Brno Lecture 1

“What the Hell, It’s Only History …”: American Cinema History and the Problem of Interpretation

Opening Remarks about the series:

Does Cinema History matter?

What is involved in writing it?

Why care about what old pictures people saw, how and where they saw them, and what they thought
about them?

And how do you find out?


In this paper, I’m seeking to explore a question that I’ve worried about, one way or another, for
most of my working life.  One version of the question is … why would you want to write a history of
entertainment?  And if you were to do that, what sort of history should it be?

“What the hell, It’s only history.” (and the anecdote may be apocryphal, but what the hell … )

Valenti’s use of the term “history” is, I think, a specifically American usage most clearly
explained to me by the advertising tag-line for the 1994 Jean-Claude Van Damme movie, Timecop,
“Turn back the clock, and you're history.”  “History” is something completed, dead, and therefore
irrelevant because it is situated in the past.

As a visit to the film section of any bookstore will tell you, there is a fair-sized industry in
publishing books about how Hollywood has got history wrong—a publishing industry almost as
substantial and about as turgidly wrongheaded as those interminable discussions of whether movie
adaptations of literary works are sufficiently “faithful” to their sources.  It is self-evidently
true that the movie industry has displayed a persistent lack of concern over the historical
accuracy of its representations, adapting historical events, like any other source material, to an
already established set of commercial and ideological conventions.  In Hollywood, history is first
of all a production value; it first obligation is to be entertaining,.  As the terms of a Warner
Bros. contract with the subject of a biopic explained, the studio considered itself “free to
dramatize, fictionalize, or emphasize any or all incidents, or interpolate such incidents as [the]
Producers may deem necessary in order to obtain a treatment or continuity of commercial value.”[1]

Hollywood has been no less cavalier with its own historical record.  At one level it has simply
destroyed a good deal of that record, destroying prints to recover the silver, burning script
libraries to save on the rental costs of their storage … In another register, the industry has
treated its own history in the sense implied in Timecop’s other tagline: “They killed his wife ten
years ago. There's still time to save her. Murder is forever... until now.”  History, the dead
past, can be returned to and rewritten “in order to obtain … a continuity of commercial value”: we
do, to paraphrase Rambo, get to win this time.

To my horror, I recently came across the declaration, by a self-styled “film history professor,”
that he has “occasionally used Singin’ in the Rain in class to show the introduction of sound,
since it is a reasonably accurate portrayal of the period.”[2]  During the movie, you may recall,
Donald O'Connor discovers the principles of sound dubbing by standing in front of Debbie Reynolds
and moving his mouth while she sings.  Hollywood's history of itself offers history as
entertainment.  It's not accurate, but it's entertaining, and we share the curious expectation that
the history of entertainment must itself be entertaining.

Film history continues to be written under this expectation.  The most widely reproduced version of
the introduction of sound—that it was introduced as a last desperate gamble by an almost bankrupt
Warner Bros.—persists in circulation because the fantasy of the kids from the ghetto making good
with an invention the big studios had turned down corresponds far more closely to the expectation
of a Hollywood story than does the prosaic account of actual industrial practice.  Jack Valenti and
his predecessors have participated just as enthusiastically in this repackaging of material from
the past to suit present entertainment needs: in a statement celebrating 30 years of the movie
ratings system in 1998, for example, the MPA happily repudiated the instrument of self-regulation
it had administered from 1930 to 1968 as “an absurd manifesto called the Hays Code [which]
literally offered a list of do's and don'ts for filmmakers and performers.”[3]  In 1934, the MPPDA
similarly repudiated the history of the evolution of self-regulation for a more melodramatic
account in which it was rescued from sin and federal censorship by virtuous hero Joe Breen riding
at the head of the Catholic Legion of Decency.  It’s not accurate—every major claim in the standard
historical account of the introduction of the Production Code is factually incorrect—but it’s
entertaining, and thus it remains the standard account of a history obliged to conform to the
conventions of a Hollywood narrative.  Frustrating as I find it, simply saying “It ain’t so,” or
even demonstrating it, doesn't seem to be enough—in large part because all the industrial pressures
of Hollywood both then and now act against the revelation of a prosaic history of economic forces.

I want to propose a distinction between what I will call film history on one hand, and cinema
history on the other. The distinction I am proposing is between an aesthetic history—essentially of
relationships of influence between individuals or individual objects, and the history of a social
and cultural institution.  The history of stylistic influence borrows its methods and rationale
from the practices of art and literary history, and it is predominantly a history of production and
producers, concerned with issues of intention and agency underpinning the process of cultural
production, usually at the level of the individual, and relatively little interested in
anything—other than influence—that happens after the point of production. The writing of such
histories requires very few sources, which may be one of the reasons why it was the most
substantial form of history writing in the early development of Film Studies, when there were few
primary sources available and few trained historians to use them. Perhaps the most prominent
residue of this form of film history is the continued prominence of the idea of genre as a way of
understanding Hollywood history, and I would suggest, a principal means by which a history of the
relations between films has substituted for a history of cinema as a social and cultural
institution.

As Rick Altman argues, genre critics have succeeded in avoiding a serious engagement with
historical issues by adopting “the transhistorical model offered by myth,”[4] essentially
establishing a mechanistic procedure by which social and political meanings are ascribed to genres,
compartmentalizing their cultural function as a predetermined textual property.[5]

The history of the American cinema is, however, not the history of its products any more than the
history of railroads is the history of locomotives.  The development of locomotive design forms
part of the history of railroads, but so, far more substantially, do government land policies and
patterns of agricultural settlement. To write a history of texts and call it a history of Hollywood
involves omitting the social process and cultural function of cinema, and denies the contextual
significance of the material conditions under which movies were produced and consumed.

As an academic discipline, Film Studies has been formed primarily in the image of literary
studies.  Its earliest academic practice was—and predominantly still is—textual interpretation.
Methodologies of textual interpretation have also dominated most attempts to construct cultural
histories of the movies, including most historians’ use of film as symptomatic evidence.  Social
and political historians have, in the main, borrowed from film historians, and thus incorporated
back into their histories the genre-based, mythological, and therefore ahistorical assumptions
about the relationship of movies to the culture of which they are a part.  Even as they are
incorporated into a larger version of social history, the movies remain under the obligation to
entertain.  Thus you will find accounts of I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang or Scarface appearing
as diverting boxed features on “social realism in the movies” to alleviate the statistical tedium
of histories of the early Depression.

These accounts rely heavily on a largely undeclared application of an idea of reflection, which has
proved to be the most persistent metaphor for understanding cinema’s relationship to the society it
forms part of.  Aesthetic presumptions about the camera’s reflection of the optically real are
transformed into expectations that the artefacts of popular culture must reflect a social reality
connected to their production.  How this relationship functions is seldom articulated, but while
the word “reflection” is itself often avoided, the talismanic powers of the term “ideology” are
frequently invoked.  The terminology of ideological analysis has, however, often done little more
than complicate and obfuscate what is usually a fairly straightforward analytical procedure relying
on a concealed metaphor of reflection.

The metaphor of reflection encourages the historian to span the distance between artefact and
context by engaging in critical interpretation rather than occupying too much time and energy in
empirical research.  Because the movies as cultural objects are positioned for interpretation, it
seems to follow that they should themselves be understood as interpretations of or commentaries on
their historical, political or social context, or alternatively as historical symptoms inviting
such interpretation.  Theories of ideology encourage acts of interpretation as necessary to the
process of decoding an encoded text.  Ideology, understood as a system of representations, becomes
the dark glass through which the critical historian looks at artefacts in search of truth.  Once a
symptomatic reading of a text has identified its codes and its structuring absences, the artefact
will reveal both ideology and truth: ideology as the revealed system of encoding, and truth in the
artefact’s now clarified reflection of the historical real.

Textual interpretation thus provides a methodology by which two discrete objects, an historical
condition (for instance, the social conditions of the early Depression) and a cultural object (for
instance, a movie about “one particular miscarriage of justice” such as Fugitive[6]) are brought
into the kind of historically entertaining juxtaposition proposed, for example, by Robert McElvane
in his book The Great Depression, when he suggests that Fugitive “was the perfect expression of the
national mood in 1932: despair, suffering, hopelessness. … [The] film was 1932.”[7]  Where and when
this juxtaposition takes place remains, however, unclear.  It is not, apparently, being claimed
(certainly it is not being documented) that this is how audiences understood and interpreted
Fugitive at the time of its release.  Rather, we remain close to the ideas elaborated by Siegfried
Kracauer in the late 1940s, that some movies, or some “pictorial or narrative motifs” reiterated in
them, may be understood as “deep layers of collective mentality which extend more or less below the
dimensions of consciousness.”[8]

At about the same time that Kracauer was writing, producer John Houseman expressed the fear that
future generations, viewing The Big Sleep or The Postman Always Rings Twice would deduce from them:

that the United States of America in the year following the end of the Second World War was a land
of enervated, frightened people with spasms of high vitality but a low moral sense—a hung-over
people with confused objectives groping their way through a twilight of insecurity and
corruption.[9]

Houseman’s fears have, indeed, been confirmed by the vast body of subsequent criticism that has
deployed what his contemporaries Martha Wolfenstein and Nathan Leites called a
“psychoanalytic-mythological” interpretation of American culture in the invention of film noir as
an expression of a general American cultural condition of “post-war malaise.”[10]  Andrew Dowdy’s
comment is typical:

If we had only movies by which to measure cultural change, those of the fifties would give us an
image of an America darkly disturbed by its own cynical loss of innocence, an America prey to fears
more pervasive and intense than anything admitted to during the war years.[11]

            Interpretative strategies such as these have a strong seductive appeal, offering
critics of popular culture the opportunity to make their objects of study meaningful by
demonstrating their utility as surfaces reflecting the spirit of the times—the Zeitgeist. Such
arguments, however, rely much more on critical ingenuity in textual interpretation than on any
precise location of movies within the historical circumstances of their production and
consumption.  As criticism, it is often highly revealing. As history, however, it is much more
problematic, at least if history’s purpose is to establish the range—and therefore the limits—of
available interpretative frameworks in any given set of historical circumstances.

In a rebuttal of Houseman’s gloomy interpretations, writer Lester Asheim noted that the most
popular movies of 1946 had included The Bells of St. Mary’s, Blue Skies, The Green Years, Easy to
Wed, and Love Letters.  Questioning Houseman’s selective sampling, he suggested that if a future
audience were to see The Razor’s Edge,

they will deduce that our generation was an intensely earnest group of mystical philosophers who
gladly renounced the usual pleasures of this world in order to find spiritual peace.  From State
Fair they can conjure up a nation of simple agrarians whose major problems centered around the
prize hog and spiked mincemeat.  And what would they make of a generation reflected in Road to
Utopia?[12]

            However glib Asheim was in his choice of examples, his critique is pertinent to any
investigation of the politics or ideology of an entertainment industry. Film historian Robert Ray
has argued that in the postwar period there was “an enormous discrepancy … between the most
commercially successful movies and those that have ultimately been seen as significant.”[13]  Ray
exaggerates only the uniqueness of this period: film history has, in almost its entirety, been
written without regard to, and often with deliberate disregard of the box office. We need to be
aware, I think, of the enormous selectivity of film history, of how much has been omitted in the
attempt to construct American film history as a story its historians want to tell and their
audiences want to hear: a story of crisis, innovation, anxiety and the elevation of the junior
branch.  This conventional film history omits the great majority of Hollywood’s most commercially
successful products—Janet Gaynor, Nelson Eddy, Betty Grable, Shirley Temple—because, I suppose,
no-one wants to write the history of a cinema of complacency.

In much the same way as some stars and some films have acquired a cult critical status unrelated to
their box-office earnings, some periods of Hollywood’s history have come to be understood as more
reflective of their cultural moment than others.  Curiously, these tend to be periods of economic
uncertainty, declining audiences and “turbulence” in Hollywood’s conventions of representation. On
the face of it, it is difficult to see why movies produced during such periods should be regarded
as more zeitgeistig than those produced in periods of larger, more stable audiences and under more
secure representational regimes.  On the other hand, one of the attractions that periods of
“turbulence” have for critics is that they are often seen as giving rise to new forms: films noirs,
for example, have an obvious appeal as objects of critical study; and a similar case can be made
for many of the movies of Hollywood’s “Golden Age of turbulence” in the early 1930s.  George
Lipsitz has recently offered a rationale for these critical preferences in his account of Hollywood
in the late 1960s and early 1970s as being characterized by what he calls “genre anxiety”: “by the
intrusion of social tremors into cinematic representations in such a way as to render traditional
genre icons unsatisfying and incomplete.”[14] This seems to me, however, to be a self-fulfilling
argument : since Lipsitz already knows that “the genre anxiety of the 1970s stemmed from a racial
crisis so pervasive that it permeated films in genres usually isolated from political and social
controversies,” he also knows what the “genre anxiety” he discovers means.

From a perspective such as Lipsitz’s, however, these periods of turbulence come to be perceived as
doubly rewarding for study, since their innovative movies were also zeitgeistig. Such historical
accounts almost inevitably become self-fulfilling, since they treat the movie-as-text as their
primary historical evidence and, not surprisingly, select the most compelling examples as the
evidence they present.  In the process, an orthodox cultural history is constructed from a
critically-prescribed canon of films.  Film history is much more likely to view the Zeitgeist of
1953, for example, through the mirror of The Big Heat, distributed and received as “a modest
picture,” than through The Robe, the first CinemaScope production adapted from the year’s
best-selling novel, and one of a sustained cycle of lavishly-budgeted and commercially successful
Biblical epics addressed to the 60 percent of Americans who affirmed the American Way of Life
through church membership.  Although Cecil B. DeMille explained to his audiences in the prologue to
The Ten Commandments (1956) that “the theme of this picture is whether men are to be ruled by God’s
law—or whether they are to be ruled by the whims of a dictator,” explicitly paralleling it to the
crusade against “godless” Communism, the Biblical blockbusters of the 1950s have been subject to
even less critical examination as artefacts of ideology or of the popular mood than have the
period’s musicals. One reason for this may be that critics have failed to discover anything
subversive in these movies.  Ironically, much contemporary criticism is as concerned to investigate
the subversive potential of Hollywood cinema as were the anti-Communists, and although they come to
praise the authors’ subversion, not to incarcerate them, their methodology is also strikingly
similar—and perhaps the comparison provides a salutary warning about the potent excesses of
interpretation.

In February 1949, eleven leading members of the American Communist Party (CPUSA) were put on trial
under the 1940 Smith Act, charged with intending to conspire to advocate the violent overthrow of
the United States government at some undetermined time in the future.  The trial’s purpose was to
establish a constitutional basis under which Communists could be arrested and interred in the event
of war.  Since the defendants had committed no overt acts of sedition, the charge hung on questions
of textual interpretation.  The prosecution argued that the “classic texts” of Communism were
written in an “Aesopian language” of metaphors, synecdoches and antitheses that could hardly ever
be taken literally – a kind of use of language also sometimes called “Orweelian. A call for the
peaceful transition to socialism was, thus, properly interpreted as a deliberate attempt to mislead
the dupes and enemies of Communism and covertly advocate the violent extinction of the ruling
class.  Under this argument, which was upheld by the Supreme Court in Dennis v. United States in
1951, people could be imprisoned on the strength of a textual interpretation, and, as historian
Alan Filreis puts it, “the normal hard work of gathering external evidence could be dispensed
with.”[15] Moreover, the mutability of the “Aesopian language test” meant that anything could be
interpreted as meaning anything else, since works were evaluated according to predetermined
assumptions about the author’s intent in a malign application of the politique des auteurs.

Dennis v. United States is a salutary reminder of the relationship between interpretation and
power. Those critics who would valorise the subversions and subversives they discover in Hollywood
might bear it in mind.  The claim that Douglas Sirk’s melodramas, to take an obvious example,
provided “a devastating indictment of the entire society’s world view” tacitly assumes that the
gullible audience—made up, in one critic’s imagination, of “women plying their handkerchiefs”—were
either “duped” into accepting a misleading meaning for the narrative or secretly propagandised or
both.[16] It is an unwarranted assumption, unsupported by evidence.  Hollywood was never in the
business of making “subversive” films, but perhaps at no time was it less likely to do so than in
the early 1950s.

This is not, however, to suggest that the movies were free of ideology or free from politics. In
the turbulent production season of 1947-8, Hollywood’s politics could be found, among other places,
in State Department reports on the suitability of individual movies for export, on the basis of
their conformity to the government’s Overseas Information program,[17] in the Congressional
Committee rooms in Washington, DC, where the House Committee on Un-American Activities was one of
three Congressional inquiries into aspects of the industry, in the Academy Award ceremonies, where
the production industry applauded its own courage and social conscience in making Gentleman’s
Agreement, and in the two university research projects investigating that movie’s impact on public
opinion.

In the late 1940s—not by any means uniquely—there was a climate of concern about what sociologist
Franklin Fearing called “the question of the cultural values in our society which films express and
the extent to which the films communicate these values.”[18] In some of their public
pronouncements, industry executives seemed to recognize that Hollywood’s own pre-war isolationism
of “pure entertainment,” free from any political content, could not be recovered, and instead
proclaimed their intention to consolidate their wartime image of social responsibility.  A number
of government agencies, including the CIA, took an active interest in Hollywood’s representations.

In April 1953, Cecil B. DeMille was appointed as a special consultant to the Eisenhower government
on cinema.  Working with the White House staff responsible for creating the United States
Information Agency, charged with the task of presenting “a favorable image of America abroad while
at the same time convincing the world that communism contained the seeds of its own destruction,”
DeMille argued—entirely in line with the assertion of conservative critics about how alleged
communist propaganda had functioned in the movies—that the “most effective use of American films is
not to design an entire picture to cope with a certain problem, but rather to see to it that in a
‘normal picture’ the right line, aside, inflection, eyebrow movement, is introduced.”[19] This was
by no means an eccentric view of ideological expression in Hollywood. In 1943, Elmer Davis,
Director of the Office of War Information, had proposed that “the easiest way to inject a
propaganda idea into most people’s minds is to let it go in through the medium of an entertainment
picture when they do not realize that they are being propagandized” by, for instance, “casually and
naturally” introducing propaganda messages into “ordinary dialogue, business and scenes.”[20]  In
keeping with such a spirit, and in the expectation that Hollywood’s expression of political opinion
or belief would be indirect, veiled, concealed or encoded, the House un-American Activities
Committee investigated Hollywood subversion, and had their expectations confirmed by Jack Warner’s
declaration that “Some of these lines have innuendos and double meanings, and things like that, and
you have to take eight or ten Harvard law courses to find out what they mean.”

This is a fascinating, and fascinatingly improbable, fascinatingly indirect, aesthetic and
ideological strategy. Where might it have come from, and how did it develop?  My answer is that the
textual indeterminacy, and therefore the need for critical interpretation of the movies’
conventional representation of political subject matter was derived from the conventions developed
for the representation of their most frequent subject matter, romance.  Textual indeterminacy is a
structural property of Hollywood movies, resulting from the economic conditions of their
circulation: their distribution to a multiplicity of venues for a multiplicity of audiences, and
the requirement that the single object serve multiple audience pleasures.  The principal instrument
by which textual indeterminacy was negotiated in Classical Hollywood was the Production Code.
Primarily occasioned by the coming of sound, the purpose of the Production Code was to find ways of
retaining the interpretative malleability of silent cinema within the constraints of a
technologically and materially much more inflexible medium.  As Lea Jacobs, Ruth Vasey and I have
documented in some detail, the early 1930s saw the development of these strategies of malleability,
and the late 1930s saw their largely successful operation in, for instance, the highly
sophisticated innocence of the discourse on sexuality in the screwball comedies or Astaire-Rogers
musicals, in which only the characters remained innocent of the suggestiveness that typically
underpinned their social relations.

On the one hand the Production Code strove to eliminate any moral ambiguity in a movie’s narrative
progression through the rigid imposition of a deterministic plot line, ascribing every character a
position on a fixed moral spectrum, and thus both confirming and contributing to Hollywood’s
adoption of melodrama as its fundamental mode.  But at the same time, precisely the same forces
obliged movies to construct strategies of ambiguity around the details of action—the spectacle, the
cinema’s erotic performance—which they were not permitted to present explicitly.  What could not be
shown was graphic, explicit, unambiguous, unmistakable, sexual behaviour.  Instead what could be
shown was mistakable sexual behaviour, the presence of which could always be denied.  The rules of
both conduct and representation under these conditions were perhaps most cogently articulated by F.
Scott Fitzgerald’s Monroe Stahr, explaining to his scriptwriters how the audience is to understand
their heroine’s motivation:

At all times, at all moments when she is on the screen in our sight, she wants to sleep with Ken
Willard. … Whatever she does, it is in place of sleeping with Ken Willard.  If she walks down the
street she is walking to sleep with Ken Willard, if she eats her food it is to give her enough
strength to sleep with Ken Willard.  But at no time do you give the impression that she would even
consider sleeping with Ken Willard unless they were properly sanctified.[21]

In devising representational strategies to achieve this effect, Hollywood was manufacturing a
product that would play to undifferentiated audiences: in the institutional parlance of the 1930s,
to both “innocent” and “sophisticated” audiences alike.  Having chosen not to divide its audience,
Hollywood was obliged to devise a system that would allow "sophisticated" viewers to read whatever
they liked into a formally "innocent" movie, so long as the producers could use the machinery of
the Production Code to deny that the sophisticated interpretation had been put there in the first
place.  Much of the work of self-regulation in the 1930s and 1940s lay in the maintenance of this
system of conventions, which operated, however perversely, as an enabling mechanism at the same
time that it was a repressive one.  As PCA Director Joseph Breen persistently argued, the
Production Code was not so much a system of censorship as an alternative to one: a system by which
censurable content could be coded and codified so as to avoid censorship.

This “deniable” mode of narrative construction accommodated both the sophisticated and the
"innocent" viewer at the same time by providing pictures that, as the trade paper Film Daily put
it, "won't embarrass Father when he takes the children to his local picture house," it.  So long as
the story remained comprehensible at the “innocent” level, innocence was protected, because
“innocent” viewers were not educated into sophistication by being forced into some half-understood
suggestive interpretation.  On the other hand, a “sophisticated” audience willing to play a game of
double-entendre could find hidden, “subversive” or “repressed” meanings in almost any movie by
supplying “from its own imagination the specific acts of so-called misconduct which the Production
Code has made unmentionable.”  They might in the process supply more plausible motivations for the
behaviour of characters in scenes that had been designed, according to Elliott Paul, to “give full
play to the vices of the audience, and still have a technical out” as far as the Production Code
was concerned.[22]

What I want to draw attention to here is the invitation to interpretation in the mode of
construction that I have been describing.  Much of the work in the narration of any Hollywood movie
involves offering the audience incentives to “read into” or activate the movie’s elisions,
contradictions and absences in ways that open up an intertextual field of possible meanings not
explicitly articulated by the movie-as-text.  In this way, movies provide considerable autonomy to
individual viewers to construct the story they please.  The interpretation of the story as a whole
is less malleable than the play with detail offered during the viewing experience, but it manifests
itself as an invitation to interpret the story as allegory, which is what genre critics usually
mean by “myth.”

Movies, particularly those that have been identified as potentially subversive—have become and
remained politicised through their accretion of interpretations based on strategies of metaphor,
allusion and allegory.  1950s westerns, for example, are frequently interpreted as allegorical
explorations of “the social implications of endangered individualism,” the “problem of society's
being able to withstand internal corruption and external challenges,”[23] or “covert commentar[ies]
on race relations.”[24]  Given the representational and interpretative regimes I have been
describing, it is hardly surprising that such movies should find themselves possessed of multiple,
often contradictory, interpretations.

Both at the time of its release and subsequently, High Noon (1952) was seen by some critics as a
political allegory, in part because its writer, Carl Foreman, had refused to testify before HUAC
and had been blacklisted. Contemporary European critics, however, considering the movie outside the
immediate circumstance of its production, interpreted High Noon as an ‘explanation of American
foreign policy’ during the Korean War. According to Harry Schein, the movie was an allegory in
which the community of Hadleyville represented the United Nations, timorous in the face of the
Soviet Union, China and North Korea, while only the 'very American' sheriff displayed the moral
courage to face aggression with righteous violence.

High Noon circulated both as a familiar Western melodrama and as an object of controversy, subject
to contradictory, mutually incompatible political interpretations.  Clearly President Eisenhower,
who declared High Noon to be one of his favourite movies, was not watching the same movie that
Paramount executive and CIA correspondent Luigi Luraschi had seen when, acting in what he
understood to be conformity with CIA policy, he used his position in the Academy of Motion Picture
Arts and Sciences to ensure that High Noon was not awarded the Best Picture Oscar in the 1953
Awards.[25]

Through its deployment of the conventions of melodrama High Noon invites the viewer’s
identification with the moral position occupied by Marshall Kane and eventually adopted by Amy, but
it does not—in keeping with the strategies described by DeMille and Warner and operated and
elaborated through the Production Code—itself ascribe to itself a meaning external to the story
events.  Instead, it invites the ascription of such a meaning through its invitation to allegorical
interpretation, and it is—in keeping with the industry’s economic procedures under the
Code—catholic in its accommodation of conflicting ideological interpretations.

But there were also limits to the interpretative ideological malleability of High Noon in 1953,
limits constructed less by the movie-as-text itself than by the interpretative and discursive
framework in which it was placed.  Genre historian John Lenihan has, for example, suggested that
Joseph McCarthy himself could be identified with “the strong individualist who refuses to
compromise with that which threatens the community,” and that the availability of such an
interpretation reveals “how closely Foreman’s liberal polemic resembles the arguments of those he
attacked,” and therefore the common assumptions shared by both pro- and anti-McCarthy forces.”[26]

That such an interpretation is possible and even plausible from this historical distance tells us
something consequential about both Hollywood’s structure of melodrama and allegory and also about
Cold War discourse, but that is not to say that such an interpretation can be assumed to have
circulated in 1953. The limits to allegorical interpretation were imposed less by the restrictions
of the text itself than by the discursive framework within which it circulated.  No liberal critic
at the time would have reason to make Lenihan’s point, while no conservative critic would seek to
redeem a movie made by blacklisted ex-Communists and fellow-travellers.  I have found no evidence
that such an allegorical interpretation circulated publicly at the time of the movie’s release, and
given the discursive frameworks within which the movie circulated, there is no great likelihood
that such an interpretative framework would have been available to any but the most wilfully
perverse of spectators.

Let me offer you one more example of the conventional constraints on interpretation that affected
the ambiguous allegories generated by Hollywood’s institutions of representation.  In early
November 1954, Robert Aldrich submitted a draft script of Kiss Me Deadly (USA 1955) to the
Production Code Administration (PCA).  In an accompanying letter, Aldrich described the changes he
and scriptwriter A. I. Bezzerides had made in the script’s source material, the Mickey Spillane
novel Kiss Me, Deadly, published the previous year.[27]  “Being reasonably well aware of the Code
and its interpretation,” Aldrich continued, “we have also avoided any direct conflict with the Code
Administration.”  Then he hesitated.  “Of course,” he noted, “there is always the problem of
interpretation.”[28]  Taken out of context, this comment seems prophetic:  Since its critical
discovery by writers for Cahiers du cinéma and Positif,[29] Kiss Me Deadly has been subject to
multiple acts of interpretation and has in the process become a canonic subversive noir text, a
conscious political allegory and a deliberate generic and ideological subversion of its source.[30]

Its initial reception was, however, somewhat different.  For many liberal critics, the
extraordinary commercial success of Spillane’s books, combined with the excesses of their content,
had made Spillane “a symbol of the most terrifying aspects of American culture, and his fantastic
success a vindication of their worst fears.”[31]  In a Saturday Review article called “Mickey
Spillane and His Bloody Hammer,” published in November 1954, Christopher La Farge argued that Mike
Hammer “is the logical conclusion … of McCarthyism,” in the belief that the ends justify the means.
According to La Farge, Spillane had succeeded in making acceptable to a huge public a character who
“mocks at and denies the efficacy of all law and decency, flouts all laws, statutory, ethical and
moral, delights in assault and murder that is brutally executed, [and] sets his personal judgement
always above that of all other men.”[32]

La Farge’s article was published three days after the Kiss Me Deadly script was submitted to the
PCA.  It articulates, with some precision, the position Aldrich subsequently expressed about
Hammer.  But as an artefact in cultural circulation in 1955, Kiss Me Deadly occupied a more
contradictory position than Aldrich’s comments suggest.  It was marketed at the existing urban male
blue-collar audience for crime films and for Spillane’s novels.  The “exploitation value” of its
source material clearly required the delivery of what Variety described as a “combo of blood,
action and sex which has attracted exploitation b.o.”[33] Advertising and promotional material
consistently identified Spillane as the movie’s author, and featured his name far more prominently
than those of any of the cast and crew: one tag-line used on a number of advertisements called the
movie “Mickey Spillane’s latest H-Bomb!”

The movie’s commercial obligation to meet the expectations of its intended audience ensured that it
would also attract the hostile attention of those various cultural forces critical of its source
material.  The process of adaptation had, therefore, to find ways of anticipating and accommodating
the likely objections of those “responsible citizens” decrying the effects of violence in the media
and also, to a lesser extent, the criticisms of the liberal cultural elite. The movie’s encounter
with the Production Code Administration was the principal site of these accommodations.

The Code required two fundamental changes to the novel’s plot in the process of adaptation: the
central plot device had to be changed from drugs to something else—to what became the mysterious
Pandora’s Box containing “The Great Whatsit.”  Secondly, the novel’s portrayal of Mike Hammer as “a
cold blooded murderer whose numerous killings are completely justified” had to be changed, since
his “taking of the law into his own hands and successfully bringing the criminals to ‘justice’ by
killing them, is in complete violation of the Code.”  The movie acquired its two most distinctive
and culturally resonant features—its thermonuclear MacGuffin and its attitude to its
protagonist—through its encounter with the Production Code Administration, which in due course
awarded it a Seal of Approval, and described its ending as “moral.”[34]  Aldrich, in return, was
fulsome in his praise for the treatment he had received:

In the Spillane pictures we have a unique and difficult problem.  The properties are of great
commercial value and yet there is not morality, or integrity, or respect for American tradition, or
the due process of law.

It is most gratifying to know that your office understood and agreed with what we have tried so
hard to accomplish.  Namely, to successfully marry the commercial value of the Spillane properties
with a morality that states justice is not to be found in a self-appointed one man vigilante.[35]

Whatever he may have said privately or later, in publicity promoting the movie, Aldrich maintained
that “we have kept faith with the 60,000,000 Mickey Spillane readers … we have made a movie of
action, violence and suspense in good taste.”[36]  It was, however, largely this publicity which
caused Kiss Me Deadly to fall foul of the Legion of Decency, the movie ratings agency of the Roman
Catholic Church, which denounced the movie and Spillane together, leading Aldrich to complain to
the PCA that “The Legion has even failed to recognise any voice of moral righteousness which is
particularly disturbing since so much time and effort was spent in finding and properly developing
such a voice in the film.” [37] While this dispute was resolved by some further minor adjustments
to the editing, these adjustments seem to have had little effect on the movie’s reception.  It was
largely ignored by the liberal press which might otherwise have shared Aldrich’s evaluation of
Spillane, but it was one of a couple of dozen movies cited for its excessive violence and dubious
morality during the 1955 Senate Subcommittee hearings investigating juvenile delinquency, chaired
by Estes Kefauver.  In these public forums, at least, Aldrich’s critique had not surfaced: the
interpretation he proposed, which we now find so evidently zeitgeistig, was not legible through the
interpretative predispositions created by the source material, and the contradictory forces
operating on the movie’s production and promotion.  In a 1956 interview with Francois Truffaut,
Aldrich regretted “having accepted the job” of making the movie: “when I asked my American friends
to tell me whether they felt my disgust for that whole mess, they said that between the fights and
the kissing scenes they hadn’t noticed anything of the sort.”[38]

I do not want to contradict auteurist claims made on Aldrich’s behalf for his subversive
intentions, but I do want to suggest that the institutional framework within which these intentions
may have surfaced determined their possibility.  The PCA’s insistence on the movie’s anti-heroic
treatment of its protagonist required the attitudinal shifts that are, by critical convention,
attributed either to Aldrich and Bezzerides as authors or to noir as a sensibility.

In making this argument, I have addressed film noir because it seems to me that the critical
invention of film noir is paradigmatic both of the ways in which film history has substituted for
cinema history, and of the role that genre has played in this process.  A body of recent critical
thinking about genre—Neale, Altman, Staiger, Williams—all argue, to my mind conclusively, that the
extent to which the industry conceived its product in terms of genres has been exaggerated.  As
Janet Staiger puts it, “Hollywood films have never been “pure,” that is, easily arranged into
categories. All that has been pure has been sincere attempts to find order among variety.” Few
would argue that the collection of generic labels and distinctions we work with has any overall
coherence; but arbitrary and inconsistent as it is, it is also now established, and it is not going
to go away.  We are unlikely to improve on it; on much the same principle as that by which Noam
Chomsky argues that if apes could talk, they would, if criticism could have developed a more
systematic means of classifying genres, it would have done so.  We can live with an incoherent
system of classification, but Janet Staiger points to a more substantial problem when she observes
the historical error committed “when a subjective order visible in the present is mapped onto the
past and then assumed to be the order visible in the past”[39]

Genres are critical categories: the industry has no interest in categorizing its products as such.
The industry categorises its audience, and then seeks to produce product that will appeal either to
or across the demographic groupings of its audience classification.  I could have made a comparable
case about the influence of genre on the understanding of film history by discussing the critical
invention of melodrama, which would have led me to take issue at greater length with Rick Altman’s
permissive attitude to the re-writing of film history—particularly with what he calls “attempts to
capture jurisdiction over the right to redefine the texts” by the invention of new genres or the
redefinition of existing generic terms—as a rhetorical strategy by which all cultural products
remain permanently available “to serve as signifiers in the cultural bricolage that forms our
lives.”[40]  My point of disagreement with Altman is that, as a historian of cinema, I am concerned
not with “the cultural bricolage that forms our lives” but rather with the cultural bricolage that
formed the lives of earlier audiences.

If the “turn to history” is to be more than an evasion of the political engagement explicit in the
critical positions of the 1970s, then it must seek not to extract the objects of attention—the
movies—into an alternative, more comfortably entertaining account of intention or influence, but
instead seek to situate them as concretely as possible, in as much detail as possible, in the
circumstances of their circulation.
________________________________

[1] Quoted from Custen in Hollywood Cinema, p. 312.

[2] Tom Stempel, Movie Audiences on Movies and Moviegoing (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press,
2000), p. 16.

[3]"Voluntary Movie Rating System Celebrates 30 Years of Providing Information to America's
Parents," Motion Picture Association of America, Press Release, 27 October 1998.

[4] Rick Altman, Film/Genre pp. 16, 20.

[5] Braudy in Browne, p. 288.

[6] Joy to censor boards in Chicago, Toronto, New York, October 17, 1932, PCA File, I Am a Fugitive
from a Chain Gang.

[7] Robert McElvane, The Great Depression: America, 1929-1941 (New York: Times Books, 1984), pp.
208, 213.

[8] Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947), pp. 6,8.

[9] John Houseman, Vogue, 15 January, 1947, quoted in Lester Asheim, “The Film and the Zeitgeist,”
Hollywood Quarterly, 2;4 (1947), 416.

[10] Martha Wolfenstein and Nathan Leites, Movies: A Psychological Study (Glencoe, IL: Free Press,
1950), p. 11.

[11] Andrew Dowdy, The Films of the Fifties: The American State of Mind (New York: Morrow, 1975),
pp. 66-7.

[12] Asheim, 416.

[13] Robert Ray, A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1980 (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1985), pp. 140-1.

[14] Lipsitz in Browne, pp. 215-6.

[15] Alan Filreis, “Words with ‘All the Effects of Force’: Cold-War Interpretation,” American
Quarterly, Vol. 39 (Summer, 1987), p. 309.

[16] Roger D. McNiven, “The Middle-class American Home of the Fifties: The Use of Architecture in
Nicholas Ray’s Bigger than Life and Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows,” Cinema Journal 22:2
(Summer 1983), p. 55; Jean-Loup Bourget, “Sirk and the Critics,” Bright Lights 6 (Winter 1977-8),
p. 8.

[17] Quoted in James J. Parker, “The Organizational Environment of the Motion Picture Sector,” in
Sandra J. Ball-Rokeach and Muriel G. Cantor, eds., Media, Audience and Social Structure (Beverly
Hills, Ca.: Sage, 196), p. 154.

[18] Franklin Fearing, “Influence of the Movies on Attitudes and Behavior,” Annals of the American
Academy of Political and Social Science, 254 (November 1947), p. 71.

[19] Eldridge, p. 158.

[20] Elmer Davis to Byron Price, January 27, 1943, quoted in Koppes and Black, p. 64.

[21] F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Last Tycoon (Harmondsworth, 1960), 51-2.

[22].Harold J. Salemson, The Screen Writer, April, 1946, quoted in Ruth Inglis, Freedom of the
Movies: A Report on Self-Regulation from the Commission on Freedom of the Press (Chicago, 1947),
183-4; Elliot Paul and Luis Quintanilla, With a Hays Nonny Nonny (New York, 1942), 63-4.

[23] Lenihan, p. 121.

[24] Peter Biskind, Seeing is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the
Fifties (London: Pluto Press, 1984), p. 229.

[25] Eldridge, p. 155

[26] Lenihan, pp. 120-2.

[27] Letter, Robert Aldrich to Geoffrey Shurlock, 10 September 1954, Kiss me deadly file,
Production Code Administration archive, Department of Special Collections, Margaret Herrick
Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills (hereafter PCA).

[28] Aldrich to Albert Van Schmus, 3 November 1954, PCA Kiss Me Deadly file.

[29] Charles Bitsch, “Surmultipliée,” Cahiers du cinéma, No. 51 (October 1955), p. 3; Claude
Chabrol, “Evolution du film policier,” Cahiers du cinéma No. 54 (1955), translated as “The
Evolution of the Crime Film,” (trans. Alain Silver) in Film Noir Reader 2, eds. Alain Silver and
James Ursini (New York: Limelight, 1999), p. 32.

[30] Adrian Miles, review of Kiss Me Deadly, CTEQ Vol. 2, 1996
(http://cs.art.rmit.ed.au/projects/media/cteq/v2/kiss_me_deadly/htm). See, for example, Robin
Wood’s description of the critique of the hero as “devastating and uncompromised.” Robin Wood,
“Creativity and Evaluation: Two Film Noirs of the Fifties, (CineAction 21/22, Summer/Fall 1990),
reprinted in Film Noir Reader 2, p. 101.

[31] Rosenberg, “Mass Culture in America,” p. 5; O’Brien, Hardboiled America, p. 105.

[32] Christopher La Farge, “Mickey Spillane and His Bloody Hammer,” Saturday Review, 6 November
1954, reprinted in Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America (New York: The Free Press 1957), pp.
177, 184.

[33] Variety review of Kiss Me Deadly, 27 April 1955.

[34] Aldrich’s letter to Shurlock of 11 February, quoted below, begins by expressing his
“appreciation and gratitude for your office reconsidering their decision not to pass my picture
Kiss Me Deadly.”  The PCA file, however, contains no details of any changes required, which
suggests that the matter was relatively minor and resolved informally through discussion.  In a
1970 interview with Alain Silver, Aldrich reported having had some difficulty with the way that
Madi Comfort, the bar singer, handles her microphone.  “Appendix: Interview with Robert Aldrich,”
in Silver and Ursini, Whatever Happened to Robert Aldrich?, p. 351.

[35] Letter, Aldrich to Shurlock, 11 February 1955, PCA Kiss Me Deadly file.

[36] Aldrich, “You Can’t Hang Up the Meat Hook,” New York Herald Tribune, 20 February 1955, Section
4, p. 4.

[37] Telegram, Aldrich to Shurlock, 18 April 1955, PCA Kiss Me Deadly file.

[38] Edward Gallafent, “Kiss Me, Deadly,” in The Movie Book of Film Noir, p. 241.

[39] Staiger, Perverse Spectators, p. 62.

[40] Altman, p.82.