The American City in the Cinema 9781315130941, 9781412851480

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First published 2013 by Transaction Publishers Published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2013 by Taylor & Francis. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2012045367 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Clapp, James A. The American city in the cinema / James A. Clapp. pages cm 1. City and town life in motion pictures. 2. Cities and towns in motion pictures. 3. Motion pictures--United States--History and criticism. I. Title. PN1995.9.C513C53 2013 791.43’6556--dc23 2012045367 ISBN 13: 978-1-4128-5148-0 (hbk)

For Denis Sanders 1929–1987 He dreamed movies

Contents Preface

ix

1

The American City in the Cinema: An Introduction

1

2

The Urban Medium

13

3

Streets of Gold: Immigrants in the City and the Cinema

33

4

The Small Town in a Metropolitan World

59

5

How Ya Gonna Keep ‘em Down on the Farm?

79

6

Suburbia and the American Dream

91

7

Growing Up Urban: The City, the Cinema, and American Youth

107

8

Family Values, City Ways

135

9

Politics, the City, and the Cinema

153

10

Mean Streets and Cities of Night

179

11

“Are You Talking to Me?”: New York and the Cinema of Urban Alienation

201

12

Class, Race, and Ethnicity in the City and the Cinema

217

13

The Urban Woman: Labor, Liberation, and Love in the Cinematic City

239

14

City Work

257

15

Nature, Technophobia, and the Cinema of the Urban Future

273

16

The City as Cinema

293

References

301

Film List

311

Name Index

349

Subject Index

351

All movie stills and posters supplied by Photofest.

Preface Over forty years ago, when I arrived in California for the first time, I took my late wife, Patricia, and our two young daughters, Laura and Lisa, to The Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles. As we ascended the steps toward the entrance, some images began to flash out of my memory with a rising sense of déjà vu. Although I had never been in this place before, the tantalizing familiarity of the images begged for a connection. As we approached the entrance doors, they, too, seemed oddly familiar. I stopped to look back over the stairs, across the garden, to the panorama of the city beyond. “What are you waiting for?” Patty asked, holding open the heavy glass door with its wrought iron decorations. “I know this place,” I said, half-questioning, still straining my memory for a connection. “I think I’ve been here.” She gave me her skeptical look. “How could you, you just got to California a couple of days ago.” “I know, but . . .” Just then it came to me with a sudden and startling flood of images: a body lying on the landing at the top of the steps, illuminated by bright headlights from police cars at the foot of the steps. I pointed to the spot. “There, right there,” I said a trifle too loudly, “That’s where Sal Mineo died!” “Who?” Patty said. Now Laura and Lisa were looking at me with a worried curiosity. “Sal Mineo. You know, the actor who played ‘Plato’ in Rebel Without a Cause,” I explained as if they would immediately understand. Now the images were pouring into my mind. I realized that I was standing right where James Dean had stood when he screamed to the police that he had taken the bullets out of Sal Mineo’s gun. This particular ix

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urban place had conflated with the cinematic space of the movie and the mnemonic record of it, made years earlier, when I witnessed it in a movie theater in Rochester, New York. “Okay, that’s nice,” she said, “now can we take the girls in to see the exhibit?” She didn’t seem too excited by my revelation. “But this is the very place that was in the movie, the very spot of the final scene.” I was walking toward the spot where I was certain Sal Mineo had lain. “You remember? He was shot when he ran out of those doors. James Dean—he was Jim Stark in the movie—he and Natalie Wood, Judy, I think, tried to stop Plato because he had a gun in his hand. A cop shot Plato and he fell dead right there.” I pointed at the spot. The movie was flooding back as I breathlessly blurted out the scene to a resigned Patty and two very perplexed girls. “Dean yells at the cops, holding up his hand: ‘I got the bullets! I got the bullets!’ Remember? He took the bullets out of Plato’s gun when they were inside the planetarium?” “The planetarium that’s going to close before we see it,” Patty intoned coolly. Chastised, I joined my family, but later, when we came out, I looked again at the spot where Sal Mineo had breathed his last in the movie I first saw when I was fifteen years old. He was killed in real life a few years later, stabbed to death by an unknown assailant on his way home in L.A. Dean was already dead, an icon of the “live fast, die young” style that would be emulated by rockers and rappers in the youth culture he figured prominently in launching in the 1950s. (Dean did it in his Porsche Spyder, others mostly with drugs and guns.) Natalie Wood would die rather young as well, in a drowning accident, not many years later. Upon reflection, it seems odd that these founders of American youth culture met such an early demise. In the movies they remain forever young and vital. They live on in Rebel Without a Cause, a film I only partially watched back in 1968, but now that I teach a course called “The American City in the Cinema,” I have seen it dozens of times and catch myself lip-synching lines of dialogue. That film, like many others, not only immortalized its cast, but also, for me at least, some of its locations. In an amazing intertwining of time and space, fact and fiction, a film I saw in my own youth, back in New York, evoked such vivid images many years later when stimulated by the circumstance of my being in the place it was made. I realized then that the Los Angeles I had carried around with me for x

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nearly two decades was the Los Angeles of Rebel Without a Cause. It was an L.A. as “real,” maybe more real, than the one I’d read about in histories and texts. And so the incident at the Griffith Observatory planted in my mind, the idea of someday exploring the ways in which the cinema influences perceptions of cities and urban life and, since the city was my prime professional focus, the reciprocal influence of the city upon the cinema. Several years later I began my collaboration and friendship with Denis Sanders, the two-time Academy Award winning director, and the first Filmmaker-in-Residence at San Diego State University. One of the results of that collaboration was a course that we co-taught, titled “The American City in the Cinema.” Denis covered the art and technology of moviemaking, and I covered the cities and urban life. I hope he learned as much from me as I did from him. I was still learning from him when he died in 1987, and fortunately I had learned enough to be able to carry on with the cinema part of the equation, although I am little more than a rank amateur when compared to my much-missed mentor on moviemaking. Of the city side of the equation, I am in more familiar and comfortable territory. With academic credentials and teaching and professional experience in city planning and urban political economy, I am qualified to address the subject of the city. But, in fact, I have always been much more interested in the city and urban life as they were perceived through the lenses of the arts and humanities than through disciplines of more practical application. My first interests in cities came from authors like Dickens and Dreiser, the sets of Chaplin shorts like Easy Street, and features like Dead End. Painters, like Hopper, Marsh, Henri, and Canaletto, seemed to be able to express as much, sometimes more, about cities and life in them as lengthy social science books. I have read dozens of books about Venice, but it’s a line from Truman Capote that sums that city best for me: “Venice is like eating a box of chocolates in one go.” A movie scene can have the same compressed evocative power. This book grew out of that course and is based on the conviction that our popular arts have a role to play in educating us about ourselves and the world that we have built and inhabit. This is hardly a new observation. Neither is the fact that the world that more and more of us inhabit is an urban world. But only in recent years have academics concerned with the study of urbanism recognized film as a prime xi

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rather than ancillary medium of instruction about cities and urban life. That has changed rather rapidly. In 1989 I was invited by the French Ministry of Education to teach my course at the University of Paris, and I was re-invited by the L’Institut d’Anglais of the University of Paris VII to give lectures on the subject for a month in 1999. The following year, as a Fulbright Scholar in Hong Kong, I taught courses on this subject at Lingnan University and City University, Hong Kong. These experiences have convinced me that film is the medium through which people of other nations have formed their vision of the American city. The student audiences for these course offerings have been students of urban affairs, social sciences, American studies, cultural studies, literature, and film Studies and media. Thus this book, which I began while in Hong Kong, is designed in a manner that mirrors that course, and other professors might employ it as a text. But its essays also raise and address various subjects and issues related to both film theory and urban theory. Finally, film buffs interested in enhancing their understanding of many major and classic feature films may find new dimensions of appreciation in this exploration of the relationship between the American city and the art-entertainment industry it was so instrumental in creating. *** The cinema has spawned many “literatures.” A popular art that has captivated us from the nickelodeon to the grand movie palaces to the living room surround-sound hi-def entertainment center, its “literary” products range from the fan magazine, to newspaper review sections, to biographies and autobiographies of cinema luminaries, to turgid academic treatises. It is perhaps not my place to situate my work in this broad canon, but it is appropriate to note that my approach to the subject has been much influenced by Robert Sklar’s Movie-Made America1 and Arthur Knight’s The Liveliest Art.2 These authors are proper film historians whose frames were concerned more broadly with the influence of film upon American society. Nevertheless, these books concentrate far more heavily upon the film industry and its development, whereas I am concerned more with the thematic content of the cinematic narrative as it relates to areas dimensions of American urban society. The focus of the present work is a hybrid of urban studies and film studies that, given the salience and dominance of cities and the cinema over their respective dimensions of the American cultural landscape xii

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since the beginning of the twentieth century, have only recently received specific academic attention. It is difficult to imagine the existence of the cinema without the precondition of the city. Cinema is an art/entertainment medium made for mass consumption, for sitting in cinemas with others in willing suspension of disbelief. In nearly its first century of existence, there has not been a better device for assembling audiences and distributing film than the city, a medium for expanding opportunity that is a willing belief in the prospects for a commonweal. The day may arrive when movies will be made exclusively for the high-definition download or pay-per-view, but the city will doubtless remain its prime subject and setting. The wonder is that urbanists largely ignored the theme of the city and the cinema until recent years. This oversight may owe something to the efforts of students of urbanism to cobble together something that could be regarded as urban theory from the various social sciences. The arts, perhaps too closely associated with the architectural dominance in planning or perhaps appearing too soft and subjective to a field seeking more scientific respectability, remained at the fringes of, if not completely distanced from, planning pedagogy. Urban and planning theorists had enough to do to satisfy students that the field has some relevance to the real world; literature, art, and film studies in or adjunct to the planning curriculum would likely have a tough trip through the curricular process and be relegated to under-enrolled electives by students mostly inured to methods and techniques. However, in recent years the linkages between the city and the cinema have made their way into more urban studies courses and curricula. Papers and panels at conferences have treated the subject, and books and articles are beginning to assemble a literature that might fall, at least interstitially, in urban studies, film studies, or cultural and popular studies. The editor of a 1997 compilation from the UK, The Cinematic City,3 provides a comprehensive introduction and overview of contributions that are thematically and stylistically diverse not only in terms of the films addressed, but also the disciplines of the authors that belie the youthfulness of this academic interest. While its editor claims it “. . . is the first major collection of its kind,” this might be correct for works in English, but the first comprehensive view of the subject is probably a collection of articles by French film theorists and critics under the title Cités-Cinés.4 The preamble of The Cinematic City states that “. . . the xiii

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relationship between city and cinema has been neglected in both film and urban studies,” but it does resolve the resultant identity problem. Such a muddle might be expected in the fusion of two fields that have coexisted and commingled for nearly a century, but have only recently been introduced to one another. However, redressing the neglect of attention to the relationships between the city and the cinema may be detained by the tendency of some authors of a postmodernist bent to indulge themselves in rather affected and obscurant prolixity, such as “. . . cinematic space cannot be simply equated with a perspectival representation of (another) space, its dynamism contained by its narrative form (thereby offering the spectator a seemingly coherent position of phallocentric visual mastery).” The present study makes no claim to clarify the connotations of “phallocentric visual mastery.” A second derailment of the prospects of this emergent field is indicated in The Cinema and the City,5 mostly of academics from the disciplines of geography and film studies from the United Kingdom. This eclectic compendium is also wide-ranging in its approach to the relationships between urbanism and film, indicating that the subject perhaps still remains at the fringes of curricular acceptance, and might be more acceptable in courses in the area of cultural studies. Here the concern is a potential ideological dominance, in this case an antiglobalism perspective. The editor-contributors are unabashed in their view that the economic dominance of corporate capitalism, particularly American corporate capitalism, and that Hollywood is a prime medium for the dissemination this cultural juggernaut. The editor’s introductory essay, “Cinema and the City in History and Theory” declares: “In today’s context, it isn’t that films or the Hollywood film industry reflect globalization, but that films and the Hollywood film industry effect globalization. Films are globalization, not its after-effects. . . .” Similar assertions have been made with regard to the globalism effects of the American city (as they have been made about the city historically),6 but the present study avoids this leaning as well. It is perhaps too early to regard the subject of the city and the cinema as a significant subset of film studies and the study of urbanism. However, courses on the subject are appearing with increasing frequency in geography, sociology, and other social science curricula, the popularity of which is probably assisted by a generation of students that is accustomed to receiving much of their information and view xiv

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of their world—a world that is urban and globalizing—through visual media. It is hoped that this book will introduce them and the general reader to that relationship. Hong Kong, 2001; San Diego, 2012 Notes

For full citations on all endnotes refer to the bibliography. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Sklar, Movie-Made America, 1976. Knight, 1957. Clarke, David B., The Cinematic City 1997. Éditions Ramsay, La Villette, Paris, 1987. Shiel, Mark and Tony Fitzmaurice, Cinema and the City 2001. Clapp, 1978.

xv

1 The American City in the Cinema: An Introduction Human place making and image making are among the earliest attributes defining humankind. In each practice there are exercised magical, even god-like, powers. Places become sacred, with the power to protect and define the notions of home and social identity; images convey a power of possession of the spirit, of reflections of our inner dreams and fears. Together place making and image making not only define what it is to be human, but they also enable all the potential and possibility of what humanity might become.1 We might allow our imaginations for a few moments to visualize the following “movie” scene: The moviegoers file silently into the picture place. There is a sense of anticipation, even an undercurrent of anxiety in the knowledge that what they are about to see could move them emotionally. They are uneasy with the sense that what they are about to witness is magical, something with a curious power through which images come to life, quicken before their very eyes, like those images that come with sleep, in the mysterious worlds where the real and the imagined commingle. They are seated now, hushed in the low light of the picture place, seeing each other only in silhouette and soft shadow. Then the magic-makers come forward with their magic torches; the wonder is about to begin. Now the gleaming surface of the wall is illuminated, and creatures, familiar and strange, begin to dance in the flickering light, jumping here and there, on and off the walls and startled retinas. Horned beasts that the audience recognizes appear, their eyes mirroring the restrained fright in those of the moviegoers. In the next flickers spears now seem to appear, entering the beasts, and there is blood on their necks and flanks. And now another creature appears—one that looks like themselves, but not: a man-beast, two-legged, but with horns and fur. In the flickering light, the man-beast dances and 1

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leaps about. To the side of the wall there appear more beasts, some big, some small, their legs jerking them over the surface, back and forth, tumbling them over one another. The moviegoers gasp, or sit silent and wide-eyed. Some, who have seen the magic images before, are again fascinated. Others, seeing the images for the first time are enthralled, even terrified. But for all there is in the magic images the affirmation of a new truth that is part lie, a new stratum of reality, borne by the mysterious process as well as the images. They have been changed; they have no word to express it, but they have become the first moviegoers.

Who were these first moviegoers? Were they the little groups of viewers in clubs and bars, witnessing on suspended sheets the first crude films of itinerant filmmakers? Were they perhaps people in nickelodeon arcades? Or even earlier viewers of zoetropes? In fact, the first moviegoers may have gone to the “movies” well before the dawn of recorded history. In a strict technical sense, the troglodytes of some fifty millennia ago were not watching movies as we know them. There were no cameras to capture images, only the pigments of ground stone, blood, and fruits to paint them. There were no screens, only the glistening walls of the inner recesses of the caves that also formed their dark, dank cinemas. Nor were there projectors to cast the images on the walls, only the torches and fat-fueled lamps whose flickering flames alternated the light and shadow that created the illusion of movement in the still images of bison, deer, horses, mastodons, and the hunters and shamans garbed in skins, horns, and antlers. The hunters and shamans also told the stories of the images, stories of the hunt and the kill, and the spirits that lived in the beasts. Yet, in essence, all the fundamental ingredients of the motion picture were present fifty millennia before Edison and the other pioneers of contemporary film: images, light, and the illusion of movement it created. The flip-card, zoetrope, and even the sophisticated modern motion picture are only technical advances in the permutation of these fundaments. But even more significant than technique is that whatever the technical process, primitive or sophisticated, the fusion of imagination and reality engendered a momentous new dimension in cognitive processes. Art historians have hypothesized that the cave paintings of prehistory might well have been occasioned by (or resulted in) the notion that humans might well have come to believe that they exercised 2

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some form of mysterious power over the actual objects of their artistic representation. If the images of bison, horses, and deer could be called forth from the mind’s record of them, then perhaps early humans felt a growing sense of dominion and control over the beasts themselves. The plausibility of this hypothesis is reinforced by other capacities of imagination, in the ability to take on the actual forms of the subjects, to imitate their sounds in songs and calls, their movements in dance, and ultimately to possess the very bodies and spirits of subjects themselves in the hunt, the capture, the kill, and the ingestion. This sense of power in the image has its counterpart in humans as subject as well. Many aboriginal peoples still fear that the possessor of images of them is capable of exercising some control over their bodies and/or souls, a notion that is semantically retained in the expression “to capture,” in a photograph, painting, or sculpture, the essences of the reality depicted. But, as we also know, the power of the image is reciprocal. Whether in a fertility-goddess figurine, the photograph of a loved one in a locket, or a motion picture, the potential power of the image over the possessor (viewer) of the image is perhaps even greater than over the subject represented. Whether in a dark prehistoric cave, or a comfortable modern cinema, we must often shake ourselves out of the willing (or unwilling) suspension of disbelief in the “reality” of the images we view, to regain control of our awe or tears or terror, by insisting to ourselves that “it’s only a picture,” a moving representation of the conjunction of “our reality” and the imagination of the moviemaker.2 Place and image seem to have a long, complex, and reciprocal relationship. Before there were permanent settlements, and humans sustained themselves by hunting and gathering, they had to be able to retain an image—the location of their places of habitation and security. Later, when they settled into more permanent villages in river valleys, they began to compose crude images of what were the very first cities. As cities proliferated and took a more import role in human affairs, painters took a greater interest in capturing their form and studying the new perspectives that cities gave to space. Artists put cities in the backgrounds of religious paintings and portraiture, and some painters made their careers composing townscapes for Grand Tourists. By the nineteenth century, when industrialism had given rise to the age of great cities, urban life and form had become the dominant visual theme or artists.3 The stage was set for an art form that could capture the city’s vibrant motion and tell its stories. 3

The American City in the Cinema

The life of cities began perhaps ten millennia ago; the life of the cinema is a little more than a century. Yet, in these two human inventions—the city and the cinema—there is a connection between the fundamental dimensions of human existence: space and time. The following may be seen as a montage of “establishing shots” that lay out the relationships between the city and the cinema. Although it concentrates upon the American city and cinema, many features of this discussion are relevant to the portrayal of the city and urban life in other cultures as well. The City: The Dimension of Space

The City may be defined or described in many different ways, but it is most basically the creation through which humans have come to exercise control or dominion over the spatial (place) dimension of their existence. The city is the way in which humans create places that are of special social, economic, and political, as well as cultural and symbolic, importance. As a human-constructed environment, the city expresses, in its form and architecture, not only the way in which mankind meets the requirements of survival, but also the higher dreams and aspirations of life. In their choice of specific places to establish their cities, humans select locations that are not only appropriate to their social needs, but which also express metaphysical and mystical needs as well. The city is not only the locus of the home and the factory, but also the temple and cemetery. In contrast to the nearly placeless nomadic or pastoral ways of life that preceded the establishment of permanent settlements, urban life delineates territory according to economic, social, and other functions of urban life. Within urban territory, space was traditionally defined between the sacred and profane (those areas outside the sanctified precincts), and between areas designated for government, commerce, production, and residence (the latter often subdivided by social class, occupation, religion, and race). In the city, space becomes socially differentiated according to its uses, from the purely functional to the symbolic. Space became valued for its productive capacity as well as the meaning and identity it gave to its owners and users. In the city, space became property, public and private, valued in a way that was fundamentally different from the value of space (territory) in pastoral, nomadic, and agricultural life. Moreover, the city gave value to the territory beyond its walls or legally defined boundaries. In the environs of the city, agricultural land 4

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was given economic value for its ability (and necessity) to supply the city its food and other products of the land. Thus, the city, of necessity, exercised a control and dominion over its environs (hinterland). Today, the external territories of cities extend much further beyond the immediate environs, in some cases to the territory of other continents. In effect, then, the city may be seen as humankind’s way of using and controlling the landscape, and defining and putting it into use for social and symbolic purposes. Yet the city is also the creator of technologies that can transcend space and release the city from its spatial bonds. Modes of transportation and communication now allow urbanites to conduct many of the affairs, transactions, and economic and social connections of urban life, without the proximity such activities once required. First with suburbanization, then globalism, the day may not be too far into the future when urban territory may extend to extraterrestrial space as well. But whatever configuration the city might come to have, we will almost certainly endeavor to establish it as our place. The Cinema: The Dimension of Time

One of the ways in which the cinema may be understood is as the human effort to exercise control over the other dimension of existence—time. The photographic image freezes time, allowing us to retain the precise visual memory of past events, places, and persons. The documentary film and photograph retain images of actual events; the dramatic film re-creates the past, depicts the present, and imagines images of the future. Moreover, the motion picture permits the manipulation of time through a variety of cinematic techniques. It may create simultaneous events, time compression or expansion, flashbacks to the past, or premonitory events. Thus, the cinema can shorten or lengthen time by means of the pacing and cutting of cinematic sequences, taking viewers into the past or projecting them into a future time. Within the time-length of a film, the viewer is able to experience historical events, covering centuries of time, or the enormous complexities of just moments in human experience. The dramatic components of a screenplay may be so well conceived and executed as to summarize the spirit of an historical period, or an episode in the life of a single individual. The cinematic language, in the way in which it relates visual images to one another, is able to suggest causes and effects by means of the artful juxtaposition of film frames and sequences. 5

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Therefore, the cinema takes us out of the world of real time into a world in which time is altered, molded, and reshaped, and in which the relativity of time is made manifest (into what some have referred to as “reel time”). Of course, both the city and the cinema are concerned with the dimensions of time and space. It has been observed that “. . . the cinema can demonstrate visually what science has discovered empirically or theoretically. We can say that a film, by varying the time dimension, in the one case substitutes space for time and in the other substitutes time for space, and thus the cinema is able to demonstrate that space and time alike are dimensions of the same continuum.”4 Parallels and Convergences between the City and the Cinema

The city and the cinema, however, are not exclusively defined by the dimensions of space and time. There are several parallels and convergences in their roles in American urbanism. By 1920 in America (and in other industrialized countries as well), the large, metropolitan city had become the dominant feature of society. During this period, the essential elements of the cinema were established, except for sound. These two decades were a time when the large city, and the features of urban life within it, became the dominant subject matter of the arts, particularly of literature and drama and painting. It is also reasonable to state that the art form of the cinema—more so than any other of the arts—was given birth by the large city, which made possible its success as an artistic medium that could reflect and interpret the life of the city with unprecedented power and realism. Many of the first documentary films, such as those of the Lumiere brothers in France, focused upon everyday life in the city. Thus the cinema shares and/or draws upon many of the elements that are common to the city, but those central to the focus of this book include the following: Communication. One of the principal features of cities from their very beginning has been communication of information, ideas, and imagination. The city, particularly in its center, its downtown, and its agora, has been, and remains, the nexus of communication. This very feature of cities assisted in making motion pictures a successful medium of communication: cities brought together the audiences necessary for the success of a mass medium. This had been necessary for the success of a mass-participation medium, until the appearance of radio, television, and home-video entertainment technology. 6

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Sophisticated technology. Also related to the purposes of communication was the development in and by the city of the sophisticated technology that the production of motion pictures requires. Many of the processes and components of film production (the chemical making and processing of film stock, lenses, timing mechanisms, lighting and sound, among others) were related to, benefited from, or were an outgrowth of, technological experimentation and development in other fields of urban life. Collaborative enterprise. Because the city is an enterprise that both requires and creates many different kinds of specialties, it can be regarded as a collaborative enterprise. In much the same way that the city requires political leadership, administrative skills, and many other specialists to conduct its complex and interrelated functions, so also does the cinema. The cinema brings together the screenwriter, producer, director, cinematographer, actors, distributors, and many other specialists who are necessary for the conception, production, and distribution of the motion picture. Entrepreneurial talent. The city provided many of the first entrepreneurs for the motion picture industry, many of whom came from the immigrant classes, many notably East European Jews. These first moviemakers produced and exhibited short, simple, silent dramas, which were screened in clubs, cafes, and bars, largely to immigrant audiences. Source of stories. As the setting for rapid social change and interclass and interethnic conflict, the city functions as a nearly endless source of dramatic material and inspiration for screenplays. Conflict, between the individual and the city, between social classes, or between concepts of behavior and morality, are the essence of dramatic stories, and by extension, motion pictures. The city as a soundstage. The earliest movies were shot in the streets of the city, which functioned as a ready “soundstage” of movement, variety, and contrasting images. With the invention of sound equipment and the heavier, more sophisticated cameras, filming moved to studio soundstages on which urban settings were re-created. However, since World War II, with the invention of sound-mixing techniques, and lighter, more mobile cameras, filming has again returned to the streets of the city. Influence upon social values. Both the city and the cinema have been powerful forces in shaping social values, customs, and mores; and both have been regarded by those who find social change threatening 7

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to the status quo, with varying degrees of suspicion and fear. Both the city and the cinema have also been subjected to varying degrees of regulation to bring the behaviors expressed (the city) and the behaviors portrayed (the cinema) into some degree of conformance with prevailing social attitudes and norms. Thus the American city and the American cinema matured together. The beginning of film as a medium of mass entertainment emerged in the last years of the nineteenth century, contemporaneous with the maturation of many American cities into their current metropolitan form. Both the city and the cinema grew with the influence of massive waves of immigrants: in the case of the city, comprising a rich stew of ethnic flavors; in the case of the film industry, providing entrepreneurial lifeblood, as well as audience. The city provided the technical advances, a vibrant soundstage of streets and crowds, and varied lifestyles to mine for dramatic conflict. In return, the film industry has held a mirror up to the American city, sometimes enhancing, sometimes distorting, sometimes oversimplifying its complexities, exploring its realities, confirming and disconfirming its myths, always adding to the lore of urban life and influencing the popular consciousness of it. In many respects the current condition of the cinema industry evidences parallels to the American city. Its original local, cottage industry characteristics, isomorphic to much of other American enterprise in the early decades of this century, has given way to macro-corporate mentalities and practices, often, according to critical commentary, compromising artistic sensibilities for mass appeal and profits. Its local, place-oriented structure has gradually evolved into a placeless, conglomerated structure strikingly similar to the contemporary circumstances of the American city. As film historian Robert Sklar expressed these parallels: The two decades from 1890 to 1910 span the gap from the beginning of motion pictures to their firm establishment as mass entertainment; they are also the years when the United States transformed itself into a predominantly urban industrial society. Many American cities doubled their populations; millions of South and East European immigrants brought their unfamiliar languages, religious institutions and cultural customs to create diversity such as the nation had never before seen; long parallel lines of horsecar and streetcar racks pushed out from the city centers to the open land where residential suburbs began to grow. Industry moved in downtown, and the middle class moved out, leaving their own houses or properties to be occupied by foreigners and migrants from the countryside. 8

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The change was not simply a matter of growth. There were basic alterations in the character of the cities. The old American city, for all its gradations of caste and class, had been a place where people of all incomes and occupations lived close to each other and intermingled. The emerging social structure of twentieth-century cities did away with such proximity and encounter. Increasingly, areas of cities were segregated by social class; how much money you made, the clothes you wore at work, the kind of job you did, the country of origin, set the boundaries of where you lived. The old American city, which had been a single community, became the new American city of many communities, separated from each other by social barriers.5

From Chaplin’s Easy Street to Scorsese’s Mean Streets, the American cinema has drawn upon and helped form the American urban consciousness. It is a reciprocal relationship that has received less attention than it deserves. Like American attitudes toward cities in general, the portrayal of the city in the American film is suffused with ambivalence. The celluloid image of urban life is often one of a place of contradictions: of great achievements and failures, hope and despair, community and loneliness, freedom and enslavement, harmony and discord, power and impotence, security and fear. As film often seeks the dramatic prospects of conflict and contradiction, those themes have been recurrently interpreted as the American city has evolved from overgrown village to metropolis, during which time millions of Americans have gone to the movies to have their experiences, preconceptions, personal images, and biases, challenged or reinforced. A Note on Writing about Movies

The purpose of this book is to treat the reciprocal relationship between the American city and those films in the body of American cinema that are relevant to the consonant and contemporaneous period of American urbanism. In recent years there has been a discernible growth of academic interest in the relationships between urbanism and film. Several compilations of articles and essays on the subject, some based on academic conferences, have been published on various aspects of the subject in cities and films worldwide.6 Other films studies have stressed the historical relationship between American film and urbanism and the relationship of particular film genre to American urbanism.7 There are indications that feature films are, in addition to their use in university courses in film studies and cultural studies, being integrated into courses in urban 9

The American City in the Cinema

geography, urban studies, and city planning.8 The advent of DVDs and “smart classrooms,” combining computers and high-tech audiovisual equipment, will encourage continued growth of the instructional use of feature films. Anyone who reads much about movies, from the cursory reviews to the lengthy tomes of theory and criticism, will be aware that there are many different ways to write about movies. Indeed, it is possible to read two descriptions of the same film and come away with the conclusion that the authors had seen two entirely different films. It is therefore necessary to provide a brief preamble to the present work to orient the reader to its epistemological perspective. This can be accomplished with (hopefully) more clarity and brevity by indicating what this book is not. It is first of all not what might be called the “two thumbs up, two thumbs down” type of review of movies. It makes recommendations only in the sense that the reader might become interested in viewing the original material(s) on which the discussion and analysis is based. It should also be noted that, at the entertainment/aesthetic level, many of the films discussed in this work are very unappealing to the tastes of this writer, although they might be favorites or even classic films to some viewers. Chacun à son goût. The reader should not hold the writer to account for reviews or recommendations that are not intended. This book does not, with a few exceptions deemed relevant to the overall subject, discuss or comment upon directorial styles, camera angles, or other technical aspects of moviemaking. Nor, beyond the relationship of the film industry to the economic base of cities, does it delve much into the business of making feature films. Third, this book is not a postmodern, deconstructive exegesis, plumbing subtextual messages and motives of writers, directors, and actors. It is not interested in filtering film through various “isms” and ideologies and assigning motivations to those involved in making films that would not be there unless sententious scholarship placed them there. Nevertheless, this work does not necessarily take the films it discusses at strictly face value. In some instances aesthetic judgments creep into the narrative, in others there may be a reference or excursion into the environs of film theory, or an obiter dictum on a noteworthy directorial or cinematographic endeavor. However, the main interest of this work is in the reciprocal relationship between American film and various aspects of American urbanism, and the role the city has played 10

The American City in the Cinema

as setting, generator of stories, and even as character in American movies. It therefore lies at the intersection of films studies and urban studies, where the city, increasingly becoming the everyday reality for Americans, has also become a principal element in the fictional and imaginary dimensions of their lives. It is concerned with the ways in which the cinema has functioned as a feedback conduit about the condition of American urban life. This book regards the cinema as the city’s own medium. 1. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Notes

Mumford, 1961, chap. 1. Clapp, “The First Moviegoers,” originally aired as a commentary on August 18, 1989, KPBS-FM, Public Radio, San Diego. One of the first discovered such images was unearthed in the 1950s in Turkey, a townscape painted in cinnabar on a wall in the town of Catal Huyuk, which was carbon-dated at 6800 BC; Clapp, n.d. (manuscript), The Art of Urbanism, chap. 2. Stephenson and Debrix, 1965, 124. Sklar, 1975, 3–4. Grenier and Boulegue, 1987; Aitken and Zonn, 1994; Clarke, 1997; Shiel and Fitzmaurice, 1997; see also, Clapp, 1998 and 2003. Sklar, 1976; Christopher, 1997. Leigh and Kenny, 1996.

11

2 The Urban Medium When the credits roll at the end of many films these days, the omission is so universal as to be completely unremarkable and inconspicuous. One of the central characters in movie after movie, in good movies and bad, is absent and uncredited. One of the most powerful engines of plot, driver of motivations, actor as protagonist or antagonist in films, barely rates a mention. It is frequently the location without which the narrative would not have much of interest to play upon or against, and sometimes it is a scene-stealer with its own insistent presence and energy. Cinematographers are drawn to its manifold personality traits, its intensity and brooding stillness, its beauty and gritty unsightliness, its frenetic pace and the languorous moments in between, its bright lights and sinister shadows, and its glaring reality and surreal netherworlds. The City, if it gets any formal credit at all, is often noted blandly in an obligatory note, such as “the producers wish to thank the people and the city or the film board of New York, Chicago, L.A., or some other city.” The City is never nominated for an Oscar, Golden Globe, or Palm d’Or. Every other art form, including the novel, the play, painting, sculpture, and architecture, had its origins in the human experience before the age of great cities. The motion picture alone is a truly modern urban creation. Yet the circumstances of the emergence and development of the motion picture as a modern urban art form might have been very different were it not for some of the unique circumstances and characteristics of the American city at the turn of the nineteenth century. Indeed, the moving picture might have stagnated and remained a novelty entertainment item, or continued primarily as an instrument of scientific study, rather than evolving into the major art-entertainment medium it is today were it not for these circumstances. This book explores the images of the American city in the cinema in the context of urban-historical analysis of the city. It draws not only 13

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upon the literature of film and film criticism, but also on the work of scholars in a variety of fields and disciplines related to American urbanism. It also draws upon a filmography of over one hundred films relevant to the subject. Nickelodeons to Multiplexes

Thomas Edison once predicted that the “moving picture and his phonograph would provide home entertainment for families of wealth.”1 But Edison’s gift for prognostication did not equal his genius for invention. The social structure of the American city was changing, and it would turn out that, in the formative years of the medium, moving pictures would have more appeal to immigrants and those of lower socioeconomic status. American cities were growing primarily by way of the swelling immigrant populations from abroad, as well as from the American rural hinterland. The American city at the turn of the century was a beacon of opportunity for foreigners, as well as those who were already beginning to forsake the rural and small town way of life within the nation. The very building of the city itself, the need for workers to construct its physical infrastructure of buildings, streets, subways, sewage systems, and the social infrastructure of its schools, police and fire protection, and other services, was a growing source of employment, along with the business and industrial and commercial enterprises. But while the city held many opportunities, it also demanded long hours of hard work. A workweek typically consisted of six, twelve-hour work days. Work was often tedious, dangerous, and exhausting. Recreation and entertainment diversions from the dominance of making a living in the city were typically what could be found in working-class neighborhoods; churches, bowling alleys, fraternal and ethnic clubs, dancing academies, and saloons provided means to relax and socialize. Rarer diversions were a day at the ballpark, the beach, or an amusement park like Coney Island. Edison’s kinetoscope peep show first appeared in 1893, followed three years later by large-screen motion picture projection. These movies found exhibition space first in penny arcades, vaudeville houses, and storefront theaters. An explosion of nickelodeons followed in a few years. The nickelodeon was usually a small theater of about 199 seats with an “amusement license” (more than two hundred seats required the more expensive “theatrical license”), which offered from a dozen to eighteen performances every day of the week. Seats were ordinary, 14

The Urban Medium

unfastened kitchen-type chairs. Other than typical repainted walls, the one-story space looked little different than the smoke shop, clothier, or other commercial establishment that it replaced. Each nickelodeon averaged a weekly attendance of four thousand viewers. In 1907 an article in The Saturday Evening Post reported something akin to the “dot com” explosion of the 1990s: Three years ago there was not a nickelodeon, or five-cent theatre, devoted to moving-picture shows, in America. To-day there are between four and five thousand running and solvent, and the number is still increasing rapidly. This is the boom time in the moving-picture business. Everybody is making money—manufacturers, renters, jobbers, exhibitors. . . . The Nickelodeon is tapping an entirely new stratum of people, is developing into theatregoers a section of population that formerly knew and cared little about the drama as a fact in life. . . .2

By 1910, the stage was set, as it were, for movies to become the dominant form of entertainment in American society. Although film industries had emerged in London, Paris, Rome, Berlin, and Moscow, by the end of World War I (and doubtless also because of it), the American film industry had come to dominate the world market for movies. The characterization of the cinema as an industry was an affectation of the early movie moguls, designed to lend their often-controversial business an aspect of solidity and respectability. However, the industrial aspects of movie production and distribution did have a significant impact upon urban land use. In specific cities, such as Rome, Bombay, London, and most notably Los Angeles (Hollywood), virtual new cities were constructed with attendant colonies of artists and technicians, particularly as sound was introduced to film and required the construction of soundstages and exterior sets. These new “movie cities” indeed took on an industrial appearance with their enormous soundstage buildings surrounded by cranes, banks of klieg lights, carpentry and costume shops, portions of sets and backdrops, and entire Potemkin villages of sets, all part of the enterprise to produce the imaginary places that would be consumed on screens around the world. More ubiquitously, the urbanscape of many more cities was altered by the emergence of neighborhood movie theaters and, in their heyday, the magnificent movie palaces designed in motifs that reflected the grandeur of historical periods that were increasingly brought to 15

The American City in the Cinema

life once again in screen epics. In a unique reconfiguration of time and space, a patron might watch the 1925 production of Ben Hur in a movie palace designed in the motif of the grand Palatine residence of a Caesar. When suburbs began to be built around American cities and automobiles took over from trolleys and streetcars, drive-in movie theaters mushroomed on metropolitan edges. Eventually, the privacy that drive-ins afforded was to be replaced by videotape and the DVD, and the production of demographic niche films would sift audiences into their respective multiplex theaters. The great downtown movie palaces would give way to the wrecking ball as center-city land use and demographics changed, and drive-ins would succumb to rising suburban land values and shopping mall merchandizing. Many of these changes were chronicled by the movies themselves, in which the body of American feature films functions as a visual documentation of the protean American urban morphology. Yet, whether in a nickelodeon or a twenty-screen multiplex, the city, if uncredited and unhonored, emerged as a pervasive player in the stories that it brought to the screen. The City as Character

In varying degrees the city functions as a character in many films. Many American novelists, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, and Thomas Wolfe, among others, have employed cities as influential characters in their narratives. In novels, such as Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, which was also made into a film, the city is portrayed as a force, an animus, or spirit that draws its power in some measure from the way in which it constitutes the collected destinies of its inhabitants. Quite often, authors and screenwriters have characterized the city as an indifferent or sometimes even a moralistic force that plays upon the frailties of human behavior. Such was the case in Dreiser’s portrayal of Hurstwood in Sister Carrie, as an ambitious and arrogant man who is ultimately brought to ruin by the city. In F. W. Murnau’s classic silent film Sunrise (1927) an inter-title reads: “Now he ruins himself for that woman from the city—Moneylenders strip the farm—and his wife sits alone.” The words sum up the theme of a farm husband’s beguilement by a wicked and wily city woman (Margaret Livingston) who ensnares him (George O’Brian) with her sexuality and causes him to plot to the murder of his sweet and innocent wife (Janet Gaynor). 16

The Urban Medium

The city as seductress was hardly a novel theme in 1927. It had, of course, the most influential of precedents in Biblical admonitions that cities were, in general, and in the specific instances of Babylon, Sodom, and Gomorrah, places to be avoided lest one fall prey to desires and blandishments that would lead to temporal and/or eternal damnation. From then forward “the city as Siren” was an irresistible dramatic theme for the posing of moral and social dilemmas across the literary, performing, and visual arts. Cities, often referred to in the feminine gender as “she,” would take over from the beguiling Eve of Eden, as a place with all manner of forbidden fruits. The cinema could hardly resist such a classic theme, but it could add to the role of the city itself as character with the grammar of film. Murnau gave emphasis to the battle of good versus evil by the creative use of shadows and light that juxtapose night and day and idyllic country life and urban settings. The German director frequently superimposed images, giving the characters dreamlike introspections and employing images of the city vamp to heighten the farmer’s obsession. He further developed the use of tracking shots with a trolley to follow the movements of characters at a time when most scenes were shot with static cameras. Such themes were usually enriched by the prospect of redemption. In Sunrise, after nearly drowning his own wife, the farmer comes to his senses and returns to his farm with her. As with many melodramas in books, as well as film, the return to the putative purity of the rural and pastoral was also a common element of these dramas. The negative attitude toward the city in Sunrise reflected the moods of German Expressionism that its director likely brought with him. The American city, although alluring with its prospects and possibilities, was also destructive of the prior dominant social order, particularly that of the independent yeoman farmer that was strongly associated with notions of the American spirit. Such momentous social changes generated an abiding American ambivalence toward the city that was mined by novelists and moviemakers. Although the demographics signaled the incipient economic and social (though not necessarily political) dominance of the city, urban reality often exacted a price. King Vidor’s The Crowd (1928) is the story of the young Sims family in the big city. The title is reflected in a variety of scenes of the iconography of mass society: thronged streets, busy traffic, and in the case of Johnny Sims’ workplace in a large insurance company, a vast room of rows of identical desks at which actuaries labor in robotic synchrony. 17

The American City in the Cinema

Although Vidor deployed his cameras to take in the activities of city streets in a documentary style, his interpretation of urban life is displayed in imbedding his central characters in mobs of people and in the bureaucratized impersonality of city life. Even after Sims’ daughter is mortally struck by a truck, he must force his way through a curious, but uncaring crowd to take her body home. Later, when he is pleading with people in the street to make less noise because his daughter in dying in their flat, a cop tells him that people will have sympathy with him for a couple of days, but they need to get on with their lives. The city character is a massive, impersonal “anthill” of movement and function that often seems to dwarf the individual. In the final scene, the Sims family are enjoying themselves in a movie theater. As the oblique overhead shot pulls back, they are seen to be in a vast theater, and as the shot further recedes, they are absorbed into the anonymity of the crowd.

Horrified parents watch a truck strike their child in The Crowd. © MGM 18

The Urban Medium

Through the years the city has played various roles in films. In a somewhat modern version of The Crowd, director Brian De Palma filmed Tom Wolfe’s story of a Wall Street investor whose financial success leads him to refer to himself as a “master of the universe” in Bonfire of the Vanities (1990). In contrast to common drone worker John Sims, Sherman McCoy’s (Tom Hanks) millions allow him the self-bestowed privileges of a socialite wife, a Park Avenue duplex apartment, and a mistress, Maria (Melanie Griffith). But a simple wrong turn off an expressway puts him in the unfamiliar netherworld of the city. His Mercedes mortally injures a young black man, and when it is discovered, the city, in the form of the media, the press, the law, special interest and racial groups, even people from his own “universe,” descend upon him like predators on a wounded animal. Only by becoming cunning and ruthless himself does he survive, broken and humbled. However, it appears that the character of the city is more forgiving for clerks than it is for masters of the universe. No Golden City on a Hill

The American city never did enjoy a golden age, such as that of Periclean Athens, Augustan Rome, Victorian London, or Paris and Vienna at the fin de siècle. Perhaps too industrial, too practical, too capitalistic, too democratic, or just historically too late, American cities came of age in a century in which change, social and technological, was simply too rapid to permit the maturation of form, style, and consistency that would mark them as icons for an historical epoch other than the age of the automobile. A vain attempt was made to connect the American urban experience with its classical predecessors in 1893, when at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, America’s greatest architects and urban planners created a showcase of what the American city might be—a showcase that borrowed extensively from those predecessors. But with few exceptions, the American city was a place primarily of business and industry, not grand designs for magnificent public projects, rather a landscape ripe for speculation and production, and the exposition is but a footnote in the annals of American urbanism. The American urban idiom was one of speed over contemplation, change over stasis, of cities on the move and on “the make.” One consequence of these characteristics was that architecture and urban design never emerged as much of a concern of motion pictures about the American city. Indeed, it was foreign director, fascinated with the vertiginous skyline of early twentieth century New York City, 19

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who took more interest than his American contemporaries in urban architecture. Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926) is noted more for its place as perhaps the first science fiction film. However, Lang commissioned architect Lionel Feininger to elaborate upon the architecture of the time and speculate upon a century of urbanism forward. Lang’s Metropolis had a futuristic architectural motif of soaring buildings connected by sky bridges and elevated highways, and with skies full of flying machines.

Workers man the machines that power the futuristic Metropolis. © Universum

But Metropolis probably appealed to American audiences because it was much more about social class than architecture and urban form, which were, as the film amply demonstrates, merely the physical embodiment of a rigid social class division. The poetic notion of architecture is that of music set to stone; more prosaically, but perhaps more accurately, architecture is power given form. In grand urban design it represents not only the power of the rulers over the ruled, but of the city over the country. The American film industry emerged at a time in which the city had become a place where, despite the contrary theme of mass society, the individual was often triumphant. The city of the nineteenth century 20

The Urban Medium

had helped to break down (or through) class barriers, and the cinema found great interest in the dramatic tensions that social class provided. The very attractiveness of the city was that it was a place where the individual might escape from the bonds of bloodlines and tradition. So even films about architecture tended to be films more about architects than their projects, wherein “. . . most architects in the movies are inheritors of the heroic modernist mission (or at least its aura), formgivers honored by society, disciples of an ancient craft, artists with steady funding and stylish quarters, creative and sexy free spirits pursuing enviably unfettered lives.”3 The architect was therefore an urban professional individual who was appropriate for addressing particular themes related to power, form, and social responsibility. This may well have been the inspiration for the role of architect Howard Roark (Gary Cooper) in The Fountainhead (1949), the film based on the book of the same title by objectivist philosopher Ayn Rand. Rand also wrote the screenplay, which turned out to be more a didactic dud that posed the architect as a heroic genius who creates severe, minimalist structures and, consistent with her philosophy, must not be fettered by any social responsibility or obligation to lesser beings. Rand’s heroic architect might well have fit the mold of urban designers, such as Sir Christopher Wren in seventeenth-century London, Baron Eugene Haussmann in nineteenth-century Paris, or other architect-planners who were able to exercise their genius unfettered by common opinion because they functioned as the minions of powerful autocratic rulers. But by the end of the nineteenth century, such individualistic views were challenged by changing political orders, brought about by urbanism itself, and were reflected in literature as well. In the later nineteenth century, urbanization shook the individualistic foundations of American culture and altered the meaning of heroism. As long as individualism remained linked to ideas of virtue, responsibility and self-restraint, heroism involved the application of an exaggerated but benevolent individualism to communally sanctioned goals. The hero, in taking matters into his own hands and acting selflessly, merely followed the dictates of his culture. Both morality and individualism defined heroism. The growth of urban lifestyles severed the link between individualism and benevolence, and undermined the popular conception of the individualistic hero. . . . In popular fiction, an important theme in many widely read novels was the demise of the hero, a fall which reflected the culture’s growing reservations about the compatibility of individualism and the public welfare in the industrial city.4 21

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Rand’s architect was given the hubris to regard the city as a personal canvas upon which to express his artistic genius, unfettered even by morality and the public welfare. In any case, not heeding L. B. Mayer’s dictum that “if you want to send a message, use Western Union,” The Fountainhead appears to have proved that movie audiences prefer to take in their philosophy, especially that of arrogant architects, from sources other than films. For the most part, architects, where they appear in films (Hannah and Her Sisters (1987), Deathwish (1974), Jungle Fever (1991), to cite some urban-based examples) are little more than convenient professional roles and never get to build anything. Beyond its frequent function as set location, architecture itself figures into plot on rare occasions, such as the scene of disaster in The Towering Inferno (1974), a corporate high-rise symbol of economic power in Die Hard (1988), or as romantic meeting place in Sleepless in Seattle (1993).5 Architecture and architects may not have figured prominently in the story of the American city because the morphology of American city was not the product of the minds of great architects and powerful urban planners,6 in the way it was in many European cities. More than being a set piece for empires and potentates, the American city has been more of a grand real estate enterprise, where most urban land, almost all privately owned, was made a commodity for its exchange value and often developed speculatively. A compelling case can be made that the most influential designers of the American city were Henry Ford and Elisha Graves Otis. The City as Stage and Prop

The city often plays as much or more a role as a stage and a backdrop than it does a force or a character in the narrative of the film. In particular, comedy films found plenty of settings and circumstances in cities to exploit for comedic purposes, such as Chaplin’s antics as a city cop in Easy Street (1917), much as another master of physical comedy, Jackie Chan, has used cities like Hong Kong as a vast array of props for comedic situations, or the Keystone Cops fumbling about in city streets. Cities streets also functioned as courses for racing cars in shootouts in mobster films of the 1930s, much as they do in more contemporary, gritty crime realism films, such as The French Connection (1971) and Bullitt (1968). City buildings have been used in numerous films with rooftop scenes, chases, and perspectives, such as Harold Lloyd’s now famous hanging from a clock on a building in Safety Last (1923) or Terry 22

The Urban Medium

Malloy’s (Marlon Brando) rooftop pigeon coop in On The Waterfront (1954). Buildings were also an indispensable element in Rear Window (1954), where all the action takes place between two apartment buildings, and in the seedy apartment buildings and pool halls in The Hustler (1961) and Midnight Cowboy (1968), as well as in the subterranean world of the city, such as in The Taking of Pelham, One, Two, Three (1974) and other films exploiting the crime and thriller potentials of subways and tunnels beneath cities, and derelict buildings (The French Connection, 1971). Districts and neighborhoods, such as Chinatowns (Year of the Dragon, 1985) and other ethnic areas (The Godfather: Part II, 1974; Hester Street, 1972; Ragtime, 1981, Cotton Club, 1984; Colors, 1988; and Boyz in the Hood, 1991, among many others), are visually rich settings for films that are dressed to re-create long-past periods, as well as contemporary dramas. Even more commonplace urban settings have been lighted and photographed to create distinctive urban moods, such as in the chiaroscuro of film noir crime thrillers that were brought to the screen from the 1940s through the early 1950s. The city has been employed more literally as a setting for various musical productions about various aspects of urban life, many of which were first produced for the stage. With the arrival of sound, most of the early musicals were filmed in “cities” that were constructed on soundstages. One of the earliest of these is 42nd Street (1933). Although essentially a backstage musical based on MGM’s first sound musical, Broadway Melody (1929, 1940), it was a celebration during the Depression of not just the famed street of Broadway theaters but of the city itself. Sets employed dancing buildings and other urban imagery as iconic elements of a musical that continues to be produced on stage and screen. After World War II many non-New Yorker movie viewers learned the essential urban geography that “the Bronx is up, and the Battery’s down” from the hit musical On the Town (1949) in which three sailors, played by Frank Sinatra, Gene Kelly, and Jules Munshin, dance and sing their way through their one-day shore leave on or by virtually every well-known tourist site in Manhattan. Guys and Dolls (1955) was a musical with a distinctly urban flavor, with is unique patois spoken by Runyonesque characters. Perhaps the most significant urban musical, not only because of the excellence of its musical score and choreography, but also because it is one that engaged social issues and used the actual city as its primary set, was West Side Story (1961). Released at 23

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the top of a turbulent decade that saw American cities as the setting for a variety of social protests revolving around both international and domestic issues, and also, in several cities, scenes of riots and conflagrations, the libretto of this big city version of Romeo and Juliet confronted not only interethnic romance, but also the problems of ethnic competition for urban turf. Owing to New York’s prominence in the musical theater, the majority of film musicals tended to be set in and be about New York. But a few others, such as Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), set in the title city; Flower Drum Song (1961), set in San Francisco; and most recently, reviving the urban musical to critical acclaim, Chicago (2001), prove that other cities can be an inspiration for song and dance.7 City musicals also appear to reflect the public mood toward cities at the time of their production. The Broadway musicals of the late 1920s and early 1930s can be regarded as a reflection of the euphoric “roaring” mood of the 1920s and an uplifting distraction from the economic woes that those years engendered. On the Town clearly reflected a post–World War II frame of mind of triumph and relief, and the relatively placid 1950s gave voice the somewhat leisurely diversions of gambling and girl-chasing that would give way to the more gritty themes of West Side Story a few years hence. It may also be contended that one of the most popular musicals of all time, The Wizard of Oz (1939), appearing on the cusp of the later years of the Depression and the eve of World War II reflected a disposition that the city (Oz) had begun to fail in its promise. The city, and the bogus technology of its Wizard, had no answers for the insecurities of Dorothy’s (Judy Garland) companions and the nastiness of witches that they would need to find in themselves. In opposition to Thomas Mann’s contention that one can’t return home, Dorothy does manage to awaken from her scary dream and be back on the farm. But for most every American, by 1939, the farm was literally “no place like home.” The Big, Bad City

The American city might have not felt like home to many of its residents in the early years of the cinema; during the preceding halfcentury, many residents came from the countryside, most of them from the rural areas of other nations. Hence, the American ambivalence toward the city is not surprising. It involved great adjustments in many people’s lives, not the least of which was learning to live peacefully in unprecedented proximity to others of different cultures. 24

The Urban Medium

Although they struggled to retain vestiges of their past lives in ethnic urban enclaves, the city took its toll on their native cultures, forcing them to become urbanites and to adopt the meta-culture of urbanism. Even so, many of those who immigrated to the American city from abroad were less antiurban in their sentiments than those who considered themselves natives. Self-defined “native Americans,” primarily farmers descended from the colonial years, were heir to the anti-urbanism of some of the nation’s founding fathers, particularly Thomas Jefferson’s. The American city was thus pinched between the pressures of a declining romantic agrarianism and the stew of multiculturalism.8 There is perhaps, then, little wonder that many early films carried this anti-urbanism into their narratives and messages. Some of the very first movies, including two of Edison’s earliest, Tenderloin at Night (1899) and How They Do Things in the Bowery (1902), were morality tales of the traps and snares of the city, stories of urban dangers designed to shock, forewarn and titillate. D.W. Griffith, the first great moviemaker, produced Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912), an expose of the harsh realities (and sentimentalities) of urban life.9

Several of Chaplin’s films, such as The Immigrant (1917) and Easy Street (1917), carried a strong strain of anti-urbanism, although this was probably mixed with a degree of anti-Americanism as well. In The Immigrant a patron in an urban restaurant is brutally beaten by the staff for being a few cents short on his bill. In Easy Street people pour out of grim tenements into narrow streets to fight, steal, and beat up each other and the police. Men abuse and violate women, drink and use drugs, and are only subdued by counter-violence and religion (although Chaplin appears to have his tongue in cheek on the latter). Later, in City Lights (1930) and Modern Times (1936), Chaplin demonstrated that his skepticism about the American city was unabated. Like Chaplin, Buster Keaton in Sidewalks of New York (1931) posed the plight of the little man trying to make his way in the big, and often unsympathetic, city.10 By the 1930s the movies had found characters seemingly capable of standing up to the big, bad city—the big, bad gangsters. Prohibition of alcohol was probably much more a boon to the movie industry than it was to temperance, and fictionalized bootleggers roared around city street corners in big touring sedans, machine guns blazing in the hands of a new breed of on-screen urban antiheroes such as Edward 25

The American City in the Cinema

G. Robinson (Little Caesar, 1930), James Cagney (Public Enemy, 1931), and Humphrey Bogart (Dead End, 1937). The facile deterministic sociology underlying many of these films was that the city, particularly its slums, was to account for the misbehaviors, made more palatable for audiences and censors by the containment of them to social Darwinist inter-mob competition. Typically, the bad guys had to pay up, often going down in a hail of bullets or, as Cagney did in Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), whimpering in the electric chair for being a bad influence on the neighborhood kids played by The Bowery Boys. Gangster films of the 1930s were rather simplistic morality plays compared to the more complex film noir dramas that took over in the 1940s in such films as The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Naked City (1948), and The Asphalt Jungle (1950). The harsh rattle of machine guns might be replaced in a noir film by the plaintive riff of a coronet through the night-shadowed canyons of a big city, and the narrative voice-over with a tale of regret. Noir introduced characters of moral complexity, whose failings were their own. The obscured labyrinthine city of dark shadows and gloomy interiors was more a reflection of tortured psychological states. The city as labyrinth is key to entering the psychological and aesthetic framework of the film noir. As German historian Oswald Spengler wrote in The Decline of the West, speaking of the megalopolis or “world city” of the twentieth century: “The city is a world, is the world.” He went on to characterize twentieth-century man as one who “is seized and possessed by his own creation, The city, and is made into his creation, its executive organ, and finally its victim.” The city is a closed system. A beast with a life of its own, into whose guts the hero’s question is undertaken.11

Elements of film noir influenced the style of a number of subsequent films dealing with various periods and aspects of American urbanism, notably, Blade Runner (1982), The Jagged Edge (1985), and The Usual Suspects (1995). Monsters in the City

If the city could be regarded in film noir as “a beast with a life of its own,” other urban narratives have treated the city as a place deserving beastly wrath and revenge. Perhaps the classic of this subgenre of urban films is King Kong (1933). The great ape possessed some of the characteristics of its movie audience: brought to the big city against its better wishes, ensnared by desires for what it could not possess, 26

The Urban Medium

and exploited for the amusement of its leisured classes. Nature takes its revenge, in this case when Kong reduces the city to a plaything by derailing elevated railway cars, stomping on automobiles, and pulling people out of buildings. That he comes to a sorry end, shot off the top of a skyscraper by military aircraft, is the way of these films. The city is mankind’s subjugation of nature, and although nature may have its entertaining days of revenge, the superiority of technology must be maintained. After they have terrorized the city in their various ways, giant reptiles, such as Godzilla (1998) in New York and TheLost World: Jurassic Park (1997) in San Diego, flailed their giant tails, destroying skyscrapers in the former and suburban subdivisions in the latter, before being put in their place. Various other creatures, such as outsized insects (Mimic, 1997) and roving packs of killer wolves (Wolfen, 1981), have fed off of New Yorkers, but city people, especially New Yorkers, are nothing if not survivors. A related subgenre consists of a group of films on the themes of urban invasion or Armageddon. The classic among these is The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), a Cold War era warning from outer space in the form of an alien (Michael Rennie) and his powerful robot who land in the middle of Washington, DC, with an admonition to earthlings to shape up and stop fighting of face annihilation. An alternative solution was to replace existing urbanites in Los Angeles with alien copies (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1956). These were, of course, aliens that looked much like us. But those that didn’t were not quite as reasonable or clever, just mean. In the classic of that corner of the genre, War of the Worlds (1953),12 invading alien spaceships piloted by unseen beings offer no warnings or advice, only merciless destruction, as they float almost leisurely above the streets of the city, killing and destroying buildings until, apparently, a human bacillus or virus vanquishes them. The intervening years of UFO sightings, Roswell speculation, and computer graphic animation have brought forth films like Independence Day (1996), in which, now famous buildings in New York and Washington, DC, are spectacularly reduced to rubble by the spaceships of invaders of giant and sinister entomological monstrosities.13 Few of these movies have added much to our understanding and appreciation of urban life, other than simple lessons that our metropolises are perhaps more vulnerable than we may think, that nature may yet find the means of chastising urban civilization for not being as civilized toward nature as it should be. With mentalities that foster automobile demolition derbies, movies with requisite explosions 27

The American City in the Cinema

and pyrotechnics, and violence-saturated video games, it seems that we always find it more interesting to smash our own creations, and none is as big and inviting as the city. Urban Rhapsodies

If the numerous filmmakers of urban discontent and Armageddon exhibit a particular fondness for unleashing their jeremiads and monsters upon New York City, they are all but countervailed by a scrawny, whiney-voiced, anxiety-ridden, ninety-seven pound weakling in thick-lensed horn-rimmed glasses. By his own admission Woody Allen cares little for traveling away from his beloved New York City,14 so it is less certain that his fondness for cities is universal (in Annie Hall [1977] he famously delivered a line about Los Angeles that he didn’t care to live in a city were the main cultural advantage was that one “can make a right turn on a red light.”). But his affections for his beloved New York are unambiguous. Through his movies, and even outside them, he seems to carry the city within him; it imbues him and he imbues it, it has created him yet he constantly recreates it. We now respond to New York with greater warmth and wonder, so deeply have Allen’s movies worked their way into our consciousness: the luminous black-and-white image of the 59th Street Bridge, accompanied by the strains of Gershwin’s “Someone to Watch over Me”; a scene set in Bloomingdale’s, moving on to the Stanhope Café; shots of a couple embracing each other, high above the Central Park fireworks—no moviemaker has engaged so thoroughly, movingly and intelligently with a single modern city than Woody Allen.15

Allen’s grandest vision of New York might be Manhattan (1979).16 Although it is a story about May-November romance, it is also a visual love letter, in black and white, to New York. What Allen implies that he is unable to express in his character’s (Isaac Davis) inability to capture verbally, he masterfully accomplishes with images and music. The film opens over Isaac writing about the city: Chapter One: he adored New York City. He idolized it out of all proportion. Now . . . to him . . . no matter what the season was, this was still a town that existed in black and white and pulsated to the great tunes of George Gershwin. Ahhh, now let me start this over. Chapter One: He was too romantic about Manhattan, as he was about everything else. He thrived on the hustle-bustle of the crowds 28

The Urban Medium

and traffic. To him New York meant beautiful women and streetsmart guys who seemed to know all the angles. . . . Nah . . . let me make it more profound. Chapter One: He adored New York City. Although to him, it was a metaphor for the decay of contemporary culture . . .

The establishing shot is a spectacular view across Central Park at dawn under the apt strains of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue”; locations are like an anthology of Manhattan shrines. Over melodies that reflect the period of the city’s halcyon days as much as they are the soundtrack for so many urban romances—“But Not for Me,” “I’ve Got a Crush on You,” “Someone to Watch Over Me,” and other classics—the characters perform an urbane lifestyle that includes visiting museums, lunching at delis, rowing and carriage riding in Central Park, going to movies, and sitting on a bench beside the Brooklyn Bridge at dawn. New York is also shown as a matchmaker in other urban romances, although they are typically complicated. Commitment problems, abetted by the complexities of urban life, plagued party girl Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn) and writer Paul Varjak (George Peppard), in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961); struggling married couple, Paul and Corrie Bratter (Robert Redford and Jane Fonda), in Barefoot in the Park (1967); and Harry (Billy Crystal) and Sally (Meg Ryan) in When Harry Met Sally (1989). Less uptown and more ethnic and offbeat are the romantic difficulties of Loretta and Ronny (Cher and Nicholas Cage) in Moonstruck (1987). All are light romantic comedies that countervail the travails of the characters of Sunrise and The Crowd and employ a benign and exciting New York as Cupid. More recently, New York was posed as tantalizingly out of reach in The Terminal (2004). Trapped for weeks in JFK Airport because he is denied entry when his country had a revolution while he was in-flight, Viktor Navorski (Tom Hanks), an Eastern European stateless person, can see the New York skyline but only through the panoramic windows of the arrivals lounge. This experience must have been similar to the many immigrants in the past who were denied entry and repatriated. Thus New York City becomes a driving element of the plot by its conspicuous absence and unattainability. New York might cast a famous building, the Empire State Building, in its romances (An Affair to Remember, 1957), but Los Angeles (perhaps aptly) uses a freeway sign in L.A. Story (1991) to inform relationship-challenged TV weatherman Harris Telemacher (Steve Martin) of changes in his romantic fortunes. Los Angeles has been the butt of endless jokes about freeways, smog, and lack of culture, 29

The American City in the Cinema

but Steve Martin, who also wrote the screenplay, incorporates rather than avoids them in creating an affectionate and appropriate portrait of a city that is often defined as New York’s coastal, cultural, and morphological opposite. Charles Dickens opened The Tale of Two Cities with the observation that “it was the best of times; it was the worst of times.” That is perhaps how we remember our net experiences in cities. They are, after all, the places where most of us live our lives these days and where most of our best and worst times are situated. In various ways the city can play a part in our personal stories, since the conditions and quality of urban life figure so prominently in our personal circumstances. Our associations with places often figure prominently in defining who we are; it is how we remember urban experiences to be able to say “that happened to me there.” Our experiences are our unique intersections of time and space. It is also a very human thing to intentionally set our experiences in special places, much as Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr did with the observation deck of the Empire State Building in An Affair to Remember. Movies set in urban locations draw us into the experiences of their characters and plots. While many movie narratives are fanciful, larger than life, or of the past or future, they can connect in different ways with our own urban experiences. It is often remarked that art imitates life, or that life imitates art; and so it can be said that there is reciprocity between the urban condition and the cinematic city. Thus this book is concerned with the city as it is in image and reality, but it also recognizes that images are their own reality, and the reality of cities is often a product of our imaginations.

1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 30

Notes

Sklar, 1976, 3. Patterson, in Ebert, 1997, 347. Levinson, 2000, 12. Margon, 1976, 71. Individualistic views of the city continued well into the twentieth century. Adolph Hitler had Albert Speer completely redesigned Berlin in the motif of the Third Reich, and Benito Mussolini created a “new Rome,” the fascistic E.U.R, on the fringes of the Rome that Augustus had himself “found in brick, and left in marble.” Even more rarely do city planning issues come into play in urban films. Nevertheless John Sayles has twice made the subject a central element in the plots of City of Hope (1991) and Sunshine State (2001). This is not to assert that there have not been powerful and influential city shapers in America. Indeed, the capital, Washington, DC, was laid out, on

The Urban Medium

7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

the orders of the city’s namesake, by a Frenchman, Pierre L’Enfant, and the New York metropolitan area was strongly influenced by urban powerbroker, Robert Moses. But they are exceptions that prove the rule and not very well known ones at that. Although it received the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2003, it remains to be seen if Chicago will revive the musical. It may be that the combination of high production costs for musicals and the sense that city streets seem less relevant stages for singing and dancing (even Chicago had to resort to that city’s reputation for crime and violence) than they used to be. Marx, 1964; White and White, 1963; Clapp, 1978. Muzzio, 1996, 194. Sutcliffe, 1984, 161. Christopher, 1997, 16. This rather mediocre film derives any classic status from the infamous radio drama of the same name that aired on October 30, 1938, and created a panic. Independence Day was a rather silly and fanciful film that ended with a round of giant insect squashing. But five years later, as the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York tumbled into rubble, there came the stark realization that our powerful cities were perhaps more vulnerable to terrestrial terrors. Shortly thereafter a few anthrax-laden letters to journalists and politicians added another form of lethal terror. The prospects for biological terror in cities had been explored in Panic in the Streets (1950), a film about a merchant seaman who arrives in New Orleans with bubonic plague. In recent years there have been several films about deadly viruses, such as HIV and Ebola, which some Jeremiahs interpret as nature, or God’s, punishment for the sins of cities. In recent years Allen has taken his fondness for casting great cities in his films to Paris, London, and Barcelona. McCann, 1990, 10. It would be easy to raise an argument about the Allen film that best represents New York. This writer’s candidate would be Broadway Danny Rose (1984) in which a group of aging New York stand-up comedians relates the story of Danny Rose (Allen), who is a small-time agent for weird and washed up performers, struggling to maintain the career of a heavy-drinking, philandering Italian-American lounge singer named Lou Canova (Nick Apollo Forte). If a city is defined by its people, Allen shows in this film that cities are a fascinating human menagerie.

31

3 Streets of Gold: Immigrants in the City and the Cinema I came to America because in the old country I had heard that the streets of America were “paved with gold.” But I learned three things after I arrived: First, the streets were not paved with gold. Second, the streets were not paved at all. And third, it was I who was going to have to pave them. Story told by many immigrants

L’America

As tough and ungilded as American city streets might have been, they never lost their allure for those to whom they represented the chance for a better life. For many, especially in the nineteenth century, that chance began with their first sighting of the Statue of Liberty in New York’s harbor. It is an image Chaplin employed in The Immigrant (1917), and it has been reprised in numerous films since. In the opening sequence of The Legend of 1900 (1998), steerage passengers, assembled on the aft deck of an ocean liner, are engaged in preparations for their imminent disembarkation. The narrator intones over their activities that there is “always one” of them who is “the first,” to get a sight of it. At first there is a sense of disbelief, and the words catch in his throat, as though he is waking from a dream. Then, as though the first one to sight land after a long voyage of lost souls, he calls out: “L’America!” The arrival of young Vito Andolini (renamed Vito Corleone by an impatient immigration official) in the Godfather: Part II (1974) is less dramatic, but it also uses the first sighting of the statue to heighten the emotional effect of arrival. 33

The American City in the Cinema

One of the most compelling scenes of arrival occurs near the end of Elia Kazan’s autobiographical America, America (1963). Virtually all of this film takes place outside the United States, in Greece and Turkey, but the “promised land” is never out of mind, especially in the obsession of the protagonist, a twenty-year-old Anatolian Greek, Stavros (Stathis Giallelis), with immigrating to America. America, America lends documentary support to the gravitational power of America’s image to oppressed peoples. Upon his arrival, Stavros falls to his knees to kiss the hallowed ground in gratitude. On being told that he should cut the almost clichéd gesture from the film, Kazan justified keeping it in, saying, “I doubt that anyone born in the United States has or can have a true appreciation of what America is.”1 However, arrival in America has not always been a glorious event for immigrants. The passage through Castle Garden, and later Ellis Island, could be undignified, as chronicled in the mustering scene in Chaplin’s The Immigrant and the screening and medical examinations in Hester Street (1975), America, America, and the Godfather: Part II. Names were changed, quarantines imposed, motives questioned, and some were denied entry and repatriated. Well before the current thrust of Homeland Security’s more rigorous scrutiny in the post-9/11 climate, there were immigrants whose arrival was unpleasant and illegal. Cinematic treatment of the smuggling of would-be immigrants into America, especially of those whose chances, owing to quotas or discrimination, would not likely gain legal entry, dates at least to the 1930s. In I Cover the Waterfront (1933), Chinese being smuggled into a West Coast port are chained and thrown overboard when the Coast Guard approaches, presaging contemporary practices in which Chinese are smuggled in shipping containers, often arriving dead or, if alive, indentured for years to pay off their smuggling costs.2 However, it is worth mentioning that feature films about immigrants and immigration fell off during the interwar years, as did immigration itself. Not only was international travel perilous during the wars, but the Depression, as well as a more xenophobic and isolationist spirit among Americans between the wars, appears to have affected the box office prospects for movies that dealt with the subjects of immigration and assimilation. Thus, I Cover the Waterfront was exceptional in this regard. But even by 1948, My Girl Tisa, a film starring Lilli Palmer as an immigrant girl in New York, which touched all the aspects of the turn-of-thecentury immigrant experience, failed at the box office. Americans, 34

Streets of Gold

adjusting to postwar conditions, were not ready for nostalgia about the days of immigration.3 The Founding Fathers of American Cinema

Still, the ungilded streets of American cities were where immigrants often found an economic foothold. In one of the early scenes of Ragtime (1981), a piano player watches pictures on a silent screen and causally fits his music to first a one-reeler and then some newsreels. A few scenes later, in re-created busy streets of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Jewish immigrants are plying various trades from stands and pushcarts. One of them, Tateh (Mandy Patinkin), makes his living cutting silhouette profiles for sitting customers. Later, he is seen peddling the flipbooks he makes to shops, and in still later scene he reappears in a beach scene, this time directing a one-reel silent film with actors in costume. The year was 1910, and the notion that a peddler might quickly rise to become a movie director is not only a plot convenience, but also an historical gesture to the early days of the cinema in America. Indeed, in the early years of the twentieth century, the conditions for the emergence and growth of the American cinematic experience might have been unique in the world. The cinema also took root in Western Europe, at the same time, and quickly spread to Asia. But in America, the city, the cinema, and immigrants came together at this time in a unique and unprecedented way. Immigrants were involved in the creation of the American cinema as audience, were often the subject matter, and installed themselves in production and distribution. The portrayal of a Jewish immigrant peddler as an early American filmmaker is more fact than fiction. Hollywood was created by a remarkably homogeneous groups of Central and Eastern European Jewish men. . . . It was they who transformed primitive moving pictures, the product of very recent technical advances by Edison and others, into America’s most popular entertainment form by the early 1920s. Nickelodeons were replaced by movie palaces (sufficiently opulent to satisfy the escapist needs of the working class and to capture the respectable middle class), short flicks expanded into features, their obscure players made into stars, and eventually, by the late 1920s, their visual pleasures enhanced immeasurably by sound.4

The founders of the great movie studios were Jews who had emigrated from the villages in Germany (Carl Laemmle), Hungary (Adolf Zukor and William Fox), Russia (Louis B. Mayer), and Poland (Benjamin Warner). The men who became the moguls of the movie industry had no special training or talent for that line of work. They were unlettered and some of them were barely literate. But they were skilled in 35

The American City in the Cinema

trades that were suited to the needs of the early film enterprise; they were used to methods of merchandising that brought products to consumers.5 Early film distribution, to beer halls and social clubs, and then to nickelodeons, was suited to men with experience as peddlers. Thus, the storefront theaters that exhibited films before 1920 were subsequently transformed into movie theaters by these men who knew how to conduct business in the city, where getting the product to the consumer was, in the initial years of movies, key to its success. Realizing the promise of this enterprise they quickly moved into all aspects of production, forming talent agencies, hiring entertainment lawyers, and, of course, with their movement to the film production friendly climes of California, founding their own industrial city: Hollywood. They were unlikely men to leave their imprint upon the American city. The cinema not only changed the way in which Americans found their diversions and entertainment, it also introduced a new land use to the city. Cities had theaters since the golden age of Greece, but they were few in number and usually centralized. Large, opulent movies palaces would be built in the centers of American city, but the cinemas would also proliferate and become a fixture for many years in different neighborhoods, until new methods of distribution came into being. These unlikely founding fathers of film did more than establish a new industry; they left their imprint on the industry’s product as well, especially in the way it was used to portray life in their adopted country. Extremely conscious of anti-Semitism and concerned about accusations that their domination of the industry would undermine American values, they made great efforts to appear as American as possible. As a result, their films created a varnished, wholesome image of the country—a place that was far more tolerant in their movies than it was of them. Although they craved assimilation, they associated mostly among themselves in a social world of their own making. Hollywood allowed them a certain respectability that would not have been possible in the Eastern establishment, and where there were no social barriers to admission in a business that was new and not regarded as the equal of other professions. Thus, in a strange way, the cinematic vision of America, certainly in the formative years of the cinema, was created by entrepreneurs who were outsiders, not only as immigrants, but also as men who continued to regard themselves as outside the mainstream of American social life.6 36

Streets of Gold

Melting Pots

Cities were the first places to bring together peoples of different ethnic and racial backgrounds; hence the first places to test assimilation, tolerance, competition, and cooperation among different cultures. There had been contact between different peoples before urbanization, but without mutual benefits of trade, these contacts were often less than amicable or sustained. Trading centers and port cities in particular were the first to experience this phenomenon. As trade between cities expanded, it became more necessary for different peoples to find levels of positive social interaction, once their respective economic interests became reciprocal. Such interests have always been, of course, threatened by greed, bigotry, and intolerance. As urban-based empires emerged, colonized territories and conquered cities became places where different peoples, cultures, and religions played out multiculturalism with dominance, accommodation, or exploitation.7 From the earliest cities to contemporary times, immigrants were attracted to the promises and possibilities that cities afforded over their rural or pastoral pasts. There were, as well, numerous forced migrations, to and from cities and countries, as a result of conquest, intolerance, and almost any number of pretexts for one group to exert its numerical or presumed cultural, ethnic, or racial superiority over others. Such circumstances of migration were in practice well before the ugly term “ethnic cleansing” made its way into the language and stratagems of intolerance in late-twentieth century Yugoslavia. Yet encounters and conflicts between different peoples are the stuff of many great dramas in literature, the theater, and ultimately film. From the Bible, to Homer, to Caesar’s Gallic Wars, from the Voyages of Marco Polo to the momentous events of twentieth century world wars, the contacts and clashes of different cultures, races, religions, and political philosophies have been the driving elements of great comedies and tragedies, in reality and on the screen. Cities have always been a ready stage for the playing out of such dramas, compressing and juxtaposing different peoples and increasing their encounters. Most Americans are “hyphenated”: Asian-Americans, HispanicAmericans, African-Americans, or Irish- or Italian- or Polish-Americans, to name a few. Despite notions that America is a melting pot that homogenizes immigrants into pure Americans, most all Americans remain, in varying degrees, hyphenated in their self-identification as well. It is perhaps a distinction that defines Americans that their identity with the 37

The American City in the Cinema

country is not by way of nativity, culture, ethnicity, race, or religion, but by citizenship. Anyone can be an American in a way that anyone cannot be, say, Chinese, French, or Egyptian.8 Prior to 1820, before which we have no accurate records, it is not known how many people immigrated to America. Since then some 50 million have come, most of whom were running away from something: potato famines for Irish; poor soil in the Mezzogiorno for Italians; religious persecution for Jews; wars and revolutions for other ethnic groups. Most were poor. Italians had a saying: Chi sta bene non si muove (the well-off don’t leave). There are two colloquial points of view about those who migrate: (1) they are the dregs of the countries from which they come; or (2) they were the hardier, more ambitious stock who were willing to take a chance to improve themselves. Considering the perils of migration and the difficulties of assimilation, it took considerable courage to be an immigrant in the nineteenth century. Ships arrived after long voyages in which immigrants sailed in steerage; many passengers died from disease or were sick from bad food and sanitation.9 While most cities that grew to unprecedented size during the nineteenth century did so with large influxes of population, New York did so with a difference. London, Paris, and other major cities drew their populations largely from within their respective countries; New York’s growth, on the other hand, was very much the result of huge waves of immigration from abroad. The story of New York can be characterized as the invasion and succession of immigrants of different nationalities. As early as the 1640s, as many as eighteen languages were being spoken in the island’s tiny settlement. As late as 1900, more than one New Yorker in three had been born abroad. In addition to the original Dutch, Manhattan’s settlers consisted primarily of German, Scandinavian, English, and Scottish immigrants when the first great wave of immigration hit New York’s shores in the 1840s. With the heavy influx, primarily of Irish refugees from the potato famine, Manhattan’s population more than doubled, from 371,000 in 1845 to 813,000 in 1860. The lure of America’s opportunities and the push of poverty and oppression in “the old country” encouraged hundreds of thousands to risk the arduous steerage passage in cramped packet ships with conditions little better than those of the Mayflower voyagers. A crossing might last longer than two months, during which time seasickness, spoiled food, storms, cholera, overcrowding, and anxiety often claimed the lives of large numbers of would-be Americans. 38

Streets of Gold

Many arrived only to be buried in the land of promise. In spite of these adversities, immigrants came in unprecedented numbers. From independence through 1845, only 1,600,000 immigrants, of all nationalities, had entered the United States; but from 1846 through 1855, more than 1,880,000 arrived from Ireland and Britain alone. Over 163,000 entered in the peak year of Irish immigration in 1851.10 Thus a body of highly dramatic experience was accumulated that would find its way into cinematic presentation, which continues to the present day. Chaplin would employ the steerage experience with an admixture of comedy and nausea-inducing effect in The Immigrant (1917); Joan Micklin Silver (Hester Street) and Francis Coppola (Godfather: Part II), among others, would take great pains in re-creating the experience in the streets of New York, and more recently Wayne Wang (Dim Sum, 1984), Ang Lee (Pushing Hands, 1994), and Gregory Nava (El Norte, 1983) are portraying the similarities and differences with the experiences of the new wave of immigration from Asia and Latin America. Streets of Gold

To some extent it might have been fortunate for the immigrants that the streets of American cities were not paved with gold. The American city was being built during the heyday of American immigration, rising out of the mythical compost of the founders that America was destined to be a nation primarily of yeoman farmers. America’s urban adolescence had all the raw energy and assertiveness of youth. Cities grew fast, without benefit of the parental oversight, without an example of a previous American urban age, and without, especially, a preceding American “golden age of cities” to intimidate the process. So it was the very construction of American cities—the buildings, the physical and social infrastructure, the unpaved streets and unexcavated subways—that provided the “gold” that immigrants needed to purchase a foothold on American soil. City-building generates numerous and varied forms of employment, and employment fueled an economic and political system that, for many, afforded an entrance to the promised land. With the assistance of the labors of legions of immigrants, New York was, by mid-century, an ostentatiously rich city. One historian reports that: At 563 Broadway old master paintings by Titian, Rubens, Raphael and others were for sale; and at 189 Broadway, Ever Pointed Gold 39

The American City in the Cinema

Pens. Gold birdcages were also to be bought. Fine French calfboots were $1.50. H. S. Beal, at his Daguerrian Rooms at 183 Broadway, would take your photograph for a dollar. Each year New York consumed $68,000 worth of fresh salmon shipped in from St. John, New Brunswick. There were 132 principal eating houses, from Delmonico’s, with its very fashionable Italian and French cuisine, to Gosling’s in Nassau Street where Mr. Gosling dined more than 1,000 people a day, very cheap. The hotels were more splendid, and very much larger, than any in Europe at the time. The grandest was Astor House, opposite the City Hall. Rathburn’s Hotel could sleep 300. The United States Hotel, proprietor H. Johnson, advertised that it had installed at great expense, “an extensive range of water closets, not equaled by any similar Establishment in the United States.”11

In the city the immigrant not only supplied the labor for this growing urban opulence, but he lived closer to it that ever before. Its proximity tantalized him with its possibilities, which could turn to resentment when it was kept beyond his reach. This dynamic new city of growth and energy also provided a vastly enriched soundstage for the entrepreneurs of the new cinema: motion, color, contrasting lifestyles, struggle, conflict, success and failure, and change; the city had it all, stories almost begging to be told. America’s streets may not have been paved with gold, but the drama taking place in them was worth more than gold. The Golden Door

The drama of the American city was often a result of some of its internal contradictions. America might be the only nation in the world with a “welcome sign” at its front door. In 1883 the Statue of Liberty, a gift from France, designed by Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, was erected in New York Harbor. Even before the statue was in place, Emma Lazarus wrote a poem, “The New Colossus” (1883) to raise funds for the pedestal on which the Miss Liberty would stand. That poem’s oft-quoted last lines were an unqualified call to America’s shores that gave voice to the country’s values of freedom and democracy: “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / . . . / Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me / I lift my lamp beside the golden door.” Despite the Statue of Liberty, and a poem welcoming the “wretched refuse of your teeming shore” and the “huddled masses,” there was also a strong nativist movement that regarded immigrants with suspicion, 40

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with bigotry, and even as an unwelcome pollution. Countering Lazarus nearly point for point is the poem of Thomas Bailey Aldrich, submitted to a government commission on restricting immigration. Titled “The Unguarded Gates,” it warned: Wide open and unguarded stand our gates, And through them press a wild, a motley throng— Men from the Volga and the Tartar steppes, Fearless figures of the Hoang-Ho, Malayan, Sythian, Teuton, Kelt and Slav, Flying the Old World’s poverty and scorn; These bringing with them unknown gods and rites, Those tiger passions here to stretch their claws. In street and alley what strange tongues are these, Accents of menace alien to our air . . .

And so the “golden door” was Janus-faced. America presented two faces to the immigrant: welcoming and wary, friendly and fearful. Such suspicions of the alien were not peculiar to America. Such attitudes have shown themselves in humans throughout time and across places.12 Against much of the historical record of such encounters, the American experience, though less noble than Americans like to believe, earns high marks. It is also worthy of mention that the relationship between immigrants and American cities has been a reciprocal one. As many older central cities suffer absolute declines in population, immigrants are once again recognized as fresh blood that might revitalize them.13 “America Was Born in the Streets”

Charles Spencer Chaplin, who had spent an impoverished youth in East London, England, immigrated to America around 1912, a few years before the large waves of immigration began to subside because of World War I. In some respects Chaplin’s art and career illustrate both the positive and negative aspects of the American immigrant experience. By the time he wrote and starred in The Immigrant in 1917, Chaplin was on his way to riches and legendary fame. Whether this short film was based on personal experience or an amalgam of immigrant experiences is unknown. But typical of Chaplin’s humor was that its truth was often based on behaviors and circumstances that were not amusing. Chaplin’s antics and masterful physical comedy as he depicts 41

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seasickness on a rolling deck, or passengers attempting to take a meal in a crude, pitching dining salon make light of the discomforts of steerage travel, but between laughs, the contemporary viewer cannot help but wonder what other discomforts there were on long passages under such conditions. The Immigrant cast of characters also includes a motley throng of gamblers, thieves, and bullies. There is a sense that not all of the characters coming to America were necessarily a positive addition. Then again, Americans themselves were not necessarily portrayed in the best terms. A scene where passengers stand awestruck and in reverence at the ship’s passing of the Statue of Liberty is followed by these same passengers being herded together behind a restraining rope, corralled like livestock, shoved, kicked, and insulted by customs officials. Chaplin’s experience with American officialdom was never much better, and while we might smile at the quick kick he returns to a bullying officer, it might also be regarded, at a more serious level, as foreshadowing his tempestuous relationship with America.14

Chaplin comforts fellow nervous immigrants prior to disembarkation. The Immigrant, Mutual Pictures, 1917 42

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Once ashore, and broke, Chaplin’s Little Tramp’s experience in a restaurant relates other pitfalls and difficulties in assimilation. Chaplin played a Jew, accustomed to eating with his hat on, but he is bullied by the waiter to remove it before he will be served. His table manners horrify a prudish fellow patron, and, owing to his illiteracy, he must he order food by pointing and miming. During his meal another patron is beaten by several waiters for underpaying his bill, and much of Chaplin’s comedy centers on his attempt to avoid similar treatment when he discovers that a coin he had found that would have paid for his meal had escaped through a hole in this pocket. The Immigrant is comedy just to the margins of tragedy, and only Chaplin’s comedic genius lightens situations that would otherwise be sad and regrettable. Chaplin also did not varnish the American immigrant experience in another film in the same series. Easy Street (1917) is ironically titled. This time his targets are religion and the American penchant for attempting to “civilize” immigrants by Christianizing them. In the first scene, the Little Tramp emerges with new resolve from the Hope Mission after submitting to some preaching and counseling to answer a Help Wanted sign by the police department. In his bright new policeman’s uniform, he is immediately given a beat in the mean and narrow Easy Street; in one scene the brawling immigrants (many still clad in the traditional garb of their native lands) savagely beat and rob one another, and police receive the worst of it. One particularly large brute is the “alpha male” of the neighborhood. Now the Little-Tramp-turned-cop must confront this intimidating nemesis who he cleverly manages to subdue by getting the bully’s head into the globe of a gaslight he is pulling over to demonstrate his great strength. This renders Chaplin the unwitting intimidator of Easy Street, where only strength is respected, the police are cowardly, and people are loyal only to their self-interest. Chaplin’s “easy” street depicts theft, wife beating, intolerance, alcoholism, crushing living densities, and even drug abuse. In the end, thanks to Chaplin’s bumbling police work, Easy Street is pacified and its residents stroll into the New Hope Mission, the former saloon. But one suspects that Chaplin, in using some of the more unsavory aspects of the immigrant experience as his subject of comedy, is keeping the best, and somewhat vengeful, laugh to himself. Chaplin’s Little Tramp character encounters the city with an immigrant’s innocence and wonder. In his tramp role, he seems to want little more that the basic opportunity the city promises. He does not hanker 43

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after fame or fortune, like some characters in novels of the period that employed the city as a vast temptation. He desired little more than a job, a square meal, and a roof over his head. His aspirations are not grand and ambitious. But Chaplin invariably gets swept up in the circumstances and events of the city, always finding himself in the midst of its turmoil. He negotiates its wiles and perils with determination and ever shifting fortunes, only trying to get by, to survive. He is often courteous in the face of rudeness and, at the same time, not fatuously grateful at what good fortune might come his way. He finds and loses money, and somehow he survives being ignorant of new customs and mores. He seems devoid of ideology, proselytizing, or other ulterior purposes, or interested in some cause or quest. His most consistent ambition seems to win the affections of the pretty girl.15 Immigrant moviegoers of the time would not have been surprised that the conditions, within which comedy was being played, were close to the social conditions familiar to them—conditions that social reformers, such as Jacob Riis and Lincoln Steffens, were photographing and writing about.16 They might also have appreciated the depiction of realistic mayhem in some of New York being perpetrated by Gangs of New York (2002).17 The look and feel of the Five Points area of lower Manhattan have been realistically re-created, ironically on the sets of Rome’s Cinecitta, as the battleground of nativists and immigrants in the mid-nineteenth century. Gangs of New York clothes the sentiments of the poems of Emma Lazarus and Thomas Bailey Aldrich in the motley leather armor of the streets and sets them at one another in bloody battle. Woven into the larger epic set piece of the story is one of revenge, the seething vengeance of a boy, Amsterdam Vallon (Leonardo DiCaprio) against the vicious gang leader, Bill “The Butcher” Cutting (Daniel Day Lewis) who killed Vallon’s father years before. These are meaner streets than director Martin Scorsese had conjured in his earlier film of a later New York ethnic neighborhood. These are streets governed only by tribal rules of war, codes of honor, and incendiary hatreds, and exploited by a cynical and greedy political system. This view of New York evokes images of cities in the midst of civil war. Gangs rule the streets and form alliances with the Tammany Hall political machine of William Magear Tweed to parcel out jobs through graft and corruption. Such conditions, too, might not have been unfamiliar to many immigrants, and some were already, or soon became, 44

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inured to it. Depending upon one’s ethnicity or political allegiance, the police could be more harmful than protective. Firemen engaged in arson in order to loot buildings they then allowed to burn down, and politicians were their accomplices. In Gangs of New York the streets are drenched in blood rather than paved with gold, and some of the “opportunities” for immigrants to the American city were there only for those violent enough to take them. Gangs and crime organizations could also prey on their own kind. “Protection” was a common means of extorting money and favors from businesses in one’s own ethnic group. In the flashback scenes to Manhattan’s Little Italy in The Godfather: Part II, the local Black Hand kingpin roams the streets demanding his protection money until the young Vito Corleone (Robert De Niro) assassinates him and takes over the power of the streets. But nearer the close of the nineteenth century, these conditions were moderated by the influx of new immigrant groups and the effects of political reforms. Gangs became more organized, but they also realized that they would eventually have to find more legitimate enterprises. Moreover, newer immigrants, more daring and desperate, were arriving to challenge the hegemony of the streets of the city. Obtaining a legitimate foothold in the American city often involved a different exploitation. Joan Micklin Silver’s independent feature film, Hester Street (1975), provides an authentic visual return to these same teeming streets in the decade before the turn of the twentieth century, and it is an intimate portal into the ways in which the city altered ethnic values and mores.18 Here Jews found work in the fabled garment industry or as peddlers and shopkeepers in the Lower East Side. The story centers on a garment worker, Jake (Steven Keats), who has immigrated ahead of his wife and child and works in one of the sweatshops. By the time his wife arrives from the old country, Jake, born Yekl in Russia but already a few years in America, sees himself as an “American fella,” even though his social life and even his adulterous adventures are confined to the Lower East Side ghetto. He regards those who cling to old country ways as greenhorns and has fun at the expense of more conservative and religious Jews, like Bernstein, a boarder who shares his meager flat, sports a heavy beard, and spends hours reading the scriptures and praying. Jake prefers the company of Mamie (Dorrie Kavanaugh), a voluptuous dancehall girl, herself not long over from Poland, who shares his powerful desire for assimilation. 45

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Dramatic tension is provided by the arrival of Jake’s wife, Gitl (Carol Kane) and their young son, whom Jake renames from his Hebrew name to Joey. With her wig, old world clothes, and unsophisticated ways, Gitl is every bit the greenhorn who clashes with Jake’s view of himself as a Yankee. He denies her any conjugal attention or even affection, continues his affair with Mamie, and despite his urging that she forgo the wig and dress herself up, when she finally does, he flies into a rage. Gitl decides she has had enough of this treatment and demands a divorce. Since Jake wants the divorce even more, he convinces Mamie, who has considerable savings, to put up some money to buy her agreement. Gitl demonstrates that her old world bargaining skills are better than those of the lawyer hired by her husband to make the negotiation. She takes nearly every penny of the girlfriend’s savings, gets her divorce, and plans to marry Bernstein, the plodding, but dependable, boarder. By the end of the movie, she is well on her way to becoming an “uptown lady,” and even Jake, is clearly impressed by her deportment during their last meeting before the rabbi who dissolves their old world marriage. Hester Street has its foundation in factual circumstances. As with other immigrant groups, Jewish husbands often came to America first to get an economic foothold and send passage money home. Hence their acculturation was more advanced, and wives, once they arrived, were a reminder of the old ways. In the city, men could find other outlets for sexual urges (as Jake does with a prostitute and with Mamie) with a degree of anonymity that the old country and villages did not avail. As a result, marital strife and divorces were not uncommon, in spite of the strong religious and cultural family bonds of Jews. Moreover, the character of Mamie, who has managed to amass substantial savings as a single woman, is an example of the emergence of the financial and social independence of city women. The city offered many new sources of employment for women in industries, such as garment manufacturing, shopkeeping, and clerical work. With financial independence, more women began to change urban demographics by choosing to remain single, leaving unhappy marriages, or not having children.19 Silver chose not only to shoot in black and white to enhance the authenticity of her film, but also to have her actors use a dialogue of heavily accented English or Yiddish. To some, who may have only heard such dialogue from Borsht Belt stand-up comedians, this might seem to ask much of the viewer, but it adds to the documentary feel of a film that is rich in historical detail. 46

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Acculturation

The relationship between immigrants and American cities has, on balance, been a reciprocally beneficial one. Immigrants have found opportunity in the city, and in turn have enriched its culture with their own contributions, but the relationship has also been complex and dynamic. The rich variety of occupations typical of cities afforded an expanded range of opportunities to people who originated from rural, pastoral, and village circumstances.20 But the transition from traditional to modern cultures has also had its effects upon those traditional cultures. The question of the breakdown of traditional cultures by contact with urbanization has long been a subject of sociological interest and debate. One point of view, best represented by Oscar Handlin’s 1951 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Uprooted, maintained that the majority of the some 35 million persons who immigrated to America in the century after 1820 had a “traumatic, potentially devastating experience.” Most of them had come from traditional, peasant societies, not cities, and in America’s urban-industrial, more technologically developed society and cities, their adjustment suffered loss of self-esteem and alienation. This pessimistic view is countered by observers who, while recognizing that the immigration experience was difficult for some, assert that most made successful adjustments to American society.21 It was helpful for some immigrant groups to have had what might be called “prior urban experience.” Many Jews and Chinese, for example, had already come to America from diasporic experiences in which they had adjusted to other host societies. Oftentimes these immigrants had been in urban environments in which the prior experience of having obtained an economic foothold in other (urban) cultures provided a familiarity with different political and economic systems. Experience has also shown that the melting pot did not fully render immigrants into homogenous, stereotypical, generic Americans, but rather they often retained important and functional attributes of their traditional cultures, such as religion, strong families, and identity with their motherlands. However, retention of traditions has also been a source of conflict between immigrants and their more acculturated fellow Americans, in addition to a source of conflict within and amongst immigrant groups as well as intergenerational conflicts within immigrant families. But conflict is also the essence of drama, and the conflict between the customs and traditions of one’s mother country, 47

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and the adjustment to becoming an American is both sociologically and cinematically interesting. Several films, by and about Asian-Americans, focus upon this dynamic. Hong Kong–born Wayne Wang’s Chan is Missing (1982) is illustrative of the interplay of cultures. Although a simple mystery about the search for the missing Chan, it is also a reference to the American-made Charlie Chan series of films that never was, and still is not, in any way insightful about the Asian-American experience.22 But the influences of American films are evident in its small debt to The Third Man (1949), and the employment of elements of film noir. The quest for Chan becomes incidental to an immersion into the culture and everyday life of San Francisco’s Chinatown. The excursion, guided by two taxi drivers who are trying to find the missing Chan and the $4000 he has of theirs, is really a journey through a part of immigrant America that has not been so exposed cinematically by one of its own. The audience is taken into restaurant kitchens, offices, bars, flophouses, not finding Chan, who is replaced by an emerging portrait of the complexity and richness of this blended culture. Wang followed his examination of Chinese-American life in San Francisco with Dim Sum (1984). The lightly plotted comedy of the Tam family illustrates how traditional Chinese values and emotional complexities have been retained and influence intergenerational relationships. However, the extent to which the old world past invades and influences the new world present is well told in Wang’s Joy Luck Club (1993) about a group of Chinese-born women who meet regularly to play mah-jongg in San Francisco. Though they now lead comfortable lives, their pasts in prerevolutionary China, a time of famine, forced migrations, and privations that often required great personal sacrifices, are indelible and intrusive. Though their daughters are Americanized and successful, their filial relationships are greatly influenced by their mothers’ pasts. These pasts include that of one mother who was one of her husband’s multiple wives, another who had children taken from her, and another who was forced to abandon her children. Joy Luck Club demonstrates convincingly that, as the new American immigrant filmmakers take their place alongside their predecessors, American cinema is vastly enriched by these cultures, their pasts, and their adjustments to American urban society. Adjustment does not come easily for the hero in Pushing Hands (1994), by Taiwan-born, US-educated, writer-director, Ang Lee. Mr. Chu (Sihung Lung), a tai chi master, copes with his new life in well48

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to-do suburban Westchester by maintaining the rituals of his former Beijing life: exercising with his tai chi chuan, listening to Peking Opera, watching Chinese videos, and preparing his own Chinese meals. Chu’s son, Alex (Bo. Z. Wang), is, in some sense, the new immigrant success story, a well-paid professional, married to an Western woman, Martha (Deb Snyder), who is a writer. They have a young son to carry on the family name. The problem is that Mr. Chu is just a little too exotic for Martha, who is home with him the entire day and cannot abide his cooking and Chinese music. Pushing Hands brings together multiple dimensions of the immigrant experience: intergenerational differences, the difficulties of those who immigrate when they are older, and the differences between the ethnic enclaves of Chinatowns, which function as retreats and halfway houses for immigrants and the cultural blandness of suburban existence. While it is a comedy, there is a core truth to the predicament of Mr. Chu, who is not only foreign, but in many ways superfluous. In the end, Chu manages a bittersweet compromise with America, immersing himself in the society of urban Chinatown and drawing upon his tai chi to restore some connection and balance in his life. In a country founded by immigrants, migration remains one of the principal means by which Americans, of the tenth or first generation, have escaped oppression (at home or abroad) and improved their well-being, whether the migration is from Odessa to Oklahoma City or Oklahoma City to Olympia or from the city to the suburbs. For many Americans a key element of the American Dream is that geographic mobility often equals social mobility. The gravitational pull of America is both powerful and paradoxical. Part of that pull is the American cinema itself, and the fascination Americans have with their own dreams. Foreign protesters might burn the Stars and Stripes and chant angry slogans against American foreign policy one moment and express a wish to come to America in the next. Some come packed into shipping containers; others packed like sardines in the trucks of coyote smugglers, while crossing the southwestern borders; or in flimsy rafts and leaky boats across the ninety-mile stretch of water between Cuba and Florida. Once in America they may complain about discrimination or some American values, but few would consider returning to their lands of lesser opportunity. The pull of the American Dream is told with truth and power in the journey of Rosa (Zaide Sylvia Gutierrez) and Enrique (Ernest Gomez Cruz), Guatemalan siblings making their way to El Norte (1983). 49

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After their father is killed and their mother disappears, they set off for America, are mistreated getting through Mexico, and end up crawling into the United States through a rat-infested tunnel. Enrique discovers he must begin by being what his father was back in Guatemala, a bracero, just a pair of arms to work the fields and orchards. Braceros are, in addition to being exploited by their employers, barely tolerated by the general public because they are regarded as doing the type of work that other Americans avoid—backbreaking stoop labor, with long hours and low pay, in sunbaked fields. But when immigrants are seen as competitive with other businesses, their reception can be cold and hostile. Such is the situation for a colony of Vietnamese fishermen who settle in a Texas gulf town in Alamo Bay (1985) in which racism surfaces when local fishermen feel their livelihood is threatened by immigrant competition. The film, directed by French director Louis Malle, demonstrates that, in some places, there is not enough room for everybody in the American Dream. Smaller cities can become overwhelmed by immigrants in ways that can upset and transform the prevailing social order, as has the immigrant Hmong population of Wausau, Wisconsin.23 The bittersweetness of the immigrant urban experience is also treated in the comedy Moscow on the Hudson (1984). Vladimir (Robin Williams) is a defector from Russia, which was, at the time the film was made, part of the Soviet Union. At first he delights in even doing menial jobs, and there is a pleasing and humorous scene at a lunch counter in which immigrants from different countries recite the US Constitution. Indeed, being New York, it seems that everyone Vladimir meets is also from somewhere else. But the realities of life in the American city are for Vladimir menial work, living with a black family that endures many of the same disadvantages that, seen in flashbacks, he thought he left back in the USSR.24 In films like El Norte and Moscow on the Hudson, one is left to ponder how much the American Dream delivers on its promise. That of course is more the stuff of sociology and statistics than of cinema, but, intuitively, or perhaps wishfully, it seems that for at least enough immigrants, there is a reasonable chance the streets are at least paved. Avalon (1990) is a film that takes the viewer through a couple of generations of the immigrant experience of a Russian-Jewish family in Baltimore. Compared to most immigrant films, this autobiographical chronicle based on the family of director Barry Levinson and its settlement in the Avalon neighborhood in Baltimore is nearly idyllic. 50

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After the arrival of the first Krichinsky brother on the Fourth of July, 1914, framed in glorious fireworks, the others arrive to fill out a large extended family of musicians and businessmen who prosper and propagate over the next four decades. The downside of the immigrant experience of the Krichinsky family is not discrimination, poverty, or restricted social advancement, but a subtle and insidious diminishing of family traditions and the connection to its roots.25 The Enduring Theme

The encounter of different cultures is perhaps the oldest, and most enduring, American social theme. It is not uniquely an American phenomenon, but one that applies to all societies with colonial roots. From the natives who first spied the sails of Columbus (or less famously, and earlier, those of the Vikings), to immigrants who emerge wonder-eyed at LAX or JFK, or slink out of a container or the back of a van into foreign air, there is no more persistent American drama. Culture clash, alienation, animosity, assimilation, whether it results in brutal internecine warfare or beautiful Eurasian children, is America’s national (con)fusion. It is as American as apple pie, with salsa or fried rice. It is also a cinematic staple that is continually refreshed by the trickles and tsunamis of immigration. While American culture is almost impossible to define, it is always—at least to those who arrogate to themselves its curatorial responsibility—being assailed and threatened with adulteration or amendment. The “national” language, cuisine, faith, and pigmentation are ever besieged by new hordes of babbling rabble. Americans are nothing if not a people destined to be dealing with those new, funnylooking and -sounding, people who moved in down the block. Typically, they do not take to the task of integration with much memory of when their folks got off the boat. America is a place (again not the only one) where the rights of first arrival are a substitute for a blood lineage social class hierarchy. Only the curious decampment of the stew pot of inner-city neighborhoods for those gated green zones of suburbia seems to give the privileged some security that their daughter might want to marry one of “them,” or that their sons will become infected with an ambition to pick fruit in the blazing California sun. Paradoxically, without the invasions of “them,” America would have no culture (save for the aboriginal that was all but expunged) to call its own. America would have a lot fewer dramatic film plots as well. Drama is conflict and Jets and Sharks sharing the same urban territory is 51

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West Side Story; Italians running New York’s Lower East Side is The Godfather; Asians dancing in the streets of San Francisco is Flower Drum Song. It is a generational genre reprised from the shifting demographics of invasion and supersession. Chinatowns, Little Italys and San Juans, Germantowns, Black Belts, and Paddyvilles, and now the Little Havanas and Saigons and others, shift boundaries like urban plate tectonics, as ethnicities compete for space or manage to escape their inner-city confines. There is every indication that the immigrant experience will continue to be a rich source of cinematic ore into the twenty-first century, perhaps even more so as economic and ecological crises force desperate populations to pack up and head for foreign lands and the lure of the city. Two films that employ the urban context and illustrate the scope of vision and narrative from wide angle to tight focus are, respectively, Crash (2004), and Gran Torino (2008). Crash is a film that tries to get one layer deep underneath the racial and ethnic stereotypes by drilling straight through their surfaces. Social and geographical space keep most interethnic and racial encounter at the level that sociologists used to call secondary relationships. We know most people in the modern metropolis by their role (job, uniform, title), and when those are combined with a black face, slanted eyes, or a thick accent, we make immediate assumptions. But beneath the surface of a cop (Matt Dillon), who abuses a professional black couple (Terrance Howard and Thandie Newton), is his being the sole caregiver of a father with a painful illness. Despite that dimension, he cannot keep from insulting the black healthcare worker who might be able to help him. A Middle Eastern shopkeeper insists on buying a gun to protect his wife and daughter. The gun shop salesman shows him nothing but contempt but still sells him the gun. Yet the shopkeeper, in turn, demonstrates mistrust of a Hispanic locksmith whose young daughter was nearly killed when gangbangers warred in his neighborhood. The locksmith cannot make himself understood to the Middle Eastern man who later suspects him of a break-in and ransacking of is shop. Two young blacks are victims of their own psychology of victimization. One is the brother of a detective (Don Cheadle) whose mother is a drug addict. Ethnic and racial groups distrust one another only slightly less than they are capable of turning on one another; none of the family relationships in this mosaic of stories is spared the neuroses of America’s identity crisis. 52

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Distrust, misunderstanding, and the transference of personal predicaments into blame on “the other” form a cycle of loosely interrelated stories also stress the interdependency of class, race, and ethnicity. Inevitably, in an L.A. movie, the car culture that both unifies and insulates its citizenry serves as a recognizable device for defining relationships. “You are what you drive” is the axiom of L.A. culture. The professional black couple, well-dressed and engaged in a little sex play in their huge Cadillac SUV; the cops whose private cars are much lower down the scale; and the undocumented Southeast Asian immigrants, who come huddled in the back of a delivery truck, depict a class system in geographic, if not social motion. Obscene gestures, blaring horns, cut-offs, and an occasional flashing of a pistol are forms of vehicular communication that too often concludes in jumbles of crumpled cars and flashing emergency vehicle lights. There are a good dozen screenplays in a freeway multiple car pileup. Crash takes a scene that might be described on a radio report on any given L.A. day, a disarray of vehicles, crumpled and upended, and flashing emergency lights. The culture clash is never far from the surface; an Asian woman from a crashed BMW blames a Caucasian woman for being on her cell phone, and the latter fires back a remark about Asians not being able to see over the steering wheel—nothing personal, just stereotypical. This might be as close as they will ever get to one another, since the Asian woman is not doing the Caucasian’s nails, or the Caucasian woman is not handling the Asian woman’s mortgage. But Crash doesn’t just leave the parts scattered all over the roadway, rather it refashions them into a sort of ersatz customized vehicle that perhaps most accurately represents L.A. The cop who abusively frisked the professional black woman ends up risking his life when pulling her out of her up-ended, fuel-spewing car just before it goes up in flames. The district attorney (Brendan Fraser) and his paranoid wife (Sandra Bullock) are reconciled after their Lincoln Navigator was carjacked by two black youths, and she learns that the only person who seems to care for her is the Mexican maid she has mistrusted. A police detective (Don Cheadle) tries to find love from his druggie mother, but she blames him for the death of his younger brother (one of the carjackers who is mistakenly shot by a rookie cop). The Persian shopkeeper, who mistakenly thinks he has been robbed by the Mexican locksmith, nearly kills the latter’s child. The Korean immigrant smuggler survives being run over by the carjackers, one of whom ends up releasing the 53

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bewildered contents of his van into an L.A. street. They will know they have made it when they have their own cars. But those cars won’t be made by retired autoworker Walt Kowalski, and they won’t likely be Gran Torinos. Where Crash plays across the broad, molar expanse of L.A. and its freeways, Gran Torino’s window into the drama of American ethnic assimilation is the molecular perspective of side-by-side working-class houses in a changing neighborhood. Clint Eastwood’s movie about a neighborhood invasion by Hmong immigrants in Michigan is part High Plains Drifter, part Dirty Harry, part Heartbreak Ridge, part almost anything from the lengthy oeuvre of the squinty-eyed, crusty, raspy-voiced man’s man whose emotions run the gamut from A (anger) to C (curmudgeonliness). Eastwood has become a respected and decorated director (he directs this one, too), but you could put the Eastwood character Josey Wales on the front porch instead of Gran Torino’s Walt Kowalski, and never know the difference. No matter, that’s what audiences go to see Clint Eastwood portray, which he probably will do until his whispery voice goes inaudible and only the Cheshire “make my day” sneer remains. But if Eastwood remains predictably Eastwood, he does make sure that his almost clichéd persona functions as an armature for weightier themes, at least in his pictures. Hence the interest in Gran Torino is in that central canon of American cinema—the dialectic of integration and social class. We Americans are nothing if not a people destined to be dealing with those new, funny-looking and -sounding people who moved in down the block. Somewhat formulaically, Eastwood’s intonation of “get off my lawn” reprises his infamous Dirty Harry catchphrase “make my day.” Recently widowed Walt, retired autoworker and Korean War vet wants to stay in his shabby working-class neighborhood and polish his venerated—and American built—Pontiac Gran Torino. But next door what appears to be a relocated Hmong village has moved in, referred to affectionately as “gooks” and “zipper-heads” by Walt. Walt is also plagued by his late wife’s confessor, an eager and innocent priest who promised her he would get Walt into a confessional. American family values are rounded out with Walt’s two self-absorbed sons and their grasping wives and children. They all cause Walt to spit, grunt, and of course, squint. There are Hispanic, Hmong, and black gangbangers in the hood as well. The Hmong gang tries to force the nice Hmong kid next door to join them but make the mistake of doing it on Walt’s 54

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lawn, bringing Walt out with his Korean War carbine to back them off. Later he does the same with three black guys intent on molesting the Hmong girl next door (Bee Vang), and Walt becomes a hero to his neighbors (again, perhaps too predictable in an Eastwood role). He is showered with food and invited over to a party in an atmosphere of mutual suspicion, but incipient tolerance. But when he touches a little kid on the head they are shocked—a reminder of cultural differences— because he does not know that Asian parents are superstitious about foreigners touching their kids on the head.

Clint Eastwood defending his neighborhood in Gran Torino. © 2008, Warner Bros.

Gran Torino does not have the heft and depth of Crash. It is too easy to see that the liveliness of the Hmong family and the respect of Hmong children for their elders is a contrast to Walt’s greedy offspring who want to grab his beloved car and put him in a “home.” And the denouement is just a bit too biblical. Josey Wales or Harry Callahan would have wasted those gangbangers. That would be more like the “American way.” 55

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Eventually, we know from experience, the Hmong and other immigrant groups will find a functioning degree of assimilation, accommodation, and integration. But the old notion of the American melting pot has been sociologically discredited. They will struggle mightily against becoming just another unidentifiable spice in the American stew pot. The immigrants will eventually become documented, or trade their green cards for citizenship, but they will not surrender their hyphen. This may be one of the paradoxes for immigrants who have achieved the security and material well-being of the American Dream. Once these are acquired, there is the time for reflection on what has been sacrificed. Mario Puzo, the author of The Godfather, and himself an immigrant son has written: There is a difference between having a good time in life and being happy. . . . We are all Americans now, we are all successes now. And yet the most successful Italian man I know admits that though the one human act he could not understand was suicide, he understood it when he became [an American] success. . . . He went back to Italy and tried to live like a peasant again. But he can never again be unaware of more subtle traps than poverty and hunger.26

In the end it may be that coming to America is not a destination after all, only a leg of a longer journey. 1. 2.

3.

4. 5.

56

Notes

Wake, n.d. As with Africans, many Chinese were also brought in against their will. Chinese women, for example, were sold, or “Shanghaied,” to be smuggled to West Coast cities to be unwilling brides or to supply brothels (Yan, 2001). The economic exploitation and physical mistreatment of immigrants, often as much by their former compatriots as by their new hosts, continues at borders around the world. In contemporary Southern California, New Mexico, and Texas, for example, illegal immigrants are often found dead from dehydration in the desert or suffocated in sealed trucks, left abandoned by their transporters or coyotes; The Border (1982). These same decades did much to breakdown the world of colonialism and unleash a tide of immigration that would wash across many developed nations; it continues to the present day. With the subsequent breakup of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact nations, a further wave of immigration was set in motion. Hence the number of films treating these populations both as subject and audience increased markedly in the period since the 1960s. Zipperstein, 12. European Jews might well have become skilled at peddling their wares from carts and stalls to consumers because in many countries they were either not allowed to own property, or otherwise found owning real estate a risky investment when expulsions or pogroms were threats.

Streets of Gold

6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

Gabler, 1989; Introduction. Clapp, 1986. Americans are projected to become even more hyphenated in the future. The Population Research Center, in Portland, Oregon, “projects that the black intermarriage rate will climb dramatically in this century, to a point at which 37 percent of African-Americans will claim mixed ancestry by 2100. By then more than 40 percent of Asian-Americans will be mixed. Most remarkable, however, by century’s end the number of Latinos claiming mixed ancestry will be more than two times the number claiming a single background.”; Rodriguez, 2003, 95. Coleman, 1972, chap. 7. Sinclair, 1967, 331. Coleman, 1972, 155. In some aboriginal societies, the stranger was subjected to harsher treatment, often tortured and killed as a “protection” against any adulteration of the native society with anything from the outsider, from viruses to religious or social beliefs; Lofland, 1973. Recently one reporter (Schmitt, 2001) observed this trend in a “small but growing number of cities with declining populations” that need to address resulting shortages of labor: [I]n Pittsburgh, . . . the population fell by 9.5 percent in the 1990s [and] Philadelphia, which lost 4 percent of its population since 1990, is considering a plan that would create an “Office of New Philadelphians” patterned after similar offices in New York and Boston that help new foreign arrivals. It was not that long ago that many city officials viewed immigrants as a drain on public services and that workers saw them as competition for jobs. But the booming economy of the late 1990s made immigrant labor at all skill levels a valued commodity, and foreign-born residents, typically with larger, younger families, helped restock urban neighborhoods that shrank as the middle class moved to the suburbs.

14.

15.

16. 17.

While it might have been a convenient device for the screenwriter in the 1992 film, Chaplin, the comedian’s kick was supposedly rebuked by his enemy, J. Edgar Hoover, at a dinner party. Hoover alleged that Chaplin was a Communist and the kick demonstrated his lack of respect for authority and the values of the United States. Off-screen, the same pretty girls who were often cast in his pictures were a source of Chaplin’s difficult relationship with the US Government, particularly the FBI. His preference for quite young women aroused fears of those who saw the motion picture industry as a threat to morality, particularly in view of some of the scandals in Chaplin’s time. Eventually the FBI’s harassment contributed to driving him from the country, to residence in Switzerland. Riis (an immigrant from Denmark) and Steffens were journalists who railed against conditions in tenements and schools and the corruption of government in newspapers and books; Riis, 1891; Steffens, 1904. New York’s streets were dangerous and violent from the very beginning, as depicted in an historical novel about the period in which it was the Dutch colonial settlement called Nieuw Amsterdam; Swerling, 2001. 57

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18.

19.

20.

21. 22.

23. 24.

25. 26. 58

Silver chose Greenwich Village’s Morton Street (because the real Lower East Side had been too modernized) to tell the story of family life among the East European Jews in Hester Street (based on Abraham Cahan’s 1896 novel of the same name) who immigrated in the later decades of the nineteenth century. The growing number of single urban women is a result of the continuation of this phenomenon, to the extent that in some countries, such as Japan, it has begun to seriously depress birthrates. Unmarried urban women became the subject of a growing number of movies. Of particular interest are The Apartment (1960) and An Unmarried Woman (1978). See also, Ewan, 1981, 42–63. However, changes in the economic structure of urban areas, particularly central cities, have diminished the number and types of occupations accessible to unskilled and under-educated immigrants. For example, many manufacturing have moved to outlying areas, or diminished in number, being replaced in central cities by service sector occupations that are less accessible to unskilled immigrants; Clapp, 1970. Krause, 1978, 291–92; Lewis, 1951; Greeley, 1976. The Charlie Chan series of over forty films from 1921 to 1949 never had an Asian actor in the role. Warner Oland played the lead until his death and was replaced by Sidney Toler, followed by Roland Winters after Toler’s death (only Chan sons, Number One Son, Keye Luke, and Number Two Son, Sen Yung, were Asians). Charlie was always brilliant, solving mysteries with a combination of deduction and Chinese aphorisms like “Sometimes insignificant molehill more important than conspicuous mountain,” which he delivered with the missing articles and simple tenses of Chinese fractured English. The popular and often amusing series was copied for another Asian detective, Mr. Moto, a Japanese imitation played by French actor Peter Lorre, which ran for nine movies. Another imitation was the Mr. Wong detective series that resulted in five films at the end of the 1940s, also with a lead played by a Westerner, Boris Karloff. Charlie Chan was resurrected most recently in Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen (1981), with Chan played by British actor, Peter Ustinov. Even when American producers got around to hiring Asian actors, they seemed to regard them as culturally interchangeable. In the Oscar and Hammerstein musical, Flower Drum Song (1961) about a Chinese girl who smuggles herself into San Francisco, the cast includes Nancy Kwan (Chinese-English), James Shigeta and Myoshi Umecki (Japanese), Jack Soo (Chinese), and Juanita Hall (African-American), all playing Chinese roles. Beck, 1994. A romantic comedy approach to immigration is treated in Green Card (1990) in which a Frenchman, played by Gerard Depardieu, makes a fictitious marriage with an American woman (Andie MacDowell) in order to obtain a green card. The film is a resurrection of the dramatic lines of some of the screwball comedies of the 1930s, and they inevitably fall in true love after predictable strains in their relationship. Avalon is also discussed in the chapter Family Values, City Ways. “Choosing a Dream” as quoted in Kessner, 1977, 177.

4 The Small Town in a Metropolitan World Back in 1905, in America, it was almost universally known that though cities were evil and even in the farmland there were occasionally men of wrath, our villages were approximately paradise. They were almost always made up of small white houses under large green trees; there was no poverty and no toil worth mentioning; every Sunday, sweet-tempered, silvery pastors poured forth comfort and learning. . . . But it was Neighborliness that was the glory of the small town. Sinclair Lewis, Main Street

At the turn of the millennium only a small fraction of Americans were born, or lived and worked, in small towns. Yet, despite their lack of experience with small towns, surveys of living location preferences often indicate that as many as one-third of the respondents express a desire to live and work in a small town.1 This preference is closely related to attitudes that Americans also have toward the family farm. Small towns and the farms, both prominent in America’s proximate past, are closely associated with so-called bedrock American values that emphasize the family, fundamental religious (particularly Christian) values, neighborliness, patriotism, and self-reliance. Many of these values are these days considered to be threatened by contemporary urbanism and social values, and are associated with conservative political platforms. Small towns are also associated with a form of democratic participation that was practiced in New England town meetings from the colonial years to the present. This sort of grass roots democracy, wherein public matters were processed in popular assemblies of citizens, was made possible in the early years of the country by the fact that most townspeople were of similar race, religion, class, and ethnicity (as contrasted with the social pluralism and competing values 59

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systems of big cities). In some sense, therefore the small town form of democracy enforces a conformance of values that lowers the necessity for compromise and political bargaining.2 But it was the sense of stability, security, and certainty that became the essence of the mythology of the American small town. Writing about his boyhood in a small town just before the turn of the century, Sherwood Anderson enthused: “The people who lived in the towns were to each other like members of a great family. A kind of invisible roof beneath which everyone lived spread itself over each town. Beneath the roof boys and girls were born, grew up, quarreled, fought and formed friendships with their fellows, were introduced into the mysteries of love, married, and became fathers and mothers of children, grew old, sickened, and died. . . . Under the great roof everyone knew his neighbor and was known to him.”3 These values play a strong part in the nostalgia for small town life. Its idealization also owes much to the notion that the small town acts as somewhat of a haven for these values by insulating its inhabitants from the “pollution” of big city values, modernism, and liberal political norms. Despite the fact that small towns receive television and radio signals, cable, satellite downlinks, and are connected to the rest of the world by the Internet, small town proponents hold to the notion that their relative geographic isolation offers the best locational and vocational conditions to raise families in an environment free of the rapid social change of the outside world. Yet evidence continues to mount of the extent to which the small town is no bastion against such influences. Consider news items recounting ritual satanic murders of friends and relations by young adults, and the increasing incidents of mass schoolyard shootings by young boys, all taking place in small towns.4 The Internet and social media, such as Facebook and personal digital communication devices, allow small town youth easy and un-surveilled access to a wider world of associations and information. After 1910, when small towns reached their zenith, they began to decline in number. With many of them originally founded to be markets and shipping points for their kindred family farms, they lost much of their economic raison d’être with the decline of the latter.5 Big city economics has also changed the economic fates of many small towns. Roads that used to run through small towns now often avoid them in order to follow the major land trade routes of the Interstate Highway System; businesses that are market-oriented, or require skilled labor pools must locate in the environs of major metropolitan 60

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centers, not small towns. These and other factors have resulted in small towns shrinking as places of opportunity for young people, many of whom leave for big cities at the first opportunity.6 Some small towns, especially those within the commutation orbit of metropolitan areas, suffer a different fate—becoming inundated with suburbanizing city-folk in search of small town atmosphere, but with suburban conveniences, and who really belong, occupationally, and normatively, to the big city. The effects of this process tends to have political consequences for the small town; splitting business and real estate people, who prosper from the infusion of big city wealth, and their fellow small town natives, who see the character of their town changing for the worse. In some instances the numbers of newcomers overwhelm the locals, forcing changes in such things as schools and other local policies to conform to the interests and values of the new, politically dominant residents.7 Despite these realities of the small town in America—and perhaps because of it—the myth of the small town retains much of its currency. To some extent the transmission of the myth from generation to generation in America—even among those who live in large cities—owes something to the portrayal of small towns in American literature. That treatment has been an ambivalent one, one of contrasting images of the small town as a place where the romanticized version of America resides, to small towns as places of narrow-minded bigots. Edgar Lee Masters wrote in his Spoon River Anthology (1915) about how her small town failed to appreciate the dreams of an aspiring young actress, and the fictional small town of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, in Sinclair Lewis’sMain Street (1920) earned his description as “tediousness made tangible.” Henry Van Dyke wrote in The School of Life (1895) that: “A little country town with its inflexible social conditions, its petty sayings and jealousies, its obstinate mistrust of all that is strange and its crude gossip about all that it cannot comprehend . . . may be as complicated and hard to live in as great Babylon itself.” The small town has long been the source of jokes and put-downs by urbanites. Thus, Elbert Hubbard could quip: “There isn’t much to be seen in a little town, but what you hear makes up for it.” Robert Quillen considered a “hick” town as “. . . where there is no place to go where you shouldn’t be.” Brooklynite Joey Adams picked on the theme of small town boredom: “A place where there’s nothing doing every minute,” and even the reputed church-going habits of small-towners: “Where 61

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people go to church to see who didn’t.”8 The paradox of the myth of the small town and its failure to live up to that myth continues to attract interest.9 The Almost Wonderful Life of Small Towns

A generation of urbanite moviegoers discovered life in American small towns through the antics of Andy Hardy and his family, who dwelled in the elm-canopied streets of fictional Carvel. The Andy Hardy Series (1937–1958) ran for fifteen pictures and was Metro Goldwyn Mayer’s expression of small town life, driven by soluble family and community problems, many of them resolved by energetic and respectful small town kids. Sherwood Anderson’s rhapsody on the small town (above) might well have functioned as the program notes for Thornton Wilder’s play, Our Town, which was filmed in 1940. Although a movie, Our Town is essentially a filmed play with minimalist sets. Taking place in a fictional small New Hampshire town called Grover’s Corners just before World War I, the story is narrated by the local pharmacist, Mr. Morgan (Frank Craven), who guides us through the lives, loves, reminiscences, and even deaths of its inhabitants. Much of the story is that of a young love story between George Gibbs (William Holden) and Emily Webb (Martha Scott), stressing the counsel to enjoy each moment of life and love in a small town Director Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) appeared at a time when the small town was waning fast in the American experience and many of the changes discussed above were beginning to take effect. In some sense it is the last of the truly positive small town films, and even at that, it has elements that recognize that the small town would never be quite the same. It’s a Wonderful Life is in many respects about the common man that Capra, an Italian immigrant, so admired in the American character. George Bailey (James Stewart) is characterized as just such a person: honest, hardworking, unselfish, uncomplicated. Except that George has dreams that exceed what his limited small town, Bedford Falls, can deliver. He yearns for travel, adventure, and to change the world for the better with noble projects. Because of circumstances (and surrendering his heart to Mary, the girl he marries, played by Donna Reed), George never gets to leave Bedford Falls, and he accounts most of his life as a failure because he has not lived out his dreams. George did not even get a chance to leave courtesy of the local daft board, which 62

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classified him as 4-F because of the hearing loss in the ear he injured while saving his younger brother from drowning. It is in George’s lowest moment, on Christmas Eve that, when besieged by debt not of his own making, he decides to end his life. That decision is the premise for the film: a guardian angel arrives (George even saves him from drowning) and shows George how many lives he has touched in a positive way and how different life would be if George had not been born. In the process, the small town values of Bedford Falls would have been transmogrified by the greedy schemes of Mr. Potter (Lionel Barrymore), the insatiable and corrupt banker.

Hollywood’s perennial favorite small town family. © RKO Pictures

Still, in some sense it was the Mr. Potters of the world that would evolve into the conglomerates and multinational corporations that, today, have no allegiance to small towns but none to metropolitan areas either. Eventually Potter’s bank would swallow up smaller savings and loan associations, much as, in time, many smaller businesses of all kinds have been devoured or at least compromised by the Walmarts and McDonalds. It’s a Wonderful Life mixes the small town ideal with Capra’s own version of social pluralism, especially in the sensitive way George Bailey 63

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treats immigrant families through his savings and loan bank.10 In the end the values of good neighbors, friendship,11 and honesty win out, with divine approval in the bargain. But the facts of the subsequent history of the small town say differently. The film’s fictional Bedford Falls was based on a small town in upstate New York, although it was filmed in Encino, California. In the decades immediately after World War II, many such small towns in upstate New York and elsewhere, towns whose economies were founded on products that were no longer competitive (e.g., Gloversville, which made gloves), or whose labor forces were not sufficiently diversified, were passed by when the new Interstate Highway System was constructed. It is also noteworthy that every one of the characters in this film who does, for one reason or another, leave Bedford Falls becomes at least financially successful, particularly George’s brother and the character Sam Wainwright (Frank Albertson). Yet the only decadence in the small town is portrayed by its biggest and most financially successful businessman, Mr. Potter. Indeed, had Potter had his way with Bedford Falls, it would have become, as portrayed in the sequence in which George never existed, a honky-tonk place of bars, dance halls, gambling joints, and other sleazy establishments. In the alternate universe town of Pottersville, Violet (Gloria Grahame), who is a pretty blonde with a slightly erotic flair, becomes a cheap dancehall girl who is being shoved into a police paddy wagon.12 More ambivalent is the depiction of drinking in Capra’s Bedford Falls. There is a certain amount of tolerance for Uncle Billy’s dipsomania and even Mr. Gower’s “medicinal” drinking to dull the pain of the loss of his son in the war, but the Pottersville sequence shows drinking in a more socially destructive light: Mr. Gower is a besotted beggar, and Uncle Billy died in a mental institution from the prolonged alcoholism. There is, then, an ambivalence that afflicts It’s a Wonderful Life: it’s wonderful if one submits to the blandishments of the small town ideal, but every time one of its emigrants returns, or phones in, there is a reminder that there is that big, wonderful, sometimes scary world beyond the borders of Bedford Falls announcing that there might be other ways and places for wonderful life. The movie has become a perennial precisely, it seems, because of its nostalgia value, and today it does better box office than it did in the 1940s. It’s a Wonderful Life was a encomium to the small town and to a rather mythic America that Capra, an immigrant, didn’t just love because 64

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he made good there, but because he loved and believed in Americans as a people. As with his other popular films, such as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and Meet John Doe (1941), he treated America’s own ambivalence toward its own values, but always allowed for the triumph of the common man, the country’s nobler intentions, and an upbeat ending to what have been referred to as his “comic fables.”13 It’s a Wonderful Life may also be regarded not only as a eulogy to the small town, but it also represents the last stand of the Capra hero. The film’s conclusion, however “uplifting,” ultimately leaves so many questions unanswered concerning the protagonist’s nature and purpose that there is little left for further explorations. Besides, time was running out for Capra’s method of storytelling. The positive values and affirmative atmosphere he hoped to promote seemed to be curiously out of synch with the nation after the war. The enormous popularity of The Best Years of Our Lives, which also appeared in 1946, proved that people were willing to accept a film which offered an honest and penetrating view of modern society. Within a few years, Hollywood began producing portraits of an entirely different America than Capra’s—a country that appeared to live mostly at night, on ill-lit city streets populated by small-time thugs and confused heroes. In the great pictures of the film noir era, like Out of the Past (1947), The Naked City (1948), White Heat (1949), and Pickup on South Street (1953), the mood was dark and ominous and the characters seemed certain only of their lack of conviction and purpose. Ironically, this brooding, fatalistic world closely resembles the nightmare vision of George Bailey—a vision Capra was at pains to explicitly deny.14

Being places of putative stability and cyclicality, small towns, or at least small town movies, often receive their dramatic impetus for the outside, be they angels, or devils, or someone in-between. By 1955, when Picnic appeared, small towns were no longer much of a genre. With the emergence of the youth generation, coming-of-age films emerged as popular genre. In 1955, the same year that James Dean was aimlessly rebelling in Los Angeles, Kim Novak was trying to rebel against traditional small town mores in a small Midwestern town in Picnic. Not untypically, small town plots are energized by the introduction of a character from outside the small town community, someone against whom the prevailing social order of the town may be challenged and seen in greater relief.15 In Picnic, outsider Hal (William Holden) arrives in a small Kansas town with seemingly nothing more to occupy its residents 65

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than speculation on who will be the next Labor Day Picnic Queen, and when she will marry the scion of the richest family in town (who also happens to have been Hal’s former college buddy). People pretty much know everyone else’s business as they socialize and gossip over backyard fences. Hal, adrift after flunking out of college in spite of being a star athlete, becomes a source of both fascination and suspicion with his rugged good looks, devil-may-care attitude, and animal magnetism. He also arouses the interest of Madge (Kim Novak), who is beautiful, not very bright, and bored of hearing how pretty she is. They seem made for one another, and Madge, after winning the Labor Day beauty pageant, forsakes the financial security that would come to her and her family if she requited the love of the local rich boy, Alan (Cliff Robertson). She decides to follow Hal to the city. However, underlying this rather regionalist view of the American small town is a sense that such places are, for young people at least, geographical and social traps with the consequences for unfulfilled lives all the more evident for being so proximate and exposed. As with It’s a Wonderful Life, while small towns were seen as places of bedrock American values, they were also seen, especially by their young, as places of limited opportunity and stagnation. Underneath the widescreen views of the small town and grain silos lies the fact that life in this small town is, beyond the celebration of the annual picnic, no “picnic”—especially for women. Madge’s younger, and less glamorous, sister, Millie (Susan Strasberg) is the one with the brains, and she hankers to go to college and on to New York City to write novels; the local school teacher (Rosalind Russell), who boards with the family, has seen her chances for such adventures pass her by and is conflicted over marrying a local shopkeeper. She’s well past her prime and doesn’t know whether to commit to the local druggist with whom she shares a drinking problem. Even Madge fails to fulfill her mother’s dreams of her daughter’s marriage to a financially secure man. (Madge’s father has been absent for many years.) But Madge falls for Hal, who hops a freight train for Tulsa and is quickly followed there by Madge. They are both beautiful, and in love, but one doubts it is enough to build much of a life on, even in Tulsa. Neither seems to possess much ambition or ability. Madge might have been like many a small town beauty queen who heads for the big city to see what fame and fortune her charms might attract, but she wishes only to be appreciated for more than her physical endowments. Hal has little more than a nervous energy to exchange for a livelihood. One is 66

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left wondering whether a small town would have been the best place for both of them to try to make it. The apt melancholy musical score of Picnic was nominated for an Academy Award, and “Theme from Picnic” became a popular song at the time. If she were from a California small town, Madge might have been encouraged to enter the teenage beauty contest held in Santa Rosa, also the setting of the send-up on small town manners and mores in Smile (1975). With its central theme a beauty contest, Smile is unavoidably about the culture of commodification. But the small town setting brings to the film a chance to explore ancillary themes of commercial boosterism that would bring a smile to H.L. Mencken. These are represented primarily through the characters of “Big Bob” Freelander (Bruce Dern) and Brenda DiCarlo (Barbara Feldon). Freelander is a car salesman who is eager to be accepted in a local fraternal organization that requires in its initiation that he kiss the rear end of a live chicken, and DiCarlo is an air-headed former “Young American Miss” in a failing marriage, whose life highpoint was the night she wore the crown. A cynical urban perspective on the pageant and its small town hosts is provided by the choreographer for the contestants, who laments: “I’ve taken a nice bunch of high school kids and turned them into Vegas showgirls.” The theme music for the film is Chaplin’s melancholy melody, “Smile.” Small towns have long been chosen, presumably for their cloistered or monastic benefits, as locations for colleges and universities. “Town and gown” relationships and problems have equally been a consequence of such associations. Local youth in college towns are usually referred to as “townies.” In Bloomington, Indiana, the locus of Indiana University, they are called “Cutters.” The contrasts and competition between the privileged outsider collegians and the Cutters forms the dramatic impetus for Breaking Away (1979), a story about four local boys whose roots are related to the erstwhile Bloomington quarrying industry, hence the name “Cutters.” The central character, Dave Stohler (Dennis Christopher), is a cyclist who dreams of joining the Cinzano Italian cycling team to the extent that he affects everything in his life as Italian, including Italian-accented English. His buddies, with whom he often goes to a now flooded limestone quarry to swim and examine the life prospects of being from working-class backgrounds, are less focused and sanguinary. 67

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The university represents a world into which they might never gain access, and a potential exit pass from the entrapment of a town with a derelict industry. The boys compete with their college rivals, losing swimming challenges in the quarry, losing in competition for coeds, and only finally, happily, but with not much certainty that victory will allow them to “break away” from their small town lives, winning the annual bicycle race sponsored by the university. The spirit of George Bailey lives on. The Dark Side of the American Small Town

The not exactly idyllic life of small town America also elides with a darker, more sinister dimension of the small town experience. Although small towns still remained with many Americans a representation of the country’s essence and identity, its true spirit, for others it began to represent tired old ways of doing things, some bad traditions, like bigotry and intolerance and racism, and small town chauvinism. One of the strongest influences on the representation of the dark side of the small town appears to have been precipitated by the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement. In newsreels and on television screens, many of the first images of the struggle of African-Americans for a fuller participation in the benefits of the society and an end to discrimination were images of resistance in small towns, particularly in the American South. Pictures of police beatings, governor’s standing in schoolhouse doors, civil rights workers attacked by police dogs or with fire hoses, and the bodies of lynched victims or slain freedom riders were primarily from the small towns and rural areas of the South. By the 1970s some television programs were employing negative depictions of small towns as a plot staple. Typical plots involved the encounter of a big city person with a small town, providing the necessary contrast in the values, attitudes and behaviors of characters. In one episode of the popular television series, The Rockford Files, the private detective from Los Angeles, passing through a small town, has a car breakdown that results in his being extorted and eventually set up on a morals charge. His experience, one of becoming prey to an alien world of petty prejudices and vengeance against city people, was a dramatic theme that appears to have had some basis in real-world experiences.16 With the growth of the Interstate Highway System and the number of automobiles, there was more travel from other regions of the country 68

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to the South, as well into other areas of small towns. Experiences of urbanites in these places were sometimes negative, particularly those who were snared in speed traps and forced to pay fines in order to pass through (one notorious small town in Georgia made much of its income this manner). There had already started somewhat of a tradition amongst screenwriters, most of them from New York and Los Angeles, of taking revenge on small towns through films like The California Kid (1974), Macon County Line (1974), Easy Rider (1969), and Deliverance (1972). These films were able to draw upon a mine of novels, some by southerners such as Faulkner and Tennessee Williams, which showed small towns as places of debauchery, small mindedness, and cruelty. It was as though Andy Hardy had grown up to lead a gang of unemployed, sexually frustrated small town youth ready to commit atrocities on any alien they can chase down in their gun-racked pickup trucks. Nor would it seem unlikely that they would be deterred by the obese, cigar-munching sheriff who is blinded by his mirrored sunglasses to any malfeasance he can’t snare in his speed trap.17 These portrayals were not exclusively of Southern small towns. Peyton Place (1957) was first a steamy bestseller of this sort and subsequently a television series. Peyton Place was a small New England town, and the movie opens with a postcard panorama and the introduction that it is a place where “time is not measured by the clock or the calendar, but by the seasons.” But beneath that thin veneer is a social life that is much like a soap opera, constructed on lies, gossip, illicit sexual entanglements, and dysfunctional families. The small town was revived as the ideal proscenium for human tragedies, Our Town now powered by a stew of dirty secrets, xenophobia, political intrigue, and licentiousness. The sinister and secretive small town is exemplified in Bad Day at Black Rock (1955). Bad things can happen in small, out of the way towns, like Black Rock, California, a settlement so small it has only a dozen or so inhabitants, and the train that runs by it never stops. Once again, the catalyst for the plot is the arrival of an outsider, Mr. Macreedy (Spencer Tracy), a mysterious, one-armed war veteran with a mission, who threatens to expose the dark secret of the town of Black Rock. Black Rock is not much of a town, very much like the set for a western, and in fact, the film has the feel and tension of High Noon (1952). When the streamliner train stops to let him off, the conductor says that the train has not had occasion to stop there for years. Macreedy 69

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remarks, “Oh, I’ll only be here twenty-four hours.” To which the conductor replies, “In a place like this, it could be a lifetime.” Macreedy is looking for a Mr. Komoko, a Japanese immigrant whose son died saving Macreedy’s life when they were soldiers in Italy and was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. Macreedy is shunned, stonewalled, and threatened at every turn by the town’s residents, but eventually, after nearly being killed himself by Komoko’s murderer, he discovers with the help of a couple of guilt-ridden residents that the Japanese man was murdered in an act of “patriotic” post-Pearl Harbor revenge. Bad Day at Black Rock is not without allegorical reference to both the mistreatment of Japanese-Americans during the war, and the climate of suspicion and the blacklists created by the McCarthy Communist witch hunts. In contrast to the big city, where social anonymity functions to provide a cloak for murder, the small town requires its opposite, a tight social collusion to keep dark secrets in the dark. Likewise, where rapid social change and social relocation in the big city provide a buffer to resentments based on races and social class, in the small town the lack of these features, ignited by the depth of local memory, often form the fundamentals of movie plots. In Sparta, Mississippi, as in seemingly all Southern small town films, the plot-driving themes are always about race or class. In the Heat of the Night (1967) brings together all the dark-side ingredients: a dramatis personae consisting of a sheriff, who is hooked into all of the “good ole boy” relationships, and a town “Mr. Moneybags,” who likes to control everything and is the leftover plantation “massa.” There are also petit bourgeois businessmen, an array of bigots, black-bashing youth, and an over-sexed vixen who likes to cavort in the nude, all stewing in a soup of distrust of anything new or alien to it, even if accepting it has economic advantages. As with many such films, the plot catalyst is the outsider who (as is often the case) finds himself or herself in the snare of a place and circumstances that becomes their worst nightmare. Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier) is a cop from Philadelphia (the Pennsylvania, not Mississippi, “city of brotherly love,” as the dialogue clarifies). He happens to be waiting for a train out of Sparta, Mississippi, on the night that a wealthy Chicago businessman, who is building a plant in the town, turns up bludgeoned to death and dumped in the middle of a street in town in the middle of the night. Being black, Tibbs is by pigmentation, as well as circumstance, a usual suspect, and he is hauled into the local constabulary. He receives the expected accusations and rude treatment 70

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until, when asked what he does for a living up there in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, he identifies himself a homicide detective. In getting this confirmed by phone, Sheriff Gillespie (Rod Steiger), is offered Tibbs’ services by his supervisor. At first Gillespie declines, but, since he has to wait for the next train out to arrive, the sheriff decides to ask Tibbs to have a look at the body of the murdered man.

Brothers of the shield and uneasy new friends. © Mirisch Corp.

Tibbs represents several aspects of big city values and demeanor. He is the rationalist, concerned with scientific evidence and not allowing prejudice to rush him to judgment (although he succumbs to an episode of that failing in a later scene). Tibbs draws a salary and holds a title that would be unheard of, especially for a black man, in a small Southern town in those times and circumstances. A professional with technical skills, he represents position earned on merit and competence, rather than birthright or skin color. This is especially made clear in the scene in which he examines the body, requesting chemicals and measurement instruments and establishing the time of death with logic and knowledge of anatomy. Sheriff Gillespie, on the other hand, displays a number of the negative small town behavioral characteristics: quick to judge on the superficial, a disdain for outsiders, narrow-mindedness, and a willingness to bend to the demands of local power wielders. With his Stetson, aviator 71

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glasses, and boots, Gillespie is almost a parody of the stereotype created by Sheriff Bull Connor, the real sheriff who unleashed police dogs on freedom marchers and young black children trying to integrate schools in Mississippi in the 1950s. What saves the performance from simple parody is Steiger’s ability to infuse his role with humor, pathos, and incipient compassion and moral conflict, in a performance for which he received an Academy Award. This film’s most interesting dramatic motion is the juxtaposition of these traits and the uneasy detente of two men who find a tenuous, but plausible basis for mutual respect. Gillespie saves Tibbs’s hide from a beating or worse by young punks, and Tibbs, in turn, solves the murder by apprehending (and in the process using not only his detective skills but also turning his race to advantage) the murderer. One scene, when Gillespie, against his wishes, drives Tibbs to interview local plantationmaster, Mr. Endicott, adds depth to Poitier’s character as well. When Endicott realizes that Tibbs regards him as a suspect,18 he slaps him across the face as though he were any black man in his employ. Tibbs immediately returns the blow, and both Endicott and Gillespie (as well as an old, black servant in the room) are too astonished to do anything. Once outside, Tibbs, still pumping adrenaline from the experience, claims that he is going to “get” Endicott, whereupon Gillespie brings the detective up short by telling him his desire for vengeance means that he is “no better than the rest of us.” In the Heat of the Night ends with Gillespie carrying Tibbs’ suitcase to the train for him. A bond of sorts has been formed between them, but one that clearly could never sustain the destructive environment of a small Southern town. It is a bond formed of two men trapped in a place and circumstance, and trapped as well in their personalities and races. In Anarene, Texas, the site of director Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show (1971), the threat to the small town is much more subtle and insidious than the appearance of an outsider. This small town is a sad place of dust-blown streets and equally desolate lives in the later 1950s. The closing of the last movie theater in town symbolizes that even the dream world it imported is over. Many small towns in the same time period and in other places were undergoing a similar fate. Nearby emerging shopping centers were killing town commercial districts; old industries were failing or relocated, hope and life were draining out; and the young were eager to join the exodus if they could. 72

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The movie house, pool hall, and café in Anarene are all owned by Sam the Lion (Ben Johnson), who represents the town’s better days (and more noble character) and is somewhat of a hero to the two young men upon whom the story centers. If Sam is a symbol of what the self-sufficient, well-adjusted Texan should be, everyone else in town seems to be an emotional mess. There is little more to do in Anarene that conduct motel assignations and adulteries, shoot pool, abuse the local retarded boy, and watch the local football team get clobbered on Friday night (something that, in Texas, is especially hard to bear). Duane (Jeff Bridges) and Sonny (Timothy Bottoms) are football teammates and buddies. They also share an admiration for Sam the Lion and women problems. Sonny enters an affair with the much older wife of his football coach (Cloris Leachman), which has a rocky course and is still unresolved by the end of the film. Duane, brash and athletic, has the attention of the prettiest girl in town, Jacey (Cybill Shepherd), but he is too poor and without much future to hold her and overcome her scheming, self-indulgent mother (Ellen Burstyn) whose genes she has clearly inherited. Eventually Jacey ends up with the local rich kids, who amuse themselves with nude swimming parties and heading off to party in the nearest big city. By movie’s end Sam has died, Jacey goes off to college, Duane to the army and Korea, and Sonny languishes in the town. Much of the story is about the death of innocence as it is about the lost better days of small towns and local movie theaters; it ends with the death of the retarded boy, Billy, in a truck accident, in the desolate main street of the town. Anarene, like so many small towns, turned sordid and mean, and seems to have been run over by events in much the same way. An anonymous proverb states: “God made the country, man made the city, but the devil the little town.” The past is always present in small town stories. Circumstances that would escape notice in the maelstrom of metropolitan life loom larger, and memory always seems longer. At somewhat of an environmental counterpoint from Texas is the portrayal of small town on an island in Puget Sound in the 1940s and 1950s. Snow Falling on Cedars (1999) is a multitextured story of interracial love and rivalry that is also part mystery and documentary. The young love story between JapaneseAmerican Hatsue Miyamoto (Youki Kudoh) and Ishmael Chambers (Ethan Hawke) provides the core of flashbacks that depict the impact of Pearl Harbor on relations between the Japanese and native residents and culminate in the trial of the Japanese husband that Hatsue marries 73

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during the community’s internment at Manzanar. Her husband, a decorated war veteran, is accused of murdering a childhood Caucasian friend who came to own farmland that was appropriated from the Japanese when they were packed up and sent away. Her former amour, Ishmael, an embittered local journalist and maimed war veteran from the Pacific theater, is posed on the horns of a moral dilemma because he is in possession of information that would exonerate the man who is married to the woman he still loves. Not only are the these emotions and racism of the small town in this period evoked in this film, but the film also boasts award-winning cinematography of bleak and chilling atmosphere of seemingly relentlessly tenebrous skies and, of course, forests of cedars frosted with the snows of dark, cold winters. The performances of Sam Shepard, as the town’s newspaper ownereditor, and Max Von Sydow, as the defense attorney, force the cast and audience into consideration of moral principles that transcend the times and circumstances of this small town. Snow Falling on Cedars proves that the small town remains a mine of movie subject matter, but one that seemingly affords only the occasional nugget in a setting that seems otherwise played out from the richer veins it provided when the small town was not so small a factor in the American urban experience. It is ironic that It’s a Wonderful Life was actually released at the end of the small town era in America. The Depression had finished off, economically, many of the small towns that were already weakened by economic changes taking place in the nation. Many young men from small towns went off to war in Europe and the Pacific, passing through New York, San Francisco, and San Diego, seeing the attractions of big cities for the first time and resolving to return to live in them (or the suburbs that would sprout on their peripheries after the war). The new dream was suburbia, and some small towns did survive, economically, if not culturally, by allowing their absorption into the suburban wave where they could. But by 1960s Capra’s fictionalized, heroic, common man, often associated with small town values, was passé, rendered irrelevant by the muddled morality of film noir, and the befuddling realities of unanticipated social changes that roiled in the wake of World War II. The new common man might be a black activist, a long-haired hippie, a student leader, a feminist, an environmentalist, or a consumer advocate, none of whom had the ideological purity and innocence to fill the heroic role. Rather than an archetype, there emerged an uncom74

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mon pluralism. The question was not how to resuscitate the sort of conformity of values and lifestyle associated with the small town, but how to fashion a society out of the increasingly fractious multicultural characteristics of American society. By 1960 the small town was no longer able to insulate itself from the larger society. Radio, the movies, and television broke through whatever censorious barriers small towns might have erected to repel the intrusion of big city values and behaviors. Suburbs were creeping into their hinterlands, sometimes absorbing them or forcing small towns to share their schools and other institutions with the outlanders. In time WiFi and the Internet would sap what little protection these places had as a bastion against influences of the larger society. Those small town residents who remain were forced to fight a rearguard action through fundamentalist religious sects, anti-big government politics, and even extreme militia groups. These twisted or perverted the original small town ideals. The one-time elm-lined nostalgic streets of Bedford Falls became a shaky refuge for those who could not, or would not, accept the emergence of modernism and global urbanism. Still, the small town makes its way onto movie screens in a metropolitan world, perhaps more often in its dark tones, but sometimes in shades of gray. In The Truman Show (2004) the neo-traditional urban development of Seaside, Florida, is employed as the set for a dark comedy in which Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey) is exploited by an icy-hearted television director (Ed Harris) as the unknowing star of a popular television show in which Truman’s life is the subject. Truman does not know that he lives in a false world circumscribed and controlled by the show’s producers and the complicity of a cast that includes everyone in his small town. His small town, laid out with retro turn-of-the-century residential architecture and a mall-like downtown is neat and orderly, and life is an everyday routine of amity and bathos chronicled by five thousand video cameras and enjoyed by a worldwide viewing audience.19 Truman is a latter day George Bailey, who wants to break away and see the world, but when he tries he finds that he is thwarted at every turn, even by his false wife and best friend. Escape only comes when he is able to take a sailboat to what turns out to be the edge of his world, confirming his suspicion that his pleasant small town was in fact a prison that allowed the outside, metro-global world to vicariously retain the myth of the small town. 75

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1. 2.

3. 4.

5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

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Notes

Clapp, 1978. These values and associations are reflected in that dimension of urban sociological literature of the early decades of the twentieth century that refers to the folk-urban dichotomy. Sociologists, such as Robert Redfield and Louis Wirth, traced the changes in American associations from the folk level dominated by primary associations, to the urban level, dominated by secondary associations. In the urban context, we tend to know our fellow urbanites more by their titles, dress, and categories, than by the more personal primary associations. For a discussion of the social thought of progressive American intellectuals on the transition of American society from one of small towns to large cities, see Quandt, 1970. As quoted in Griffin, 1989, 188. The late 1990s witnessed a series of mass violence in middle and secondary schools conducted by young men from small towns, upsetting the popular notion that most youth violence was a large city, particularly inner-city, phenomenon. While few eyebrows would be raised these days at shootings in the Bronx, South Side Chicago, or East, public reaction to the mayhem perpetrated by young men in small towns with names like Jonesboro, AK; Littleton, CO; Paducah, KY; Pearl, MS; and Moses Lake, WA, had smalltowners asking themselves if there was any safe place left to raise children, where the children themselves were not a danger to each other. Smith, 1985, 189. Cohen, 2001. The literature of “community power studies” is suffused with the political changes brought about by these demographic changes, See especially, Lynd Studies (1929 and 1937) and Warren (1978). It is also noteworthy that there have been occasional, what might be called “small town revivals” in America, during which economic conditions and the attractions of small towns have resulted in the relocation of erstwhile urbanites to small towns. These revivals are, however, usually short-lived and not of significant demographic effect. Often these relocations are not to remote small towns, but those that are within the communication and commutation orbits of metropolitan areas. Lamb, 1986; Morgenthau, 1981. Clapp, 1984. Most recently, two American expatriate writers returned to travel their home country in search of its essences, and both found it mostly disappointing. Rosenblum, 1989; Bryson, 1989. The character Martini, clearly an Italian immigrant in the film, bears some resemblance in stature and facial features to Frank Capra. George Bailey’s friends, Ernie (Frank Faylen) the cabdriver and Bert (Ward Bond) the cop, were later used as models for the Sesame Street children’s program characters of the same names. Sexual behavior in the small town movie was not, at the time, always portrayed with the innocence of George and Mary Bailey. In Preston Sturges’s The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944), the film’s heroine, Gertrude Kockenbocker (Betty Hutton), is the uncontrollable daughter of a local policeman, who contrives to meet, marry, and become pregnant by a soldier, and

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13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

18. 19.

when she manages to achieve the third goal, she cannot even remember his name. A local boy with a crush on her then contrives to step into the role of the soldier, and thus begins the whacky antics of a vintage Preston Sturges comedy. Karp, 1981, 34. Rose, 1977, 165–66. A similar movie circumstance generates the action in The Music Man (1962), in which the Broadway musical by Meredith Wilson and Franklin Lacey is put on screen. A city-slicker type con man, who drifts into a small town in Iowa, persuades the gullible residents that the children need to organize a big marching band. Stein, 1979, 17–18. Nevertheless, there remained a vital current in the American imagination that retained the small town as an ideal preferable to the rising tide of urban discontent. TV series like The Waltons helped keep alive the notion that the values that allegedly inhere in small town life could be revived. Ironically, some of the renewed interest in small towns came from the disillusioned political left in America. Young people primarily, disaffected with the Vietnam War, alienated from conventional politics, and seeking freedom to “do their own thing” without the hassles of government or their parents, sought to establish communes or settle in older small towns. The movement was largely a failure and a disappointment, the emigrant urbanites becoming disillusioned in some cases by the reactionary values and politics of small towns and rural areas that wanted no part of their revolutionary politics and avant-garde attitudes. The urbanity of Tibbs is enhanced in this scene (in Endicott’s hot house) in which the detective impresses the plantation owner and Gillespie with his knowledge of orchids. Clapp, 1991a.

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5 How Ya Gonna Keep ’em Down on the Farm? The farmer is the hoarded capital of health, as the farm is the capital of wealth; and it is from him that the health and power, moral and intellectual, of the cities come. The city is always recruited from the country. The men in cities who are the centres of energy, the driving wheels of trade, politics or political arts, and the women of beauty and genius, are the children or grandchildren of farmers, and are spending the energies which their fathers’ hardy, silent life accumulated in frosty furrows, in poverty, necessity, and darkness. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Society and Solitude

If one grew up in a big city in the 1950s, contact with a farm might consist of a sunny autumn Sunday drive in the family sedan into the countryside—a countryside that was much more accessible and proximate than it is in the present day. It was a time when families actually went out for “a drive,” and perhaps made a stop at a roadside produce stand at the edge of a farm-to-market rural road. There might be a chance to see, up close, some pigs or ducks, maybe even some larger farm animals, before returning to urban territory, where the farm is represented mostly in different aisles in the supermarket. Years later they might be the kind of people, who, remembering such a pleasant, idyllic experience, would answer a living preference survey by saying that, yes, they would prefer to live on a farm.1 In the movie theater, the farm might make an appearance in a rural comedy like in of the series of Ma and Pa Kettle films of the late 1940s and the 1950s, or perhaps something with a powerful strain of reality, such as Grapes of Wrath (1940), or The Good Earth (1937). But the farm would likely retain a degree of romantic appeal, ingrained by the myth of the yeoman farmer, the Minutemen, the art of Regionalist painters, and the proximate period in which many Americans lived on and by the land. 79

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© 1940, 20th Century Fox

Nevertheless, the farm has not come in for cinematic treatment commensurate with its role in the American experience. However, in the 1980s, as discussed below, farm stories, exclusively dealing with the travails of family farmers and the role of farm wives, emerged in the minor and fleeting genre of rural realism. The Hinterland

The city could not exist without the farm. The Agricultural Revolution (circa the Neolithic Age, some twelve thousand years ago) made permanent settlements possible by feeding and clothing them. In an important sense, the changing relationship between the city and the farm has been one of the principle measures of the effects of urbanism on the character of human life. But, while the city was recruited from the country, it was the city that returned to the country, with its technology and control over its markets that shaped the countryside and the farm to its own ends. Beyond its functional necessity, the farm has had a powerful symbolic impact upon the character of American life. It has been the source of many myths, especially that of the yeoman farmer, the stalwart of 80

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self-sufficiency and independence. Agriculture has been influential in national and state politics and still remains so. For much of American history, the farm was over-represented in political strength,2 which is perhaps one of the reasons we have not fully come to grips with the problems of our cities. Moreover, many Americans retain a nostalgic affection for the farm, even though only a tiny fraction has ever had any experience with the rigors of farm life. The farm represents to many Americans the notion of rugged individualism, the frontier ethos of self-sufficient, freedom-loving people associated with the early years of American continental expansion. Such notions did not originate with America but have their roots deep in history. Several classical writers, Hesiod, Cato, Xenophon, Virgil, Horace, among others, spoke in favorable terms about farmers. Many wealthy Romans enjoyed the countryside as a relief from noisy and hectic city life and retained country villas, which were also farms. To the Romans farmers were also considered to be better recruits for the Roman army, perhaps because they had a stronger allegiance to protecting territory, since to the farmer the land is an indispensable factor of production. In America the yeoman farmer achieved an almost sacred status: his honest industry in the land, his closeness to nature and therefore to God, his simple enjoyment of abundance, his self-sufficiency; these being traits that in some ways came to define the ideal American character. Farmers were celebrated by Thomas Jefferson, Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, and Enlightenment political philosophers. Jefferson distrusted cities and city people, but even urbanites like Alexander Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin were complimentary of farmers. Doubtless the fact that it was primarily farmers, taking the muskets they used to hunt game, who were the ranks of the revolutionary army in America, that earned the farmer this somewhat exalted status. This myth of the special status of the farmer was built however on the idea of the small, relatively self-sufficient, independent farmer, not the commercial farmer. In fact, the farmer, probably always saw it rather differently; that is, he saw farming as an opportunity to make money, and his self-sufficient status was more forced upon him by circumstances, such as inadequate farm to market roads.3 This notion that the farm and the farmer should enjoy a special status in American society translated itself into a powerful political consciousness. Because he lived and worked in close communion with nature, the farmer’s life was believed to have a wholesomeness and integrity that the populations of cities could never achieve. By the 81

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mid-nineteenth century much of the expansionist policy of the country was based upon the notion of opening up and settling new territories with farms and farmers. Politically, politicians not only found it necessary to advance the notion that agriculture enjoyed a special status, but it was politically advantageous to have an agricultural background to be elected to political office. Bright Lights and Big Cities

Despite the positive repute of the rural life throughout the nineteenth century, there was a vast migration from the farm to the city by farm youth. Farm journals like The Prairie Farmer lamented that young men were going to the city and would be ensnared in a life of “dissipation, reckless speculation and depravity.” In fact, the opportunities in cities were far greater for farm youth. Cities were undergoing rapid growth in the 1900s, with immigration from abroad and within the country. Manufacturing and the jobs related to city-building did not require formal education or much training for access to jobs. Despite the felicitous notions of the agrarian myth, farm youth knew from experience and from the toll that it often took on their parents that, in reality, farm life was hard, dangerous, and often unrewarding. Farm life could even be more difficult for women. Cast in the role of providers of the farm’s family workers through multiple pregnancies, they often bore their children without medical assistance, and, along with the fact that they themselves were farmhands, were often literally worked to death. Farm daughters had little to look forward to other than marrying a farmer and following in their mothers’ arduous footsteps. As novels like Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie and other novels of the time attest, the allure of the city for young farmwomen was quite strong.4 The Origins of “Agribusiness”

In spite of the allure and wiles of cities, and perhaps because of them, the agrarian myth maintained its power. And in spite of the realities of farm life, farmers themselves were believers in it. The agrarian myth encouraged farmers to believe that they were not themselves an organic part of the whole order of business enterprise and speculation that flourished in the city, partaking of its character and sharing its risks, but rather the innocent pastoral victims of a conspiracy hatched in the distance. The notion of an innocent and victimized populace colors the whole history of agrarian controversy. . . . Like almost all good Americans [the farmer] had innocently sought progress from the beginning, and thus hastened the decline of many of his own values.5 82

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Dedicated to the idea of progress, it was progress that was the undoing of the yeoman farmer. As the cities grew and needed food, so grew the commercial opportunities for farmers; rather than remaining strictly self-sufficient, farmers sought to take advantage of these opportunities. In short, the prospects for profits—the same thing that cities were all about—tainted the farmer with urban values. These rural entrepreneurs began to concentrate on cash crops, bought more supplies from the country store, supported the building of farm-to-city roads to rush their produce to market, and began to introduce mechanization into agriculture. The simple rural life was getting more complicated because the farm entered into a compact of mutual dependence with the city.6 In feeding and clothing the city, the yeoman farmer began sowing the seeds of his own undoing as early as the eighteenth century. Since his time, which also gave birth to the Industrial Revolution, cities swallowed farmland in the path of their expansion, and engendered an agricultural technology that vastly altered the scale of farming in both acreage and capital investment. It has been one of the ironies of the American experience that many an erstwhile farmer has ended up working in factories making the tractors, threshers, and combines that would replace others like himself. As farming transformed from a way of life to a business career, the farmer became an employer of labor, went into debt to finance the purchase of more land and equipment, and found it necessary to engage in politics to protect markets or enhance competitiveness. Even the land, which he worked as a God-given trust, became a commodity, particularly as cities expanded to reach out to farms and land values rose; there was as much value in selling farm land for profit as in farming it, turning some farmers into speculators. The characteristics of farmers were becoming more like those of the urbanites from whom they had differentiated themselves. With the advent of the telephone, good roads, rural electrification and rural free delivery, the automobile and the tractor, then radios and television, and finally the Internet, the differences between the urban and rural ways of life were being obliterated. If Jefferson, that great celebrant of the agrarian yeoman, were around to meet today’s American farmer, he more than likely would encounter him in Washington, DC, perhaps testifying before a congressional agricultural committee or ensconced in a corporate board room in Manhattan. An expensive three-piece suit would have replaced the coverall—the business suit being the more appropriate costume for plowing financial furrows with a depreciation table for massive tractors 83

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and combines. The contemporary farmer’s “farmhands” now consist of accountants, lobbyists, and ag-school graduates. Jefferson would doubtless wince at learning that these are the people who feed America (and some other nations as well) through something called agribusiness. There is ample documentary evidence for this momentous social transformation, which has accelerated over the past century. Between 1950 and the end of the century, the number of farms had fallen from 5.6 million to 2.2 million. Fewer and fewer of them are family operated and thousands go out of business every year, or have given way to corporate farm operations.7 Nevertheless the agrarian myth has remained influential in the growing relationship between agriculture and government. Ironically, this dimension of the American economic sector, which has been historically associated with selfsufficiency and the independent rugged-individualist spirit, has evolved into the most publicly dependent sector of the economy. By 1987 federal subsidies to farmers had reached $26 billion, much of it to pay farmers not to produce farm products but to keep their farms in operation.8 Today, although only about one-sixth of the nation’s farms are run by family farmers, the American cultural attachment to the family farm remains relatively undiminished. Surveys still record a surprisingly high number of people who, when asked where they would like to live, express a desire to live on a farm. Most of those surveyed, of course, are born and bred urbanites that have never shoveled out a barn, milked a cow, or worked around the clock to out-race a storm. Fewer still, think about price fluctuations, bank foreclosure auctions, and the other perils and tribulations of contemporary agrarian life. But the Jeffersonian image of the family farm will probably continue to live on in the minds of city people, perhaps even more so as the reality fades. Today’s vanishing yeoman farmer probably maintains no such illusions; he knows that the city has conquered its erstwhile ally, the countryside, and that the factory has come to the farm. The Farm in the Cinema

1984 was supposed to be the year when George Orwell’s “Big Brother” would terrorize urban societies. In Hollywood, at least in that anomalous year, it turned out that his Animal Farm was a closer inspiration. Farm movies were a thin genre, and then, with the salient exception of Grapes of Wrath (1940) were often comedies. The “Ma and 84

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Pa Kettle” series of nine comedies from 1949 to 1957 were a spin-off from the successful The Egg and I (1947) about the hardships a city girl faced after moving with her husband to a rural chicken farm. Such films were mostly cornball rural humor that explored comedic contrasts between city and country life. The long-running television series Green Acres mined similar material for years. These series were not much concerned with addressing the realities of farm life, but they probably added to the mythology of agriculture. Only recently have mass media begun to record the realities of American farming. The rural realism of films like Country, The River, and Places in the Heart, all released in 1984, have shaken the pastoral romantic consciousness in a way that has not been seen on screens since Grapes of Wrath. All these films share several things in common, but the most notable is the role of women as the center, the strength, of the family farm. Of the rural realism films, the most “documentary” in form is Country. The Ivys, Iowa farmers played by Sam Shephard and Jessica Lange, along with three children and Lange’s father, represent what may have been the circumstances of thousands of family farmers caught up in the spiral of declining crop prices and mounting interest on government loans used to purchase feed, seed, and machinery to produce overabundant harvests. Tenaciously trying to retain a way of life that, despite high appraised net worth, renders little more than a subsistence lifestyle, they are blindsided by forces they cannot control or cope with. The prime casualty is that staple of the myth of the yeoman farmer: the family. At least Gil (Shephard) only succumbs to drinking and inept physical violence against his son and wife; his neighbor, an otherwise hardworking and honest man forced to hide his livestock from the government, only to be found out and disgraced, commits suicide. Others are forced to sell out, or have their capital auctioned, to pay off government loans, in effect to be out of farming. Reference to the relationship between the farm and the city is oblique. Government loan officers are “college boys”; Gil refuses to have his wife work as a waitress to help pay the bills, and when Gil asks his son if he wants to be a farmer someday the boy is unhesitating in his negation. That provokes a violent attack by Gil on his son, and under the influence of alcohol and a sense of dishonor, he turns his violence upon his wife when she tries to intercede. Jewel exiles her husband, shaming him further by saying that they don’t need him on the farm because he has become a quitter. 85

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The Ivys, endangered species of the American family farm © Universal Pictures

But there is little doubt that these farmers have made some sort of Faustian compact with the urban world that controls the prices for the produce and the repayment schedule for their loans. Ultimately, 86

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though they vow to fight on to the end, they must play by the government’s rules and take legal action to get relief. Gil had complained to a banker that they used to loan money “on the man” (his word), a time when a handshake was enough to secure a loan. But times changed, the new reality is that, when a “man” can’t make the payments, it’s a good idea for him to have a good lawyer. Relationships of farming to the exigencies of cities are less oblique in The River (1984). Once again, a stalwart farm family, this time from Tennessee, are pinched between the forces of nature and human greed. The latter is represented by Joe Wade (Scott Glenn), a collective farm owner who sees the prospects of the fertile river valley for commercial development. The valley includes the farm of Tom Garvey (Mel Gibson) and Mae Garvey (Sissy Spacek), a piece of land that lies squarely in the flood plain. As it does in the opening sequence of Country, when Carlisle Ivy is almost smothered to death under a mound of corn from a truck overturned by a tornado, nature nearly eliminates Tom in the opening scene when the river nearly drowns him under an overturned bulldozer. Once again, one has to accept that there is some primal force that compels farmers to fight on against seemingly insurmountable circumstances. City-born audiences might well wonder about such stubborn attachments to the land—especially land that floods with the frequency and ferocity of the Garvey farm. But Tom steadfastly refuses to sell his farm, even though it seems it might be the best thing he could do for himself and his family. Just as things seems to settle down into a benign rural domesticity for the Garveys, they get caught in a credit crunch and, to supplement income or be foreclosed on the by the bank, Tom is forced to take work in a foundry in the city. Tom is also placed in a moral dilemma when he discovers that he has enlisted as a scab and must cross a violent picket line. The factory, like the farm, has its perils. Here, The River seems to reach for some easy and clichéd moralisms. A deer wanders into the factory and ends up being surrounded by the workers, a pristine, innocent representative of nature surrounded by the brutal implements of production and hungry, desperate men. They set it free, but they themselves remain trapped in the foundry where they must work for days and be protected by goons who keep the strikers at bay. At the same time Mae Garvey labors on without her husband, and she, too, is nearly vanquished by machinery as she becomes stuck underneath a tractor in gears that threaten to amputate her arm. Moreover, it appears that the villainous Joe Wade also has designs on Tom’s wife. 87

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In the end, the Garveys resist the onslaught of development, the bank loans, the perils of the river, the dastardly attempt by Wade to drive them out by dynamiting the levee that holds back the river, and seemingly whatever else might come to threaten their way of life. But their way of life seems more one crafted by Hollywood than by the realities of contemporary agriculture. Places in the Heart (1984) is more concerned with its characters than with the particulars of farm life. Set in Waxahachie, Texas (the boyhood town of the film’s director, Robert Benton) during the depression years of the 1930s, it tells the story of a farm widow whose struggle to save her land is indeed a challenging one. Her husband was the local sheriff who was accidentally shot to death at the town’s train tracks by a drunken drifter. Like Jewel Ivy and Mae Garvey, Edna Spalding (Sally Field) is left by her man, in her case, permanently, although, unlike the other two farmwomen, she does not have a clue how to operate a farm. There are other similarities. Edna is encouraged to give up her farm, the only wealth she possess, by everyone around her, and reside with her relatives (who live in the city).9 All the cards appear to be stacked against her, she is alone, ignorant of raising cotton, and an easy mark for the maledominated society in which she lives. Her banker reluctantly tries to help by finding her a boarder, Mr. Will (John Malkovich), a blind World War I veteran. Her deus ex machina turns out to be a black man, Moses (Danny Glover), who drifts by looking for work and who she first resists, perhaps because it would be more than unseemly in 1930s rural Texas. But Moses is insistent and, furthermore, knows something about raising cotton. With the black drifter’s help, and despite a night visit by the Ku Klux Klan to try to persuade him to leave the vicinity, Edna somehow manages to get a crop in, and for the season at least, is able to keep her farm. Down on the Pharm

It is questionable whether the farm will constitute much of a theme for American movies in the future. Few Americans will have any direct experience with farm life, especially on the family farm. Even recent immigrants, such as Mexicans and other Central American immigrants, legal and not, who comprise cheap agricultural labor in the southwestern states will likely, if possible, have only a temporary involvement in agribusiness when the most fertile economic opportunities may lie in valleys named “Silicon.” On the other hand the line between the urban and rural sectors of American life may become further blurred in the future. Much 88

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of farming, as has already been discussed, has transmogrified into agribusiness, driven by a balance sheet and corporate mentality that is at a different scale and ethos from the comparative “mom and pop” operation of the family farm. In these days when a head of lettuce, grown in the Imperial Valley of Southern California, is picked, packed, ported to an airport, and flown a third-way around the world in a refrigerated air freighter to be a salad in a restaurant in Stockholm, farming is a business that is as much concerned with what war in the Middle East will do to oil prices as any urbanite with a sports utility vehicle.10 Drawn deeper into the orbit of international trade, urbanism, and geopolitics, the farm might well begin to provide sources of stories ripe for cinematic consideration. Livestock and crops are being genetically engineered; farms and livestock processing facilities are coming more to resemble factories in their scale, output, and modes of production; and agriculture is being examined for economic activities that have the ring more of a science fiction film than of rural romanticism. In 2002 it was disclosed that some genetically engineered soy, produced as a powerful drug for the treatment of diarrhea in pigs, was mistakenly mixed with soybeans intended for consumption as human food. In this case it is possible to conceive of a movie script for a vulgar comedy, but the prospects for such errors, especially with other drugs being engineered to increase agricultural productivity, might suggest themes for apocalyptic dramas that will hardly resemble the original Animal Farm. Such concerns, as reported, are viewed with alarm by agricultural specialists, but they may be viewed by film producers and writers as very fertile ground. Nature is not a pharmaceutical factory. It was never meant to be. But we have reached the point where it may be possible to make it that, and that prospect excites politicians and corporate executives who see this as a new way to make money. They talk a great deal about the benefits for society. But it’s really the economics that attract them. They think they can grow drugs more cheaply and have lower production costs than if they were produced in factories. Also, if a drug goes well, they can just scale up the acres involved in production. If the drug is a bust, they can just fire the farmers.11 We should ask whether pharmaceutical products should be engineered into food plants in the first place. Our view is that the answer to the question should be no. . . . The practical aspect of trying to keep these pharmaceutical plants separate from the regular food 89

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plants is an insurmountable problem. . . . It just can’t be done. It can’t be done because of the fallibility of human beings. It can’t be done because you can’t control pollen flow. It can’t be done because you can’t control mother nature that way. And if you can’t control mother nature and fallible human beings, we’ve come to the conclusion that you shouldn’t try.12

For the present, with Country and The River representing the status of the American family farm, one must temper the good felling of seeing good people overcome the odds against them. In each of these films, there is the uneasy feeling that, as Joe Wade prophesizes to the Garveys in The River: “Sooner or later, you’ll have to [sell out]. The river will flood again, or there’ll be a drought, or a surplus.” Or maybe it will be the recombinant DNA. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

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Notes

Clapp, 1978, 3. It was not until 1964 in the case of Baker v. Carr that proportional representation finally began to give cities and suburban areas there due representation based on population. Hofstader, 1956. Still, as books like Sister Carrie also attested, the city was often as much viewed as a place of sinister traps for the young farm girl. Hofstadter, 50. The reciprocal dependence between farms and cities is especially pronounced in farm states where many cities are fiscally dependent on the success of local farms. Lawson, 1986. True Grit, 1999, 21. Lochhead, 6. It should be noted that there is an aspect of this story that consumes substantial film time that is rather gratuitous. Running as somewhat of a sidebar to the main narrative and contributing little too it, other than the reference to Edna’s relatives, is the romantic affair being conducted by Edna’s brother-in-law, Wayne Lomax (Ed Harris), with another local woman. The source of this information was one of the author’s students, a MexicanAmerican who works in the lettuce fields by day and commutes fifty miles to attend classes in the evening. Bill Freese, policy analyst with Friends of the Earth Nichols, 2002. Jean Halloran of Consumers Union, Nichols, 2002.

6 Suburbia and the American Dream Our property seems to me the most beautiful in the world. It is so close to Babylon that we enjoy all the advantages of the city, and yet when we come home we are away from all the heat and dust. Letter written in 539 BC

The first Academy Award Best Picture of the new millennium, American Beauty (1999), centered on the theme of contemporary American suburban disappointment. It is perhaps prophetic that suburbia, the most significant American urban phenomenon of the latter half of the nineteenth century, was the kick-off theme for the next century. The automobile, the nuclear family, mass media, the middle class, mass merchandising, and home ownership, central ingredients of the American Dream that are all either under threat and/or subject to critical reassessment, are associated with suburbia. There have been suburbs almost since the first cities. An ancient Babylonian text extols the virtues of living “out of town.” Wealthy Romans cherished their suburban villas, and the idea of having a town house and a country house was the signal of having made it in nineteenth century British society. As cities became more industrialized, with the soot and smoke that factories brought with them, the countryside offered a quiet, clean, and healthful alternative. However the most attainable version of the best of town and country often retained some of the less appealing features of each. In the late nineteenth century, America’s railroads and electrified trolleys made the first inroads into ex-urban territory, creating what came to be called “streetcar suburbs” around some of the nation’s major cities in the 1920s. Some urban planners, such as Clarence Stein and Henry Wright, and architects, such as Frank Lloyd Wright and Andrew Jackson Downing, saw possibilities in the suburban territories for 91

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innovative planning and building. Urban concepts, such the construction of entirely new towns in the orbits of metropolitan areas, an idea that also had ancient roots,1 held the promise of not repeating some of the mistakes of urban development that had produced congested and unhealthful cities. The suburban trend was slowed by the Great Depression and the war that followed it, but in America, the trend dramatically reaccelerated in the postwar period as pent-up demand was released upon the land surrounding many American cities. Fueled by the baby boom and returning GIs entitled to VA mortgages, as well as new roads and highways providing accessibility to ex-urban territory, housing became America’s biggest industry. Indeed, normally a small industry in which the typical builder constructed twenty-five or fewer houses annually, mass producers of housing emerged as a new phenomenon. On July 3, 1950, the cover of Time magazine featured William J. Levitt, standing before uniform rows of identical houses on freshly bulldozed suburban land, advertising “a new way of life.” This new way of life evidenced novel characteristics that went beyond mass housing development. Suburban communities broke some of the traditional connections that the cities afforded. Young suburban housewives no longer had easy access to their mothers and aunts for advice on child rearing and cooking. New schools, PTAs, clubs, and social institutions had to be formed where there was no preexisting social infrastructure. Much responsibility for these needs fell to women, who remained behind in suburbia when the men went off to work in a car pool or by suburban rail. While experience with these activities created what was called the “suburban blues” in suburban women, they also gained a new self-reliance that later factored into the so-called women’s liberation movement. Most activities now centered on the home, barbecuing, and backyard games, because of the lack of other diversions. Homeownership involved more do-it-yourself projects. In short, the suburban subdivision became a cocoon of family and child-oriented activities. These factors were mirrored in, and abetted by, the growth of the corporate model of work life. William Whyte’s The Organization Man (1956) described the emergence of a new junior-executive worker who has moved away from the traditional individualism toward a group ethic. Sociologist Leonard Reissman also wrote of the emergence of The Lonely Crowd (1955) of people who had transitioned from being “inner directed” to being “other directed.” The new way of life was one that was characterized by the expansion of the so-called middle 92

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class whose archetype was the single-family suburban-dwelling, corporation-employed American.2 To some observers there wasn’t much life or culture in the suburbs, and suburbia became a target of criticism and jokes. The Levittowns, in Long Island and Pennsylvania, and Park Forest, Illinois, as well as small subdivisions, were stereotyped as characterless places inhabited by coffee-klatching housewives who, deserted daily by commuting junior-executive husbands, coddled their children while driving them in station wagons to a welter of planned activities. In communities composed of look-alike split levels and formulaic shopping centers, cultural high points allegedly consisted mostly of barbecues and wife-swapping. Numerous articles in cosmopolitan magazines, and books like The Split-Level Trap and The Crack in the Picture Window, assailed the suburb from humorous parody to outright malediction. Burb-bashing became a minor industry for architecture and urban planning critics, one of whom complained that: “Suburban Christmas is a cheap plastic Santa Claus in a shopping center parking lot surrounded by asphalt and a sea of cars. Suburban spring is not a walk in the awakening woods, but mud in poorly built roads. Suburban life is no voyage of discovery or private exploration of the world’s wonders, natural and man-made; it is cliché conformity as far as the eye can see, with no stimulation through quality of environment.”3 This polemic plays upon a stereotype that others took up in kindlier terms. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, suburbs were often subjected to quips about crabgrass and being unable to find one’s house because they all looked the same. Television personality Art Linkletter once wrote that a child had defined them thus: “Suburbs are things to come into the city from.” However, according to newspaper columnist Earl Wilson, it takes increasingly longer to come into the city from them because, “. . . by the time you’ve finished paying for your home in the suburbs, the suburbs have moved 20 miles further out.” These days many suburbanites often neither need nor want to come into the central city. The early suburbs may have been strictly dormitories, but today many people now both live and work (and shop and recreate) in suburbia. Metropolitan regions are increasingly multi- rather than single-centered, with the equivalents of downtowns growing up around office parks and the increasing number of multifamily residential developments. These new urban villages may look neither like the old central cities, nor the small towns of the past, but 93

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neither do they fit the visual profile of the stereotypical look-alike mass subdivisions of the 1950s and 1960s. The suburbs, at least in the American experience, have been for many, an environment of insulation, if not isolation, from the perceived disorder, chaos, and diversity of the city.4 In fact, many older suburbs now encounter some of the problems associated with inner cities—worn and outmoded infrastructure, parking and transportation problems, and housing dilapidation. Demographic data indicate that suburbs are no longer entirely white in racial composition; political studies have refuted the idea that people automatically changed their party affiliation from Democrat to Republican, once they moved to the suburbs; and problems of drugs, crime, pollution, and fiscal distress are sometimes just as prevalent in suburbs as they are in the inner cities. Paradoxically, once derided for being bland dreamlands, many suburbs are now criticized for being unable to deliver on the dream of insulation from urban problems. Among the attractions of suburbia has been the accessibility it putatively provides to what has come to be called the American Dream. While this term might have various connotations, principal among them is homeownership. Not long out of their era when agriculture and the family farm predominated in occupation and location for most Americans, an attachment to the land and to the homestead evolved, as urban occupations eclipsed farming, into the notion of suburbia. The suburb promised fresh air, a closeness to nature that the city could not supply, sufficient land to grow things, if only grass and flowers, and of course, the sovereignty of land ownership. With much, if not most, of their personal wealth in their real estate, Americans had a literal vested interest in keeping that investment secure. Security in suburbia often expressed itself in terms of a self-defined conformity. If the suburban subdivision of homes looked very much alike in style, and if regulations prohibited much deviation from the visual norm, the resulting uniformity of product, the suburban home’s property values, received some protection from the anomalous and uncertain.5 The need to maintain property values could cause concern over one’s neighbors and, in part, the resulting obsession over neighborliness in suburbia.6 Suburbia in the Cinema

There was also a wholesomeness associated with suburbia, contrasted with the noise, pollution, crowdedness and unwholesome attractions of the big city. This point of view allowed for, at least in the first films 94

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that chose suburbia as their setting, a light and mostly comedic touch that soon came to be reflected in the suburban and family-oriented television sitcoms. No sooner had significant numbers of people begun to settle in the suburbs than they became a niche market in which they could watch stereotyped versions of themselves on the televisions sets in their pine-paneled recreation rooms. That light touch is exemplified by Please Don’t Eat the Daisies (1961). Based on a best-selling humor book about the suburbs, it was also a vehicle for Doris Day to showcase a hit song of the same title. Day and her screen husband (David Niven) move to the suburbs at her insistence, but he must continue to work in New York, where he is a drama critic and there is the temptation of city women (Janis Paige). Minor misunderstandings, and other plot elements that soon became the staple of television sit-coms, resulted in ultimately happy endings. These kinds of comedy situations pop up again in suburban settings in Wives and Lovers(1963) and The Grass is Greener over the Septic Tank (1978). By far the most amusing scene on this theme appears in The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1975), wherein Mel Edison (Jack Lemmon), who is having a nervous breakdown because he has lost his job, and his wife, Edna (Anne Bancroft), are invited to the suburban home of his older brother, Harry (Gene Saks). Upon arrival they are accosted by Harry’s enormous dogs, and Harry begins extolling the advantages of the suburbs over the city. He badgers his younger brother to fill his lungs with the fresh air and to walk over his extensive property, during which Mel is victimized by poison ivy. Meanwhile, Harry’s wife involves Edna in her homemaking projects and gardening with comic ineptitude. The city dwellers seem relieved to return to their high-rise apartment far from the suburban zealotry of their well-meaning relatives. With the exception of The Prisoner of Second Avenue, such conditions hardly qualify for a compelling comedic or dramatic setting, unless the security and serenity of suburbia are threatened by circumstances alien to its homogeneity and conformity. Indeed, this dramatic plotline appears to be a common one when screenwriters elect to address life in the suburbs. That a film might be titled Bachelor in Paradise (1961) is an indication that the suburbs were family-centered places in which an unmarried individual would be a sufficient anomaly to drive a plot. The suburb in this case is a generic California subdivision of new homes inhabited mostly by young families in a circadian round of husbands departing en masse to jobs in the city, and wives engaged 95

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in child-rearing, homemaking and coffee-klatching. One scene shows an early morning routine in which all the husbands on a street depart at the same time, in cars backing out from garages and driveways and driving off on the commute to the city. Introduced into this paradise is a womanizing bestselling author of books observing the manners and mores (particularly romantic) of Europeans, A.J. Niles (Bob Hope), who is compelled to spend a year in the United States for tax purposes. Niles decides to use the time writing about American suburbanites and alien (to him) suburban life. As a bachelor who is the sole male left in the subdivision with a potential harem of somewhat bored wives, Niles becomes the subject of amorous possibility for some of them and a threat to their husbands. Much of Bachelor in Paradise is a stage for comedian Bob Hope to deliver one-liners and for situation comedy sequences. Along the way much fun is poked at suburban lifestyle and the need for something interesting to happen in it. As it happens, the other single individual in the cast is Rosemary Howard (Lana Turner), the woman from whom Niles is renting a house, and there is little doubt they will end up together. Anyone who settled in a California suburb in the 1950s or 1960s will immediately recognize the setting of this movie, and perhaps the social ennui as well. Infidelities and Neighbors from Hell

Marital infidelity was only hinted at in Bachelor in Paradise, but that film was made before the sexual revolution. By the late 1960s and the 1970s, the suburbs were a couple of decades older and sexual escapades had come to be regarded as a prime preoccupation to relieve marital and geographical boredom. The Ice Storm(1997) looks back to the 1970s from the vantage of some thirty years later. The suburb is New Canaan, Connecticut, the hometown of the Hood family. Their new way of life has already begun to tatter, and nice houses, cars, and good schools are proving no guarantee for happiness in suburbia. The father, Ben Hood (Kevin Kline), is having an affair with the mother of his children’s friends. Ben’s wife (Joan Allen) suspects as much and has retreated into her own emotional “ice storm.” Their children, Wendy (who plays sex games with the boys next door) and Paul, are at least (if not more) as grown up as their parents, whom they refer to in their private language as “parental units.” During an actual ice storm, which glazes the suburb, the adults engage in games of wife-swapping that were becoming popular in the 96

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period. At boozy parties, men threw their car keys into a bowl, and women chose randomly from it to determine their sexual partner for the night. But as director Ang Lee looks back upon this from the vantage of later years, the scene takes on an irony. The men evidence an anxiety over having their keys drawn from the bowl, and one woman is relived that she has selected her own husband’s keys. Supposedly even the swinging lifestyle of suburbia quickly loses its momentum.7 It is bored suburban husbands, occupied with crabgrass and spying on each other, who drive the storyline of The Burbs (1989). With little else of interest in the suburban setting, the writers reprise the plot from Frankenstein, injecting mysterious, unsociable, and unsavory looking neighbors into a dilapidated house next door to the family of Ray Peterson (Tom Hanks). Ray, concerned about his property values, but also suspicious of strange noises and lights coming from the shuttered old house, is fed sinister scenarios by other bored husbands. Soon, a neighbor who has not been seen for days is considered to be a victim of some vile doings in that house. After a social intrusion (under the ruse of being neighborly) the newcomers prove to the absurdly sinister looking and with strange accents.

© Imagine Entertainment 97

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Later, Ray and his fellow protectors of the neighborhood break in, while the occupants are away, in search of evidence of malfeasance. After several silly mishaps, a gas main in the basement is broken and the house explodes. When the occupants return, they are exposed after the trunk of their car is shown to be full of human bones. The Burbs has little, if any, cinematic or sociological values, although it is interesting that its writers seem to take delight in having the youth of the subdivision act as observer-narrators whose main enjoyment of suburban life was watching their parents make fools of themselves. A more interesting variation on what might be regarded “the Frankenstein in suburbia” subgenre, involves a young man created by a weird inventor, again in an old gothic mansion at the edge of a suburban subdivision. With allusion to Pinocchio as well, a lonely aging inventor turns a cookie-cutting machine into a young boy, but he dies before finishing the project, leaving the boy with scissors for hands. Edward Scissorhands (1990) is an endearing little Frankenstein, played touchingly by Johnny Depp. Reclusive Edward, who knows the outside world only from the magazine pictures he has clipped, is discovered by Avon Lady Peg (Diane Wiest). She brings Edward to her home in the pastel-painted suburban tract and introduces him to her husband, Bill (Alan Arkin), their son, and cheerleader daughter, Kim (Wynona Ryder). Edward’s pasty complexion is often scarred when he attempts to flick away his long unruly hairs. He wears a Goth-inspired black leather suit, which only adds to his alien stature. Much is made of Edward’s physical predicament: he not only scars himself, and accidentally punctures waterbeds, but he also is capable of giving haircuts and creating, with great artistic flurry, topiary and ice sculptures. But director Tim Burton also shows how the curiosity of some of the suburbanites about Edward turns suspicious and hostile when he is called a fake and a freak, and he is bullied toward crime by one of the local boys. Even an oversexed housewife tries to seduce him, and her scorn adds to his rejection. In the end, suburbia is too unaccommodating for such a misfit, and Edward is once again alone. Like ET (1982), Steven Spielberg’s cuddly little alien visitor to another American suburb, Edward really doesn’t quite fit in when the initial curiosity wears off because it is normalcy and security, not eccentricity, that suburbia values most. 98

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As noted above, suburban settlement patterns were not so much influenced by ethnicity or race (although, initially, non-white were not much of a demographic factor in suburbia), as by income. There were, indeed, suburbs that were designed and built for different income classes, with neighborhoods of similarly priced houses, such that the primary variable that decided who lived where was income. This factor, however, provided no assurance that, other than similar income, one’s neighbors would be compatible in any other way. Indeed, they might turn out to be neighbors from hell, according to several films. Neighbors (1981) presents Dan Ackroyd and John Belushi, playing against type in a farce about middle-class suburbanites. Earl Keese (Belushi) is a polite and nervous man, living an uneventful life with his unremarkable wife, when macho, boisterous, and boorish Vic (Ackroyd) and his vixen wife move in next door. The movie proceeds as a send up of suburban conventions and expectations about sex and marriage and that descends into a suburban nightmare. Wife-swapping is the theme in another suburban neighborhood in Consenting Adults (1992) in which Kevin Spacey plays the threatening neighbor who broaches the subject to his benign and retiring neighbor played by Kevin Kline. But the ultimate suburban neighbor from hell might be the terrorist played by Tim Robbins in the deceptively titled Arlington Road (1999). While essentially a thriller that takes its market impetus from the Oklahoma City federal building terrorist bombing, its suburban setting lends an especially unsettling element to the possibility that the person mowing the next-door lawn or firing up the barbecue might have a benign appearance masking a sinister intent, as that of Timothy McVeigh. Whither the American Dream

The wholesomeness that characterized the early films set in suburbia quickly gave way to satire and eventually to darker themes. The sociological fact was that suburbia changed the environment, but it didn’t really change people. The American tendency to put too much faith in physical determinism, much in the same way we regard our nation and its ideals as historically exceptional, proved to be unfounded. If suburbia was the best expression of the American Dream, it was found wanting. Suburbia’s critics, however, made the same mistake, stereotyping suburbs as homogenous social wastelands concerned with crabgrass and keeping up with the Joneses. Demographically, 99

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suburbs were often more ethnically diverse than inner-city ethnic enclaves. Although suburbia became associated with the American Dream, it was also often purchased at the expense of other aspects of the American experience. This is an aspect of the subject that rarely makes its way into cinematic expression, except indirectly. Chinatown (1974) is a film noir murder mystery, but it is set in Los Angeles in 1937 during a severe drought. This was also the period in which the city was expanding into the San Fernando Valley, and the film’s story chronicles the chicanery of corrupt public officials and land speculators behind the construction of a reservoir and the eventual building of new housing developments. Los Angeles had already proved itself to be a placed where the “gold in the hills” was essentially real estate value. Between 1906 and 1926, it grew from twenty-nine to over four hundred square miles. In the arid climate of the Los Angeles basin, it was water that made that real estate value, and the political power that came from an expanding city, grow. Corrupt politics aside, the suburbs ate up erstwhile farmland, swallowed small towns, and eventually established political rivalries with central cities. As suburbs matured, internal political divisions emerged as well, tax burdens increased as new services were added, debates over growth, integration, pollution, and other matters began to remind some suburbanites of the problems they had supposedly escaped the city to avoid. Central to many of the problems of suburbia was the question of property values; and social, political and environmental problems threatened the gold in suburban hills. While suburbs were associated with familism, they also engendered a growing independence for women, who took more responsibility for the development of the social infrastructure of these areas, sitting on school boards, establishing Girls Scouts and Little Leagues, selling real estate, and other activities. This independence took flower among some suburban women in the 1960s and 1970s in the women’s movement, and it posed a threat to the notion of suburban family solidarity. There were also early indications that men were finding the American Dream more elusive than a simple relocation to the suburbs. Tom Rath (Gregory Peck) is The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956). Although partly about the problems of the readjustment to civilian lives of World War II servicemen, this film is also a view into the gloomier side of the American Dream. A New York executive, 100

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Tom endeavors to provide a good home to his family in Westport, Connecticut, from which he commutes. Needing a better salary, he applies for a better job but soon realizes the pressure of more responsibility. His life is complicated when wartime memories about an affair, an illegitimate child, and the accidental killing of his best friend begin to become known. When Tom’s wife Betsy learns of the child, their lives begin to unravel further, and Tom must decide if the promotion will be worth the time it will take away from his family. This film thus probed some of the early problems associated with the emergence of the corporate-dominated version of the American Dream. A darker view of male adjustment to the suburban promise of the American Dream is The Swimmer (1968). The swimmer, Merrill (Burt Lancaster), is on a strange odyssey of swimming his way home by way of the swimming pools of the suburbs of Connecticut. Along the way the viewer becomes convinced that there is something wrong with him, beyond this strange obsession. That his odyssey takes place by way of something so typically suburban as swimming pools, in which Merrill is treated rudely by a public swimming pool attendant and shunned by neighbors at a poolside party, is transformative. When Merrill finally arrives home, he discovers that he has lost more than his dignity. Waking Up from the American Dream

By the close of the millennium, the suburbs had become such a dominant feature of the American urban scene that films set in suburbia no longer had much of a locational distinction. The largest demographic cohort going to the movies now comes from the suburbs, filing into the multiplexes in suburban malls to see films that may well be made by filmmakers who, like themselves, were born and raised in suburbs. Films, such as Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995), about an awkward and unattractive girl in a suburban high school humiliated by her schoolmates and dissatisfied with her family, or the schemes and infidelities of Election (1999), or the Ice Storm (1997), all plumb the sinister, dark, and unfulfilling sides of the suburban experience.8 Moreover the line between city and suburban has become less distinct. Suburbs increasingly are experiencing many of the problems associated with the inner city. Americans are less shocked to learn of school shootings like those at Columbine, Colorado, and other 101

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suburban schools, perpetrated by students with all the supposed material advantages of suburbia. The scourge of the triangle of drugs, gangs, and prostitution, once associated exclusively with inner cities, has surprisingly made its way into the American suburb.9 When American Beauty (1999) received the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2000, the suburbs might have seemed to have finally arrived as environments that could be taken seriously for cinematic drama. That is, the suburbs were no longer those tracts of bungalows and Cape Cods of the 1950s, portrayed in farces like Bachelor in Paradise. Nearly a half-century of American suburbanization has brought us to the realization that it is not so much where we are, but what we are, that makes the difference. Urban planners, who long denigrated and scorned the visual blandness of suburbia, continue to offer physical fixes and palliatives. Neo-traditional design proffers communities that putatively recall the neighborhoods and small towns before the suburban era, places where, presumably, people sit on stoops and front porches, greeting passing neighbors and women push prams along cozy streets of American Gothic homes. But neotraditional design cannot make neo-traditional people, families, jobs, and values.10 American Beauty is, in a sense, a summation of suburbia’s social pathology set against an antiseptic physical environment. The beautiful colonial homes with manicured lawns and driveways full of late model sports utility vehicles, all the surface features of the American Dream, are present in the establishing shots. But the narration track tells a different story. Very much is wrong with Lester Burnham, his family, and his neighbors. Entrapped in a mid-life crisis, masturbation is the highlight of his day. He has a beautiful, but Stepford, wife,11 and a daughter as sullen as (Dollhouse’s) Dawn Weiner, who regards him as a loser. The viewer tends to identify with Lester because it is his story and he is its narrator, with all the grim irony of Joe Gillis in Sunset Boulevard. He hates his job so much that he is willing to resign from it and take a burger-flipping fast food, minimum-wage job instead. His wife is unfaithful to him, and he has an infatuation with a high school cheerleader. He may be flailing about, but at least he is rebelling. None of it has turned out satisfying for Lester, not the house, the job, the family, or the neighbors. American Beauty even reaches back to the old suburban theme of the neighbors from hell, in this case, a Nazi-memorabilia-collecting, homophile, ex-Marine and his weird voyeuristic son. 102

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Suburban fantasy. American Beauty, Dreamworks, 1999

Perhaps it is because America never seemed to have enjoyed a golden urban age that the suburban dream seemed to offer so much promise. Americans have always had a good case of anti-urbanism. They might have left the farms and small towns in great numbers to take advantage of the allure of the city and its riches, but they seem to have done so without fully grasping what that meant in terms of the diversity, disorder, and distance from traditional norms, and they have retained a nostalgia for those good old days that never were, but seem so with increasing distance. Suburbia was the compromise. It did however deliver much of the material promise of the American Dream. Many Americans entered the middle class through the door of suburbia. But in both the virtual and actual suburbia, on the other side of that door is a volatile world on the edge of self-destruction. Revolutionary Road (2009), one of the most recent tragic suburban dramas, was released in the midst of a global economic recession, ignited by a housing crisis, fueled by subprime housing mortgages. Set in the early 1950s, when the suburban dream was just taking form, the Wheelers, Frank (Leonardo DiCaprio) and April (Kate Winslet), and their two young children abide in a classic clapboard Early American suburban home on a very generous grassy plot. They are a demographic cliché; Frank commutes to the city by train to a boring corporate office job; April is what we now anachronistically call a stay-at-home mom. 103

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They are like many other couples forsaking the city to set up a life away from all the heat and dust. There might not be much of a story in that, but in Richard Yates’ novel on which this Sam Mendes film is based, the Wheelers prove sufficiently introspective and projective to discern that their suburban dream just might be existential death and that something should be done about it. Frank’s job is an unfulfilling routine with the same coworkers, the same lunches, and an occasional dalliance with a secretary to relieve the boredom. Her acting role in community theater only depresses April. So why not go to Paris, the ultimate city of expat dreams in the 1950s? Frank had been in Paris during the war, and the suggestion to April that they might chuck it all and live an exciting urban life ignites a dream of an escape from suburban dullness and drudgery. They make plans and tell friends and Frank’s coworkers of their incipient adventure, even exciting the children with the project. But, almost as quickly, realities intrude. April learns she is pregnant, and Frank objects to her wish to have an abortion. But maybe Frank is really lured by a promotion in a company that appears to have a future in the digital revolution. The existential reality of the suburban life they have already made is torn raw in a visit by a neighbor’s mentally deranged son, a Cassandra whose verbal rages contain truths the Wheelers seem unable speak to one another. Their suburban dream turns into a prison of mutual contempt, until April tragically botches her self-administered abortion. It is not just the superb screenwriting and acting that made American Beauty and Revolutionary Road such a successful films; it might also be the plausibility. 1. 2.

3. 4. 5.

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Clapp, 1968. Popular opinion has it that the movement of city people to the suburbs also reflected a shift in political values from liberal Democratic to conservative Republican. However, the situation is more complex than that (Berger). While the suburbs now dominate in the overall electorate and suburban political concerns, they are neither politically uniform nor monolithic. Schneider, 1992. Huxtable, 1964, 37. Sennett, 1970. Uniformity of product was also abetted in the construction of suburbia by the practices of emergent merchant builders of mass subdivisions in the 1950s. Mass building techniques were more efficient if homes were relatively

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6.

7.

8. 9. 10. 11.

uniform in style, of involved minor variations in style. Clapp, 1971, chap. 5; Clapp, 1990. Suburbia also promoted neighborliness because, as often entirely new communities at some distance from established urban centers, they were required to establish social facilities and institutions de novo, thereby increasing the degree of social participation among residents. Gans, 1967. Apparently not with everyone, however. The 1999 documentary, The Lifestyle, chronicles the activities of those who have adopted swapping houses and spouses as a fullfledged way of life. Spoken of by its adherents with almost religious zeal, the lifestyle is promoted as something that can even, paradoxically, enhance marital fidelity and monogamy. The documentary shows these swappers to be rather dull and unappealing people, who sometimes admit they have not found sexual paradise and opt out for more conventional lifestyles. Ng, 1999. From Rubies to Blossoms: A Portrait of American Girlhood: The New Gangs of New York, National Public Radio, February 8–9, 2003. Clapp, 1991a. She, like Rosemary (Lana Turner) in Bachelor in Paradise, sells real estate.

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7 Growing Up Urban: The City, the Cinema, and American Youth Dear kindly Sergeant Krupke, You gotta understand, It’s just our bringin’ up-ke, That gets us out of hand. Lyric from “Gee, Officer Krupke” by Stephen Sondheim, West Side Story (1961)

For most of human history children grew up right alongside their parents. In hunting and gathering societies, they needed to be close to adults to survive the twin dangers of predation and starvation. For much of history, more children died than survived. In agricultural societies they were part of the essential labor of the agricultural enterprise, and as other crafts emerged with the first settlements, children toiled and learned mostly beside their parents Children in rural areas in undeveloped countries continue to grow up in ways not too different from the ways they had for millennia. The rural way of life, at least until the present century, tended to be cyclical: generations of children in rural and pastoral areas transitioned from childhood to adulthood without benefit of a period of youth in between, taking up, for the most part, the occupations and lifestyles of their parents and marrying and siring a new generation that would continue the cycle. They acquired their abilities, their values, their beliefs, and their world view mostly from their families, and for the most part, their lives followed a similar course of life as that of their parents. As villages and small urban settlements emerged, 107

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some children were sent away to work for others, but most remained close to home. Those experiences associated with childhood—games, toys and children’s stories—are really only a European creation of as recently as the past four centuries. Most primitive peoples regarded and treated children as infants until age seven. They made little differential between the genders of their offspring, often dressing them alike. After age seven, boys began to follow men’s activities in herding, hunting, or farm labor, except that they were not men in the two major aspects of making love and making war.1 Urbanization fractured these longstanding traditions and practices and set in motion changes in children and their relationship to their families and social institutions that continue to the present day. Growing up in the city, in more specific times and places in the city, would be profoundly different than the experience of children in earlier times and nonurban environments. Most significantly, with the appearance of the city, came the possibility of an alternative way of life, one that was not only different but, because the city was a place that embraced change, and seemed to thrive on change, held the promise and prospect for a better life. It was in the early years of the development film that the transformation from a predominantly rural to an urban environment was itself the experience of many Americans. The farm to city migration, as well as the arrival of many immigrants from abroad, was commonplace. That very process of change, with its inevitable cultural collisions, social adjustments, and challenges to long-held traditions produced stories with real-life drama, that is, stories of city life that were not just stories of people, but of the city as well. Nature and Nurture in the Streets

Urbanization and industrialism brought changes for many by offering an alluring alternative to the drudgery of farm labor and by providing occupational alternatives in the urban commerce and services. Although rural life was difficult and often dangerous for children, cities, too, posed their own risks for children. In a scene in The Crowd (1927), the children of the lead run into the street to greet their father, and the young girl is killed by a truck. While urbanites certainly knew of the dangers of city life in the streets and tenements, movies were supposed to be a form of entertainment and escapism from the difficulties of everyday city life. Our Gang Comedies and later, the Andy 108

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Hardy series of films tended to portray the life of children and youth in idyllic and playful terms. The Crowd was one of the first films to address its realities with social commentary. Cities also changed the relationship between parent and child. With the diversity of occupations, children were turned over to guilds and factories, and then to schools, to learn trades that might be different from those of their parents, breaking the tradition of millennia of the occupational linkage between parent and child. This resulted in, what one commentator refers to as a “de-conditioning” from the traditional association that children have with their parents to new forms of authority. The school, it is alleged, plays a decisive role in this process.2 The city was also a more socially diverse environment, containing  people with different values, religions, and political and social views. Its streets were a different social setting for young people than the farm and the pasture, a setting in which the young might have contact with everyone from the rich to the wretched, from prelates to prostitutes. The effects of technology, urban institutions, and particularly the physical environment were regarded in both popular and scholarly opinion of the time as deleterious to the interests and well-being of children. This was consistent with what has been described as American “romantic dis-urbanism,” a nostalgia for a pastoral, agrarian, small town past that was not all that distant, particularly at the time the motion picture came into being. But before that there had long been a prevailing notion that the nonurban, natural environment was salutary and restorative of the true values and spirit of the country. Much of the literature of the nineteenth century recounted stories of erstwhile farm girls and boys who had encountered the city, experiencing moral struggles and unfortunate circumstances that required a return to the roots of the rural environment for salvation. Not only adult literature, but also children’s literature portrayed the simple, rustic life as one of healing and recuperative from the pressures and complexities of urbanism. At the time the city was experiencing much growth from rural immigration, books, such as Jean George’s Julie of the Wolves and Betsy Bryan’s Midnight Fox, and classics, such as At the Back of the North Wind, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Wind in the Willows, The Secret Garden, Heidi, and, of course, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, comprised a nostalgic, escapist literature that fed the anti-urbanism of its generation.3 109

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Dead End (1937) was strongly influenced by the prevailing social thought of the American 1930s and ‘40s that stressed the influence, mostly negative, of the urban environment in shaping the values of children. Its title not only refers to a street that terminates at the East River (a convenience that suited well that fact that the film followed a stage play and was itself filmed on a soundstage), but it also unambiguously indicated what social outcome could be expected from the dense, dirty, blighted, tenement environment of the back alleys behind luxury high-rises of the rich. Dead End adopts the nurture side of the nature versus nurture argument over human behavior: slums were seen as places that breed crime, which was a sociological as well as popular theme in the Depression years. The story centers mostly on the antics of a group of young boys whose playground is the narrow street behind the high-rise apartment of the rich. They beat up and rob a rich kid who lives in the high-rise, much to the amusement of “Baby Face” Martin (Humphrey Bogart), who used to live in the street and who has become a public enemy for his crimes. Martin is the quintessential bad example for kids, he has money, expensive clothes, and people are afraid of him, all except his mother, who still lives in the tenement and who greets his return with a slap across his face. Martin has had some cosmetic surgery to disguise him from the police, but little doubt is left that Martin’s continued criminality is a result of his upbringing in the streets of the slum. So also is the sorry state of the girlfriend of his youth, Francie (Claire Trevor), whom he learns has become a prostitute. Poverty, a certain contributing variable, also plays a role. Food is stolen from babies, roaches infest the tenements, and kids fight over pennies and encourage one another to steal from their parents. But there’s also a strong theme related to hardened class divisions that are difficult to breach. Drina (Sylvia Sidney), the sister and sole “parent” of one of the boys, joins a picket line striking against the low wages in her place of work, and she is beaten by the police for her efforts. Dave (Joel McCrea), her love interest, is an architect with ambitions to renew the area of the slums, but all he can manage by way of work is some sign painting for a local restaurant. With his noble ambitions and humanity, Dave is an example that the poor might rise to higher purpose. Dave’s plight shows that it’s possible, but also that there are no guarantees in getting an education. Meanwhile Dina dreams of escape to an idyllic countryside, a more popular fantasy 110

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in the late 1930s than today. Drina and Dave are also products of the mean streets of the slum, but they are proof that antisocial lives are not inevitable. Much of the plot of Dead End is driven by class differences. Dave  even has a brief, but doomed, dalliance with a bored and self-indulgent, rich girl, Kay (Wendy Barrie); films of the time still recognized the social class barriers of the big city. At the other end of the social scale are those in the high-rises that overlook the cramped alleys as well as the East River.4 In the screenplay the rich come in for their fair share of facile sociology as well. Essentially arrogant, absorbed with their idle pursuits, they are insensitive to the dire circumstances of the lower-class people with whom they live—spatially at least—side by side, and blame them. Judge Griswald’s brother, with his superior attitudes and notions of what is appropriate to protect the privileges of his class, is particularly galling. The socially parasitic Kay is only pathetic.5 Although there is spatial proximity there is no social proximity among the denizens of Dead End. The rich live above, the poor below; the rich send their children to tutors and private schools, the poor learn in the streets and reform schools; the rich are insulated in their private cars, the poor get around as they can. Most of the action of Dead End takes place in the street that ends at the river. Here the young boys convene their indolent lives each day, squabble, plot fights with other gangs, initiate newcomers, and generally comport themselves like they are destined for reform school or worse. Their heroes are not Dave, who they respect but figure is going nowhere, but characters like Baby Face Martin or tough guys from reform school. They taunt the local beat cop and the other “uniforms,” such as the doorman for the rich apartment building. The impression is that these are kids who are one misbehavior away from juvenile detention, which is more likely to teach them more sophisticated criminal behaviors, and then on to prison. The urban sociology of the time was that it was the streets, tenements, and lack of parental guidance that made these kids this way. “He’s not a bad kid,” it is said of Tommy (Billy Hallop), who his sister is trying to keep out of trouble. Boys Town (1938), another film about the plight of youth in the Depression, was released a year after Dead End came out. The community for orphans and runaway boys was founded by Father Flanagan in countryside in the Midwest, the idea being that a little fresh air, distance from bad influences, and tough love were what was 111

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needed to put the lives of young boys on a straight path. The notion that abuse breeds abuse is another prevalent Dead End hypothesis that continues into the present; Angel’s father is a drunk and beats him and his mother. The pathologies of slum life almost become a badge of distinction: “TB, I got TB,” one of the boys intones almost with pride. As New York urban sociologist has pointed out,6 the poor and “the swells” often did live side by side in New York City, a proximity that not only underscored class distinctions in the city, but seemed almost perfectly made for dramaturgy. But the times also provided substance for dramatic conflicts. The Depression had cast a dark shadow over the American Dream, but in the cities, the very rich were still partying in their high-rises beside alleys of slums where roaches scurried in dark stairwells, kids swam in the river, and where many of the role models were thugs. Lillian Hellman’s screenplay for Dead End has an evident leftist slant. Based on the play by Sidney Kingsley (who subtitled it “Cradle of Crime”), it reflected the prevailing “physical determinism” view of slums7 that has been leavened by subsequent analysis. Many urbanists regarded slums as breeding places of both social dysfunction and seditious politics, which resulted in housing policies that alleged that replacement of slums with better physical conditions would solve the underlying social problems as well. The labor movement was very active, and even some Hollywood actors and writers, as the congressional House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings brought out, had at least an intellectual interest in the prospects of communism. But crime trumped all other cinematic themes for films about and set in the city. The theme of the negative influence of criminal adults upon urban youth was reprised with the same group of young actors in Angels with Dirty Faces (1938). This melodrama involved two Lower East Side buddies, Rocky (James Cagney) and Jerry (Pat O’Brien), who grow up in the same tough urban environment but come out differently. Rocky becomes as cocky, career criminal; Jerry becomes a mild-mannered priest. They remain friends, but their friendship is strained when Rocky begins to influence a gang of young neighborhood boys, the Dead End Kids, that Jerry has been working hard to keep on the straight and narrow. Rocky even anonymously gives money to the priest, but they are in a struggle for the souls of the boys. However, Rocky, the bad example, becomes a hero to the kids. 112

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Urban morality play. © First National Pictures

Angels with Dirty Faces is most remembered in film lore for its riveting ending. After Rocky has bumped off a couple of guys who double-crossed him and had a shoot out with the cops, he is apprehended, tried, convicted, and sentenced to die in the electric chair. But he remains a hero to the boys because his bravado is such that he will walk the “last mile” to the chair with a grin on his face and spitting in the face of his executioners. However, Jerry asks Rocky to make a sacrifice that might even be greater than losing his life: to die like a coward so that the boys will not idolize and emulate him. Rocky replies: You asking me to pull an act, turn yellow, so those kids will think I’m no good. . . . You ask me to throw away the only thing I’ve got left. . . . You ask me to crawl on my belly—the last thing I do in life. . . . Nothing doing. You’re asking too much. . . . You want to help those kids, you got to think about some other way.

Despite his refusal, Rocky asks his old friend to accompany him down the last mile. Cocky, unrepentant, Rocky even punches a sarcastic prison guard on the way. Yet in the final moments before his execution, as he enters the death chamber, Rocky falls apart, begging 113

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not to be killed. With pathetic cowardice, he screams for mercy. “Oh, I don’t wanna die! Oh, please. I don’t wanna die! Oh, please. Don’t let me burn. Oh, please. Let go of me. Please . . .” This entire scene is shown only in shadows projected on a wall, heightening the ambiguity that Rocky might be pretending for the sake of his old friendship and the future of the boys. The newspaper headline announces that Rocky turned yellow during his cowardly execution: “Rocky Dies Yellow, Killer Coward at End.” The theme of the dangers of urban life for young boys, particularly because the city exposed them to unsavory characters, temptations, and influences, was a prominent one through the 1930s and 1940s and early 1950s. For the most part, city boys were portrayed as basically good kids who could be led astray by bad role models.8 World War II changed a lot of things, not the least of them the position of young people in American society. The Dead End Kids would have been about the age to sign up, or be drafted as GIs and go off to battle foreign foes rather than beat cops, social workers, and other gangs. Those who returned would also have found the country changed, among them the attitudes of their sisters and mothers and racial minorities, the Depression replaced by robust economic expansion, and the opportunities of the GI Bill and mortgages insurance for veterans to buy new homes. Most of these changes would abet the prevailing notion that they would make a better world for the next generation of Americans, their own children. For some, this meant getting out of the city, to the new suburbs where a fresh start would ensure that the conditions that were temptations to the Dead End Kids would be absent. They would go to college and keep the American Dream alive. Or so it seemed it would be. The Youth Generation

The emergence of the “youth generation” in America’s post–World War II years was ushered in by a series of complex factors. There were the Beats, J.D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, and, of course, Elvis, the Beatles, and rock and roll, all giving voice to youth’s exuberance and angst. Along with this was came the differences in adolescent clothing, music, television programming, and a host of “youth niche” products, which rising affluence resulted in what LIFEmagazine reported as early as 1950 as a 10 billion dollar teenage-product industry. 114

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Parents were changed in their ways as well. They turned increasingly to experts to assist them with the new and different children, children who were not like them in their own youth. Dr. Benjamin Spock,  who was not a character on the yet-to-be created Star Trek, injected the expert into child rearing that had long been the province of the family and church. But children would also increasingly turn to their peer group for counsel and understanding of the changes that characterized their emerging culture. As one observer, in 1969, put the momentousness of the changed attitude toward youth: By the end of the Sixties this country will have been dominated by children for almost twenty-five years. Ever since World War II the needs, values, styles, and demands of the young have been the major neurotic concern of very nearly the whole of our educated adult population. Our postwar passion to breed, which spawned the baby boom of the Fifties, died, seemingly overnight, into a guilty preoccupation with our offspring, and this in turn has ended by making us peculiarly vulnerable to attack from the current armies of self-righteous puberty and dissident studentism. The result has been that those of us who are now in our forties have scarcely known a moment in our mature lives when we have not been either changing diapers or under siege, when we have not been obliged to seek and shape our identities in the face of enormous moral and emotional pressure from the adolescent or preadolescent Establishment.9

In addition there was the zeitgeist of the 1950s, a war won, America on a giddy rise to affluence and, owing to the aura of victory and the technological successes of the war, the feeling that Americans could make a society to their own designs. It was a sense of control that could include the rational creation of the next generation: kids were healthier, stronger, a break from their relatively fragile state throughout history in which children were subject to lethal childhood diseases and were more “tentative.”10 In a not too-distant past children had been commoditized as laborers. Now they were an investment in the future, an investment, which considering their care, nurturing, and education (much less their rising consumption), would come to be a substantial monetary outlay for their parents. The nuclear family superseded the extended family, and suburbs put distance between them and the senior generation, which used to have a role in child rearing. With the emergence of the suburbs as a significant element of American urbanism the city morphed into metropolis. 115

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College and Career

The post–World War II period also represented a time in which most  young people (in America at least) would likely be pursuing employment destinations different from those of their parents. For much of human history, the great majority of children followed almost lockstep in the footsteps of their parents. It might not be uncommon for there to be generations of farmers or cobblers or coopers in a family, as it was parents and relatives who were the primary educators of children for the world of work. The American notion of progress, the idea that each generation could be better off than the preceding, and that the primary route to achieving this norm was formal education, spelled the demise of a system of transmission of not only work skills, but also social values, from generation to generation. With mass public education, and the enhanced accessibility to higher education for greater numbers, an increasing number of young people would not be continuing in their parents’ occupations and social roles. Moreover there was the increased likelihood that they might not be sharing, as they moved into adult life, their parental politics and social values. The emphasis upon formal education in children’s lives not only drove a wedge in the traditional relationship between parent and child, but at the same time, paradoxically, extended the period of the parent-child relationship. Young people would find themselves financially dependent upon their parents for the long period of schooling that was becoming customary in American society. Whereas in bygone days a young person might be regarded as an adult member of the community at as early an age as twelve, now the typical American twelve-year-old was a junior high school student, living at home and, if not regarded as a child, also not likely to be regarded as an adult. This in-between period of life, one that in many respects is a creation of the latter half of the twentieth century, became the teenage years. With extended educational requirements, often reaching into the  middle twenties, this period of youth and dependency can extend  into years that only a century ago would have been consider late adulthood. This unprecedented period—one of being in between—brought with it new, but largely unanticipated challenges and problems. 116

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Rebels without and with Causes

Blackboard Jungle came out in 1955, the same year that rock and roll music began to gain widespread popularity among American youth. Richard Dadier (Glen Ford) is a new teacher in a vocational high school in a tough inner-city neighborhood. During the course of the film, some of the students, almost symbolically, destroy his treasured collection of jazz records, reflecting a rejection of the older generation’s interests. By the time idealistic teacher Dadier reaches this school, the rest of the faculty have become jaded and cynical about the prospects for the young punks who terrorize their classrooms. The classroom cast exhibits the range: the needy kid who is picked on at home and at school, the dull-witted followers, the class clown, the outright bad kid, and the racial outsider. The last of these, played by a young, but far too-old to be a high schooler, Sidney Poitier, represents the talented, potentially redeemable, kid who might be saved by a patient, idealistic teacher.11 Dadier overcomes his desire to quit after his record collection is trashed and his pregnant wife (Anne Francis) is threatened. Using cartoons and a light hand, he gets most of the class to calm down and pay attention long enough for some thought to replace unfettered impulse. Along the way, there is the usual debate that these kids are the victims of tough inner-city social problems, such as broken homes, physical abuse, poverty, and such, against the cynical view, as expressed by Dadier’s colleagues, that they are worthless, unappreciative, social trash. The themes were reflective of those being hashed out in political debate and academic journals. There was outright confusion about what this postwar generation wanted, needed, and how they should be handled. But while there was confusion, the baby boom continued unabated until the early 1960s. Seen in a post-2000 retrospective, one has to wonder how many of Dadier’s colleagues decamped for the newly forming suburbs, where shiny new schools looked promising to kids who hankered after raising their SAT scores and admissions to prestige universities. 1955 was, in several respects, a transitional year; perhaps day one of the Youth Generation calendar. Marlon Brando’s The Wild One was released two years earlier, setting the tone of rebellion among young motorcyclists, shiftless, dangerous, and setting themselves apart from the rest of society. 117

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The recognition on the part of the entertainment industry that youth  were developing into a significant niche market brought forth a flood of celluloid trash that may be of greater value to social archeology than to art. By the mid-fifties surveys by movie producers had shown that a quarter of movie attendees were between fifteen and  twenty-five years of age. Their titles, The Delinquents (1957), Dragstrip Girl (1957), Hot Rod Rumble (1957), Reform School Girl  (1957), High School Confidential (1958), and I was a Teenage Werewolf  (1957) (followed by Teenage Frankenstein, Cave Man, Monster, etc.), tell the story well enough. Most of their themes were thinly veiled, and often pathetic, attempts to express youth’s rebellion, against not being understood, even though youth did not quite understand itself. What youth did seem to understand was frustration. Biologically old enough to take their place in adult society (which indeed generations of people their age did in fact do), becoming parents, workers, and warriors, the new generation of youth were stuck in morass of social ambiguity. Neither child nor adult, neither fish nor fowl, they were out of synch with their own hormones. Much of that biology centered on their coming of age sexually. Rock and roll ballads and teen films bemoaned frustrated teenage love, repressed sexual desires, and pleasures forbidden to their cohort. Adults became puritanical wardens enforcing a morality that seemed cruel and unfair, since nearly all of this lovelorn demographic lived at home. The sexuality of “teenage” has no defined transition between proscription and permission. If previous generations and societies had their rites of passage, be they tests of courage or ceremonial passages conferred by religious rites, such as bar mitzvah and confirmation, the new generation of youth had none. At age thirteen, a young man of the 1950s was hardly ready to take his place among the warriors, fathers, and landowners of his society. He was more likely to be sweating a passing grade in algebra to get into college. What avenues for expression of manhood remained were left to those who could make varsity sports teams, one of the only remaining equivalents of a warrior class and legitimized opportunities to demonstrate manhood. For the rest of teenaged men, drinking to excess, driving fast, taking drugs, and playing at gangs had to suffice to express primal urges and manhood rites. 118

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The dawning of the age of youth was an age not without its material bribery. The Depression and World War II were over, America was in economic ascendancy, and youth were the primary beneficiaries. There was the Cold War and its terrors in the background; but aside from bomb shelters (many of which became play rooms), and “duck and cover” exercises in schools, it seemed not to be much of a youth issue beyond the occasional reference in youth niche films that the world might end at any moment and therefore why not give vent to teenage passions. Geopolitics would not engage their attention very much until Vietnam and the Selective Service. Teenage was not a term or a demographic category before the 1950s, prior to which those years might have been referred to as adolescence, or colloquially as “the awkward age.” With it came an introspection and self-indulgence. Youth became the subject of their own interest and introspections, fracturing into subcategories and stylistic distinctions. Today it is commonplace to refer to boomers, twenty-somethings, slackers, Gen-Xers, and so on. “What Else Is There to Do?”

It is a telling reply that Buzz Gunderson gives to Jim Stark’s question in Rebel Without a Cause (1955). “Why do we do this?” asks Stark (James Dean). He and gang leader Buzz (Corey Allen) are about to engage in a staple action scene of the 1950s youth rebellion film, the “chickie run.” Almost reflexively they get in their respective cars and race toward the precipice of a cliff, high over the Pacific shore, to determine which of them will first turn chicken and leap from his car before it plunges, causing certain death. Rebel might just well be the classic youth film, permuting all the elements of the youth culture: the social adjustments of high school, cars, manhood rites, dysfunctional families, sex, and early death. Only rock and roll does not play a significant role. However, early death may well be responsible for giving Rebel its cult status. Buzz “wins” the chickie run, but only because his leather jacket becomes ensnared in the door handle, and he plunges over the cliff to a fiery end. Dean, who was a twenty-four-year-old teenager at the time he made Rebel, died shortly thereafter in a car crash, becoming the first martyr of the tormented teenager generation. Costars Sal Mineo and Natalie Wood also met tragic premature deaths, by murder and drowning, respectively.12 119

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Rebellious James Dean won’t be called “chicken.” © Warner Bros.

There seems to be little guidance on what to do from the parents of these young rebels. The parents are almost ridiculous stereotypes, eating dinner in suburban homes in jackets and ties (mom is in pearls), and completely misunderstanding the angst of their offspring. Jim’s father is cowardly, uxorious, and indecisive, lacking every trait Jim needs in paternal guidance. His mother is a social climber. It is little different for Judy (Natalie Wood), who still wants to be a little girl who can kiss her father, but is physically filled out to be provocative to an adult male. “You’re too old for that stuff!” he scolds after rebuffing her affection with a slap, then apologizes by addressing her by her cutesy, childish nickname. Given that, Plato (Sal Mineo) doesn’t know how good he has it to have divorced parents, who are never home, and be cared for by a nanny, a large, sympathetic black woman who seems the best “parent” of the lot. If the rebellion was against sexual norms of the times, there is little evidence of it in Rebel. Jim seems only mildly infatuated with Judy, looking more for a friend than a sexual encounter. Their love scene in the old mansion near the end of the film is tepid and innocent, and the scene is rather suffused with allusion to family, especially with Plato’s bonding to the young couple as surrogate parents. The implication 120

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is that they just might just be better parents to each other than their bumbling natural parents have been. A subtheme of Rebel relates to geographic mobility. Jim complains that his family is always relocating (ambiguously) to “protect him.” He is always trying to fit in, to adjust, needing to make new friends, but he is always awkward at it, provoking tough guys to call him chicken and, in his (on screen) lack of coolness, putting off girls. In some sense Jim’s plight relates to demographic changes in the American urban landscape. The film was made at a time when more parents could move to the suburbs to avoid unsavory urban influences on their children. But that was attended by a dislocation that required social skills for fitting in and dealing with the forms of prejudice and exclusion that prevail in such situations. Rebel accurately reflects a reality of postwar urban America. While Americans have always been movers in a way that Europeans and Asians tend not to be, they were especially migratory post– World War II. The major factor in American internal migration has been the rise of metropolitanism, with its attendant suburbanization, a trend that remains unabated. In a five year period, an average metropolitan areas will experience geographic moves for nearly half its population, and over a span of five years, a fifth of the population of the region will be change.13 There were many Jim Starks in American suburbs, struggling to fit into new surroundings and make new friends. Rebel made James Dean the first youth film icon. With his mumbling, naturalistic delivery, and his red jacket of rebellion that he is forever giving away, in addition to his early death in real life, which guaranteed his eternal youth, Dean was the forerunner of a hoard of youth entertainment media stars for his generation. By the 1960s youth had found a cause or causes: racism, feminism, and protest against the Vietnam War (partly led by their surrogate father Dr. Spock). The rebellion turned political. It also provided a basis for another revolution that had been brewing—the so-called sexual revolution. If young people, even ensconced in their university dormitories, could take on weighty issues of society, then they were entitled, they seemed to reason, to act in other ways like adults. In fact, by engaging in political and social issues, they had found a means to give social leverage to their age cohort. Accordingly, music, dress, and film began to reflect these changes. With events, such as Woodstock, youth culture began to create its own private history. 121

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Director George Lucas’s American Graffiti (1973) is set in a period only seven years later than Rebel, but is made with another decade’s hindsight. By the time period of the movie, parents were literally “out of the picture,” and rock and roll was very much in. It portrays an American youth culture that had evolved in a few years into a relative comfort zone of mostly its own making. The question of what to do had received more definition by then, essentially consisting of choices to stay in the hometown, marry the high school sweetheart, head off to college, or to Vietnam. Lucas was himself a participant and a product of that generation, with a well-developed sense of its cinematic tastes that made him one of the most successful directors and producers of the last several decades.14 The car culture displayed in Rebel had become part of the solution to the delayed and frustrated sexuality of youth trapped in the newly acknowledged demographic cohort wedged between childhood and adulthood. In American Graffiti, cars functioned as the prime means of display and courtship in the nightly passages on the main streets of the city and socializing in parking lots and drive-ins. Young men had found an ideal expression for the hormonally induced need to express manhood. They engaged in risky exploits (the chickie runs had their less deadly alternative in late night drag races), and, perhaps most importantly, their hot rods provided a place of relative privacy for sexual escapades that ranged from simple petting to “going all the way.” But the American Graffiti era was the halcyon days of American teenage culture, a period of innocence that had to, for most, come to an end. That end was not only in the emergence of the compelling issues of the 1960s—Vietnam, the Civil Rights Movement, the assassinations of national leaders—but a function of age itself, of the need to grow up. In that sense, American Graffiti is a coming-ofage film. In 1955, when Rebel was released, cars, particularly customized cars and hot rods, were part of the emerging youth culture. Rock and roll music was, at that time just becoming popular. By the time period of American Graffiti music by, for, and about youth culture was a major component of it. The music shared the innocence of the time period. Songs like “Sixteen Candles” and “Gonna Find Her” and “The Book of Love,” focused, like much of the music for youth at the time, on young love and unrequited sexual feelings.15 In a few years the music of the Youth Generation would turn harsher, more political, challenging all of the social institutions that threatened the freedom and hedonism of the culture. 122

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American Graffiti bestrides that transition: the end of an innocent age for a group of high school graduates, which stands for the end of a brief era. The film revolves around the recent graduates and their dreams and doubts: college-bound all-American boy, Steve (Ron Howard); the Hamletic class brain, Curt (Richard Dreyfuss), whose sister, Laurie (Cindy Williams), is Steve’s steady girlfriend; the class nerd, Terry (Charles Martin Smith), desperate, yet inadequate, to be cool; the wannabe in with the older crowd Carol (Mackenzie Phillips); and the local hot-rodder “top gun,” John (Paul Le Mat), who drives “the fastest car in the valley” and feels that his vaunted position is somewhat of a burden. He is eventually challenged to a race by Falfa (Harrison Ford) that confirms his vulnerability. They comprise an almost-complete dramatis personae of American youth, representing the range of social types that exist in almost any high school cohort. Most of the action of American Graffiti takes place in cars, usually with the radios playing music from the renowned DJ, Wolfman Jack. The film is mostly about the concerns of guys (the film is supposed to be autobiographical of Lucas’s Modesto youth days) and is driven by nostalgia for the innocent days of high school in the late 1950s and the need to move on to college, marriage, and the frightening adult world that was emerging in the 1960s. It was the model for the hit television series about the same period, Happy Days. Nearly all of these young actors went on to successful television series, films, and directing careers. Urban Turf

It does not appear that gangs existed in nonurban societies. For one thing, young men were more scattered, schools, as meeting points, did not exist in many places, and there were alternative routes for young men to express their manhood. In other societies and in earlier times, there have been bonds and social functions—brotherhoods, tongs, associations of knights, and so forth—that have formed among young men that provided some of the same functions that urban gangs do for you men these days. Gangs have existed in New York City well before Martin Scorsese got around to making a film based on Edward Ashbury’s book, also titled The Gangs of New York (2002). To some extent, gangs revert to primitive forms of social organization. In the mid-nineteenth century setting of this film, much of the social infrastructure of the city we know today was nonexistent. Much of what there was, the provision 123

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of employment and access to housing, police, and fire services, were controlled by the political machine.16 At the street level, competition was often fierce for jobs, for living space, and competitors often divided themselves along ethnic and racial lines. Power and protection, under such circumstances, were largely defined in terms of numbers and control of urban turf. Gangs of New York is a visually powerful evocation of the time period, with magnificent sets recalling the density, squalor, and in the action within them, the ferocity of the violence that took place in city streets of the time. The meticulous re-creation of the infamous Five Points neighborhood of lower Manhattan was achieved at great expense at Rome’s Cinecitta studios. Gangs were a means of survival in the Darwinian world of urban politics at a high point of foreign immigration to the American city, showing that American democracy was forged not only out of stirring political debates of rights and the federal system by men of milder temperament and reason, but also by the courage and menace of those who struggled for advantage with knives, cudgels, and guns at the bottom of the social ladder. By the time the aerial views of the title sequence of West Side Story (1961) were shot, the Five Points area had been leveled and given over to civic buildings. By comparison, the gangs of West Side Story seem rather tame. West Side Story is, of course, a musical largely based on Romeo and Juliet, and its gangs, the Jets and the Sharks, composed of appealing Anglo and Puerto Rican youths, respectively, are more amusing than menacing. Nevertheless, many of the aspects of gang culture are present: fierce loyalty, disdain for legitimate forms of authority, and the importance of control of urban turf. The Jets and Sharks graffiti in the film were followed in a few years by the pervasive defacement of buildings and subways in New York City by the “tags” of actual urban gangs. Urban turf also plays a principal role in The Warriors (1979). At an assembly of the city’s gangs in upper Manhattan, the Warriors, a gang from a beachside area of Brooklyn, is falsely accused of assassinating a charismatic who has called an assembly of all the gangs in the New York. With all the gangs hunting them down, coordinated by a radio disk jockey, the Warriors make their perilous way through the turfs of various other gangs. Violence is highly stylized, and gangs are tricked out in various themes, such as baseball uniforms, complete with bats as weapons, and the Warriors themselves like leather-clad rock stars. 124

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Urban gangs in New York also come in for the light touch with films like The Lords of Flatbush (1974), 1950s Brooklyn leather-jacketed and duck-tailed hairdo misfits who spend more time on girls and in soda shops than at misbehavior. It is perhaps most notable for introducing Sylvester Stallone and Henry Winkler. The Wanderers (1979), a 1960s Bronx gang who also sport athletic jackets emblazoned with their names, and engage in not very violent competition for girls and turf sovereignty with other thematic gangs, such as the shaved-head “Baldies” and the Chinese “Wongs,” achieved a mild cult status and also employed popular rock and roll tunes. If New York appears to have been the location for most gang movies, Los Angeles is probably more renowned for being the location of the Crips and the Bloods, as well as biker “clubs” like the Hell’s Angels. The Crips and Bloods are primarily black gangs, but in addition to these name gangs, there “. . . are over 600 active Hispanic gangs in Los Angeles County with a growing Asian gang population numbering approximately 20,000 members.”17 L.A. adds its own particular take to the urban gang scene, especially in the nature of its turf. The lowdensity character of its urbanism almost necessitates that gangs function as mobile units, using cars to patrol their territories and protect their enterprises, such as drug distribution and, in their enforcement, they employ the drive-by shooting. In contrast to the almost fanciful portrayals of gang culture in West Side Story and Warriors, more recent films set in L.A., such as Colors (1988) and Boyz in the Hood, have a more gritty and quasisociological perspective. These films present, in greater relief, the prospect for young men growing up in these neighborhoods, such as South Central Los Angeles, that life in them is binary: one is either a gang member or in an increasingly perilous limbo. In Colors, veteran gang unit officer, Bob Hodges (Robert Duval), and rookie Danny McGavin (Sean Penn) are two cops facing the impossible odds of dealing with “70,000 gang members and one-million guns.” Much of Colors focuses on the dynamic between the two policemen and their different attitudes and approaches to dealing with gang members. Their internal differences come close to compromising the tenuous authority they have with the gang members themselves. But among the better scenes in the film are those dealing with the internal sociodynamic of gang behavior, especially in which gang members profess the importance of their membership in serving the functions of family, and the loyalty that they expect from their comrades. That 125

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loyalty is partly sealed by the rather primitive process of “jumping in” new members, a process in which initiates receive severe beatings by “brothers” as a blood rite of membership.18 Loyalty and group solidarity are critical in a social environment in which warfare among well-armed gangs competing for control of turn and drug traffic often results in outright firefights. Contrasts between the environments of New York gangs and those of Los Angeles are also evident in films like Boyz in the Hood. The relatively benign appearing, suburban-style neighborhoods in which this film is shot mask the undercurrent of violence that exists within them. This fact is announced in an early scene in which young kids come upon the body of a dead gangbanger who they view with a chilling level of insouciance. Boyz deals very much with the difficulties of growing up in neighborhoods where the role models are males who are quick to express their manhood or settle differences with extreme violence. The movie is driven by the pressures on young Tré Styles (Cuba Gooding, Jr.) to maintain his father’s middle-class values in a neighborhood in which most young black men lay about dinking and abusing women, and in which drugs and sex-for-drugs are openly available. Tré, who is destined for a college education, and an athletically gifted buddy, might just overcome the odds, until the latter is gunned down by local gangbangers. Only a strong father (Lawrence Fishburne) keeps Tré from joining the other neighborhood boys for a campaign of bloody vengeance. Gangs will likely continue to be a significant social feature of American urbanism and consequently a recurrent cinematic theme.19 They present irresistible dramatic elements such as the return to primitive social organization as a response to discrimination and repression, or family disorganization; they generate the dramatic competition between legitimate authority and the solidarity of indigenous social organizations, and the tensions of the insider and the outsider. And in a time when urban space is traversed by speed and telecommunications, they reaffirm the power of turf in social identity and solidarity. Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll

These three pervasive ingredients of youth culture and many youth films do not necessarily appear together, or in that order. Sex has been a part of life and film well before films about urban life, but the particular angst of growing to an age of sexual maturity while remaining socially adolescent has given sex, in films about growing up in the 126

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city, a particular slant. Scores of unmemorable Beach Blanket and Gidget movies have been mostly about unrequited urges of teenagers of the 1950s, as well as later reprises of the subject, such as the musical Grease (1978). Most of these have little to do with exploring or exposing dimensions of urban life in any interesting way, if at all. Most concentrate upon infatuation, falling in and out of love, social class and parental conflicts, and other dramatic elements of high school. In the 1980s there was a revival of youth coming-of-age comedies, such as Sixteen Candles (1984), Breakfast Club (1985), and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986). Filmed mostly in suburban Illinois, and directed by John Hughes, these films centered on the family and high school as the two prominent social institutions in growing up. Parents by now were perceived as less influential in their lives, the peer group having replaced aspects of the family function, and youth are portrayed as both dealing with more serious problems of coming of age, and being more sophisticated than youth in earlier films. The suburban context seemed to have become the natural niche for this generation. In 1955 when Blackboard Jungle was introduced with the song “Rock Around the Clock,” it signaled an abiding fusion between the youth film and the music that came to be associated with the concerns of the young generation. American Graffiti employed rock and roll music in virtually every scene and knitted together an almost plotless meander through one summer’s evening with the selections of famous disk jock, Wolfman Jack on the radios of the cars that cruised the streets. The streets of Modesto could have been the streets of many American cities at the time. Despite the fact that the rhythm and blues roots of rock and roll were in small towns and rural areas, it quickly became an urban form of musical expression and, among many youth, an almost obsessive element in their lifestyle. In a memorable scene from Diner (1982), set in 1959 Baltimore, Shrevie (Daniel Stern), upbraids his wife, Beth (Ellen Barkin) for not appreciating the importance of his rock and roll record collection, which he has meticulously catalogued and from which he can provide the most trivial details with faultless recall. By the 1970s the culture of rock and roll—its iconic bands, the tours  and concerts, and the almost fetishistic worship of its star performers—had become a consuming lifestyle for many young people and a multibillion dollar business.20 The groupie lifestyle of rock and roll is chronicled in Almost Famous (2000), a story loosely based on 127

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the actual experiences of the film’s director, Cameron Crowe. A fifteenyear-old boy (Patrick Fugit) gets an opportunity to travel with a rock band, Stillwater, on a 1973 tour. After submitting his record reviews for an underground newspaper to a local rock magazine, Rolling Stone magazine agrees to bankroll him on a concert tour with the group. There he meets the “Band Aids,” groupies who follow the band and minister to their sexual needs and substance abuse. For some, the difficult and confusing passages of youth are tolerable not only just with the background music of rock and roll, but they also require altered states of consciousness. Drugs have been a subject of films, directly, or indirectly, since the beginning of film. In Chaplin’s 1917 Easy Street, a comic scene takes on a sinister aspect when a junkie shoots up in the basement of a saloon and ties to rape the heroine. Chaplin, playing a cop, accidentally gets stuck with the needle and, cranked up with the drug, pummels the rapist, and proceeds to subdue the rest of the riff-raff in the bar. What might be termed the light touch on drugs is evidenced by the character Jeff Spicoli (Sean Penn), one of the students experiencing Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982). Spicoli is a likeable, almost admired, surfer dude who has been stoned since the fifth grade, with the slurred speech and “let the good times roll” attitude that belies the potential for eventual overdose. The light touch might owe to the fact that Fast Times is a comedy set mostly in a high school and suburban mall, and it treats casual sex, abortion, substance abuse, and reckless driving as devoid of consequence. The only two adults in the film are a cynical history teacher and a nerdy man trying to get his money back on a mostly eaten breakfast at a fast food establishment. Although amusing, Fast Times conveys the notion that it is a period in which young people can do adult things without adult responsibilities. However, it also “documents” to some degree the phenomenon of mall life in American cities and suburbs as the new, air-conditioned “towns” of fast food joints, multiplex theaters, and brand name shops that have become the meet and hang-out venue for many of America’s youth. By contrast, director Gus Van Sant chose the gritty areas under overpasses and in front of derelict buildings in Portland and Seattle for his Drugstore Cowboy (1989). Set in 1971, it is about drugs as a consuming lifestyle for a crew of young adults that burgles drugs from pharmacies. Drugstore Cowboy is not one of those drugs films that traces a descent into debauchery and final destruction due to drugs. Addict and parolee Bobby (Matt Dillon) leads a crew that consists 128

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of his wife (Kelly Lynch) and another couple, who enjoy the highs of the robbery as well as the drugs and live materially decent lives. The destruction is more insidious. Nadine (Heather Graham) dies from an overdose because she is just trying to fit in better with the crew; getting high takes on greater preference for Bobby and his wife than sexual intimacy (eventually, she prefers to remain with her addiction than with Bobby when he tries to get off drugs).21 Bobby and his crew seem a cut above the countless runaways and lost souls in the seedy underbellies of inner cities. The lifestyle doesn’t seem that deleterious if one is clever and lucky, and it is almost familylike. Even though Bobby manages to get clean, he recognizes that he is once and for all addicted to more than the drugs, an addiction to not really growing up. As he puts it: “To begin with, nobody, and I mean nobody, can talk a junkie out of usin’. You can talk to them for years, but sooner or later they’re gonna get hold of somethin’. Maybe it’s not dope, maybe it’s booze, maybe it’s glue, maybe it’s gasoline. Maybe it’s a gunshot in the head. But somethin’. Somethin’ to release the pressures of their everyday life; like havin’ to tie their shoes.” All Grown Up and No Place to Go

With college and graduate school increasingly part of “growing up” in metropolitan society in which most work is in personal and professional services, the period of youth often extends into the categorizations referred to as “twenty-somethings” and even “thirtysomethings.” Audiences for which teenage movies were designed graduated to a slightly more mature cinematic niche that addressed and played upon problems of adjusting to, or avoiding, full-fledged adulthood. Perhaps the most celebrated of films in this genre is The Graduate (1967), a story that is in some sense a time capsule of attitudes prior to the onset of the sexual revolution. Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman), recent college graduate, is entirely unmotivated to get on with his life, spending much of his time floating around in the family pool. He ignores a family friend’s advice to get into plastics as the coming business venture,22 instead having an affair with his wife and falling for his lovely, but rather simpleton daughter. The only motivated action he takes is to crash her wedding and get her to run off with him. But where? And to what? Benjamin Braddock would probably have been a little to “West Coast” to fit in with the crowd that are the dramatis personae for 129

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Metropolitan (1990), although the premise for this comedy of upper class manners about preppies who refer to themselves as the UHB, or “urban haute bourgeoisie,” is the invitation into their midst of a young man of lesser pedigree. They are the Park Avenue set of debutantes whose round of activities is amusing themselves with games and parties, and Tom Townsend (Edward Clements) is only given entrée because they are in need of another male escort. He, from the West Side, and wearing clothes that aren’t “in,” ads some romantic interest, but even he gives little movement to the doings of self-absorbed and indolent privileged people who inhabit a latter day Jane Austen salon. The Eighties were often referred to as “the Me Decade,” and films like St. Elmo’s Fire (1985) seem to fit the appellation. A group of college graduates in Washington, DC, poised on the brink of the rest of their lives, hardly seem capable of accepting the responsibilities of adulthood. University life doesn’t seem to have prepared them for transitioning to adulthood; rather it has left them with matters of unresolved sexuality, inability to accept responsibility, and other problems of extended adolescence. Much as they did in college, they hang out together (at the St. Elmo’s Fire Pub), often trying their friendships, and attempting to come to grips with the realities of adulthood they need to face. The tagline for Diner (1982) was: “Suddenly, life was more than french fries, gravy and girls.” Barry Levinson’s coming-to-adulthood narrative is set in 1959, but it too has some me-generation sensibilities. This time the clique hanging out together for protection against threatening adulthood is a bunch of guys in Baltimore. More consistent with the 1950s, some have gone off to college, and others have remained on the home turf, working in the family business or scrounging a life out of debts and handouts. What they share is the camaraderie of the diner—in this case that uniquely urban creation that was part Quonset hut, part trolley car, which was often tucked into a too small lot or on a vacant site. At its long counter or in plastic covered booths with tableside juke players, they almost nightly convene to kibitz, cajole, and plot pranks. Diner’s cast of characters seems much more drawn from life than those of Metropolitan and St. Elmo’s Fire, more idiosyncratic that stereotypical. If they are male chauvinists, and they are, they are more amusing about it. Boogie (Mickey Rourke) bets the guys he can get his penis touched by a certain girl and manages to win with the assistance of a box of popcorn at the movies. Eddie (Steve Guttenberg) will not 130

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marry his girl unless she can pass a test of facts about his favorite football team, the Baltimore Colts. However the diner scenes are the most enduring, a private world of jokes they already know the punch lines for, or personality quirks well-tolerated, and the comfort and assurances that can hold off a more serious world with the tin walls of a diner. “You live with your parents, you hang with your buddies and on Saturday nights you burn it all off at 2001 Odyssey. You’re a cliché. You’re nowhere, goin’ no place.” That’s how Tony Manero’s (John Travolta) dance partner, Stephanie (Karen Gorney), characterized him when they weren’t getting along in Saturday Night Fever (1977). Manero is a Brooklynite from the “urban bas proletariat” rather than the UHB, a twenty-year-old who is interested in his own looks, the applause he gets for dancing to disco music, and his aspiration to somehow get to Manhattan. There are other elements to Tony’s self-absorption. His mother clearly favors his older brother, who is a priest and always referred to as “Father Frank, Jr.,” and his father belittles Tony’s job in a paint store, slapping him around if he shows any disrespect. So Tony gets his respect from his buddies and the girls who want to dance with him. Tony Manero represents that ephemeral period in youth, when, like a good high school athlete in his prime, he is at the top of his game, but he can even sense that his abilities will wane, that his time in the limelight is ticking away with his youth. Unlike the dawdling cohorts from Metropolitan and St. Elmo’s Fire, who can cash in on their education and connections somewhat at will, Tony’s prospects are far more limited. One might wonder, on seeing this film, what adulthood will be for Tony when the hairline recedes and he can no longer fit into the tight pants and his disco music is regarded as a faded fad. It will be only on film that Tony Manero can stride down the streets of Brooklyn in his boots and leather jacket, every hair in place, making girls’ heads turn, in the glory of his young years, and seemingly in perfect synch with his time and his city. A scant seventy-five years earlier, a young man in is twenties would scarcely seem as evolved to the urban setting as Travolta’s Tony Manero. He would more likely have been the rube, greenhorn, or bumpkin from a farm or village in America, or from abroad. He would more likely have been the butt of jokes and the victim of scams, unless he could qualify for the tutelage of gang membership. Today, for those youth with other qualifications, there are trendy central city 131

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pubs and clubs or the corridors of suburban malls. After thousands of years, youth have evolved multiple niches of urban existence, with their own styles, languages, and routes to further succeeding into the worlds of adult urbanites. Throughout this momentous transitional period, the cameras have been rolling and chronicling what it means to grow up in urban America. 1.

2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

12. 132

Notes

Plumb, J.H., 1971. Children were, in past times (e.g., Spain), dressed and presumably treated, as miniature adults. Even today, there are ceremonies or festivals where children are dressed as adults, for example, in southern China, children are dressed, made up, and paraded as adults, and in America there is the somewhat bizarre child beauty pageant phenomenon. See, for example, Mendel, Gerard, 1973. Kuznets, Lois, 1983, 156. Anti-urbanism and pastoral settings in children’s literature are also treated in Clapp, 1973. This juxtaposition is not just a cinematic convenience. There are many areas in New York City where the swells reside “cheek by jowl” with the less fortunate social classes. The combination of dislike and envy of the upper class also remains a popular dramatic theme: television series, such as “Dynasty,” “Dallas,” and their offspring, thrive on the social dysfunctions of wealthy families (as do many tabloids). Glazer, 1967. National Resources Committee, 1937, 55–70. The street kids of Dead End—Billy Halop, Bobby Jordan, Gabriel Dell, Huntz Hall, Leo Gorcey, and Bernard Punsly—had also played the same roles in the stage version of the story. They went on to become “The Bowery Boys.” The Bowery Boys Series grew out of the Dead End Kids films of 1937–43 and the East Side Kids series of 1940–45. In the following year, they appeared with such costars as James Cagney (Angels with Dirty Faces), Humphrey Bogart (Crime School), and John Garfield (He Made Me a Criminal). Most of these films maintained the sociological point of view of portraying these kids as victims of their urban environment. However, as the series progressed, and perhaps because the social-deterministic explanation of such behavior lost currency, their films moved toward comedy and farce. In all they made some forty-eight films that were made right up to the 1950s. Aldridge, 1969, 49. Polio was the terror of the times, but vaccines were on the way. Poitier went on to play exactly the same role in a film about almost identical punks in a British high school, To Sir, With Love (1966). It is also noteworthy that this portrayal of such problems in American schools was not what some political figures wished to become widely known. At the time of its release, Ambassador to Italy Claire Boothe Luce opposed the screening of Blackboard Jungle at the Venice Film Festival. Remaining “young forever” has also been achieved by several others in the youth star pantheon, among them Janis Joplin, Jimmy Hendrix, Freddie Prinz, Jim Morrison, Curt Cobain, and River Phoenix.

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13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

19.

20.

21. 22.

Jason P. Schacter et al., 2003. Born in 1944, in Modesto, California, the locus of American Graffiti, Lucas is primarily associated with the immensely successful Star Wars films, which have an almost cult following that spans his generation and the next. Part of youth identity was for many the particular type of rock music one preferred. Rock stars became new youth gods and role models, and collections of music, at the time on “45” records, became obsessive with some youth. See, for example, the role played by Daniel Stern in Barry Levinson’s Diner. Political machines are discussed in greater detail in the section on politics in the city. Alonso, 1998. This ceremony of “jumping in” appears also to apply to the initiation of girls into gangs (Lyden, 2003), and it is also borrowed from, or imitated by, Maori gangs in New Zealand. The Auckland film Once Were Warriors (1994) contains a brutal scene of a young man being initiated. Variation on gangland behavior appear to emerge across urban cultures, known as tongs, or triads, yakuzsa, Cosa Nostra, among other names in cities around the world. Their appearance and rationale range from (or combined aspects of) poverty, social and political oppression, broken family structures, and outright greed and lawlessness. In the case of the followers of some rock groups, such as The Grateful Dead, fans have been known to follow their beloved band to concerts around the country, well into their adult years. Indeed, the culture of rock and roll can no longer be said to be the province entirely of the young when its leading performers, such as The Rolling Stones are older than the parents of their fans. This is reminiscent of another excellent film about addiction (alcohol), Days of Wine and Roses (1962). At the time it was not known that the San Francisco Bay Area would spawn Silicon Valley, a revolution in plastics that would make (and break) many young millionaires and billionaires.

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8 Family Values, City Ways All happy families resemble each other, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. L. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, chapter 1

Perspectives on the role and importance of the family, both personally and socially, are likely to be subject to temporal conditions or influences. As with most human institutions, the family has been subject to considerable change and flux according to its relationship to other social institutions, such as work, governance, education, and art. Contemporary American perspectives on the family, in both civil and cinematic life, represents only a small, brief, and culturally conditioned point of view when considered in global and historical terms. In some countries and cultures, the family is the most important social institution, often providing the only reliable form of social organization where governments and social systems are oppressive or ineffectual. In many such places, to be outside the family—particularly for women and children—is to be vulnerable or without social respect or protection. Yet in other countries, the family seems almost vestigial, retained or honored more by sentiment or by social choice than by necessity. Often the difference between these two extremes is the extent to which societies are socially and economically developed. For the great part of human history, the prevailing family organization was the clan, a largely blood-related group, typically between twenty to forty persons, who shared common interests of survival, protection, and identity. The clan prevailed through millennia of hunting and gathering and troglodytic periods of human development. It remains a viable form of social organization in some societies in the form of the tribal organization and large extended families.1 But with the advent of the first permanent settlements and early agriculture, clans, which tended to be nomadic, because less socially appropriate for settled circumstances. 135

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However, from the Urban-Agricultural Revolution to the Industrial Revolution, the extended family of blood-related individuals with allegiance to a paternal figure remained dominant in most societies. The small business organizational features of the farm and the urban guilds suited the extended family, and vice versa, as an organization that could provide the more diverse labor requirements and transmit the knowledge and skills associates with agriculture and proto-industry. The Family and the City

However, the rise, and increase in size, of cities that followed the industrial revolution lessened the necessities for extended families. An amplification of modes of mobility; increased immigration to cities, where living space was more confined and expensive; and the rise of the factory system that had less need for a familistic organization, compressed family structure toward what is generally referred to as the nuclear configuration of a single set of parents and children. In developed countries, with the advent of social institutions that have replaced many of the functions and responsibilities of the traditional family, many families have been reduced to subnuclear form consisting of one parent and children, and in an increasing number of cases, nontraditional families of unmarried persons and single-gender parents. Thus, while a family-like social structure appears to have predated the city for a great period of time, the emergence of urbanization began to alter its form and relationships. While most of the human population remained in agriculture or pastoral frameworks up until the twentieth century, the extended family and nuclear family structures retained a functional relationship to the nonurban economic structures within which they existed. The modern city and metropolis, however, are less reliant upon the traditional family, and indeed, the traditional family might, in some ways, be an encumbrance to economic advancement in the modern, postindustrial city. Moreover, the city has also engendered political freedoms—particularly the emancipation of women—that have in part been responsible for the emergence of the subnuclear family, and the emergence of nontraditional family forms. Urban work, in both the private and public sectors, is largely, and increasingly, service work, the preparation for which is provided almost exclusively from formal schooling. Education itself is no longer the province of the family, the guild, or the church, but a professionalized activity outside the family, the church, and even the neighborhood. Urban work, relying more upon intelligence than upon physical 136

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strength and endurance, is less gender specific than in the nonurban categories of agriculture, mining, and commercial fishery. At the turn of the twentieth century, most young men and women had a high probability of engaging in the same work and lifestyle as their parents. In the ensuing century, the changes that have taken place in education and work have resulted in the probability that only a small percentage of children will follow the same work patterns, careers, and responsibilities as their parents. These circumstances have tended to attenuate family bonds and internal traditions. These threats to the traditional functions of the family structure were countered by a romanticization of the family that began in the middle of the nineteenth century and continues in various manifestations (particularly conservative and Christian political values) to the present day. The family was characterized as a retreat from an urban world of chaos and conflict. If the fields and forests of the past could no longer function as walls against the influences and forces of the city, then the family could become a keep within the city itself. It was a notion that asked the family to do even more than it had done in the past.2 Perhaps the significant effect of advancements in education and work has been lowering birthrates and the emancipation of women from the confinement of homemaking and child rearing. Moreover, as women began to achieve greater economic independence, their need to be, or remain, within a traditional family structure lessened. In 1890 only 19 percent of married women were in the work force, by 1940 over 27 percent of wives held jobs outside the home, and by 1987 over 56 percent of women had their own jobs and careers. In 1955, nearly two-thirds of American families consisted of a biological father who went to work and a biological mother who remained at home. By 1990 only a little over 10 percent of families fit that description.3 By the close of the twentieth century over half of first marriages ended in divorce, and in some parts of America more than half of families were subnuclear. A quarter of all kids would grow up with a step-parent. Broken Building Block

Any politician who wants to remain in office must proclaim that “the family is the foundation, or the building block of American society.” The family is invoked in nearly every public policy pronouncement from housing to transportation, from health care to education. If one wants to denigrate a policy, say it is destructive to families, if one wants prayer 137

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in schools, say that it will preserve the family. For many, at the root of what they consider wrong with America is the decline of the family. The family is, therefore, a political battleground. The “cause” of the family “problem” is everything from the women’s movement, television, rock and roll, public education, selfish parents, lack of prayer in schools, and dozens of other supposed reasons. Children are increasingly latch-key kids, ignored by their parents, and their parents’ parents are shipped off to nursing homes rather than cared for by their children. The home is regarded by many as a bastion against the insurgent threats of society,4 but also because we have come to expect too much of it.5 It depends upon one’s perspective on the importance of the traditional family whether the shrinkage of the family is an unfortunate social phenomenon, brought about by sinister and disruptive forces, or the by-product of socially progressive changes. Indeed, much of contemporary political debate rages over such difference in perspective. Political and religious conservatives tend to see high rates of divorce, or threats to the very American concept of family posed by such notions as legal recognition of gay and lesbian marriage, as corroding the very foundation of American society. Many prevailing social problems, such as youth crime, drug use, premarital sex, and teen pregnancy, for example, are often assigned causality to the “broken home” and lack of parental guidance. While the home is seen by some as a fortress to protect against the intrusion of heretical ideas and sinister influences, it is increasingly a porous line of protection. Children must be released from it to attend school, where feared subjects, such as sex education and topics such as evolution, are taught, and the powerful influences of peers can lead children away from home-taught values. Even at home, television, the radio, movies on demand, and the Internet easily pierce the domestic cordon of defense against external values. A counter point of view might regard changes in the family structure as a sign of the liberation of women and children from the strictures of the traditional form. In highly developed urban societies more women, educated and earning sufficient incomes to free them from dependence upon the fathers or their husbands, are able to pursue lifestyles of their own choosing. As women have exercised greater selfdetermination in their single and married states, the effects have been profound both endogenously and exogenously on the family. Female control of reproduction has been the most pronounced and contested example of this effect. The social effects of reproductive choice have not only been socially divisive within the family structure, but also 138

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between social factions that view the matter, particularly with respect to abortion, from morally divergent positions. Moreover, such choices have also resulted in declining and even negative birthrates in several developed countries, notably in Japan and Italy. The Family in the Cinema

The family is so pervasive a social institution that even in films that seemingly have little or nothing to do with it, the absence, particularly of parents, is often conspicuous. From the Our Gang comedies and the antics of the Bowery Boys, to later films such as Lord of the Flies (1963), home life and parents were so absent as to cause the viewer to wonder what shaped the personalities of their players. In a sense, these little gangs often functioned as their own little families. But such films are the exceptions that highlight the fact that the family is a pervasive, if subtle, presence in many, if not most films, simply because human character is always formed in varying degrees by family upbringing. Each family is, in some sense, a proscenium that provides for a host of dramatic situations, from love to war.6 Therefore this discussion can only address a selective cross section of candidate films of the family.7 The Family as Acculturator

In the American context, the family has played an important role in terms of the acculturation of immigrant populations into the mainstream of the society. For immigrant groups, living in urban ethnic enclaves, especially in the period of massive foreign immigration from the mid-nineteenth century to World War I, the traditional family, often in extended form, provided the principal social organism of protection and usually economic participation in the American city. Areas commonly called Little Italy, Chinatown, Germantown, Jew Town, Irish Town, and so on, reflected not only the ethnic concentrations in various parts of the city, but also how the families in enclaves functioned as places of security and, importantly, as “micro-economies.” Extended families in immigrant enclaves often pooled and shared resources in order to establish businesses, nurture the education of talented and intelligent children, and enhance political influence. In commerce, by providing ethnic products and foods, they were able to eventually extend their trade from the patronage of their local residents to beyond their neighborhoods, “taking in other people’s wash,” (and cash) as the adage goes, metaphorically, but also quite literally, as for example, in the case of the Chinese laundry.8 139

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But while the traditional family system within urban ethnic enclaves in America served a purpose, they were in some sense undone by the very success of their economic and social achievements. As second and third generations were availed of the benefits of education and economic growth they often expressed their accession of the American Dream by moving to the suburbs, marrying outside their ethnic group and religion, and adopting a less ethnic lifestyle.9 In The Godfather there are several instances in which Vito Corleone, the don of the Mafia family that is chronicled in this film, admonishes his sons to be good family men, faithful to their wives, and caring for their children. It is one of those aspects of the outlaw lifestyle of the Mafia family that paradoxically coincides with a cornerstone of American political ideology. The family is a scared institution in America. To call for the protection of the family and the values that term evokes is a refrain that crosses all ideological factions of American politics. The crime family of The Godfather is, of course, not strictly a family, but a throwback to the clan structure, presided over by a headman, secretive, and run in quasi-militaristic fashion, owing to its deviation from conventional society and its competition for territory with other clan/families. This version of the family has its origins in Sicily, where for centuries there existed no adequate governmental institution to forestall invasions and rule by Greeks, Arabs, Spanish, and French. Yet the Godfather series actually chronicles the necessity for such families to adapt to changes, as for example in the moving of the Corleone family to Las Vegas and its funds into more “legitimate” businesses. But The Godfather also explores the internal contradictions of this model, wherein the family, rather than being a place of security, is, for those who violate its rules, a place of danger and death. By the end of the series, its Godfather has ordered the execution of his brother and brother-in-law, and estranged his wife, the wages of the necessities of business in a family business. The clannish version of the family is, however, not in any sense obsolete. The family, as a haven, as a redoubt against besieging heresies and counterculture values, is invoked widely. In many developing countries, especially those with oppressive governments and little social infrastructure, but also colonies and erstwhile colonies, the family is the only reliable social institution. In such places, the global-corporate world is as yet not so much of a presence. Many businesses, productive and commercial, are local in character, and mostly family oriented. This is one of the reasons for higher birthrates in developing nations, 140

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where children are a source of cheap labor. Families in such countries are often mini-business enterprises. In a world that increasingly is approaching “global village” characteristics, the threat is manifold for the traditional family, wherein the developed, corporate world threatens to influence national governments (often shoring up dictators and other tyrants), threatens local businesses with the introduction of franchises and international brand-name products, and menaces the integrity of the indigenous, traditional family structure by acting as a conduit for “foreign” ideas and values.10 Threats to the traditional family, whatever the connotation of the term, have not been confined to the developing world. Contemporaneous with the postwar circumstances that augured for a strengthening of the family in America—the baby boom, the rise in material well-being and suburbia, and the emergence of the Cold War11—the second half of the twentieth century ushered in sperm banks, artificial insemination, surrogate parenting, in vitro fertilization, amniocentesis, genetic screening, legalized abortion, and most recently, the prospect of cloning, as well as a spate of child-rearing and relationship counseling expertise, that opened possibilities and problems that had been largely unanticipated. The family had much to deal with, even its own successes. Barry Levinson’s Avalon (1990) opens with his grandfather, Sam Krichinsky (Michael Krauss), arriving in Baltimore amidst the fireworks of July 4, 1914, which sets the tone for this nostalgic accolade to his family’s arrival and assimilation into America. Sam is the first of five Russian-Jewish brothers to immigrate to Baltimore and assemble in the neighborhood that gives its name to the title of the film. The Krichinskys are wallpaper hangers and musicians. They embrace the chance that America gives them and rise into its middle class with gratitude and a certain grace. Part of that success is clearly the maintenance of the extended family and its traditions. It is much of the latter that absorbs the film, especially these scenes built around Thanksgiving holidays, at which the family ritualistically dines and tells old stories, bickers, enjoys its “in” jokes and jibes, and reaffirms the importance of the family. It is a colorful ensemble of their children, aunts, uncles, and nephews. Part of the success of the Krichinskys can also be attributed to the economic boom period following World War II in which the next generation prospers, principally in the retail appliance business. This is also the period of the suburban boom that also poses a threat to the old family traditions. One of the sons moves to the suburbs, 141

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and the older generation is showing signs of aging and will soon no longer be around to be the glue that holds together the extended family. In a concluding scene, Jules (Aiden Quinn) brings his son to visit his grandfather, Sam Krichinsky, now in what appears to be an elder care facility. Earlier in the film, Sam was the one who sat each Thanksgiving in an easy chair and told stories of the old country and the coming to America to enraptured children of the family at his feet. But now, when Sam begins to retell some of the literal family tradition, his grandson quickly becomes bored and turns his attention to a television cartoon. One of the most popular movie series of all time started with A Family Affair (1937). The first Judge James Hardy, noble patriarch of the Hardy family of the small town of Carvel during the Depression era, was played by Lionel Barrymore. Son Andy Hardy (Mickey Rooney) virtually grew to maturity in the fifteen pictures that followed over the next twenty years. Lewis Stone took over as Judge Hardy, the stern, but reasonable, father and Fay Holden played Andy’s “swell” mother. They were probably America’s first mass-media created family. There constantly seemed to be problems to solve in the town and family, but things always seemed to come out well because of what would be regarded these days as strong family values knitting the aptly named Hardys together. There was an older sister as a foil for Rooney, an Aunt Millie, and Andy’s girlfriend, Polly. The series also showcased a number of other notable stars, among the Judy Garland, Lana Turner, Esther Williams, and Donna Reed. Judge Hardy, always at the head of the dinner table in coat and tie, dispensed good sense, and Andy always politely asked to be excused for some plot antics of an American teenager, usually something to do with cars and girls. Kids respected parents and never got so far out of line that problems couldn’t be solved by their ingenuity or those strong family values. For moviegoers in the late Depression years, the Andy Hardy series set a template for the idealized American family that influenced a number of television sitcom families, such as the Cleavers, the Nelsons, and the Douglases of My Three Sons. A special Academy Award was even given to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer “for its achievement in representing the American Way of Life.” It is notable that the Hardy family affairs were played out in the elm-tree-lined, small town streets built on the back lot at Metro Goldwyn Mayer, well-insulated from the more challenging and grittier atmospherics of the city. But Hollywood, although 142

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many of its moguls either created or felt obliged to enhance American myths, was also capable of more honest social commentary. The antics of Andy’s urban counterparts portrayed in Dead End (released in 1937), while perhaps tame by present-day standards of juvenile misbehavior, presented a marked contrast with family life in Carvel. Set in tenements beside the East River in New York, family dysfunction on the dead end street is unvarnished:a young boy named Angel carrying a pail of beer tells his buddies that his father is a drunk who beats him up; an older woman, who turns out to be the mother of a killer, steals food from a baby in a carriage; another young boy has no parents in evidence and is being raised by his sister. It is a Darwinian world in which poverty and lack of hope threaten the family with extinction. In contrast to Carvel, the judge in Dead End sends one of boys who beat up his son to reform school.12 The War, the City, and the Family

In the opening sequence of The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), three American servicemen are returning from their roles in World War II to their Midwestern hometown. Although, like most soldiers, sailors, and airmen, they fought as much for home and family as for “keeping the world safe for democracy,” they were returning to an America that had not remained socially static during the years of the war. There is an ambiguity to the title of this 1947 Academy-Award winning film: whether the servicemen had given up the best years of their lives, or their expectation was that their best years were now before them. Much of Best Years is about the readjustment problems of American servicemen to civilian life after the war. This proves not to be an easy matter for any of them. Al Stephenson (Fredric March) is the most upper class of the three, a bank loan officer, who is warmly welcomed by his family and his former employer. His readjustment is perhaps the least problematic. But Banking does not seem to have quite the excitement of combat for the erstwhile Army sergeant in spite of the fact that he is placed in charge of loans to veterans, so Al lubricates his readjustment with the aid of some heavy drinking. Homer Parrish (Harold Russell),13 the sailor returning to his middleclass neighborhood minus both hands and parts of his arms was the typical all-American boy slated to marry the girl next door. He withdraws into himself and spurns the affections of his girl. The highest ranked of the three returnees is Air Force Captain Fred Derry (Dana Andrews). Derry is from the most humble of backgrounds, 143

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brought up by foster parents who live in mean circumstances beside a railroad. But his eagerness to be home is to reunite with the pin-up bride he left just after their honeymoon, although it soon becomes evident that they had insufficient time to learn of their incompatibilities. All three servicemen have supportive and understanding families. The difficulties that they faced are what director William Wyler14 wanted to emphasize: the changes and obstacles that faced the returning serviceman. In spite of the sentiments of a grateful nation servicemen faced concerns that they would replace workers who had remained on the home front, jealousy, people who wanted to forget the war as soon as possible, and, in one poignant scene in the film, revisionists who felt that American had actually fought on the wrong side. However, there are also glimpses in The Best Years of Our Lives of changes in American family structure that had been occasioned by the experience of the war. In particular, women had taken a hand during the war years in running not only their homes, but also businesses, and engaging in factory work (the “Rosie the Riveter” phenomenon) that was the precursor for what would come to be called “The Women’s Movement.”15 This more independent woman is foreshadowed in the character Peggy Stephenson (Theresa Wright), who eventually becomes the romantic interest of Fred Derry after his marriage dissolves. In fact the Rosie phenomenon proved to be confined mostly to the wars. With servicemen returning, women were encouraged to return to their “home duties” and to relinquish their wartime jobs to men. Single, workingwomen were also seen as a threat to the traditional family structure as well as to prevailing notions of femininity and the moral fiber of the nation.16 The final scene of TheBest Years of Our Lives is a wedding. Homer Parrish, double amputee, and his girl next door pledge to each other in a touching scene that also has Fred Derry ask Peggy Stevenson to be his bride. It’s a reaffirmation of marriage, and by extension, the traditional, and given the period, 1946, the nuclear family. Both men have some strikes against them, but both believe that they need the love and support of a woman. The real Homers and Freds of World War II must have believed in the family. In May 1946, exactly nine months after V-J Day, births in the United States jumped from February’s low of 206,387 to 233,452. In June they swelled to 242,302. In October births has spurted to 339,499 and were running at a record rate. By the end of the year the cry of the baby was heard across the land. An all time high of 3.4 million babies 144

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had been born in the United States—one every nine seconds—20 percent more than in 1945. Every known measure of fertility has soared dramatically as the overall population made its biggest oneyear gain in history to a total of 143 million. Suddenly pregnancy was patriotic.17

This was, presumably, what the boys were fighting for: the opportunity to marry the girl next door and impregnate her. In the movies that girl next door might have been a young Elizabeth Taylor, the intended bride in Father of the Bride (1950). The film is mostly notable for being a rather suspicious comic representation of postwar suburban middleclass respectability, Hollywood style. The father is almost always in his suit and mother (Joan Bennett) in her dress and perfect coif. The narrating father, Spenser Tracy, is a banker with a beautiful daughter with whom he seems to have an almost oedipal fixation. Tracy is a likable sort, muddling along through his daughter’s mostly unsuitable suitors, and dealing with wedding preparations with resignation. Everything in this family is tidy, clean, and comfortable, another Metro-GoldwynMayer idealization of the American family. Films of the 1950s were also affected by the anticommunist paranoia of the period best represented by the hearings of HUAC. While the committee was getting writers, actors, and directors blackballed, the studies were conscious of the need to portray good, solid American values in their films to relieve the scrutiny and pressure that Hollywood was a den of left-wing agitators. The effect of the pressure was to enforce mediocrity. Films dealing with social, political or psychological problems were reduced to a minimum. A statistical examination of feature-film content found that while the social problem film accounted for 28 percent of all movies produced in 1947 (the first year of the HUAC investigations), by 1949 this percentage had dropped to 18. By 1953–53 only nine per cent of movies dealt with social issues. Like the other media and academics, by the early fifties Hollywood tended to portray America as one big, bland, middle-class paradise with problems no more serious that picking the right mate (How to Marry a Millionaire, 1953), or paying for the wedding (Father of the Bride, 1950). Most films celebrated the myths of romantic happiness and material achievement, or they simply provided escape and entertainment (westerns, gangster movies, musicals) in ways that had little to do with how people actually lived.18

If the 1950s were a period in which Americans were finding emotional and intellectual escape in bland mass entertainment media they 145

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were also beginning to effect a geographical escape from the problems and complexity of the city through a growing exodus to the suburbs. The demographic sorting out of the urban population represented the most major spatial reordering of society since the rural to urban migration that began nearly a century earlier. The paternal Tracy encountered more challenging nuptial (and social issues) circumstances seventeen years later when Sidney Poitier was the suitor who showed up in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? (1967) This time Tracy (Judge Drayton) and his wife, played by Katharine Hepburn, live in plush comfort on one of San Francisco’s hills, where their liberal values are put to the highest test. Their daughter has fallen in love with John Prentice (Sidney Poitier), who is not only handsome and genteel, but also an MD who does research. Poitier’s parents are also middle-class respectable. After a lot of soul-searching and expressions of concern about how the rest of society will regard the interracial couple, the judge blesses marriage with a somewhat sappy speech at the film’s end.19 In fact, interracial marriages had begun to increase in the 1960s and have increased every decade since.

The emerging American family. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner © Columbia Pic 146

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Going Subnuclear

Director Paul Mazursky relates a personal story about a divorced female friend who was purchasing a house. On the papers she had to sign, the indication was placed next to her name “an unmarried woman.” Mazursky asked the loan officer if it were an unmarried man who was purchasing the house, would the form indicate “an unmarried man?” The officer replied no. An Unmarried Woman (1978) takes its inspiration from that incident (Mazursky also wrote the screenplay), but the incident is a factual one that, during the 1960s and 1970s, has growing statistical underpinning. The so-called sexual revolution not only gave “permission” for sexually starved unmarried individuals to assuage their frustrations, but it also widened the fissures that existed in marriages. Erica (Jill Clayburgh) gets, in what has become the colloquialism, dumped for a younger woman by her husband of seventeen years in a tragic-comical scene in a street in the SoHo section of Manhattan. She had regarded her marriage to her stockbroker husband (Michael Murphy) as stable and happy. They live in a nice high-rise apartment, their daughter can go to a private school, and she can have her own job in an art gallery. Her marriage over, Erica is thrust, in her middle thirties, into a single status initially consumed by anger, uncertainty, and self-doubt. Most of An Unmarried Woman is how she manages to construct a new life for herself. After a period of excessive drinking, crying, and taking her grief out on her daughter, she consults a woman psychiatrist who assuages her of some of her misanthropy. With support of her friends Erica ventures into the dating scene for the first time in seventeen years. As a growing number of similarly circumstanced woman (and men) have found, she finds herself suffering boring lunches with boorish dates, fending off amorous advances in the back of cabs, and other unsatisfying “auditions.” At length Erica falls in love with a British painter (Alan Bates) she meets at the art gallery. But in the process of her reconstruction, she finds an independent strength and doesn’t need the family structure that proved to be fragile for her. To some degree her circumstances might be blamed on some of the characteristics of the high-end urban life she had been living, with its numerous choices, chances, and opportunities. But the city also serves the unmarried woman in ways that are not available to women in villages, small towns, and rural areas. It tolerates and accepts lifestyles that deviate from traditional norms, provides ranges of employment accessible to unmarried women, and an extensive array of social services. 147

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An Unmarried Woman is also one of several films in the 1970s that explored the changes in marriage and family in America. Mazursky had directed two other films, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969), on the social phenomenon of wife-swapping, and Blume in Love (1973), on divorce, that explored the dimensions of the sexual revolution primarily as it affected the more advantaged social classes. Such films might also receive partial credit for fueling the religious fundamentalist reaction that followed in their wake and such events as the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision in 1973. Women were embarking on careers, not just working, and doing it with the assistance of greater control over their sexuality. The new choices in family lifestyle were not always bilateral in marriages. To some extent Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) reversed the circumstances of An Unmarried Woman, although it is not about infidelities in the usual sense. The notion of “needing some space” has almost become cliché in both life and film. But that is in effect what Joanna Kramer (Meryl Streep) announces to her husband one day when he returns from work. Workaholic Ted Kramer (Dustin Hoffman) hardly notices the momentous announcement, so preoccupied is he with his job. The problem is that the somewhat mutually selfish couple has a young son, Billy, a first grader. Joanna is needy enough about being free to discover herself that she leaves her son in the custody of her frenetic husband. The circumstance forces Ted for the first time to pay attention to his son, exacerbating his already hassle-filled life. With the mother out of the movie for most of middle part, father and son gradually settle into a closer relationship. But when Joanna returns and demands to take custody of her son, Ted decides to fight it out in court, where typically, in the American situation of the time, the mother’s claim was favored. She prevails in spite of an impassioned plea by Ted, but in the process she realizes that he just might be the most appropriate parent for the boy. Kramer vs. Kramer and other films, such as Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), Baby Boom (1987), and 24 Hour Woman (1999), likely resonated with a growing number of young American families in the 1980s and 1990s in which both parents, out of ambition or economic necessity, pursued careers, and in which preschools and daycare centers played an increasing role in the upbringing of their children. When death, divorce, or even the choice of single-parenthood results in subnuclear families, many women seem better prepared, at least in films, to financially and emotionally to deal with their circumstances. 148

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The Kramers discuss going subnuclear. Kramer vs. Kramer © Columbia Pictures, 1979

It is probably safe to say that the definition of, and form of, the family will continue to be expanded and modified by changes in the other institutions of urban life. Whatever its form, it will likely continue to provide vital subject matter for the cinema because of the dramatic possibilities the family presents. Sometimes the dramatic context is between traditional and emergent family forms, as in The Birdcage (1996). The story of the Miami impresario of a gay night club, Armand (Robin Williams) and his female-impersonating partner, Albert (Nathan Lane), as parents of a straight young man who falls in love with a girl from a conservative political family, forms the basis for this farcical comedy. There is little plot to The Birdcage, an American version of the French La Cage Aux Folles (1978). It mostly deals with the comedic properties of the coming together of a gay family of convenience (the boy being the result of Armand’s night of alcohol-induced heterosexual adventure some years earlier), and a straight-laced traditional family. When the girl’s parents are to meet their future son-in-law’s parents at a dinner in the latter’s curiously decorated home, Albert attempts to impersonate the boy’s mother. The evening results in several humorous misunderstandings, ending with the necessity for the girl’s father, 149

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Senator Keeley (Gene Hackman), to escape being discovered in this awkward circumstance by himself having to dress up in drag. It’s a family scenario that the writers of the Andy Hardy series could never have imagined. 1.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8.

9. 150

Notes

The most recent references to the clan or the tribe have been in the context of the Afghanistan conflict following September 11, 2001. Clannish organizations, often dominated by a headman or a strong leader, control large groups of adherents bound together by tradition, bloodlines, and fierce loyalties and attachments to territories. Gypsy social organization and atavistic tribes in Southeast Asia and South America also bear some of the same characteristics. See Cox, 1973; Jeffrey, 1972. US Bureau of the Census and The Los Angeles Times, January 23, 1990. Sennett, 1970. Aires, 1971. Indeed, many murders take place within families. Television has employed, perhaps exploited, the drama of the family to a greater degree than the cinema. Most successful television situation comedies are based on family situations. Series like I Love Lucy, The Dick Van Dyke Show, All in the Family, and The Cosby Show, are just a few of the most successful television programs of all time. However, a documentary on the American family may prove to be the most influential on contemporary television programming. In 1973, PBS aired a documentary series called An American Family: A Televised Life. In twelve unscripted weekly installments (edited down from 300 hours), the lives of the Louds, a well-to-do family from Santa Barbara, California, were scrutinized by as many as ten million viewers. Parents Bill and Pat Loud, their three teenage sons and two teenage daughters, and their goings-on and battles, became the first reality television celebrities and the subject of popular and well as intellectual speculations and debate. The parents eventually divorced, and the family disappeared into obscurity after their brief period of fame. But they were the precursor for much of the reality TV today that is based on dysfunctional families, The Jerry Springer Show being one of the most notorious, and other dysfunctional relationship programs in which real American families watch “real” and dysfunctional American families, undoubtedly with a certain amount of shadenfreude (See Ruoff, 2001). This concept is also parodied in Real Life (1979). The family is also a central subject in sections of this book that deal with the small town and the farm. In this manner, the ethnic enclave created what might be called a “favorable balance of trade,” in which, by selling its wares and service not only to its own indigenous population, but also “exporting” its surplus to the rest of the city and beyond, it brought wealth into the community. This is, in a mircoscale, the same economic advantage that cities, as well as entire nations, strive to achieve. There were also other factors responsible for the breakup of families and traditional family structure in the American immigrant experience. See,

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10.

11. 12.

13. 14.

15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

for example, the discussion of Hester Street in the chapter on immigration. Also, some families had internal problems that resulted in their problems or breakup. Alcoholism, for example, is the main difficulty of the family in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945) about an Irish family in New York at the turn of the century. It is the story of a loving father who is a dreamer with a drinking problem, whose family must struggle with poverty. This is perhaps most pronounced in the Middle East, where the family structure if further unpinned by Muslim religious traditions governing internal, as well as external, family relations, and thus foreign influences are a threat to the institutional structure that is most closely allied to the family. The result of such threats is often expressed in fundamentalist coups or increased repression by established authorities. May, 1988. There is extended discussion of Dead End in the chapter Growing Up Urban. It should also be noted that this film does not portray wealthy families in a positive light either. Dead End takes place where the poor live juxtaposed to the rich. Dave (Joel McCrea), the hero of the story has a brief romantic encounter with a girl from the wealthy high-rise bordering the tenements. But her economic class is shown only to be concerned with indolence and pleasure. Russell was actually a double amputee. While his physical condition was the primary reason he was cast in the film, his performance won him an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Wyler was not unfamiliar with servicemen, having made a documentary film of B-17 Super Fortress crews in Europe by flying missions with them. The nose of the B-17 was also the director’s choice location in scenes at the beginning and end of the film. It is also fair to say that some of the roots of the Civil Rights Movement were sown during World War II as black servicemen, who had risked their lives in protection of the US Constitution, returned home with resolve to finally demand to have their rights protected by it. May, 1988, 68–9. Landon, 1980, 11. Miller and Novak, 1975, 313–14. These proved to be Spencer Tracy’s last movie lines. He died ten days after shooting ended.

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9 Politics, the City, and the Cinema Are you now, or have you ever been . . . ? The beginning of the infamous question of the infamous HUAC

The relationship of the city to the concerns of politics may be more immediate and obvious than those of the cinema. Cities are, after all, at their legal and administrative levels, governmental entities, responsible for the exercise of political authority and the distribution of governmental services. The cinema’s relationship to politics is less direct, but its influence, real and perceived, upon cultural values has been a normative concern that has pulled the movie industry into the orbit of politics at all levels, local, national, and international. Indeed, the perception of America that people of many nations, who have no more contact with American culture than that which they see portrayed on projection screens, can be of enormous political consequence. Moreover, the perception that many Americans have of life and politics in their own cities is also influenced by the view they get from Hollywood. Both urban life and the cinema influence values, and what influences values is the interest of politics. The American cinema, as has been discussed, has been intertwined with public normative concerns since the earliest days of the movie industry. What also has been uniquely American about the beginnings of this relationship has been that the movies arrived as an entertainment medium in America contemporaneous with the country’s significant era of political reform, particularly urban civic reform. Contemporaneous with, and in some measure a result of, the massive period of immigration from abroad, that spirit of reform touched all elements of American society. The movies arrived at a 153

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period of significant social change in America, a time at which not only the values associated with an erstwhile primarily agrarian society were being replaced by values shaped by the incipient urban majority, but also in which the political and economic power of cities was a new factor in national politics. A struggle between the old and the new ensued, and the movies, more off screen than on, were drawn into the vortex. Not many movies have dealt directly with the subject of politics, perhaps because of the risks involved, and urban politics has received even less cinematic attention. But politics permeates most everything in one way or another in American society, and it is therefore appropriate to address it more generally before moving on to its treatment in film. The following discussion therefore takes place in two separate, but related parts. First, we will treat those aspects of the history of urban politics and governmental reform in America, particularly those aspects that have garnered cinematic attention. Second, we will discuss the relationship of the American cinema to debates about social values and the influence of the film industry upon them. In both sections we will note that the American experience in the interrelationships between politics, the city, and the cinema have been historically unique. Urban Politics and Governance

Politics precedes urbanism, but the city brought forth a new, different, and complex set of political and governmental concerns. In agricultural and pastoral societies politics was often confined to relatively simple power distributions based on age, physical prowess, or bloodlines, at a time when primary social organizations were the clan, tribe, or manorial systems. The distributive role of power was also confined to limited ranges of physical property, such as herds, tools, and fixed real estate like farmland. Urbanism changed all that. First, it expanded social roles: with specialization of labor to accomplish the growing number of occupations that urbanism generated (trades, education, administrative functions, etc.), individual and group interests, and hence power, became more fragmented. With increased specialization of labor, other forms of property became valuable, particularly skills, information, and scientific and technical knowledge. By extension, these new roles came to represent new, diverse, and often divergent and conflicting interests that necessitated appropriate political representation in the political marketplace. Politics was the medium through which differences could be reconciled. 154

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Second, the space of the city became more public. Streets, parks, schools, and other public buildings became the shared capital of the public enterprise, to be overseen and administered by government, and to be measured by a different form of profit, called the public good or the commonweal. The construction and maintenance of this enterprise involved the institution of fiscal mechanisms, particularly taxation, to cover and distribute its costs, and new regulations became necessary to bring order where public and private interests intersected and competed with one another. Third, urbanism redistributed power into the hands of nontraditional authorities. Economic elites, such as owners of industries, labor unions, and professional societies, began to challenge aristocratic and religious entities for power over the affairs of urban society.1 These were tumultuous changes for a society that had been founded on agrarian values and which had not considered the prospect of, or prepared itself governmentally for, the rapid growth of large cities. The prevailing political thought was much more influenced by what has been called classical liberalism, a political theory with a minimalist view of the role of government in people’s lives.2 In consequence Americans are remarkably skeptical and distrustful of politics in general, never finding an easy accommodation with its necessity. From Watergate to Irangate, the polity seems to get regular confirmation of Walpole’s dictum that “power corrupts,” and to discount what might be considered as government’s achievements. Americans hold similar, if not more powerful, sentiments about urban politics. Part of this stems from the American abiding antiurbanism.3 Having started as a rural nation, cities were not supposed to figure prominently in the American destiny. Thomas Jefferson, one of the most prominent and intellectual of the Founding Fathers, exhibited in his writings a strong strain of anti-urbanism that was perhaps influenced by his observation of the events of the French Revolution. He viewed the populations of great cities as potentially unruly mobs, or as he put it, “a sore upon the body politic.” With little expectation in any case that America would become a predominantly urban nation, there was little attention paid as to how cities should be governed. Emergence of Machine Politics

When, during the waves of immigration that commenced in the middle of the nineteenth century, large numbers of immigrants elected to 155

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remain in coastal cities, such as Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and San Francisco, rather than settle the interior of the country on farms and in small villages, the influence of political machines, whose origins have been cited to a dozen years after independence, began to flourish.4 Machines were not only an outgrowth of the fact that there had been no real preparation for the structure of local government in America, but also of the fact that the American city was being built, and its very construction was a generator of enormous opportunities. The city meant jobs, in construction, public works, education, government, and employment in its burgeoning number of businesses to cater to its expanding population. Whoever controlled access to these opportunities would wield considerable political and economic power. “Machine bosses” were not necessarily elected officials, but those who controlled the slates of candidates and the machine, or system, that would ensure their elections. The lifeblood of the machine was immigration, hundreds of thousands of eager workers who would give their political loyalty to those who could provide them with the necessities for gaining an economic foothold in the American city. Lacking a governmental apparatus that could provide job training, public housing, welfare, health care, or other public services, the machine filled the gap; acquiring these needs through favoritism, secret contracts, backroom deals, and other questionable methods, bosses could exact favors from beneficiaries, which they could bestow on needy immigrants in return for the latter’s voting allegiance. One description of the relationship of the political boss to those who supported the machine states that: The boss enjoys doing good turns for men. Stories are told by his admirers of his generous deeds. For instance he has been known to pay the funeral expenses of poor people who have no insurance. At Christmas time and Thanksgiving he gives turkeys to certain needy families. Dance tickets, baseball passes, tickets to the theatre, railway passes, and so forth—which cost him nothing, being simply incidental results of his tools in the common council or the legislative voting “right”—are distributed with wise discrimination. He is always ready to treat. Some go so far as to say that if he died tomorrow his friends would have to pay his funeral expenses. This all sounds very generous; but the chief admirers of the boss cannot deny that when the supremacy in the ward is at all endangered, he makes capital of all his good deeds. In other words, every man to 156

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whom he has granted a favor is made to feel that the boss expects a vote.5 Thus, what might be termed crooked or illegal in today’s political mores,6 has also been described as latent functionalism (a system that  worked for its times and circumstances). Outnumbered by the waves of immigrants, the old political authority of the city of white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs) was overwhelmed. Whoever controlled the machine controlled access to the expanding numbers of public “patronage” jobs and insured continued political allegiance.7 The political boss often sought and employed the allegiance of local gangs. Urban Politics on Screen

In Gangs of New York, gang leader “Bill the Butcher” has formed an alliance of convenience with Tammany Hall’s boss William Magear Tweed (James Broadbent) that involves extortion, graft, and the use of public services for larceny, when rival fire companies plunder burning buildings. An observer of the period remarks that, “to show the play of personal and social forces beneath the surface of boss rule and ward politics . . . it is necessary at the very beginning to understand the prevalence and power of gangs, and their methods of organization. The importance of the gang as a social factor, which the politician manipulated, has never been fully appreciated except by the politician.”8 Several factors led to the decline of the urban political machines. First, there had always been elements in urban politics that opposed the practices of the machine. Political reformers and muckrakers9 exposed the excesses of machine politicians, particularly the graft and kickbacks and other corrupt practices. Second, state legislatures began to take a more active role in creating new laws for municipalities that placed restrictions on the machine. Third, immigration began to taper off because of World War I and the dangers of crossing the Atlantic. Still, elements of political machines remained in many of the older cities of the country, particularly those with plural ethnic concentrations. In various cities, such as Chicago, some aspects of the machine were very influential well into the twentieth century. Though nowhere as significant as it was in the latter half of the nineteenth century, some features of the urban political machines are evident in various American cities today. 157

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Urban politics has not been a very large genre in the movies. The subject of how cities are governed often requires some additional help from crime and corruption in order to hold the attention of movie audiences. So despite the fact that city politics pervades our lives in so many ways, there are relatively few films that employ it as a central cinematic theme.10 One film that does address urban machine politics directly, however, is The Last Hurrah (1958). Spencer Tracy plays Irish mayor Frank Skeffington, who is loosely based on real mayor James Curley, in an unnamed New England city that very much resembles Boston. Skeffington is an old-style political boss, running a campaign in the old style of “grassroots politics” on the eve of the emergence of television in politics. Grassroots is represented in this film in the close contact that the mayor has with his various ethnic constituencies. As sitting mayor he holds court each day with his ward heelers, before, like a seigneur in some medieval town, giving audience to a line of supplicants and petitioners outside his home; he also attends funerals and other social functions. Contemporary viewers might find The Last Hurrah a pastiche of stereotypes and political clichés. “Yes men” are overly solicitous, ethnic stereotypes cast in a bit too much relief, and class distinctions are rather finely drawn. But then this is a film based on Edwin O’Connor’s book of the same title, about what is now very much a bygone era, in some aspects more of a political relic than the politics of Gangs of New York. Although reforms and declines in immigration had sundered the foundations of political machines, their vestiges remained in cities like Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and a few others. In particular, that inductive style of politics referred to as grassroots politics remained appropriate to central cities with distinct ethnic districts and new immigrant populations. Skeffington’s unnamed city retains features of late nineteenth century social geography. His ward organizers are expected to bring him information about the wards that are primarily Irish, Italian, or Jewish, and importantly, to get out the vote for him at election time. These tactics are in some measure even more important than in the past, when politicians could rely upon patronage, backroom deals with city contractors, and if necessary, gang strong-arm intimidation to get their way.

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The mayor rallies his constituents one more time. The Last Hurrah © Columbia Pictures

Skeffington is given an easy charm in Tracy’s portrayal. He has come up in the world from the scrappy Irish tenements, as have, we also learn, the Roman Catholic cardinal and other leaders of the community. But he has been unable to achieve public office and retain it without making his share of enemies along the way. Principal among these are the old-line Yankee WASPs who assemble in their private club and plot to overthrow the mayor. It is these enemies that provide the melodrama that drives what otherwise might be a soporific narrative. Skeffington finds ways to frustrate the crusty vengeance of newspaper owner Amos Force (John Carradine), who years earlier abused a relative who was in service in his house for taking a piece of fruit. He outfoxes the leading banker, who is holding up the bonds for a low-income housing project, by enticing the banker’s dim-witted son to be fire chief, a post at which he is very likely to cause embarrassment. He attends funerals and other social events, using his charm and cleverness to endear himself to various constituencies. There is even a little lesson in the art of political compromise when, at a dinner with his nephew

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and his nephew’s wife, Skeffington explains how he managed to get a statue erected in the Italian ward where different groups there wanted to honor different Italian historical figures. But all of this political acumen is doomed against the rising forces of the new politics. The jobs of policemen and firemen are still beholden to the mayor; there are still favors he can bestow and patronage jobs to distribute, but many of the ethnics have moved on into the middle class, suburbs now encircle the city, which increasingly remains home mostly to the poorer elements of society, and politics is being reshaped by the medium of television. His political opponents nominate a dolt to run against him, seen almost exclusively in television, and in spite of obvious ineptness, he prevails over the old political warrior. The undoing of the Skeffington machine is not the opposition of the old English-based elite of the city, but rather the demographics of the new metropolitan area and television. The emergence of the suburbs, in which issues were different or competitive with those of the older parts of the city, placed limitations on the old, ethnicity-based, grassroots politics. Residents of suburbia were often the children of the residents of the ethnic neighborhoods, but the ethnic mixture of the suburbs—based more upon such concerns as the quality of schools, home ownership, and the journey to work—was more diversified. Unlike the neighborhoods of the inner city, the suburbs were not predominately Irish or Italian or Polish, but they were as likely to be a mix of these and other ethnic backgrounds. Television became a means by which candidates could be presented more like products that personalities. They could be packaged, and shown only in the best of “photo-op” circumstances. Politicians could engage in a noninteractive form of communication with their constituencies. While Skeffington was telegenic, he was at his best in small groups and one-on-one political relationships. While a his opponent would have been ineffectual in such a context, he could be packaged sufficiently by TV handlers to make an effective candidate, enough to deprive old-time political operative Frank Skeffington of his last hurrah. The Last Hurrah did not, however, spell the end of political chicanery, rough stuff, and other behavior that is reminiscent of machine politics. As often happens, political power can be relocated by social changes, but its capacity for corruption goes with it. John Sayles wrote, directed, edited, and played the role of Carl in City of Hope (1991), an ironically titled film about contemporary 160

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American inner-city politics. In this film urban politics is still ethnic, as well as racial. Moreover, the politics in this city—a fictional East Coast city called Hudson City11—has its own corrupted political structure. Kickbacks, payoffs, goof-off jobs, police brutality, intra- and interracial strife and distrust, and outright criminal behavior are portrayed in a tightly edited series of overlapping and interlocking scenes involving a vast array of characters, one of which is a deranged street person, Jeremiah, who babbles television commercials and prophecies of doom as he passes in and out of frame. The principal character, Nick (Vincent Spano), represents in his own cynical and dissolute lifestyle the moral character of Hudson City in general. Nick has a goof off job on a construction site operated by his building contractor father, but even that is too much commitment for him. He quits to hang out with his substance-abusing pals, and he becomes involved in an aborted heist of an appliance store. Nick is about to get himself involved in circumstances much like those of his ill-fated brother, who went to Vietnam to avoid prosecution for drunk driving and was killed in action. A major difference between The Last Hurrah and City of Hope is the reference to the influence of external, even global, forces on the internal politics of cities. Much of the plot revolves around the machinations of the mayor and other political figures to profit politically, and otherwise, from a large-scale redevelopment project that would be financed by funds from New York and Japan. The mayor is not an entertaining rogue, like Frank Skeffington, but a callous and conniving operator who feels that it is the a right of the previous generation of immigrants, who now run the city, to take what is their due. Nick’s father, Frank Rinaldi (Tony Lo Bianco), has long associations with the political leadership, which have gained him lucrative contracts, but also forced him to engage in kickbacks and other corrupt practices. He gets caught up in the redevelopment deal and is forced, in trying to protect his ne’er-do-well son from arrest for theft, to resort to arson on the apartments he manages. A child dies in the fire, and we learn that Nick’s father acquiesced in the arson as a favor to keep his son from being arrested. But the catalyst for this action is that the destinies of many cities are now determined by financial power that is not controlled from within the city, but without. Whereas it was the emergence of suburbia that altered political prospects for Frank Skeffington, the politicians of Hudson City are already aware that the new immigrants—in this 161

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case blacks and Hispanics—are politically marginalized because the municipal patronage jobs have been taken, are vastly reduced, and that their influence is already diluted by the emergence of the suburban vote. Moreover, the film shows that there is considerable internal division and dissent within these ethnic and racial groups, as well as considerable competition among them for the little that remains of the city to be picked over.12 The politics of Hudson City is a quilt of contemporary American urban ills and grievances. Blacks feel marginalized, and the lone African-American councilman (Joe Morton) is abused even by his own constituency. Latinos and blacks inhabit the tenements slated for removal and are besieged by power outages and other strategies to force them to leave, even arson. Whites complain about welfare cheaters, cops and city bureaucrats are on the take, and even the white high school teacher of urban relations, is mugged by two black youths who falsely claim he made homosexual advances. In Hudson City the most recent immigrants are not in a struggle with the old, Yankee power structure, which has already left for the suburbs and the state legislatures, but with their immediate immigrant predecessors. This is an American city in a later stage of political change from that of The Last Hurrah, but one that is immediately recognizable by students of contemporary urban affairs. City of Hope does not conclude on a hopeful note. In the unfinished building in which the film began Nick, wounded by a gunshot from the outraged ex-husband of his girlfriend, is found by his father, who shouts down into the night and the empty street below. “Help!” he calls, “up here, help!” But down below there is only the deranged street person, who merely, almost mockingly, echoes his words back up to him. Still, urban politics in the movies is a hard sell all by itself. It usually needs, as discussed above, some narrative assistance to keep audiences engaged, which is probably why City Hall (1996) opens with a deadly encounter between a cop, a drug dealer, and a stray bullet that kills a six-year-old child. This happens while New York City Mayor John Pappas (Al Pacino) is engaged with visiting Japanese dignitaries. So City Hall could easily be taken for a crime thriller with political backdrop, a political intrigue pushed by a crime cover-up scandal, or an amalgam of both. His deputy mayor, Kevin Calhoun (John Cusack), quietly begins to investigate the circumstances and finds himself on a trail that involves judicial corruption, connection with mobsters, and other elements of 162

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civic scandal, which is a problem for the mayor and his presidential ambitions. Some of the circumstances and characterizations, such as that of Brooklyn Boss Frank Anselmo (Danny Aiello), seem drawn from actual events in New York politics.

Mayor Pappas (Al Pacino) explains city politics to his deputy mayor (John Cusack). © Castle Rock/Columbia

The story is narrated by the deputy mayor, an idealist with a Louisiana accent. Calhoun is an admiring student of the mayor, and parts of the dialogue are didactic with quotations of political wisdom from the likes of Kennedy, LaGuardia, and even Pericles. But the more realistic political instruction seems to come from Frank Anselmo, who maneuvers for improvements in his territory, such as a subway stop and a bid for the next Democratic National Convention. In one scene Anselmo shows his political skills in the way he finesses a group of Brooklyn realtors at a breakfast meeting. An accidental death is also the trigger event for and exploration of political factions and interests in New York as told in Bonfire of the Vanities (1990), which is based on film novelist Tom Wolfe’s story of a Wall Street investor whose financial success leads him to refer to himself as a “master of the universe.” Sherman McCoy (Tom Hanks), whose millions allow him the self-bestowed privileges of a socialite-wife, a Park Avenue duplex apartment, and a mistress named Maria (Melanie 163

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Griffith), may be a master of the universe, but that universe does not appear to include New York City. After collecting his mistress from the airport, McCoy’s seemingly perfect existence begins to fall apart when he makes a fatal wrong turn off the expressway and finds himself in the quite unfamiliar universe of the South Bronx. That very unfamiliarity results in him and his mistress panicking and running his car into a black youth she thought was attacking them. A greedy mother and an opportunist black preacher, closely modeled on the real Reverend Al Sharpton, make this boy’s death—otherwise a not particularly noteworthy event in a big city—an overnight media sensation. McCoy’s car is identified by the police as the vehicle that killed the boy, and very soon all of the various political interests in the city that might profit from his arrest and punishment descend like carrion eaters on the fallen master: a district attorney needing a sensational case to spur his political campaign, various attorneys, racial activists, and political opportunists. This also creates a media sensation, and Peter Fallow (Bruce Willis), a boozy, out of work reporter (who functions as narrator for the story), is the film’s guide through the gritty political universe that will determine McCoy’s fate.13 McCoy becomes the center of a publicity circus: He ends up indicted for the death of the boy after trying to cover it up at the urging of his selfish, oversexed mistress. He loses his job and his wife and is about to be evicted from his co-op apartment complex. He learns that the real masters of the urban universe, one in which he has traveled only to the planets of privilege, are cops, neighborhood activists, sleazy politicians, newspaper gossip hacks, publicity hounds, cynical lawyers, and ambitious civil servants. For all of his business acumen, with stocks and bonds and big international trades, he is ill-prepared to deal with such characters. He is only saved by a lucky coincidence that produces a tape recording that counters his mistress’s perjured testimony, which would surely have convicted him. Despite this deus ex machina, it is certain that McCoy’s encounter with the political vortex of the city has shown him who is master. Metropolitics in the Cinema

Chinatowns are typically found in or around the inner cities of most metropolitan areas. In this film the politics of Chinatown are intertwined in the political machinations of the expanding metropolitan region. No American urban region has expanded its boundaries with fervor equal to that of Los Angeles. And nothing nurtured the Los Angeles 164

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basin’s real estate value and made it grow as much as water did. The history of the hydration of Los Angeles might make a good documentary, but the addition of the mysterious ways of Chinatown and the personal—as well as political—misdeeds of the rich and greedy with Los Angeles water politics of the 1930s, makes a compelling drama. In the early years of its development Los Angeles acted as an imperial city, exhibiting similarities to classical Rome. Los Angeles didn’t have a natural harbor, so like Rome, which built one at Ostia, Los Angelenos built their own. Rome spread its regional hegemony to take in local tribes like the Sabines and Latini, and Los Angeles grew territorially with its own land-grab (between 1906 and 1926, it expanded from twenty-nine square miles to over four hundred). And much of this growth was made possible by bringing in water (in Rome’s case by its magnificent aqueducts) through massive water and power projects. In Los Angeles the power over water and power lay with commissioners and bureaucrats who were progressive reformers—people such as Mulholland, Ezra Scattergood (an apt name for a promoter of urban sprawl), and John Randolph Haines—who operated a bit like the old political bosses, but who could also be regarded as idealists who saw public enterprise as almost a civic theology to promote economic growth, rather than (or as well as) line their own pockets.14 Set in the 1930s, Chinatown (1974), a detective thriller, is in the mode of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. It mines the history of the expansion of Los Angeles, especially the water-rights and real-estate scams. Director Roman Polanski, whose own personal history in Los Angeles is filled with horror,15 gives the pastel, spare, and languid landscapes of 1930s Los Angeles an eerie feel. The picture is impeccably dressed in the period, from the wide white-walled convertibles right down to a box of bandages. J.J. “Jake” Gittes (Jack Nicholson) is a reasonably successful private detective who specializes in getting the goods on adulterers. But what would normally be a routine contract of catching an errant husband in the arms of younger woman turns out to be lead to a murder, political intrigue and chicanery, and a case of incest. The story of Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway), wife of Hollis Mulwray (a name close to that of Mulholland), one of the barons of water projects that opened up vast areas of the Los Angeles area to real estate development, and her father, Noah Cross (John Huston), is one that interweaves a sordid personal story with a dirty political story that has some resonance with actual events in Los Angeles history. 165

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In his investigation of Hollis’s past, Gittes learns that he recently blocked the construction of a dam that would have given Los Angeles a greater water supply, and that Hollis’s one-time partner, Cross, would have profited enormously from the dam because the water would have irrigated his orchards and real estate projects. When Gittes pokes his nose too deeply into the activities of the water barons (who are diverting and spilling scare fresh water during a drought) his nose is slit with a switchblade by a little thug (played by director Polanski). A love affair develops between Gittes and Evelyn, but he still does not fully trust her because she is reticent about the truth of her relationship with her husband and father. When Gittes finally learns from Evelyn (rather he beats it out of her) that her father raped her at age fifteen and that Hollis’s young mistress is really Evelyn’s daughter—and her sister—Katherine he decides to help Evelyn and Katherine escape Noah to Mexico. But they are caught in Chinatown by Noah and his men, along with the police who seem unwitting accomplices. With Gittes handcuffed by the police, Evelyn attempts to flee with Katherine after wounding Noah. She is shot and killed by the police (with Dunaway dangling out of the driver’s seat of the car in a death posture very reminiscent of her demise in Bonnie and Clyde). Jake Gittes is rendered powerless in the reenactment of an attempted (only alluded to) good deed years earlier in Chinatown that resulted in the death of another woman with whom he had become involved. He is told by his associates to: “Forget it, Jake; it’s Chinatown.” In other words, it doesn’t fit our notion of what’s rational, or explicable. Gittes watches, powerless, as the events overcome him, in an area of the city where he once worked as a police detective, and where his career was ruined by a case he could never solve. He is led away by his partners, one of them assuring him that the mystery he has been unraveling is equally inexplicable and unalterable. Sometimes American urban politics seems a little bit like Chinatown. The City, the Cinema, and American Values

The second part of this discussion relates to the long and uneasy relationship between government, politics, and the film industry. This is, of course, anything but an exclusively American phenomenon. Many governments today exercise tight control over the subject and distribution of films, in many cases relegating the works of their most talented and renowned filmmakers to greater notoriety outside their 166

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home countries. This is especially the case where the subjects of films intersect with political, social, or religious values. Films are banned in some countries and employed as propaganda in others. In the United States, the cinema is regularly a part of political debate as to its effects on the development of values in immigrants, the behaviors of the young, sexual mores, and as discussed in greater detail below, different political ideologies. The Politics of Reform

Countervailing the machine was the Municipal Reform Movement that consisted of muckraking newspaper reformers, good government organizations, and state government officials and legislators. Weakened by declines in immigration and exposures of some of its abuses and corruption—William Magear Tweed gave his daughter a wedding that reputedly cost over one million dollars—these auspices chipped away at the machines power over civic affairs. Reform in the film industry was partly related to the fervor for ridding cities of corruption and immorality. After all, the immigrants, both fodder for the political power of the machines, as well as the prime movie audience (in addition to their involvement in movie production) connected concerns about both civic and cinematic reform. Much in the same way that political machines were seen as corrupting influences, so also were the earliest motion pictures. Censorship was raised as early as 1894, when Edison’s kinetoscope showed pictures of ladies ankles and little vignettes of a bride’s wedding night. By the end of the 1910s the film industry was confronted with a variety of reform organizations. Churches, women’s clubs, and organizations dedicated to youth and patriotic concerns were alarmed by the ways in which movies might encourage deviant behavior, permissive sexuality, crime, labor strikes, substance abuse, and riots, and they often descended on theaters that attracted ethnic audiences. Local governments had a variety of restrictive capabilities, including censorship boards within police departments, film inspection bureaus, and boards of city censors. Since films need to be exhibited in buildings with public access and assembly, they could be regulated by fire laws, building codes, licenses, and other municipal regulations, such as zoning.16 The situation in the early years of the twentieth century is not too dissimilar to that of concerns about adult movie theaters in the last quarter of the century.17 167

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In response, the movie industry recognized the necessity of gaining the approval of the urban middle classes, and the industry began erecting movie theaters in middle-class neighborhoods. These were larger, more comfortable, theaters that were more elaborately decorated, and in which they could screen movies that were more attuned to middle-class values. Discounted prices for women and children encouraged more family patronage.18 Although the influence of the movies on American values would remain an abiding concern of politics, by the 1930s the cinema had become the dominant form of mass entertainment.19 The “Hollywood Babylon” Factor

One peculiar aspect of the American film industry that has affected its relationship with political power has been the geography of that industry. It is not unusual today to hear in casual conversation references to the presumed immorality and debauchery of Hollywood. While this in part owes much to the media’s fascination with people of fame and fortune, it also has its origins in the early days of the film industry on the American West Coast, a time when that location was more remote and removed from the centers of political power and social conventions, and its Wild West reputation was generalized to the entire film industry.20 That Hollywood was interpreting and presenting values and lifestyles in a popular mass medium gave added weight to any concerns that arose from those behaviors. Perhaps the most renowned scandalous incident in early Hollywood—one that had results that brought significant changes to the film industry—is that of Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle. In 1908, Arbuckle, a former plumber, baby-faced and agile for his 320-pound frame, was hired as an extra, and appeared in many one-reel comedy films. By 1913 he rose to stardom in a series of short comedies, partnering with Mabel Normand, Ford Sterling, Chester Conklin, and Charlie Chaplin. He also wrote and directed many of his own films, and within a few years he became one of Hollywood’s most popular personalities, with his own production company. But in 1921, at a wild drinking party he threw at a San Francisco hotel, a starlet by the name of Virginia Rappe went into severe convulsions, allegedly after having been sexually assaulted by Arbuckle. She died a few days later of a ruptured bladder, and Arbuckle was charged with manslaughter. The case twice ended in a hung jury, but in a third trial, he was acquitted. The media sensationalized the case, 168

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arousing public outcry, and Hollywood was characterized as a modern Sodom. Arbuckle was forced to retire, and his films were banned and withdrawn from circulation.21 The MPPDA: Government, Politics, and the Film Industry

The Arbuckle scandal was instrumental in the creation of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA), a selfregulatory trade association set up by the film industry itself to form a cloak of respectability and to preempt the potential for more direct governmental regulation. For its moral overseer, the industry prevailed upon Will H. Hays, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee and Presbyterian elder, to resign as postmaster general and function as a glorified public relations front man for the movie industry. But if government per se was deflected from direct interference and influence, politics and politicians were not. Politicians often saw political advantage in obtaining the endorsements of popular film actors, and many film actors and others in the industry enjoyed playing at politics. The two-way direction of this influence is illustrated by the elections of John F. Kennedy, who courted and received political influence from friendly film actors, such as Frank Sinatra and Marilyn Monroe. There is little doubt that the acting career of Ronald Reagan was responsible for his successful runs for the governorship of California and ultimately the presidency. Politics also figured significantly in the involvement of the film industry in the US war effort during World War II. Film actors entertained troops, and others, such as James Stewart and Wayne Morris, served with distinction in combat. Hollywood made training films for the armed forces with propagandistic features, including Wake Island (1941) and Lifeboat (1944), and directors, such as William Wyler and Frank Capra, made morale-boosting documentaries. Films were made that vilified our enemies, particularly Japan and Germany, and portrayed our allies, including England, France, and the Scandinavian countries, in positive terms. Ironically, it was Hollywood’s affirmative portrayal of one of the US allies in World War II, the Soviet Union, that was subsequently twisted into charges that the film industry was un-American. The House Un-American Activities Committee

In 1945 the US Chamber of Commerce issued a report on Communist Infiltration in the United States that warned that Communists were trying to take over the American entertainment industry. (The product 169

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of the film industry was not constitutionally protected under the First Amendment.) The committee members were convinced that Hollywood, with many foreign actors, and directors, as well as liberal artistic types, was full of subversives with Communist connections and sympathies. In fact several had been members of the party, especially in the 1930s when Communists were regarded as enemies of fascism, but they did not harbor seditious intentions. It was not illegal to be a member of the Communist Party, and many people in the film industry who were brought to testify admitted their membership or at least having gone to meetings. However the committee wanted witnesses to “name names,” or inform on other people, many who were their friends or coworkers. Politically ambitious “red-baiters,” like Senator Joseph McCarthy, gloried in the opportunity to interrogate Hollywood bigwigs and famous actors and directors. HUAC originated as the Special Committee on Un-American Activities, a temporary committee chaired by Congressman Martin Dies of Texas from 1938 to 1944. In 1945, Congressman John Rankin of Mississippi, whose motives were also influenced by his anti-Semitism, moved to make it a permanent standing committee. HUAC quickly became one of the most controversial political organizations in American history. After the war conservative segments in Congress began a purge of people and institutions they considered subversive. This was a broader movement rather than one simply focused on the film industry. During the peak years of the Cold War (1947–56), HUAC pursued an aggressive campaign of anticommunism through a series of highly publicized hearings. These hearings were described by journalist Victor S. Navasky22 as “degradation ceremonies,” for their blatant aim of exposing and destroying the careers of people suspected of having Communist Party affiliations or associations. Because the entertainment industry had been an active focus of Communist Party recruitment, Hollywood became the committee’s prime target. The congressional hearings into Hollywood’s alleged un-American activity began in 1947, when ten objecting witnesses, who came to be called the “Hollywood Ten,” were cited for contempt when they refused to answer the notorious question, “Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?” Although many did name names, among them director Elia Kazan and writer Bud Schulberg, both of whom had flirted with leftist groups earlier, as well as actors Sterling Hayden, Robert Taylor, and many others, who 170

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were widely condemned, their complicity was often complex, and not necessarily malevolent. After the House of Representatives upheld the contempt charges in November 1947, the Hollywood Ten lost their jobs. Later they were given prison sentences ranging from six months to a year, and the US Supreme Court voted not to hear their appeal in the spring of 1950. The group then went to prison. A second wave of HUAC hearings began in Hollywood on September 17, 1951. In the following decade of hearings, many excellent careers were ruined by blacklisting. Rather than face such consequences by not cooperating, many witnesses chose to become HUAC informers, volunteering the names of people suspected of engaging in Communist Party activities. At one time there were more than three hundred names added to the lists. The studios were also threatened with loss of financial support from banks if they did not cooperate with HUAC, so they, too, capitulated and informed employees that a refusal to cooperate meant their employment would be terminated. The fear of being blacklisted created an underground system in which some writers worked under assumed or false names; others fronted for blacklisted writers. The Hollywood Blacklist lasted over fifteen years, during which time no blacklisted writer received a motion picture credit. This continued until 1960, when actor-producer Kirk Douglas and producerdirector Otto Preminger gave screen credit to Dalton Trumbo on their respective films, Spartacus and Exodus. HUAC was renamed the Internal Securities Committee in 1969 and finally abolished in 1975. Perhaps no other film elucidates some of the contradictions of American society in the way that On the Waterfront (1954) does. It is a film that easily might not have been made at all. Its two principle creators, director Elia Kazan and screenwriter Bud Shulberg, had given cooperative testimony at the HUAC hearings and had become, for many in the filmmaking community personae non grata. On the other hand, had they refused to cooperate they might have been blacklisted and, like many of their brethren, prevented from working at all. Moreover, the subject of the film, corruption in labor unions, was not one that Hollywood production companies preferred to approach for fear of upsetting union members in general. But the story, which came from a series of newspaper articles in the New York Post in 1948, was compelling, and the similarities to the issues raised by the HUAC hearings themselves added further temptation (and prospect for exoneration). 171

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Ultimately, however, it was a taut screenplay, artful direction, and award-winning performances that made the film the recipient of eight Academy Awards in 1954. On the Waterfront is the story of corruption in the New York docks’ longshoremen’s union in the later 1940s. Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb) is the gangster union boss and Charley “the Gent” Malloy (Rod Steiger) his crooked assistant. Charley’s brother Terry (Marlon Brando), an ex-prizefighter and longshoreman, runs dirty errands for Friendly for handouts. Terry keeps pigeons on a rooftop and is the hero of young gang members. The story opens when Terry is given the task of setting up Joey Doyle, a longshoreman who has talked to officials about the corrupt union. Joey goes to Terry’s rooftop pigeon coop, and two of Friendly’s goons push him off the roof to his death as Terry watches in shock, remarking “they were only gonna lean on him a little.” Edie Doyle (Eva Marie Saint) is the murdered man’s sister and the daughter of a longshoreman. She is home from school and attending a church meeting is the aftermath of her brother’s death when the meeting is violently broken up by Friendly’s thugs. Terry, who was spying on the meeting, meets her there and protects her. It is the beginning of his attraction to her, and he begins to feel love and guilt. She introduces him to Father Barry (Karl Malden), who further troubles Terry’s conscience. Another longshoreman, “Kayo” Dugan (Pat Henning), is finally pushed to cooperate with the crime commission investigating the union, but a huge packing crate is dropped on him. The priest gives Kayo his last rites, then makes an impassioned speech urging the longshoremen to go to the authorities to tell what they know about union corruption. Terry is begins to feel worse about his relationship with Friendly. Later Father Barry gently leads him into cooperating with Glover (Leif Erickson) and other members of the crime commission. When it looks like Terry might become a pigeon (the pigeon metaphor plays throughout the film), Johnny orders Charley to talk with his brother and get him straight. They have a brotherly talk in the now-famous taxi scene. Charley tells Terry he could have been another Billy Conn in the ring if his manager hadn’t been so bad. Terry responds: “It wasn’t him, Charley. It was you. Remember that night in the Garden and you came down to my dressing room and you said 172

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‘Kid, this ain’t your night. We’re going for the price on Wilson.’ You remember that? This ain’t your night! My night! I could have taken Wilson apart! So what happens? He gets a title shot outdoors in a ballpark and I get a one-way ticket to Palookaville! You was my brother, Charley, you should’ve looked out for me just a little bit so I wouldn’t have to take them dives for the short-end money.”

Terry Malloy (Brando) after his beating by longshoremen thugs.© Columbia Pictures, 1954

Charley gives up trying to convince his brother. The next time Terry sees his brother, Charley is hanging from a longshoreman’s hook, his cashmere coat riddled with bullet holes. Terry is now bent on killing Friendly with a gun, but is he talked out of it by Father Barry. Barry exhorts him to testify instead. The next day Terry goes before the crime commission and rats on the union. Johnny tells Terry he’s a “dead man,” who won’t be able to get work in any job where his union has influence The next day on the docks, everyone gets work but Terry. Terry runs down a gangplank to a barge where the union has its office and challenges Friendly. Terry is viciously beaten when Friendly’s henchmen 173

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join in the fray. The longshoremen remain idle while Terry is being beaten, but then claim that they will not go to work without him. Terry struggles to his feet, half-conscious, and staggers up the gangplank, making his way through the crowd toward the warehouse and past the big boss, who is standing in the doorway. The men follow him, and Johnny Friendly is left screaming curses and threats at the workers. On the Waterfront was accused of being anti-American and denounced by union leaders. It was mired in controversy at the time of its release, but it has become a classic. It depicts the gritty tenements and docks of the city and life and work in appropriate black and white photography. Kazan employs the grammar of filmmaking with great skill and cleverness (e.g., the scene in which Edie’s scream is synchronous with the ships shrieking horn), and he draws great performances even from bit actors. The film deservedly earned its acclaim. Yet the issues raised by HUAC and On the Waterfront linger on in the film industry. With the success of the film, Kazan felt he had avenged himself with those who criticized him for his naming names. He considered that the Communist threat trumpeted by the committee was a real one and merited his cooperation. Yet, at an Academy Awards ceremony many years later, when an achievement award was given to the elderly director, there were many in the audience who turned their backs on him.23 The wounds of politics heal slowly in Hollywood, and that they are displayed on film seems to lay them open from time to time. In fact, the HUAC debacle has the elements of good drama: strong passions, intrigue, betrayal, and ruined lives—themes that Hollywood, from time to time, enjoys resurrecting. In The Way We Were (1973), though not the major focus of the film, which is a love story, the film treats the HUAC hearings and their effects on friendships, careers, and marriages is explored. Robert Redford plays WASPish and sporty Hubbell Gardner, who falls in love with leftist social activist, Katie Morosky (Barbra Streisand), when they are at college. They marry and Gardner becomes a Hollywood screenwriter. Their political differences are exposed by the HUAC hearings, but they go beyond that to their differences in social class as well as politics, and the marriage comes apart. In Guilty by Suspicion (1991) Robert De Niro plays fictional director David Merrill, who refuses to betray his friends to the HUAC witchhunt. Like many real film personalities, Merrill went to some party meetings in the 1930s, when it was fashionable in Hollywood to embrace antifascist groups, but he didn’t get along with the members. 174

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Nevertheless Merrill finds he is pressured to name names if he wants a film project to go through. He refuses to name a friend and so begins his downfall by being blacklisted. In The Majestic (2001) Peter Appleton (Jim Carrey) had the misfortune of being pulled unwittingly into a Communist meeting while in college, and he pays dearly for it when congressional commie hunters discover it after he has become a reasonably successful screenwriter. Appleton becomes an amnesiac after drinking his troubles away and having an auto accident. He finds that he has a ready-made identity in that of a missing in action war hero of the small town that adopts him. Appleton falls in love with the MIA’s girlfriend, helps restore the town’s movie theater, and after Commie hunters track him down, delivers a stirring defense of his rights at his hearing. Hollywood may yet find another story it can mine out of the bad old days.

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Notes

This is a dynamic particularly pronounced in many developing countries, where, as urbanization increases, tensions between traditional and religious authorities and new, urban secular sources of political power are often socially disruptive. Chief among these in recent times, although hardly alone, has been the case of Iran, particularly as evidenced by the Iranian Revolution of the late 1970s. Stanley, 1961. Clapp, 1978. Muskat, 1971. Woods, 1898, 279–80. Although some might well argue today that the influence of lobbyists and now, in the aftermath of the Citizens United decision of the US Supreme Court, the influence of corporate money in politics might rival the corruption of the machine politics of old. At one time Mayor Richard Daley, of Chicago, could provide as many as nine thousand jobs to those faithful to his party, a source of immense political advantage that, along with his chairmanship of the Cook County Democratic Party, insured his long tenure as mayor. See also Banfield and Wilson, 1963; Clifford, 1975. Woods, 1898, 276. These were newspaper writers and others who wrote about the conditions of corruption in the machine and also exposed dangerous and unhealthful conditions in the city that were partly attributable to the practices of the machine. Although it does not deal with urban politics per se, a film that presents an interesting point of view on American politics in general is Frank Capra’s Meet John Doe (1941), which relates a tale with a strong message about the prospects for populist political movements being exploited by fascist interests. Capra, always interested in the common man in the American idiom, 175

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seized upon a story about a young female newspaper reporter (Barbara Stanwyck), who writes a column in which she concocts a fictitious author of a letter of protest against an unjust political and social system. The “John Doe” of the letter, which reads: Dear Miss Mitchell: Four years ago, I was fired out of my job. Since then, I haven’t been able to get another one. At first, I was sore at the state administration because it’s on account of the slimy politics here. We have all this unemployment. But in looking around, it seems the whole world is goin’ to pot. So in protest, I’m goin’ to commit suicide by jumping off the City Hall roof. Signed, a disgusted American citizen. John Doe.

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14. 15.

16. 17. 176

The ruse creates great interest and many men come forward to claim they are the author of the letter, allowing Editor Mitchell to choose an ex-baseball player and homeless person, John Willoughby (Gary Cooper), to impersonate John Doe. Doe preaches charity, kindness, and a doctrine of brotherly love, and he instigates the formation of “John Doe Clubs” across the country. But this is all exposed and exploited by a fascist organization run by D.B. Norton (Edward Arnold), and a disgraced John Doe is thrown out by his disappointed admirers. In the end he decides that he will, in fact, carry out the threat of the John Doe letter and leap to his death from the roof of city hall. Only common Americans, awakened from the false promises of fascism, can save him. Meet John Doe seems like a very dated film when viewed today in the contemporary American context, but viewers might find more threads of commonality than they would expect with the circumstances of America in the 1930s and contemporaneous worries about the fragile state of democracy. The film was actually shot in Cincinnati, Ohio. It is also worthy of note that Sayles heightens the sense of political and social interrelationships through a cinematic grammar that interweaves the fates of the denizens of Hudson City through the masterful employment of overlapping scenes. The action of one scene connects to the next for the most part without fades, dissolves, or cuts, by bleeding the action of scenes into one another. New York City seems to have a predilection for scandals among the privileged classes. A similar circus revolved around the case of Robert Chambers, a playboy in the debutante crowd who was convicted for murdering his girlfriend in Central Park. Clapp, 1991, 2. Polanski’s pregnant wife and actress, Sharon Tate, was one of the victims of the murders of the infamous Manson family in 1969. Later, the Polish-born director fled the United States in 1979 to avoid legal proceedings because of his sexual involvement with an underage girl, a liaison with some similarity to that of the Noah Cross character in Chinatown. Jowett, 1972, 115. Clapp, 1988.

Politics, the City, and the Cinema

18.

19. 20. 21.

22. 23.

As the audiences expanded, movie theaters did also. The first movie palace, NYC’s City Theater, was erected around 1909, followed by the Regent in Harlem (seating 1,800), the Strand (capacity 3,000) in Times Square, and the Capitol Theatre (capacity 4,000) on Broadway. Eventually, plush movie palaces arrived in all the major American cities until the advent of talkies. These were followed by the establishment of proprietary theater chains by both independent promoters and movie studios themselves. The “Big Five” chains of the 1920s and 1930s, Paramount, Warner Bros., Loew’s (which owned MGM), 20th Century Fox, and RKO, were all owned by major studios, which later became an antitrust issue. Wittman, 1979, 37. Anger, 1965. In 1922 another case of Hollywood scandal became national news with the mysterious death of a renowned film director. Another star, one who had acted with Fatty Arbuckle, was implicated. Mable Normand was noted for her wild all-night parties. Rumors circulated that she was addicted to drugs and sometimes she disappeared for days at a time. In 1922 director William Desmond Taylor was mysteriously murdered. Normand was romantically linked with the director at the time. Since she was one of the last persons to see him alive, she was dragged into the case, and although proved innocent, her image career was ruined. Naming Names, 1991. Another film that exposed political contradictions and rifts in American society was Spartacus. One of the screenwriters on the film was Dalton Trumbo, of the Hollywood Ten. When the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars took to the streets protesting at movie theaters to try to convince filmgoers to boycott the movie, they were, paradoxically, protesting a film that celebrated the revolt of slaves over a dictatorial and imperialistic political system, in effect, a film that presented values that were consonant with those of America.

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10 Mean Streets and Cities of Night And a strong angel took up a stone, as it were a great millstone, and cast it into the sea, saying, “With this violence will Babylon, the great city, be overthrown, and will not be found anymore.” Revelation 18:21

The subject of violence, in either the city or the cinema, extends far beyond the scope of its immediate consideration. Perhaps no other aspect of human affairs is so debated and misunderstood, yet so pervasive, as is violence. Indeed, discussion can sometimes progress no further than the definition of the term itself. Why, except at the most primal level, there is so much intraspecies violence within the somewhat misnamed species Homo sapiens sapiens continues to perplex the best minds. Violence, and its etiology, may occur just about anywhere one looks for it, in the family, the workplace, schools, and of course, on the streets. Prime suspects in the cause of violence is the American city include both the media and the city itself. It was reported many years ago when the first feature motion picture was screened that many in the audience were as much shocked by its content as they were awed by the novelty of movies. The film was Edwin Porter’s 1903 film The Great Train Robbery, a western. By today’s standards it wasn’t more sophisticated than an amateur home video. What shocked many of the viewers however was that the movie contained the first scene of a dramatized killing, a shooting. There was no sound of the gun, or cry of agony, in this silent movie, no red blood showed on the black and white film, no slow motion of the clumsy actor tumbling into death. Yet, despite the brief scene’s lack of realism, many thought the actor had actually been shot and killed in 179

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the process of making the movie. The line between real and imagined violence had been smudged. The first feature film might have been a western, but today crime and violence are primarily associated with cities. Even a cursory perusal of television and film fare shows a dominance of series and movies that situate dramas of murder, mayhem, and other malicious doings in urban settings. The perpetrators might be gangsters and gangbangers, serial killers, anonymous loners, scheming business associates, terrorists, government rogues, bad cops, and, of course, family members. The evening news and documentaries on urban woes further advances the conclusion that cities are dangerous environments full of a lot of violent people. Cities might, some conclude from media’s representations, be places that cause, or at least promote, crime and violence. Ironically, it is media itself that is often indicted as a cause of crime and violence. The very same motion pictures and news footage that portray crime and violence in cities are regarded by many as accomplices in the fostering or perpetuation of criminal and violent behavior. Such causal chains are often conflated and convoluted. Media, as is well understood, is able to, and often does, distort reality, choosing what to focus upon, and framing it for effects that are well beyond an exclusive concern for truthful representation. The cinematic techniques of realistic representation itself are employed in the service of fiction and misrepresentation. Is the media simply reflecting what violence it sees, or, in adding its commercial and even political motives, enhancing and exploiting violence? Much the same might be asked of cities. Cities, because they are places in which social differences are juxtaposed, are where opportunities are greater for crime, where materialism is flaunted. Cities are places of change, and change often begets violence; neighborhoods that were once the domain of one immigrant group are threatened by the arrival of another. Cities are places of competition, and competition often begets violence. So it may not be cities themselves that are the root cause of crime and violence, but social differences, change, and competition, among other things. Crime and violence can be found in small towns and rural areas, often in greater frequency per capita than they occur in larger cities, but these places lack the media attention that is focused on crime and violence in the city. Statistically, cities contribute the bulk of the nation’s violence. But while there is a considerable amount of urban violence in America 180

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(seven times more homicides per capita than in Great Britain and Europe, for example), other nations far exceed America in political violence. European wars in just this century resulted in millions of deaths, the Holocaust, and interethnic violence have been the worst expressions of human violent behavior. Moreover, not only has political violence—in the partition of India in 1947, the revolution in China in 1949, the various wars of independence or subsequent struggles for political power in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and South and Central America—produced far more death and social disruption than American urban violence, but these countries are far less urbanized than America.1 The high association of cities with other types of crime also does not bear up under scrutiny. For example, a recent news report cites that a study by the National Centre on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) at Columbia University found that: “Eighth graders in rural America are 83 percent likelier than those in urban centers to use crack cocaine, 50 percent likelier to use cocaine, 34 percent likelier to smoke marijuana, 29 percent likelier to drink alcohol and 70 percent likelier to get drunk, . . . [and] were 104 percent more likely to use amphetamines, including methamphetamine.”2 Other characteristics of urbanism that have been associated with crime and violence are density and crowding of population, discrimination, and social anonymity. Studies conducted with laboratory rats have been employed to demonstrate social breakdown under conditions of high density and overcrowding. However, human populations have proved to be more complex, and populations in highly urbanized countries, such as the Netherlands, Hong Kong, and Japan, have much lower rates of interpersonal crime and violence than the United States.3 As to social anonymity, it is true that the city is a place with higher proportions of unrelated individuals and strangers, but the fact is that, despite widely publicized incidents of mass murders, serial murders, and other incidents by socially alienated or disturbed individuals,4 the majority of interpersonal violence takes place between persons who are known, and often related by blood or marriage, to one another. Related to social anonymity is social heterogeneity. But here again, the city is only culpable by association for interethnic and interracial violence. While cities are places where physical contact among different groups takes place more frequently, the causes for racism, intolerance, and bigotry (which are as endemic to rural areas and 181

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small towns as anywhere) cannot be assigned to urbanism. Indeed, it can be argued that cities, by expanding opportunities for social advancement, may do more to reduce incidents of violence among them.5 In sum, cities are places where crime and violence do indeed occur, but not in significantly higher proportions than elsewhere. But they are places where crime and violence may get greater attention because they are where most of the mass media is located. Cities are also places where acts of crime and violence are more thoroughly chronicled and recorded, and hence may be places that give the appearance of being more criminogenic. They are also places of change, and change typically creates social and institutional stress, some of which becomes expressed in antisocial behavior. They are also places where the differences between the “haves” and “have-nots” may be more juxtaposed and obvious. These are social characteristics that have association with crime that are debatable, but they perhaps have an even stronger association with the requisites for drama, and the crime film is proof that as far as the cinema of the American city is concerned, crime pays. Crime on the Screens

From the very beginning, American cinema has subject to the accusation that films are harmful to society. The notion that the very representation of various behaviors on the screen would invite their imitation by a psychologically malleable viewing audience has been a credible hypothesis to films social critics. One student of violence in films has written that such views are not limited to segments of the censorious public. The view that movies are inherently violent is at the heart of socalled apparatus theories, which emphasize film’s supposed ability to force malignant ideological effects upon viewers. Indeed, it is a view that has surfaced again and again in the history of what we call “film theory,” bridging otherwise opposed theoretical frameworks. Sergei Eisenstein famously insisted that montage, with its percussive, violent power, was the essence of the film medium, and championed radically new kinds of films that would more fully exploit the medium’s capacity to force its violent effects—visceral, emotional, intellectual—on viewers. Less, famously, Eisenstein believed that every frame of every film had, as it were, the blood of the world on it, due to the violence of the camera’s original act of tearing pieces of the world from their “natural” place.6 182

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Despite such theoretical notions, the relationship between media and violence remains much mooted, poised between objective academic studies and its uses for political advantage, and also between the poles of whether violence is abetted by media or merely reflecting it. It is less debatable, however, about violence being very much a part of life; there is an equal and parallel debate about whether it is endemic to human nature. To be sure, some of the greatest works of art would not exist if there were no violence, of if art avoided its representation. From The Great Train Robbery to the Godfather, Hollywood has long known that crime pays, and it pays well. The advantage of the crime film is that drama is fundamentally about conflict, and the crime film, with its inherent dualities of good and evil, right and wrong, is conflict in its clearest relief. And while there are indeed crimes that do not entail violence, it is violence that give dramatic conflict its action, and of course, a methodology for conflict resolution. The only close rival to the crime film’s dominance in cinematic offerings is the love story. The western provided an apt setting for movies with violence, but the winning of the West and its virtually lawless and native-settled outer territories, seemed almost natural settings for violence-drive dramas. The city, the engine of civilization, seemed a less apt setting for violent fare. But the American city, fashioned by political machines and populated by a Babel of immigrants, its territory as valuable and up-for-grabs as any Western lands, proved to be no peaceable kingdom. With the addition of vaulting ambitions and the fuel of historical circumstances, like Prohibition, the city took over cinema screens as the prime locus for the crime film. With such a prominent and enduring genre any discussion of films of crime and violence in the American city is necessarily highly selective. Mobsters, City Boys, and Wiseguys

Crime and violence on American streets obviously predates its portrayal on screen. Indeed, the fact that only recently, with the release of Gangs of New York in 2002, has major cinematic attention been given to urban violence well before America became predominantly urban. Young street toughs foraged an existence out of the streets of London and New York in the nineteenth century, as chronicled in works of Dickens and Edward Ashbury, respectively, but their representations on the screen were not contemporaneous with their 183

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social period, and hence they were left to receive cinematic treatment as period pieces. Chicago mobster Alphonse Capone was still alive when Edward G. Robinson’s portrait of him in Little Caesar (1930) was released. Robinson established a formula for the swaggering, ruthless wiseguy that ruled the streets of the American cinema since the early days of the Depression. Sociologists would later hypothesize that his archetype would fill countless young men from city slums with grand criminal ambitions.7 It is noteworthy that Rico Bandello, the film’s title character, is, in the opening scene, a small town thug, sitting in a diner with his cohort and friend Joe Massara (Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.), reading the newspaper about the assassination of an underworld kingpin, and considering heading to the big city to make it big. “I could do all the things that fella does, and more, only I never got my chance. Why, what’s there to be afraid of? And when I get in a tight spot, I shoot my way out of it. Why sure. Shoot first and argue afterward. You know, this game ain’t for guys that’s soft!” Rico says. All it takes is audacity, and the city is for the taking.8

Public enemy James Cagney. Tough guys rule the crime screen. © Warner Bros., 1931 184

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As with most gangland movies, the action is primarily internal to the competition among mobs competing for urban turf, rackets, and lucrative enterprises like prohibition liquor. Much like the real events on American city streets, such violence was mostly a sideshow to the average urbanite unless they were caught in the crossfire. Little Caesar did not employ graphic depictions of violence, although Rico meets his end when a police machine gun takes him out after his refusal to surrender. His last line as he lies dying is “Mother of Mercy! Is this the end of Rico?” It wasn’t. A genre had been born, and Robinson would be back terrorizing cinema cities. Another bantam wiseguy was James Cagney, who played the title role in Public Enemy, released a year later. The size and tough demeanor of the actors wasn’t the only similarity. Again, most of the violent action was off screen (although Public Enemy is more violent and tougher that Little Caesar), and Cagney, too, was playing a role based loosely on a real-life mobster, Hymie Weiss. But this time the city is definitely Chicago and, although the film opens with Tom Powers (Cagney) as a young street kid, it depicts a devolution into a life of crime in the days of Prohibition. The violence of Public Enemy is not confined to the battles among the mobs of the city. In fact the most memorable scene from the film is an act of domestic violence: In the often shown scene, Tom, in a fit of anger and frustration, shoves a grapefruit half into the face of his girlfriend, Kitty (Mae Clarke), before he spurns her for another woman, Gwen (Jeanne Harlow). Later in the film Tom slaps another woman for reminding him that they had made love while he was drunk. In the finale Tom engages in a furious shoot-out with his gang rivals, killing most of them, but taking wounds himself, and he staggers out falling half-dead into a gutter flowing with rain water. But he still has one more scene to play: he is kidnapped by other rivals from the hospital, and delivered, wrapped like a mummy in bloody bandages, dead, to his brother’s house. Despite the ending there was concern by the studio that the Public Enemy might be a bad role model, and Warner Brothers decided to include the following statement after the opening credits: “It is the ambition of the authors of ‘The Public Enemy’ to honestly depict an environment that exists today in a certain strata of American life, rather than glorify the hoodlum or the criminal. While the story of ‘The Public Enemy’ is essentially a true story, all names and characters appearing herein, are purely fictional.” 185

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Such disclaimers were, beyond the concerns of censorship, an indirect recognition of the emergence of what one film historian refers to a “city boys.” By the 1920s America had become a predominantly urban nation. More and more of its youth would not be raised on farms and in small towns but in cities. Young men in particular would be influenced by role models that came from outside the traditional family, models that would be, as the term came into common usage, “street wise.” Out of these circumstances, Robert Sklar, writing of the film careers of legends of the genre—James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, and John Garfield—describes the emergence of what might be the first urban cinema antiheroes. This figure was not merely a gangster or a tough guy, but was rooted in the mannerisms of urban male street life. He was a fictional construction—drawn from, but not necessarily similar to, young urban men in American society. . . . The City Boy was a product of performance, genre, and ideology, transmuted into popular entertainment. He did not so much mirror social life, if contemporary observers are to be believed, as create model for life itself to imitate. Arising from the teeming ethnic polyglot of the modern industrial city—especially New York—he began playing a central cultural role with the more or less simultaneous occurrence, in the late 1920s, of talking pictures and the Great Depression.9

Bogart’s classic portrayal of city boy “Baby Face” Martin, who pulls himself out of the backstreets of the city through crime in Dead End (1937), is disapproved in both his violent death in the film, as well as the double entendre of the film’s title. But both he and Garfield perhaps became better known for their roles in film noir, discussed below, where urban violence received, if it can be said, more refined treatment and moral complexity. The mobster period, now fading into a blend of urban history and mythology, continues to serve as a rich mine for urban drama. The heady historical confluences of the emergence of the Great Depression and sound in motion pictures in 1929, created not only a dramatic national social drama but also expanded the prospects for its narrative.10 However, today, the stories now take on a certain operatic familiarity. Numerous actors have followed E. G. Robinson’s snarling Capone portrayal, among them Rod Steiger and Robert De Niro. Much like opera, the interest in the classic mobster era subject is often in terms of the nuances of character portrayal, or, of greater 186

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interest to the urbanist, in the re-creation of lost periods of American urbanism. In films such as The Untouchables (1987) and, more recently The Road to Perdition (2002), production and set designers have found locations and constructed sets, and cinematographers have created atmospherics of great urban authenticity. The attention to details in Road to Perdition in rendering the Hopperesque gloom of houses and streets in Rock Island and Chicago evoke a 1930s Midwestern urbanism that not only enhances the narrative but also shows, in the best manner, the conquest of time that only the cinema can achieve. Similar achievements, in films such as Gangs of New York, The Godfather, and Hester Street, among others, constitute a form of urban preservation that can only be made possible by writers, directors, and other production personnel who not only aspire to great filmmaking, but also have an abiding interest, if not love, for the American city. At the narrative level mob pictures have, beyond gangland violence, focused upon character relationships. Interestingly, several of the major films—The Godfather, Gangs of New York, The Untouchables, and The Road to Perdition—have each in their own way focused upon father-son relationships, particularly as to the ways in which sons of violent men are forced to repeat, or repent for, the sins of their fathers.11 Mr. Scorsese’s Neighborhood

Although the mobster period of St. Valentine’s Day Massacres and machine-gun wielding hit men riding on Duesenberg running boards through city streets is largely over, except for period re-creations, or even the settling of family scores in scenes like the now famous Godfather baptism killings, gang mayhem on city streets is still to be found in urban films. The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II, are, as one writer has put it, about the “aristocrats” of crime, “building their empires and plotting against one another.”12 The tapestry of the Godfather saga is woven of a warp of cities and villages, in several states and countries, and a weft of decades of major political events. The Mafia aristocracy, with it seigneur Godfather, conducts its affairs from behind the guarded manorial estates of Long Island. But the working end of the Mafia is in the streets of the inner city, where a host of vassals squeeze its tribute from protection rackets, 187

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gambling, prostitution, and drugs. New York’s Little Italy neighborhood figures in both The Godfather and Mean Streets (1973). In The Godfather: Part II it is the neighborhood in which the young Vito Corleone (Robert De Niro) settles in the 1910s and begins his rise to power. The streets teem with immigrant Italians, pushcart peddlers, and a swaggering Don Fanucci (Gaston Moschin), the local Black Hand extortionist that Corleone assassinates during the festival of the Feast of San Gennaro. Vito Corleone rises from those rather humble beginnings to the legendary status he holds on the annals of American cinema. Mean Streets13 remains contained within director and writer Martin Scorsese’s Mulberry Street environs of Little Italy, a neighborhood to which he is native. None of his characters have the grandeur and nobility of Vito Corleone, rather they are the small time chisellers, punks, and loan sharks that prey on the neighborhood and often one another. Charlie (Harvey Keitel) is a small-time hood, who works for his uncle, making collections and reclaiming bad debts, but he struggles with his conscience. He has a job where he should not think so much, especially about the morality of his actions. That is not the case with his behavioral opposite and “goombah,” Johnny Boy (Robert De Niro), who is a foul, violent, but likeable screw up who is always ready to brawl. The release of Mean Streets followed The Godfather by one year, and the film is the story of what the New York Mafiosi might have been had it been told from the perspective of one of the minions of the Corleone family, the unsung nephews who are only big shots in the environs of their neighborhoods. Inner-city neighborhoods, of varying ethnicity, are still full of these wiseguys. Not capable of rising above their status, or of grander ambitions, they spend much of their frustrations in endless verbal and physical violence among each other. It never seems to lead anywhere because they really have nowhere else to go unless they can rise within the hierarchy. In the parlance that has now become familiar to movie audiences, the ambition of the wiseguy is to become a “made guy,” and then there may be no way out of the neighborhood than into the “gated communities” of a witness protection program. Scorsese refrains his understanding of inner-city neighborhoods with Goodfellas (1990), but his wiseguys this time are both more ethnically ecumenical and more menacing. 188

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“Goodfellas” Joe Pesci, Ray Liotta, and Robert De Niro with a bag of the “take.” © Warner Bros., 1990

Neighborhood role models influenced a young Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) to aspire to the life of a wiseguy. From the window of his apartment he watches the activities of the social club across the street, where low-level wiseguys flash cash, sport with girls, drive hot cars, and seem to have a way with the cops. Goodfellas is based on a book about the real life of Henry Hill,14 who is quoted as having claimed: “At the age of twelve my ambition was to become a gangster. To be a wiseguy. Becoming a wiseguy was better than being the President of the United States. To be a wiseguy was to own the world.” Hill worked his way up from an errand boy for Don Cicero (Paul Sorvino) to fellow wiseguy with Jimmy (the Gent) Conway (Robert De Niro), a man who loves the sheer joy of theft, and Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci) who is as entertaining as he is volatile. Goodfellas is an intimate look into the lifestyle of wiseguys, a life that supports itself on car theft, hijackings, smuggling, scams, and hustles, and one in which violence is always just below the surface. Things begin to turn bad for this crew when Tommy nearly kicks to death a made guy,15 whom he later has to finish off with a carving knife. The film is also famous for the scene in a nightclub where Tommy terrorizes Henry for an innocent remark in which Henry says Tommy “is funny.”16 189

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The scene is gripping for its ambiguity. That ambiguity made clear to Hill that he didn’t “own the world,” but his world was the mob, and the mob owned him. The only way out of that world was betrayal and the anonymity of the witness protection program. Choreography of Violence

On the West Coast, Reservoir Dogs (1992) assembles a cast of impromptu goodfellas to pull a heist of a diamond shipment in Los Angeles. This off-beat group of strangers, assembled by Joe Cabot (Lawrence Tierney), to pull one job and disperse. They are given names like “Mr. White” (Harvey Keitel), “Mr. Orange” (Tim Roth), “Mr. Blond” (Michael Madsen), and “Mr. Pink” (Steve Buscemi). The title of the film doubtless refers to the vicious infighting that ensues. The anonymity of color names only enhances the distrust they have for one another and the caper descends into some of the most brutal scenes every filmed. Director Quentin Tarantino, who appears in the film as “Mr. Brown,” pushes the level of violence, often blending it with a dark humor that pushes film violence to the edge of absurdity. As with his subsequent L.A. film, Pulp Fiction (1994), violence is choreographed into characters and scenes that involve not just the acts themselves, but zany circumstances and casual amorality. In Reservoir Dogs, in which much of the action takes place in an abandoned warehouse where 1970s pop hits are playing on the radio, Harvey Keitel bleeds profusely and protractedly from a gunshot wound to the stomach, often delivering lines as though his problem was really indigestion. Keitel also performs a sanguineous role in Pulp Fiction, as a professional cleanup man engaged to remove blood and brain segments for a car after Vincent Vega (John Travolta) accidentally kills a passenger in his car with a handgun gesture. Both films appear to raise violence to a style. In Reservoir Dogs, Mr. Blond tortures a hapless bound up policeman taking and excruciatingly long time on getting to slicing off his ear, although the viewer is spared the actual butchery. In Pulp Fiction hit men Vincent and Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) are on their way to deal with some yuppie drug dealers, but they causally discuss the pressing question of what the French call “Quarter Pounder” hamburgers. Other sequences involve long scenes of tormenting people with pointed guns while dialogue that seems incongruent with the action is delivered. The effect is often a curious and provocative blending of humor and brutality that can 190

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produce laughs at the Eisensteinian juxtapositions of violence and the mundane. But it is an uneasy laugh. Good Cop, Bad Cop

America has a long history of a love-hate relationship with the police. A popular early comedy series, The Keystone Kops, poked fun at them, and implied their lack of efficacy in their clumsy antics. Chaplin, too, often satirized cops, as he did, savagely and hilariously, in Easy Street (1917). With their notorious love for the underdog, Americans have cheered countless films, from comedies to crime films, in which the cops are outdone, caught in corruption, or undone by their own bureaucratic intransigence. The portrayal of cops has been an equivocal one, ranging from the cop as hero, to antihero, to even outright villain. To counter antagonists and antiheroes as formidable as Don Vito Corleone, Mike Sullivan, Bill the Butcher, and Al Capone, as well as lesser but often more sinister crime figures, it is sometimes necessary to fashion characters with matching audacity. Steve McQueen plays one of the first rogue cops to use the city as a means of expressing his questionable means of law enforcement in Bullitt (1968). Frank Bullitt’s frustration over the political intrigue that interferes with his search for the killer of his friend, as well as the shooting of a witness that he was assigned to protect, is used as a basis for his pursuit of the killers with little regard for the safety of the citizens of the rest of the city. His endeavors entail a lengthy car pursuit for which the film is most remembered. For several minutes Bullitt’s throaty, roaring muscle car launches off the crowns of San Francisco hills, skids around corners at high speeds, and otherwise, since the point of view frequently cuts to that of a passenger in the rear seat, provides the viewer with one of the great thrill rides in the history of cinema. Bullitt formed part of the template of a series of crime films involving irascible cops who hold little regard for the rights of either suspects or urban citizens. Dirty Harry (1971), with Clint Eastwood in the title role this time, made famous, not reckless driving through San Francisco streets, but the menacing of them with a .44 magnum handgun. Like Frank Bullitt, Harry Callahan, has no respect for politics, the judicial system, or anything that gets in the way of his version of street-corner justice. The trailer for the film announces that “you don’t assign Harry Callahan to a case, you just turn him loose.” Callahan epitomizes the rogue cop that roamed city streets in 1970s crime-thriller films in search of sleazy serial killers, in this case 191

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a deranged hippie who uses a sniper’s rifle to kill several people. His justification usually comes from some great personal psychological wound (his wife was murdered), and from the portrayal of the criminal justice system as a criminal-coddling, politically cynical system that is responsible for the city’s unsafe streets. Callahan is as cold-blooded and ruthless in his dispensing of justice as his criminal foes, and he takes some dark pleasure in executing it, as his now famous line at the film’s conclusion (in which he toys with his now defenseless quarry) suggests: “Go ahead, make my day!” But few rogue cops could match the zealousness of Popeye Doyle (Gene Hackman) in The French Connection (1971), who combined Bullitt’s Grand Prix driving skills with Callahan’s ultra-violent nature to keep the streets of New York clear of a carload of heroin shipped from Marseilles. Based on the exploits of a real New York narcotics officer, Hackman, who won a Best Actor Academy Award for the role, relentlessly pursues foreign drug smugglers and their New York buyers through city locations, such as Bedford-Stuyvesant, Grand Central Station, the Lower East Side, and gritty abandoned industrial sites in Riverside. In a hot pursuit sequence that rivals Bullitt’s, Doyle chases a smuggler who is on the elevated section of the subway, endangering hundreds of drivers and pedestrians, and leaving destruction in his wake in a maniacal pursuit that ends with his shooting and killing his quarry on the platform stairs. Also, as with Bullitt, there is a documentary realism affected by hand-held camera shooting and the use of subtitles in scenes with French dialogue. Hackman’s Popeye Doyle, wearing a “pork pie” hat except when he was undercover as a Santa Claus, and his partner Buddy Russo (Roy Scheider), created a new mold for tough, determined big city cops that inspired a sequel and several television series. A film poster for The French Connection advertises “Doyle is bad news—but a good cop.” Although hooked on drugs in his passion to eliminate them, other cops were hooked in the “take”: the drug traffic in cities that served as a salary enhancement. Two years after release of the French Connection came Serpico (1973), also based on a true story of the NYPD. Frank Serpico (Al Pacino) is a rogue cop of another sort. A loner, obsessive, dressed like a hippie, he is anti-cop not only in his appearance but also in his refusal to join in the corruption of his fellow officers by payoffs and extortion money, making him a pariah and danger to his own kind. Bullitt, Dirty Harry, and The French Connection were films set in their own time and drawn from actual circumstances. L.A. Confidential 192

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(1997), a period film noir piece set in postwar Los Angeles, is based on James Ellroy’s complexly plotted novel. In some ways L.A.’s urban past seems easier to re-create, rather find, to lend great visual authenticity to films like L.A. Confidential. Sprawling and low density, there remain patches of lazy palm-lined streets, sleepy complexes of hacienda-style bungalows, swatches of ethnic enclaves, and of course the mansions of stars and moguls, requiring little more than the addition of period cars and signs to turn back the clock. The plot trigger for L.A. Confidential is, in fact, a murder that takes place in a venerable L.A. haunt, the Formosa Café. From that event flows a labyrinthine plot that is played out by a stellar cast. Faithful to its title, drawn from a Hollywood gossip magazine that focused on the scandals of the stars (in the film renamed “Hush-Hush” and edited by a sleazy character played by Danny DeVito), the movie is peopled by “types”: Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey), a narcotics cop who moonlights as a technical advisor to a television cop show; Bud White (Russell Crowe), an overly aggressive one-man wrecking crew; Ed Exley (Guy Pearce), a straightarrow detective with too much ambition to rise in the department; and Lyn Bracken (Kim Basinger), a prostitute who has been enhanced by a sleazy call girl operator to look like film star Veronica Lake—a stew of characters one might believably find in contemporary, as well as 1950s, L.A. streets. It is also an atmosphere that credibly can turn cops dirty. While Hollywood’s cops and robbers play at “cops and robbers,” sometimes with role reversals and sometimes with little consideration for innocent bystanders, some popular film plots have citizens taking crime prevention and punishment into their own hands. Death Wish (1974) spawned four sequels over the next two decades. Essentially macho, vigilante, revenge films that gained “feel good” popularity in the rising concerns over urban street crime in the 1970s and 1980s,17 they employed (first) the seamy underbelly of New York as a setting for the revenge executions of architect Paul Kersey (Charles Bronson), whose wife and daughter were raped and his wife murdered by marauding thugs. Over the series, Kersey’s rampage, with the blessings of the police, take him on thug hunts to Los Angeles and finally back to New York in the last iteration, the lead actor bloated and aged, much as was the concept.18 Cities of the Night

One particular type of crime film, the film noir crime thriller, merits separate consideration. Although a far larger subject than can be fully 193

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addressed in the present work, film noir was, among other things, a distinctly urban cinema genre that dominated American film, particularly during the 1940s and 1950s, but whose elements have been revived and employed in subsequent films. French critics coined the term film noir to describe a type of film that is distinctive in its dark and somber tone and cynical, desperate mood. The term is derived from roman noir, “black novel,” which was used by French critics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to describe the British Gothic novel. But critics and students of the subject disagree on nearly everything else about film noir, in particular how many films are included in the genre, a range that may be as low as a half-dozen to over two hundred.19 For some the defining characteristic of such films is mood, for others narrative style, or cinematic techniques and expression, or the underlying message of the times, or the ways in which many of these films critique features of American society.20 But a common descriptive is, as their rubric indicates, their darkness. The film noir locus is a place of shadows, of the partially obscured, of dimly lit back alleys and brooding buildings, of murky recesses that also reflect the moral ambiguities of the characters that inhabit them. This was a netherworld of crime and corruption, where both heroes and villains are often loners afflicted with doubt, cynicism, and disillusionment, and a fatal attraction for beautiful, but often destructive, women. Night scenes predominate in film noir, emphasizing deep shadows that accent the mood of tension and foreboding, and interior sets are lighted with strong contrasts between light and dark, using ominous compositions and camera angles.21 The prime setting for the film noir is the city, as: a labyrinth of human construction, as intricate in its steel, glass and stone as the millions of webs of human relationships suspended within its confines. It is a projection of the human imagination, and also a reflection of its inhabitants’ inner lives; and this is a constant theme—really, a premise—of the film noir. In these films, the framing of the city, our visual progression through the labyrinth, is a significant element as plot or characterization. The oblique lighting and camera angling referred to, in both studio and location scenes (especially the night-for-night shoots), reinforce our implicit understanding that the characters’ motives are furtive, ambiguous, and psychologically charged; that their innermost conflicts and desires are rooted in urban claustrophobia and stasis; and that they tread a shadowy borderline between repressed violence and outright vulnerability. Hence the obsessive emphasis on urban settings that 194

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are precarious and dangerous: rooftops, walkways on bridges, railroad tracks, high windows, ledges, towering public monuments (a Hitchcock favorite), unlit alleys, and industrial zones, not to mention trains and cars.22

The city appeared in numerous titles that conveyed various moods and themes. The Captive City (1952), The City That Never Sleeps (1953), The Naked City (1948), Night and the City (1950), The Sleeping City (1950), While the City Sleeps (1956), or titles with streets and alleys, or allusions to the city, such as The Asphalt Jungle (1950), were often immediate indicators of a film in the genre. Other features of film noir are such narrative techniques as the voice-over. In Sunset Boulevard (1950), Double Indemnity (1944), and D.O.A. (1950), the narrators of the films are already dead or dying. The audience discovers that they are often responsible for their own undoing. But The Naked City (1950) opens in documentary style, with an aerial view of Manhattan, under an anonymous narration that establishes the city not only as locus, but also almost a character itself, an Olympian, but indifferent, primal force in the destinies of its inhabitants and the drama that will unfold. This is the postwar New York profile, absent the World Trade Center and the postmodern additions to the skyline. As the camera descends into the streets, the city has a more benignly busy atmosphere than in the present, reminiscent of the Reginald Marsh paintings of New Yorkers engaged in their circadian, frenetic rounds, entering and exiting subway entrances, buses and taxis, and stopping for sidewalk hotdogs or to peruse newsstands. Viewed from a half-century later, the city takes on some of the feel of a movie set.23 But as the view evolves into the city at night, the narrator segues into the plot. The night city is a different city, and in its shadowy streets, or behind the illuminated windows in the forests of silhouetted skyscrapers, there are many stories, and some involve murder. In one of those skyscrapers, a beautiful model is murdered and police detectives Dan Muldoon (Barry Fitzgerald) and Jimmy Halloran (Don Taylor) are assigned the case. Their detective work uncovers her promiscuous lifestyle, a sexual alliance with the dissembling fiancé of her coworker and her physician, stolen jewels, and clues that eventually lead to her killer, a washed up wrestler living in a run-down, low-rent district of the city. At its conclusion, as the camera concentrates again on the everyday activities of the city, the narrator returns and reminds the audience 195

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that: “There are eight million stories in The Naked City. This has been one of them.”24 Urban Exposé

In the mid-1950s, a series of films were released that employed some elements of film noir, but they were mostly an amalgam of documentary, scandal sheet, vice exposé, and elements of stag films. Shot in urban locations in several cities, and often employing locals as actors, these films focused in semi-documentary manner on vice, political corruption, and other sleazy doings under titles such as The Phoenix City Story (1957), Kansas City Confidential (1952), New York Confidential (1955), Las Vegas Shakedown (1955), Miami Exposé (1956), Inside Detroit (1955), and Portland Exposé (1957). According to one student of these films: The cycle of city exposé films was inspired, in its initial phases, by the Senate hearings on municipal corruption chaired by Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee. By the time of New Orleans After Dark [1957], the influence of that political event persists only in the practice of incorporating city names in a film’s title, and in a brief reference to a grand jury investigation of a narcotics racket. However, that film is inseparable from the backdrop of a culture of urban exploitation and exposé which flourished in the middle years of the decade. As a nocturnal, urban crime film, New Orleans After Dark is one moment in the unraveling of film noir, but this is noir after the major studios, prestige stars and canonical directors have left.25

The Senator himself did appear (uncredited) in a 1951 film directed by Robert Wise, titled The Captive City, about a journalist in a mediumsized city who uncovers corruption in the municipal government (controlled by a local tycoon who is involved in gambling and has corrupted the local police), but has to flee with the information to stay alive after a private detective who tried to expose the corruption is murdered. He eventually gives testimony before the Senate Committee and Kefauver gives a speech at the end about the perils of gambling. Neo-Noir

The urban confidential film would eventually have been supplanted by reality TV and 60 Minutes, and, in any case, Kefauver’s warning about gambling would have been drowned out by the noise of casino slot machines that, in their own way, have corrupted cities that have increasingly come to rely upon them for revenue.26 196

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The heyday of film noir has been over for forty years, but elements of its visual style to its narrative approach recur as writers and directors mine the genre for various contemporary films. In films such as Angel Heart (1987), Blade Runner (1982), The Jagged Edge (1985), and The Usual Suspects (1995), elements of noir’s sinister themes, urban underworlds, and labyrinthine plots can be detected in the shadows of those cities of night. Perhaps the contemporary film that is most reminiscent of the film noir is Chinatown (1974). Robert Towne’s screenplay, a story that is set in the 1930s and is based on actual events related to nefarious tactics by developers and public officials over access to water in the San Fernando Valley, contains almost all the film noir elements, and it pays homage to classic films, such as The Maltese Falcon (1941)27 and The Big Sleep (1946). Private detective Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) operates from an office in a B-grade building. What begins as a routine surveillance of a case of marital infidelity evolves into a labyrinth of lies, deceptions, corruption, and intrigues—personal and political—that is metaphorized in the term Chinatown. Against the backdrop of a Los Angeles that still contains tracts of sleepy bungalows and U-shaped apartment courts along palm-lined broad streets, and over a music track that mournfully evokes some deep psychological pain, Gittes diligently pursues leads and suppositions that never quite get him to the truth. Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway), the wife of Hollis Mulwray, a powerful commissioner of water and power, is somewhat the traditional film noir femme fatale: beautiful, mysterious, dangerous, and flawed. She lures Gittes deeper into the labyrinth while withholding essential information. Her husband is found dead, drowned (apparently at the site of a water outfall into the Pacific), where Gittes discovers that, although the city is experiencing a long drought, badly needed water is being dumped into the ocean. Gittes pursues the case, getting his nose slashed by Roman Polanski (the film’s director in the role of a thug) and beaten up by farm workers. The connection between the two mysteries is Noah Cross (John Huston), a crusty farmer and land baron and father of Evelyn Mulwray, who is the force behind the diversion of water. He stands to profit from its use that will follow (as is often the case in Southern California) for urban development.28 It also turns out that he has raped his own daughter and is the father of the child, a daughter/granddaughter, of that incest. 197

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After many reversals and plot twists, the story ends in Chinatown, where Gittes once served as an L.A. cop, and where there remains the murky residue of a case gone bad, which remains mysterious. This time Evelyn and her daughter, Katherine, who were briefly hiding out at the home of a Chinese friend who has helped hide her daughter from her father/grandfather, are trying to escape town in a convertible. All the central characters are also convened in the Chinatown street, and Cross, who now wants possession of his granddaughter, tries to grab the girl. Evelyn pulls out a pistol. Gittes suggests letting the police take care of things, but she replies: “He owns the police.” Cross pleads that she is a disturbed woman, who cannot hope to provide for the girl and then adds: “You’ll have to kill me first.” Evelyn fires, wounding her father in the arm in full view of all, and then she attempts to escape by car with Katherine. As mother and sister/daughter drive off, LAPD detective Escobar fires his pistol twice into the air as a warning, and then another cop fires. The convertible rolls to a stop, the girl screams, and Evelyn’s body slumps dead onto the horn, which is now blaring. Cross retrieves the girl, shielding her from the horror of her mother’s death. Nothing will be done about the incident because “it’s Chinatown,” and Escobar dismisses everyone as the people of Chinatown look on. Chinatown received eleven Academy Award nominations, but only Robert Towne received an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. It had the misfortune to be up against The Godfather: Part II (1974), another great film about crime in the American city. But the neo-noir film had been critically recognized, and, as far as the American city in the cinema was concerned, crime still pays. 1.

2. 198

Notes

American urban violence has also been associated with capitalism, which reputedly creates economic and social disparities among social classes. But here again there seems no basis to argue that alternative economic and social systems have been any less (and are often more) violent that America’s. Moreover, many capitalistic countries have lower rates of violence that the United States. It can be argued, however, that poverty has a strong association with violence, as it breaks down social norms, destroys personal esteem and family structure, and encourages antisocial activities, such as use of drugs and alcohol and dealing in illegal substances, which in turn results in a variety of violent behavior. In this case the city per se is not to blame for failed laws and social policies, corrupt political systems, and capitalistic greed. Reuters, January 26, 2000.

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3. 4. 5.

6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

Fischer, B., M. Baldassare, and R. Ofshe, 1975, 406–419. Such as the example of the murder of Kitty Genovese in New York, which took place as thirty-eight witness watched from their homes. Another variable is urban size, with the prevailing assumption that the larger the city, the larger the rate of crime and violence. However here again this assumption is countered by the statistics. In recent years, smaller cities, such as Detroit and Miami, have had higher crime rates than New York and Chicago. Rothman, 2001, 39. Television violence is subject to many of the same concerns. See also Andison, 1977. By 1934, when the Hays Production Code came into effect, the concern was sufficient to force the withdrawal of Little Caesar and Public Enemy from release. They were not rereleased until 1953. Nevertheless, Robinson, having been typecast, reprised his little gangster role in numerous films for the next fifteen years in crime films such as William Wellman’s The Hatchet Man (1933), John Ford’s The Whole Town’s Talking (1935), The Last Gangster (1937), A Slight Case of Murder (1938), Brother Orchid (1940), Key Largo (1948), and Hell on Frisco Bay (1955). The city in this case is rather ambiguous, perhaps Chicago, perhaps New York, but mostly back lot sets at Warner Brothers. Sklar, 1992, xii. American mobs, past and present, had become a staple of American film and television, even before the phenomenon of The Sopranos, such that terms like the Mafia (although of Sicilian origin) have been used as metaphors for all sorts of illicit group behaviors. Mothers, rather than usually absent fathers, figure more influentially in the earlier Little Caesar, Public Enemy and White Heat. Denby, 1973–74, 48. One writer claims that the title derives not from a reference to the gritty and low social status of the streets, but it is a reference to a passage from an essay by detective novelist Raymond Chandler about tragedy and redemption. Bliss, 1985. 82. Pileggi, 1985. A “made” guy was someone who achieved the Sicilian equivalent of knighthood in the Mafia and who was somewhat inviolate. It was open only to full-blooded Sicilians and conferred in a secret ceremony. It was dangerous to disrespect, much less kill, a made guy. Sicilians and conferred in a secret ceremony. It was dangerous to disrespect, much less kill a made guy. Urban gang films were also contemporaneously popular during the period. For example, The Warriors (1979), Wanderers (1979), The Lords of Flatbush (1974), were all set in New York, and Colors (1988) was set in Los Angeles. Perhaps the best-known and important film of urban vigilantism is Taxi Driver (1974). More recently, Falling Down (1993) involves a form of vigilantism-revenge in Los Angeles. Both these films are discussed at length in other sections of this book. Sklar, 1993, 304. The film noir period was also contemporaneous with the HUAC witch hunt for Hollywood Communists. Some of the dark themes of the films may well 199

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21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

200

have been a reflection of the mood of the film industry of the time, as well as disguised critiques of American society or the onset of the Cold War. But the origins of film noir predate these circumstances, at least stylistically, in pulp crime stories of the interwar period. Krutnik, 1997, 83. Night titles abound in film noir: Clash by Night (1953), Fear in the Night (1947), He Walked by Night (1949), The Long Night (1947), Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948), Nightfall (1957), Nightmare (1956), Nocturne (1946), So Dark the Night (1946), and Somewhere in the Night (1946), to cite just few. Christopher, 1997, 16. The movie won Academy Awards for Best Cinematography, Black and White (Wm. Daniels), Best Editing (Paul Weatherwax), and Best Writing (Malvin Wald). This line was also used as the tagline for the television series, The Naked City, which ran from 1958 to 1964, still leaving the substantial number of stories yet to be told. Straw, 1997, 112. Clapp, 1995. John Huston, who directed The Maltese Falcon, plays a central role in this film. Competition between farmers and urbanites over California water supplies remains an on-going issue in California politics. See Clapp, 1991b.

11 “Are You Talking to Me?”: New York and the Cinema of Urban Alienation The deepest problems of modern life flow from the attempt of the individual to maintain the independence and individuality of his existence against the sovereign powers of society, against the weight of the historical heritage and the external culture and technique of life. Georg Simmel, The Metropolis and Modern Life (1903)

Writing about cities and film inevitably involves a conflation of images of the city actual and the city virtual. A particular film image that keeps insinuating itself into the subject of this essay is of a giant gorilla athwart the peak of New York City’s Empire State Building. These days, in the period now commonly demarcated as post-9/11, that cinematic image is likely to evoke the real terrors that can be unleashed upon cities and their proudest technological achievement, the urban skyscraper, by those who feel alienated by, or from, the values that they represent. The final scene of King Kong (in the eponymous 1933 version), is neither as well-known, nor horrific, as the searing memories of the last hours of the World Trade Center towers, but it has been screened often enough since its first release to allow direct reference to the film’s denouement. When Kong finally succumbs to the bullets of the warplanes and plunges to the streets of New York below, the showman who brought him there, played by Robert Armstrong, intones the line that is supposed to sum up the poor creature’s fate: “Oh no, it wasn’t the airplanes. It was beauty killed the beast.”1

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The City versus Nature

There is an alternate view to the fatal attraction giant primates seem to have for pretty blondes; it is that the city killed the beast.2 Not just New York in this case, but the city, and the urban-spawned technology that could wrench such a formidable monster from his prehistoric island, take him to the arguably post-historic island of Manhattan, and put him on display for the amusement of jaded urban sybarites. New York, ever on the make and in search of any way to make it, just epitomizes the city’s break with nature, the city’s alienation from its origins.

The first of many Kongs to perish in the city. © 1933, RKO

More than a classic tragic love story, King Kong is classic antagonist conceived in the womb of an offended Mother Nature. The film is a part of a smaller, but still significant, genre that began with Frankenstein movies; it’s a lineage may be traced forward through King Kong to Godzilla to Jaws to Jurassic Park, and one may confidently assume on into the future of mass entertainment.3 Such contrasts allow for plots that exploit the natural against the urban, honesty versus guile, simplicity versus complexity, and other dramatic dualities. It is a message that proclaims that the city is a 202

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distinctly human invention that exploits and menaces nature with the result; these cinematic parables aver, of periodic and dramatic retribution exacted by nature’s outsized creations. The underlying message is that humans themselves are not immune to the negative influences of the city.4 These are, however, merely cinematic representations of a broader and deeper lineage of anti-urbanism, traceable to Biblical injunctions against Babylon, Jericho, Sodom, and other biblical Gothams, the gibes of Juvenal at Rome, through Dickens to the American Social Ecologists of the early twentieth century. The city, especially the big city, has been indicted, tried, and convicted as the destroyer of community, family, religion, as well as other institutions of social harmony and cohesion.5 Many writers and artists had long ago questioned the city as a suitable environment for humans, but with the rapid growth of cities in the late nineteenth century their concerns escalated. The emergence of great cities magnified their threat to traditional social institutions and fractured traditional social relationships. By the turn of the century, artists such as the French futuristic writer and illustrator Albert Robida were composing visual works, such as his Demolition of the Old World, in which portrayals of the old city and social order are represented by Gothic structures being demolished by dynamite. History and tradition are being discarded, and old ideals consigned to museums with other anachronisms. Against the backdrop of a sprawling industrial city stands, ambiguously, a symbol of the messiah, or perhaps the menace, of science and technology. A few years into the new century, the German Expressionist painter, Ludwig Meidner, was also producing apocalyptic views of the big city, linking human psychological turmoil with urbanism. Other German painters, such as Georg Grosz, Otto Dix, and Max Beckman, composed works that caricaturized urban life as immoral, dissolute, and psychologically destructive.6 Related themes in literature came from the pens of Russian anti-utopian Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924). Even children’s literature has been found to occasionally be a vector for the virus of anti-urbanism.7 The Metropolis as Monster

It was New York City that German director, Fritz Lang, took for his model of Metropolis (1926), a futuristic science fiction film depicting the giant city in the year 2026. Influential on numerous subsequent science fiction films set in imaginary cities, Metropolis created the notion of the city as some human-created, but only tenuously 203

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human-controlled other: the city itself as monster. The urban counterpart of the scientist-gone-mad became the administrator-gonemad with the power of his own creation. The city’s needs for endless productivity become the alienating force that divides the producing working classes from the consuming elite classes. In Thea von Harbou’s screenplay, the only solution to an imminent clash between the netherworld of the city’s workers and the exploitative uber-world of Metropolis is not a return to nature’s ways, but to religious ways. This model (and its visual icons) for the over-developed, overcontrolled city as a place of social alienation recurs in other films, such as Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), George Lucas’s THX 1138 (1971), and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982). Strangers in the City

These portrayals of the influences the big city are prologue to the central theme of this chapter: the putative effects of the characteristics of urban life upon the individual and the resultant urban alienation that has come to be expressed in the American cinema. For most all of human existence, people have had some personal (biographical) knowledge of those with whom they had social contact. The great part of that existence has been spent in the small social circle known as the clan, a large, extended family, or small groups of families that might not have averaged more than twenty to forty people. In rural and small village societies as well, people tended to have some degree of biographical knowledge of those with whom they came into contact.8 Cities changed that condition, and as they became larger and more socially heterogeneous, the numbers of people who were strangers, that is literally alien to one another, increased commensurately and exponentially. These days urbanites share their urban environments overwhelmingly with people of whom they have no biographical knowledge; people who they scarcely and incompletely identify by the clothing they wear, the cars they drive, and other superficial variables. In urban societies urbanites remain mostly alien to one another. Urban Alienation

There is perhaps a sense in which the urban personality is afflicted with alienation. Urbanites are alienated from the natural environment, which they exploit, and from which they insulate themselves. They are, by their very social diversity, socially alienated from one another except in the most instrumental and functional ways. And, they are, 204

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to some extent, “alienated” from their very selves, by virtue of the constancy of their social change. Urbanites have long been viewed as exceptions to the norm, especially when they were not, numerically, the norm. Such perceptions owe a great deal to biblical anti-urbanism.9 Biblical cities, with few exceptions, were almost always regarded as dens of iniquity. Jericho, Babylon, Sodom, and Gomorrah still retain their referential and allusive use as places of sin, depravity, or godlessness. But the Bible is only the earliest course of concern that the city is inimical to what is natural and proper in human behavior.10 Serious behavioral scientists have posited that the city is to human behavior a “behavioral sink” or a “human zoo,” unnatural to human biology and psychology.11 However, many of their conclusions have been based on studies of animal populations under conditions (such as extreme high density) that, putatively, are similar to urban conditions.12 The city has long blurred the line between normal and abnormal or deviant. In part, the very specialization of urban labor results in a degree of social differentiation. But the city also encourages, indeed to some degree requires, deviation from the status quo and the norm. Thus, while the city requires some level of social conformity in order to maintain its stability and orderliness, it also requires individuality and self-expression in order to progress and change. Nevertheless, it remains a moot issue as to what the appropriate limits of individuality and self-expression should be. At one level of concern, a respect for the laws and customs of the urban society or a concern for its commonweal, requires some subordination of individuality and self-expression to the public interest. One the other hand, a state of repressive conformity that limits individuality and self-expression to a narrow range of approved behavior assigns an anti-social and deviant status to such behavior.13 Thus, what some might regard as deviant is actually the expression of affective behaviors, eccentricities, and subcultural presentations that find latitude for freedom of expression in the city. Unusual dress, parades and demonstrations by various groups and interests, and so on, might produce behaviors that others regard as deviant or inappropriate. It has been a long quest of urban sociology and social psychology to more completely understand whether cities create or generate such behavior, or whether they simply provide a tolerant setting for inherent tendencies toward individual and subgroup behaviors to become expressed. Or, does the city simply attract, because of its 205

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tolerance, openness, and level of social anonymity, those individuals who are more unusual or even eccentric? Another hypothesis is that the city, with its many media outlets seeking interest and novelty, is simply a setting where that which is different and unusual is given more exposure than elsewhere. These remain working hypotheses in social science investigation, while serving as a mine of speculation for the screenwriter, who is not tethered to the protocols of research and the canons of statistical proofs. Why New York?

There is a certain obviousness as to why New York City seems to receive special attention by cinema’s great monsters of urban retribution. Whether it be Kong derailing elevated rail cars and scaling the tallest building, or the more recent remake of Godzilla, clomping through the concrete canyons of Manhattan, crunching yellow taxis and smashing the high-rise symbols of corporate greed and arrogance, the choice of New York seems most apt. As the song says: “If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.” If nature can take on New York and win, it can take on any city and win.14 In Hollywood’s terms: big monsters need big cities. The reasons that New York City should also be the predominant locale for its human aliens may well derive from the opposite scalar relationship. The individual human, posed against the giant metropolis, is subject to different evolutionary requirements, more accommodative than adversarial. New York City presents a permutation of physical, social, and iconic characteristics that present dramatic contrasts better than lesser cities.15 Among these are: Intensity. Social change in New York is more constant and fastpaced. These changes range from modifications in styles and fashions to political and economic changes. The pace and energy of New York has been interpreted in virtually every artistic medium, from painting to stand-up comedy.16 Often behavioral repertoires follow these, or are even seen as necessary adaptations to them. Tolerance. Big cities like New York tend to be (though not always or necessarily) more tolerant of different lifestyles and behaviors. Social differences are part of the marketplace of the city, for different talents and roles, as well as the generation of new products and services. The different labor requirements of the city tend to bring in people with different values and world views, requiring, if not always engendering, a higher degree of social tolerance. 206

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Anonymity. The big city both generates and permits anonymity, allowing one to remain a stranger to others in a way that would not be possible in a rural or small town setting. Anonymity further allows for greater creativeness of lifestyle and presentation of self, in which dress becomes a primary mode of communication to others.17 Multiple social worlds. The vast social heterogeneity of New York is composed of a mosaic of ethnic enclaves, bohemias, uptowns and downtowns and slums. Residents of each area can be aliens in the turf or territory of other areas. Indeed, this often forces the alien to adopt false postures and “city faces” in order to safely navigate though other areas. Density. The compaction of these areas of the city often juxtaposes people of different values, backgrounds and lifestyles, hence heightening the sense that city is a place of others and aliens. Spatial structure. New York, and particularly Manhattan, presents a spatial profile and skyline that is instantly recognizable at a distance (laterally or from above) and coveys an iconic power. From within the physical geography created by its grid of streets and avenues, the prominence of Central Park, and the strong physical identity of its districts and neighborhoods, New York affords settings and visual references that can be employed to visually underscore and enhance a film’s narrative.18 The Cinema of Urban Alienation

Travis Bickle’s menacing challenge in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver has become almost an anthem for the culture of urban alienation, an abstraction of the anonymity, loneliness, social disengagement, and moral detachment for which the big city is often regarded as prime cause. It is an accusation that has been leveled at urban culture that long antedates the jeremiads of the brooding loner played by Robert De Niro. In its wake of social flotsam lies the alienated urbanite, the spectral figure, silhouetted against the urban canyons, lurking in the city’s dark interstices, the pitiful down-and-outer and sinister rogue. Concerned with drama (conflict) as it is, the cinema has always found social alienation a compelling theme. The immigrant’s struggle against rejection; the anti-conformity of the beat and bohemian; the country-bumpkin’s victimization by the scheming urbanite; slum dwellers versus the swells; even mythical beasts, such as extraterrestrials, Kong Kong, and Godzilla, versus urban exploitation; all allow 207

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for exploring behavior in the urban environment. The adventures of the individual, struggling for corporeal or psychological survival against the wiles and exigencies of the city, particularly the big city, is traceable in film to the ingenuous “Little Tramp” of Charlie Chaplin, who, in a variety of shorts, posed the pluck and luck of his character against riotous slum dwellers, sly hustlers, greedy industrialists, and other species in the menagerie of urban types. In 1927, renowned German director F.W. Murnau chose a dimension of urban alienation as the subject of his first American film. Murnau based the film, Sunrise, on a short story by Hermann Sudermann, in which a young man from the country (George O’Brien) is seduced by a woman from the city (Margaret Livingston) who convinces him to kill his wife (Janet Gaynor), sell his farm, and join her in the city. He plans to drown his wife in a boat “accident” but reconsiders and rows her to the opposite shore where the movie turns expressionistic and they enter a stylized city in which everything is blown out of proportion and scaled to present the metropolis as it might look to non-urbanites. As with German Expressionism in general, the city represents and stimulates internal psychological state of being, in particular turbulent moral predicaments.19 Other significant films of the period, such as the short documentary, Manhatta (1921) by photographer Paul Strand, and King Vidor’s feature, The Crowd (1928), employed photographic techniques and angles that emphasized the dwarfing of the individual by New York’s size and verticality. New York’s urban morphology and demography are also employed in William Wyler’s Dead End (1937), which, drawing upon the prevailing social theory of the times held the city to account for the creation of juvenile delinquents in New York City. In this film (which actually used a soundstage) the swells live beside and above the tenement dwellers who suffer in cramped, roach-infested quarters in the alleys behind the luxurious residents of the rich, and they spend most of their time in the streets. The city’s slums are regarded as the breeding ground of the next generation of the criminal class. The sense of isolation and alienation felt by the lower classes is further emphasized by their consignment to alleys, streets that dead end at the East River, and the city of opportunity that rises above them and beyond their reach. At the beginning of the film, the camera descends into this social basement, and at the end, it once again rises to a panorama of the city’s magnificent skyline. 208

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New York City’s streets and buildings are also employed to strong narrative effect in A Thousand Clowns (1965). Adapted from a Broadway comedy, it is the story of a nonconformist alienated from his demeaning employment as a kiddie show writer, but also (as the exterior scenes are used to great effect) from the rat race of the life of the urban workers scurrying almost maniacally through the streets to their jobs. The scenario expertly blends a view of the city, and New York in particular, that plays to both its positive and negative features. The protagonist, Murray (Jason Robards), “retires” from his writing job to enjoy all the fascinating corners of the city, its parks, ports, junk yards and streets, in the company of his young nephew Nicholas (Barry Gordon). The plot is driven by the threat of his losing custody of the boy because he does not have a job, and the city is seen as a place that is both interesting and alienating for those who refuse to conform to its rules. Masters of the Urban Universe

The city is not only capable of bringing to heel the hairy and scaly aliens that occasionally clomp through its streets, climb its buildings, and infest its subways. In the cinematic world at least, although the city may not enforce social conformity to the extent implied, it does not abide male hubris. The American cowboy, icon of individuality and self-sufficiency, has made for an even more familiar plot driver. The opposite of the sophisticated urbanite, the cowboy’s alienation from city ways is often posed as extreme as Kong’s or Tarzan’s. Two somewhat related films serve to illustrate contrasting interpretations of the individual—in these cases represented by cowboy types, hence aliens—against the city. In Midnight Cowboy (1968) and Crocodile Dundee (1986), the contrasts between Joe Buck and Mick Dundee, respectively, represent the cowboy, the primitive, the nonurban. But the ways in which they encounter the city (in both instances, New York City) is instructive in terms of the resolution of each of the films.20 The principal character difference between Joe Buck and Mick Dundee, as regards their respective encounters with the city, is that Joe Buck has ambitions to exploit the city, to strut through the bedrooms of its lonely women, divesting them of their money. He doesn’t consider his chosen profession as stud as all that dishonorable, he’s not greedy, and he feels that he gives good value for money. His is a spoiled innocence, justified to some extent by the flashbacks to his childhood 209

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in the film, but also by his preconceptions of the city, particularly New York City, as a Babylon of immorality. But wanting something from the city, arriving with the intentions of a conqueror, destines him to fail. In contrast Dundee seeks nothing more from New York than access to the pretty young woman who has enticed him there from its environmental opposite, the Australian outback. Indeed, the city (more specifically one of its newspapers) wants something from him, the novelty and curiosity of a story. Dundee can be insouciant, innocent, and yet formidable as a crocodile, dangerous, but unthreatening if left alone and his territory isn’t violated. Joe Buck isn’t looking for love in the city, and after finding little success in his chosen profession as leather-clad stud to bored Upper East Side matrons, and only slightly more successful with the SoHo psychedelic set, he hits bottom with Forty-Second Street “fags.” He does find partial moral redemption though his brotherly concern for small-time hustler Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman). Mick Dundee finds himself in New York City more out of curiosity over the woman who entices him there. It is simply an alien environment that has its own sorts of dangerous denizens, and Dundee encounters hoods, hustlers, and hookers with the same disarming equanimity he exhibits toward crocodiles and water buffaloes in the Australian outback. How is it that the city (and doubtless audiences) find it easier to have sympathy for Dundee than Buck? Perhaps this is partly answered in their different attitudes with respect to exploiting the city. But how is it that Joe Buck is regarded by the city as a “fag,” a “midnight cowboy,” an alien who is unaware that is how he is perceived? Yet Dundee, in essentially the same costume, is roundly welcomed? The difference may something to do with the people with whom they associate. Dundee is brought immediately into the world of the upper class New Yorker. He is at one of the best hotels and his rent is paid by someone else. Buck is in meaner accommodations that he can only temporarily afford. Audiences enjoy watching Dundee prick the pompousness of the upper classes with his unwillingness to take them as seriously as they do themselves. It is audience-warming plotting that he forms the best relationship with an African-American chauffeur, and that he slugs the effete boyfriend in the restaurant without even causing a fuss. Joe Buck never gets to intersect with these social classes. His intent is to service the supposed sexually bored wives of the better off, but 210

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the closest he gets is to a sluttish nouveau-riche matron and a kinky party girl, one of whom divests him of some of his money, the other of the essence of his sexual self-confidence. The contrast in these two characters is that, in one character (Buck), the allure of the city brings about his loss of innocence, and he falls and must leave the city to regain his lost confidence and self-esteem. Mick Dundee retains his innocence and self-esteem, as well as the esteem of others, because he has nothing to prove. In the final analysis, while both characters are aliens in the big city, Buck alienates himself from the city, and Dundee ingratiates himself to it. Perhaps one of the ways in which this now familiar theme has retained its resilience is through the variations in its resolutions of the conflict. It is a rarity that the city is conquered (survival of self or values, or outright rejections of the city, perhaps a split-decision is the best that can be achieved). More often it is the city that has its unyielding and uncompromising way. But being composed of individuals themselves, audiences typically identify with, and root for, the individual. If the pitfalls of the city can be especially perilous for the unsophisticated, they can also be so for those more familiar with city ways. In Youngblood Hawke (1964), Hawke (James Franciscus) is a promising young author from Kentucky who has come to New York City, the center of the nation’s literary world, and is told by his editor that New York “can be had if your talent’s big enough.” But he also warned by a critic that the city will devour him, and he should return to where he came from. Despite success for a time, Hawke loses his success and money as he is sunk in urban corruption and dissipation, is seduced by a married woman, and is betrayed by friends. The ending is a somewhat familiar one of a return to his roots and the redemption of his innocence in the countryside. A somewhat different result of the theme of the city as a stern and unforgiving master is played out in Bonfire of the Vanities (1990), especially for the arrogant urban male who regards himself as bigger than the city that made him. In director Brian De Palma’s 1990 filming of Tom Wolfe’s story of a Wall Street investor whose financial success leads him to refer to himself as a “master of the universe,” the city plays a pivotal role in driving the plot. Sherman McCoy (played by Tom Hanks), whose millions allow him the self-bestowed privileges of a socialite-wife, a Park Avenue duplex apartment, and a mistress named Maria (Melanie Griffith), may be a self-nominated master of the universe, but that universe does not 211

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appear to include all of New York City. After collecting his mistress from the airport, McCoy’s seemingly perfect existence begins to fall apart when he makes a simple mistake anyone might make—a wrong turn off the expressway—and finds himself in the quite unfamiliar universe of the South Bronx. That very unfamiliarity results in him and his mistress panicking and running his car into a black youth she thought was attacking them. The boy’s death, the boy’s greedy mother, and an opportunist black preacher, make the story an overnight sensation. Thus begins a decent into urban hell for McCoy, in which the various interests in the city begin circling wounded master of the universe like carrion eaters: the a DA needing a sensation case to spur his political campaign, various unscrupulous attorneys, racial activists, and political opportunists, and journalists, in particular, Peter Fallow (Bruce Willis), a boozy, out of work reporter, who functions, but almost blows the story that eventually makes him a celebrated author. McCoy, who can do nothing to prevent becoming the center of a publicity circus, ends up indicted for the death of the boy, after he tried to cover it up at the urging of his selfish, oversexed mistress. He loses his job and his wife, and he is about to be thrown out of his apartment. He learns that the real masters of the urban universe, one in which he has traveled only among the planets of privilege, are cops, neighborhood activists, sleazy politicians, newspaper gossip hacks, publicity hounds, and cynical lawyers. We learn that there are different rules in this alien, dark side of the urban universe. Such a scenario might have concluded in any number of ways, but Wolfe chooses to provide his sufficiently chastised character with a deus ex machina: McCoy is saved by a lucky coincidence that produces a tape recording that counters his mistresses perjured testimony that would surely have convicted him; but only after he decides, with the approval of his normally scrupulously upright father, to lie and perjure himself. Among the morals that one might draw from Bonfire of the Vanities is that the city offers no quarter to those who think they are its masters, and that survival requires one to play by the city’s rules.21 The City’s Own

In Taxi Driver, it is two types of urban women that give taxi driver Travis Bickle the only purpose he seems to be able to cobble together in a life of estrangement, cynicism, and inexorable madness. Robert 212

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De Niro’s Bickle, ex-marine, Vietnam vet, dutiful writer of letters to his parents, has nothing but contempt for the urban bottomfeeders who compose the only social milieu to which he seems to have access. Bickle tries his luck with a beautiful young woman with whom he becomes obsessed. Betsey (Cybill Shepherd) works in the campaign office of a presidential candidate, but her attraction to him turns to repulsion at his quirkiness, especially when he takes her to a porn film. Bickle descends into madness, trying unsuccessfully to assassinate the presidential candidate.22 Then he turns his attentions to a messianic obsession with twelve-year-old prostitute, Iris Steensma (Jodie Foster), one of the fallen runaways to the city who is managed by a pimp “Sport” (Harvey Keitel). He ends up perpetrating a brutal and bloody killing spree in a flop-house brothel to free the girl and send her back to her parents. At the film’s end Bickle fades back into the underbelly of the city, a place where his alienated nature is most at home.

Best wait for another taxi. © Warner Bros.

The New York City that director Martin Scorsese conjures is mostly a nightly world of wet streets, steaming vents, and honky-tonk neon-lit garishness peopled with pimps, prostitutes, hustlers, and down-andouters. Screenwriter Paul Schrader’s Travis Bickle is of that cohort of 213

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socially alienated flotsam, but he is alienated even from them. He is likely damaged from his Vietnam experience, but little is made of it. Bickle is lonely, bitter, and seemingly without social or psychological resources, to keep away his demons of sleeplessness, except long hours plying the streets of the city. Only obsession, first with a pretty, young woman, then with the assassination of a political candidate, and finally with the rescue of a young prostitute, seem to provide for him any sense of purpose. But so profound is his alienation that he has no socially acceptable means for resolving his obsessions. Travis Bickle is perhaps the most extremely alienated of urbanites, an urban archetype who, when we encounter him on the screen or in the streets, is suspended somewhere between our pity and our revulsion. Not like the country girl or the bumpkin who have come from elsewhere, the cowboys who come in search of women, or even King Kong and nature’s monstrosities dragged there for the city’s amusement, Bickle is of the city, with seemingly no place to go back to if he could. “Are you talking to me?” has made its way into movie lore alongside “I coulda been a contenda” and “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn,” the words of other alienated males. Even non-movie buffs are able to identify its origin. But fewer recall the line that followed it, a line with perhaps even more signification and power. “Well, I’m the only one here,” Bickle says to the camera. In New York City, America’s biggest, most dense, most heterogeneous, most populous city, the sense of being alone, alienated, estranged, and inclining toward madness, is more potent and incontestable than perhaps any place else. It is a theme that moviemakers will continue to find irresistible, and a condition that some urbanites find unavoidable. 1. 2.

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RKO Pictures, 1933. Having improved the process for making two-foot models look like giant apes, RKO reprised the theme in 1949 with Mighty Joe Young. This time the beast’s weakness is for actress Terry Moore, and the relationship is closer to that of Lassie than Kong’s ardor. Kong turns up again in the Dino De Laurentiis remake with blonde Jessica Lange as the object of his desires. So far the only blonde to go chasing apes was in Gorillas in the Mist (1988), the story of primatologist and ill-fated gorilla activist Diane Fossey, which film critic Pauline Kael called a “feminist version of King Kong.” The visitors to the city are typically, but not always, outsized animals. In 1942, a Tarzan film plot brings the “lord of the jungle” to the jungle of the big city—in this case, as is often the case, to New York City.

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4. 5. 6

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

This is a message that has been sounded in literature from the Bible to the present day. See Leo Marx, l964. Thompson, 2009. Several of these images are reproduced in Ian Jeffry, 1977. While it is not insignificant that these images are also a reflection of the social breakdown in Germany prior to World War I, the prominent use of urban images and social types reflects strong anti-urban sentiments. See, for example, Clapp, October 1973. Lofland, L., 1973, chap. 1. Clapp, January 1978. Douglas Muzzio, 1996, 189–215. The subject of “mental health in the city” as portrayed in cinema is treated in a separate section. Fischer, B., M. Baldassare, and R. Ofshe, November 1975, 406–419. Consider the unending debates over free speech, flag burning, and pornography as prime examples of this feature of urban society. It should not go unremarked that the T-Rex of the Jurassic Park sequel, The Lost World, was brought to San Diego, California, to give that city a good thrashing, or that most of the Godzilla films make a wasteland of Tokyo, Japan’s equivalent of NYC. Moreover, the occasional small town provides a suitable setting for the vengeance of nature, as in Jaws and its sequels. It should also be recognized that nature’s heavyweights never come out victorious against the big city, or even the small town. If, as they often are, created by urban technology (radio-activity being the prime culprit), then they are usually dispatched with the same technological superiority of the city. Idyllic urban films (at least those set in New York, such as Top Hat, On the Town, Barefoot in the Park, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and The Out of Towners, among others) always seem “stagey.” Perhaps because many such films are musicals and comedies, the typical menagerie of the city is cast more in the form of the chorus and props than as drivers of plot. As early as 1866, Englishman Charles Dilke felt it appropriate in a description of his visit to New York to record the joke that: “Every New Yorker has come a good half-hour late into the world and is trying all his life to make it up.” Over a century later, according to comedian Jackie Mason, the frantic pace of New Yorkers has not abated: “They look like they’re being chased or trying to catch somebody. People never walk slowly, even if they have no place to go. There’s nothing more pathetic to a New Yorker than somebody who doesn’t look busy.” Clapp, 1987a. Examine, in particular, the paintings of Edward Hopper, with their solitary urbanites posed in the stark urban void like so many insects encased in amber. Also, Donald B. Kuspit, writing about modern painting in New York City, states that: “The way the city allows isolation, as a choice—as a village would not, with its demands of communal participation and conformity—is also a confirmation, however ironic, of its belief in individuality. The much lamented loneliness of the city is as much a symbol of its opportunity as of its oppression. Kuspit, 1977, 70. New York also affords excellent settings, ranging from some of the highest buildings in the world to subway netherworlds deep beneath the streets of 215

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19.

20.

21.

22.

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the city. A notable example, relevant to the theme of this paper, is The Taking of Pelham 123 (1974) about the hijacking of a New York subway train for a million dollars ransom. The “city beneath the city” is also employed to an almost Dante-esque effect in Mimic (1997), in which a plague of giant genetically altered insects inhabit the netherworld of the subway and prey upon humans, again employing the well-trod theme of urban-based technology turning nature to unexpected bad results. It is significant that Murnau used panchromatic negative film, which was developed for color photography in the early 1920s, in shooting this black and white film, which, along with incandescent tungsten lighting, enhanced the psychological moods of the with more dramatic rich chiaroscuro. It should also be noted that what appears to be outright plagiarism of plot elements and visuals from Midnight Cowboy is difficult to miss. Consider the obvious similarities of the scenes in both films dealing with the “cowboy” walking down a long-lens compressed view of Fifth Avenue, the scenes with transvestites, and the Art Party scene. De Palma’s film did not receive the positive critical acclaim that was received by Tom Wolfe’s book, on which the movie is based. It is also worth reading Wolfe’s essay about writing the new social novel and about the city. Wolfe, November 1989. There was an ironic connection between film and reality in this scene. On March 30, 1981, five years after the release of Taxi Driver, a twenty-fiveyear-old drifter named John W. Hinckley, Jr., shot and seriously wounded a US president. Hinckley was no replica of Travis Bickle, but he was, before the assassination attempt, and in prison to this day, obsessed with actress Jodie Foster.

12 Class, Race, and Ethnicity in the City and the Cinema The old American city, for all its gradations of caste and class, had been a place where people of all incomes and occupations lived close to each other and intermingled. The emerging social structure of twentieth-century cities did away with such proximity and encounter. Increasingly, areas of cities were segregated by social class Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America Can we all get along? Rodney King

What divisions nature has not placed among humans they have placed there themselves. Racial differences are a biological product of evolution and environment; social class stratification derives from induced distinctions of superiority and power. Race and class often compound, conflate, and confound to produce the most dramatic historical events, and the most historic events of drama. For the great part of human history, great distances and relatively simple social organization separated races and minimized class distinctions. The city brought race and class into greater contact and relief. The cinema, from the earliest features, such as Intolerance (1916) and Birth of a Nation (1915), has found irresistible the differences that make a difference in human relationships. Drama, to repeat, is about conflict, and differences make for conflict. Americans might be brought up on the principal that “all men are created equal,” but the cinema often finds it more interesting that they don’t

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necessarily end up that way. What happens in between is often the stuff of great movies. Social Class and the City

Social class and stratification in societies preceded urbanism. There were gradations of status, elites, and subordinates, in the nonurban environment that regulated roles, responsibilities, authority, and other features of social relations. Class positions in pre-urban and nonurban societies tended to be established along clan blood lineage, power, and property. Status in such societies was therefore mostly “ascribed status,” conferred by birth and gender; one was largely born into one’s social class, and for the most part, remained there. Even today, in rural and nomadic societies, the roles of women, ethnic minorities, and even children, remain immutably subordinate. Birth order and traditional ways govern their social destinies. The city brought into being alternative ways to social advancement through the potentials of achieved status, the possibility to rise in social position by means of effort or merit. Although the city did not guarantee that these alternatives would be effectively available, it created conditions that challenged traditional restrictions to achievement. For example, urbanism created different forms of property. In rural and pastoral societies property consisted primarily of land and the herds, usually in the control of male elders. Cities generated other marketable skills, writing and record keeping (scribes), administration, various crafts, occupations related to community security, and education, among others. These broadened the skill sets and talents of the work force. Women’s roles, in particular, began to undergo change, from being restricted to wife or concubine, to craftsmen, clerical, and other skills, marking the beginning of a long, and still active, process of the change in women’s roles. Changes in the structure of the family followed as clans and large, extended families became less of a social necessity. Allegiances to families were also attenuated by allegiances to guilds, professional associations, and corporations. The elderly no longer commanded as much respect and care as they did in traditional societies, where they were the repositories of the traditional skills and the histories of their groups. As knowledge could now be recorded, they became socially redundant and economically burdensome.

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Education, now also conducted by guilds, schools, and universities, was no longer the exclusive province of either the family or of religious institutions, as the forms of knowledge and skills exceeded their capacities. As education became more important, children became economically dependent upon their families and the community for longer periods of time, forcing down birthrates, but it also eventually made the children more independent of their parents. These factors (among others) are somewhat taken as given in the present age, but they are on-going, and describe a momentous social transformation that began with the first urban communities, but it has vastly accelerated in the past two hundred years. Many of these changes have been described as the beginning of an urban middle class, a class of burghers, or bourgeoisie.1 Thus the social class system of the city is more fluid and flexible than in traditional nonurban environments. However, while the city offers the promise of higher social status, it also makes one more acutely aware of social distances. In the urban environment different social classes are more juxtaposed, as is evident in the film Dead End (1937), where the rich and the poor live in close proximity to one another even though they reside in different social worlds.2 The city can also blur class distinctions because it contains a higher percentage of strangers, or people who are unknown to one another save for their dress and other physical characteristics. In distinction from the traditional and folk environment, where persons are typically biographically known to one another, urbanites are typically strangers to each another. Thus class identifications in the city are often made on the basis of how one is dressed, what kind of car one drives, or other secondary, and potentially inaccurate, indicators of socioeconomic status.3 Social Class in the Cinema

The subject of social class pervades much of cinema. It has been addressed in every film genre and period, and, as with many of the topics of this study, is beyond comprehensive treatment here. Nevertheless, some films are particularly relevant to the interest of the relationship between the city and the cinema. Despite egalitarian ideals and the status achievement potentials of urbanism, social class and stratification have always been 219

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a part of American urban life. Indeed, it is one of the paradoxes of the  American city that its very success in elevating social mobility has abetted a geographic mobility that has contributed to make the American metropolis more, rather than less, geographically segregated. In many respects this statement holds true at the end of the twentieth century. Cities have always been segregated places by social class. Social association is usually a function of commonality and similarity. Ethnic and racial enclaves, areas of cities dominated by peoples of one religion or another, even one patron saint or another, or by occupations (the quarter of the tinsmiths or the street of the fullers), were the precursors for the little bohemias, gay districts, gated communities, and other divisions of urban space by inclusion and exclusion today. But the city has also changed institutional structures in such a way that to be born in one or another district is not nearly as determinative of one’s destiny as formerly held true. Birthplace is not destiny. It is not uncommon to hear Americans boast that we are a classless society, where, with hard work and ambition, anyone might rise from rags to riches and any son might one day become president. It is interesting to ponder whether this happens as much in reality as it happens in the movies. There are those who have not let this myth go unchallenged in American lore. Indeed, some feel that the failure of this promise, or the ambitions it raises, is at the core of a darker American prospect. Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, published in 1925 is such a perspective. Based on a real homicide that took place in upstate New York, where a social-climbing young man causes the death of a working girl, the story was later filmed as A Place in the Sun (1951). George Eastman (Montgomery Clift) took the role of the novel’s Clyde Griffiths,4 distant cousin of Angela Vickers (Elizabeth Taylor), whose wealth and beauty turns his head and heart and motivates him to cause the drowning of his pregnant girlfriend, Alice Tripp (Shelly Winters). Most of A Place in the Sun takes place in a small town and in the idyllic settings of the wealthy alongside the lakes of the Adirondacks, but the contrasts of a working-class girl, who works in the local plant, and the plants owner’s beautiful and leisured daughter is deeply etched in George Stevens’ direction. 220

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Clift and Taylor tragically crossing class lines. © Paramount, 1951

Class pretensions were an early source of plot drivers in film. The Marx Brothers made their movie career out of poking fun at the rich and privileged in films like A Night at the Opera (1935). Other screwball comedies of the Depression years were also likely a source of solace to those who could still afford the price of a movie ticket. Doubtless, even the leisured classes, who could well afford it, enjoyed seeing themselves portrayed in mildly unflattering films if, for example, the commercial and critical success of My Man Godfrey (1937) is any measure. Down and out Godfrey (William Powell) is plucked from dumps by scavenger hunting socialites and becomes the butler of a scatter-brained rich family. The premise of a gentleman from the unemployed classes, with more class than the upper crust, who becomes almost essential at solving their self-induced problems, was a great success. Godfrey ends up marrying the family beauty, Irene (Carole Lombard), adding some badly needed red to their blue blood. A similar premise is employed in Frank Capra’s Meet John Doe (1941). This time the premise is political and the down-and-outer is a washed up baseball pitcher, John Willoughby (Gary Cooper), who lives under a bridge. The notion that anyone might rise to position of 221

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political importance is given almost cynical treatment by Capra, when an unscrupulous newspaper reporter, Ann Mitchell (Barbara Stanwyck), writes a fictitious letter5 to the editor from a man who threatens to commit suicide because he is despondent over the state of the country. The newspaper decides to find the “author” and, from among a throng of unemployed candidates, Willoughby is selected, becomes “John Doe,” and is fashioned by Mitchell into the leader of a political movement. That John Doe is eventually exposed and deposed is illustrative of the ambivalence that American’s are capable of showing toward social class: the rich and privileged can be both admired and reviled; the notion that the class system is open and fluid is celebrated at the same time as those who aspire to rise socially are seen as ambitious and pretentious. Barbara Stanwyck connives in a different manner as Stella Dallas (1937) in which she plays a low-born seamstress who happens to snare the attentions of a well-off man, Steven Dallas (John Boles), and has a daughter with him. Stella’s ways are rather coarse, and she dresses tastelessly, and soon her husband tires of her, leaving her to raise their daughter, Laurel (Anne Shirley) alone. She loves and dotes on her child, and when she takes her on a trip to a resort as a teen, the girl makes friends with rich kids. Stella decides that her daughter would have a better life in the social world of her father and nobly gives her up. In a touching scene, she is literally on the outside of her daughter’s new world as she looks through the window of a fine house and watches Laurel at a party with the upper social classes she has joined. The idea of a mother making such a selfless sacrifice might have seemed less shocking to audiences in the Depression years, and when attitudes about class distinctions were somewhat different than they might today.6 One of the American values that American GI’s were fighting to protect in World War II could be summed up as the “American way of life.” While there are several different elements of that ideal, one of them was the protection and enhancement of a society in which, putatively, all were “created equal” and progressed and prospered, or not, according to their effort and merit. The degree, to which American ideals are anything close to the American reality, particularly as it relates to social status, is an unending debate.7 World War II served to both reinforce and challenge these myths. It was alleged by some that there were no class distinctions or racial prejudices in a foxhole. But America had a race-segregated military,8 222

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and for the most part, Americans took their values and attitudes right along with them into the foxholes.9 Hollywood did its share, especially with its contributions of war propaganda films, to further myths about the American social system, and in fewer instances, to call them into question. There seemed to be no class distinctions in the nose cone of a B-17, in one of the early scenes of The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). In a cross section of American social stratification, Sergeant Al Stevens (Frederick March), a banker who served without a commission; Captain Fred Derry (Dana Andrews), a guy from the working-class side of town who became an Air Force officer; and Homer Parrish (Harold Russell), a sailor with solid middle-class roots, ride back to their mutual Midwestern home town with anticipation and uncertainty. Only Homer, who has lost his hands and forearms, shows visible injuries from the war. While the war might have scrambled their class identities, each is anxious in his own way about his impending repatriation and the uncertainty of the America they will find waiting for them. It is one of the ironies of the film that the America these soldiers had left had become not only stronger for the efforts of the war, but it had also changed in some ways that contradicted the very propaganda that had justified their sacrifice. The Depression of the 1930s was vanquished by the war, but the war also changed some gender, family, and status distinctions, and it left others less affected. The “Rosie the Riveter” phenomenon as well as “home front” responsibilities had given women a stronger role to play in American life, which was the precursor for the so-called women’s movement of the next decade. African-Americans, who had risked their lives to protect a land of avowed equal opportunity, returned with a resolve to test the sincerity of that promise, and so the civil rights movements also took root in the battlefields of World War II.10 The Best Years of Our Lives was a title tinged with irony. Reverting to the civilian class structure, tensions develop between Al and Fred over Fred’s interest in Al’s daughter, which seem to have as much to do with class differences as Fred’s marital status. Al himself feels estranged from his own social set when he is admonished by the president of the bank for which he works for making an unsecured loan to a fellow serviceman. There are Nazi sympathizers, and other civilian types, who did not see the returning serviceman as a hero, but as a dupe or a threat, and all three servicemen have their episodes of cynicism.11 223

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In a sense, it is the city that offers some hope for Fred, the most cynical and lowest class of the three. About to depart Boone city after his unsuccessful marriage, his failure to find decent employment, and his romance with Al’s daughter forced to a close, he stumbles on a opportunity for some income and self-respect in working for a company dismantling mothballed B-17s for use in building prefabricated homes. The American way of life, it turns out, comes with no guarantees. Hollywood recognized it as well. Films like Gentleman’s Agreement (1947), which addressed anti-Semitism, and The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit (1956), with its questioning of the struggle for success, tackle many of America’s problems of class and identity. Class barriers are also a strong element in The Last Hurrah (1958). Although it is a film principally about the last days of boss politics in a New England city, it is also resonant with the subtheme of political control of urban turf. This was often, as the plot related, achieved in battles waged between those who regarded themselves as part of an urban aristocracy and those immigrant populations that found the franchise, and their swelling numbers, as a potent counterforce to wealth and the “rights of first arrival.”12 Social class continues to be a theme for films set in cities and demonstrates that American audiences enjoy stories in which characters can both rise and fall through its relatively permeable barriers. The precipitous descent of an arrogant wealthy securities trader in Bonfire of the Vanities (1990) castigates every social stratum in a portrayal of New York as a city obsessed with money and power. However, another film set in Beverley Hills was apparently a commercial success because of the American penchant for the underdog, especially if the underdog is a she, and she is very pretty. Pretty Woman (1990), a romantic comedy and contemporary version of My Fair Lady, all but made prostitution respectable when Vivian Ward (Julie Roberts) captured the heart of a ruthless businessman (Richard Gere), who arbitrages companies. In this scenario of social class in America, the heroine from the basement of the class system finds love, financial security, and elevated social status. Real prostitutes doubtless know better, but in the movies love apparently breaches all barriers to social class. The Urban Melting Pot: Race and Ethnicity

Perhaps the features of urbanism most closely associated with the geographical, if not always social, proximity of peoples of different 224

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races and ethnicities are the specialization of labor and trade. Labor specialization and trade are interrelated, the former bringing about greater efficiency of production and requiring different skills, and the latter requiring contact with other cities and their peoples. Owing to these factors, cities facilitated interracial and interethnic contact and association much more than village and rural societies. It is also these same features that result in what might be termed a melting pot, in which some differences between and among different races and ethnic groups become secondary to common characteristics of urban employment. This consequence is in contrast to a version of the American melting pot hypothesis that holds American culture results in an eventual stewing out of differences, which are replaced by the emergence of a more homogeneous general culture. The idea is that the typical hyphenated American (Irish-American, Italian-American, Polish-American, etc.) gradually, and generation by generation, loses his or her ethnic identity, and even that those of different races take on more of the cultural characteristics of the general culture. Rather, the urban melting pot that emerged was more strongly related to socioeconomic status (SES) characteristics. Urbanism has gradually evolved what might be termed an “ecumenical urban culture” that transcends not only traditional localism, but also cultural characteristics associated with different racial and ethnic groups. That is, by way of illustration, it has emerged that a businessman in Hong Kong may have more in common in political and social values with a businessman in Karachi or New York than with a farmer or industrial worker in his own culture. Similarly, a black stockbroker may see his interests as being more akin to those of a white financial advisor, who shares the similar occupational status and perhaps economic values, than he might with a black American bus driver or with an African herdsman. These social characteristics are strongly influenced, as already implied, by the economic globalization and the decline of local autonomy and localism. The rise of the service economy in all advanced markets and the requirements of education associated with that rise, have engendered communities of interest. Such communities are linked by professional associations, universities, corporations, and most recently, the Internet. While an urbanite is surely a resident and citizen of his or her city and neighborhood (their civic citizenship), they are also increasingly allied with their professions and corporations across local, and sometimes even national, boundaries. 225

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All these factors, among others, tend to diminish the influence of ethnic and racial characteristics among the more highly educated, professional, or globalized. While these characteristics do not eradicate traditional prejudices or historical animosities, such concerns can be ameliorated or subordinated to commonly shared values related to professional security, power, corporate loyalty, and profit. But while these developments have tended to engender communities of interest and association, their spatial proximity has not followed in equal measure. Urban racial and ethnic segregation are complicated by numerous factors and extend deep into urban history. The restriction of certain races and ethnic groups to specific areas and quarters of cities precedes the first mention of the term ghetto in the early sixteenth century.13 At the same time, the tendency of people to congregate in urban districts where similar cultural, religious, and commercial practices could be maintained, was often an economic advantage and not necessarily an enforced condition. The social geography of cities to the earliest times have been influenced by the attraction and repulsion, the inclusion and exclusion, of the segments of their populations with different religions, racial characteristics, ethnic origins, and even occupations. Of the last of these, there are still cities in many countries with quarters that were occupied almost exclusively by different occupation with street or districts names that indicated that they were occupied by tinsmiths, fullers, coopers, potters, woodcarvers, and so on. Often such districts also had guilds, workmen’s association, and even religious buildings that were patronized by specific racial and ethnic groups who practiced or dominated in specific trades. While such districts were a form of social segregation, they were also a form of economic integration that allowed these districts to prosper by means of a concept that economists refer to as “agglomeration economies.”14 Thus the concentration of many similar and related businesses in one area of the city resulted in greater attraction for seekers of their goods and services. Moreover, these ethnic enclaves also performed an important function in serving as way stations for new immigrants, the nation, and the city. These urban villages retained cultural elements of their old country and provided an immediate trading area that could be expanded to serve the larger city.15 Many cities maintain such areas, which preserve their economic and social functions, and/or names as Chinatown, Little Italy, Little Saigon, Spanish Harlem, and so on. Race and ethnicity are arguably the most pervasive and profound aspects of the American experience. As a country of immigrants 226

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(voluntary and not), the fact that the country has a native race of people is almost buried by its dealing with the legacies of slavery and “Jim Crow” and the animosities and competitions from successive waves of legal and illegal immigration from everywhere else. Race, therefore, in any consideration, urbanism, film, or any other subject in America, is an enormous and complex subject that can only be accorded a very selective treatment herein.16 Urban Turf

One of the main areas, in which the American city and movies related to race and ethnicity come together, is with respect to territorial competition. Most significantly this phenomenon has been addressed in Gangs of New York (2002), an epic of the forging of American urban politics in the mid-nineteenth century in a brutal arena called Five Points, New York. Though primarily an historical drama based on the battles for control of this patch of urban turf, as well as access to the jobs, contracts, and corrupt practices of the era of political machines, it is also about the battles between Nativists and Irish immigrants. Caught somewhat in the middle were African-Americans—freemen and runaway slaves—who were brutalized by everyone: natives, immigrants, and police. Gangs of New York is resonant with the antipathies toward newcomers to the city and the threat that their willingness to work for lower wages, form new political coalitions, as well as their cultural and religious differences pose to the status quo. Race and ethnicity functioned as the primary identity and focus of social allegiance, and skin color and accents as the prime identifiers of who was in the right or wrong patch of urban turf. Urban turf could also be considered an element in Year of the Dragon (1985) in which an out-of-control, Polish-American, New York cop, Stanley White (Mickey Rourke) runs a one-man crusade to bring down a Chinatown triad led by Joey Thai (John Lone). The racism that drives White’s zeal (born of his service in Vietnam) is only slightly leavened by the affair he has with a beautiful, and pushy, Asian television reporter. The triads have violence to match that of a rogue cop, and The Year of the Dragon is often awash in blood; a Chinese restaurant is shot to splinters and even White’s estranged wife is brutally murdered. Apparently the producers and distributors were concerned that the portrayal of the Chinese might engender sympathy for White’s racism and added a postscript disclaiming any intent to show the Chinese as a criminal element in American society. 227

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Do the Right Thing (1998) ironically invited critical debate as to whether it is an insightful or provocative film, perhaps both. The turf is a block in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood inhabited by blacks and Latinos; however, as with many such areas the local grocery is Korean, and the local food joint, Sal’s Famous Pizzeria, belongs to an Italian-American, Sal (Danny Aiello). Ownership and control of neighborhood businesses by outsiders has long been an incendiary feature of African-American communities and, paradoxically, the resentment is often aimed toward the other racial and ethnic minorities that operate them.17

Sal and Mookie and tensions over turf. © 40 Acres, 1989

Sal’s sons work with him in the pizzeria, as does Mookie (writerdirector Spike Lee), the deliveryman. A trivial argument over Sal’s “Wall of Fame” (featuring photos of Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Frank Sinatra, and other Italian-Americans) leads to bad feelings with his black clientele. High temperatures, sensitive temperaments, and the killing of a young black by the police lead eventually to the trashing and burning of Sal’s pizzeria. Yet no one person or group seems entirely guilty or innocent of what happens on this one block of urban turf 228

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in this one day. The plot is moved by circumstances that were all too common in American cities in hot summers in the 1960s and 1970s, leading to interracial conflict. Nevertheless Do the Right Thing seems less a documentary effort than a morality play with ambiguous lessons. Antipathy toward minority-owned businesses also comes into play in Falling Down (1993), a film with uncharitable references to several racial and ethnic stereotypes. In one scene the angry, laid-off defense worker, Bill Foster (Michael Douglas), trashes a convenience store and terrorizes its Korean owner for overcharging him. Douglas’s character is nevertheless accorded some nobility in his encounter with a gunshop owning skinhead (Frederic Forest) who spews a litany of vicious racial epithets. The gritty urban realism of films such as American History X (1998), addresses the most unsettling dimensions of deep-seated racial hatred. No level of violence is beyond graphic representation; in one scene, a young black man’s teeth are pounded out on a street curb. No dialogue is restrained either. Before his reformation, Nazi skinhead Derek Vinyard (Edward Norton) unleashes the following hate-filled scatalogue on the Jewish teacher (Elliott Gould), who is courting his mother and arrives for dinner: You don’t think I see what you’re trying to do here? You think I’m gonna sit here and smile while some fuckin’ kike tries to fuck my mother? It’s never gonna happen Murray, fuckin’ forget it, not on my watch, not while I’m still in this family. I will fuckin’ cut your Shylock nose off and stick it up your ass before I let that happen. Coming here and poison my family’s dinner with your Jewish, Nigger-lovin’, hippie bullshit. Fuck you! Fuck you! [Murray begins to leave.] Yeah, walk out, asshole, fuckin’ Cabala reading motherfucker. Get the fuck out of my house!

The effect of such films upon audiences who are increasingly exposed to similar images and dialogue on newscasts and reality television is yet to be given much sociological account. Whether such films expose, inform, shock, desensitize, or even provide vicarious pleasure—if not all—the border between the cinema and the real city may seem at times to be no thicker that the walls of a multiplex movie theater. In contrast there have been a series of films countervailing the negative side of American race relations. White Men Can’t Jump (1992) is a comedy whose very title makes light of a oft-cited racial distinction, and in which a white basketball hustler (Woody Harrelson) teams up 229

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with his black buddy (Wesley Snipes) to make some money on the city’s playground basketball courts. Harrelson’s girl friend in the movie, Rosie Perez, is also a Puerto Rican. The cops-and-robbers comedy genre is a popular source for interracial buddy films that have featured strong box-office duos, such as Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder, Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte, and Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker, among others.18 Urban turf can also be the source of intraracial discord. The homeboys who contest for control of the turf in the hood in John Singleton’s Boyz N the Hood are all African-Americans, and so is their neighborhood, which, through squinted eyes, might pass for any slightly downat-the-heels working-class suburban subdivision of modest houses and weedy lawns. But appearances can be deceiving. Singleton set his film about coming of age in the late 1980s in South Central Los Angeles: the infamous South Central that made the evening news nearly everywhere in the aftermath riots of the Rodney King verdict.19 More open eyes reveal an area of young, unemployed black men around prevalent liquor stores, street corners and vacant lots, wearing gang colors and sports attire, and also quite likely, carrying concealed weapons. Their social prospects are far bleaker than the physical appearance of their physical environment. Boyz N the Hood is about intra-, not interracial relations, and here Singleton, also an African-American, pulls no punches. BlackAmericans are not stereotyped: the protagonist’s mother, Reva Styles (Angela Bassett), is a beautiful, yuppie-ish, educated professional woman, who has similar aspirations for the young son, Tre (Cuba Gooding, Jr.), she reluctantly surrenders temporary custody of him to her ex-husband. Tre’s father, Furious Styles (Lawrence Fishburne), lives in the treacherous South Central. Reva is a stark contrast to two mothers who are her ex-husband’s neighbors: one an unwed shrewish mother who can only manage enough affection for one son, the other a drug-besotted, unwed mother who offers sex for drugs and whose toddlers wander into the street. The only father present is Tre’s. Furious is a hard-working, store-front real-estate agent, self-possessed, and convinced that his street-wise counsel and manly, tough love can steer his son through the social reefs of South Central. Although the circumstances remain unspecified, it is quite plausible why Tre’s parents are no longer together: his mother seems to carry her race at a different level than his father. There is also a powerful scene in which a black cop torments Tre with physical threats and racial slurs, while the cop’s white partner looks on with dismay. 230

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The dangerous reefs of the hood are Tre’s peers. Chief among them is Doughboy (played by rapper, Ice Cube), who is in and out of jail and sees women as categorically “bitches and hos,” perhaps partly because he is unloved by his mother. He can also be cold-bloodedly homicidal. Only that the audience is given a glimpse of Doughboy’s inner torment distinguishes him from the gangbangers who prowl the streets of the hood in their tinted-windowed, rap-thumping cars. Ricky, Doughboy’s younger brother, a teenage-father and Crenshaw High football star, is more pacific and amiable, and he would prove deserving of his mother’s love if he can land a collegiate athletic scholarship as his ticket out of the hood. Of the cast, only Tre and his girl, Brandi (Nia Long), make it out (she the only apparent exception to the foul-mouthed, sexually precocious young women of the hood), and then only to black colleges and not USC or UCLA, but not before Tre, after Ricky’s death in a drive-by shooting, nearly joins Doughboy and his buddies in a blood vengeance drive-by of their own. What makes Boyz N the Hood a film worthy of some regard is that its characters are all flawed in some respect, partly by the social circumstances they live under, but also by plain human frailties as well. Singleton shows that in spite of these circumstances, they still have choices in their lives: choices about using and selling drugs, impregnating their teenage girlfriends, or settling dispute with or without fists and firearms. These are not cardboard cutout characters, or stereotypical black villains or heroes. Clearly this film wants to inform the viewer that these characterizations are grounded in some grim social statistics. In the city more than one in five young black males will die a violent death, a like amount will do time in prison. Moreover, a black male’s chances in the job market are far less hopeful than those of black women, even women who are single mothers.20 But Boyz in the Hood is not shy of assigning some blame. In a scene that is far enough away from the main line of the film’s theme, Furious Styles takes Tre and Ricky to another part of the hood where a large billboard on a vacant lot announces a new housing development. But the development will be, as the billboard announces (“Seoul to Soul”), built by Koreans, and the houses may not be affordable by the locals. In his little lecture on gentrification, Furious makes it clear that the blacks of the hood must get control of their own lives; that the narcotics, liquor, and guns with which they are destroying one another, come 231

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from outside the community; and that they are responsible for making right choices. Tre and Ricky are impressed, if not entirely convinced, but a small crowd of local old-timers and young punks are already too beaten down or cynical. West Side Story (1961) was made in a time and place before cars and automatic weapons were prevalent. Set on the west side of New York City, this musical about turf battles between Anglos and Puerto Ricans is also about other proprietary matters. Treading on another’s turf can be a source of trouble; messing with their women can be big trouble. With unmistakable similarities to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, love across ethnic divides is doomed almost from the outset. But not before some of the best music, lyrics, and choreography ever to come the screen precedes the bitter ending. West Side Story opens with a establishing helicopter shot over the west side of Manhattan and zooms in on the notorious Hell’s Kitchen area, the contested turf of the Jets (Anglos) and Sharks (Puerto Ricans). The Sharks are led by Bernardo (George Chakiris) and the Jets by Riff (Russ Tamblyn). They represent the equivalent warring Montagues and Capulets. A fragile truce between the two gangs is broken when Bernardo’s sister, Maria (Natalie Wood), arrives from Puerto Rico and, despite warnings by Anita (Rita Moreno) to avoid Anglos, falls for Tony (Richard Beymer), a Polish boy who is one of the Jets. The inter-ethnic romance issue is conveniently resolved with a Jets-Sharks rumble over the hegemony of West Side turf. Maria tries to put a stop to the battle by persuading Tony to act as a peacemaker. He is seen as a “chicken” and fails. Then Riff dies in a knife fight with Bernardo. Tony loses his cool, grabs a knife, and stabs Bernardo to death. Afterward he rushes to Maria’s side, explains his failure, and they sleep together and dream and sing of running away to “a place for us.” But Hells’ Kitchen is not an easy place to escape from, and Tony is trapped by one of the Sharks and killed in the playground. The story concludes with Maria kneeling and crying beside Tony between the glaring gang members. Members from both the gangs join forces to carry the dead Tony out of the playground. If West Side Story were only a rehash of Romeo and Juliet in jeans and sneakers, it would not merit much attention, much less the handful of Academy Awards it received, among them Best Picture. But the movie was also released in the midst of the American civil rights movement, and it introduced audiences to social issues in a cinema genre not typically employed for such purposes. It also employed the streets of the 232

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city to maximum effect in showcasing its magnificent choreography by Jerome Robbins and songs by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, making it one of the most popular musicals of all time. The Ultimate Taboo

There was little surprise in the star-crossed ending to the romance of Tony and Maria. As much as audiences seem to prefer happy endings, from Romeo and Juliet, to Othello, Caesar and Cleopatra, and Madame Butterfly, most interracial romances have ended badly.21 In most cultures and nonurban circumstances, it would be unlikely that such liaisons even begin. But cities provide both social contact and anonymity, conditions in which romance may bloom, even romances that violate social taboos. The taboos affected the world of the cinema as much as the real world, so interracial romance on the screen has always been approached cautiously, often through the gauze of classical dramas. When a white blind girl who strings colored beads has a chance encounter in a city park with a black man several metaphors are already in play. Hollywood softened the prospect of an interracial romantic situation in A Patch of Blue (1965) in several ways: Gordon Ralfe (Sidney Poitier) is a middle-class professional; Seline D’Arcy (Elizabeth Hartman) is literally color-blind; her mother is a vulgar, bigoted prostitute, who was responsible for the girl’s blindness; and the sexual tension between the couple is minimized and rationed. Gordon becomes Selina’s only friend, opening up her world with his attentiveness and seeing things for her, and the friendship warms to something more. But when it is discovered by Selina’s mother, she conspires to move the girl away. Poitier reprised the role of a professional (a medical doctor who does research on infectious diseases), sensitive, handsome AfricanAmerican two years later in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), but this time with a young white woman who is only “blinded” by her love and admiration for him. However, this time Joey Drayton (Katherine Houghton) is the daughter of liberal, well-bred parents, Matt (Spencer Tracy) and Christina (Katharine Hepburn) Drayton, he a judge, who live well in their San Francisco home with a beautiful city view. Poitier’s Dr. John Prentice is widowed and childless by a tragic accident and comes from a middle-class family of loving parents, completing a formula that makes Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner the perfect set-up for a drama that would put to the test the liberal politics driving 233

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the Civil Rights movement in the mid-1960s with the litmus test of interracial marriage. Prentice’s parents are added to the dramatic mix and, after agonizing considerations of how the general society might treat a racially mixed couple and their children, the couple’s union is blessed, perhaps leaving some in the audience to wonder whether they might also have been influenced by beautiful people and outstanding performances.22 Twenty-five years on and a successful African-American director may go a long way to explain why Jungle Fever (1991) does not shy away from the physical expressions of affection that are carefully avoided in A Patch of Blue and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. That great shibboleth of racism, the concern of “racial pollution” has become more of a demographic reality. Five decades after the end of legal segregation, and only thirty-six years after the Supreme Court struck down anti-miscegenation laws, young African-Americans are considerably more likely than their elders to claim mixed heritage. A study by the Population Research Center, Portland, Oregon, projects that the black intermarriage rate will climb dramatically in this century, to a point at which 37 percent of African-Americans will claim mixed ancestry by 2100. By then more than 40 percent of Asian-Americans will be mixed. Most remarkable, however, by century’s end the number of Latinos claiming mixed ancestry will be more than two times the number claiming a single background.23

Writer/Director Spike Lee chose to title his picture after a metaphor for sexual passions of the races for each other based on stereotypes and myths, principally of black male sexual prowess and the white woman as female ideal. Once again the black male, Flipper Purify (Wesley Snipes), is a professional (architect), although already married and residing in a better part of Brooklyn when he is attracted to a temporary secretary in his office, Italian-American Angie Tucci (Anabella Sciorra). He comes from a traditional, conservative religious family, with a father who is a former preacher; she comes from lower down the social ladder, from a bigoted, abusive Bensonhurst family. She is also engaged to a passive Italian-American man (John Turturro). But whatever their backgrounds might dictate, they are each blinded by jungle fever and tumble into a torrid relationship. When the affair becomes known, Angie is attacked violently by her family, Flipper is 234

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thrown out of his marriage, and the message of Jungle Fever is rather unambiguously that interracial liaisons are doomed, born of curiosity about racial myths and fantasies.24 White Man’s Burden (1995) also involves interracial sexual fantasy. In this alternate world drama, in which the social positions of blacks and whites are reversed, whites live in inner-city ghettos and blacks reside in exclusive upscale neighborhoods. Lou Pinnock (John Travolta), a white worker in a chocolate factory, a loving husband, and father of two children, volunteers to make a delivery to the palatial home of a powerful business executive, Thaddeus Thomas (Harry Belafonte). He becomes lost on the grounds, during which time he glimpses, through an upstairs window, the businessman’s wife (Margaret Avery) while she is dressing. Mistaken for a voyeur, he is fired, beaten, and evicted from his home.25 In this upside-down world, it is the black big-boss, Belafonte, who is the racist, and the aggrieved Travolta is driven to kidnap him and demand some justice, turning the story away from its issues about race relations to a more conventional chase film. Perhaps that was necessary, since human relations are a good deal more complicated than simply reversing the colors. 1.

2.

3. 4.

5.

Notes

In the Middle Ages the Germans had a saying that reflected to some degree the liberating aspects of the city from traditional social rigidities and strictures. The phrase Stadt Luft Macht Frei, or City Air Makes One Free, referred to the freer environment of the city. In fact, the American suburb may be more socially heterogeneous than the older parts of the city. For the most part access to the American suburb is mostly by means of income (i.e., the ability to afford the down-payment and payments on a suburban home). Thus a given subdivision might contain a variety of households from different ethnic, religious, and educational backgrounds, sharing the common trait of similar income. The demography of suburbs is actually more complex and variegated than conventional and popular depictions of suburban life; Cf. Schnore, 1972. Suburbia is treated in greater detail in another essay. Lofland, 1973. Drieser, doubtless for fictional purposes, also changed the name of the original perpetrator, a real person by the name of Chester Gillette (Clyde Griffiths and Chester Gillette deliberately share the same initials.), who was put on trial and convicted of killing Grace Brown (Alice Tripp in the film), though Griffiths claimed that her death was an accident. Gillette was executed by on March 30, 1908. The murder trial drew international attention when Brown’s love letters to Gillette were read in court. Dreiser wrote the novel several years later. See chap. IX, note 9. 235

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6. 7. 8. 9.

10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

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18. 19.

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The story was remade in 1990 as Stella, with Bette Midler in the title role. Mayer, 1955, 129–130. Ironically, segregated units, such as the African-American Tuskegee Airman, and the all Japanese-American 442nd infantry regiment, fought with equal or greater bravery and distinction than their white counterparts. Class and race are often conflated and even confused with one another in the American experience, but they have different treatments and consequences in social life and policy. American policy makers have often not appreciated these differences and distinctions, for example in designing desegregation and housing policies. For a discussion of these policy implications, see Clapp, 1978b. The film industry’s contribution to the war effort, as well as the mythologies of its justification, was mixed. Many actors, producers, writers, directors, and other members of the industry enlisted or volunteered for stateside service. Hollywood churned out propaganda films, training films, and documentaries; actors and actresses entertained troops in war theaters or canteens; and they raised money selling war bonds. Nevertheless, the industry, populated with immigrants and social liberals, was still suspect in the minds of right-wing politicians, and would be under siege from the despised HUAC almost as soon as the war ended. This subject is treated more extensively in the chapter on politics. Moreover, it seems that the world had only briefly been “made safe for democracy”; the Cold War had commenced, a hot “police action” in Korea had American servicemen back in the foxholes, and in a few years Americans were adding nuclear bomb shelters to their suburban abodes. In The Last Hurrah religious differences also align somewhat with social stratification, with Irish-Catholics relegated to the lower classes. Clapp, 1986. Clapp, 1978b, chap. 4. This phenomenon has long been a subject for sociologists and social ecologists. Schnore, 1975, chap. 1. Other aspects of this subject are treated in the chapter on immigration. A listing by the University of California Berkeley Library provides an appreciation of the volume and range of films that treat race and ethnicity directly and indirectly; cf. http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/MoviesVid.html. Notions such as “black capitalism” were touted in the 1960s as part of a urban strategy to bring investment into inner-city communities and provide for indigenous business growth and employment. But such attempts were generally far less than the promise, and investment often came from other minority groups attempting to get an economic foothold in the city. The advantage of other immigrant groups, such as Asians and MiddleEasterners, was of large-extended families that could operate “mom and pop” businesses for many hours. Clapp, 1991d. For example in such films as: Stir Crazy (1980); 48 Hours (1982); Rush Hour 2 (2001). Rodney King, a large black man with a not unblemished record with the LAPD was pulled over on March 3, 1991, and brutally beaten by several police officers while a private citizen videotaped the incident unbeknownst to them. The subsequent acquittal or light sentences given the four officers

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20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

at their trial (which was conducted in another, largely all-white area of L.A.) resulted in riots, arson, looting, and beatings for several days. Boo, 2003, 107. Cf. Clapp 2002. This film was Spencer Tracy’s last; he experienced health problems during production and passed away not long afterward. It was Ms Houghton’s debut film. She is also the niece of Katharine Hepburn. Rodriguez, 2003, 95. A trend that has become almost a tradition in film and literature. See Clapp, 2002. Travolta is no stranger to such roles. In Mad City (1997) he is also a simple and likeable family man, who takes a museum hostage when he loses his job.

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13 The Urban Woman: Labor, Liberation, and Love in the Cinematic City [I]f we have been able to teach men that women have more than a nurturing role to play in the world, perhaps it is time for us to teach cities how to nurture their people and provide for their needs. The cities should learn quickly. After all, the city is a she. Donna Shalala, Preface, Women and the American City

The relationship of women and cities is long and complex. Feminine traits have tended to be associated with Mother Nature, the natural environment, but not the man-made. The first deities were fertility goddesses who ordained the fates of humans well before the advent of cities. Indeed, women seemed to fade in their influence with the rise of cities, for a time they were confined to temples and rites that were still associated with agriculture. “The Goddess appears to have been originally worshipped in all ancient agricultural societies. We find there is evidence of the deification of the female—who in her biological character gives birth and nourishment, just as the earth does—in the three main centers for the origins of agriculture: Asia minor and southeastern Europe, Thailand in Southeast Asia, and later in Middle America.”1 Indeed, it may well have been the women of the Neolithic period who were the first farmers, tending village gardens while men concentrated on hunting.2 But it was the very surpluses of agriculture that permitted the foundation of permanent settlements in the Neolithic era, which grew eventually into the cities that formed the basis of the first urban civilizations. Women goddess and priestesses faded in influence with the rise of urban power, and they were consigned to temples and rites, or retained position of respect and admiration in the form of Aphrodite or 239

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the Blessed Virgin as the “priest-warrior-king” came into prominence, and eventual monotheism was given a male persona. Eve, mother of us all, morphed into the temple-goddess-whore, or the Madonna, or both. In regard to cities, the symbolic position of the female is marked by a similar ambiguity. Cities are often represented in feminine terms. Babylon, a city of luxury and wealth, but also poor biblical reputation, is referred to in Revelation 17:1 as a whore: “Come hither; I will show unto thee . . . the great whore that sitteth upon many waters.” (Babylon was built on many canals.) Not only Babylon, but most cities in the Bible do not fare well in the minds of authors who were pastoral and nomadic. Cities became places where the Hebrews were almost always enslaved or endangered their covenant with Yahweh. They were not only dangerous places for men, but for women as well, as when Lot’s wife could not resist one last backward glance at their departure from Sodom (Genesis 19). Yet most cities, like ships, are characterized in feminine terms. The very word is feminine in gender in French (la ville), Italian (la citta), and German (die Stadt). In Egyptian hieroglyphics the word for town may also mean mother. Although the Bible referred to Rome as “a Babylon,” Claudian called it the “Mother of arms and law.” Prague, called Praha in Czech, has a feminine ending, and is nicknamed maticka, “little mother.” There are feminine references that are less flattering: Henry Miller called Paris a “lovesick bitch,” and it has been called a whore, bitch or, slightly the less pejorative, “grisette,” by several other authors. There are “male” cities, Carl Sandberg’s Chicago, stands out; but they are outnumbered by urban ladies.3 Women in the Urban Cinema

In the early years of urban cinema, the portrayal of women might well have reflected prevailing attitudes and ambivalences in the exigency of social changes in social roles. The Mutual films of Chaplin in the second decade of the twentieth century are sociologically interesting in this regard. Despite his association with the comedic, other dimensions of human behavior are portrayed in shorts like Easy Street, where Chaplin shows us much ethnic violence and, surprisingly, a window into drug abuse at that time. But he also, typically, wraps a love story into his plots. Immediately upon becoming an inept policeman, he uses his uniform and authority to gain access and favor with the pretty church organist, even if it takes some questionably legal behavior. His getting the girl and even escorting her to church in the ending might have ingratiated him with audiences, if not J. Edgar Hoover. 240

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In another Mutual, The Immigrant (1917), we witness Chaplin’s rebellious reaction to the rather rude welcome that immigrants often had to endure upon entering the United States. His rebellious spirit is signaled in the kicking of a discourteous immigration official. But perhaps one of the more surprising scenes in this film deals with the precipitous and aggressive manner in which Chaplin’s “Little Tramp” character engages a woman immigrant, whom he scarcely knows, into marriage and, in the final scene, an obvious suggestion to its imminent physical consummation is made. That the woman is herself a fresh immigrant, whose mother has recently died, perhaps suggests that her consent owes something to a need for protection and sustenance in a brand-new country to which she arrives with scarce means. The American city at this time was not, if it ever has been, as welcoming or comfortable a place as the lines of Emma Lazarus’ poem promised. In Easy Street Chaplin pulls no punches about the condition of some women in the turn-of-the-century American city. The story shows one woman is savagely beaten by her hulking husband (also the nemesis of Chaplin the cop), and another woman is shown to have been used like a broodmare by her husband. Alternatively, silent movie audiences might also have seen women portrayed as not necessarily the “weaker vessel,” but as powerful and manipulative, at least if they were exposed to two films of the later 1920s,  Metropolis and Sunrise. The city is portrayed much more as the siren, rather than a Cupid, in the hands of directors Fritz Land and F.W. Murnau. In Metropolis, schoolmistress Maria is transformed from a delicate, caring love interest of Jon Feder into an evil feminine robot by the same modern technology on which the giant modern city is founded and controlled by corporate elites. Is she a precursor and 2026 projection in the minds of Lang and writer Thea von Harbow of the late twentieth century economically and sexually liberated woman that strikes terror in the hearts of religious and social conservatives? The city as a sinister “she” appears again as an irresistible urban marriage-threatening siren in Murnau’s Sunrise. Writer Herman Sudermann’s moral fable opposes both city and country when a married man travels to the city and falls into the clutches of a cigarette-smoking city woman, who almost persuades him to drown his wife in the lake that separates their village from the big city. In a resolution that seems to anticipate a similar scene of moral dilemma in A Place in the Sun, this temptation drowns in ambiguity. But there is less ambiguity about the attitudes of these writers and directors about women and the city in the days of silent film.4 241

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Between the films of Chaplin and Lang and Murnau lie the early dichotomous depictions of urban women as needing the protection of men and as (at least symbolically) preying upon them. This polarity has been filled since those silent days; but women’s roles in both the city and the cinema appear far more evolutionary than fixed. The term “city woman” conveys the general ambiguity of the relationship between women and cities, perhaps a certain sophistication, independence, and self-possessed worldliness that her country sisters lack.5 However this urbanity is often tainted with the perception, or the actuality, of moral laxity. The very independence a city woman might possess also allows her to make her own choices, free of the (male) restraints and moderating social sanctions of small towns and rural areas. A city woman might be regarded as a grisette (the term applied to a shop girl, who, in nineteenth century Paris, habitually dressed in grey), or as someone of loose virtue, perhaps a gold digger. She might be the wise-cracking city woman of Miss Adelaide (Vivian Blaine) in Guys and Dolls (1955), the somewhat innocent office girl like Miss Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine) in The Apartment (1960) or, in between—everything from ruthless corporate executives, like Katherine Parker (Sigourney Weaver) in Working Girl (1988), to a juvenile street hooker, like Iris Steensma (Jodie Foster) in Taxi Driver (1976). The city, at least the modern city, unmoored women from their confined traditional society roles and status, exponentially enlarging their possibilities and potentials, with social effects that have been both positive and negative, but which continue to evolve. The city is arguably a great liberator of women. One need only contrast their general status in predominantly agrarian and folk societies for confirmation. What cities have done, from the very first small Neolithic villages in Sumer some ten thousand years ago, is to generate the specialization of labor. Prior to specialization there were two rather basic work roles, hunting and gathering, although, for physiological reasons, women may have participated more heavily in the latter. Cities vastly expanded work roles beyond hunting and gathering, indeed consigning women to a more progressive role, or roles in the beginnings of urbanization. They probably played key roles in the beginning of agriculture, tending gardens; in the crucial crafts of pottery making and basket weaving, which were essential for the safe storage of food supplies; and in the domestication of animals. All of these activities were essential to the establishment of permanent settlements, and the economic surpluses that formed the wealth and security of the community and permitted a larger proportion of the community to become engaged in other occupations. 242

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It has been one of the ironies of the process of urbanization that, for reasons too lengthy and complex to recount, women have benefited less than men from the expanded opportunities that cities have afforded. In part this is attributable to the fact that not until the twentieth century did more people live in cities than in rural ways of life. Moreover, there where the rigid social and religious conventions that barred women from access to the new occupational opportunities that cities afforded. But since the Industrial Revolution, the kind and number of occupational roles the city has to offer have expanded exponentially. In the early phases of this revolution women proved themselves equally, if not in some cases, even better suited to the occupations of industry— tending looms, cutting and sewing garments, assembling items of manufacture. Industries needed nimble, reliable, and eager labor, and many women found their way into the work force through industry. They were often exploited, underpaid, and found managerial levels closed to them, but it was a point of entry that would never have been available to them in a nonurban, traditional society. The city respects efficiency and progress more than traditional attitudes toward gender.6 In today’s urban economy the most rapidly expanding sector of occupational opportunities is not in manufacturing but in a vast array of personal and professional services—education, health care, management, banking, finance and real estate, insurance, recreation, social services of all sorts, government, advertising, the arts, communications, and so on—work that favors no one gender. The economic structure of the modern city was not the only factor involved in what has been the most significant social transformation of the modern era. “For immigrants in particular, one of the most powerful components of this new urban culture was the development of moving pictures. In a world of constant language barriers, the silent film was compelling and accessible. Silent picture spoke primarily to urban immigrant audiences of women and children, themselves caught up in the social drama of transformation.”7 Soon thereafter audiences could see and hear women on screen, such as wisecracking Jean Harlow, a salacious Mae West, savvy newspaper women like Bette Davis in Front Page Woman (1935),8 or as detectives and underworld molls. In Designing Woman (1957), a sportswriter meets and marries a woman on vacation, only to find out, when they return to the city, that she is much more successful in her job as a fashion designer than he is in his. The roles were not always what social conservatives wanted to see promoted on the screen: ambitious, pushy, 243

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and sometimes morally compromised women who were anything but subservient to men. In Front Page Woman, Ellen Garfield (Bette Davis) refuses to marry star reporter Curt Devlin (George Brent) until he admits that she is just as good a reporter as he is; in His Girl Friday (1940) reporter, Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell) enjoys tormenting her ex-husband, Chicago newspaper editor Walter Burns (Cary Grant); in Meet John Doe (1941), a reporter played by Barbara Stanwyck plays fast and loose with journalistic ethics and people’s lives, in order to increase circulation and secure her job. Designing Women

These roles might have been seen as portraying urban women as having become alienated from the traditional role of woman as wife, mother, and homemaker, and as obedient and subservient to males. Turn-of-the-century novels often portrayed women, particularly women from small towns and farms, as potential prey for wiles of the city and urban males. The archetype for the country ingénue, morally refashioned by her encounter with the big city, is Carrie (1952), based on Theodore Dreiser’s novel Sister Carrie (1900).9 “With the publication of Sister Carrie, the twentieth-century American city novel came into being. While other novels of the time showed insight into modern city life, none before had combined the major urban themes, attitudes, and moods to create a new kind of fiction that clearly broke with nineteenth-century tradition.”10 Carrie Meeber (Jennifer Jones) migrates from a rural area in 1890s Wisconsin to Chicago, where she boards with her sister’s family and finds work in a shoe factory. She is soon seduced by a traveling salesman, Charles Drouet (Eddie Albert), whom she meets on the train on her way to Chicago. Carrie then falls in love with well-to-do restaurant manager George Hurstwood (Lawrence Olivier), who promises marriage to Carrie, deserts his family, and steals ten thousand dollars from his employer. Hurstwood later returns the money and goes to live with Carrie in New York City, but he is unsuccessful in regaining his former affluence and, in despair, takes his own life. Carrie enjoys a modest career on stage, but continues on in Hoppersque loneliness. The characters in Dreiser’s novel and in the film are caught up in what has been referred to as urban materialism. As described by Richard Lehan: The self is defined externally. Take away Drouet’s clothes and, as Dreiser writes, “he was nothing” (Sister Carrie, 72–73); so too with 244

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Hurstwood’s managerial position, and Carrie’s connection with the theater. Carrie is able to enlarge her circumference of being, as Hurstwood’s gets smaller and smaller, leaving him little room to operate and finally no choices. As a heliotrope turns toward the sun, so all of Dreiser’s characters turn to the lights of the city; within the city they are moved to material desires that they cannot resist.11

The young starstruck girl from some Midwest small town bent on making it big in the big city theater is a common theme that lends itself well to theatrical representation. She often finds the competition intense, since she is of a cohort that consists of small town beauty queens who are now a dime a dozen in the big city, and she may be required to lower herself below some or all of her small town girl virtues in order to rise above the crowd of aspirant actresses and chorus girls. Whether the city should be held to account for ruthless ambition of characters, such as Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter) in All About Eve,12 or a preexisting personality condition, is debatable. Competition can be fierce in the city and, in the limited world of Broadway theater, there is only just so much room at the top. Like many other starstruck girls from small towns, Eve is consigned to the role of understudy or chorine rather than marquee billing. In Eve’s case she proves to have what it takes in histrionic talent, which she employs to good effect both on and off stage. Through flattery and conniving, she unseats and replaces the reigning prima donna of the theater, Margo Channing (Bette Davis), eventually receiving a high theatrical award,13 but no respect as a human being. Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s screenplay is cynical about the Darwinian world of entertainment, but also, indirectly, about the city and the types of characters it creates in its own dramas. 42nd Street (1933) takes a quite different view of the small town girl who has come to the big city to make it in the theater. A successful musical, it gave a new meaning (or perhaps derivation) to the theatrical adage “break a leg.” In this case the understudy, Peggy Sawyer (Ruby Keeler), gets her own big break when the star of a new show that is in rehearsals breaks her ankle. The show must go on, and Sawyer emerges as a beloved star. 42nd Street also employed urban iconography in both film and stage productions, particularly the skyscraper, in set designs for song and dance numbers. The Femme Fatale

If the city is often metaphorically presented in feminine terms, the femme fatale of the film noir genre represents a city that is 245

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alluring, dark, dangerous, and sexual. The femme fatale has been regarded as: a great departure in American cinema, where so often women’s sexuality has been depicted negatively—from a male viewpoint—as a source of weakness and uncertainty. In comparison to the housewife or other maternal figure traditionally found at the nucleus of family life, the femme fatale (usually the other woman) is nearly always the more intriguing and energetic figure in the films, imbued with intelligence, guile charm, and ambiguous sexual electricity. Not to mention the sort of street smarts that were previously evident solely among male characters.14

The femme fatale is often seen hanging around a cocktail lounge, maybe married to some poor sap who runs a small motel, as Lana Turner was, in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), or is a waitress or mobster moll, or some other socially edgy role. She is not the careeroriented newspaperwoman or social climber, and she is certainly not the girl next door, unless she is the one who left next door for the seedier parts of town and hasn’t been heard from since. Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) in Double Indemnity (1944) is the classic film noir femme fatale. Beautiful and conniving, she met her husband when she was nursing his late (perhaps by her hand) wife. She gets insurance salesman Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) to write a fifty thousand dollar insurance policy on her husband and then kill him. It would have been perfect crime except for the dogged curiosity of insurance claims investigator Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson). Double Indemnity was classic film noir in other respects, one of which was the use of a narration, often by one of the principals, and the flashback. The story opens with Neff, wounded, dictating a memo to Keyes that sums up the dangers of the femme fatale. Office memorandum. “Walter Neff to Barton Keyes, Claims Manager, Los Angeles, July 16, 1938. Dear Keyes: I suppose you’ll call this a confession when you hear it. Well, I don’t like the word ‘confession.’ I just want to set you right about something you couldn’t see because it was smack up against your nose. You think you’re such a hot potato as a Claims Manager; such a wolf on a phony claim. Maybe you are. But let’s take a look at that Dietrichson claim, Accident and Double Indemnity. You were pretty good in there for a while, Keyes. You said it wasn’t an accident. Check. You said it wasn’t suicide. Check. You said it was murder. Check. You thought you had it cold, didn’t you? All wrapped up in tissue paper with pink ribbons around it. It was perfect—except it wasn’t, because you made one mistake. Just one little mistake. When 246

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it came to picking the killer, you picked the wrong guy. You want to know who killed Dietrichson? Hold tight to that cheap cigar of yours, Keyes. I killed Dietrichson—me, Walter Neff, insurance salesman, 35 years old, unmarried, no visible scars, until a while ago, that is. Yes, I killed him. I killed him for money and for a woman. I didn’t get the money and I didn’t get the woman. Pretty, isn’t it?”

Executive Shrews and Working Girls

While the city expanded access to employment opportunities for women, the cinema found dramatic opportunities with the premise that some women succumbed to the blandishments and abuse of economic power and authority that were once exclusively male privilege. The competition between men and women in the workplace provided a rich mine for comedies and dramas. In Desk Set (1957), as in most of the newspaperwoman films of the 1930s and 1940s, that competition was often dramatic foreplay for an eventual romantic reconciliation. No audience would have expected (indeed tolerated) a vicious relationship between Bunny Watson (Katharine Hepburn) and Richard Summer (Spencer Tracy), she as a television network research department head, and he an efficiency engineer who believes computers are the coming innovation to transform her line of work.15 Much of the sparring about statistics and computers is preamble to a Tracy-Hepburn’s romantic denouement. Tracy would have been no match for the ratings-obsessed television programmer Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway) in Network (1976). The film is best known for Howard Beal’s (Peter Finch) madness, and his ranting “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!” Its less satirical side relates how Diana will go to any length to advance her career.16 A ruthless people user, she seduces her boss, Max Schumacher (William Holden), but in a love scene in which she is putatively at the height of her sexual passion, she utters the name of a program she is promoting. That is enough to inspire Max to return to his wife and to lamenting the surrendering of journalistic integrity to what screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky anticipated as the infotainment and reality television that dominates the contemporary battles for ratings. Such blatant self-interest and exploitation might be expected in a Darwinian world run by men, but when women are placed into the equation, such roles, in the “reel” or real world, seem out of place 247

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with prevailing notions of the more sensitive and nurturing traits of women. It is also possible that such behaviors may have more to do with power than with gender. The cinema has been kinder to the average working girl in the city, perhaps because she is more likely to be the dreamer in the audience, but less cynically, because she is more often less the victim of her own ambitions rather than those of someone else, usually a male. Both male and female lower-level workers are exploited in The Apartment (1960), which opens with a series of New York skyline views and establishing shots of office buildings and expansive rows of desks. The cubicle had not been invented as of this date, so legions of clerical workers labored over bulky calculators and typewriters in full view of one another and their supervisors in surrounding offices with window views. C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) is one of the wage slaves at these desks. He makes less than three figures each week, but it is enough to rent an apartment, which he only occasionally gets to use because his bosses have found out that he is a bachelor with a flat that is ideal for their extramarital trysts. Baxter doesn’t even get to go there when he is sick, having surrendered his key to one boss or another because he would not want to offend them.

Baxter finally declares his love for Miss Kubilik in his apartment. © United Artists, 1960 248

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Baxter would like to ask out the comely elevator operator, Miss Kubilik (Shirley MacLaine), who he is unaware is being led to his own apartment to conduct an affair with Baxter’s boss, Mr. Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray). Sheldrake has tendered her the usual promises about leaving his wife, and like Baxter, she willingly accepts the exploitation by her superior, although for love rather than promotion. The Apartment (1960) was made not only before the desktop computer made its way into office work, but also before the term “sexual harassment” made its way into the lexicon of office workplace manners and mores. Miss Kubilik nearly succeeds in an attempted suicide, but she survives to share the apartment and a newfound, and hopefully less exploitative, love with Baxter. Nine to Five (1980) could be subtitled “Miss Kubilik’s Revenge,” albeit two decades—and one Women’s Revolution—later. A fantasy-revenge comedy about three San Francisco women (office mates played by Lili Tomlin, Jane Fonda, and Dolly Parton), who have all been abused or harassed by their boss, Franklin Hart (Dabney Coleman), a “sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot.” But the plot, which involves the women kidnapping their boss and making him see the errors of his despicable ways, is too far-fetched to provide even vicarious revenge for victimized women viewers. Slightly closer to reality is arrogant, abusive, self-indulgent corporate boss Kathleen Parker (Sigourney Weaver), who attempts to steal an idea from her Working Girl (1988), Tess McGill (Melanie Griffith). Tess has ambitions to be more than a working girl (a secretary), and when given the opportunity to work for Parker, she submits some of her ideas to her boss. When Parker breaks her leg skiing, Tess discovers that her boss intends to claim authorship of her best idea. Rather than being a “big sister,” Parker is a larcenous witch. It is not about sisterhood; it is about power and profit. Tess gets her revenge and success, including corporate arbitrager Jack Trainer (Harrison Ford) in the bargain. But by outsmarting Parker, she has to become a little like her nemesis. As city women continue to acquire economic power and social independence, this theme is likely to continue to receive the dramatic attention that it provokes, not only in conflicts and tensions between women and men, but between woman and woman. Most recently, this is explored in the semi-biographical film The Devil Wears Prada (2008), in which women’s magazine editor, Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), runs her corporation, consisting mostly of women, with a satanic cynicism and ruthlessness. 249

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Free Spirits

The city, with is social heterogeneity, its vastness, and its anonymity, has long been a setting for self-reinvention. Both style and lifestyle, sometimes melding into a unity, are prominent features in the presentation of self in an urban world in which the vast majority of fellow urbanites are strangers. For women, more traditionally bound to limited social roles, the city has been, as asserted above, an engine of liberation. For some women it has been a place to give rein to the spirit, to eccentricity, and to search for, or escape from, the essential self. Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn), who likes to grab a Danish and have Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), is perhaps the quintessential urban free-spirited woman. She follows her own muse, whether it is engaging in pranks, skipping out on the rent, or out-maneuvering some groping date she has taken for a dinner or bauble. She is, of course, unmoored from meaningful relationships, as they would certainly limit the freedom of her spirit. Breakfast at Tiffany’s is in some sense a “boy meets girl” movie, albeit the first real meeting takes place as Holly is escaping from one of her own parties and ends up in the next-door apartment of city newcomer, and would-be writer, Paul Varjak (George Peppard). So their friendship begins, but Holly is incapable of much attachment. Even her cat is named Cat. More of Truman Capote’s plot complexity has Paul being kept by an older woman. Holly keeps herself by being an escort, throwing allnight parties, and delivering “weather reports” to a mobster in prison. But there is an undercurrent of sadness in Holly Golightly, not so much out of the dissoluteness of her lifestyle, as from a troubled past that brought her to it. Henry Mancini’s score and award winning “Moon River” has a mournful center to it, but the score, played over the playfulness of the two budding lovers as they enjoy the city’s simple entertainments, promises something more substantial in the way of a relationship. Although it is a romantic comedy, there is the sense that Holly could easily end up maimed or killed by an outraged suitor, or in a mental institution, and Paul could spend his days as a cute plaything for a rich woman. They end up together, but one wonders what two beautiful social leaches can do to survive. Diane Keaton’s Annie Hall (1976) is a ditsy Midwestern girl who is a lighter free spirit than Holly Golightly. But she is the creation of the writer, directors, and costar of the film that bears her name. Alvy Singer is Woody Allen and vice-versa: neurotic, obsessed with sex and panicked by it, self-deprecating, pessimistic, and a satirical comedian. 250

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A neurotic woman whose fashion statement features baggy pants, vests, ties and floppy men’s hats might seem the perfect match. However, neither of them can handle much commitment; even moving in together involves compromises they seem to take reluctantly. Annie feels that Alvy thinks she is not intelligent enough for him; he is threatened by her being invited to Los Angeles by a record producer and liking the West Coast. Annie Hall is an immigrant to the big city, but she seems paradoxically more adaptable to it than native New Yorker, Alvy, who cannot abide an unfamiliar environment. The relationship eventually fades for both of them, seemingly because they can’t figure out a compelling reason to remain together.

Annie and Alvy. © Metro Goldwyn Mayer, 1977

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The breakup in An Unmarried Woman (1978) is not so amicable. Erica’s (Jill Clayburgh) husband, Martin (Michael Murphy), tearfully asks her for a divorce in the middle of a lower Manhattan street so he can marry a younger woman. While this is hardly an unusual occurrence in a big city, it is perhaps less devastating than in might be in a small town or rural area. Erica does rely upon traditional sources of support, particularly female friends, to see her through the rejection and readjustment, but the urban environment provides resources of employment and associations, as well as a cushion of anonymity, that allow for her to choose to remain unmarried. Unmarried status is rejected by Isabella (Amy Irving) in Crossing Delancey (1988), but apparently without much more compulsion than to fulfill the wishes of her grandmother and her matchmaker friend that she find a nice Jewish man to marry. Isabella works in an uptown New York bookstore where she gets to interact with a variety of interesting literati. “Izzy” Grossman is city woman with a foot in the ethnic village world of downtown. She has a disappointing encounter with an egotistical gentile writer, but that doesn’t alone seem a sufficient reason for her to begin seeing Sam (Peter Reigert), a nice Jewish man who has a pickle shop, much less marrying him. In the end, her ethnic heritage, more than Sam, seems to win her over and she crosses Delancey Street. Director Joan Micklin Silver’s heroine also directed Hester Street (1975), but in that film her heroine is an immigrant to lower Manhattan from Russia in the late 1890s. The heroine rejects her husband for his avoidance of her and his philandering, and she marries a traditional man who studies Jewish scripture. But she also becomes a city woman in her own right. Both films are about women in the city making choices about their lifestyle. Which choices the filmmakers choose for them may be less important than that the city is portrayed as a place where women have the power to make such choices. The subject of women in the city is far larger than this necessarily selective consideration. This thesis is not intended to suggest that an urban determinism is at work that has functioned to transmogrify some women from a docile, subordinate and submissive nature or status. But clearly the big city is an environment that seems to express its own peculiar version of that nature or nurture debate. In this respect, the differences between men and women may, as far as the city is concerned, only be differences in the time. Certain dimensions of the urban culture may transcend those of the folk cultures that defined gender 252

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and power differently. For some, the alienation of women from their erstwhile social status may be a welcome byproduct of life in the city, even if some of their behavioral repertoire might seem to ape that of their former oppressors. But as one observer of women’s roles in films asserts: “The price of possessing power . . . has always been high: independent women rarely retained both power and the hero at film’s end.”17 Work, Love, and the City

Immigrants to the American city often brought their own communities with them, establishing, as we have discussed in earlier chapters, their ethnic enclaves and, for a time at least, retaining their culture and marrying their own kind (Hester Street, Crossing Delancey, Moonstruck). But these communities are frequently edged up against other ethnic enclaves, communities of other races, and the general community, creating contacts and associations, as well as romantic entanglements across racial and ethnic lines (Jungle Fever, A Patch of Blue, West Side Story). These cultural differences, the resistance of older generations, religious conflicts, not to discount the general misogynistic resistance in American culture to interethnic and interracial blending,18 offer a rich array of dramatic scenarios. The city also acted as matchmaker for needy, lonely, and wounded people seeking one another out for safety, comfort, and love, in the city that can be harsh and unforgiving to those without friends, families and connections. The city juxtaposes people who comprise rich and varied dramatis personae for potential romantic/sexual encounters. Big cities have long been a magnet for the small-towner—the Carrie Meeber (Sister Carrie) or the Joe Buck (Midnight Cowboy)—seeking encounters for ulterior purposes that end badly or with defeat and departure. But there are less instrumental motives in the relationship that the city engenders between the lonely divorcee lawyer from the Midwest, Jerry Ryan (Robert Mitchum), and heading over-the hill Jewish hypochondriac dance instructor Gittel Mosca (Shirley MacLaine) in Two for the Seesaw (1962). When the city blurs the old rules of tradition and religion as the prime matchmakers, the reel and real dramatic possibilities abound. In this film, true to its title, Jerry and Gittel, while meeting certain needs in one another, do not find romantic fulfillment easily achieved. Love and irony are an equally popular theme, especially as the contemporary American city has become the denizen of young professionals of both sexes with separate and sometimes competing 253

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personal goals and other baggage that complicate romantic interests. The gamut ranges from romantic comedies, such as Pillow Talk (1959), one of several predictable plots in which Rock Hudson and Doris Day squabble and make up; The Seven Year Itch (1955) and Boys Night Out (1962), in which older men nurse adulterous urges toward beautiful young women (Marilyn Monroe and Kim Novak, respectively); to young couples (played by Robert Redford and Jane Fonda) adjusting to urban as well as married life by going Barefoot in the Park (1971), or a conservative writer (Redford, again) and a pinkish political activist (Barbra Streisand) failing to adjust in The Way We Were (1973); to those round and round relationships that morph from friendship to love as When Harry Met Sally (1989) with Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan, respectively, in the title roles; or when an urban icon such as the Empire State Building serves as meeting place for a mournful Seattle widower (Tom Hanks) and a romantic dreamer in New York (Meg Ryan, again) in Sleepless in Seattle (1993), with the latter film serving as an homage to an earlier classic romantic city movie as well (An Affair to Remember, 1957). Is it every lonely, searching urban man’s fantasy to, on turning some city street corner, encounter that mysterious beautiful woman that has long been haunting his forlorn dreams? In Eben Adam’s (Joseph Cotton) case it is not a corner, but a snowy slope in New York’s Central Park; not a woman, but a fetching and friendly girl; and not a “real” encounter but a fantasy even his dreams have not fully conjured. Adams comes upon Jennie Appleton (Jennifer Jones)—or she comes upon him?—when his is dispirited and impoverished in Depression-dreary New York City of 1934. Portrait of Jennie (1948) is the stuff of which cinematic epiphanic encounters are made (and maybe the occasional real encounter, too). This is Jennifer Jones at her ingénue best, tantalizingly poised between precocious girl and ripe womanhood, but in full cognizance of her desires and, more auspiciously, her fate. It is Jennie that provides the muse—and more—that has long eluded Eben. Yet, as is soon revealed, she is from another time, twenty-four years earlier in 1910; she is a phantom that his desire and need for her makes more real at each encounter in which she matures iteratively into a woman who seems to need to love him in equal return. It is a possession that harkens to Murnau’s Sunrise. Were it not for William Dieterle’s direction, and (perhaps even more) Joseph August’s atmospheric cinematography19 of the city, Portrait of Jennie might have been remembered only as a tear-jerker 254

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romance novel put on screen. But the often ethereal visuals are complemented by a script, gleaned from Robert Nathan’s novel, which is enriched with existential ponderings. A sketch of Jennie—and later her portrait—launch Eben’s renown but, as it happens, as prefigured in a landscape he painted earlier of a lighthouse off Cape Cod, Jennie has a divergent destiny. It is nature, not the city that intervenes in this urban-spawned love affair. Whether the city plays Cupid or adulterous co-respondent in these dramas, or whether it is active or passive in its role, it is indisputable that these stories could not be as interesting, if they could plausibly exist at all, were it not for their taking place in the city. In the end, while love supposedly conquers all, it probably has a better chance if it keeps peace with the city. 1. 2.

3. 4.

5.

6. 7. 8.

9.

Notes

Eisler, 1987, 21. Women may also have been the Neolithic village’s first industrialists. Crafts such as pottery and basket weaving were essential for the protection and storage of the community’s agricultural surplus, and so were the first warehouses. Implements and methods for the production of these storehouses were among the first tools of manufacture. Clapp, 1984, xxi–xxii. It is appropriate to mention that both Metropolis and Sunrise, products of German writers and directors in the years following World War I, have been shaped by the gloomy, foreboding German Expressionist influences that were in play in other German arts (e.g., the apocalyptic paintings of Ludwig Meidner) at the time. Such distinctions are often transmitted early in life by means of, for example, children’s literature. In the Aesop fable of “The City Mouse and the Country Mouse,” the country cousin is looked down upon by the city mouse for her lack of sophistication (Clapp, 1973). In China there is no surer way to convey a lack of sophistication than to refer to a woman as a “countryside girl.” Nevertheless, in American lore, the countrywoman, especially the farm wife, has been portrayed in some films as courageous, loyal, and strong. Most notable are Country, The River, and Places in the Heart. Clapp, 1987. Ewan, 1981, 43. Women newspaper reporters were popular film roles in the 1930s and 1940s, among them Joan Blondell in Back in Circulation (1937), Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday (1940), and Barbara Stanwyck in Meet John Doe (1941). Such movie roles may well have exceeded the representation of women as real newspaper reporters; Rosen, 1973, 145. Women newspaper reporters were popular film roles in the 1930s and 1940s, among them Joan Blondell in Back in Circulation (1937), Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday (1940), and Barbara Stanwyck in Meet John Doe (1941). 255

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10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

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Such movie roles may well have exceeded the representation of women as real newspaper reporters; Rosen, 1973, 145. Gelfant, 1954, 63. Lehan, 1998, 199. The picture was awarded six Oscars. It may take something as thin on plot and upbeat as a musical to counter the theme of the ruthless understudy. In 42nd Street (1933), small-town girl Peggy Sawyer (Ruby Keeler) is actually the heroine, saving the Broadway show from having to close because of an injury to its star. All about Eve also received the highest number of Academy Award nominations in the awards, winning several, including Best Picture, but, curiously, none for either of the lead women actors, who were both nominated. Christopher 1997, 197. This was 1957! Google and LexisNexis would have sounded like Martian baby babble back then. In contrast to some of the nasty “Queen Bee” portrayals of executive woman in recent films, a new study of global business refutes the oft-cited assertion that women are reluctant to help other women and will undermine each other to get ahead. In fact, the study shows that women are more likely to develop new talent—especially other women—than men are. http://www.npr.org/2012/06/13/154904196/study-working-women-dontplay-queen-bee. Sochen 1991, 101. This resistance, with its consequent effects upon American films for many years, is not restricted to American culture. See, for example a discussion of it in Asian movies in Luk and Rice, 2002, 31–45. August was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Cinematography posthumously, for his shooting in Boston and (mostly) New York. He shot many of the scenes through a canvas, creating scenes that looked like actual paintings.

14 City Work Mr. McGuire: I just want to say one word to you—just one word. Ben: Yes sir. Mr. McGuire: Are you listening? Ben: Yes, I am. Mr. McGuire: “Plastics.” Ben: Exactly how do you mean? Mr. McGuire: There’s a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it? Ben: Yes, I will. Dialogue, The Graduate, 1967

“Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness.” So advised Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle in the eighteenth century. He might have emphasized that he meant chosen work; for most of human history, the work that most men and women have done was whatever needed to, or could, be done just to survive. The idea of finding their chosen work, in the same way in which a university student might seek a major that fits his or her ambitions, would have been a fanciful prospect, if it were entertained at all. Indeed, most of human experience was spent in the work of hunting and gathering, and even since the foundation of the first cities, the majority of the world’s population has been engaged in the work of agriculture, fishery, and pastoral life. Only on the eve of the twenty-first century would the majority of the world’s population be defined as urbanized. By urbanized is meant, increasingly, not just or necessarily people who reside in cities, or places with physical urban characteristics, but also those who perform urban work. Indeed, work, or more specifically, the division or specialization of labor, is central to the definition of urbanization. Permanent settlements both enabled and necessitated the expansion of different forms of work. Even at the most rudimentary levels of urbanization, occupations expanded exponentially: crafts for storage of products, such as pottery and baskets; scribes to maintain 257

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records; building trades; and the beginnings of administrative functions, were among the first new jobs of the city. Various cities were founded upon some industry or economic activity, the location of particular natural resource, for example, as in the case of the Turkish city of Catal Huyuk, established in 6800 BC as a manufacturing center for products made of glass-like obsidian.1 Specialized or diversified labor, assisted by the development of tools and technologies that increased efficient productivity and created surplus products, were characteristics of the earliest cities that remain the fundamental features of contemporary urban economics.2 Manufacturing created new specialties: tool makers, suppliers of raw materials, fabricators, assemblers, and so on, and subsequently those concerned with retailing and trading finished products. Record-keeping required the new occupation of clerks and scribes. Trade itself engendered new occupations associated with transportation of products. Regionalization, the precursor to today’s globalization, first brought about the expansion of agriculture to accommodate the food and fiber requirements of the increasing number of workers engaged in nonagricultural occupations,3 and then, the colonization of other territories that functioned as markets, related manufacturing centers, and distribution points on the expanding trade network. By the late nineteenth century, it could be asserted, “most of the necessary preconditions for the rise of the large industrial city had been satisfied.. . . The dynamic forces of industrialization and urbanization nurtured and sustained each other. The factory and the modern city grew up together.”4 The social effects of origination of cities and urban economies and trade are too extensive and profound to even enumerate, much less discuss here. It might suffice to say that it changed—and continues to change—two sets of relationships: that between man and man, and that between man and nature. Relationships between men, women, and children were profoundly affected by the urban economy. New forms of property, among them the new knowledge and skills fostered by industrialism, were created that vastly changed relationships between social classes. Virtually every social institution—family, religion, government, warfare, and education—changed and continue to change. Moreover, mankind’s relationship to nature, once passive and benign, now turned exploitative. The environment became a factor of production; forests were cleared, rivers dammed, mountains mined, and the gods that once resided in them were replaced by a monotheism that gave mankind authority and dominion over the earth. The 258

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environmental issues of today are an outgrowth of attitudes toward nature that were shaped in the very first cities. The opportunities created by the vast expansion in numbers and types of occupations were a powerful lure of cities that also had profound effects upon the countryside. Nineteenth century industrialization created a push-pull effect upon rural society; cities lured country youth away from farm life and also produced the mechanization of agriculture that would make farming less labor intensive, eventually leading to the agricultural imitation of the factory that is today called agribusiness. The dividing of labor into various specializations produced an efficiency of production that could not have been achievable in nonurban society. As specialization produced surpluses these surpluses could be employed in the next stage of economic development: trade. Trade would bring increased wealth to the urban community that would express itself in the expansion of other types of economic activity, particularly services that would produce increased levels of labor specialization. This relationship, between the income produced from trade and the services produced, is referred to by economists as the multiplier effect: a generation of economic activity produced as money is circulated and recirculated throughout the community. As technology developed—the harnessing of power and the invention of efficient techniques for the production and distribution of products and services—all these economic functions accelerated. It is also noteworthy that manufacturing was instrumental in the mechanization of time. With the development of urban economies that were more complex and necessitated the orchestration, integration, and management of the diverse forms of labor and other factors of production, the clock replaced the natural day as the prime regulator of time. The factory did not need to conform to the circadian segments as did the farm and the pasture. Industrial Iconography

Industrialism altered the appearance and rhythm of the city, the most obvious, almost clichéd, image being the smokestack, the spire of the cathedrals of production. They rose defiantly and fogged the skyline in towns that once had edicts that prohibited any structure to be higher than that of the spire of a church. Cities came to be governed by the clock and the whistles that signaled the work shifts. The factory paid no respect to nature’s chronology, generating power to light up the night and to dress the streets of the city in colorful illumination. And industrialism 259

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powered the new urban locomotion: trolleys, buses, subways, and elevated trains, which added new sounds and motions to the city. The motion picture was nearly contemporaneous with these structural and visual changes, and, of course, in its own way, a part of it. The new urban iconography was a bonanza to the motion picture that thrived on change, motion, and novelty. Today, the factory seems an almost anachronistic feature of American urbanism. As manufacturing plants have been displaced in many inner cities by other land uses, or have relocated to the more spacious suburbs, and as manufacturing itself accounts for a smaller proportion of the American workforce, the factory is less of an economic icon today. But in the early days of the motion picture, they were prominent in the landscape of many American cities, and in some cases were the economic raison d’être for a city. Brick industrial buildings were often juxtaposed with the residential neighborhoods that supplied their workers who flowed in and out of them, carrying metal lunch pails, to the summons of the steam whistle. Such images were regarded as evidence of the growing industrial strength of the city and the nation— blast furnaces of steel plants forging sheet metal, girders and tools, assembly lines of durable goods marching off the production floors, smoke pouring from stacks into skies above cities—and celebrated the power of industrial capitalism. The Cinema of Industrialism

While the earliest filmmakers undertook the documentation of the industrial activity of the city, influential directors took a narrative perspective that focused on the negatives of the machine in the city. Among early films most notable was Metropolis (1926).5 Set in the future year of 2026, a century after Lang visited New York City and was impressed by its size and verticality, Metropolis was a film born of a different view of the promises and perils of industrial capital and urbanism. In many respects its views of technology reflect a late nineteenth century point of view about the effects of science, technology, and industrialism. It questions the social (and metaphysical) consequences of industrialism and urbanism in a narrative about the capitalist and managerial elite who enjoy the pleasures of a ruling upper class. They reside in the sunlight and are supported by a subterranean-dwelling and -laboring proletariat living a life of drone-like drudgery, physically and socially, beneath them. The workers of the urban netherworld toil on a subterranean industrial ziggurat in shifts that are ruled by the clock and the factory 260

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whistle, while the rich and privileged leisure themselves above ground. Metropolis reflected late nineteenth century views and early twentieth century German Expressionist perspectives about industrialism, particularly in its metaphysical themes that the industrial city was a new Babel and that the machines of industry were a devouring Moloch to which laborers were sacrificed to the emergent materialism. Although Metropolis, with its skyscrapers, airplanes, and machines, has been called “the first science fiction,” hence futuristic, film: Lang’s city is not the modern city. The final chase on the cathedral roof evokes the medieval city. The Expressionist clutter and cliché of von Harbou’s novel (already clearly out of date by the mid-twenties) is exploited by Lang for its sensational and commercial potential. In the language of Expressionism, the cathedral stands for a hope of spiritual renewal in the city; in Lang’s cinematic language it supplies the setting for a cliff-hanger. The same can be said for the Expressionist elements of the plot, such as father-son conflict, the theme of the ‘savoir, and the scenic uses of the symbol of the cross. These elements do not signify on their own account, but propel a succession of images. Only where the images themselves are eloquent, does Lang’s film fascinate and move us.6

But Metropolis also raised social themes with its sequences relating to the physical and social distances between labor and the managerial elite of the city. The imagery was powerful; the workers of Metropolis were no longer craftsmen plying their skills at traditional trades, but they were shuffling ciphers dwarfed by the monstrous machines they tended like robots. Indeed, viewed through contemporary lenses of a cybernetic age, it is easy to speculate that so many of the tasks depicted in Metropolis could be performed by robotic devices and computers, which, in the intervening decades, is in many respects what has become of industrial enterprises. There is no indication as to what is produced by all the industrial activity taking place in the bowels of the metropolis. No products come off assembly lines, and there is no treatment of economic transactions. Thus to an economist it would be implausible for a city to exist primarily upon building itself, without producing an economic surplus to trade with other cities. The very purpose of machine technology is efficiency and productivity. This matter was of scant concern to the cinema’s depiction of urban industrialism. Ten years later Modern Times (1936), written by, directed by, and featuring, Charlie Chaplin, also focused on an industry which 261

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produced and unidentified product. Modern Times showed the influence of Metropolis, an influence that would extend to futuristic films to the present day,7 at least in its use of the clock as a metaphor for the machine and industrialization, its portrayal of workers as drones, and particularly in the casting and scenes involving the indolent chief executive of the factory. Although Chaplin avoided reference to religious themes, he does portray factory work as monotonous and dangerous, and the workers as subject to the greed of the owners. This induces madness in Chaplin’s Little Tramp character and several misadventures that allow Chaplin to make oblique comedic reference to his liberal politics. The film contains the now classic scene of Chaplin literally drawn into a giant piece of machinery, a visual metaphor that requires no further explanation.8

The assembly line drives Chaplin a little crazy. Modern Times, © United Artists,1936

Modern Times can be considered a social protest film about work and working conditions. Prior to its opening Chaplin had been quoted as saying about work: “Why this terrible insistence on work? Work is a beastly thing, especially when it gets to be a kind of religion. If you don’t work, you can’t eat—they’ve got to offer us something better than 262

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that in a Communist society. It’s too damn irksome and nasty. I’d like to see a state of society where everybody could get up in the morning and say, ‘Well, it’s all right, I don’t have to work.’”9 The film opens with a clock face approaching six o’clock and a forward: “Modern Times: A story of industry, of individual enterprise— humanity crusading in the pursuit of happiness.” This is followed by an overhead shot of a flock of sheep jostling in their sheep pen, and rushing through a chute (one of the sheep is black). The sheep dissolve into another overhead shot of industrial workers thronging out of a subway station during rush hour on their way to their jobs in a factory. Chaplin pursues several themes, but mostly the corporate obsession with efficiency of productivity at the expense of the physical and psychological welfare of the assembly-line worker. Eventually, he is driven crazy by it. Following his arrest for his work-induced berserk behavior in the factory Chaplin fails at a succession of jobs—shipyard worker, waiter, and night watchman in a department store—and is arrested several times, once as a mistaken political agitator, before he and his companion, a gamine (Paulette Goddard) leave the city and walk off toward a sunrise. For Chaplin, the modernity associated with industrial production was clearly not ennobling to humans. Mill Towns Blues

While manufacturing assembly lines may have been monotonous and a drudge, they were far less dangerous, dirty, and probably better compensated than the industries that supplied the raw materials for the production of durable goods. Monotonous work has not been a prime subject for the cinema unless strong dramatic plots could be built upon it. So when How Green Was My Valley (1941), a story of the tribulations of a family of Welsh miners in a village built on slag, won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1942, there was a spate of imitators. Pittsburgh (1942), a melodrama about an overambitious steel baron (John Wayne), is much like a western moved into a steel town; Valley of Decision (1945) is also set in Pittsburgh and focuses on a beautiful Irish immigrant maid (Maureen O’Hara). Both films were more concerned with romance between the social classes than with the arduous working conditions in the steel mills. Taking a page from Metropolis, the nephew of a steel mill owner (John Lund) in Steel Town (1952), who wants to learn the business from the bottom up, goes to work in the mills, which wins him not only the respect of his coworkers, but the beautiful daughter of the mill owner as well. 263

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Each in their own way, these films deal with the class structure that manufacturing created in American industrial cities and towns. The great fortunes of the nineteenth century were literally and figuratively forged in the mills and industries that extracted the raw resources of production and power for manufacturing and converted them into the consumer goods that defined American material progress. But as manufacturing jobs were numerically overtaken by service and professional occupations in the American workforce, such films were less relevant to the experience of the average movie audience, and mill towns became known more as places that produced tough football players as well as steel. And as places to get out of. The mill is a powerful icon; its stacks dominate the skyline like cathedrals of capital tinting the atmosphere, and its forges roar causing its milling operations to raise a din. The mill’s overbearing presence serves also as a constant reminder to the youth of a community that the blast furnaces and milling floors are their destiny, unless they can find a way out. That there are not many options for workers who are essentially appendages to machines is evidenced in The Deer Hunter (1978). Though primarily a film about the effects of the Vietnam War on friendship, the story is set in a dingy Pennsylvania mill town where Eastern-European ethnic blue-collar workers bond over beers and hunting excursions. The opening sequences establish that three of the workers, Mike, Nick, and Steven (Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, and John Savage), of the foundry have finished their last day of work before leaving for Vietnam, the hellish images of the blast furnaces prefiguring what they will experience in the cauldron of S.E. Asia. All three return: one maimed by the war; another decorated, but emotionally damaged; the third in a casket from a self-inflicted gunshot. A football scholarship to a major university is the intended ticket out of another Pennsylvania mill town in All the Right Moves (1983). All of Stef ’s (Tom Cruise) relatives work or have worked in the mills, and he will likely end up there. Like The Deer Hunter, there are the elements of male-bonding, ethnic solidarity, the camaraderie of the weekend release at the local bar and, like many such towns, the almost pathological devotion to local high school football. But most of the Friday night heroes of football eventually end up wearing hard hats instead of football helmets. Stef is a promising high school football defensive back, a candidate for a football scholarship. He has a chance to escape from the almost inevitable trap of a steel town youth with not much more to offer the outside world than a strong back for the mills or the 264

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gridiron. Circumstances (an unfortunate incident involving his coach and a romantic involvement) almost ruin his chances, but in the end he gets his scholarship to a West Coast university. For those who have to stay on in their city or town and make the best of jobs that are often boring, repetitive, and dangerous, with long hours and low-pay there are fewer options. American industry has a long history of changing location or using other practices to avoid regulation or to reduce production costs and raise profits. Workers have often been pitted against one another in order to resist unionization, and films such as Matewan (1987), The River (1984), and Hoffa (1992) have chronicled various aspects of the checkered circumstances of the American labor movement. In Norma Rae (1979), Sally Field plays the title role of a woman who labors at a drudge job at a textile mill in Alabama, and she appears to hold the views of most of her coworkers: unions mean trouble, and it is better to leave things alone and not risk one’s job when it comes to workers rights. When fast-talking New Yorker and union organizer Reuben Warshawsky (Ron Leibman) arrives, Norma is gradually drawn into the unionization effort, causing problems with both her coworkers and her marriage.10 Have I got a deal for you . . .

Between the producers and consumers lies a seemingly ever-expanding stratum of occupational categories made both possible and necessary by the process of urbanization. Urban economies are engines for the constant creation of new work—new enterprises to produce new products for new levels and tastes of consumption.11 Thus are generated new occupational categories: advertising agencies, sales and service personnel, distributors, and a variety of financial intermediaries to process the transactions. Anyone who has ever purchased a house quickly realizes that every level is involved: the homebuilder, the seller, real estate brokerages, title companies, saving and loan institutions, and governmental agencies, each taking their piece of the action. Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), which was originally a play by David Mamet, provides a view into one aspect of the real estate transaction, by way of a company of salesmen who sell land for vacation homes. Set in seemingly perpetually rainy nocturnal Chicago, at a dingy bar and even more shabby real estate office, this is a world of desperate Willy Lomans who compete with each other for sales contracts and promotional bonuses. Blake (Alec Baldwin) has come in from the head office to berate the sales crew for their low sales, of which he and his 265

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cold and calculating office manager, John Williamson (Kevin Spacey), will take their part of the commissions. Shelley “The Machine” Levene (Jack Lemmon), a worn-out huckster with a sick wife; Dave Moss (Ed Harris), who is cynical and suspicious; Ricky Roma (Al Pacino), a quack philosopher hotshot salesman; and George Aaronow (Alan Arkin), occupy the desks, making calls on leads doled out by the management on which they are expected to produce sales or to be laid off. The dehumanizing competition among them, fueled by both ego and economics, drives out what little remains of camaraderie and moral restraint. They lie, cheat and use every blandishment and subterfuge to close a deal. Jack Lemmon’s Levene was the culmination of several similar roles over his distinguished career of characters, all in varying degrees of desperation over their jobs and the loss of them. Beginning with The Apartment (1960) in which he plays a young accountant, who occupies a desk in a sea of desks, in a huge New York insurance company and is exploited by his superiors until he tenders his resignation. In Days of Wine and Roses (1962), he is a young public relations director who feeds his alcoholism with afterhours cocktails and turns his wife into an alcoholic as well. Save the Tiger (1973) is a twenty-four hour view into the psychologically distressed circumstances of the owner of a Los Angeles garment factory filled with Mexican-immigrant workers, which is on the economic skids and he wants to burn it down. In The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1975), Lemmon’s character has a nervous breakdown after being laid off from his corporate job. Over time, Lemmon assembled a body of work that comprises a cross section of the perils of the middle-class American city workplace. If Glengarry Glen Ross is pure tragedy, Tin Men (1987) is a tragiccomic perspective on two feuding salesmen of aluminum siding: BB (Richard Dreyfuss) and Tilly (Danny DeVito). The feud, begun when they have an accident with their Cadillacs, drives the respective and reciprocal acts of vengeance, which even includes BB seducing Tilly’s wife (Barbara Hershey). The time period of the film is near the end of the 1950s, when Cadillac ownership was considered the preferred way for a salesman to display success, or at least its appearance (an Eldorado Cadillac was also the prize for the best salesman in Glengarry Glen Ross). For these “tin men,” success is slipping away. They are concerned that a commission holding hearings on their high-pressure sales techniques will end their careers. They employ the questionable loss-leader approach, promising to cut in first buyers in the neighborhood when others see their house and sign up for siding, or they promise to get a 266

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buyer’s house pictured in Life magazine, and other scams such as the “bait and switch.” Contemporary audiences might find such methods quaint, having been through the junk bond era, the savings and loan debacle, Enron, and the financial malfeasances of Wall Street in the great recession of 2008, as well as dealing daily with cold calls and Internet pop-ups. Greed Creed

“The richest one percent of this country owns half our country’s wealth, five trillion dollars. One third of that comes from hard work, two thirds comes from inheritance, interest on interest accumulating to widows and idiot sons and what I do, stock and real estate speculation. It’s bullshit. You got ninety percent of the American public out there with little or no net worth. I create nothing. I own.” So says Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas), one of the masters of Wall Street (1987). It was also Gekko’s credo that “greed is good.” Real estate and aluminum siding hucksters may not contribute all that much to GNP, but what harm they might do is negligible when compared to that stratum of American workers who produce nothing, but make money off of other people’s economic efforts.

Gordon Gekko making money the modern way—on other people’s labor. © 20th Century Fox, 1987 267

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The insidiousness of the combination of Gekko’s creed and his morality are viewed through a young recruit, Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen), who tries to keep up with his mentor’s avarice and materialism, despite the fact that he comes from a working-class background; his father (Martin Sheen, in both real and reel life) is a trade unionist. Eventually like many arbitragers and wheeler-dealers, Gekko is brought down, as were several real-world counterparts during this period, by his greed and bravado. But the mentality of the 1980s that led to the popularity and resonance of this film had resulted in one of every nine American university students majoring in business administration, many convinced that the way to get rich in America was not to produce, but to play with the rules of the economic game.12 Most did not become rich, but enough did to result in the observation: Like the Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties, the Roaring Nineties (which had its roots in the early 1980s) brought [America] worrying new levels of inequality. Those who owned stock, homes and other assets enjoyed substantial gains each year—and those with privileged access to initial public offerings often doubled their money in a day. Meanwhile, global competition and the ruthless restructuring of the economy put a lid on wages and benefits for the great majority of Americans, especially those without college degrees. While the rich monitored the gains on their monthly brokerage statements, Americans without financial assets struggled each month to pay the interest on their credit-card bills. By the end of the 1990s the United States had become more unequal than any other time since the dawn of the New Deal—indeed, it was the most unequal society in the advanced democratic world.13

The nouveaux riches were heroic models for some and moral foils for others. Not long after the fall of Gordon Gekko, another Wall Street hotshot was calling himself a “master of the universe.” Like the monk Savanaola, who took over Medicean Florence and coined the term, Sherman McCoy (Tom Hanks) finds himself sacrificed on his own Bonfire of the Vanities (1990) when he runs afoul not of the laws of economics, but the laws of the urban jungle. A mistake that any mere mortal might make thrusts him into the brutal universe of the city, from which he escapes with his life, and not much more.14 Work, Identity, and Health

There are two fundamental aspects to our identity, as making our way around a cocktail party usually demonstrates: who you are and what 268

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you do. In some sense the aspects are less distinct than complements. We often describe ourselves by what kind of work we do. Indeed, there was a time when names such as Cooper, Sawyer, Sailor, Taylor, Finstermacher, and other similar surnames actually identified both who we were and what we did. However, these days a Sawyer might be an accountant, a Sailor might be an airline pilot, and a Taylor might be a teacher. But the importance of what we do to our sense of ourselves and our self-worth has not changed. We need only consider the degree of personal and social breakdown, physical and mental, that occurs when the link between people and their work in broken by layoffs or other factors causing unemployment.15 The establishing shots in the opening scenes of Falling Down (1993) show the license plate of Bill Foster’s (Michael Douglas) car: “D-fens.” Vanity plates are commonplace on California’s freeways, where “you are what you drive” (and what your plates declare) is about the only way left of self-identification. D-fens is, or was, a defense worker. He has been laid off, looking unsuccessfully for work for weeks, and he is enraged at his fate. On the Los Angeles 405 freeway, the cars and other vehicles are in what newscasters are fond of calling “a parking lot.” Jammed bumper to bumper, the drivers blare their horns, curse, pound on their steering wheels, or engage in distractions, as the heat and frustration rises. Camera angles focus on distorted faces, screaming children, and D-fens, who, like the others, is going nowhere. He is out of a job, out of his home (his wife has divorced him), out of touch with his daughter (there’s a restraining order to keep him away), and soon to be out of his mind. At the end of the long opening scene, he is also out of his car and, already losing his mental equilibrium, walking home, with the intention of attending his daughter’s birthday party. The momentum of Falling Down is composed of sequences of serial vengeance in which D-fens vents his anger and frustration at his circumstances upon an over-pricing Korean convenience store proprietor, Mexican-American gang-bangers, and an arrogant fast-food restaurant manager. He finally kills a neo-Nazi gay-bashing gun dealer, but the trigger for his descent into madness is his unemployment, the repudiation (as he sees it) of having done everything he was supposed to do and following the rules, only to have it all unravel by forces he could not or did not anticipate or control. His unemployment is an emasculation, and in the end, he sees no way of self-determination other than to cause his own execution by the police. 269

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Mel Edison’s (Jack Lemmon) rising frustrations at his circumstances in The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1975) are also introduced in traffic. He is first rudely refused entry into a New York City bus for not having the correct change, and then he has a subsequent dispute with a taxi driver. His company is experiencing problems and is downsizing. Each day there are fewer middle managers, until, inevitably, Mel is given notice. He keeps the bad news from his wife, Edna (Anne Bancroft), while he roams the streets looking for work. Mel even has his own vengeance scenes: He chases down a pickpocket through Central Park (played by a pre-famous Sylvester Stallone) to retrieve what he thinks is his wallet, but it is actually the pickpocket’s. He also plots revenge on various neighbors with whom he differs or disputes. When his apartment is burglarized and Mel admits he is jobless, Edna finds work in theater production, but Mel descends into a nervous breakdown, requiring counseling and sedation. With the help of his wife and brother (who contends that a move to the suburbs is the remedy for his maladies), Mel regains his resolve to survive in the city and to find work. A few years earlier Lemmon had starred in another Neil Simon film, The Out of Towners (1970). He played Ohioan George Kellerman, who is coming to New York with his wife Gwen (Sandy Dennis), for an all-expense-paid job interview. A position in New York will be a big step up in status and income for George, but the experience turns out to be disastrous, starting with a plane delay that requires they take a long, uncomfortably crowded train ride from Boston. When they arrive late, their rooms at a posh hotel have been let; they are mugged, chased by the police through Central Park at night, and George breaks his tooth. Still, George, even after nearly being killed by an exploding manhole, stands in the middle of the street screaming that he will not let the city defeat him, and he resolves to take the job rather than retreat back to Ohio. The scene is a contrast with Modern Times, with which we began this discussion of city work, where Chaplin and Goddard walk out of the city into the countryside after their unsatisfying adventures with city work. But, half a century of American urbanism later, that may be less of an option. 1. 2.

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Hamblin, 1973, chap. 3. The development and the use of technology predate cities. Humans developed simple technologies, such as the bow and arrow, throwing stick, and other tools, many millennia before cities were founded. Such technologies

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3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

might be referred to as biotechnic, in the sense that they were derivative of and composed of elements found in nature and involved little manufacture. The technologies of the first great revolution in human history—the Agricultural Revolution—were primarily biotechnic and mechano-technic. The second Agricultural Revolution of the nineteenth century was a result of the capital substitution of labor brought on by technologies that made the sowing and reaping of agricultural produce more efficient. More advanced forms of technology, for example, the shaduf, a device used to elevate water from rivers for irrigation purposes, employed the lever, or even a screw, to more efficiently perform a variety of functions. Such technologies, which appear to bridge pastoral and nomadic and early urban societies, might be classified as mechano-technic and cover a large variety of technologies, ranging in sophistication from basic to the internal combustion engine and the movie camera. The Industrial Revolution that began in the English Midlands in the late 1700s was predominantly a mechano-technic revolution. Today, we take almost for granted electro-technologies whose operational properties might take place in the invisible world of the microchip at speeds that make the piston movements of an internal combustion engine seem like slow motion. Indeed, it is not beyond the bounds of imagination, and even possibility, that technological functions might one day be performed with wholly different physical properties and energy, as in the technology of psychokinetics. Still, biotechnics may yet again play a role, albeit a more sophisticated and complex role, in human social evolution, as recombinant DNA and other techniques of genetic and other biological engineering emerge with great promise and portent. The fusion of mechanics and electronics in the form of artificial limbs or organs, or the prospect of nanotechnology, further blurs the traditional distinctions between and among different technologies. Jacobs, 1969, chap. 1. Mohl, 1985, 53–4. Metropolis is also discussed at some length in relation to futurism and technology in the chapter on cities of the future. Minden, 1985, 200. Blade Runner and THX 1138, both films that were influenced by Metropolis, also do not indicate what products the workers in these films are actually producing. Cf. the chapter Nature, Technophobia and the City of the Urban Future. It is also noteworthy that Metropolis was first viewed by audiences in the midst of the great American Depression. November 17, 1935. Another film that takes on unions, this time in the industrial north, portrays them as conniving to keep workers at odds with one another in order to control them, is Blue Collar (1978). Jacobs, 1969. As these words are being written in 2012, America is in the midst of the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression, brought about, most likely, by this very cohort of greedy money manipulators and investment fund managers. Boshara, 2003, 91, 94. 271

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14. 15.

272

Bonfire of the Vanities is discussed in greater length in the chapter on politics and the city. The subject of the city, or attributes of the city, as a threat to mental health is not uncommon in film. The city’s density, intensity, diversity, social organization, and moral relativism, have often been posed as antagonistic to peace of mind. For the immigrant from the small town or rural area, especially so for those from such places in foreign cultures, the American city (any city) can be a place that exacts a toll for adjustment to the stresses and pressures of urban life. It is a toll that can be charged in damages both to physical and mental well-being. The mentally deranged individual, too often in the form of the serial killer or perpetrator of other mayhem, is an explicit or implied character in urban crime films, with the characterization often amalgamated with the terrorist, or some other psychologically compromised personality (e.g., films like Speed, Die Hard, Dirty Harry, Silence of the Lambs). Some serious behavioral scientists feel there is ample evidence to assert that the city might not be a natural environment for the human species. The urban environment accounts for only a fraction of a second in the evolution of the human species. Its physical intensity and social complexity are, in their opinion, ill-suited to a biology that evolved for and in a nonurban way of life, and that many human diseases, physical and mental, owe their etiology to this incongruity. (Ardrey, 1966; Lorenz, 1966). However, even formal studies of the subject indicate that easy conclusions as to the relationship between the city and mental health are confounded by other factors. Early studies of this subject did not take into account that immigrants to the city were making a transition in cultures (from rural to urban) that placed stresses upon them that could be assigned as much to the difference in environment and changes in work and contact with different peoples than to the city per se. It is also relevant that problems of mental health are more likely to be observed, both statistically and otherwise, in the city than in rural areas and villages, leaving incomplete basis for parametric analysis. In addition, there is a greater likelihood that deviations from normal behavior are given more refined, and clinical, categorization in the city than in the countryside. Moreover, some studies of depression and suicide, for example, seem to show that the occurrence of these conditions is as frequent in rural areas as it is in the city.

15 Nature, Technophobia, and the Cinema of the Urban Future “You have nowhere to go.” The last line of George Lucas’s THX 1138

In the 1951 movie The Day the Earth Stood Still, a single alien visitor and his powerful robot land their saucer-shaped spaceship in a park in Washington, DC. To demonstrate technological superiority, they turn off all electrical and mechanical power on earth, illustrated in a montage of cities brought to a halt of stalled modes of communication and transportation. The message of the film is that unless humans find a way to live peacefully with one another—the film was made during the days of the Cold War and the proliferation of atomic weapons in the United States and the Soviet Union—even more technologically advanced aliens might have to step in like a parent among squabbling children and slap some sense into we bellicose earthlings. Klaatu, the alien played by Michael Rennie in an aluminum foil suit, is a rather messianic figure backed up by an eight-foot cyclopean robot that can incinerate anything with its ray-gun eye. He has been sent by a federation of our galactic neighbors to tell us to get our act together and show us what might happen if we don’t. Although Klaatu is on a peace mission, he does not hesitate to have his robot, Gort, melt a few tanks and soldiers when they get too militaristic and wound Klaatu. He also exhibits some very human tendencies by getting close to an interplanetary love affair with Patricia Neal. The film was timely, well-acted, and, given the rising Roswellian1 atmosphere and the beginning of UFOs as a cottage industry, kept 273

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from getting out of hand by director Robert Wise. It also achieved a somewhat cult status in the phrase “Klaatu barada nikto,” a message from Klaatu to robot Gort not to use his powers to level the planet when Klaatu was briefly incarcerated by his hosts. Gort instead uses his powers to rescue Klaatu. After an admonitory speech by Klaatu in the concluding scene, he and his robot fly off in their spaceship leaving no more than a patch of scorched grass behind. The message of The Day the Earth Stood Still is a forewarning that has been sounded by cool heads and Jeremiah’s from cinemas, book pages, political podia, and pulpits since the first technology expanded humans’ control over nature and over themselves: beware what you make; it might remake you.2

Klaatu and the robot, Gort, emerge from their spaceship to greet and warn Earthlings. © 20th Century Fox 274

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When humans began to construct permanent settlements some twelve thousand years ago, they began to exercise dominion and control over their environment. By engaging in agriculture, animal husbandry, damming rivers and clearing forests, and creating technologies that made their lives more secure and efficient, they became “man, the engineer,” altering their environment as much as they could to meet their goals and desires. In the process, they broke not only with their hunting and gathering nomadic past, but also with their traditional social forms and even their ancient deities. Formerly metaphysically atavistic and pantheistic, humans eventually created anthropomorphic gods who would place them at the center of creation and bestow upon them permission to “multiply and subdue the earth.” Now nearly gods themselves, humans would seem to have found their place, with their intelligence and the permission to use it, to make a world to their liking. All things seemed possible, life was more secure and longer, and perhaps one day, in the far off techno-urban future, even eternal. Earth, air, fire, and water were no longer simply elements of their existence, but through technology, factors of production. Mankind could consider the prospect of utopia itself. At the center of this utopia was the city, the creation not of the gods, but of man. Yet this very capability for control, it seems, carried with it elements of fear, anxiety, guilt, and, in the minds of some, a blasphemy. Most futuristic novels and films appear to focus more upon the dystopic expectations of future worlds rather than on utopian notions. In part, it may be that novels or films that portray ideal and idyllic future cities offers less dramatic prospects and are less interesting than places beset by human failings.3 Nevertheless, such dystopic visions must have their roots in imaginings that preceded their artistic expression. But beyond this difference lies the hypothesis that the control of sophisticated technology of modern urbanized humankind may not be without some residue, some nagging kernel of guilt and anxiety, if only subliminal. The theme that man has overreached his human prerogatives, and tried to become godlike appears in nearly every age and society. The biblical account of the Tower of Babel warns against man’s arrogance at believing he can reach heaven by means of his technological prowess. Like the Greek Icarus, he seems to overreach his human prerogatives, and fly too close to the sun. These concerns continue to resonate in both the actual and virtual world, as technology plays a more prominent role in human affairs.4 275

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Nature’s Vengeance

Perhaps the precursor to many more contemporary expressions of this notion is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818), which questions the concept that it might be possible for man to conduct the most godlike of all wonders: the creation of life itself. Following in its wake have been literally hundreds of novels and films exploring the folly of such hubris. Time after time, science and technology, their blessings notwithstanding, are misused or put to work for evil intentions. Godzilla monsters rise from the sea to crush arrogant cities; insects, transmogrified into marauding giants by radiation, attack their human creators, only to have to be subdued or eradicated by some even more fearful technology. Nature, raped and outraged, exacts its revenge through outraged leviathans from Moby Dick to giant sharks that attack holiday beaches. Snakes, crocodiles, apes, wolves, virtually every known species, including, of course, humans, have been employed in novels and films to avenge nature’s injuries and insults. Indeed, one of the most financially successful science fiction films of all time, Jurassic Park (1993), fits squarely within this time-honored genre. The most common scenario of this genre finds technology in the hands of mad scientists, power hungry politicians, or greedy showmen, among others. In plot renderings of these dystopic fantasies of the future, the city is often reduced to some awful primal state in which civilization gone awry has been atomically expunged. Wiping the slate clean presents some interesting dramatic opportunities for exploring the notion that civilization contains the seeds of its own undoing and that the culprit is not so much technology as the moral failings of its makers. Frequently, it is a resort to technology that is required for mankind to extricate itself from its technologically produced predicaments. The endurance of these themes in film no doubt owes something to its resonance with concerns of contemporary life and public policy. How can we get along with aliens from outer space if we are unable to abide aliens from the country next door, or the neighborhood next door, these films might also be asking. Our xenophobia toward fantastic space creatures is not all that different from our intraspecies xenophobia.5 But, in that part of the genre that features the city as a character, a common theme is that of an urban society that has become overdeveloped. It offers an urban world where technology has developed beyond the understanding of the individual citizen and where the 276

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power and authority to control powerful technologies has fallen into grasping and ignoble hands.6 Urban Technological Dystopias

Perhaps the first major film to employ the city as an expression of the potential achievements and the power of technology was German director Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.7 Lang was reputedly extremely impressed with the verticality and energy of New York City in his visit there in the early 1920s, and he enlisted architect Lionel Feininger to design sets, based the architecture he saw in New York, that expressed what he considered would be the urban scale and form of the city a century later. Set in the future year of 2026, a century after Lang’s visit, Metropolis is a city of soaring structures, connected by sky-bridges, and traversed by various modes of transit, some wildly futuristic, others amusingly anachronistic, that surely influenced the urban morphology of Ridley Scott’s futuristic film, Blade Runner. But Metropolis was a film born of a different view of the promises and perils of technology and urbanism. In many respects it is a late nineteenth century point of concern about the effects of science, technology, and industrialism upon traditional institutional structures, especially work and religion. Lang’s wife, Thea von Harbou, wrote a melodramatic screenplay that is suffused with religious imagery, with an overriding theme that, in embracing technology and urbanism, mankind has lost touch with its metaphysical roots. In Metropolis a ruling elite enjoys the sybaritic pleasures of the powerful and privileged. They play and rule from the soaring structures of the upper city, and are supported by a subterranean dwelling and laboring proletariat living a life of drone-like drudgery that is physically and socially beneath those aboveground. The workers of the urban netherworld toil on a ziggurat-like structure that, in a dream sequence, becomes the mouth of the devouring ancient pagan deity, Moloch; the clock serves as symbol of the crucifix upon which one worker is, so to speak, “chronified.” Another dream sequence shows legions of workers attempting to construct the Tower of Babel, ultimate symbol that salvation is to be reached by faith, not technology. Von Harbou mined the New Testament for allegory as well: the heroine of the movie is named, appropriately, Maria. If these clues are insufficient, there is a deluge that floods the underground city, and the reconciliation of the ruling and the ruled in the ending takes place in front of a cathedral. 277

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The narrative line, often muddled by the stew of class politics and religion, allusions to ancient history, myth, and science fiction, is driven by guilt. Freder Fredersen (Gustave Frolich), son of Joh Fredersen (Alfred Abel), the “Master of Metropolis,” realizes that he lives a life of indolence and privilege that is purchased at the expense of hard and dangerous labor by the people of the lower city. He becomes infatuated with Maria (Brigitte Helm), a schoolteacher from the lower city, and visits the industrial bowels of Metropolis. Freder returns to the surface and begs his father to consider the exploitation he has observed, but the master has problems of his own, among them secret cells of disgruntled workers who may be plotting insurrection. Joh consults the scientist, Rotwang, who interprets the drawing and leads the master to the catacombs in the lower city where Maria is preaching to the workers a message of mediation between the workers and the administrators of the city. Not trusting the workers, Joh enlists Rotwang’s more sinister powers, and the mad scientist kidnaps Maria and turns her into a doppelganger evil robot to sow discord among the workers. Thus the woman whose evangelism was supposed to save Metropolis is turned by science and technology into a monster. Technology is itself very much a part of the production of this film, which has been called the first science fiction film. Lang effectively employed new special effects in the transformation of Maria and used elaborate and expensive sets. Cinematographer Eugene Shufftan also developed a method of simultaneously shooting two separate images, one full-sized and the other miniature, to produce monumental images without double exposure. Produced at a cost of over five million marks, and employing over thirty-seven thousand actors and extras, it was perhaps the most expensive film of its time.8 The evil Maria is eventually burned at the stake9 by the workers, and the true Maria emerges, after saving children from a flood in the lower city, to be abducted once more by Rotwang and dragged to the top of the cathedral. In the final scene, she is rescued by Freder, who hurls Rotwang from the cathedral roof. The heroic couple then emerges from the cathedral and affects reconciliation between the workers and the master on its steps. Thus Metropolis concludes by reaching back to an older set of values, one of religion and a social system of seigneur and serf. There is an implication that technology itself can be accommodated if the social system did not lose touch with these values. Presumably there still would be an upper city and a lower city in the metropolis, with its corresponding class distinctions. 278

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But technology’s power is as undisputed as it is indispensable in Lang and Harbou’s Metropolis in what is now a much more proximate future. It has pushed the urban skyline well beyond the spires of the cathedral, and the seat of urban power is secular, not sacred. Despite their wistfulness for aspects of the old social order, much of that had already been swept away, with the assistance of technology, during World War I just a few years before their picture was released. But whatever its flaws in prognostication, Metropolis, proved to be a considerable influence on the future of futuristic films. Its influence is readily evident in Modern Times (1936), written by, directed by, and starring, Charlie Chaplin. As Lang did, Chaplin employs the clock as a metaphor for the machine and industrialization, portrays industrial workers as drones (sheep in the title sequence), and particularly in the casting and scenes involving the indolent chief executive of the factory. The president of the factory in which Chaplin works bears a strong resemblance to the “Master of Metropolis,” and he even uses a similar video surveillance system to control his workers. He is obsessed with increasing productivity to the point—in a hilarious scene in which Chaplin displays many of his comedic talents—the president considers a feeding machine that will allow his workers to continue working through their lunch hour. While Chaplin avoids reference to religious themes, he does portray factory work as monotonous and dangerous, and the workers as subject to the greed of the owners, in spite of the fact that the factory appears clean and efficient. The increased pace and monotony finally induces madness in Chaplin’s assembly-line worker character, and he runs amok in the factory, playing with the machinery and taunting workers and administrators. The film contains the now classic scene of Chaplin literally drawn into a giant piece of machinery, a visual metaphor that requires no further explanation.10 He is carted off to jail, but the film continues with several misadventures that allow Chaplin to make oblique comedic reference to his liberal politics. The twenty-fifth century is the future setting of THX 1138. Based on a student film George Lucas made while a film student at University of Southern California, he constructs a world (mostly from the setting of the tunnels of the then under-construction Bay Area Rapid Transit System) of several levels of technology. Workers in this subterranean world are suspiciously drone-like, as were those of Metropolis. In fact, the film is homage to science fiction luminaries, referencing Orwell’s Big Brother, and Huxley’s Malthusian principles of Brave New World. 279

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Released in 1971, it is full of allusions and references to contemporary TV programming, and to the infamous HUAC phrase (“Are you now or have you ever been . . .”). Conventional names have been replaced by names that sound like automobile license plates. THX 1138 is reputedly derived from Lucas’s San Francisco phone number.11 For the creator of the immensely popular Star Wars series, THX 1138 is a film that is more serious and interesting, if less expensively produced and less easy to view. Lucas creates a visually claustrophobic world that matches that of the social world portrayed in the film. Tight camera shots, looped tracks and montages are accompanied by what has come to be called elevator music. Technology is everywhere in the world of THX 1138. Workers perform repetitive tasks using remote manipulation arms to handle radioactive materials, while being constantly monitored for their performance. Their recreation consists of sitting in their sterile residences and watching stultifying hologram TV programs featuring blacks engaging in gratuitous sex and violence. However they are required to control any sexual urges that might be stimulated by using suppressive drugs. If they break the rules of this micromanaged society of constant video monitoring, they are hunted down by cyborg police and placed in jails without walls or boundaries, reconditioned by machines and electronic shocks.12 LUH 3417 (Maggie McOmie), the roommate that THX impregnated because she tampered with his libido-dampening drugs, is “recycled.” One never discovers just what it is that this underground city produces.13 THX’s job seems to have something to do with radiation. There are a couple of mortal industrial accidents that occur in the film and are treated as unfortunate only because they interfere with productivity. But the film discloses nothing of the political structure of this future world except for the fact that it is a society that is managed and regulated in the extreme, whose nearly every feature is controlled, monitored and enforced by technology, even its metaphysics. Yet it is an attribute of a technologically managed society that allows THX to escape from this oppressive society. His flight to freedom in a high-speed automobile ends at a tunnel that leads from this subterranean world to the surface. He is nearly apprehended by cyborg police, but they are recalled at the last minute because the computers have calculated that the cost of their pursuit has exceeded its budget. It is ironic that, in this over-managed, oppressive future city, it is possible for the hero to be liberated by the unlikely deus ex machina of a computer-processed cost-benefit ratio. 280

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But at the end of THX 1138, the viewer really has no idea what kind of surface world THX has emerged into. The cyborg cops exhort him to surrender and return, saying “you have nowhere to go,” but he climbs a long shaft to the surface, only to emerge into a frame of ambiguity.14 He stands motionless before a huge setting sun, and although a bird flies through the frame, we are unsure whether he has emerged into perhaps a post nuclear holocaust environment, or maybe a healthy natural world that is reserved for only the very few privileged and powerful, or a world that is kept from all human habitation. The scene extends, only the setting sun altering the frame, suggesting that the director wanted the audience to consider those and other questions. THX 1138 might be considered to be a possible, not too remote, world. The working conditions, the use of drugs, the numbing use of media, even the perspective on religion, the exploitation and dehumanization of minorities, and the loss of privacy, are not implausible futuristic extensions of conditions to be found at large in contemporary society. Despite the historical perspective that the city has been a vehicle for human liberation, the over-managed city of THX 1138 is a claustrophobic place of repression and technologically assisted social domination.15 Indeed, a refugee from the world of THX 1138 might plausibly be expected to find the urban future of Blade Runner. Set in twenty-first century Los Angeles, it is brilliantly conceived and designed futuristic film based on Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? In contrast to THX 1138, the city of Blade Runner is well above ground and, in place of THX’s blanched backdrops, the Los Angeles of 2019 is a blaring, gaudy, acid rain drizzled megacity viewed mostly at night. Most of the people, rather than living mole-like subterranean existences, are now denizens of massive, soaring mastaba-like high-rise buildings or, if among the poorer classes, making do in the rundown remnants of an earlier era’s housing. Since there is neither sufficient space nor resources, many citizens of this futuristic society are required to live as extraterrestrials in off-world colonies. Artfully and carefully dressed (director Scott is a former graphic designer), the film has the convincing look of the kind of futuristic city we just might get. A visual fusion of contemporary Los Angeles that is also part Hong Kong, part Tokyo’s Ginza, and part Frtiz Lang’s Metropolis, this future megacity is seen mostly at night through rising steam, mist, and glare, combining the film noir elements of the story with the refractions and reflections that give the city the mystery of multiples levels of reality. 281

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The social makeup of the city of Blade Runner is a mélange of races, cultures, and languages, mostly Asian, reflected as well in the food establishments and advertising that occupy the busy street life of the city. There is little indication of what class structure might obtain in this future world, beyond the fact that most people live in the offworld, and those remaining terrestrials reside in slum-like areas with blighted buildings, as well as luxurious apartments in the stratosphere of high-rise structures. The division of social classes by altitude appears derived from Metropolis. The story, like the settings, is reminiscent of the film detective genre.16 Deckard (Harrison Ford) is a blade runner, or a bounty hunter, who specializes in running down and eliminating replicants, or cyborgs, whose human likenesses are so well conceived and executed that special tests with a iris-scanning lie detector are needed to determine their true identity. Indeed, much of the film is concerned with the subject of identity. The very essence of humanity, one’s identity, has become muddled in this future world by a technology that is capable of manufacturing an identity so effectively its replicants can even be convinced of their humanity. It is suggested even Deckard, at least in Dick’s novel, might unknowingly be a replicant. Much of the plot is driven by the quest of four replicants, who have escaped from the off-world and are in quest to find their identity by finding the scientists and technicians who have designed them. Although they are the latest and most advanced models of their kind, the “Nexus 6,” like other “products,” they are designed to obsolesce and their “deaths” have been preprogrammed. Reminiscent of Brave New World, they, too, have been designed for specific purposes: to meet out violence, or in the case of “Pris,” as a “pleasure model.” Finding their way to the residence of the head of the Tyrell Corporation that designed them, they “meet their maker” and, realizing that their fate is sealed, dispatch him. However the replicants are hunted down, one by one, and, in violent confrontations, retired. Faithful to the film noir detective form, Deckard’s behavior is often ambiguous. He is pulled out of his own retirement as a blade runner to hunt down and kill replicants with the same sang-froid as they might display toward him. Indeed, the ambiguity extends to the prospect that Deckard himself might be a replicant. He falls in love, or lust, with the beautiful Rachael, a replicant in denial, and he eventually runs off with her to an uncertain fate: how long before her designed obsolescence comes due? 282

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Deckard already knows that it might not be that long. He had his own life spared by a replicant, Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer). In one of the film’s most powerful sequences, he is pursued by Roy, angered by the detective’s killing of Pris, through a derelict building dripping with rain running through its floors. A warrior model, Roy, is physically superior to Deckard, but once he corners him, elects to let him live. “Time to die,” Roy intones, but he means himself, and he expires in front of a puzzled Deckard.17 Thus the city in Blade Runner is one of blurred identities, an exponential version of the social world of the contemporary metropolis that, increasingly, is a world of strangers, invented personalities, and affective behaviors. In the future Los Angeles of Blade Runner the very origins of identities are obscured by a technology of replication that is capable of programming personal history, confounding “what am I?” with the question of “who am I?” “Who, and what, one is, in this world of resource scarcity, determines where one is allowed to be. The technological world of Blade Runner is one in which technology first apparently has played a major role in the ruination of the natural world, and now is applied to replicating it. Not only humanoids, but also animals are now created out of a highly advanced biotech science.

Deckard prowels the streets for replicants in Blade Runner. © The Ladd Co.1982 283

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It is a grim view of the future, one of a ravaged natural environment, and a built environment that seems to have been planned by mad real estate agents and scientists. Faulty Futurism and Failed Cities

Despite the excellence of films such as THX 1138 and Blade Runner, it seems that one of the weaknesses of futuristic projections of the city in the cinema is that they seem rather superficial. To some extent the filmmaker’s problems in projecting the future city are similar to those of the urban planner: it is difficult to imagine in any realistic way what the city of the future will be like without imagining with some confidence what the people of the future will be like. Hence, futuristic portrayals of human behavior tend to revolve around simple dualities, easy class divisions, the controllers and the controlled, masters and servants, human and non (or semi) humans, and so on, Those who have better knowledge or control of technology are those with privilege and power. Cities tend to be imagined as extensions of the technology that would permit greater size, concentration, density, and verticality to urban form. Overpopulation, post-holocaustal conditions, particularly destruction of the natural environment, and economic and biological aberrations form the most popular conditions that are caused by and addressed by the use of technology. These factors may, of course, be partly a product of the necessary conceits of the cinematic form, the need for simple narrative line, and the requirements of resolution within the time frame of the motion picture. But as one student of the subject asserts, “the treatment of the future city needs to be seen in the light of the cinema’s treatment of the city in general. Throughout its history, the cinema has shared that intellectual bias against the city that has marked contemporary literature and the arts.”18 Dystopic views of the future bear a similarity to utopian views in that they are often necessarily contained within some place that allows their authors and screenwriters to focus on what are often ersatz and limited features of future society. The most common of these is that the future city is a standalone city, not imbedded in a larger society of universe (even when that future city is on some other planet), and that technology is used as a means of totalitarian control over people’s lives and nature in general. Thus films such as Brazil (1985) and A Clockwork Orange (1971) are both derivative of Orwellian phobias about over-controlled 284

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societies, and the forces of control are always pervasive, powerful, and sinister, whether they are being visited on clerks or urban “droogies.”19 Even Woody Allen, in his futuristic comedy romp, Sleeper (1973), awakes two hundred years in the future to a world controlled by a “Big Brother” figure called the “Leader,” who is only a nose, not even a whole person, which is somewhat similar to THX 1138’s deity, who is just a large photo. Yet, despite the prognostication of 1984, which Orwell wrote in 1948 at the onset of the Cold War, by the time the second film version was released in the same year as the title, the walls of totalitarianism were crumbling and only a few years from coming down altogether. Science fiction writers and futurists predicted neither that event, nor the yet-to-be adequately defined “new world order.” Cities also seem to figure in futuristic dystopic visions of urbanism as places that somehow have failed. In films such as Escape from New York (1973), the city seems to have devolved into what some ethologists might consider a behavioral sinkhole, a place in which all vestiges of civilization have disappeared, and survival requires some primal form of survivalist behavior in order to continue to exist among the ruins of some erstwhile metropolis. In this case Manhattan has been turned into a maximum-security prison, run, as most prisons are believed to be, largely by the most brutal inmates. Similar to Escape from New York, other films in the post-holocaustal subgenre tend to use the city as both the premise and locus for rather simplistic science fiction themes. Charlton Heston reprises his former biblical role as Moses with the same moral assurance in Soylent Green (1973) and The Omega Man (1971), both set in urban environments, the latter film, once again, in New York City. The premise in Soylent Green is that in this overcrowded urban setting, there is not enough food to go around. The population continues to burgeon, and so the human surplus is being used to supplement the soybean and lentil food that the title refers to. Heston is messianic again as the Omega Man, because in an apocalyptic world ruined by a biological war between Russia and China, everyone but Heston suffers from a plague that makes people sensitive to light and therefore everyone must live in the dark to protect their milky-glazed eyes. The plague also makes them nasty and ghoulish. Heston’s blood contains the antibody to this plague, but he is unwilling to shed any of it for such unworthy people. His loneliness is assuaged when he does manage to hook up with a small racially mixed group who have yet to succumbed to the plague and inoculates one of them with a transfusion. 285

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By far the most popular and commercially successful post-holocaustal science fiction films have been the Planet of the Apes series, a pentology released in the turbulent political years from 1968 to 1973. Here again is Charlton Heston, grimacing in the face of evil and injustice, in a world that had devolved (or evolved) to the hegemony of primates. A wayward astronaut, he finds himself in a world on the other side of the human-primate hierarchy—a man who is enslaved because he is regarded as being an evolutionary dead end—and he is believed only to be miming his captors when he speaks. It was a premise that found resonance in the social period marked by the Civil Rights Movement, but also in which other interests, from women’s rights to animal rights, found parallels. But the Planet of the Apes premise could hardly be allowed to stand much longer than the drive it gives to the films’ stories. Given the opportunity to establish a new civilization, the apes ape their predecessors; they are good and evil, sagacious and stupid, vicious and charitable. In the first (1968) film, astronaut Heston complains from his space capsule: “somewhere in the universe there must be something better than man.” But man and ape turn out to be more closely related than even their nearly identical DNA profiles. By the end of the series they have done little to vanquish prejudice, lust for power, and war and, in the final episode, Man and Ape battle for dominion of the planet. But where the Apes do seem to have deviated from humans is in forsaking the city. Their degree of urbanization does not approach the heights and magnitudes of the urban civilization they have replaced (nearly all of the original film was shot in seaside Malibu, California). The most telling statement about urbanism that is made in the series is when Heston’s character, an astronaut who has thought all along that he has crash landed on another planet, discovers that he has been contesting apes on the buried ruins of what used to be, yet again, New York City. Protruding from the sand on a beach he discovers the partially buried fallen symbol of freedom, the Statue of Liberty. He really hasn’t traveled anywhere. Imagining the Future

That may be, in another sense, the problem with science fiction. Sci-fi remains one of the most popular genres of both the novel and films, but it has generally failed to gain intellectual respectability, and even has critics from among its practitioners. 286

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One of its successful authors has written that “science fiction should be accounted, and can best be understood as, a branch of children’s literature. [He notes] how often a taste for sci-fi is acquired in early adolescence—the golden age of science fiction, our tribal wisdom has it, is thirteen.”20 Given the immense commercial successes of the Star Wars series, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), ET (1982), and other rather jejune science fiction film offerings, there seems more than ample empirical evidence for such an assertion. Most extensions into the unknown future are in fact derived from the known past and present. Alien creatures are primarily bipedal, bifocal, intelligent beings of a nasty or amiable demeanor, or are extensions of known animal and insect forms. Their behaviors and their roles in narrative plots are extensions of human hopes and fears. Striped of futuristic technology many such films are merely high-tech westerns, swashbucklers, crime dramas, or in the case of ET, that staple of children’s films, “a boy and his dog.” It is also notable that the futuristic technology shown in these films is typically employed in a positive, if not, amusing way. Moreover, there is little concern in this genre for portraying technology in ways that are, or likely would be, consistent with known physical laws. While such films are not the primary concern of this book, they merit mention because they represent one side of the larger debate between technophiles and technophobes that influences both cinematic and real-world views of technology. From the simple throwing stick to the intercontinental ballistic missile, from the cuneiform tablet to the computer, technology has been regarded as a two-edged sword that modifies the old relationships between man and man, and man and nature, for both good and ill. Despite the benefits of technological advancement in transportation, communication, production, medicine, and virtually any dimension of human society, there are those who lament the social change, the altered power relationships, threats to older institutions, the counterintuitive side effects and other negatives of technology. Luddism, the antitechnology movement founded in the midst of the Industrial Revolution in England, represents the extreme reaction to the negatives of technology, an uncompromising position that has some current day adherents in the more extreme environmental and anti-globalism activists.21 Nevertheless, there is a more pervasive and modulated concern over the negative effects of various technologies. Environmental disasters, from the Love Canal to Chernobyl, to 287

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massive oil spills and hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, all reflect on the uses and requirements of modern technology. Less dramatic, but more insidious, are the grievances of manufacturing workers made redundant by robotic technology; concerns over privacy and identity theft, by those who find themselves increasingly within the frame of surveillance cameras or risking submission of personal information in a simple commercial transaction; the worries of parents over the information accessible to their children over the Internet; and the legion of other concerns about the price that is exacted for the benefits and blessings of greater speed, productivity, convenience, and information that technology affords. Cloning, genetically engineered food, and other technological marvels are also not without their Faustian consequences. Technophobia is no longer just for extremists or robotically replaced factory workers. Technology has champions as well. In a world in which it is possible to design micro-robots that can be injected into the blood stream to perform diagnostic and clinical procedures, it is easy to understand the almost giddy zeal of technophiles.22 One might expect such a personal beneficiary of technology as Bill Gates to enthuse: “Over time, the new machine finds a place in our everyday lives because it not only offers convenience and saves labor, but it can also inspire us to new creative heights. It assumes a trusted place beside our other tools. A new generation grows up with it, changing and humanizing it—playing with it.”23 But there are many others who also see the technologies glass as more than half full, if not overflowing with the passion of Mr. Gates.24 It may be that the negative portrayal of technology in films therefore does not so much reflect the divisions in society over the blessing and curses of technology as it does the requisites of the film narrative. Cinema is a dramatic form, and drama is conflict. The film The China Syndrome would not be very interesting (indeed would not get made) if it were a film about how safely and efficiently a nuclear power plant can operate. The misuses of technology or its failures and unanticipated consequences, from Frankenstein (1931) through almost countless films of mad scientists, irradiated insects, human and animal monstrosities, and human arrogance, greed, and gullibility, are more dramatically interesting than technological successes. The latter is typically represented in the cinema as an eventual deus ex machina, the weapon, vaccine, or other technological remedy to the offending technology’s problem. 288

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It has become axiomatic that the future will contain even more powerful and dazzling technology. That potency will be both lusted after and feared. Perhaps the most inspired illustration of the fact that technology is only an object until a human hand puts it to some (good or evil) use was in the opening sequences of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). In that sequence the earth was truly a planet of the apes, or in this case, ape-like hominids. A hominid picks up a femur bone and subdues a rival hominid with it, instilling fear in the others in his group. Suddenly, even in so primitive a world, much seems instantaneously changed. The bone-wielding hominid exults in his newly discovered power, flinging the new tool-weapon into the air. Imagining the City of the Future

The city is humankind’s most sophisticated and complex technology. However, to imagine the city of the future, whether it is the intent of the screenwriter or the city planner, it is not so much necessary to imagine the technology of the future, as to imagine (or perhaps imagine the imagination) of the urbanite of the future. What makes Metropolis, THX 1138, and Blade Runner, social science fiction is that they are ultimately about human behavior rather than technological determinism. It is not the soaring urban structures and subterranean factories of Metropolis that determine the social structure, but human greed, prejudice, and power. It is not cyborgs, cybernetics, and perverse pharmacology of the urban netherworld of THX 1138 that create his claustrophobic existence, but administrative power and control run amok. It is not the threat of an invasion of replicants in the future Los Angeles of Blade Runner, but the corporate domination in a world of scarcity. In the end, these are films about what humans do (or intend) with the technology they create, not what technology determines them to do. It was noted above that in none of these films does the viewer learn what economic goods are produced and form the economic base of the cities of these films. But it does not matter (nor does the manner of production) because it is not the product, but production, that is at issue. If the cinematic views of future urban life tend to be dystopic, it may owe something to the narrative advantages of the negative, and to concerns, fears and anxieties about the power of technology, but it may also reflect, fundamentally, an abiding distrust of human nature. It is not that technology changes our behavior, but it expands the range and consequences of human behavior. 289

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Perhaps the most positive message that the film industry has had to say about technology is implied by its embrace of the quantum advances that cinema technology has brought to the art of filmmaking itself, seemingly leaving little left to the imaginations of audiences. Increasingly, highly realistic computer animated special (CGI) effects conjure alien creatures, vast expanses of space, high tech weaponry and transport vehicles, and fantastic cities, which are more often employed to enhance the fantastic and escapist versions of science fiction film. The special effect has become, for much science fiction, the only story it needs for commercial success. In his book exploring science fiction prognostications about future cities, Robert Sheckley asks: What will Futuropolis be like? We may be able to put our city together and take it apart like a doll’s house. Perhaps we will put in on wheels or rails, locate it under the sea or out in space. We might even dispense with any formal structure and carry individual sections of our city around with us, to plug in where we please. There are almost limitless possibilities. And of course, the planning of Futuropolis reveals our conflicts and uncertainties as well as our hopes and dreams. To speculate on the future if to express what is wrong with our present life.25

Contemporary cinematic technology is already capable of rendering these fantastic possibilities of future urban life. But whatever might be the form of future cities, and whether they are constructed in actual or virtual space, it is the nature of their inhabitants, not their technology, that will determine the quality of life in them. Perhaps that is what the cyborg cops in THX 1138 meant when they warned: “You have nowhere to go.” 1.

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Since Orson Wells’ famous War of the Worlds radio drama on October 30, 1938, caused many people to run screaming in terror from their homes at the “arrival” of vicious Martian invaders, the “little green men” genre of film and pulp literature has expanded almost exponentially. With the Roswell incident in 1948 and the subsequent NASA programs, interest in exobiology, and extraterrestrial creatures, in fact and fiction, has grown enormously, with alien invaders ranging from marauding space aliens in Signs (2002) to benign ET ’s. More recently, television has successfully employed the genre in the series Roswell, and the mini-series Taken. Documentary programs on UFOs, crop circles, and recounts of alien abductions follow predictably in the wake of curiosity and credulity.

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2. 3.

4. 5.

6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

Winner, 1972. It is nearly impossible to find a film that is fully utopian in subject and plot. Even Lost Horizon (1937), the low-tech utopia of peace, abundance, and longevity in the Himalayas, had to have a cost (rapid aging) for those who chose to emigrate, and, presumably, to keep audiences from succumbing to eventual boredom. Mumford, 1966, 1999; Marcuse, 1964; Kenniston, 1964; Arendt, 1958; Ellul, 1965; Mesthene, 1970. Cf. Enemy Mine, a 1985 science fiction film directed by Wolfgang Petersen. The Robinson Crusoe premise strands a human (Dennis Quaid) and a “Drac” (a dual-sexed, bipedal reptilian played by Lou Gossett, Jr.) on a volcanic planet. They are warriors from their respective races and mutually despised enemies who see the other as an inferior race. Although well-acted and designed, the movie is undaring in its treatment of racial (actually special) differences, and reaches, predictably, for a feel good ending. Beck, B., 1971. In the 1920s, German Expressionism was in vogue among artists in various media. Expressionist painter Ludwig Meidner’s agonized depictions of cities in calamity presented the city as psychologically disorienting. The works of Otto Dix and George Grosz presented an urbanism of greed, debauchery, and intolerance that it would take two world wars to sweep away. But if in Europe the city was being viewed as a threat to religious and social life, in America the view was moderated. Indeed, 1920 marked the year that America became an urban nation, when the majority of the population lived in cities and had urban occupations. The city was proving to be the great engine of acculturation of the droves of immigrants who had come to America before World War I. But while immigrants might have prospered from urban expansion, there festered an American anti-urbanism as well, mostly in the sentiments of the social classes that had lost control of the city to immigrant-controlled political machines. American artists also tended to see their cities in more positive tones. Contemporaneous with the gloomy German Expressionist school was the American “Ash Can” school, which, while not varnishing the American city, took it as it was. Ott, 1979, 125. Perhaps another religious allusion, to the immolation of Jean D’Arc in this case, but this is an auto da fe of technology in the hands of Satanic powers. It is also noteworthy that Modern Times was first viewed by audiences in the midst of the great American Depression. It is also reprised in Lucas’s American Graffiti, as the license plate on Milner’s hot rod. This being a clear reference to experiments conducted in some universities in the 1970s on “authoritarian” behavior. See, for example, the Zimbardo prison experiments at Stanford in the early 1970s. This is typical of this genre of films. What forms the economic base of Metropolis, Modern Times, or Blade Runner, is also not indicated. Yet each film contains an implicit or explicit exhortation to increase production, or in the case of THX 1138, consumption. Lucas’s use of “Nowhere” is perhaps a reference to Samuel Butler’s 1871 satirical novel about a utopia, Erewhon. 291

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15.

16. 17.

18. 19.

20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

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It is chilling to consider the prospects for social control suggested by one scene in the movie in which SEN (Donald Pleasance) encounters a group of elementary age school children. Like him they are dressed completely in white and have their heads shaved. One quickly notices that the children have small intravenous bottles attached to their arms. The bottle has become loose on one of the children, and SEN offers to reattach it, remarking that back when he went to school “economics took two large bottles and a whole week.” There is also a Chandleresque voice-over from Deckard in the original version, removed in a later director’s cut. The unanswered questions and ambiguities of Blade Runner has been a gold mine for academic circles, taking the deconstructionist or postmodern of film. Such speculative forms of analysis and interpretation are often employed as a wheel upon which to grind ideological axes and apply fustian prose that may cause one to wonder what film is being referred to. Cf., for example, Doel and Clarke, 1977. Gold, 1985, 125. “Droogies” are the urban gangs of a near-future London in A Clockwork Orange. Based on Anthony Burgess’s book of the same title, the story raises the question of the uses of behavioral modification techniques and drugs used as a means of reducing crime in society by reconditioning criminal types. When a vicious young criminal is reduced to a defenseless victim himself by criminal scientists, the film questions the propriety of society taking such extreme measures to protect itself that they deprive even antisocial individuals of their freedom of choice. Disch, 1992, 87. The movement was founded by Ned Ludd, a weaver from Nottinghamshire, who felt that new textile factories were a threat to his and his followers’ livelihoods. The movement spread to France, where adherents to Luddism threw their wooden shoes, sabots, into machinery (giving us the word sabotage). Luddites literally attacked new machinery, but they also had many supporters among philosophers, poets, and social reformers. A notion realized first in cinematic imagination in Fantastic Voyage (1966: 20th Century Fox) Dir., Richard Fleischer, and Innerspace (1987: Warner Bros.) Dir., Joe Dante. Gates, 1995, 209. Sheckley, 1978. Mitchell, 1995; Harding, 1989.

16 The City as Cinema The Cinema

INT: SUBWAY STATION, IRT, NEW YORK, MARCH 23, 2014 MEDIUM SHOT: Subway platform and train and modest crowd ACTION. Mark enters the door of the IRT and is about to take his seat when we see him reach into his coat pocket and extract his iPhone that is still playing its heavy metal ring tone. He smiles; it’s Molly. CLOSE-UP: Mark’s iPhone. Molly’s face appears in the screen, live. There is street action behind her. It’s a bit shaky, a nervous handheld. MOLLY (Stressed) Baby, where are you? You are not going to believe this! Jennifer and I were just coming out of the movie theater when we heard—and felt!—this explosion just down the street from us. Jesus, Mark, it was incredible. Look, I’ll turn this around so you can see.

LONGSHOT in Mark’s phone as the screen flips: ACTION: People running toward Molly, police cars, and other emergency vehicles, along with a news station’s location van heading away and down the street. The air is thick with smoke and there is still some fluttering debris descending through the frame. CLOSE-UP: Mark: surprised face. MARK I’m just getting on the subway. Jesus! It’s like 9/11 again!

TWO-SHOT: Elderly lady sitting next to Mark throwing a look of rebuke at him. 293

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MARK You OK, Mol? You look scared.

CLOSE-UP: Mark’s iPhone. Returns to Molly’s face. MOLLY (voice shaking) Jennifer has been recording it on her digital camera and is going to upload it to her Facebook page. You might want to go and take a look at it. She’s thinking of posting it on YouTube, too.

CLOSE-UP: Mark’s face. MARK I will. Hey, see if you can get some more video. Maybe this footage is something I can use for my film project at NYU. But be careful.

CLOSE-UP: Mark’s iPhone; Molly’s face. MOLLY I don’t know if we can. Maybe we should just leave. The police are saying it probably was a bomb and there might be another one, you know, to kill the responders, but . . . [audible crackle]

CLOSE-UP: Screen on Mark’s iPhone turns to snow static. FADE TO WHITE To photograph is to confer importance. There is probably no subject that cannot be beautified; moreover, there is no way to suppress the tendency inherent in all photographs to accord value to their subjects. . . . In the mansions of pre-democratic culture, someone who gets photographed is a celebrity. In the open fields of American experience, as cataloged with passion by Whitman and as sized up with a shrug by Warhol, everybody is a celebrity. No moment is more important than any other moment; no person is more interesting than any other person.1

In the ability to fashion images, it seems that humankind has always been especially fascinated with itself, whether it is with those Paleolithic cave drawings, the bustle of turn-of-the-century streets, or the realistically or surrealistically imagined narratives of moving fiction. We are mostly fascinated with ourselves, perhaps because we are each in our own way a camera. 294

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Mark and Molly, with their iPhones capable of digitally recording real-time events, transmitting them to one another, uploading them to various forms of mass communication, sharing images only moments removed from their occurrence, are of course light years beyond a troglodyte tableau depicted with crude brushes and pigments, or those grainy, flickering snippets of urban life documented by clunky locked down cameras in some turn-of-the-century American avenue. But the essences remain the same: life observed and made into images, and those images examined, interpreted, dissected, manipulated, slowed down, speeded up, and so on, in order to either understand its story or to imagine one.

© 1966, University of California Press 295

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The cover photo of Victor Burgin’s book of his photography is illustrative of the photographer’s eye that seeks out what is mysterious in the seemingly most mundane of urban moments. In an Antonioni-like “blow-up,” the blurry silhouette of a woman (girl?) strides across a space (street?) with only vague urban components in the distance. We only learn later that this nameless, faceless woman, is a Varsovian on some unknown errand, appears in the corner of a photo the author made of another, primary subject in Warsaw in 1981. But does she not represent untold urbanites in cities everywhere? One wonders in studying the photograph whether she has any recollection of a moment and place in her life that was chosen, albeit perhaps in afterthought, to stand for a body of work selected from nearly two decades of the author’s travels. Burgin forces us to think about her, and by extension, to consider the city. The city has once again invented and expanded its technology of image making and its communication, such that the capability exist to hold up an iPhone or a small digital camera and decide that something before us merits being framed and recorded, to simply give it a title, or a caption, and to be a complete narrative or a clue to one. With Molly and Mark, the urbanite has evolved from the subject of urban cinema to an amalgam of writer, cameraman, director, editor, producer, and distributer. All that urban space for soundstages, movie theaters, and heavy equipment is replaced by digital space and imported images, multiple-terabyte computer hard drives, and sophisticated movie-editing software. With the new image technology we all have become potential moviemakers. But the iPhone, the point-and-shoot, and the highly portable video camera do not portend technologically-determined art. Give a kid a point-and-shoot and we might get two-dozen pictures of a sleeping cat, and we have all sat in polite boredom at someone’s interminable and inane vacation video. Video games have yet to evolve from simplistic violent plots. The essence of the captured image is, as it always was and always will be, what captures our interest—what we think the images says, not just depicts, what it represents, not is just representational, and not just what its story is, but how it connects with us. And the story is always imminent (and immanent) at the intersection of image and imagination. Molly’s shaky video of dust and debris rolling down a New York street is now immediately evocative of other time-coded images of the city. At times it seems the city can almost impose its narrative upon us. Movies that contain the New York skyline shot of lower Manhattan can now be dated or demarcated by 296

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the presence, or absence, of the World Trade Center. Moreover, those very structures continue to exist in a King Kong movie, and numerous others, and evoke or stand for movies like 9 to 5 or Wall Street. These iconic buildings become places exposed in our memories from actual events, or what we have imagined in them. Of course, this new, multiple-refractive reality between image subject and image maker, has itself become the story of many motion pictures. The mere curiosity of observation has become transmogrified into what is considered to be the necessity of surveillance, seizing the urbanite as “talent” in daily documentaries of a myriad of cameras in shops, public buildings in spaces, elevators, and ATMs. We might, or might not, be a person of interest in some drama into which we are unwittingly captured. In many parts of the city we are never “off camera,” a new reality that has become the subject of surveillance and surreptitious observation in films from The Conversation (1974) to Enemy of the State (1998) and Eagle Eye (2008). We not only capture images, but in an age in which we are virtually surrounded by images, many images are intended to capture us, or at least our attention from the mass of still and moving images we encounter in a single day. What will be the effect upon creativity? With everyone a potential moviemaker with access to technologies that we only imagined in science fiction and comic books a generation ago, will the image be so trivialized by its abundance and ubiquity that we will come to regard it or ignore it out of a bored insouciance. Not likely; we are humans, the only self-conscious critters on earth. The City Our relations with cities are like our relations with people. We love them, hate them, or are indifferent toward them. On our first day in a city that is new to us, we go looking for the city. We go down this street, around that corner. We are aware of the faces of passers-by. But the city eludes us, and we become uncertain whether we are looking for a city, or for a person.2

From its very beginnings, the great attraction of the city—serving its noblest purpose—has been its capacity to expand the possibilities for individual opportunity and self-expression. At its best it offers, sometimes out of exploitation, sometimes out of need, sometimes out of its sheer mass and anonymity, a freedom to be, to self-define, the highest achievements in the human experience. 297

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The city, as embraced by this project, is our greatest subject. It is our most complex and important invention, the container not only of our art, politics, ingenuity, intelligence, but also our dreams; it continues to fascinate, perplex, and entertain us. We began this exploration of the reciprocal relationship between the city and the cinema with a discussion of those earliest films produced in the streets of cities in the first decades of the twentieth century, composed largely of voyeuristic curiosities of the commonplace circadian activities of American urban life. In its formative days, the cinema of urbanism featured the activities of the same city streets that Molly emerges into today. A lot has changed in a century but some essentials remain. What remains is the dynamism of the themes that were chosen. Immigrants will continue to be drawn to the flame of urban opportunities like moths. They will look and sound different from Chaplin’s characters, but they will emerge as wide-eyed with wonder and trepidation, as they do in the final scenes of Crash (2004), as they did on first sighting the Statue of Liberty in America, America (1963). The contrasts between small towns and the big city remains a viable theme for exploring the differences in American values, such as in New in Town (2009). A simple search, in the online movie database IMDb, on “suburbia” testifies to the growth of both producer and audience interest, especially in films such as Hesher (2010) and Everything Must Go (2010), in rebellion against its oppressive norms. As it did for years with Japanese monster films, the city, especially the large metropolis, will be punished (sometimes by remake) by giant monsters and space aliens (remakes of Godzilla, The Day the Earth Stood Still, War of the Worlds), climate change (The Day After Tomorrow), transformers, pandemics (Contagion), and end-of-theworld predictions (2012) in the expansive theme of urban holocausts. Out of guilt or childish distemper, we seem always impelled to the theme of seeing our greatest inventions brought low by forces unleashed, often by our own ungoverned impulses, entertained by it when it is the product of our own imaginations, and abhorred by it when there is no necessity for suspension of disbelief. Yet in those same cities, we remain willing to believe that there is a Breakfast at Tiffany’s or Moonstruck love story in full bloom (or gone sour) in every other window in an apartment building, or a Double Indemnity crime story in every other brownstone or lurking in gloomy alleys. We expect that there will always exist the dramatic 298

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frictions of rich and poor of Midnight Cowboy, the contending races and ethnicities of West Side Story, dreams alive on 42nd Street and Sister Carrie’s dreams dashed, those on the way up for a Pretty Woman or down in Bonfire of the Vanities, and the ever present sense that, in the city, something might happen: a Prisoner of Second Avenue urged by circumstances to rebellion, or an attempted hit on The Godfather in Little Italy. There is always the molecular world of an immigrant Jew in Hester Street or the rhapsodic sweep of a Portrait of Jennie. Every culture has its characteristic drama. It chooses from the sum total of human possibilities certain acts and interests, certain processes and values, and endows them with special significance: provides them with a setting: organizes rights and ceremonies: excludes from the circle of dramatic response of thousand other daily acts which, though they remain part of the “real” the world, are not active agents in the drama itself period the stage on which this drama is enacted, with the most skilled actors and a full supporting company and specially designed scenery, is the city: it is here that it reaches its highest pitch of intensity.3

The cinematic city and the life portrayed in it as discussed in the preceding chapters are admittedly a subjective take on the subject. The topics chosen, the films selected—especially those chosen to typify their theme—owe everything to the author’s time, place, and circumstance, his own, particular, personal, and peculiar urban chronicity. This is, unavoidably, to use the vernacular, “where I am coming from.” If those themes and reciprocities can be communicated, if there are commonalities and connections, or if they open possibilities, then there might be merit in this effort, in spite of the certainly of overlooking someone’s iconic city or film or perspective, as it surely must, then there at least remains a wider frame and always room for further exploration. This is not a treatise on the fixed body of work of a dead poet, but of a dynamic and mutating relationship of elements that grow and change both independent of and because of that relationship. Consequently, there is an inescapable subjectivity in the ramification of the screenwriters vision, the directors interpretation, and what particular focus of interest—in this author’s case, what this or that movie has to say about cities and urban life—that one can only hope can be expressed in a manner of some academic value, adding perspective, provoking discourse, and inciting further attention. Or, will it push us further creatively, seeking that angle, that composition, that montage of shots, that mixture of sight with sound and 299

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speech, that cut that is so apt or revealing, that edit that composes something that says not only what, is but what we subjectively want it to be. I will probably always be there. Perhaps when Molly and her friend emerged from a movie theater into a street in which there is a real drama unfolding, which they are moved to document, the city and the cinema intersect and merge—the city becomes cinema, and it becomes a critical means by which we try to comprehend it ramifications. And, as we urbanites are intensely conscious of ourselves as observers and subjects of images, we fall into an existential illusion/synthesis in which we become the subject/ objects of at least a sense of our own urban drama. THE END . . . 1. 2. 3.

300

Notes

Sontag, 1973, 28. Burgin, 1966, jacket leaf. See also, Clapp, 1997. Mumford, 1938, 60.

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310

Film List

Film Title

City Prod. Co (Note: Italicized cities are fictional.)

Year

Director

Topic

Lead Actors

1984

London

1984

M. Radford

City of Future

J. Hurt R. Burton

24 Hour Woman

NY

Dirt Road

1999

N. Savoca

Family Work

R. Perez P. Lupone

2012

Vancouver and L.A.

Columbia

2009

R. Emmerich

City and environment

J. Cusack T. Newton C. Eliofor

42nd Street

NY

MGM

1933

L. Bacon

Women Work Musical

R. Keeler W. Baxter B. Daniels G. Brent

Alamo Bay

Rockport, Texas

TriStar

1985

L. Malle

Immigration

E. Harris H. Nguyen A. Madigan

All about Eve

NY

20C Fox

1950

J.L. Mankiewicz

Women in the city

B. Davis C. Holm G. Marshall A. Baxter

All the Right Moves

***

20C Fox

1983

M. Chapman

Work Small Town

T. Cruise L. Thompson

A

Almost Famous

San Diego

Dream Works

2000

C. Crowe

Youth

K. Hudson B. Crudup

Alice Doesn’t Live Phoenix Here Anymore

WB

1974

M. Scorsese

Family

E. Burstyn H. Keitel

America, America NY

WB

1963

E. Kazan

Immigration

S. Giallelis L. Antonio

American Beauty

L.A.

DreamWorks

1999

S. Mendes

Family Suburbia

K. Spacey A. Benning

American Graffiti

Modesto, CA

Lucasfilms Universal

1973

G. Lucas

Youth

R. Dreyfus R. Howard P. La Mat C. Clarke

American History X

L.A.

New Line Cinema

1998

T. Kaye

Race

E. Norton E. Furlong B. D’Angelo

An Affair to Remember

NY

20C Fox

1957

L. McCarey

Urban Rhapsody

C. Grant D. Kerr

Andy Hardy’s Dilemma

L.A.

MGM

1938

G.B. Seitz

Family

M. Rooney L. Stone

Angel Heart

New Orleans

Carolco Entertainment

1987

A. Parker

Crime Noir

R. De Niro M. Rourke L. Bonet

Film Title

City Prod. Co (Note: Italicized cities are fictional.)

Year

Director

Topic

Lead Actors

Angels With Dirty Faces

NY

First Nat’l Pictures

1938

M. Curtiz

Youth Crime

J. Cagney H. Bogart Bowery Boys

Annie Hall

NY

Rollins-Joffe

1977

W. Allen

Women Romance

W. Allen D. Keaton T. Roberts C. Kane

The Apartment

NY

The Mirisch Company

1960

B. Wilder

Women Romance

J. Lemmon S. MacLaine F. MacMurray

Arlington Road

Wash. DC

Screen Gems

1999

M. Pellington

Suburbia

T. Robbins J. Bridges

The Asphalt Jungle

***

MGM

1950

J. Huston

Crime; film noir

S. Hayden L. Calhern J. Hagen

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

NY

20C Fox

1945

E. Kazan

Family

D. McGuire P. A. Garner James Dunn

Avalon

Baltimore

TriStar

1990

B. Levinson

Family; Immigration

A. M. Stahl A. Quinn L. Jacobi J. Plowright

B

Bachelor in Paradise

***

MGM

1961

J. Arnold

Suburbia

B. Hope L. Turner J. Paige

Bad Day at Black Rock

Black Rock

MGM

1955

J. Sturges

Small town

S. Tracy R. Ryan A. Francis

Barefoot in the Park

NY

Paramount

1971

G. Saks

Urban rhapsody

R. Redford J. Fonda C. Boyer

The Best Years of Our Lives

Boone City

S. Goldwyn

1946

W. Wyler

Family Social class

F. March D. Andrews T. Wright H. Russell

The Big Sleep

***

WB

1946

H. Hawks

Crime; film noir

H. Bogart L. Bacall J. Ridgely

The Birdcage

Miami

MGM

1996

M. Nichols

Family

R. Williams N. Lane G. Hackman

MGM

1955

R. Brooks

Growing up

G. Ford A. Francis S. Poitier

Blackboard Jungle ***

Film Title

City Prod. Co (Note: Italicized cities are fictional.)

Year

Director

Topic

Lead Actors

Blade Runner

L.A.

Ladd Co.

1982

R. Scott

Future city

H. Ford R. Hauer S. Young E. J. Olmos

Blue Collar

Detroit

TAT Communications Co.

1978

P. Schrader

Work in the city

R. Pryor H. Keitel Y. Koto

Blume in Love

L.A.

WB

1973

P. Mazursky

Marriage

S. Anspach G. Segal K. Kristofferson

Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice

***

Columbia

1969

P. Mazursky

Marriage Family

N. Wood R. Culp E. Gould D. Cannon

Bonfire of the Vanities

NY

WB

1990

B. De Palma

Work, alienation

T. Hanks M. Griffith

The Border

El Paso

RKO/ Universal

1982

T. Richardson

Immigration

J. Nicholson V. Perrine H. Keitel W. Oates

Boys Town

***

MGM

1938

N. Taurog

Youth

S. Tracy M. Rooney

Boyz N the Hood

L.A.

Columbia

1991

J. Singleton

Youth Race

L. Fishburne C. Gooding Ice T

Brazil

London

Universal

1985

T. Gilliam

City of future

J. Pryce R. De Niro

Breakfast at Tiffany’s

NY

Paramount

1961

B. Edwards

Women Romance

A. Hepburn G. Peppard P. Neal

The Breakfast Club

North-brook, IL

Universal/ A&M

1985

J. Hughes

Growing up

E. Estevez J. Nelson M. Ringwald A. Sheedy

Breaking Away

Bloomington, IN

1979

P. Yates

Small town

D. Christopher D. Quaid D. Stern P. Dooley

Brighton Beach Memories

Brooklyn

Rastar

1986

G. Sacks

Youth

J. Silverman B. Danner

Broadway Danny Rose

NY

Orion

1984

W. Allen

Urban rhapsody

W. Allen M. Farrow N. A. Forte

Film Title

City Prod. Co (Note: Italicized cities are fictional.)

Year

Director

Topic

Lead Actors

Broadway Melody NY

MGM

1929

H. Beaumont

Music in the city

C. King B. Love A. Page

The Brothers McMullin

NY

The Brothers McMullin Co.

1995

E. Burns

Growing up

E. Burns M. McGlone J. Mulcahy

Bullitt

SF

Solar

1968

P. Yates

Crime

S. McQueen D. Gorden J. Bissett

The Burbs

***

Imagine Entertainment

1989

J. Dante

Suburbia

T. Hanks B. Dern C. Fisher

The Captive City

***

Aspen Production

1952

R. Wise

Crime Noir

J. Forsythe J. Camden M. Milner

Carrie

NY Chicago

Paramount

1952

W. Wyler

Women in the city

J. Jones L. Olivier E. Albert

C

Chan Is Missing

SF

New Yorker Films

1982

W. Wang

Immigration

W. Moy L. Chew M. Hayashi P. Wang

Chicago

Chicago

Miramax

2001

R. Marshall

Music; Crime

R. Gere R. Zellweger C. Zeta-Jones Q. Latifah

Chinatown

L.A.

Paramount

1974

R. Polanski

Suburbia Politics

J. Nicholson F. Dunaway J. Huston

City Hall

NY

Castle Rock/ Columbia

1996

H. Becker

Politics

A. Pacino J. Cusack B. Fonda D. Aiello

City Lights

SF

Charles Chaplin Productions

1931

C. Chaplin

Romance in the city

C. Chaplin F. Lee H. Myers

City of Hope

River City

Esperanza/ Goldwyn

1991

J. Sayles

Politics Race

V. Spano T. LoBianco J. Morton

Colors

L.A.

Orion

1988

D. Hopper

Growing up

R. Duval S. Penn

Film Title

City Prod. Co (Note: Italicized cities are fictional.)

Year

Director

Topic

Lead Actors

Consenting Adults ***

Hollywood Pictures

1992

A. Pakula

Suburbia

K. Kline K. Spacey

Contagion

Atlanta, et al.

WB

2011

S. Soderbergh

City and plague

M. Damon K. Winslet J. Law

The Conversation

SF

American Zoetrope/ Paramount

1974

F. Coppola

City and surveillance G. Hackman J. Cazale F. Forrest

The Cotton Club

NY

Zoetrope

1984

F. Coppola

Race and ethnicity

R. Gere N. Cage G. Hines D. Lane

Country

***

TriStar

1984

R. Pearce

City and the farm

J. Lange S. Shepard W. Brimley

Clockwork Orange

London

WB

1971

S. Kubrick

City of future

M. MacDowell

L.A.

Bob Yari Productions

2004

P. Haggis

Immigration Race relations

M. Dillon D. Cheadle T. Howard T. Newton

Crash

Crocodile Dundee NY

Paramount

1986

P. Faiman

Alienation; Love

P. Hogan L. Kozlowski D. Gulpilil

Crossing Delancey NY

WB

1988

J.M. Silver

Women

A. Irving P. Riegert S. Miles

The Crowd

***

MGM

1928

K. Vidor

Urban life

E. Boardman J. Murray

The Day after Tomorrow

[NYC]

20C Fox

2004

R. Emmerich

City and environment

D. Quaid J. Gyllenhaal S. Ward

Days of Wine and Roses

San Francisco

WB

1962

B. Edwards

Addiction

J. Lemmon L. Remick

The Day the Earth Wash. DC Stood Still

20C Fox

1951

R. Wise

City of future

M. Rennie P. Neal S. Jaffe

Dead End

NY

S. Goldwyn

1937

W. Wyler

Growing up in the city

J. McCrea S. Sidney H. Bogart

Deathwish

NY

Paramount

1974

M. Winner

Crime

C. Bronson H. Lange V. Gardenia

D

Film Title

City Prod. Co (Note: Italicized cities are fictional.)

Year

Director

Topic

Lead Actors

The Deer Hunter

Clairiton, PA

Universal Pictures

1978

M. Cimino

Work Small town

R. DeNiro J. Savage M. Streep C. Walken

Designing Woman NY

MGM

1957

V. Minnelli

Woman Work

L. Bacall G. Peck D. Gray

Desk Set

NY

20C Fox

1957

W. Lang

Women Work

K. Hepburn S. Tracy J. Blondell

Desperately Seeking Susan

NY

Orion Pictures

1985

S. Seilelman

Woman

R. Arquette Madonna A. Quinn

Die Hard

L.A.

20 C Fox

1988

J. McTeirnan

Architecture

B. Willis B. Bedelia A. Rickman

Dim Sum

SF

CIM

1984

W. Wang

Immigration Family

L. Chew K. Chew V. Wong

Diner

Baltimore

MGM

1982

B. Levinson

Growing up

S. Guttenberg M. Rourke K. Bacon

Dirty Harry

SF

D.O.A.

SF

Dog Day Afternoon Do the Right Thing

1971

D. Siegel

Crime in the city

C. Eastwood H. Guardino J. Larch

Cardinal Picture

1950

R. Maté

Crime Noir

E. O’Brien P. Britton L. Adler

NY

Artists Entertainment Complex

1975

S. Lumet

Crime

A. Pacino J. Cazale C. Durning

NY

40 Acres

1989

S. Lee

Race

S. Lee D. Aiello J. Turturo O. Davis

Double Indemnity L.A.

Paramount

1944

B. Wilder

Crime Noir

F. MacMurray B. Stanwyck E. G. Robinson

Drugstore Cowboy

Portland, OR

Avenue Pict.

1979

G. Van Sant

Youth Drugs

M. Dillon K. Lynch

Eagle Eye

L.A.

Dream Works SKG

2008

D.J. Caruso

Urban surveillance

S. LaBeouf M. Monaghan R. Dawson

East of Eden

Salinas, CA

Warner Bros

1955

E. Kazan

Small town

J. Dean R. Massey J. Harris

E

Film Title

City Prod. Co (Note: Italicized cities are fictional.)

Year

Director

Topic

Lead Actors

Easy Street

NY

Mutual

1917

C. Chaplin

Immigrants

C. Chaplin E. Purviance

Edward Scissorhands

***

20C Fox

1990

T. Burton

Suburbia

J. Depp W. Ryder A. Arkin

The Egg and I

***

Universal Pictures

1947

C. Erskine

The Farm

E. Albert M. Main P. Kilbride C. Colbert

Election

***

Paramount

1999

A. Payne

Suburbia

M. Broderick R. Witherspoon

El Norte

L.A.

American Playhouse

1983

G. Nava

Immigration

Z. Gutierrez D. Villapando E. Cruz

Enemy of the State L.A.

Touchstone

1998

T. Scott

Urban surveillance

W. Smith G. Hackman J. Voight

Escape from New York

AVCO Embassy

1981

J. Carpenter

City of future

K. Russell D.Pleasance I. Hayes

NY

Everything Must Go

Phoenix

Temple Hill

2010

D. Rush

Suburbia

W. Ferrell R. Hall M. Pena

Falling Down

L.A.

WB

1993

J. Schumacher

Crime

M. Douglas R. Duval B. Hershey

Fast Times at Ridgemont High

***

Universal

1982

A. Heckerling

Growing up (Suburbia)

S. Penn J.J. Leigh J. Reinhold

Father of the Bride ***

MGM

1950

V. Minnelli

Family

S. Tracy E. Taylor D. Taylor

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

***

Paramount

1986

J. Hughes

Growing up

M. Broderick M. Sara A. Ruck

Flower Drum Song

SF

Universal International

1961

H. Koster

Music in the city

N. Kwan B. Fong J. Shigeta

The Fountainhead ***

First National, WB

1949

K. Vidor

Architecture

G. Cooper P. Neal R. Massey

The French Connection

20C Fox

1971

W. Friedkin

Crime

G. Hackman R. Schieder F. Rey

F

NY

Film Title

City Prod. Co (Note: Italicized cities are fictional.)

Year

Director

Topic

Lead Actors

Front Page Woman

***

Warner Bros

1935

M. Curtiz

Women Work

B. Davis G. Brent

Gangs of New York

NY

Miramax

2002

M. Scorsese

Growing up

L. DiCaprio J. Broadbent D.D. Lewis

Glengarry Glen Ross

Chicago

New Line Cinema

1992

J. Foley

Work

J. Lemmon K. Spacey A. Baldwin A. Arkin A. Pacino

The Godfather

NY; LV

Paramount

1972

F. Coppola

Crime in the city

M. Brando A. Pacino R. Duval J. Caan

The Godfather: Part II

NY; LV

Paramount/ The Coppola Co.

1974

F. Coppola

Crime in the city

R. De Niro A. Pacino M. Brando R. Duval

G

Godzilla

NY

TriStar

1998

S. Spielberg

City of future

M. Broderick J. Reno

Goodfellas

NY

WB

1990

M. Scorsese

Crime

J. Pesci R. De Niro R. Liotta P. Sorvino

The Graduate

SF Berkeley

Embassy

1967

M. Nichols

Growing up

D. Hoffman K. Ross A. Bancroft

Gran Torino

Michigan

WB

2008

C. Eastwood

Immigration

C. Eastwood B. Vang C. Carley

The Grapes of Wrath

***

20C Fox

1940

J. Ford

City and farm

H. Fonda J. Darwell J. Carradine

The Grass Is Always Greener over the Septic Tank

***

J. Hamilton Production

1971

R. Day

Suburbia

C. Burnett C. Grodin C.T. Nelson

Grease

L.A.

Paramount

1978

R. Kleiser

Growing up

J. Traavolta O. Newton-John

Green Card

NY

Touchstone

1990

P. Weir

Immigration

G. Depardieu A. MacDowell

Film Title

City Prod. Co (Note: Italicized cities are fictional.)

Year

Director

Topic

Lead Actors

Guess Who’s SF Coming to Dinner

Columbia

1967

S. Kramer

Family Race

S. Poitier S. Tracy K. Hepburn

Guilty by Suspicion

L.A.

WB

1991

I. Winkler

Politics

R. De Niro A. Benning G. Wendt

Guys and Dolls

NY

S. Goldwyn

1955

J. L. Mankiewicz

Women

F. Sinatra V. Blaine M. Brando J. Simmons

Hannah and Her Sisters

NY

Orion

1986

W. Allen

Women

W. Allen C. Fisher D. Wiest M. Farrow M. Cane

Hello Dolly

NY

20C Fox

1969

G. Kelly

Music in the city

B. Streisand W. Matthau M. Crawford

Hester Street

NY

1975

J. M. Silver

Immigration

S. Keats C. Kane

H

His Girl Friday

Chicago

Columbia Pictures

1940

H. Hawks

Women Work

C. Grant R. Russell G. Bellamy

Hoffa

Chicago Pittsburgh

20C Fox

1992

D. DeVito

Work

J. Nicholson D. DeVito A. Assante

The Hustler

NY

20C Fox

1961

R. Rossen

CT

Fox Searchlight 1997

A. Lee

Suburbia

K. Kline J. Allen T. McGuire

Reliance Pictures

1933

J. Cruze

Immigration

B. Lyon C. Colbert E. Torrence

P. Newman P. Laurie J. Gleason G. C. Scott

I

The Ice Storm I Cover the Waterfront The Immigrant

NY

Mutual

1917

C. Chaplin

Push

C. Chaplin E. Purviance

In the Heat of the Night

Philadelphia, MS

The Mirisch Corp.

1976

N. Jewison

Small town

S. Poitier R. Steiger W. Oates L. Grant

Film Title

City Prod. Co (Note: Italicized cities are fictional.)

Year

Director

Topic

Lead Actors

Independence Day ***

20C Fox

1996

R. Emmerich

Urban horror

B. Pullman W. Smith J. Goldblum

Invasion of the Body Snatchers

L.A.

Allied Artists

1956

D. Siegel

Urban horror

K. McCarthy D. Wynter C. Jones

It Could Happen to You

NY

TriStar

1994

A. Bergman

Romance

N. Cage B. Fonda R. Perez

It’s a Wonderful Life

Bedford Falls, New York

RKO

1946

F. Capra

Small towns

D. Reed J. Stewart L. Barrymore T. Mitchell

The Jagged Edge

SF

Columbia

1985

R. Marquand

Crime Noir

J. Bridges G. Close

Jaws

Amity

Universal

1978

S. Spielberg

Small town

R. Dreyfus R. Scheider R. Shaw

J

The Joy Luck Club SF

Hollywood Pictures

1993

W. Wang

Immigration Family

F. Nuyen L. Tom L. Lu T. Tomita

Jungle Fever

NY

Universal Pictures

1991

S. Lee

Race

W. Snipes A. Sciorra S. L. Jackson S. Lee

Kramer vs. Kramer

NY

Columbia

1979

R. Benton

Family

D. Hoffman M. Streep J. Henry

King Kong

NY

RKO

1933

Cooper; Schoedsack

Alienation; Technology

F. Wray R. Armstrong B. Cabot

L.A. Confidential

L.A.

Regency WB

1997

C. Hansen

Crime

R. Crowe K. Spacey G. Pearce K. Basinger

L.A. Story

L.A.

TriStar

1991

M. Jackson

K

L

S. Martin G. Tenant S.J Parker

Film Title

City Prod. Co (Note: Italicized cities are fictional.)

Year

Director

Topic

Lead Actors

The Last Hurrah

Boston

Columbia

1958

J. Ford

Urban politics

S. Tracy J. Hunter P. O’Brien

The Last Picture Show

***

Columbia

1971

P. Bogdanovich

Small town

T. Bottoms J. Bridges E. Burstyn B. Johnson

The Last Exit to Brooklyn

NY

Allied Filmmakers

1989

U. Edel

Work

J. Jason Leigh S. Lang J. Orbach

The Legend of 1900

NY

Medusa (Italy)

1998

G. Tornatore

Immigration

T. Roth P.T. Vince C. Williams III

Little Caesar

***

First National Pictures

1930

M. LeRoy

Crime in the city

E. Robinson D. Fairbanks, Jr.

The Lords of Flatbush

NY

Columbia

1974

M. Davidson S. Verona

Growing up

S. Stallone H. Winkler

The Lost World: Jurassic Park

San Diego

Amblin/ Universal

1997

S. Spielberg

Monsters in the city

G. Goldblum J. Moore R. Attenborough

M

Mad City

***

Punch Productions

1997

Costa-Gravas

Work

D. Hoffman J. Travolta A. Alda

The Majestic

***

Castle Rock

2001

F. Darnabont

Politics Small town

J. Carrey L. Holden M. Landau

The Maltese Falcon

SF

WB

1941

J. Huston

Crime; film noir

H. Bogart M. Astor P. Lorre

The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit

Westport, CT

20C Fox

1956

N. Johnson

Suburbia

G. Peck J. Jones

Manhatta

NY

***

1921

Sheeler & Strand

***

***

Manhattan

NY

Jack Rollins & 1979 Charles H. Joffe Prods.

W. Allen

Urban rhapsody

W. Allen D. Keaton M. Murphy M. Hemingway M. Streep

Matewan

W. Virginia

Cinecom Entertainment

1987

J. Sales

Immigration

C. Cooper J. E. Jones D. Strathairn

Meet John Doe

***

Frank Capra Productions

1941

F. Capra

Politics

G. Cooper B. Stanwyck E. Arnold W. Brennan

Film Title

City Prod. Co (Note: Italicized cities are fictional.)

Year

Director

Topic

Lead Actors

Meet Me in St. Louis

St. Louis

MGM

1944

V. Minnelli

Music in the city

J. Garland M. O’Brien M. Astor

Metropolitan

NY

Allagash

1990

W. Stillman

Growing up

C. Farina E. Clements C. Eigman

Metropolis

NY

Universum

1927

F. Lang

City of the future

G. Frolich B. Helm A. Abel R. Klein-Rogge

Midnight Cowboy NY

Florin

1968

J. Schlesinger

Alienation

J. Voight D. Hoffman

Mimic

NY

Mirimax

1997

G. del Toro

Urban horror

M. Sorvino J. Northam G. Giannini

Miracle on 34th Street

NY

20C Fox

1947

G. Seaton

Youth

N. Wood E. Gwenn M. O’Hara

Modern Times

***

Chaplin Prods./ United Artists

1936

C. Chaplin

Work

C. Chaplin P. Goddard C. Conklin

Moonstruck

NY

MGM

1987

N. Jewison

Women Ethnicity

N. Cage Cher D. Aiello V. Gardena

Moscow on the Hudson

NY

Columbia

1984

P. Mazursky

Immigration

R. Williams M. C. Alonso C. Derricks

Miramax/ Merchant

1990

J. Ivory

Suburbia Family

J. Woodward P. Newman

1962

M. DaCosta

Small town

R. Preston S. Jones

1948

E. Nugent

Immigration

L. Palmer S. Wannamaker

Mr. And Mrs. Bridge The Music Man

River City, Iowa

My Girl Tisa

NY

U.S. Picture

Mystic Pizza

Mystic, CT

S. Goldwyn Co. 1988

D. Petrie

Small town Growing up

J. Roberts V. D’Onofrio A. Gish

The Naked City

NY

Universal International

1948

J. Dassin

Crime Film noir

B. Fitzgerald D. Taylor H. Duff

Neighbors

***

Columbia

1981

J. Avildsen

Suburbia J. Belushi D. Ackroyd

N

Film Title

City Prod. Co (Note: Italicized cities are fictional.)

Year

Director

Topic

Lead Actors

Network

NY

1976

S. Lumet

Women

F. Dunaway P. Finch N. Beatty W. Holden

New in Town

Winnepeg, Canada Lionsgate

2009

J. Elmer

Industry, employment

R. Zellweger H. Connick, Jr.

MGM

New Orleans after New Orleans Dark

Allied Artists

1958

J. Sledge

Crime

S. Harris T. Pelle L. Sirgo

Nine to Five

L.A./SF

20C Fox

1980

C. Higgins

Women Work

J. Fonda L. Tomlin D. Parton D. Coleman

Norma Rae

***

20C Fox

1979

M. Ritt

Work in the city

S. Fields R. Leibman B. Bridges P. Hingle

***

WB

1971

B. Sagal

City of future

C. Heston A. Zerbe

O

The Omega Man

On the Town

NY

MGM

1949

S. Donan G. Kelly

Music in the city

F. Sinatra G. Kelly J. Munshin

On the Waterfront NY

Columbia

1954`

E. Kazan

Politics Crime

M. Brando E. Marie Saint L. J. Cobb R. Steiger

Our Town

***

MGM

1940

S. Wood

Small town

F. Craven W. Holden M. Scott

Over the Edge

***

Orion Pictures

1979

J. Kaplan

Growing up Suburbia M. Dillon P. Ludwig V. Spano

Panic in the Streets

New Orleans

20C Fox

1950

E. Kazan

Urban horror

R. Widmark B. Bel Geddes J. Palance

A Patch of Blue

***

Filmways MGM

1965

G. Green

Race

S. Poitier S. Winters K. Hartman

The Pawnbroker

NY

Landau/ 1964 Pawnbroker Co.

S. Lumet

Race

R. Steiger G. Fitzgerald B. Peters J. Sanchez

P–Q

Film Title

City Prod. Co (Note: Italicized cities are fictional.)

Year

Director

Topic

Lead Actors

Peyton Place

***

20C Fox

1957

M. Robinson

Small town

L. Turner H. Lange

Picnic

***

Columbia Pictures

1955

J. Logan

Small town

W. Holden K. Novak S. Strasberg C. Robertson

Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh

Universal

1942

L. Seiler

Work

J. Wayne M. Dietrich R. Scott

Paramount

1951

G. Stevens

Social class

M. Clift E. Taylor S. Winters

1984

R. Benton

City and the farm

S. Field E. Harris J. Malkovich

A Place in the Sun *** Places in the Heart

***

Please Don’t Eat the Daisies

***

MGM

1961

C. Walters

Suburbia

D. Day D. Niven

Portrait of Jennie

NY

Vanguard Films

1948

W. Dieterle

City as character

J. Jones J. Cotton E. Barrymore

The Postman Always Rings Twice

***

MGM

1946

T. Garnett

Women Film noir

L. Turner J. Garfield C. Kelloway H. Cronyn

Pretty Woman

Beverly Hills

Touchstone Pictures

1990

G. Marshall

Social class

J. Roberts R. Gere R. Bellamy

The Prisoner of Second Avenue

NY

WB

1975

M. Frank

Mental health Suburbia

J. Lemmon A. Bancroft G. Sacks

Public Enemy

***

WB

1931

W. Wellman

Crime

J. Cagney J. Harlow J. Blondell E. Woods

Pulp Fiction

L.A.

Miramax

1994

Q. Tarantino

Crime

J. Travolta S. L. Jackson B. Willis U. Thurman

Pushing Hands

NY Long Island

Ang Lee Productions

1994

A. Lee

Immigration

S. Lun D. Snyder B. Z. Wang

Film Title

City Prod. Co (Note: Italicized cities are fictional.)

Year

Director

Topic

Lead Actors

R

Ragtime

NY

Dino De 1981 Laurentiis Prod.

M. Forman

Immigration

E. McGovern M. Patinkin J. Cagney B. Dourif M. Gunn

Reality Bites

Houston

Jersey Films Universal

1994

B. Stiller

Growing up

B. Stiller E. Hawke W. Ryder J. Garofalo

Real Life

Phoenix

Paramount

1979

A. Brooks

Family

A. Brooks C. Grodin

Rear Window

***

Paramount

1954

A. Hitchcock

Buildings

J. Stewart G. Kelly R. Burr

Rebel Without a Cause

L.A.

WB

1955

N. Ray

Family Suburbia Growing up

J. Dean N. Wood S, Mineo

Reservoir Dogs

L.A.

Dog Eat Dog Prod

1992

Q. Tarantino

Crime

H. Keitel M. Madsen T. Roth S. Buscemi

The River

***

Universal

1984

M. Rydell

City and the farm

M. Gibson S. Spacek S. Glenn

The Road to Perdition

Chicago

20C Fox

2002

S. Mendes

Crime Violence

T. Hanks P. Newman J. Law

Saturday Night Fever

NY

Paramount

1977

J. Badham

Youth

J. Travolta K. Gorney

Save the Tiger

L.A.

Paramount Filmways

1973

J. Avildsen

Work

J. Lemmon J. Gilford

Serpico

NY

Paramount

1973

S. Lumet

Crime

A. Pacino J. Randolph B. McGuire

She’s the One

NY

Good Machine

1996

E. Burns

Growing up

E. Burns J. Aniston M. McGlone

Sidewalks of New York

NY

MGM

1931

Z. Myers J. White

Comedy

B. Keaton C. Edwards A. Page

Sideways

San Diego, Other Calif. cities

Fox Searchlight 2004 Sideways

A. Payne

Growing up

P. Giamatti T. H. Church V. Madsen S. Oh

S

Film Title

City Prod. Co (Note: Italicized cities are fictional.)

Year

Director

Topic

Lead Actors

Sixteen Candles

Glencoe, IL

Universal

1985

J. Hughes

Growing up Suburbia

M. Ringwald J. Henry A. M. Hall

Slacker

Austin, TX

Detour Films

1991

R. Linklater

Youth

R. Linklater R. Basquez

Sleepless in Seattle

NT Seattle

TriStar

1993

N. Ephron

Architecture

T. Hanks M. Ryan

Snow Falling on Cedars

Mossyville, WA

Universal

1999

S. Hicks

Small towns

E. Hawke S. Shepard Y. Kudoh M. von Sydow

Steel Town

***

Universal International Pictures.

1952

G. Sherman

Work

J. Lund H. Duff A. Sheridan

St. Elmo’s Fire

Wash. DC

Columbia

1985

J. Schumacher

Growing up

E. Estevez R. Lowe D. Moore A. Sheedy

The Stepford Wives

Stepford

Palomar Pictures

B. Forbes

Suburbia

K. Ross P. Prentiss P. O’Neal

Smile

Santa Rosa, CA

1975

M. Ritchie

Small town

B. Dern B. Feldon A. O’Toole

Soylent Green

NY

1973

R. Fleischer

City of future

C. Heston E. G. Robinson

SubUrbia

Austin, TX

Castle Rock

1996

R. Linklater

Youth Suburbia

G. Ribisi S. Zahn A. Carey

Sunrise

***

Fox Film Corp

1927

F. W. Murnau

City as character

G. O’Brien J. Gaynor M. Livingston

Sunset Boulevard

L.A.

Paramount

1950

B. Wilder

Crime Noir

W. Holden G. Swanson E. von Stroheim

Sunshine State

***

Anarchist’s Convention Films

2001

J. Sayles

Real Estate

T. Hutton E. Falco J. Alexander A. Bassett

The Swimmer

***

Columbia

1968

F. Perry S. Pollack

Suburbia

B. Lancaster

NY

Palladium Productions

1974

J. Sargent

Crime

M. Balsam R. Shaw W. Matthau

T

The Taking of Pelham, One, Two, Three

Film Title

City Prod. Co (Note: Italicized cities are fictional.)

Year

Director

Topic

Lead Actors

Taxi Driver

NY

1976

M. Scorsese

Alienation

R. De Niro J. Foster H. Keitel

The Terminal

NY

2004

S. Spielberg

A Thousand Clowns

NY

UA

1965

F. Coe

Family

J. Robards B. Gordon B. Harris

Tin Men

Baltimore

Touchstone Pictures

1987

B. Levinson

Work

R. Dreyfus D. DeVito B. Hershey

THX 1138

SF

WB Zoetrope

1971

G. Lucas

City of the future

R. Duval M. McOmie

The Towering Inferno

SF

20C Fox/ WB

1974

I. Allen

Architecture

S. McQueen P. Newman F. Dunaway

Paramount

1998

P. Weir

Small town

J. Carrey E. Harris L. Linney

The Truman Show Seaside, FL

WB

T. Hanks S. Tucci K. Zeta-Jones

U–V

An Unmarried Woman

NY

20C Fox

1978

P. Mazursky

Family ways; women in city

J. Clayburgh A. Bates M. Murphy

The Untouchables Chicago

Paramount

1987

B. De Palma

Crime Violence

R. De Niro C. Costner S. Connery

The Usual Suspects

PolyGram Filmed Entertainment

1995

B. Singer

Crime Noir

G. Byrne K. Spacey C. Palmenteri S. Baldwin

MGM

1942

T. Garnett

Work

G. Garson G. Peck D. Crisp

O. Stone

Work

M. Douglas C. Sheen T. Tunie

NY/L.A.

Valley of Decision Pittsburgh W

Wall Street

NY

20C Fox

The Wanderers

NY Bronx

Orion

1979

P. Kaufman

Youth Gangs

K. Wahl J. Fredrich

Paramount

1953

B. Haskin

Urban horror

G. Barry L. Tremayne A. Robinson

War of the Worlds L.A.

Film Title

City Prod. Co (Note: Italicized cities are fictional.)

Year

Director

Topic

Lead Actors

The Warriors

NY

Paramount

1979

W. Hill

Youth Violence Gangs

M. Beck J. Remar D. Wright

The Way We Were NY L.A.

Columbia/ Rastar

1973

S. Pollock

Politics

R. Redford B. Streisand B. Dillman

Welcome to the Dollhouse

W. Caldwell, NJ

Suburban

1995

T. Solondz

Suburbia Growing up

H. Matarazzo

West Side Story

NY

Mirisch/Seven Arts

1961

R. Wise J. Robbins

Youth in the city

N. Wood R. Beymer R. Tamblyn

We

***

***

1924

Y. Zamayatin

***

***

When Harry Met Sally

NY

Castle Rock/ Nelson

1989

R. Reiner

Urban rhapsody

B. Crystal M. Ryan C. Fisher

White Man’s Burden

***

HBO; Rysher Entertainment

1995

D. Nakano

Race

H. Bellafonte J. Travolta K. Lynch

White Men Can’t Jump

L.A.

20C Fox

1992

R. Shelton

Race and ethnicity

W. Harrelson W. Snipes R. Perez

The Wild One

***

Columbia

1953

L. Benedek

Youth

M. Brando L. Marvin

Wives and Lovers

***

Paramount

1963

J. Rich

Suburbia

J. Leigh V. Johnson M. Hyer

Wolfen

NY

WB

1981

M. Wadleigh

Monsters in the city

A. Finney G. Hines D. Venora

Working Girl

NY

20CFox

1988

M. Nichols

Work in the City

M. Griffith S. Weaver H. Ford

MGM

1985

M. Cimino

Race/Ethnicity

M. Rourke J. Lone Ariane

X–Z

Year of the Dragon NY

Name Index Capote, Truman, 250 Chan, Jackie, 22, 230 Dean, James, 65, 119–121, 323, 340 Dickens, Charles, 30 Dos Passos, John, 16 Dreiser, Theodore, 16, 82, 220, 244–245, 303 Edison, Thomas, 14, 25, 35

Marsh, Reginald, 195 Mayer, L.B., 22, 35 Mineo, Sal, 119–120, 340 Murnau, F.W., 16–17, 208, 241–242, 254, 343 Otis, Elisha Graves, 22 Rand, Ayn, 21–22

Ford, Henry, 22, 316, 347

Sanders, Denis, 308 Sklar, Robert, 8, 186, 217, 308

Haussmann, Eugene, 21

Vidor, King, 17–18, 208, 321, 325

Keystone, Cops, 22, 191 Knight, Arthur, 305

Wolfe, Thomas, 16, 19, 163, 211–212, 309 Wood, Natalie, 119–120, 232, 316, 334, 340, 346 Wren, Christopher, 21

Lumiere, 6

* NOTE: names of directors, cast, and production personnel to be found in the Film Index, and cited authors in the Bibliography.

349

Subject Index alienation, 47, 51, 201–202, 204, 207–209, 214, 253, 316, 321, 331, 334, 344 American film industry, 15, 20, 168 anti-globalism, 287 antisocial behavior, 182 architects, 19–22, 91, 110, 193, 234, 277, 306 architecture, 4, 13, 19–22, 75, 93, 277, 306, 309, 322, 325, 342, 344 art form, 3, 6, 13 assimilation, 34, 36–38, 43, 45, 51, 54, 56, 141 Babylon, 17, 61, 91, 168, 179, 203, 205, 210, 240, 301 Biblical admonitions, 17 bigotry, 37, 41, 68, 181 Chinatown, 23, 48–49, 52, 100, 139, 164–166, 197–198, 226–227, 319 Chiaroscuro, 23 cinematographer, 7, 13, 187, 278 city (as “character”), 16, 338, 343 city (as cinema), 293 city (as soundstage), 7–8, 15, 23, 40, 110, 208, 296 city and country, 85, 241, 309 city as seductress, 17 city as Siren, 17 city buildings (props), 22 city, and employment, 39, 156 city, and opportunity, 208 city, golden age, 19, 36, 39, 287 class, 4, 7–9, 14, 20–21, 27, 35, 51, 53–54, 59, 67, 70, 91, 93, 99, 103, 110–112, 117–118, 123, 126–127, 130, 141, 143, 145–146, 148, 158, 160, 168, 174, 204, 208, 210, 217–224, 230, 233, 258, 260,

264, 266, 278, 281–282, 284, 306, 308, 315, 338–339 collaborative enterprise, 7 Columbian Exposition, 19 coming of age, 65, 118, 127, 230 communication, 5–7, 53, 60, 160, 207, 243, 273, 287, 295–296, 316 crime, 22–23, 45, 94, 98, 110, 112, 138, 140, 158, 162, 167, 172–173, 180–187, 191, 193–194, 196, 198, 246, 287, 298, 313–315, 318–319, 321, 323, 325–327, 330–333, 335–337, 339–341, 343, 345 cultural studies, 9 customs and mores, 7, 44 defined, city, 4, 6, 21, 25, 30, 93–94, 118, 124, 244, 252, 257, 264, 285 depression, 23–24, 34, 74, 88, 92, 110–112, 114, 119, 142, 184, 186, 221–223, 254 discrimination, 34, 49, 51, 68, 126, 156, 181 distribution, 7, 15, 35–36, 125, 153–154, 166, 258–259 districts, 23, 53, 72, 158, 164, 195, 207, 220, 226 drive-ins, 16, 122 DVD, 10, 16 dystopic, 275–276, 284–285, 289 economic independence, 137 education, 82, 110, 115–116, 126, 131, 135–140, 154, 156, 218–219, 225, 243, 258, 302, 306 employment, 14, 39, 46, 48, 116, 124, 147, 156, 171, 209, 224–225, 247, 252, 336 entrepreneurial talent, 7 epistemological perspective, 10 ethnic competition, 24

351

The American City in the Cinema ethnicity, 38, 45, 53, 59, 99, 160, 188, 217, 224, 226–227, 320, 335, 346–347 family farm, 59–60, 84–86, 88–90, 94, 304 family values, 54, 135, 142 feminine gender, 17 femme fatale, 197, 245–246 film industries, 15 film noir, 23, 26, 48, 65, 74, 100, 186, 193–197, 245–246, 281–282, 302, 314–315, 333, 335, 339 film studies, 9 future city, 280, 284, 304, 316 gender, 17, 108, 136–137, 218, 223, 240, 243, 248, 252, 301 German Expressionism, 17, 208 Golden City on a Hill, 19 good versus evil, 17 grammar of film, 17, 174 Hong Kong, 22, 48, 181, 225, 281, 303 HUAC, 112, 145, 153, 170–171, 174, 280 identity, 1, 4, 37, 47, 52, 68, 126, 135, 175, 207, 224–225, 227, 268, 282, 288, 305 image, 1–3, 5, 7, 9, 13, 17, 28, 30, 33, 34, 36, 44, 61, 68, 84, 201, 229, 259–261, 264, 278, 294–297, 300, 302, 304–307 image-making, 1, 296 immigrants, 7–8, 14, 25, 29, 33–49, 50– 54, 56, 62, 64, 70, 88, 108, 139, 155–158, 161–162, 167, 180, 183, 188, 207, 224, 226–227, 241, 243, 251–253, 263, 266, 298–299, 304–305, 309, 324, 329 impersonality of city life, 18 industrialism, 3, 108, 258–261, 277 inter-ethnic romance, 232 kinetoscope, 14, 167 Manhattan, 23, 28–29, 35, 38, 44–45, 83, 124, 131, 147, 195, 202, 206–207, 232, 252, 285, 296, 333 masters of the universe, 19 morality, 7, 21–22, 25–26, 74, 113, 118, 188, 229, 268 motion picture, 2–3, 5–10, 13–14, 109, 167, 169, 171, 179–180, 186, 260, 284, 297 352

movie cities, 15 moviegoers, 1–2, 44, 62, 142 multi-plexes, 14, 101 musical productions, 23 nature, 27, 65, 81, 87, 89–90, 94, 108, 110, 125, 183, 192, 202–204, 206, 213, 215, 217, 239, 252, 255, 258–259, 273–274, 276, 284, 287, 289–290, 308 neighborhoods, 14–15, 23, 26, 36, 43–44, 50, 52, 54–55, 98–99, 102, 112, 117, 124–126, 136, 139, 141, 143, 160, 164, 168, 180, 187–189, 207, 212, 225, 228, 230, 235, 260, 266, 276, 301, 304 niche market, 95, 118 nickelodeons, 2, 14–16, 35–36, 307 place, 1, 3–5, 8–9, 15, 17, 19–24, 26–27, 30, 34, 36–37, 40–41, 48, 50–51, 60–62, 64–67, 69–70, 72, 74–75, 85, 88–89, 93, 95, 101–102, 108, 110–112, 118, 122–124, 129, 131, 135, 137, 139–140, 154, 180–182, 190, 193–194, 204–205, 207, 209, 213–214, 217, 220, 232, 240–241, 247, 250, 252, 254–255, 257, 261, 264, 275, 277, 281, 284–285, 288, 296–297, 299, 301–302, 304, 307–309, 338 place-making, 1, 131 politics (in cinema), 153–155, 157–158, 160–169, 174 production, 4, 7, 15–16, 19, 23–24, 35–36, 81, 87, 89, 167–168, 171, 187, 225, 245, 258–260, 263–265, 270, 275, 278, 287, 289, 318–320, 327, 333, 339, 343 quality of life (city), 290 race, 4, 37–38, 53, 59, 68, 70, 72, 84, 99, 119, 122–123, 209, 217, 222, 224–227, 229–230, 234–235, 253, 282, 299, 308, 313, 317, 319–320, 323, 328, 331, 337, 346–347 real time, 6, 295 reality, 2–3, 11, 13, 17, 30, 37, 79, 82, 84, 87, 104, 121, 180, 196, 220, 222, 229, 234, 247, 249, 281, 297, 306, 340 reciprocal relationship, 3, 9–10, 298 reel time, 6 Romeo and Juliet, 24, 124, 232–233 rural and pastoral, 17, 107, 218

Subject Index small towns, 14, 59–75, 93, 100, 102–103, 109, 127, 142, 147, 175, 180, 182, 184, 186, 207, 220, 242, 244–245, 252–253, 298, 302–304, 306–309, 312, 315, 317, 322–323, 329–330, 332–333, 335, 337–338, 342–344 social values, 7, 59, 116, 154, 225 Sodom, and Gomorrah, 17, 205 sophisticated technology, 7, 275 source of stories, 7 space and time, 4, 6 suburbanization, 5, 102, 121 suburbia (suburbs), 51, 74, 91–103, 141, 160–161, 298, 301, 313–315, 318–320, 324–325, 327, 329, 333, 335, 337–340, 342–343, 346–347 technology, 5–7, 24, 27, 80, 83, 109, 202– 203, 241, 258–261, 274–280, 282–284, 287–290, 296–297, 303–306, 309, 331 technophobia, 273, 288 the return, 17, 126 theatrical license, 14 time, 2, 4–6, 9, 15–17, 20, 24–25, 30, 35, 38, 40–41, 43–45, 48, 50, 56, 62–65, 67, 69, 71–72, 74–75, 79, 82–83, 87, 92–93, 96, 101, 109, 111–112, 116–117, 119–129, 131, 136, 142, 144, 146–148, 154, 156–160, 166, 168, 171, 173–174, 181, 185, 187–188, 190–192, 194, 196, 198, 204, 208, 210–211, 219, 221–222, 226, 229, 231–235, 239–241, 244, 252–254, 259, 261–263, 266, 268–270, 276, 278–279, 283–285, 288, 295–296, 299, 304–305, 308–310, 325, 334 tracking shots, 17

urban design, 19–20 urban form, 20, 127, 284 urban life, 3–9, 11, 18, 23, 25, 27, 29–30, 104, 114, 126–127, 147, 149, 153, 203–204, 220, 289–290, 295, 298–299, 302–304, 309, 321 urban medium, 13 urban politics, 124, 154–155, 157–158, 161–162, 166, 227, 332 urban studies, 10–11, 306, 309 urban-historical analysis, 13 urbanists, 112 utopias, 275 videotape, 16 violence, 25, 28, 85, 124, 126, 179–183, 185–191, 194, 227, 229, 240, 280, 282, 301, 308, 341, 345–346 World War II, 7, 23–24, 64, 74, 100, 114–116, 119, 121, 141, 143–144, 169, 222–223 youth, 39, 41, 53, 60, 65, 67, 69–70, 82, 98, 107, 109–112, 114–119, 121–124, 126–129, 131–132, 138, 162, 164, 167, 186, 212, 259, 264, 313–314, 317, 323, 334, 341–343, 345–347 zoetropes, 2, 320, 344

353