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THE HOLLYWOOD
HALLUCINATION

by
Parker Tyler

Introduction by

RICHARD SCHICKEL

SIMON AND SCHUSTER

NEW YORK
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ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

INCLUDING THE RIGHT OF REPRODUCTION

IN WHOLE OR IN PART IN ANY FORM

COPYRIGHT 1944 BY PARKER TYLER
INTRODUCTION COPYRIGHT © I97O BY SIMON &SCHUSTER, INC.
PUBLISHED BY SIMON AND SCHUSTER

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Certain material used in the chapter ''The Good Villain

and the Bad Hero** originally appeared under different
form in View.
 INTRODUCTION

As a reader I am peculiarly, indeed fatally, attracted to the

special kind of critical daring practiced by Parker Tyler in
The Hollywood Hallucination and Magic and Myth of the
Movies. This daring consists of two major elements: a willing
ness to risk overinterpretation of specific objects (the popular
films and film stars that catch his endlessly roving eye) and
the courage to build on these fragile and transitory creations
a towering theoretical structure (a structure from which, it
should be added, one can gain a unique view of the way one
of our most significant cultural institutions actually works—
or used to work at the height of its powers—on us). There are
a few works of literary criticism that are a little bit like Mr.
Tyler's books; one thinks of Lawrence's Studies in Classic
American Literature, Pound's ABC of Reading, Fiedler's Love
and Death in the American Novel. But it requires a very com
modious critical tradition, much critical activity, to produce
even such a small number of stimulating, intelligently eccen
tric works. We have not had, in film criticism, anything like
the level of activity, or length of history, that can support
such work. Indeed, there has been so little basic scholarly
activity in film (a situation now, perhaps, beginning to be
rectified), so little genuine criticism (as opposed to review
ing), that it is a wonder we have produced even the tiny,
standard shelf of worthwhile volumes we now have (Agee on
Film, Warshow's The Immediate Experience, Kael's I Lost
It at the Movies, and three or four others).
It has long been my contention that Mr. Tyler's two books
VI INTRODUCTION

belong in that select company and that they are the more
remarkable in that they were published in 1944 and 1947.
For at that time a man attempting to seriously comprehend
the phenomenon of film was really working on his own, with
no tradition to sustain him, few books and articles to refer to,
few colleagues with whom he might conversationally test and
refine his ideas. And, worse, as the indifferent commercial re
ception of these books proved, no genuine audience to
address—just a handful of fellow buffs, nuts, fans . . . you
pick the patronizing word.
Indeed, it is as some such character that Mr. Tyler was
brought to the attention of the nonspecialist audience re
cently, when Gore Vidal, in the course of his extended sick
joke, Myra Breckimidge, seized on Magic and Myth as just
the kind of work—so intense it often comes close to
self-parody—his hero-heroine-whatchamacallit required as
motivation-inspiration for his-her-its idiot savantry about
Hollywood. If Mr. Tyler's book had not existed, Vidal would
have had to invent it.
And, in decency, he should have. Except that he couldn't
have, for there is nothing in his work with the imaginative
intensity, the intellectual daring, of Mr. Tyler's work. I am
sure the subject is, or was, painful to Mr. Tyler, since un
doubtedly large numbers of the reading public now think of
him as an invention of Vidal's. On the other hand, there is no
critic in America better equipped to understand and appre
ciate the irony of this transformation of himself from a liv
ing reality into a symbolic fiction.
Indeed, it is one of the basic ironies he explores in these
two books. All the movie stars he writes about preceded him
in the kind of self-transcendence Vidal foisted on him. Crea
tors of images (usually unconsciously, since they have the
fortune or misfortune of looking like our imagined ideal of
hero or villain, vamp or virgin), they become prisoners of
those images. They come to each new role with bits of gossip
 INTRODUCTION Vll

about their private selves adhering to their public selves, trail

ing the bright rags and tatters of previous impersonations, en
cumbered by our expectations about what the behavior of
certain types ought to be in certain situations. So they be
come creatures at once less than human and more than
human. It is Mr. Tyler's prime business to explicate the ico
nography of these faces and forms—more real than real at first
glance, less and less so the more we study them—and it is
singular that, a quarter century after he introduced us to the
fascinating possibilities inherent in this work, he has found
so few disciples. For once we begin tracing out such analyses
with him it seems a completely logical, completely natural
thing to do.
And so it also is when he begins to work on the cliche that
movies are dreams, the studios, dream factories. It is, he argues,
in the nature of a camera designed to capture moving images
to create a special kind of realism—surrealism—a special kind
of naturalism—supernaturalism. But it is not just technics
that impart this quality to movies. There is also the industry
as social, commercial institution to consider. With its ''mad
search for novelty, the iron necessity to keep producing and
to find ideas, angles," it unconsciously contrives to create a
much richer matrix of meanings—and ambiguities—than, to
use Mr. Tyler's example, "the efforts of dramatists to congre
gate enough words ... to permit the curtain to ring down
on another Broadway hit" can possibly aspire to. In other
words, the drama clearly visible within the borders of the
screen does not end there. He alludes to the off-screen drama,
much more intense, that may take place between a directorial
Svengali and his current Trilby. He mentions how an actor's
vocalquality, his accent, may work against the characterization
he strives for, may work for it, but always "refuses to be com
pletely absorbed into the artistic mesh and creates a little
theater of its own." The attempts to shoehorn "properties"
into preexisting mythopoetic screen forms produce yet an-
Vlll INTRODUCTION

other interesting example of off-screen tension that is scarcely

ever mentioned in formal reviews, yet is acknowledged in the
trade phrase "licking the story" (rather as a mother cat licks
her newborn offspring into acceptable behavioral patterns),
and in our minds as we witness the movie unfolding before
us. And then there is the career drama proceeding in almost
every film we ever see. For example, Jennifer Jones in The
Song of Bernadette asking us, after her "novitiate" in B
westerns for "strict observance of the occasion" of her arrival
in major films, like "a trained nurse admonishing us with
finger on lips and murmuring: 'actress winning award.' " And
so much, much more that Tyler himself can say better than
an emcee can.

What it comes to, in essence, is this: There is the conscious

movie: the one the people who created it thought they were
making and the one we thought we were paying our way in to
see. Tlien there is the unconscious movie: the one neither
makers nor viewers are consciously aware of, a movie that
exposes the attitudes, neuroses, desires shared by both parties.
This film, if not beyond good and evil, is certainly beyond
the reach of "good" reviews or "bad" reviews, beyond favor
able or unfavorable criticism. It is not, however, beyond con
templation of the sort Mr. Tyler practices.
And, it should be mentioned, his style is as unique as his
subject matter. He has a way of warily circling his prey, sur
rounding it with speculation, until, weary and frightened by
an astute hunter, it falls victim to one of his quick dashes to
its most vulnerable point.
I said at the beginning that I am extremely vulner
able to the charm of daring critical huntsmen of Mr. Tyler's
sort, inclined to concede them their excesses of enthusiasm,
their occasional lapses (even into incomprehensibility). Im
plicit in their enterprise is their own vulnerability to satirical
and parodistical shots of the sort that people like Vidal, with
their unquestioned ability to hit the broad side of a barn, can
 INTRODUCTION IX

SO easily make. Most of the best screen actors and screenplays,

the ones we best and most lovingly remember, are similarly
vulnerable, as is much of our best literature. In the end, work
of this kind lingers in the mind precisely because it opens it
up, leaves it speculating, trying to apply radical formulations
to new phenomena as they appear.
It is possible, of course, that some of my affectionate regard
for Mr. Tyler's work stems from the fact that most of his
examples are drawn from a period (the late Thirties and the
Forties) that happened to be the most formative one for me
as a watcher in the shadows. They may seem obscure or dis
tant to people under thirty-fivish. Yet, most of the genres and
performer types he discusses are still very much with us. And
the processes by which they were created are still very much
aliveand well wherever people get together and make movies.
Styles may change but the basics remain constant. Mr. Tyler
may have written these books as the sound film passed
through adolescence—age 14-18—but the bending of the twig
was by then complete and its maturity was clearly prefigured.
And even if the New American Film that one now sees taking .
shape should totally drive the traditional commercial prod
uct from the screen (which I doubt, some form of coexist
ence being a much better bet) The Hollywood Hallucination
and Magic and Myth of the Movies would remain essential
tools for understanding film history. Moreover, the mark they
have made on at least some writers about film since they
were published would remain indelible, even if, as is generally
the case, unacknowledged.
Movies are, no matter what else they may from time to time
claim to be, a mythopoetic form, and Mr. Tyler's criticism
has, appropriately enough, a poetic quality about it. The
critic Barbara Herrnstein Smith has lately defined the poem
as an entity which ''allows us to know what we know, in
cluding our illusions and desires, by giving us the language
in which to acknowledge it." That, precisely, is what Mr.
X INTRODUCTION

Tyler was trying to do when he wrote in his strange, compel

ling, uniquely rewarding way about films back in the days
when we knew no better than to call them ''the movies'' and
pretend their unimportance to us.
Richard Schickel
CONTENTS

PAGE

Introduction by Richard Schickel V

CHAPTER

I. The Play Is Not the Thing 3

II. Hollywood's Surrealist Eye 22

III. The Technicolor of Love 37

IV. The Somnambules 74
V. The Good Villain and the Bad Hero lOO

VI. Of Mickey and Monsters 137

VII. Orpheus a la Hollywood 155
VIII. John Doe; or, the False Ending 168
IX. "... Where the Body Lies" igo
X. To Be or Not to Be; or, the Cartoon
Triumphant 208
XI. The Human Mask 222

XII. The Daylight Dream 230

 To the memory of my mother,
that golden nature whose image so often
illuminated with me this side of the movie screen.
CHAPTER I

THE PLAY IS NOT THE THING

In Hollywood, anything but the play is usually the

thing. Whereas the tradition of the legitimate theater
conceives presentation as a sort of centripetal opera
tion, all forces tending toward the center of a single
artistic inspiration and directly deriving their character
from contact with it, the genius of Hollywood has
progressively opposed such a conception and tended
centrifugally to regard the story as but a jumping-off
place for a complex series of superimposed and often
highly irrelevant operations. The process which a
novel or play, contemporary or historic, must go
through before it reaches a movie audience is familiar
enough. It is a bromide of Holljwood that hundreds
of thousands of dollars may be paid for a title alone,
a title of course which has been attached to a Broad
way hit or a best-selling book. Foreign Correspondent,
by Vincent Sheean, and The Company She Keeps,
3
4 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

by Mary McCarthy, are notable cases in point. Ir

reverence in this sense has been the bible of the movie
city. Nonetheless, the loud and infinite clink of cinema
dollars has overwhelmed the still, small voice of the
proud author, who has been known to exclaim pub
licly that he fails to recognize the child of hisimagina
tion. The point is, he recognizes only too well the
distortions, from the casting to the dialogue, but finds
it necessary to deny parenthood in order to save his
face. But his face has been irretrievably lost; indeed,
it is now the face of Norma Shearer or Joan Bennett,
and as such it must inevitably go down among the
optical archives to posterity.
The voice of the proud author is not only still but
still small; on the other hand, especially of recent
times, there are exceptions to the rule that authors are
tempted to repudiate their works after transference to
the screen. Moreover, the widening scope of the movie
industry has progressively allowed for the "fine" ex
ceptions, promoting a reciprocal graciousness between
literature and the cinema. Two outstanding examples.
The Infoimei and How Green Was My Valley, came
from the same director, John Ford. It is difficult to
determine exactly what turns the scales in favor of the
original literary conception; sometimes, it is an in
sistent author, one who contracts to take a personal
interest in Hollywood machinations. It is not that
Hollywood is always unwilling to collaborate with
 THE PLAY IS NOT THE THING 5

authors; often certain ones, such as Ben Hecht and

Clifford Odets, already crowned (however dubiously)
with artistic laurels, are seduced into employment as
scriptand scenario and dialogue writers, causing litera
ture and cinema to become hand-in-glove conspirators
against ultimately embarrassing discrepancies—not
only between the written word and the screen image
but between the written word and "life."
Sentimental worshipers of the written word are often
great enough in number to overawe any original im
pulses of presentation that may occur to an omnipotent
mind of the movie industry; the readers of Gone with
the Wind stood like a vast jury at the gates of Holly
wood, prepared to judge even the candidates for the
roles of Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler. Of course,
the jury were summoned by the penetrating whisper of
the publicity department, but they appeared with the
obedient alacrity of a geni rubbed in his most sensitive
spot. Thus—so uneven is the administration of the
movie capital—it is possible to exploit optional slavery
to the written word, as such a thing of itself may seem
sensational.
The question of Hollywood's judgment, its strategy
in regard to the evaluative scale placed upon what it
buys or selects from the grab bag of the past—as it
selected Romeo and /uliet—leads to the very heart of
American cinematic matter. Does a principle of selec
tion exist? And, furthermore, why has Hollywood
O THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

never developed an original literature, a definite script-

character of its own, entirely without dependence upon
the stage or "literature"?
I believe the answer to the corollary question can be
grasped intuitively: Because, being a vast attempt to
industrialize an artistic medium, Hollywood must feed
upon all sorts of digestive devices and an agglomera
tion of raw materials to satisfy its mere size. It is mam
moth, mammal, mammon. Theoretically, there is
nothing which the camera cannot conceive and pro
ject on a conveniently empty screen; nothing, from
journalism to Shakespeare; and there is nothing, prac
tically, which it leaves untouched. Holl5WOod cannot
be choosy. Its methods are those of a superlatively
equipped factory prepared to transform anything ac
cording to a flexible method of manufacture. It does
not matter if taint is present in the material; it can be
refined or eliminated; if taint is lacking and deemed
necessary, Hollywood creates its own peculiar taint,
which shows in the finished article like silver threads
in an evening gown on Claudette Colbert.
As Entrepreneur of Anything, Hollywood is inevita
bly a popular institution, and its sins of omission are
the normal ones of such an institution. Built upon an
extensive rather than an intensive scale of operations,
it tends to sacrifice what is unique and take second
er third-hand what is original. Its studios are like a
continuous cell-structure all in the same organism, but
 THE PLAY IS NOT THE THING 7

capable of anything atany moment, heldtogether only

byan established preoccupation witha single mechani
cal instrument, the camera. More than a camel has
passed into the heaven of America's movie houses
through this "needle's eye." Apparitions known and
unknown, from Frankenstein's monster to Mr. Hyde,
from Snow White to Dumbo, from Fatty Arbuckle and
Zasu Pitts to Mae West and Garbo doing the rumba.
For one reason or another, often superficial but some
times of profound interest, eaeh of them has been ap
propriate, and arrived with no pain attached to their
wonderful uterine passage.
What, then, of the principle of selection? It must
be either phony or practically invisible. But it is too
powerful to be phony and too egregious to be totally
invisible. Any tangible dynamie has its lurking law, its
rudiment of choice, and that of Hollywood has the
curiously protean law of a centrifugal collective. Its
selectivity is thus hazardous and dialectical. It does
not revolve about a static original scheme (as Maurice
Evans and company revolved about the uncut Ham
let) ; any given Hollywood periphery, whether it be
Broadway-laid Shakespeare, such as The Boys from
Syracuse, or a studio writer's pristine inspiration, is
"cubistic" in charaeter. Once an original story or idea
is bought and delivered (here the term "original" is
acutely accurate), its subtle and often semi-conscious
process of transformation begins.
8 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

The "idea" may go through three or four script and

scenario writers, its preparation meanwhile being su
pervised by the star, the director, and the producer,
who eventually must also approve it. Then the actual
"shooting" begins—in which are involved not only the
actors but the supervisor of production, the director,
the assistant director, the camera man, and the as
sistant camera man. During the shooting occur the
test showings, which lead to a certain number of "re
takes" (scenes photographed again); these may lead
even to a change of plot or casting. The final product
mustgo through the cutting room, and the film-editor,
whose importance is not usually understood by audi
ences, assumes his place in the scheme. It is an axiom
of the industry that this man may make or almost be
allowed to break a picture. Thus a single movie is as
highly departmentalized asthe mostcellular ofbureauc
racies—only its endeavors are directed toward a crea
tive rather than a mere formal or routine result. If
often Hollywood's results are formal and routine, it
is owing to the operation of a wide and elastic meta-
physic; the instinct of the producers to please an al
most illimitable public.
It is said, and truthfully, that much of the organiza
tion of a movie depends upon the director, but his
authority fluctuates. There are a number of talented
directors powerful enough to affect and even control
almost all aspects of production, but (even putting
 THE PLAY IS NOT THE THING 9

aside the notion that his "free hand" may be due to

his having made early, important eompromises) for
him to get a unified result, he must eonstantly apply
his will. There is usually some point at whieh he is
foreed to give in,either from ennui, fear, or diseretion,
to the demands of others. This is notably the experi-
enee of direetors imported from abroad. Such men
have been in much greater control of theirproductions
on foreign soil for the simple reason that bureaueratiza-
tion there has been more primitive, as the economic
structure of the industry was simpler. But another
cause was the tradition of respect for the "original
script," of whieh the director has been the command
ing representative. The foreign direetors have, found
that they are up against something bigger than the
mere problem of giving a story a cinematic form. Be
sides the general unwieldiness of Hollywood produc
tion machinery (so far as unity of purpose goes), the
star issometimes more powerful than the director, and
may have different ideas. Being bossed primarily by
the producer, who is very seldom the director in Amer
ica, the star makes a complaint, and so on. Von Stro-
heim, a foreign director domesticated before any of
the others, was notorious for his egotism and wayward
ness, and hisexpenditures on production seldom were
redeemed in terms of financial profit to his backers.
Whenever he prevailed, someone was bound to be
sorry—usually too sorry.
lO THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

Yet no one can be made too unhappy because of

Hollywood: this is to be taken axiomatically. The com
plex machine of the movie industry may be termed
roundly a collective phenomenon in which is im
bedded a will to make indiscriminate numbers of peo
ple indiscriminately happy. Written on the walls of
Griffith's Babylon, as well as on those of Darryl
Zanuck's and Samuel Goldwyn's offices, were and are,
in invisible ink, the words: Take thy neighbors advice
—it is bound to be worth something to someone. But
be sure hrst that he is paid a large salary; this makes
him generous of advice. It is strange: the degree to
which one is tempted to seek the secret of so extraor
dinary an organism as Hollywood, as though one
searched for the soul of the mechanical Franken
stein . . .
The focal point of Hollywood dynamics is a kind of
material workroom into which is introduced the germ
of a narrative idea. Since it is a brain capable of ex
tending its operations in space, it grows with the di
mensions of its own ideas, involving its energy factors
quantitatively, and thus evolving its original "idea" in
quality as it amplifies it in quantity. That is why even
a Shakespearean play is reduced to the fetus-state
within the walls of Hollywood. This individuality of
the type of growth is the movie capital's vanity and
triumph. Hollywood is in the nature of things because
it adds to that nature. The purely logical origin of its
 THE PLAY IS NOT THE THING 11

contribution lies solely in the remarkable capacity of

the movie camera to transcend stage effects.
Literature in the movies has assumed a minor role
precisely in ratio to the increase of technical cinema
elfects. At first sight, this may seem a contradictory
statement, inasmuch as "serious" literature has gotten
a bigger break as the industry has "come of age." But
coming of age is a relative convention. How seriously
has serious literature ever been taken in Hollywood?
Indeed, in certain respects, Hollywood has become less
serious just where it might have been expected, be
cause of amplitude of means, to become more serious.
It may not be quite a platitude to declare that Holly
wood's waywardness is due to intoxication with its
technical powers in the giddy springtime of those
powers. In this way it is at once as naive and sophisti
cated as Frankenstein's monster—depending upon
which end of the human-mechanical scale you look at
it. As a machine, it is wonderfully human; as human
ity, it is awesomely mechanical.
Hollywood is nothing if not a show-oS. And what is
showing off but the will toward form regardless of
content, the impulse toward expression regardless of
skill? Hollywood's awkwardness balances its tour de
force. An acrobat, a conceited child, a machine are
all show-offs. The muscular expenditure in which not
even a race is won . . . the fluorescence of sauciness
that turns out childish jabberwocky . . . the precise
12 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

and monotonous operation regardless ofgrist—all these

modes are in the same series of psychological dy
namics. Any one of the operations may please or irri
tate, according to the occasion, the psychology of the
observer, or the skill of the performer. But the pri
mary point about the "show-off" is that his effort is
in a sense its own reward, and depends only relatively
upon the result observed in the spectator, or any other
"objective" criterion. The psychology of show-oflism
is independent self-consciousness: a trying-out of
powers for their own benefit: a narcissism of energy.
And here is the most subtle part of Hollywood dy
namics: the implicit but necessary r61e of the narcis
sistic movies is to let as many people as possible "in
on" its narcissism, which is only the showing-off by
the camera; it is to give the assembled spectators the
illusion of their own technical virtuosity. That is why
the screen is in more than a simple sense a mirror. It
isa psychologically cubistic mirror in which dimension
is materially reproduced or "reflected" in the texture
of the psychological medium itself—that texture being
the collectivity of the artistic creators, the cinema
craftsmen, as an unusually intelligent bureaucracy.
Thus, representational taste and creative judgment
in Hollywood cannot be standardized or conveniently
isolated as formal means. Form, in the purely esthetic
sense, is the deliberate and controlled imprint of a
single intelligence on a certain material and is the
 THE PLAY IS NOT THE THING I3

only means by which we dare approach this material.

Obviously, the form of Hollywood, relating so much
to current fashions and to popular show-ofhsm, must
be in a fundamentally impotent and perpetually liques
cent state. Such a super-plasticity has its drawbacks in
respect to the esthetic relation between form and con
tent.
There comes to mind a classic of the silent days
starring Theda Bara and called A Fool There Was.
It illustrates very well the difference in tone between a
"serious" latter-day drama and one of yesterday. The
material of the Bara film is obviously third-rate from
an artistic viewpoint, but most impressive, when I
saw it again three years ago, was the concentration
upon a serious aspect of human emotion: a disinte
grating erotic passion. As lurid and obvious a concep
tion as the Vampire was, she was more serious, both
morally and artistically, than Bette Davis' neurotic
or Garbo's exotic woman. It is true that Garbo acted
a Tolstoi, a Dumas, and a Pirandello heroine, but in
proportion as the screen had more camera angles,
lighting devices, scenic effects, and narrative tricks to
exploit, the theme—and the way character emphasizes
theme—lost value in these Garbo pictures. As a result,
her Gamille became a dextrous series of familiar Garbo
postures, intonations, and swoons, ending in the great
est swoon of cinema history: Gamille's death-bed
scene. Though Theda Bara was soon converted into
14 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION
the leading siren of her day as Garbo of this, it is on
the contrary the theme which remains uppermost in
A Fool There Was, her first picture. At that time, the
camera had a definite reportorial humility; it was
present to record the main objective events, and this
film had an almost Flaubertian simplicity of plot. The
wife is chaste and futile; the Vampire is corrupt and
triumphant; thefaithless husband is weak and doomed
—as the picture proceeds, they become more so. The
camera then had not become a virtuoso in its own
right; its logic was simple since its capacity was lim
ited, its field barren of elaborate effects. Until Griffith
exploited the intimacy of the close-up, it even stood,
so to speak, at a respectful distance from the actor, but
thereafter emotions began to be more intimate, more
fugitive. Even the pioneering Griffith was relatively
simple in his psychology and thus in his cinematic
logic. When he thought of great events, such as the
panorama of the past, of the heyday and destruction
of cultures, priests, and kings, he thought of vast
spaces and vast sets, and photographed them as
though they were the Grand Ganyon, allowing the
camera to approach "at its own peril."
Today a "great event" in Hollywood is indiscrimi
nately a "wow" close-up of Dietrich, a grab of a
coveted copyright, the importation of a foreign actor,
someone's divorce, or a prop set of a city: a master
piece of illusion. A profound relativity of size has in-
 THE PLAY IS NOT THE THING I5

vaded and dominated the precincts of Hollywood

"artistic morality," no less than Hollywood studios.
Since the industry is big, every detail, which is so im
portant as a link in the whole machine, is also big;
but so aggressive is the Hollywood dynamic that such
"details" or departments tend to overexpand and as
sume an individualistic hallucination of the whole.
The movie city entertains a strange mathematics: the
whole is equal to less than the sum of all its parts.
Each studio department is subconsciously out for
itself, and wants to shine as independently as possible
in Movie Heaven. Many a shot is a kind of three-ring
circus, a contest for attention between the make-up
man, the dialogue writer, and the star's personality.
In particular, the r61e of make-up is insidiously intro
duced. When Lon Chancy, the exotic character man
of American cinematic history, used make-up, it was
to exploit its sensational effects; thus the artificiality
was as easy to take as it was obvious. But Paul Muni's
make-up is the modest—and thus carefully immodest
—attribute of a virtuoso who desires only to seem in
conspicuous, commonplace. Why, then, can we never
quite forget that Mr. Muni is wearing an elaborate
make-up? Only because he is even more anxious than
we are to conceal the fact by his perfect nonchalance.
But why is he so patently nonchalant? Because he, as
the star,ismore importantthan the story, and knows it.
The feeling of consciously "hogging" the camera is
l6 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

communicated by numbers of Holljwood actors, and

Mr. Muni, even as a European, was noted for making
love to the spotlight. Such was the esthetic error in
Zola; it was not a play, it was a biographical sketch of
a man called Emile Zola who once imagined, a little
absurdly, that he was Paul Muni. The reason that the
same effect almost never occurs in foreign films is that
foreign actors are bred in a tradition of subordination
to character, which in turn is subordinated to story—
namely, to a single artistic conception which is all that
a play is. No Hollywood actor, however, dares to sub
ordinate himself in theory to anything, and of course
his director follows this rule of actor-hegemony pretty
closely. No one in the industry can stop striving a
minute, for if he does, someone or something may
steal the scene or the picture from under his nose. I
have often sat luxuriating and lazy in my seat, watch
ing with relish the metaphysical sweat of American
movie actors, especially Clark Gable and Spencer
Tracy, doing their darnedest to outact Donald Duck
and Dumbo a few blocks away. And what can tell us
better than the lips of Rita Hayworth and Ann Sheri
dan, pronouncers of special dialogue by special writers,
that the play is not the thing in Hollywood?
Holljwood is strongenough to transcend "the play."
Yet it is important to determine what, in essence, and
as an indivisible visual-literary product it is which the
 THE PLAY IS NOT THE THING 17

Factory City of Fancy offers in the guise of a play.

The answer is simpler than it may seem: the charade.
In a charade, a word is guessed by observing a pan
tomimic scheme improvised by human performers for
representing its syllables. Of course, the actors in a
cinema charade are given the solution, "the word," in
advance, but the point is they have to employ the
pantomimic-literary system of symbols provided by the
scenarist—and there's the catch. One can imagine,
after recalling all I have said about the creative ma
chinery of Hollywood, what the problems ofa charade-
provider must be. The hazards which may befall his
interpretation of a given theme or plot may be mani
fold and relatively catastrophic. It is not inconceivable
that a charade may come full-blown into the head of
an idea-man, for popular fiction in magazines and
books is likewise on a perpetual production basis vul
garizing ideas and parodying social reahty. Indeed, a
cinema charade is sometimes only a parody of a freely
circulating theme in current fiction.
The actor himself—a point which will be brought
out in the following chapters—is always able, since his
art is one of individualistic competition and monop
olistic rigor, to impose a charade on a charade. Great
stars are accustomed to step into r61es adapted for
them in advance; their idiom hasalready been imposed
upon the material selected by the idea department.
l8 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

Thus a scenarist's "trained incapacity" for understand

ing the drama or novel material with which he is pre
sented is further complicated by the star's "trained in
capacity" for acting any but one role, one human
type, whether it be close to average life or far from it.
Thus the Hollywood star-system tends toward mono-
lithism of idea, interrupting this motion only when
(another of the industry's stunts) four top-ranking
players are cast all in one film to see if more than two
make a crowd at the box office.
Till very recently, it would have been far from an
original observation that the most dependable money
makers are the star-personalities to whom the art of
portrayal and the art of drama are the most remote
considerations. At the moment, some of the perennial
features of movie-manufacture are bogging down, an
eventuation not altogether due to universal social con
vulsions. Finally, it is the charade stereotype which
has proved most perduring, and a short analysis will
demonstrate the reason for such hardihood. Since, in
a charade, the action must be extremely simple and
commonplace so that the game can proceed quickly,
the basic idea must pertain to a single word or two or
three words. Moreover, the action of the performers
sometimes combines crude elements of symbolism
with its realism because, as a rule, actual objects are
excluded from the pantomime. Accordingly, the rela
tion of charade to reality is indefinitely oblique, almost
 THE PLAY IS NOT THE THING I9

like the relation of a child's primer to adult language,

whereas the reality is that of presumably grown-up
folk. Thus the correlation between thought and action
is not only of a primitive logic, but highly approximate.
Approximateness is the distinguishing quality of the
relation between the basic plot-idea, which the audi
ence instinctively associates with reality, and the pan
tomimic plot which Hollywood designs to portray
"reality." The basic idea therefore has to become even
more elementary than it was in the beginning to be
brought within touching distance of communication
by movie technique. An illustration of this was in the
"normashearing" of Romeo and Juliet, in which the
feud between the Montagues and the Capulets needed
only Jimmie Durante for it to seem like a skit from
Jumbo. Then, if the myth-pattern be that of a great
star, such as Dietrich or Garbo, the plot-dimensions
shrink nakedly without shame and assume a charade
silhouette in the eyes of the beholder. Details become
inconsequential, realism is dissolved in the alembic of
heterogeneous, more or less stupid, artifices.
If this esthetic reaction to hundreds of Hollywood
products is not common to movie-goers, it is only be
cause of the supreme transcendence of Hollywood en
tertainment power. This power is in the fun, the plain
lack of literary seriousness of the cinema charade,
effected by its use of all manner of tours de force. The
more consciously funny Hollywood is, the less chance
20 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

it has of being unconsciously funny or incongruous,

as it so often and so subtly is. A peculiar irony of this
law is that the Hollywood actor, and particularly ac
tress, who sometimes have an inferiority complex to
ward more serious players, appear to be condescending
toward the comic idiom when doing comedy. It is
usually hard to say whether this is from simple lack
of sensibility or due to hard perversity. So many little
complexes appear like jewels on the wrists of Holly
wood ladies! I call to mind Joan Crawford's nostalgia
for tragedy in the romantic comedy. When Ladies
Meet.
Such defects are no more solely the personal fault
of actors than any other idiosyncrasy which Holljwood
may call its own. First and last comes the movie capi
tal's protean energy, fixed and yet flowing. It is this
American city's monumentally practiced delusion of
grandeur with which I am concerned in this book,
which I certainly have not undertaken merely to an
alyze the failure of its industry to create the unity of
a work of art. From one viewpoint, the energy of
Hollywood must be called super-artistic. At the same
time, its power of presenting the real—the illusion of
the real—is so great that effects flow from it which
engulf the beholder (and I confess I am one such) in
a maze of symbolic emotions. These emotions are not
logically formalized on the screen, but issue from it in
free forms that seduce and entangle by their universal
 THE PLAY IS NOT THE THING 21

repercussiveness. Like a watchful comet, art in Holly

wood awaits its chance to shine, shedding perennially
a dialectical kind of light, illuminating as much by its
bad taste and illogicality—indeed, illuminating more
by these than by its isolated triumphs.
CHAPTER II

HOLLYWOOD'S SURREALIST EYE

Displacement, so familiar and democratic in sur

realism and dreams, is the unofficial, veiled dictator
of Hollywood. In this way, the movie cityis being true
to its own deep tradition. When pictures first moved,
the photographer showed off their virtuosity by imitat
ing the visual illusions of magicians—displacement of
the kind practiced by sleight-of-hand artists. But the
original delight-in-displacement has traveled a long
road, one strewn with the "corpses" of the technical
advances of the cinema. Museums, such as the Mu
seum of Modern Art Film Library in New York City,
hold the documents tracing this advance, though one
might say that on the surface, at least, they are place
ments rather than displacements; and justin the sport
ing sense, like an ace-shot in tennis which somehow
suggests a perfect "close-up," or the cinematic angle-
shot which displaces the normal point of vision and
 Hollywood's surrealist eye 23
obtains a view unexpected of the circumstances. And
there is the "swimming close-up": an eye that moves
through the air with the greatest of ease, as supple as
a fish in dodging the obstacles between it and the
climax of its passage; one such in Citizen Kane goes
through electric signs and past the glass of a skylight
to settle its cold nose against the heroine's cheek.
As a recorder and creator of movement, the movie
camera has been inevitably an instrument capable of
as much displacing as placing, as much alienation as
familiarizing. In moving with a more pyrotechnic virtu
osity than the human eye, it has displaced the body of
the spectator and rendered it, as a carriage of percep
tion, fluid; the eye itself has become a body capable
of greater spatial elasticity than the human body, inso
far as it seems a sort of detachable organ of the body.
By turning one's head, onecanaccomplish much more
in scope of perception than the movie camera, being
able to see more, as they say, "at one glance." But one
does notadd to the clarity of that perception excepting
through the limited devices of the telescope and micro
scope. These very instruments demonstrate that clarity
of vision is largely a question of attention and thus of
exclusion, narrowing. It remains for the peculiarly
alienating faculty of the movie camera to clarify and
"selectify" vision in a generally significant sense. Was
it not possible to see at one glance the most extraor
dinary possibilities in such an art-medium? Was the
24 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION
camera not a kind of monster capable of projecting
marvels? Mechanical marvels, when they have ap
peared, have become commonplaces, but some ofthem
manage to retain permanently the faculty of creating
the wonderful.
The very soul of the cinematic medium, the camera,
is the displacement of those visual conditions upon
which, as a recording instrument, the camera is di
rectly based. A wise man has said: "The camera does
not lie."Why should it? Its truths are illimitable. Like
all man's instruments, it is made to serve him in every
potential fiber of its being. First, the camera displaced
color by making it implicit in pictorial values, and
then, in restoring it, provided a color gamut not that
of either life or painting. But it displaced something
more subtle than color; even more radically, it dis
placed that complacence which men had in subcon
sciously saying of a photograph, "It is very lifelike.
Thank heaven it does not move!"—and the movie came
as just as great a shock to those who secretly yearned
to say, ". . . and look, it moves too!" Galatea moved,
and answered Pygmalion's prayer, but in terms of pure
movement, these having become a problem as soon as
Galatea lived, Pygmalion's desire was an invitation to
a greater catastrophe than perpetual and absolute in
ertia.
The movies alienated photography from painting
by placing within it movement. This was so radical a
 HOLLYWOOD S SURREALIST EYE 25

challenge to reality that reality became a rival! After

the novelty of the fantastic effects of the French
pioneer, Melies, wore off, it was plain that the con
quest of "reality" remained. The illusion of normally
clear vision and, above all, of dimension, had to be
created in the artificial eye. By embracing movement,
the still camera had initiated a new and different move
ment. The first law to be satisfied was not dimension,
however, but the general articulation of the image:
value andline. Melies, of course, emphasized curiously
the issue of dimension in his Trip to the Moon, yet
at that time both the still and the moving cameras
had much distance to advance toward the technical
perfection of the single moment of vision.
Even as late as 1925 (I am thinking specifically of
The Big Parade), the illusion of normal pace in move
ment had not been created—nor, for that matter, had
the distribution of values yet become easy to the eye.
In order to get enough light into the picture, that is,
in order to see the delineation of the image well
enough, the pattern had to be broken up too much.
Lines were too sharp in distinction to the modulation
of masses—the same effect which in the still photo
graph of that time had provided the same virtue with
out the eye being overtaxed. Thus, an extra effort to
see came into being over and above the mental and
visual concentration necessary for so variegated a spec
tacle as the movie. It was a long time before anyone
26 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

connected with the industry understood how to solve

the problem of pace, of having the actor move so as to
create an illusion of normal action, and by that time,
the camera itself was improving so much that only a
subtle remodulation was necessary. Movies were then
photographed—and run off—at completely arbitrary
paces, creating unhappily unintentional effects.
Depth in intimate scenes—that is, of scenes in ordi
nary rooms—was difficult to achieve and was solved in
one way by using over-sized sets, there being no effort
to preserve the illusion of a normal-sized room. This
dual mode de conv6nance and artifice to create depth
have a curious echo in the contemporary cinema musi
cal which sometimes, in depicting a theater stage
within a movie, employs effects which could not pos
sibly exist on any stage mechanism in use in the con
temporary theater. Only the mobility of the camera
makes such effects possible. Everything connected
with the moving photograph eventually had to move
in its peculiar manner, and assume a specific r61e in
the whole mechanism of movie-making. When sound
came, it was poor since, at first, the microphone re
mained stationary and since reproduction was not per
fected. When the microphone moved with the same
ease as the camera, sound became both "natural" and
adequate to the effect desired. Hence the history of
cinema technique involves perpetual displacements
and replacements; transparent and egregious artifices
 HOLLYWOOD S SURREALIST EYE 27

have inevitably given way to concealed or "noncha

lant" ones. In one sense, while the mechanism has be
come more complicated, the effects have become sim
pler, more "natural" and direct, and, though greater
in number, arecomplex only in proportion to the trivial
content they sometimes bear. At one end of the scale
is the spectacle, which is supreme today as the musical
comedy; at the other, is the cinema trick—the bravura
offering of the keyhole type of exploitation, and by
"keyhole" I mean merely the concentration on detail.
Even as actors on the stage, movie actors had to use
make-up "for seeing's sake." Historically, stage make
up means character, as in masks; that is, the distance
between the actor and the spectator was a definite
element in determining the character mask. Primarily,
the mask hadmeant a disguise of thereal which perma
nently joined it to convention and symbols. Inherent,
however, in the magically alienating faculty of the
movies was that movie make-up implied a gradual dis
placement of the traditional objective of the means
of make-up. This was because the invention of the
stillcamera signified men's scientific desire to see more
clearly—a desire to isolate reality and look at it at
leisure. Thus, implying realism in culture, it implied
it in artistic media. By photographing a mask, the
artifice of the mask was expressed in distinction to the
reality of the illusion; that is to say, the means and
the end fell apart on the cinema screen to reveal a
28 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

new problem in the chess of vision. The whole body

of reality had in various ways to be "made up," but
onlyin order to be more itself, to bringit closer. There
fore, in creating a purely visual intimacy between actor
and audience that never before had existed, the movie
displaced all the established visual conventions of
dramatic expression, especially so far as the actor's
person went. The point was not that actors should
express emotions with their faces, but rather the re
verse, that they should express their faces with emo
tions—to prove they were real, not waxworks, faces.
Because of the primitive crudity of lighting, the actor's
mouth, for instance, tended to become two almost
undifferentiated black lines.
Moreover, the first movies were silent Reality and
artistic convention alike were alienated from the hu
man portrayal. It is chiefly the absence of Bernhardt's
voice which makes a somewhat grotesque marvel of
her anachronistic style when seen in the movies. Visi
ble on her face, alas, is a rapt listening to her own
voice. The positive absence of sound swept away an
element of reality from all living and inert images, and
revealed a fabulously alienated world of movements.
We must not forget that normal people suddenly fixed
on the moving image the concentration of the deaf.
Not only was written dialogue and narrative in the
form of captions soon deemed necessary to the photo
graph when it moved and told a story, but the specta-
 HOLLYWOOD S SURREALIST EYE 29

tor began to feel need of a further device to create the

artistic illusion of unity—the "whole of reality." This
was music. Why music? Obviously, because it was
auditory, but, more than that, because, being organ
ized sound, music tended to contribute to the total
ized effect of silent movement assisted by literature.
Stillself-mindful, the movie camera producedclearer
and more "seeable" photographs until all of a sudden
—a thing which people had hardly noticed—a "sur
realism" of make-up was brought to being: the black
and white make-up, unlike the stage medium, seemed
a disguise, an impediment to the reality of the effect.
The presence of middle values, articulated grays, which
had been relatively easy for the still camera, was sug
gested in cinema by the very fact that the actor's face,
because it was painted, looked abnormally high-lighted:
it looked too black and white because it is in the
camera's nature as an instrument of accuracy to seek
effects of realism. Even after a definite middle register
had been reached, expressionist values in the foreign
films exploited this very abnormal, black-and-white
effect. In this medium, the cinema found its photo
graphic science displaced by the abstract dimensional
devices of painting. Modern painting, with its plastic
conception of movement, had invaded the field of
photography from which it was previously exiled. In
the most extreme example of expressionist cinema.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, fantastic in content as
3© THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

well as in manner, the sets were painted structural

designs conveying dynamic movement and a sense of
space. But this was obviously a relative, by-the-wayside
device, since in the movies it is the actually mobile
means which are absolute, and hence there was no
contribution to the genuine cinematic marvel through
such means.
In early films, however, including all those made in
America, the black-and-white effects were an absolute
condition of the photography and spread through the
total atmosphere of the movement without demarca
tion between static and mobile means of conveying
movement. In total relationship, paradoxically, the
object in relief tended to recede, that is, to draw to
gether because of internally unarticulated value, in
relation to the arbitrary black-and-white value, which
came forward purely as a result of the camera lens
and the reproductive medium. This was old-fashioned
movie photography. At one time Cecil de Mille
mimicked this quality in flat decors and costume, so
that Gloria Swanson's face was merely the stylistic
climax of the entire chiaroscuro. Nothing like an ex
pressionist orillusory decor was used. Instead, it was a
matter of the regular or realistic interior, "stepped up"
in dramatic black and white, and sometimes almost
caricatured. This was by no means altogether the acci
dent of primitive studio lighting or unassisted exteriors
(the "sunlight studio"). Two classical types of the
 HOLLYWOOD S SURREALIST EYE 3I

simple, tendential black-and-white motif, shyof middle

values, were thebathing-girl comedy and theKeystone-
cop comedy, usually combined. The female figures
against the sand of the beach, the black uniforms of
the cops against every light value—this was the super-
real vision of the early camera; namely, the displace
ment of mobile detail in respect to a totality of the
single moving image. The sportive nature of the con
tent, embellished by the flagrant designs of bathing-
suit modes, assisted in this type of "dramatization" of
cinema. Unforgettable also is Charlie Chaplin's sil
houette against the broad glare of the road (he still
uses it), as well as that fat eel, his mustache, fran
tically imprisoned in the fishbowl of his face.
"Beautiful" photography in 1944 is a platitude in
every first-rate studio in Hollywood—I mean specifi
cally photography freed from every condition limiting
the total representational means with clarity as an end.
Yet one kind of displacement occuned in Hollywood
that is altogether characteristic of its middle period of
inventiveness. When the camera began to show off its
realism, its ability to catch action in all its detail as
well as its sweep, the spectator was brought into the
esthetic realm of physical effort and its illusory crisis
of danger in a more directly visual sense than the stage
could provide. This special effect was only gradually
understood. From the beginning, Criffith, for instance.
32 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

never ceased to expand the area of action (even if it

meant placing a desk in the center of a large unoccu
pied area), desiring only to outdo the scope of the
dramatic spectacle and yet to create its mobile details
with some leisure. While as an artist remarkably in
telligent, he failed to understand the natural possibili
ties of the camera, in that he assumed it was primarily
extroversive, while it is equally introversive. He made
many technical advances; the close-up, for example,
as an accessory to the long shot, and vice versa. Work
ing thus dialectically, this pioneering director added
enormously to the dramatic vocabulary of the movies.
But—dependent upon the visual psychology—there is
more than one kind of narrative. While inferior to
Griffith in ingenuity, Cecil de Mille, his successor,
penetrated into the most primitive nature of the movie
camera when he touched symbolically in his "bed
room dramas" upon the intimate genius of cinematic
narration of images. He introduced bathroom se
quences whose immodestwhites exposed to the camera
a secret place of light: a white mystery. In a wholly
different way, Eisenstein, the Russian pioneer, realized
intimacy with montage, which depends upon detail
and stresses the fundamental imagery of the mind and
its process of creating total thought by using objects
as parts of thoughts * . . . Thus, as a generality, the
* Notice the discrete relation to charade; here the object, rather than
its user, conveys the idea.
 HOLLYWOOD S SURREALIST EYE 33

cinematic use of detail creates the subjectivity of men

tal states in narrative; namely, psychology.
Yet, of course, unless the content is dreamlike, the
total effect of cinema cannot be psychological in type.
In the previous chapter, I stressed those forces in
Hollywood working positively against that unity of
effect sometimes obtained even in a second- or third-
rate work of literature. Hence, when I refer to "total
effects" or suggest them, I am necessarily limited to
speaking of technique only. If there be no primary
unity—this very rarely occurs in American pictures,
much more often in foreign pictures—there is incom
plete receptiveness in the spectator toward the events
on the screen as they aim at a total esthetic effect.
Hence, especially if one is sensitive, he resists many
aspects of the movies and automatically displaces them
in the total (or "charade") scheme of cinema values.
What is left then?
Always with us must be the positive accidents oc
curring as results of this curious struggle between
forces, which we, as unusually passive spectators, re
flect automatically rather than consciously. Conse
quently a displacement occurs in us corresponding to
the first displacement within normal vision when the
photograph appeared. I would callthis an almost magi
cal, perhaps a "surrealist," displacement of taste and
accustomed finality of judgment—a ritualwhich begins
with the sound of our change sliding down to us from
34 the HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION
the change machine at the box ofEce. Observe that
the most potent contribution of the movie camera,
which is its intimate genius in recording physical ac
tion, is quite capable of isolating itself. Scenes of great
and intense action, with which Hollywood movies es
pecially have been filled, grip us most when we are
involved with their intimacy, their visual selfness,
wherein we are the miraculously protected participants
through unique courtesy of the camera. This does not
mean that we measure our enjoyment by equating the
effect of the physical mode with that of the spiritual
and emotional mode! Alas, no.
Having solved so many problems of portraying ac
tion, Hollywood technicians employ the camera's
genius for sheerly pyrotechnical ends; thus, the beauty
of the camera may seem most eloquent just when its
material is most incongruous and trivial. In its ap
parently scientific function of analyzing movement
(vide the super-speed camera and its revelations) and
of bringing us into closer visual proximity with the
physical world than the eye is normally capable of
achieving, the Hollywood camera is capable of intro
ducing us into and then out of an imaginative idea
with the utmost arbitrariness of timing, and with a
purely bravura energy. So the camera seems to possess
the wildness, the compulsiveness, and the interior
meaning of the most instinctive life, such as that
 HOLLYWOOD S SURREALIST EYE 35

symptomatic in dreams, romantic poetry, and surreal

ist art.
When we go over a cliff in an automobile without
being in it and see a gunbeing fired at uswithout being
hit by the bullet (things which we imagine bya simple
transposition of spatialpoints), the camera's eloquence
automatically is alienated from the content of the
movie and becomes a more or less independent effect.
Yet because the causation is evident and simple, such
thrills seem as perpetually amusing as discovering how
the rabbit may appear from the empty hat. The most
moving effect can be derived from such an episode as
one recentiy in A Woman's Face, a chase on horse
sleigh through snowy mountain trails. This beauti
fully and dynamically photographed sequence, because
its given human motives were of almost no interest,
can be filled with almost any content involving human
terror, and in this situation the most available content
is that of dreams, half-remembered associations of our
past, or subconscious or conscious literary memories.
The fact that we are so physically relaxed in our thea
ter seats corresponds to our effort to woo the visual
blank of sleep, and hence our eyes are peculiarly pre
pared for the unexpected and the overwhelming.
Like its first imaginative efforts on the part of
Mdies and others, and like the extreme literary so
phistication of Cocteau's The Blood of a Poet, the
36 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION
protean personality of the movie camera is romantic
and of an unpredictable and shocking entrance. It
catches us like guilty or timid children in an un
guarded moment. Even in certain French, German,
and Russian films of high artistic quality, it is evident
that, in order to create the illusion of artistic unity, to
keep the literary conception foremost, either fullness
or depth of feeling on the one hand, or the cinematic
possibilities of narrative exploitation on the other, have
had to be slighted. The movie camera is unbelievably
hospitable, delightfully hospitable—but supremely
conceited. The spectator must be a suave and wary
guest, one educated in a profound, naive-sophisticated
conspiracy to see as much as he can take away with
him.
CHAPTER III

THE TECHNICOLOR OF LOVE

1. The Background: The Theme

A PALE, rational, dead-gray, blushlessly journalistic

problem of the movies has been whether the act of
fornication did or did not take place. Whenever this
much-shunted problem appears, it is but an indication
that the true importance of the sexual act and its bio
logical secrets is being underrated. The conventional
nature of theatrical representation, its ambiguity in re
gard to this alternative of did or did not, has con
sistently been exploited by the movie city as propa
ganda to get us to believe in the honor of hero and
heroine. Although they may have been tempted and
often deliberately or, so to speak, despite themselves,
gotten into a sexually compromising situation, they
have usually proclaimed their innocence implicitly or
explicitly if only in their behavior toward each other
the morning after. No stratum, section, or individual
in society is disposed to deny the presence of carnal
37
38 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION
temptation—the impulse to give way to the purely
animal feelings as they take by storm the male and
female, but the morality of Hollywood ordains that,
either to the scrupulous scientific eye or the givers-of-
the-benefit-of-the-doubt, the hero and heroine, though
they may suffer the consequences of an overt indiscre
tion, covertly obey "the law of sexual decency."
It is a little strange to reflect on the intelligence be
hind the etiquette which, barring evidence to the con
trary, assumes the innocence of a particular man and
a particular woman because general sympathy is pre
sumed to be with them. A platitude is that any hero
and heroine are the Chosen Pair . . . but in the pro-
founder reaches of the human understanding and the
art it produces, the Chosen Pair are almost of neces
sity the sinners, Adam and Eve. The relation of moral
ity to carnal desire is an inescapable subject of im
aginative literature, but this relation in all first-class
novels and dramas is necessarily explicit concerning the
physical relations between men and women. Such art
(and one may list the better foreign movies) has at
hand perfectly lucid devices for communicating this
necessary information—call it "sex for the sophisti
cated" if you like. On the other hand, my own point
of view may be accused of lack of sophistication. Is it
not very possible that the "liberated," the cultured, or
the merely cynical are one in thinking of the ambigu
ous shutting of a door, a fadeout on a kiss, and a fadein
 THE TECHNICOLOR OF LOVE 39

on the next morning: "But of course they went to bed

together, it's obvious enough!" Yet in exactly what
sense, I counter, if they did so? Suppose that only
thinking made it so for the lovers? There would be a
tremendous difference in the moral implications—a
diflFerence which, it may be observed, Hollywood
ignores.
Look at the actual plots ofany number of comedies,
serio-comedies, and dramas involving such "sexual"
situations as spending-the-night-in-adjoining-rooms.
The crux of the situation is not whether they actually
did or not, but whether others know they were in the
situation and are thus in a position to draw their own
conclusions; and also, on a third remove, whether
those who know of the compromising situation care
whether others (perhaps the whole community)
know. Under the last circumstance, the would-be
lovers usually are concerned with establishing their
innocence, and indeed, it is this purely formal concern
with "decent" appearances which the public would
seem to require and for which it is properly apprecia
tive. I say "the public," but I have already credited a
large proportion of it with a cynical attitude toward
this point asa problem. But is this attitude not a viola
tion of the etiquette not only of that good will which
one has for cinema personages (because one can sym
pathize with the genuine feelings of alarm about "ap
pearances" no less than the rigors of temptation
40 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

resisted or yielded to) but also a violation of the "eti

quette" of art? For if we assume as true actions the
ambiguity of which forms an element in the scheme
of the story before us, we are willfully participating in
its creation, wresting it from its makers, and molding
it, at least in this all-important detail, to suit our own
desires. This "anti-artistic" habit is not without a
subtle retribution!
Let us look a little more closely at the precise man
ner in which action is communicated with regard to
sexual behavior in Hollywood movie romances. Is it
not true that, where there is unsatisfactory post-fade
evidence that carnal union did take place, the actors
and actresses nevertheless behave as though, to all
ostensible appearances, the temptation is mathemati
cally equal to the surrender? I remember Valentino's
kidnaping of the heroine in his outstanding role of
The Sheik. The woman (played by Agnes Ayres) re
sists his advances before the eyes of the audience. But
are we to assume that such a man as this desert lover
would be content, once he was so much aroused, with
the mere ceremonial gestures of wooing? Passion does
not always play the gentleman, even in a desert aristo
crat. What of the long, nocturnal hours which are not
shown and which breed their own monstrous eti
quette? Again we see Miss Ayres as the trapped Eng
lish beauty repulse her admirer. But may this not be
because she has already been dishonored—or worse.
 THE TECHNICOLOR OF LOVE 4I

because she really wants to yield and has already suc

cumbed in her imagination? Moreover, she knows very
well that she will be considered an object of mingled
pity and disgust, once she returns, if she ever does, to
her own society. Toward the end of the movie, did
Miss Ayres claim that her honor was unstained by the
desert chevalier? I forget. But it is possible to assume
that, under the circumstance that she was to "marry
the man," she believed a lie of this sort was justified.
In any case, cinema discretion placed a dusky hand
maiden at Miss Ayres' elbow, apparently as her guard
ian angel, throughout her first night spent on the
brocaded divan of the Sheik's tent. But such a trans
parently fictitious device did not disguise the psy
chology which operated here and hereafter in a thou
sand other cinema products from Hollywood. This is
an unconscious law of civilized psychology in the
United States, and is to the effect that if, though it
may be through no fault of their own, a man and
woman spend the night together in unsupervised pri
vacy, and they are "normal" and roughly equivalent
in sexual attractiveness, they are bound to cohabit.
This is virtually an unspoken moral code, being, it is
assumed, only what the animal nature of the sexes
ordains, and hence any mortals so unfortunate or in
discreet as to be together under such circumstances
have to stand the consequences. Indeed, it would be
insulting to assume they are not guilty, unless their
42 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

known probity and their word declares theminnocent.

This is a heritage of New England puritanism no less
than of the feudal South, and is founded on the as
sumption that "morality" is largely a negative, self-
sacrificing force.. .
Especially does the contemporary movie tend (as I
have occasion to point out elsewhere) to displace
seriousness in its perfection of the talkie and replace
it with entertainment—even in regard sometimes to
serious dramas and "tragedies." I have introduced the
subject of morahty only in order to provide a basis for
discussing what happens in the movies. In recent ex
amples, it is customary, when a "serious" style is de
sired, to have him, incidentally, marry the girl. This
satisfies those movie-goers who, once the serious is
essayed, must have it all official, legal. Consequently
as a convention, the cinematic esthetic-serious in sex
must be sanctioned by the facts and not by a specula
tive ambiguity. To be thoroughly true, up to the hilt,
sex must have the permission of the legal guardian of
morality. This is an artifice, mind you, and sometimes
not especially noticeable; but, when it is not so notice
able, it is only because the original story depended,
not so much on a positive conception of sexual moral
ity, as on licentiousness as the frank form of its enter
tainment. Here is one of the most blazing of Holly
wood hallucinations: the neglect of the fact that the
Serious depends altogether upon comprehensiveness
 THE TECHNICOLOR OF LOVE 43

of morality and psychology, not only as to sex but

everything else. The problem of factual ambiguity in
sexual morality can never arise from citation of a
single instance, because one generalizes from a single
instance only with great danger to truth. The am
biguity inherent in They Did or They Didn't once
is infantile and ludicrous amongambiguous situations;
it tells little or nothing of character as a permanent
aspect. Such an ambiguity is far too much in the past
and is important only in analyzing the cases of sexual
neurasthenics. From the viewpoint of morality, the
only serious question is: The Same Two Do or The
Same Two Don't—only with each other or also with
others . . . indefinitely. And this would be merely the
statistical aspect of sexual morality, necessary, how
ever, to that psychological judgment which is part of
all personal moralities. But, even from the serious
viewpoint, morality is not all—and this is the strength
of Hollywood: the metaphoric tendency of its myths,
the chief of which is the Desert Island for two; that
is why lovers are always being, semi-accidentally or
accidentally, marooned. To thequestion, "What would
you do if you were cast on a desert island with a beau
tiful blonde (or brunette) ?" there is but one "con
ventional" answer. In a recent movie, Bahama Pas
sage, Sterling Hayden was very slow in giving this
answer, but, since it was the point of this particular
44 the HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION
charade ("See Eve, see apple, see Eve eat apple ..."),
he gave it.
Thus, under the head of the Romantic rather than
the Serious, there arises with or without hindrance in
the mythological world of the movies the dilating
Single Instance—the very pre-marital or post-marital
incident of fornication or adultery or near-same which
is involved in so many Holl5wood comedy dramas
and society romances. The most frequent pattern, of
course, is that of Will He Ever Get the Girl, or Will
She Ever Get the Boy?—depending on which sexual
party is a little obtuse or a little timid. In basic terms,
the whole upshot of many such films is: Will the
Single Instance ever take place? Will Eve ever eat the
apple? After the climax (and ofcourse a little pointed
isolation of the pair accomplishes this trick) —oblivion
—a blackout of the future . . . but the Single Instance
ad infinitum after the last reel (one hopes) . . .
How many times have I stayed to the end of a
movie plot, in simple-minded avidity, to be sure the
potential union took place at least once! Thus, the
hypnotic power of what is perhaps Hollywood's most
historic and sure-fire device. Although, radically speak
ing, either marriage, adultery, or fornication amounts
to a Symbol of Possibility more than a Tried Experi
ment or Old Habit, the more realistic and sophisti
cated movie products (usually straight from Broad
way) convert the "possibility," when the plot requires
 THE TECHNICOLOR OF LOVE 45

it, into a dubious habit, or else a boring kind of mo

notony, an almost static form of experience. Indeed,
marriage itself appears as the consequence of a glam
orous misstep, and the only consequence of such a
consequence would be another glamorous misstep-
such as an infidelity. When Ladies Meet and The
Women are two excellent examples displaying this
logic.
The wife played by Greer Carson in When Ladies
Meet is a saddened but faithful sexual soul who at last
revolts against her husband's constant outside affairs
when sheis introduced to the viewpoint (literally, face-
to-face) of one of his prospective mistresses. Miss
Carson, one of Hollywood's most intelligent actresses,
makes the r61e more credible and sympathetic than it
otherwise would have been. Hitherto, this lady has
takeu'the rather inverted attitude that her husband,
every time he returns to her contrite, has been unfaith
ful once more to the institution of adultery! This time,
however, the "other woman" is so fine a girl and pos
sesses such proud illusions that the wife feels she is
wrong to keep taking her husband back, and decides
to relinquish him to someone who may have a better
chance of making a successful marriage than she had.
The nobility of her impulse is obvious, but will it
stand a complete analysis? It seems more plausible to
suppose that she sees vividly in the pristine eagerness
of the other woman the foreshadowing of a pleasure
46 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION
which is now a historical matter with her—an ideal,
perfected moment of happiness which was lost in her
marriage. May not the bitterness of her regret for this
failure (due, possibly, to an irresponsible yielding to
passion which the couple thought best to legalize)
cause her to seek revenge against her sex? She may
easily wish to expose other women to the probability
of this denouement, since she may see repeated in the
"forced marriage" aspect of the situation (created by
her leaving him "free to marry") merely the reflection
of her own experience. Hence, here is the Morality of
the Single Instance! Supposedly, that is, in theory,
a moral form continuously binding male and female,
marriage is revealed by such psychology as the Ro
mance of the Single Instance, an apotheosis of the
first time the two indulged their carnal passion to
gether. What is the explanation of such a mythical
psychology but an overemphasis placed on the First
Time—a sort of shock, a persistent sub-flowering of
shame and guilt? The basic pattern is clear enough:
marriage is not a complex spiritual and physical union
to be revitalized by all manner of devices, and sus
tained by culture and imagination. It is, rather, a
series of repetitions of an originally legalized sin; it is
a compulsory, monolithic act of nature that one has
received legal permission to repeat indefinitely. Alas,
it was thus almost inevitable for Miss Garson as the
married lady to conclude that an interesting ambiguity
 THE TECHNICOLOR OF LOVE 47

flowed from that original They Did . . . Did They

really? This proves that the original act, in the moral
sense, must be divided into physical act and emotional
act; thus, act and conception of act. If the attitude of
the performers toward the fait accompli is not crea
tive, protean, certainly nothing truly happy, nothing
to compare with the first moment, will come of it.
In The Women, too, with all its wisecracks, mar
riage is a patently monotonous, if sometimes inno
cently parturitive, perspective on a historic act (done,
no doubt, with "mirrors" of time). This movie is pri
marily about the Legal Possessors of Male Property
and those who would deprive them of same by sexual
banditry. Love is conceived materialistically in terms
of mutually possessed property: the home, children,
and community reputation, as well as husband him
self. It must not be forgotten that the husband is not
only a symbol but, under the present system, often
the sole material provider and maintainer of the wife
and her material environment. Doesnot the ambiguity
here lie in the fact that such wives as the main char
acter in this movie are unequipped, esthetically or
materially, to be providers in casesupport is withdrawn
after marriage? Perhaps there is sexual fetishism in
her, even an approximation of what is known as
"love,"but given the whole ambiance in The Women,
it would be very rash to romanticize beyond what is
actually revealed. Per se, it is a social, legal, and rather
48 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION
crassly logical affair. True, the wife is obviously dis
satisfied that the male property is being lost, yet it is
she who insists on the divorce. Now what is divorce,
historically considered? It is not merely a legal opera
tion designed to protect the female and her children;
it also constitutes a formal negation of those first mo
ments of sexual happiness—the same moments turned,
so to speak, inside out in public; it is public repentance
for a "mistake." If it were not more than a pure eco
nomic arrangement, it would bear no such feared onus
as it still does. Also, divorce leaves the ex-husband free
to marry the wife's supplanter. The forces causing a
wife to seek a divorce in the face of the necessary up
heaval and against her husband's desire (this is his
first infidelity) are no doubt roundly "practical." But
in bedroom terms, an infidelity means but one thing:
the woman does not give satisfaction. Now a public
infidelity, such as it is in The Women, is an official
exposure of this fact; namely, what is news to the
public is not necessarily news to the wife . . . unless
she has been under the naive illusion that she still does
give satisfaction. If she is not under such an illusion,
she has had but one thing to console herself with: a
historic incident, her marriage night, or her honey
moon. Again we meet, perforce, the desire of the los
ing woman to visit the same risk, and possibly the
same fate, on her victorious rival. The generic problem
of all such dramas reduces itself to the tendency of
 THE TECHNICOLOR OF LOVE 49

the male and female in wedlock to fail in converting

the sexual act into a true matrix of pleasure, into the
production of children of desire, who are at onceactual
progeny and progeny of the imagination.
In all this, of course, Hollywood slavishly imitates
the coarseness and superficiality of the Broadway
drama, and necessarily, I maintain, strives to outdo
Broadway in all the fundamental artifices of sentimen
tality. The further away Hollywood gets from the real
ity and complexity of human problems, the closer it
draws to the "single instance," not only of vision, but
of morality. I think at once of the exquisite tones of
Linda Darnell's skin in the most recent version of
Blood and Sand with Tyrone Power. Since all art is
but science of convention, the movies, beginning, as
I discussed in the preceding chapter, with a startling
mirror imitation of reality, relied (unlike the theater)
on vision alone and by pure illusion; for the actors
were not there, only their images were. As these images
improved in quality and the visual illusion therefore
was adequate, the movies competed with the stage,
and finally, on the sheer basis of production, includ
ing multiple manufacture, overcame the popularity of
the stage. Then movies acquired the voice of the stage
and sound effects of an unrivaled reality; finally, and
lastly in the sense of fulfilling the possibilities, techni
color came into being: a method of color reproduction
which encompasses the palette and which, if it lacks
50 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

the subtlety of painting, supplies in the colored mov

ing photograph an artifice as varied as painting, inso
far as it creates the illusion of visual reahty.
At one time, color was a uniform tint, such as sepia
(still used), or, rarely, tinted films of a very sloppy
kind were exhibited. Rather irritating scenic shortsub
jects of a blue-and-red prism came to be common, and
were real for the paradoxical reason that they repro
duced the dazzling effect of too much sunlight on the
retina! Such devices are associated with the old plod
ding days of the films, when they indulged in the high
jinks and low shadows of the mystery and Western
serials. Then Griffith came with his pageantry and his
forthright conception of the premarital single in
stances: rape or the marriage proposal. These were the
poles of the screen's original technicolor of love. One
was too plain for day, the other too plain for night.
They were, like the bacchanals of which De Mille and
Griffith were fond, crude conceptions, over-primitive,
and either well-dated, or, as "real life," objectionable
today. If they had been in color, and in such beautiful
photography, would they have been acceptable even
then? I imagine so, for a solemn moral attitude was
taken (largely by way of a commentary which does
not exist today: the subtitle) toward sexual excess,
whereas today such excess is a form of entertainment,
either in romantic comedy or fables of the Franken-
 THE TECHNICOLOR OF LOVE 5I

stein genre. Primitive Hollywood was well aware that

the most daring extremities can be reached under the
cover of moral seriousness—a moral seriousness which,
having been so thoroughly debunked in the last two
decades, can seldom enter the scene of human enter
tainment today except in its most sentimental and in
nocuous forms. Both De Mille and Von Stroheim,
though in differing genres, exploited the "sexual situa
tion," especially with regard to adultery. They pro
vided the "smart" dramas of their time. Von Stroheim
going to bat for "freedom of sexual speech" and
De Mille for some of the "naughtiness" that appeared
now and again in Broadway farces or in such hell-
raising among hicks as The Squaw Man. It is impos
sible to say how much such a relatively worldly man as
Von Stroheim worked with tongue curled safely in his
cheek so that it would not puncture his face. As Holly
wood innovators, he and De Mille undoubtedly
brought a moral seriousness about real-life problems
and frankness about marital relations to a new high
for the movie city. But this contemporary fact must
be faced: sex is no longer a subject; indeed, it has been
taken over in the large sense by the psychoanalysts.
So that there was really no struggle when Hollywood
romance set out to subdue Hollywood morality: it had
always been the stronger force. Hence sexual morality
(when it is not a comic myth as in Don Juan) is a
52 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

matter of incidents and metaphors; of rape, isolated

seductions, or courtship.
With the importation of Ernst Lubitsch, a new
sophistication came to Hollywood with a brand of sex
comedy European in flavor. Where Von Stroheim had
been heavy-handed, Lubitsch could be delicate; where
Von Stroheim had been bluntly moral, Lubitsch was
subtly immoral. For Hollywood, it was a coming-of-
Continental-age. It was the "normal" view of sex, situ
ated between the exotic romance and the monster-of-
rape shocker. In the following chapter I shall discuss
a most important aspect of Hollywood's presentation
of sex: the myth of the somnambules; but this is thor
oughly exotic, a kind of "domesticated" primitiveness
. . . like the image of herself in a cage drawn through
the streets of Rome which caused Cleopatra to prefer
death. The modern Queens of Love among actresses
do not flinch, however, at a parallel fate!
Beyond, beneath, among, and—indeed—saturated
with all the more mythical forms of sex, American
movies maintain a certain necessary constant—a con
stant as indispensable as good photography and articu
late speech. It is almost equivalent to a grammar of
sex as opposed to its metaphors, its large myths. It is
a form of etiquette practiced by ladies and gentlemen
of fiction, aided and abetted by actors and actresses of
Hollywood. For the purposes of this chapter, I call it
the Technicolor of Love.
 THE TECHNICOLOR OF LOVE 53

2. The Foreground; The Incident

The technicolor screen has form, color, and sound

—all the actual perquisites of Vivian Leigh and Leslie
Howard, Olivia de Havilland and Clark Gable. Con
sidering that Gone with the Wind, as a work of litera
ture, is at best but a uniquely elaborate scenario, a
third-rate novel, these actors and actresses are material
improvements upon their fictional prototypes. As Scar
lett O'Hara,Rhett Butler, Ashley Wilkes, and Melanie
Hamilton, they impersonated a long and esteemed
line of Hollywood "types." The preparation of Mar
garet Mitchell's ready-made epic, which as usual
started with the first gun from the arsenal of the press
agent, was itself a drama. The producers unerringly
realized that the picturization of a novel which had
populated the country with prostrate and unwinking
readers was only to be done without stint of money or
veneration. Vivian Leigh was finally chosen, not only
for her talent and because she suited the part physi
cally, but because the producers, having signed her
lastamong the four featured players, had decided they
must save on expenditure after putting out so heavily
for the other three, especially for the messrs. A canny
choice, for, though the war was responsible for calling
Miss Leigh from these shores, she won the statuette
for the year's best screen performance, as well as her
first r61e in an American film.
54 the HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION
Scarlett was so instantly appreciated by hordes of
literate women because she reflected a typical (or at
least typically envied) lack of moral rectitude and was
what might be called a "strong-minded" sexual type.
She was temperamental and sensual. While eliminat
ing certain coarser suggestions about the character as
created in the novel, Miss Leigh succeeded in com
municating the waywardness, the grit, the depth of in
stinct, and the flavor of "bitchiness" which Miss
Mitchell's second-rate wisdom so carefully pinned to
so many of her many pages. She also succeeded in
being "naturally" attractive, like a highly intelligent
advertisement for unpretentious make-up. It was her
triumph as a performer, moreover, that she carried
with her an essential: obvious femaleness. I have often
reflected that one of the least fortunate traits of Holly
wood is its temporal conventions; there is little chance
among all its technical blandishments for character
development in the running-off time of a movie. Con
sequently we can reflect that concentration on dra
matic turning-points of sexual conduct, regardless of
their moral truthfulness, has been obligatory on ac
count of the length plus the treatment of a Holljwood
movie. But the sheer length of Gone with the Wind
offered some semblance of the seriousness of pace
which dominates the best European films. Gone with
the Wind communicates a sense of character duration
—the sense of people existing within time and society
 THE TECHNICOLOR OF LOVE 55

as in a single and unremitting milieu. One of the grav

est Hollywood faults is that the passing of time is too
conventionalized—too much a temporal gap bridged
by cheap montage eflEects (calendars peeling off their
numerals, and so on). A sense of both change and
progression is supplanted by non-plot elements, rigid
symbols, and external events such as the seasons—
usually because somebody in a movie is always pa
tiently waiting for the plot to catch up with his desires
or else lagging behind nature. This has been curiously
stressed by sagas of time in which actors and actresses
are seen from childhood or youth to old age. With
make-up at its peak, it affords a wonderful opportunity
for clever thespians to prolong their acting careers.
But vegetable decay is a very weak (if ostentatious)
substitute for drama. Here again we have the pedantic
nature of Hollywood exploiting the vocabulary of
make-up and the ingenuity of its lighting department.
A narrative with the scope and leisure of Gone with
the Wind, however, could accommodate many of the
screen's favorite vanities without noticeable injury: its
picturesque episodes, its action sequences, its techni
color opportunities, and its bathroom-mirror fixation
upon the faces and motions of the leading players.
The scenic sweep and variety of visual pattern, rightly
considered appropriate to this movie, necessitated
some repetition of the feeling of Griffith's camera: the
obligation to keep at a certain respectful distance from
56 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION
the players—a convention which makes the close-up
more dramatic by a switch to touching distance, some
times without much notice, and its consequent hint
of indelicacy. It is well known that the movie camera
tends to make life seem larger than it is. This is the
larger-than-lifeness that means most to the Moment of
Love. It should not amaze that I refer to the manners,
pertinent or "impertinent," of the camera, by no
means so impersonal as some still imagine it to be.
The camera would be impersonal only if it were un-
selective—if it were allowed to report "all that goes
on," although this omnipresent eye is eithera Utopian
dream or a pure (and empirically dubious) conven
tion.
Basic narrative is the notion of what happens in the
physical sense. Soundless cinema was much more
"basic" in this respect, less sophisticated in the show
manship sense—a fact which provides another reason
for the greater seriousness of pre-sound cinema. Let
ting the pantomime of nature "speak for itself," with
a limited number of verbal captions, entailed a more
rigid visual logic than that of sound cinema, which
reverts to the static background of the stage main
tained in the eye while the actors are speaking. Thus,
adding the voice to the movements of the actor re
sulted in a limitation where there had been a freedom.
But this also made the psychology of the movie more
akin to the novel, for when a shift of scene was de-
 THE TECHNICOLOR OF LOVE 57

sired, it could be done just as in the novel, and yet

without loss of the auditory; namely, dialogue had a
more strategic position in the new technical medium
than it had had in silent days.
Yet what happened? Naturally, the screen was slow
in acquiring good dialogue or a shrewd placement of
dialogue in the whole scheme of cinema. If we glance
(not so irrelevantly as may be at first supposed) at
the novels of Henry James, we notice that a compli
cated social etiquette infuses the relations between
the sexes, an etiquette expressed both in terms of psy
chology and conversation. We notice that this novelist
apparently placed no value whatever upon what actu
ally occurred, or might occur, in the bedroom, and
thus is much closer to Hollywood than one might have
supposed. Indeed, in James' novels, dialogue is the
"natural" medium of sexual intercourse—verbal rather
than carnal conversation. It happens that, without
having at all the conscious moral purpose of James,
Hollywood assumes that a manipulation of dialogue
in relation to indicated psychology is a sufficient con
vention to convey sexual reality. Note that this is a
convention for strict purposes of communication, and
is not what Hollywood depends on for conveying its
ultimate presentation of life; for this, it depends on
the moving photograph, preferably colored. At the
same time, it does not hesitate to utilize what might
58 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION
be called the "J^niesian" device of the voices of peo
ple in love, transposing them to the audible oral
medium . . .
In the plays of Bernard Shaw and others, no less
than in the novels of Henry James, speech is a specific
form of love-making and a powerful element in creat
ing sexual situations. Shaw specifically isolated this
theme in Pygmalion. Thus, in novels and plays, both
more speechified if diversely so than the movies, the
voice, vehicle of words, is a purely esthetic weapon in
the hands of the artist, both as to literary inventive
ness and the assumed charm of the actor's linguistic
style. Shaw's professor in Pygmalion was played by
Leslie Howard, a coincidence meaningful to the pres
ent theme. The Galatea tutored into cultural life
by Pygmalion was ostensibly merely an instrument
intended by Shaw, asa satirist, to embarrass the British
society of his time, but she was also a symbol of sly
propaganda for conversation as a builder oflove. What
is the denouement? Mr. Howard's professor is hardly
aware that the flame of love has awakened in the breast
of the linguistic phoenix he has created, and she has
to bring to his attention the very motive, love, by
which his prototype, the legendary Pygmalion, was
actuated! Hollywood is just as forgetful as this profes
sor and justas concerned as his pupil. It has made use
of the voice mostly for purposes of snobbery. Nat
urally, if the spoken word was to invade the Holly-
 THE TECHNICOLOR OF LOVE 59

wood studio, it had to be by way of the most dulcet

vocalists and the best elocutionists. These inevitably
came from the stage, dominated of course by the Brit
ish accent. All actors in the movie city got "instruc
tion" purely as a matter of utilitarian strategy. They
bad to be understood; the words, whatever they were
or portended, bad to be communicated. It has been
only by a sort of inadvertence that the voice, as a
builder of love, as an esthetic instrument of the sexual
emotion, has been given a place in the talkies. Holly
wood's psychology of love is that an anterior fact of
mutual magnetic attraction exists and this rigid, quasi-
bedroom fact results in the act of wooing, regarded in
essence as a legal convention rather than an eloquent
ceremony. ITius it was merely unavoidable that at
tached to the word spoken by the voice of a British
actor was the Lady and Gentleman and their natural
bodies as dressed animals.
I introduce such an apparently salacious idea on the
grounds that clothes have a symbolic importance equal
to that of voice in sexual relations. The difference be
tween a man and a gentleman, for instance, is that the
latter wears bis clothes as though he were born in
them and they grew with his body; the man is within
the gentleman even as the woman within the lady.
But in the act of divesting, just as in the act of ceasing
to speak, lies a great morality. It is a ritual because
secrets will be learned, and it is the pure depth of such
6o THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

secrets aswell as their dimensions and form that satisfy

the seeker. Beneath all, and enclosing it like an en
velope, is the necessity for evaluating what occurs in
the single instance of organic sex—but this evaluation
can be gained only by understanding it in relation to
a total society of acts and thoughts, acts and imagined
acts. As it happens in Gone with the Wind, the hero
ine, so vitally inspirited with sex, has no such means,
and never, despite her cleverness, develops any, for
arriving at those decisions which would permit a se
cure and permanent sexual happiness.
Her golden experience, Ashley Wilkes, eludes her,
and she accepts instead Rhett Butler, a charming rake,
a "gentleman" gone a bit too cosmopolitan for pro
vincial society. This is Scarlett's "revenge"; iijdeed,
her entire life is a series of bittersweet alternatives
slipped into envelopes of postponed solutions. Miss
Mitchell in the novel is consistently clear about this.
The mercurial nature of Scarlett's emotions is a won
der of monotony; fear, rage, malice, desire, despair-
all that she requires to escape them is another mo
ment of life, another tick of the clock. Scarlett is
always naively imagining her experiences in the frac
tional terms of absolutes divided by mere conven
iences, and (the psychology is perfect) this is theresult
of her bad and certain conscience; she knows that her
hyperbolic emotional temperament does not hit bot
tom and never will. Yet she knows that nothing but
 THE TECHNICOLOR OF LOVE 6l

death or crippling will lick her, and nothing does.

Why? Because her mind is capable of infinite post
ponement in trying to recognize any final, unpleasant
truth, any fixed, distasteful fact. The movie like the
novel ends on this symphonic note after Rhett Butler
has deserted her; 'Til think of it tomorrow, at Tara,"
she says. "I can stand it then. Tomorrow, I'll think of
some way to get him back. After all, tomorrow is an
other day."
As a heroine, Scarlett is a masterpiece of self-decep
tion, self-bribery: she can go on happily only because,
in spite of her failure of character, life has bestowed
on her a faculty of optimism, a faculty of isolating
desire from its crisis in action—a faculty v/hich makes
her the screen's typical heroine of all time and a sym
bolof Hollywood itself. You might say it is through no
fault of hers that Ashley Wilkes, in their crucial inter
viewafter his return from the battlefield, does not take
her, as he says, "here in the mud like a —and so
precipitate a separate phase in her emotional life. For
then, according to his code, he would have had to
divorce Melanie and marry her. The trouble with such
a morally indecisive heroine as Scarlett is that she con
taminates her creator: the creative vision itself reaches
a stalemate, which only Hollywood's technicolor of
love can loosen and liberate.
In this era of civilization, it is an instinct of the
woman to be pseudo-somnambulistic: to let the man
62 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

decide . . . Is the tone of his voice not authoritative

and beautifully registered to hint of stepping down
from that authority and, out of loving mockery, play
ing the slave? Though Shaw himself insists that mascu
line hegemony ended with Victorianism, I think the
relative quality of voice in the sexes proves my point.
If the male is by no means so strong as he was, owing
to the equalization of male and female in the eco
nomic world, the vestiges of his power remain in sym
bols and myths that survive in art and its representa
tions. The best male voice of this kind belonged to
Leslie Howard, I believe, and so it was only poetic
that he should play Ashley Wilkes, abdicator from
sexual action. Howard's closest competitors in Holly
wood among the British were Laurence Olivier,
Herbert Marshall, and Ronald Colman; among the
foreigners, Charles Boyer. It is possible, I suppose, to
prefer the last-named to Mr. Howard, but as far as
the voice bred alone in the British bone goes, Mr.
Marshall's is a trifle hurry and obtrusively mannered.
Moreover, physically, he hasn't Mr. Howard's quali
fications, and if Mr. Olivier (now lost to Hollywood)
is more personable than Mr. Howard, he has not so
much finesse as an actor. Mr. Howard's effect was
slenderness without fragility; he had a virile neck and
youthful, wavy, golden hair—that it was, orwas not, his
own hardly matters. Where it is a case of the genteel
male animal, any artifice or disarray ofartifice becomes
 THE TECHNICOLOR OF LOVE 63
his own through moral domination of what is above
the neck and inherent in the most articulate portion
of anatomy, the face. It is that portion, rising with
such promise from the contemporary male collar, and
riding like a wave permanently suspended above an
ocean, that concentrates in itself the communicated
tenderness for which the female perpetually searches
in the male. What is there may constitute a symbolic
guarantee, not only of infinite generosity of all kinds,
but against possible overestimation of any other part
of his body. It is fear of this overestimation which the
female must struggle against, as well as the overestima
tion itself, knowing as she does that man will un
scrupulously hold this over her once he is morally
weak enough to coldly exploit her, either as an instru
ment of pleasure or of economic support. This is the
other, not the self, bribery of women. Seeking the
complete conquest of the human body, not only in
life, but as our eyes roam through endless feet of film,
we are bound to encounter and attempt to judge man
and woman without their clothes; to see them, that is,
as the man thing and the woman thing. Johnny Weis-
muller, Buster Crabbe, Jon Hall, Enrol Flynn, and
Victor Matureare perhaps the mostvivid among those
men who have stripped without teasing; whereas the
bodies of such women as Dorothy Lamour, Rita Hay-
worth, Betty Grable, and Paulette Goddard are
stripped either for the dance floor or the boudoir quite
64 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION
as a routine part of civilized or semicivilized living in
the movies.
As the somnambule (that is, as the apparently in
voluntary candidate for the sexual act), woman must
advertise her latent strip-tease personality through ex
cessive languor or excessive activity. But man, the
gentleman, accomplishes the same thing by a golden
mean, an ideal modulation of the clothing pelt and
the naked body. While the same thing is theoretically
true of womenas ladies, American and English women
are almost incapable of a female correspondence to
this male achievement. European women are a dif
ferent question, but even they, in American movies,
are compelled, in order to "get their man," to enact
the somnambule; namely, to resort to the unspoken
monosyllable of dreamlike acquiescence. Curtain.
Finis. You know what happens next.
Scarlett could have been happy if she had seen in
Ashley's face after the sexual act all that she saw (or
thought she saw) there before. Then she would have
believed it, for it would have been a verified moral in
terpretation of the raptures of the flesh. Scarlett's per
ception to the bottom of the sexual dimension was
perfectly clear, and therefore she was in a position
subconsciously to acknowledge to herself woman's
universal danger; male fetishism. As provincially lim
ited a kind of culture as Ashley Wilkes represented,
he was capable of providing Scarlett with the reassur-
 THE TECHNICOLOR OF LOVE 65
ance she desired: a promise against enslavement. On
the contrary, Rhett Butler provoked her to this en
slavement, to which she did not utterly yield, only
because of her thwarted desire for Ashley. Mr. Gable
was excellent for the part because his face held a
purely sensual and limited promise. It is not that he
could not also fulfill (as he did) the duties of a hus
band and father. It is a question of the logic of the
male "strip tease," and thus of sexual style, and thus,
finally, of erotic sensibility.
The natural and universal reticence of feminine eti
quette under masculine hegemony makes her look for
enlightenment first to the male face. However "eman
cipated" woman has become, only "professional"
women of one sort or another go beyond certain
bounds of purely sexual aggressiveness. When his eyes
drop to her breasts, she is unconsciously dismayed,
fearful, and the only thing that reassures her is his
voice, a lyric instrument upon which her whole soul
leans as though its harp strings were a staff. If it is the
jungle, and thus the underside of sexual nature, which
packs a punch in the body of Johnny Weismuller,
et al., it is civilization, and thus the overside of sexual
nature, which packs a punch in the voice of Leslie
Howard, et al. The effect of the former is to knock
the female senseless; the effect of the latter is to
awaken her. Yet the body remains, in any case, and
receives through the genius of Hollywood the gift of
66 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

technicolor. Scarlett heard seduction, a technicolor of

love, in Rhett's voice, whereas she heard courtship,
another technicolor of love, in Ashley's voice. It is
possible that Ashley Wilkes would never have satisfied
Scarlett O'Hara. In the end, she decides she does not
love him, but it is pretty transparent that this is be
cause she has despaired of provoking in him enough
animalism to "take her" simply and without benefit
of clergy. But although the novelist, as the novel is
only paper and ink, may have control over these mat
ters, what control have the actor and actress, living
images in the opening envelopes of technicolor? Even
in flesh tones, technicolor does not reproduce the
unity ofcolors seen directly in nature. Each color tends
to remain jealously, arrogantly in its own patch, and
though it may be harmonized with other colors by
prearrangement, it cannot be married to its environ
ment as color in nature. It is true that one color, such
as fire-red, may deluge the screen (as it does in Gone
with the Wind) but obviously this is a tour de force.
Under normal circumstances, lip-red will return wil
fully to its source. Miss Leigh's lips, or husband-pink
will readily reseat itself on Mr. Howard's forehead.
Thus, in technicolor, flesh color is subtly an individ
ualized perquisite of the human body and flaunts its
symbolic flags to give notice that it prevails in every
recess of its natural domain.
When the artistic conception of a work of art does
 THE TECHNICOLOR OF LOVE 67
not dominate and fulfill all that we know and expect
from a work of art, its elements are invariably lib
erated into an anarchy, a free form of competition
among themselves. It is into such an analogous world
of dream that the movie liberates its components, the
author of Gone with the Wind being in a parallel
position with the Freudian "censor" of waking life.
During sleep, this censor is evaded; likewise in the life
of the imagination, objective reality, which poses as a
censor of desires, is removed, and the mind lives
among free images. As I have emphasized already, the
movies entertain a very powerful conspiracy to dis
suade the imaginative life from resorting to its own
maneuvers, its own daydreams or artistic works, and
to adopt instead the free, often perverse or irrelevant
play of desires issuing from their works. So far as
Hollywood goes, however, this function is in eflfect the
antithesis to the effect produced by works of art, for
the Hollywood pattern does not dominate or satisfy
our esthetic instincts. Thus we, the spectators, are
offered a collaborative role with the other Hollywood
employees, and Scarlett O'Hara, who cannot unify or
control her processes or be certain of an object of de
sire, is a true symbol of Hollywood itself and so super-
united with her audience.
The single instance of sex is but a profoundly covert
germ which, like the unified and adequate mental
conception of a work of art, must flower into an overt
68 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

and amplitudinous objectivity; that is, into a satisfy

ing symbol of reality. Set within a cinema work of art,
Scarlett and Ashley assume in their sexual situation an
ominous isolation, which has made all the speculation
set down here possible. The first domain of isolation
(remember the desert island!) is that they are Leslie
Howardand Vivian Leigh: namely, they havea unique
capacity to please the spectator entirely without refer
ence to their characters within the scheme of the
movie. At the same time, their strategic position is
that they are obeying the etiquette of aeting, of artistic
pretense. The peculiar qualifications of this actor and
actress also make them apt; we pjfy tribute to the
casting.
The emotion of not wanting a hero to die, of want
ing a heroine to be happy, is an infantile one; the re
sult of naive identification of ourselves with person
ages of fiction that we possessed as ehildren. When
reading Dostoievsky or watching a performance of
Shakespeare as adults, we consider this habit absurd,
yetsittingin a movie theater we arecontinually caught
up in the Hollywood conspiracy to do as well as pos
sible for our favorite charaeters. Look at the situation:
first of all, they are living people, and we realize that
Camille does not really die, and that Scarlett O'Hara
as anyone but herself (as for instance, Vivian Leigh)
might have succeeded in provoking Ashley Wilkes as
anyone but himself (as Leslie Howard, shall we say?)
 THE TECHNICOLOR OF LOVE 69
to take her that day in the field at Tara. As we sit in
this dilemma, the images before us are moving, the
dialogue is relentlessly proceeding. We begin to face
(and, since the theater is dim, why not?) all the facts
of the particular qualifications which these two pos
sess as Man and Woman and which I have been dis
cussing. In our imagination, and initiated already into
the classic dilemma of They Did or They Didn't, we
begin to associate with these ideas, before we know it,
the idea. They Might Have; psychologically, this is
equivalent to They Did.
All the while, we are observing the actions on the
screen, listening to the words, and hardly aware of
our subconscious. Miss Mitchell clothes Ashley in
"grotesque rags" on his return from the battlefront,
but Mr. Howard wears merely a disheveled but very
whole uniform of the Confederate Army, gray and
gold, to match his hair. He has divested himselfof his
coat in the scene with Scarlett near the barn, but his
trousers are merely rumpled and need no mending,
his boots unimpaired. Hollywood will not yield its
quantitative richness to realism! Scarlett wears a torn
brocaded dress and an apron of sackcloth; a shabby
shawl is around her shoulders, and a bright snood
pathetically gathers up her hair. Here is the test of
Ashley's gentlemanliness and Scarlett's weak woman
liness, which is only the natural result, as he chival
rously acknowledges, of her courageous assumption of
yo THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

the masculine part at Tara after the catastrophes of

the war. The situation is ideal for a breakdown of his
resistance under the force of Scarlett's feminine pathos
and desirability. They are both physically and morally
weary, and the whole world, saving the earth at their
feet, seems to have been snatched from them. The
hypnotic effect of Mr. Howard's thoroughly civilized
head in this scene is most conspicuous; assuredly, it is
the chief contribution of British civilization to society
and somehow still alive. That artful tact of the male,
which Hollywood, with all the heroism of Emily Post,
has imitated in its scripts for the purpose of polite
scenes between the sexes, was triumphantly illustrated
by Mr. Howard's complete vocal and anatomical ward
robe. As a result, the latter became a true symbol of
that sexual tact which Ashley (being married to Mel-
anie) was supposed to be applying to Scarlett, for
whom he felt a sharp animal desire. Scarlett's clothes
and his become the naked suits of human animals in
love at this stage of civilization. Of course, Ashley is
painted as an idealistic, almost bookish male in love
with a serene, leisurely, and dreamlike, aristocratic
mode of life. But this only points his obvious Holly
wood avoirdupois. Scarlett says of her sisters and the
sick Melanie: "I could leave them ... I'm sick of them
. . . tired of them . . ." Later, struck with quick sym
pathy, he "came to her swiftly and in a moment had
her in his arms, cradling her comfortingly, pressing
 THE TECHNICOLOR OF LOVE 7I

her black head to his heart, whispering: 'Dear! My

brave dear, don't! You mustn't cry!' " On the screen,
his arms do "cradle her comfortingly." Surely, it is not
that the rules of etiquette have been disobeyed. On
the contrary, the visualization and vocalization here
are as good as the scenario for them, and no doubt
such personages as Miss Mitchell's characters existed
at that period of the South. In fact, it is because Miss
Leigh and Mr. Howard exist so snugly in this pattern,
with such magnificent visual illusion, that we don't
mind fitting in with them. But to submit to this pat
tern entirely would be to accept the art of the movies,
whereas we know in the back of our heads that this
is impossible. Leslie Howard and Vivien Leigh can
never remain in our minds as Ashley Wilkes and Scar
lett O'Hara. After all, we are to see them in other pro
ductions, other patterns. And because their personali
ties are powerful enough to gain them excellent roles,
they emerge from the artistic pattern of Gone with the
Wind as the naked body from its clothes—they shine
through their multiple masquerade as the sexual per
former shines through his preliminary motions of
courtship. The male voice is the spokesman for all
those tongueless organs whose "speech" must be sub
ordinated to the human personality as will and moral
ity and is itself a fetish against the fetishism which is
capable of dismantling the human organism and sepa
rating one part from another as in a debacle. The
72 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

divestment for sex is a mock debacle, and if the mutual

pairs of hands pluck and dislodge, it is only under the
originally visible guarantee, by all the features of the
face (above which golden hair is an angelic token),
that clothes are but conventional illusions, and that
the intention of the covered part is as open to the day
light and as subject to as much criticism as the un
covered part.
What a terrible danger does Tyrone Power in his
unaccustomed role as the Son of Fury undergo in this
respect! For to show the skin beneath the skin of the
civilized animal is to paste rudely on the conventional
urban eye an illusion of an ultimate dimension. But
the true ultimate dimension is and must be morality—
the infinite, rather than the single, instance: the eval
uation in time and social experience rather than the
evaluation in space and individual experience. And
this is the romantic illusion: the absolute evaluation
on the Single Instance, the finger pointing to the
closed door, and the whisper: They Do. Sexual life
cannot be only this. Yet only true art could succeed
in perpetuating such an illusion; otherwise it is tran
sient, a "mock wedding." Technicolor is but an at
tribute of art, a pure medium of representation. It is
the latest, perhaps the final, contribution of Hollywood
to that illusion of objective reality which has been its
dilating destiny. The color of Miss Leigh's skin: it is
not precisely the color of flesh. It is artifice. But be-
 THE TECHNICOLOR OF LOVE 73

hind all these incredibly transparent artifices, like so

many useless dermal layers (pure because we know the
living persons are not there—these are only their re
flected images), is the ultimate fact of human life,
human desires, human movements, human etiquette.
Technicolor takes us to the ends of the earth, away
from the costumes of Miss Leigh and Mr. Howard,
and back again in an instant. Every visible and unde
fended part of them, flesh or fabric, is isolated, by
dint of the transparent facts of illusion, from any or
ganized resistance to our will of imagination. As the
words go on, as the routine proceeds, as these human
beings obey all the conventions of art, manners, and
their sexual natures, as we know they have obeyed
them in faithful and sincere mimicry (since their
obedience is being mechanically reproduced for us),
we are tempted to contradict it all, to unmake history,
to stop the film at a certain point, and to direct the
deployments of the remainder. Since there is no su
preme artistic illusion to hinder us, the technicolor
epidermis of the screen is ripped open . . .
CHAPTER IV

THE SOMNAMBULES

Xhe tradition of the somnambules in the movies is

more conspicuous than those who put two and two
together to make money may have noticed. It is only
prudery, of course, that would prevent conceding the
fact that the somnambule's myth essentially signifies
the "ritual" readying of woman for sex by depriving
her of her conscious powers through hypnotism. But
she does not have to get up from her bed and walk in
her sleep to respond to intangible influences of desire
and fear. In ordinary, "waking" terms, somnambulism
in women is susceptibility to seduction by psychologi
cal tour de force. The Phantom of the Opera, a silent
movie, very well illustrated that the somnambule, act
ing under some strange power which defiled her, was
a percolation of the Gothic romance into modern art.
Although she has appeared from time to time, her
success per se has never equalled that of the vampire,
74
 THE SOMNAMBULES 75

who, far from being unaware of her disreputable state,

was not only acquainted with her wickedness but
exulted in her erotic triumphs. I remember a Holly
wood "Trilby" some fifteen years ago, as well as the
heroines of old mystery thrillers, hypnotized and at
the mercy of the villain's amorous brutality. Their
state of danger was a logical antithesis to their con
scious chastity—a sort of mock retribution with the
devil as the instrument.
Three of the most famous vampires I remember are
Theda Bara, Valeska Suratt, and Nita Naldi, though
by the time Naldi arrived, the descriptive word was
already well dated. Yet vampirish movements in wom
en continued to be popularly—and justly—termed
"snaky." No doubt, "The Serpent of Old Nile" had
much to do with the verbal tradition, and indeed,
more than one gaudily mature Cleopatra graced the
native screen with a snake as both physical instructor
and murderer. All the vampires fascinated their vic
tims with the same paraphernalia of hypnotism as
that with which Svengali subdued Trilby: a serpentine
pantomime and a glittering eye, appurtenances of the
most ancient magic. The somnambules, or the hypno
tized ladies, were rendered almost rigid, or at least in
capable of very articulate movement. This was pre
cisely the effect produced in the unfortunate males
who came within the enchanted zone of the vampire.
We have to conclude that nature has provided a
76 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION
poetical antinomy in the sexual struggle. Yet Holly
wood—as was almost inevitable—did not allow this an
tinomy to remain static. What was not inevitable was
that the variation should have been as distinctive and
triumphant as that embodied by the Gish sisters, Mae
Marsh, and a few successors. Though physically frail,
these glamor girls of the sunlit sets possessed a virtue
that was strong. Of course, they too had a literary an
cestry, but one more specialized and recent than that
of their vampirish sisters. Although, at first, they
seemed merely the delicate romantic heroine of decent
but rather humble birth, they were seen to exhibit
signs of the strong-mindedness of Jane Austen's hero
ines. Consequently they had a dialectie element whieh
militated against their serving the European conven
tion of the female as born imder the star of Venus,
and hence a "natural" sinner, not so morally responsi
ble as the male. But D. W. Griffith, who may indeed
have been influeneed by Barrie—who knows?—pre
ferred to coneeive woman as naturally virtuous—a kind
of Eve versus a Lilith conception, the latter realized
by the vampire. Yet this director had a somewhat Vie-
torian sensibility and modeled his famous heroines as
women less susceptible than Eve. Not only did Lillian
and Dorothy Gish refuse to consider the snake either as
a physieal or moral instructor, but they would deny it
even their metaphysical toleration unless there were a
minister and his book in the background. Though,
 THE SOMNAMBULES 77

later, Dorothy took over gamine roles, the simple, if

essential, condition of the typical Griffith movie was
that the exquisite sense of chastity possessed by Lillian
should be constantly threatened. The value of this
pattern is obvious. What is remarkable is the special
physical state that resulted in Miss Gish: she became
a permanent lyric of jumpiness. It seems doubtless
that Griffith trained her in her mannerisms as though
she were a canary ... I used to read of numberless
rehearsals of one short scene, the very arduousness of
which must have contributed to the effect Griffith
desired in his star. His judgment was excellent, since
Lillian became a human canary who, while her song
was perforce unheard, portrayed her fright beautifully
in the visible flutter of her body and arms. What a
strange antithesis for the legendary somnambule! Be
fore she became defenseless, and thus an object of
desire to the subconscious minds of the male audience,
the somnambule-type had had to be hypnotized and
rendered utterly passive and obedient.
Surely both the anti-somnambulistic vampire and
the pre-somnambulistic canary are discrete but com
plementary types, together forming a dual opposition
to the orthodox somnambule, the woman who submits
herself readily to the powers of sleep or hypnotism.
Both vampire and canary illustrate the sexual excess
of the female herself, while the somnambule is merely
an instrument of the sexual excess of the male. This
78 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION
distinction, self-evident with the somnambule and the
vampire, is superfieially ambiguous with regard to the
canary. Why is the canary not merely Consciously
Frightened Virtue? Indeed, why should the canary
not be coupled with the somnambule, sinee when
awake and rational, they both resist unweleome seduc
tion? But the whole psyehologieal hypothesis of the
somnambulistie and hypnotized states here interferes
with the argument, for this hypothesis implies a split
in the desires of the woman. While, in her abnormal
state, she cannot resist seduction, this does not neces
sarily presuppose that a level of desire does not exist
in her whieh she may obey undercertain eonditions of
release. Thus, the somnambule (and this is the basis
on whieh I evaluate the Holljwood aetresses in this
ehapter) is the generic female rather than an indi
vidual female.
In defining the eanary, we have to assume that all
women know, and understand more or less con-
seiously, what does and does not exeite the male. Un
less a woman wishes to feign defenselessness for her
own aggressive end of seduetion by pretending to be
asleep or drugged, she knows that movement, par-
tieularly if of an extremely feminine kind, informs the
male perfeetly of her various irresistible and lively
charms; namely, the more aetive a frail woman is, the
more effeetively shedisplays herinviting fragility. Only
when the female is impassive, therefore, ean she pre-
 THE SOMNAMBULES 79

sume to claim neutrality of her own emotion. To the

snake figure of the vampire, we oppose the statuesque
figure of the somnambule. Yet, while grace of the
snake and grace of the canary are quite different, they
are, as symbolic patterns for female deportment, to be
considered equally conscious as part of the personality.
If "clean competition" be the issue, the snake by no
means has the advantage over the canary. And com
petition exists, even if it be only the professional com
petition of rival actresses.
I use such socially outdated symbols as "vampire"
and "canary" for the sake of the historicity of my argu
ment no less than for the sake of revealing the pro
found perspective of time in which I wish to situate
the Hollywood somnambules. Throughout this book,
I have tried to deal as much as possible with basic
psychology and basic norms. From a scientifically
analytical viewpoint, the motions of fear closely re
semble those of strong desire when the emotion is
unrepressed. The peculiarly artificial style of Miss
Gish's femininity (I speak of her Griffith days only)
must be considered a synthesis of fear and desire:
fear in the sense of timidity and virginal propriety,
and desire in the sense of flirtation, an impulse to be
noticed by and to please the male. These counter emo
tions produced their refined hieroglyph of the Gish
femininity under the Svengalism of Griffith, who con
ceived Miss Gish as a Trilby in whom pantomime was
8o THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

substituted for voice. It is worth noting here that

both Trilby and Lilhan are making love under the
direction of their masters, and, moreover, making love
professionally, one as a songstress, the other as a
movie actress. Consequently the element of evil in
the hypnotic males involved is forced to give way to
a more or less impersonal element of good: both
Griffith and Svengali were teachers and taught their
charges to earn a living. It is important to bear in
mind the economic element in the careers of those
Hollywood somnambules whom I shall discuss later.
The nervous somnambule of Lillian Gish is hard
working, although her type, considered with reference
to society and to the characters she portrayed, is less
competent than a very recent successor: Vivian Leigh.
Gone with the Wind and The Birth of a Nation over
lap in many respects. Both had heroines victimized
by the change the Civil War brought in its wake; both
were brutally awakened from the feudal dream into a
post-feudal reality. Both endured great physical rigors.
But Scarlett O'Hara, prophetically, was much more a
modern woman, a more complete psychological and
social type. Miss Gish was incidental to the theme of
her story, whereas the theme was incidental to the per
sonal story of Scarlett. What is Scarlett but a feudal
Eve who passed through the Lilith stage into a stage
ruled over by Tallulah Bankhead as the termagant
heroine of The Little Foxes? Scarlett learned to con-
 THE SOMNAMBUEES 8l

trol her nerves; therefore she seems nothing but a

Lillian who was initiated into a sophisticated person
ality by events. If Miss Gish had not been so active,
she would roughly correspond to Scarlett's counter
foil, Melanie. Miss Gish, however, was hardly more
than a stylized dream, a somnambule with the jitters.
Women who are ashamed of desire (and this is the
generic, psychologic base of the Gish formula) cannot
forever feign a pseudo-somnambulistic isolation—un
less as actresses they should become figments of the
romantic genre itself: dream characters, metaphysical
symbols, heroines of Poe. As an artist in pantomime.
Miss Gish could be as enchanting as anyone I have
ever watched; her art was unimpeachable, her charm
intense. Her modern counterparts, strangely enough,
are foreigners: Elizabeth Bergner and Luise Rainer.
Yet in comparison with Miss Gish, these actresses are
sophisticated and more human. The course of movie
history dealt Miss Gish a harsh but poetical fate: her
heroine of Broken Blossoms (the Gish-Griffith chef-
d'oeuvre) was but the somnambule debunked—beaten
rather than hypnotized into her "ideal" stateof sexual
readiness.
Phoenix-like, the somnambule's myth arose from
the frail, lifeless body in the Ghinaman's arms to dom
inate in several curious forms the sexual industry of
Hollywood. Actresses from abroad have brought new
styles subtly inflecting the Gish tremor and the Bara
82 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

undulation of sex-consciousness. The importation of

foreign stars was absolutely necessary to the expansion
of the love-romance film, the growth of which was
coincident with the general growth of Hollywood and
the "art" of the movies. The great female stars of
Hollywood, as soon as the foreigners began to arrive,
were characteristically "women of passion"; that is to
say, they became the heroines, whereas before they
were "villainesses." Norma Talmadge was one of the
few female stars of fairly mature and average charac
teristics who could compete with such players as Mary
Pickford, Marguerite Clark, and their mythical galaxy
of chastity and charm. The first important foreign
actress, the one who changed the tide, was Pola Negri,
who could not, however, reproduce her continental
successes in America. This was owing largely to the
ambiguous way in which Holl5AVOod understood her
talents: she was cast in semi-vampire roles. The truth
was that her histrionic realism was alien to the arti
ficial pattern of the Hollywood tradition of the vam
pire. The point is that she was not a somnambule, she
was not a neo-Gothic symbol. Hollywood ended her
career by casting her in an Irene Bordoni role.
As long as her spell remains potent, the Hollywood
somnambule thinks perpetually in terms of her own
myth, the myth Hollywood has fashioned for her,
and is indifferent to all others. Indifference is a char
acteristic of the sleepwalker as it is of sleep. When
 THE SOMNAMBULES 83
sleeping, we immunize ourselves to the outside world,
and when sleepwalking, we parade that immunity.
The paradoxical quality of the elision of the somnam-
bule with the woman-of-passion is that a certain im
munization from sex is combined with passionate
desire: a desire which must have at least the super
ficial appearance of activity. Garbo appeared on the
Hollywood horizon as a rich emissary of this pecuhar
ambivalence between chastity and passion. She corre
sponded, as a matter of fact, to the American taste for
symbolism in sex, for a dramatic arrangement of
chastity and passion conforming with the vestiges of
the puritan tradition. Hollywood's wizards correctly
sensed the Northern asceticism in Garbo and divined
its true mission. The extra-curricular images of Garbo's
loosely tailored suits and mannish shoes by no means
disappear as essences in her cinema portrayals. Her
grace is angular, no matter what she wears, and her
personality emanates a subtle frigidity. On the screen
in terms of character, this spiritual quality has the ap
pearance of "restraint," namely, passion held in re
straint—a "deep and smoldering" passion. Such a con
ception of Garbo's passion, however, is far too pat,
superficial, and, indeed, "literary." Not even the boys
in the backof the balcony believe it.
When a woman of passion is portrayed in the movies
(a unique instance and a moving portrayal were given
by Elizabeth Bergner in Dreaming Lips), American
84 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION
audiences misunderstand it in proportion to the lack of
"sizzling hot" embraces and innuendoes of the bed
room. Hence Garbo's metier of the woman-of-passion
inevitably and gradually became the kind of burlesque
which I designate as the charade. The pantomime of
Hollywood somnambules tends to be statically conven
tionalized (like the movements of national dance
forms), and when theylend themselves to the creation
of such a specific form as a character, they tend to
transform the movie they are playing in into a charade.
Garbo, play-acting passion to the hilt, created never
theless a somnambulistic kind of detachment. The au
dience as a whole senses this unerringly withoutbeing
aware of its structure, and the usual reviewer can do
no better than call it "mystery" or "remoteness," or—
at the most radical—"frigidity." After all, there are
mysteries of sex life which Hollywood does not treat,
from the most metaphysical, such as that treated by
Balzac in Seraphita, to the most technical, such as
those dealt with in the psychoanalytical clinic.
The sheer power of the somnambule's personality
arises from the social situation which it connotes:
frigidity in a woman of beauty or charm is a direct
challenge to male sexual vanity. Garbo's peculiar art
hasbeen always to say in essence to the male audience:
"Don't forget that I am only an image, and that that
is all I can be to you; in fact, it is all I would be even
if you, instead of Ramon Navarro or Melvyn Douglas,
 THE SOMNAMBULES 85
held me in your arms." Even if . . . that is perfectly
true. Still, such a conscious thesis in an actress's work
would not accountfor her devastating effect—only the
accidental presence of the somnambule's image ac
counts for it! Men sense the rigidity in Garbo's spine,
are aware of the broad, squarish shoulders deliberately
hunched and the long, poetically prehensile arms of a
growing youth; therefore, when she bends her head
back, revealing a neck as lissom as a white goose's,
there is an ambivalent reaction: her orthodox defenses
are down, her will against seduction seems to melt, at
last all her conscious, instinctive reluctance disap
pears ... A few moments of pantomime rehearse the
basic natural drama of sexually uneducated woman
and sexually educating man.
But Time is inexorable. Somehow, the most flam
boyant successes become, like weapons of warfare,
anachronisms. And Garbo's face, Garbo's somber, elu
sive charm, joined the anachronisms. The box-office
barometer, tardilyenough, began to fall. Hence Garbo
had to start all over again with the American public.
She was always wise about publicity—at least, her wis
dom was temporarily practical. She needed mystifica
tion no less than mystery. Her large feet and mannish
clothes, however, received too much publicity and had
a corrosive effect: as the mystery became stereotyped,
the mystification became too evident. In that plod
ding way the public has, movie audiences began to
86 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

wonder about the meaning of Garbo's "private" assets.

They read she was girlish and unaffected off the set.
They read that in real life she had lighthearted ro
mances. The moment had come when the mystifica
tion had to be elucidated, since the mystery had already
been liquidated. Hence Ninotchka, in which Garbo's
private style of dress became transiently her public, or
professional, style. The movie's plot followed the pat
tern of her "private" Hollywood legend of preoccupa
tion and standoffishness. In it she was cold, absorbed
in her work, distant from pleasure-loving society, and
oddly enough, shecame as an emissary from that home
of a new society, Russia. Ah, she was a revised som-
nambule of a revised steppes! She obeyed a Svengali
called Stalin until a realistic American came into her
life and awakened "the woman" in her. Now at last
the narcissistic appetite of the American public is satis
fied: Garbo, paragon of individual exoticism, has been
initiated into the national lessons of Vogue and
Harper's Bazaar/ She has entered the shopgirl's para
dise: imported chic. A strange Americanization for a
foreign actress: a fall from the true "Paris" model to
the original, American Paris-emulated model. How
timely Hollywood was—connecting its greatest star
with the destiny of hats on the eve of a war which iso
lated Paris from the fashion world!
The sado-masochism of the public was obviously
aroused when Garbo gave a belly laugh from the
 THE SOMNAMBULES 87
region of that remarkably monosyllabic pelvis, with
its boyish imitation of the Venus de Milo. This was
made clear by Ninotchka and its successor, Two-
Faced Woman, in which the star not only laughed,
giggled, and flirted like Ginger Rogers, but danced a
version of the rumba and appeared full-length in a
bathing suit. The audience mercilessly kibitzed
Garbo's kibitz of Garbo in the comic plot of a sports
woman's attempt to keep her new husband's love by
imitating (via a mythic twin sister) the city sirens he
is used to in his urban business life. Such are popular
triumphs—for the audience. Garbo is unbelievably in
appropriate in all but her sports getups, and even one
of those is bold, bold Bonwit-Teller. For his designs,
Adrian seems to have peregrinated between the Fifth
Avenue and the Broadway chic shops, turning out a
negligee that would sell for five dollars at Klein's on
Union Square. The star swishes around in them, like
Bette Davis before she learned how to walk from chair
to table in front of a camera, and dances with aston
ishing lightness and grace for one who seems to have
lead in her heels. Gonstance Bennett, who plays in
Two-Faced Woman, can give her hammer and siclde
and still win out as more human. Garbo's other face
is no less artificial than her first one; in fact, it's much
more so.

But the issue is an apparent Hollywood attempt to

Americanize its culture at a psychological moment in
88 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

history, and the method is in concrete sense "anti-

artificial." Garbo at last appears with eyelids bare of
false lashes. She is being made re-available to the
many by a kind of stripping. Even her voice is becom
ingegregious bydislocation from the traditional Garbo
personality. During Two-Faced Woman, I closed my
eyes in order to experiment, and Garbo's voice
sounded like a chipper little grandmother's. If Holly
wood goddesses, somnambules, and so on cannot be
transformed, they necessarily must yield to younger
rivals. Dietrich, too, had to go through a sort of meta
morphosis in order to revive her box-office divinity.
But in her case, since she is more morally common
place than Garbo, it was a matter of keeping the pat
tern but gently lowering it to another level of dignity.
This was accomplished in Destiy Rides Again, the
comedy-romance version of The Blue Angel.
Dietrich, more than Garbo or Grawford, has em
phasized the recognizable moral values in Hollywood
somnambulism. Grawford is a pure product of beauty
parlor and dramatic school, and thus there was a per
fect symbolism in casting her in the role of a woman
whose life was ruined by a scar on her cheek. The scar
itself is symbolic of "natural" ugliness and plainness,
which the nation's beauty parlors are sworn to destroy.
This movie charade was symbolic in still another way:
Grawford's public is being addressed much as was
Garbo's, if more tentatively: "Do you want our Joan
 THE SOMNAMBULES 89
as she is—or shall we start to rehaul her?" In the sense
that any girl who wants to reach the top in Holly
wood must eliminate all personal prejudices and de
sires, and submit herself passively to the Hollywood
factory of beauty and style, every actress in the movie
city is a sort of Trilby ... a Trilby who may or may
not be talented enough to act the roles she pleases
after two or three years. Dietrich, just as much typed
as Garbo, "clicked" by a more obvious route. She is
what the boys on the street corner sartorially describe
as "class." To put it more comprehensively and tact
fully, she is the Carnal Woman in distinction to the
Woman of Passion. Both European, Dietrich is more
typically so than Garbo, who brings a draught from
snow-capped mountains. The superiority of the Euro
pean brand of siren goes beyond her greater sophisti
cation as a woman and human being. She has a liter
ary, social, and theatrical tradition, and this invests
her inevitably with a humility in the center of which
is a superb assurance of her r61e as an instrument of
love. Dietrich has this exceptional humility, which
too frequently passes for chic swagger or mere pose.
That Dietrich preserves this quality through, the thick
and thin of her artistic fortunes attests to its univer
sality. To compare her role in The Blue Angel, how
ever, with that in The Scarlet Empress or another of
her heavy glamor parts is to observe the process of her
somnam bulization.
9© THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

The bedroom morality of a Dietrich heroine is

always precisely the same: vague. The only rational
conclusion about many of her r61es is that she would
certainly be a lady of easy virtue (even if she isn't) if
she could ever bring herself to be really promiscuous.
Though sometimes the story gives one the right to
believe she has been promiscuous, her life is changed
or threatens to be changed by the entrance of a unique
male who arouses in her a sentiment of pure love (ob
serve that this is a reversal of the Garbo legend).
Dietrich's pubhc has relished this almost mathemati
cally set theme ever since shebegan to make American
pictures. Its popular attraction is unquestionably the
delicious ambiguity of fact that she enjoys all the
sensations of promiscuity without necessarily having
to go to bed with anyone! Thus the somnambulistic
ritual: she is a carnal woman who sacrifices her proved
nature to chaste behavior temporarily or as an experi
ment; that is, she creates a charade of virtue while
apparently she has undergone no basic change of per
sonality. It is as though, for the benefit of her man or
her public, or both in one, Dietrich consents to an
initiation rite into pure love, a rite which (she some
times carefully warns her prospective mate) may or
may not transform her. What is the implication for
a male spectator who has no special desire to hypno
tize a woman in order to get her to sleep with him? It
is that Dietrich would have been ripe for him before
 THE SOMNAMBULES 9I

John Wayne or Gary Cooper came into her life to

limit her activities by offering marriage. The Ameri
can ethnic conscience requires obeisance to its two
gods: Money and a Decent Home; namely, a proper
standard of living honestly paid for. Dietrich is a siren
who consents to behave chastely while she is directly
in front of the altar of the American conscience. Her
somnambule—charming, subtle, of an infinite twilight
wisdom of Lilith—is obviously prostituted to an idea
rather than to the opposite sex. The idea is that, if she
were not just hopelessly "bad," she would enjoy the
privilege of marrying a nice American and having a
couple of kids ...
Given its premises, Hollywood is most wise! As
long as personality is a problem in the clinical sense,
and assuredly it is just that today, the problem of
good and evil is hopelessly compromised and may be
manipulated with bold symbolic freedom. A dated,
and non-Hollywood, manifestation of this moral am
biguity was R. L. Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde fable.
In its own terms, Hollywood has a "literature" paral
lel to the sophisticated creative treatment of personal
ity problems in Gide and Pirandello. If it were not for
Bette Davis, however, it is doubtful if Hollywood
could be said to have furnished a concrete case of
modern neurotic somnambulism. Miss Davis has
many times portrayed sexual neurasthenics in plots
92 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

more or less revealing the technical portent of charac

ter, and thus she appears as the inheritor of the Gish
tradition, as a veritable jitterburg of tragediennes. She
has never sought to soft-pedal her pantomimic pro
clivities, and these have tended toward the crystalliza
tion of a nervous, sharply high-lighted style, mixing
petulance, acerbity, infantile emotionalism, and whim
sicality. This style has nothing necessarily to do with
her stories, being as integrated with her spontaneous
physical movements as were Miss Gish's quaveriness,
flirtiness, shyness, and naivete. Miss Davis seems only
a Gish grown older and wiser, aware that her early
illusions of sexual innocence (somnambulism-of-the-
chaste as a social value) are wretchedly inadequate
but still unable to do altogether without them. The
Davis personality, while advertising itself as the com
mon "maladjusted" type, is brazen, strong, and con
sciously willing to meet society with what weapons it
has at command. This was distinctly brought out in
Dark Victory—in which the moral problem, however,
was resolved in a physiological debacle. A satanic
flavor (an anti-somnambulism) exists in Miss Davis'
typical heroine: she is like a woman who has been
awakened from an unconscious state to discover that
she has been ravished, but who suspects that the
"somnambulism" had a measure of her own complic
ity, and thus has a perpetually unsolved psychological
problem. The paradox of casting Miss Davis in ordi-
 THE SOMNAMBULES 93

nary r61es requiring a purely dramatic working out of

a psychological problem, of course, is irrelevant to
Hollywood specifications. Though Miss Davis' neu
rotic style has a certain legitimate reflection in the
literary material given her, I cannot eliminate an
image of her as a perverse somnambule who perpet
ually purges herself in a dramatic crisis false to her
true character. It is the awe-inspiring secret of Holly
wood that its dramatic situations, while superficially
plausible, seldom solve the problems they are sup
posed to solve. Like much second- and third-rate liter
ature, this is to present the pre-drama, and is related,
as I shall show at length in a later chapter, to a static
conception of drama in art and morality in life. In the
movies of Hollywood this is not so significant as it is
in modern novels, since the cinema terms are basi
cally hypocritical, a romantic camouflage of the real
problems.
While Garbo and Miss Davis are slyly unavailable
in sexual roles, Dietrich and MaeWest are slyly avail
able. Of all the ladies with sleep in their eyes. Miss
West is the most complex—but if she is the most
complex, Hedy Lamarr is the simplest. Miss Lamarr
doesn't have to say "Yes," allshehas to do is to yawn.
A surrealist imager, Joseph Cornell, has isolated the
purely poetic quality of this somnambule by casting
her apparently empty beauty and unquestionable im
pression ofnocturnal acquiescence in the personality of
94 the HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

the opposite sex. The somnambule Hedy accepts even

this imposition with astonishing placidity! Mr. Cornell
cut her face from one of her photographs and imposed
it overthe face of a young painter of the quattrocentoin
a reproduction of hisself-portrait. Her beautiful eyes do
not protest from amidst the alien hair of the past, and
the tingling torso does not rise up from the seat of
the opposite sex. In her perfect will-lessness Miss
Lamarr is, indeed, identified metaphysically with her
mesmeric midnight captor, the loving male.
Once she portrayed a showgirl (not a chorus girl)
in the movie Ziegfeld Girl. This animated odalisque
of American theatrical history, the showgirl, is the
purest somnambulistic type of all. She neither speaks
nor is spoken to; she appears and disappears more in
advertently than the dream; she is loaded with dia
monds of the imagination and rubies of hoarded
blood. The most fantastically unreal costumes not
long ago were invented for her, merely to distract the
attention from the fact that she was actually clothed.
Her gait is strictly standardized; it is a gliding, rhyth
mic somnambulism . . . The strip-tease girl of bur
lesque is but a step and a shake toward "waking up"
the showgirl; namely, toward achieving that reality of
sex which the poorer man finds necessary for his eve
ning hallucinations, since he cannot buy—even in the
imagination—the shimmer and sheen of the showgirl.
The strip teaser is only the somnambule tipped off
 THE SOMNAMBULES 95

that she can't get away, like the showgirl, with being
passive and statuesque; she must actively evince the
symptoms of sexual readiness and even seem to un
dress for the sexual act. A further step toward such
"reality" away from somnambulism, and yet still in
the ritual-symbolic mold, is the device of the female
impersonator. Because nature has not fitted him for
the waking role he really desires, and because he can
not imagine that role satisfyingly in his own dreams,
the female impersonator imitates the somnambule.
His experience takes him, however, from the showgirl
stage to the strip-tease stage and beyond it in an agony
of frustration, because, although he is often, if tal
ented and attractive, relatively successful (though he
has almost disappeared from the professional theatre),
he cannot realize in private life those sterling func
tions which would give him a necessary impartiality
toward his artistic charade. Thus, every time he puts
on his female masquerade, he must realize the whole
gamut of somnambulism I have just outlined in one
evening—from the astral vision of a Hedy Lamarr at
the top of the stairs to the strip-tease girl doing "the
bumps" at the bottom . . . and finally, perhaps, be
reduced to that blushless order of advertisement from
which even women usually cringe. It would be diffi
cult to imagine a sexual type that would rescue the
purgative somnambulism of the female impersonator
from its context of devastating reality and render it
96 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION
paradisiacal and esthetic, but such a type actually ar
rived in Hollywood from Broadway: Mae West.
As with all somnambules, Miss West's infirmity is
instantly recognizable to everyone, though not always
correctly identified as such—namely, as a symbolic or
dream form. It is remarkable that one may think of
her as a joke, or a freak even, but not, except through
sheer snobbery, as an objectionable woman. The most
amazing thing about Miss West is her good humor.
She herself has said, with more perspicacity than a
thousand cinema scribes, that her popularity rests, or
at least rested, on the fact that everyone believes in
her goodness. Assuredly, it is a goodness more con
vincing than that of any of her competitors, for it has
large quantities of the maternal in it. Her particular
charade is fairy tale, and astoundingly impertinent. In
herfilms, shewas the Bad Girlwho was always a Perfect
Angel. Her instinct for ambivalence was as neat as
the magnificently simple style she created to express
it. Her goodness was the goodness of everyone's
mother in the most elementary and orthodox sense,
whereas her badness, so mysterious to the uninitiated
as to induce many to eall her "sexless," was a purely
mimic badness. Miss West dared to add a legitimate
dash of humor to the myth of the CEdipus complex.
No doubt she observed the female impersonator
and, spontaneously imitating him, extracted for her
self all his eomedy, leaving him his pathos. In effect,
 THE SOMNAMBULES 97

she expunged the burlesque quality from his active

masquerade of the female sex. On the other hand,
she implicitly placed on the altar of his seriousness the
one supreme sacrifice of female nature: the mother's
recognition and condonement of the homosexual flaw
in her son! This, of course, almostnever happensin life;
that is why it had to happen at least once in art. Only
one convincing symbol to embody this condonement
is imaginable—for her to imitate the ritual of her son's
excess and perversion: a ritual which, she recognizes,
may be but the ironical counterpart of her own per
verse repression of sexuality, or else a straightforward
reflection of the same depraved desires and their real
ization. Thus came about in Hollywood art the most
extraordinary and insinuating somnambule of them
all.
If you will analyze the simple but subtle hieroglyph
of Miss West's physical style, it is possible to identify
the gestural traits of all the somnambulistic types I
have mentioned. Her gait is considered inimitable-
only a unique synthesis could be so inimitable. At first
glance it seems to be a disrespectful emulation of the
Lillian Russell era of feminine charm, a Bowery ver
sion of a Florodora girl. But its idiom is too creative
for that, its intonations are too distinctive. Miss
West's poise, identical on every occasion, no matter
what, is inevitably carried out, while it corresponds to
nothing in life. It suggests, however, mellowed and
 98 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION
reassured, the hysterically stylized movements of the
female impersonator. Moreover, though few may have
noticed it, Miss West is as lazy as a snake. Yet she is
always a showgirl, and, just as paradoxically, she is
also always "on the make." She is too dignified to do
"the bumps," an activity which she reserves either for
her eyes or her voice. Again, it would be audacious
and unconventional to call her delicate, yet her deli
cacy has the status of a duchess's concern for the for
mal respect due her; in this sense, she is an illustration
from Ronald Firbank. Like Lillian Gish, albeit anach-
ronistically, sheassumes in her person and without self-
consciousness the prerogatives which a fragile female
once believed, if she had been reared properly, were
accepted by a sympathetic and gentle world. She
knows what is, or was, due a lady, and wouldn't take
guff from Garbo. She is also, inevitably, mysterious;
when she smiles and rolls her eyes up, I think of
Mona Lisa and the Sphinx; that is, of the banalized
classics of mystery.
The strip-tease girl is forced to exaggerate the show
girl, and the female impersonator is forced to ex
aggerate the strip-tease girl—this is the minimum r61e
for the somnambule; after this, there must be differ
ent dreams, different gestures, a different style . . .
That I find the somnambules the most attractive sym
bols of femininity is a purely personal prejudice. But
I must assert that I have not tried to determine here
 THE SOMNAMBULES 99

Hollywood's prize winners in general sex appeal or

realistically negotiable charm. I have tried to explain
the mechanism of the charade—to analyze a phenom
enon peculiar to the movie city. Only Hollywood,
with its complete tastelessness, could have leapt the
chasm between the somnambulistic female impersona
tor—so intent on "waking up" to a new reality—and a
visible and animated symbol (in Mae West) which
could bestow on him a secure somnambulism and,
through an art of maternal understanding, rescue him
from that vulgarity into which the somnambulism of
the unmarried woman (imitated by him) had con
signed him in America. The scandalous sway of Miss
West's hips—it reminds me of nothing so much as
the motion of a cradle; it is hypnotic, soothing: a fin
ishedand flawless equilibrium...
CHAPTER V

THE GOOD VILLAIN AND THE

BAD HERO

Between these ambivalent poles—villainy and virtue

—the most striking types of Hollywood hero have been
stretched, their voluntary suffering being the better
borne as they are mindful, during the intense spiritual
and physical suffering they undergo, of the reward that
lies at the end of the torture: their salaries. The zest
for living and high adventure which is displayed by
so many protagonists in gangster melodramas and his
torical romances—this feeling I have never been able
entirely to dissociate from the type of self-confidence
a man exhibits to the world when he is certain of a
well-paying job in the movies as well as certain of his
ability to survive the final blank from the gun that (if
he enacts a gangster) is presumed to kill him. I do not
depreciate the talents of Edward G. Robinson, James
Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, and others of the sym
pathetic bad man type (a type, even as I write, some-
100
 GOOD VILLAIN AND BAD HERO lOl

whatsenescent), for they have brought a certain vital

ity and character to lines on the screen that might
easily have been void of interest and ingeniously per
formed roles obviously cut from the identical piece of
whole cloth, fitted with but few alterations to suit
their personal idiosyncrasies. Nor do I point with in
adequate sophistication to the fact that the Holly
wood gangster hero has often been a bad man sugared
with the sanctity of vulgar sentimentality. For to this
charge might be opposed: "But you, who have com
plained that Hollywood does not treat seriously
enough the problem of good and evil, now deplore
that both the traditional beloved rogue and contem
porary 'good man gone wrong' are absurdly ambiguous
—apparently just because the actors are well paid for
their work!"
I bow my head. It is true. I realize that the greatest
heroes of all time have been sinners in the conven
tional sense, andthat the protagonist ofGreek tragedy,
the most significant ethical type in Western art, may
be viewed as gathering unto himself the moral burden
of mankind: he must (even as Jesus Christ) martyr
himself for the sins of others and be stretched between
the very poles I have mentioned, villainy and virtue,
before the critical yetsympathetic gaze of an audience,
realizing that, as the hero is a symbol for society, so
is the individual actor but a symbolic vessel for the
characteristics of the hero. It is not that in its own way
102 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

Hollywood does not recognize the existence of the

problem of good and evil, it is that its terms are artis
tically disingenuous, and that, though realism either of
a romantic or naturalistic sort may be intended, the
result is nevertheless apt to be charade-like, of an alle
gorical crudity.
At first sight, it would seem that the moral struggle
of the criminal, especially the dude gangster, is fool
proof and, barring obvious fictional devices, realistic
enough; namely, has a rough proportion of truth, a
fair adherence to the facts. Certainly Hollywood is not
to be chided for having spared the rod and spoiled the
gangster. But this was a journalistic realism, and the
obvious fictional device was to present the criminal as
a weakling or a "pure victim" of circumstance. Such
was the moral thesis of two of the most famous of
Hollywood's gangster melodramas. Public Enemy with
James Cagney and Scarface with Paul Muni. A third,
Little Caesar, unequivocally indicated vanity as the
vice supreme and posited the guilt of the Napoleonic
complex (current examples, Mussolini and Hitler),
which in its most serious aspect, hinted even by
Hollywood, is the inferiority complex. Thus, evil, as
obediently typified by Hollywood tradition, is the re
sult of deviation from society, its laws and conventions
—among which, incidentally, is a decent standard of
living. In fact, with respect to this last, Hollywood
does not depart an inch from the sacred platitudes of
 GOOD VILLAIN AND BAD HERO IO3

criminology; the criminal element arises from social

maladjustment owing to lack of education and to
temptation practically fostered by poverty. The
"heroes" of the rod and the stiletto-glance emerge as
such notorious examples because of extreme personal
daring combined with extreme personal vanity. They
are outstanding victims of an "individualistic illu
sion"—a romantic belief that they can "beat the
game." Thus, psychologically, they differ in no degree
from the beloved rogue type ofpre-cinema fiction, from
the Homerian Ulysses to The Prisoner of Zenda. The
swashbuckling heroes of Douglas Fairbanks, Senior,
were early Hollywood examples of the fascinating
scoundrel who won the ladies' hearts and yet was by
no means morally irreproachable; especially two of his
heroes areclassically significant: Robin Hood and Don
Juan. What may be called the Robin Hood motifis the
most comprehensive, perhaps, that could be assumed
to motivate the beloved rogue, and of course Holly
wood has not failed to exploit the theme of benevolent
villainy also in regard to its gunman and racketeer
heroes. There was always love or loyalty to a hench
man, a sister, a mother, or a virtuous sweetheart to do
duty for salving the criminal's conscience toward so
ciety. In Scarface, it is a sister who brings out the only
humane trait in the character of the gangster, who in
every other respect reveals himself as a cheap show-off
and a profound coward.
104 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

It certainly seems not only artistically conventional

but natural to humanize such a type-villain as the
gangster, with his journalistically stereotyped traits.
But it should be recalled that the gangster is, to begin
with, a somewhat limited symbol of social noncon
formity. He does not represent either a heresy to some
subtle ethicalcustom of society, such as the extra-legal
relations of the sexes, or a conscious rebellion against
economic, political, or religious laws. That is, the
gangster is an "unethical" sinner, he does not deviate
through principle but through some muffled necessity;
moreover, he is not, like Raskolnikoff, a borderline case,
a man who commits a crime for esthetic-ethical rea
sons, partly out of an inner necessity to experience a
certain emotion, and partly because he obscurely per
ceives an incongruity inherent in the processes of legal
justice. Raskolnikoff's metaphysical principle, that of
experiment in sin, touches strangely upon both the
decadence of Greek drama in Euripides, whose "hu
manism" questioned the authority of the gods, and
the pseudo-ethic of the modern gangster, who kills for
a thrill. Both Scarface and Raskolnikoff are modern
and sceptical to the extentthat they are individualistic,
and in this sense emblematic of the romantic hero
developed in nineteenth-century literature. Even as
Rhett Butler of Gone with the Wind, they have a
"cavalier" attitude toward what respectable society
considers is fixed, absolute, and thus sacred, whether
 GOOD VILLAIN AND BAD HERO IO5

it be God or the Republican Party. I visualize Raskol-

nikoff as a man somewhat Einsteinian in his sensibil
ity, one who apprehended somehow the hidden com
plexity of the criminal's guilt; that is, observing that
the criminal deeds of murder and theft were sins
against both God and society, he perceived—or in
tuited—a discreteness, a confusion between these
points of view toward crime—namely, God's and the
police's. Raskolnikoff somehow imagined that God's
retribution should be as persistently and emphatically
material as that of the police's: a purely logical and
practical, rather than ethical, issue. One cannot ac
cuse him of lack of spirituality, yet it would seem that
he missed in sensible observation, not only a logical
retribution, but even the basis for the Ghristian as
sumption of God's protection over the innocent and
His precaution against the impulses of the evil. Truly,
the police are not omnipotent, they cannot prevent
crime, but they can punish it. Thus the ironic title
of Dostoievsky's novel. Crime and Punishment,
whereas its real theme was, paradoxically because of
the inverted order of the words, Crime and Pre
vention. RaskolnikofFs tragedy was that he could
carry through the crime as logically as the police could
pursue and capture him, the criminal. The only true
cancelling of the crime was that of the police, which
is why he accepted it fatalistically, even saved the
police the trouble of pursuit. Dostoievsky's grim moral
lo6 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

was: If not the pre-cancelling of God (the sensibility

of Good), then the post-cancelling of the pohce (the
sensibility of Redemption from Evil).
The economic r61e of the romantic hero is that he
is out for what he can get; whether it is inside or out
side the pattern of legal conformity is of no account
to him, but the extremity of his emotions nevertheless
logically carries him beyond the boundaries. His in
spiration, as in the case of Don Juan, is often sexual,
and thus a greater ambiguity of immorality attaches to
this sub-type than to those who, such as the gangster,
endanger a kind of material property competed for on
less humane terms: money and private property other
than women. Although a large portion of society
frowns or pretends to frown on wife-stealing and hus
band-stealing, fornication and adultery have tacitly
been deemed essential to the working of the social
order, particularly since the post-Victorian "emancipa
tion" of woman. A certain purely humane, free form
of sexual competition exists, and condemnation of
transgressors against sexual morality takes the form of
social exclusivism of various degrees of harshness, but
is not in the large sense to be termed "legal." Briefly,
one cannot go to jail for stealing a woman's affections
unless, to effect the theft, it has been necessary to mur
der her husband, her father, her brother, or her sweet
heart. Without requiring a metaphysical sensibility,
the movie gangsters have always recognized that it
 GOOD VILLAIN AND BAD HERO IO7

was The Law they were up against, and the meta

physical aspect of the law which corrals a cinema
Dillinger on a mountain top is no less and no more
inexorable and "absolute" than that which corraled
Raskolnikoff in the ofhce of the police inspector. Both
are physical processes presumably set in perpetual mo
tion until they attain their end, the apprehension of
the criminal, and meanwhile they have the united
ethical approbation of society as well as the assistance
of "every decent citizen."
A dynamic law of living has it that all forms of ex
cessive passion or moral extremism are self-cancelling.
But an intuitive awareness of this law has never de
terred those who are seriously tempted to be extreme
from fulfilling their natures. After all, it is experience
which is desired foremost by human beings, and if
moral problems exist in society, making it natural for
art to depict them, it is not awareness of "inevitable
retribution" that should deter the heroes of drama and
fiction from action, for then art would be homiletics;
virtually, it would commit suicide. How curious it is
to note that suicide is the precise metaphysic which
governs the moral flavor of gangster sagas as well as
of Dostoievsky's great novel of crime—for does not
Raskolnikoff's behavior constitute a sort of suicide?
Ah, but it is a moral suicide, a true expiation, an ex
change of a sense of Hell for a sense of Purgatory, and
therefore not self-extinction except in the dramatic
lo8 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

sense of a change of identity. Yet what is the expiation

of the gangsters who have died in a hundred Holly
wood movies? Indeed, the hollowness of the art of
movie gangsterism is that the moral experience is
lacking—the sense of the nature of crime is lacking.
Thus the sociological dictum that ignorance produces
crime is socially true but dramatically and esthetically
defective. CEdipus was a genius; it is only that he
lacked a single point of information: the identity of
his mother and father.
Why—and here is Hollywood's journalistic realism
—do, not only screen criminals, but actual criminals
sometimes have to be dragged "the last mile"—why
do they whine, beg for impossible pardons, or sit in
brutal apathy? Because they cannot understand why
they are being punished, that is, because they have the
amoral inflection of the beloved rogue, the same
romantic adventurer whose individualistic social non
conformity is an ethic of "I (namely, the ego) am
good and society is bad," without realizing that a dia
lectic must exist, that every individual is a result of
social forces. It could be argued that "society" is sub
stituted by the gangster and the beloved rogue for
"the father," but one should not begin by making the
mistake of assuming the family-complex isisolated from
society! Jean Jacques Rousseau's "dodge" that the
secret solution lies in a sort of spiritual nudism merely
placed the pagan tradition ineffectually behind the
 GOOD VILLAIN AND BAD HERO IO9

ego ... The sentimental gangster (always with a dash

of Robin Hood if not Rousseau in his moral com
plexion) is a confused person who believes that right
is might insofar as the individual and only the individ
ual goes; if he has a few friends who like to be or
dered around, all the better. This is largely the result
of narcissism, but how can we morally evaluate nar
cissism? The question is too broad for Hollywood.
An important recent event in the cinema city is the
transference of the romantic emphasis from the crim
inal—though he still clings as the "gentleman thief"
or a shady detective (vide, I Wake up Screaming) —
to a revival of Tarzan and the introduction of Super
man: oneof their chief traits is an obviously justifiable
narcissism. The social defect of Tarzan is that he is
still too rural; it has taken him too long to adapt his
prowess to the conditions of urban civilization, a
sequence Hollywood has seen fit to imitate by its
casual production of this series. The fact is, Tarzan is
too much inflected toward certain more romantic, al
most ideal, aspects of life isolated from reality; his
jungle paradise, for instance, is a reincarnation of the
Eden myth. On the contrary. Superman derives his
supernatural qualities, which ally him to the airplane
and the cannon themselves, directly from the city in
which he appears to have been bornand always stayed.
He has a reporter's job, and the only credible explana
tion of his muscles is that he developed them in a
no THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

gymnasium, though this hypothesis could not explain

his superhuman strength and preternatural psychic
and neural capacities. His importance in the popular
imagination is testified, not only by Hollywood's hir
inghim, but by the many dozens of imitations of him
in comic-strip literature. In one way, he is the logical
inverse of the gangster hero; he is out to counter gang
sters and their gangs; he is also the sublimation of all
detective heroes, while at the same time he is not as
sociated with such an unsavory place as a police court.
His solution of evil is not merely superhuman, it is
super-social. In not accepting the realistic conditions
ofsociety's struggle against crime, hesjmbolically does
not accept the moral premises of normal human efforts
to correct and prevent crime. It is now a common
place of comic-strip, cinema, and radio melodramas
that individuals who take the apprehension of crim
inals into their own hands (even though, like Super
man, they may fly through the air with ,the greatest
of ease) are disliked or somehow distrusted by the
appointed guardians of the law. This is no romantic
convention of melodrama, but a logical reaction re
alistically founded. The moral significance of Super
man is that he is a disrupter of normal official order
through the possession of exceptional faculties and
perceptions, and it is inevitable for different moral
ideas to flow from suchan equipment when it is placed
 GOOD VILLAIN AND BAD HERO 111

by the individual owner at the service of his ownwhim.

What is a romantic convention, however, is the self
less aspect of Superman, his apparent lack of personal
problems or even private satisfactions. Especially dan
gerous is the "superman" attitude of individuals in
the case of international war, for then the adventurer,
the beloved rogue, interested, as I have pointed out,
only in his personal prowess, is a potential "man with
out a country" and, hence, may be enlisted by any
class, nation, or individual who happens to attract
him or offer the highest pay. A man of this ilk is po
tentially the most morally dangerous a society could
possess, depending upon his degree of talent. Thus it
is only in the popular moral sense that Superman is the
gangster turned inside out. More truthfully, he is an
extension of the narcissistic gangster to the point
where his individualistic lust to exceed the strength,
daring, and self-glorification of other men is visibly
and neatly satisfied by attainments which brook no
comparison and which nature herself mysteriously
(and unassisted by society) supplies. Society, in the
eyes of Superman, does not have to be overcome in
order for him to be glorified. Having been born glori
fied, so to speak, he has only to overcome those men
having false and delusive individualistic excesses—the
criminals. Notice that substantially this is Hitler's
message to the German people: a "super-race." But,
112 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

as I have just said, in the case of war between nations,

in which the good-bad distinctions are turned topsy
turvy (prisoners were released by the Confederacy to
fight in its depleted armies and promised freedom), it
is the superman who becomes the potential criminal!
—even as Lindbergh, that superman of the airplane,
became the object of blacksuspicion when it appeared
he might be a sympathizer and collaborator with Ger
many. It is no romantic conceit that manyversions of
Superman appear on the newsstands today with red,
white, and blue stamped on their tights, and it sur
prised no one when Superman began to fight on our
side.
Hollywood cinema has actually supplied the real
gangster with that mythical glory which was an indis
pensable part of his dream, and which connects him
with Raskolnikoff in the consciousness of those who
understand, not only to what degree Raskolnikoff has
nothing to do with Scarface and Little Caesar, but
also to what extent each is involved in the social
creation of the criminal. Is it not largely a question of
taste? Yes, taste is all that can rescue us from a purely
literal distinction between Raskolnikoff and the others
—between Raskolnikoff and, for instance. Spade, the
private detective of The Maltese Falcon. Certainly an
inept association of ideas is bad taste. But it is not bad
taste to analyze the internal mechanism of inept asso
ciations of ideas. It was not inept for Raskolnikoff to
 GOOD VILLAIN AND BAD HERO II3

kneel in the streets, confess to God, and then hurry to

the police station. This is a purely ethical type of glori
fication. But it is inept for Hollywood to invent a par
allel process for the gangster, who may or may not
confess, who seldom confesses to God, and who never
hurries to the police station. The gangster, like the
beloved rogue, is only melodramatic. His death may
have pathos, but it is the pathos of human misery
which any newsreel is equipped to give us if it so
choose. The artifice of such a death lies in the clever
ness or eloquence of the sympathetic personality in
Hollywood who may be impersonating an ignorant
scoundrel. The movie city believes that to humanize
is to glorify—when that suits its convenience; its
method may also be to ruralize, de-humanize, and
super-humanize.
It is well not to be too dogmatic about these gen
eralizations. Human courage, the determined endur
ance of suffering, has a certain moral virtue and a
certain power of appeal; one spontaneously pities the
sorely harried and the close beset. But these are minor
considerations which Hollywood treats as major. It is
the old tear-jerking tradition. A startling and relevant
proof of all this is the absurd American production
accorded Crime and Punishment. After the Russian
and French productions, it was sheer vulgarity. And
why was Hollywood at such a loss to make anything
out of Dostoievsky's "original script"? Simply because
H4 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

there was no place in it for that violence which urban

movie audiences find necessary to make them feel "at
home." Let us admit that gangster and detective melo
dramas, adventure stories of all types, satisfy a per
petual latent craving in the American psyche for
physical expression, for a type of energy that humdrum
factory and office jobs have no way of releasing. After
all, the gangster's choice, though neither conventional
nor "reasonable," issomehow profoundly wise. It gives
him a personal weapon of noise and action; on him
and with him, the machine becomes personal—an ex
tension of his physical nature—and he orders people
around with it. The illicitness of his incontrovertible
power corresponds to the illicitness of the employee
who would like to tell his boss to go to hell, and if he
doesn't like it... The gangster is also "amusing"—he is
a little Caesar, and the audience knows this very well,
not only because he seems marked by fate for destruc
tion from the beginning, but because they intuit he is
overrating his personal powers, is a "cocky" personal
ity, an extreme narcissist; they love it the way they
love a spunky child ora small boywho very irrationally
takes on a couple of big bulhes. It is adorable, but
adorable because, like some of our own petty illusions,
it is a romanticizable illusion of the weak. As for the
gangster's ignorance, that is so forgivable to the non-
ethical movie audience! If ignorance were the crime,
then it would be the crime of the audience, who rep-
 GOOD VILLAIN AND BAD HERO II5

resent society. From the view ofan enlightened ethics,

ignorance is that bliss which exists until compelled
reluctantly to pay a price for knowledge. Hollywood
should have been persuaded that Raskolnikoff was not
bewildered; Peter Lorre, who played the part in the
American version, submitted to the Hollywood inter
pretation of Raskolnikoff as naive, frightened, and
puzzled ... and no wonder, with Marian Marsh play
ing Sonia.
Holl3wood crime has been well or knowingly done
only when it has had recourse to violence, in which
it is expert, not only for temperamental reasons, but
because effects of rapid and cataclysmic action are
especially adaptable to the cinema medium. San Fran
cisco, for instance, despite its absurd characters and
story, was impressive purely because of the camera's
reconstruction of the physical debacle. Here was the
thrill of becoming intimate with physical events with
out actually participating in them. This business of
eavesdropping on earthquakes—is it not quite analo
gous to becoming intimate with a gangster's fate? It
makes little difference, so far as the audience goes,
who is on the receiving end of the bullet or who will
sit in the electric chair.
The prime device for cinematically creating a gang
ster hero has been to counterpose his outward violence,
addicting him to gunfire, to his inner gentleness, ad
dicting him to love. It is true that he was tough even
Il6 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

in his tenderness, which is natural enough, but it is

clear that his toughness was but the clumsiness of a
certain social class. At bottom, he was as sentimental
as the nextguy, whomayhappen to havethe advantage
of being born into a better family and have had a
better education.
Hitherto, I have talked of Hollywood's good villains
almost exclusively; I shall now notice its bad heroes—
that is to say, the ones who have had enough educa
tion to detect which is the side of the angels and which
the side of the devil, and whose choice of the former
has been somewhat ambiguous. From CEdipus to
Superman, it is not hard to see that the man in whom
good qualities are developed (that is, educated) to
truly heroic proportions is socially undesirable—in an
extra-criminal but still ethical sense. OEdipus' wisdom
was as much a challenge to the gods as Superman's
strength to credulity. Whereas Superman's is a fan
tastic myth (like that of Philoctetes, whose strength
in drawing the bow aroused the jealousy of Hercules),
Scarface and CEdipus have realistic myths. Thus,
CEdipus was not a criminal who was made much of,
but a man who was much and made a criminal-
being created indirectly through his excess of good
qualities. Thus, he was a "bad hero," an educated and
virtuous man who somehow had to suffer for the sins
of an unevenly developed and inwardly disharmonious
society. As an old man in exile, he complained that it
 GOOD VILLAIN AND BAD HERO Iiy

still puzzled him why the gods had made him suffer
for something which he did ignorantly—the legitimate
complaint of a man who had no human technique for
foreseeing the disaster that would befall him: killing his
father and marrying his mother. And to the end,
though still god-loving, OEdipus was bitter and de
fiant.
The differences between the good villain and the
bad hero are esthetically manifold, and yet they form
the human circle; in the hemisphere of the former we
find the gangster hero and the beloved rogue: Holly
wood individualists who, although they retain lovable
qualities as individuals, are voluntary exiles from
"good" society and re-enter it only out of motives of
irony or gain, to mock or plunder it. Thus, as they
operate socially, they are ignorant of that type of col
laboration which is considered essential to society's
welfare. In the otherhemisphere, what has Hollywood
to offer? Very little, for in this sphere lies the tragic
destiny of the hero, who falls from the height of social
grace to the depths of social disgrace or to death itself.
A villain (lago is an ideal example) isone who realizes
his inferiority as an absolute limit to advancement
into the highest state of social grace, and yet whose
pride will not allow him to accept his weakness, his
hardship, lying down; he will scheme to overthrow
those who exist in the envied state of grace. The
romantic hero of the satanic variety (Byron's heroes.
Il8 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

for instance, and Des Esseintes) are individuals who

stand an even chance of attaining the highest social
grace but who, while they refuse to be saints, renounce
"good" society in order to lead a more exciting, glam
orous, dangerous, or secret life. The romantic, so to
speak, takes the fatal leap before he is toppled . . . He
is still a good villain—one might say a damned good
villain. Hollywood's "pure" villains have always been
lagoan, and powerful, as a rule, solely through money.
The nearest thing to an orthodox bad hero in Holly
wood is Gary Cooper, whose purity is tainted by his
rural ignorance, his lack of worldliness—but this taint
is always richly overcome by the actor's personal
charm, a fact which makes Cooper and one or two
others wholly artificial with relation to actual society.
The fact is that men of "charm" with the rube's view
point on civilization are usually professionalized—like
Will Rogers, or, to skip to another field, Edgar Cuest!
Of course, there persists a weird fallacy, on which
Holl5wood bases much of its output, that to be naive
and gullible and sentimental is the essence of the hu
man—and is "heroic" because inescapable. Alas, alas!
As for pureheroes, besides the obvious pairof young
lovers, with the male's human, all too human, faults,
Hollywood of late years has offered us the Benefactor
of Mankind, the scientific inventor and discoverer,
thus veering skillfully to the side of genius, knowledge,
and education. This type has been surefire, since, far
 GOOD VILLAIN AND BAD HERO II9

from being romantic in the individualistic sense, men

such as Pasteur, Zola, Bell, and Ehrlich (all of whom
have had screen biographies) were visionaries ofsocial
good and carried on their work specifically to identify
themselves with thecommon destiny. Themoral would
seem to be that the Devil disappears before the advanc
ing footsteps of Knowledge. But how many human be
ings canbe thusheroically "self-sacrificing"? Firstofall,
it requires geniusin a specific, objective medium: an art
or a science. What did his education, his general cul
ture, avail (Edipus so long as he could not please the
gods as well as he could rule the people of Thebes?
Society favors only the producer, and then only so
long as he manifestly produces, fits into a broad, prac
tical scheme: that is, so long as his public character is
identified with the prosperity of the community. The
road of individualism is besetwith grave dangers to the
hero who reaches for the highest social grace.
Considering QEdipus as one whose "business" it
was, like that of modern presidents, dictators, and
kings, to govern well, the essence of the hero may be
defined as a super sort of professionalism. All men de
siring greatness in the public eye (including actors)
undergo a difficult discipline and the acquisition of an
elaborate system of knowledge, whether medicine, law,
government, or a fine art. But for the sake of consider
ing the subject matter of art (morality) rather than
its form (esthetics), we must turn to the direct role of
120 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

morality in society—that is, to the doctors, the polit

ical rulers, the inventors, and so on—rather than to the
writers or actors who depict them. (Edipus, a great
king, erred fatally in his private life. A blemish on a
great man's character may be forgiven in enlightened
times but, in the strict ethical sense, it declasses him as
a hero—unless he be a good villain or a satanic hero,
the devil triumphant. All societies covertly accept the
underdog, the unredeemed wrongdoer, the little fel
low, as a hero—but on the esthetic rather than the
moral side. Sin is sometimes "pleasant." Superman is
a professional in the physical skills of man—his phys
ical and mental athleticism. A great actor is an adept
at acting a large variety of serious r61es. Some Holly
wood actors attempt to be such heroes (Charles
Laughton, Paul Muni, and so on), but without any
notable degree of success. It is much more natural to
castthem, therefore, as good villains, romantic fellows
who, so to speak, reject the commonplace morality of
a "mere job" to enterthe "profession" of piracy, gang
sterism or, most dubious of all, beachcombing. Thus
the step of Hollywood heroes from virtue to villainy is
parallel, strange as it may seem, with the step from a
job, which is commonplace and routinized, to a pro
fession, where competence has a certain creative
aspect, or at the least, definite elements of individual
initiative, judgment, and imagination. The body of an
actor's art is no less broad and general, while still un-
 GOOD VILLAIN AND BAD HERO 121

der individual control, than is the great doctor's or

lawyer's. But suppose that in acting stereotyped gang
sters or adventurers, the actor's art suffers, itself be
comes "villainous"? Acting then tends to become a
"job" rather than a "profession" and is declassed in
the way that a safe cracker's job is a demeanment of a
racketeer's profession! At the same time, a racketeer is
villainous just because, ethically speaking, he evades
the conventional virtue of holding a job.
Such speculations are in direct line with three fairly
recent screen heroes: Chaplin's Dictator, Orson Welles'
Kane, and Spade, the private detective of The Maltese
Faleon. All these men, from the Hollj/wood viewpoint,
are good villains caught red-handed in the first reel at
tempting to be bad heroes. Having submitted, appar
ently, to one esthetic-moral doctrine as screen types,
they have arbitrarily adopted for their respective, par
ticular films a new aspect of personality. The first fact
to strike us in considering the three (I exclude for the
moment Chaplin's Little Barber) is that each is a
stock villain somehow found in the hero's place, the
temporary place of social grace. Yet by this token they
do not become good villains, for they are plainly not,
as are the gangster and the beloved rogue, melodra
matic and stereotyped. They are individualized char
acters—and Spade, indeed, reverses the villain-into-
hero motion. For although as an actor his personality
122 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

is molded on gangster lines, he enacts a private de

tective, someone on the side of the law; in this case,
the ambiguity is less obviously the result of the type
of man characterized. The dictator and the master-
financier are, after all, types around whom a nucleus of
public disfavor has grown, whereas the private detec
tive is a sort of psychological surprise, a strictly up-to-
date revelation. But let us examine these amalgams
separately.
Hitler started out by being a villain; that is, as a
common man he was on the losing side and felt weak,
inferior, and dishonored. Then he became a political
conspirator: another kind of villain—and what, in a
sense, are all three men, Hitler, Kane, and Spade, but
conspirators plotting to force upon society a considera
tion of their personal qualities, their peculiar kind of
education, their "belongingness"? Hitler was a "ro
mantic hero" of a kind in his Austrian days; he was
exiled from his homeland, and was violent, seething,
restless: he longed to return to Germany and become
a "pure" hero. This honorable redemption ofthefallen
hero is a familiar enough theme, but one which in
itself Hollywood has never taken at all seriously; by
chance (though not altogether by chance), a few
Hollywood artists have been original enough to vaguely
perceive its importance. In Chaplin's case, oddly
enough, it is for more or less hidden autobiographical
reasons. First, he himself is a Jew, and must in his
 GOOD VILLAIN AND BAD HERO I23

early life have associated his difhculties with being a

member of that race. But finally he came to the top
of the social heap through art: that is, with the pe
culiar weapon of his knowledge. But this, Chaplin
plainly sees, is his individualistic triumph which,
coupled with the fact that outside of Germany it is
common to think of Hitler as an individualistic case,
a megalomaniac, gave Chaplin a perfectly coherent
impulse to play Hitler. It should be interpolated here
that the actor's contribution to the common good is
not only transient but unique in its ratio of individ-
ualization to socialization. But Chaplin obviously
could not put into Hitler all that he (Chaplin) is
as a man, while it is equally evident that he could
neither put in him all that he is as an artist. . . Thus
came about the conception of the dual role. As a
general thing, the dual r61e fascinates actors because
it is seldom indeed that an actor expresses his entire
personality by his art of human portrayals. On the
other hand. The Great Dictator would have been
much more interesting artistically if the Great Dicta
tor and the Little Barber had had a scene together,
but aside from the risk of an artificial effect in the
double shots, Chaplin neglected the opportunity be
cause he did not concretely realize that in acting the
two r61es, he was splitting his personality. This is the
moral motivation of his assumption, in the final scene,
of his personality as a man when he puts aside his
124 the HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

motley (both as Dictator and Little Barber) and be

comes a small, middle-aged, embarrassed but cou
rageous Jew, making a liberal plea in behalf of his race
and all humankind. The effect is tremendous—but
not just as Chaplin intended it. Suddenly, one wants
to look anywhere but at the screen. Here was the Man
abdicating from the Mask of the Clown purely for the
sake of making propaganda. Was there not a grave
irrelevancy here? Was this irrelevancy not a misunder
standing of the real relation between art and society?
Chaplin's art is comic. The clown he placed on the
heights is a mousy sort of man, an underdog, a uni
versal type whose antics are perpetually moving
because they are the acme of incompetence and un-
worldliness. Gary Cooper's incompetence is too realis
tic, that is, too capable of being educated and turned
into social currency, cheap profit. Mr. Cooper has
been starred in the Deeds, Smith, and John Doe pic
tures, wherein the Common Man has been turned
into the Great Hero overnight. But poor Charlie has
always sought a mere job! Hitler also had this diffi
culty, but it happened that he created for himself a
very big job—to conquer the world, on the basis of
having become a super-professional politician. Like
wise, Charles Spencer Chaplin became a super-profes
sional actor. The moral significances of their respec
tive professions, both attained by extreme mastery of
technique, are wide apart, not only in The Great Die-
 GOOD VILLAIN AND BAD HERO 12$

tator but in society. As adepts, both Chaplin and Hit

ler are "pure" heroes; they benefit vast numbers of
people—or, as to the latter, such is the illusion of the
German people at this time as well as hidden groups
elsewhere. In the purely esthetic sense, both men are
great creators of movement. But in stepping from the
r61e of the Little Barber directly into the r61e of the
Dictator, Chaplin bridged the impossible; one man's
art could not do both clowns anymore than one man's
morality could do both professionals. So, in the end,
one had to step down—and the one to do so, of course,
was Chaplin, the professional actor, who in the ges
ture became Chaplin, the man. As a comedian, Chap
lin has always been the good villain, the shiftless, ro
mantic little bum, who nevertheless wished somehow
to be united with society. Since in The Great Dictator
this little person has a barber's trade until an organized
social force puts him out ofbusiness, his step from the
good villain to the bad hero-from the tolerated ro
mantic bum to the "intolerable" little barber—becomes
visible. Morally (and Mr. Chaplin is intelligent in
this respect), he had to place himself in the position
of Hitler's typical victim, the common worker; hence,
he had to be both a "professional" worker (an artist)
and a mere job-holder. Hitler, in the movie and in
life, had evaded an ordinary job, his course having
taken him through the sub-professional romantic ad
venture to the orthodox "great profession" of ruler of
126 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

a nation. But Chaplin wished a moral judgment

against a professional hero with the wrong ethical and
political philosophy. He became the fool in the king's
place with satire as his scepter. On the other hand,
since in real life Chaplin is a ruler of his art, he does
not escape leveling a finger at an aspect of himself as
the artist who has formed a professional dictatorship
over the httle bum, who, even as the small business
man, has become typed. As rich and unique a concep
tion as this clown is, perhaps he is isolatedly unique
and somewhat ovemch with perfection.* Is he not
strictly complementary to the dictator of real life.
Citizen Kane, and thus indissociable from him?
The theme of a lonely dictatorship is also manifest
in Citizen Kane. An entirely different conception of
this movie I shall discuss in a later chapter, but here
it is the central figure which is relevant. While he is
obviously patterned to life, this fact in itself is of no
special interest. Kane is a man who has made a huge
success of the financial business of living and yet who
had a great private passion and a great frustration—I
use the term "great"ill-advisedly, for the simple reason
that I use it strictly in the Hollywood sense of super-
production; and, indeed, it is on super-production that
the Kanes of real life base their "heroic" statures.
Welles' point was to show the emptiness ofsoul which
dwelt in this love-mad collector of objets d'ait. Welles'
♦ Mr. Chaplin has recently said, 'The tramp is dead."
 GOOD VILLAIN AND BAD HERO I27
expert camera is trained upon the transitional stage
of good villain into bad hero more realistically than
Chaplin's less self-conscious camera. Here is a single
individual who, as an entrepreneur of yellow journal
ism and a piler-up of profit, has earned a romantic
treatment from Welles' hands, the same "humaniz
ing" biographical treatment given gangster heroes.
Thus the gift of good villainy is first bestowed on
Hollywood's "Kane." But finding himself a good vil
lain, Kane, as it were, and I can see how his spirit was
tempted by young Mr. Welles' cherubic countenance,
felt inspired to trespass on the territory of the bad
hero. He desired a tragedy, an "ending" in the grand
style. He dies in his modern castle, alone, eaten by
despair, clutching to him the only memory he has
saved from the vastand hollow pretensions of his life:
a bauble which reminds him of his boyhood sled and
his innocent happiness as a child. The scheme is
gaunt enough to be tragic, but unhappily it is also
naive and basically phony. Owing to the insuperable
obstacle that every moment of his adult life Kane is
manifestly a vulgarian and merely goes through the
mimetics of tragic frustration, Mr. Welles' movie is
reduced to the artistic importance of a flower pattern
on a shaving mug. It is chic to have one on the mantel
piece. A hero must fall from a greatheight, but Kane's
obsessive passion for the girl he makes into an opera
singer, no less than his spiritual resurgence to the past
128 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

in the form of childhood fetishism, is strictly a hy-

draulically elevated, studio height. What a true cha
rade!—and with Kane forced to impersonate Orson
Welles ... It would have been more interesting if
Mr. Welles, dividing his personality as neatly as did
•Mr. Chaplin, had portrayed Kane the dictator and
also "himself" as the struggling young actor who
dares to impersonate him. Then, at least, we would
have had comedy, rather than something which is
neither fitly foul nor good red hero. A good villain
may vulgarly cover himself with as much blood or as
many ornaments as he desires, but, unless he be also
austere, he cannot be a bad hero.
Spade, the private detective of The Maltese Falcon,
through his austerity comes poetically close to being
a bad hero. His austerity seems the result of his steer
ing a delicate course between being on the side of the
law and opposed to it. So remarkable are the plotand
characters of this movie and so excellently are four
leading roles played that an independent and vital
personality emanates from it—an actually creative
flavor, a most rare thing in Hollywood. Spade, bril
liantly brought into being by Humphrey Bogart, is
limned in the very image of a gangster hero, but with
an unusually fine and acrid edge. Spade's power seems
to derive from a kind of moral decision as the result
of a complex emotional struggle, a struggle that evokes
the Dostoievskian heroes of crime and compassion—
 GOOD VILLAIN AND BAD HERO 129
even Muishkin himself, as well as Dostoievsky's most
"contemporary" hero, the Man from Underground.
The last named is the man who understands that his
doom is to look at life from beneath and envy what is
above, to squirm and do nothing about it but com
plain; he is the neurotic finally deprived of a sense of
social solidarity: the prototypic paranoiac. The inter
esting thing about this conception is its static verti-
calism, the awareness of a narrowly extensive but
heaven-aspiring hierarchy like the one Kafka's hero, K.,
perpetually seeks to join. K. is the automatic exile,
the "hero" who has never been permitted to act, to
exist in dynamic relation to the orthodox hierarchies
of society. But there can be neither hero nor villain
in the true sense unless there be action, unless man
either finds for himself a usual place in society or
creates an unusual one, at home or abroad. The citi
zen's relation to the law, explored so exhaustively by
both JCafka and Dostoievsky, must, to be dynamic,
involve a dramatic attitude toward law, a basis of
action. Save in his last novel, Amerika, which strangely
resembles the plot of a Chaplin movie, Kafka avoids
this element, and as a result his stories are neo-alle-
gories. Dostoievsky created a character corresponding
to K. in the Underground Man, but at least he took
a sardonically comic view, made him a clown, whereas
K. is even deprived of the privilege of suffering like
a clown.
130 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

Spade's occupation as a private detective places him

in a highly strategic, dialectical position toward so
ciety and its orthodox values. Openly, as a profes
sional, he is against the lawbreaker, and, in order to
keep his job going, has to play ball with the police. But
is not this thereby merely an economic bond with the
law? Is Spade not really bribed each time he accepts
a client's fee, not only in the sense that he works
privately and may for the sake of a client (as he does
in this movie) withhold information from the police,
but because his license permits him to enter the con
fidence of clients whose reputations and dealings
would otherwise be at the mercy of official, public
justice? Thus, cast in the orthodox temperamental
mold of the gangster hero, the good villain Spade
avoids beingsentimentalized because of an ambivalent
orthodoxy—an ambivalence that permits him to have
sympathy or contempt for his clients, and also friend
liness or hatred for the police. Thus he is an ideal ex
ample of the visible metamorphosis of good villain
into bad hero, and capable as well of juggling these
categories while he is in action; for he may be a good
villain to the lady crook at the very moment he is a
bad hero to the police department, and vice versa!
When he is being a good villain to the police, when
he finally traps the crooks and dutifully hands them
over, he is being a bad hero to the woman and her
 GOOD VILLAIN AND BAD HERO I3I

gang of co-plotters—he is betraying his previous r61e

of her benefactor.
Alas, he does not love her, and his ability to detach
himself even from love, as well as from all the other
emotional appeals his clients may make to him as a
human being, is based on his moral temperament as
an underground man, onewho, out of some mysterious
necessity, cannot socialize his emotions, cannot throw
himself into the drama of admiring and being ad
mired, into the mystery of believing in values and
participating in their crises. Yet some vestige of human
emotion, eager and curious, having its own strange
brand of sentimentality, draws him toward the under
dog, the fellow in a scrape, the fellow whose happiness
or reputation is threatened, the fellow who is afraid
of the ofEcial law. This is why he is a private detec
tive, for he divines in the hapless underdog the victim
and suspecter of what he himself suspects and of
which he is a victim—the law. He is the law's victim
because he cannot, even as Raskolnikoff, detach him
self from it, flout it; and, like Muishkin, he feels some
inexhaustible well of weakness in himself which for
ever binds him to the suffering and the helpless, to
the naive believer in, or victim of, a moral value. I felt
Spade's large and sentient pity for the woman as he
mercilessly baits her in her apartment while trying to
extort her secret. She interests him because he wants
132 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

her to be sincere and he thinks she isn't; he is uncon

sciously confusing a sexual motive with a professional
motive. And later, in the highly touching love scene,
when he declares it is only good business to avenge his
partner's death (he now knows she is the killer!), he
adds that, anyway, he could never trust her if he let
her oflF and married her, since he has something on
her, and, who knows?—she might put a bullet in his
back some day. Here his relationship to Muishkin be
comes very clear, if only by the devious way of a unity
of opposites. Yet Muishkin, too, hadan unconquerable
shyness which operated practically as moral hesitation,
a magical sort of detachment from normal social life,
which he vanquished only through an almost "mes
sianic" delusion of grandeur. Spade's messianic im
pulse (the woman is a sort of Mary Magdalene) is
perverted into mental sadism; his catastrophic symp
tom is not epilepsy but masochism—emotional self-
denial. Why does man not believe in values, why does
the flag of values not carry him headlong into the
midst of human experience, to live or die under that
flag? This is a profound human mystery. Today its
manifestations are largely concerned with the legal,
the basic constitution of human society.
Ignore the law? Be yourself? Oh, yes. Assuredly.
But that takes a certain toughness, another backbone,
a certain uncompromisingness of desire which neither
Spade nor Muishkin has. That Spade should be a
 GOOD VILLAIN AND BAD HERO I33

softie of this kind aligns him with our other subject,

Kane. Spadeexits from the picture carrying the phony
statue, the supposed value of which all the trouble has
been about. It is within the essential plot, not only of
the movie but of his character, that the Maltese Fal
con should be a phony, for all along it has symbolized
those values of life Spade scornfully and shyly asso
ciates with the above, and which ironically the law is
designed to protect, justas it must protectthe tremen
dous collection of art works accumulated by a vulgar
Kane. But Spade, poor soul, is a naive romantic in
comparison with Kane, who is bluntly sophisticated.
It is only Spade's idiosyncratic delusion that the
genuine work of art is symbolic of values, for con
sciously he does not realize this. As remarkable an
archaic piece as is the genuine Falcon statue, it has
value for Spade, as for the crooks, only because its
lead coating is supposed to conceal a fortune in jewels.
The jewels are not there. And because the crooks too
seem interested only in the money. Spade despises
them. Spade won't break the law; the jewels wouldn't
be his. But the crooks, as Spade does not perceive,
are interested likewise in adventure, in a certain glam
orous mode of living, in the value of breaking the law.
They are romantic good villains. Unlike Spade, Kane
respects allthe premises of the law, even to the bottom
of his soul, and takes every technical advantage of
134 the HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION
them to enrich himself. What matter if his apprecia
tion of art has only the motif of conspicuous consump
tion? What if, in this sense, he is very like Hollywood
itself? His gang, the other capitalists, have played ball
with him, even though, as a "lone wolf," he has often
fought groups of them; in this sense, he has been con
spicuously companioned, and warmed. It was sexual
love, personal love, that did not warm him, or at least
not properly. Yet he batted in the same league. It is
Mr. Welles' rather foolishly sentimental myth that
there is no warmth, no spiritual substance, amidst the
economic gregariousness of the Kane breed. Any close
and numerous assemblage of financial digits generates
its own warmth. Kane obviously got a lot of ordinary
pleasure from living. He believed for a long time in his
gaudy fetishes; they, too, had an undeniable warmth;
they incarnated his spirit. Of course, he was neither
sensitive nor very intelligent; he could not be expected
to tell one work of art from another in any informed
sense, but if so, neither could he tell one sled from
another—unless it belonged to him. It is true that he
made the mistake of hiding the true warmth, the sled,
in a sort of arctic attic of the mind. But then, Mr.
Welles is wrong: the sled is not a true fetish. On a
different level, the psychology assumed in Kane is that
of the seekers after the statue of the Maltese Falcon.
The fetishism, the value, is supposed to lie irrelevantly
under the skin of the object; the form is largely a lie.
 GOOD VILLAIN AND BAD HERO 135

If this is true, Kane is not a tragie, but a melodramatic,

hero. At least, it is evident that the romantic crooks
always had the object in view and thus are more inter
esting and more intense than Kane.
Spade, intelligent enough to stand in some awe of
values, and creating a recipe to deal with them in prac
tical life, is tactful enough to work alone. Kane did
not work "alone" out of tact, but desperation, and
basically did not depend on himself but on the mone
tary system. In the fatal sense. Spade had to be a pri
vate detective, for it is perhaps the one profession
where one can work alone and feel truly self-reliant,
where one can exercise individual initiative, imagina
tion, and so on, without assuming the hero's plan for
individual self-glorification in the eyes of law-abiding
society. Spade is a quibbling Satan, a Robin Hood who
doesn't steal anything but the glory of the police—in
a way, he even adds to that glory by giving the credit
to the police department as a whole rather than to the
police chief himself! Spade stands in a sort of hinter
land between the job and the profession. He is crimi
nal, psychologist, detective in one. But he also has the
sense of "doing jobs" in the manner of the petty
crook or the plumber. Perhaps his true job is to keep
himself human . . .
Indeed, here is formulated the "job" of Hollywood
professional actors, who humanize themselves by tak
ing the r61es of job-holders or those who evade jobs
136 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION
by adopting illegal or adventurous professions. How
ever, the actor may slip over into the realm of the
"illegal," the "villainous," to the extent that he does
not rise above the level of hackwork in his profession.
Many Hollywood actors are racketeers of pantomime
and voice—more or less clever, more or less inept.
Sometimes a virtuous acting equipment is put to vil
lainously small use (like that of John Garfield), or
sometimes acting one type so much, even if doing it
well, makes the profession declassee, makes it seem
like a job. Under such circumstances, actors' salaries
are likely to seem excessive, and hence the good-evil
content of their roles to seem secondary to their heroic
money-earning capacity. Thus, the size of a salary
may be in comic disproportion to our understanding
(via Hollywood) what is villainous and what is virtu
ous in society.
CHAPTER VI

OF MICKEY AND MONSTERS

Mickey Mouse is the antithesis of Frankenstein. A

perfectly acceptable analogy would be David and
Goliath; indeed, I am pretty sure that Mickey once
played the redoubtable giant-killer. The antithesis is
basic: Mickey is tiny and agile, Frankenstein is huge
and unwieldy. They belong to the same allegorical
class by token of their marginal relation to the animal
kingdom: Mickey is of the ^Fsop genre, whereas
Frankenstein, being, inversely, the debasement of a
man rather than the aggrandizement of a beast, is the
plausible hero of Mrs. Shelley's anti-materialist fable
of the soul and body. As dichotomies, they have the
same traditional drama of irreducible antagonism:
body-soul, animal-man. The genius of yEsop was to
show by a comic allegory, clothing a serious human
situation, the effectuality of spirit. With a grain of
human intelligence, given their simplicity of instinct,
137
138 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION
the animals could reproduce the experience of man
kind in illustrations a schoolboy understands. yEsop,
of course, was a dialectician of the transmigration-of-
souls doctrine, the purpose of which was to prove that
man is a higher form of life, and that in dying he does
not cease, he only proceeds to a lower (more elemen
tary) form by continuing his life in the body of an
animal.
Mickey, as Hollywood's leading representative of
the .^sop tradition, is soundly comic, his animation
being a logical development of the comic-strip sense
of action. The great humor of Mickey and his con
freres, Donald Duck and so on, is based on rapidity
combined with economy, a principle which also gov
erns human beings in factories, for it is in the latter
that speed, directness, and skill count most when the
human organism is not engaged in the sports arena or
on the battlefield. The antics of the animated-cartoon
beasts are by no means always laughter-provoking. Our
satisfaction is comic in a deeper sense—something in
the way that Moliere affects us, it is the pleasure taken
in observing a miraculous simplification: a wise pup
pet-show of the emotions. But it is not altogether, in
Mickey's case, his parody of human nature which
pleases so completely; or rather, his parody partakes
of a very special and contemporary form of human
nature: man's perfectly serious parody of the machine
in factories and offices. Observe that the Disney
 OF MICKEY AND MONSTERS I39

studio is literally a factory. Of course, it is an esthetic

platitude that the basic pattern of comedy is parody
of the machine, but even this relatively recent concep
tion does not seem really adequate in this case. To be
mechanical is, after all, not precisely the same as to be
mechanized. First of all, Mickey Mouseand the others
are, like clowns with collapsible costumes and soldiers
with guns, "mechanized": fitted out with a machine,
their machine being the cinematic principle of "ani
mation." Just as we saw the ease with which the Hare,
in Mr. Disney's brilliant rendition of the well-known
fable, performed as a mechanized "idea" of speed, we
see Mickey perform as a mechanized "idea" of David;
with the machine, they do things which otherwise
would be impossible. It was David's expert use of his
primitive weapon that won the battle against Goliath,
and the inspiration to use it arose from the desire of
the human spirit to overcome material odds in brute
nature. If the Hare lost the race, it was because he
was a show-off: he preferred the form to the content,
and thus the profound defect of .^sop's moral is that
it offers no means of evaluating the result of winning;
namely, what is the permanent value of the prize?
Mickey, however, uses his machine-donated agility to
outrun, foil, and vanquish the most fearsome monsters.
At the same time, an ambiguity lies in the fact that
Mickey also is a machine, namely he is a mouselike
image which is subject to perfectly mechanical laws
140 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

manipulated on paper at the will of his creator, Walt

Disney. He is also a vessel with an allegorical content,
but for all his pre-existence in painting and literature,
he did not before have at his disposal such a perfect
"slingshot" as cinematic movement. In having this
weapon, this element of agility which is so much su
perior to man's, he assumes, together with his legend
as a being persecuted by man, a certain ominousness,
a queer illusion of independence of his creator; he is
so fabulous an acrobat!
I recall one of the first animated cartoon efforts in
American cinema; he was a clown, and he used to
emerge from and go back into an ink bottle, leaping
from this womb as mature as when he returned to it.
I also remember that, mixed with his antics, was a
most insouciant defiance of his creator to catch him
and put him back in the bottle; no matter what took
place in each successive film, the identical interplay
followed: he had to be captured and reincarcerated all
over again. Sometimes his creator would torment him
by leaving a part of him undrawn; that is, sometimes
he would begin on the paper, and there were glimpses
of the artist chuckling with amusement at the im
potent anger of the little man, perhaps demanding
his other leg so that he could begin his performance.
This drama between creator and created is the basic
pattern of the Frankenstein myth—the monster created
 OF MICKEY AND MONSTERS I4I

in man's image who, lacking a soul, is aware of it and,

resentful, turns upon his maker in wrath. But why is
one serious and the other comic? Because in the pen-
and-ink clown, the old principle of the parody of the
machine prevails. Whereas Mickey illustrates the
comedy of the mechanical resources of the underdog,
Frankenstein is the late nineteenth-century myth of
reaction against mechanization—mechanization, that
is to say, as an enemy of the human spirit rather than
its ally. Today, in the world drama of war, we see ex
actly this latter situation: mechanization as an agent
of destruction, and the German and Japanese armies
in the esthetic guise of so many million "Franken-
steins" while our own boys are "Davids."
But let us look at what Hollywood did with the
Frankenstein legend. Byhaving to use actors and mak
ing the story a melodrama, as indeed it was largely
conceived by Mrs. Shelley, the movies transposed the
body-soul pattern, its ostensible moral import, into the
man-animal pattern—the more "esthetic" meaning and
an inversion of yEsop. Boris Karloff, as Frankenstein's
monster, is a standard, subhuman convention of the
cinema city as well as Mrs. Shelley's character; that is,
he is one of the folk symbols of rape. A picture which
takes this crude melodramatic slant leaves quite open
the question of the relation of the machine to man,
whether it is valid to consider that it has the same
142 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

subhuman status as the animal to man, or whether

man's dependence upon it is permitting it to usurp
the human.
The Shelleyan inversion of yEsop (brute instinct in
man's body) is but a latter-day conversion of the trans-
migration-of-souls myth. When man's spirit dies, it
lives again in the mechanized body, and then this
curious machine begins to live; that is, it becomes
"animal." This—one criticism of mechanical civiliza
tion—is an inversion of the comic principle of man
imitating machine: it is machine imitating man. Ac
cording to the esthetic of Mickey Mouse and com
pany, this isstill comic to the extent that at the bottom
of the Disney hierarchy is inanimate nature; the first
Silly Symphony, Trees and Flowers, was an arboreal
parody of the human, and even dead nature is revivi
fied by the animated-cartoon genius—cutlery, books,
playing cards, and so on.
But, as I have said, we react to the animated cartoon
on a certain serious, unhilarious, levelas well as on any
other. What is this deep pleasure of ours in Mickey's
hair's-breadth escapes, managed partly through the
most astonishing skill, and partly through a curious
kind of coincidence? For it is as though the world of
nature, with its purely physical laws, should—ap
parently out of a humorous sense of benevolence-
conspire to threaten Mickey with annihilation only to
save him the next instant, and over and over again
 OF MICKEY AND MONSTERS I43

... I think of him on the bicycle, and the nonchalant

cat on the other end of the plank onto which he rides,
as the plank seesaws over the abyss of the river: a
cartoon in which the innocent cat (intent on food)
seems to symbolize this mock-tragic whimsicality of
benevolent nature. Morally, it is tonic to think that
the mechanical being of nature, the mathematical
operation of all its physical laws, can respond so win-
ningly, so musically, to the physical ardor and grace
of man himself! But, beyond this "musical" reciproc
ity, we must consider that the "man" is really a mouse,
and so has a special symbolic meaning. Are you a man
or a mouse? goes the proverb, which means. Are you
strong enough to fight material odds in the open or
must you resort to the tricks and subterfuges of the
weak? Must you, in other words, develop skill as a
defensive technique?
It is of the profoundest irony that in the case of
war, in which whole nations of men organize against
each other in a life-or-death struggle, the machine
principle prevails and synthesizes the maximums of
skill and power. Alas, then! Mickey is a peace-time
morality, his only analogy in the world of war being
a small and plucky nation such as Greece—and we
know what happened to Greece. But in the more
pertinent sense of his myth, Mickey is the peace-time
individual, indulging in a dream of pure escapes from
material dangers in which at the same time he has
144 the HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION
the most strenuous fun. Consequently he represents
sportas a morality, no less than morality as a sport...
When the mechanical principle is symbolically dedi
cated to the consummation of peaceful happiness and
delight in leisure, its protean joy becomes wonder
fully manifest. Then its coordination of deliberate
skill with spontaneous reaction is on an esthetic-moral
level; it is musical and profound. The spectacle pro
duces in us soundless laughter that is the laughter of
irony in a world of grim seriousness. For we under
standperfectly in the depths of our being, as we watch
Mickey or that acme of futile and amusing rage,
Donald Duck, that it is man in nature who may cun
ningly divert its mechanical principles toward objec
tives of destruction.
The title of this chapter parodies a title of John
Steinbeck's. The movie made from his novel. Of Mice
and Men, was in some ways a very slick affair. Indeed,
the original literary conception suffered, not so much
from clumsiness, as from that grossly disguised vul
garity which passes in the popular theaterfor "drama";
by mixing melodrama with "character-study," a bas
tard sort of drama may be achieved. There is some
shrewd observation and invention in Mr. Steinbeck's
opus, and this is quite evident in the movie, but, like
so much popular fiction (and I include the more seri
ous variety), it is the interpretation of the material in
terms of concepts that invalidates the realism—or,
 OF MICKEY AND MONSTERS I45

since Of Mice and Men has so many realistic devices

that, largely for cinematic reasons, succeed, perhaps
I should say spoils the reality. The finally disastrous
element of the movie is its effect of a "realistic"
Frankenstein-monster in Lennie, the huge cretin. His
normal pal, George, is at pains to reveal to society that
he alone is responsible for saving Lennie from the
authorities, and thus is as morally responsible for the
girl's murder as Frankenstein's creator for the deeds
of his monster. Why hedge? Lennie is George's thing.
There is no other force that motivates the cretin other
than a pitiful kind of animal intelligence; in Lennie,
in fact, we get full-fledged just the ambiguity I men
tioned above: a crossbreeding of the two antithetical
schemes: man-animal and machine-human. In the
movie, the ostensible truth is that George is a boon
to Lennie, that he checks, soothes, and consoles him,
as well as manages him; in short, that he is the civiliz
ing force in the brute's nature. But how subjective,
naive, and radically false is this evaluation of George's
—for it is his and the author's, not the spectator's or
reader's. On the contrary, George is molding the free
form of the brute: the brute released, as Frankenstein
was released, into the world of men and things. To
have given Frankenstein a zealous and tyrannical
nursemaid (which is all George is to Lennie) could
not have saved him from perdition any more than
(Mr. Steinbeck is the authority) it was able to save
146 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION
Lennie. Like Frankenstein, Lennie is overcome with
emotion in the presence of what is living, soft, and de
fenseless. As Frankenstein could pause to dandle a
flower above the fluffy head of a little girl, Lennie
loved to cuddle rabbits and mice.
The conception of a bona-fide, flesh-and-blood
Frankenstein, whose tenderness is logically isolated
from his brutality, is revoltingly vulgar. The original
blame must go, I fear, to the scientific fallacy of con
temporary fiction: the attempt to introduce socio-
pathological categories into character creation: a fal
lacy to which Mr. Steinbeck fell victim. Even so, he
is astonishingly superficial, because, from the patho
logical view, George is much more profoundly ailing,
and much more "dangerous to society," than Lennie,
who achieves a rapid and absolute extinction. The in
teguments of George's problem are firmly knit with
so-called normal society. The Lennie-George relation
as imagined by Steinbeck-Hollywood is definitely pre-
Freud; it is obvious that George's emotional pattern
is to seek other Lennies. He is not only a sentimental
bum of the American road, but a sentimental bum of
the American mind, and unconsciously perverse. His
dream is a little farm, not where he can raise a family
of human beings, but where Lennie can have all the
rabbits he wants to pet. Did not Mrs. Shelley's doctor
also have a "dream"? Did he not believe that Franken
stein was the inhabitant of a future heaven-on-earth?
 OF MICKEY AND MONSTERS I47

When the impossibility of realizing such a dream was

forced on George by events, he, like Frankenstein the
creator, understood his duty. It was kill the monster.
The inference is simple. If the cretin Lennie, who
theoretically is the recipient of our sympathy through
out, be viewed as a mechanism controlled by George,
he becomes repellent and monstrous. But so, at the
same time, do the mice and rabbits he fondles, so does
the girl whose humanity avails her nothing in Lennie's
arms, for they are but the grist for a machine. Ah,
Lennie loves! And there's the rub, for this love is
only the disguise of rape, and hence but another
weapon (and how ambivalent a weapon) in the arse
nal of the subconscious. For a purely logical sado
masochism, of which rape is the emotional symbol,
is inevitably destructive. As nature benevolently seems
to conspire with her mechanical properties to create
an illusion of danger for Mickey, she malevolently
seems to conspire to create an illusion of safety for the
mousy creatures who come tame to the hands of a
Lennie.
Gan we, however, leave Lennie as such an unsym
pathetic and troublingly tragic brute? If we exclude
the murderousness, the potential explosion that will
come, we can almost sympathize with the couple,
George and Lennie, in their extreme pathos as have-
nots, unfortunates of the road, inheritors of "the grapes
of wrath." Let us try to open our spiritual pores to
148 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION
the most human and conventional aspects of the for
lorn two, Lennie and George, let us gradually trans
form them into shapes more akin to their own "ortho
dox" desires for happiness. Let us first forget they are
of the same sex, and remember that Lennie is per
fectly female in his dependence on George, that his
economic role cannot exist without George's mascu
line organization. He can work like any plow horse,
but he must be tended like one. If he could have
cooked, he would have been perfect. But George
could cook.
In choosing Lennieas a future domestic companion,
George is not very far from the sensible and common
place motives of the average American male. One has
often heard men of humble economic status complain
of being unable to find a woman suitable for the
home. Having a woman around means the sexual
problem, it means a type of moral obligation which a
surprising number of males are ill-equipped to afford
these days—a moral and financial obligation. A pretty
woman is the thing to have in a home, but the prettier
they are, alas, the less useful they feel they ought to
be.* Gharlie Ghaplin has a perfect solution for this in
Modern Times: the dream. Gharlie's wisdom, like
George's, makes no bones of the wish situation, but
fleshes it forthrightly. Sitting on the curb in front of
* Of course, the present war has sensibly modified "the domestic
situation."
 OF MICKEY AND MONSTERS I49

a vacant lot, Charlie experiences the ultimate heaven

of imagined happiness: a little cottage with Paulette
Goddard in the kitchen, grapes (not of wrath) grow
ing in the window, and a cow who comes to the back
doorstep to be milked.
Oh, yes, Charlie has a job, a humble one since he
carries a dinner pail, but not too humble. Just humble
enough. For the cottage is a spiritual cocoon in which
is woven the silk of dreams for two—Adam and Eve.
Of course, the silk is really cotton, but that's only
American industry, and right now, only patriotic.
Charlie is more of an artist than George, however; he
knows when to draw the line, and prefers a pretty
woman and a dream to a real cottage and a human
work horse. What a pathetically grotesque elision of
desires we have in George! His psychological malady
is compensation; his social malady is hyper-economiz
ing; and his sexual malady is symbolic substitution.
Lennie has more points of contact with Paulette God
dard than appear on the surface. He is docile and
faithful—at least, Charlie's dream makes Paulette
docile and faithful. Contemplating such a curious
parallel, the mind goes back to those days of the cave
man, when a male had to knock a female in the head
and drag her home before she could be domesticated.
At least, so we have been taught to believe. And we
are reminded (without laughter) that Lennie was
knocked on the head when he was young, an accident
150 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

which made him as available to George as the primor

dial female was to her mate.
A part of the magic of the movies is the unconscious
irony, the twist of reality, the arabesque of fancy which
makes thrice real an inferior, vulgar fable such as Mr.
Steinbeck's. But the dream must give way to the harsh
reality, as Charlie's dream did. Neither George nor
Lennie knows this: Mr. Steinbeck keeps it from
George—hence the catastrophe. Charlie and Paulette
hit the road again—still together, still romantic, still
in love. That's something. But what has George got
after he has disposed of Lennie? His real problem is
just beginning. He can't go out and begin knocking
large, useful males on the knob. What will he be?—
the truth is breathtaking: an itinerant worker with an
unrealizable dream, but a dream which has become
a historic myth: a creator has murdered his creation
because it didn't work. No, not even though it should
have been patented in Washington! It just isn't in
nature. Too bad, George, try again. But first, be
stronger than your creator, John Steinbeck. Dispose
of him! There are other, better dreams.
It would be refreshing to think that Hollywood had
neatly counterposed in rival studios Mickey, the me
chanical principle of joy, and Lennie, the mechanical
principle of horror. But it was not to be. Mr. Disney
made his first error when he went in for a certain "hu-
 OF MICKEY AND MONSTERS 151
manization" of hisartificial dynamic ofaction. When I
saw Snow White and the Seven Dwarh, I was dis
turbed by the movements of Snow White and the
Prince in the earlier sequences, and then I realized
that Mr. Disney had actually effected an approxima
tion of the cinematic principle of human movement.
Publicity on the picture had already revealed that the
animated drawings were copied after movies of an
actor and actress impersonating the cartoon charac
ters. So much for "scientific" efficiency! Instead of
economy and the illusion of extra speed and grace,
absolutely essential to the generic success of animated
cartoons, one got in Snow White and the Prince a
pastiche of ease and awkwardness: a redundance of
mechanical movements; actually, a reversion to nickel
odeon cinema. Again the apotheosis of American
esthetic intelligence, which hadbroken into the dump
ing-ground of artistic megalomania. Mr. Disney could
not stop there ... He did not stop there . . .
The r61e of music in the animated cartoons has al
ways been an integral one. Jazz was especially apt—
and Toscanini is known to have praised a Disney pic
torial interpretation of the William Tell Overture. I
wonder what Toscanini thinks of Fantasia . . . Music,
so often compared with mathematics, assuredly has
the appearance of obeying inexorable laws. Counter
point and dissonance, typical modern devices, have
152 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION
been most helpful in the effects of animated cartoons.
At any rate, it is apparent that the movement of ani
mated cartoons tends toward the ultimate synthesis
of movements as music tends toward the ultimate
synthesis of sounds. When Mr. Disney conceived
Fantasia, he evidently had some such thing in mind,
for he chose certain classic examples of music and cor
related with their orthodox rendition practically his
whole troupe of animated creations, his whole reper
toire of effects. As Tschaikovsky and Wagner gave all
they had, he wished to give all he had. In this sense
so morally satisfying, this formula in the same sense
is esthetically catastrophic. For now Mr. Disney was
what he was not very definitely before: an illustrator;
and being a man of distinction, an illustrator with an
aggressive sense of interpretation.
What is the sight-seer and the sound-hearer to make
of Fantasia? Why were these culturally disparate
things put together? What is in the music that could
be interpreted by Mr. Disney's idiosyncratic sense of
form? It must be understood that his talent as an
artist is secondary to the type of movement given his
forms: his art is specifically form-in-movement. Thus
he has given us "comic" ballet in Fantasia, and also a
"ballet" of impressionist forms. But his ballet is not
really comic, any more than his forms are really im
pressionistic. By using the music of serious ballet, he
is apparently parodying the ballet. Now the serious
 OF MICKEY AND MONSTERS 153

ballet may be parodied, as indeed it was recently by

an American company, but special music was written
for it; you can only parody the way a work of art has
been done or the way it is now received. How can
Mr. Disney parody the ballet with serious ballet
music? What is he really poking fun at? All right, he
is parodying the human. But why ballet? Why classi
cal music? Whether he knows it or not, he is parody
ing the musical appreciation of the audience. His un
conscious psychology is perfect, and he has actually
projected on the screen in visual terms the aural re
sponses of certain listeners to serious music. Those
elephant and ostrich ballerinas are not mere optical
witticisms, they represent many a listener doing the
Dance of the Hours in his or her head. Therefore,
seen from within, at the heart of its esthetic meaning,
Fantasia is not a fantasy at all, but a most prosaic and
sober sermon on the lagging wits of man, a black
board illustration in psychological dynamics. Mickey
Mouse and the others are ominous, they are inde
pendent of their creator, Walt Disney. With their
subtle insouciance, they have trapped him into mak
ing a Frankenstein of music, which becomes a sublime
and serious art interpreted from within by irresponsi
bly mechanized beasts. Are they not fully as irre
sponsible as those gaudy versions of science which
appear in Hearst newspaper weeklies—dinosaurs which
are but pen-and-ink animations of those re-created for
154 HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION
natural history museums? In the case of Fantasia, their
revivification becomes an incongruous invasion of
music bypopular science, a rape of spiritual profundity
by the listener who dons the guise of music as awk
wardly as Frankenstein donned the guise of the human
body . . . Even an ichthyosaur becomes a mouse
when music is a mousetrap.
CHAPTER VII

ORPHEUS A LA HOLLYWOOD

I. The Geni from the Music Box

In Chapter II, I have referred to the "totalizing"

effect of music in the films—the need for musical ac
companiment to re-create the effect of reality that was
missing from silent pictures. But sound-recording
came; pictures then supplied their own music, co
inciding precisely with the action and supplement
ing it with sound effects to step-up reality; finally,
the voice itself appeared, first in sequences and then
throughout. Yet because the voice arrived, music
was not relieved of its job. It was still required as a
sort of vocal apparatus of destiny, a "chorus" to im
press the spectator with the inner quality of the action
by audibly sympathizing with it. Consequently musi
cal accompaniment has the same place with reference
to the modem movie as the chorus has to the ancient
Greek theater. Four forms of contemporary theater
»55
156 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION
exist in which music has an integrated rdle—the musi
cal revue, the operetta, grand opera, and dance (ballet
or native) as a spectacle separate from the revue.
Hollywood has wisely neglected the third, but has
been prolific in the first two. Indeed, the movie
medium is peculiarly suited to run a gamut from
straight operetta to regular movie plots with occa
sional songs. It has produced a voluminous array
through romantic musicals, such as Rose Marie, The
Vagabond King, and Naughty Marietta, to the musi
cal extravaganzas of the Follies type interwoven with
an "off-stage" plot. At this date, the gamut is very
subtle. Nowhere is Hollywood so much at home as
among gags, music, girls, and slapstick action: a mix
ture over which Manhattan reviewers gloat contemp
tuously with especial acidity toward the absence of
"plot." But "plot" should not be too rudimentarily
conceived. As to the literary element, Hollywood
plots (as emphasized in Chapter I) are notably
lacking in thorough structure, but the plot structure
of a play is not necessarily the straight dramatic con
vention. Naive reviewers speak of emptiness or illogi
cality of plot when emptiness and even "illogicality"
have point, namely in musicals. Previously I referred
only to the straight dramatic convention and its
Hollywood handling. But the musical comedy con
vention, like grand opera, in bringing musical accom
paniment into the theatrical medium and making it
 ORPHEUS A LA HOLLYWOOD 157

integral with the proceedings, makes it part of the

plot. Thus a musical is Hollywood's truest "play" in
the plot sense, not only because it is comic, but be
cause it is musical—that is to say, lyrical rather than
dramatic. Grand opera combines the lyric and the
drama, elides the Greek play and the Greek Ghorus.
Even so, it is only comic grand opera, such as Mo
zart's Marriage of Figaro, that utterly succeeds as an
artistic medium on the stage. Rossini, Verdi, Wagner
—these opera composers, when presented in the
theater, seem to satisfy less than they do as straight
composers, when their music is performed purely
orchestrally ... for a reason which applies equally to
presentation in the musical medium by Hollywood.
It is much more difficult for the artifice of singing
to "get across" in the tragic genre. The Greek and
Shakespearean conventions of tragic drama seem
more artistic; their artifices are the right ones for
tragic feeling, of which poetic speech is the proper
vocal medium. The "musical" and the "dramatic"
can mix only when both make compromises—when
the romantic comedy is essayed. Who can prefer
Tristan and Isolde to Figaro, Carmen to The Barber
of Seville? Only those who prefer symphonic music to
theatre, or whose taste in opera is vulgar.
The special joy of the musical revue or romance is
lyrical. The comedy convention absorbs song nat
urally, since song is celebrative rather than sacrificial—
158 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION
when it is specifically elegiac, it becomes the chant,
approaches the Greek Chorus and the lyric poem. Yet
how would Hollywood be expected to judge properly
even that convention it uses most intelligently? A
good thing to Hollywood is a good thing, barring no
circumstances. The real excuse for reviewers who
chide music-and-gag movies for triteness or emptiness
of plot is that, being Hollywood-educated, they have
been hopelessly confused. Again, it is purely a ques
tion of a recipe so flexible that anything may be ad
mitted so long as it adds "zest" to the dish. Some
times the gags are not so good, the situations are
tagged, the actors are overfamiliar or mediocre.
Grounds for spectator complaint, assuredly. Oh, for
a freshly-worked gag, or for a new prat-fall!—a prayer
which was answered by Dietrich, who took several of
them in Destiy RidesAgain. Not only must the Holly
wood hoydens be mussed up but also the Hollywood
ladies, and, the moment this ishappening, the hoydens
are being groomed for glamor parts in which not a hair
of their heads will be disturbed. In the movie city,
the "mortal" must eventually become the "divine,"
and vice versa. Thus, too, with music . . .
It must cease to be music, precisely, and become
an embellishment of anything it accompanies. In the
old days when serials were the rage, piano music
served really onomatopoeic ends. It provided an ex
tension of horses' hoofs and locomotive wheels, it
 ORPHEUS A LA HOLLYWOOD 159

was the "crooning" of the lover's blood when he made

love to his sweetheart. Thus it was a slavish chorus,
not a philosophic commentary, not a semi-independ
ent actor, as sometimes in Greek plays. It did not
illustrate a related but separate principle: it merely
echoed, reflected. It still does. For the best modern
cinema dramas and melodramas, special musical
arrangements are made or original scores written for
the incidental effects or orchestral accompaniment.
Often, we can forget their presence insofar as they
become automatically accepted conventions—like
operatic gestures. But in the case of singing, the
voice, an instrument of the actor, is also being musi
cal; the convention is not only in the orchestra pit, it
is also on the stage. Thus music is in the integument
of the play as lyric poetry, in the person of the
Chorus in the Greek play, was in the integument of
the play. Only in the musical comedy and the oper
etta is this true of Hollywood procedure. Hollywood
does know a good thing, but it can never control it.
It has allowed music ostentatiously to visit plots into
which it does not properly fit, or fits only according to
a certain "naturalistic" convention which I shall pro
ceed to illustrate.
Like everything else in the movie city, music is
filled with its own importance to an overweaning de
gree. The chief example of Hollywood's musical
"opportunism" is a kind of biography of the young
l6o THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

singing star—Deanna Durbin being the outstanding,

yet by no means the only, example. These films have
a dominant motif: the power of a young female voice
(always aspiring to operatic stature) to stop traffic,
hypnotize all males in listening distance, and other
wise take charge of planetary affairs. It is the wish-
fulfillment myth of the music in the pit to become
part of the play; its voice is young, it has a success
story on its lips. Miss Durbin's voice caresses the
microphone and out leaps the Geni of Grand Opera.
At the worst, she may be expected to become a Jean-
ette MacDonald. The Svengalian eye of the movie
camera looks at a young girl and Trilbyizes her; it
does no less to a mythical music score for a Holly
wood drama—that music score which subconsciously,
one feels, wants the heroine to be a Jeanette Mac-
Donald, even if she is really a Norma Shearer. "Why
can't all actresses sing?" the music seems to ask.
A type of singing dramatic actress does exist, such
as Irene Dunne. This type occasionally takes the part
of an opera star (indeed, the opera stars, Lily Pons,
Grace Moore, and Gladys Swarthout, have all en
acted "themselves" in Hollywood). The fundamental
pattern, even for the revue singing star, is always the
success story, with the picture seldom covering a suffi
cient span to include degeneration of career. But an
actress such as Miss Dunne is not likely to be adrift,
even if she parts from her movie career, for she is
 ORPHEUS A LA HOLLYWOOD l6l

not only wedded to dramatic acting and singing, but

also, I believe, to vaudeville, in which she once played,
just as Joan Crawford used to dance in revues. Like
many movie actresses. Miss Dunne has a versatile
repertory from straight to character to singing to
comedy. Even if pride should not permit actresses to
step down a few pegs, they can always console them
selves, if they ultimately prefer obscurity, with think
ing, "I could go back to the old stuff if I wanted to."
This multiple professional personality has a parallel
in the technical virtuosity of music and its Holly
wood roles. A spectacular song or music-and-dance
sequence can appear in the very middle of a Holly
wood comedy romance (take Fred Astaire's films),
occupy from five to ten minutes, and then allow the
"plot" to proceed. In the case of Mr. Astaire, the nat
uralistic convention of the dancer's climb to fame
replaces that of the singer. This particular genre illus
trates perhaps better than any other what I mean by
the plot as charade. The only purpose of the Durbin
and Astaire "plots" is to reveal their respective and
true professions: dance and song. By this token, plot
becomes a relatively artificial convention while, at the
same time, it is apparently realistic. The Durbin-
Astaire myth pattern is simply at the top of the hier
archy of Hollywood's musical opportunism. But it is
nevertheless a patent indication of Hollywood's con
spiracy to use music as a highly plastic substructure
162 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

of "plot" in order to bolster its esthetic irresponsi

bility. Hollywood is dedicated to exposing the com
mon esthetic r61e of music as a public pacifier, a
crowd consoler, a decorative deceiver. Thus, its uses
of music are intended to supply a "harmony" ob
viously missing from real experience, and which must
be missing from it, since music is but a symbol of
moral harmony and cannot convert reality into har
mony, either magically by appearing like a geni or by
faithfully following the plot around like a bodyguard.
The ideal effect of the success story of the girl singer
would be to convince the world that reality (if caught
young enough) may become glamorous and beautiful
and that, provided sufficient push is applied, "she"
may even be married. And even if you don't marry
her, she can, like Jeanette MacDonald, be watched
and heard, if that much will satiate you.

2. The Poetry Cure for the Castration Complex

It was obviously with music as the "naturalistic

convention," rather than as pure artifice that Holly
wood would offend the most inartistieally; and there
fore it is not surprising that music should unaccount
ably take the form, in this instance, of what is perhaps
Hollywood-conceived as the most ambiguous and
irresponsible of dulcet mellifluities: poetry. A very
recent film. King's Row, is a grim sort of opposite
 ORPHEUS A LA HOLLYWOOD 163
to anything that might actually suggest a "musical"
happiness. It tells of a community askew, an Ameri
can town in the last century which is very conscious
of the differences existing on either side of the rail
road track. On one side is Robert Cummings
(heavily made up) and Respectability (likewise heav
ily made up), and on the other side are the Ross
girls, heavily made up in one way but, alas, lightly
made up in another. All is not hotsy-totsy on the
right side of the old town—you can bet the Judith
Anderson in your home on that. For King's Row is
one of those "revolutionary" Hollywood products
which bear down with no end of phony pressure on
supposedly "nice" people. It is the wrong side of the
railroad track that gets away without murder. There
are bats in the belfries of the nice people for the
logical reason that it is they who own the belfries, or
their equivalents, whereas the Ross "chippies" can
afford nothing more dangerous to the soul than
canaries in cages.
A "nice" young girl goes inconspicuously insane
and is murdered by her "nice" father, who then com
mits suicide. Betty Field has been chosen to die in
this way, but Ann Sheridan has been elected to live
in quite another. She is the humble sweetheart of a
young man whose legs are cut off by a surgeon having
an uncontrollable but wholly unscientific passion for
cruelty. Guilty of a delusion of grandeur, the surgeon
164 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION
despises the town's well-bred "sinners" and wreaks
his private brand of punishment on them whenever
there is a minor accident. This sadist is taken by
Hollywood in perfect stride, and appropriate music is
found for him. Why not? The look-the-other-way
toleration of certain residents of King's Row has per
mitted his peculiar practice to continue; accordingly,
sadism has its moral "music," its conciliating prin
ciple in the "respectable" partof society, its god from
the juke-box of the hidden soul. Just as certain circles
of society feel that "snubbing" is the most cruel fate
that can be dealt anyone or anything, Hollywood has
ritually "snubbed" reality. But Hollywood tries to
make up for such "inhumanities" in its own manner.
The real crisis in the film develops when the young
man without the legs, even though certain of the de
votion of the girl he loves and marries, acquires an
inferiority complex. Dr. Cummings, who has become
a psychiatrist, undertakes his cure, but is really
stumped when, learning that the legs have been need
lessly amputated, he fears that this information
might undermine his patient's mental cure at one
blow. The crying—or should I say singing?—need of
therapeutic harmony is obvious in the case of this
plot. Since it is drama, however, music can hardly be
dragged in by Dr. Stokowski's coattails. Thus, it is
hopelessly confined to the artificial convention of the
orchestral accompaniment, and the play, needing the
 ORPHEUS A LA HOLLYWOOD 165
naturalistic convention of music (or its equivalent)
is in a pickle. Robert Cummings is not Nelson Eddy,
nor is Nelson Eddy Ronald Reagan, the young man
who has been victimized by the mad surgeon. Mr.
Eddy, obviously, would sing himself out of any dun
geon, even the Dungeon of Despair.
I do not exaggerate: the manipulation of the plot,
as it turns out, is visibly and audibly on my side. I am
ignorant of whether such a device of musical magic
occurs in the original story; all I know in this case is
what I witnessed in the movie theater. The concrete
and dialectical presence of some intense sweet strains
from the Orphic realm was deemed so badly needed
by the music doctors in the studio that application
was made (if the suggestion was not already in the
story) to the sibylline science of poetry. It must be
explained that Dr. Cummings has a genuinely difh-
cult problem on his hands, because the mad surgeon
(now dead) has left a sexually frustrated daughter
who can relieve her distraught mind only by telling
of her father's crimes. And the first one she wants to
tell, rather inevitably, is her ex-suitor, the young man
with the inferiority complex—or, as I am inclined to
believe, the castration complex. Be this as it may, the
young woman is temporarily dissuaded from her pur
pose, though Dr. Cummings realizes that his patient
is by no means safe from her. Then romance lures
the young doctor away from his duty. He is willing.
l66 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

after meeting a eharming young woman, to ehuek the

eure and elope to Vienna where he has a psyehiatrist's
post, leaving the legless youth at the merey of the tale
teller. While his intended eonsents to the elopement,
she implies that she would not be proud to go. In this
dilemma, the young doetor arrives at an instant and
brilliant deeision; he'll break the news himself so that
it will not matter if the deranged female Winehell
finally does get to the mierophone. Of course, he's
taking a big ehanee in switching his methods in this
manner, since apparently he does not at once realize
the advanced stage of Hollywood's musical thera
peutics. You feel as though, seeing Dr. Cummings
break at the barrier, he might not get to the patient's
bedside first. But he does, and asking him to hold
out his jaw, since he's about to take it, Dr. Cummings
delivers a remarkable "left," the bad news, but not
without preceding it with an even more remarkable
"right" from that famous fistie manual. The Oxford
Book of English Verse; the poem is Henley's "In-
vietus." This pugilistically-read psychiatrist, appearing
with a poem on his lips, has all the effect of a deus
ex machina. Of course, he is really the geni from the
music box, with whom Miss Durbin is on such ex
cellent terms, and thus should not astonish us too
much. Anyway, the patient issaved. And if the patient
is saved, the method is vindicated. Yet as a paying
customer, I reserve the right to derive my ownreaction
 ORPHEUS A LA HOLLYWOOD 167
of the macabre from this movie. I recall that a geni
comes from the East, which is also the home of a
character praised by Kipling. Assuredly, now, the
ghost of Freud can address the ghost of the poet;
"You're a better man than I am. Dr. Kipling."
CHAPTER VIII

JOHN DOE; OR, THE FALSE

ENDING

In THE beginning is the end. This purely formal myth

had had an uneomputable amount of popularity long
before the invention of the movie camera. "Fate" is
one of the terms it has been known by, and, in Greek
drama, it took the form of an inescapable trap for the
hero, laid by the gods especially to be his undoing. No
matter how clever a tragic hero may be (Macbeth is
the classic example of the precautionary hero of trag
edy) , he winds up in the toils which apparently are
his own creation but which, supernaturalists would
have us believe, have been merely a thought that has
occurred to an Omnipotent Being or Beings. In other
chapters I have shown the Hollywood conception of
fate rather indirectly in relation to the villain and the
hero, but here I will examine the plot as an overall
element, an "omnipotent" conception which business
acumen has lodged firmly in the minds of the cinema
i63
 JOHN DOE; OR, THE FALSE ENDING 169
city, from the industry's owners to the script writers
and film editors. The movie makers are virtually the
gods of Hollywood, and the actors and actresses, the
divine impersonations, are the contemporary vestiges
of that Old Omnipotence of love, war, wisdom, and
nature which was Greece's.
At the top of the hierarchy of Greek society were
the gods. We may consider it a hierarchy because the
gods, like men, had names, homes, and families as
well as specified "political" duties. Moreover, they
were individuals in a sense which the Hebrew-Ghris-
tian hierarchy (aside from Ghrist Himself) were not;
that is, in polytheism there is a chance for individual
insistence and expansion, as well as for such a thing
asfilial rebellion, whereas, we know very well, the mono-
theist Ghrist is the Obedient Son of the history of re
ligion. The caste natureof pagan society permitted the
exclusivism of the gods, whose visits to the earth were
purely occasional, and not missionary as was Ghrist's.
But although the caste feeling of pagan divinity was
static, there were assumed to be internal quarrels, and
so human quarrels were simply a reproduction on a
lower moral level of the dissidence that perpetually oc
curred in divine society; moreover, the gods contended
with each other in influencing the fates of mortals. In
this way there was a type of demarcated internal free
dom in all pagan society; and if the gods ruled the
destinies of individuals it was only, as we learn from
170 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

Greek myths anddramas, because they took a personal

interest in certain individuals. There was no assump
tion as in Christian mythology that God and the
angels perpetually watch over the destinies of all hu
man beings.
Greek democracy was a democracy of castes and of
a particular nation. But Christ appeared as the first
planetary democrat, and as the first indication that
divine nature has an unconscious wish to fuse itself
with human nature, namely, to intervene in such a way
that no human being can ever forget his own divinity.
Suchwas the ideal; the reality is self-evident. In Chris
tian monotheism, direct intervention in human affairs
by the divine nature automatically equalized the access
which each individual had to God's audience. Which
is to say, while it was not practically demonstrable
that "God dwells in every man," it could be ideally
assumed—but since, as a constant fact, it could
be only ideally assumed, God had to continue His
heavenly residence and supervise the divine course of
human events from that remoteness. Once having sent
His Only Son, and thus imitated the human duress of
losing Him, Godhad provided an object lesson for the
planet: a supreme illustration of humility. As Chris
tianity spread westward, it met paganism, and pagan
ism dialectically transformed it into the Church;
namely, a permanent symbolic visit by divine nature
through a highly organized human iconography. It
 JOHN DOE; OR, THE FALSE ENDING I71

is not the blood of a beast or a man, but the "blood of

Christ," which is sacrificed in the Catholic ritual!
Hence the lack of distinction made by the participant
in the ritual between the actual "blood" drunk and the
blood of Christ is testimony to the extreme urgency
of the permanent symbolic residence of the divine on
earth. In practice, of course, the Catholic Church was
created by the priest caste purely as a political weapon
against the State: the inevitable result of the democ
ratization and terrestrialization of the divine . . . Am
I far afield from Hollywood? Not at all. For what
happened universally to the fatal plot of drama and
myth? Hollywood, which excludes nothing necessar
ily, inherited this consequence of Christianity ... It
isknown as the Happy Ending.
To begin with, it is not death. Nor is it disgrace,
unless disgrace is repaid by death, as the criminal pays
for his evil happiness in the electric chair. It is often
sjmbolic death, however, the beginning of redemp
tion, of a "new life." This last term rings familiarly.
Did not Christ die to redeem human sin? Did His
death not precede resurrection? The agony on the
Cross was only the end of the beginning. The begin
ning of the end is . . . Easter: promises, optimism.
Yet life, of course, is what happens between the be
ginning and the end, between birth and death, be
tween Hollywood and the movie public. It is the
between in which art, no matter what its periodic
172 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

endings, is permanently interested, namely, in the

means by which all ends are attained, all beginnings
propelled. Only a proper conception of the reality of
the between, however, can avail either an important
ending or a significant beginning. The conduct of life
as an idea is the essence of morality, and opposed to
the maybe of morality is the fatal symmetry of the
beginning-indistinguishable-from-the-end, one recip
rocally being implied in the other. This symmetry can
exist, however, only under certain conditions of con
trol over human morality, over terrestrial conduct.
That is, a control from above: a control by superna-
ture. Art is an imitation of life only if the conditions
of life are fatally conceived by the creative artist—if
he understands the pattern perceived in nature as the
operation of a law imposed by an Omnipotent Being.
If the artist, man, becomes the "omnipotent" being,
plot no longer possesses this fluid ambivalence be
tween beginning and end. In romantic fiction and the
modern novel and drama, the artist has assumed this
omnipotence, and hence his plots are notably "un-
fatalistic." For instance, in Ibsen, Shaw, and Piran
dello, the characters in one way or another debate
among themselves what the end shall be. To preserve
the classic conception of fate, James Joyce had to
parody a classic plot or, as in Finnegans Wake, make
the cyclic pattern of the mind the only fatal design in
living. Joyce and Proust have this in common; their
 JOHN DOE; OR, THE FALSE ENDING 173

chief plots are merely manifestations of the desire to

repeat mechanically, to rehearse faithfully what has
happened to them or their friends. Hence the begin
ning of Proust's novel is also the end only because the
mind is assumed to be instinctively cyclic and its
mode a series of unchangeable mechanical links. The
causation of supposed fictitious events is taken to be
psycho-physical, and limited in Proust's case abso
lutely by personal experience. Both the "I" of Proust's
novel and Finnegan are heroes who, psychologically
considered, are always in bed, always passive, always
lying on their backs with springs of apprehension
coiled to surprise the black curtain of night or memory
when it shallburst into a cinematic brilliance of image
and movement. All that Proust knows of events is
what did happen, nothing of what might have hap
pened ... an alternative which has been avidly seized
by Hollywood and the Christian Scientists. Of course,
I do not mean that Proust literally reproduced events.
We know he did not, but he invented the closest pos
sible analogies to events within the realm of discre
tion, and left the logical, causational pattern the same.
Naturally, that a certain fate or necessity exists in
human behavior is not universally denied by mod
ernity any more than by antiquity. But in the absence
of a controlling factor from "above," or at least, def
initely outside the human being, the "necessity" be
comes inner, and thus involved with the pure instincts
174 HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION
of man, the activities of the various layers of his civi
lized-animal nature. It is thus inevitable that a romantic
view of this situation should more or less alternate
with a realistic or naturalistic view in artistic periods.
There arose, as a result, the school of naturalist fiction,
in which a primitive, environmental necessity reigns
over human acts. It was logical that Hollywood, asa sort
ofesthetic "opium ofthepeople" andthe folk art ofthe
cities, should tend toward a romantic view of neces
sity, of the causal factor of plot. In a previous chapter,
I have discussed the romantic adventure film as a
genre, and as its sub-genre, the film glorifying the
gangster. Moral choices by the heroes of such films
are cut to a crude conventional pattern, and so they
are actuated by motives whose ambiguous good-evil
character is not confusing on the surface, norcomplex.
This is because, giving themselves to a forthright kind
of action, these heroes are caught up instantly within
the legal plot, that is, within the ever-present toils of
local fiats and taboos. Such "fatality," however, is
purely delimiting, since it is statically opposed to in
dividual excess and exotic desires, possessing a rigidity
which not eventhe mosthardened criminal is disposed
to quarrel with in theory. Such good villains as the
gangster and the romantic adventurer primarily set
out to release themselves systematically from social
obligation, but not to modify the theory on which the
laws of society are based; they are escapist. On the
 JOHN DOE; OR, THE FALSE ENDING I75

other hand, the nature of the tragic hero is that he is

superhuman. He has the god-delusion, and believes
that by his own genius he can change the nature of
fate, overcome whatever "omnipotence" there be. We
see very well the pass to which the tragic hero has
come in Hollywood; he is Superman, who has suc
ceeded, by the grace of comic-strip humor, in tran
scending the psychic, neural, and physical hmitations
which hitherto have fatally bound the behavior of the
individual. Thus,he is a sortof substitute imagined by
a Christian Science esthete; as a result, his metier is
not moral tragedy but romantic comedy.
Andyet the average Hollywood hero is by no means
a superman. He veers from the romantic-realistic hero
ofTyrone Power to the romantic-realistic hero of Gary
Cooper, with such drawing-room types as George
Brent, Fredric March, and William Powell to imper
sonate the buccaneers of "parlor, bedroom, and bath."
The plexuses of action in which all these men are in
volved might be termed the Domestic Tangle, the
Military or Soldier of Empire Tangle, the Criminal
Tangle, the Pioneer or Soldier of Fortune Tangle, and
the Civil Ambition Tangle, representing the fields of
home, war, gangsterism, travel, and business. All these
spheres roughly indicate, either by themselves or their
casual interlacings, the limits of various plot-patterns.
Though Hollywood stood up faithfully to the task of
doing a rather flat version of Dreiser's American
176 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION
Tragedy, it is usually thoroughly inept in the genre of
naturalistic tragedy, as in the actually fantastic Of
Mice and Men. In any case, Dreiser's conception was
a much-inflated pathological study, rendered almost
opaque by a quaint variety of humanitarianism.
No matter what the plot-pattern or the hero type,
Hollywood movies notably tend to begin with a bang
and end with a whimper, a sigh, or a grin. The faithful
diagnostician of the movies sometimes complains that
this or that picture begins so well and ends so poorly.
This conclusion is often esthetically sound as far as it
goes, but it holds only a beginning for criticism.
Among the more sophisticated patrons, it is resignedly
accepted as a convention that the ending of a picture
is pretty unimportant. Indeed? Why do the patrons
permit themselves this passive, laissez-faire sophistica
tion? Apparently because it is enough only to have
glimpsed the gods quarreling, semi-nude, in the same
predicament as us poor mortals! Indeed, so far as
many patrons go, that is the underlying answer to the
question. But do the Hollywood gods and goddesses
take a personal interest in mortals, as did their proto
types in Ancient Greece? They do not. One of their
main problems is to prevent our taking too personal
an interest in them—and well they might, for it is they
who have done more to break down the conceptual
distinction between publicity and privacy than any
other element in modern democratic life. On the con-
 JOHN doe; or, the false ending 177

trary their private lives are subject to our indirect,

mass intervention, and therefore they are compelled,
assisted considerably by their press agents, to keep
their lives in normal working order with a decent
minimum of scandals and divorces.
But where is the origin of authority, in their myth
sphere or ours? Which follows the lead? This question
is like that of which came first, the chicken or the egg,
and can be applied to the theme of the present chap
ter. Logically, it makes little difference as a rule
whether the end of a Holl3wood movie should be at
the beginning or the end, because both start and
climax are premature. To art, it is the fate of the
grown "chicken" that matters. What interferes with
this interest of Hollywood in the "chicken's" mature
fate is that its conception of entertainment is merely
to watch it lay an egg—watch things happen without
maintaining the integrity of the causal pattern. When
reality and entertainment are thus held identical, all
endings are purely conventional, formal, and often,
like the charade, of an infantile logic. "Ah," you may
say, "but Hollywood is healthy; it has the sense of life,
it is not interested in endings, for endings imply death;
let death come casually—yes, even mechanically, and
with little 'reality.' Let life somehow seem to go on."
(Resurrection, Easter promises, and so on.) Person
ally, I can see no meritin this conception of the vital
ity of Hollywood, excepting that it indirectly provides
lyS THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION
an excellent preparation for the selfless sacrifice of the
soldier's hfe in warfare. What matter the time of
death, or its manner, so long as one has hved, so long
as others shall live? The influence of Hollywood is not
to be discounted in such considerations. But I must
confine myself primarily to esthetic values. I am en
gaged in showing what Hollywood is as a manufac
turer of hallucinations.
Two recent movies occur to me as striking and
strikingly contrasting examples of the "false ending,"
which is my term for Hollywood's happy ending. It
is not merely that the conclusions of the action in
these pictures are unsatisfying or ridiculous, but also
because they are but the logical results of a pristine
confusion of purposes and slandering of reality. Sus
picion, so streamlined on the surface, is a mesh of fic
tional incongruities. The story is a melodramatic
thriller the original basis of which as a book may well
be dubious. First, it seems likely that only an unat
tractive young spinster would have fallen so hard for
an obvious society adventurer such as Gary Grant
portrays, and then have felt justified in suspecting him
of a desire to murder her for her money. Joan Fon
taine, who plays the woman, is a handsome young
person, but let us assume that she could indeed, being
so attractive, suddenly have realized her true sexual
longings only when Mr. Grant appeared. Of course.
 JOHN DOE; OR, THE FALSE ENDING I79
on the screen, Miss Fontaine's heroine shows no sign
of that complex due to suppressed sexuality which
one would expect to motivate such a bold romantic
gesture as her marriage with the high-stepping Mr.
Grant's hero. I understand that in the original story
the husband does murder the wife, and thus her
suspicions are justified. If, I say, we accept this con
clusion for the plot, then we have to deal with many
things as beginnings which Hollywood does not
allow. Consequently, it was only natural that, visualiz
ing a happy ending, Holljwood would consistently
prepare for it by adapting the material. Thus, Mr.
Grant is his usual self, not at all implying he might
murder somebody, much less his own wife, and Miss
Fontaine is also herself, and not at all the morbid and
unattractive type she could more plausibly have been.
Given the original plot (that he eventually murders
her), there is but one reasonably possible hypothesis:
that a very clever and completely unscrupulous ad
venturer systematically victimizes an ugly, naive, sex-
starved spinster; because a beautiful woman would be
murdered by her husband only out of passion, either
of sadism or revenge, but then he would never be the
pettyfraud Mr. Grant'sherois. On the contrary, given
the events of the movie plot (that the wife's suspicions
are a misunderstanding), there is but one reasonably
possible hypothesis,which the movies do not assume:
the creation of her suspicion is due to the absence of
l8o THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

sexual satisfaction—a deduction which is only ele

mentary.
Hollywood, however, always has its own logic, and
this is that, considering the events of the plot taken
together with the characters, Mr. Grant could not
have murdered Miss Fontaine. But then the spectator
has to assume that her suspicions are hallucinatory
and thus require a pathological basis. It is true that
the couple are acquainted with a detective-story writer,
and at dinner the subject of murder and its detection
and method is discussed. This creates an opportunity
for the wife's suspicion to gain head, but a fresh op
portunity does not account for the basic situation, for
which a pre-existing emotion is necessary. Well, there
is one of a sort: Mr. Grant has been a financial
finagler and petty deceiver, a fact which the wife has
soon discovered, but knowing that her husband does
not have the conventional sense of honor is far from
imagining he desires to murder her. Indeed, his lack
of conventional ethics is only too commonplace and
explicable on social grounds of an obvious nature, and
if the shock were too great, she could have gone home
to mother at once. But she stays on. Thus, the psy
chological link between impatience and shame at her
husband's unstable morality and suspicion that he
wants to murder her—this necessary link is missing
from the evidence. Where is it? Unfortunately, Holly
wood as yet has imported it very gingerly; it is the sex-
 JOHN DOE; OR, THE FALSE ENDING l8l
ual neurosis. Only the husband's social behavior com
bined with his sexual behavior could have adduced
emotional hallucination on top of moral shock. At one
point in the crisis, the wife denies the husband her
bedroom. This is very strange, unless we assume that
she is eitherfrigid and has grown to find sex repulsive,
or that she is using her suspicion as a device to excuse
her husband at night from that which he cannot suc
cessfully accomplish. Understanding this as the reality,
the climax of the film, which pictures Mr. Grant's
heroically taking the desperate situation in hand and
promising to reform is merely a hoax, an element of
charade. Because nothing has happened powerful
enough to induce him to be different. He has not even
learned the cause of his wife's nervousness; even as
suming that he suddenly understands, as the picture
wants us to assume, that some hysterical fear possesses
his wife, and that this is enough to convince him he
has been cruel and selfish, the real situation, as the
movie ends, is just beginning! What has happened?
Hollywood has indulged in a little charade (titled,
you will notice, with the three-syllable word. Sus
picion) in order to disclose the possibility of a real
dramatic struggle between husband and wife. One has
the terrible "suspicion" that if the camera remained on
the scene, one would be treated to endless quarrels
between the wife and husband as to who is right and
who is wrong, and then only things would be said
182 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

which have already been said by Bernard Shaw. But

at least most of the cards would be face up on the
table. Neurotic domestic relations would be por
trayed as something ofwhat they are. ButHollywood's
wisdom is profitable if not profound. Of the conse
quences of such a sexual situation, once it is apt to
become thoroughly visible between husband and wife,
Hollywood creates its own brand of comedy drama
. . . but that would be in another picture and at an
other admission price.
For instance: Meet John Doe. I could not help
thinking, as I gazed at Gary Cooper's face, that the
most serious commonplace hero of the century in art,
Joyce's H. C. Earwicker (H.C.E. or Here Comes
Everybody) presents a weird antithesis to the hero
of this film. The essence of Earwicker's commonplace-
ness is contained in the night, in dreams, in passivity,
in the anonymity of the last layer of the libido as it
stands, stark and abstract, in the starless universe of
sleep. Alas, the hero is literally on his back! But in
stead of kicking him when he is down, as the world
wants to do to John Doe, Joyce devises a subtle, sado
masochistic scheme to elevate Earwicker to a linguistic
paradise: the beyond-which-not of the psychic mono
logue^ the stream of consciousness which is uncon
sciousness. John Doe, however, is not a pampered lit
erary figment of this kind. He is an ordinary man,
make no mistake, and because Mr. Cooper has the
 JOHN doe; or, the false ending 183
certain charm he was born with, his ordinariness ap
pears as human goodness, human benevolence, human
enthusiasm for the human race.
Oh, boy! Some picture! Here Comes Everybody out
of bed and on his feet and in the political race. Then:
Horrors! The Frankenstein of fascism looms in the
poor fellow's bathroom mirror. He's been duped. And
by the girl he thought was wonderful. He's just been
used. Ideals don't mean a thing to his backers. In fact,
he's been a mere figurehead in a wicked plot to hood
wink and bulldoze the public . . . his public: all those
John Does out there ... and listen—those are boos ...
Well, if they want a fight, here's a fight, and John
Doe plunges into the melee. He also sees that the
public is unhoodwinked and then—is tempted to throw
himself off the Empire State Building, going so far as
the railing on the observation tower. Here was a neat
little thesis on the dangers of believing in a political
upstart, because he may be the cat's paw of crooked
interests—a covert warning against the fascistic Huey
Longs, as well as a choice fable on the pathos of the
average man's benevolent instincts and gross credulity.
The chivalry of the average American is exploited
to its peace-time (pre-war) maximum by making capi
tal of his impulse to crusade for politics that will right
all social and economic evils, and so on. But the most
important thing the movie does is to admit the exist
ence of a large audience for the individual crusading
184 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION
fervor of a Coughlin or a Long—and this audience is
no less than all the John Does out there, who also,
sensing something has been imported from Denmark,
desire rather helplessly to do something aboutit.
This is the common or garden variety of the messi
anic complex in all the nakedness of its provincial
panoply. Here the Hollywood hero-god steps down
from his heaven andstrips off the theatrical mask (this
is easy for Mr. Cooper, who apparently wears the
simplest make-up) and says to John Doe; "Look, I'm
you after all. I'm really that fellow in the bathroom
mirror. But because I am also an instrument of divine
power, I shall intervene in your affairs to your ad
vantage. Accept me, and the Kingdom of Heaven on
Earth will be yours." But this, as an ending, would
not be realistic enough—it would not correspond to
the actual experience of John Doe, who, being a wage-
earner, is a realist during his waking hours. Therefore
the hero-god-actor must admit he is merely an imper
sonator, merely acting in a charade, really Gary
Cooper, not John Doe or Huey Long . . . Thus, his
suicide, whether consummated in the movie or not, is
inherent in the pattern; it constitutes a symbolic
change of identity from the picture's John Doe to
Hollywood's John Doe (ne Gary Cooper). Conse
quently, the ending is the death of the hero, whether
Hollywood has elected he shall die or be restored alive
 JOHN doe; or, the false ending 185
to the arms of the heroine ... Of course, Hollywood
insists on the Resurrection and the Redemption;
hence, in the conclusion that was finally decided on,
Mr. Cooper leaves the building by going down in the
elevator, and he and Miss Stanwyck decide to work
patiently and without illusions for the "end" which
has been missed in the film: the political salvation of
the American nation and perhaps even the human
race.

The end has become the beginning in the sense of

"If at first you don't succeed . . ." Actually, there is
no cosmic fatality to the failure of an individual or of
a single effort by a group or an individual to effect a
social improvement. Yet Hollywood's artistic failure
is fatal, because the individualistic moral terms are too
ambiguous, the specific fable isoversimplified and thus
mystifying. The film's mores are those of the status
quo, and so Meet John Doe can easily be conceived as
propaganda for human sacrifice of individual life in
war—a war which is ostensibly fought for human ideals
under the general classification of democracy. At this
point in planetary affairs, American democracy be
comes the theoretical right to hold a job and vote
every four years for a new president. Thus, the war for
democracy is strictly a struggle for preservation of the
political and economic status quo. Consequently such
a political fable, when it emanates from Hollywood, is
l86 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

constrained to impose the political reality of democ

racy as the only "fate" coneeivable, the only "omnip
otent" plot from "above," able to determine the end
for the hero.
As it was in the beginning for John Doe under
Roosevelt, so shall it be in the end. And his real name
canbe O'Reilly or Ginsberg. Aecording to Hollywood,
the first and last letters of the alphabet of human hap
piness are A—and by this token, the twenty-four other
letters are only A's in disguise. As for Z . . . On the
other hand, there is nothing divine or insuperable in
the politieal "plot." Political reality is fluid and alto
gether terrestrial: it likewise is a product of the civi
lized animal nature, and arises from social evolution.
It is not immortal. In Shakespeare, a new king was
usually crowned on the death site of his predecessor,
thus insuring the continuation of the system. The
Hollywood happy ending is false because it is pseudo-
divine, just as the Holljwood fate is false because it is
pseudo-tragic—and both depend upon an optimistic
re-beginning. Christian Science, the "science" which
converts hope of heaven into mundane optimism, is
no more than a straight-faced burlesque of Christian
ity. The great fundamental esthetic of Hollywood is a
perversion of the sound Aristophanic principle of a
burlesque of the gods; Hollywood's is a straight-faced
burlesque of the gods. Notice that in America you can
be satirical about anything but religion, the divine
 JOHN DOE; OR, THE FALSE ENDING 187
aspect. It is exempted in the social pact made with the
heterogeneous elements of American democracy:
Obey the political and economic laws, and you are
free to worship as you please. By common consent,
therefore, this is the sacred individual province, upon
whose solemnity nobody but a hoodlum will trespass.
The Hollywood "gods" and "goddesses" raise all
mundane traits to a humorlessly divine level, because
as an impregnable group they seem to us rich, happy,
carefree, and handsome or charming. A Jean Gabin
or Charles Laughton may appear throughout a movie
in dungarees or rags, it is only a professional mas
querade; not only are they presumably "gentlemen of
nature," but they are known to visit nightclubs out
side of working hours; at the worst, they are dude
ranchers, or they putter around yachts. Whatever they
do of this kind, you may be sure it is a condescension,
a "pleasure game," such as charades, barn dances, or
kiddie-parties. By this logic, when they appear "ridic
ulously" poor, uneducated, or stupid on the screen,
one ought to laugh as everyone does at kiddie-parties
or the like. Yet one doesn't, simply because the Holly
wood gods are themselves straight-faced, and we know
they want us to be. If we weren't, they'd lose their
contracts, and that would be "tragic." Such moral
and esthetic values as beauty, virtue, and intellect are
assumed to be so common and easily owned in the
movies that they have a dizzying ambivalence. Like
l88 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

those signs reading "Applause" held up for the

audience in radio studios, laughter-cues in the movies
are implicit. Beauty and brains are neatly replaced
by that peculiarly cynical, American, and compensa
tory humor which takes a "democratically" excusing
view toward spiritual and mental defects. This com
prises, in a sense, "legitimate" comedy. But Holly
wood's emphasis is strictly indigenous. Ignorance of
modern adult education is assumed in the audience
and flattered. A word such as "psychiatry" is treated
as hifalutin, and persons otherwise apparently edu
cated aremade to apologize to each other on the screen
for using such a word by joking about it. A noticeably
literary form of speech is ritually associated with men
tal infirmity—there springs to mind a rdle played by
Claude Rains in Moontide, that of a water-front phi
losopher significantly nicknamed "Nutsy." Perhaps I
myself seem mentally extravagant to cavil at such
well-established devices on stage and screen. But if
we compare the use of a "literary" sort of madness in
Gorki's The Lower Depths (a French version) with
that typical of American movies, we see that philos
ophers and actors, no less than clerks, are driven mad
by poverty; thus, an inclination toward aphorism,
poetry, and hallucination has a profoundly serious
source, and its juxtaposition with poverty is com
pounded equally of tragedy and comedy. There have
been a few contemporary efforts to portray the modern
 JOHN doe; or, the false ending 189
bohemian literary clown in the theater, but none has
found its way whole into Hollywood.
Therefore, in line with the psychology of the movie
city, only an intellectual crank or an obsessed esthete
would demand an "inevitable" climax to a narrative.
So Hollywood takes a markedly sophisticated view of
"endings." Perhaps the deepest source of the esthetic
of "false endings" is in the movie serial, which remains
a symptom of Hollywood's early desire to set up a
perpetual motion of human activity as "great adven
ture." Old and new serials possess both super-men and
super-women, capable of endless effort and resistance.
This is a beautiful myth. If only it were not so ideal!
CHAPTER IX

. WHERE THE BODY LIES"

I HAVE spoken at much length of the inalienably visi

ble in Hollywood movies. In this manner, I have
considered and made judgments of the forms which
are characteristic, and also I have tried to show in
various ways the limitation and perversion of the con
tent as a result of formal errors or defects. The most
crucial instance of the omission of form is in regard
to the sexual behavior of Hollywood lovers, which I
discussed in "The Technicolor of Love." This, as I be
lieve I showed, exposed an evasion of a certain moral
problem in sex: the significance of the Single Instance.
There is, however, a "single instance" toward which
Hollywood takes a totally inverted point of view; it is
murder. This act is no less "secret" than that of sex,
but in the obvious ethical interests of society, it is far
more important to turn up the murderer than the for-
nicator. The fornicator, even if his act is immoral and
 , y y
. . . WHERE THE BODY LIES I9I

may lead to evil consequences, is engaged in life-giv

ing, whereas the murderer is a life-taker.
I have provided here no treatment of the purely
technical aspects of cinema narrative, but it is obvious
that such narrative has peculiar problems and individ
ual solutions; even though such solutions may resem
ble closely the narrative, both psychological and phys
ical, of literature. The camera is devoted at all times
to telling its tale—excepting when a murder has been
committed or some criminal uncaught or unidentified,
and then it must close its eye out of sagacity. The
peculiar joy of the camera—and the best Hollywood
technicians have discovered how to handle this effect
—is to reveal . . . and to reveal often with an artless
open-eyedness, carrying with it at times a naive kind
of coquetry. The art of introducing a character or a
theme or an incident is naturally advanced in all
branches of the arts, but, in the case of the movies, it
must be remembered that it is necessary to keep be
fore the eye much that is not always intrinsically in
teresting in relation to the main narrative, a fact espe
cially true of Hollywood, and the consequences of
which I indicated in "Hollywood's Surrealist Eye."
This is due not only to the vacuity of many Hollywood
themes, but also to the inelasticity of the camera when
its lack of absorbing material places upon its distrac
tion-value an unusually heavy burden. There is one
stereotyped solution for inner vacuity in Hollywood,
192 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

and that, naturally, is outer activity: the show-offism

of the camera; the sheer skill in presenting the most
commonplace realities. Yet a time comes, as I have
just hinted, when quite another problem of entertain
ment exists for the camera, a much more literary and
psychological problem—a problem concerned crucially
with the relation of form to content: the narration of
the detection of crime.
Of course, the detective novel is itself an advanced
form, and it is often simple for the movies to follow
the original literary presentation of a detective story.
But right here is the delicate issue: the ability of the
camera to reproduce what in many novel plots is
primarily the deductive ingenuity of the hero, the de
tective. If the story is a horror-thriller, this problem of
communication does not exist. But the horror story
has been exhaustively exploited for the sake of its un
varnished exposures of black and insinuating deeds;
the machinery of crime has been nothing if not visible,
and the identity of their perpetrator, if concealed, a
mere formality. "X" usually marks the spot where
the body lies, and it is seldom that the body disap
pears, though this is an inevitable adjunct of certain
plots for the sake of complication.
Thus, while in works of art as the natural thing all
isgiven, either explicitly or in the shape of more orless
known symbols, an essential element is lacking to the
nature of the mystery-detective story: the identity of
 . > y
. . . WHERE THE BODY LIES I93

the criminal and sometimes, as a necessary corollary,

the method of the crime. The character of the detec
tive mystery accordingly depends upon the omission
of a main term that must be supplied before the story
ends, in order to obtain the "total revelation" toward
which all art proceeds. Technique of the detective
mystery varies more than may be glibly supposed.
First of all, the author delegates an agent of investi
gation, the detective, who proves his superiority to
all other agents of investigation (notoriously, the po
lice themselves). In my chapter on the villain and the
hero, I did not emphasize the glorification of this
"superman," for the particular reason that Holljwood
has never realized the same heights with its straight
forward solvers of crime as with its murderers and
gangsters. One reason for this is obvious enough: the
literary medium is more susceptible than the camera
in displaying the deductive powers and mental in
genuity of the detective. The detective is a student—
and according to fiction, a master—of psychology, and
much of the form of the mystery narrative depends
upon the detective's train of thought, which is fol
lowed approximately up to the end, when his final
intuition of the criminal's identity is kept from the
reader in order to save the conventional climax of the
story—the sudden revelation of the criminal. Conse
quently, in the literary form, the consciousness of the
 194 HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

detective hero is a specific convention which stands

between the reader and knowledge of the criminal, in
the course of discovering him, just as it stands be
tween the detective and other persons in the story as a
real obstacle. It is probable that, in the beginning,
nobody knows the identity of the criminal excepting
the criminal himself and his possible accomplices. The
"game" is to guess his identity before it is revealed;
thus, the reader is in some sense in competition with
the detective. It happens, however, that owing to the
nature of communication in the genre under discus
sion, the reader does not have the same chance as the
detective, who is on the scene. In one sense, he may
be argued to have a better chance, inasmuch as, un
like the detective as a rule, he is not under pressure
of time, and so may go over "the evidence" as many
times as he likes.
One thing must be noticed now. The presentation
by cinema creates an illusion of omniscience which, un
der the circumstances, belongs correctly onlyto the de
tective. What I mean to say is that the camera, with
its "literal" eye, is somewhat freer, in substance, to
report what happens than is the verbal medium of
literature. Notice that I do not say that the camera's
ability to do this is used! That would not be Hollywood
cricket. In other words, sometimes events, facial expres
sions, are shownto us (eitherreaderor spectator) from
which the detective is excluded. Yet such tantalizing
 , 9 9
. . . WHERE THE BODY LIES I95

"revelations" orclues must be deliberately selected, ac

cording to the discretion of authoror director, and may
be intended, indeed, as misleading—or "leading" in the
sense offalse lures. The fact remains that in the type de
tective-mystery, a subtlechange of quality occurs when
it is transferred from the printedpage to the screen: the
convention of the "knowing" hero, the detective, is
damaged in the transference. Potentially, he is all-
knowing, but in stepping out of a book into a Holly
wood studio he relinquishes some of this potential
faculty to the camera itself. All this is due to some
thing which I have given great emphasis: the illusion
of the screen's physical reality. Though it is quite pos
sible to manipulate the spectator's psychology of sus
picion and process of deduction in any number of
tricky ways, both director and spectator are aware that
in reproducing the physical conditions, the concrete
mise-en-scene, the movies increase the expectation of
visual discovery which is the very heart of the detec
tive mystery. Either the screen must fulfill this in a
peculiar way or fail to fulfill it in a conspicuous way.
There have been more than a few detective heroes
whose exploits have been presented from time to time
by Hollywood, notably Sherlock Holmes, Philo Vance,
Ellery Queen, and latterly the Falcon and the Crime
Doctor. The most popular Holmes movie. The Hound
of the Baskervilles, had a great deal of hocus-pocus
196 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION
which the novel itself had designed to keep the reader in
a stateof thrill and suspense. This story isa good exam
ple of the crossbreeding of the two main divisions of
detective story: the story of logical deduction and the
story of horror (both done masterfully, of course, by
Poe). Now the Hollywood camera is very much at
home in the latter, but is somewhat stumped by the
former. "Magically" disappearing persons, walls open
ing suddenly into secret passages, arms blossoming
from apertures, and (since sound pictures) weird cries
in the night—all these are incidental thrills of the
rabbit-from-the-empty-hat kind. In all but the super
natural or pseudo-scientific yarns, such stunts create
an appetite to learn not only how they are done but
also the identity of the doer; sometimes, as in The
Gorilla, the monster is a clever criminal in disguise.
In fact, the more extravagant the melodrama, the
more insistent the average spectator's curiosity as to
who and how. The burden placed upon the movie is
obvious: there must be a "debunking," whether verbal
or visual. The material mechanism of the magician's
tricks is revealed—even if only in a mental flashback
by which a variety of effects are explained by a simple
exposure of a fact or an identity. Under these condi
tions, the spectator may achieve a curious satisfaction.
The subconscious mind of modern times entertains a
perpetual yearning to be told that its deepest fears.
 . y y
. . . WHERE THE BODY LIES I97

its wildest nightmares, are merely hocus-pocus, per

fectly susceptible to the revelation of "daylight"—the
"light of reason." When we consider the almost limit
less assortment of magicians' tricks, among which are
those of fake spiritualists, we can understand the vivid
r61e played by the camera in the solving of a mystery.
The camera has, indeed, had an important part in un
covering the devices of fraudulent mediums. Thus,
there is a suspended faith in the mind of every spec
tator of a movie mystery that, if only the camera be on
hand at the light moment, the criminal will be re
vealed. Naturally, every spectator is aware that the
agent of curiosity and its satisfaction is the human de
tective, and that nothing will be solved without him.
But is it not the idiosyncratic defectof the professional
detective that mysteries are primarily man-made, con
sciously fabricated, and thus does he not conspire with
the rationalistic tendency just referred to in believing
all the horrors of nature and human nature are mere
nightmarish illusions? In The Murders in the Rue
Morgue, Poe's rationalist psychology madethe criminal
an ape which had escaped from a menagerie—thus
setting him quite apart from the legendary and semi-
supernatural monsters of Gothic romance. Gothicism
—and, indeed, its descendant, surrealism—imply that
monsters, even if apparently they have an external
existence, are in some sense the meaningful creations
igS THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION
of man's brain, and dwell within him as well as out
side him.* Now, considering that Hollywood's natural
impulse is to exploit horror and rapine, the story of
logical deduction as an express form is automatically
compromised by the cinema medium, and thus the
rdle of its protagonist, the detective, rendered mate
rially ambiguous.
The problem with which any detective is faced
squarely is this; What type of crime is the one he has
to solve? He must determine the motive before he
speculates on the probable identity of the criminal.
Is it money or passion, or blended of both? He may
embark on several different hypotheses and thus his
suspicion may be attracted to several different people
as the culprits. But if he be a really good detective, he
has to keep one mostcrucial premise in mind; if he has
to deal with a pathological case of crime, he must seek
for clues which nature has planted for him and which
have accrued over a number of years. Thus, he care
fully divides motive from method, though naturally,
in respect to any single hypothesis of the criminal's
identity, the method and the motive are inevitably
parts of the same logical complex. The purpose of this
little resume is to show that two interwoven plots of
the crime exist: the phenomenal plot of criminal
nature, peculiarly suited to rendering by the camera,
* The Cat People is a fairly recent and an excellent, rare example of
this principle of mystery.
 . 7 9
. . . WHERE THE BODY LIES I99

and the character plot of the criminal individual, pe

culiarly suited to rendering by psychology—to the de
ductive faculty conventionally represented best by
words. The shock-and-shiver melodrama of Hollywood
combines these two plots in a childish way. But if we
take the analogy of the fake medium, it is somewhat
easier to perceive that the camera, by secret surprise
or penetration of the dusky spiritualist ritual, reveals
only the method by which such "frauds" are accom
plished. It does not solve the "mystery" of their value
to those who wish to believe in them. Thus it offers
no light on the natural mystery of belief in supernat
ural phenomena, a belief which Hollywood subtly in
dulges even while it debunks it. We observe, too, that
the camera is appropriate only when the most concrete
symbolization of the rational faculty exists ... as when
the hollow hood of the gorilla's head is lifted off and
we see a human face emerge from the rest of the
costume.
Mr. Orson Welles is Hollywood's most straight-
faced and ingenious gorilla, as well as its cutest. It is
asthough in Citizen Kane, Mr. Welles wished to make
up for not having been born when his hero was born
and thus been enabled to help create the history of
the movies, which, as it turns out, he can only express
in retrospect. Considered altogether apart from its
literary fable, which I have discussed elsewhere in this
book, the movie is monstrously clever, so much so that
200 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

Mr. Welles, as director and actor, is enabled to live a

pseudo-historic agony of all the heroes and all the
directors who ever commanded or participated in the
operations of a movie studio. Byutilizing all the stunt-
devices Hollywood ever thought of—including the
"intrepid" news shot of an "unphotographable" celeb
rity being wheeled around his private grounds in a
chair—and by choosing a protagonist who blends many
kinds of motive, Mr. Welles has arrived at a super-
condensation, which appears in all its surrealistic
glory once you lift the cellophane wrapping that em
bodies the ostensible fable. Even if you disengage the
parts of this synthetic engine of cinema, you will get
an inkling, because it is possible to lay side by side
in your mind the newsreel, the comedy, the romance,
the historical adventure, and the mystery story, all of
which are in it. And note that the overall form is that
of the detective story, and that outside the cellophane
of the cinematic events is the ribbon of the news-
reporter's search, the logical-deductive path, tied with
a symbol of the "natural mystery": the word, "rose
bud." It is the word on the dying man's lips, and it
occurs to a bright young reporter that here is a clue
to the "enigma" of the dead man's life. His intuition,
of course, is based on the myth of the meaning of
"last words" in the mouths of the dying. This myth is
founded on the moral-psychological premise that
many persons go out of existence with some desire left
 . . WHERE THE BODY LIEs" 201

unexpressed or abortively satisfied, and that, in the

delirious irresponsibility of dying, this desire works
its way to the lips and achieves a momentary suprem
acy of form it never attained before. That Kane's
word is a to-be-identified symbol attests to Mr.
Welles' desire to be everything to his public, a writer
as well as actor and director.
Like all important devices, this little word reveals
more even than is on the surface of the mystery;
ostensibly, it is a mechanical device to allow the movie
to rehearse the dead man's life. But this "rehearsal"
(besides being something close to Mr. Welles' vora
cious theatrical heart) is only the rehearsal which is
known in detective stories as the reconstruction of
the crime. For the reporter nominates himself as a
detective to track down the origin of the symbolic
word in Kane's life, which will reveal, so to speak,
the spot where "the body" of meaning lies in Kane's
fabulous outer existence. "Rosebud" is the X, the un
known quantity, which finally the camera must photo
graph. Thus Mr. Welles has at once combined the
simplest of devices with the most complex in a dou
ble sense: the clue is extremely simple, and so is its
physical explanation; but first we must follow the
logical-deductive path of the detective (which con
sists of a series of eliminations of probabilities) and
the natural-mystery path of Kane's life. The former
is represented—if not ably represented—by the reporter.
202 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

who altogether neglects the natural-mystery line of

speculation; after all, he is only a reporter.
But this in itself is significant. For a reporter is
someone who tries to getpeople to talk, simply byask
ing them or by deluging them with importunities, and
his parallel in the detective world is the policeman,
who tries to coerce answers from people. It is not that
the people in Kane's life refuse to talk. Some of them
talk freely, and indeed it appears that they tell allthey
know or remember. But this does not divulge what
the reporter wishes to know—the import of the word,
"rosebud." Why? For the simple reason, as we learn
at the end, Kane has never disclosed this particular
secret to anyone; if it signifies any r61e in his life, it is
an unconscious role or a "Freudian" r61e. It has never
been directly communicated. Mr. Welles' reporter
may be said to suffer from the occupational delusion
of ineptplaywrights and novelists, who believe (anach-
ronistically, shall we suppose?) that all that is worth
communicating is communicated by human nature
verbally; or, in essence, consciously. The value given
the peculiar timing of the word on Kane's lips was
erroneously assumed by the reporter, who used the
psychology of the policeman—namely, that a mystery
is solved by a verbal confession which connects a dead
body with its cause of death. The movie's assumption
is that Kane is a spiritual dead body as well as a phys
ical dead body, and that his spirit, in the sense of
 . 9 7
. . . WHERE THE BODY LIES 203

happy spirit, died when he was forced to part from his

boyhood fetish, his sled, on which was written the
name, "Rosebud."
Alas, the logic is ambiguous! And it conceals the
clinic beneaththe third degree—and beneaththe clinic,
the confessional. The sled "Rosebud" reaches an
apotheosis in its "astral" appearance on Kane's lips,
and the hero is cleansed at the moment of his death.
Thus, starting with the religious confessional, the
movie makes a psychoanalytical assumption and on
this basis seeks a "criminal"—a masquerading culprit
—after which, however, it proceeds to utilize the assist
ance of the detective-reporter, who seeks the posses
sion of the mystery as though it were to be revealed in
the manner of the charade—by connecting an object
or objects with a word. The law itself, in all its majesty,
is a charade in this sense. The crime occurs. As soon
as the law knows how it occurs, all that has to happen
from its subjective point of view is for someone to
supply the name of the criminal or for the criminal to
confess. The fun is over. The fun is definitely over in
Mr. Welles' picture when the eye of the camera,
meandering over the desolated pyramids of Kane's
posthumous miscellany of bric-a-brac, at last hesitates
and focuses on the sled being thrown into the furnace,
and one sees the paint blister and the name "Rose
bud" gradually vanishing on the surface of the wood.
The apparently artless eye of the camera has "solved
204 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

the mystery" where the human detective has failed.

One faintly suspects, of course, that Mr. Welles is
behind the camera. But this does not placate those
who prefer the work of art to the charade.
According to the pattern of logical deduction, in
which the reporter failed and in which the "imper
sonally" propelled camera succeeded, the criminal is
the sled—namely, the criminal is the fact, the physical
counterpart of Kane's spiritual agony; alternately,
the fetish or the circumstantial evidence: Exhibit X.
But now it is also a "dead body," in that it is the true
identity of the dead man, the killed potential of his
spirit. The spot has been duly marked with Mr.
Welles' sensational "X," and the corpse cremated.
As an ambivalized quantity, however, "X" draws
together the three patterns involving reluctant verbal
communication: the religious confessional, the psy
choanalytical clinic, and the legal third degree. What
have these patterns in common which makes it possi
ble for the symbolic sled to embrace them all? They
invert cause and effect, since in each case the narra
tive begins with the phenomenon and proceeds to its
explanation, finishing with the cause. The three meth
ods of procedure recognize the mystery of the phe
nomenon as "guilt" and a redeeming or cancelling
function in the elucidation of the mystery. This con
cept is crudest in the police court, where the name of
the criminal and his resultant conviction is sufficient
 . > >
. . . WHERE THE BODY LIES 205

to erase the crime from the pohce records—if the crime

remains unsolved or the prisoner pronounced inno
cent, a smirch remains on the books of the police, of
science, or of God. Something has not been brought
to the hght, to "justice."
Let us glance at the structural efforts of Mr. Welles
to provide such a justice for his hero's guilt. The truth
is that in eliding so tightly the three patterns, there
is insufficient room for them to breathe in: the whole
plot is too trig, melodramatic, and charadish. No basis
exists for the esthetic judgment of Kane's life accord
ing to the form given his story, A very significant
thing remains: the fact that the hero's death occurs
at the beginning of the screen narrative, inverting the
tragic pattern of the hero's death at the end of the last
act. He is revived in Citizen Kane ostensibly for the
sake of discovering the meaning of the symbol, rose
bud. But neither meaning nor thing named is dis
covered—at least not by the traditional revealer of
facts, the news-reporter who, in the role of detective,
represents the force of human intelligence and justice.
Mr. Welles quaintly reserved the privilege of uncover
ing the thing named to Holljovood's pet, the movie
camera. This surrealist eye has been signally, narcis-
sistically honored by one who likes to think of himself
as a pet: the new, if already tarnished, Hollywood
genius, Orson Welles. Where does the body lie in
which Mr. Welles is really interested? Being in Mr.
2o6 the HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

Welles' own breast, its cremation is a charade. Like

Carmen and her oiheer in the Chaplin version of the
operatic story, the sled may be expected to emerge
from the furnace whole, smile, and take its bows.
Whatever it may be nicknamed, it is Mr. Welles' per
sonal ambition. As for the other directors, they are
"dead," and Mr. Welles is the rosebud who will make
flower all that they have failed to realize.
With Hollywood's surrealist eye in his lapel, Mr.
Welles has utilized the great tradition mentioned at
the beginning of this book, that of displacement in the
comprehensive scheme of values we identify as "re
ality"—the whole and balanced richness of human
existence. Esthetically, Mr. Welles, even as his news-
reporter does, intuits the existence of the natural mys
tery, but for convenience' sake, for the sake of a
stunning and well-aimed success, he has preferred to
make it a detective story charade—one of those "see
how it's done, it's really very simple" mystery solu
tions. It is a "displacing" irony in the sense of the
magician's fluent charade of ease, and Mr. Welles
meant to displace with one gesture the classic reputa
tions in the directorial hierarchy.
On the other hand, the truly sur-real irony is that
photographing a thing well does not explain its mean
ing in the great context of values. "Rosebud" remains
a thing, an inanimate object, a mechanism—alas, it
cannot come back from death and take its bows! It is
 , * 9
. . . WHERE THE BODY LIES 207

a trite kind of symbol, surely, a "skeleton in the

closet." But the camera discovers it in the way a child
points or opens its mind in public. The child-camera
has been conceived by Mr. Welles as an adequate
antidote for the closed-mouth reluctance of "inscru
table nature"! There is a certain sensationalism in the
revelations made bychildren, especially when strangers
are present, and a lot of strangers hide in the darkness
of a movie theater. But is all nature to be conceived
as a family with a few skeletons rattling in its cosmic
closet? Art, in the genuine sense, has always been
above the documentary, the circumstantial, evidence of
reality unless its purpose has been consciously limited.
Citizen Kane is a spectacular kibitz of the Hollywood
charade with itsmechanism glaringly and scandalously
visible. A thousand Holl3nvood turkeys areserved upon
Mr. Welles' sled, and theirputrescence measured with
amazing olfactory accuracy and disposed of by decent
incendiarism. But in another respect, the sled, the
fetus, the potential instrument, has the faculty of
the phoenix. The eye of the camera is stillalive.
CHAPTER X

TO BE OR NOT TO BE;
OR, THE CARTOON TRIUMPHANT

Modern life deals us many surprises and at a rapid

rate of speed. Its very pace, even in time of peace, is
hard on the nerves, and keyed-up city dwellers, avid
readers of the scandals, murders, international devel
opments, the comic-strip, and "Believe It or Not"
departments are always prepared for the mental and
emotional eye-opener. The values of Hollywood nat
urally have kept rhythm with the thickness and fast
ness of existence beyond its studio walls. Interesting
to note is that the taste for rapid action used to be
satisfied largely by horses, automobiles, and trains in
the old Western and adventure serials. A good chase
was oneof the great stand-bys of Hollywood in supply
ing its film climaxes and is by no means outi6 today.
The modern melodrama, depending equally on action
208
 TO BE OR NOT TO BE 209

but buttressed with many subtle resources, tries to

make the rapidity of pace permeative and inward, to
give a consistent snap to all levels of the story. Hitch
cock, the English director, is an adept at creating "ex
pectancy," his best film to date being The Lady
Vanishes, which incidentally indulges with profit in
some old-fashioned mystery hocus-pocus.
With the accent cleanly on pace, surprise is more or
less prepared for, since desperation and inspired effort
lead naturally toward danger, accidents, and the
otherwise unforeseen. Hence modern movie audi
ences are natural patrons of the grotesque, the sud
den twist of plot, or the surprise climax. Of course,
they desire the surprise without cost to the underlying
conventions in all their heavy multiplicity, a goodpor
tion of which has been indicated in past chapters. Yet
again, it is Hollywood's perpetual wail that efforts at
originality have always been sternly rebuked by pop
ular taste, with few exceptions, and so the greatpuzzle
of the movie city is to be both startling and banal at
once . . . just as, indeed, it has to show that a woman
is both good and bad, and that life ends and does not
end.
If Hollywood were serious about the ambiguity of
modern values, as it is not. To Be or Not to Be, star
ring Jack Benny and the late Carole Lombard, would
have been a different story. The paradoxical title from
Shakespeare is not accidental but one of those quaint
210 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

clues of which Hollywood, on careful examination, is

by no means ungenerous. The time has come when a
sort of systematic chaos exists in Hollywood's proved
esthetic values. It cannot be called surrealism, even of
the Marx brothers, Olsen and Johnson, or Gracie
Allen variety, because it is not witty; it is not verbal
Dada or pantomimic farce with symbolic overtones.
It is, however, a sort of Hellzapoppin version of Piran
dello—though more profoundly incongruous even
than this characterization hints. It should be borne
in mind that at the bottom of artistic nonsense, from
Rabelais to Gracie Allen, from Alice in Wonderland
to Lautreamont, is a joy in wit for its own sake and a
consciousness of power and freedom. The dominant
force is the destructive image, willfully displacing rea
son and logic, and molding reality wholly into a vio
lent and strange form, having its unique quality and
aspect.
Now when Holljwood is violent and strange, it is
"Gothic" and magical, but the emotional pattern (as
in suchfables asDr. /ekyll and Mr. Hyde and Franken
stein) is clear and unmistakable; it is horror, it is the
thrill of fear or lust. When it is goofy, in the Hellza
poppin and Marx brothers sense, the emotional pat
ternisalso clear; it is laughter—the irresistible response
to a stylized form of pantomime and verbal wit. But
when Hollywood essays a complicated charade, as in
To Be or Not to Be, when it cooks up a recipe for
 TO BE OR NOT TO BE 211

comedy with the strangest admixture of styles and

plot-motifs, the emotional pattern can hardly be said
to exist. Ernst Lubitsch was the director, though not
the author, and in this movie can be pointed out a
true example of the catastrophic in charade-supplpng.
It isfathered bydozens ofauthors, however elliptically,
and is synthetic to such an extent that its charade-
meaning is apparently derived from some language
not locally known, perhaps Esperanto or Eskimo. At
the same time, the movie's form does not prevent its
bromides ofsituation and nuance from being palpable;
indeed, they stick out of this film like wrecks on the
mental sound-track of the script-writers.
Only peculiarly contemporary conditions could have
produced a film in which—aside from directorial
"touches"—sensibility and style are lacking to such
a horrific and chaotic degree. The time and scene of
the film are Poland just before and after the German
invasion. A Polish actor, his wife, and troupe are
about to present a play about the cruelties of Nazism.
The film has beenconstructed like a series ofmagician's
tricks, not new to the screen but here in large num
ber. The initial eye-opener is the now famihar device
of showing a scene apparently a direct part of the
movie but which at a crucial point is revealed as a
play within the movie. But in this particular "play
within the play," the actors are obviously Hollywood
comedians at their time-honored job of working up to
212 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

a gag. The question the spectator instantly asks is: Is

the Nazi play within the movie supposed to be unin
tentionally bad, and thus hammily funny, or are they
intentionally acting the ham parts of those pigs, the
Nazis? This illustration gives the key-value of am
biguity in this movie. Jack Benny fits perfectly into
the scheme, but in regard to the casting, in his case
one can also ask: Is Mr. Benny merely acting himself,
his own radio charade, or was his behavior written in
the script? Here that curious independence of style
which now and again creeps into films was oddly ap
parent. To Be or Not to Be has the air of having been
made up, like a charade, from scene to scene in the
studio, with nothing definitely planned.
Yet as the plot develops, the dubious ambiguity
proves remarkably consistent. The Polish troupe, espe
cially Mr. and Mrs. Tura, its stars, become involved
in an espionage situation in which they have to rescue
papers from the Gestapo in order to save themselves
and a large number of prominent compatriots; they
are all in the underground Polish movement. Later,
in order for the troupe to escape from Poland, they
are compelled to enact the very roles theywere stopped
from playing previously by the Gestapo's prewar
threat. Mr. Benny, assuredly one of the world's least
persuasive actors, comic or otherwise, impersonates
one of the head spies, a Polish traitor, while another
 TO BE OR NOT TO BE 213
cheese-faced member of the troupe plays a mute Hit
ler, looking precisely like a waxen apparition from
Madame Tussaud's. In the sense of device and twist
of plot, this is one of the trickiest of films, but there
is no awareness in it of dealing with that single and
readily recognizable "substance" known as fife. No
matter how exaggerated artifice may be, it may be
symbolically recognizable; no matter how arbitrary
plot may be, it is possible to create an underlying
design, a symbolic unity. To make a list. To Be or
Not to Be is all of a Lubitsch sex comedy, a Hitch
cock spy melodrama, an act of HeUzapoppin, and a
play about character-ambiguity by Pirandello, as the
whole might have been written by Clifford Odets in
an immoral moment. For a highly complicated dish
to be successful, either in cooking or art, an exquisite
taste is necessary. Hollywood possesses no such taste.
Sometimes the movie has the aspect of a second-rate
revue. Mr. Lubitsch can allow Jack Benny, dressed
like a Vassar girl as Romeo, to mince six or seven
steps away from the camera and then, seen face to
the audience, recite the first words of the "To be or
not to be" speech like a timid actress in the r61e of
Goethe's Marguerite. ... In a comedy, it is neces
sary to take one thing seriously: the comedy. In this
scene, flatly speaking, Mr. Benny made me feel like
dying . . .
214 HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION
Yet is it not odd that the comedy in this film is not
taken as "straight" as it should be; indeed, that noth
ing in it is quite straight? For this, there is a contem
porary reason and, with respect to movie history, an
ancient one. Give the charade a group of inexpert
performers, and it becomes, willy-nilly, a cartoon—the
mostimpertinent and nonchalant form of humor. The
peculiarity of all political cartoons is that they are
double-faced and to be distinguished in this sense from
the "single face" of the caricature. Thus Hogarth,
Rowlandson, and Daumier, and all social caricaturists,
had a fundamental seriousness which, like Swift's, lay
in their direct approach to man as a planetary animal.
Mankind is evaluated by a few strokes of the pen or an
epigram. But the cartoon, either the political cartoon
or the less significant comic strips, such as Gasoline
Alley or The Gumps, achieves a split of interest, either
by being for one side against another or separating
reality from romance. Its content is projected into a
fairy-tale world, a sort of wish-fulfillment world, which
says in effect: "Oh, if things were only like this, life
wouldn't be a serious matter!" And the point of the
caricaturing of the Nazi military man is "If Nazis were
only like this, they wouldn't be a genuine menace!"
But we know they are a genuine menace. The daily
sacrifices of the American people, at home and on the
battlefield, are no laughing matter. A dangerous and
well-equipped adversary is in the field. Moreover, he
 TO BE OR NOT TO BE 215

is a respectable enemy in that overcoming him de

mands all our powers.
To view a picture such as The Invaders, recounting
the fortunes of six members of a Nazi submarine
crew who are marooned in Canada when the sub
marine is blown up by airplanes, was to be convinced
of the tenacity of spirit and potent organization of
Nazi forces. This film, astonishingly enough, re
versed the r61e of the traditional romantic hero of
Hollywood. No longer does the glamorous lone-wolf
win out over tremendous odds. After he is deprived,
one by one, of the little band, with a whole nation
looking for him, the Nazi captain does not escape;
he is captured by the wit and brawn of a Canadian
private in an ingenious climax to his arduous saga.
The film is English, and the actors starred in it take
the parts of Englishmen and Canadians; they are all
well known to the American screen: Raymond
Massey, Leslie Howard, and Laurence Olivier. Yet
these glamor boys take the "bit" parts; naturally, they
are outstanding bits, and have the same place in the
heroic values of the movie as a common man, a private
in the army, would have should he distinguish him
self by heroic action on the battlefield. So "life" has
entered the hierarchy of Hollywood art and converted
the conventional individualistic heroes into conspicu
ous members of the supporting cast—that "support
ing cast" which is a figure of speech for the masses of
2i6 the HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

the people. As cited in the chapter on John Doe, it is

in the cards, however they be played, that all heroes
must finally confess, by some means, that they are
subject to the laws governing the man in the street.
Historically speaking, gods and kings must be pre
pared to endure their periodic and ritual self-sacrifice;
Garbo, the "goddess," had to become a mere woman,
a client of American coutuiieres. In comparison with
To Be or Not to Be, The Invaders is a model of
realism. Hollywood's general tendency is to present
Nazis as caricatures participating in a struggle with
"real people" having a highly developed sense of
humor as well as an insurmountable cleverness.
Melodrama and its tricks, used against the Nazis, be
come absolutely fabulous in Mister V, in which the
situation is reversed. Mr. Howard, who is starred, is
the professorial leader of a little band of archaeological
students, and he effects the escape of twenty-eight
important prisoners of the German police. Although
in The Invaders, the Nazi captain had to face the
most realistic opposition, Mr. V has to face only a
comic-opera set of Gestapo agents. I do not complain
of the facts, if they are facts. I am an American, and
know what my interests are. I complain of the Holly
wood moral. The triumphant cartoon of inverted
heroism is not respectable art or respectable thought
. . . The troupe of Pohsh actors in To Be or Not to
 TO BE OR NOT TO BE 217

Be make a comic-opera escape of the most incredible

kind.
The moral of this whole cartoon, after a few mo
ments' serious thought, is obvious enough. It is the
aim of Hollywood, as of official propaganda, to sepa
rate the facts in the newspapers from the "facts" in
entertainment. The psychology is that, if imaginatively
the enemy is underrated, it is easier to defeat him.
Is this true? Why is To Beor Not to Be so fabulously
comedic and so incongruously put together? Is it not
because even the Hollywood propagandists are aware
of the profound dislocation required for, first, separat
ing the hero from his individualistic function, and,
second, separating the seriousness of life from the
comedy of art? Granted that it is serious to treat sex
from a farcical standpoint, because sex itself has,
appropriately, a comic side of its own, still, by ex
aggerating this angle, we are brought around again
to the seriousness of sex. By winning exemption from
the tension of sex in a comic explosion, we are better
prepared to grapple with its tension once more. But
can the same argument be applied to the cartooning
of Nazism?
Chaplin's personality gave a genuine caricature to
Hitler's personality; he communicated to this charac
terization something of what he really was and gave
the part a pathos which humanized Hitler. At several
points in To Be or Not to Be, a commentator's voice
2i8 the HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

is interpolated with regard to the appearance on

Warsaw streets of a man taken for Hitler, and, later,
the same voice describes the first bombing of the city.
Why was this special device deemed appropriate? Did
it not seek to provide a place in the movie for such a
serious thing as a bombing, a note which is excep
tional to the comic pattern of the plot? It seems self-
evident and is also tangible proof that the movie is
aware of its inconsistency as a pastiche. Now, here
a fact is introduced into a work of art—a very recog
nizable fact: the bombing of cities. And side by side
with it is the attitude recommended by Hollywood
art. Should art itself adopt defensive measures? Was
"art," too, caught "unprepared"? If Hollywood, in the
pictures just noted, has organized some of its heroes
as "underdogs" and its "underdogs" as glamorous
lone-wolves, it is because social morality itself has been
caught in a defensive posture. It is thus peace, and
the art and morality of peace, which have been un
prepared.
We must face the fact that the typical American
hero has been placed in the anomalous and rather
embarrassing position of becoming, at times, a sort
of Mickey Mouse, just as "the enemy" is a Franken
stein's monster whose power is based on "inferior"
mechanical insides. Mickey is a David who is heroic
through the ingenuity of his mechanical weapons.
 TO BE OR NOT TO BE 219

But why should Americans fall so easily into the pos

tures of the underdog? Isn't the United States a
powerful and large nation? Doesn't the British Empire
cover almost two-thirds of the globe? It is Germany
that is relatively small. Yes, but it has become large
through the upstart genius of fascism, a philosophy
of the Great Leader against many scattered groups of
small leaders. The most famous myth of Hollywood
has come true—in Berlin! The bandit, the "Robin
Hood of the Aryan Race," robs the "rich" of the
world to give to Germany which, according to this
legend, is the "poor" of the world. For its "sins" of
glamorizing the public enemies and the Little Caesars,
at first moralistically and then nonchalantly, Holly
wood is now paying the rapidly minted and dubious
coin of its art. Values have to be hastily rejuggled.
The script writers are sent scuttling to their dens to
rewrite a third rewriting. There must be laughs.
There must be patriotism. There must be all this—
and hell, too . . . but a censored hell, a neat hell, a
sugared hell.
It may be argued that democracy on the defensive
has to organize all its resources to fight and finally
conquer the enemy. If so, that is too bad. I do not
deny it may be true. But in this bitter fact, this radical
state of affairs in which art must be sacrificed, are not
some of us to remain critical? Are we not to record
220 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

what is happening in the factual sense to art? If an

incendiary bomb punctures the ceiling of our apart
ment, we instantly adopt a critical attitude toward
the event and attempt by proved methods to quench
or smother it. Can we not do the same for art? Taste,
standards of judgment, the maintenance of a serious
morality, these are not mere traits of unusual indi
viduals. Under democracy, they tend to spread, to be
assimilated by the many. Holljwood has been a great
but whimsical educator, sometimes even a force of
obstruction and perversion. Yet art has always had its
popular aspects, and Hollywood has produced a few
great works. It is the admirable exceptions of Holly
wood for which 1 implicitly speak in this book. 1 have
also spoken, as 1 declared at the outset, for those
irresponsible wonders of the movie city, those un
coordinated and inadvertent elements of grandeur,
which it affords along with all the frippery and the
falsity. An exceptionally equipped spectator is re
quired, on the other hand, to discern and evaluate
these chance events. One of the Janus faces of Holly
wood must be saved, but it must be the one with eyes
on the future. Mr. Benny is a gag man. His face must
go. He is not responsible—not even for his gags. He
distorts To Be or Not to Be exactly the way the claim
(which was featured in Mister V) that Shakespeare
is a native ancestor of Nazi culture distorts the true
and unique face of reality. Mr. Lubitsch's film itself
 TO BE OR NOT TO BE 221

is full of remarkable effects of melodrama and even

some genuine wit. Not only is pace absent, however,
but all is spoiled by a hamminess that infects the
whole as a single drop of sour milk infects sweet milk.
Is this way, finally, "to be or not to be"? It is the
privilege of Americans to answer with an emphatic
negative. Perhaps we will get around to it. If we do,
Hollywood will obey. What else can it do?
It is, moreover, the principle of the thing. As to the
sometime fact, Hollywood is quite capable of putting
its ear to the ground and reading official prognoses
and warnings in the newspapers; vide, the recent Life
boat directed by Hitchcock. Obviously, here, a highly
capable German enemy must be defeated by the
scions of democracy. But the lesson is not so allegori
cal in nature as many have supposed. In the lifeboat,
the Nazi is literally outnumbered. Eventually, numeri
cal power is bound to win, and we have the numeri
cal power on every level, in every department. Yes!
Nazism will be pushed overboard. Just as inevitably
as that. But meanwhile, the succession of sins against
art and reason will have been pasted by Hollywood
on the billboards of history.
CHAPTER XI

THE HUMAN MASK

In Chapter II, I wrote this sentence concerning

a primitive stage in the development of movie
technique: "The point was not that actors should ex
press emotions with their faces, but rather the reverse,
that they should express their faces with emotions—
to prove they were real, not wax-works, faces." Since
movie photography and make-up now leave no doubt
that we are watching real faces on the screen, we
might think that emotion is no longer called upon to
express the mere reality of the human face, and that
all the actor's face must do is to express emotion.
Perhaps the most striking irony about Hollywood is
that its art still lags in this respect: the actor's face
very seldom forms a character mask; that is, it seldom
conveys the mature experience of an adult, rarely
lends authority to the words with which an actor ex
presses his emotions.
This point may be obviously illustrated. The term.
 THE HUMAN MASK 223

"character," in Hollywood primarily means the as

sumption by an actor of a different or older character.
Merle Oberon and Barbara Stanwyck become "char
acter actresses" by portraying r61es that take them
from youth to old age. Paul Muni, and formerly Lon
Chaney, have assumed a varied assortment of r61es,
not merely, in the former's case, because he could
command—however dubiously—almost anyaccent, but
also because both were inspired make-up artists: they
invented masks for themselves. Muni's most ingenious
mask was undoubtedly "Scarface." Hollywood has a
fundamentally puerile conception of the mask as a
disguise of character, whereas from the true esthetic
viewpoint, the mask should reveal character.
But what, indeed, is "character" in the orthodox
acting sense? It is the identity assumed by a person
ality for a particular r61e. In Hollywood, however,
there has always been a gallery of personalities who
may be called, in the popular sense of the word, "char
acters," and who were imprisoned in the masks pro
vided for them by nature as surely as though each
morning they had left their dressing rooms made up
for a single role. Such types easily come to mind:
Wallace Beery is one; Marie Dressier and Zasu Pitts,
others. For a while, Mr. Beery was given "villain"
parts, but the essentially comic pattern of his face at
last triumphed. All three are memorable human masks
because they belong to a semi-grotesque category;
224 HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION
indeed, they are contemporary masks of the comic,
like the pre-eminent one of Charlie Chaplin, although
his is an invention. The important thing about a
"mask" is that, in itself, it is unchanging. If, however,
the mask has a native "character interest," expresses
some unique and revelatory quality of the human, it
changes by remaining the same thing: it sheds light
on everything with which it comes into contact. It is,
exactly, a source of light. The unhappy thing about
Holl}rwood acting is that most players, lacking the
maturity of human experience before they face a
camera, have to gyrate with their features in order
to express feelings and ideas with emphasis.
I do not mean (as the reader knows quite well by
this time) that Hollywood charades usually succeed
in providing actors with really adult material to ex
press. But mypoint will be evident by glancing at the
technique of acting in French films. Take such tal
ented actors as Louis Jouvet, Harry Baur, and Raimu.
Jouvet acted in The End of a Day and Raimu in The
Bakers Wife, two of the most beautiful films ever
produced. Interesting to note is that Raimu is a
"French Wallace Beery"; both, roughly speaking, are
"common man" types. But we instantly notice that
Beery is coarser, and that both his "human mask"
and acting technique lack the finesse of Raimu's. By
American standards, Jouvet's style and, for instance,
that of Victor Frangen, are "wooden." The fact is
 THE HUMAN MASK 225
that this supposed woodenness is the eflFect of the
immobiUty of their "masks," the unchangingness of
their facial expressions. This unchangingness is not to
be confused with monotony. On the contrary, a style
adopted by French actors for high-comedy and drama,
it shadows forth a subtle variety.
In The End of a Day, there is an interesting ex
ample of a comic mask, a male actor's corresponding
to the extravagant features of the deceased actress,
Edna May Oliver. Yet this actor did not gyrate his
features the way Miss Oliver used to gyrate hers. The
reason is simple: the French actor's comedy was prin
cipally in his lines—the lines of the play, not the lines
of his face. The comic mold of his face merely
emphasized the comic nature of his r61e, whereas in
Miss Oliver's case, her effect depended entirely upon
her facial and bodily pantomime apart from the sig
nificance of her lines. Being by no means the same
thing as "character," what is the "human mask" in
acting?
It is the un-cinematic element of the cinematic. It
is what is already given in human personality before
the individual personality isassumed. It is as immobile
as a painting is. This is why Garbo fascinated us by
her presence alone. The mold of her face expresses
without having to move; so does Mae West's; so did
Duse's and Bernhardt's. Louis Jouvet's face, no matter
what r61e he plays, expresses a certain sum of human
226 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

experience that resides in the modulations of his face

as lines of print reside in a novel. It is a quality which,
unhappily, very few actors in Hollywood possess. I
cannot think of an American actress who has it to
any notable degree. First of all, American actors are
all too young. It was a relief to welcome, among the
Hollywood male leads, the dissipated face of Joseph
Gotten. On the other hand, Orson Welles has a child
ish type of countenance which makes him an unsuita
ble mask for any but peculiarly neurotic adult roles,
and yet he is too big to play adolescents. This con
dition drove him into inventing masks for himself.
Edward G. Robinson is the only dramatic actor ma
ture in years who possesses a really striking mask, but
then Mr. Robinson (doubtless owing to his experience
in gangster r61es) has mugged himself into a per
manent grimace. Walter Pidgeon is a mature actor
who never mugs, but he looks much too much like
Walter Pidgeon. Alone among the serious American
actresses, Bette Davis creates an illusion of the mask;
I phrase it this way, because the whole effect of the
mask comes from her eyes, which are hyperthyroid in
tendency. Their restlessness keeps her face in constant,
too constant movement. This means merely that her
personality, as I stated at length in a previous chapter,
is neurotic. Neuroticism is something, but it limits,
at the same time that it defines, the mask.
Before the talking movie appeared, American actors
 THE HUMAN MASK 227

had a better chance to create their "human masks."

Not only did we get Chaplin then, but also Lillian
Gish, as well as the romantic figures of Rudolph
Valentino from Italy and John Barrymore from Broad
way. Acting, with distinct but rare exceptions, was
extremely bad in the first two decades of the movies.
Of course, in Hollywood less was demanded of acting
than on the stage. At the same time, because every
thing depended in those former times, so far as the
actor went, on pantomime, the actor's physical style
had to be highly distinguishable, had to have some
of the quality of the human mask. If nowadays we
notice a relatively competent young actor, such as
Robert Young, we see that physically he has no style
whatsoever. Yet if we recall certain matinee idols of
the older days, such as Carlyle Blackwell and Eugene
O'Brien, we see acting much less competent than
formerly, but we see something more important: a
sense of physical style, a sense of fulfilling certain
functions merely by being an image, even if the only
objective were to cause the most commonplace flutter
in the feminine heart.
As we know, great art is simple; its simplicity is
subtle, never stark or crude. What I described in "The
Technicolor of Love" as the ability of actors and
actresses to reveal, "to denude," by the simplest move
ments of the clothed body, may have a great simplic
ity. Provokingly enough, Hollywood's art does not
228 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

have to be greatly simple to obtain extraordinary

effects. Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O'Hara and Leslie
Howard as Ashley Wilkes are not great masks, but
they become extraordinary chiefly through the magic
machinery of Hollywood. Carlyle Blackwell's romantic
profile and black hair, his genteel slouch, fashionable
with men at that time even though it produced a
visible belly, formed a significant hieroglyph and is
part of the romantic tradition of the movies. Valen
tino's arrival meant an influence of fire, and gave a
content to the artificial athleticism of Fairbanks,
Senior. Valentino had charm and zest, and even the
addition of John Barrymore's profile to the screen
gallery did not challenge the former's supremacy as
a romantic type. The human mask, finally, is the com
plete physical style of an actor, and exists independ
ently of the special character he plays.
Just as Valentino's face, smiling or unsmiling, con
veyed an "ocean of meaning" to spectators, so latterly
did Dietrich's for her sex. Dietrich, fully clothed, is
far more alluring than Betty Grable or Dorothy
Lamour, divested of all but their modesty. It is a sad
fable, especially sad to be so popular, that "mystery"
is inseparable from "the dark," that to be mysterious
is to be concealing. Even mystery, to exist, must ex
pose its symbol, evince its inviting hieroglyph. The
most moving among mysteries are invariably those
that brazenly reveal their masks to the light. The
 THE HUMAN MASK 229

human presence is literally a maslc for all the expe

rience the humanbeinghas undergone. So the Human
Mask is the face or "fagade" symbolizing one human
experience. To have great acting, there must be great
masks, too.
CHAPTER XII

THE DAYLIGHT DREAM

Day and night. What exotic dreams! The most dar

ing romantic dream man ever had was to create a
bright and saturative light after the sun had with
drawn its holy essence from half the planet. A rival
sun; an artificial light. What a candle for the universe!
It is as though the moon, believed dead, had been un
screwed from the socket of heaven and brought down
to be placed behind a small transparent picture, so
that a great hallucination was created on an empty
space—the empty space of night whether it is black
or white. The most primitive movies were created by
placing a lighted candle behind opaque silhouettes
cut from paper—we getthe same effect when we place
our hands in front of a light and create figurations on
a blank wall. Of course, it is the spirit of night that
moves in our fingers, and the light is still, as steady
as the sun. This light is necessary for projection, for
230
 THE DAYLIGHT DREAM 23I

reproduction after cinema is created. Primitive cinema

was done in black on white on the gyroscope, a con
traption that whirled like the earth in space: a horse
ran, a man leaped. Then, when the camera repro
duced this physical principle by unwinding film in
front of what it was desired to photograph, in move
ment, light was necessary, sunlight and then intense
artificial illumination. And the same intensity was
necessary for the reproduction of the moving images
as was required for their recording.
The eye had absorbed the exterior light falling upon
opaque masses, a dialectic which created space—the
eye of the camera: the lens and the film. Then, bring
ing to its aid the artificial light, the lens and the film
could project what had been memorized. But for this,
certain conditions, conditions of rest and darkness
were necessary. We are obliged to forget our imme
diate concerns when we enter a movie theater and
relax in our seats. What we remember, for reasons
given throughout this book, is apt to be rather acci
dental and associated with states of passive memory,
with moments of daydreaming and spontaneous wish
ing. Hence the darkness of the movie theater is actu
ally the night itself, the night of sleep and dreams.
And the field of the screen is the lidded eye through
which the mind that will not sleep, the universe whose
sun will not go down, projects its memory and its
wild intelligence, penetrating unnumbered relativistic
232 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

miles into empty space to reach . . . immeasurable

trivia. Trivia? Much has been said about Hollywood's
trivia, about the strange relativism of size which per
vades its studios and its creations.
I have defined this relativity in many ways, in
various directions. But it is most necessary not to
forget the machine and its role; the man-created ele
ment. For light, used for the purpose of illumination,
and not for warmth or cooking, is an artifice, once it
exists beyond the primitive forest, suited chiefly for
the mental and spiritual needs of man. It was neces
sary for early man, surrounded by hostile animals and
unprotected by walls, to build fires to scare off his
enemies. Fire was also used in innumerable rituals,
as a fetish against danger, as an exultation, as an
accessory of sacrifice to the divine elements. And fire
is but the red heart of light. In the heart of the earth,
there is presumed to be fire, and in the heavens there
is presumed to be an icy blue of vapor, so that the
color gamut goes from red to yellow to green to blue,
as we think of ourselves as vertical in relation to the
earth's surface. And within this color gamut we must
not forget the yellow burning to white to icy blue of
daylight—artificial light, electric light. It is man's
particular bright dream, for with it came thought,
came leHection. After fire, after burning faggots, had
served all the practical needs of his life, man cooked
his mind over the symbolic fire of the night and
 THE DAYLIGHT DREAM 233

achieved the concept. As white heat is necessary for

the projection of what the camera's eye has memo
rized, it is also necessary for what man wishes to
project on the screen of his memory, developing there
as it issues from the sun of his brain. Around him,
meanwhile, is the night, unseen but alive and moving,
and existing in all its secrets and its phenomenal
stories. To think that artificial light at first meant the
scholar, the artist, the witchery of thought! Today,
it means an extension of life for the purpose of a
different kind of activity, for amusement, for court
ship, for the vestiges of religious ritual (dancing and
singing), as well as for study and artistic creation.
Who is the artist in relation to this scheme, the Holly
wood artist, as well as the painter and the poet? It is
he who uses the daylight hours not for work in the
common usage of the word, not for making the wheels
of physical life go round, but for creating a product
presumed either to amuse or uplift man in his "idle
hours."
It is only natural for ritual, too, to go on an eight-
hour-a-day working basis in this era of extreme special
ization. The ritual of the daydream at night, of which
artificial illumination is the symbol, cannot be aban
doned merely because of the "daylight-saving" phi
losophy of bourgeois capitalism. What is religion? Is
it not strictly speaking the spiritual illumination of the
dark? God was created as the neo-spirit of the dark.
234 HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

for first He had to exist in order to set the sun in the

heavens. Hence God is essentially the night, but He
is also light-bringing. And man wishes to imitate Him,
for light-bringing is in every way beneficial to the con
ditions on his earth. Yet the energy of man as an indi
vidual organism is limited; he must exile the light and
return to the night from which he came in order to
refuel the engine of his body and arise in the morning
refreshed. He must sleep. But it happens that as man's
brain has developed and provided a white sort of heat
that rivals the heart, the brain too has its Jangueurs,
its rhythms and rest periods, parallel orders of exist
ence which do not coincide exactly with his expendi
ture of physical energy. Because of this rivalry between
the bodily orders of existence in man, because of this
economic inequality of energy elements within the
human animal, the dream was created as the rever
beration of an unconscious dissidence, the voice of
desire for a more exact chiaroscuro. The dream is a
bright-blowing flag, peopled with the enigmas of the
future: future time and future space. The dream is
that trembling flower which is a pure protest; it is the
only pure and trembling flower of protest.
We know that even the burning eye of an electric
bulb has a pulse, but a pulse whose throbbings are so
finely separated that they beat in rhythm with the
visual pulse, those waves of recognition by which the
human eye envelops all that lies in the field of its
 THE DAYLIGHT DREAM 235

vision. Of course, the eye is only a medium, a medium

forlight. The eye itself, asa physical engine, is nothing
without the human intelligence, the light behind it.
And within the human intelligence lies memory, a
steadily burning if mufHed light. The heart beats in
sleep; the heart does not cease. The heart is the inter
nalsymbol of the human body, representing the world
outside like an ambassador from a foreign country.
At night it becomes a film behind which is placed
the artificial bulb of the brain—a single bulb burning
in the endless night of the body. Sometimes this body
of the heart, like a planet in space, passes opaquely
between the lower human body and the brain, and
the brain is eclipsed. This is the dream. It casts the
interior of the body into a dusk, a semi-seeing, lit by
a fugitive flash. This is still the dream. Otherwise, in
what we call "sound sleep," the heart is a mechanical
thing, a remote thing; it is the veritable illusion of the
moon, that cold celestial illusion produced in space
by the hidden sun.
Light invaded the night. The man of cities lives on
in his waking state after the sun goes down. He goes
into the movie theater to be amused and moved, to
feel that life is real but not very earnest, or else not
very real and hence too earnest to bother about. Man
robbed the night of its darkness in manifold ways.
Was the night not going to retaliate according to the
great inexorable law of its nature? It is enough for the
236 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION
night to entertain day, to submit to that eternally,
rhythmically suppurating cancer in its black heart, the
sun. Just as the mechanism of the body does not cease
when the mind sleeps, but throbs till the organism
awakes, so man as he works in field and factory and
oflBce behaves as the heart of what he has created,
the things of his man-made world. In this world of
bread-winning, even while he submits to the bargain
he has made with his things, he himself—a httle uni
verse of light and dark, heat and cold—is sleeping, in a
sense, working at sub-par, because in his interior uni
verse, he reserves the right to shine at his utmost, and
when he is acting like a machine among machines, he
does not shine at his utmost, he does not create day
light in himself.
The world of mechanical things is a night, and the
brightest metal, like the brightest blood when it passes
beneath the lid of the eye, cannot shine in this night.
The factory worker polishes his metal; he admires his
metal; he knows it is part of a necessary night. He
works, during war, longer than normally in this night,
merely to create instruments that will destroy the
enemy, annihilate the daylight of the enemy. And as,
at night, the never-dark brain, the unshut eye, burns
futilely through the opaque masses of the human
body, man's spirit burns as futilely through the mate
rial objects which he has mechanically organized. It
is himself, a sun amidst the sleeping world of things.
 THE DAYLIGHT DREAM 237

which creates the moony highlight on a piston rod,

no less than this highlight is created by the light of
the sun shining in the heavens. But this eye of mem
ory, infused with the light of the brain, is as aware
of the night of the machines as the sitter in the movie
house is aware of the night of the world when his
attention is concentrated on events unreeling a hun
dred feet away on the screen. And sitting in offices or
standing in factories, repeating the same motions over
and over, speedily and flawlessly, the daylight dreamer
has his dream in relation to which the most glittering
machine is only a figment of primeval darkness.
Hollywood is but the industrialization of the me
chanical worker's daylight dream. Do not think that
the vast factories of the movie city represent anything
more than the daylight dream, the dreamlight of the
soul and will and intelligence which is separated from
the night of things—the daylight dream extended
ritualistically into those hours reserved by custom for
relaxation and amusement. The compulsiveness of the
movie habit is neither simple nor limited; it has power
even over those who escape from intimate concern
with the wheels of the material world. For after all,
such an escape is in great part an illusion—as though
we could escape from the dark. The best we can do is
to isolate ritually the dark from the light. Few of us
are so free of obligation to the mechanical, objective,
and material aspects of living that we do not need to
238 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION
reproduce our slavery to them, however partial, by
slipping into a movie house and seeing unroll the most
highly systematized, the commonest, daydream of all:
the average Hollywood product.
Is it not highly amusing, even to the weariest and
most jaded of us, to observe the daydream, sought
desperately in the blackest part of things, converted
by the movie into the most logical forms of narrative,
the most conventionalized of emotions, the most lumi
nous shapes of the visible? For here is "reality," the
rationally arranged, sensible orders of existence repro
duced in the most literal and physical form possible
to artifice. The "absolutism" of dream, its lawlessness
in the Freudian sense, is here replaced by a formalized
scheme available not merely to this or that individual
but also to the person sitting next to him in the sub
way and the theater. Hollywood is the mass uncon
scious—scooped up as crudely as a steam shovel scoops
up the depths of a hill, and served on a helplessly
empty screen. A thousand small wishes are symboli
cally satisfied by the humblest and worst Holljwood
movie, and the excellence or triteness of a movie has
little to do with satisfying the average customer. He
goes to see it as to a sacrifice rather than as to a cele
bration. Pain, theoretically, is to be mixed equally
with pleasure, and one is as welcome as the other.
Surely the sadism, no less than the masochism, of this
book has not been missed by the reader. The act of
 THE DAYLIGHT DREAM 239

submitting to the spell of a movie is to me a ritual of

masochism, while writing about my experiences in the
movie theater is a ritual of sadism. The impulse of the
daydreamer is to escape from the facts. The artist
always begins by being a daydreamer, but his day
dreams are inevitably turned into works of art by way
of the dialectic of testing them by relating them back
to the facts. This movement is continuous. Facts, to
the artist, form an opacity, and the concept of opacity
is black, relieved only by light, which provides a con
ception of the object in space, a conception of the
total relations of living processes. Translucency is
mental, a reading of the future, purely a question of
learning the formula of total action. Science is trans
lucent by divining the mechanical insides of things,
the will which exists in a single element contributing
to larger complexes, but science's mentally disintegrat
ing eye, soon discovering that "singleness" is relative,
has divided and subdivided until the atom, and be-
yond-the-atom, has been split. It is very hard to relate
such a vast number of active elements as science de
scribes back to a simple human need, a concrete
human desire: the need for sleep and food, the desire
to love and be happy. Hence, science's burning eye,
while it creates vast abstract structures, tends to show
that in relation to the total physical world, with man
as its center, such structures might as well be made of
cellophane. It isas necessary for science to be humanly
240 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

modest as it is for art to be humanly pretentious, and

Hollywood is art at its most humanly pretentious; and,
thus, I hint at its necessity.
Today, Hollywood is as necessary as our economic
status quo, and no more and no less necessary. In a
day of modern painting and literature, the exploration
of the dream and, coevally, of the far past of mankind,
thereare many references to the monstrous. The home
of the monster is perennially in man's brain, for there
the monster is first illuminated and burns only in in
timate contact with the womb whose sperm is the
light of memory—that memory which, contrary to its
orthodox reputation, is as inventive as it is passive.
It is only when man wills it so that memory is con
ceived as passive, as faithfully reconstructive in the
logical narrative sense, as producing a well-balanced
concept of total experience. Proust's great novel, to
which I have referred previously, is a remembrance of
things past on a specific basis of what occurred in a
selected past. Indeed, Proust's actual novel is a "Holly-
woodizing" of what really occurred, an adaptation
on the basis of the most discreet, overt, and palatably
memorized eventuations. True, it consists of the way
Proust most nearly thought of these things from an
esthetic viewpoint at the time when he experienced-
them. But this is merely the novelist's method of
composition and, being a specific method, must ex-
 THE DAYLIGHT DREAM 241
elude as well as include certain kinds of truth. Some
times Hollywood too tries to treat life, as feasibly as
possible, the way some greatauthor treated it, but the
charade produced, and presented on thousands of
theater screens, is basically a selective, and thus more
or less unconsciously censoring, method of composi
tion. I hope I have not given the impression that the
conception of charade is totally foreign to legitimate
literature. Proust's novel is a charade of Parisian so
ciety played in the intimacy of his bedroom, while he
himself is confined to his bed alone. While all things
may enter the darkness of the bedroom, some are ex
cluded from the brightness of the bedroom. Some
things we do are really done in the dark, in semi-dark,
or perforce under fugitive streaks of light, fugitive
visibility—it is the shocking effect of these fugitive
glimpses, knitwith such profoundly intimate emotions,
that so often distort our visual perspectives and create
those purely emotive forms seen in modern and primi
tive types of painting. But Proust depended, as Holly
wood depends, upon a decently burning light in the
bedroom no less than in the drawing room; upon the
classical traditions of form characteristic of the white
ness of Greek marble figures no less than of the light
that burned so equally in the minds of Plato and
Euclid, illuminating the whole human house by a
single beam. This is also what the movie projection
242 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

machine attempts to do: cast a straight beam through

out the world's house. That is why I think of Holly
wood actors and actresses as gods and goddesses in the
Greek sense, images always seen (virtually) at full
length, composed and in relaxed attitudes, whether
sitting, standing, or reclining. A popular actress dare
not distort her face too much. Tales are told of the
rages of goddesses, but one never sees Minerva in a
temper or Venus' face contorted with jealousy (unless
in a modern Frenchmovie), for if one did, they would
seem almost monstrous. The monster is the son of
light and darkness; he is part day and part night; part
reason and part blind desire—but beware of the pro
portion and its occasion! In seeking amidst the past
and the present like grab bags, Hollywood has pro
ducedout of ignorance the proportions of the monster.
But this ignorance—what is it but the deliberate,
systematized exclusion of knowledge which results
from man's efforts to adjust himself to the external
world, the world of sunrise and sunset, as simple as the
raising or lowering of a shade? But does not such a
"natural" simplicity depend entirely on what happens
between sunrise and sunset, the way in which darkness
and light have been timed, opacity and translucence
manipulated? Ah, there are "standards" for these
things, just as there is "standard time" and "daylight-
saving time." Such criteria, in the dynamic sense, are
utilized by men to be conventional, to cooperate, fuse.
 THE DAYLIGHT DREAM 243

and harmonize with their environment, large or small.

In Hollywood, this element is placed side by sidewith
a bold creative attempt: the creation of the visual
language of the films; an art of representation which
creates specific cinematic means, a means grown so
much larger than the dynamic ability of the content.
So does the dynamic power of the individual often
outpace his desire to be conventional, to fit in, to
render his desires "normal" in every way. Out of this
individual comes the artist or the scientist, someone
with a creative technique—a technique derived entirely
from preoccupation with the daydream. Hollywood is
in competition with other forms of art; it, hke the
artist, wishes to outshine rival artists. But, as I have
tried to show, it is composed internally of an aggre
gateof rival artists, a structure of elements designed to
create a highly popular, undifferentiated series of prod
ucts, and is also competitive, compromising, building
on destruction. In this sense it is too much of a social
science, too little of a social art. The black daylight of
the office and the bright nightlight of the movie the
ater balance too easily the daydream of the office and
the night dream of the theater; the effect is one of
cancelling, and hence of a perpetual suspension of the
true conflict of forces.
The thesis of Hollywood, the personal daydream of
the common man, is suspended in its antithesis, the
mass daydream, and cannot break out of this womb.
244 HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION

The movie theater is the psychoanalytical clinic for

the average worker and his day-, not his night, dreams!
He emerges from the theater cured of the illusion that
his effort to alienate himself from the night of me
chanical work in lighted ofhce or factory is morbid, a
monstrous kind of wish. By seeing it re-created, for
malized, conventionalized on the screen, he is immeas
urably reassured; he is healthy again. What do his
night dreams matter? He has roughly equated in his
mental continuity the facts of his night and those of
his day. He has reached a classical adjustment: the
gods do it, too. The gods arelike him; theytoo aresen
timental, frustrated, escapist. Theytooseek fine clothes
—wine, women, and song. But theyarecontented. They
are paid. Their agonies are sham. That is the priceless
faculty of the divine; they earn their livelihood by
being themselves—just by being themselves. A celes
tial, a socialist Utopia? Let man go forth and imitate
them. Let him be reconciled. Let the end of desire
be its beginning. Let the night of the machines descend
on him every morning at eight-thirty. All right, he will
dream. But his dream will be psychoanalyzed in the
evening. Let him pierce this night with images of
pleasure and longing, dreams of the flesh and the soul;
he will see those dreams ritualized and "realized,"
equated with the mechanical night in the inside of
the movie theater.
But this is barren. All the monsters of Hollywood
 THE DAYLIGHT DREAM 245

cannot compare with the luminous and authentic

monstrosity of a little child's drawing or the paintings
of the insane. For in these lie the basic sperm of the
creative dream, the desire to bring light into darkness,
and so transform both. I do not mean by this a log
ical compromise, a formal, gray reality, for in its cease
less movement, human desire can never stop to be
come a logical fusion, a static neutrality of coloration.
Human desire is to pierce the deepest dark, no matter
how remote it may be. From this: a synthesis—an ex
plosion, a restless rainbow of color—an all-consuming,
all-creating dialectic! The movement of light into
space is endless and revolutionary. Today, science tells
us that the behavior of the universe is far more com
plex and "unreadable" than materialist science has
declared it to be. Some of science's most cherished
pr'.iciples have fallen by the wayside, have died, while
some of the most ancient myths have survived. The
movement of the planets exists, we believe, and laws
have been invented that explain the seasons and day
and night themselves by computing the manner in
which the rotating earth circles the sun. However com
plex this system is, it becomes fabulously simple when
we consider the moon of lovers, the sun of bathing
beaches, the seasons of grain-growing, the evening of
the supper bell, and the morning of the alarm clock.
We do our best to obey the laws of nature in conjunc
tion with the functional structures of our society. But
246 THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION
the sun, the moon, the stars, and the earth as we know
them—either as classical myths or scientifically defined
bodies—are not the only spheres possible. Nor are the
colors on the simple palette the colors of the artist's
picture. The imagination has transformed them. No
matter how bright technicolor may be, it is too dark
if it hangs there, a chimera in a void, unattached to a
dominant imagination, unleashed to the forces that
are really carrying us to the wide world's end and be
yond. Through the camera's eye, Hollywood has de
veloped a tremendous faculty for the presentation,
however inadequate, of the classical-humanist world
of men and women. Inherent in its visual realism lies
the irreducible tag of the human norm, that "arma
ture" on which mankind must work its future miracles.
Hollywood can remain monstrous and pernicious in
its varieties of hallucination or be seriously utilized, I
hazard, toward an end beyond what any other art has
accomplished in a mass sense. Now that, with the rest
of cultural manifestations, the movie city's works are
being placed on a universal testing ground, we shall
see what happens to the camera, to the charade, to
"displacement," and to "reality." After all, everything
proceeds by contradiction. That is our intrinsic social
hope.
FILM-CRITICISM
.PARKER
Written with the shameless ★ the comic modes of Charlie -= • -ER
extravagance and the Chaplin and Danny Kaye
adventurous imagination of the the significance of Joan i
art it describes, The Hollywood Crawford's nostalgia for tragedy
Hallucination is a delightful, This is a pioneering study of
illuminating tour of American one of the central achievements
cinematic culture. Here, for of 20th-century American
instance, is the lost word on; culture: the unique expressive
★ why Hedy Lomarr is more style which developed out of the
morally objectionable than convergence of the beliefs and
Mae West values of the American people
★ the similarities between the and the peculiar technical
moral dilemmas of Raskolnikov properties of the medium of P®
and Edward G, Robinson's the film.
Little Caesar With a critical intelligence of
★ the authority problemsof a quality rarely applied to the
Orson Welles's Citizen film, Tyler shows how the screen
Kane and Humphrey Bogart's image reflects the aspirations
Sam Spade and frustrations, the fears and
★ Mickey Mouse as the beliefs of the audience. He also
stylistic antithesis of provides sharp insight into
Frankenstein film technique.

The Hollywood Hallucination may well be the

most intelligent commentary on Hollywood
movies thot hos come from ony literory mon.
ERIC BENTLEY IN THE KENYON REVIEW

It hos olwoys been my Intention to write

o book obout Hollywood. Since reoding this
book by Porker Tyler, I know Isholl never h
do It: the job hos been done In o woy beyond
anything Icould ever hope to occompllsh.
HENRY MILLER IN SUNDAY AFTER THE WAR

T "i

20600