The Reassuring Patriarchy of Old Movies (or: a real long post on The Cake Is A Lie, 1950s cultural hegemony edition)
In addition to watching a ton of action movies, I watch a lot of old movies.
Like action movies, old movies can provide a remarkable insight into some of what’s happening today. You don’t even have to go that far back; whenever somebody tells you that the ‘80s and ‘90s were less racist or sexist than the Year of Our Lord 2016, pull up Major League (1989, where undressing the effigy of a [scheming, manipulative, looks-driven] woman who presumes to run a sports team is considered just comeuppance for her sins) or 48 Hrs. (1982, where the hero angrily calls a woman a “dyke” and later uses her as a human shield because she had the temerity to turn down his crude and unwanted advances) and bask in the sheer unadulterated sexism and hostility toward uppity women that permeates both films.
Keep in mind that these are mainstream blockbuster *comedies,* explicitly geared toward things that the broadest possible swath of the American public would find to be funny and not offensive, and wildly successful in that regard. Those attitudes used to be not only totally normal, but fine fodder for loljokes. If you didn’t think that was funny, welp, that was why everybody used to think feminists were humorless scolds, because *obviously* that stuff is harmless comedy.
Except it isn’t, and now when you watch the “funny” ways that men trivialized and undercut women back then, it is downright painful. Cringeworthy. Because, contrary to the oft-repeated misperception, we haven’t actually gotten more racist or sexist in modern times. We’ve gotten more race- and sex-*conscious,* but that’s the opposite thing. I’m serious: rewatch some ‘80s comedies and see what they tell you today about what the world was then.
Anyway, I like using old(-ish) movies as primary documents because most people have seen them (so it’s less painful than asking people to read and analyze Procopius for historical insight on old-school sexism), and since they’re broadly mainstream fiction, nobody needs to be put on the spot for *personally* holding those attitudes (we’re not saying *you* were a racist sexist dick, we’re saying Nick Nolte’s fictional character in 48 Hrs. was a racist sexist dick! …that millions of people in American audiences were happy to applaud), but at the same time there’s no denying that these *were* mainstream attitudes. If you try to use Latasha Harlins or Mark Fuhrman to talk about 1990s racism, people who feel threatened will try to push those aside as extreme outliers (not untrue!), but talk about Falling Down (1993) or even Olympus Has Fallen (2013, twenty years later!) and the mainstream appeal of some real iffy racial caricatures can hardly be denied.
I got to thinking about this again when I read Edsall’s NYT piece on how Trumpies got a morale boost from their guy winning, not because of any specific policies or programs they thought he’d enact, but purely on the basis of feeling like their identity as disinherited white people was validated and maybe they’d get to be back on top again. I linked this once already but I’ll link it again since I’ll be talking about it here: http://www.nytimes.com/…/…/trump-voters-are-feeling-it.html…
Block quote:
In their widely covered 2015 study, “Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century, ” Anne Case and Angus Deaton, economists at Princeton, found a marked increase in the all-cause mortality of middle-aged white non-Hispanic men and women in the United States between 1999 and 2013.
This change reversed decades of progress in mortality and was unique to the United States; no other rich country saw a similar turnaround. The midlife mortality reversal was confined to white non-Hispanics; black non-Hispanics and Hispanics at midlife, and those aged 65 and above in every racial and ethnic group, continued to see mortality rates fall. This increase for whites was largely accounted for by increasing death rates from drug and alcohol poisonings, suicide, and chronic liver diseases and cirrhosis. An important approach to depression in the psychological and evolutionary literature has been to view it as an evolved response to “involuntary subordination,” to being displaced from dominance.
This is exactly what happens when you have to accept a subordinate position on a status ladder because you lost your job and can’t find a comparable one.
[…]
Going into the last election, nearly three quarters (72 percent) of those supporting Trump said that American society and its way of life had changed for the worse since the 1950s, according to an Oct. 25 survey conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute.
Then I got to thinking about how you square “the 1950s were better” with “I’m not a racist,” and this is where I landed:
It’s safe to say that most Trump voters either weren’t alive during the ‘50s or have nostalgia-fogged childhood memories that are about as accurate as my memories of watching Robocop as a 10-year-old (turns out Batman is not actually in Robocop, in case you were wondering), and that most of their impressions about what life was like in the ‘50s come from the pop culture of the time. Because what we *actually* know about the ‘50s is that it was a time when the civil rights movement started gaining steam, despite various efforts to stomp it down (blacks won the right to be admitted to white universities in 1950, and Brown v. Board got started in 1951 before the decision came out in 1954, spurring violent resistance by white segregationists in the latter half of the ‘50s and into the ‘60s). We know that the ‘50s were when housewives hit peak usage of Valium, Librium, and other tranquilizers to cope with the stifling, perpetually smiling lives of birdcage domesticity they were expected to lead.
But we also know that’s not how the decade was portrayed in contemporary movies, and it’s really interesting to watch Old Movies with a careful eye toward what, exactly, is idealized in their depictions. Because it *is* a world in which white people (specifically white men) are on top, but that’s not the entirety of its appeal.
First off, recognize that Old Movies (which is my personal shorthand for “Golden Age Hollywood movies made from roughly 1934 [with the advent of the Motion Picture Production Code] through 1960 via the established studio system”) are all about escapist fantasy. “Shall We Dance” (1937, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers) posits a transatlantic ocean liner where the guests wear full evening dress, all tuxedos and ankle-sweeping silk gowns, to potty-walk their dogs. “42nd Street” (1933, Busby Berkeley vehicle) gives you a bunch of starving chorus girls in the depths of the Depression who nevertheless all own luxurious fur stoles and designer dresses. Realism has no place in these movies. They’re all about getting to escape to a beautiful world inhabited by beautiful people for a couple of hours.
And in the 1950s, the nature of that beautiful world changed sharply.
‘30s movies, especially pre-Code movies, can be surprisingly daring. The costumes are revealing, the innuendos are scandalous, and the plotlines are frequently ones that you’d have a hard time getting away with today (e.g. in Ernst Lubitsch’s 1933 pre-Code comedy “Design For Living,” the happy ending is a menage a trois: the heroine ends up living happily ever after with *both* of the male leads, and abandons her husband to do so). Female characters in ‘30s movies are often smarter, stronger, and more ruthless than their male counterparts; Barbara Stanwyck in “Baby Face” (1933) is a straight-up Nietzchean power fantasy where the heroine uses, crushes, and coldly casts aside a series of men in her relentless march to the top via sex. She never gets punished for her sexuality and she never expresses any regrets about any of the guys she drives to ruin. She straight-up *wins* that movie, and she does it without any apologies.
By the ‘50s you don’t see that anymore. The economic exigencies of the Great Depression and WWII (which empowered women to work outside the home and achieve some financial independence) are gone, and in their place you have a suddenly anxious wave of American men who want their jobs and social status back. They’re insecure and they don’t want to see strong women getting the better of male characters on screen. They want to be reassured of their primacy, and the movies change to reflect this.
Gone are the quick-witted and relentlessly competent heroines of His Girl Friday (1940) and The Lady Eve (1941). In their place we have Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield creating the new archetype of the dumb blonde in movies like Some Like It Hot (1959) and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957), in which they play vapid, gullible, childish beauties who are overtly sexualized but also infantilized. These are women who can’t manage themselves, let alone their male rivals. They *need* to be shepherded through life with a kindly but firm hand, and they’re always ever so grateful for the help (barring the occasional petulant pouting fit). And it’s that gratitude, I think, that’s really the key part of the fantasy. It’s not enough that women have to be subordinate to men; they have to *welcome* it, to be shown as actually grateful for the loss of control. The fantasy is (as ever) that they *want* it, and it’s really what’s best for them anyway.
This same fantasy exists with regard to minority characters, although on this front there isn’t the same dramatic change from the ‘30s to the ‘50s, because nobody was ever portraying black or Asian characters as getting the better of white people. Rather, they’re mostly invisible — they simply do not exist in the moneyed and glittering parties and restaurants that these movies revolve around, except occasionally as performers or waiters; that any minority could ever be an educated professional, love interest, or (maybe above all) *club member* is utterly unimaginable — and when they do appear as menials (bootblacks, train porters, domestic servants), they’re invariably servile, with huge exaggerated smiles and head bobs to convey just how childishly happy they are with their low-status positions. And non-Christian religions, other than the rare token Jew, simply don’t exist. They are elided from the world, scrubbed out of the comforting uniformity of churches and Christmases.
It’s the same thing. It’s the same comforting fantasy that everyone who isn’t a white Christian *wants* to be in those marginal roles, they’re happiest there, they’d only be miserable and afraid if they had to compete with white men, so best we just keep them down below where they’re content. Or erase them altogether, otherwise.
That, I suspect, is why the pop culture of the ‘50s has such a strong pull for white people who’d prefer not to consider themselves out-and-out racist or sexist today: because the lure of that idealized world is that everyone else *wanted* to be subservient, and that was the happy and natural order of things. Because there wasn’t any overt conflict or unhappiness, it was (and is) easy to tell yourself that there wasn’t any racism or sexism or xenophobia, either. After all, nobody was *complaining.* Everybody was just happy! Why can’t we just have that again!
Well, obviously, because it was a lie. Because in the actual real world, lots of women *aren’t* happy to just be vapid sex toys, and lots of minorities *aren’t* thrilled to bob their heads and smile along subserviently without saying a word, and non-Christians do actually exist. And that was why the ‘60s were what they were: because the ‘50s were a lie, and a lie so pernicious and hateful and hurtful that in the end it had to be broken by sustained and sometimes violent resistance.
But the lie persists. The fantasy persists. And the great fantasy of the ‘50s, the thing that was so reassuring to a wave of insecure Americans then and remains reassuring to the same insecure population today, wasn’t just that you could *have* a white patriarchy, but that you could have one where everybody else was totally happy to stay in their places. Where you could, at least if you were in the right part of the audience, remain happily oblivious to the invisible threats and coercions that kept the smiles on everyone else’s faces. Where you could pretend those smiles were real, and not have to care that they weren’t.
That’s what the movies of the ‘50s were selling. That’s what a lot of people, for very similar reasons, would like to buy today. Primacy and cultural dominance, but a cultural dominance where you don’t have to feel like you’re being mean (or racist! or sexist!) to get it. You’re not stepping on anyone else to get on top. They’re just lying down in the mud on their own.
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