empty. While advertising language proved essential in effectively representing –

and calming – some of the most vexing postwar concerns, when transplanted into the

medium of film, it also called attention to its own artificiality. In this regard, the

commercialized visual flourishes in the film become less a reflection of a national

“ideal,” and more of how much that once-unifying image was now in flux.!!

Commercial moments in Niagara compelled Americans to look within – within the

depths of the human psyche, within the ideologies and divisions that comprised the

nation – and to challenge the type of identity that postwar popular culture customarily

! "++!

projected. Advertising language, and its unique ties to contemporary social and

political issues, calls into question the various standards that once defined national

and individual identity. In doing so, it effectively named the fears – of invisibility, of

lack – that began to transform the dominant American subject position amid a

growing calls for civil justice and a growing recognition of heterogeneity within the

national “self.” Regardless of the closure the narrative seems to offer us at the end,

commercial moments allow a certain uneasiness to linger, giving shape to otherwise-

inexpressible truths.

! "+"!

Chapter 2 | Looking Back: Reclaiming History

Introduction

In 1949, billboards across America unveiled Ford’s new advertising campaign

(figure 18). In it, a little boy, a dog, and a grown man stare eagerly back at us from

the opposite side of a Ford showroom window, their eyes wide, mouths open, and

hands pressed against the glass. The billboard provides would-be consumers with

little information about the car itself, replacing the usual selling points (standard

features, price, or the handsomeness of the model) with the spectacle of the

consumer’s rapt gaze. On one level, the image speaks to the commodity’s ability to

bring unadulterated joy to everyone: young, old, human, animal. Yet the heart of its

message lies in the distinctive way in which everyone – including the middle-aged

father – is infantilized before the promises of postwar capitalism. Far more important

than the material properties of the car itself is its power to return consumers to the

elusive spaces of childhood.

Perhaps no other decade in American history is as notorious for indulging this

slippery fantasy of regression as the 1950s, with adults-acting-like children flooding

print advertisements, narratives about spoiled, commitment-shy bachelors dominating

the box office, and childishly unaffected sex symbols such as Marilyn Monroe and

Jayne Mansfield setting new standards of beauty. Yet the embrace of America’s

“inner child” represented more than gluttonous indulgence in a long awaited

! "+#!

peacetime prosperity.1 Rather, it embodied a conflicted, often-melancholic process

through which Americans attempted to rebuild their national identity in the wake of

World War II. This chapter argues that commercial moments in film provided a

model through which postwar Americans could confront a difficult past, and reclaim

that past as part of the collective “self.” I contend that advertising and film’s

representation of childhood helped Americans understand the growing pains of the

nation, and thus, to accept them as a necessary part of national development.

I will begin by discussing the cultural standing of the child in the postwar era,

suggesting that popular media directed Americans to view children as not only

symbolic of a better future, but also as a means of working through a traumatic past. I

will examine the increasing media presence of the child through photo-essays and

documentary photography covering Korean War Orphans and the origins of

transnational adoption in the United States. In exploring these images and the popular

response to them, I discuss the ways in which a national audience came to locate and

visualize its conflicted feelings about history – namely, the recent trials of World War

II – through vicarious identification with the suffering Korean child, othered by

poverty and race. Such analysis will provide the foundation for examining how

advertising, film, and their hybridization within the commercial moment positioned

childhood as an acknowledgement of history’s “otherness,” and how recognition of

this alienated past affected identity formation in the present. In a neo-Freudian era !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1 Scholars such as design historian Thomas Hine have long cited the relief and commodity abundance following World War II as the cause of this childish impulse. As he argues, “…Even some of the home and design magazines and mass magazines such as Life offered forums for those who warned Americans against ornamental overindulgence. They listened politely, then, like adolescents who have come into a windfall, went on a binge” (Thomas Hine, Populuxe [New York: Knopf, 1986], 14).

! "+$!

that was just beginning to view childhood as a distinct but crucial stage of human

development, this model offered a relatable, personal way of coming to terms with a

national history that too seemed shameful, imperfect, and far removed from current

self-perception. Through a consideration of infantilized adults in films such as Pillow

Talk (1959), The Seven-Year Itch (1955), and On the Town (1949), I discuss how

commercial moments shaped the national relationship to history by re-enacting the

processes of regression modeled by other forms of media. Building from scholarship

that discusses childhood as a queer, “primitive,” and racially distinct stage of life, I

explore how understanding the past through this lens affected a nation that was

struggling to come to terms with not only the memory of World War II, but also with

its own diversity in an age of emerging identity politics.

In the beginning of the decade, Ford introduced this billboard image without

knowing exactly what childhood would come mean to 1950s Americans. As the little

boy and the man stare, transfixed, into an unknown world beyond the showroom

glass, one gets the sense that neither knows exactly the cultural and ideological

tensions that would become knotted around their infantile gazes, and how their

cultural positions – both as a child and as a man who wants to be a child again –

would change in the coming years. I suspect that it is this naïveté, which initially

made this ad so appealing, now lends it such strange pathos.

! "+%!

Anything Other Than Themselves

Children have long served as useful cultural symbols, valuable in part because

of their complete dependency upon the adults who determine what they represent. In

western culture, childhood encompasses both past innocence now out of reach, and

possibilities that have not yet taken shape.2 This opposition, one that has defined

childhood since the Enlightenment, has special relevance in the United States, where

children were sentimentalized in the nineteenth century as embodiments of innocence

(and therefore vigorously protected from the hardships of adult reality), only to be

valued in the early twentieth century as the breeding ground for responsible

citizenship and torchbearers for a progressive future.3 Thus, “when it comes down to

it, and it always seems to come down to it,” Michael Cobb observes, “children can be

almost anything, other than themselves.”4

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!2 John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s writings would structure modern perceptions of childhood. For Locke, children were tools with which to build a better, more rational, more civilized future, whereas for Rousseau they represented the unstudied innocence of the past – all of the best parts of human nature that are lost with age (see Gillian Brown, “Child’s Play,” in The American Child: A Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Caroline Levander and Carol J. Singley [New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003], 24; see also Howard P. Chudakoff, Children at Play: An American History [New York: New York University Press, 2007], 113). 3 While most children in an agrarian economy were absorbed into the labor force as quickly as possible, industrialization in the 19th century meant that children of middle class families could be protected from the hazards and responsibility of adult work. During this period, children’s everyday lives – structured by school and increased free time for play – became distinct from that of their parents, leading to the gradual recognition of children as a separate social category (see Chudakoff, 99). New developments in childrearing philosophies, such as the gradual abandonment of the Calvinist notion that children were embodiments of Original Sin, allowed parents to view their children sentimentally (Brown, 19). By the twentieth century, the establishment of the Children’s Bureau (1912) and the National Child Labor Committee (1904), as well as a widespread effort to monitor the development of children through national – academic, extracurricular, and behavioral – standards, attest to the ways in which childhood became viewed as a training ground for responsible citizenship during the Progressive Era (On Children’s Bureau, see Lynn Spigel, “Seducing the Innocent: Childhood and Television in Postwar America,” in Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs [Durham: Duke University Press, 2001], 189; see also Chudacoff, 101). 4 Michael Cobb, “Childlike: Queer Theory and Its Children,” Criticism 47, no. 1 (Winter, 2005), 119.

! "+&!

The fifties brought these earlier constructions of childhood to their logical

limit, in large part because children became such a central part of postwar culture.

The baby boom led to a new consciousness of the nation’s youngest, most dependent,

and most vulnerable citizens (between 1946 and 1964, 75 million infants were born,

compared to less than 50 million in the preceding 19 years).5 Young parents, newly

relocated to the suburbs and no longer able to solicit childrearing guidance from their

extended families, looked desperately to cultural “experts” for advice, thereby fueling

a surge in popular literature on the subject.6 The development of the polio vaccine in

1954, along with a spate of other medical advancements (such as immunizations for

whooping cough, diphtheria, tetanus, and even anti-cavity fluoride treatments) offered

new hope for providing children with longer, healthier lives. The fifties also brought

the Progressive idea of children’s “right to play” to a feverish pitch: foods such as

Sugar Frosted Flakes (1951), Jiffy Pop (1958), games such as Candyland (1949),

Yahtzee (1956), and toys such as Mr. Potato Head (1952), Silly Putty (1950), hula

hoops (1954), coonskin caps (1955), and Barbie (1953) made mealtimes, free time,

and family time more focused on the child’s pleasure.7

Although always in danger of representing “anything other than themselves,”

children in the postwar era were often shamelessly used to bolster the nation’s Cold

War ideologies, and often in a manner that reprised the past/future binary historically

associated with childhood. Soviet children may have “lost their childhoods to the !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!5 See Steven Mintz, Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 276. 6 See Ann Hulbert, Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice about Children (New York: Knopf, 2003), 191-292. 7 Mintz, 275-279.

! "+'!

disciplinary will of the state,” but Americans prided themselves in providing theirs

with an extended period of comfort and freedom from worry.8 In this tense

international climate, an upbringing of leisure and abundance symbolized the

superiority of American capitalism and ensured future resistance to communist

expansion (since, the logic dictated, a child that experienced the material fruits of

democracy and capitalism would be more likely to carry out these principles as an

adult).9 Upon children’s shoulders thus rested a nation’s idealized vision of itself, and

the belief that such ideals could be met in the future.10 At the same time, however,

adults – whose childhoods had been subsumed by economic depression and war –

seized their role as parents as an opportunity to give the next generation everything

they had been denied, suffusing childhood’s implications of a better future with

shades of compensation for a lost past. As much as this period was, as editor of

Parents’ Magazine George Hecht claimed, “the children’s decade,” the postwar

construction of childhood was remarkably adult-centric.11 Through their relationship

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!8 Spigel, Welcome to the Dreamhouse, 225. 9 As Spigel claims, during the Cold War standoff with the Soviet Union, “The ability to provide children with wondrous products became a hallmark not only of good parenting, but also of national pride” (246). 10 This idea of childhood as an investment in a democratic future shaped a number of important postwar policies. The fervent push to reform the nation’s educational system stemmed primarily from anxieties that American schoolchildren would not be able to compete with their international peers in an increasingly science and technology-oriented world – a fear heightened by the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957 (see Mintz, 287). Perhaps most striking, however, are the ways in which policymakers viewed children as both a motivation for, and means of, resolving the ideological tensions that undercut America’s self-constructed image of liberty, prosperity, and equal opportunity. The mandated desegregation of public schools in 1954 placed children at the forefront of civil equality, a socio-political ideal that many adults were not completely ready to embrace and that would play out – dramatically, and with great struggle – over the course of the next decade through riots, boycotts, marches, and protests (see ibid., 302). 11 George Hecht, “1950-1960: The Decade of the Child,” Parents’ Magazine, January 18, 1950, 18, quoted in Nicholas Sammond, Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1936-1960 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 250.

! "+(!

to children, postwar parents conflated their domestic role with the good of the nation

and past with future, rendering, as Nicholas Sammond argues, “Every child...a new

beginning to history,” and providing the grounds from which a new national narrative

might be built.12

But what made the postwar era’s overinvestment in the child most unique was

the fact that children had come to offer a means of understanding and coping with

recent political traumas that had deeply upset the foundations of national identity.

Beneath the playful veneer of child culture in the fifties lay a very real history that

Americans could barely face. To understand the actual significance of the child in this

era thus requires an investigation into the “other” children and the “other” history that

this imagery seemed to disavow. It requires us to search images, like the little boy

pictured in Ford billboard, with the aim of uncovering his unseen counterpart –

another little boy halfway around the world, whose plight would shape a generation’s

understanding of childhood, history, and trauma.

Children, Trauma, and the Postwar Politics of Looking Back

On March 17, 1952, Life magazine’s “Picture of the Week” featured a Korean

War Orphan named Kang Koo Ri (figure 19).13 He had been introduced to readers

about a year before in a photo-essay titled “The Little Boy Who Wouldn’t Smile,”

which documented his discovery by American marines in his war-torn village and his

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!12 Sammond, 279. 13 “Picture of the Week, ‘Kang Koo Ri and His New Face,’” Life March 17, 1952, 37.

! "+)!

gradual recovery at a U.S. military base.14 While the original photo-essay’s opening

image presented Kang to American readers as tight-lipped, malnourished, and

disoriented, the “Picture of the Week” depicts an older Kang, dressed in western

clothes, smiling and holding up the Life picture of his former self.

On the surface, the “Picture of the Week” seems to demonstrate the power of

Americans to improve the lives of the most disenfranchised and vulnerable victims of

the Korean War. It uses the postwar understanding of childhood – that children must

be happy, plump, and smiling – to demonstrate the degree of Kang’s progress and to

highlight the ability of American benevolence to curb global suffering. Eventually,

Kang was adopted into a suburban American family, and Life chronicled this final

step in his biography with the follow up article, “A Famous Orphan Finds a Happy

Home.”15 His trajectory – from the nightmarish circumstances that left him without a

home or family to the safety of an American military base, and eventually to adoption

into a white U.S. family – was one that became well known through popular media

coverage during the postwar era. Much like, as Sammond argues, every child was an

opportunity to change the course of history in a positive way, here, Kang Koo Ri

represents the ability of Cold War era Americans to bring their national culture – and

the benefits of democracy and capitalism – to the world, one orphan at a time.

Yet there is another narrative at work in these images. As much as coverage of

the Korean War’s tiniest victims kept Americans up-to-date with current events, such

images of suffering and eventual recovery also helped them come to grips with the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!14 Michael Rougier, “The Little Boy Who Wouldn’t Smile,” Life July 23, 1951, 91-98. 15 “A Famous Orphan Finds a Happy Home,” Life, May 14, 1956, 129-130.

! "+*!

collective traumas of recent history – specifically, the unresolved tensions

surrounding the use of nuclear weaponry at the close of World War II. With the

Korean War orphan-turned-adoptee, we can see how childhood became a way of

looking back – and grappling with the thorniness of that vision – as much as it was

about preparing for a better future or reasserting national prowess on the global stage.

Within images that otherwise celebrate American principles, there is evidence of

Americans laboring to make sense of a troubled national past.

The term trauma is rarely used to describe the United States following World

War II.16 Spared the structural devastation, loss of civilian life, and horrors of

genocide that consumed so many other regions of the world, many Americans, it is

assumed, experienced trauma from an arm’s length away: knowing or loving

someone who encountered the devastation firsthand, or in many cases, feeling what

Geoffrey Hartman calls “secondary traumatization”: a “guilt, perhaps shame, which

the knowledge of evil, or simply of such suffering, implants.”17 Yet following World

War II, and the fateful decision that ultimately ended it, Americans experienced the

horrors of war not secondarily, but primarily, as a cultural trauma, which sociologist

Jeffrey Alexander defines as, “occur[ing] when members of a collectivity feel they

have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their

group consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their future

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!16 Aside from references to the conditions of combat veterans and what would eventually become known as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (for more on the history of PTSD, see Michael R. Trimble, “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder: History of a Concept,” in Trauma and Its Wake, Volume 1, ed. Charles R. Figley (Bristol: Brunner/Mazer, 1985), 5-14. 17 Geoffrey Hartman, “Tele-Suffering and Testimony in the Dot Com Era,” in Visual Culture and the Holocaust, ed. Barbie Zelizer (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 119.

! ""+!

identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways.”18 Cultural trauma, like psychological

trauma, stems from an event that inflicts violence upon the core of the collectivity,

shattering its founding narratives and rupturing its sense of cohesion. So disruptive is

this process that the event and its effects cannot be immediately processed or clearly

remembered, yet are internalized as an ever-present and haunting reality.19

Given these criteria, World War II may seem to be the opposite of cultural

trauma: wartime industry pulled the nation out of the Great Depression, offering an

apparent reward after years of struggle and sacrifice; Allied political goals had been

achieved and Axis evils quashed, giving rise to a celebratory “victory” culture, and

fostering confidence in national political principles.20 In spite of this, however,

collective identity had been badly shaken. The internment of Japanese Americans and

the use of nuclear weapons were deeply divisive during this moment of supposed

unity, and while official rhetoric always justified these measures, other public figures

pointed to the ways in which such actions called the nation’s values into question and

cast doubt over everything that Americans felt separated them from their enemies.

According to sociologist Neil Smelser, World War II operated as a cultural trauma,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!18 Jeffrey Alexander, “Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma,” in Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, ed. Jeffrey Alexander (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 1. Neil J. Smelser offers another definition: “a cultural trauma refers to an invasive and overwhelming event that is believed to undermine or overwhelm one or several essential ingredients of a culture or the culture as a whole” (Neil Smelser, “Psychological Trauma and Cultural Trauma,” in Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, 38). 19 See Arthur Neal, National Trauma and Collective Memory: Major Events in the American Century (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1998), 4. 20 See Margot Henriksen, Dr. Strangelove’s America: Society and Culture in the Atomic Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 4; see also Tom Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation (New York: Basic Books, 1995).

! """!

“obliterating, damaging, or rendering problematic” the “value[s] and outlook[s]” that

had once been the cornerstones of national identity.21

Of all of the morally ambiguous, identity-splintering actions of the U.S.

during World War II, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki best fit the classic

definition of trauma, theorized by Cathy Caruth as a violent, paradigm-shattering

event, so overwhelming that it exceeds the limits of representation and the victim’s

ability to process it. Taking a psychoanalytic approach, she argues that trauma is not

defined by the event itself, but the fact that it is so overwhelming it is “not available

to consciousness until it imposes itself again, repeatedly, in the nightmares and

repetitive actions of the survivor.”22 An event can only be recognized as traumatic

when the subject is prompted by way of another event – an après-coup – to relive it,

again and again.23 Yet the corporeal “return” to the site of trauma that occurs

unconsciously and automatically within an individual is impossible for “complex

national cultures,” in which there are competing opinions, political stakes, and

varying levels of personal investment in the event.24 Thus, cultural trauma must be

defined after its occurrence, and is, as Smelser argues, “for the most part historically

made, not born.”25 According to Alexander, such a duty lies with “carrier groups” –

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!21 Smelser, 36. 22 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 3-4. 23 Ibid. Freud referred to this later return – so necessary to comprehending the initial, shattering event – as “nachtraglichkeit” (deferred effect, afterwardness). Kathryn Bond Stockton summarizes the concept as “events from the past acquir[ing] meaning only when read through their future consequences” (Kathryn Bond Stockton, The Queer Child or, Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century [Durham: Duke University Press, 2009], 14); for more on the après-coup, see Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 80. 24 Smelser, 38. 25 Ibid., 37.

! ""#!

politicians, public figures, and the media – who act as “collective agents” that define

trauma, ensuring that it is packaged and relayed decisively, and that “returns” to the

once shattering, unfathomable event can render some greater sense of understanding.

Certainly Caruth’s model is applicable to those who experienced the bombings

directly; who bore immediate witness to a feat of science that was unprecedented and

indescribable in its destruction. Yet for Americans who experienced this

destabilization from the other side – not as personal trauma, but as a unique form of

cultural trauma – it was the lack of a coherent response from carrier groups that was

most damaging to the core of collective identity. Oppenheimer’s famous words (“I

am become death, destroyer of worlds”) and the apprehension expressed by others in

the media (including NBC newscaster HV Kaltenborn, who famously claimed, “we

are like children playing with a concentrated instrument of death whose destructive

potential our little minds cannot grasp”) clashed with government officials, who

praised the bombings as a necessary end to the war.26 Without a unified means of

understanding these political actions, the ability to return or to process the original

event was impossible.

Eventually, mainstream journalism did expose limited details of the civilian

suffering that resulted from the bomb (although actual photographs of the damage

were extremely rare).27 In providing concrete evidence of what before was only

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!26 Kaltenborn Broadcast, 6 September 1945, H. V. Kaltenborn Papers, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison, quoted in Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light, 7. For more on this ambivalence, see Frank G. Tyrrell, “Is the Use of the Atomic Bomb Justified?” in Vital Speeches of the Day, October 1, 1945, 767-768 (delivered before Beverly Hills Bar Association, September 5, 1945). 27 For examples of early reporting on the human toll of the bomb, see “First Official Report on Damage to Japan,” in U.S. News and World Report, July 5, 1946, 63-78 (which included charts and statistical

! ""$!

speculation, however, these articles heightened rather than quelled national

ambivalence over the outcome of the war. This confusion eventually morphed into

disgust, shame and guilt – the “negative affects” that form such a large part of cultural

trauma – alienating this part of history from the nation’s self-perception in the

present.28 Descriptions that resonated uncomfortably with images of Axis atrocities

designated this part of history as something that Americans wanted to deny or forget.

As a result, any attempts to return to the original event without a carrier group only

further alienated Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a shameful part of history that lay

forever outside of the collective “self,” a wound left painfully exposed.

Another set of images, another war, and another type of trauma, would

eventually provide the carrier group necessary for postwar Americans to come to

terms with its recent past. “The Little Boy Who Wouldn’t Smile,” photographed and

written by Life staff contributor Michael Rougier, begins by exposing the grisly

details of Kang’s discovery by U.S. soldiers, who searched his bombed-out village for

survivors after an invasion. The opening image of Kang, taken shortly after his arrival

at the base, is striking not because it represents the horrors of his experience, but

rather because it emphasizes his shock, his very lack of emotion, implying that recent

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!data, but no photographs). Life’s earliest coverage of the bomb was in its August 20, 1945 issue in its photo-essay “The Atomic Bomb: Its First Explosion Opens a New Era,” which focused solely on the science and development of the bomb, limiting its imagery to abstract diagrams of nuclear fission and profiles of the men behind the developments (87-95); Life’s two-part series on “The Atom” focused on educating a lay public on the politics and science of the bomb so that Americans would be prepared if such weaponry were to become a feature of the Cold War (“The Atom,” Life, May 16, 1949, 68-84, and “The Atomic Bomb,” Life, February 27, 1950, 90-100). 28 As Smelser outlines, a primary component of cultural trauma is that an event becomes “associated with a strong negative affect, usually disgust, shame, or guilt” (Smelser, 36).

! ""%!

events left him incapable of processing the full scope of his situation (figure 20).29

Rougier then recounts his conversation with Kang after he was placed in a U.S.

sponsored orphanage in Taegu:

All that he does remember is that for many days before the soldiers found him he sat beside his mother and brother in their home, all of them too weak to get out and forage for food. The memory that is strongest is of the flies and maggots which crawled over his mother’s lips and nose…He still doesn’t know she is dead, nor does he know what happened to his father… To [many] questions he simply replied, ‘I have forgotten…’”30

The fragmentary nature of his memory, in which the jarring events (of death or

disappearance) are obscured by vivid details, introduced a mass American audience to

the nature of traumatic memory, allowing them to identify with this “breach in the

mind’s experience of time, self, and the world”31; to recognize their own crisis in

memory and self-perception in his plight.

Life, in other words, defined trauma for a popular American audience, using

photographic evidence of another boy, another international conflict, and another kind

of loss to name what could not be clearly articulated at the end of the previous war. In

addition to providing this elusive definition, however, the body and experience of

Kang Koo Ri also served as an après-coup for the cultural trauma of postwar

Americans – similar, but not the same, as the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and

offering a powerful depiction of the horrors that were only half-revealed during the

immediate postwar years. Like the memory that pulses within the trauma victim, the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!29 Rougier, 93. 30 Ibid., 97. 31 Caruth, 4.

! ""&!

images of the suffering Asian body – malnourished and crying out in pain – returned

Americans to the moment of the bombings, enabling the photographic depiction of

Korean War Orphans to signify past victims who were only imagined or selectively

represented. In doing so, such photo-essays lent form to a past that had not been fully

processed, mourned, or understood as traumatic.32 Notably, it was not until Life’s

1952 photo-essay, “When the Atom Bomb Struck – Uncensored” that the now-iconic

photographs documenting the initial effects of the bomb were first published, making

the images of orphaned, starving, and suffering Asian children in Korean War

coverage some of the first concrete representations of the destruction that Americans

had known about, but not truly seen during World War II.33

The ease of their interchangeability – one nation, one war, one people

standing in for another – stems in part from the intimate political connection between

the wars, as well as between the nations (Korea having been a long time colony of

Japan). But the power of these images to reference both the contemporary and the

historical is a direct result of what Roland Barthes has called photography’s

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!32 Most news coverage of civilian casualties in Korea acknowledged that civilians were caught in the crossfire between both sides, focusing on the magnitude of the suffering itself rather than charging one side or the other with complete responsibility. Free from feeling sole culpability for the loss of civilian life, and therefore not needing to deny the fact that they – in their anti-communist efforts – inadvertently contributed to the damage, Americans were able to see and to feel more freely in this war than in the last, which is part of what made the documentation of the Korean War such an effective carrier group for World War II. 33 “When Atomic Bomb Struck – Uncensored,” Life, September 29, 1952, 19-25 (touted on the cover as “First Pictures – Atom Blasts Through the Eyes of Victims”). In a letter to the editor, Pete Morse from Wilmette, Illinois noted that “The Little Boy Who Wouldn’t Smile” was “one of the most unforgettable series of pictures to come out of this or the last war,” tacitly acknowledging the lack of such media coverage during World War II (See Letters to the Editors, Life, August 13, 1951, 8-11).

! ""'!

“stupidity”34 – the inability of photographs (often considered the most faithful

documentation of reality) to convey the critical context, analysis, and detail necessary

for viewers to identify accurately the event and subjects depicted. As Susie Linfield

argues, photography’s mimetic transcription of an event thus always falls short of

specificity, leaving images vulnerable to appropriation, projection, and misattribution

such that one image of pain can easily stand in for another.35

The graphic depiction of suffering in Korea allowed Americans to experience

the empathy, remorse, and despair with regard to their (or their nation’s) role in

causing it – all of the rawest, most complex emotions that official ambivalence over

the original event did not allow. Academic studies of trauma warn against such over-

identification – admonishing us to avoid exploiting or aestheticizing this imagery, to

be reflexive of our position in relation to the subjects depicted, and to understand the

pitfalls of vicarious affect – but at heart, these photographs are visceral, searing

reminders of our own humanity; of our ability to feel, even if it is through someone

else’s pain.36 It was the inability to feel, or to feel fully, that marked Hiroshima and

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!34 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections of Photography, trans. Richard Howard, 1st American ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 4-6. 35 Susie Linfield, Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 21. 36 There have been numerous academic studies critiquing this kind of identification, warning against what Mieke Bal calls the “trap” of “vicarious suffering,” a “cannibalizing form of identification [in which] the viewer identifying with other people’s (represented) suffering appropriates the suffering, cancels out the difference between self and other, and in the process, cheapens the suffering” (Mieke Bal, “The Pain of Images,” in Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain, ed. Mark Reinhardt, Holly Edwards, and Erina Duganne [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006], 108). This all-too-common exploitation of suffering for our own emotional outlet has raised many ethical questions around the practice of photojournalism, and prompted scholars to examine new ways of engaging with such imagery. Yet it is unlikely that the average Life reader maintained such reflexivity. At root, such images were still shocking and profoundly moving on a bodily, affective level. As Bal notes, regardless of readers’ personal experiences, they have “skins that hurt and eyes that see…” and

! ""(!

Nagasaki as a collective trauma. As Linfield argues, in spite of the photograph’s

status as documentation or factual evidence, we still rely on it for “a glimpse of what

cruelty, or strangeness, or beauty, or agony, or love, or disease, or natural wonder, or

artistic creation, or depraved violence, looks like. And we turn to photographs to

discover what our intuitive reactions to such otherness – and to such others – might

be.”37 For readers of “The Little Boy Who Wouldn’t Smile,” such images served as

insight into the reactions they could not have to the bombings in Japan; reactions to

people othered by their sorrow, their race, and their politics. Within these images, the

original event becomes real again, giving postwar readers the opportunity to

recognize that trauma affects both victims and perpetrators, often blurring the lines

between the two.

More than merely a return to the original event, however, such images

presented a tale of suffering that still had the potential to end triumphantly and onto

which Americans could project themselves as guardians rather than destroyers.

Following the publication of “The Little Boy Who Wouldn’t Smile,” letters to the

editor demonstrate the degree to which American readers empathized with Kang and

his situation (“The picture of the little Korean boy who wouldn’t smile impressed me

so much I burst into tears…”), and how this empathy manifested into a desire to act

(wrote “Mrs. Donald S. Miller”: “My heart went out to Kang Koo Ri. I want

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!can therefore identify – through the problematic ambiguities of compassion, sympathy, and imaginative projection – with the subjects of the image (ibid., 110). 37 Linfield, 22.

! "")!

desperately to send him gifts from time to time. Is this possible?” 38) The Picture of

the Week in 1952 offered Americans photographic evidence of his improvement and

how the collective care of American strangers – men on the military base, donations

from anonymous Life readers – had nurtured his gradual evolution into a smiling,

healthy, westernized child. In 1956, with the publication of “A Famous Orphan Finds

a Happy Home,” Life issued the final installment of his narrative, documenting

Kang’s adoption into a white American family and juxtaposing this happy ending

with the destitution from which he came. Kang’s story, although one of the most

famous, was far from unusual.39 Throughout the fifties, periodicals such as Life, Look

and Collier’s eagerly framed such stories as evidence of American outreach, as the

shred of goodness in an otherwise very bleak international political conflict, and of

childhood restored.40 The group consensus so lacking in the previous war is therefore

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!38 “Helen E. Stevenson,” Letters to the Editors, Life, August 13, 1951, 8; “Mrs. Donald S. Miller,” Letters to the Editors, Life, August 13, 1951, 11. Less than one month later, “Mrs. L.W. McGuirk” wrote with an update: “My son-in-law had this picture taken with Kang Koo Ri, ‘The Little Boy Who Wouldn’t Smile.’ The gifts in the background are a small portion of those received through Life magazine’s appeal for Korean orphans.” Lest the connection between American material aid and childhood happiness be missed, she adds at the end: “Note the difference in the boy’s facial expression” (“Mrs. L.W. McGuiirk,” Letters to the Editors, Life September 10, 1951, 17). 39 The Holt family, which famously adopted eight Korean War Orphans and established the first international adoption agency in 1956, received extensive coverage (see “Unwanted Find a Home,” Look 20, October 30 1956, 106-108; “New Faces,” Time, December 23 1957, 16; Ron Moxness, “Good Samaritan of Korea,” American Mercury, October 1956, 84-88; “Lord is Their Sponsor,” Life, December 26, 1955, 58). Other adoptive families also became symbols of U.S. benevolence and the degree to which happy children defined national identity (See Dave Strout, “Pete Smith – American,” American Magazine, July 1954, 51, and Bud Reid, “Adoption by Picture,” McCall’s 85, January 1958, 51). 40 Popular news magazines, then as now, were far from objective; photojournalistic “documentation” of global and national events often reinforced a particular ideology and bolstered nationalistic pride (for in-depth analyses of how Life’s coverage of major historical events and everyday life reinforced mainstream ideology, see the essays compiled in Looking at Life Magazine, ed. Erika Doss [Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001]). Often, Korean adoptees were depicted engaging in leisurely activities that celebrated American capitalist abundance and reinforced gendered conventions, with boys playing with cap guns and girls baking in the kitchen (see the adoption of Lee Palladino in “New American Comes ‘Home’” Life, November 30, 1953, 25-29 and of Hang Soon Im

! ""*!

achieved in Korea, restoring a sense of wholeness over the historical ruptures in

national identity.

Thus, a complex relationship between past and present was embedded in

photojournalism’s language of cultural trauma. And as intricate as these connections

were – between Korea and Japan, guilt and reconciliation, childhood and a troubled

history – they were widely legible and accepted by a mass audience. The popular

appeal of such themes is nowhere more obvious than in the 1957 Hollywood film

Battle Hymn, which narrativized (in painstakingly literal terms) everything that the

photo-essays in Life implied, but never stated directly. Starring Rock Hudson and

directed by Douglas Sirk, Battle Hymn chronicles the true story of Dean Hess

(Hudson), an American fighter pilot who, due to a plane malfunction during World

War II, accidentally bombed a German orphanage, killing 37 children.41 After

quitting his military career, marrying, and becoming a minister in Ohio, he decides to

re-enlist in Korea, hoping to make amends for his past. The remainder of the film

follows his work there, from his initial job as a trainer for air force personnel to his

eventual establishment of an orphanage for Korean children. At the film’s dramatic

climax, when enemy bombs threaten to raze the area in which the orphanage is based,

Hess and his team orchestrate an elaborate plan to air lift the children to safety.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!in Sam Castan, “Unadoptable Finds a Home,” Look, April 11, 1961, 82-85 for a contrast between the representation of male and female adoptees). Such a gendered divide was a key to maintaining political ideologies, since, according to official rhetoric, the Soviet Union’s insistence upon total equality flattened the distinction between genders, whereas American capitalism allowed women to maintain their femininity. 41 For more on Dean Hess, see “Pious Killer of Korea,” Saturday Evening Post, July 21, 1951, 26; for similar stories of American servicemen establishing orphanages in Korea, see William J. Lederer and Nelle Keys Perry, “Operation Kid-Lift,” Ladies’ Home Journal, December 1952, 48.

! "#+!

In spite of an introduction by General Earle Partridge – who introduces Hess’s

guilt as a “condition uniquely his own” and his mission to save Korean War Orphans

as a case of private redemption – it is clear that Battle Hymn is a metaphor for the

nation and its own struggles with postwar identity.42 Like Americans at large, it is

only through the figure of the orphaned Korean child that Hess is able to recognize

and face the trauma that haunts him from World War II. And, like postwar photo-

essays that returned Americans to an event that they could not fully process, Hess’s

encounters with suffering Korean children constantly return him to the original site of

trauma through chaotic, fragmentary flashbacks. Throughout the film, these

remembrances alternate with scenes that mirror the form and affect of the best-known

orphan-turned-adoptee narratives in photojournalism (Figures 21 and 22). Sequences

featuring dozens of nameless, parentless Asian children huddled in a makeshift

shelter, and these same children, later on, dressed in jeans and baseball caps or

gleefully playing on the military base, clearly recall photo-essays that, in real life,

prompted Americans to define and confront their own tortured relationship to World

War II. The close-ups of the children’s expressions, shell-shocked and exhausted by

their efforts to survive, seem like Technicolored counterparts to “The Little Boy Who

Wouldn’t Smile” and others like him; likewise, happy children amassed around Hess

resemble countless images of American soldiers and missionaries in Korea, who were

similarly depicted as saviors amid clusters of anonymous children. Battle Hymn thus

brings the haunting and then triumphant tableaux of photojournalism to life on the big

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!42 Quote from Battle Hymn, directed by Douglas Sirk (1957; Universal City, CA: Universal, 2004), DVD.

! "#"!

screen, playing specifically on the visual conventions that made such photo-essays so

iconic, so ideologically effective, and so ego reinforcing; in essence, what made them

most commercial. (The inherent commercialism of photojournalistic form is evident

in the extent to which relief organizations and even corporations appropriated images

from photo-essays. Rougier’s headlining photograph from “The Little Boy Who

Wouldn’t Smile” made Kang the poster boy for a number of religious organizations’

relief efforts, and, by December of 1951, for Life’s winter campaign to boost

subscriptions.43) Battle Hymn’s commercial moments thus reenacted national

sentiment regarding the relationship between this and the last war, as well as the

significance of these orphans’ lives in relation to other orphans’ deaths.

Yet unlike the film’s simplistic equation of Korean children with atonement

for past wrongs, Kang and others like him also represented the centrality of the child

to contending with collective trauma in this era. The “wounded child” has long served

as a metaphor for violent ruptures in identity. As Jane Thrailkill argues, the child’s

developmental stage and reliance upon the body and the senses (in lieu of language)

makes it especially susceptible to trauma, and therefore useful for reminding adults

“of our own sensory capacity, our own fragility, our own pain, and what it is like to

be human.”44 By the Korean War, the wounded child, and specifically, the othered

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!43 See “What’s In a Picture,” (advertisement), Life, December 31, 1951, 90; for more information on how Rougier’s photograph was used for relief posters, see John Leongard et. al., The Great LIFE Photographers (New York: Bullfinch, 2004), 253. For more on how iconic photographs have been appropriated by commercial culture and why such imagery lends itself so easily to appropriation, see Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Liberal Democracy, and Public Culture (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2007), 53-58. 44 Jane Thrailkill, “Traumatic Realism and the Wounded Child,” in The American Child: A Cultural Studies Reader, 133. For a discussion of the child’s special susceptibility to experiencing trauma

! "##!

wounded child, began to represent a special kind of historical continuity, which

framed the national past in the most intimate of terms. In a society newly interested in

Freudian psychoanalysis, the child became symbolic of the past – a history all but lost

to us today, accessible only symptomatically – and the need to recuperate this past in

order to understand our identities in the present. Childhood, like trauma, came to

constitute a “gap in, or a threat to, life narrative as we know it,” and only in

rehabilitating one’s childhood could one’s otherwise indeterminate sense of “self” be

secured.45 This period-specific understanding of personal history in terms of trauma

and recovery offered an important template for grasping the processes of national

development, especially for postwar Americans newly attuned to the uneasy

relationship between historical memory and identity. As Alexander argues, cultural

trauma too requires “reconstructing the collectivity’s earlier life” – an “identity

revision” that ultimately leads to “a searching re-remembering of the collective past,

for memory is not only social and fluid but deeply connected to the contemporary

sense of the self.”46 The psychoanalytic framework that rendered childhood an

estranged but nonetheless integral part of the whole thus became key to the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!because of her lack of psychic development (certain events “are all the more momentous because they occur in times of incomplete development and are for that reason liable to have traumatic effects…) see Smelser, 33. Scholars have also pointed to an affinity between cinematic representations of both childhood and trauma, stating that film’s special ability to convey both is evidence that childhood and trauma occupy similar places in the cultural imagination (see Lisa Cartwright, Moral Spectatorship: Technologies of Voice and Affect in Postwar Representations of the Child [Durham: Duke University Press, 2008], and Karen Lury, The Child in Film: Tears, Fears, and Fairytales [New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010]). Vicky Lebeau argues that teasing apart the trope of the child and the cultural value we place on it can be a useful way of tracing the development of the cinematic medium (Vicky Lebeau, Childhood and Cinema [London: Reaktion, 2008], 17). 45 Steven Bruhn and Natasha Hurley, “Introduction,” in Bruhn and Hurley, eds. Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), xxiii. 46 Alexander, 22.

! "#$!

symbolism of the suffering Asian child and its role as a carrier group for historical

trauma. Already coded as culturally and racially other, the Korean War

orphan/adoptee defined the national past as alien, distant, and hazily remembered,

like both trauma and childhood.47 In representing the literal kinship between white

American readers of Life and orphaned Asian children a half a world away, “The

Little Boy Who Wouldn’t Smile” embodied the intensity of American identification

with history as Other, and gradual embrace of the Other within.

In this regard, American Life readers not only viewed Korean War Orphans as

children to be saved, but rather as parts of a collective self that needed to be

confronted. In other words, white Americans did not relate to them only as potential

parents, but identified with them and their place as children.48 And it was the nature of

their outreach to these “wounded children” that exemplified the true significance of

this return to childhood, which was a means of both accepting history, as well as

engaging with a particularly infantile form of citizenship – what Lauren Berlant

describes as a wholesome, naïve political faith that the government is capable of !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!47 For childhood as an “estranged” part of a fully grown adult, see Stockton; for commentary on Stockton’s argument, see Bruhm and Hurley, xxi. 48 It is possible that Life readers also identified with Korean War Orphans on a most literal level, seeing in these children parallels with own state of being overwhelmed, vulnerable, and the subject of conditions beyond their control. Articles describing children as “timid,” “uncertain,” “exhausted,” and “alone” echoed contemporary descriptions of postwar adults, who felt much the same way when facing new pressures of postwar affluence, the conformity of corporate culture, and the isolation of suburbia (see Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap [New York: Basic Books, 1992], and Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave [New York: Basic Books, 1983]). Raised during an era of scientific childrearing and economic hardship, it was also feasible for adults to empathize with these children’s lack of affection and material wealth. Such identification allowed white American readers to identify cross-culturally and cross-generationally, reinforcing Alexander Hinton’s belief that in mass media victims of trauma “are frequently condensed into an essentialized portrait of the universal sufferer, an image that can be …(re) broadcast to global audiences who see their own potential trauma reflected in this simulation of the modern subject” (Alexander Hinton, quoted in Alexander, 25).

! "#%!

“transcend[ing] the fractures and hierarchies of national life” to protect the best

interests of the people.49 Just as the child citizen full of awe and reverence for

America eventually grows more skeptical of the nation’s ability to uphold its own

ideals, postwar Americans began to adopt the attitude of hardened adults,

disillusioned by the ways in which racial tensions, political abstractions, and nuclear

threat weakened principles that had previously been a source of pride and unity. For

this generation of adults, then, Korean War Orphans offered an opportunity to engage

in a humanitarian gesture unambiguously aligned with the national values that

Americans feared they had shed with their naïveté. These images of the othered child

thus ensured that the reconstruction of history, the confrontation of trauma, and the

assertion of collective identity came to represent an ideal form of self-understanding

accessible only to those who were willing to become children again themselves.

The Primal Stare: Commercial Culture and Childish Identification

Within this context, one of the most common postwar visual trends – the

infantilized adult – takes on new meaning. Advertisements for products as diverse as

breakfast cereal and razors depicted parents acting as children: engaging in childish

activities (crawling on the floor, playing peek-a-boo), adopting immature gestures and

behaviors, and eschewing or clumsily mismanaging adult responsibilities. Likewise, a

wave of popular films starred child-like adults and featured lovable protagonists who

never fully grew up. Such infantilized language, like all advertising rhetoric, reified

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!49 Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 29.

! "#&!

capital and was thus a natural part of postwar culture’s blanketing commodity

spectacle. Yet at the same time, it also translated photojournalism’s complex

processes of identification into commercial terms, reifying the unspoken ideologies

that lay beneath Kang’s iconicity and the outpouring of support for children like him.

For advertisers, the cultural symbolism of childhood yielded great potential

for generating market demand. Positioning the child – and the child within – as

representative of resilience and pleasure in hard-won postwar affluence encouraged a

still-weary population to spend.50 At the same time, however, celebrating the

infantilized adult modeled how to reinhabit that space of the child, initiating in the

most capitalistic terms the same chain of identification encouraged by Life’s gritty

documentation of suffering children. One of commercial culture’s most reliable

means of achieving this effect was through emphasizing the act of looking and the

assumption that children have a special connection to vision.51 (As James Barry

asserts in Peter Pan, it is the ability to see that separates children from adults.

Children can see Peter, Tinker Bell, and Neverland, while adults, whose cynicism and

weariness has left them with a depleted capacity for imagination, cannot.52) In the

Ford billboard, for instance, the father’s identification with his inner child is most

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!50 Postwar advertising imagery is notable for its depiction of adults reveling in commodity abundance, largely because it attempted to convince Americans – still frugal and fearing another Great Depression – to be more at ease partaking in the era’s sudden abundance. On adult anxieties over spending, see Leerom Medovoi, Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 17. 51 This assumption has been consistently reinstated by iconic imagery: the photographs of children watching puppet shows by Morris Engel (c. 1940s), Werner Bischoff (1951), and Alfred Eisenstaedt (1963), and the extended sequence of Truffaut’s 400 Blows (1959). 52 See Susan Ohmer, “Disney’s Peter Pan: Gender, Fantasy, and Industrial Production,” in Allison B. Kavey and Lester D. Friedman, eds. Second Star to the Right: Peter Pan in the Popular Imagination (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2009), 155.

! "#'!

apparent by the way he adopts his son’s rapt gaze, his face so close to the showroom

window that he crushes the tip of his hat. Here, as in many advertisements, the ability

to see and to take such pleasure in seeing, allows grown-ups to become children

again, and viewers of the ad to identify with their infantilization.

In addition to encouraging regression via secondary identification, however,

advertisements also directly returned viewers to childhood by simulating for them a

state of infantile sensory exploration. As many theorists have argued, children are not

only more enraptured by the act of looking than their parents, but the very quality of

their sight is unique. In Emile, for example, Rousseau argued that children’s

perception is more acute, intense, and lively than their parents’.53 As a being that is

still in many ways “outside” of culture – without the ability yet to filter her sensory

engagement with the world through language or other cognitive processes – the child

has what art historian Alexander Nemerov calls a “primally enchanted experience of

the world.”54 In this regard, the increasingly lush colors and elaborate form that

characterized postwar advertising can be understood as granting adult consumers

access to childhood perception, and thus the lost realm of childhood itself.

These artistic developments speak to the ways in which postwar visual culture

began to privilege identification with the child, even when not openly displaying

children or adults acting like children. During the postwar period, major advertising

agencies began to stress what executive Leo Burnett called “the inherent drama” of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!53 See Lebeau, 16. 54 Alexander Nemerov, The Body of Raphaelle Peale: Still Life and Selfhood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 41.

! "#(!

the product, often making a close-up of the commodity itself – as in the famous

postwar Pillsbury Cake Mix and Meat Institute ads – the center of the composition.55

Pillsbury quickly became well known in the postwar era for their increasingly

dramatic compositions that featured extreme close ups of the cakes, as well as full

color spreads (introduced by more frequent use of the four-color printing process) and

full bleed, a printing technique in which the image appears to run to the page’s edge,

uncontained by internal visual margins (Figure 23).56 The tactility of the objects, their

apparent material presence, helps to transform the viewer’s (usual) unfocused, roving

glance into what Freud called the “primal stare” of the infant.57 Within this primal

stare, the details of the object we might otherwise ignore become apparent, inviting us

to explore their material properties with the bodily, cross-sensory interest of a child

who is just learning how to take in her surroundings.58 For children engaging with a

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!55 See “Is There a Case for Bleed?” Analysis of Bleed Space Advertising, Prepared by J. Walter Thompson Media Research Department (New York), May, 1956. J. W. Thompson Collection, Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History, ADV Techniques, Bleed v. Non-Bleed, Folder 2. 56 D. Morgan Neu, “Readership of Bleed Versus Non-Bleed Advertisements,” Art Direction Department, February 1981, J. W. Thompson Collection, Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History, ADV Techniques, Bleed v. Non-Bleed, Folder 2. During the fifties, use of bleed grew rapidly, spurred by statistical studies that found bleed more effective for emphasizing detail or magnitude of a product, and gaining viewer attention amid an increasingly busy mediascape. In Life magazine, for instance, the number of bleed pages in 1953 was 486 (19%); 1954, 657 (19%), and 1955, 815 (22%). In Ladies’ Home Journal, 1953 was 63 (10%); 1954 it was 77 (14%), and 1955 was 135 (16%) (see Is There a Case for Bleed? Analysis of Bleed Space Advertising, Prepared by J. Walter Thompson Media Research Department, New York, May 1956, p. 9, Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History). For a summary of statistics regarding the relationship between color and reader attention, see “Daniel Starch Lists Some Basic Conclusions About Readership of Advertising,” Advertising Age, December 2, 1963, 103 (in J. W. Thompson files, Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History, Box 84, Folder 1 “Advertising Techniques”). 57 See Nemerov, 43. 58 This interrelatedness between sight and touch mirrors a type of perception that is resolutely infantile. While adults may use vision as a primary means of interpretation, children link this vision to their other senses, encountering the world through their bodies. Nemerov argues (following Merleau-Ponty) that the close-up image most fully incorporates the body into our act of looking, allowing us – even as adults – to violate the barrier between the material object and our own subjectivity; to touch, smell, and

! "#)!

world they have yet to fully understand, the quotidian details of life – a slab of meat,

a slice of cake – are extraordinarily sublime. These advertisements make the most

familiar and mundane goods newly abstract to adult readers, transporting them, if

momentarily, back to an earlier time in their development.

Together, the shimmering surfaces of commercial language and the somber

“documentations” of trauma formed the visual scheme of popular periodicals and thus

served as a microcosm of the postwar era’s eclectic visual fabric. Yet underlying the

apparent opposition between images of suffering children and commodity abundance

are similar processes of identification, and thus, similar means of articulating the

postwar relationship to history. In prompting adult readers to identify with child-like

perception, these advertisements offer another iteration of the historical confrontation,

acceptance, and catharsis encouraged by orphan-turned-adoptee narratives. As distant

from the harsh realities of the Korean War as it may seem, advertising’s logic in

representing adults-as-children allows us to see how past traumas became translated

into the bright, fantastical space of commercial visual culture, and eventually, into

other realms of popular media, such as film.

Men Will Be Boys

This golden age of childhood produced many films for and about children:

Old Yeller (1957), Houseboat (1958), Cheaper by the Dozen (1950), Little Women

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!taste that object with our vision (see Nemerov, 31). Nemerov describes this subject-object relationship as “a relation in which objects do not have names but gain in sensuousness; in which secure distinctions between subject and object break down; in which the objects of one’s perception phenomenologically mirror one’s primordial embodiment” (ibid., 4).

! "#*!

(1949), Member of the Wedding (1953), The Bad Seed (1956), Shane (1953). Yet the

films made for and about adults often more candidly reveal what postwar childhood

actually meant to the culture that produced it.59 Free from the responsibility of

entertaining children or presenting an angelic ideal through the figure of an actual

child, such films about regressing adults present a straightforward view of what

childhood came to symbolize in an era obsessed with juvenility.

It is not merely coincidence, then, that two years after the release of Battle

Hymn, Rock Hudson starred in Pillow Talk, the first of a series of light romantic

comedies that he would make with Doris Day. Pillow Talk – what cantankerous New

York Times critic Bosley Crowther proclaimed as “one of the most lively and up-to-

date comedy-romances of the year”60 – charts the eventual union of philandering

songwriter Brad Allen (Hudson) and interior decorator Jan Morrow (Doris Day). As

expected, their relationship begins acrimoniously: the couple has never met in person

but shares a party line and disagrees over its use (Jan, angry that Brad ties up the line

serenading his girlfriends; Brad, angry that Jan is interfering with his seduction

ritual). When the pair ends up at the same club one night, Brad is shocked to find Jan

attractive, and, fearing that she would reject him based on their current relationship,

introduces himself as “Rex Stetson,” a gallant, upstanding Texan. For the remainder

of the film, he (as Rex) lights up the party line, wooing Jan with elaborate tales of his

humble beginnings and various clichés about ranching in Texas. Instances of !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!59 After all, as Jacqueline Rose argues, the meaning of childhood in any given era is always more about adults – their wishes, desires, anxieties – than actual children (Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan, or, the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction [London: Macmillan, 1984], 3). 60 Bosley Crowther, “The Screen: Pillow Talk, New York Times, October 7, 1959, 47. http://proquest.umi.com.

! "$+!

mistaken identity, double entendre, and misinterpretation ensue, until eventually Jan

discovers the ruse. The two engage in one last verbal brawl, and the film ends – like

all of the Hudson/Day films – with their marriage.

Pillow Talk forges its most obvious link with childhood through its

commercial moments, which encourage, like contemporary advertisements, both

primary identification with childish perception and secondary identification with

infantilized protagonists. Given its visual brilliance, Pillow Talk is a prime example

of the cinema’s ability to “thrust…its audience back into the world of childhood.”61

Jan’s occupation as an interior designer and status as an urban “single girl” provide

ample opportunities for flamboyant displays of costuming and décor, color and

texture, which presents viewers with a multi-sensory – and thus, juvenile – visual

experience. Likewise, the use of Cinemascope alters the frame’s aspect ratio to reflect

more closely the horizontal range of the human eye. For audiences unaccustomed to

widescreen formats, Cinemascope offered an unexpected re-introduction to the

breadth and capacity of human perception, which is both newly engaging and

infantilizing in its sensorial complexity.62

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!61 Lebeau, 17. 62 In this regard, Pillow Talk is part of a broader movement within the industry that devised ever more elaborate ways to make movie-going a multi-sensory experience. Cinerama – the more elaborate predecessor to Cinemascope – used three projectors to produce a single image across a screen that had been curved to mimic the viewing angle of the human eye (William Paul, “The Aesthetics of Emergence,” Film History 5, no. 3 [September 1993], 326-7). 3D, which debuted in 1953, focused not on panoramic width, but rather depth of field, attempting to dissolve the barrier between viewer and screen object (ibid., 334-335). Other faddish technologies had a similar aim: Regiscope used electronically animated puppets to augment the action in the scene, AromaRama and Smell-O-Vision disseminated various perfumes at different points in the film (see Thomas Doherty, Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s [Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002], 20). It makes sense then, that William Paul’s description of a Cinerama horror film is so similar to popular understandings of infantile sensation. As he claims: “the terror here is one of total

! "$"!

In addition to mimicking childish perception with new screen technology,

Pillow Talk also returned viewers to childhood by encouraging secondary

identification with protagonists who acted like children. And, similar to commercial

culture, the primary means of signifying such “childishness” was through an infantile

infatuation with looking. Grown-ups enraptured by new visual “toys” was a common

trope in the postwar era, with images circulating widely of adult spectators

hypnotized by the (3D, Cinemascope) spectacle before them, and critics using these

parallels between parents and children as evidence of popular media’s deleterious

effect on American culture (figures 24 and 25).63 Pillow Talk immediately aligns us

with Brad’s perspective, suturing us into the diegesis through his character’s vision.

During the first in-person encounter between the two main characters, for instance,

the camera adopts Brad’s point of view, cutting to a close up of Jan’s legs and tilting

up to her lower back, mirroring – within the restrictions of the Code – the libidinous

(male) gaze that defined photo-spreads in Playboy. When not objectifying female

bodies, the film’s objective shots of Brad’s apartment, the swanky restaurants and

rustic lodges of the couple’s romantic outings, or of Brad himself adopt the

commoditized stylization similarly aligned with the print and advertising culture of !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!engulfment, a regression to a state in which boundaries between self and other are totally obliterated” (Paul, 337). 63 Dwight McDonald’s “A Theory of Mass Culture,” for example, compared the postwar United States with the U.S.S.R., arguing that America’s advertising, film, and television produced an “infantile” society in which adults avoided engaging with serious intellectual culture (for summary, see Sammond, 207). Despite how overblown these arguments may seem, television programs and movies directed at children often had a substantial following from parents (see Spigel, 200). Likewise, when Peter Pan premiered in 1953, a great deal of the merchandising and fashion trends were embraced more by adults than children, including the Peter Pan collar and the Peter Pan haircut (see Ohmer, 182). At this time, media directed toward children (thanks to codes established by the National Association of Broadcasters in this period [see Spigel, 194-5]) began to incorporate educational components, while film and television for “adults” became increasingly less cerebral.

! "$#!

male bachelorhood. Like in Playboy, Pillow Talk’s visual schema constantly reminds

viewers of who has the privilege of looking: looking with unrestrained sexual urgency

at women, looking with narcissistic self-appreciation at himself, looking voraciously

at a world of things open to consumption. This type of looking, so deftly articulated

in both print and film, exemplified the philosophies of the person most responsible for

this postwar embrace of childishness and its visual culture: Hugh Hefner.

The fifties did not completely give rise to the wealthy male bachelor (who

existed throughout western culture since the nineteenth century), but this era did see

its culmination in Hefner and his media empire.64 Hefner founded Playboy in 1953,

offering postwar men an image of blissful material and sexual indulgence, free from

the tedium of corporate culture and the stresses of suburban family life. Like its

predecessor Esquire (launched in 1933), Playboy established itself as a publication

for the urbane, sophisticated connoisseur, publishing articles on appropriate wine

selection, interior design, art, and music, and running advertisements for products

such as two-seater sports cars (what Playboy scholar Elizabeth Fraterrigo calls “the

automotive antithesis of ‘togetherness’”) and the grooming products that were

necessary to maintain the postwar bachelor’s impeccable standard of hygiene.65

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!64 See Bill Osgerby, Playboys in Paradise: Masculinity, Youth, and Leisure-Style in Modern America (New York: Berg, 2001), especially chapter 2: “This Side of Paradise: The Emergence of the Man of Style,” 17-38. 65 Elizabeth Fraterrigo, Playboy and the Making of the Good Life in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 65. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, advertisers struggled to market toiletries for men, since grooming was deemed effeminate. During the war years, when the military subjected men to more rigid standards of cleanliness, such advertisements gradually became more accepted, but it was not until the postwar era, and largely through Playboy, that male hygiene was so openly promoted (see ibid., 61; Kathy Piess, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture [New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998], 253-255).

! "$$!

Playboy believed that men deserved to be recognized as a viable market and resented

the fact that many companies continued to define consumerism as “feminine”

(although in order to prevent its forays into consumerism from being labeled

“effeminate,” the magazine courted the straight male libido with “playmates”).66

Beneath all of bachelorhood’s racy sexuality and sophistication, however, lay a need

to fulfill the most basic human desires all at once. Fancy canapés and designer suits

were status symbols, of course, but also a means of satiating intense yearnings for

physical comfort and pleasure. Likewise, sex was a carnal yearning to be fulfilled, not

by a “sweetheart” (which implied long-term commitment), but by a “playmate of the

month,” who had no aspiration for the entanglements of domesticity, and who was as

tantalizingly displayed as the commodities promoted in advertising spreads.67 Like

the impatient child who is tormented by sensations of longing, the Playboy bachelor

allowed himself to feel the full weight of these desires and to pursue them without a

second thought – if not in real life, then through the vicarious fantasies enabled by his

particular mode of spectatorship.

The Playboy-like exhibition of Brad’s lavish lifestyle further highlights his

regressive behavior. His apartment, for instance, is a model of the postwar “bachelor

pad,” complete with a cocktail bar, framed modernist paintings on the wall, a piano

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!66 See Barbara Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (Garden City: Anchor Press, 1983), 50. See also Tom Pendergast, Creating the Modern Man: American Magazines and Consumer Culture, 1900-1950 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 211-212. Unlike nudes in pulp magazines, which were often crudely explicit and printed on a shoestring budget, Playboy’s nudes exuded the same kind of upscale “sophistication” as any other commodity appearing in its pages. Printed on thick, glossy paper in full color, and posed modestly, the “Playmate” was, as Hefner explained “a fresh, young thing…” (Quoted in Fraterrigo, 41-2). 67 See Fraterrigo, 42.

! "$%!

(for work and for wooing), and a control panel on his coffee table, which can dim the

lights and transform the sofa into a bed with the flip of a switch. This home,

engineered for the inhabitant’s pleasure, is almost an exact copy of the urban

apartments featured on the pages of Playboy, and celebrates the philosophy of private

space championed by Hefner’s Playboy mansion, which, as Hefner himself stated,

was

A place where…I could change night into day screening a film at midnight and ordering a dinner at noon, having appointments in the middle of the night and romantic encounters in the afternoon. It was a haven and a sanctuary….68

Within this universe, the “rules” of the adult world no longer apply, and as such, it is

similar to the malleable, subversive concept of time and space advanced by many

children’s television programs. As Lynn Spigel argues, shows such as Howdy Doody

sought to provide children with an escape from an adult world order. Howdy Doody’s

opening sequence, which features the hands of a clock spinning uncontrollably,

assures children that for the next half hour, they will be transported into a child-

centric realm of fantasy and consumerism.69 The playboy and the child are therefore

united in their quest for an existence separate from the grown-up world. As Gary

Cross writes, “While Hefner has long relished his role as an icon of carefree

sexuality, his real achievement is remaining a boy all his life. ‘Hef’ lives on his own

playground.”70

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!68 Quoted in Beatriz Preciado, “Pornotopia,” in Cold War Hothouses: Inventing Postwar Culture, from Cockpit to Playboy, ed. Beatriz Colomina, Annmarie Brennan, and Jeannie Kim (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004), 218. 69 Spigel, 204. 70 Gary Cross, Men to Boys: The Making of Modern Immaturity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 15.

! "$&!

Within this “playground,” grown men revert back to the behavior of their

childhoods – Playboys are not men, and so much of Hefner’s enterprise supported

this. While the original logo of the magazine was designed to be a male deer (the

“stag”), it eventually transmuted into a much more playful icon, the female

“bunny.”71 Like schoolchildren, Playboy marked its territory, adopting a “no girl

(readers) allowed” attitude from the very first issue: “We want to make clear from the

very start, we aren’t a ‘family magazine.’ If you’re somebody’s sister, wife or

mother-in-law and picked us up by mistake, please pass us along to the man in your

life and get back to your Ladies’ Home Journal.”72 Such an environment of perpetual

play breeds an attitude of entitlement (not unlike that of the child, spoiled by

permissive parenting): the expectation that he will receive what he demands this

instant, and when such demands are not met, he has the right to voice his discontent,

without heeding manners or social convention.

Brad’s lifestyle, modeled after Hefner’s, purposely evades social expectation,

making a clear statement against postwar conformist, suburban, corporate culture.73

And while much of his rebellion consisted of very adult endeavors, this act of doing

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!71 Preciado, 226. 72 “Volume 1, Issue 1,” Playboy undated first issue, 3, quoted in Fraterrigo, 21. This was true of many magazines directed toward a male reader. True, the Esquire for what Prendergast calls “the beer and poker set,” adopted a similar stance toward women. In 1944, editor Bill Williams responded to angry letters from readers who worried that True’s advertising and editorial content was making it more feminine: “We have been trying to put out a magazine for men. Personally, we don’t want women in here. What’s going on, anyway? Are there women readers of this book? If so, why? Why don’t they get out?” (quoted in Prendergast, 233). 73 Hefner’s resistance to postwar mass culture developed from being very much a part of it during his early life. After graduating from high school and completing military service, he attended college, married, had a baby, and then attained a series of corporate desk jobs, one of which was as a circulation manager for the youth-oriented magazine Children’s Activities in 1953 (see Fraterrigo, 18-20).

! "$'!

what is forbidden or not culturally sanctioned echoed the “naughty” child narratives

that became increasingly popular in advertisements throughout the fifties. While the

“trickster” child (such as Buster Brown, mascot of the Brown Shoe Company)

appeared occasionally before the fifties, parents or other authority figures depicted in

the ad always punished him for his behavior. In the postwar period, however, parents

indulged the naughty child, applauding his anti-establishment sensibility as a

necessary defense against the conformist evils of mass society.74 According to Spigel,

Dennis of Dennis the Menace was one such “naughty” child who embodied all of the

qualities that Americans felt were once at the root of their national culture: disregard

for authoritarian structure, endless curiosity, independence from normative

restrictions, and a lively sense of adventure. In breaking the rules, Dennis (and the

little boys like him) exhibited the qualities once vital to American identity, and in

many ways, Brad and Hefner did the same. The nude photographs of playmates, for

instance, served as a way of mitigating the influences of mass capitalist culture that

the magazine’s advertising and editorial content promoted. The bachelor who uses

sex for personal enjoyment rebels against postwar culture (namely its domestic

ideals) even while partaking of its material offerings. In this regard, he is most like

the ideal postwar child: representative of fifties abundance and privilege, and yet

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!74 Most of the “naughty children” in literature and in popular postwar culture have been little boys. The free spirit, independent nature, adventure and curiosity associated with this “badness” was assumed to be an inherent part of boys’ culture rather than girls’ (see Brown, 25).

! "$(!

resisting, through his self-indulgent but harmless antics, the parts of culture that

seemed dangerously conformist.75

Instances that directly recall the gestures, expressions, and mannerisms of

children further enhance Brad’s affiliation with the childish consumer of Playboy.

The opening credits, for example, immediately infantilize the two main characters,

depicting them within a parallel set of bedrooms, separated by a changing screen

running down the middle of the frame (figure 26). Both are pajama-clad and

positioned face up on their beds (so that only their crossed legs are visible to the

audience), within an unmistakably childish mise-en-scene: Brad’s half of the screen is

a light blue, and Jan’s a soft pink. Moreover, throughout the credit sequence, the two

throw pillows at the center screen – an action that had served as a reference to

childhood since early cinema.76 Later, while Jan and “Rex” are on a date they

participate in a number of childish activities: joining in, sing-along style, to the club’s

rendition of “Roly Poly,” turning to each other during the chorus to play paddy cake

(figure 27); and on another date, “Rex” describes his ranch in Texas to Jan by making

a diorama out of napkins and sugar cubes at the dinner table (figure 28). Brad’s

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!75 Such anti-normative attitudes pervade the dialogue in Pillow Talk. The now-famous speech that Brad gives to his thrice divorced best friend, Jonathan (Tony Randall) about “settling down” humorously references concerns about marriage’s castrating effects: “Before a man gets married, he’s like a tree in a forest. He stands there independent, an entity unto himself. Then he’s chopped down, his branches are cut off, he’s stripped of his bark, and is thrown into the river with the rest of the logs. Then this tree is taken to the mill. And when the tree comes out, it’s no longer a tree. It’s a vanity table, a breakfast nook, a baby crib, the newspaper that lines the family garbage can.” Playboy features similarly advanced this notion, with articles such as “The Abdicating Male and How the Gray Flannel Mind Exploits Him,” “The Womanization of America,” and a piece on alimony titled “Miss Gold Digger of 1953” (Fraterrigo, 30-2). 76 Children engaging in pillow fights provided some of the most common themes for early film, with titles such as A Pillow Fight (1897), New Pillow Fight (1897), and Pillow Fight, Reversed (1903) (see Lebeau, 24-25).

! "$)!

position as the “child” is perhaps most pronounced in his earliest interactions with

Jan. In their first split-screen confrontation over the phone, Jan attempts to establish a

logical system for sharing the line (“Now, Mr. Allen. Let’s try to be adult about this,

and work out some kind of schedule…”77) while Brad rolls his eyes, sighs, lights a

cigarette, and at one point, removes the receiver from his ear and waves it around to

express his ennui. While Jan attempts to manage the situation as a mother would,

Brad, like a child being told what to do, reluctantly agrees but demonstrates his

dissatisfaction.78

Brad was one of many playboy roles Hudson would fill throughout the

decade, and nearly all of them expressed his immaturity through a childish – that is,

carnal, multi-sensory, desirous – mode of vision. Some, however, used vision as a

direct metaphor for his access to childhood, with Hudson’s ability to see, and

eventually to help others to see, linking him to a kind of eternal youth. In Douglas

Sirk’s 1954 melodrama, Magnificent Obsession, for example, he plays selfish

bachelor Bob Merrick, whose recklessness causes the death of the venerable town

doctor, Wayne Phillips, and whose subsequent attempts to square himself with

Phillips’s widow, Helen (Jane Wyman), results in a serious accident that causes her to

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!77 Quote from Pillow Talk, directed by Michael Gordon (1959; Universal City, CA: Universal, 2004), DVD. 78 Pillow Talk is one of many postwar films to feature female characters playing “mother” to bachelor playboys. In The Tender Trap (1955), urban singleton Charlie (Frank Sinatra) relies on an endlessly rotating group of nameless women (former companions) who cook for him, clean his house, walk his dog, and keep him entertained (for more on this point, see Steven Cohan, Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997], 276). In Bells Are Ringing (1960), the conflation of mother and wife becomes especially apparent when bachelor songwriter Jeff Moss (Dean Martin) falls in love with his telephone answering service operator (Judy Holliday), whom he had always referred to as “Mom” because of her willingness to provide him with advice and helpful reminders.

! "$*!

lose her vision. Although Bob learns “adult” virtues such as generosity and discipline

as the film progresses, he maintains a youthful faith in forgiveness and recovery,

believing that Helen will see again and that their affection for each other will continue

to flourish (their relationship grows only because he, like Brad in Pillow Talk, poses

as someone else). Such innocence contrasts Helen’s seasoned poise and grim outlook,

thereby aligning his sight with childish optimism, her blindness with adult realities.

By the end of the film, however, Bob’s influence returns Helen to a version of her

former self both figuratively (as her daughter claims, Bob’s presence makes her

happy again, turning her “into the girl she was before…”79) and literally: after earning

his medical degree, he performs the near-impossible procedure that restores her

vision. Like Pillow Talk and other swinging-bachelor comedies of the era, it is the act

of seeing that most clearly links the grown man to America’s idealized, metaphoric

child. And it is identification with this particularly “juvenile” mode of vision that

facilitates, for casual moviegoers, the same type of regression that became essential to

embracing history as a part of the national body.

Children Inside, Others Within

Brad’s carnal desire, which formed perhaps the most telling link between

Pillow Talk and infantile regression, underscores the unique taboo carried by postwar

children, who bore the mark of “otherness” even as they served as glorified symbols

of national identity. In this stateside “golden age” of psychoanalysis, the evolutionary

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!79 Quote from Magnificent Obsession, directed by Douglas Sirk (1954; Irvington, NY: Criterion Collection, 2008), DVD.

! "%+!

model advanced in Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality gained much

traction, conditioning Americans to understand childhood as the most “primitive”

stage of human development, characterized by qualities – such as sexual impulses –

that “civilized” adults had learned to control.80 Of course, this idea sat uneasily with

long held cultural beliefs about children’s purity and innocence, making this work

very controversial when first published in 1905, and causing widespread discomfort –

as well as fascination – when childrearing experts such as Benjamin Spock began to

address childhood sexuality in the postwar era. The careful, nonthreatening language

of his Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care betrays an enormous effort to

domesticate psychoanalytic theory for anxious American parents.81 When examined

through the lens of postwar neo-Freudian discourses, Brad’s sexual exploits render

him recognizably “child-like” – not only because he shares so many qualities with

Hugh Hefner and the infantile Playboy philosophy, but because his preoccupation

with sex (so beyond the bounds of civilized society that it is played for laughs) marks

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!80 Freud asserts that the key to “the growth of a civilized and normal individual…” is the relinquishment of “the infantile sexual impulses themselves” (Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 4th ed., trans. James Strachey [New York: Basic Books, 1975], 44). 81 For a generation of mothers who, having moved en masse to the suburbs, could no longer rely on networks of extended family members for parenting advice, Spock was a comforting and reliable source of information. He became, as Steven Mintz claims, a “national father figure,” urging parents to trust themselves and to show their children love and affection (Mintz, 279). He helped parents understand their children’s behavior through “common sense” explanations of Freudian theory. To explain castration anxiety, for instance, he claims, “if a boy around the age of three sees a girl undressed, it may strike him as queer that she hasn’t got a penis like his” (Benjamin Spock, Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care [New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1957], 366; also quoted in Mintz, 279-80).

! "%"!

him as still at the beginning stages of what Spock termed the “slow process of

growing up.”82

Understanding Brad’s libidinous urges from a psychoanalytic perspective

revitalizes the links between his regression and national efforts to confront an

obscured and shameful history. For Freud, childhood was a “primitively”

unrestrained, sexualized state that constituted a “gap” in one’s life narrative – a

critical void that required ex post facto reconstruction. In his view, childhood was the

site of sexual formation (foundational to one’s subjectivity), which, like trauma, could

not be fully recalled in adulthood. As Steven Marcus argues, this “turn[ed] everyone’s

childhood into something like a prehistoric epoch…conceal[ing] from him the

beginnings of his own sexual life.”83 Childhood sexual development was a part of the

self that, like a national traumatic past, needed to be resurrected in order to establish a

stable sense of identity in the present (tellingly, Freud’s entire essay on infantile

sexuality was largely based on adult interviews rather than children’s).84 Pillow

Talk’s use of (hyper)sexuality to infantilize Brad reflects postwar Americans’ efforts

to rebuild the lost roots of who they had become – as humans and as a nation – by

accessing the alienated, silenced child within.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!82 Spock assured parents that, “If you realize that this early interest in sex is a natural part of the slow process of growing up and that it occurs to a degree in all wholesome children, you can take a sensible view of it” (Spock, 368-9). 83 Steven Marcus, introduction to Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality by Sigmund Freud, 4th ed., trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1975), xxiv; Freud, 42. 84 As he claims in a footnote in the second edition of Three Essays: “When the account which I have given above of infantile sexuality was first published in 1905, it was founded for the most part on the results of psycho-analytic research upon adults. At that time it was impossible to make full use of direct observation on children: only isolated hints and some valuable pieces of confirmation came from that source” (quoted in Marcus, xxv).

! "%#!

Pillow Talk’s portrayal of adult regression thus lends new complexity to

Brad’s performance as Rex. Such comedic role-playing (a quality of childhood

enthusiastically promoted by the postwar toy industry) immediately marks Rex as

“childish.”85 Yet what makes his performance exemplary of postwar regression is

how it defines this space of role-playing as exceedingly porous, indeterminate, and

conducive to the blurring of normative gender and sexuality codes. The film positions

Rex’s flagrant opposition to Brad’s machismo as the source of humor and as

stereotypical “evidence” of his gayness: Rex raises his pinky while sipping his

cocktail at the club, compliments the food and décor, and frequently mentions his

mother (“Sure would like to surprise my ma when I go back home…”). Aside from

perpetuating the era’s misguided equation of homosexuality and gender inversion (a

philosophy advanced in the first of Freud’s Three Essays, on “Sexual Aberrations”),

Brad’s turn as Rex also emphasizes the degree to which such postwar neo-

Freudianism conflated homosexuality with childhood – a stage of life in which one’s

sexuality was still fluid and indeterminate, and that would eventually be shed in favor

of adulthood’s hetero-normative patterns.86 Following this “logic,” childhood was a

period in which subjects had the freedom to engage with all forms of desire and

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!85 Since the nineteenth century, commoditized American play had revolved around taking on a persona other than one’s own. In the postwar era, coonskin caps and plastic guns encouraged little boys to imitate characters they saw on television, Barbie dolls and kitchen sets urged little girls to identify as potential wives and mothers, and a surge in “career-oriented” toys allowed both genders to play at being doctors, dentists, nurses, and teachers (see Mintz, 278; see also “Big Business Goes Tiny: Toys Help Promote Trade Names,” Life, November 9, 1953, 97-102). 86 See Stockton, 27. For a discussion of “gender inversion” see Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society, 2nd ed. (New York: Rougledge, 2004), 165-166. For more on object choice in infants, see Freud’s section on “Ambivalence” in Three Essays, 65-66, and also his discussion of how children’s high sensitivity to stimulation renders every experience potentially sexually charged (Freud, Three Essays 50; see also Lury, 77 and Lebeau, 101, 104).

! "%$!

object choice, including same-sex attractions and romantic attachments to one’s

parents.87 As Kathryn Bond Stockton argues, gay adults therefore represented “a

certain arrest in sexual development,” and as a result were “fastened…to the figure of

the child…”88

Coded as gay in the broadest of terms, Rex’s appearance throughout the film

reminds audiences of the degree to which the Rex/Brad split produces a certain sense

of ambiguity; an interstice that highlights the performativity of gendered norms and

the coexistence of varied sexualities (and ages) within the same subject. Rex’s

greatest importance to postwar viewers, then, was his ability to define childhood as

beyond the bounds of “normativity” (sexual and otherwise) – as something alien, if

foundational, to our current identities. Here, Pillow Talk reworks Freudian notions of

childhood-as-trauma, transforming its characteristic gaps in memory and narrative

biography into instances of queer potential, and encouraging viewers to regard Rex as

a necessary component to Brad as a man, as a subject, and as a metaphor for the

nation.89

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!87 According to his “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego” essay, Freud claimed that the adult gay man had never fully given up his identification with the mother, leading him to transform himself into her and to seek objects through which he can re-enact his mother’s care and affection toward him (see Bruhm and Hurley, xix). Like Freud, Spock believed that such stages are integral to one’s “normal” development. As he claims with regard to children’s attraction to their parents: “These strong romantic attachments help children to grow spiritually and to acquire wholesome feelings toward the opposite sex that will later guide them into good marriages” (Spock, 358). 88 Stockton, 22. Freud’s characterization of homosexuality continues to drive other cultural assumptions that link alternatives to heterosexuality with childishness. Following Vivian Zelizer’s study Pricing the Priceless Child in 1985, Stockton claims that conservatives often label homosexuality as “hedonistic, arrested, and, especially wasteful” in its non-procreativity (see ibid., 48; see also Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive [Durham: Duke University Press, 2004]). 89 See Bruhm and Hurley on how gaps, inconsistencies, fragmentations of texts often generate a text’s most “queerly productive moments” (xxi).

! "%%!

Yet the queerness of postwar childhood encompassed racial otherness as well.

The same theoretical paradigms that conflated race (i.e., “non-white” peoples) with

unrestrained sexuality (as discussed in Chapter 1) also forged a strong link between

race and childhood. For Freud, the raw, unregulated sexual drives characteristic of

early development connected sexuality to “primitiveness,” thereby coding the child –

bearer of this aberrant sexuality – as racially “other.”90 As Gail Bederman argues,

white western culture had long located itself at the pinnacle of civilization and

relegated all other cultures to an earlier era of evolution, closer to the barbarism of

animals than to the comparatively refined intelligence, compassion, and dexterity of

humans. At the turn of the twentieth century, psychologist G. Stanley Hall introduced

recapitulation theory into public discourse, proposing that white westerners’ life

cycles retraced the evolutionary steps of their ancestors, ultimately culminating in a

fully civilized adulthood (“other” races, by contrast, simply lingered in incomplete

evolution for the rest of their lives).91 Hall’s model allowed the once-binary

oppositions of primitiveness and civilization to be conceived as part of a single

developmental process, and for the regression of adults – particularly adult men – to

signify a re-acquaintance with the “savage” (non-white, non-western) other that he

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!90 See Mary Ann Doane’s discussion of Freud’s “A Question of Lay Analysis,” in which he likens the more puerile, untamed sexuality of women to the racialized primitiveness of the “Dark Continent” (see Mary Ann Doane, “Dark Continents: Epistemologies of Racial and Sexual Difference in Psychoanalysis and Cinema,” in Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis [New York: Routledge, 1991], 209-248). This, in combination with his assertions about childhood and “uncivilized” sexuality in Three Essays solidifies the Freudian affiliation between childhood, race, and sexuality. 91 Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Culture History of Gender and Race in the United States 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 93. Childhood became affiliated with racial otherness also because this model equated white children with black, Native American, and Asian adults, arguing that they were at the same evolutionary stage.

! "%&!

had been as a child.92 While Americans had historically used social Darwinism and

recapitulation to justify the disenfranchisement of certain groups, the postwar period

appropriated these theories to serve contemporary philosophies on childrearing.93

Permissive parenting methods embraced the child as a subject of observation rather

than an object to be behaviorally “conditioned” – a social science-inspired approach

that viewed growing up as a process of enculturation and children as animals in the

wild, distinct from white civilization.94 Thus, the postwar attribution of both racial

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!92 Bederman, 91. It is important to note that Hall’s theory of recapitulation excluded women, who he believed did not engage in the same extremes of “barbarism” and civilization as boys (see ibid., 97). Hall used recapitulation to encourage young boys to embrace their inner wildness so that they could retain some of this vigor and passion when they became “civilized” men and susceptible to certain diseases of “over-civilization” such as neurasthenia (see ibid., 86-88). 93 William Graham Sumner was one of the most enthusiastic proponents of social Darwinism during the nineteenth century, and frequently used Darwin’s theories to justify slavery. In his understanding, slavery, or the subordination of the “weaker” races, allowed the “stronger” races the freedom and leisure necessary for further intellectual development (see Rutledge M. Dennis, “Social Darwinism, Scientific Racism, and the Metaphysics of Race,” in Journal of Negro Education 64, no. 3 [Summer, 1995], 244). Imperialists mobilized a similar logic. As Richard Hofstadter claims, “Imperialists, calling upon Darwinism in defense of the subjugation of weaker races, could point to The Origin of Species, which referred in its subtitle to The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. Darwin had been talking about pigeons, but the imperialists saw no reason why his theories should not apply to men…” (Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought [1944; repr. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992], 170-171). Popular representation during this era often infantilized non-white, non-western groups, using the child as a metaphor for their presumed subordination and lack of evolution. The racialized “types” emerging from literature and minstrel shows often depicted African Americans as comically and benignly infantile in an effort to maintain the antebellum racial hierarchy in the reconstruction era and beyond. For literature on these representations and their relationship to post-bellum white anxieties, see David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991), and Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). For a discussion of these stereotypes in popular culture, especially film, see Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in Film (1944, repr., New York: Bantam, 1973). 94 See Sammond’s discussion of this movement, 252, 261-2. The postwar turn toward permissive parenting drew from anthropological models, such as those introduced by Margaret Mead in her 1955 study, Childhood in Contemporary Culture, which emphasized observation over conditioning and respecting children as autonomous individuals with unique needs, preferences, and skills. Spock and others often referred to recapitulation theory when explaining the naturalness of children’s sometimes-unruly behavior, and the role of parents in ensuring the nation’s bright, “civilized” future (see Spock, 223-4; see also Sammond, 284). For more on how this method differed from the previous generation’s behaviorist method of childrearing, see Rima D. Apple, Perfect Motherhood: Science and Childrearing in America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006), especially “The Modern

! "%'!

and sexual otherness to the “pre-cultural” child implies that beneath the racial

homogeneity of films like Pillow Talk lay the specter of “other” children like Kang,

whose faces and predicaments helped establish childhood’s place in postwar

ideology.

Much as Rock Hudson’s presumed heterosexuality made his portrayal of Rex

so “humorously” indicative of his regression to an earlier stage of life, it is was his

whiteness – the unmarked conformity of his star persona and the adult characters he

usually played – that implied a similar racial otherness in his developmental past.95

And while only implied in Pillow Talk, other films, such as the 1955 romantic

comedy, The Seven Year Itch, made such affiliations between childhood and race

readily apparent. In this film, Richard Sherman (Tom Ewell) is the straight, white

male lead – a Manhattan businessman whose wife and son have taken leave upstate to

avoid the summer heat, and who discovers upon their departure that a voluptuous,

nameless subletter (Marilyn Monroe) has recently moved into the apartment upstairs.

A series of fleeting exchanges in the hallway eventually culminate in the two

characters’ first real interaction, after a tomato plant crashes from her window onto

his verandah and he invites her down “for a drink.” As soon as he makes this offer, he

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!Way: Mothers Circa 1920-1945,” and “Now I Know that An Authority Figure Has the Same Opinion As Mine: Motherhood in the Postwar Period,” 83-134. 95 Hollywood publicity departments worked hard to cultivate Hudson’s unmarked “normality,” setting him apart from the hyper-virility of John Wayne and Charlton Heston, or the vulnerable, androgynous rebellion of Montgomery Clift and James Dean. In 1956, for example, Look ran a feature article on Hudson, who had just ended his brief, studio-orchestrated marriage to Phyllis Gates. The author writes, “He’s wholesome…He doesn’t perspire. He has no pimples. He smells of milk. His whole appeal is cleanliness and respectability. This boy is pure” (see summary and analysis of this article in Cohan, 296). It was only upon his death in 1985 that Hudson’s homosexuality would become a central focus, and that scholars would begin to discuss the implications of his “cleanliness and respectability” in relation to racial ideologies.

! "%(!

is torn as to whether he should pursue a temporary sexual relationship with this

anonymous woman or not, and the remainder of the film follows his moral struggle

over the course of the next three days.

Like Brad, Richard embodies childishness in his desire for (sexual) pleasure,

as well as in his knowledge that this desire naughtily transgresses the institutions of

marriage and the family. Much of the film is devoted to depicting his elaborate

fantasies, in which he places himself and The Girl in film, comic book, and pulp

fiction storylines. While there is some narrative justification for this (he works for a

publisher of sensational pocket books), his daydreams also align him with postwar

children, who many experts claimed were becoming so over-absorbed in popular

media that they had difficulty separating fiction from reality.96 Likewise, his

fumbling, clumsy interactions with his material environment evoke almost cartoonish

humor, as when his son’s roller skates seem to appear upon their own will to trip him

at the most inopportune moments. As he rushes to answer the doorbell (anticipating

the arrival of The Girl), a close up of the skate sailing inexplicably into his path

recalls the anthropomorphized, physics-defying realm of animation – that most

childish of art forms – in which “everyday objects…violate the conventional behavior

of the world of things” in order to provide an easy laugh. 97

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!96 Throughout the forties and fifties, stories about children imitating the behaviors they saw on television dominated the popular press. In a number of infamous cases, prosecutors claimed that children committed crimes – such as murder – because they had seen similar acts carried out on television. In 1954, the Kefauver Senate subcommittee hearings on juvenile delinquency used these instances as evidence that television was a negative influence on youth (see Spigel, 195). 97 Stephen Kline, Out of the Garden: Toys, TV, and Children’s Culture in the Age of Marketing (New York: Verso, 1993), 114. In another instance, when Richard attempts to navigate Manhattan with his son’s abandoned canoe paddle in tow, it repeatedly gets caught in ceiling fans and doorways and trips

! "%)!

But well before any of these childish displays, the film directs viewers to

anticipate Richard’s regression. Just after the opening credits, the first scene fades in

on an antiquated map on “the island of Manhattan,” which, an authoritative male

voice explains, “derives its name from its earliest inhabitants, the Manhattan Indians.”

Feigning the detached objectivity of an anthropologist’s eye, the camera pans across a

cluster of tipis and eventually rests upon a group of men in redface and stereotypical

American Indian attire. The narrator explains that they will stay behind to “set traps,

fish, and hunt” while their wives and children embark “up the river” to escape the

summer heat. As the men dutifully wave goodbye to their families, however, they

quickly become distracted by a scantily clad young woman (whose very presence

designates her as neither a wife nor a mother), and follow her as if in a trance, away

from the shoreline (figure 29). Rather than serve any narrative purpose, this sequence

instead foreshadows our introduction to Richard, who we first encounter waving

goodbye to his son and wife from the platform at Grand Central Station (“Manhattan

Island,” 500 years later, the narrator explains) along with a group of other husbands.

In a direct parallel with the previous scene, a sharply dressed woman interrupts their

farewell ritual, pausing them in a classic example of what Laura Mulvey has

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!him at every turn. The repetition built into his performance also offers a parallel with early cartoons, which presented the same “stunts and gags” over and over with little impact on the narrative – a quality, scholars claim, that made animation popular among both children and non-native speakers of English. Thus, Richard’s repeated act of hiding his cigarettes on himself and throwing away the key (only to search frantically for the key minutes later), offers a the same gag repeatedly, emphasizing this “short circuit language” of humorous action (for a discussion of this “short circuit language” and its appeal to a broad audience, see ibid., 100).

! "%*!

famously called “erotic contemplation” (figure 30).98 Clearly striving to relate the

Manhattan businessman’s libido to that of his Native American predecessors, the film

conflates – from its very first scenes – racial difference and sexual impulse, inflecting

the eventual infantilization of Richard with postwar beliefs about the distance

between childhood and “civilized” maturity.

Notably, the ways in which this awkward, racially charged scene employs the

codes of advertising places it firmly within postwar ideologies of recapitulation. By

the fifties, television and dime novels (The Lone Ranger, Davy Crockett, King of the

Wild Frontier, The Adventures of Long John Silver) offered their own iteration of

classic children’s fairytales, generating a market for related merchandise and media –

toy guns, spyglasses and eye patches, theme parks (such as Disney’s Frontierland),

Hollywood adaptations, and movie posters – that linked childhood and racial

otherness within a ubiquitous, capitalistic, visual rhetoric. As Jacqueline Rose argues,

the assumption that the child has “some special relation to a world which – in our

eyes at least – was only born when we found it” 99 has long been a staple of children’s

literature, which often featured an encounter with primitive “other” cultures in order

to establish an affinity between childhood and a certain “cultural infancy.”100 And

although she focuses on nineteenth century works, the unabashed commodification of

children’s culture in the postwar period made this evolutionary theory newly apparent

through a distinctly commercialized visual form.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!98 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Constance Penley, ed. Feminism and Film Theory (New York: Routledge, 1988), 57-68. 99 Rose, 50. 100 Ibid., 56.

! "&+!

In this regard, it becomes obvious why Peter Pan – written in the late

nineteenth century, but remade by Disney in 1953 – includes the character of Tiger

Lily, and why the animated film version allots significant screen time to a caricatured

spectacle of Native American culture, despite the fact that these scenes have little

bearing on the plot and many of the focus groups cited it as their least favorite.101 As

a character in Barry’s original text, Tiger Lily was perhaps viewed by producers as an

essential component to the re-telling of a beloved story; but the overt commerciality

with which Disney presents her scenes seem to move beyond homage, producing

social, rather than narrative, meaning through their resonance with adverrtising

culture. On the most obvious level, her stereotyped actions and attire echo the broad

misrepresentations common to travel industry campaigns, which often used Noble

Savage imagery to promote the history and mystique of remote destinations (figure

31). But on another, these scenes’ glaring abruptness – their unapologetic

discontinuity with the rest of the narrative – strongly resembles the visual references

of race and “primitiveness” in advertising, which are often unrelated to the product at

hand. Throughout the postwar period, white children (usually male) dressed as Native

Americans appeared frequently in advertisements for products as diverse as

televisions and station wagons, not because – as in campaigns for trains and airlines –

the ability to witness or engage with “authentic” Native American culture was itself a

selling point, but because stereotyped American Indian dress and movement

coincided with popular assumptions about the innocence, artlessness, and abandon of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!101 Disney decided to keep these gross misrepresentations in the film in part because it assumed that children – brought up on television westerns – would be able to relate to them (see Ohmer, 171).

! "&"!

children (note that a 1953 ad for Sylvania offers “free Indian headdresses” for

children when families visit the dealership [figure 32]). Tiger Lily’s abrupt presence

in Peter Pan adopts this rhetoric, with as little claim to authenticity and narrative as

the white children “playing Indian” within many contemporary advertisements. When

considered in relation to the broader visual language of capitalism, then, the

gratuitous, coarse references to race in The Seven Year Itch garner new meaning. In

signifying a fleeting return to childhood, they also assert a personal, evolutionary, and

national history marked by heterogeneity and (racial) difference.102

Films across genres readily employed such commercialized references to

childhood as a means of situating the past in relation to the present, and

acknowledging (in however misguided a way) the “remote” and “distant” parts of

history that constitute the self. But it was the musical, now in the final push of its

heyday, which most systematically used this rhetoric to represent the primacy of race,

“otherness,” and childishness in defining a newly porous national identity. Drawing

from commercial language to conventionalize its depiction of adult regression,

musicals encouraged mainstream audiences to identify more intimately with the

spaces of “otherness,” not as a distant and former part of the self, but as a living part

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!102 Within this context, Monroe’s signature childishness serves as a complement to Ewell’s regression. Uninterested in sexual relations or in stealing someone else’s husband (much to Richard’s disappointment), The Girl’s actions are motivated by basic needs: air conditioning in a hot apartment building, champagne and potato chips, company in a lonely town. Like a child not yet initiated into the grown up world of sexual politics, she only wishes to fulfill her physical urges. And, as discussed in Chapter 1, such wide-eyed frankness in embracing her sexuality marks her not only as a child, but also as raced. Given this contrast between Richard and The Girl’s embodiment of childishness, we might say that the masculine and feminine versions of regression reflect two different sides to “childishness”: men the naughtiness, self-fulfillment, and indulgence; and women the helplessness, dependency, and lack of wherewithal.

! "&#!

of the collective whole. In this regard, what had been long considered the most

uniquely and exclusively “American” of all film genres began to raise new questions

with regard to “Americanness” and its formerly rigid contours.

Commercial rhetoric in the style of Peter Pan and The Seven Year Itch

virtually defined the postwar musical number, which regularly – and without

narrative justification – featured white characters miming stereotyped movements,

sounds, and iconography of a culture other than their own. In the “Good Morning”

number from Singin’ in the Rain, for instance, the excitement of three friends (Gene

Kelly, Donald O’Connor, Debbie Reynolds) that results in an “impromptu” song and

dance around the house also spurs a brief musical interlude in which the performers

grab their coats and hats and mimic, in turn, “other” cultures: Reynolds wraps her

jacket around her waist to mime a hula dancer; Kelly uses his as a matador’s cape;

O’Connor makes his into an imaginary partner, caricaturing jazz dance. Nothing

about the narrative or the song itself invites this interruption, and as soon as it has

begun it is over, its awkwardness erased by the now famous tumbles over the living

room furniture.

Scholars and fans of musicals often overlook these moments, dismissing them

as evidence of the era’s intolerance or the postwar tendency to exoticize the

familiar.103 Yet if we understand them in terms of both the commercial moment and

concurrent developments in the genre, it becomes possible to see these racialized !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!103 Such a trend is perhaps best analyzed through the era’s food. In the postwar period, Chung King’s prepared “Chinese” foods (a line created in the ‘40s by an Italian American) became wildly popular, and cookbooks featured recipes for dishes such as “Spanish Fandango,” paella, risotto, and Chop Suey (see Jessamyn Neuhaus, Manly Meals and Mom’s Home Cooking: Cookbooks and Gender in Modern America [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003], 178).

! "&$!

clichés as an expression of childhood and thus, of a national identity in flux. What

most distinguished postwar musicals from their predecessors was the effort to

integrate narrative and number. During this period, the “backstage” formulas, which

presented their musical routines as visually spectacular and completely distinct from

the rest of the diegesis, gave way to routines that offered plot-related information and

advancement to the story. Singing and dancing were no longer justified as diegetic

performances but were intended to represent a character’s spontaneous effusion of

emotion. The rise of the integrated musical routine, in other words, marked the

introduction of childishness as a generic convention, achieved through loveable and

relatable protagonists whose indulgence in unmediated, juvenile expression playfully

rebelled against the rules of “civilized” adult society.104

From this integrated format emerged a new set of musical superstars – chief

among them Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire – whose postwar style became known for

combining the child-like and the virtuosic.105 In the “I Got Rhythm” number from An

American in Paris (1951), for instance, Kelly sings and dances on a Paris street with a

group of French schoolchildren, comically acting out the vocabulary of their “English

lesson” – “solider,” “airplane,” “cowboy” – all while forgetting his very adult

troubles as a loveless starving artist.106 Indeed, many of the era’s most iconic routines

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!104 For more on the integration of postwar musicals, see Jerome Delamater, Dance in the Hollywood Musical (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1981), and Gene Kelly: Anatomy of a Dancer, directed by Robert Trachtenberg (2002; Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2002), DVD. 105 When I mention Astaire here, I reference his postwar work for MGM (following his emergence from retirement with Easter Parade in 1948), which is much more in the “integrated” tradition than his Depression-era work for RKO. 106 Kelly was known in the industry as the one who specialized in dancing with children, and An American in Paris is but one example (see Rick Altman, The American Film Musical [Bloomington:

! "&%!

are notable for their expression of childish inhibition: so moved by his love for

Reynolds in his famous “Singin’ in the Rain” routine that Kelly leaps into puddles

and onto lampposts in the dead of night, shrugging sheepishly when “caught” by an

authority figure (the police); so thrilled by his encounter with a beautiful ballet dancer

in Royal Wedding (1950) that Astaire returns to his hotel room to dance out his joy,

cartoonishly tapping up the walls and onto the ceiling.107 As the era progressed,

integration’s emphasis on spontaneity helped cultivate what Jane Feuer terms

“bricolage,” a genre-specific style of performance that incorporates the surrounding

material environment into the dance.108 Like children who are fascinated by everyday

things, postwar musical performers maintained an innocent relationship to objects,

valuing them not for their cultural or use value but for their physical and sensorial

properties. When Kelly makes music out of a creaky floorboard and torn newspapers

in Summer Stock (1950), when Astaire twirls and dips a coat rack in Royal Wedding

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!Indiana University Press, 1987], 54-57 and Beth Genne, “’Freedom Incarnate’: Gerome Robbins, Gene Kelly, and the Dancing Sailor as Icon of American Values in World War II,” Dance Chronicle 24, no. 1 [2001], 83-103 for discussions of his routines with children in other films). 107 As Altman argues, the musical number transports us from “an unrelenting reality where slamming doors always make the sound of doors slamming…and a never-never-land in which doors only slam if they can be made to do so in time to the music” (Altman, 65). This physics-defying quality – or the idea that the material world has suddenly come to life and gone awry – was a large part of a childish aesthetic embraced by animation (Kline, 113-114). For an example of a musical routine that blends animation and live action, see Kelly’s “The Worry Song” with an animated Jerry the Mouse in Anchors Aweigh (1944); for an example of an anthropomorphization of material worlds, see Astaire’s “Shoes with Wings On” routine from The Barkleys of Broadway (1949). 108 Initially coined by anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, “bricolage,” or “tinkering,” refers to making “use of materials at hand which may not bear any relationship to the intended project but which appear to be all he has to work with” (Jane Feuer, The Hollywood Musical, 2nd ed. [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993], 3-7).

! "&&!

(1951), they demonstrate their wonder in everyday material things, as well as their

childishly anarchic interest in using objects in unexpected and unsanctioned ways.109

Recognizing the centrality of childishness to the postwar musical enables us to

see the racist clichés of individual routines as an extension of the period’s Social

Darwinist beliefs. And few routines more obviously reflect this equation of childhood

with racial difference as the “Prehistoric Man” sequence from the 1949 musical, On

the Town. The film, which follows the escapades of three sailors on a 24-hour leave

in New York City, very quickly provides a narrative excuse to place the cast in the

Museum of Natural History. There they meet Claire Hudson (Ann Miller), a woman

who had been ordered by her therapist to take up studying the evolution of humans in

order to kick her addiction to men. As Claire begins to sing of her ideal mate

(“Modern Man is not for me/the movie star or dapper Dan/Just give me a healthy

Joe/from Ages Ago/My Prehistoric man”), the rest of the characters dance in the

background, using the artifacts as props and costumes. Like children who cannot

resist the urge to play with everything they are not supposed to, Kelly, Frank Sinatra,

Jules Munshin, and Betty Garrett draw from a vast range of objects in order to create

brief tableaux vivantes. While the song implies that the characters are embodying

“prehistoric” civilizations through their performances, these discontinuous shots

suggest that such “primitiveness” is deeply connected to race. Each of the characters

mime, dance, and produce nonsensical vocalizations as accompaniments to each set

of props and costumes (Garrett appears in furs and a feathered headdress, Kelly and

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!109 For the anarchic streak in children, see Kline, 111.

! "&'!

Sinatra wield spears and wear grass skirts before a totem pole). In all of these

vignettes, the prehistory of man, embodied by the child, is crudely coded as

“Polynesian,” “Native American,” and “African” (figures 33 and 34).

In this example, integrated musical numbers are quite similar to postwar

advertising, and therefore to the commercial moments in films such as The Seven

Year Itch: seemingly incongruent with the rest of the narrative and visual surface, yet

bolstering an underlying ideological connection between childhood, identity, and

“cultural infancy.” What distinguishes postwar musicals from other films, however,

is the fact that childishness is such an essential, formative part of the genre – the

structural center around which integration, character development, and the intimacy

of viewer identification pivot. Though the appearance of racial cliché in musicals

retains the abruptness of “playing Indian” in advertising, it ultimately encourages

viewers to imagine themselves occupying the position of “other,” through the

movements and actions of characters with whom they can powerfully identify. As

Michael Wood elaborates, the integrated musicals of the fifties generated a certain

feeling of relatability. Musicals, he claims, “hint…that music is everywhere, scattered

all about us if we will only look and listen. Astaire and Kelly are the agents of hidden

truths rather than pure fantasies, they are our own voices and our own feet, dancing

and singing through those times when we really feel that way about our lives…”110

“Prehistoric Man” and “Good Morning” offer a visceral and immediate identification

that The Seven Year Itch humorously denies. With its “redface” clichés placed before

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!110 Michael Wood, America in the Movies, or, Santa Maria, It Had Slipped My Mind (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), 148.

! "&(!

the official opening of the film, and prior to any real introduction to Ewell’s

character, this scene is a crude metaphor for a distant, primitive past. The generic

structure of postwar musicals, however – their insistence that the protagonists are us,

and that in their regression, we experience our own – allows race and its intersections

with childishness to interpellate viewers on an intimate level.

Although the boorish ethnocentrism of these racial representations certainly

maintains a troubling distance between “self” and “other” (and cannot be mistaken for

a genuine embrace of diversity), the specificities of the postwar musical frame this

expression of childishness as directly linked to the self – whether through the

individual who identifies secondarily with the actor’s performance, or through a mass

audience that witnesses the integration of visible racial difference into a resolutely

“American” film tradition. The postwar musical thus lends the unspoken white

standard of Hollywood new significance, offering overwhelming racial homogeneity

not merely as the status quo, but as a metaphor for its destabilization. In this regard,

the whiteness of the performers of “Prehistoric Man” is doubly meaningful,

representing first the once-homogeneous makeup of the idealized, national prototype,

and the gradual acknowledgement of difference as an essential part of the characters’

self-expression and the genre as a whole. No longer locating difference as part of

distant evolutionary and personal past, the musical incorporated childhood and race

into its generic formulae, transforming this pastness into a recognizable and relatable

part of the present.

! "&)!

What all of these child-centric commercial moments hold in common is their

insistence that present identity stems from difference, from what is currently

perceived to be “other.” Just as Korean children were diversifying the nuclear family

ideal, the confrontation with history and the types of difference that they represented

gave voice to the burgeoning recognition of how much the national “Self” was

changing. These commercial moments, therefore, served as symbols not only of the

nation’s relationship to history, but of a new era of American identity formation in an

age of emerging identity politics.

It’s Always Fair Weather

Six years after the success of On the Town, MGM released It’s Always Fair

Weather. Initially conceived as a follow up to On the Town, it follows three army

buddies (only Kelly was retained from the original cast) who, upon returning to the

U.S. after World War II, make a pact to meet on the same day ten years in the future.

Most of the film takes place on that fateful day, tracing how their lives – and their

feelings toward each other – have changed over time. The very theme is a meditation

on aging and loss, and, with a satirical script by Betty Comden and Adolf Green, it

self-reflexively critiques the conformity and shallow materialism of postwar life.

While scholars frequently discuss It’s Always Fair Weather’s poor reception in terms

of its somber tenor (and less-than-triumphant ending), I think its most telling

deviation from previous postwar musicals – and thus, its greatest source of

melancholy – is its lack of childishness. At root, It’s Always Fair Weather is a film

! "&*!

about individuals – as well as a genre, and a culture – that have left their youth

behind.

The film exhibits some instances of spontaneity, but many of the routines rely

much more on montage and camera gimmicks than bricolage; likewise, many of the

musical numbers result from drunkenness (that most adult of activities), as if

inebriation rather than uninhibited joy or anarchic disregard for adult norms were a

prerequisite for entering these dream worlds of song and dance.111 The film’s

standout routine – Kelly’s “I Like Myself” – serves as one exception, and yet even it

lacks the unstudied, juvenile exhilaration of other postwar numbers. Accidentally still

wearing his roller skates from a previous scene, Kelly finds himself on a busy city

street and begins to sing and skate (and dance while skating) about his newfound

happiness. Stunning for its technical virtuosity and seemingly ebullient message of

love, redemption, and self-worth, the number echoes of his earlier “Singin’ in the

Rain.” And yet, while in his previous work, song and dance serve no other purpose

than to express his childish ability to feel, here, Kelly is clearly performing. Gone are

the children of his earlier films, who force him to be impulsive and wildly

imaginative. Instead, adult passers-by stare in awe of his talent and applaud politely

after he finishes. The only routine that highlighted adult childishness – one featuring

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!111 See Wood, who claims: “In the world as it is, in order to sing and dance, you have to be drunk. One could hardly be further from the world of Fred Astaire, or even from the earlier movies of Gene Kelly” (160).

! "'+!

Michael Kidd and a group of children making mayhem in a restaurant kitchen – was

cut from the final version of the film.112

It’s Always Fair Weather demonstrates the process of growing out of

childhood, perhaps before postwar audiences were ready. Most films with childish

protagonists hinted at this inevitable transition: after all, Pillow Talk ends with

marriage and a baby; The Tender Trap and Bells Are Ringing similarly imply

marriage and a domestic life; The Seven Year Itch proves that Richard’s childish

fantasies are precisely that: at the end of the film, The Girl helps him realize that his

wandering eye is a product of his own insecurities, essentially encouraging him to go

back to his wife and son. In all of these films, childishness is a necessary and valuable

trope through which to imagine the nation, and yet it remains a temporary measure,

eventually harnessed by an ideologically rigid ending that – as in real life – casts

aside juvenility in favor of adulthood. It’s Always Fair Weather, in true self-reflexive

fashion, merely makes this process of aging the subject of its narrative, implying that

the child’s special cultural status was unique to the postwar era, and would eventually

taper in a new age with new ideological biases and new means of representing them.

Yet its poor reception in 1955 indicates that it offered postwar audiences a harsh

reality that they were not quite ready to face: that all little boys and girls must grow

up eventually, and so, too, must all genres, and all nations.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!112 See “It’s Always Fair Weather: Going Out on a High Note” commentary on It’s Always Fair Weather, directed by Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly (1955; Culver City, CA: Warner Home Video, 2006). If On the Town included ample references to the postwar connection between childhood and primitive, evolutionary “otherness,” here they have been reduced to a brief musical reference to the pentatonic scale – a vaguely orientalized detail that is then quickly subsumed by his dancing technique.

! "'"!

Chapter 3 | Looking Forward: Teenagers and the Look of Rebellion

Introduction

In 1955, Geoffrey Shurlock, the notoriously conservative director of the

Production Code Administration, called a special meeting with Nicholas Ray and the

writers of Rebel Without A Cause, claiming that the script contained too many PCA

violations to convey in a single memo. After two long meetings and a total of

nineteen mandated changes (ranging from deleting the line “Good Lord!” because it

was “not used entirely reverently,” to reducing the number of kisses between the main

characters), Rebel was finally approved for release.1

The PCA could not be too careful. As Estes Kefauver blamed popular media

for the rise in juvenile delinquency, and as trusted periodicals such as The Saturday

Evening Post began to label the spike in youth crime “The Shame of America,”

Hollywood wanted to ensure that its film on the subject quashed any suggestion of

aberrant sexual activity, excess, or subversion.2 Yet when Rebel premiered on

October 3, 1955 – just three days after the death of its young star, James Dean – it

seemed to have the opposite effect: adults remained disquieted, unconvinced by the

film’s tidy, moralizing ending; and teenagers quickly fell in love, appropriating it as a

banner for their own disillusionment. As Jerold Simmons remembers, “Rebel was the

first motion picture to express our world rather than theirs. More than any other, it

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1 See Jerold Simmons, “The Censoring of Rebel Without a Cause,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 23, no. 2 (Summer 1995), 58. 2 See Richard Clendenen and H.W. Beaser, “Post Reports on Juvenile Delinquency: The Shame of America,” Saturday Evening Post, January 8, 1955, 17.

! "'#!

captured our youthful torment, our restless natures, our craving for acceptance…We,

too, were causeless rebels, and Rebel Without a Cause was our picture.”3

In spite of the PCA’s best-laid plans, something subversive lingered in Rebel,

difficult for both its staunchest critics and most loyal fans to locate. This chapter is

about that “something else” – those inaccessible, unsanctioned elements that

ultimately opened the film to such enthusiastic appropriation by all of the wrong

audiences for all of the wrong reasons. Like Marilyn Monroe’s Technicolor lipstick

in Niagara and the Cinemascope interior design of Pillow Talk, Rebel’s incorporation

of capitalistic visual rhetoric fostered a powerful, alternative dimension under the

radar of the censors. The film’s embrace of this imagery, particularly in its depiction

of teenagers, provides insight into how postwar, mainstream adult culture began to

use this new demographic – and the new visuality that grew up around it – as a means

of envisioning an imminent but highly uncertain future. And, since teenagers were

now uniquely capable of responding to representations of themselves (through both

consumption and new public forums such as Seventeen and Boy’s Life), their reaction

to Rebel highlights the polysemy of commercial moments, and the special power of

this hybrid visual form to upset the conservatism of mainstream popular culture.

That teenagers so easily appropriated the adult-constructed rhetoric in Rebel

speaks less to the “failures” of this imagery and more to the deep-seated ambivalence

that it embodied. Postwar advertising and studio executives – at once seduced by

teenagers’ potential as a consumer market, inspired by their promises for a more

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!3 Simmons, 63.

! "'$!

hopeful future, and terrified by the social changes they represented – attempted to

define teenagers in a manner that reinforced everything mainstream adults wanted to

believe about the nation’s future. Yet these efforts betrayed a fear that youth, like the

future itself, was beyond their control. Understanding how this commercial imagery

operated, and what it meant to different postwar demographics, is to understand the

complexity embedded in the American vision of the days ahead.

This chapter begins with a case study of Rebel Without a Cause, analyzing

how the union of cinematic and commercial rhetoric produced an image of

“teenagerness” that touched on the postwar era’s irreverent, anti-authoritarian

impulses, even as it so carefully tried to temper adult fears about an indeterminate

future. I will then discuss the ways in which films not ostensibly about teenagers,

such as the 1957 musical The Pajama Game, also appropriated this rhetoric. Released

from the moral restrictions placed on “social problem” films like Rebel, such films

had the freedom to use this teenaged imagery as a means of conveying adult

ambivalence about the prospect of imminent social change. Thus, if Rebel’s use of

this language opened up an alternative narrative thread that was in defiance of

industrial codes, Pajama Game’s references to the same visual language demonstrates

a willful embrace of teenaged visual rhetoric and all of its (often conflicting)

symbolism. Through Pajama Game’s more deliberate use of commercial moments to

represent civil struggle – and particularly its references to certain politically engaged

brands – I examine the degree to which this capitalistic, youth-based language was

always about more than markets and more than teenagers. Through commercial

! "'%!

language, both Rebel and Pajama Game worked within Code-era restrictions to

advance a radical message about postwar identity and to signify fraught issues –

about racial integration, unfair labor policies, and grassroots resistance – that were

otherwise repressed or ignored. In doing so, they encouraged mainstream Americans

to identify with people and experiences outside of their own, and to see this otherness

as part of their collective selves.

A Matter of Style: the Unintended Lives of Popular Imagery

Rebel Without a Cause remains one of the most iconic films about teenagers

from the postwar period, in part because its famous game of “chicken” eerily

resembles the fatal car accident of James Dean, and in part because the vast literature

on the film has cemented its status as a staple in cinema studies.4 The film famously

takes place over the course of one twenty-four hour period, beginning on Easter

Sunday evening, when the lonely, restless Jim Stark (Dean), is hauled into the

precinct on counts of “general drunkenness,” the night before his first day at a new

high school. At the police station, he encounters the other two troubled teens who,

over the course of the film, become his closest friends and surrogate family: Judy

(Natalie Wood) and Plato (Sal Mineo). The appearance of Jim’s overbearing mother

and submissive father at the end of the scene offers an explanation for his inner

torment, demonstrating how their shallow ineffectuality has left him without a moral !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!4 See Thomas Elsaesser, “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama,” in Film Genre Reader III, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), 366-395; for a range of scholarship on Rebel’s relationship to Cold War social culture, masculinity, and national identity, see J. David Slocum, ed. Rebel Without a Cause: Approaches to a Maverick Masterwork (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005).

! "'&!

authority or role model. The next day, Jim formally meets Plato, Judy, and “the kids”

– the menacing, exclusionary “in crowd,” led by Judy’s then-boyfriend, Buzz. After a

series of contentious encounters, Buzz challenges Jim to a game of chicken, which

ends in Buzz’s accidental death. In the ensuing hours, Jim, Judy, and Plato form an

intimate bond, fleeing to an abandoned mansion to escape Buzz’s gang, and finding a

reprieve from the stifling confines of postwar suburban culture. Eventually, when

Buzz’s friends descend upon the mansion, Plato – wielding one of his father’s guns –

flees back to the planetarium, where he is mistakenly and fatally shot by a police

officer. The film ends with a reconciliation between Jim and his parents, and a crane

shot of the police cars and ambulance pulling away at dawn.

As scholars have discussed at length, the narrative closure in the end is

predictably neat: Plato’s accidental death at the hands of the police fractures the self-

made kinship between the three friends, allowing Judy and Jim to assume normative

roles as romantic partners (a move made even more explicit by Jim’s final line of the

film: “Mom, Dad, this is Judy…”), and extinguishing the decidedly “non-normative”

sexual energy signified by Plato and his infatuation with Jim.5 With the dawn, the

tragedy, restless apprehension, and rebellion of the last twenty-four hours subsides to

make room for a reformed Jim and Judy, coupled and more accepting of adulthood. In

the last frames, the drabness of suburban, corporate culture snuffs out any glint of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!5 See Timothy Schary, Teen Movies: American Youth on Screen (London: Wallflower, 2005), 22. See also Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), 109-110.

! "''!

youthful energy as Jim covers Plato with his red jacket and the ambulance sweeps

him away.

Nonetheless, Rebel still sat uneasily with reviewers. As critic Rod Nordell

explained, “There is…a pictorial slickness about the whole thing in color and

CinemaScope that battles at times with the realism in the direction of Nicholas Ray.”6

It seems unlikely, however, that the root of critical unease was merely a matter of

style; after all, mannered performances and “slick” visual presentation were cherished

hallmarks of the industry during this golden era of family melodramas.7 As throngs of

teenaged fans demonstrated, the glimmer of rebellion that so stubbornly persisted at

the end of the film lay less in its “style” and more in its animate, commercialized

treatment of material things. Rebel’s excesses may have eluded concrete definition,

but their effects became evident through the actions of youth, whose demand for Ace

combs (which Dean routinely sweeps through his hair) and red jackets skyrocketed

after the premiere.8 As Steffi Sidney, one of the extras, claimed: “After the movie

came out, I’d go past my old high school, Fairfax High. It had a huge lawn in front

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!6 Rod Nordell, “Rebel Without a Cause,” Christian Science Monitor, October 28, 1955, 6. 7 Postwar auteurs such as Ray, Sirk, and Minnelli often used artistic flair to interrupt the flow of the classical narrative, and open it up to a variety of critical interpretations. In producing this alienating effect, style subverted the overarching (often ideologically conservative) message to which the film was forced to adhere. For examples of these readings in film studies, see Elsaesser, Laura Mulvey, “Notes on Sirk and Melodrama,” Movie no. 25 (Winter 1977-1978), 53-57, and Paul Willeman, “Towards an Analysis of the Sirkian System,” Screen 13 (Winter 1972), 133. For contemporary reviews, see Bosley Crowther, “The Screen: James Jones’ Some Came Running,” The New York Times, January 23, 1959, 17, Mae Tinee, “Written on the Wind is a Powerful Picture,” Chicago Daily Tribune, December 28, 1956, A9, and Edwin Schallert, “Magnificent Obsession has Inspirational Values,” Los Angeles Times, July 22, 1954, A7. 8 See Kerry Segrave, Product Placement in Hollywood Films: A History (Jefferson: McFarland, 2004), 133.

! "'(!

where kids used to eat lunch. And if you’d go past it in 1955, all of the boys would be

wearing the red jacket.”9

As popular responses across the generation gap reveal, Rebel’s engagement

with the material world of teenagers and teen-centric advertising imagery ultimately

forged a powerful connection between insubordination and the seductive realm of

youthful consumption. While Code-driven narrative conventions stifle teen rebellion

by the end, commercial moments ensured that the promise of rebellion remained very

much alive. As reviewer Philip Scheuer suggested anxiously in his review, taming

Jim and Judy and killing Plato was not enough to extinguish teenaged rebellion, or

prevent others from being inspired by the film’s portrayal of it. As he claims, “the

larger question still stares us in the face: What of all the other ‘rebels’?”10

We might say, then, that Rebel spoke on two different levels: one for

teenagers, and one for adults. Understanding the film’s relationship to the postwar

socio-political context relies upon teasing out the teenaged one – a thread clearly

discernable only through the film’s commercial moments. The commercial rhetoric

that developed around teenagers offers special insight into the ways in which

mainstream, adult culture used the figure of youth as a symbol for contending with

their own – conflicted, indeterminate – feelings about imminent social change. The

cinematic absorption of this rhetoric, and the affective registers that such cross-media

hybridization managed to touch, highlights the ways in which such seemingly

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!9 Quoted in Lawrence Frascella and Al Weisel, Live Fast, Die Young: The Wild Ride of Making Rebel Without a Cause (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005), 120. 10 Philip K. Scheuer, “James Dean Cheats Car Death in Bit of Film Irony,” Los Angeles Times, October 30, 1955, E2.

! "')!

contrived visual imagery acknowledged everything mainstream culture both loved

and feared about this newly forming demographic and, by extension, about the future

itself.

Of course, “teenagers” existed before the 1950s, but were for many decades a

porous, derivative category who were subordinate to adult approval and whose image

was driven by adult standards.11 But in the postwar period, emerging consumption

patterns legitimized teenagers as a unique demographic: more young people had

access to cars (by the early 1960s, over a fifth of American boys would own their

own vehicles), and youth spending (either by youth themselves or by their parents for

them) rose steadily, particularly for items such as mouthwash, makeup, cameras,

records, and extracurricular hobbies.12 With the proliferation of teen-specific goods –

“Date Bait” lipstick, “Collegiate” dictionaries – came a new regard for teenagers as

valuable consumers that deserved special consideration.13 Suddenly, the question was

not how best to mold the teenager to suit adult desires, but rather what would best

appeal to the teenager’s specific needs and interests. What were teenaged tastes? How !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11 Prior to this time, a majority of Americans skipped from childhood into adulthood, joining the workforce early to help support their families, and with high school education a privilege only accessible to the wealthy. Yet the job shortage wrought by the Great Depression meant that more adolescents remained in high school throughout the thirties, engaging with their peers outside of work and family (see Grace Palladino, Teenagers: An American History [New York: Basic Books, 1996], 5). By the early forties, businesses became eager to exploit the market potential of teenaged peer groups, inventing age-specific brands such as “Petiteen” and special issues of Parents magazine titled “Calling All Teens,” which boasted an advisory board of Judy Garland and Shirley Temple (ibid., 52-56). As historian Grace Palladino argues: “At this early stage in the process, the teenage world was neither hostile nor rebellious; ‘Teenager’ was just another name for an adolescent or high school student, a step up (but not away) from childhood” – an image that would change radically in the postwar era (ibid., 55). 12 Ian Brailsford, “Ripe for Harvest: American Youth Marketing, 1945-1970” (PhD diss., University of Auckland, 1998), 7. 13 Some products, such as colorful Royal typewriters, were invented specifically for the teen market (see Eugene Gilbert, Advertising and Marketing to Young People [Pleasantville: Printer’s Ink Books, 1957], 57).

! "'*!

did teenagers envision themselves and their futures? How might their tastes influence

the household spending? Catering to teenagers as consumers became crucial in the

postwar years – an endeavor that required continual, if masked, deference to adult

desires, and that eventually produced a type of imagery distinct from any previous

era.

Print advertising, which grew to new prominence during the postwar era, set

important precedents with regard to yoking various ages and interests into a single

form. Television is perhaps the medium most closely associated with the fifties, but

the postwar era was also a golden age for print media, with circulation at an all-time

high and revenue from advertising nearly seven times what it was during the

Depression.14 Part of its appeal, to readers and advertisers alike, was its ability to

speak directly to specific segments of the population. In contrast to the flow of

television programming, which aired over a broadcast and on a device shared by

“everyone” (in the nation and in the family), magazines often focused exclusively on

niche readerships, and were therefore an ideal medium through which to reach – and

define – postwar youth.15 Seventeen, first published in 1944, set the standard for the

postwar cultivation of this new demographic, engaging teenaged readers in a casual

and intimate “conversation” about issues that ranged from the seemingly mundane

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!14 See John Tebbel and Mary Ellen Zuckerman, The Magazine in America, 1741-1990 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 244. 15 See ibid., 245. In the postwar period, television began synchronizing its broadcasts and advertising to the schedules of its audiences and their presumed tastes. For instance, soap operas would be aired throughout the day, catering to (largely female) homemakers completing routine domestic tasks, and cartoons or other children’s programming would be aired in the early mornings and on weekends (see Lizabeth Cohen, Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America [New York: Knopf, 2003], 302).

! "(+!

(“the importance of eating breakfast in the morning”) to the weighty (juvenile

delinquency, atomic energy, and the stock market).16 Through regular features such as

“Letters to the Editor” and “It’s All Yours” – which invited readers to contribute

fiction, editorials, artwork, and poetry – Seventeen defined itself as a participatory

community, forged through active dialogue.17 As one reader claimed, “Though I’m

only fifteen-going-on-sixteen – I still think your – I mean ‘our’ – magazine is super

swell…”18

Yet this tone overlaid a complex network of other (adult) considerations.

Dependent, as most periodicals were, on the sale of advertising space for a bulk of its

revenue, Seventeen’s content was pitched as fervently to companies and parents as it

was to actual readers, aiming to convince potential advertisers that teens would have

both the financial support and permission to purchase the goods advertised to them.19

Thus, in 1944, when Estelle Ellis became Seventeen’s first “promotions manager,”

she used parental testimonials as evidence that advertising to its readers would be a

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!16 See “Who Said It’s Baby Food?” “Your Diluted Dollar,” and “Atomic Energy: Fearful Miracle,” c. 1946-48, Estelle Ellis Collection, #423, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Box 25, Folder 9. Seventeen was established in 1944 after it took over the flailing gossip magazine Stardom at Triangle publications (Brailsford, 18; Palladino, 107). There were, of course, a number of other prominent teen magazines, including Hot Rod, Senior Prom, and the publications circulated by the Boys and Girl Scouts of America, Boys’ Life and American Girl. I focus on Seventeen because its high circulation and positive feedback indicates that it most successfully balanced the demands of its various audiences, and also because, as a magazine “for girls,” it was especially invested in the visual rhetoric of consumption. While advertisers also targeted teenaged boys, they viewed young women as the ultimate consumers due to their assumed interest in cosmetics, fashion, and association with domesticity (see Lynn Spigel and Denise Mann, eds. Private Screenings: Television and the Female Consumer [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992], and Tania Modleski, Feminism Without Women: Culture and Criticism in a ‘Postfeminist’ Age [New York: Routledge, 1991], chapter 2: “Femininity as Mas(s)querade,” 23-34). 17 “256 Pages – March 1946,” Seventeen Promotional Reprints, 1946, Estelle Ellis Collection 423, NMAH, box 25, folder 7. 18 Phyllis Quinlan letter to the editor, c. 1945, in Estelle Ellis Collection, NMAH, box 17, folder 9. 19 Enid Haupt, one of the managing editors, kept a careful eye on the products advertised in Seventeen during the postwar era, prohibiting any items or advertising copy deemed too racy (see Brailsford, 26).

! "("!

worthwhile investment.20 As one grateful mother stated: “In so many ways I’ve found

your magazine a great help in putting across to my children the idea of acting and

dressing according to their age…I recommend that each and every mother read

‘Seventeen’ each month.”21 Throughout Ellis’s tenure, the language that Seventeen

used to advertise itself often stressed this dual appeal to teens and their parents, which

was crucial to convincing potential advertisers that the magazine could both generate

demand for new products (enlightening insecure teenagers about how to dress and

what to buy), as well as secure the means for purchase (promoting teenaged

consumerism as stepping stones to a respectable, parent-approved future).22 In spite

of the intimacy it established with its teenaged audience, Seventeen stayed true to its

belief that “there is a parent over the shoulder of every young reader.”23

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!20 Ellis served as promotions manager of Seventeen from 1944-1950 (see Kelly Schrum, “’Teena Means Business’: Teenage Girls’ Culture and ‘Seventeen’ Magazine, 1944-1960,” in Delinquents and Debutantes: Twentieth Century American Girls’ Cultures, ed. Sherrie A. Inness [New York: NYU Press, 1998], 140). 21 The letter continues: “I find that since the publication of your very fine magazine my children have taken quite a different attitude toward me, their mother. In fact, I am about the last word in everything that is ‘up-to-date’ and ‘sharp-as-a-tack’ – to use their own words. Thanks to you, they know mother was quite right in her constructive criticisms…” (letter from Mrs. Murray, “Seventeen Testimonial Letters, 1945-1946,” in Estelle Ellis Collection, NMAH, box 17, folder 9). 22 For example, in 1946, Seventeen issued a “preview” of the March edition, superimposing commentary over samples of the articles, which claims: “Our interest in their interests and in their problems prevails…What teen-age girls think, do, plan, and above all – are, continues to be our major concern…” At the same time, however, the language also emphasizes an appeal to parents. For instance, the “Decent Exposure” article ostensibly introduces fun hobbies to teenagers, but, as the commentary states, “Hobbies…frequently lead to a career! Serious, responsible, Seventeeners spend much of their leisure time planning and preparing for the future,” thereby guarding against speculation that the magazine would indulge a teenaged impulse toward rebelliousness or delinquency (“256 Pages – March 1946,” Seventeen Promotional Reprints, 1946, Estelle Ellis Collection 423, NMAH, box 25, folder 7). To further entice potential advertisers, Ellis touted the market potential of teenaged girls. A 1948 pamphlet claimed, “The items on Teena’s shopping list today are the ones she’ll buy when she’s feeding, clothing, and keeping house for a family of her own” (“Any Way You Look At It…Seventeen Comes Out on Top!” Print Ads to Advertisers, 1948, Estelle Ellis Collection 423, NMAH, box 26, folder 1). 23 “256 Pages – March 1946,” Seventeen Promotional Reprints, 1946, Estelle Ellis Collection 423, NMAH, box 25, folder 7. Perhaps the best evidence of this philosophy was “Teena,” a promotional

! "(#!

Such was the context within which advertising to teenagers – a relatively new

concept with little aesthetic precedent – needed to emerge. In 1945, Eugene Gilbert

became the foremost advisor to companies interested in appealing to youth through

his marketing firm (not coincidentally, his first account was Seventeen).24 The

booming popularity of his firm, his prolific writing – including a book, Advertising to

Young People, and a weekly syndicated column “What Young People Think” – made

Gilbert highly influential in molding this commercialized language. His pioneering

research methods, in which he solicited feedback from a “consultant board” of actual

teens, allowed him to create campaigns that used a voice and style consistent with

contemporary teenaged sensibilities. Yet like Seventeen, he aimed to cultivate an

image of youth that would satisfy mainstream standards of respectability and in many

cases assuage or redirect adult fears about this mysterious new social category.25

While postwar experts fretted that teenaged “other-directedness” and copycat

behavior could lead to delinquency, Gilbert and Ellis reframed these qualities as

being beneficial to manufacturers whose success relied upon the latest trend

spreading through word of mouth.26 While adults worried about teenagers’

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!figure used by Seventeen to convince companies of teenaged girls’ unique buying potential. Culled from a series of interviews with over 1075 loyal readers in 1945, Teena’s composite image was undoubtedly skewed by a biased sample and the fact that many parents chaperoned the interviews (based on the statistical data, she was a white, 5’4” sixteen-year-old, weighing 118 pounds, who has about $13.48 spending money per month, subsidized by $2.13 weekly allowance. Her father is a white-collar professional, and she aspires to be a successful homemaker in the future). Teena – the face of the magazine to the adult world – was thus less a reflection of the “average” reader and more a projection of parental and corporate fantasies (see Brailsford, 20). 24 See “Youth Market,” last modified September 15, 2003, http://adage.com/article/adage-encyclopedia/youth-market/98946/. 25 See Brailsford, 27. 26 As Gilbert claimed, there was a strong “leader influence” among teenagers, who “like to do what other[s] do,” which could be very beneficial to retailers (Gilbert, 31). Ellis similarly stressed the power

! "($!

irreverence toward tradition, Gilbert and Ellis instead saw their vanguard sensibility

as useful in generating trends.27 Their work stressed how teenagers could brighten the

future with their promise and capability, but mostly by fuelling the economy,

absorbing wartime overproduction and therefore helping to prevent what many

Americans feared: another Great Depression.28

The process of developing a teenaged commercial rhetoric took time and

conscious effort, and many advertisements directed at teenagers throughout the forties

bear the traces of this trial and error: some were too racy (as in the 1944

advertisement for “Varvacious” perfume, which states “Her presence is

dynamic…her attraction undeniable…her impression unforgettable” over the face of

a young woman with her mouth seductively open and eyes half closed29), too

restrained (as in the ad for “Junior First” dresses in 1946, which displays models in

prim, stiff-backed poses), or too quirky (such as a series of early forties Pepsi

advertisements that provides an “English translation” for teenaged slang [figure 35]).

In the postwar period, advertisers eventually chartered a middle ground, featuring

what Gilbert called “charming” and “fun-loving” youth, rather than the “stiff-figured,

long legged prototypes” or the sexy vamps of the previous decade.30 Eventually, the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!of youth-based peer relations in generating sales, claiming that “[Teena wants to] look, act, and be just like the girl next door…For Teena and her teenmates come in bunches, like bananas…Sell one and the chances are you’ll sell them all” (quoted in Palladino, 102). 27 As Gilbert asserts, “Within this group almost all mass buying trends originate. The mass adult market may not feel all the trends in this storm center, but most of those that reach the adult market have their beginnings here” (27). 28 On “absorbing” wartime overproduction, see Leerom Medovoi, Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 17. 29 See Schrum, 146 for a full analysis. 30 Gilbert, 158.

! "(%!

“Varvacious” ad gave way to Revlon’s “Bachelor Carnation,” in which a clean-cut

teenaged girl and boy stand back-to-back while holding up a box of matching nail

enamel and lipstick (figure 36).

As the plot of Rebel confirms, Hollywood’s postwar portrayal of teenagers

was similarly marked by compromise.31 Yet the occasional merging of cinematic and

advertising language reveals the deep anxiety that lingered just below the surface of

advertising imagery and just before the neat closure of the Hollywood ending.

Commercial moments, in other words, kept all of the elements that films attempted to

suppress (or to tie up neatly at the end) very much alive. Rebel thus contains another

narrative, told through its use of capitalist-inflected imagery, which stands in defiance

of the ostensible “social problem” plotline. Although subtle, it opened the film to

interpretations that no one – not even the PCA – could tame, precisely locate, or

ignore.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!31 The fifties saw the rise of the teenage exploitation film, or “teenpic,” which, unlike major releases backed by the larger studios, were quickly and cheaply produced, featured a pulsing rock and roll soundtrack, and drew their inspiration from sensational headlines. Because they avoided the scrutiny to which mainstream films were subjected, they catered to the sensational plots and affective engagement that this particular audience desired (see Thomas Doherty, Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s, revised and expanded edition [Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002], 71-75). There was a flourishing market for these films, since postwar teenagers had allowances and either their own cars or access to the family vehicle, which gave them the means to congregate at movie theaters (see Schary, 17). Yet because their production, reception, and lack of censorship was so anomalous, and because they focused on a single niche market rather than the broader American “masses,” films such as Rebel reveal much more about how mainstream, popular culture contended with the uncertainties of teenaged life and everything teenagers represented for national identity.

! "(&!

“You’ve Got to Do Something” – Commercial, Teenaged Rhetoric in Rebel Without a Cause

In an effort to assuage postwar fears of a rampant and uncontrollable teen

sexuality, Shurlock mandated that bodily contact between Jim and Judy be kept

minimal, that kisses on the lips be changed to pecks on the cheek, and that costumes,

hair, and makeup remain in perfect order between cuts so as to avoid any implication

of an intimate encounter.32 Yet throughout the film, Judy’s daisy-embossed Dorothy

Gray compact absorbs and transmits the two characters’ feelings toward each other,

keeping the film’s sexual intensity very much alive in spite of Shurlock’s draconian

restrictions. These close ups of the object – and of characters touching, holding, and

using it – form some of the most obvious commercial moments in the film. Bearing

uncanny resemblance to advertisements that appeared in youth-oriented publications,

such instances express teenagers’ exceptional, almost electric connection to the

material world, while also inadvertently naming the other excesses that had become

associated with the distinctly teenaged pleasure in commodities.

A common convention in postwar advertising was the strict separation

between the commodity itself and the human subjects that promoted it. Many

campaigns isolated the image of the commodity within the mortise, saving the main

frame to demonstrate either the effects of the product’s use or a general abstract affect

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!32 Simmons, 59. Sex among teenagers became a national concern in the postwar era. As columnist Sumner Ahlbum lamented in 1957, suburban sprawl and car culture opened up new opportunities for illicit sex, with drive-in movies and remote lover’s lanes serving as venues for unsanctioned activities (Sumner Ahlbum, “Are You Afraid of your Teenager?” Cosmopolitan, November 1957, 45). Studies from 1956-1957 added to this concern, reporting that over half of the documented cases of gonorrhea and syphilis came from the 15-24 age group, even though this group comprised a mere 13 percent of the total population at the time of the survey (“Venereal Disease Hits Teenagers,” Science Digest, 45, 1959, 69).

! "('!

that the product was intended to generate. In Revlon’s 1952 “Fire and Ice” campaign,

for instance, a glamorous Dorian Leigh occupies most of the page, while the product

itself is relegated to a small space in the lower part of the frame (figure 37). In spite

of its celebratory tone, mainstream advertising – namely, its distinct graphic

separation of product and scenario – subtly reflected adult ambivalence over such

sudden commodity abundance, and the persistent anxiety that excess in the present

could lead to economic destruction in the future. By contrast, an advertisement from

the same year for “Date Bait” lipstick features the product in both the mortise and in

use, with the teenaged model holding up its case for admiration (figure 38). Here, the

lipstick is both the focal point of the composition and the convergence of all of the

characters’ sight lines (it is purposely ambiguous whether the football players are

gazing at the girl or at what she is holding). Emphasizing energetic, direct

engagement with the commodities at hand, these ads suggest that teenagers, unlike

their parents, indulged wholeheartedly in the pleasures of consumerism, unfamiliar

with the memory of the Great Depression and unconcerned with the possibility of its

reprise.33 Yet regardless of how much this quality positioned teenagers as an ideal

market and necessary stimulant to the postwar economy, many adults remained wary

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!33 As Gilbert stated in 1957, the adult market is “ a depression-conscious market. Even those who have not suffered financially are nevertheless acutely aware of what they term ‘extravagant’ purchases…Young people, on the other hand, have never known a nonprosperous world. What the adult considers a luxury, young people consider a necessity to keep pace with today’s living” (Gilbert, 28). The special connection that this imagery developed between teenagers and material things stressed an unabashed quest for personal satisfaction and individual fulfillment, rather than a need to carry out the responsibilities associated with a particular cultural role. Here we might think of the ubiquitous fifties food campaigns, which convinced women that the product would make them better wives and mothers rather than promising any direct pleasure from using it (see Katherine Parkin, Food is Love: Food Advertising and Gender Roles in Modern America [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006], chapters 1-2).

! "((!

of their carefree, decadent relationship to material things. During an era dominated by

media coverage of juvenile delinquency, it was not long before anxieties over the

nature of youthful consumption quickly bled into concerns over greater moral decay:

what was to prevent the easy, immediate pleasures associated with teenaged

commodity desires from affecting other areas of social and sexual life?

Rebel’s careful treatment of Judy’s compact is therefore a direct appropriation

of these commercial codes. In the first scene at the police station, the film introduces

us to Judy’s compact with as much grace as it does the three main characters.34 Seated

in the background of the station, she nervously fiddles with the compact, opening it,

applying her lipstick while looking in its mirror (figures 39 and 40). She clutches it

as she is questioned by Officer Flemmick, and when she leaves, Ray includes a close

up of it positioned precariously on the edge of the seat – material evidence of her

presence, and an invitation to be picked up by someone else (figures 41 and 42). It is

the compact that first introduces Jim to Judy, as Jim, now sitting in Flemmick’s

office, picks it up, studies it carefully, and slips it into his pocket (figures 43 and 44)

Here, the intensity of their first encounter is mediated – as in advertising – by a

product (in the Bachelor Carnation ad, for instance, the product literally intercepts an

erotic touch between boy and girl). These careful, loving shots of the compact

cautiously transfer the weight of human attraction onto inanimate objects, keeping in

play the sexual excesses that no one could fully identify, but everyone could see.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!34 See Geoff Andrew, The Films of Nicholas Ray: The Poet of Nightfall, 2nd ed., (London: BFI, 2004), 112.

! "()!

Jim eventually does return Judy’s compact, and it is not coincidental that he

does so during one of the most emotionally complex and heavily censored moments

in the film. In the scene directly after the fateful game of chicken, writer Stewart

Stern had originally sought to use Jim, Judy, and Plato as a means of exploring the

complexity of human reactions – including grief, humor, and desire – following the

trauma of Buzz’s death. Censors balked at his initial depiction of Jim and Judy’s

amorous interaction so soon after the tragedy, and ordered a number of modifications

to the script.35 What remains is a scene that realizes the characters’ palpable sexual

connection, not through dialogue, but through their exchange of a material object. As

Jim leans out of the car window to pass the compact to Judy, the film cuts to a close

up – not of Judy’s reaction but of the object itself, close enough to capture the small

scrap of linen inside with the brand name printed on it. Having always carried the

aura of the other person within it, the compact here acts as unspoken (and

unspeakable) evidence of the main couple’s romantic attraction (figure 45). Lingering

shots of Judy holding it to her cheek as Jim and Plato drive away, and close-ups of

her running her fingers over the case in the next scene recalls the gestures of

teenagers in advertisements, whose loving interaction with commodities had come to

signify so much more than material possession (figures 46 and 47).

For Shurlock, however, it was the “inference of a questionable or homosexual

relationship between Plato and Jim” that was most concerning.36 Forbidden from

cinematic representation by the Production Code, homosexuality was often relegated

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!35 See Frascella and Weisel, 174-175. 36 Simmons, 59.

! "(*!

either to invisibility or stereotypical “coding” (as villainous or ridiculous) in most

Hollywood narratives.37 The PCA was cautious of the Plato-Jim relationship, as

demonstrated by its opposition to Stern’s original treatment of their scene after the

chicken run, which required Plato and Jim to dissolve into hysterical laughter and

embrace each other, grateful to have cheated death. It then called for Jim to pull

away, crying, and for Plato to say, “Come home with me,” exposing an underlying

romantic sentiment.38 Yet not even omitting the laughing and changing Plato’s

proposition from a romantic to a platonic one (his need for a father figure rather than

a lover) could calm Shurlock’s reservations.39 After numerous re-examinations of the

script and screenings of rough cuts yielded no concrete evidence of his claims, he was

eventually forced to drop the issue entirely. Similar to the sexual excesses between

Jim and Judy, everything about Jim and Plato’s relationship that was forbidden from

cinematic representation became channeled through commercialized codes – a visual

system that had developed its own, culturally accepted means of governing shared

glances, touches, and homosocial affection in its representation of teenagers. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!37 See Russo. 38 As Stern claims: “[this scene] showed a reaction to tragedy which is not only bare and honest, but a reaction which, though probably the truest, has not been seen on the screen before, at least to my knowledge. It was a scene with which everyone who has come close to tragedy and felt the guilty impulse to laugh in celebration of their own relief of being alive may fully identify. Beyond that, it’s only because of the hysteria gripping him that Plato gets the nerve to invite Jim to his house, and to express his real need for companionship” (quoted in Frascella and Weisel, 174). 39 The final version reads as follows: “Why don’t you come home with me? I mean nobody’s home at my house – and I’m not tired, are you? I don’t have many – people I can talk to…Gee…if you could only have been my father” (see Frascella and Weisel, 174-175). Many scholars have discussed how Rebel subverts heteronormative censorship through nuances in direction and performance (particularly Sal Mineo’s portrayal of Plato as sensitive and timid, and Dean’s dramatic method acting style and often feminized objectification [see Medovoi, 185]). With these details, however, filmmakers remained mindful of the censors, always carefully avoiding any outright claims of homosexuality. When it came to casting Plato, Mineo was favored over Jack Simmons, because, as Stern elaborates: “Jack was gay, and he was very androgynous…He was feminine – and pert and puckish and adoring…I wanted the role to have homosexual overtones – but he was too much…” (quoted in Frascella and Weisel, 80-81).

! ")+!

As uneasy as mainstream adult culture was with issues of both homosexuality

and teenaged sexuality, commercial imagery during this era consistently depicted

youth in scenarios rife with these implications. Seventeen’s 1946 issue, for instance,

included an advertisement for Celanese Jersey (used to manufacture lingerie and

undergarments), in which two teenage girls, dressed only in their bras and slips, chat

together in a bedroom (figure 48); likewise, an advertisement for Levi’s denim

appearing in a 1955 issue of Boys’ Life depicts three teenaged boys in matching jeans,

linking arms and laughing as they lean into each other (figure 49). Such scenes

displayed a teenaged, homosocial intimacy that other advertisements, especially those

directed toward adults, were careful not to exhibit. As John Ibsen argues, the postwar

period marked a dramatic shift in representations of same-sex camaraderie. While

wartime campaigns often featured men shaving together, swimming together, and

lighting each other’s cigarettes (figure 50), the postwar years shifted focus to the

suburban-bound nuclear family, with the generic bride and groom eventually

replacing groups of soldiers.40 Men in each other’s company during the 1950s, as

Ibsen argues, were “a comparatively lonely, joyless lot.”41

The Lee advertisement – its trio of boys with arms entwined and bodies

touching – therefore proclaims that same-sex closeness is still acceptable for

teenagers, if not for their fathers. While depicting grown men and women interacting

in their underwear immediately carried a valence of forbidden sexual desire, for

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!40 John Ibsen, “Masculinity Under Fire: Life’s Presentation of Camaraderie and Homoeroticism Before, During, and After the Second World War,” in Looking at Life Magazine, ed. Erika Doss (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 185. 41 Ibid., 187.

! ")"!

teenagers such scenarios complexly connoted a youthful, almost pre-sexual

innocence, echoing the same-sex closeness that was becoming as much a part of

postwar teen culture – in the form of sports teams, slumber parties, Girl and Boy

Scouts – as “going steady.” Thus, the obvious queerness of teenaged social relations

quickly became absorbed into a normative, homogenizing narrative of human

development, with social scientists arguing that alternative sexual preferences were

characteristic of teenaged life, and a necessary rite of passage en route to full

(heterosexual) maturity.42 Advertisements appearing in mainstream teen magazines

aligned themselves with these mainstream beliefs, emphasizing the same-sex

camaraderie deemed so crucial to shaping the teenaged demographic, while also

striving to uphold the gendered expectations of a rigidly heteronormative society.

Campaigns designed especially for Boy’s Life (the official publication of the

Boy Scouts of America), highlighted the BSA’s mission to foster presumed

“masculine” qualities such as preparedness and rugged self-sufficiency within a

community-oriented, homosocial environment. Attempts to represent this dynamic,

however, often resulted in a visual language that fell victim to its own clichés,

reinstating the very queerness that it attempted to deny.43 Pepsi’s 1955 Boy’s Life

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!42 Robert Lindner, in the psychological report that gave Rebel its title, claimed that homosexuality was merely another form of rebellion against the institution of marriage (see Robert Lindner, Rebel Without a Cause: the Hypnoanalysis of a Criminal Psychopath [New York: Grune and Stratton, 1944], 35-37); see also Medovoi’s discussion of this issue, p. 170). 43 “Boy Scouting” originated in England in 1908, and officially migrated to America two years later. Ever concerned that youth was becoming “politically radical, morally degenerate, and physically soft,” the BSA provided what was deemed a productive outlet for boys’ rebellious tendencies, and an antidote to the so-called “feminizing” influences of industrialization (see David I. McLeod, “Act Your Age: Boyhood, Adolescence, and the Rise of the Boy Scouts of America,” Journal of Social History 16, no. 2 [Winter, 1982], 4).

! ")#!

advertisement, for instance, relies so heavily on stereotyped gender roles in its

depiction of same-sex teamwork that it cannot help but blur the line between

friendship and domestic partnership (figure 51). Depicting two boys as they set up

camp for the evening, the ad visually assigns them the roles of husband and wife: the

boy on the right’s proximity to the fire and the spoon in his hand indicates that he is

the primary “cook,” and his gesture of holding the pot out for his friend

communicates that he is the one who seeks approval of his domestic competence, like

the women in countless postwar food advertisements. Moreover, the composition

itself reinforces this gendered imbalance, with the boy on the right also turned in

profile and positioned slightly below his friend – two formal qualities that are most

often associated with women in commercial imagery.44 In assigning the hetero-

normative codes of adulthood to teenaged homosociality, this ad reinforces the

queerness of youth and demonstrates the failure of postwar culture – in spite of its

most strident efforts – to impose its rigid ideologies of gender and sexuality onto this

new demographic.

Just as Jim and Judy’s exchange of the compact allowed for the expression of

“forbidden” sexual desire, a similar engagement with material objects marks the

trajectory of Jim and Plato’s relationship. Echoing the same-sex configurations from

advertising, the film frames the two boys within well-worn dominant-subordinate,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!44 Erving Goffman claims that advertising often positions women at a physically lower level than men, and more often in recumbent positions on beds and floors (Erving Goffman, Gender Advertisements [New York: Harper and Row, 1979], 28-29; 40-47). As Annamari Vanska, claims, in western visual culture, profiles are often equated with subordination, and thus are more often associated with women (see Annamari Vanska, “Why Are There No Lesbian Advertisements?” Feminist Theory 6, no. 1 [2005], 73).

! ")$!

male-female gender conventions. Given the era’s popular misconceptions of

homosexuality (as resulting from so-called “gender inversion”) and assumption that

outward social performance was indicative of internal sexual identity,45 such an

allotment of husband-wife roles suggests an almost matrimonial partnership, even

though all other indications of such closeness in the script had been removed by the

PCA. In the first scene at the police station, just before Jim happens upon Judy’s

abandoned compact, he offers a shivering Plato his jacket, asking, “Are you cold?

Here, take my jacket…it’s warm…”46 When he is rejected (Plato turns briskly away,

notably mirroring Judy’s first reaction to Jim), Jim retreats back to his corner of the

room with his jacket in hand, not unlike a spurned lover. Like advertisements

featuring boy-girl pairs on dates, the act of chivalry and protective care – opening the

car door, carrying books, or lending one’s jacket – connotes masculinity, while the

position of either accepting or rejecting these gestures marks one as feminine. These

implications come to a head at the end of the film, when Jim attempts to calm Plato at

the planetarium. Feeling abandoned by his friends and now carrying his father’s gun,

Plato exhibits the same huddled frailty he did in the opening scene. In an almost

direct quotation from their earliest scene together, Jim offers him his jacket. Now,

rather than turn away, Plato accepts, asking hopefully, “can I keep it?,” stroking the

collar and placing it against his cheek before putting it on (figure 52). Here, Plato

engages with this material object as if it were a surrogate for Jim, cradling it and

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!45 See Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2004), 165-166. 46 Quote from Rebel Without a Cause, directed by Nicholas Ray (1955; Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2005), DVD.

! ")%!

hugging it with an affection that he was forbidden to express toward an actual person.

Yet perhaps the strongest evidence for the nature of his longing is how his actions

recall commercial representations of women and their characteristically “feminized”

handling of material objects: holding the product up, caressing it, and pressing their

cheeks against it (figure 53). By so closely mirroring advertising form in his

interaction with the jacket, the film ultimately codes him as a female partner to Jim’s

chivalrous masculinity, replacing – in a manner noticeable, but untraceable to many

officials – the more overtly queer segments that had been censored from the original

script.

But Rebel’s commercialized rhetoric has an even farther and more unexpected

reach, affecting other relationships besides the much-examined one between Jim and

Plato.47 In many ways, Buzz is the antithesis of Plato’s sensitive vulnerability, a

leather-clad model of swaggering toughness. Yet nuances in the film’s staging and

mise-en-scene – inspired by commercial codes – connect him intimately to Jim. On

the night of the chicken run, for instance, the film codes Buzz and Jim less as rivals,

and more as corresponding parts of a whole – Buzz wears a black jacket and sits in a

car with a red interior, while Jim dons a red jacket and drives a car with a black

interior. Similar to print advertisements that must rely on color palette in order to

express complex affective associations between figures in a single frame, this scene

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!47 Much scholarship on Rebel has focused on the latent attraction between Plato and Jim, and the film’s coding of Plato as potentially gay. For instance, many have cited Sal Mineo’s physical appearance, along with shots of a male pin-up in his locker, and lines that reveal his concern for Jim’s safety throughout the film as evidence of this character’s romantic feelings toward Jim (see Russo 110-11).

! ")&!

offers a schematic, formal shorthand for linking Jim and Buzz.48 While perhaps not

explicitly hinting at attraction, the pair, much like their contemporaries in commercial

culture, adopt the tender homosociality that fully grown men were no longer allowed

to exhibit in the years after World War II.49 This intimacy becomes more obvious in

the moments just before the chicken run (that most macho exhibition of confidence,

speed, and intrepidity) when the two characters share a private moment at the edge of

the bluff. The camera captures them in a two-shot, looking down as the waves crash

against the rocks and the wind tousles their hair. Buzz pauses to watch as Jim lights a

cigarette before brusquely grabbing it from him and placing it to his own lips. Posed

picturesquely over the water’s edge, musing over their relationship (Jim asks: “why

do we do this?”, to which Buzz replies “You’ve got to do something”), and sharing

drags from the same cigarette, the two “rivals” bear striking resemblance to romantic

couples, in both Hollywood and contemporary advertising campaigns (figures 54 and

55). At the same time, their dialogue also positions them as part of a special

fraternity, bound together by a set of social forces over which they have no control

and with which they do not necessarily agree.

When asked why he felt Rebel was so popular among teenagers (and so

unpopular among their parents), Stern claimed that: “It was an attempt to define

masculinity in a different way at a time when it seemed all to be leather and boots.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!48 See Murray Pomerance, “Stark Performance,” in Rebel Without a Cause: Approaches to a Maverick Masterwork, 39-40. 49 Stewart Stern admits that wartime camaraderie influenced his writing of Rebel: “bonding…was unbelievably sentimental, and very romantic, and not sexual per se…I think a kind of love was born that skipped sexual definition…it had nothing to do with that. It had to do with something so deep and so particular, but it awakened, I think, in men a kind of permission to be tender” (quoted in Frascella and Weisel, 183).

! ")'!

The kids caught that. They caught the undercurrent of sweetness in Jim Stark and in

the actor who portrayed him and the longing for a lost, loving world, where people

could drop their bravado and treat each other gently.”50 Much of this sweetness and

humanity, cut from the script and highly regulated in the actors’ performances, found

an outlet through commercialized form. Whether channeling the first hints of sexual

attraction through a compact or a jacket, or connoting intimate camaraderie through

the sharing of a cigarette, Rebel ensured that such affection remained a part of the

film by quoting advertising – a visual system that was a ubiquitous point of reference

for both teenaged audiences and their parents.

While the suggestion of unsanctioned sexual relations is perhaps the most

obvious function of commercialized language in Rebel, the codes of advertising are

also employed to depict youth as a group united by age and social activity; a

collectivity bound by little more than their unique social position as “in between”

childhood and adulthood. Linked by commonalities such as age and consumer “taste”

rather than the criteria (class, race, religion, ethnicity) that determined their parents’

social relationships, postwar teen groups offered a progressive model for “social

mixing” and a glimpse into a more integrated, not-too-distant, future. Changes in

legislation and shifting conditions in mainstream adult culture suggested that a new

tomorrow was on the horizon: Supreme Court acts desegregated public schools, and

expanding notions of the “middle class” (and the ability to purchase on credit)

contributed to a greater leveling of socio-economic hierarchies. Teenagers, defined

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!50 Quoted in Frascella and Weisel, 183.

! ")(!

outside of the divisions that shaped their parents’ world, seemed to foreshadow these

changes. And for this reason, they still held slightly dangerous implications for adults,

who saw social “mixing” as a threat to the racial and class boundaries they were not

yet ready to relinquish.51

The group shots of Rebel are overwhelmingly commercial in their lively,

varied color palette, careful composition, and intensity of social engagement. Similar

to the fetishization of material objects, the “clique” was another valued visual trope in

postwar teen-focused advertisements, appealing to youth’s other-directedness while

reassuring companies that peer pressure could result in more lucrative returns (figure

56). Yet the appearance of these commercialized group shots in Rebel also raised

adult concerns about the potential dangers of peer dynamics. By picturing teenagers

together, such images recalled the “experts” who stressed the links between teenagers

and conformist behavior – an unthinking, brainwashed, consensus mentality that

could have detrimental effects on communities and even the nation (as sociologists

claimed, Hitler appealed first and most strongly to youth, and communism thrived on

a strong group, rather than individualistic, character).52 Compounding this anxiety

was the fact that white, suburban teens seemed drawn en masse to music (rock and

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!51 Eisenhower gave voice to these anxieties when he claimed in a private letter that, “it’s all very well to talk about school integration – if you remember that you may also be talking about social disintegration” (quoted in Medovoi, 145). 52 See Medovoi, 28. Parenting guides similarly picked up on this social dynamic and offered advice on how to tame it. As the article, “When These Teen-Agers Say: Everybody’s Doing It, Everybody Is!” claims, teenagers would warm up to parental guidelines – curfews, dress codes, limited allowances – if they were uniform for everyone within a given community (Dorothy Shaftner, “When These Teen-Agers Say Everybody’s Doing It, Everybody Is!” Good Housekeeping, April 1957, 38; see also Joan Beck, “Popularity a ‘Must’ With Teens: Failure to Conform, They Believe, is Social Suicide,” Chicago Tribune, January 8, 1959, C5, http://proquest.umi.com).

! "))!

roll), dance (the twist, the bop), and culture that spanned race and class lines, which

many adults feared left them susceptible to the “delinquent” behaviors stereotypically

associated with working class, Latino, and African American youth groups. The

carefully posed collection of youth thus served as a reminder of everything that made

teenagers economically valuable but also potentially threatening, raising the

possibility of miscegenation, cross-class mixing, and disruptive behavior.

Superficially, the figures in these advertisements and the entire cast of Rebel are

unmistakably white. Racially integrated advertisements in mainstream publications

would not appear until well into the sixties, and, as Australian scholar Ian Brailsford

notes, American advertising throughout the postwar era was incredibly class-

conscious, with far fewer depictions of lower middle or working class consumers than

British and European publications.53 Yet to mainstream audiences, the

commercialized image of teenaged group interactions implied a much greater

diversity than was visible on the surface and thus, a much greater danger.

Upon his initial scrutiny of the script, Shurlock felt that the film presented a

graphic and sensationalized view of delinquent behavior and demanded heavy editing

of the “chicken-run” and “blade game” sequences, as well as the omission of a

number of other scenes.54 And yet, despite these concessions, reviewers still found

the film “blunt and startling,”55 troubled by a lingering “feeling” of danger and threat

– a phantom offense located less in a thrust of a pocketknife, and more within the !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!53 Brailsford, 15. 54 For specifics regarding the omission of violent content, and the scenes that were modified, see Simmons, 60-62. 55 Mae Tinee, “James Dean’s Last Movie Has an Impact,” Chicago Daily Tribune, November 22, 1955, B5, http://proquest.umi.com.

! ")*!

ostensibly benign, very commercial, depiction of postwar youth. In Rebel, the coming

of nightfall and the deadly “chicken-run” obviously touch on the explosive potential

of teenagers in social groups, establishing a narrative correlation between masses of

young people and reckless behavior. Yet prior to this point in the film, frame after

frame of teenaged “group shots” – “the kids” who come to pick Judy up for school at

the very beginning of the film, or the same gang, draped over Jim’s car at the

observatory – mirror the clusters of peers common to advertising campaigns: groups

of friends in broad daylight, whose vivid, stylish clothing, exaggeratedly canned

gestures, and smiling faces construct a hyper-ritualized commercial world (figure 57).

Since it was commodity culture and the power to consume that linked white teens to

the supposed dangers associated with “otherness,” such “group shots” bear the later

tragedy within their apparently colorful, optimistic form. Thus, it was youth’s

engagement with contemporary advertising culture, rather than any individually

explicit, graphic scene, that allowed original viewers to see “violence” everywhere

and yet nowhere in particular.

Formal and industrial similarities facilitated Rebel’s production of the

commercial moment, which inadvertently thwarted both mediums’ efforts to define

and control this new demographic. Commercial moments had a life and message of

their own, and within the context of teen social problem films – bound by narrative

conservatism and heavy-handed, moralizing themes – they represented a grudging

admission of American ambivalence and lack of power in the face of future change.

In films not ostensibly about teenagers, however, use of teenaged visual rhetoric had

! "*+!

the freedom to signify in different ways. Not burdened by the heavy responsibility of

representing the nation’s youth, films such as the 1957 musical, The Pajama Game,

were able to channel teenaged visual rhetoric more directly toward envisioning

radical and idealistic social change.

The Pajama Game

Two years after Rebel, Warner Brothers released the musical, The Pajama

Game – a quick, low-budget, low-priority project that was filmed in less than six

weeks and was expected to make little money at the box office.56 By 1957, film

musicals were in serious decline; rather than the elaborate spectacles crafted

especially for the big screen, most studios opted instead to produce hasty, economical

adaptations of Broadway shows, and Pajama Game was created in this vein. While

critics marveled at Rebel’s visual splendor, Pajama Game had to forgo Cinemascope

and stereophonic sound due to budget restrictions.57 While Rebel underwent

meticulous examination by the censors and several re-writings of the script, Pajama

Game’s labor dispute plot – what producer George Abbott called “the least romantic

thing I could think of” – faced much less scrutiny.58

The film’s central conflict arises when unmet demands for a 7 and ! cent

hourly raise by workers at the Sleep Tite Pajama Factory strain the budding romance

between union leader, Babe (Doris Day) and the new superintendent, Sid (John Raitt). !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!56 See Stephen M. Silverman, Dancing on the Ceiling: Stanley Donen and His Movies (New York: Knopf, 1996), 248. 57 Ibid. 58 Quoted in Carol Ilson, Harold Prince: From Pajama Game to Phantom of the Opera (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989), 13-14.

! "*"!

Eventually, Sid discovers that the company owner had already accounted for the raise

and had been swindling the extra money. Once the corrupt executive is removed from

power, Sleep Tite is able to provide its workers with their demands, which then

allows Babe and Sid (union and management) to unite as a romantic couple. Like

most movie musicals, a series of song-and-dance routines guide us efficiently toward

the marriage of the two protagonists and their opposing ends of the labor dispute.59

Few viewers expected a low budget musical about a labor divide to comment

on youth or the future of the nation, and yet Pajama Game rather obviously frames its

motley group of adult laborers as a band of rebellious and idealistic teens. On the

most obvious level, Day’s character, Catherine, goes by the nickname “Babe,” lives

with her father, and often refers to “Pop” as an authority figure (even brushing off

Sid’s advances one night, asking him to “wait until Pop leaves”60). Likewise, the fact

that the film takes place in a pajama factory references the history of American

garment work, which had traditionally been dominated by young, female

immigrants.61 Yet the film also positions these women as teenagers in the particularly

postwar sense, using the popular, commercialized representations of peer groups to

draw explicit parallels between them and the clusters of teenaged girls that postwar !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!59 This is what Rick Altman has famously termed the Hollywood musical’s “dual-focus” narrative structure, in which each member of the romantic pair represents one side of a fundamental binary that is irresolvable in real life. Through the healing power of music and dance, the genre eventually allows for the romantic union of the couple, which, by default, weds the various oppositional qualities that each character represented. Through this narrative device, audiences can briefly and vicariously experience the resolution of otherwise-insoluble social and ideological oppositions (Rick Altman, The American Film Musical [Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1978], 16-58). 60 Quote from The Pajama Game, directed by Stanley Donen (1957; Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2005), DVD. 61 See Roger Waldinger, “Another Look at the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union,” in Women, Work, and Protest: A Century of U.S. Women’s Labor History, ed Ruth Milkman (New York: Routledge, 1991), 92.

! "*#!

advertising so often featured chatting at a slumber party, or gathered around a locker

at school (figure 58). Throughout the film, the female characters gossip on their lunch

breaks, ribbing Babe about her apparent attraction to Sid, affectionately leaning

against one another, eating, singing, and primping in each other’s company (figure

59). Within these scenes, in private corners of the factory and out from under the

watchful eye of the foreman, the frames are filled with all things “feminine” – curled

hair, the bright patterns on the women’s smocks, high heeled shoes and seams on

stockings – and the dialogue limited to stereotypically “teenaged” banter. Like

advertisements featuring teenaged boys, those featuring teenaged girls privileged this

kind of homosocial engagement absent from postwar campaigns directed toward adult

women, which often emphasized her role as wife and mother rather than her

connection to her peers. In the film, female employees temporarily free from the

responsibilities of work and domestic obligation transform the factory corridor into a

haven of single-sex, pre-adult closeness.

The film does not limit this youthful characterization to just women, however,

often coding both male and female union members as teenagers. Nearly all of the

main characters, for example, are single and childless. Without the social

responsibilities of postwar domesticity, Sleep-Tite employees are free to engage –

like teenagers just beginning to explore their sexuality – in a variety of loose,

noncommittal relationships. Relieved of the moral pressure that governed teen social

problem films, Pajama Game is allowed to foreground this promiscuity, using the

figure of the teenager and its postwar, capitalist associations to represent the sexual

! "*$!

experimentation that Rebel could only imply. When the film later reveals where union

members convene in their off hours – a seedy, late-night bar called “Hernando’s

Hideaway” – it further underscores these associations between the workers’ juvenility

and other excesses commonly associated with teenagers. The accompanying song and

dance routine describes this social atmosphere as “a dark secluded place/ A place

where no one knows your face/ A glass of wine, a fast embrace/ it’s called

Hernando’s Hideaway.” True to the lyrics, the bar is a dingy, smoke-filled hole-in-

the-wall that can only be accessed through a dark tunnel (visitors are led by a small

African boy, wearing a turban and bearing a match); inside, couples tango

lasciviously, and are surrounded by clichéd references to the near east: gaudy,

mismatched couch cushions, tassels, and strings of plastic beads. Not a place for

families or children, a covert realm (“dark secluded place”) in which forbidden

pleasures can be played out anonymously (“where no one knows your face”) and

without consequence or responsibility (“a glass of wine a fast embrace”), Hernando’s

Hideaway references the sexual illicitness of teenaged hangouts and lover’s lanes.

Moreover, its clear exotification marks this space as one of racial and ethnic blending,

channeling the era’s connections between youth, “otherness,” and sexual promiscuity

in ways prohibited from social problem films or advertising.

Yet in addition to depicting everything that mainstream Americans found

unsettling about teenagers, Pajama Game’s references to commercial codes also

highlighted the teenaged potential to represent future social change, vital to the

survival of core American principles. For a nation disquieted by its new, paternal

! "*%!

position in global politics and shamed by its own denial of equal rights to all citizens,

identifying with teenagers was necessary in reasserting the nation’s much

mythologized origins in insubordination, liberty, and freedom at all costs.62 Equally

as important was the belief that resistance to authority symbolized a healthy,

independent spirit that made individuals less susceptible to communism.63 Teenaged

rebelliousness – at least in principle – was therefore praised as a necessary part of

American identity, especially as critics began to compare America’s sudden

capitalistic affluence with the unthinking conformity of its Cold War enemies. As

historian Thomas Frank notes, “Author after Author warned in the 1950s that long-

standing American traditions of individualism were vanishing and being buried

beneath the empires of the great corporations, the sprawl of prefabricated towns, and

the reorientation of culture around the imperative of consuming homogenized, mass-

produced goods.”64 Identification with teenagers, or more specifically, teenaged

consumption, allowed postwar Americans to merge two seemingly incongruous

concerns: the practical desire to maintain the economic boom and the ideological

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!62 As historians such as Warren Sussman and Margot Henricksen have discussed, Americans were proud of their distinction from power, wealth, and largesse (Margot A. Henricksen, Dr. Strangelove’s America [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997], 4; see also, Warren Susman and Edward Griffin, “Did success Spoil the United States?: Dual Representations in Postwar America” in Recasting America Culture and Politics in the Age of Cold War, ed. Lary May [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987], 19-37). 63 As columnist Edith Stern claims, resistant behavior “which can be so wounding and harassing to parents, is just one manifestation of a teenager’s wholesome – though uneven and confused – progress toward becoming an independent adult. Indeed, if he did run to you with everything, that wouldn’t be good either. For then he might be headed towards becoming the last kind of adult you’d want – dependent, indecisive, unsure” (Edith Stern, “When Teenagers Clam Up,” Parents’ Magazine and Family Home Guide Journal [1959], 47). See also Andrea Friedman, “The Smearing of Joe McCarthy: The Lavender Scare, Gossip, and Cold War Politics,” American Quarterly 57, no. 4 (December, 2005), 1105-1129, http://muse.jhu.edu. 64 Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 10.

! "*&!

need to undercut the deadening, conformist culture that such capitalistic consumption

encouraged. As Leerom Medovoi argues (evoking the work of Simon Frith), while

adult consumption may be stifling and normative, youthful consumption of mass

culture – sometimes frivolous, sometimes rebellious – has the potential to be an

expression of freedom and enjoyment of life outside of responsibility or

expectation.65

Displacing teenaged identity onto singing and dancing adults enabled

Americans to fully embrace rebellion as a crucial part of postwar identity. As a result,

Pajama Game takes great pains to define its union members as youthfully defiant of

capitalism’s uniformity and regimentation. From the film’s opening sequence, a

mobile camera captures row after row of women workers bent over their sewing

machines. Set to mantras such as “Can’t Waste Time” and “Hurry up!” sung in

counterpoint, each woman pedals, threads, and steams in synchronization,

subordinated to the hawkish eye of the foreman (Eddie Foy). Gradually, the pace

increases until by the end of the scene, everything dissolves into a frenzied blur.

While obviously a heavy-handed comment on the dehumanizing nature of modern

industry, such a scene also connects the factory floor to the kind of authoritarian

environment that teenagers faced both at home and at school. With their lives

structured by adult-mandated restrictions and social codes, teenagers also lacked

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!65 Medovoi elaborates: “presenting itself as an autonomous, and potentially dissenting mode of consumption – even within suburbia – youth culture gained ideological currency as a freer form of leisure than that found in parental suburban culture” (Medovoi, 102). Such a principle – the idea that consumption can be a form of freedom and mode of self-expression – is a concept that major corporations honed with their campaigns in the sixties, which convinced the public (both young and old) that purchasing commodities could be hip, rebellious, and aligned with rising countercultural sensibilities (see Frank, 24).

! "*'!

control over their time and their bodies. Their rigid class schedule, curfews, and

financial dependency constituted, for some, proof that the corporate Theory X model

had encompassed every aspect of modern life, and – perhaps even more worryingly –

was in the process of being passed onto the next generation.66

Thus, when the union gathers in the park for a summer picnic, the use of

teenaged commercialized codes signal the workers’ release from duty and emphasize

that, like teenagers, their freedom and fun-loving nature cannot be stifled by an

overbearing work regimen. In the number “Once A Year Day,” performed at the

picnic, the cast frolics outside, turning cartwheels, playing leap frog, and indulging in

other childish excursions. Here, the brightly patterned summer outfits, picnic

hampers, checkered blankets, and friendly groupings all recall the visual style of

advertising aimed toward youth. In this scene, Pajama Game quotes the

commercialized depiction of youth at play in social spaces (bowling alleys, football

games) to demonstrate the union workers’ aliveness despite the deadening quality of

their work. Moreover, it attests to the internal cohesion of the Sleep-Tite community,

which echoed the growing separation of teenagers from adult mainstream culture.

Pajama Game helps align the union with this teenage insularity through the

particularly commercial use of language, employing sayings designed to cohere a

specific community and alienate everyone outside of it. While the factory is filled

with signs prohibiting the workers (“No Smoking!” “Do not operate while steam is

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!66 See Medovoi for his discussion of teenaged identification with the lyrics of “Rock Around the Clock” (Medovoi, 110); see also his analysis of student life with regard to Blackboard Jungle (ibid., 155).

! "*(!

on”), warning them (“Caution”), and demanding certain behavior (“Keep files locked

at all times!”), the union represents itself through a different verbal code. Boosting

signs during their rallies that are brightly colored and makeshift (as opposed to the

standardized, preprinted signs in the factory), slogans vary from demanding change

(“Let’s Talk Cents!”) to complete irreverence (“Sew What?”). Energetic and

irreverent, the language of the union unites workers together against the stodgier,

parental signage of their bosses in a manner made familiar by advertising.

This sense of community culminates in Babe’s self-identification outside of

gender expectations. As the stalemate between the union and the factory owner

reaches an unbearable pitch, Babe faces an ultimatum: either side with Sid and the

management or with her peers in the union. In the choice between romantic love and

loyalty to her friends, Babe chooses the latter. And although the plot contrivance at

the end of the film allows Babe to have the best of both worlds, it is clear that her

commitment to the group – the mass of single, struggling workers – is stronger than

her desire to uphold the normative institutions of marriage and domesticity.

Throughout their struggle, the union members gain their momentum, collective unity,

and sense of identification from the proud fact that they (like teenagers) rebelled

against corruption; that the banner of their resistance to the establishment lays in their

high moral standards and ideals. Babe chooses what is “right” – equality for the

working classes, a fair wage – over personal pleasure or love, and the union’s overall

mission represents an idealistic rebellion against the injustices it inherited from

existing institutions. The boss – embezzling, dishonest, and willing to turn his

! "*)!

employees into mindless automatons for his own profit – is essentially a provincial

distillation of the evils of corporate America. In this regard, the union mirrors the

postwar teenaged expectation of a more just and equal world and their willingness to

rise up against the establishment in order to achieve it.67 Babe and her coworkers

embody the kind of spirited, youthful idealism that an increasingly corporatized,

suburbanized, and politically powerful U.S. feared was slipping away.

“Twice as Much for a Nickel”

Pajama Game’s most complex engagement with the postwar concept of

youth, however, pivots around a different commercial detail – one that, in its glaring

ties to consumer culture, helps pull the film’s other references to teenaged rebellion

into sharper focus. Within a ninety-minute musical involving a major love story,

ample singing and dancing, and a company scandal, there is little room for extraneous

details. And yet, the film goes to great lengths to demonstrate one seemingly

impertinent fact: that the workers at Sleep-Tite enjoy drinking Pepsi-Cola. Pepsi

bottles litter the tables at social gatherings, workers sip Pepsis during their lunch

breaks, and Pepsi vending machines light up the corridors (figures 59, 60, 61, and

62). Although Pepsi’s presence seems to foreshadow modern product placement,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!67 This image of idealistic youth ran parallel in the popular media to other narratives of teenaged moodiness, reticence, and delinquency. Seventeen often featured letters to the editor from teenagers who expressed deep awareness of their position as the future of America, and an effort to shape that future in the most progressive, democratic light. As one reader claimed, she was not too young “to think seriously about the part I am to play in the great postwar world” (Letter to the Editor, Seventeen [December 1946], 4, quoted in Schrum, 155). This idealism was also obvious in social problem films. In Rebel, for instance, Jim’s frustration with his parents stems from the fact that he wants to do the moral, just thing (confessing to the police about Buzz’s death), whereas his parents want to move to a different neighborhood in order to protect Jim’s reputation.

! "**!

there is no evidence of a formal agreement between the company and the studio.68 In

the absence of corporate intent, and with no clear narrative purpose, Pepsi seems

instead to function as a highly charged cultural reference, bringing its politicized

brand identity to bear on an otherwise all-white and ideologically conservative film.

Known in this era for its popularity in African American communities as well as for

its progressive hiring practices, Pepsi infuses the workers’ struggle with

contemporary fights for racial equality. Such commercial moments thus remind

viewers that Pajama Game’s teenaged sensibility represented a youthful idealism that

extended into the increasingly contentious territory of civil rights.

In some respects, the moments that feature Pepsi mirror the formal rhetoric

that postwar advertising had developed to describe teenagers. Just as advertising often

stressed an almost fetishistic affinity between teenagers and commodities, Pajama

Game often shows Pepsi “in action,” making it a focal point for many scenes: the

visual pivot between two sparring characters, the material highlight that provides

continuity between the cuts, or the object that lends rhythm and order to the frame.

Such treatment of a name brand product differs significantly from other films of the

same era. Although still predating the systematized product placement of the eighties

and beyond, more films in the postwar era – under terms which today seem

ambiguous, sparsely documented, and widely variable from case to case – began to

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!68 It remains ambiguous as to whether some or all of these placements were actually negotiated agreements between studios and advertising agencies or were a new attempt at realism. Already, the trade press buzzed with concerns that a commercial influence would soil the cinematic experience (see “Plots Sneak in Advertising,” Variety, August 7, 1957, 3).

! #++!

incorporate actual branded commodities into their scenes.69 Rather than drop the

slogan into dialogue or the product into the mise-en-scene, Pajama Game instead

borrows from commercialized visual schemas, suggesting that its main concern is not

to expose audiences to the brand name, but rather to use the product as a means of

linking the characters with a teenaged visual rhetoric and teenaged style of

consumption.

Yet the connection between the union and rebellious youth runs deeper still,

and largely because of Pepsi’s postwar brand identity. After all, if soda were just soda

in Pajama Game – just a prop to hold – it might as well have been Coca-Cola.

Established earlier and with formidable financial means, Coca-Cola had quickly

become the American “standard,” with its elaborately blown glass bottles, unified

national advertising campaigns, and overwhelming presence in soda fountains,

military bases, and drugstores.70 Coca-Cola was virtually synonymous with the term

“soft drink,” and as a result, appeared more frequently in novels, screenplays, and set

designs by default, if not by deliberate choice. Pajama Game was therefore doubly

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!69 Love in the Afternoon, released in the same year as Pajama Game, actually did make agreements with companies such as Pepsi, Coca-Cola, and various liquors, and throughout the film these contractual obligations become strikingly apparent. At one point, for example, a character says to his client: “I saw him drinking a Pepsi,” to which the client responds: “Oh! Is that the ‘Pause that Refreshes?” (current advertising slogan of Coke). The investigator laughs and replies, “No – that’s the other one.” In many films from this era, the products are very rarely shown in use by the characters (many companies even complained that Love in the Afternoon did not feature their product prominently enough [see Segrave, 114]). 70 Coca-Cola was much more aggressive in pursuing drugstores and soda fountains. As former Pepsi executive Tom Dillon claims, “The consumer typically has no choice to make. The choice is made by the restaurant and store proprietor. He does not want to carry two cola varieties…any more than he wants two ketchups” (Tom Dillon Interview, May 23, 1984, The Pepsi Generation Oral History and Documentation Collection, #111, Archives Center, NMAH, Box 15, tape 1). For more information about Coca-Cola and its association with the military, see M. Weiner, “Consumer Culture and Participatory Democracy: The Story of Coca-Cola During World War II,” in Food in the U.S.A.: A Reader, ed. Carole Counihan (New York: Routledge, 2002), 123-142.

! #+"!

likely to feature Coca-Cola, since, in the script for the original Broadway musical, the

only a time a beverage is mentioned by name is when the corrupt executive

complains, “What right does the union have to run its Coca-Cola machines with our

electricity?”71 Although the rest of the film script follows the stage version almost

verbatim, this line has been conspicuously changed to Pepsi. Rather than keep the

“standard” brand, or striking the brand name entirely (both common Hollywood

practices), the film instead intentionally mentions the nation’s “number two” soft

drink and goes through the added trouble of coordinating all of the props to reflect

this preference.

Such a concerted effort to feature Pepsi itself constituted an act of rebellion.

As motivational researcher Ernest Dichter claimed in his 1951 study of Pepsi: “many

of our respondents hesitate or refuse to order Pepsi-Cola in public because of the

implications of their choice…When one orders a Coke, he does only what others

do…In ordering Pepsi-Cola, however, he commits himself as to a definite

preference.”72 Yet the stigma of this “definite preference” involved more than going

against the crowd; the “implications” of choosing Pepsi over Coke, at least in the

postwar period, were bound tightly to Pepsi’s raced, classed, and socially engaged !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!71 Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, The Pajama Game: A New Musical Comedy (New York: Random House, 1954), 42. 72 Pepsi commissioned Dichter to run this study in 1951 in hopes of modifying their marketing approach and increasing sales. In this report, Dichter claimed that the culture of social conformity affected beverage choice. For most consumers, the fact that choosing Pepsi caused one to stand out was a negative quality. As one interviewee claimed, “I’ll tell you something. If I were with a group of people, I’d ask for Coca-Cola. I’d feel foolish ordering Pepsi Cola” (“Progress Report on the Psychological Study of Sales and Advertising Problems of Pepsi-Cola,” April 1951, Collection 2407, Hagley Archives, Box 6, p. 25; 30). Commented another: “I wouldn’t like to ask specifically at a counter for Pepsi – everybody asks for Coke. I don’t want to be labeled a character on account of my insisting upon a Pepsi. I really feel that Coke is liked by all age groups, and both sexes alike. This is so because it has become an American habit” (ibid.).

! #+#!

corporate history. Of course, ever since the landmark “Pepsi Generation” campaign in

1964, Pepsi has become synonymous with youth – today it continues to be known as

the beverage for those who “think young.” The great success of this campaign was

due in large part to the widespread corporate takeover of countercultural sentiment,

which rebranded Pepsi’s historical underdog status and associations with civil

struggle as “hip” and masked them beneath a less controversial image of generational

difference.73 In the late fifties, however, Pepsi still retained its political edges,

thereby forcing mainstream American audiences to confront the imminent social

transitions that the future generation would bring.

The brand identity that shaped Pepsi’s corporate image throughout the

postwar period had its roots in the Great Depression. In 1933, spurred by

unprecedented financial restraints, Pepsi began selling its product in bottles that were

twice the “standard size” (established by Coca-Cola as 6 ounces), but for the same

price (5 cents), hoping to increase sales. Unable to produce their own uniform bottles,

Pepsi relied on mismatched, discarded beer bottles for its new packaging (beer, unlike

soda, had always been sold in a larger container), and adopted the slogan, “Twice as

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!73 As Thomas Frank explains, Pepsi’s ability to capitalize on the concept of youth is a representative example of the corporate mainstreaming of countercultural sentiment in the sixties. He argues that the sixties social revolution was not just defined by the rebellion of hippies and bohemians against the establishment; instead, corporate America began to react against its own history of conservatism, which resulted in business culture’s embrace of certain countercultural themes (Frank, 6-8). This shift in corporate culture had the effect of adding variety and anti-establishment “edge” to mass culture, while simultaneously forcing counterculture to become less adversarial and more hegemonic. While the youth-oriented “Pepsi Generation” campaigns of the sixties may have associated Pepsi with subversive, youthful individualism, it at the same time covered over its previous connotations of race and class.

! #+$!

much for a nickel, too.”74 By this time, Coca-Cola had successfully branded itself as

the “all-American” beverage: its advertising campaigns featured “American” icons

(servicemen, Santa Claus, baseball diamonds, soda fountains [figure 63]), aligning it

with a nostalgic, racially homogenous, and therefore exclusionary national identity.75

Pepsi, however, with its deep discount and array of secondhand bottles, appealed on

both a practical and symbolic level to many underrepresented populations – groups

that Coca-Cola inevitably neglected. While many of the “American” institutions that

served Coca-Cola – the armed forces, drugstore counters – remained segregated by

race, Pepsi obtained most of its business through the take-home and door-to-door

market; while Coca-Cola dominated sales to white Americans, Pepsi deliberately

courted its working class and black consumers, running advertising campaigns in

Ebony, which were some of the first to feature respectable (rather than grossly

caricatured) images of middle-class African American consumers (Figure 64). In the

early 1940s, company president Walter Mack instituted African American production

lines, sponsored a number of college scholarships and internship programs for

African American students, and hired Pepsi’s first African American salespeople to

travel around the country and promote Pepsi in African American communities.76 By

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!74 See Walter Mack Interview, December 16, 1985, The Pepsi Generation Oral History and Documentation Collection, #111, Archives Center, NMAH, Box 18, tape 1; see also Bob Stoddard, The Big Nickel Drink (Claremont: Double Dot Enterprises, 2003), 3. 75 The potbellied, red-and-white clad Santa Claus that most Americans associate with Christmas was actually commissioned by Coca-Cola in 1933 from Saturday Evening Post illustrator Haddon Sundblom (see Dillon interview, NMAH, collection #111, tape 1). 76 For a detailed account of the formation of this team (called the “Negro Sales Division” in the forties), see Stephanie Capparell, The Real Pepsi Challenge (New York: Wall Street Journal Books, 2007). Around this time, then-president Walter Mack had also founded a number of scholarship funds (forerunners to the National Merit Scholarships, awarding two students from each state full funding for four years of college), and ensured that African American students would be eligible to apply (see

! #+%!

contrast, Coca-Cola did not begin to address the African American market until the

mid-fifties and early sixties (running its first advertisements in black publications in

1955 and hiring its first black salesperson in 1960), claiming that it would risk losing

that ten percent of the market in order to keep its most loyal (white) consumer base.77

Pepsi’s efforts to target the African American community were limited and

flawed – its production lines were not integrated, and black salespeople were

expected to sell only to black neighborhoods – yet its business practices took the first

tentative steps toward greater equality in the work force. Such a fact was not lost on

Pepsi’s African American employees and consumers, who, throughout the forties,

began to use the company’s hiring policies and marketing approach as a rallying point

in their struggle for racial equality.78 Organizing marches and boycotts, and

distributing flyers that criticized competitors for their unfair employment policies

(some stating, “Refuse to Support Discrimination: Don’t Buy Coke!”), visibly

associated Pepsi with African American civil rights and encouraged consumers to

consider social justice issues when making their beverage choice (figure 65). Thus,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!Harvey Russell Interview, November 15, 1984, The Pepsi Generation Oral History and Documentation Collection, #111, Archives Center, NMAH, Box 18, tape 1). 77 By the early sixties, when Coca-Cola was hiring its first African American sales representative, Pepsi-Cola had promoted Harvey Russell to Vice President of the Special Markets Division, making him the first African American executive of a major national corporation (see Russell interview, NMAH, Collection #111, tape 1). 78 Principles of the “citizen-consumer” (in which the rights to partake equally in the nation’s capitalist offerings are considered inseparable from one’s political freedoms) have had a long history in the African American community. From early boycotting of streetcars in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaigns during the Great Depression, to the public criticism of Coca-Cola’s discriminatory practices in the forties and fifties, Civil Rights have often been closely intertwined with consumer and labor equality (see Lizabeth Cohen, 41-53, 84-96).

! #+&!

when one chose Pepsi, one not only deliberately went against the status quo, but also

identified oneself with a product marked by race, class, and civil struggle.79

Pepsi’s brand identity cycled through a number of related phases throughout

the fifties. While thrift and progressive hiring policies had benefitted the company

during Depression and war, in the affluent postwar era such assets became a liability.

As motivational researcher Ernest Dichter reported in 1951, Pepsi was marked as a

bargain brand, “flatter and poorer” than its rival.80 In the years that followed, the

company attempted to revise the brand’s identity through new marketing schemes,

labels, and especially advertising campaigns, which couched its old connotations

within the newly in-vogue rhetoric of other directedness (figure 66).81 By the end of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!79 For more information on the specific protests and political action of Pepsi’s African American employees, see Capparell, Chapter 6: “The Coca Color Wars,” 169-203. 80 See Dichter, “Progress Report,” 34. Under the new leadership of Al Steele in the fifties, Pepsi attempted to increase profits through a number of practical changes, such as downsizing the bottle from twelve to eight ounces and taking greater advantage of the burgeoning vending machine market (see Milward W. Martin, Twelve Full Ounces [New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1962], 123). But the company placed most of its faith in boosting sales through a revised brand image. A smaller bottle directly undermined Pepsi’s famous “more for less” philosophy, and a number of other implementations – renovating the uniforms, delivery trucks, and point-of-sale signage – also attempted to reverse its lower-class, bargain image (see Ernest Dichter, “Requested Memo on Pepsi Cola Depth Interviews to Date,” March 6, 1951, Collection 2407, Hagley Archives, Box 107B, p. 46, for description of delivery trucks). “Out of the kitchen and into the living room” became the company’s mantra throughout the fifties, and was as much of a reference to the raced connotations of the kitchen – a space of labor, concealed and separate from the rest of the home – as it was to the stereotype that families consumed Pepsi in private to save money, but served Coke to guests. John Toigo (a colleague of Steele) echoed this sentiment, stating that these new initiatives would help Pepsi “escape from poverty” (see Hinerfeld interview, NMAH, Collection #111, tape 1). 81 Recognizing that it could not compete with Coca-Cola’s image of nostalgia and patriotism, Pepsi instead decided to experiment with a new approach to advertising that focused on casual sociality, fun, and friendship. Norman Heller, who served as Pepsi’s head of market research during this period, claims that Coke’s advertising focused on inner-directedness, positioning Coca-Cola as a personal reward for having completed a task (“the Pause that Refreshes”). Pepsi, however “went in the other direction…Pepsi was a social drink. And I did research that showed that drinking Pepsi together was the equivalent of sitting down and breaking bread together” (Norman Heller Interview, January 9, 1985, The Pepsi Generation Oral History and Documentation Collection, #111, Archives Center, NMAH, Box 15, tape 1). By the late fifties, Pepsi began to display its product as an essential part of the social fabric that brings people together. “More Bounce to the Ounce” (1952-4), which featured

! #+'!

the decade, Pepsi had successfully transformed its reputation of thrift and political

activism into a signifier of fun, sociability, and youthful progressiveness.82 Eight

years after Dichter’s initial report in 1951, his follow up interviews indicated that

Pepsi had become known for its friendliness and down-to-earth nature, rather than for

its bargain price. Like mink coats and Cadillacs, Dichter claimed, Coca-Cola had

become an old status symbol that signified the restraints and prohibitions of history,

while Pepsi suited modern tastes and changing American social patterns.83 Although

none of Dichter’s sample directly addresses Pepsi’s historical interaction with black

and working class communities, the language that many respondents used to describe

the brand – “democratic friendliness” “down-to-earthness” and “inclusionary” –

recalls the company’s unique business philosophy, and moreover, how Pepsi’s social

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!clusters of young adults drinking Pepsi while having picnics, riding bikes, and doing yard work together, was among the first Pepsi campaigns to use this approach. 82 The variety of postwar campaigns that the company attempted prior to settling on “More Bounce to the Ounce” demonstrates how devoted it was to revising its public image: in response to criticism that Pepsi was a sugary beverage that encouraged juvenile overindulgence, “The Light Refreshment” depicted slender, elegant-looking women touting its “refreshing” taste and lower calorie count, often in the company of peers or her significant other (see Hinerfeld interview, NMAH, Collection #111, tape 1). Likewise, “The Sociables” attempted to shed the remnants of Pepsi’s working-class reputation by featuring white-gloved socialites serving it in champagne flutes. 83 See Ernest Dichter, “Testing of Five Soft Drink Ads, submitted to Norman Craig and Kummel, Inc.,” March 1959, Collection 2407, Hagley Archives, Box 6, Folder 107F, p. 11; 25. An overwhelming number of respondents in this study claimed that Pepsi’s strongest qualities were its openness, inclusiveness, embrace of change, and its modern, relaxed style. When asked who drinks Pepsi, many respondents responded with “everyone” and “people like me” (ibid., 25), and when asked to describe the sensory qualities of the beverage, replied with adjectives such as “tangy,” “refreshing,” and “a nice lively taste,” which differs significantly from the responses (flat, low quality) in the 1951 round of interviews (ibid., 27). This study, which used a variety of motivational research/popular psychology techniques, also found that interviewees were more likely to associate Pepsi with creativity, inhibition, and fun. The “non-verbal association” test, for instance, demonstrated that, when asked to choose a piece of fabric that best described Pepsi’s product personality, participants chose figured silk (as opposed to plain, black silk) four to one. Likewise, when a set of teenagers were asked to produce a finger painting describing both Pepsi and Coke, “the finger paintings of the Pepsi Cola personality [had] considerably more movement and more color than those of the Coca-Cola personality. In addition, there [were] elements of greater sociability in the designs created” (ibid., 8).

! #+(!

engagement had moved from signifying mediocrity in the public eye to representing a

brighter, more tolerant future.

Pajama Game’s release coincided with this transitional moment in company

history, foreshadowing Pepsi’s sixties cachet while still reflecting its origins in

progressive politics and accessibility. Although the next decade’s activism would

bring significant social change (the Civil Rights Act, the increased appearance of

peoples of color in mainstream advertising), in the fifties, Pepsi anticipated this future

diversity: its continued availability in segregated, underserved communities coincided

with its growing appeal to the white market, uniting consumers (some of them

unwillingly) across race and class lines through common consumer preferences.84

This “democratic” history was materially inscribed as well: although the elegant

“swirl” bottle design would eventually revolutionize the brand’s image alongside the

“Pepsi Generation” campaigns, the 1957 version still carried much of its Depression-

era, beer bottle bulkiness, inviting consumers to trace the company’s history through

the bottle’s size (still larger than Coca-Cola’s 6 oz. bottle) and clunky silhouette.85

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!84 The deep discomfort that some white markets still had toward such a cross-racial consumer base is evident in Dichter’s report, which stated: “In one high grade grocery and market near 52nd street, I asked the owner why he didn’t carry Pepsi: He said it brought the Negroes from the adjoining colored block on 52nd street into his store for that and nothing else…” (“Requested Memo on Pepsi Cola Depth interviews to Date” (1951), 43). 85 As Dichter pointed out in his 1951 memo, “One only has to stand the two bottles [next to each other]…to realize what a really great gap there is…In the one, Coke, the bottle is a dignified, beautifully fashioned shape…Even the color of the glass apparently has been carefully selected – it is a pleasing bottle-green that gives the bottle, when empty, a quality look and, when filled with the product, is a complementary color to it…This dignified, slender bottle can and does appropriately grace a table in a dining room at the Ritz as well as the lowliest kitchen. The Pepsi bottle is clumsy in shape by comparison, even aside from the fact that it is double the size. The glass not only has not been selected for complementary color to the product but is covered with a pressed filigree that gives it a cheap appearance. It has a large red, white, and blue label, which further contributes to this appearance. One can’t possibly visualize such a bottle appearing, suitably, on the tables in good hotels and

! #+)!

The specter of Pepsi’s long association with frugality and underserved consumer

groups therefore lingered in the bottles even as its brand image began to shift, thereby

linking the Pepsi-devoted characters in Pajama Game with the same attitudes of

struggle and resistance.

Get Hot

Even though Sleep-Tite’s beverage choice might at first seem like an

insignificant detail, its presence throughout the film suggests that the workers, in a

characteristically teenaged manner, demonstrated their progressiveness, idealism, and

rebellion through their consumption practices. Not unlike the youth response to rock

and roll music, which signaled the next generation’s embrace of aesthetics and artists

across class and race lines, the workers’ support of Pepsi suggests progressive future

changes – ones that ultimately suited postwar idealism for a more civil society, but

that to most viewers (and the Code-governed film industry) were still too extreme to

be realized through actual teenagers.86

Such was the major paradox of this new demographic, which was too close to

the reality of the future to represent idealistic social change except for in the most

abstract terms. Clearly, postwar Americans expected much of teenagers. Representing

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!restaurants. It would be utterly out of keeping…” (“Requested Memo on Pepsi Cola Depth Interviews to Date,” 45). The new swirl bottle debuted in 1958. As company biographer Milward Martin claims, “With that, in Steele’s mind, the world’s finest soft drink was now on the market in the world’s most outstanding soft drink bottle” (Martin, 130). 86 Teenaged support of this style of music thus demonstrated a willingness to challenge the present generation’s racial intolerance. While listening to rock and roll cannot be mistaken for an actual fight against bigotry, it was perhaps the most widespread example of suburban white youth embracing the cultural contributions of a racial and socio-economic demographic different from their own (see Medovoi, 92-3).

! #+*!

hypothetical future change, youth provided an opportunity for the adult generation to

couch admission of its own social and historical wrongs in a projection of future

harmony. As editor Barbara Gair claimed in the inaugural issue of Seventeen, “We

expect you to run this world a lot more sensibly than we have…No group of adults

who have created a civilization which is blackened by a world war can claim to have

done a good job.”87 Ebony echoed her sentiments in its debut issue, stating that, even

though the news headlines “spelled out a hymn of hate” and “Soldiers who sailed

overseas to conquer the doctrine of Aryan supremacy [see] that it has invaded their

own homeland, while they were gone…” there was still hope for the future. “In

America,” it claimed, “the younger generation spells out the future. If the teensters

can achieve the melting pot ideal at home, they carry happy tidings for a world

hungry for final peace.”88 For adults it was too late, but for teenagers, the future

remained theirs to shape.89 A 1945 article in the New York Times summarized the

teenager’s position as this: “The ‘teen-ager’ wants opportunities. In education and

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!87 Barbara Gair, “The World is Yours,” Seventeen 4 (April 1945), 58-59, 139, quoted in Palladino, 90. 88 See “And a Child Shall Lead Them,” Ebony 1 (December 1945), 28. Much like Seventeen, Ebony cites comments and actions from teenagers that demonstrate their tolerance, such as when a group of (white) eighth grade students in New Jersey voted to boycott the Daughters of the American Revolution essay contest because it would not consider essays submitted by African American students. 89 As the Ebony editorial states, parents were the main problem, passing on their bigotry to their children: “Innocent youngsters, still trying to grasp the lessons of democracy in high schools, have been infected by their parents” (ibid., 28). This concept of ‘tainted’ adults reverberated throughout popular entertainment as well. Hit Broadway shows (debuting in the fifties and then adapted into Hollywood films as the decade progressed) such as South Pacific, The King and I, and Flower Drum Song, for example, claimed that racism and intolerance is learned, not inherent or natural. In each of these cases, it is the younger couple that demonstrates more openly its commitment to tolerance. In South Pacific, Joe Cable (who, with the Balinese Liat, form the younger foil to Nellie and Emile) sings “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught” about how ignorance is learned and can therefore be unlearned; in The King and I, Anna Leonowens is the young, single, childless governess who sings of open-mindedness and respect (“Getting to Know You”) and teaches the king – the governing power and father – about how to overcome his prejudices (see Christina Klein, Cold War Oreintalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003], 143-190).

! #"+!

vocation, and he wants to be able to compete fairly for them, regardless of sex, race,

color, or creed. When these opportunities are denied his frustrations are deep and

sometimes explosive.”90 And yet, the actual teenagers of that most iconic teenage

movie, Rebel Without a Cause, become their parents in the end, leaving the burden of

representing social change to grown-ups with a teenaged rebellious streak. The

union’s devotion to Pepsi in Pajama Game allows its generalized connection to youth

– skepticism of authority, fun lovingness, devotion to understanding themselves as a

collectivity – to become more sharply focused around activism and progressive

politics. But on an even more powerful level, it situates Sleep-Tite workers within a

broader paradigm shift, which set the foundation for sixties-era identity politics and

began to broaden the very contours of national identity. If teenagers became their own

demographic with their own set of traits in the postwar period, it was because they

(and by extension, their unique traits) became a useful basis of identification for

mainstream Americans who were also feeling restless, liminal, and increasingly

aware of the degree to which the “other” – both within the human life span and within

the nation itself – comprised everything once defined by homogeneity.

Teenagers served as such a richly symbolic category because their own

processes of identity formation provided a useful metaphor for the nation’s efforts to

rediscover itself in the wake of postwar upheavals. As Medovoi argues, Erik

Erikson’s landmark Childhood and Society (1950) was the first study to designate the

teenage years as a crucial developmental stage – one in which individuals acquire a

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!90 Elliot E. Cohen, “A Teen-Age Bill of Rights,” New York Times Magazine, January 7, 1945, 16-18.

! #""!

sense of “self” outside of the predetermined identities they inherited at birth.

Although conscious, politicized affiliation with and among different designations of

race, gender, sexuality, and class would become more pronounced in the following

decades, the trope of youth, according to Medovoi, allowed Americans to embrace

the identity formation as part of national efforts to build a new self-image after the

war. Teenagers and everything they represented – hope for and fear of future change,

material indulgence, sexual excess, the blurring of current social and racial

boundaries – demonstrated the extent to which human life is itself shaped by a series

of stages distinct from the adult status quo, and how such stages intersect with other

types of (social, political) diversity.91 Identifying with the teenager allowed postwar

Americans to access the “otherness” that youth had come to represent, and thus to

accept heterogeneity and a resistance to the status quo as vital parts of the national

whole.

By inserting the very language of capitalist reification into the diegesis, the

brand name of Pepsi serves less as a reminder of a particular product, and more as a

cultural object that carries with it the politics of race and class that had become most

visible within the realm of consumerism. As a result, Pepsi’s prominence throughout

the film – gripped by the union president as he discusses a potential strike against the

establishment, emblazoned on the vending machine that divides the frame between

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!91 In Childhood and Society (1950), Erikson states that the personal, psychological process of youthful identity formation is easily transposed from individual to collective and from citizen to the nation (see Medovoi, 6-8). As Medovoi argues, although more specific identity distinctions such as race, gender, and sexuality would eventually eclipse its socio-political influence, youth served as the initial distinction from the hegemonic status quo and thus as a template for the rise of countercultural, identitarian resistance in the sixties and seventies.

! #"#!

Babe (oppressed laborer) and Sid (manager) – overlays a seemingly one-dimensional

union struggle with connotations of the current civil rights debate. The workers’

visible devotion to Pepsi not only aligns them with progressive politics, but also

positions them as occupying the space of otherness. Through the commercialized

rhetoric of teenaged culture, white working-class union members identify with

African American citizen-consumers, forging solidarity across lines of socially

constructed difference.92 As with all commercial moments, these instances direct our

response to the film as a whole, inflecting all scenes – even those not featuring Pepsi

– with the weight of this message. Perhaps no scene in the film demonstrates this

transference of meaning as effectively or as complexly as the now-iconic musical

routine, “Steam Heat.”

About three quarters through the film, the union holds an evening rally, which

features some entertainment to help the union workers, as the president claims, “get

hot.” What follows has become one of the most famous routines in the history of

Broadway and Hollywood musicals. Choreographed by then-newcomer Bob Fosse,

“Steam Heat” features “Gladys from the front office” (Carol Haney), and two other

“boys from the floor” (Peter Gennaro and Buzz Miller) performing the catchy Adler-

Ross chorus while mimicking the sounds and movement of industrial equipment.

Throughout the number, the trio debuts elements such as the pump step, vertical hat

toss, and hip roll that would later become Fosse standards, while singing about a !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!92 It is also possible that postwar audiences were particularly sensitive to the correlations that Pajama Game suggested between working class union members and African Americans. The Taft-Hartley Act (passed in 1947), which placed new restrictions on the political activity and capabilities of organized labor, began to resonate with the institutionalized inequalities that continued to oppress other racial and social groups (see Lizabeth Cohen, 153).

! #"$!

subject completely unrelated to the purpose of the rally (“I’ve got steam heat/but I

need your love/to keep away the cold” [figure 67]).93 As many scholars have claimed,

“Steam Heat’s” narrative irrelevance renders it merely a thinly veiled excuse for

dazzling choreographic display.94 Examining this dance purely in terms of Fosse’s

genius, however, overlooks its greater significance both within and beyond the

narrative. Even though the lyrics have little to do with the union’s struggle, the

mechanized movements of the three dancers – mimicking the operation of belts,

pistons, and pulleys with their bodies – reframes a song that is ostensibly about the

need for interpersonal love into one about the injustices of industrial labor.

Transformed into, as dance historian Robert Emmett Long claims, “some weird

hybrid, half human and half machine,” the dancers mirror the staccatoed precision of

the film’s opening sequence and thus its critique of factory culture.95 In addition to

referencing a particular set of industrial conditions, their movements also allude to a

broader history of dehumanization through labor; one that is inextricable from the

issue of race.

The history of slavery in the United States recalls the most brutal reduction of

human beings to material things – things that, like the modern machine, were bought

and sold based on what was believed to be quantifiable potential for labor and

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!93 For a description of Fosse’s choreographic style, see Debra McWaters, The Fosse Style (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008). 94 Such observations thus identify “Steam Heat” as similar to the formulaic Busby Berkeley routines, in which a backstage premise provided justification for elaborate diegetic performances that had little or nothing to do with the narrative (see Ethan Mordden, Coming Up Roses: The Broadway Musical in the 1950s [New York: Oxford University Press, 1998], 99). 95 Robert Emmet Long, Broadway: The Golden Years: Jerome Robbins and the Great Choreographer-Directors (New York: Continuum, 2001), 150.

! #"%!

efficiency. Throughout the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century,

institutionalized racism prevented many African Americans from accessing skilled or

professional jobs, thereby continuing to link them with unskilled, repetitive, and

undercompensated labor. In this light, “Steam Heat” produces a hybrid, not only of

human and machine, but of the racial division that has historically been mapped onto

this binary. Such a conflation of labor and race within these three performers becomes

especially evident in the second half of the routine, in which the initially minimal

vocal simulations of machinery are joined by full orchestral accompaniment. As the

music mounts in both tempo and volume, a sweeping pickup line pulls the song into

an entirely different key and cadence. Free now from the taught synchronization of

the previous section, the dancers allow their bodies to move in time to the swing beat,

and to shed the onomatopoeiac “ssssteam heat” for the discordant shouts of “they told

me to shovel some more coal in the boiler” and “they told me to pour some more oil

in the burner.” After a few moments, the accompaniment fades to a minimum and the

performers engage in a call and response pattern of “coal in the boiler” and “no

good.”

Suddenly, the racially coded implications of these (white) workers turning

into machines becomes much more explicitly linked to African American labor. The

verbal construction of “They told me to…” and the response of “no good,” reference

the subordination, monotony, and denial of personal gain common to the forms of

labor that (often silently) support a capitalist, industrialist society. Now, rather than

simply mime the machine, the dancers reference the human labor that has long been

! #"&!

regarded as machine-like, citing the sounds and movements of those communities that

have historically been limited to the most brutal forms of work. The call-and-response

format and slippage into dialect mirror the format and delivery of African American

vernacular song and its origins in enslaved plantation work.96 Similarly, the transition

in dance technique during this segment references African-derived styles of dance,

which served as an essential means of black American self-expression and solidarity

in the antebellum era. Whereas in the first half of the dance, the performers remain

stiffly erect, bending only slightly at the knee and moving only on the downbeats of

each measure, in the second half, their steps become syncopated, rhythmic; the hands

move out freely from the torso, the hips swivel, and the body makes more concerted

contact with the floor – shuffling and stomping the feet, gliding on the knees, tracing

circles with the toes. As Barbara Glass claims, this increased fluidity, looser body

carriage, and hip-centric movement are all examples of the “Africanization of

American movement (figure 68).”97

Essentially, then, “Steam Heat” draws an explicit connection between the

three white union members and African American labor. Its approach to collapsing

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!96 As Katrina Hazzard-Gordon argues, the disparate aesthetic traditions of slaves (all with ties to different regions of Africa) became unified under the working rhythms of the cotton fields, helping to give rise to a distinctly African American form of movement and music (Katrina Hazzard-Gordon, “Dancing Under the Lash: Sociocultural Disruption, Continuity, and Synthesis,” in Kariamu Welsh Asante, ed. African Dance: An Artistic, Historical, and Philosophical Inquiry [Trenton: Africa World Press, 1996], 108-109); see also Joel Dinerstine, Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African American Culture Between the World Wars (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), 20. 97 Quoted in Dinerstine, 17. As Marshall and Jean Stearns claim, while the Irish/Scottish (clogging, jigs) and European ballroom traditions all stressed stiff carriage and verticality (moving up into the air), the African tradition instead stressed contact with the ground, crouching, bending over at the waist and at the knee, producing rhythm through shuffling and tapping the feet (see Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance [New York: MacMillan, 1968], 15).

! #"'!

two socially constructed categories into one, however, raises unsettling questions

about the distinction (or lack thereof) between racial quotation and racist

appropriation, which had a long and painful history in the United States. The fact that

the entire routine is built around white actors performing an essentialist version of

race through gesture, sound, and costume serves as an uncanny reminder of American

minstrelsy, which similarly blurred the boundaries between race, and ultimately

between sentiments of fear, longing, love, and hate.98 According to David Roediger,

the practice of blackface minstrelsy originated with the desire of ethnic laborers in the

mid-nineteenth century to gain access to white privileges. Due to their lack of

education and poverty, lower class immigrants (usually Irish) were often forced to fill

out the ranks of hard, low-paying, deskilled labor, and were thus closely affiliated

with African Americans, who were similarly denied access to the romanticized

notions of independence and self-made prosperity that were so crucial to national

identity.99 By donning exaggerated black makeup and embodying caricatured

movement and gestures, white immigrants could visibly perform their distance from

blackness, demonstrating that they, unlike actual African Americans, had the

privilege of putting on and removing their caricatures at will.100

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!98 See David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991), 4-5. For a detailed analysis of the white ambivalence that sustained blackface minstrelsy’s popularity in the U.S., see Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). As Lott argues, “It was cross-racial desire that coupled a nearly insupportable fascination and a self-protective derision with respect to black people and their cultural practices, and that made blackface minstrelsy less a sign of absolute white power and control than of panic, anxiety, terror, and pleasure” (Lott, 6). 99 See Dinerstine, 227; Roediger, 11-12. 100 Michael Rogin discusses blackface minstrelsy as a form of cultural performativity, arguing (through the work of Butler and Modleski) that in assuming the role of another culturally constructed category, one not only distances oneself from that group, but also asserts one’s social status. Only the privileged

! #"(!

At its most disconcerting, “Steam Heat” borrows certain elements directly

from nineteenth century minstrelsy. Although most scholarship has likened the three

dancers to “Chaplinesque tramps,”101 the dilapidated elegance of their costumes also

bears striking similarity to the blackfaced dandy caricature. Their bow ties, bowler

hats, and ill fitted suits – hems falling awkwardly above their white socks, cuffs not

quite reaching to the wrists – recall the minstrel figure “Zip Coon,” whose

pretentiousness clashed with the visible evidence of his poverty and signaled his

humorous detachment from modern industry.102 Likewise, the colors of their dress –

red bow ties and black suits and hats – mirror the “minstrel” palette, which often

consisted of black and red to represent a primitive, cannibalistic impulse.103 The

routine, which features Gladys in identical dress as her two male partners, similarly

echoes Michael Rogin’s view that minstrelsy was an “all male transvestite form,”

which created a space in which troupes of men could engage in intense physical and

verbal exchanges (touching, wrestling, playfully roughhousing together) under the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!few are able to assume other identities with the knowledge that they may return to their original position of power at any time (see Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996], 34). Tania Modleski also discusses this notion in her essay on men who assume certain “feminine” qualities in popular film and television. As she argues, such constructions of passing “down” (imitating the social performances of a socially oppressed group) is often played for comedy, reinforcing, rather than debunking, patriarchal norms (Modleski, 88). 101 Long, 150. 102 See Roediger, 98. 103 As Manthia Diawara argues, such an association with subhuman behavior helped articulate the distance between black and white, and moreover to legitimize the humiliating reduction of African Americans to degrading stereotype on the minstrel stage. As Diawara elaborates, “They can fool nobody – even when they wear suits, ties, and hats – because their lips are painted with blood, which often spills over and matches their ties. Red, as a symbol of cannibalism, is the dominant signifier here” (“The Blackface Stereotype,” in David Levinthal, Blackface [Santa Fe: Arena Editions, 1999], 11).

! #")!

cover of racial masquerade.104 With their slippage into southern accents – verging on

black dialect – and their delivery of these lines while bulging their eyes, exaggerating

their facial expressions, and flashing opened palms (a gesture made familiar by white-

gloved minstrel acts), the three dancers reference not only black aesthetics, but also

blackface, through a form that descended directly from the song-and-dance olios of

the minstrel stage (figure 69 and 70).105

Despite taking on these qualities, however, “Steam Heat” stops just short of

literal blackface, refraining from having its performers don the mask of burnt cork –

that most notable signifier of minstrelsy’s grievous presence in American culture. By

first miming the motion and sound of the machine, then morphing into those bodies

that were forced to become machines, race and class appear to merge within the

actors’ performance of “Steam Heat.” While the white working class has historically

used blackface to deny the labor-based inequalities that united them with African

Americans, here it attempts (partially, imperfectly) to bridge this separation. In this

routine, the three dancers noticeably evade the common blackface “types” – the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!104 Rogin, 191. 105 See Barry Keith Grant, The Hollywood Musical (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 3. That such a complex expression of identification occurs within a musical number is notable. Not only is the Hollywood musical a direct descendent of minstrelsy’s form and structure, but much of its history and cultural iconicity has been built upon the white appropriation of – and profit from – the uncredited labor of African American artists. As scholars suggest, African American artists (most of whom were denied the same public platform as white performers) often inspired white musical celebrities, who built their own reputations upon this appropriation of black aesthetics. Musicals thus perpetuated the theft and racial divides of minstrelsy, often (unconsciously) referencing this guilty past through turns of phrase and subtle gestures in the routines (see Dinerstine, 238, and Clover’s analysis of Kelly’s “Singin’ in the Rain” routine in “Dancin’ in the Rain,” Critical Inquiry 21 [Summer 1995], 725). The musical routine and its place in American culture therefore represents historical injustice in relation to labor, making “Steam Heat” doubly significant: it references not only cross-racial solidarity through the labor crisis in the diegesis, but also alludes to the genre’s own part in actualizing these inequalities within other industries (the “culture” industry) and within popular representation.

! #"*!

loafing plantation worker, the pre-industrial dandy – separating the clichéd inflections

of speech and movement from such connotations and using them instead to express

modern industry’s grueling subordination. Within the routine, performers use some of

the most glaring, historically rooted (and deeply problematic) racial signifiers to align

themselves with blackness and the plight of black labor, even foregoing the most

definitive means of distanciation – the cosmetic application of burnt cork – in order to

strengthen their sense of unity with this historical “Other.”

It is difficult to say whether “Steam Heat’s” visual and aural evocation of race

is too egregious to effectively unite the struggle for labor equality and civil rights. For

viewers today, the searing reminders of the nation’s racist past likely overshadow any

progressive statement it might make regarding race and class unity, rendering the

hairline separation between these categories – blackface, ridicule, solidarity, mimicry

– even more difficult to distinguish. On a number of counts, “Steam Heat” might

therefore seem to be a new (but no less offensive) version of minstrelsy, an extension

of what Rogin termed the “minstrel consciousness”: when white artists usurp the

rhythms, sounds, and movements developed by African Americans in order to

contend with their own feelings of alienation and dehumanization.106 As Carol Clover

and others have argued, a version of this “minstrel consciousness” haunted the

American popular arts well into the post-blackface era, especially within the musical

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!106 This white, uncredited appropriation of black aesthetics “not only repressed the savagery experienced by slaves on plantations; it also appropriated for voluntary immigrants and migrants to the New World the homesickness of the single group of Americans who were actually stolen from their Old World homes, and whose children were stolen from them under slavery” (Rogin, 143). As Rogin claims, such aesthetics have been developed by the African American community in response to their specific history of subordination and disenfranchisement, and the fact that white culture attempted to mitigate their own struggles through these artistic forms was a particularly egregious form of theft.

! ##+!

genre, where white Hollywood song-and-dance men such as Gene Kelly and Fred

Astaire often built their own reputations upon this theft of creative labor.107

Indeed, the minstrel consciousness still hangs heavy in this routine, which at

worst uses African American history and subordination to motivate white union

workers for their own cause. Despite these downfalls, however, it does suggest a

radical dissolution of social division, and points toward a rather youthful embrace of

difference in order to achieve its political goals. These codes – much like the presence

of Pepsi – may be less apparent today, but legible to postwar viewers conditioned by

their immersion in civil rights debates and classical-era representation in ways that we

are not. As David Roediger argues, the white working class’s efforts to separate

themselves from their black peers in the middle of the nineteenth century sabotaged

their own cause, weakening any potential that a racially unified laboring class might

have had for collective bargaining.108 In this regard, Pajama Game – like the youth-

based movements that were to come in the sixties – strives to provide a vision of the

future that forges connections across pre-established social boundaries. “Steam

Heat’s” ultimate message of cross-racial unification and solidarity in no way

legitimizes its embodiment of racialized signifiers, but its clumsy attempts to merge

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!107 For a particularly nuanced discussion of this aesthetic theft in Hollywood musicals, see Clover’s analysis of Singin’ in the Rain, and Joel Dinerstine’s analysis of Fred Astaire’s “Slap that Bass” from Shall We Dance (chapter 4). The similarities between “Steam Heat” and “Slap that Bass” attests to Fosse’s infatuation with Astaire – said his sister, “Bobby always said he wanted to go to Broadway to become the next Fred Astaire,” his sister claims (quoted in Biography: Bob Fosse: Dancing on the Edge, produced by Andrew Rothstein [1999; New York, NY: A&E Home Video, 1999], DVD). At the same time, the differences between the two dances – namely, the fact that “Slap that Bass” choreographically distances Astaire from the black men in the scene, whereas “Steam Heat” privileges the inherent links between the white laborers and black dance aesthetics – demonstrates a uniquely postwar take on collective identity. 108 See Roediger, 6.

! ##"!

human and machine, white and black, appears to strive toward solidarity rather than

division. As the camera pulls back to reveal an audience of “hot” and hollering white

union workers at the end of the routine, it seems that “Steam Heat” – for postwar

viewers both within and beyond the diegesis – begins to realize the breakdown of

social division and thus, the teenaged idealism, that Pajama Game’s commercial

moments hinted at all along.

Conclusion: Growing Pains

Teenagers may be an almost clichéd symbol of postwar American culture,

holding a special place in popular memory and the Grease-tinted glasses of nostalgia

– all rock and roll, poodle skirts, pom-poms, and drive ins. Yet the depth of their

symbolism reaches far beyond their economic importance or their mass cultural

influence, touching the very core of national identity and its tortured, searching

efforts to rebuild itself after the war. Teenagers – and, more specifically, the vision of

teenagers cultivated by a capitalistic culture – gave form to this particular stage in

national development, allowing Americans to come to terms with their collective

growing pains, and to identify with all of the sentiments that studies in this era

claimed were associated with youth: its embrace of “others,” its skepticism of pre-

established social divisions, its wonder, its restlessness, and its potential. Commercial

moments helped trace the dynamics of this process. In social problem films, they

revealed the desperate, ultimately futile, efforts to control teenagers and everything

they represented about the future; they allow viewers to see the other side of Rebel,

! ###!

the side that reinforced anti-establishment attitudes and embraced difference despite

its conservative ending. In films such as Pajama Game, commercial moments

revealed the implications at the heart of this “teenaged” identity, foreshadowing the

types of transitions that would eventually reshape the national “self.” Taken together,

both films highlight the extent to which the language of capitalism changed postwar

visuality, providing a raw commentary on this particular stage in the nation’s

development.

! ##$!

Chapter 4 | Looking Beyond: Old Age and the Limits of Existence

Introduction

Byron Haskin’s 1955 science fiction film, Conquest of Space, ends well

enough: after being stranded on Mars for nearly a year, an international team of

astronauts devises a way to navigate their damaged spaceship back to earth. In the

final frames, the men stare in awe and relief as Mars recedes from view, and just

before the credits roll, we are left with one last image of their rocket as it cuts its way

triumphantly through a velvety, star-studded sky. Yet the closure offered by this

ending is an uneasy one. Contrary to the bravado of the title, Conquest is less a

narrative of victory than one of human weakness and failure. With the spiraling

psychological decline of the crew – and in particular, the mission’s patriarch – the

film makes a powerful statement about human frailty in the face of powers it cannot

fully understand.

Although set in outer space, a fairly conventional domestic melodrama lies at

the heart of Conquest. As innovator of the world’s most advanced satellite

technology, General Samuel Merritt (Walter Brooke) serves not only as the figurative

“father” of the mission, but also as the actual father of first officer Barney Merritt

(Eric Fleming), who – to the general’s dismay – does not yet share his father’s

passion for space exploration. Although the general begins the journey with the

entitled, confident swagger of a true colonialist (fulfilling orders to explore Mars for

new sources of raw materials), as the spaceship draws nearer to its destination his

! ##%!

confidence begins to wane. One evening, while still en route, he claims to his son:

“According to the bible, man was created on the earth… The question is…what are

we? Explorers? Or invaders? Invaders of the sacred domain of God. His heavens. To

man God gave the earth. Nothing else. But this taking of other planets…it’s almost an

act of blasphemy.”1 In these tense moments, the general, with his graying temples and

stern countenance, serves as a foil for Barney, who sits confidently at the center of the

frame and at the helm of the ship, unfettered by thoughts of the bible or his own

mortality. A series of two-shots emphasize this spatial configuration, and alternating

close ups stress the gradual transference of hero status from father to son (figures 71,

72, and 73). In this scene, it is the character whose age has given him a different

perspective on both the duration and fragility of human life that brings God into outer

space, making this new frontier eerily reminiscent of heaven, and emphasizing (if

only briefly) the special symbolism of old age in postwar society.

This unexpected interlude introduces a different notion of heaven and outer

space, both of which superficially connoted (then as now) promise, reward, and the

possibility of an endless future. Through its depiction of the mission’s elder, this

sequence exposes the popular associations of both realms as little more than a

perverse manifestation of postwar anxiety and existential crisis. The rawness of this

message is encoded in the general’s eerie dialogue, but is perhaps most forcefully

expressed within the formal qualities of the scene and its particularly commercial

articulation of generational difference. Here, the film’s uncannily unified color

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1 Quote from The Conquest of Space, directed by Byron Haskin (1955; Hollywood, CA: Paramount, 2004), DVD.

! ##&!

palette, balance of form, and triteness of gesture render its depiction of older age

similar to advertising language, which became increasingly invested in depicting the

elderly in the years following World War II. Like so many other commercial

moments, the particular way that this capitalist language merges with the cinematic

text illuminates what “old age” really came to signify in an era newly obsessed with

the limits of existence – the “final frontiers” of both the lifespan and the greater

galaxy.

Eventually, the general’s descent into madness interrupts this moment of

reflection and candor, pulling viewers back into standard Hollywood territory. After a

number of similar outbursts and attempting to sabotage the spaceship’s landing, he

eventually invites his own death at the hands of his son (in the climactic scene,

Barney must shoot his father in order to prevent him from setting the ship on fire and

killing everyone on board). Barney, once the reluctant space explorer, steps into his

father’s place, commanding the mission and returning the rest of the crew safely to

earth. But the specific – and specifically commercial – visual articulation of the

general casts a pall over this triumphant ending, transforming an otherwise shopworn

space adventure into a meditation on the nation’s increasingly self-reflexive

understanding of identity.

I begin with Conquest because it so directly illustrates this chapter’s primary

argument: that through film, we can trace the ways in which shifting social and

political conditions compelled postwar Americans to understand themselves as

defined not only by the usual means – citizenship, politics, common culture – but also

! ##'!

by a shared humanity, which was symbolized most forcefully through the trope of old

age. Popular film and its dialogue with advertising language demonstrate how a

renewed cognizance of the things that make us most human (our limitations, our very

mortality) prompted contemporary viewers to think differently about the days to

come. Commercial moments like the ones in Conquest, in other words, made

Americans rethink their relationship to both heaven and outer space – two entities that

represented an distant, but eventual future. That a greater awareness of senior citizens

as a distinct demographic coincided with interests in space exploration is not a

coincidence, but rather a prime example of how concerns on a political, global, and

intimately human scale merged in order to cultivate a uniquely postwar relationship to

emerging existential questions. Conquest, with its graying, bible-wielding astronaut,

may seem at first to be a rare and too convenient example of how these cultural

anxieties manifested themselves visually, yet it is only one of a number of space

exploration films from the fifties to exploit the formal and affective layers of the

commercial moment to touch on these themes.

This chapter therefore starts with an examination of old age in postwar

commercial culture, discussing the ways in which the popular, commodity-driven

language of advertising helped develop a unique visual shorthand for portraying the

new social and ideological place of the elderly in this era. I argue that secondary

characters in films as varied as Battle Hymn and The Pajama Game drew from

commercial representations of the elderly, further solidifying the strong links between

this demographic, the fragility of life, and the imminence of a mysterious, unearthly

! ##(!

future. I will then discuss the ways in which this new consciousness of humanity

affected the science fiction genre, especially through space exploration films such as

When Worlds Collide (1951), Conquest of Space (1955), and Destination Moon

(1950), which conventionalized the presence of an elderly, supporting character and

his theatrical contemplation of mortality. I explore how his commercialized portrayal

helped cultivate outer space as a kind of afterlife – a place of both physical death and

spiritual rebirth – and discuss why the cosmos became such a convenient metaphor

for heaven during an era marked by significant transitions in religious culture.

Finally, I turn to science fiction’s use of commercial language in its rendering of what

Vivian Sobchack calls the “visual surfaces” of outer space. I argue that the sublime

solemnity of these films’ formal conventions resonated deeply with commercial

efforts to visualize outer space, and aimed to provide postwar viewers with a new

spirituality in a cosmic, rather than heavenly, landscape. Attending to the deeply

nuanced exchanges between advertising and film opens up an alternate narrative

space within films like Conquest: one that tells a contentious and open-ended story of

how postwar identity was shaped through the very human conditions of loss, faith,

and fear of the unknown.

Old Age and the Threshold of Life

Exactly what prompts the general’s outburst is never clearly stated, and yet

the film’s distinctly commercial rendering of him seems to imply that this exhibition

of human frailty is a condition of his age. Counter-intuitive as it may seem, the

! ##)!

flattened visual language of commercial culture is what lends the general depth

beyond his role as the wooden, authoritarian patriarch, and provides the only

explanation for why the film’s rigorous closure still seems haunted by his presence.

As the tragedy of Norma Desmond (Sunset Boulevard [1950]), madness of

Blanche and Jane Hudson (What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? [1962]), pathos of

Margo (All About Eve [1950]) and buffoonery of Sir Francis “Piggy” Beekman

(Gentlemen Prefer Blondes [1953]) demonstrate, Hollywood films that directly

addressed aging were rare, and often structured around broad caricatures of senility,

insanity, or crassness. Far more common in this period were the seemingly

inconsequential elderly characters that lingered, barely noticed, in the visual and

narrative fringes. In fact, such figures have filled out the peripheries of nearly all of

the films analyzed in this dissertation: Babe’s father, “Pop” in Pajama Game, the

innkeeper in Niagara, the grandmother in Rebel Without a Cause, the village elder in

Battle Hymn. As opposed to the films that are specifically about old age, the vast

majority of postwar Hollywood narratives included characters like these: bland points

of excess within an otherwise obsessively economic classical system. And while

minor elderly characters had long been a staple of Hollywood films, they became

newly significant in the postwar era by taking on the visual conventions of

contemporary advertising campaigns.

During the war years, emphasis on productivity, industriousness, and strength

meant that those who were viewed as “dependents” (such as the elderly, children)

! ##*!

virtually disappeared from advertisements.2 The return to a peacetime economy,

however, gave advertising executives an opportunity to establish a concrete system

for representing the elderly once again. Occupying secondary positions as graying,

bespectacled grandparents in postwar commercial culture, senior citizens often served

as benign symbols of tradition and stability in a world now scarred by history. Yet

embedded within such form was also an expression of their complex, period-specific

relationship to the nature of life and the mysteries of death. In a 1954 7-Up ad

designed by J.W. Thompson, a granddaughter greets her grandparents at a holiday

party (figure 74).3 Even though all sight lines of this multi-figure composition

converge upon the spectacle of the grandfather kneeling to greet his granddaughter, it

is clear that the grandparents are merely guests in this house. Still wearing their

winter coats, still positioned near the entryway where other guests have just arrived,

they are familiar strangers, visually associated with transience and detachability.

Here, as in many postwar advertisements, the elderly remain perpetual visitors who

are always in excess of the nuclear family.

At their most literal, such compositions are a transparent reflection of

sociological shifts in postwar American life. As the suburbs drew Americans away

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!2 For a discussion of the absence of children and other “dependents” during World War II in advertising, see Eileen Margerum, “The Child in American Advertising, 1890-1960: Reflections of a Changing Society,” in Images of the Child, ed. Harry Eiss (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1994), 347. The absence of elderly figures is evident in the selective survey of popular American advertisements offered by Jim Heimann in his 40s: All American Ads (New York: Taschen, 2001). 3 J.W. Thompson was the oldest and most well established advertising agency in the country at the time, and as such, its visual language reflected the most mainstream of American values. Its campaigns were among the most hyper-ritualized and conservative in the industry, and also the most ubiquitous, which is why a number of my examples in this chapter focus on its work.

! #$+!

from urban apartment buildings and extended kinship networks, the nuclear family

model became the new norm, and as scholars have discussed at length, the rise of this

ideal was accompanied by dramatic changes in language (“togetherness” coined in

1950), architecture and interior design (the suburban ranch house’s single level,

picture windows, “family rooms,” and backyards were tailor-made for families with

children), literature (childrearing and domestic “how-to” manuals proliferated), and

especially consumption patterns, with the debut of “club” and “family” packs.4 In this

regard, the marginalization of the elderly in postwar advertising had a very practical

valence, reflecting the oldest generation’s absence from the suburban family ideal, as

well as the fact that they were not yet themselves a targeted market.5 Often designated

as “grandparents” and thus known only by their relationship to the nuclear family, the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!4 For “togetherness,” see Elizabeth Fraterrigo, Playboy and the Making of the Good Life in Modern America (New York: Oxford, 2009), 3. For the ways in which the architecture and design of the suburban home reflected the needs of nuclear families with children, see Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, Revised and Updated 20th Anniversary Edition (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 163. According to May, kitchens were placed at the front of the house, so mothers could watch children as they cooked, the one-story design made homes safer for smaller children, and the large windows facing the backyard allowed for constant surveillance of children at play. For more on how the television changed postwar domestic design and layout, see Lynn Spigel, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 67. 5 The elderly did not appear as central figures in advertisements until companies began to court them as a valued market in the 1990s, when the so-called “baby boom” generation began to retire and were expected to use their pensions for purchasing consumer goods (see Kimberly Anne Sawchuck, “From Gloom to Boom: Age, Identity and Target Marketing,” in Images of Aging: Cultural Representations of Later Life, ed. Mike Featherstone and Andrew Wernick [New York: Routledge, 1995], 174). Until that point, the elderly were often in minor, stereotyped roles. As one well known study by Ursic and Ursic argued, from the 50s-80s, there was only about a 3.2% increase in portrayals of old age in popular magazines such as Good Housekeeping and Time (see Anthony C. Ursic, Michael L. Ursic, and Virginia L. Ursic, “A Longitudinal Study of the Use of the Elderly in Magazine Advertising,” Journal of Consumer Research 13, no. 1 [June 1986], 131-133; see also Thomas E. Robinson III, Portraying Older People in Advertising: Magazine, Television, and Newspapers [New York: Garland, 1998], 26).

! #$"!

elderly in postwar advertising served first and foremost to frame the main characters

(parents and children) rather than to draw attention to themselves.

Popular film adopted a similar approach to depicting old age, with elderly

characters providing more of a visual accent than any plot-related function: in Pajama

Game, Pop spends his negligible amount of screen time weaving casually in and out

of the frame, “just passing through” the house he shares with Babe; in Battle Hymn,

the village elder serves an expository function, providing necessary plot-related

context and adding a touch of Korean exoticism for postwar American audiences; and

in Niagara, the owner of the inn engages in mundane tasks – watering the plants or

sitting on the porch – as the main action unfolds around him. In each instance, these

characters’ graying, slow-moving bodies provide a comforting rhythm to the film’s

visual spaces, leaving elderly characters – like their commercial counterparts –

transient and largely undeveloped. In Conquest, the use of such advertising

techniques lays bare the general’s actual function within the narrative. During his

pivotal monologue, his hands remain idly wrapped around a bible while Barney sits in

the commander’s seat, confidently tinkering with the control panel and navigating the

ship toward its destination. This sequence allows us to read the general as secondary,

visually hovering outside of the main nucleus of action and meaning; it also allows us

to recognize his incapacitating crisis as being little more than a catalyst for Barney’s

heroic turn. His presence, like all of the “visiting” grandparents in contemporary

advertisements, is always already anticipating his absence.

! #$#!

In addition to reinforcing narrative marginality, these commercial moments

also highlight the degree to which old age came to represent an impermanence of a

very human kind: the finitude of life, and the haunting threat of death. Postwar

reflection upon the horrors of two world wars and anxiety over potential nuclear

annihilation made Americans newly sensitive to both the vulnerability of the human

body and the errs of human judgment. Suspended between an immutable, flawed

yesterday and a terrifyingly mysterious tomorrow, they became more attuned to the

passage of time, and the degree to which this awareness of time defined them as a

nation and as human beings. Perhaps few gauges of time were – and are – so

intimately familiar, so readily accessible, as the process of aging. On a fundamental

level, we are all defined by the human life span and are therefore susceptible to time’s

relentless, forward progression as well as the history it leaves in its wake. In their

growing awareness of both time and the frailty of the human condition, then, postwar

Americans became more sensitive to the finiteness of their own existence. From this

schema, the elderly emerged as the ultimate metaphor for the tension between past

and future and life and death, which shaped so much of postwar consciousness.

This fixation on old age as the preeminent representation of human nature was

primarily a postwar phenomenon, but followed in a long philosophical tradition. In

the nineteenth century, Nietzsche theorized that this awareness of temporality is what

distinguishes humans from other animals, structuring our consciousness around an

innate awareness of history. Since time is a steady, finite progression – a linear march

toward the future that cannot circle back – humans are in large part defined by their

! #$$!

relationship to moments that can never be relived. The elderly, with their

stereotypical ties to tradition, their links to family memories and heritage, are

repositories of this history, reinforcing Nietzsche’s belief that humans always carry

their pasts with them, forging ahead but harboring a tortured desire for moments that

have already been.6 At root, human beings are like Benjamin’s angel of history,

which is propelled by the linear march of time “into a future to which his back is

turned, while the pile of debris before him grows toward the sky.”7 The elderly, with

their frail bodies marked by time, most visibly encapsulate the backward glance of

human beings, and the ways in which our journey into the future is always freighted

with the pain and pleasures of the past.8

As much as old age is indicative of history, it is at the same time one of the

most potent signifiers of the days to come (though pushed by the forces of progress

and modernity against its will, Benjamin’s angel still moves forward). Older bodies

may bear the scars of previous worldly experience, but they also represent the

unyielding progression through life, foreshadowing for younger generations what it

means to be swept forward by time and to draw nearer to the ultimate closure of

death. For Nietzsche, humans have a perpetual “world-openness”: we are forever in

flux as we evolve, always striving for a sense of completion and wholeness that we

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!6 See Bryan Turner’s discussion of Nietzsche in “Aging and Identity: Some Reflections on the Somatization of the Self,” in Images of Aging, 247-249. For Nietzche, our understanding of time gives us a sense of both history and future goals, lending us our unique ability to feel boredom and melancholy (see ibid., 249). 7 Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938-1940, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2003), 392. 8 As Turner claims, “Time is inscribed indelibly on our bodies” and “My body is, so to speak, a walking memory” (250).

! #$%!

can never fully achieve until we die (the only point at which this constant evolution

stops).9 Such an awareness of temporality endows humans with their most distinctive

trait: an acute sense of their own mortality, or what Brian Turner calls an “inevitable”

and “painful” awareness “of their own exorable fate.”10 Historian Peter Stearns

explains it more bluntly: “The generalized awareness, the consciousness of death

even when it is not immediately present…seem to be distinctly human.”11

By the 1950s, the elderly had become nearly synonymous with mortal

limitation. Medical innovations such as the polio vaccine and the end to World War II

led to a decline in premature death, such that future “completion” became more

exclusively linked to old age – the only demographic in which death was still deemed

logical, expected.12 As a result, Americans began to focus on the elderly through a

series of academic, legislative, and social endeavors, including the first elderly

community (“Youngtown”), the rise of goods and services exclusively for an elderly

market (termed by industry insiders as the “professional aging industry”), and

academic departments devoted to analyzing this burgeoning demographic.13 With

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!9 Turner elaborates on Nietzsche’s point: “Human beings are ontologically nostalgic, because completed time has a security which by definition the future can never have” (Turner, 249). For more on death as a state of stasis and ultimate completion, see Elizabeth Bronfen and Sarah Webster Goodwin, “Introduction,” in Death and Representation, ed. Elizabeth Bronfen and Sarah Webster Goodwin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 11. 10 As Turner summarizes: “human beings are anticipatory beings directing their actions towards future contingencies, but also by the very fact of conscious memory they are necessarily aware of their own finitude, of the passing of time, and therefore inevitably and painfully aware of their own exorable fate – their individual inescapable death” (Turner, 248). 11 Peter N. Stearns, Revolutions in Sorrow: The American Experience of Death in a Global Perspective (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2007), 7-8. 12 Ibid., 89. 13 Youngtown was established in 1954 on the site of an abandoned ranch in the Arizona desert. Although its founder claimed that he simply wanted to “make elderly people not feel old,” Youngtown responded to much of the era’s research in geriatrics, attempting to provide residents with a sense of

! #$&!

retirees and beneficiaries of a new Social Security system on the rise by the 1940s,

the U.S. came closer to realizing the goals of psychologist G. Stanley Hall, who

believed that old age is a font of untapped wisdom, and, if valued and analyzed as

such, can offer insight into building a more just society.14

Yet such developments often stigmatized the elderly, designating old age as

distinct from, rather than a vital part of, contemporary society. Growing efforts to

study and accommodate the aging population seemed guided by an impulse to

segregate and contain. Academic and policy studies surveyed senior citizen’s social

needs, but also charted their subjects’ mental and physical deterioration as they

approached the end of life. Likewise, Youngtown was practically a self-contained

island 20 miles from the nearest city, boasting its own town hall, hobby shop, and

general store.15 And, even though it was created with the aim of giving older

Americans a chance to enjoy their retirement (as Andrew Blechman claims, “they

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!community (Sunday potlucks, Canasta clubs), and a cost of living well within the means of one’s pension and Social Security benefits (the “no children allowed policy” kept expenses low by eliminating school taxes, and the small, uniform homes ensured easy, low cost maintenance). By the end of the decade, Youngtown had served as a model for many similar communities, including Del Webb’s “Sun City” “resort-retirement living” complexes in 1960 (see Andrew D. Blechman, Leisureville: Adventures in America’s Retirement Utopias [New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2008], 28). During this period, the elderly also received much more federal and academic attention. For example, the U.S. Department of Public Health established a unit of gerontology, various state governments instituted programs to help manage chronic disease, and cities throughout the country sponsored studies that investigated the medical needs of the elderly. In addition, the University of Chicago established one of the first social gerontology programs with its Committee on Human Development in 1948, and similar programs at Duke and the University of Michigan followed suit (see Thomas R. Cole, “The Prophecy of Senescence: G. Stanley Hall and the reconstruction of Old age in America,” The Gerontologist 24, no. 4 [1984], 364-5). 14 Widely acknowledged as the founder of gerontology, Hall believed that the human life cycle mirrored the Darwinian process of evolution, and thus that old age represented the pinnacle of psychological and moral development (See Jill Lepore, “Twilight: Growing Old and Even Older,” The New Yorker, March 14, 2011, 30, http://archives.newyorker.com; see also Cole, 360-1). 15 Blechman, 29.

! #$'!

didn’t come to die; they came to live…”16), its construction of the “golden years” as a

reward for living well also seemed eerily close to a “last gasp”: encouraging the

elderly to enjoy the best parts of life with the time they had left. Old age represented a

hard truth about human mortality – a truth that the rest of the population found both

fascinating and terrifying, and thus could not help but keep at a firm distance. This

attitude is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the rapid rise of the private, for-

profit nursing home in the fifties, which began to serve as the “catch all” solution to

the rising numbers of elderly who – in an age of suburban, nuclear families – had

nowhere else to go.17 Here, the mild (and voluntary) seclusion of Youngtown grew

severe, confining those who most exemplified human frailty to a version of what

Erving Goffman termed “total institutions,” or places that completely dissociate their

inhabitants from the rhythms of the outside world.18 Postwar Americans began to

view gerontology as a necessary way of understanding human nature, but one that

was implicitly touched by death.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!16 Ibid. 17 A number of factors contributed to the rise of private nursing homes in the fifties. In addition to the fact that changes in domestic structure (suburbanization, the rise of the nuclear ideal) meant that fewer families were willing to take in elderly relatives, initial guidelines also prevented Social Security beneficiaries from using government funds for public institutions such as “poorhouses” or “almshouses,” which meant that the rising number of senior citizens who could not live in retirement communities began to turn instead to privately owned nursing facilities (see http://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/nursinghomes/timeline.html; see also Frank E. Moss and Val J. Halamandaris, Too Old, Too Sick, Too Bad: Nursing Homes in America [Germanton: Aspen Systems Corporation, 1977], 6) . 18 See Joel S. Savishinsky, The Ends of Time: Life and Work in a Nursing Home (New York: Bergin and Garvey, 1991), 4. This was especially true in postwar nursing homes, which became increasingly modeled after (and physically connected to) hospitals, due to the increased demand and special medical needs of many elderly residents. The sterile, institutional nature of nursing homes was thus a product of the postwar era (see http://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/nursinghomes/timeline.html).

! #$(!

Within this cultural milieu, the elderly that today appear so blandly marginal

in postwar advertising and film carried tremendous ideological weight. No matter

how unassuming the veneer, the trope of “the (visiting) grandparent” in postwar

visual culture inevitably reminded viewers of what it was to be a subject of time, and

thus, to be human. Understanding Hollywood from this perspective allows us to read

the seemingly inexplicable, excessive elderly characters in postwar film as bearing

important social meaning; as serving less as formulaic contributors to the usual plot-

driven economies of classical cinema, and more as poignant, extra-diegetic references

to the new American understanding of humanity. In this regard, these older characters

reinforce Judith Roof’s belief that minor, supporting characters often act as “truth

telling” devices. As she claims, “like the psychoanalytical symptom,” they are “the

site where unconscious meaning opens and becomes visible.”19 Mainstream films

may not have wanted to address questions of human weakness, flaw, and mortality

directly. And yet, by choosing to populate the fringes of their narratives with

commercial clichés of old age, these films deliberately use the elderly as a form of

“truth telling.” Characters such as the captain in Conquest therefore called attention to

the era’s new ontological awareness, and the ways in which it would reshape not only

how Americans thought about life on earth, but life beyond it as well.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!19 Judith Roof, All About Thelma and Eve: Sidekicks and Third Wheels (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 5.

! #$)!

Infinity and Beyond

If the supporting and largely “unnecessary” elderly characters implied a

certain truth about life and humanity, their presence in science fiction from this era

made these innuendos explicit. Throughout the postwar period, the lone older

character – contemplating his age, his death, or in many cases dying himself –

became a convention in space exploration films, raising questions about the

insignificance of earthly existence within these otherwise triumphant narratives.

Films such as Destination Moon and When Worlds Collide, like Conquest, at first

seem to reinforce human capability: new beginnings in outer space, safe returns home

from an extraterrestrial adventure, the preservation of human life in the face of

danger. Yet each also includes a pivotal scene in which the actions and words of one

character – inevitably the oldest – forces the rest of his team (and the audience) to

reflect upon human nature and its many limitations.

Destination Moon (1950) is perhaps the quintessential postwar space

exploration film. In addition to featuring award-winning special effects and

fantastical, detailed views of the moon’s surface long before any footage of it existed,

the film also introduces what would become a classic Cold War era premise: the

Russians are rumored to be making plans to travel to the moon just as federal funding

for American endeavors is being cut. A rogue team of scientists decides that beating

the enemy to the moon is vital to securing a political advantage on earth, and thus

carries out the mission on their own, courting private backers and launching without

government clearance. Destination Moon revels in the opportunity to inform a lay

! #$*!

public about the wonders of outer space, aiming to make the universe seem newly

within reach. As a result, much of the film thrills viewers not through plot dynamics,

but rather through a number of educational sequences: an animated short (justified as

part of a presentation for potential backers) explains the mechanics of rocket power,

while other scenes – a heated discussion about launch and landing maneuvers,

extended emphasis on the men using their oxygen tanks and “space boots” – serve as

isolated, episodic demonstrations of how current scientific knowledge might be

applied to actual humans in space.20

So diligent is Destination in its efforts to reveal the science of space travel that

it is not until the very end of the film that the primary conflict begins to unfold: a

spaceship malfunction has left the astronauts with too little fuel to make the trip back

to earth, forcing them to contemplate the likelihood of their own deaths. When they

realize that the ship is merely 180 pounds overweight (or, the weight of a single

human being), each crewmember valiantly claims that he should be the one to stay

behind for the sake of the team. Yet none advance any compelling reasons for why

one life is worth any more or less than the others. None that is, until the doctor, who

rests his case upon his age (“I’m the oldest,” he says. “I’ve lived my life”21). As

might be expected, such negotiations prove to be unnecessary: the crew is eventually

able to shed the necessary cargo and spare the lives of all four members. And yet, the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!20 Such efforts proved very effective, with one reviewer claiming: “If ‘Destination Moon’ weren’t so carefully researched, you’d probably find this film Buck Rogerish. Even now it seems rather fantastic, but the physicists tell us the eventual trip could be very much like this” (“Destination Moon,” The Commonweal, July 21, 1950, 367). 21 Quote from Destination Moon, directed by Irving Pichel (1950; Chatsworth, CA: Image Entertainment, 2000), DVD.

! #%+!

doctor’s words – much like the General’s in Conquest – leave a lasting impression,

reinforcing the degree to which old age is the touching point between human life and

the mysteries beyond, as well as the channel through which outer space is redefined

as a place not of adventure and regeneration, but rather as the end of earthly existence

in death.

In many respects, Destination set the tone for Hollywood space exploration

features to come: its emphasis on educating general viewers about the science of

space travel, its imaginative projections of what outer space might look like, and its

fixation on exploratory details – often at the expense of the plot – all became defining

qualities of the subgenre. Most notable, however, was the fact that many other big-

budget hits adopted Destination’s narrative trajectory, conventionalizing how

unexpected conditions in space force the mission’s patriarch to confront – and then

embody – the interface between known and unknown, life and death. Few films from

this era so readily adhered to this formula as When Worlds Collide (1951), what one

Time reviewer called “Hollywood’s most ambitious foray into the thin air of science-

fiction” to date.22 The film, an apocalyptic narrative directed by Rudolph Maté,

focuses on the anticipation of the star Bellus’s imminent collision with (and

obliteration of) Earth. After a small group of scientists led by Dr. Cole Hendron

(Larry Keating) fails to convince the United Nations of this impending danger (and

therefore to secure the funding necessary to relocate masses of people to a

neighboring planet) the team turns to private investor Sydney Stanton (John Hoyt),

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!22 “When Worlds Collide,” Time, November 12, 1951, 114.

! #%"!

and recruits hundreds of the nation’s brightest students to realize its plans. Without

international financial backing, however, the team can construct only one rocket, and

a lottery must determine the makeup of its forty-person crew, which will be charged

with repopulating the new planet.

Aside from the expository information frontloaded at the beginning of the film

(introducing Zyra and its danger, as well as the requisite love triangle) and the safe

arrival of the rocket in new world at the end, much of the film focuses on the

mounting conflict over who will survive and who will be left to perish on earth.

Recurring shots that capture the fleeting embraces of young, anonymous couples

foretell the imminent separation of loved ones, reminding viewers of what is at stake

in the moral conflict between the two most senior characters: Stanton, the elderly,

wheelchair-bound benefactor of the mission, personifies human flaw, attempting to

use his wealth to fix the lottery and even resorting to violence in order to get his way,

whereas Dr. Hendron, the leader of the project, represents human benevolence and

rationality, striving to maintain fairness amid the chaos. The moments just before the

world’s end provide the backdrop for their climactic final standoff, which results in

Hendron keeping himself and an unwilling Stanton behind as the rocket is sealed

(yelling his famous last words: “The New World is for the young!”23). When the

rocket eventually lands safely on the new planet, the crew discovers that the

combined absence of Hendron and Stanton provided just enough fuel for the journey,

sparing the lives of those on board. The final frames – first a close up of the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!23 Quote from When Worlds Collide, directed by Rudolph Maté (1951; Hollywood, CA: Paramount, 2001), DVD.

! #%#!

survivors’ awed expressions, then a slow pan across a glorious, verdant landscape –

essentially justify the loss of the older generation as a necessary sacrifice. Although

billions of people on earth presumably die at the film’s end, it is Hendron and Stanton

– with their aging bodies and age-old conflicts – who become symbols of human

vulnerability. Narratively and visually secondary, they enact what their advertising

counterparts merely imply: that they are dispensable in and of themselves, existing

only as foils for youth and reminders of the nation’s period-specific obsession with

mortality.

Even though When Worlds Collide seems to celebrate the cosmos as a life-

giving realm, the particularly commercial handling of old age in this – and in many

postwar space exploration films – transforms outer space from a site of regeneration

and fertility to a site of life after death, or afterlife. Conventional scholarship has long

described the cosmos as a locus of regeneration: outer space is where UFOs and

aliens – Klaatus in The Day the Earth Stood Still, Martians in War of the Worlds, and

pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers – reside, as well as where humankind can

achieve a futuristic version of manifest destiny, propagating its values in alien

territory.24 Likewise, as Vivian Sobchack argues, the very spaces of outer space can

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!24 For more on how postwar film defined space as a source of alien life (and how the nature of such life forms reflected contemporary politics), see Peter Biskind, “The Russians are Coming, Aren’t They? Them! And The Thing,” 318-324, and Mark Jancovich, “Re-examining the 1950s Invasion Narratives,” 325-336, both in Liquid Metal: The Science Fiction Film Reader, ed. Sean Redmond (New York: Wallflower Press, 2004), and Hugh Ruppersberg, “the Alien Messiah,” in Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema, ed. Annette Kuhn (New York: Verso, 1990), 32-38. Scholarship relating science fiction to westerns examines the manifest destiny attitudes in postwar space exploration films, and their designation of outer space as a site of expansion, prosperity, and propagation (for a discussion of these themes in relation to science fiction films from the 70s and 80s, see Lane Roth, “Vraisemblance and the Western Setting in Contemporary Science Fiction Film,”

! #%$!

serve as erotic, reproductive zones, transforming the greater universe into an abstract

replacement for all of the human intimacies that the genre refuses to engage directly.

As she claims, science fiction films tend to repress the “dependencies of the flesh”

and sublimate them instead into the vast, and decidedly not human, cavity of space.25

Both Destination and Conquest support this position, introducing women briefly –

capturing them bidding farewell to their space-faring husbands, or referencing them

in throwaway lines by crewmembers who long for home – but ultimately positioning

them as ideological tools rather than independent characters.26 In both Destination

and Conquest, women are hollow stand-ins for normative domesticity, there out of

habit or to negate the queer implications raised by the homosocial dynamics of the

spaceship. Such an observation seems relevant to When Worlds Collide as well,

which attempts to give the love triangle between Joyce Hendron (Barbara Rush),

Dave Randall (the maverick pilot, played by Richard Derr), and Tony Drake

(respectable doctor and Joyce’s current fiancé, played by Peter Hansen) the same

amount of attention as the coming apocalypse, which results in, as one reviewer

asserted, a “tiresome triangular romance”… “caught in the rut of Hollywood.”27 In

this world of cardboard characters and passionless romance, it is outer space that !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!Literature/Film Quarterly 13, no. 3 [1985], 180-186; for such themes in literature, see Patricia Kerslake, Science Fiction and Empire [Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007]). 25 Vivian Sobchack, “The Virginity of Astronauts: Sex and the Science Fiction Film,” in Alien Zone, 104. 26 In Destination Moon, women receive only a small fraction of screen time, when the main characters say goodbye to their wives before the mission. Conquest, which never takes place on earth (only on an earth-rotating satellite and then on a rocket to Mars), follows a similar pattern, inserting lines from Barney about how much he misses his wife, showing a clip of an “Arabian”-themed musical complete with scantily-clad belly dancers, and beaming in recorded messages from crewmembers’ mothers and girlfriends just before they leave on their dangerous mission. 27 “When Worlds Collide,” The Catholic World, November 1951, 144; and “When Worlds Collide,” Time, November 12, 1951.

! #%%!

absorbs the sexual energy denied to humans. Space exploration films, with their

rockets exuding from the body of “mother earth,” and spacecrafts penetrating

heretofore unknown territories, have thus long been associated with “life” and life

giving forces.28

What is most fascinating about Sobchack’s discussion, however, is that in

describing science fiction’s wooden romance plots, she inadvertently touches on the

degree to which the genre’s treatment of humans (and all of the things that make us so

distinctly human – our emotions, our carnal desire, our intimate relationships) is

uniquely commercial. As she claims, the men in science fiction “tend to be more

corporate than corporeal…visually coded as assembly-line sameness” and are marked

by “interchangeable blandness,” “programmed cheerfulness,” and “mechanical and

robotic competence.”29 Such adjectives, deeply reminiscent of the postwar, white

collar rat race, also describe the particularly vacant male “types” articulated by

commercial imagery: businessmen, devoted dads tending the barbecue, breadwinning

husbands being welcomed home by their wives. And while arguably all figures in

advertisements are merely vehicles for promoting a (corporate, mass produced)

product and specific set of cultural ideals, these men, with their sleek handsomeness

and banal, mannered expressions, seem particularly robbed of depth. Whereas in

other eras, the presence of men in advertising connoted certain values – rugged

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!28 As Sobchack summarizes: “The narrative enterprise of space exploration and its accompanying visuals may be viewed as a symbolic representation of birth and/or intercourse: the expulsion from the body as well as the penetration of space, the infant’s separation from the Mother or the adult male’s reunion with the mother in the form of the female Other” (Sobchack, “The Virginity of Astronauts,” 110). 29 Sobchack, “The Virginity of Astronauts,” 108.

! #%&!

independence, urbane sophistication, strength and stability – in the postwar period,

these previously varied contours of masculinity gave way to a new, corporatized

superficiality; a one-note, unreflective joy that stems from amassing commodities.30

Thus, Sobchack’s description of men in outer space as being “about as libidinally

interesting as a Ken doll…all jaw and no genitals,” parallels their commercial

counterparts, whose idealized, graphic flatness precludes any trace of libidinous

desire.31 Barney, who cannot abandon his rigid posture or businesslike tone even

when declaring his love for his wife, and Tony and Dave, whose sleek looks and

hackneyed gestures culminate in a passionless battle for the leading lady, are typical

science fiction heroes, not only because they are “bland,” but because their blandness

is deeply commercial.

Understanding Sobchack’s observations in terms of fifties-era advertising

“types” allows us to see the postwar cinematic representation of outer space as

operating within commercial culture’s newly developed framework of existential self-

reflectivity. An underlying preoccupation with the fragility and brevity of human life

inflected all of advertising’s vivid, glossy surfaces, such that commercial culture’s

characteristic visual triteness actually highlighted the deep-seated concerns it

attempted to mask. The urgency of advertising’s postwar message, which encouraged

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!30 While in earlier eras, advertising defined ideal masculinity as exceptionally distinguished, elegant, or ruggedly individual, in postwar advertisements, ideal men were depicted as conforming to an all-encompassing standard. Although the Man in the Hathaway Shirt became a well known advertising icon in the fifties, signifying upper crust elegance and wearing a mysterious eye patch (both of which distinguished him from advertising’s usual suspects), he appeared almost exclusively in The New Yorker, and therefore is less indicative of general trends in representing masculinity (see James Twitchell, Twenty Ads that Shook the World: The Century’s Most Groundbreaking Advertising and How It Changed Us All [New York: Three Rivers Press, 2000], 139). 31 Sobchack, “The Virginity of Astronauts,” 107.

! #%'!

unabashed revelry in the material pleasures of earthly abundance, thus reads as a thin

disguise of the period’s fixation on mortality – a repressed anxiety that surfaced most

readily through the figure of the grandparent. The explicit visual parallels between

space exploration films and commercial language (especially in their representation

of older men) therefore remind audiences that the sense of fulfillment and

completion, awe and wonder, associated with outer space are as indicative of death as

they are of life itself.32

Such a perspective provides perhaps the only logical explanation of postwar

science fiction’s common – yet puzzling – references to contemporary death culture.

For instance, the layout of the rocket interiors, and specifically, the positioning of the

astronauts as they brace themselves for takeoff and landing, contradict the life-

affirming confidence that the overarching narratives often project. In both Destination

and Conquest, the arrangement of each man – supine, buckled onto small, cushioned

mattresses – eerily recalls death: bodies stacked as if in a mausoleum, individuals

contained within units that closely resemble the insides of coffins, and lingering shots

of each man with his hands at his sides, as if lying in state (figures 75 and 76).33 For

all of the films’ efforts to convince audiences that these men have been set free into a

new universe, they seem prohibitively contained, trapped in a casket-like vehicle that

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!32 As Elizabeth Bronfen argues, a razor’s edge separates the creation of life and the limit of death. Freud refers to the same processes that foster “new life,” for instance, as a “small death”; likewise, the state of completion and fulfillment that one equates with the “infant-mother dyad” is – in its stasis, its wholeness – more akin to the calm completion of death than the fraught dynamism, or “change, tension, discontinuity, and difference” of life (Bronfen, 11). 33 Coffins in the postwar era, continued the twentieth century trend of becoming both more cushioned and elaborate in order to give the impression that the dead would be “protected” and “comfortable” in their final resting place (see Stearns, 47-8; see also Ian Crichton, The Art of Dying [London: Owen, 1976], 99).

! #%(!

floats through the vacuum of outer space. Such clear funerary references would likely

not have been lost on contemporary audiences, who became newly aware of

American death rituals throughout the fifties, due in large part to the spike in

journalistic exposés on the funeral industry (criticizing their high cost, pageantry, and

wastefulness – an argument that would reach its culmination with Jessica Mitford’s

now-iconic study, The American Way of Death in 1961), and rising debates over

alternative methods such as cremation.34

In addition to equating space with death, commercialized language also

reframes some of the most well known staples of the space exploration film as

encounters with life after death. The well-worn convention of featuring close-ups of

the astronauts’ faces when they first encounter the extraterrestrial may, as many

scholars argue, demonstrate an infantile sense of ambivalence – the feeling of being,

as a newly autonomous individual, simultaneously curious and yet afraid, confident

and yet humbled.35 And yet, this awed reaction also resonates with the postwar

American understanding of the afterlife. Much like outer space in this (pre-space age)

era, Heaven was a realm that Americans could only imagine based on the projections

of experts (scientists in the case of outer space; clergy in the case of Heaven) whose

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!34 Knowledge and popularity of cremation grew steadily throughout the 1950s. The People’s Memorial Association (PMA) was the first memorial society in the U.S. and supported cremation. It grew more than three fold by the end of the decade. In arguing that cremation was more sanitary, environmentally sound, efficient, and affordable than conventional burials, the cremation industry greatly increased awareness of the current state of American funerals (Stephen R. Prothero, Purified by Fire: A History of Cremation in America [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001], 152). 35 Sobchack further elaborates on the genre’s infantilization of astronauts: “the infant has a tendency to introject or project maternal power, to see itself as powerful and potent and autonomous like the mother or to fear the other as monstrous, destructive, and all-powerful. All is well, the infant is both curious and afraid in its lack of knowledge – it wants to know, but is afraid of what it does not know or what it may find out” (Sobchack, “The Virginity of Astronauts,” 114).

! #%)!

lifelong devotion to examining these distant places allowed them to speak as trusted

authorities about entities that were literally beyond human perception. Like space in

the fifties, Heaven was as yet an unknown realm, but one that “experts” felt certain

was beyond all description in its magnitude and splendor. Similar to the films that

focused as much on the astronauts’ reaction to space as on depicting what they saw,

religious leaders admitted that any human attempts to describe Heaven would

inevitably fall short (as a minister wrote in 1960, “[heaven] is so grand and glorious

that our small, finite minds cannot fully comprehend it”36), and that the only way we

might be able to grasp even a fragment of its radiance is to reflect upon our sense of

being completely overwhelmed, awestruck; of recognizing how powerless and small

(and decidedly human) we are in relation to the truly sublime. The scenes in postwar

space exploration films that focus on the fearful, elated, overwhelmed reactions of

astronauts as they first set foot on alien territory, then, recall not only postwar, Neo-

Freudian knowledge of infantile subjectivity, but also the era’s understandings of the

afterlife as – according to the controversial but very influential Book of Revelations –

both breathtaking and tinged with terror.37 Postwar science fiction not only

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!36 Charles L. Allen, When You Lose a Loved One (Westwood: Revell, 1959), 23-4. 37 The Book of Revelations provided “all the images of heaven that have filtered into the popular imagination” in the U.S., including God in human form sitting atop a dazzling throne, surrounded by winged, singing angels. It also provided the basis for popular notions of heaven as both a lush garden with flowing rivers and a bejeweled, urban, architectural wonder. Importantly, throughout, John concedes that his descriptions cannot accurately describe his experiences in heaven: only the most precious jewels can describe the splendor of the throne, for instance, and even they are inadequate (see Lisa Miller, Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination With the Afterlife [New York: Harper, 2010], 66; Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang, Heaven: A History [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988], 37-44; Jeffrey Burton Russell, A History of Heaven: The Singing Silence [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997], 50-51).

! #%*!

encompassed the wonder and curiosity of passing from womb into earthly existence,

but also of passing from earth into life beyond.

Film scholar Douglas Cowan characterizes the ascent from earth to outer

space in science fiction film as a moment of religious transcendence, one in which we

can breach “the boundaries of time and space as these have been established by

material existence…”38 and move into a realm that is “something wholly other on

which we wholly depend.”39 Although recalling in part the infant-mother dyad,

Cowan’s description strongly references what western, monotheistic traditions

designate as the eternal kingdom of Heaven. This largely Christian belief structured

much of the popular postwar discourse on death, which stated that death was not an

agonizing, sorrowful departure from life into nothingness, but rather a pleasurable

transition in which one sheds the local pain of earthly existence in favor of a bright

and beautiful hereafter. Claimed one minister in 1959, “We hate to leave the

associations and interests of this life, but then there is a larger life waiting beyond!

There is something glorious and joyful about it.”40 Medical doctors, too, began to pay

more attention to this phenomenon. In a McCall’s article titled “How Does It Feel to

Die?” Dr. H.D. VanFleet summarizes the findings of nine medical doctors as such:

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!38 Douglas Cowan, Sacred Space: The Quest for Transcendence in Science Fiction Film and Television (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2010), 17. 39 Ibid., 16. 40 Allen, 14-15. Aware that the impending space age had roused scientific skepticism over the existence of heaven, he also mentioned Thomas Edison, “one of the greatest scientists this world has ever produced,” for good measure: “When Mr. Edison was dying, he was heard to whisper, ‘It is very beautiful over there’” (ibid., 12). Norman Vincent Peale does the same, including a number of anecdotes of non-famous individuals, such as the former meteorologist who, upon dying claimed, “I see the most beautiful place. It is beyond description and in a window is a light for me” (Norman Vincent Peale, Not Death at All [Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1949], 11).

! #&+!

“As a doctor who has seen many people expire, I know it is often sweet to die.

Frequently I have seen a change of expression as the moment of death approached,

almost a smile, before the last breath was taken. Science cannot explain this, as

science cannot explain the dynamic power which controls life.”41 In the fifties, outer

space held out the same kind of optimistic promise for a world growing increasingly

weary of earthly life and drawing closer to making interplanetary travel a reality.

Postwar science fiction films therefore understood space, according to Sobchack, as

promising “an ecstatic release from the gravitational demands of Earth…remov[ing]

us from ourselves and the complexity of life on our planet, taking us to new

Edens….”42

Early space exploration films took these themes of transcendence at their most

literal, relying on the postwar understanding of death and the afterlife in their visual

expression of crossing the earth-space boundary. Most striking in all of these films is

the amount of screen time allotted to exhibiting human suffering as the rocket begins

its ascent. Both Destination and Conquest intersperse wider shots of the cabin’s

interior with close ups of individual characters’ faces and bodies, which record their

physical strain as the rocket propels itself into the atmosphere: the men cry out in

pain, their faces contorted, their noses and ears bleeding from the violent pull of

gravity. Details of the rocket’s gadgetry document the magnitude of the force that

these frail, and all-too-human, bodies must endure, until suddenly everything falls

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!41 Quoted in Allen, 18-19. 42 Vivian Sobchack, Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film (New York: Ungar, 1987), 68-9.

! #&"!

silent (Figures 77, 78, 79, 80). At this point, both films cut to a shot of the rocket as it

breaks the gravity barrier between earth and space. Now gliding through the dark,

quiet sky, the passengers sigh in relief and gingerly begin to move around again, as if

slowly coming back to life. For postwar audiences exposed to popular discourse on

the process of death and deliverance, the astronauts’ serene, contented expressions

conveyed the relief of people who suddenly found themselves on the other side of

pain, and (literally) on the other side of earthly existence.

Heaven is a Place on Earth

Postwar science fiction’s designation of space as afterlife further solidified the

growing affinity between interstellar voids and the processes of aging, dying, and

eternal life. Through its embodiment of capitalistic rhetoric in the commercial

moment, science fiction films gradually began to develop visual formulae to represent

the cultural connection between the seemingly disparate realms of heaven and outer

space. Perhaps the most pressing question raised by the popular conflation of these

two entities is how something so scientific – so dependent on calculations and

concrete facts – could come to be associated with something that, by its very nature,

evades scientific study. What was it about the postwar era that allowed, if briefly, this

convergence of science and faith? As in the case of old age, the language most

directly related to market flow provided a formal means of representing the era’s

existential anxieties. In addition to providing a vision of outer space that

resembled/replaced the afterlife, commercial language also gauged contemporary

! #&#!

changes in the American relationship to faith, the gradual waning of spirituality in

popular culture and the need for a new kind of cultural myth to rise in its place. In

other words, the rhetoric of capitalism (and its eventual presence in film) first defined

a cultural void, and then provided a means to fill it.

Commercial culture’s ability to provide insight into an era’s otherwise-

invisible abstractions (such as collective identity or historical memory) makes it a

crucial tool in understanding how postwar Americans grappled with the notion of

religion – one of the most frustratingly abstract entities of them all.43 Advertising has

long been a sanctioned outlet for America’s spiritual impulses, evidence of a secular

nation’s willingness to believe in, and celebrate, the animus of everyday life through

its visual fetishization of goods. As Jackson Lears argues, American advertising is

one of the main mediums through which the usual subject-object dualism was

subverted in favor of a perspective that “enfold[s] the natural as well as the humanly

constructed world” and “place[s] the person amid things animated with meaning.”44

Some of the most well known campaigns have openly exploited the animism of our

material worlds, personifying inanimate objects and forces, or implying a spiritual

force within the product itself (brands such as Old Dutch, for example, suggest that !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!43 Given its origins in democracy, revolution, and participatory government, America has historically regarded religion as private matter, putting their faith instead in the public sphere and the rationality of human beings rather than divine power (see Kevin Schultz, Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held America to its Protestant Promise [New York: Oxford, 2011], 77-79). 44 Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 8. Sut Jhally agrees, claiming that Karl Marx, in Kapital, anticipated the ways in which modern advertising would frame the material world as vaguely spiritual: “Marx was able to predict the supernatural world that advertising would create, in which relationships between people are mediated through things and in which things themselves come alive and interact with each other and with human beings” (“Advertising as Religion: The Dialectic of Technology and Magic,” in Cultural Politics in Contemporary America, ed. Lan Angus and Sut Jhally [New York: Routledge, 217-229], reprinted in Advertising and Society Review 1, no. 1 [2000], http://muse.jhu.edu).

! #&$!

small spirits – such as an army of miniature, red-clogged, stick-wielding women –

inhabit every package of cleaning solution to “chase away dirt”).

Even with the rapid corporatization of American advertising throughout the

twentieth century, commercial imagery continued to provide, as Lears asserts, “a

vision of transcendence, however fleeting,” well into the 1930s.45 Since the beginning

of the twentieth century, the French toiletry company Djer-Kiss incorporated pre-

Raphaelite imagery – longhaired women in gauzy drapery who frolicked in sprawling

gardens – in its advertisements for soap and talcum powder. Like the best-known

Millais paintings, the compositions are crowded with intricate detail, humming with

the movement of nymphs, mermaids, and other enchanted creatures (figure 81). And

although such realms are never explicitly named “Heaven,” for Americans (many of

whom were familiar with mainline Christian beliefs about the afterlife), these sun-

filled scenes of blossoming vegetation and winged women summoned popular

perceptions of the divine kingdom. Even in the thirties, when advertising agencies

famously waffled between spare modernist abstraction and plain-speaking “hard sell”

techniques, these mystical “other” worlds remain.46 The Commercial National Bank

and Trust Company of New York’s holiday campaign (c. 1930), for instance, drew !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!45 Lears, 9. 46 Ernest Elmo Calkins, head of Calkins and Holden Company (a New York based advertising firm) in the 1930s, advocated for a modern art aesthetic in advertising – one that relied on the abstraction of form rather than descriptive visual realism – and rote, text-heavy product pitches. As advertising historian Steven Heller argues, he wanted to do away with the “sentimentally representational” and instead “used symbols and metaphors to create a ‘magical’ atmosphere for consumables” (Steven Heller, “Advertisements of the Thirties: From Modernism to Shirt-Sleevism,” in ‘30s: All American Ads, ed. Jim Heimann [Los Angeles: Taschen, 2003], 24). The fundamental needs of a weary population became a primary concern as the Depression took hold, and eventually this avant garde vision gave way to what Roland Marchand terms “’loud,’ cluttered, undignified, and direct” advertising (see Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985], 300-302).

! #&%!

explicitly upon solemn religious iconography, rendering an angel – head bowed and

arms poised over a snow-covered house – in the finely wrought hatchmarks of a

medieval engraving. Recalling the biblical illustrations of Dürer and Baldung in its

pitch for financial stability, religiousness in this ad – like so many others from this

period – remained sober, dignified, and serious (figure 82). Though employed to

promote some of the most quotidian goods and services (lipstick, pantyhose, perfume,

insurance), spirituality in commercial culture had, for the first half of the twentieth

century, served as a device through which to idealize and glorify.

Yet the postwar period witnessed a dramatic shift: while prewar ads tended to

treat these spiritual “other worlds” with awe and respect, the postwar period

positioned them as humorous kitsch. Gone are the Dürer-inspired prints of stoic

angels and the Edenic playgrounds of Waterhouse and Ruskin; no longer are we

delivered into a world of majesty, or even one in which the spiritual animates and

coexists with reality. Instead, ordinary people and objects don the hollow signifiers of

“Heaven,” visually rejecting the belief that any such divine realm actually exists.

Rather than elevating commodities through their association with the heavenly,

postwar commercial culture brings the heavenly down to the level of the mundane

everyday. One notable example of this transition is the Chase and Sanborn “Early

Morning Angels” campaign, in which stock “heavenly” details – a golden halo,

wings, a blissful facial expression – signal the brand’s ability to transform a hapless,

ineffectual crank into an ideal husband and father. Instead of implying spiritual

transcendence, these colorful, cartoonish ads suggest that coffee can help a typical

! #&&!

suburban man fulfill his earthly, postwar responsibilities better: in one, he plays the

patient father, sitting calmly as his son beats a toy drum; in another, he is dressed for

work and prepared to take on his breadwinning duties, unruffled by the baby beside

him, who makes mayhem in its high chair (figure 83); in another, he is the dutiful

husband, bringing coffee to his wife in bed. Humorously dulled by their association

with this humdrum man and his unextraordinary life, the angel wings and halo

become chintzy visual metaphors, so much a part of daily routine that they have lost

their power to signify the divine.

Throughout the fifties, this hollow “Heaven” imagery appeared in a number of

campaigns. Hunt’s “Heavenly Peaches” advertisements (1950) also treated the once-

reverent imagery of God and spiritualism with a flattened detachment, depicting a can

of peaches lifted into the air by a comically small set of wings, accompanied by

multi-colored starbursts and the slogan: “Hunt’s Heavenly Peaches at down-to-earth

prices!” As if in dialogue with this cardboard portrayal of Heaven, Snider’s (1957)

presented an equally hackneyed representation of Hell in its ketchup ad, which aimed

to associate the “chili-pepper flavor” of the Snider’s brand with the fires of

damnation. In many ways, this ad is the literalization of postwar commercial culture’s

attitude toward the supernatural, depicting not Lucifer himself, but a man in a devil

costume, mischievously eyeing the bottle of ketchup as he pokes his head over the

tabletop (figure 84). Attesting to the growing emptiness of these divine entities,

companies throughout the fifties used words such as “heavenly” and “angel” in the

names of products, while abandoning the imagery altogether. “Angel Face” powder

! #&'!

by Pond’s and “Heavenly Rice Pudding” (made with Carnation condensed milk) are

but two examples of this trend, and in both, heaven is present as a label only (figure

85). These stylistic transformations signal that heaven is really just another place on

earth, subject to the same corporate realities as mortals.

Hollywood, which had become very invested in “afterlife-fantasy” films

throughout the thirties and forties, witnessed a similar transition in the postwar era.47

Such films, what Peter Valenti termed films blancs, were the direct opposite of the far

more critically acclaimed film noir cycle, which stressed the godlessness of society

and the dark side of human nature. Films blancs had always been optimistic and

sentimental compared to film noir, but, according to many critics, they became

significantly more saccharine in the postwar era. Andrew Sarris argues that films

about the afterlife from the thirties possessed a noirish gravity and moroseness,

expressing “two themes with particular force: the indispensability of death as a

cyclical process of existence and the comparative triviality of all other human

endeavors in the face of death.”48 His silence on films after 1939 (in an article

dedicated to redeeming the genre as philosophically significant) tacitly reinforces

Valenti’s belief that films blancs after World War II lost their sense of gravity and

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!47 Term coined by Andrew Sarris in “The Afterlife, Hollywood-Style,” American Film 4, no. 6 (April 1979), 25. As Peter Valenti argues, this cycle often featured encounters between the earthly and the divine around the time of death, involved heavenly messengers (and a number of scenes in heaven itself), pivoted around a blossoming love affair, and ended with the protagonist having acquired a new view on mortal life from his exposure to the heavenly (Peter Valenti, “The ‘Film Blanc’: Suggestions for a Variety of Fantasy, 1940-45,” Journal of Popular Film 6, no. 4 [1978], 295). 48 Sarris cites certain films from the thirties as being particularly solemn: Outward Bound (1930, remade in 1944) depicts the journey to the afterlife as an eerie cruise down a mysterious river (Styx); Death Takes a Holiday (1934) and On Borrowed Time (1939) trace the pathos of encounters between humans and angels of death (Sarris, 27).

! #&(!

“conviction.” According to Valenti, prior to and during the war, films such as The

Fighting Sullivans (1944), A Guy Named Joe (1943), and Here Comes Mr. Jordan

(1941) took heaven seriously, reassuring audiences that some pre-ordained, spiritual

logic would guide them through a chaotic world. Postwar films blancs and their

audiences, however, seem to have abandoned this earnest belief, collectively deciding

that “the trips between heaven and earth may not be so plausible after all.”49 In citing

an apparent lack of faith within his dismissal of postwar films blancs, Valenti

unintentionally points to the similarities between Hollywood and commercial

culture’s shifting treatment of spirituality throughout the late forties and fifties. Like

commercial culture, the “implausibility” of heaven-earth contact in these later films

stemmed from their growing affective flatness and increasing reliance upon visual

cliché when contending with spirituality. Thus, when Valenti points to the postwar

film blanc’s lack of “conviction” after 1947 – holding up the prewar Here Comes Mr.

Jordan as exemplary while denouncing its postwar follow-up, Down To Earth (1947)

as kitsch – he notes the formal resonance between film and advertising media, which

were both responding to unspoken shifts in national religious culture.

In Here Comes Mr. Jordan, the overzealous angel, Messenger #7103 (Edward

Everett Horton) mistakenly escorts boxer Joe Pendleton’s (Robert Montgomery’s)

soul to the afterlife, fifty years before his time. Mr. Jordan (Claude Rains), who

calmly presides over the messengers in a distant, celestial realm, offers Pendleton an

opportunity to exist again on earth, proposing that he inhabit the body of another man

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!49 Valenti, 302.

! #&)!

who is just about to die: the wealthy and corrupt Mr. Farnsworth. Mr. Jordan returns

Pendleton to earth in Farnsworth’s body, effectively replacing a morally

impoverished soul with a purer one, and transforming for the better all the lives that

were touched by this once-malicious man. Divine error gives way to the best form of

spiritual guidance, which resolves conflict, ends strife, and eventually brings two of

the main characters together in marriage. Six years later, Down To Earth strived to

capitalize on the success of Here Comes Mr. Jordan by re-using much of the same

supporting characters, such as the befuddled Messenger #7103 and the god-like Mr.

Jordan (played this time by Ronald Culver), but expanding the heavenly realm to

include deities from antiquity, including Zeus, Athena, and Terpsichore, the goddess

of music and dance (Rita Hayworth). Following the plight of stage director/producer

Danny Miller (Larry Parks), whose ability to repay his gambling debts (and his life)

depends on the success of his latest show, the film focuses on divine intervention not

as a corrective to divine error, but rather as a response to Terspichore’s personal

dissatisfaction with the show. Guided by Messenger #7103, she attempts to

implement her views into his production, but in the process realizes that her aims are

selfish; in the end she learns to sacrifice her own desires in order to save the show and

Danny’s life. Unlike Here Comes Mr. Jordan, Down to Earth reveals the gods

themselves (not just the apprentice angels) to be subject to the same types of

pettiness, jealousy, and self-centeredness as humans. Here, it is not the mortal who

undergoes a change of heart, but the heavenly spirit herself. In focusing on

! #&*!

Terpsichore coming to terms with her flaws, the film – like contemporary advertising

campaigns – draws the divine closer to the terrestrial.

Stark formal similarities provide obvious support for Hollywood’s adoption of

commercial rhetoric: Down to Earth’s glossy, Technicolor presentation (a significant

departure from Here Comes Mr. Jordan, which was filmed in black and white),

Hayworth’s gauzy pastel draperies, and the bright blue backdrop of the heavens all

echo the “divine” signifiers of advertisements for products such as Angel Face

(figures 85 and 86). But perhaps more significant is the way in which Down to Earth

emphasizes the corporate structure of the afterlife, humorously designating heaven as

an extension of Madison Avenue’s business practices: the Messenger, for example,

must request vacation time from Mr. Jordan (and is threatened with demotion for his

reluctance to take on a new case); souls, upon entering the afterlife, must check in

(last name first) and board a plane for eternity; a “registrar” manages an official

ledger documenting the names and times of death of every human; and lines of

uniformed workers perform their duties with machine-like efficiency.50 Another film

blanc from the immediate postwar period, The Horn Blows at Midnight (1945),

depicts heaven in a similarly business-oriented manner: here, a contract trumpeter for

the “Paradise Coffee Hour” television orchestra (Jack Benney) dreams he is the angel

Athanael, who is assigned by “The Chief” (Guy Kibee) to play the fanfare that will

signal the apocalypse. In his heaven, responsibilities are divided among various

separate “departments” (with Athanael’s falling under the rubric of “small planets

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!50 Valenti calls this version of the afterlife a “vast bureaucracy [with] obvious hierarchies and pecking orders…” (Valenti, 296).

! #'+!

management”), executives sit behind imposing desks, and, in a nod to Freudian dream

theory, Kibee plays not only Athanael’s celestial “Chief,” but the radio director (his

boss in real life) as well.51

By the fifties, Hollywood took the formulae of the 30s and 40s to their logical

limit: rather than imagining heaven as a corporation, film began to use the visual

language of corporate capitalism to define it. In 1956, MGM released its adaptation of

the Carousel, the highly acclaimed Broadway musical that recounts the misguided

life and death of ne’er do well carnival barker, Billy Bigelow (Gordon McRae) and

his decision to leave the afterlife for one day in order to contact his widowed wife and

the daughter he never met. The narrative of Carousel takes the concept of spirituality

very seriously, relying upon the audience’s earnest belief in both the afterlife and

divine benevolence for its affecting, melodramatic pathos. And yet, its depiction of

the afterlife is anything but grand and serious. Billy, whose checkered life resigns him

to the very lowest position in heavenly hierarchy, spends his days polishing stars by

hand, working in silence next to other anonymous souls who labor over the same

rudimentary task (figure 87). While this version of the afterlife may resemble the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!51 Treating heaven as a “bureaucracy” was a trend even in some of the earliest films blancs. Here Comes Mr. Jordan is premised upon the error of a new messenger overeager to impress his boss (see Gary Scott Smith, Heaven in the American Imagination [New York: Oxford, 2011], 168). Likewise, in Stairway to Heaven (the 1944 Powell and Pressburger production originally released in the U.K. as A Matter of Life and Death), British airman Peter (David Nivens) accidentally survives a fatal mission due to heavenly oversight, and must negotiate with the gods in order to remain alive. The film portrays the afterlife as a grim corporation in which dull, numbingly monotonous operations proceed with unfeeling efficiency: souls are channeled via giant moving sidewalks through a central processing center, in which stern, uniformly clad women issue them a pair of wings. Coca-Cola vending machines appear in the waiting area. Some critics believe that this rigid, bleakly bureaucratic depiction of heaven is a metaphor for the Nazi “New World Order,” while others claim that it is a political allegory, representing the contemporary British conflict between the Tories and the Socialists (for a summary of these views, see James Chapman, “’The True Business of the British Movie’? A Matter of Life and Death and British Film Culture,” Screen 46, no. 1 [Spring 2005], 46).

! #'"!

bureaucratic monotony of other heavenly realms, Carousel goes one step further,

removing the last shred of genuine awe or wonder from the divine by depicting the

afterlife as merely flattened, schematic (i.e., “commercial”) artifice. In Carousel,

heaven is like a theater set, visibly rooted in – and, indeed, constructed from – the

elements of earthly reality: rather than the residence of spirits, as in many films

blancs from previous decades, (figure 88) stars here are tangible things that dangle

like Christmas tree ornaments, fit in the palms of our hands, and can be accessed with

stepladders and washed with spit and handkerchiefs. Earlier films, despite their

references to corporate culture, still went to great lengths to distinguish heaven from

quotidian reality (1944’s Stairway to Heaven, for instance, used mannered dialogue,

massive deco sets, and steely black and white to define heaven as distinct from earth;

even Down to Earth relied on steam machines and a silver-haired, regal-looking Mr.

Jordan to portray the afterlife as adequately divine). Yet Carousel’s heaven echoes

the stylistic turn of advertising – that most corporate, most material, most “earthly”

visual form. Like the detachable wings on a can of peaches, it relegates the spiritual

to little more than a theatrical, cardboard fantasy. Within this commercial context, it

is little wonder that its plastic stars bear striking resemblance to the fashionable

“sparkler” symbol that – appearing on items such as wallets and purses – itself

became a commodity during this era (figure 89).

Like advertising, then, Hollywood reflected heaven’s spiraling descent in

postwar culture from the formidable to the impotent, from the fantastic to the banal.

Yet perhaps it was less that Americans had lost faith in the afterlife, and more that the

! #'#!

foundations of that faith had begun to shift dramatically throughout the postwar

period. Death, for instance, had taken on an entirely new cultural significance by the

mid-twentieth century, with the Victorian era’s impassioned expressions of grief and

the “stiff upper lip” motto of World Wars I and II giving way to complete disavowal.

This was an era in which mourning attire became less common, employers allotted

less time off for bereavement, and open displays of grief became pathologized as

“Chronic Grief Syndrome.”52 In removing the acknowledgement of death from

culture (and sublimating it into highly coded figures, such as the commercialized

“grandparent”), Americans attempted to lessen its impact as a haunting reminder of

what they already spent a great deal of time pondering: their own mortality.53 As

death became a less immediate part of postwar American life, so, too, did heaven.

The “white-robed, harp-playing, crown-wearing, bored saints who endlessly sang

hymns…” may have offered earlier generations comfort during harrowing times, but

according to historian Gary Scott Smith, postwar Americans preferred to focus on the

“here and now” of life in order to distract themselves from the distant promises (and

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!52 “Chronic Grief Syndrome” was known as a juvenile form of separation anxiety in need of “grief counseling,” and one that (as etiquette expert Amy Vanderbilt warned) could jeopardize the mourner’s social standing if it made her peers too uncomfortable (for Chronic Grief Syndrome, see Stearns, 96; for “grief counseling,” mourning attire and time off from work for bereavement, see Stearns, 1, 103, and Amy Vanderbilt, Amy Vanderbilt’s Complete Book of Etiquette: A Guide to Gracious Living [New York: Doubleday and Co., 1958], 137-138). Experts encouraged parents to shield their children from death by keeping them away from funerals and critical care units of hospitals, avoiding conversations about the afterlife, and stealthily providing “replacement pets” when the family pet died (see Stearns, 98). 53 Stearns, 94. In many ways, these postwar attitudes toward death were the culminating point of Americans’ growing aversion to public, demonstrative displays of mourning. In the nineteenth century, rich visual and literary tributes to death inspired by the Civil War (see Mark S. Schantz, Awaiting the Heavenly Country [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008]) and sentimental literature contributed to a highly expressive, overwrought Victorian grief culture. During the world wars, such open mourning became passé due to the belief that open enactments of grief hindered progress, and thus did a disservice to those who died (Stearns, 33-34).

! #'$!

terrifying unknowns) of life after death.54 Even religious leaders began to associate

heaven with qualities that contemporary Americans valued, such as hard work and

personal growth.55 As Billy Graham declared at a revivalist meeting in 1950, Heaven

is “as real as Los Angeles, London, Algiers, or Boston…16,000 miles long, 16,000

miles wide, and 16,000 miles high. [It is a place where] we are going to sit around the

fireplace and have parties, and the angels will wait on us, and we’ll drive down the

golden streets in a yellow Cadillac convertible.”56

The gross commodification of the heavenly in Carousel reflects the lowering

of heaven to earthly proportions, but it also reflects a significant shift in the tenor of

religious life. By the fifties, many Cold War era, nuclear-age Americans looked to

religion for guidance: nearly half of Americans reported that they attended religious

services every week, an estimated 80% claimed that they belonged to a religious

congregation, and bible sales were at their peak.57 A national government valued for

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!54 Even in religious circles, the afterlife began to fade as a powerful spiritual tool: hell disappeared almost completely (the “fire and brimstone” threats of earlier eras were eventually replaced by the concept of hell as more of a tortured mental state [Smith, 163-164]), while heaven became, as religious historian Martin Marty claims, “dull, dull, dull…,” or at least less rigidly imposing (see Miller, 212). 55 Postwar versions of heaven promised no impediments to reaching one’s aptitude (ensuring success in all endeavors) and days full of fulfilling work and rewarded by leisure and play, undoubtedly appealing for a generation that defined itself as much by backyard barbecues as corporate advancement (see Smith, 165). 56 Quoted in David van Biema, “Does Heaven Exist?” Time Magazine World, Sunday, June 24, 2001, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,137446,00.html. As Robert Wuthnow summarizes: “Indeed, popular depictions of heaven increasingly used worldly images to show what it was like, by implication arguing that heaven was not such a bad place because it was at least as good as the here and now” (Robert Wuthnow, After Heaven: Spirituality in America Since the 1950s [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998], 29). 57 See Robert S. Ellwood, 1950: Crossroads of American Religious Life (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2000), 5, and Schultz, 74. Ellwood argues that the nation felt “betrayed” by modernity and in need of recovering “forgotten power”: “In that profoundly conservative slough after the smashing of so many modern idols and icons, the assumption was that somewhere within age-old traditions, not in anything newly minted today, was to be found a power and vision equal to the desperate times” (Ellwood, 5).

! #'%!

its secularism began to rely on religion in the form of Presidential Prayer Breakfasts,

national days of prayer, and the addition of “under god” to the Pledge of Allegiance,

all of which officials thought were necessary in building Cold War era morale and in

combating a “godless” communist enemy.58 God was everywhere, it seemed, and yet

organized faith itself was characterized by a new amorphousness and nonspecificity.

Such broad appeals to “God-in-general” became a banner of equality and democratic

liberty in a nation still divided by race, symbolically uniting the three major

monotheistic traditions in the U.S. – Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism – under

the umbrella of interfaith pluralism.59 In an effort to assert its democratic principles

without having to contend with the more controversial issues of racial injustice,

postwar culture embraced the “tri-faith” ideal by celebrating the qualities that the

three religions shared and downplaying those that made them unique, resulting in an

increasingly general – and ultimately, secular – approach to national religious

identity.60 The secularizing effects of postwar pluralism were perhaps most evident in

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!58 For more on the Presidential Prayer Breakfast tradition and its efforts to promote tolerance among the three major monotheistic religions in the U.S. (always including a rabbi, a minister, and a priest to bless the food), see Schultz, 81. In addition to adding “under god” to the Pledge of Allegiance, in this era “In God We Trust” replaced “E Pluribus Unum” – “out of many one” – as the national motto, signaling the extent to which God became the national symbol of unity across difference (see ibid., 74). 59 According to historian Kevin Schultz, although racial injustice in the U.S. was an equally severe contradiction to the American democratic “image,” leaders agreed that it was still too divisive an issue to include in its identity-building agenda. In fact, the network of agencies, government officials, and non-profit organizations at the head of the tri-faith movement was so sensitive to race – and so fearful that it would interfere with its broader mission of national “unity” – that it went to great lengths to exclude any suggestion of an alliance between religious equality and other forms of social justice (see ibid., 73, 107). 60 Schultz, 7, 10. The push toward a tri-faith ideal played out powerfully through children. Gradually, popular culture iconography (such as Santa Claus, candy canes) replaced the scriptural significance of Christmas, and the postwar transformation of Hannukah – which focused on gift-giving and togetherness – initially began as an effort to make public school observances more inclusive (ibid., 125-127).

! #'&!

the everyday religious practices of Americans, which, according to some critics,

became less about actual worship and more about the various community-based

services that congregations could provide: recreational activities, daycare services,

and the support once passed down through large extended family networks.61 As

Herbert Gans stressed in his study of Levittown, suburbanites tended to “believe in an

increasingly similar God, share an increasingly similar Judeo-Christian ethic,” and,

tellingly, “worship in an increasingly similar way, with similarly decreasing

frequency.”62

Thus, the clichéd emptiness with which advertising – and film, by way of

advertising – treated divine subject matter served as a mirror to the dramatic changes

in the substance and practice of faith during the early Cold War era. In this period of

religious pluralism, it is not surprising that postwar films about the spiritual realm

were so frustratingly vague, so careful not to associate themselves with any particular

religion. God is not Jesus or Yahweh, but “Mr. Jordan,” “The Starkeeper,” or “the

Boss,” and, rather than dwelling within a Christianized, Book of Revelations heaven,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!61 See Ellwood, 104; see also Schultz, 85. 62 Herbert J. Gans, The Levittowners: Ways of Life and Politics in a New Suburban Community (New York: Pantheon Books, 1967), vii; see also Schultz, 101. As sociologist Will Herberg argues in his highly critical Protestant-Catholic-Jew, such trends proved that the postwar nation had embraced “religiousness without religion” (Will Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology [Garden City: Country Life Press, 1955], 276). Herberg specifically points to the “paradox” of “pervasive secularism amid mounting religiosity,” citing various examples, including “men and women valuing the Bible as revelation, purchasing and distributing it by the millions, yet apparently seldom reading it themselves” (ibid., 14). In many respects, Robert Wuthnow’s discussion of American spiritualism in the fifties offers a lesser known, but still important insight into the sociological trends that Herberg dismissed as growing “secularism.” As Wuthnow argues, postwar Americans still believed in both God and the afterlife, but began to develop a more private relationship to the divine after the end of World War II, thereby initiating a gradual but widespread turn toward “spirituality” (although I use the term “spirituality” loosely throughout this chapter, it is defined here as “all the beliefs and activities by which individuals attempt to relate their lives to God or to a divine being or some other conception of a transcendent reality” [Wuthnow, viii]).

! #''!

he resides in a flattened, generalized “god like” realm – one that includes various

divine powers, or, in the case of Down to Earth, Mt. Parnassus and the muses.

Likewise, the appearance of winged canned peaches in ads and plexiglass stars in film

followed the course of the divine in real life, which became anchored to earthly

existence (as evidenced by Graham’s Cadillacs in heaven) as never before. Now,

heaven cast off its former status as almighty and sublime, becoming a symbol that

could never quite transcend its ties to earth.

Spirit in the Sky

Despite the waning of religious orthodoxy in the fifties, the actual need for

some kind of divine being or guidance persisted. In fact, the postwar press frequently

framed the potential of nuclear annihilation in biblical terms, running headlines such

as “Atomic Energy for War: New Beast of the Apocalypse,” labeling the current era

of atomic innovation “Armageddon,” and invoking scripture, usually II Peter 3:10.63

During a time in which the scientific power of humans seemed dangerously close to

overriding human reason, Americans were eager to believe that impending

destruction might be controlled in some way by a higher being. The new, more

secular role of religion in American culture forced them to look to a new form of

faith, one that blended the scientific and the divine. Throughout the postwar period, a

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!63 II Peter 3:10: “The heavens shall pass away with great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.” “End of days” language had been common in popular culture well before World War II, but prior to 1945, the end of the world was often envisioned as resulting from natural disaster. As Paul Boyer argues, “With the coming of the atomic bomb, everything changed: it seemed that man himself had, in the throes of war, stumbled on the means of his own prophesized doom” (Paul Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture [Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992], 115).

! #'(!

gradual transition occurred, in which outer space replaced heaven as a sphere of

salvation, judgment, and transcendent beauty in the popular imagination. And, like

the changing faces of American religion, such a transition can be traced through the

dialogue between Hollywood and Madison Avenue’s commodified forms.

In many ways, outer space conveniently served as a kind of non-

denominational heaven for an increasingly secular nation. As Lisa Miller clarifies,

“heaven” designates both a place where individual souls reside after death, as well as

where the faithful go at the end of the world, when the Messiah descends to earth and

subjects all of his children to final judgment.64 The heightened awareness of mass

destruction in the nuclear era made Americans more aware of this latter valence and

their need for some kind of abstract place beyond earth that would be able to provide

limitless sanctuary for humankind after Armageddon. As postwar science fiction

films indicate, outer space fulfilled this function: When Worlds Collide, perhaps most

obviously, positions space as a heavenly destination for the pure and righteous (coded

as young, innocent) when earth is destroyed. Opening with a biblical description of

Noah’s Arc, depicting the interplanetary collision as unleashing prophetic natural

disasters (a reference to the flames and floods in the scriptures), and presenting Zyra

as a wondrous paradise, the film frames the events of the narrative as an act of God,

and outer space as God’s heavenly kingdom.65 A rich (if eccentric) culture of pulp

speculation about the extra-terrestrial helped condition postwar audiences to make

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!64 See Miller, 6. 65 Although less overt, Conquest of Space makes similar claims, with Mars offering limitless possibilities for humans just when resources on earth are becoming more scarce. Like Zyra, Mars becomes a place of human redemption after the world meets its end.

! #')!

these connections with Judeo-Christian beliefs. During an era of Roswell and UFOs,

space – like heaven – seemed to be the dwelling-place of deeply mysterious and yet

strangely powerful beings. Popular journalism (such as Frank Scully’s Behind the

Flying Saucers) generated an almost religious devotion to these mystifying spirits that

flew through the sky and worked – not unlike God and his angels – in mysterious

ways, eluding direct contact with humans and sending frustratingly opaque signs.66

Some texts even literalized this conflation, arguing – like Immanuel Velikovsky’s

Worlds in Collision (1950) – that biblical miracles can be explained by astronomical

transitions (the parting of the Red Sea, he argues, resulted from the gravitational pull

produced by planets moving into new orbits).67

Most importantly, however, postwar visions of outer space elicited the same

mixture of terror and fascination as heaven. The pre-space age fifties would be the

last era in which space was still unknown, and thus still a blank canvas upon which

Americans could project their need for supernatural power. Just as heaven could only

be understood “through a glass, darkly,”68 so, too, could outer space. The sixties

would see the triumph of the “technocratic” model in America (what historian Walter

McDougall describes as the “management of society by technical experts”), and

under the leadership of John F. Kennedy, outer space would eventually be “drafted

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!66 For a description of UFO culture and Behind the Flying Saucers, see Howard E. McCurdy, Space in the American Imagination (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), 72, and Ellwood, 71, respectively. 67 See Ellwood, 70. 68 An often-quoted phrase from 1 Corinthians 13:12, referring to the fact that Heaven can never be directly experienced by mortals.

! #'*!

into the cause of national prestige.”69 But Eisenhower was hesitant to provide the

billions of dollars necessary to achieve what he believed had little practical

importance, and advocated for supporting military defense and scientific

advancements rather than for using space as what historian Howard McCurdy calls “a

theater for some sort of exploratory opera.”70 Thus, in spite of growing public

curiosity about the extraterrestrial, outer space remained a mystery throughout the

fifties – something to be regarded with interest, but also with terror.

Federal reluctance to engage with outer space opened up a gap in knowledge

that a new wave of enthusiastic scientists strived to fill. Throughout the decade, these

“space boosters” provided postwar Americans with both the intense desire to explore

the greater universe, and the belief that such forays were indeed possible. In 1951,

Collier’s 8-part series brought the highly specialized concepts discussed at the

Hayden Planetarium Symposium to a mass audience, inspiring many other popular

periodicals and television programs to cover issues such as astronomy, rocket science,

and astrophysics with similar zeal.71 Such widespread publicity eventually elevated

the men behind the science – most prominently, German-born rocket scientist

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!69 He continues: “The moon program was a lever by which the young President, who extolled vigor and assaults on the New Frontier, and the nation, which seemed to have lost faith in itself, could find their legs….” (Walter A. McDougall, The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age [New York: Basic Books, 1985], 8). 70 McCurdy, 59. Eisenhower believed that the U.S. remained the leader in scientific advancements, and that competing with the Soviet Union (even after Sputnik) was merely engaging in a (less productive, but more expensive) battle of engineering pyrotechnics (ibid., 60). 71 In 1947, Willy Ley’s Rockets: The Future of Travel Beyond the Stratosphere, had gone into its second edition, and two years later Arthur Clarke published The Exploration of Space, both of which used basic language and lively, colorful illustrations to educate a lay audience on the science behind space travel (Ibid., 34).

! #(+!

Wernher von Braun – to celebrity status.72 Throughout the period, their efforts to

share their expertise with the masses bore striking resemblance to religious leaders,

proselytizing a particular belief system and a faith that the intangible – something

more noble and majestic than anything we know on earth – exists somewhere “up

above.” Moreover, the image they projected of space convinced Americans that

experiencing this realm was, like heaven, part of both our imminent future and of

humankind’s ultimate destiny.73

By the time Sputnik launched in 1957, more than 41% of Americans believed

that humans would reach the moon within the next 25 years (with a great majority of

that percentage believing that such feats would take place within the next decade).74

Although this radical shift stemmed in part from the media appearances of the space

boosters, it was also a direct result of the new visual vocabulary that such exposure

helped cultivate. Whereas earlier eras reveled in fantastic notions of the extra-

terrestrial, boosters strived to provide a vision of space that was rooted in scientific

research, using this factual basis to convince Americans that the once impossible was

now within reach, and that the “real science” and real potential of space travel was

infinitely more enthralling than pure fantasy (an endeavor that was especially evident

in Disney’s Tomorrowland, which called upon Braun and his colleagues to research

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!72 Ibid., 35-40. 73 Space boosters rivaled religious leaders as the media celebrities of the fifties, and media publicity about outer space’s “experts” helped solidify space’s growing link with the afterlife (see ibid., 40). 74 See Ibid, 41.

! #("!

and design rides that simulated space flight).75 When it came to realizing the space

boosters’ philosophy through graphic means, however, none were so influential as the

painter Chesley Bonestell, whose work accompanied many of the articles and books

about space travel appearing in the popular press throughout the fifties. Bonestell,

who had worked as an architect and a special effects artist in Hollywood, strived to

produce more scientifically grounded visualizations of outer space, conducting

painstaking research, applying layers of glazes in order to lend his paintings a

photographic (and thus, more “documentary”) finish, and calling upon his familiarity

with cinematic techniques in an effort to convey a realistic sense of perspective.76 His

work thus made outer space palpably real, but also – exhibiting miniscule figures

swallowed up by massive, extra-terrestrial landscapes – truly sublime.

It is in this respect that Bonestell best embodied the booster spirit, with his

majestic imagery encompassing everything that was scientifically known and yet still

wondrously unknown about outer space at that time. Bonestell played within this

small margin of mystery, projecting onto it a national desire for wonder, awe, and

religiosity. As McCurdy argues, “Bonestell did for space what Albert Bierstadt and

Thomas Moran accomplished for the American western frontier… [His] paintings

took viewers to places they had never been before.”77 But more than this, Bonestell’s

work, like the best nineteenth century landscape paintings, invoked the divine,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!75 Ley and von Braun designed an 80-foot-rocket ship, and a “Rocket to the Moon” ride, featuring a range of multi-sensory devices to simulate what it might feel and look like to be in a lunar module (see ibid., 43-44). 76 For Bonestell’s use of cinematic perspective, see Frederick C. Durant, III “Chesley Bonestell: A Portrait,” in Frederick C. Durant, III and Ron Miller, Worlds Beyond: The Art of Chesley Bonestell (Norfolk: Donning, 1983), 6; on the glazing technique and materials, see ibid., 16. 77 McCurdy, 45.

! #(#!

visualizing God’s hand leading Americans toward new frontiers.78 And while

Bonestell never openly referenced the spiritual in his work, the formal qualities of his

paintings strongly reference the landscape tradition. Even when located on the surface

of other planets (as in The Surface of Venus), Bonestell’s dramatic, jagged peaks,

broad expanses of sky, and patches of clouds invoke God in a similar manner as the

most notable landscape painters, such as Albert Bierstadt (figures 90 and 91).79 At the

same time, his work in the film industry – and, tellingly, as the special effects

designer of The Horn Blows at Midnight – gave him an especially keen awareness of

Heaven’s declining status in popular culture.80 When understood in this light, his

planetary work seems to be a deliberate reaction to the constricted, stagey clichés of

films blancs, overturning the usual kitsch of heaven imagery with the visual grandeur

of nineteenth century landscape painting. Richly three-dimensional and sweepingly

panoramic, Bonestell’s visualization of outer space lent the cosmos the divine power

that Americans sought, but could no longer find in heaven.

Bonestell’s aesthetic appears distinctly “fifties” in large part because the era’s

pre-space age wonder and reverence is so carefully inscribed in its form. And yet part

of what designates his work as so uniquely reflective of the period is its inherent

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!78 Landscape paintings of the American west often expressed manifest destiny ideology, and thus also served as allegories for the nation’s special relationship to God (see Albert Boime, The Magisterial Gaze: Manifest Destiny and American Landscape Painting c. 1830-1865 [Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991]). 79 See Andrew Wilton and Tim Barringer, American Sublime: Landscape painting in the United States, 1820-1880 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 230; see also Barbara Novak’s argument that the landscape tradition defines the west as a “natural church” in which humans can come into closer contact with God (Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825-1875 [New York: Oxford, 1980], 151). 80 See Durant, 105.

! #($!

commerciality; the ways in which his characteristic style – velvety skies and dazzling

bodies in orbit – so strongly reinforce contemporary commercial trends. This was an

era, after all, that saw the introduction of Scripto Satellite ballpoint pens, Sparton

“Cosmic Eye” Televisions, and “sound barrier” Chrysler GM-Fives, which all

inspired advertising campaigns that (as their names suggest) catered to the postwar

interest in outer space (figures 92, 93, and 94). Within these space-themed settings,

the exaggerated, schematic human tableaux that characterized most other situation

centered ads dissipates so that the commodity, like a rocket set against an infinite blue

sky, can occupy the center of the composition.81 The formal considerations of

Bonestell’s artistry thus had deep ties to its contemporary commercial milieu: the

Sparton television glows with the warm, animate light of the spacecraft in Bonestell’s

Touchdown on the Moon, setting it apart from the other futuristic objects that lay

disjointedly in the foreground (figures 93 and 95). Likewise, the prominently

positioned Chrysler GM-Five bears striking resemblance to the sleek, steely noses of

Bonestell’s formidable spacecrafts, mirroring the way in which their dramatic

projection out of the picture plane connotes perpetual speed and motion (such as

those in The Mars Expedition, 8,600 Miles from its Goal [figures 94 and 96]). By

couching product pitches for everyday objects in the extraordinary visual language of

space travel, these advertisements attest not only to the formal kinship between

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!81 The famous Meat Industry and Pillsbury Cake Mix advertisements (as discussed in Chapter 2) from the late forties and early fifties most clearly demonstrate the effort to draw consumer attention to what advertising executive Leo Burnett called the “inherent drama” of the product (See “Is There a Case for Bleed?” Analysis of Bleed Space Advertising, Prepared by J. Walter Thompson Media Research Department [New York], May, 1956. J. W. Thompson Collection, Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History, ADV Techniques, Bleed v. Non-Bleed, Folder 2).

! #(%!

Bonestell’s style and commercial culture, but also the extent to which all realms of

postwar visual culture were subject to the era’s overwhelming faith in the twin

promises of capitalism and outer space. Considered alongside contemporary

advertising campaigns, Bonestell’s work becomes recognizable not only as a

“documentation” of the cosmos, but as providing a vast, rolling canvas for the display

of objects.82

Given the era’s frequent dialogue between commercial culture and film, the

visual quirks established by Bonestell quickly became absorbed into the spate of

space exploration films released in the fifties. On an obvious level, the visual style of

postwar science fiction is so indebted to Bonestell because he served as the special

effects designer for a number of the most influential films in this subgenre, including

Destination Moon, When Worlds Collide, War of the Worlds, and The Conquest of

Space, transferring the visual conventions he had established in illustrations onto the

big screen.83 Some of the most familiar visual tropes in these films therefore stemmed

directly from Bonestell’s paintings and their capitalistic sheen: the rocket in

Destination Moon – a smooth silver tear in the dark sky – is almost a direct copy of

the painting Zero Hour Minus Five, much as the imposing satellite complexes that

float above the earth (and the miniscule astronauts alongside them) in Conquest

resemble the weightless drift of bodies and objects in Assembly of the Moonships

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!82 The carefully gradated blue backdrop, so common to Bonestell paintings, became an advertising convention in these space-themed campaigns. Clearly Bonestell understood how well his work translated into the commercial realm, agreeing in the fifties to collaborate on a whiskey advertisement, in which he painted the cosmic background while another artist painted a line of whiskey bottles leading up into outer space (see Durant, 10). 83 See McCurdy, 47.

! #(&!

(figures 97 and 98). Given Conquest’s partial setting in Mars, many of its establishing

shots – of the rocket gliding through a star-studded sky toward and then away from

Mars, raised into launching position, and swallowed up by the dusty peaks of the

planet’s surface – strongly echo Bonestell’s earlier paintings and sketches of Mars

(figures 99 and 100).

Most importantly, however, is the way in which the commerciality of his style

also provided a vital model for postwar science fiction’s fundamental visual

philosophy. As Sobchack argues in her study of the genre’s “visual surfaces”: unlike

the grittier, almost noirish visual aesthetic of the B science fiction films, the style of

films produced by major studios in this period were overwhelmingly “optimistic,”

offering audiences a widescreen, Technicolored vision of the alien and “other

worldly” that was both slick and empowering.84 Bonestell’s work, which merged

scientific rigor with a sunny, comforting – highly commercial – affect, embodied the

“optimism” so foundational to postwar science fiction. Although she never cites

Bonestell specifically, Sobchack’s discussion of the genre’s period-specific visual

gloss and buoyant, promising tenor recalls the commercial tendencies of his aesthetic.

The ability of these films to convey confidence and speed through the dynamic

placement of the spacecraft, to render the stillness of the rocket “mysterious but

nonhostile…” and to grant the most baffling pieces of space equipment the soothing

glow of an everyday commodity (such that they become, in Sobchack’s words,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!84 As she claims with regard to the lower budget films: “quietly and grayly, they turn the familiar into the alien, visually subvert the known and comfortable, and alter the world we take for granted into something we mistrust” (Sobchack, Screening Space, 109).

! #('!

“breathtakingly beautiful, awe inspiring, and yet warmly comforting like the night

light in a child’s bedroom”) serves as proof of Bonestell’s influence in “pictorializing

the unfamiliar” during this particular era.85

Commercial form thus greatly influences postwar science fiction’s

overwhelmingly “positive visual movement,” which, with its “somewhat smug and

optimistic belief in infinite human technological progress,” thrives upon similar ego-

reinforcing myths as contemporary advertising.86 But the influence of this visual

rhetoric reaches beyond the superficial layer of glossy “optimism,” affecting the

film’s very articulation of “alienness” – the fundamental distinction between ordinary

and extraordinary upon which the genre depends. Advertising had long relied on

visual hyperbole in its product pitches, placing mundane objects in overblown,

spectacular settings and using (with varying degrees of seriousness) this incongruity

to elevate an otherwise quotidian object to spectacular heights. But the reverse of this

is also true, as the postwar era’s space-related advertising imagery made clear, using

objects lit, framed and presented in a familiar commoditized manner to highlight the

wonder of its improbable surroundings. While contemporary advertisements featuring

heaven lowered the spiritual to the everyday, those featuring outer space maintained

the great distance between the grandeur of the universe and the commonplace

banality of the products on sale. Postwar science fiction thus had large stakes in

referencing this commercial strategy as it attempted to depict a part of the universe

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!85 Ibid., 69. As she claims with regard to “pictorializing the unfamiliar”: “The major visual impulse of all SF films is to pictorialize the unfamiliar, the nonexistent, the strange and the totally alien – and to do so with a verisimilitude which is, at times, documentary in flavor and style” (ibid., 88). 86 See ibid., 110.

! #((!

that audiences had never experienced but still yearned to feel connected to. As

Sobchack claims, science fiction “films must obligatorily descend to Earth, to men, to

the known, and to the familiar mise-en-scene if they are to result in meaning rather

than the abstract inexplicability of being.”87 Hollywood made its imagery

appropriately alien without alienating viewers through the visual methods common to

advertising – a technique that maintained the fantastic distance between earth and

space, but that was familiar enough to avoid “abstract inexplicability.”

As stated in the introduction of this chapter, Conquest of Space is not a

conquest, but a failed mission that dwells on human frailty, much like Destination

Moon asserts that one’s happiest destination is not on the moon, but back on earth.

Mainstream science fiction in this era may not have been as overtly pessimistic as the

noirish low-budget B films, but their optimism was far from wholehearted. Rather

than exuding cool, confident swagger, these films presented audiences with a vision

of outer space that was strangely ambivalent – both newly within reach and still

terrifyingly unknown, encouraging humans to realize their potential as well as their

limits. Such a perspective produces awe and wonder by making humans more aware

of their smallness at the same time as it reveals to them the possibilities of the future.

This was central to Bonestell’s work, and to the space booster attitudes that gave rise

to his particular aesthetic: in spite of our progress and capability, there still remained

a great deal of mystery, and thus, of fear, keeping us distinctly separate from God

even while allowing us to assume an omniscient perspective. The Bonestell influence,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!87 Ibid., 104.

! #()!

and the distinctly postwar combination of awe and confidence and God-fearing

humility, cut through the whole of visual culture in the postwar era. It is what makes

space exploration films from this period – heavily dependent upon commercial

moments – so eerily unsettled, forcing viewers to confront the dramatic shifts in how

postwar Americans saw themselves, not only as “Americans” but as human beings.

Conclusion: Old At Heart

The postwar period may be best remembered as an era of hopeful new

beginnings – of carefree revelry in newfound prosperity, of an eagerness to leave

behind a painful past, and a widespread belief that the youngest generations held

promise for a better future. But in spite of the fact that the 1950s was an age of youth

(and, with the advent of Playboy, the whimsy of popular design, and the dramatic rise

in purchasing on credit, of youthful regression) postwar Americans remained

profoundly aware of age and the unflinching forward progression of time. In other

words, even as fifties-era Americans focused wholeheartedly on the virtues of youth,

they felt themselves growing older – not just on an individual level in terms of age,

but on a fundamentally human level, in terms of their relationship to earthly limits. It

was in feeling themselves collectively up against this boundary between the “here and

now” and a vast, unknowable, but imminent future that prompted Americans to

regard old age as such an important symbol in postwar culture; to look to this

demographic and its nearness to the threshold between life and death as a metaphor

for national struggles with faith, mortality, and the wonders of the universe. The same

! #(*!

set of ontological anxieties spurred the search to define this limit and everything that

lay beyond it, and eventually prompted the era’s tendency to locate the divine not in

heaven but in outer space. Such a decisive transition forever changed how Americans

defined “Americanness,” reframing questions of collective identity within the more

universal canon of what – our frailty, our folly, our need for faith – makes us most

human. Yet, like so many other shifts in perspective during the postwar period, this

dramatic reorientation was the result of sprawling and complexly interrelated socio-

cultural conditions; ones that were so carefully folded into the rhythms of everyday

life that they are perceptible only when they appear, like the return of the repressed,

through commercial and (commercially influenced) cinematic form. This chapter, like

all previous chapters, argues that mass-mediated, corporatized visual language served

as an unintentional outlet for the messiest and most abstract aspects of identity

formation, giving form to narratives of anxiety and disillusionment that postwar

society was not ready to admit, even to itself.

The apparent one dimensionality of this visual rhetoric thus reveals itself to be

richly layered, pointing to the ways in which the once-stable anchors of identity –

such as faith and human subjectivity – were beginning to dissolve, and were radically

rebuilt as postwar Americans struggled to come to terms with these newly shifting

paradigms. In this regard, old age is an especially appropriate symbol of the era, not

only because it encompasses the nation’s period-specific awareness of mortality and

humanity, but also because it reflects Americans’ unusually heightened sense of self-

reflexivity. Like the wise, venerable family matriarch reflecting upon a lifetime of

! #)+!

error and achievement, postwar Americans began to adopt a critical distance from the

turbulent history that shaped them and the various unknowns that marked their future.

Although they childishly regressed in other parts of culture, it was through this

underlying maturity – a kind of calm impartiality that comes with age – that they

began to recognize their humanness, its relationship to national identity, and the

myths that had once bolstered both. Their ability to register these changes and then to

adapt is evident in their acceptance of human frailty and their constant search for faith

in other realms. It is this journey, more than any other fantastical interplanetary

excursion, that postwar science fiction and all of its associated media (the film blanc,

the elderly in advertising, space booster literature) implicitly trace. Regardless of how

impressive the trips to Zyra, or the Moon, or Mars may seem, this narrative of a

nation coming to terms with itself lies at the heart of these films, granting postwar

viewers a most candid reflection of their time and of themselves.

! #)"!

Conclusion: Aching to Return

AMC’s hit series Mad Men sets the personal entanglements of Don Draper

(Jon Hamm) and his colleagues at the Sterling Cooper advertising agency against the

glittering backdrop of midcentury commodity culture. Since its premiere in 2007, the

show has acquired a loyal fan base, inspired a number of copycat series (such as the

short-lived The Playboy Club and Pan Am), and initiated a wave of popular interest in

the political, material, and visual cultures of postwar America.1 The success of Mad

Men has been attributed to many factors: the brilliance of writer/producer/director

Matthew Weiner, the meticulous attention to period detail in sets and costumes, the

seamless integration of history – from the Kennedy assassination to the misogyny of

office politics – into its storylines.2 Yet underlying all of these explanations is

nostalgia, which Don himself describes in the finale of Season 1 as a “delicate but

potent” emotion – one that expresses a longing to return to some inaccessible past.3 In

this episode’s now-famous presentation to Kodak, Don aims to aims to convince the

company that its rudimentary slide projector can still appeal to a generation hungry

for novelty and drawn to technological innovation. Over slides of his own family !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1 See, for example, popular literature on midcentury life and culture inspired by Mad Men: Judy Gelman and Peter Zheutlin, The Unofficial Mad Men Cookbook: Inside the Kitchens, Bars, and Restaurants of Mad Men (Dallas: Smart Pop, 2011); Janie Bryant, The Fashion File: Advice, Tips, and Inspiration from the Costume Designer of Mad Men (New York: Grand Central, 2010); Natasha Vargas-Cooper, Mad Men Unbuttoned: A Romp Through 1960s America (New York: HarperCollins, 2010). 2 “Current events,” such as the Kennedy assassination often make an appearance (see Maggie Furlong, “Mad Men Tackles Pop Culture History: Other Major Events that Happened in 1966 and 1967,” Huffington Post, April 27, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/27/mad-men-pop-culture-events_n_1432423.html). 3 Quote from Mad Men, season 1, episode 13, “The Wheel.” Mad Men, directed by Matthew Weiner (2007; Santa Monica, CA: Lionsgate, 2008), DVD.

! #)#!

snapshots, he argues that this product can give consumers what no new piece of

technology can: the ability to go back, he argues, “to a place where we ache to go

again.”4

In many respects, this speech serves as a meditation on the show’s own

success. As such, it raises complex questions about how much of Mad Men’s

popularity stems from today’s nostalgia for the postwar era, and forces us to consider

why, given the inequalities suffered during that period, we would harbor such

nostalgia in the first place. Is it, as Katie Roiphe argues, that we have “…the tiniest

bit of wistfulness, the slight but unmistakable hint of longing toward all that stylish

chaos, all that selfish, retrograde abandon?”5 Is it because we take some kind of

pleasure in denouncing the sexism, racism, and homophobia of a past era, and in

using this bigotry as a spectacle against which we can measure our own progress?6 Or

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!4 Mad Men, season 1, episode 13, “The Wheel.” This scene has become a central object of analysis for scholars and fans of Mad Men. See Mark Taylor, “The Past Isn’t What it Used to Be: The Troubled Homes of Mad Men,” Jump Cut 51 (Spring 2009), http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc51.2009/mad-men/text.html; Aviva Dove-Viebahn, “Mourning Becomes the Mad Men: Notes on Nostalgia,” (In)Visible Culture: An Electronic Journal of Visual Culture, no. 17 (2012), http://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/portfolio/mourning-becomes-the-mad-men-notes-on-nostalgia/; Brenda Cromb, “’The Good Place’ and ‘The Place that Cannot Be’: Politics, Melodrama, and Utopia,” in Analyzing Mad Men: Critical Essays on the Television Series, ed. Scott Frederick Stoddart (Jefferson: McFarland, 2011), 67-78. For an especially nuanced discussion of this scene and the concept of nostalgia in relation to avant-garde art and popular visual culture of the 1960s, see Irene V. Small, “Against Depth: Looking at Surface through the Kodak Carousel,” in Mad Men, Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style, and the 1960s, ed. Lauren M.E. Goodlad, Lilya Kaganovsky, Robert A. Rushing (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 180-191. Her work on this topic helped me to think more closely about this scene’s relationship to my own project. 5 Katie Roiphe, “The Allure of Messy Lives,” New York Times, July 30, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/01/fashion/01Cultural.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0. 6 My thanks to Vicky Pass for calling my attention to this issue. See also Daniel Mendelsohn, “The Mad Men Account,” The New York Review of Books, February 24, 2011. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/feb/24/mad-men-account/ and Fiona E. Cox, “So Much a Woman: Female Objectification, Narrative Complexity, and Feminist Temporality in AMCs Mad Men,” Invisible Culture 17 (2011), http://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/portfolio/issue-17-article-1-so-much-woman-female-objectification-narrative-complexity-and-feminist-temporality-in-amcs-mad-men/.

! #)$!

is it because, in a moment of economic uncertainty, we take solace in the candy-

colored surfaces of an era now known for its material abundance? Nostalgia is a

thorny issue in all of these cases, since immersion in the past involves embracing and

confronting some of the parts of history that we reject as a part of our identity –

personal and national – today. As Times critic Alessandra Stanley noted after the

series premiere,

There were seven deadly sins practiced at the dawn of the 1960s: smoking, drinking, adultery, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and racism. In its first few minutes “Mad Men” on AMC taps into all of them…The magic of ‘Mad Men’ is that it softly spoofs those cruel, antiquated mores without draining away the romance of that era: the amber-lit bars and indigo nightclubs, soaring skyscrapers, smoky railway cars and the brash confidence that comes with winning a war and owning the world.7

Like so many fans, Stanley cites the uncomfortable co-existence of “cruel,

antiquated mores” and visual “romance.” Yet I would like to argue that our cultural

fascination with Mad Men is not based on a fundamental contradiction between our

pleasure in postwar visual surfaces and disdain for its social hierarchies. Instead, I

sense that the show’s success rests on its ability to replicate the rhythms and affects of

consumer culture from that era, and in doing so, to recreate a version of the

commercial moment for audiences in the twenty-first century. Our nostalgia therefore

stems not from a desire to return to a pre-Civil Rights past, nor even to applaud

ourselves on how far we’ve come since then, but rather to immerse ourselves in the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!7 Alessandra Stanley, “Smoking, Drinking, Cheating, Selling,” New York Times, July 19, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/19/arts/television/19stan.html?pagewanted=all.

! #)%!

visual culture of a historical period in which commercial form – the most

commonplace visual rhetoric – had significance beyond a product pitch.

Mad Men’s premise provides ample opportunities to engage with the visual

conventions of postwar advertising culture, and also serves as a convenient vehicle

for the show’s own product placement obligations. Although the series is praised for

its seamless references to midcentury advertising campaigns (as AMC president

Charlie Collier explains, even though “We absolutely have product integration in the

show, you shouldn’t know which ones are paid and which ones aren’t”8), one of the

most powerful ways in which it returns audiences to the past is by mirroring the

postwar era’s commercial visual style. Mad Men is so reminiscent of the past because

its flat, hyper-ritualized compositions rival the Technicolor films of Sirk and

Hathaway at the same time that it mimics the commercial spreads featured in Vogue,

Playboy and Life.9 Harking back to a time in which commodities reified both capital

and socio-political conflict, product placement in Mad Men seems to be both less and

more than it is today: devoid of a brazen product pitch and yet giving form to realities

often omitted from popular historical narratives.

Mad Men therefore cultivates an environment in which the commercial

moment can be briefly revived. Plots revolve around accounts that Sterling Cooper is

trying to secure, new products in need of publicity spur love triangles and illicit

affairs, pivotal scenes take place over debates about brand image, and office rivalries

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!8 Abe Sauer, “Mad Men Fight Proves Product Placement Critics Wrong,” Brandchannel, April 4, 2011, http://www.brandchannel.com/home/post/2011/04/04/Mad-Men-Proves-Product-Placement-Critics-Wrong.aspx. 9 See Goodlad, Kaganovsky, and Rushing, 3.

! #)&!

emerge from trends in visual marketing, such that capitalistic visual rhetoric is

incorporated organically into the very foundation of dramatic action. In Don’s

presentation to Kodak, for instance, the slide wheel becomes a “carousel,” allowing

us to “travel…as a child would travel. Around and around and back again.” In this

scene, his job becomes a commentary on his life, and the carousel a metaphor for his

private desire to reclaim a happier, more unified past. But it also seems to act as a

solemn reminder of broader social changes, forging powerful connections with the

historical context of the early sixties – or, more specifically, the early sixties as

imagined by viewers in 2007. Aware of the turbulence that would mark the coming

decade, Mad Men viewers can see the carousel as representing the childishness and

(clichéd) innocence of the immediate postwar years, and as a melancholic tribute to

“tranquility” in these last gasps of the long fifties. Moreover, a twenty-first century

perspective allows this product – a now-outdated material thing – to serve as a stirring

reflection on the passage of time: a reminder of the technological innovations that

would soon render the carousel obsolete, and of the economic crises that would

eventually lead to the demise of Kodak, once a giant of the image-making industry.10

In this scene and in so many others, commodities become the central focus, inviting

affective weight and socio-political signification to converge within their narrative

presence. The trials, gains, and injustices of the past are therefore mediated through

the commercial language of history, and whether the characters use this language to

embrace change or reject it, the show recreates a time when advertising rhetoric

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!10 For a discussion of how this scene emphasizes obsolescence and memory through Kodak, see Small, 181.

! #)'!

served this greater purpose. Like postwar commercial moments, these instances in

Mad Men make meaning beyond the diegesis and force audiences, under the guise of

escapism, to confront realities about the nation and about history.

Mad Men’s enormous success reminds audiences of how commercial visual

style operated in the postwar era – mediating interactions between different social

groups, absorbing the currents of change, and forcing characters to confront personal

transformations within the context of national upheaval. In this project, I have tried to

draw out the ways in which the commercial moment provided a shorthand for

expressing how a particularly fragmented historical era recast Americans’

understanding of identity. Certainly the social, political, and economic milieu of the

twenty-first century differs greatly from that of the postwar era. And yet, economic

downturns, international conflicts, as well as debates over racial profiling,

reproductive rights, and the definition of marriage keep the concept of selfhood – of

how to define the body and body politic – in play as much today as yesterday.

The commercial moment, a mode of expression so key to the postwar era,

disappeared for a number of years, only to be resurrected by a culture and an era

faced with equally pressing questions about how to grasp the messy abstractions of

the “self.” It is therefore possible that Mad Men’s popularity comes from the

collective longing for a time when the most quotidian of visual forms offered a way

of working through, or at least acknowledging, these questions. The place that we

“ache to go again” lies not in a physical space or an era, but rather in a visual form

that let Americans, desperate to know themselves better, see their world more clearly.

! #)(!

Bibliography

A. W., “Niagara Falls Vies with Marilyn Monroe,” The New York Times, January 22, 1953, 20. http://proquest.umi.com.

Abel, Elizabeth. “Shadows.” Representations 84 (Autumn, 2003): 166-199. Adler, Richard and Jerry Ross. The Pajama Game: A New Musical Comedy. New

York: Random House, 1954. Ahlbum, Sumner. “Are You Afraid of your Teenager?” Cosmopolitan, November

1957, 40-45 Alexander, Jeffrey. “Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma.” In Cultural Trauma and

Collective Identity, edited by Jeffrey Alexander, 1-30. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.

Allen, Charles L. When You Lose a Loved One. Westwood: Revell, 1959. Allyn, David. “Private Acts/Public Policy: Alfred Kinsey, the American Law Institute

and the Privatization of American Sexual Morality.” Journal of American Studies 30, no. 3 (1996): 405-428.

Altman, Rick. The American Film Musical. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,

1987. “And a Child Shall Lead Them.” Ebony, December 1945, 28. Andrew, Geoff. The Films of Nicholas Ray: The Poet of Nightfall. 2nd ed. London:

BFI, 2004. Appadurai, Arjun. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective.

New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Apple, Rima D. Perfect Motherhood: Science and Childrearing in America. New

Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006. “The Atom.” Life, May 16, 1949, 68-84. “The Atomic Bomb.” Life, February 27, 1950, 90-100. “The Atomic Bomb: Its First Explosion Opens a New Era.” Life, August 20, 1945,

87-95.

! #))!

Avila, Eric. Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in

Suburban Los Angeles. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Bal, Mieke. “The Pain of Images.” In Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the

Traffic in Pain, edited by Mark Reinhardt, Holly Edwards, and Erina Duganne, 93-115. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

Banner, Lois W. “The Creature from the Black Lagoon: Marilyn Monroe and

Whiteness.” Cinema Journal 47, no. 4 (Summer, 2008): 4-29. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard

Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. Basten, Fred E. Glorious Technicolor: the Movies’ Magic Rainbow. Cranbury: A.S.

Barnes, 1980. Batchelor, David. Chromophobia. London: Reaktion, 2001. ---. Colour. Documents of Contemporary Art. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008. Battle Hymn, directed by Douglas Sirk. 1957; Universal City, CA: Universal, 2004.

DVD. Baxandall, Michael. Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in

the Social History of Pictorial Style. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972.

Bazin, Andre. What is Cinema? Vol. 1. Translated by Hugh Gray. Berkeley:

University of California Press, 2005. Beck, Joan. “Popularity a ‘Must’ With Teens: Failure to Conform, They Believe, is

Social Suicide.” Chicago Tribune, January 8, 1959, C5. http://proquest.umi.com.

Bederman, Gail. Manliness and Civilization: A Culture History of Gender and Race

in the United States 1880-1917. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Belton, John. Widescreen Cinema. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992. Berger, Martin A. Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture. Berkeley:

University of California Press, 2005. Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.

! #)*!

---. The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American

Culture. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. ---. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship.

Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. Bernardi, Daniel, ed. Filming Difference: Actors, Directors, Producers and Writers

on Gender, Race, and Sexuality in Film. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009.

Berry, Sarah. Screen Style: Fashion and Femininity in 1930s Hollywood.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Biberman, Edward. “…In Glorious Technicolor.” Hollywood Quarterly 2, no. 1

(October, 1946): 50-56. “Big Business Goes Tiny: Toys Help Promote Trade Names.” Life, November 9,

1953, 97-102. Biography: Bob Fosse: Dancing on the Edge, produced by Andrew Rothstein. 1999;

New York, NY: A&E Home Video, 1999. DVD. Biskind, Peter. “Rebel Without a Cause: Nicholas Ray in the Fifties.” Film Quarterly

28, no. 1 (Autumn, 1974): 32-38. ---.“The Russians are Coming, Aren’t They? Them! And The Thing,” In 318-324,

Liquid Metal: The Science Fiction Film Reader, ed. Sean Redmond, 318-324. New York: Wallflower Press, 2004.

---. Seeing is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the

Fifties. New York: Pantheon Books, 1983. Blechman, Andrew D. Leisureville: Adventures in America’s Retirement Utopias.

New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2008. Bogle, Donald. Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks: An Interpretive

History of Blacks in Film. 1944. Reprint, New York: Bantam, 1973. Boime, Albert. The Magisterial Gaze: Manifest Destiny and American Landscape

Painting c. 1830-1865. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991.

! #*+!

Borde, Raymond and Etienne Chaumeton. “Towards a Definition of Film Noir.” In Film Noir Reader, edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini, 17-26. New York: Limelight Editions, 1996.

Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson. The Classical Hollywood

Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985.

Bower, Anne. Reel Food: Essays on Food and Film. New York: Routledge, 2004. Boyer, Paul. By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn

of the Atomic Age. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994. ---. When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture.

Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992. Brailsford, Ian. “Ripe for Harvest: American Youth Marketing, 1945-1970.” PhD

diss., University of Auckland, 1998. Braudy, Leo, and Marshall Cohen. Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory

Readings. 5th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Brenner, Robert. The Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist

Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945-2005. New York: Verso, 2006.

Bronfen, Elizabeth and Sarah Webster Goodwin, ed. Death and Representation.

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. Brown, Bill. The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane, and

the Economies of Play. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. Brown, E.G. “History and Memory.” National Parent-Teacher, February 1, 1957. Brown, Gillian. “Child’s Play.” In The American Child: A Cultural Studies Reader,

edited by Caroline Levander and Carol J. Singley, 14-38. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003.

Bruhn, Steven and Natasha Hurley. “Introduction.” In Curiouser: On the Queerness

of Children, edited by Bruhn and Hurley x-xxv. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.

Bryant, Janie. The Fashion File: Advice, Tips, and Inspiration from the Costume

Designer of Mad Men. New York: Grand Central, 2010.

! #*"!

Bullock, Marcus and Michael W. Jennings, ed. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings,

Volume 4: 1938-1940. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2003. Buscombe, Edward. “Sound and Color.” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary

Media, no. 78 (April, 1978), http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC17folder/SoundAndColor.html.

Cain, Susan. Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking. New

York: Broadway Paperbacks, 2012. Capparell, Stephanie. The Real Pepsi Challenge: The Inspirational Story of Breaking

the Color Barrier in American Business. New York: Free Press, 2007. Cardinal, Roger. “Pausing over Peripheral Detail.” Framework no. 30-31 (1986):

112-130. Cartwright, Lisa. Moral Spectatorship: Technologies of Voice and Affect in Postwar

Representations of the Child. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore:

The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Castan, Sam. “Unadoptable Finds a Home.” Look, April 11, 1961, 82-85. Chapman, James. “’The True Business of the British Movie’? A Matter of Life and

Death and British Film Culture.” Screen 46, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 33-49. Charney, Leo. “Historical Excess: Johnny Guitar’s Containment.” Cinema Journal

29, no. 4 (Summer, 1990): 23-34. Chudakoff, Howard P. Children at Play: An American History [New York: New

York University Press, 2007. Churchwell, Sarah. The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe. New York: Metropolitan

Books, 2004. Clendenen, Richard and H.W. Beaser. “Post Reports on Juvenile Delinquency: The

Shame of America.” Saturday Evening Post, January 8, 1955, 17. Clover, Carol. “Dancin’ in the Rain.” Critical Inquiry 21 (Summer, 1995): 722-747.

! #*#!

Cobb, Michael. “Childlike: Queer Theory and Its Children.” Criticism 47, no. 1 (Winter, 2005): 119-130.

Cohan, Steven. Incongruous Entertainment: Camp, Cultural Value, and the MGM

Musical. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. ---. Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties. Bloomington: Indiana

University Press, 1997. Cohen, Elliot E. “A ‘Teen-Age Bill of Rights.’” New York Times Magazine, January

7, 1945: 15-18. Cohen, Lisa. “The Horizontal Walk: Marilyn Monroe, CinemaScope, and Sexuality.”

The Yale Journal of Criticism, 11, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 259-288. Cohen, Lizabeth. A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in

Postwar America. New York: Knopf, 2003. Cole, Thomas R. “The Prophecy of Senescence: G. Stanley Hall and the

reconstruction of Old age in America.” The Gerontologist 24, no. 4 (1984): 360-366.

Colomina, Beatriz. Domesticity at War. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. The Conquest of Space, directed by Byron Haskin. 1955; Hollywood, CA:

Paramount, 2004, DVD. Coontz, Stephanie. The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia

Trap. New York: Basic Books, 1992. Corber, Robert J. “Rethinking Sex: Alfred Kinsey Now.” American Quarterly 57, no.

2 (June, 2005): 463-474. http://muse.jhu.edu. ---. “You Wanna Check My Thumbprints? Vertigo, the trope of invisibility and Cold

War Nationalism.” In Hitchcock: Centenary Essays, edited by Richard Allen and S. Ishii-Gonzalez, 304-314. London: BFI Publishing, 1999.

Cowan, Douglas. Sacred Space: The Quest for Transcendence in Science Fiction

Film and Television. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2010. Cowan, Ruth Schwartz. More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household

Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave. New York: Basic Books, 1983.

! #*$!

Cox, Fiona E. “So Much a Woman: Female Objectification, Narrative Complexity, and Feminist Temporality in AMCs Mad Men.” Invisible Culture 17 (2011). http://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/portfolio/issue-17-article-1-so-much-woman-female-objectification-narrative-complexity-and-feminist-temporality-in-amcs-mad-men/.

Crary, Jonathan. “Modernizing Vision.” In Vision and Visuality, edited by Hal Foster,

34-35. ---. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century.

Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990. Crichton, Ian. The Art of Dying. London: Owen, 1976. Cromb, Brenda. “’The Good Place’ and ‘The Place that Cannot Be’: Politics,

Melodrama, and Utopia.” In Analyzing Mad Men: Critical Essays on the Television Series, edited by Scott Frederick Stoddart, 67-78. Jefferson: McFarland, 2011.

Cross, Gary. Men to Boys: The Making of Modern Immaturity. New York: Columbia

University Press, 2008. Crowther, Bosley. “Juvenile Misfits: ‘Rebel Without a Cause’ Depicts Another Set.”

New York Times, October 30, 1955, X1. http://proquest.umi.com. ---. “The Screen: James Jones’ Some Came Running,” The New York Times, January

23, 1959, 17. ---. “The Screen: Pillow Talk, New York Times, October 7, 1959, 47.

http://proquest.umi.com. ---. “The Screen: Trio of Stars in Cinemascope: Monroe, Becall, Grable…” New York

Times, November 11, 1953, 37, http://proquest.umi.com. Cuordileone, K.A. “Politics in an Age of Anxiety.” The Journal of American History

87, no. 2 (September, 2000): 515-545. http://www.jstor.org. Dalgin, Ben. Advertising Production: A Manual on the Mechanics of Newspaper

Printing. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1946. Dayan, Daniel. “The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema.” In Film Theory and

Criticism: Introductory Readings, edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, 5th ed., 118-129. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

! #*%!

Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Ken Knabb. Detroit: Black and Red, 1983.

De Hart, Jane Sherron. “Containment at home: Gender, Sexuality, and National

Identity in Cold War America.” In Rethinking Cold War Culture, edited by Peter J. Kuznick and James Gilbert, 124-155. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001.

Delamater, Jerome. Dance in the Hollywood Musical. Ann Arbor: UMI Research

Press, 1981. Della Femina, Jerry, and Charles Sopkin. From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave

You Pearl Harbor: Front-Line Dispatches from the Advertising War. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970.

De Lauretis, Teresa, and Stephen Heath, eds. The Cinematic Apparatus. New York:

St. Martin’s Press, 1980. Dennis, Rutledge M. “Social Darwinism, Scientific Racism, and the Metaphysics of

Race.” In Journal of Negro Education 64, no. 3 (Summer, 1995): 243-252. http://www.jstor.org.

Destination Moon, directed by Irving Pichel. 1950; Chatsworth, CA: Image

Entertainment, 2000. DVD. “Destination Moon.” The Commonweal, July 21, 1950, 367. Diawara, Manthia. “The Blackface Stereotype.” In David Levinthal, Blackface, 7-17.

Santa Fe: Arena Editions, 1999. Dichter, Ernest. Handbook of Consumer Motivations: The Psychology of the World of

Objects. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964. ---. Strategy of Desire. Garden City: Doubleday, 1960. ---. “A Psychological View of Advertising Effectiveness.” The Journal of Marketing

14, no. 1 (July, 1949): 61-66. ---. Psychology of Everyday Living. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1947. Dinerstine, Joel. Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African

American Culture Between the World Wars. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003.

! #*&!

Di Piero, Thomas. “White Men Aren’t.” Camera Obscura 30 (1994): 113-137. Doane, Mary Ann. Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis. New

York: Routledge, 1991. Dobrow, Larry. When Advertising Tried Harder: The Sixties, The Golden Age of

American Advertising. New York: Friendly Press, 1984. Doherty, Thomas. Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in

the 1950s. Revised and Expanded Edition. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002.

Double Indemnity, directed by Billy Wilder. 1944; Universal City, CA: Universal

Pictures, 2006. DVD. Douglas, Mary and Baron Isherwood. The World of Goods: Towards an

Anthropology of Consumption. New York: Routledge, 1996. Dove-Viebahn, Aviva. “Mourning Becomes the Mad Men: Notes on Nostalgia.”

(In)Visible Culture:An Electronic Journal of Visual Culture, no. 17 (2012). http://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/portfolio/mourning-becomes-the-mad-men-notes-on-nostalgia/.

Drucker, Johanna and Emily McVarish. Graphic Design History: A Critical Guide.

2nd ed. Boston: Pearson, 2013. Durant, Frederick C. III and Ron Miller. Worlds Beyond: The Art of Chesley

Bonestell. Norfolk: Donning, 1983. Dyer, Richard. Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society. 2nd ed. New York:

Routledge, 2004. ---. “Resistance Through Charisma: Rita Hayworth and Gilda.” In Women in Film

Noir, edited by E. Ann Kaplan, 115-122. New Edition. London: BFI Publishing, 1998

---. White. London: Routledge, 1997. Eckert, Charles. “The Carole Lombard in Macy’s Window.” Quarterly Review of

Film and Video 3, no. 1 (1978): 1-21. Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke

University Press, 2004.

! #*'!

Elsaesser, Thomas. “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family

Melodrama.” In Film Genre Reader III, edited by Barry Keith Grant, 366-395. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003.

Engelhardt, Tom. The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the

Disillusioning of a Generation (New York: Basic Books, 1995. Epstein, Barbara. “Anti-Communism, Homophobia, and the Construction of

Masculinity in the Postwar U.S.” Critical Sociology 20, no. 3 (1994): 21-44. Erickson, Peter. “Invisibility Speaks: Servants and Portraits in Early Modern Visual

Culture.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 9, no. 1 (Spring/Summer, 2009): 23-40.

Ernest Dichter Collection #2407, Hagley Archives, Wilmington, DE. Estelle Ellis Collection, 1944-1994, #423, Archives Center, National Museum of

American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Ewan, Stuart. Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the social Roots of the

Consumer Culture. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976. “A Famous Orphan Finds a Happy Home,” Life, May 14, 1956, 129-130. Ferguson, Frances. “The Nuclear Sublime.” Diacritics 14, no. 2 (Summer, 1984): 4-

10. Feuer, Jane. The Hollywood Musical. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,

1993. ---. “The Self-Reflexive Musical and the Myth of Entertainment.” In Film Genre

Reader III, edited by Barry Keith Grant, 457-471. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003.

Field, Douglas, ed. American Cold War Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University

Press, 2005. “First Official Report on Damage to Japan.” U.S. News and World Report, July 5,

1946, 63-78. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. First

American ed. New York: Pantheon, 1970.

! #*(!

Frank, Thomas. The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.

Frascella, Lawrence, and Al Weisel. Live Fast, Die Young: The Wild Ride of Making

Rebel Without a Cause. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005. Fraterrigo, Elizabeth. Playboy and the Making of the Good Life in Modern America.

New York: Oxford, 2009. Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. Translated by David McLintock. New York: Penguin

Books, 2003. ---. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Edited and Translated by James

Strachey. 4th ed. New York: Basic Books, 1975. Friedberg, Ann. “Cinema and the Postmodern Condition,” in Viewing Positions:

Ways of Seeing Film, edited by Linda Williams, 59-82. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995.

Friedman, Andrea. “The Smearing of Joe McCarthy: The Lavender Scare, Gossip,

and Cold War Politics.” American Quarterly 57, no. 4 (December, 2005): 1105-1129. http://muse.jhu.edu.

Furlong, Maggie. “Mad Men Tackles Pop Culture History: Other Major Events that

Happened in 1966 and 1967,” Huffington Post, April 27, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/27/mad-men-pop-culture-events_n_1432423.html.

Gans, Herbert J. The Levittowners: Ways of Life and Politics in a New Suburban

Community. New York: Pantheon Books, 1967. Gelman, Judy and Peter Zheutlin. The Unofficial Mad Men Cookbook: Inside the

Kitchen, Bars, and Restaurants of Mad Men. Dallas: Smart Pop, 2011. Gene Kelly: Anatomy of a Dancer, directed by Robert Trachtenberg. 2002; Burbank,

CA: Warner Home Video, 2002. DVD. Genne, Beth. “’Freedom Incarnate’: Gerome Robbins, Gene Kelly, and the Dancing

Sailor as Icon of American Values in World War II.” Dance Chronicle 24, no. 1 (2001): 83-103.

Gilbert, Eugene. Advertising and Marketing to Young People. Pleasantville: Printer’s

Ink Books, 1957.

! #*)!

Gilbert, James Burkhart. A Cycle of Outrage: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Gilman, Sander. “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female

Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature.” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (Autumn, 1985): 204-242.

---. Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness. Ithaca:

Cornell University Press, 1985. Goffman, Erving. Gender Advertisements. New York: Harper and Row, 1979. Goldman, Robert. Reading Ads Socially. New York: Routledge, 1992. Goodlad, Lauren M.E., Lilya Kaganovsky, and Robert A. Rushing. “Introduction.” In

Mad Men, Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style, and the 1960s, edited by Lauren M.E. Goodlad, Lilya Kaganovsky, and Robert A. Rushing, 1-31. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013.

Grant, Barry Keith, ed. Film Genre Reader III. Austin: University of Texas Press,

2003. ---. The Hollywood Musical. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. Gudis, Catherine. Buyways: Billboards, Automobiles, and the American Landscape.

New York: Routledge, 2004. Haines, Richard W. Technicolor Movies: The History of Dye Transfer Printing.

Jefferson: McFarland, 1993. Haralovich, Mary Beth. “All that Heaven Allows: Color, Narrative Space, and

Melodrama.” In Color: The Film Reader, edited by Angela Dalle Vacche and Brian Price, 145-153. New York: Routledge, 2006.

Hariman, Robert and John Louis Lucaites. No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs,

Liberal Democracy, and Public Culture. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2007.

Harris, Thomas. “The Building of Popular Images: Grace Kelly and Marilyn

Monroe.” In Stardom: Industry of Desire, edited by Christine Gledhill, 40-44. New York: Routledge, 1991.

! #**!

Hartman, Geoffrey. “Tele-Suffering and Testimony in the Dot Com Era.” In Visual Culture and the Holocaust, edited by Barbie Zelizer, 111-126. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001.

Harvey, Sylvia. “Woman’s Place: the Absent Family of Film Noir.” In Women in

Film Noir, edited by E. Ann Kaplan, 35-46. New Edition. London: BFI Publishing, 1998.

Hazzard-Gordon, Katrina. “Dancing Under the Lash: Sociocultural Disruption,

Continuity, and Synthesis.” In African Dance: An Artistic, Historical, and Philosophical Inquiry, edited by Kariamu Welsh Asante, 101-130. Trenton: Africa World Press, 1996.

Heller, Steven. “Advertisements of the Thirties: From Modernism to Shirt-Sleevism.”

In ‘30s: All American Ads, edited by Jim Heimann, 24-27. Los Angeles: Taschen, 2003.

Henriksen, Margot A. Dr. Strangelove’s America: Society and Culture in the Atomic

Age. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Herberg, Will. Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology.

Garden City: Country Life Press, 1955. Higgins, Scott. Harnessing the Technicolor Rainbow: Color Design in the 1930s.

Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007. Hill, Mike, ed. Whiteness: A Critical Reader. New York: New York University Press,

1997. Hine, Thomas. Populuxe. New York: Knopf, 1986. Hiner, N. Ray, and Joseph M. Hawes. Growing Up in America: Children in

Historical Perspective. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985. Hofstadter, Richard. Social Darwinism in American Thought. 1944. Reprint, Boston:

Beacon Press, 1992. Holm, Wilton, et al. Elements of Color in Professional Motion Pictures. New York:

Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, 1957. Hollowaty, Laurel Frances. “Achievement, Equality of Opportunity, and Equality of

Access: Ideology and Aesthetics in Life and Ebony, 1945-1975.” PhD diss., University of California, Irvine, 1974.

! $++!

Holly, Michael Ann. “Mourning and Method.” The Art Bulletin 84, no. 4 (December 2002): 660-669. http://www.jstor.org.

How to Marry a Millionaire, directed by Jean Negulesco. 1953; Beverly Hills, CA:

20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2001. DVD. Hulbert, Ann. Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice about

Children. New York: Knopf, 2003. Ibsen, John. “Masculinity Under Fire: Life’s Presentation of Camaraderie and

Homoeroticism Before, During, and After the Second World War.” In Looking at Life Magazine, edited by Erika Doss, 181-197. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001.

Illouz, Eva. Saving the Modern Soul: Therapy, Emotions, and the Culture of Self

Help. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. Ilson, Carol. Harold Prince: From Pajama Game to Phantom of the Opera. Ann

Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989. “In Central Park: Memories of War.” Commonweal, December 23, 1955, 301-303. Inness, Sherrie A., ed. Delinquents and Debutantes: Twentieth Century American

Girls’ Cultures. New York: NYU Press, 1998. “It’s Always Fair Weather: Going Out on a High Note.” Commentary on It’s Always

Fair Weather, directed by Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly. 1955; Culver City, CA: Warner Home Video, 2006.

J. W. Thompson Collection, David M. Rubenstein Rare Books and Manuscript

Library, Duke University. Jackson, Kathy Merlock. Images of Children in American Film: A Sociocultural

Analysis. Metuchen: the Scarecrow Press, 1986. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.

Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. ---. “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture.” In The Jameson Reader, edited by

Michael Hardt and Kathi Weeks, 124-148. Malden: Blackwell, 2000. Jancovich, Mark. “Re-examining the 1950s Invasion Narratives.” In Liquid Metal:

The Science Fiction Film Reader, ed. Sean Redmond, 325-336. New York: Wallflower Press, 2004.

! $+"!

Jay, Martin. “Scopic Regimes of Modernity.” In Vision and Visuality, edited by Hal

Foster, 3-28. Seattle: Bay Press, 1988. Jhally, Sut. The Codes of Advertising: Fetishism and the Political Economy of

Meaning in the Consumer Society. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987. ---. “Advertising as Religion: The Dialectic of Technology and Magic.” In Cultural

Politics in Contemporary America, ed. Lan Angus and Sut Jhally, 217-229. New York: Routledge, 1989.

Johnson, Fern L. Imaging in Advertising: Verbal and Visual Codes of Commerce.

New York: Routledge, 2008. Johnson, William. “Coming to Terms with Color.” Film Quarterly 20, no. 2 (Autumn,

1966): 2-22. Kalmus, Natalie M. “Color Consciousness.” In Color: The Film Reader, edited by

Angela Dalle Vacche and Brian Price, 24-29. New York: Routledge, 2006. Kaplan, E. Ann. “The 'Dark Continent' of Film Noir: Race Displacement and

Metaphor in Tourneur's Cat People (1942) and Welles' The Lady From Shanghai (1948).” In Women in Film Noir, edited by E. Ann Kaplan, 183-201. New Edition. London: BFI Publishing, 1998.

Kerslake, Patricia. Science Fiction and Empire. Liverpool: Liverpool University

Press, 2007. Kindem, Gorham. “Hollywood’s Conversion to Color: The Technological, Economic

and Aesthetic Factors.” Journal of the University Film Association 31, no. 2 (Spring, 1979): 29-36.

King, Geoff. New Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction. New York: Columbia

University Press, 2002. Kinsey, Alfred, Wardell B. Pomeroy, and Clyde E. Martin. Sexual Behavior in the

Human Male. Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders Company, 1948. Kinsey, Alfred, Wardell B. Pomeroy, Clyde E. Martin, and Paul H. Gebhard. Sexual

Behavior in the Human Female. Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders Company, 1953.

Klein, Christina. Cold War Oreintalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-

1961. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.

! $+#!

Kline, Stephen. Out of the Garden: Toys, TV, and Children’s Culture in the Age of

Marketing. New York: Verso, 1993. Kopytoff, Igor. “The Social Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process.” In

Social Lives of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai, 64-94. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Knight, Arthur. Disintegrating the Musical: Black Performance and American

Musical Film. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Kracauer, Siegfried. Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. New York:

Oxford University Press, 1960. Lawrence, Mary Wells. A Big Life in Advertising. New York: Knopf, 2002. Lears, Jackson. Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America.

New York: Basic Books, 1994. LeBeau, Vicky. Childhood and Cinema. Locations. London: Reaktion, 2008. Lederer, William J. and Nelle Keys Perry. “Operation Kid-Lift.” Ladies’ Home

Journal, December 1952, 48-49, 122-123. Leja, Michael. Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to

Duchamp. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Leongard, John et. al. The Great LIFE Photographers. New York: Bullfinch, 2004. Lepore, Jill. “Twilight: Growing Old and Even Older.” The New Yorker, March 14,

2011, http://archives.newyorker.com. Letters to the Editors, Life, August 13, 1951, 8-11. Lindner, Robert. Rebel Without a Cause: the Hypnoanalysis of a Criminal

Psychopath. New York: Grune and Stratton, 1944. Linfield, Susie. Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 2010. Loftin, Craig M. “Unacceptable Mannerisms: Gender Anxieties, Homosexual

Activism, and Swish in the United States, 1945-1965.” Journal of Social History 40, no. 3 (Spring, 2007): 577-596.

! $+$!

Long, Robert Emmet. Broadway: The Golden Years: Jerome Robbins and the Great Choreographer-Directors. New York: Continuum, 2001.

“Lord is Their Sponsor.” Life, December 26, 1955, 58. Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class.

New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. ---. “The Whiteness of Film Noir.” In Whiteness: A Critical Reader, edited by Mike

Hill, 82-96. New York: New York University Press, 1997. Loukides, Paul, ed. Beyond the Stars: The Material World in American Popular Film.

Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Press, 1993. Lury, Karen. The Child in Film: Tears, Fears, and Fairytales. New Brunswick:

Rutgers University Press, 2010. Mad Men, directed by Matthew Weiner. 2007; Santa Monica, CA: Lionsgate, 2008.

DVD. MacGowan, Kenneth. “The Screen’s ‘New Look’: Wider and Deeper.” The Quarterly

of Film Radio and Television 11, no. 2 (Winter, 1956): 109-130. http://www.jstor.org.

Magnificent Obsession, directed by Douglas Sirk. 1954; Irvington, NY: Criterion

Collection, 2008. DVD. Marchand, Roland. Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity.

Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Marcus, Steven. Introduction to Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality by Sigmund

Freud, 4th ed., trans. James Strachey, xix-xli. New York: Basic Books, 1975. Margerum, Eileen. “The Child in American Advertising, 1890-1960: Reflections of a

Changing Society.” In Images of the Child, edited by Harry Eiss, 334-349. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1994.

Marks, Laura U. “Video Haptics and Erotics.” Screen 39, no. 4 (Winter, 1998): 331-

348. Marling, Karal Ann. As Seen on TV: The Visual Culture of Everyday Life in the

1950s. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994.

! $+%!

Martin, Milward W. Twelve Full Ounces. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1962.

May, Elaine Tyler. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. New

York: Basic Books, 1988. May, Lary, ed. Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of Cold War.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989 Mayne, Judith. Cinema and Spectatorship. New York: Routledge, 1993. ---. “Immigrants and Spectators.” Wide Angle 5, no. 2 (1982): 32-40. McCracken, Grant. Big Hair: A Journey into the Transformation of Self. Woodstock:

The Overlook Press, 1995. McCurdy, Howard E. Space in the American Imagination. Washington: Smithsonian

Institution Press, 1997. McDaniel, Patricia A. Shrinking Violets and Caspar Milquetoasts: Shyness, Power,

and Intimacy in the United States, 1950-1995. New York: New York University Press, 2003.

McDannell, Colleen and Bernhard Lang. Heaven: A History. New Haven: Yale

University Press, 1988. McDougall, Walter A. The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space

Age. New York: Basic Books, 1985. McLeod, David I. “Act Your Age: Boyhood, Adolescence, and the Rise of the Boy

Scouts of America.” Journal of Social History 16, no. 2 (Winter, 1982): 3-20. McWaters, Debra. The Fosse Style. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008. Medovoi, Leerom. Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity. Durham:

Duke University Press, 2005. Mendelsohn, Daniel. “The Mad Men Account.” The New York Review of Books,

February 24, 2011. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/feb/24/mad-men-account/.

Metz, Christian. “The Imaginary Signifier (excerpts).” In Narrative, Apparatus,

Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, edited by Philip Rosen, 244-280. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.

! $+&!

Meyerowitz, Joanne. “Transforming Sex: Christine Jorgensen in the Postwar U.S.

Magazine of History 20, no. 2 (March, 2006): 16-20. http://proquest.umi.com. Miller, Lisa. Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination With the Afterlife. New York:

Harper, 2010. Miller, Mark Crispin. Seeing Through Movies. Pantheon Guide to Popular Culture

Series. New York: Pantheon Books, 1990. Mintz, Steven. Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood. Cambridge: Harvard

University Press, 2004. Modleski, Tania. Feminism Without Women: Culture and Criticism in a

‘Postfeminist’ Age. New York: Routledge, 1991. Mordden, Ethan. Coming Up Roses: The Broadway Musical in the 1950s. New York:

Oxford University Press, 1998. Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.

Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992. Moskin, J. Robert. “Why do Women Dominate Him?” Look, February 4, 1958, 77-

80. ---. “Revolution in Adoption.” Look, December 8, 1959, 35-41. Moss, Frank E. and Val J. Halamandaris. Too Old, Too Sick, Too Bad: Nursing

Homes in America. Germanton: Aspen Systems Corporation, 1977. Moxness, Ron. “Good Samaritan of Korea.” American Mercury, October 1956, 84-

88. Mulvey, Laura. “Notes on Sirk and Melodrama.” Movie no. 25 (Winter 1977-1978):

53-57. ---. “Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema.” In Feminism and Film Theory, edited by

Constance Penley, 57-68. New York: Routledge, 1988. Nadel, Alan. Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the

Atomic Age. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. Naremore, James. More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts. Updated edition.

Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.

! $+'!

Neal, Arthur. National Trauma and Collective Memory: Major Events in the

American Century. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1998. Neale, Stephen. Cinema and Technology: Sound, Image, Colour. Bloomington:

Indiana University Press, 1986. Nemerov, Alexander. The Body of Raphaelle Peale: Still Life and Selfhood. Berkeley:

University of California Press, 2001. Neuhaus, Jessamyn. Manly Meals and Mom’s Home Cooking: Cookbooks and

Gender in Modern America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.

“New American Comes ‘Home.’” Life, November 30, 1953, 25-29. “New Faces.” Time, December 23 1957, 16. Niagara, directed by Henry Hathaway. 1953; Beverly Hills, CA: 20th Century Fox

Home Entertainment, 2006. DVD. Nordell, Rod. “Rebel Without a Cause,” Christian Science Monitor, October 28,

1955, 6. Novak, Barbara. Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825-1875.

New York: Oxford, 1980. O’Barr, William M. Culture and the Ad: Exploring Otherness in the World of

Advertising. Boulder: Westview Press, 1994. Ogilvy, David. Confessions of an Advertising Man. New York: Antheneum, 1963. Ohmer, Susan. “Disney’s Peter Pan: Gender, Fantasy, and Industrial Production.” In

Second Star to the Right: Peter Pan in the Popular Imagination, edited by Allison B. Kavey and Lester D. Friedman, 153-183. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2009.

Osgerby, Bill. Playboys in Paradise: Masculinity, Youth and Leisure-Style in Modern

America. Oxford: Berg, 2001. Packard, Vance. The Hidden Persuaders. New York: David McKay Company, 1957. The Pajama Game, directed by Stanley Donen. 1957; Burbank, CA: Warner Home

Video, 2005. DVD.

! $+(!

Palladino, Grace. Teenagers: An American History. New York: Basic Books, 1996. Parkin, Katherine. Food is Love: Food Advertising and Gender Roles in Modern

America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. ---. “The Sex of Food and Ernest Dichter: the Illusion of Inevitability.” Advertising &

Society Review 5, no. 2 (2004). http://muse.jhu.edu. Paul, William. “The Aesthetics of Emergence.” Film History 5, no. 3 (September

1993): 321-355. Peale, Norman Vincent. Not Death at All. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1949. Peiss, Kathy. Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture. New York:

Metropolitan Books, 1998. Pendergast, Tom. Creating the Modern Man: American Magazines and Consumer

Culture, 1900-1950. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000. Pepsi Generation Oral History and Documentation Collection, 1938-1986, #111,

Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

“Picture of the Week, ‘Kang Koo Ri and His New Face.’” Life March 17, 1952, 37. Pieterse, Jan Nederveen. White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western

Popular Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. Pillow Talk, directed by Michael Gordon. 1959; Universal City, CA: Universal, 2004.

DVD. Pincas, Stephane, and Marc Loiseau. A History of Advertising. New York: Taschen,

2008. “Pious Killer of Korea.” Saturday Evening Post, July 21, 1951, 26. Place, Janey. “Women in Film Noir.” In Women in Film Noir, edited by E. Ann

Kaplan, 47-68. New Edition. London: BFI Publishing, 1998. “Plots Sneak in Advertising.” Variety, August 7, 1957, 3. “The Plug Lobby.” Time, May 14, 1951, 110.

! $+)!

Pomerance, Murray. “Stark Performance.” In Rebel Without a Cause: Approaches to a Maverick Masterwork, edited by J. David Slocum, 35-52. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005.

Pope, Daniel. The Making of Modern Advertising. New York: Basic Books, 1983. Preciado, Beatriz. “Pornotopia.” In Cold War Hothouses: Inventing Postwar Culture,

from Cockpit to Playboy, edited by Beatriz Colomina, Annmarie Brennan, and Jeannie Kim, 218-253. Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004.

Prothero, Stephen R. Purified by Fire: A History of Cremation in America. Berkeley:

University of California Press, 2001. Pryor, Thomas M. “Color is Required for Cinemascope.” New York Times, April 5,

1955, http://proquest.umi.com. Puleston, William Dilworth. “Blunders of World War II.” U.S. News and World

Report, February 4, 1955, 106-139. Ragas, Meg Cohan and Karen Kozlowski. Read My Lips: A Cultural History of

Lipstick. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1998. Rapaport, Brooke Kamin, and Kevin L. Stayton. Vital Forms: American Art and

Design in the Atomic Age, 1940-1960. New York: Brooklyn Museum of Art and Harry N. Abrams, 2001.

Rebel Without a Cause, directed by Nicholas Ray. 1955; Burbank, CA: Warner Home

Video, 2005. DVD. Reeves, Rosser. Reality in Advertising. New York: Knopf, 1961. Riesman, David, with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney. The Lonely Crowd: A Study

of the Changing American Character. 2nd abridged ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.

Robinson, Thomas E. Portraying Older People in Advertising: Magazine, Television,

and Newspapers. New York: Garland, 1998. Roediger, David R. Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past. Berkeley:

University of California Press, 2003. ---. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class.

New York: Verso, 1991.

! $+*!

---. Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs. New York: Basic Books, 2005.

Reid, Bud. “Adoption by Picture.” McCall’s 85, January 1958, 51. Rogin, Michael. “’Democracy and Burnt Cork’: The End of Blackface, the Beginning

of Civil Rights.” Representations 46 (Spring, 1994): 1-34. http://www.jstor.org.

---. Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot.

Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Roiphe, Katie. “The Allure of Messy Lives.” New York Times, July 30, 2010,

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/01/fashion/01Cultural.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.

Roof, Judith. All About Thelma and Eve: Sidekicks and Third Wheels. Urbana:

University of Illinois Press, 2002. Rose, Jacqueline. The Case of Peter Pan, or, the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction.

London: MacMillan, 1984. Roth, Lane. “Vraisemblance and the Western Setting in Contemporary Science

Fiction Film.” Literature/Film Quarterly 13, no. 3 (1985): 180-186. Rougier, Michael. “The Little Boy Who Wouldn’t Smile.” Life July 23, 1951, 91-98. Ruppersberg, Hugh. “The Alien Messiah.” In Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and

Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema, ed. Annette Kuhn, 32-38. New York: Verso, 1990.

Russell, Jeffrey Burton. A History of Heaven: The Singing Silence. Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1997. Russo, Vito. The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies. New York: Harper

and Row, 1981. Sammond, Nicholas. Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the

American Child, 1930-1960. Samuel, Lawrence R. Freud on Madison Avenue: Motivation Research and

Subliminal Advertising in America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010.

! $"+!

Sarris, Andrew. “The Afterlife, Hollywood-Style.” American Film 4, no. 6 (April

1979): 25 ---. The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-1968. New York: DaCapo

Press, 1996. Sauer, Abe. “Mad Men Fight Proves Product Placement Critics Wrong.”

Brandchannel, April 4, 2011, http://www.brandchannel.com/home/post/2011/04/04/Mad-Men-Proves-Product-Placement-Critics-Wrong.aspx.

Savishinsky, Joel S. The Ends of Time: Life and Work in a Nursing Home. New York:

Bergin and Garvey, 1991. Sawchuck, Kimberly Anne. “From Gloom to Boom: Age, Identity and Target

Marketing.” In Images of Aging: Cultural Representations of Later Life, edited by Mike Featherstone and Andrew Wernick, 174-180. New York: Routledge, 1995.