The American Abroad: The Imperial Gaze in Postwar Hollywood Cinema 9781501314476, 9781501314506, 9781501314490

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Cinema, Empire, and the “American Century”
1 The Sublime: Urban Ruins from Nazism to the Cold War
2 The Ethnographic: Imperialist Nostalgia and the American Technological Gaze
3 The Picturesque: Italian Landscape Views and the American Female Gaze
4 Glamour: The Necropolitics of Women’s Fashion from the Bombshell to the Princess
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

The American Abroad

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The American Abroad The Imperial Gaze in Postwar Hollywood Cinema Anna Cooper

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2022 Copyright © Anna Cooper, 2022 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on pp. x–xi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Eleanor Rose Cover image: Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron in An American In Paris, 1951, Dir. Vincente Minnelli © Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer / Getty Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Cooper, Anna, author. Title: The American abroad : the imperial gaze in postwar Hollywood cinema / by Anna Cooper. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Expands our understanding of the complex relationship between the American and European metropoles in the postwar period—a period of simultaneous European colonial devolution and American colonial expansion”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2021048080 (print) | LCCN 2021048081 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501314476 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501314483 (epub) | ISBN 9781501314490 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Motion pictures—United States—History—20th century. | Motion picture industry—California—Los Angeles—History—20th century. | National characteristics, American, in motion pictures. | Imperialism in motion pictures. | Culture in motion pictures. Classification: LCC PN1993.5.U6 C6376 2022 (print) | LCC PN1993.5.U6 (ebook) | DDC 791.430973—dcundefined LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021048080 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021048081 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-1447-6 ePDF: 978-1-5013-1449-0 ebook: 978-1-5013-1448-3 Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of Figures  Acknowledgments 

vi

Introduction: Cinema, Empire, and the “American Century” 

1

1 2 3 4

The Sublime: Urban Ruins from Nazism to the Cold War  The Ethnographic: Imperialist Nostalgia and the American Technological Gaze  The Picturesque: Italian Landscape Views and the American Female Gaze  Glamour: The Necropolitics of Women’s Fashion from the Bombshell to the Princess 

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25 63 97 133

Conclusion 

177

Bibliography  Index 

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185

Figures

Introduction 1 An American in Paris: The backlot-constructed Parisian cityscape  2 2 An American in Paris: Jerry Mulligan (Gene Kelly) entering the space of one of his own drawings  3 3 An American in Paris: Jerry’s arrival back in his neighborhood imaginatively reenacts the liberation of Paris  4

Chapter 1 4 The Search: Ruins stretching off into the distance  5 The Search: A form with nothing but question marks and blank spaces dissolves to a shot of a roiling river  6 The Search: The river’s rushing water is transferred to a pastoral, peaceful, and safe setting  7 Berlin Express: Encountering Frankfurt’s ruined cityscape through the window of an arriving train  8 Berlin Express: A new architectural style known as “early twentieth-century modern warfare”  9 Berlin Express: The I. G. Farben building as a centrifugal space  10 Berlin Express: A vat of putrescent liquid serves as a symbol of feminine threat  11 The Third Man: Anna’s decaying Rococo apartment  12 The Third Man: The haunted city at night  13 The Third Man: The sewer as a sublime space  14 The Third Man: A promontory view from the Ferris wheel to the “dots” below  15 The Third Man: Harry Lime as hyperwhite 

26 37 37 40 41 43 46 50 51 52 53 54

Figures

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Chapter 2 16 Boy on a Dolphin: Sophia Loren as an ignorant Greek peasant who has no concept of the value of Greek antiquities  17 This Is Cinerama: Lowell Thomas as narrator, rehearsing a Eurocentric history of image making in the prologue sequence (Academy ratio)  18 This Is Cinerama: The Venetian gondolier  19 This Is Cinerama: A bagpipe rally in Scotland  20 This Is Cinerama: A boys’ choir performs on the grounds of Schönbrunn Palace in Austria  21 This Is Cinerama: A dance performance in Spain  22 The Quiet Man: A lingering view of the faces of Irish peasants  23 The Quiet Man: Women with shawls and scarves covering their heads—a standard ethnographic trope  24 The Quiet Man: A glowing, low-angle shot of Mary Kate (Maureen O’Hara) that seems to draw upon Flaherty’s ethnographic style  25 The Quiet Man: One of a series of shots of Irish villagers directly addressing the camera  26 The Quiet Man: Sean sits on a bridge surrounded by grays, with obvious studio lighting, gazing upon the Irish landscape  27 The Quiet Man: Costumes show an ambiguous mash-up of time periods 

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75 78 79 80 81 85 86 87 88 89 90

Chapter 3 28 Rome Adventure: Prudence (Suzanne Pleshette) and Don (Troy Donahue) falling in love in the Italian Alps  29 Three Coins in the Fountain: The women’s convertible in front of the Trevi Fountain—an automobile-bound version of flânerie  30 Three Coins in the Fountain: Couples strolling in the gardens at Tivoli  31 Three Coins in the Fountain: A woman and two boys by the fish ponds at Tivoli  32 Three Coins in the Fountain: Pinched by an Italian man 

98 111 112 112 114

viii Figures

33 Three Coins in the Fountain: Anita (Jean Peters) crashes the jeep, leading to a passionate embrace with Giorgio (Rossano Brazzi)  115 34 Summertime: Jane meets the McIlhennys, a stereotypical American tourist couple  118 35 Rear Window: Jeff (James Stewart) with his enormous, and phallic, telephoto lens  122 36 Rear Window: A view across the courtyard into the windows of Jeff ’s neighbors  123 37 Summertime: Jane gazes upward as she is led along by a porter  124 38 Summertime: Jane’s view of a Venetian building from below  125 39 Summertime: Renato (Rossano Brazzi) notices Jane as she films the tourist views  126 40 Summertime: Jane hides her eyes behind sunglasses before entering Renato’s shop  127 41 Summertime: A figure on a cuckoo clock—one of many shots in which the chiming of bells seems to free Jane’s gaze from materiality  130

Chapter 4 42 Silk Stockings: Peggy Dayton (Janis Paige) in her typical “old Hollywood glamour” look of glitzy gowns and flashy jewelry  136 43 Silk Stockings: Nina’s more demure glamorous style, exemplified in a white and nude-colored evening gown of delicate chiffon draped in Grecian layers  137 44 Exotic fashion on Vilma Banky in Son of the Sheik  142 45 A black, bias-cut, backless satin gown in Roberta suggests the feminine-as-occult  144 46 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: Monroe’s and Russell’s outfits in the opening number are an instantly recognizable image of classical Hollywood glamour  149 47 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: Lorelei in a tight dress of bold, synthetic pink with ultra-modern lines, in “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend”  157 48 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: Dorothy derails the pompous seriousness of the legal proceedings by shimmying around the courtroom  158 49 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: Lorelei with two Parisian children who appear to be Algerians  160

Figures

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50 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: The shopping sequence when the women arrive in Paris  161 51 Funny Face: An example of Hepburn’s “princess” glamour  163 52 Funny Face: Jo Stockton’s shapeless, ill-fitting brown dress in a rough tweed makes her resemble a starving European peasant to be transformed through the magic of American consumer capitalism  169 53 Funny Face: An abstracted, black-and-white image of Jo’s face erases her organic body  170 54 Funny Face: A fashion shot of Jo, taken by Dick  171 55 Funny Face: The same fashion shot, as a negative—foregrounding its status as a created image  172 56 Funny Face: The same fashion shot, cropped  172 57 Funny Face: Jo steps fully into the narrative assigned to her by Dick, confessing her love for him while dressed as a glamorous bride, in soft focus and with beautifully dappled lighting  173

Acknowledgments Many people and organizations have helped me over the many years this book has been taking shape, and I can only begin here to express my deep gratitude to them all. The project began as a Ph.D. dissertation in the Department of Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick, and I will always be grateful for the ways that the department and its faculty shaped me as a scholar. I would also like to thank the Graduate School and Humanities Research Centre at the University of Warwick, both of which provided indispensable financial support for my studies. Catherine Constable was a wonderful supervisor, who was kind and supportive all along the way even as she continually challenged me to do better; I will always be grateful for her guidance and teaching. Thank you also to the other members of my thesis committee, Stella Bruzzi and Rosalind Galt, for their invaluable feedback on the project and other helpful support. And to Charlotte Brunsdon for her early encouragement and support of my doctoral studies, which shaped the project in important ways. Heartfelt gratitude goes to Katie Gallof of Bloomsbury Academic, whose support for this project has been unflagging. A special thank you, as well, to Richard Perkins of the University of Warwick Library. Parts of Chapters 2 and 3 were published previously in “Colonizing Europe: Widescreen Aesthetics in the 1950s’ American Travel Film,” Transnational Cinemas 7:1 (2016), 21–33. Sections of the introduction and Chapter 4 were published previously in “ ‘Our Love Is Here to Stay’: Transatlantic Relations in 1950s Hollywood Musicals about Paris,” in Projecting the World: Representing the Foreign in Classical Hollywood, edited by Anna Cooper and Russell Meeuf (Wayne State University Press, 2017), 159–80. The book has benefited incalculably from the feedback I received on drafts. My colleagues in reading groups organized by the Classical Hollywood Special Interest Group at SCMS have been wonderfully helpful, including Katie Bird, Jonathan Cannon, Dawn Fratini, Erin Hill, Peter Kunze, and most of all Pamela Robertson Wojcik. Other readers whose thoughtful feedback I’ve been lucky

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enough to receive include Russell Meeuf and Douglas Morrey. All the book’s flaws are, of course, my own. I feel immense appreciation for the ongoing support and camaraderie of colleagues at the School of Theatre, Film, and Television at the University of Arizona, including Andrew Belser, Jacob Bricca, Joshua Gleich, Mary Beth Haralovich, Claire Mannle, Elaine Romero, Bradley Schauer, Barbara Selznick, Jack Walsh, and especially my partner in crime Beverly Seckinger. There are many others to whom I owe my thanks for their encouragement and intellectual generosity throughout the long years I’ve worked on this project: Hannah Andrews, José Arroyo, Elizabeth Clarke, Paul Cuff, Peter Falconer, Gregory Frame, Ed Gallafent, Stephen Gundle, Peter Labuza, Derilene Marco, James McDowell, Alison McKee, Rachel Moseley, Celia Nicholls, Joseph Oldham, Santiago Oyarzabal, the late great V. F. Perkins, Alastair Phillips, Michael Pigott, Rebecca Prime, Karl Schoonover, Krupa Shandilya, David Sloan, Shelley Stamp, Daniel Steinhart, Timotheus Vermeulen, Rick Wallace, Helen Wheatley, and James Zborowski, to name but a few. Thank you most of all to my wonderful chosen family, my anchors in life: Leah Bailey, Sara Bachman-Williams, Sarah Baracks, Emily Belleranti, Fen Davidson, Melinda Himel, Laura Love, the late and much-missed Ellen Melamed, Michelle Ort, V. Spike Peterson, Denise Pigott, Lindsey Retterath, Jaime Rossman, Jayne Rossman, Sarah Rossman, Nicole Stansbury, Emily Viola, and Natalie Wilson. Without you, completing this book would not have been possible, in so very many ways.

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Introduction: Cinema, Empire, and the “American Century”

The Oscar-winning 1951 MGM musical An American in Paris uses elaborately painted sets to represent an idealized view of the city of Paris. Verisimilitude is clearly not the goal; the film’s richly textured, brightly colored, shimmering homage to the city closely resembles the paintings made by the protagonist Jerry Mulligan, a struggling American expatriate artist played by Gene Kelly (Figure 1). The film sets out to give us not the “real” Paris, but rather an image of it from the mind’s eye of an American—a fact that is reinforced through the opening narration, as we hear Jerry present the sights of the city to us: “This is Paris, and I’m an American who lives here. … We’re on the Left Bank now; that’s where I’m billeted. Here’s my street.” Later on, the film’s famous dream-like ballet sequence is similarly an illustration of Jerry’s interior world: he imagines himself entering into a picture that he has just drawn of Les Jardins des Tuileries, and the world it represents comes to life before our eyes (Figure 2). Paris here is identified as a United Statesian fantasy, a projected image in the American mind rather than an actual place with a life independent of Jerry’s presence there. A particularly fascinating scene shows Jerry sitting atop the seatback of a green convertible, waving victoriously as he parades down the street while French children gather around, cheering and begging for bubblegum (Figure 3). The scene imaginatively reenacts the liberation of Paris six years prior—a recreated moment of triumph for this ex-GI. In the number that follows, “I Got Rhythm,” he teaches these children both English words and jazz music, the quintessential United Statesian art form. In a tap dance sequence, he playacts as a train, a soldier, a cowboy, an airplane: all symbols of United Statesian expansionism, here presented to the children as an irresistible pleasure. Kelly’s charismatic and playful demeanor as he takes over the space of this Parisian street builds what Richard Dyer calls a “colonial structure of feeling” (1995, 30), an aspect of Hollywood style that functions to establish the white American man’s symbolic

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Figure 1  An American in Paris: The backlot-constructed Parisian cityscape. (Source: All figures are author’s own unless mentioned otherwise.)

dominance over spaces and their inhabitants. The fact that he uses jazz and tap dancing—both African American art forms—to do so sets up a parallel wherein his white, male, American identity appears to seamlessly entitle him to a playful, expansive appropriation of cultures not his own. An American in Paris thus positions the United States as a dominant force in relation to France (and indeed to all of Europe, given the historical importance of Paris in US culture as the symbolic capital of the continent). It is often taken as a truism that Hollywood cinema constructs global spaces as an imaginative dreamworld, subsuming geographical and cultural differences into a characteristically Hollywoodian aesthetics of utopian fantasy. This is often understood to be true across periods of Hollywood history and across the various global locales represented. Ruth Vasey, for example, writes the following as an introductory maxim: A motion picture may be set in New York or ancient Rome, but if the movie is a product of Hollywood we know that the fiction will be governed by a set of narrative and representational conventions that will override the social,

Introduction

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Figure 2  An American in Paris: Jerry Mulligan (Gene Kelly) entering the space of one of his own drawings. geographic, and historical characteristics of its nominal locale. The world according to Hollywood is an exotic, sensual cousin of the realm outside the cinema, simultaneously familiar and strange to its worldwide audiences. (1997, 3)

Yet this facet of Hollywood cinema has rarely been explored in detail. How are such representations actually constructed within film texts? Is this utopian aesthetics really as uniform and transparent as this quotation appears to indicate, or are there nuances that are worth unpacking? An American in Paris certainly suggests that closer readings would be rewarding, given how deeply invested the film appears to be in positioning Paris as subject to US imperialist powers, both literal and imaginative. Other questions abound too: How and why was this Hollywoodian system of representation formed? Since artistic/aesthetic systems rarely spring from nowhere, what other Western aesthetic traditions does Hollywood’s utopian view of the world draw on? Are there other traditions or movements that it influences in turn? And, given its prima facie geopolitical nature, how might we consider it in

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Figure 3  An American in Paris: Jerry’s arrival back in his neighborhood imaginatively reenacts the liberation of Paris.

relation to the United States’ status as an imperial power and the fluctuations this undergoes over time? This last question is an especially crucial one: this book’s central contention is that Hollywood cinema must be understood as a United Statesian imperial cinema, and the films it produces must be textually interpreted as such. The idea that Hollywood participates in imperialism is certainly not new, yet this has been studied largely in terms of its industrial practices. Indeed, Vasey’s book from which the above quotation is taken is concerned with Hollywood studios’ foreign distribution practices and negotiations with foreign governments; it spends virtually no time looking at film texts in any detail. And Vasey is not alone by any means. Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease famously observed the multiple lacunae in scholarship on US imperialism: “The absence of culture from the history of U.S. imperialism; the absence of empire from the study of American culture; and the absence of the United States from the postcolonial study of imperialism” (1993, 11). It would be apt to substitute “cinema” for “culture” here, since cinema was the most important popular art form in US culture for much of

Introduction

5

the twentieth century—and the statement would still be accurate: Hollywood’s imperialism has rarely been considered from a cultural or imaginative angle. The aim of this book is to address the above questions with reference to a specific corpus of Hollywood film texts: those set (and often made) in Europe between 1948 and 1963. This constitutes a crucial time and place because, following the end of the Second World War, the major European empires were collapsing and the United States was rapidly rising as a new global imperial power. These films thus powerfully illustrate a developing US imperial imaginary that positioned the United States as a new locus of power and demoted Europe to a new imperial periphery. More broadly, these Hollywood film texts must be understood as participating in and indeed working to construct an American imperial cinema, an influential body of popular cultural texts which have collectively shaped and imaginatively reinforced discourses of United Statesian superiority and the rightness of its indirect global rule. They do so by drawing on some of the most significant aesthetic traditions associated with European imperialism, including (as each chapter will respectively address) the sublime, the ethnographic, the picturesque, and glamour—adapting them to a specifically United Statesian context. Tracing the changes in the US geopolitical status over the period in question, a new United Statesian utopian aesthetics slowly coalesces. An American in Paris is a significant starting point in part because it was entirely studio-made. This body of films—postwar Hollywood films set in Europe—has occasionally been studied by other scholars, yet the focus has been on their connections to runaway production: Hollywood’s postwar practice of making films on location in Europe and the discourses of “reality” that often accompanied this practice in the films’ marketing materials. As An American in Paris indicates, not all Hollywood films set in Europe in this period were made there—indeed, a great number were not—which signals that these films must be considered as producing discourses about European landscapes and their imaginative relationship to the United States rather than simply showing “reality” or reflecting an industrial trend. In considering Hollywood cinema as an imperial cinema, this book draws on an eclectic range of intellectual traditions and is highly interdisciplinary in nature, addressing a number of important gaps. It is first and foremost a work of film studies, yet within this discipline there were no extant approaches that provided a close fit with the present topic. At first glance, this book may appear to be a work of classical Hollywood studies, yet it runs against the grain of the

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industrially focused, archivally oriented, materialist practices that have largely defined this subfield for the past two to three decades. Postcolonial film studies is another influence, insofar as it exists; film studies as a whole is sorely lacking a robust postcolonial intellectual tradition, though what little does exist is very rich. Yet, as I discuss further below, the existing scholarship in this area has focused almost entirely on the British and French empires and their aftermath and has largely excluded the study of Hollywood. Gaze theory offers the most robustly developed concept of how power is inscribed within film texts, yet this area has mostly been focused on gender rather than on race or colonialism. Because of the lacunae I found whenever I looked to the most relevant aspects of film studies, I have had to improvise by utilizing the parts of these that I could while also drawing on further-distant intellectual traditions: postcolonial approaches to interpreting texts and images, cultural histories of transatlantic relations, the sociology of travel and tourism, and so on. The remainder of this introduction is structured as a discussion of each of these various intellectual traditions and their overall influence on the present work, introducing the book’s topic and arguments via a kind of multilayered, kaleidoscopic literature review.

Postcolonial Studies, the United States, and the Imperialist “West” An American in Paris, and many other films like it, could reasonably be described as engaging in what Edward Said (speaking of a very different place and time) termed “flexible positional superiority.” This is a textual expression of imperial power that can take different forms but always functions to “put the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the relative upper hand” (Said 2003, 7). A text that engages in this kind of move, Said argues, is both shaped by and further contributes to the European discourse of the Orient, and this discourse has a life of its own, a “regular constellation of ideas” (ibid., 5), which does not reflect specific historical realities on the ground so much as it helps to shape those realities. Just like this Orientalist move, there are a variety of ways in which Jerry Mulligan is placed in a position of imaginative superiority over Paris, which is converted into an expression of his desires and projections rather than a “real” place. It may seem outrageous to apply concepts from Said, the intellectual parent of postcolonial studies, to films that depict Europe—the very seat of the imperialist

Introduction

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West. Yet that is the outrageousness of the films examined in this book: in a period of rising US global power, they copy discursive moves that had long been used to justify and imaginatively buttress European colonialism, but they appropriate them in ways that specifically center the United States as the seat of power and make Europe itself into a symbolically colonized outpost. Studies of imperial aesthetics have tended to merge the United States into the “European.” Said himself did precisely this, inserting a section at the end of Orientalism that names US actions in the Middle East as the latest phase in a long history of “European” interventions there (ibid., 284–328). Ella Shohat and Robert Stam’s seminal study similarly calls the United States “neo-European” and US media “Eurocentric” (1994). Yet European colonialism and United Statesian neocolonialism appeared in different historical moments and took vastly different forms of political, military, economic, and cultural power. As the British and French empires were devolving in the early to mid-twentieth century, the United States was arising in their place, responding to different historical circumstances and guided by its own distinctive utopian vision. It follows, then, that the imaginative aspects of this new, United Statesian form of imperial power would also be distinct from the European. Of course I don’t dispute that there are fundamental characteristics the United States shares with European cultures—often collectively called (along with a few other settlercolonial nations) “the West”—yet lumping them all together can only impede scholarly examination of these historical shifts and, as this book argues, the US’s development of its own distinctive imperial imaginary. A central contention of this book is that mid-twentieth-century Hollywood cinema adopted elements of British and French imperial visual culture, transforming them to suit a new United Statesian imperial context. Hollywood films appropriated older modes for the Western cultural expression of geopolitical power, but in ways that centered specifically the United States as the metropole rather than a broader “West”—thus positioning the United States as the new, more dynamic, and ingenious inheritor of European imperial traditions. They were made during a period in which the United States militarily and economically occupied and “rebuilt” western Europe, and in the process ascended to its postwar role as a global “superpower” while the older European colonialism was devolving; indeed, it’s been argued that the US’s imperial power grew first and strongest on European soil (de Grazia 2005). This book explores how four imperialist visual discourses in particular— the sublime, the ethnographic, the picturesque, and glamour—became

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building blocks in the development of a new imperial visual language that was specific to the United States and its own nationalist/imperialist narratives. The four chapters of this book each examine how one of these imperial aesthetic traditions influenced and was absorbed into Hollywood film style in distinctive ways. The European continent is of course home to a considerable variety of different countries, languages, cultures, cities, and landscapes; it may at first glance appear ahistorical and ageographical to lump them all together as a single entity of “Europe.” But this book is not about the lived existences, perceptions, or cultural products of people who live in European countries. Nor is it particularly interested in examining whether the films discussed herein are historically accurate or otherwise correlate to the real world. Rather, this book attends to the shape of the idea of “Europe” according to United Statesian culture, looking at how these films build and contribute to a set of internal “created consistencies” that refer primarily to other texts rather than to “brute reality” (Said 2003, 5). This is not to deny that in US culture there are also other, more specific discourses surrounding particular European cultures that merit close study on their own, like “France” (Schwartz 2007), “Scotland” (McArthur 2003, 1982), “England” (Stubbs 2019, Glancy 1999), or “Nazi Germany” (Fay 2008b, Slane 2001). Indeed, many of my own case studies will build on this previous scholarship in examining how these specific national discourses factor into ideas about and cinematic representations of “Europe” as a whole. At the center of these films’ discursive work is the figure of the “American abroad”: a tourist, expatriate, businessman, soldier or ex-soldier, government official, artist, or criminal from the United States who encounters European cultures and spaces through travel. This figure is found in a wide range of Hollywood genres, from film noir to musical to woman’s film, as well as across many western European locations: Italy, Scotland, France, Germany, Austria, Spain, and Ireland. This “American abroad” continually serves as the films’ central subject: both visual viewpoint and interior consciousness through which the spectator’s experience of Europe is refracted. A note about terminology: It is often now forgotten that “America” and “American” are terms that are themselves loaded with imperialist signification. As Caren Kaplan eloquently puts it, America includes, after all, Canada as well as Central and South America. In utilizing the term “America” to refer only to the United States, a persistent

Introduction

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contextual “ghost”—the history of the power relations that give rise to names, nations, and borders—is eliminated. (1996, 83)

I use “American” in the title of the book (and throughout the text) in ways that point to this loadedness, attempting to restore it as a term that is internal to the US’s self-inscription as an imperial power. I use it when referring to the imaginative inscription of, for example, the “American” characters within the film texts. For a more neutral descriptor (at least insofar as any nation’s naming can be neutral), I borrow a move from Spanish (estadounidense) and use “United Statesian.” It is around this subject of the “American abroad” in 1950s Hollywood cinema that a United Statesian neocolonial imaginary coalesced, positioning as its primary object a conjured-up Europe that, despite its “whiteness” (although this is complicated somewhat by the bizarre intricacies of US racial schematics), is made to absorb a range of exoticizing discourses, becoming a major site of otherness in opposition to—but also inextricably connected to—the United Statesian self.

US Imperialism and the Idea of “Europe” “Europe” has long functioned discursively as a single, faraway space in US culture, often in opposition to the United States as “home.” In the mid-nineteenth century, Ralph Waldo Emerson excoriated “the courtly muses of Europe” (1983 [1837], 70), identifying Europe as a feminized space of over-civilization, contrasting with the freedom and manly virtues of the American frontier (Cooper 2015; Slotkin 1973). Emerson’s characterization already rhymes curiously with the feminization, sensuality, and supposed political backwardness of the Orient in relation to the West—evidently the universal terms in a constructed dichotomy of superiority/inferiority in Western culture, yet here squarely aimed at Europe itself. On the other hand, Frederick Jackson Turner, also speaking of the frontier, saw Europe as providing the United States with a cultural and racial “germ” whose highest expression could be found in its growth on US “soil,” providing it with a new vitality arising from the domination of wild nature (Turner 1976 [1893], 43). As a travel destination too, “Europe” in nineteenth-century US culture was often deemed a single location, as affluent United Statesians took a cue from the English tradition of the Grand Tour and sent their children to see the sights of “the Continent” as an indispensable aspect of upper-class education. Indeed, this

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is the period in which the term “abroad” in US culture came to mean, more than anything else, Europe. Meanwhile, throughout the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, successive waves of Europeans of various nationalities were arriving on the North American continent as immigrants, sometimes deemed stupid, lazy, and dirty compared to the preexisting white American stock, and initially excluded from many of the social and legal privileges of whiteness (though, unlike for Black and Indigenous people and non-European immigrants, these were soon gained by European immigrants’ descendants). “Europe” thus functions as a complicated nexus of meanings in US culture: as the origin of civilization and of white racial superiority, and yet simultaneously as inferior to the United States for its feminized degeneration and lack of a Protestant work ethic in comparison to the masculine vitality of the new nation. During the world wars, “Europe” was likewise often positioned as a single place, as in “the European Theater” of war. In the Second World War, US culture’s complicated mix of envy and superciliousness continued to resonate, as it was feared that US soldiers would fall prey to the lax sexual morality and sensual delights of Europe and hence lose their American discipline and spirit; this was such a widespread concern that the “America First” movement came into being to publicly articulate these fears on a national scale and demand that the soldiers be “protected” from European decadence (McEnany 1994). Yet during and after the Second World War, these older sensibilities were joined by a new sense of brotherly concern for the welfare of the continent, as US forces were rhetorically positioned as benevolently “saving” Europe. This was again accompanied by a sense of condescension, as the United Statesian national narrative insisted on its superiority in military, technological, and cultural terms. This implicit sense of superiority still echoes today in the stereotyped figure of the “American tourist” in Europe who demands ice in their drinks and complains loudly about the plumbing. The figure of the “American tourist” points to another element of this developing United Statesian sense of superiority, which is that it was increasingly articulated with reference to its consumer capitalist society. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the United States began to develop what would become its “informal” empire—that is, one that went for the most part without officially annexed colonies—in which US corporations opened new global markets to US-style consumer capitalism. Through this informal empire, the “American way of life” was spread and came to exert increasing economic and political influence

Introduction

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globally. “Europe” again became the United States’ main foil in this dynamic— and there are historical reasons for this. As Victoria de Grazia shows, Europe actually functioned as the primary territory on which the US market empire was built (2005, 4). In the wake of each of the two world wars, when Europe was most in need, the United States opportunistically cultivated consumer desire there as an antidote to wartime poverty in order to create a new consumer– capitalist empire, for the benefit of US corporations. As de Grazia argues, The Old World was where the United States turned its power as the premier consumer society into the dominion that came from being universally recognized as the fountainhead of modern consumer practices. ... In the process of challenging Europe’s bourgeois commercial civilization and overturning its old regime, the United States established its legitimacy as the world’s first regime of mass consumption. (ibid., 4–5)

In the interwar period, the incursions of consumer capitalism were a “totally private endeavor” (Rosenberg 1982, 220) on the part of US corporations, but after the end of the Second World War this became a matter of government policy, as the United States deliberately worked to convert its increasing economic power, especially in Europe, into a “Pax Americana,” a “great imperium with the outlook of a great emporium” (de Grazia 2005, 3). Europe was the first and most important place where the United States developed this new, consumer capitalist imperial power. And, as Britain and France were concurrently losing their own empires, Europe took on another important symbolic place in the US imperial imaginary: the United States was “conquering” the very nations that had previously occupied the global seat of power, effectively converting Europe from metropole to periphery. Post Second World War, these dynamics took shape as the Marshall Plan, implemented from 1948 to 1952, in which the United States provided billions of dollars to “rebuild” Europe around the values of free trade and a consumer economy. This brought about enormous changes to European society: labor, patterns of consumption and leisure, and the structures of politics (Sywottek 1993) were all increasingly modeled after the United States. Kristin Ross illustrates the enormous changes this brought to Europeans, as in the space of just ten years a rural [French] woman might live the acquisition of electricity, running water, a stove, a refrigerator, a washing machine, a sense of interior space as distinct from exterior space, a car, a television, and the various liberations and oppressions associated with each. (1996, 5)

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Collectively referred to in Europe under the term “Americanization,” the Marshall Plan cemented US influence over the western half of the continent. This was widely regarded as “benevolent” both by the United States’ and European citizens; although the United States was extensively critiqued by Leftist intellectuals, in the mainstream Europeans experienced these changes as welcome developments that increased their quality of life. For scholars this sense of benevolence and eager welcome that characterize the mid-twentiethcentury US empire has presented a quandary: although the US’s actions in the postwar period clearly led to a new hegemony as it came to constitute a global “superpower,” this cannot be regarded as an empire in the traditional sense— both because it did not involve the direct annexation of territories and because it was widely desired and welcomed (at least in western Europe). Geir Lundestad has accordingly defined US imperialism as an “empire by invitation” with a uniquely benign moral status in accordance with liberal principles (1986). Yet there is also a darker side. The Marshall Plan was most immediately motivated by the desire to shore up Soviet influence on the continent; by 1947, there was a growing consensus in the United States that the USSR was a menace to the “free world.” In March of that year, President Truman launched what became known as the Truman Doctrine in a much-publicized speech to Congress, arguing that it was incumbent upon the United States to “support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures” and thus “giv[e]‌effect to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.” This was framed in neutral, even passive, terms of providing aid and supporting others to “work out their own destinies in their own way,” and it was on these terms that the United States “invested” billions of dollars in western Europe. Yet the Truman Doctrine came to underpin a global neocolonial project as the United States made strategic decisions to fiscally and militarily involve itself in the affairs of other countries. From the aid given to Greece and Turkey in 1947 to fight communist uprisings, to military intervention in Korea (1950–3) and Vietnam (1955–75), to crushing popular communist movements and installing dictatorships across Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s: all were deemed necessary for the safety and security of the capitalist “free world,” and all were often couched in similarly passive terms of aiding people to achieve freedom and democracy within the framework of a supposed global consensus. The Marshall Plan itself was arguably the mechanism by which consent was bought from the European global powers, building a strong liberal capitalist North Atlantic alliance and sweetening the concurrent loss of their own empires.

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The “American abroad” films arrived at precisely the historical juncture in which this “new world order” of US dominance was being shaped on European soil. What can these films reveal about the US’s imaginative investments in the “American” and the “foreign” in this critical period? What specific discourses of selfhood and otherness are being formulated? What precisely are the imaginative terms through which US imperialism is discursively identified as righteous and benevolent? And what is the relationship between these growing United Statesian imaginative discourses of empire, and the older discourses that framed the moral project of European colonialism? This book explores these questions through an examination of this crucial group of Hollywood texts.

Cinema and Empire Film studies has heretofore been somewhat limited in its explorations of the colonial and postcolonial. As Sandra Ponzanesi and Marguerite Waller show, the discipline of film studies has tended to privilege Western-centric theories like psychoanalysis and semiotics, and thus concerns about postcoloniality have been pushed to the margins (2012, 3–4). From the other side, cinema has largely remained on the periphery of scholarship on imperial culture and aesthetics. The British and French novel, as an influential popular art form in societies experiencing periods of global dominance, is often understood as fundamentally expressive of imperial ideas and sentiments (e.g., Said 1994, Brantlinger 1988); other writings, like travel narratives, have received similar treatment (Pratt 1992, Suleri 1992). Visual art, too, has received a good deal of scholarly coverage (see e.g., Barringer, Quilley, and Fordham 2007), as well as commercial advertising imagery (McClintock 1995). Cinema, on the other hand, was born as the British and French empires were on the verge of decline, so the handful of studies that exist have focused on silent cinema, the relatively brief moment when cinema most clearly converged with and participated in European imperial rule (Peterson 2013, Griffiths 2002, Rony 1996), or on the following period of European imperial decline and its postcolonial aftermath (Jaikumar 2006, Chowdhry 2000, Bernstein and Studlar 1997, Sherzer 1997). This is all accomplished work; Priya Jaikumar’s book Cinema at the End of Empire, Fatimah Tobing Rony’s The Third Eye, and Jennifer Peterson’s Education in the School of Dreams in particular have strongly influenced the present volume. Yet these works largely deal with empire as something that came to an end in the mid-twentieth century, and with cinema as a medium that traces its decline.

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Despite this, there are some disciplinary truisms by which film scholars identify Hollywood as, in essence, an imperial cinema: from the 1920s onward, it was said that “trade followed the film” as US capitalism spread internationally, and by the 1950s Hollywood films “sold the American way of life” to the world as the United States rose to the status of global superpower. Even so, the role of Hollywood in the twentieth-century growth of US imperialism has largely been treated as a fact suited primarily to industrial and economic analyses examining whether trade did indeed follow the film, how this worked at various levels of the US industry and government, and the complex ways these dynamics were negotiated and resisted by other nations (Steinhart 2019, Palmer 2016, Trumpbour 2002, Wagnleitner and May 2000, Nowell-Smith and Ricci 1998, Vasey 1997, Fehrenbach 1995, Ellwood and Kroes 1994, Wagnleitner 1994, Doherty 1993, Jarvie 1992, Koppes and Black 1987, Winkler 1978). On the whole, little attention has been paid to the imaginative aspects of Hollywood’s geopolitics. But films are not just objects of trade, like refrigerators or soap; they are texts with potentially complicated layers of meaning that can powerfully convey dominant ideology (or resist it or both at once). There are a few important works that constitute exceptions to this tendency toward industrial analysis of classical Hollywood, such as Melani McAlister’s Epic Encounters (2001), Christina Klein’s Cold War Orientalism (2003), and Russell Meeuf ’s John Wayne’s World (2013). Each does laudable work in examining how classical Hollywood cinema negotiates the “foreign” and articulates a United Statesian imperial worldview. But on the whole this has been a far less prominent approach. Previous work that specifically examines postwar Hollywood films about Europe has largely followed the same economic/industrial vein, linking this corpus particularly to Hollywood runaway production in Europe in the 1950s. Most prominently, Robert R. Shandley argues that such films function as “allegories” for their own conditions of production (2009). Shandley also links them to the contemporaneous trend of increasing US tourism in Europe, claiming that these films capitalize on this trend by offering a vicarious, virtualized experience of travel. Yet his work tends to stay solidly within the realm of materialism, looking at how films reflect historical, economic, and industrial trends. I do not dispute, of course, that runaway production in Europe occurred in the postwar period, nor do I disagree that it is linked to changes in how Europe was portrayed visually and narratively as a cinematic location in Hollywood cinema. Rather, the most salient questions about these changes have yet to be asked. The right question is not “how did these

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films’ industrial conditions of production influence their aesthetics?” but rather, given the nature of discourse as an inward-looking, self-sustaining pattern across texts, “how do these films speak to and shape United Statesian desires, idealized self-images, and repressions?” and “why did they resonate so powerfully during the period when the United States was setting out its flag as a new global imperial power?” Runaway production is itself an expression of economic domination; poorer countries don’t typically send personnel abroad to make films in richer ones (except in cases of diaspora). With this power comes the very important power to represent the world according to one’s own national viewpoint. Shandley also links these films to the growth of American tourism in Europe during the same period—which again is undeniably true in an industrial sense, that is, these films were intentionally made to capitalize on a tourism trend by depicting European travel. But what has not been much noted is that travel has, at least since Robinson Crusoe (Daniel Defoe, 1719), been one of the primary modes for the imaginative and affective articulation of empire—again pointing to the limitations of a narrowly materialist approach to postwar cinema. A closely related issue in previous scholarship is the focus on these films’ “realness”: the novelty and excitement they offered to audiences through the filming of spectacular scenes on location (Palmer 2016). However, this approach copies almost verbatim the studios’ own marketing campaigns for these films—which is reason in itself to approach such claims more critically. In addition, concepts of “real,” “authentic,” “location-shot,” and the like are not sufficient in accounting for these films’ powerful appeal—as An American in Paris readily demonstrates (given that it was not shot on location, yet won the 1951 Oscar for Best Picture). Hollywood films set in Europe (or other “foreign” locales) were not always filmed there—yet the significant number of studioshot Hollywood films that depict European locales have largely been left out of previous studies. Moreover, as a concept in film aesthetics, “real” is notoriously fraught with difficulties. One of the first things we teach undergraduates in many film programs is that there is no such thing as an unmediated “truth” or “reality” on screen, that “reality” itself is political and that filmic claims of such need to be considered critically. The question I pursue, then, is not whether these films offer an experience of reality, but rather whose reality? How are different kinds of textual claims to reality constructed aesthetically, and for what purposes?

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The Tourist as Subject In hindsight, the mid-century decades of US imperialism were a transitional era: by the early 1970s, capitalism had become so globalized, so unbounded from the nation-state that it was coming to constitute a qualitatively new economic system, deemed “late capitalism” or “globalization” or (later) “neoliberalism.” The postwar decades were, it later became clear, merely an interim period in which the postwar US government assisted in the establishment of the multinational corporation (which ultimately overtook the nation-state as the primary unit of power), promoted the deterritorialization of capital, diplomatically smoothed the path from a world shaped by European imperial dominance to this new world order, and positioned the US military as its global police force (Hardt and Negri 2000, Harvey 1990). As Fredric Jameson puts it, “it was the brief ‘American century’ (1945–73) that constituted the hothouse, or forcing ground, of the new system” (Jameson 1991, xx). The massive cultural shift which accompanied these economic changes, from modernism to postmodernism, was “the first specifically North American global style” (ibid.), having likewise been shaped by the preceding period of US imperial dominance. US international tourism arose as a mass phenomenon during this “American century” period with the rise of jet travel, an increase in United Statesians’ vacation time and disposable income, and a strong US dollar relative to other currencies (Endy 2004). Europe was by far the most popular international destination for these US tourists, who would often visit multiple European countries in a single trip. The American tourist thus constitutes a prototype for the globalized capitalist subject, hopping from continent to continent for the pleasurable consumption of other cultures and spaces. Tourist practices are grounded in and shaped by modernity. They have one foot firmly in the European colonial past, which shapes the global flows of leisure travel—from richer/more “developed” nations to poorer/less developed ones; and by the postwar period, Europe itself was beginning to count as lessdeveloped by the new standards set by global capitalism. Colonial capitalist history configures the flow of the imaginative along similar lines, shaping which cultures produce travel narratives and which are conversely the objects of such narratives (again, with European countries increasingly becoming the latter). Perhaps most importantly, tourism borrows from modernity the practice of “imperialist nostalgia” (Rosaldo 1989), in which colonizers mourn the loss of

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the “natural” or “authentic” elements of a culture that they themselves have contributed to destroying. In his classic 1976 study of the sociology of tourism, Dean MacCannell writes, For moderns, reality and authenticity are thought to be elsewhere: in other historical periods and other cultures, in purer, simpler lifestyles. ... The concern of moderns for “naturalness,” their nostalgia and their search for authenticity are not merely casual and somewhat decadent, though harmless, attachments to the souvenirs of destroyed cultures and dead epochs. They are also components of the conquering spirit of modernity. (1999, 3)

Tourism is not an innocent or harmless practice: it is central to the destruction of the natural world and traditional cultures by the imperialist expansion of modernity. And it is simultaneously a primary practice by which this destruction is sentimentalized, its violence displaced by fetishization and nostalgic longing. Though grounded in modernity, the tourist constitutes a crucial transitional subjectivity in the shift from modernity to postmodernity; indeed the tourist “acts as a witness to the breakup of modernity … as we move from national to transnational eras” (Kaplan 1996, 62) and partially catalyzes that shift. Postmodernism is “what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good” (Jameson 1991, ix): when there is nowhere left for tourists to “discover” and destroy. The hyperreal—a central aesthetic practice of the postmodern—is born precisely from the need to satisfy the tourist gaze when there is no “authentic” traditional culture left to colonize; hence the need for spaces of “staged authenticity” which cater to US tourists’ imaginative expectations (MacCannell 1976, 101–2). What Daniel Boorstin calls the “pseudo-event” began in US tourist destinations, most prominently Disneyland (Boorstin 1961; when there was no “reality” referent left to cannibalize, what was left were hyperreal simulacra that emulated the imperial pleasures of tourism, cutting “reality” to the measure of tourist desire. The “American abroad” was thus a kind of postmodern vanguard, becoming a guiding source in the aesthetic transformation of the world to the hyperreal in subsequent decades. And Europe, conversely, was a primary ground on which the hyperreal was born. The figure of the “American abroad”—the postwar United Statesian tourist in Europe—is not a mere historical footnote, an interesting cultural corollary to the “serious” history of politics and economics. Rather, it is a pivotal figure through which we might better understand the formation of postmodern aesthetics, and the shifting definitions of the subject that would ultimately lead

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to a new neoliberal subjectivity. Films about this tourist figure, in particular, are especially potent as a site for study. For one thing, these films are central texts in the formation of a US-based tourist imaginary which shaped individual tourists’ expectations and desires; a popular film about a location would inevitably cause a rise in tourism there. Anyone who has ever been to Salzburg, for example, will know just how powerfully US tourists’ expectations from a popular film (in this case The Sound of Music) can shape reality on the ground. The “American abroad” films, in other words, do not merely reflect but participate in the material creation of the hyperreal and late capitalist aesthetics more broadly. Even more importantly, these films give us unique access to a mid-century American viewpoint and its definitions of self versus other at the very moment when it is participating in a formative stage in the development of late-capitalist aesthetics. Cinema has long been identified as a medium uniquely suited to the construction of subjectivity, with its capacities for the complicated inscription of both spatial and epistemic positionality. The “American abroad” films are prime sites for tracing shifting definitions of the subject during this transitional period from modern to postmodern.

The Imperial Gaze As one might expect from the foregoing discussion—as well as from the title of the book—this work is grounded in the foundational concept of the gaze. It has long been one of the central tenets of scholarship on film aesthetics and ideology that the politics of looking inscribes power relations: broadly speaking, looking is linked to empowerment and subjecthood, while being looked at is linked to disempowerment and objecthood. The film camera constantly directs us to look with some characters and at others, thereby writing these power relations into the act of spectatorship in ways that unconsciously produce sympathy and alignment—or the lack thereof—within dominant flows of power. Laura Mulvey (1975) famously argued this point in relation to gender. A plethora of subsequent feminist film criticism has shown how, in practice, these processes involve complicated layers of identification and distanciation on the part of the spectator, in ways that are often inflected through genre and that do not always straightforwardly produce identification along strictly gendered lines (e.g., Clover 1992, Williams 1991, Doane 1987). It might be surprising that a book in 2022 would make an intervention in gaze theory. In the past two decades

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or so, gaze theory has been an area that, while constantly taught in university courses, has seen little in the way of new intellectual developments. In an era of intersectional research and broad antiracist/anticolonial challenges to older feminist theories, however, this is an opportune moment to revisit and revise the gaze. This book aims to do just that, offering an alternative to psychoanalysis as it explores eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonial formations of looking relations and their subsequent influence on Hollywood film style. Indeed as this book shows, colonial modes of gazing—the sublime and the picturesque in particular—played critical roles in the historical development of the concepts of point of view and individual subjectivity in Western culture. They thus offer a new way to think about the origins of the cinematic gaze—one that places race and colonialism at the very center, rather than as an offshoot of feminist analysis. E. Ann Kaplan’s book Looking for the Other is the most prominent attempt to extend the concept of the gendered gaze to race and colonialism, noting that “the ‘male’ gaze and the ‘imperial’ gaze cannot be separated within western patriarchal cultures” (1997, xi). She builds on the ways that gender and race are connected in the works of Freud wherein the feminine is linked to the colonial, with both marked as threatening “dark continents,” to consider race and colonialism within looking relations in cinema. Kaplan’s work is sophisticated and at times inspiring—however, the present book has a few points of departure from her approach. One issue is that, like most postcolonial scholars, she lumps the United States together with Europe as a single entity, leading to some issues with ahistoricity, as she crisscrosses continents and time periods; she lumps “Hollywood” together with things like “Science” under the single heading of “imperial gaze.” As discussed above, the present book departs from this in looking specifically at Hollywood as a United Statesian imperial cinema rather than a broader “Western” one. It also challenges the idea that there is a single hegemonic, imperial gaze: like the male gaze, racial and colonial subjectivities are inflected through genre and through various aesthetic traditions, and more is accomplished by unpacking these than by merging them. Each chapter in this book is devoted to a different tradition in imperial looking relations, interrogating, and distinguishing them through close attention to detail. My biggest quibble with Kaplan, though, is in how closely she cleaves to psychoanalysis as a theoretical paradigm for understanding the politics of vision. Although I certainly wouldn’t deny its historical importance in the twentieth-century Western formations of gender and sexuality, Freudian theory is neither necessary nor sufficient as an explanation for the gaze as a whole.

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This conviction came to me partly through teaching: in my experience, most students immediately grasp that vision is connected to power—but when Freudian terms are introduced, their comprehension turns quickly to confusion and exasperation. The gaze also, I have found in the classroom, is applied just as readily to race and colonialism as to gender; this is not a particularly difficult leap for students, again unless you try to bring psychoanalysis into it. This suggests that we do not need Freud or Lacan for the gaze to hold water as a theory and that the traditional emphasis on psychoanalysis in this area may be due more to a coincidental convergence of scholarly trends in the 1970s than to any necessary relationship. Indeed, it is past time for us to place Freud definitively in the past and start reading his works symptomatically, as producing theories that justified a posteriori a deeply misogynist Victorian worldview and that mobilized many of the same racist metaphors that were already floating around in Western culture at the time of his writing. This book offers an alternative to psychoanalysis as a basis for theorizing the imperial gaze. It traces four different traditions in Western imperial aesthetics— the sublime, the ethnographic, the picturesque, and glamour—as they are taken up and transformed for the conventions of Hollywood representation and for specifically United Statesian imperialism in the postwar period. Each of these aesthetic traditions has its own distinctive imperial politics of vision—all interconnected in that they all rest on some broad Western colonial and racist traditions, yet all mobilizing the gaze in different ways, producing different modes of subjectivity, instigating wildly different affects, and emphasizing different facets of racist and colonial representation. The imperial gaze, as we’ll see, is not one thing but rather an array of visual and narrative techniques that are grounded in and extend historical discursive formations and that together produce a “flexible positional superiority” as the natural state of the white United Statesian man and, to a lesser degree, his female counterpart. Each of these aesthetics is addressed in a dedicated chapter. The sublime, the subject of Chapter 1, going back at least to Kant has been linked to claims of European/white superiority by ontologically splitting humans into two groups— white subjects who experience the sublime, and racially othered objects whose images can provoke sublime reactions but who are not themselves capable of experiencing it. The sublime was the earliest of the four aesthetic traditions to arise in European art and philosophy, so it is fascinating that it also turns up first in the “American abroad” films, in both cases aestheticizing a period of initial encounter with the dark other. In the late-1940s Hollywood films

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about bombed-out German cities, like Berlin Express (Jacques Tourneur, RKO, 1948) and The Third Man (Carol Reed, London Films/Selznick, 1949), Germans and Russians become the objects of an American sublime gaze, as these films invoke the Iron Curtain as a liminal space between light and dark. The mobilization of the sublime in these films implicitly positions the white American man as the natural choice for reordering the moral and epistemic disarray of postwar Europe—as the only subject capable of confronting this existential chaos and overcoming it. The ethnographic, similarly, has for centuries been a major aesthetic strategy for the creation of a racial/colonial other, aligning the spectator with the figure of the white male colonial explorer and constructing a condescending yet aweinspiring gaze on the lands and peoples he visits. Associated with the phase of European exploration and the development of “scientific” classificatory systems of foreign peoples and places that have been economically/politically subjugated, the ethnographic likewise arrived in the “American abroad” films at a moment in the early 1950s when the formal US occupation of Europe was coming to an end. Chapter 2 shows how postwar Hollywood films draw on this tradition in their depictions of Europe. In so doing, it deploys the strange intricacies built into the United Statesian concept of whiteness to impose an outsider’s understanding of racial politics onto the European continent, while at the same time positioning the securely white American man as the new owner of the technological gaze of modernity. The first two chapters focus on the white American male subject as the central figure in the development of an American imperial gaze. The second half of the book instead focuses on the white American woman—a figure who must continually negotiate her role as a disempowered bearer of patriarchal meanings while simultaneously accruing power as a maker of imperial meanings. Chapter 3 explores the “American abroad” films’ mobilization of the picturesque, with its troublesome history in relation to white women in colonialism. The picturesque aesthetic long played a masking or repressing function in European colonialism, converting white colonial anxieties into static imagery that fixes the landscape as to-be-looked-at, as if constructed solely for the pleasure of the white spectator. Long associated with the rise of mass tourism, especially for white women in colonial spaces that had been deemed “safe” for them, the picturesque comes to prominence in the mid-1950s during the rapid expansion of American tourism in Europe. This chapter looks at white American women’s complex negotiations of gender and race/colonialism found in the Italy-set “woman’s film,” including

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Three Coins in the Fountain (Jean Negulesco, 20th Century Fox, 1954) and Summertime (David Lean, United Artists, 1955), investigating how the figure of the white American woman traveler invokes the tradition of the picturesque through her gaze upon the landscapes of Italy. And Chapter 4 examines glamour as an aesthetic that frames imperial power as a symbolic power over life and death and then inscribes this decoratively onto white women’s bodies. The latest of these four aesthetics to arrive historically, glamour is a visual style associated with the industrialization of colonial economies and the rise of mass consumerism in the West; it likewise arises in the mid- to late-1950s “American abroad” films as an aesthetics of secure ownership, as though the process of takeover is now complete. Hollywood’s 1950s Paris-set musicals are centrally focused on the adornment of women’s bodies through this city’s association with both high fashion and the figure of the showgirl. Films like Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Howard Hawks, 20th Century Fox, 1953) and Funny Face (Stanley Donen, Paramount, 1957) thus serve as prime case studies for the examination of glamour as an imperial aesthetic. It is a cliché that classical Hollywood was superlatively glamorous, and this chapter gives this fact the racial/geopolitical reading it has always deserved, thus offering yet another approach to the links between the gendered gaze and the colonial. Each chapter is relatively self-contained, so readers should feel free to skip around. Yet, taken together, the book as a whole tells an important story. The four chapters are arranged in rough chronological order, starting with the sublime’s rise in Hollywood cinema of the immediate postwar period and ending with the shifts in glamour discourse of the mid to late 1950s. This order echoes the historical development of each of these aesthetics within European imperial culture. The sublime originated in the early Enlightenment as Europeans were experiencing first encounters with other cultures and honing the sense of superiority that would justify further colonial exploration. The ethnographic arose during the later Enlightenment period, as colonial expansion was increasingly justified in terms of scientific study. The picturesque, although it appeared earlier (alongside the sublime) as a concept in philosophical aesthetics, exploded into popular visual culture during the Romantic period and took on connotations of a feminized viewing position upon a colonized world. And glamour, finally, appeared as European colonial capitalism became increasingly industrialized and mechanized; it is fundamentally an aesthetics of globalized consumer capitalism. The “American abroad” films trace a similar historical progression of imperialist aesthetics in fast motion, over a single decade. Taken together,

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these films illustrate how the United States developed its own self-perceptions as a new global imperial power. This begins with an initial sublime encounter with the dark other of Nazism that functions as a moral call to neocolonial interference in the name of democratic values. Through the ethnographic and the picturesque, films of the early to mid-1950s trace a gradually increasing sense of security, both political and epistemological, in US dominance on the world stage. And late-1950s shifts in glamour indicate, finally, a sense of having fully arrived within the traditional halls of power, projecting American prestige through the mobilization of what had previously been an upper-class aesthetic. Taken altogether, the “American abroad” films lay the foundation for what would become an American-dominated global visual culture for decades to come. As I’ll address in the conclusion, both the identificatory figure of the American abroad and the four aesthetic traditions explored in this book had major implications in the development of postmodern/late-capitalist aesthetics that continue to reverberate today. Speaking very broadly, classical Hollywood had two modes of spatial representation: the utopian and the dystopian. The dystopian is centrally exemplified by film noir, which often depicts dingy, shadowy, half-ruined spaces, usually in black and white. Chapter 1 addresses at length Hollywood’s tradition of dystopian aesthetics, arguing that it is inextricably linked to the imperialist aesthetic tradition of the sublime. The other three chapters are each about different flavors of utopia, and I want to say a little more about this here as a broad concept before each chapter gets into more specifics. Dyer has shown that the Hollywood version of utopia is a capitalist, white supremacist one (2002, 1995). This is perhaps most clearly illustrated in the musical, which as Jane Feuer notes is often organized around a dichotomy between the realm of the everyday and a utopian dreamworld (1993). The musical thus offers a unique view on what Dyer calls the “capitalist palliatives,” which propose to solve the very problems caused by capitalism itself. The musical constitutes Hollywood’s most potent theory of space, as it were: the most immediate expression of its “dream factory” status. A sizeable chunk of the “American abroad” films are musicals, and these could be described as conjuring up “real” European locations in ways that satisfy the utopian representational expectations of this genre. In other words, “European” space becomes a site for the enactment of utopia for the American abroad. And we might understand the other, non-musicals in the group of “American abroad” films as similarly conforming to the sensibility of utopian spectacle that was first

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developed in that genre: a case where a discourse of the “real” (e.g., filming on location) has been made to fit into a preexisting utopian sensibility. This melding of the Hollywood dreamworld with the discourse of the real further buttresses its capitalist white supremacist underpinnings, as Hollywood’s powerful utopian vision is combined with the technologized, colonial gaze of the film camera. From the earliest days of cinema, this medium was used in ways that evoked colonial discourses of “eyewitness” travel as a visual mode of domination. Perhaps, then, we can read the “American abroad” films as an expansion of the “dream factory” project: what happens when the United Statesian vision of utopia packs its bags and goes abroad?

1

The Sublime: Urban Ruins from Nazism to the Cold War

The Search (Fred Zinneman, MGM, 1948) is a Hollywood film that illustrates and buoys United Nations-led efforts to aid children recently released from German concentration camps. An initial documentary-like sequence depicts a group of children as they arrive at a UN camp in boxcars with shell-shocked, terrified faces; they are generously fed, given comfortable beds to sleep in, and their stories are painstakingly untangled by compassionate UN bureaucrats so that they can be reunited with their families. The film then focuses in on the story of one traumatized little boy (played by Ivan Jandl) who has no language and can’t tell them anything about himself. Elsewhere in Germany, his mother (Jarmila Novotná), herself recently liberated from a concentration camp, is looking for him. The remainder of the film cuts back and forth between the boy and his mother as they search for each other—she in UN children’s camps and he in the haunted spaces of an unnamed, bombed-out German city—to be tearfully reunited in the final scene through the actions of two Americans, a US military engineer (Montgomery Clift) who has found the boy on the street and taken him in, and a UN children’s official (Aline McMahon) who takes on his case. The Search thus melodramatically enacts a healing of European trauma through the official state actions of US personnel, who are positioned as uniquely capable of sorting through and compassionately reordering the wreckage of German life. The story plays out against the backdrop of Germany’s devastating urban rubble, a space within which the ragtag children are often visually situated. In one sequence, trucks loaded with children make their way through the ruined German city, and we are shown a series of panoramic views on the scene. One particularly striking shot peers through a hole in a bombed-out building to gaze upon the ruins stretching off into the distance behind it (Figure 4). Others show the trucks wending their way through piles of rubble, all that is left of the city.

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Figure 4  The Search: Ruins stretching off into the distance.

Such visual fields of overwhelming destruction, accompanied by a sense of distance and infinity, are constitutive of the aesthetic tradition of the sublime. Christine Battersby defines the sublime as the “overwhelming, breathtaking, awe-inspiring, tremendous, terrifying, unrepresentable” (Battersby 2007, 1). It’s an aesthetics of incomprehensibility, a way of portraying irreducible difference and the terror of infinity—yet it does so in a way that also functions to manage difference, to convert terror into a pleasurable aesthetic experience and thus, paradoxically, to deprive it of its power. As I’ll show, the sublime is also deeply intertwined with colonial, gendered, and classed politics. It can be traced back to the Enlightenment when it was seen as the exclusive purview of educated white men; indeed, Kant argued that experiencing the sublime was an essential step in the development of “reason,” a mode of mental and moral superiority that was available solely to this demographic. The sublime is a Western colonial aesthetic, linked to colonial contexts as a mode for the depiction of the terror of the other. Ultimately, it functions as a justification for the colonial violence that will bring this other under control by “rational” white men.



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This chapter considers a cycle of films that I call “ruin films”—Hollywood films made in the late 1940s that feature the urban rubble of cities destroyed by bombing during the Second World War. Made between 1948 and 1950, this cycle includes The Search as well as Berlin Express (Jacques Tourneur, RKO, 1948), A Foreign Affair (Billy Wilder, Paramount, 1948), The Third Man (Carol Reed, London Films/Selznick, 1949), and The Big Lift (George Seaton, 20th Century Fox, 1950), all of which prominently feature location-shot images of war-torn German and Austrian cities. Calling them “ruin films” links them to the Trümmerfilm or “rubble films” that were made by the newly reestablished German film industry around the same time and place—films about Germans who had survived the war and were now piecing their lives back together amid these same bombed-out German cities (Wickham 2014, Fay 2008a, Shandley 2001). The ruin films, by contrast, are Hollywood studio-made films that focus on American characters and on a United Statesian view of such landscapes. They mobilize the sublime as a spectacular visual aesthetics focused on the dystopian, prominently featuring visually oriented montage sequences that give the viewer sensory access to the overwhelming destruction wrought by the war while enabling sublime contemplation of the magnitude of the devastation. A sense of distance is a defining feature of the sublime and, indeed, these montage sequences often present promontory, aerial, or other distanced/distancing perspectives on the ruins. In conjunction with this visual project, each film depicts a story about the messy, ambiguous, and difficult entanglements with a nebulously defined other greeting white United Statesian men in a newly postwar Germany. The aesthetics of danger and doubt mobilized in these films paradoxically functions to recenter the white American male subject as a moral and martial authority in a polarized world. The white American man is positioned both as the primary subject through which this terrifying world of chaos, danger, and uncertainty is perceived and comprehended, as well as the natural and necessary leader to palliate and reorganize it. This chapter examines how, in the ruin films, the sublime aesthetic was adapted to serve a specifically United Statesian imperial worldview. I argue that the ruin films draw on the Western imaginative framework of the ruin—a primal site of the sublime—to construct a new configuration of otherness suited to justifying a US-led world of liberal capitalism. This began in Hollywood’s attempts to comprehend and present the atrocities of the Nazis to the US public: when finally fully exposed in the immediate aftermath of the war through vehicles like Death Mills (Billy Wilder, US Department of War, 1945),

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many in the United States experienced the magnitude of Nazi crimes as defying reason, beyond understanding, too horrifying to fathom—in other words, as sublime. Over the crucial three-year period in which the ruin films were made, we witness a transfer of this logic of the sublime from Nazis to Russians, as this aesthetic became a primary mode for depicting and narrativizing the early Cold War. The sublime was thus instrumental in shaping a US neocolonial imaginary that positions the United States as the savior of the “free world,” framed against a dark other. The sublime was the earliest of the four aesthetics discussed in this book to arise historically; it was the subject of philosophical tracts as early as the late seventeenth century. From the beginning, it functioned as a mode for the aestheticization of early colonial encounters in the exploratory phase of European expansion. In this context, the sublime was fundamentally conceived as a way for white European men to manage their terror of the colonial other by converting this terror into an experience linked to “reason,” and thus ultimately, functioning to justify colonial violence and European dominion. It thus seems doubly significant that it arises once again during and after Second World War, this time in Hollywood cinema, as a culturally available mode for the management of terror in a formative period of American neocolonial encounters in Europe. Several of the ruin films are also films noirs, or at least noir-adjacent: Berlin Express and The Third Man share many evident features with film noir; The Big Lift is a military drama that contains some important noir elements, such as a femme fatale, while A Foreign Affair is more generically unstable and has been called a “satire-noir” (Fay and Nieland 2010, 48). It has often been argued that film noir style constitutes a mode for managing difference, functioning at once to express and to contain the fears associated with an encounter with the other—a function that shares many features with the sublime. Psychoanalysis, with its emphasis on sexual difference, has been the dominant framework for such an understanding of noir, with national and racial difference often understood as playing symbolic functions within this system—though in recent years there has been an increasing interest in noir’s approaches to national and racial difference in their own right. This chapter extends this newer scholarship by considering film noir through the colonial lens of the sublime. Two aesthetic traditions that have been extensively linked to film noir will be a particular focus: the uncanny, which functions as a disturbing echo of repressed otherness, and modernism, with its reflexive interrogation of the narrativization of the (white, male) self. Following some further discussion of the history of the sublime, my analysis of



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Berlin Express will consider the uncanny in relation to the sublime, arguing for the latter as a more suitable aesthetic framework for comprehending film noir. Then in the final section, my study of The Third Man will examine the extensive links between the sublime and modernism. Following on Priya Jaikumar’s reading of modernism as a mode for managing British imperial anxieties (2006), I read The Third Man as a modernist self-interrogation of the possibilities of imperial narration which contains a dual address to both British and United Statesian imperial cultures.

Ruins and the Sublime Ruins are imbued with a superabundance of meanings in Western culture, and ruin gazing must be understood as a political as well as an aesthetic activity that brings varying, contested theories of race, national identity, power, and subjectivity into play. For more than two centuries in Western culture, ruins have been thematically linked to the rise and decline of empires, crystallizing “imperial imaginaries and their particular articulations of time and space” (Hell 2010, 171). Following the discovery of Pompeii in the late eighteenth century, Roman ruins arose as a major trope in Romanticism, speaking to the ramifications of the French Revolution and its radical break with the past (Hell and Schönle 2010, 2). Napoleon’s obsession with the ruins of Egypt was connected to his vision of empire, and these (and other Middle Eastern ruins) became frequent subjects of Orientalist art and writing throughout the nineteenth century. Ruins thus constitute a semantically loaded site for political articulations of space—connoting dreams of expansion and domination—as well as time, simultaneously facilitating both nostalgia for an idealized past and utopian possibilities for the future. All of this could be mobilized for rich, multivalent political ends. In the 1930s, Nazism engaged this tradition, putting ruins in the imaginative service of a new German Reich. Hitler was besotted with imagery of Roman ruins; his cabinet room at the Reichstag was decorated with a Romantic painting of the Roman Forum, and with great fanfare he visited Mussolini in Rome in 1938, the highlight of which was a nighttime tour of the ruins of imperial Rome, splendidly lit up to give a sense of “scopic mastery” that “allowed them to look both backward and forward—to their imperial past and to the future of their empire” (Hell 2010, 182). Hitler and his chief architect Albert Speer envisioned

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a German imperial architecture that would not only last hundreds of years, but which, when it did eventually decay, would do so in a way that would emulate Roman ruins and thus enable analogous sorts of ruin gazing. So, Nazi ideology already connects to a rich imagery of ruins, making it even nearer at hand in early postwar US portrayals of the war’s devastation in Germany. The ruin films mobilize an ironic gaze that turns the Nazi obsession with imperial ruins into a dark, bitter joke in the face of the utter devastation of the Nazi imperial project. In A Foreign Affair, the American congressmen joke as they fly over the ruined skyline of Berlin that it looks “like packrats been gnawing at an old moldy hunk of Roquefort cheese,” while the narrator of Berlin Express sardonically designates the crumbling skyline of ruined Frankfurt as a unique architectural style called “early twentieth-century modern warfare.” The films repeatedly draw grim, ironic attention to the immense violence of Nazi imperialist grandeur, thus functioning to distance the United States from fascist dreams of expansion. It is important for Hollywood ruin films to highlight this distance from Nazism because they engage in an analogous activity, imposing their own political, self-glorifying meanings onto the very same ruins. In twentieth-century Western liberal democracies, ruins are often linked to the cycle of destruction and progress that is viewed as endemic to modernity. Through imagery of ruins, destruction of the old to make way for the new is perceived as inevitable, being necessary for the march of progress, while simultaneously bringing forth a sense of awe, of shock at the magnitude of the wreckage and all that has been lost. As Russell A. Berman submits in his discussion of ruins in US culture: The ruin of the past is the declaration of independence of the present. Modern ruins therefore enact a particular political representation, the ruin as the ruins of an ancien régime. Moreover, the destruction of that regime is the precondition for democracy: the path to the future is strewn with rubble. Democracy requires ruins. (2010, 104)

Even as the ruin invokes dreams of a revered ancient civilization, it simultaneously has an opposite temporality in US culture: a temporality of fleetingness, as the ruins are soon to be cleared away to make space for the new. In the ruin films, the people who are viewing and contemplating the ruins of Germany are largely white American men, and the newness to be built is US-led liberal international capitalism–two facts that are clearly linked, as the white American male protagonists in each of these films are narratively positioned as uniquely capable



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of bringing about this future utopia. In any case, who is looking at the ruins, how the audience is to experience them, and what they signify politically is a topic of major concern in the films, as well as a potent site of contestation in the postwar world. Indeed, “The ruin is often the playground of speculative strategies that tell us more about the beholder than about the ruin or its original environment” (Hell and Schonle 2010, 7). The ruin films are an excellent site for interrogating the visual politics in play in the postwar world as US culture was coming to see and understand the world in new ways. These issues of visual politics come to a head in the aesthetics of the sublime, which has long-standing associations with ruin imagery and which constitutes a major Western mode for the aesthetic management of political power. In fact, ruins constitute not merely one type of sublime image, but its primal site. The sublime arose in part out of the immense wreckage of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake (Regier 2010), whose catastrophic tremors were felt as far away as North Africa and England. Contemplation and aestheticization of this traumatic continental event had widespread reverberations in Enlightenment philosophy, as the earthquake, its ruins, and the sublime art that they inspired would catalyze an entire wave of thinking about secularizing concepts of perception, reason, and consciousness. Enlightenment articulations of the Western subject were happening in the context of the flourishing of European colonialism, and the sublime, being wrapped up in this project, was a deeply raced and gendered concept. Indeed, the sublime can be understood fundamentally as an aesthetics for the management of colonial difference, playing a vital role in Enlightenment philosophy’s singling out of white men as uniquely suited to fulfill an empowered, dominant subject position in Western colonialism. In Edmund Burke’s account of the sublime, it is defined as a delight that can be found in the aesthetic contemplation of danger, pain, or terror—always at a remove, of course, in a way that incites excitement rather than genuine fear. Many of Burke’s examples are heavily tinged with racial, colonial, and/or gendered implications. For example, he describes white people’s contemplation of darkness or blackness as linked to a “natural” horror that Burke believes is mechanically generated by the “contraction of the radial fibres of the iris” (1782, 278). He illustrates this point with a story about a white child who, upon recovering from blindness, sees a Black person and is immediately struck with horror (ibid., 276). The sublime is thus quite explicitly reserved for white people to experience. And it is also reserved specifically for white men; white women are confined to the lesser category of the “beautiful,”

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both as objects to be looked at and in terms of their own capacity of perception. Burke’s analysis of the sublime thus engages a tangled nexus of race and gender. As Battersby summarizes it in her remarkable book on the history of the sublime, “the psychological thrill that comes from the sublime [in Burke’s analysis] … is exemplified by kings and commanders discharging their terrible strength and destroying all obstacles in their paths” (2007, 7). Simultaneously gendered and geopolitical, Burke frames spatial expansion and colonial violence as a pleasurable, enrapturing, delightful aesthetic experience available solely to white men. Kant expands further on this logic, defining the sublime as a type of fear that has been modified by reason, enabling one to “consider an object as fearful without being afraid of it” (2000, 144). The sublime opens up a split in the self between reason and terror, with the rational part of the mind working to overcome the terror and reestablish control, thus “giv[ing] us the courage to measure ourselves against the apparent all-powerfulness of nature” (ibid., 145). Kant is at pains to establish that the experience of the sublime is not possible without the prior faculty of “reason,” and that only white, educated European men have this faculty. An “Alpine peasant” cannot, in Kant’s view, access the sublime due to the lack of development of his faculty of reason, and as a consequence he is simply afraid of the “icy mountains” (Battersby 2007, 31; Kant 2000, 265). The sublime is therefore “culturally and historically specific” (Battersby 2007, 31): it is inaccessible to anyone who lacks the right kind of moral education, namely lower-class or uneducated Europeans, let alone people of color. It is also inaccessible to white women, although this is conceived not as an inability so much as a “quasi-moral duty for women not to develop their personality, reason and understanding in the direction of the sublime” (ibid., 13), since experiencing fear is necessary for the protection of fetuses and children. The experience of the sublime, then, is conceived as belonging to educated white men, while women, non-whites, and “peasants” are conversely placed as potential objects of sublime perception. The whiteness, maleness, and class privilege of the rational subject experiencing the sublime becomes quite important given that Kant’s later writings “link full personhood and moral autonomy to the sublime” (ibid., 9). The white Western male must learn, through education and the attainment of reason, to overcome the inscrutable other, converting his innate fear into a rational containment of their incipient threat. Indeed, for Kant, warfare is practically a necessary condition for the creation of rational male subjectivity through the sublime, as



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periods of peace “usually debase the mentality of the populace” to the point that it lacks sufficient reason to experience the sublime (2000, 146). The sublime thus constitutes a central moment for the exercise of colonial and gendered power: in other words, as an implicit justification for colonial violence. The objects of sublime experience are envisioned as a dark, terrifying wilderness to be conquered, while the subject—the white male—is placed at the center of perception and endowed with the unique capability to intervene in, reorder, and regulate the colonial chaos with which he is confronted.

The Atomic Sublime and the Cold War The colonial sublime has specific, and continuing, resonances in white US culture. David Nye argues that sublime spectatorship became a foundational aesthetic experience in the definition of United Statesian citizenship (1994). Nye takes a celebratory tone in his discussion of the “American technological sublime.” He identifies the sublime’s United Statesian iteration as arising from the discovery of the New World and its framing through aesthetic experience, in a way that was “in harmony with American political, social, and religious conditions” as United Statesians’ “fashioned a discourse that identified the new nation with the landscape” (ibid., 3). It seems clear, though unmarked, that this refers specifically to white US culture. Indeed, the sublime, in causing a split or rift within the white male self between terror and reason—with one half getting too close to the colonial other, while the other half uses reason to pull back and reestablish control—bears a striking resemblance to discourses of the white masculinity of the frontier, which situates the white United Statesian man as standing guard at the border between the light of civilization and the dark wilderness, continually working to expand white civilization through overcoming the other. The frontier was prominently defined by Frederick Jackson Turner as a borderland between civilization/rationality and a threatening wilderness, thus giving rise to the primary “democratic” traits of the white male subject (1893). The sublime resides on the same borderline, the same split between self and other which is also a split between two halves of the self, and which is evidently so central to the proper formation of the white male subject. Nye argues that as the sublime developed in the US context, it increasingly applied not just to natural phenomena but to man-made technological wonders whose massive scale causes astonishment to the beholder, including railroads,

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skyscrapers, and the electrified cityscape. These man-made sights connect to the original meanings of the sublime in that they continue to suggest white men’s domination over nature, but at a further degree removed, since what is gazed upon in the American technological sublime is the immense magnitude of the works built to the measure of this domination. Yet for all that, the first atomic bomb detonation constituted a rupture in the discourse of the American technological sublime, as the immense ruination caused by atomic blasts brought “terror back to the technological object and eras[ed] any illusions that science was intrinsically beneficent” (Nye 1994, 225). Indeed, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki “seemed less like a military action than a rupture in the very order of nature” (Weart 1988, 107). Thus, at the end of the Second World War, the sublime was brought back into immediate cultural currency: ruins, even when in Europe (geographically distant from the atomic blasts), subtly mobilized atomic terror through the lens of a newly reinvigorated sublime aesthetic. The atomic bomb threatened a traumatic new rupture in white male consciousness, since it was now the rational, scientific, Western self which was the source of sublime destruction. This threat to explode dichotomies of self versus other was perceived as a new kind of interior crisis over the darkness within the white male subject, which would require new, heightened levels of exertion—focused both outward and inward—to be “contained.” It is at this historical juncture that the ruin film appears; it speaks directly to the newly roused sublime reaction to the atomic bomb. These films work to build new modes of perception suited to this politics of the sublime through their depictions of white American men who are confronting a dark other amongst the urban rubble of Germany. While during the immediate postwar period the atomic sublime was conceptually linked with Nazism, by the end of the 1940s the dark half of its Manichean split was increasingly occupied by Russians rather than Germans. In 1946, Winston Churchill delineated an “Iron Curtain” that was splitting the continent between the free Western world and the “Soviet sphere of influence.” In President Truman’s celebrated 1947 speech that inaugurated the Truman Doctrine, he also framed the conflict with the USSR in dualistic terms, a rhetorical move that would grow to become enormously prevalent in the decades that followed. At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. The choice is too often not a free one. One way



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is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions … The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed on a majority. It relies on terror and oppression.

This binary of the light of freedom versus (in Ronald Reagan’s immortal phrase) an “evil empire,” separated by an Iron Curtain—a hard border, both physical and epistemological—was extraordinarily resonant in the postwar United Statesian cultural imaginary. Truman’s version of this logic is mild mannered and thus seemingly naturalized under the aegis of white male rationality, yet it subtly mobilizes a long history of Western, and particularly United Statesian, imaginaries of otherness in order to justify a neocolonial project. The sublime, an aesthetic that dramatizes the encounter between the two halves of this divide, came to occupy a crucial place in the development of a Cold War imaginary in United Statesian culture which drew extensively on colonial imagery to justify a US neocolonial project, protecting the self from a menacing other. The ruin films serve as key texts illustrating the formation of this Cold War neocolonial imaginary, forged through American encounters with the sublime ruins of central Europe. Let’s return to The Search for a moment to look at how the sublime is interpolated into the film text. For one thing, there is a thematic tension in this film between mappability and unmappability, the comprehensible and the incomprehensible, that which may be rationally ordered and that which can never be—a key feature of the sublime. The children arrive on a train—a US colonial symbol of ordering the wild untamed landscape (Kirby 1997)—but they pour out of the boxcars as an unwashed, multitudinous, wretched mass. The voice-over narration by Aline McMahon cements a US perspective on the film’s events, describing to us these “millions of tiny, helpless, bewildered children” who were “found wandering, lost, homeless, in concentration camps” and who “move like machines, making not a sound.” The camera gazes repeatedly on their terrified or tuned out faces, their defeated, hollow, rote bodily movements, and their bedraggled, filthy hair and clothes. The experiences that led them here are framed by the narrator as beyond comprehension and beyond any redress that could be enacted even by the best-meaning officials. The children’s horror is represented as beyond representation—marked as a rupture in documentary’s discourses of legibility, a terrain that is unmappable. This endows the spectator with positional superiority: the children are only capable of fear, while the spectator is implied to have the superior faculties of

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reason and comprehension, aligned as we are with the UN officials’ mission of compassionate reordering of the war’s dark chaos. These gaps in perception and knowledge between the spectator and the children are spatially and visually organized via sublime aesthetics: the children are situated within the war-torn landscape, while the spectator is positioned at a distance from them, viewing them, and often also given visual access to facts that the children cannot see. Just prior to the sequence of dystopian panoramic views discussed above, we see the children being loaded en masse into trucks, some of which are ambulances, after having been sorted by destination. The children are frightened of ambulances as rumored sites of Nazi mass murder. The children flee in terror, yet the spectator knows all along that they are in safe hands; the children’s perspective is shown to be incorrect, lacking key information that the spectator possesses. Raging water is a common theme in the sublime, and an important motif in The Search is the rough, churning river. Near the beginning of the film, the narrator asks about the little boy, “Why won’t you speak? Where do you come from? Where is your home? Who are your father and mother?” This voice-over is accompanied by a close-up shot of a paper form filled out with nothing but question marks and blank spaces, followed by a slow dissolve to a roiling river, symbolizing the shapeless and unnavigable chaos that the US bureaucrat must try to reorder (Figure 5). Later, when this boy (whose name we eventually find out is Karel) and his French friend escape, the French boy dramatically drowns in the same river. Two uniformed servicemen attempt to rescue him, but they fail; his small body is swept away by the current and disappears underneath the surface, accompanied by melodramatic music. Steve (Clift), the US serviceman who discovers Karel amongst the ruins and takes him in, is an engineer who is specifically identified as a specialist in building bridges—rather clunking us on the head with a colonial metaphor for turning chaotic danger into something safe, navigable, and even beautiful through white male endeavor. When he later gets the idea of adopting Karel (whom he believes to be an orphan) and taking him back to the United States, he says, “I’ll construct a kid’s life for a change, instead of a bridge,” thus connecting the child’s need for familial reordering to the sublime destruction of the ruined landscape. Later, as Steve and Karel pause together on the banks of the river outside the city, the image of the rushing water is transferred to a pastoral, peaceful, and safe setting (Figure 6). The sublime is thus converted to the picturesque, a utopian transformation of the sublime that symbolizes the positive effects of Steve’s care for the child. American characters thus do the mapping, the making navigable



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Figure 5  The Search: A form with nothing but question marks and blank spaces dissolves to a shot of a roiling river.

Figure 6  The Search: The river’s rushing water is transferred to a pastoral, peaceful, and safe setting.

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and safe, that is necessary to mitigate the aftermath of European children’s horrific encounters with Nazi violence. The sublime is about precisely this tension between order and chaos, between reason and the irrational, encapsulating the moment of encounter between the two sides. It functions paradoxically both to dramatize a rupture, yet simultaneously to recuperate this rupture into the rational by bringing the power of white male consciousness to bear upon it. The terror of the sublime heightens the power of the white male subject, who is solely capable of overcoming and managing the sublime landscape through his exercise of reason. In The Search and the other ruin films, the sublime is folded into Hollywood representations of postwar Germany and Austria, becoming a mode for the specifically white American man to organize his perceptions and overcome his terror of both Nazis and Soviets to become a benevolent hero.

Berlin Express and the Neocolonial Politics of Film Noir Berlin Express, an RKO film released in May 1948, focuses on Robert Lindley (Robert Ryan), an American nutritionist who is being sent to Germany by the US government to work in the Occupied zone and “make 1,500 calories seem like an eight-course meal,” as he describes his mission. Starting out in Paris, Lindley boards a US government train bound for Frankfurt and Berlin, where he shares a car with an assortment of other characters: an important German academic working for peace, the academic’s French woman secretary, a Russian army officer, a British school teacher working in “re-education,” and a French businessman. The scene is immediately set for an allegorical reading, with various nationally identified actors aboard a train bound for Germany. The German academic—or rather, as we soon learn, his stand-in, designated for security purposes so that the man himself can travel anonymously—is murdered, and the other characters become embroiled in an investigation that takes them through the nighttime ruins of Frankfurt, with the American Lindley taking on a leadership role in the posse and ultimately identifying the killer. Major elements of the film clearly mark it as the terrain of film noir: the plot revolves around a murder investigation; the setting is a ruined urban space mostly at night; the visual style is characterized by sharp high-contrast black and white photography; a voice-over narrates the film; and Robert Ryan plays the lead (as he often did in hard-boiled thrillers). In this section, I will focus a reading of



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Berlin Express on three areas of noir scholarship—noir and urban space, noir and the Cold War, and psychoanalytic approaches to noir. I examine how the critical lens of the sublime enhances, and challenges, each of these areas of noir theory, thus advancing a case for the sublime as a crucial consideration in the scholarly analysis of film noir. Colonial imagery is pervasive throughout this genre, a fact that has often been read in a Freudian vein—as though such imagery is “really” about gender and sexual difference. The theoretical framework of the sublime has the capacity to put race and colonialism at the center rather than subsuming it into other concerns, a move which is long overdue. The film starts in Paris, moves to Frankfurt and then, briefly at the end, to Berlin. The contrast between how Paris and the German cities are portrayed, both visually and in terms of what the voice-over narrator says about them, is striking; it mobilizes similar discourses of mappability and reordering that we saw in The Search, but here the legible and the illegible are each endowed with a corresponding urban topography and hence mapped spatially with reference to national borders. Paris, in the opening sequence, is a space where Lindley can take a break from the pressing problems facing Europe and enjoy himself for a moment. We, along with him, are treated to a tour of the beautiful city: Notre Dame, the Eiffel Tower, Sacre Coeur, and so on, all shown in idealized tourist views that emphasize their beauty and timelessness. The French city’s quaint inhabitants (including the schoolboys who spot a downed carrier pigeon and thus set the film’s plot in motion) are displayed for us as are its beautiful women, as one of the first shots of Lindley shows him sitting in a sidewalk café, framed by the bodies of two attractive women in the foreground. These touristic views of Paris have utopian overtones of peace, safety, and legibility via tourist discourses; the French capital is available to be seen, walked around, and visually consumed for pleasure, corresponding to the light, safe, domestic half of the colonial dichotomy. But Lindley soon departs for Frankfurt, which by contrast is a scene of sublime destruction: wrecked, rubble-strewn, in need of US-led rebuilding efforts. The first shots we see of the city are through the window of the train, with the spectator positioned as a passenger who is encountering Frankfurt for the first time (Figure 7). The film thus emulates the visual position of the train in the western genre, and more generally in the visual politics of colonial exploration— and indeed the narrator describes the cityscape as “the biggest ghost town you’ve ever seen,” another mobilization of the “Old West” imagery. Just as we are given a side-mounted view of the train pulling into the central station, the narrator

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Figure 7  Berlin Express: Encountering Frankfurt’s ruined cityscape through the window of an arriving train.

tells of the “skilled experts in restoration and order who would enter this strange new world” at the war’s end; the narration thus aligns itself both visually and conceptually with the arrival of the Occupation forces. Once Lindley is on a bus being taken to the US military police headquarters, the tour of the city continues from the perspective of a passenger on this vehicle. Frankfurt’s disorganization and ruin, symbolized by the moral disorder of the black market, is contrasted with the tourist discourses of Paris: in Frankfurt, there is “no such thing as the casual sightseeing traveler.” The German city’s built environment, though visually displayed for us through idealized, aestheticized views, is endowed with a tone of ironic remove given the immensity of the destruction displayed. As the narrator sardonically puts it, “the architecture has a modern touch, with new lines and new shapes, generally referred to as early twentieth-century modern warfare” (Figure 8). Yet at the same time, the narrator is seemingly at pains to emphasize that the destruction is not simply chaos: it was implemented by Allied bombings



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Figure 8  Berlin Express: A new architectural style known as “early twentieth-century modern warfare.”

according to a “methodical plan” that would “cancel out the city as a tough enemy center and still retain some choice spots, like the Hauptbanhof—the railroad depot which would serve the Occupation forces.” This careful planning now enables Frankfurt to serve as a postwar “nerve center for the entire American zone.” As in The Search, the German city is described and displayed according to discourses of the overwhelming chaos of the sublime versus the US capacity for reordering it, for making it legible and governable, and it is at pains to position the spectator alongside the occupation forces both visually and epistemically. Edward Dimendberg’s pioneering study of noir and urban space focuses on films set in US cities. He argues that film noir embodies “nostalgia and longing for older urban forms combined with a fear of new alienating urban realities” (Dimendberg 2004, 7) that were arising during the wartime and postwar periods. The films thus record a rapidly disappearing late-modern urbanism as it was on the cusp of shifting toward the postmodern. Accordingly, Dimendberg argues, films noirs demonstrate a tension between what he calls centripetal and centrifugal space. Centripetal space corresponds to the older, denser urban core

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where people live and work in close proximity to each other—often characterized, for example, in The Naked City (Jules Dassin, Universal, 1948), by urban rhythms that order the city and structure its surveillance/policing. Centrifugal space, by contrast, corresponds to the new sprawls of suburbs, characterized as safer and more sanitary yet also marked by distance, isolation, and getting lost (since it all looks the same). Reading Berlin Express through a similar lens, we might notice that both Paris and Frankfurt are centripetal, but registering opposite ends of the affective possibilities for the older urban center. “Centripetal space is simultaneously celebrated and mourned in [noir] films as characters traverse the vertical urban center, partake of its dynamism, or succumb to its violence” (2004, 108): the Paris sequence of Berlin Express illustrates this celebration of the centripetal city’s pleasures, emphasizing the dynamic rhythms of its organization, the structures of its surveillance, while the representation of Frankfurt elegiacally emphasizes destruction and decay. Showing a city poised on the edge of oblivion—not subject just to decay but to near-total destruction—the film’s sublime aesthetics brings postwar discourses of urban rehabilitation to new heights of urgency. It also links these discourses explicitly to the perceived need for a new politics of “security” in relation to the Cold War and the threat of Communist-imposed oblivion. Dimendberg addresses how fears about the atomic bomb informed US urban planning by the early 1950s, as urban density was now seen as a potential Cold War vulnerability that would increase casualties in the event of a bombing (2004, 249). Berlin Express makes this fear of density explicit, with its urban ruins laid out as a warning. When Lindley arrives at the I. G. Farben building, which served as the headquarters for US occupation and later for the implementation of the Marshall Plan, we see that by contrast it is shown as thoroughly centrifugal. A modernist office block built by a German industrialist in the 1920s, the building is horizontally rather than vertically organized, spread out on a park-like campus that the film depicts as accessible only via automobile (Figure 9). The postwar move toward a centrifugal space here has geopolitical significance: the United States was constructing a centrifugal defense against both Nazism and looming communism, a “nerve center” with centrifugal spokes spreading out across Europe. The I. G. Farben building is deployed in Berlin Express as a potent symbol of European rebuilding-as-defense, with the efforts of white American men required to reorder the sublime urban scenes of the war’s destruction through urban spatial reorganization.



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Figure 9  Berlin Express: The I. G. Farben building as a centrifugal space.

On the train between the two cities we witness a border crossing from France to Germany that is marked as a major moment of initial encounter with the other. Lindley passes the German bodyguard as he goes back to the caboose for a smoke, and as he pensively watches the international barrier go by, the narrator takes over, saying: There he was: his first German. You can’t knock it out of your head. You know you’ve licked him, licked him in two wars. And you’re still not so sure you’ve got the upper hand. You could be wrong though. Maybe he is a right guy. Then you find yourself rolling over the former enemy border and back comes the doubt. You’re in his territory now. The trees look the same, the sky is the same, the air doesn’t smell any different.”

At this moment in the film, suddenly the very trees and air are suspicious, transfigured by a haunting encounter with a perceived enemy other. Moments later, the murder occurs. Jonathan Auerbach reads film noir in the context of the Cold War, showing how these films were obsessed with borders and security. The noir approach is often ambivalent, registering both an intense anxiety about borders,

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about frontier regions between self and other, as well as, often, a sense of forbidden pleasure. This dualistic concern over borders was registered at the time, Auerbach argues, in discourses of the “un-American” pervading political debates during the Red Scare, which “revolved around the social and psychological threshold between the inner and the outer” (2011, 3). It’s fascinating that film noir is one of the primary aesthetic frameworks through which the early Cold War was comprehended in US culture: a geopolitics that, on the surface, is all about the United States leading the world into democracy and freedom contains so much ambivalence and darkness right at hand. Berlin Express and the other ruin films take noir’s obsession with boundaries and external threats into European space, showing how Europe—and by extension, the rest of the globe, since Europe is the stamping ground for this new world order—gets mapped via these anxieties about borders, threats, and the un-American. The sublime offers a critical framework that helps explain this close-at-hand darkness shadowing postwar US triumphalism: the darkness and destruction of the sublime registers anxiety about, while simultaneously justifying, US neocolonial interventions abroad. Auerbach links noir’s obsession with borders to the Freudian concept of the uncanny, which he defines as “primarily a matter of trespassing or boundary crossing, where inside and outside grow confused as (presumed) foreigners enter domestic space and, conversely, the home reveals dark secrets hidden within” (2011, 6). The sublime is closely connected to the uncanny. Both are characterized by an irruption in neat, stable categories of identity; and both are often marked by imagery of racial otherness, which in both cases takes on symbolic importance as an interior aspect of the white male self. Scholars have remarked on Freud’s frequent reliance on colonial imagery for his points about human psychology, such as his infamous description of female sexuality as a “dark continent” (see Kaplan 1998, Kaplan 1997, Doane 1991). So, while Freud emphasizes the concept of home or the domestic within the heimliche/unheimliche dichotomy and the ways that the repressed familiar turns up on both sides, Auerbach convincingly argues that it is no stretch to apply the concept to the “home” of the nation-state, arguing that the uncanny can also be understood as “the peculiar condition of citizenship intensified by wartime security measures” (2011, 6). Yet there is one major difference between the sublime and the uncanny: the sublime highlights the moment of confrontation or reckoning with the other, the moment of overcoming its threat through the exercise of reason, while the uncanny marks an echoed return of the otherness



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that had been repressed. The uncanny, in other words, denotes the aftermath of a transmutation of fear into the sublime. There are other points of contact between the sublime and Freudian psychoanalytic theory as well. Indeed, it is certainly possible to give a coherent psychoanalytic reading of Berlin Express, as has so often been done with the noir genre.1 The femme fatale of the film is a sexy German nightclub performer whom Lindley finds extremely attractive. She does an “Oriental” act, dressing in harem pants and telling fortunes from a crystal ball, suggesting her sexual otherness—and she is also identified as one of the “bad guys” by literally having a cigarette that is too long. She’s phallic, in other words, which makes her an alluring threat. She is contrasted with Lucienne (Merle Oberon), the French secretary, a good girl who is there to look after the liberal German academic and thus protect democracy. Kelly Oliver and Benigno Trigo (2003) would call the good girl “maternal” in a Freudian sense; turning, again, to the uncanny, they argue that Freud “concludes that the ultimate source of the uncanny is the most unheimlich place of all, the former home (Heim), the most unfamiliar and familiar of places, the mother’s genitals, because they recall our first home and foreshadow our final resting place; both birth and death are displaced onto the mother’s sex” (xxiii–xiv). Lucienne is clearly on the happy, life-giving side of this divide; indeed her identification as maternal is literalized in Berlin Express, as she looks after her employer with a sort of warm, loving condescension, enforcing parental-style rules. And then there is Lindley, the white American man entering the liminal space of Frankfurt and finding himself investigating, surveilling, and mapping it. His conflict with the dark side—Nazi murderers who are trying to subvert the peace—comes to a standoff in a shadowy, bombedout brewery, specifically in an enormous vat of putrescent liquid (Figure 10)— suggesting the uterus which here serves as a site for the threat of death, but also potentially of life, if Lindley can prevail against its castration threat. This is all to suggest, again, that the sublime and the uncanny are deeply connected concepts in Western culture, both doing much to explain the interiority of the white male subject in terms of conflicts between two opposed sides. They differ in emphasis—one on colonialism, the other on sexuality—and in temporality, with the sublime focused on the moment of rupture while the uncanny is focused on

E. Ann Kaplan’s psychoanalytic discussion of Tourneur’s most famous film, Cat People (RKO, 1942) would certainly suggest the validity of such a reading. See Kaplan (1997, 99–131); and Kaplan (1998). 1

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Figure 10  Berlin Express: A vat of putrescent liquid serves as a symbol of feminine threat.

its aftermath. Yet both speak to white masculinity as a split consciousness between a self and an other, which is also contained within the self. And both point to the need to somehow reconcile or reunite the two in order to constitute a “healthy” or “morally educated” white male subject. This dualistic model of masculinity, as Steven Cohan shows, came to be prevalent in white US discourses in the 1950s: Demobilization required restoration of the gender relations that World War II had disturbed both in the home and the workplace, while anxiety about the mental stability of returning veterans exaggerated the danger their ungovernable masculinity posed to the social order. ... Cold War politics further complicated the picture by projecting contradictory ideals for American manhood, requiring a “hard” masculinity as the standard when defending the nation’s boundaries, yet insisting upon a “soft” masculinity as the foundation of an orderly, responsible home life. (1997, xi–xii)

It is striking how the “crisis” of postwar masculinity is set up in the popular culture of the time as a series of dualities: peace versus wartime, social order versus “ungovernability,” marital domesticity versus sexual drives, “soft” versus “hard” masculinities. This is organized along the lines of a Freudian escape-valve



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model of masculinity, in which the id (the sex drive and death instinct) exerts a pressure that must somehow be released in order for the superego (the rational self) to stay in control. The healthy man must perform a balancing act, achieving enough release to function in society and thus avoiding the pathological extremes of either too much repression (resulting in effeminacy) or too much expression (leading to psychopathic behavior). The way Frank Krutnik describes this phenomenon in his canonical discussion of masculinity in film noir is that the “phallic regime” of rationality and law “has to be consolidated and perpetually protected against various forms of deviance and disruption” (1991, 85), and that film noir dramatizes this process of consolidation against threats. This dualistic view of white masculinity, we might notice, is structured around a very similar divide in the male self as was envisioned by Kant, with the sublime constituting the moment of battle between the two. And they are also, echoing the discourses of Manifest Destiny, organized around a symbolic conception of geographical space. “Home”/domestic space corresponds to one side of the duality—the side requiring men to be husbands, fathers, peaceful and law-abiding citizens, and providers. The space of war and violence, outside the safety of American borders, is mapped onto the other end of the spectrum as the space of men’s darker urges. In other words, postwar masculinity has a geopolitics. Berlin Express makes this plain, as the fight for the good/light/domesticated half of the self is also the fight for democracy and freedom abroad. Given the pervasiveness of colonial imagery both in Freud and throughout the postwar film noir, I would argue against subsuming all the evident geopolitical significance contained in these films into mere symbolisms for psychosexual phenomena. Although developing this point in relation to all of film noir is outside the bounds of this study, I do want to suggest that the sublime offers a way to comprehend the distinctive aesthetics and urban geographies of noir in a way that keeps the colonial and geopolitical meanings at the forefront rather than subsuming them into psychoanalytic symbolisms. The sublime, as a framework, also has the advantage of speaking to issues of subjectivity and the gaze—in other words, it potentially accounts for close textual analyses of the hegemonic power relations built into the film noir text rather than being confined to the more distant historical readings that have traditionally been the domain of film and geopolitics. In Berlin Express, as Lindley looks at the city of Frankfurt, we are aligned visually and spatially with him, and the voice-over narration correspondingly endows us with capacities for mapping and reordering alongside the figure of the white American man.

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The framework of the sublime accounts for the power relations inscribed into his gaze upon the city and its inhabitants. As has been well established, psychoanalytic approaches to cinema risk erasing racial difference as a category of oppression (see Kaplan 1997, 1998). The sublime offers a way out of this conundrum: it makes explicit that the split masculine self is a white masculine self—and not only that, but in Hollywood films it is an American white masculine self. The sublime is racially and nationally specific. Psychoanalytic approaches unintentionally bolster the noir hero’s position of neocolonial dominance by effacing his whiteness and his United Statesian nationality. Such studies conform to, or at least do little to challenge, psychoanalysis’s racial erasure, agreeing with the fundamental idea that racial difference can be subsumed into a politics of interior conflict—as though race and colonialism are really just symbolic of something else that is more important (i.e., white men’s psychological lives). The sublime framework puts race and colonialism front and center—a much-needed corrective.

The Third Man: The Sublime and Imperial Modernism in Britain and the United States Both The Search and Berlin Express mobilize sublime aesthetics in relation to Nazism and the immense destructiveness of the German imperial project. In The Third Man, the logic of the sublime is transferred to the Cold War, with Russia positioned as the dark colonial other and the Iron Curtain as the sublime frontier in which a confrontation with this other occurs. Indeed, scholarly accounts convincingly articulate the film’s project both as a modernist response to Nazism (Craig 2010) and as a crystallization of the nascent tensions of the Cold War (Carpenter 1986). This dual role is symptomatic of the ruin film generally: they collectively illustrate a slow-moving shift from Nazism to communism as the primary other to the self of Western liberal democratic capitalism. The Third Man was an influential early narrative of the Cold War, and its themes and visual style were widely appropriated by other United Statesian popular Cold War texts, particularly Hollywood films. In this well-known film, American novelist Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) arrives in Vienna at the invitation of his childhood friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles). Upon arrival, he learns that Harry has recently died. Martins believes Harry’s death to be suspicious and starts investigating, despite the warnings of British military



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police commander Major Calloway to leave Vienna immediately. This search for answers brings him into contact with a raft of macabre Viennese characters, getting him more and more tangled in a web of truths and falsehoods, until Harry himself—still alive—arrives on the scene. In this section, I read The Third Man as a colonial narrative, arguing that what would become Hollywood’s Cold War style—wherein Cold War tension is a conflict between the rational white male American self and a dark, nebulous, terrifying, uncontainable other— draws extensively on European colonial aesthetics. Moreover, the moment of sublime confrontation dramatized in this Cold War narrative is also a moment of profound modernist doubt, in which truth, knowledge, and certainty break down and the unknowable threatens to overcome the rational. Jean-François Lyotard links the sublime to modernist epistemic breakdown, identifying this aesthetics as a modernist attempt to gesture toward all that “the imagination fails to present” (1982, 78). The Third Man’s meta-interrogations of narrative form and problematizations of perspective are thus also linked to its sublime aesthetics, and we must consider how the film’s modernism is itself an expression of colonial anxieties. As in the other ruined cinematic cities in this chapter, Vienna in The Third Man is depicted through a discourse of mappable versus unmappable. The opening voice-over narration accompanies a quasi-documentary sequence of postwar Vienna, describing the efforts of the four-power police force in the international zone as hopeless and not up to the task of surveilling this dark, enigmatic city. The piles of rubble left by the war and the black-marketeers who are currently overrunning the place mark the city as beyond understanding, beyond legibility, beyond the usual categories of morality. The film begins with an uncanny aesthetics that ultimately irrupts into the sublime. Its notable use of extreme and canted camera angles in its depiction of the Viennese cityscape is one example of this. The film’s domestic spaces, too, are marked as uncanny. Both Harry’s and Anna’s (Alida Valli) apartments are in grand old buildings with spacious, echoing stairwells, adorned with ornate ironwork. Anna’s apartment, in particular, is evidently in a once-fine mansion that is now in an advanced state of ruination, with elaborate Rococo plasterwork that is crumbling off the walls and a dirty makeshift kitchen in which Anna camps out (Figure 11). Harry’s is in better shape but is similarly over-adorned with busy, extravagant details. The evocation of eighteenth-century aesthetics recalls a period during which Austria was at the height of imperial glory and during which Orientalism was at a peak in the nation’s visual culture (e.g., in the form of

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Figure 11  The Third Man: Anna’s decaying Rococo apartment.

chinoiserie and the Turkish trend of the 1780s). In The Third Man, the decorative of the Rococo is redeployed in its postwar, ruined form, presenting a nostalgic look back on the decayed infrastructure of a period of imperial glory that is now haunted by the ghosts of colonialism which modernity seeks to exorcise. Rosalind Galt (2011b) argues that modernism has a deep distrust of what she calls “the pretty”—anything with an aesthetic of ornate surface decoration is associated with both the feminine and the Oriental, and is therefore to be expunged from modernism’s aesthetic project of smooth, rational, masculinist functionality. The pretty, decorative details of Vienna’s Rococo architecture are here deployed in this modernist way, delineating the colonial uncanny as other to modernity. The uncanniness intensifies through the course of the film, registering narrative and emotional tension through a growing sense of being haunted, of things being not quite right. One particularly striking example comes just after the literary meeting, when Harry escapes Popescu by climbing a spiral staircase, muddling through a dark, cluttered apartment with a screeching parrot, and jumping out a window onto a large pile of rubble. The ruined nighttime cityscape



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Figure 12  The Third Man: The haunted city at night.

which he traverses in this scene is framed in beautiful, haunting, canted angles that suggest enclosure, making the city feel claustrophobic and flat, as the zither music crescendos to a frantic high (Figure 12). Yet, the film makes clear, only Holly is capable of perceiving the uncanny nature of the city; Major Calloway (Trevor Howard) continually tells him to stop being a cowboy, to be rational, to stop dreaming. It is this ability to perceive the uncanny that marks Holly as special, as uniquely capable of untangling its mysteries—in other words, as the rational white male self. Once Harry appears, the uncanny morphs into the sublime: after a chase, he seemingly vanishes into the large, empty Am Hof square, perhaps the first frame in the film to suggest an open, sweeping space with depth, rather than an expressionist flatness and enclosure. When Holly returns to the spot with Calloway and Sergeant Paine, they discover the entry to the sewers, which with its rushing waterfalls and seemingly infinite tunnels again mobilizes the sublime (Figure 13—a scene that will return in the final shootout). The scene of Harry’s next appearance is in the Prater; as Holly approaches, it is depicted as a centrifugal, wide open space with broad skies rather than the enclosed spaces of

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Figure 13  The Third Man: The sewer as a sublime space.

the inner city. The sublime reaches a peak as Holly and Harry look down from the top of the Ferris wheel, a promontory view down on the “dots” below as Harry blithely describes his own power over the lives and deaths of these distant people (Figure 14). Later, in the children’s hospital, Holly will encounter these “dots” up close, their unspeakable suffering too great to show on screen, a presentation of the unpresentable horror of the other. The closer Holly gets to Harry, the more he is confronted by the terror of the sublime and must work to overcome it. Harry’s reappearance in the city thus organizes the film’s aesthetics: as he gets closer, the uncanny becomes more pronounced, and when he finally appears, the oblique haunting of the uncanny erupts into the more overt confrontation of otherness that characterizes the sublime. In keeping with this logic of a horrifying otherness that is closing in, Harry’s appearance presents him in a way that is suffused with colonial symbols of otherness. He lurks in the shadows of the city, dressed head to toe in black and with black hair. Yet this trope of darkness contrasts with his very pale white skin—lit up with a pallid glow in the first moment we see him (Figure 15). Sean Redmond (2006) would call this “hyperwhiteness”—a mode of whiteness



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Figure 14  The Third Man: A promontory view from the Ferris wheel to the “dots” below.

that is too white and is thereby associated with death. Richard Dyer reads the association between whiteness and death as a return of the colonial repressed, a disavowed echo of the horror of white colonial violence in which the supposedly highest white virtues of “civilization” and “science” actually bring death to racial subalterns (1997, 209–10). That Harry Lime is pale white but wears black, then, indicates that he is the “wrong” kind of white, a kind that is too closely connected with colonial violence. Maintaining the importance and superiority of whiteness, in other words, requires a disavowal of white terror—a façade which Harry refuses to play along with, instead proudly embracing his status as a colonial-capitalist murderer. Of course, the film disavows him in other ways— he is an overt totalitarian, and he is hiding in the Russian sector, associating with the Russians and with a variety of sinister “foreign” characters. Yet still, he is an American and, after all, a capitalist, and this places him entirely too close to the United Statesian self for comfort. The other is really a part of the self and in the cinematic space of central Europe, the American self simultaneously embraces its colonial power and, in the same moment, disavows it, displacing

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Figure 15  The Third Man: Harry Lime as hyperwhite.

it onto the Russians. This sets up what would become a dominant Cold War schematic in US culture: Russians in Cold War Hollywood cinema are often very pale white but with dark clothing and belongings that symbolically link their intense whiteness to colonial horror. The Third Man thus takes a colonial logic and adapts it to a new Cold War moment, with the West—led by the United States—placed in opposition not to the Orient but to Russia, and the Iron Curtain as the frontier between these two ontological halves. The sublime characterizes the terrifying moment of confrontation between the two, as the dark half threatens to overcome the rational white American male self whose job it is to protect the “free world” from this dark other—a task which strains even his powerful capabilities of reason and light. The Cold War narrative is, then, a version of what Dyer identifies as the colonial narrative; westerns, for example, often have a similar structure and iconography (1997, 34). The sublime is the aesthetic that characterizes the most dramatic moments of rupture between the two sides of this duality. It is thus mobilized in Hollywood cinema in ways that adapt this colonial aesthetic tradition to the justificatory needs of the American Century.



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Speaking of the western, The Third Man is self-aware about its mobilization of western iconography in relation to the Iron Curtain: Martins is a writer of tawdry western novels who fancies himself a cowboy, arriving on the scene to heroically save his friend. He thus functions as doubly American: not just in his literal national identity but in his symbolic significance, standing-in for the entry of the American cowboy onto the world stage. Playing opposite him is Major Calloway (Trevor Howard), who again is not just a character but also a symbol of British imperialism, a jaded managerialist who sees himself as far more experienced than the newcomer. The film was itself a US/UK coproduction and it reads as an imperial allegory which speaks simultaneously, yet differently, to both British and United Statesian audiences. Given that the film itself is a quintessential modernist film which thematizes the very possibility of conflicting, irreconcilable narratives, we’ll have to consider how its modernism is linked to the colonial. The Third Man was made in a simultaneous moment of decolonization by the British and French and the rise of the United States as a neocolonial power, and central Europe was the ground zero for both of these. After all, Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech didn’t just identify Russia as a shared enemy, but it also proposed that the United States and UK could work together as neocolonial powers, taking joint leadership roles in the global policing that would be necessary for the maintenance of the liberal world order. Churchill was, in other words, inviting the United States to think of itself as a colonial power alongside Britain. The years to follow would bring Churchill’s vision to fruition, for example, as the United States increasingly took on leadership in countering communist threats in Greece and Turkey (a region where the UK had been involved in colonial endeavors for decades). The Third Man was made during a critical period both for early Cold War politics and for the rise of the United States as a neocolonial power alongside Britain’s waning global regime. One empire was coming down as the other one was coming up, and the occupation of Germany and Austria are where the two met in the middle. The Third Man records a version of this encounter and endows it with imaginative significance for both countries. The film is a US/UK coproduction that began when the British Alexander Korda and the American David O. Selznick struck a deal whereby Selznick would put up most of the money and supply Hollywood star talent for the film (in the form of Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles), while Korda’s London Films would carry out the work of production. During the scriptwriting process, there were several antagonistic meetings between Selznick and the British team of Korda, director Carol Reed, and writer Graham Greene. Selznick insisted on changes

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that would make American characters more sympathetic, get rid of anything that wouldn’t satisfy the Production Code, and generally portray the United States in a positive light—for example, making the character of Popescu Romanian rather than American, and by erasing any hint of a homosexual connection between the two central characters (White 2003). During postproduction, Selznick insisted on further changes: he rerecorded the film’s initial voice-over narration so that it would come from Martins rather than the British version’s voice-over by Reed; he shortened the film by thirteen minutes to make it more streamlined, he deleted untranslated German dialogue, and made other changes to portray Martins in a more positive light. To this day, my observation has been that British people tend to understand it as a British film, while United Statesians tend to believe it is a Hollywood production. It is on the American Film Institute’s prominent list of greatest US films of all time (at number fifty-seven). In my experience, many in the United States far more strongly associate the film with Orson Welles—sometimes even mistakenly believing that he directed or wrote it—than with Carol Reed or Graham Greene or indeed anything British. These varied understandings of the film arise from the text itself: the crux of the film’s modernist exploration of conflicting subjectivities and narratives revolves around a dual national address that speaks simultaneously to British and US audiences in different ways. The film is on some level aware of this, functioning as a meta-narrative on these very conflicts and centrally exploring questions of differing, nationally inflected perspectives. The film refers intertextually to Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novel Heart of Darkness, a quintessentially modernist exploration of precisely these issues of perspective and narrative. The name of Baron Kurtz (Ernst Deutsch) tips us off to this intertextuality—Kurtz is also the name of a prominent character in Conrad’s novel—and the film shares the trope of the naive colonial explorer, arriving as an outsider in a wild, dark, unmappable place and getting ever more entangled in the “gloomy circles of some inferno,” as the protagonist Marlow puts it in the book (Conrad 2006, 38). In the film, this naïve colonizer is American, not British, yet the film’s plot, like Conrad’s novel, revolves around digging into an increasingly all-consuming mystery concerning a charismatic but absent man. Heart of Darkness is frequently called a quintessential modernist text, not least by Fredric Jameson, who calls the work of Conrad “impressionist modernism.” In this analysis, the perceptuality of modernity—its wide-ranging interest in an exploding visuality and other modes of perceptual pleasure—serves as



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compensation for all that has been lost under bourgeois capitalism. Jameson argues that Conrad’s writing draws perpetual attention to itself and its own stylization in order to implement an “aestheticizing strategy” that will “recode or rewrite the world and its own data in terms of perception as a semi-autonomous activity” (1981, 230). The Third Man similarly draws attention to the stylization of its own narrative, dramatizing conflicts not just between people but between their modes of perception. Holly Martins sees himself, the film makes clear, as a cowboy in a western, avenging his friend Harry Lime; indeed, he summarizes one of his previous novels, The Lone Rider of Santa Fe, as “a story about a man who hunted down a sheriff who was victimizing his best friend.” This colors how Martins sees himself and his goal in Vienna for much of the film: he is a lone rider, bravely pursuing truth and justice as he traverses and maps a space he reads as a wild, outlaw terrain. There is considerable ambiguity as to whether this makes Martins a sympathetic idealist or childishly naïve. James Palmer and Michael Riley argue in favor of the former, maintaining that “as Holly’s experience in Vienna deepens, he comes to use his Western references ironically as a way of fending off the worldly European cynicism that surrounds him” (1980, 17). Such a reading is surely buttressed by the US version of the film, which places Martins’s consciousness at front and center by giving him the film’s initial narrative voice-over; the film is framed from the outset as his story such that Hollywood conventions would lead us to feel sympathetic toward him. Yet at the same time, the film continually undercuts Martins’s supposed hero status. He is knocked unconscious by Sergeant Paine (Bernard Lee) in a single blow, displaying that he is out of his league in physical combat. His investigation is continually marred by the fact that he doesn’t speak German and is reliant on others’ (sometimes unreliable) translations. He often blunders by showing his metaphorical cards to the wrong people. For example, he provides information to Harry’s business associates that enables them to stay one step ahead of him. He decides to trust Baron Kurtz’s advice on grounds that the baron owns one of his novels—yet we know the baron not to be trustworthy, to be a spinner of rather devious yarns (and his homosexual coding, in the language of classical Hollywood, further confirms his untrustworthiness—which Holly seems blithely unaware of). In other words, Martins is an unreliable narrator for the events of this film; his cowboy-like perspective on Vienna is shown to be incorrect, naïve, and self-aggrandizing in its imperialist certainties while the man himself is something of a weakling. What’s more, at the literary meeting,

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Martins is shown to lack awareness of questions of differing perspectives; the western genre, after all, displays an artless positivism that is too ensconced in its own colonial epistemology to be aware of potential modernist challenges. Contrasting with Martins’ naïveté is Major Calloway’s cynical, worldly perspective. He’s familiar with the black-market and keeps a constant eye on all its major players; he can look with clear eyes on this messy, mysterious, opaque city and carve a path of morality through it by constantly investigating and being in the know about what is going on. He’s a self-described “professional” of death, a realist policeman who can no longer be shocked by anything. We observe him looking directly, without the merest flinch, at the children maimed by meningitis whose bodies are too horrific to show on screen. He’s suspicious of any sort of idealist narrative, particularly the one coming from Martins. Calloway exemplifies another kind of imperial perspective—a realist one which prides itself on its own overarching rationality and pragmatic managerialism, and thereby constructs a sense of implacable command over the place under his control. In addition, Calloway’s perspective is specifically identified with British colonialism. When Martins calls him “Callahan,” the major insists multiple times that he is English, not Irish, thus emphatically signaling his identity as colonial oppressor (not oppressed). The opening voiceover narration in the British version of the film further contributes to this British identification (which was voiced by Carol Reed, who has a similar voice and upper-class English accent to Trevor Howard’s). Before the war, this English narrator spent his time in Constantinople—the old colonial name for a city long regarded as a gateway to the Orient, in a region in which Britain had meddled for decades—thus positioning the postwar occupation of Vienna as a continuation of British colonial expertise. Postwar Vienna is, especially in the British version of the film, read as a sort of pseudo-colonized place—the occupation of which, it is emphasized, the British forces are used to doing, well equipped for and competent at, especially in comparison to the naive American cowboy who has just arrived on the global scene.2 And yet Calloway’s realist colonial perspective is also shown to be unreliable: it is his cynical, bureaucratic certainty and arrogance that has allowed Harry Lime

“Cowboy” is sometimes used as an insult in British English, signifying a conjunction of arrogance with incompetence–an over-certitude in one’s own mediocre abilities which can lead to foolish actions. I have been unable to trace when or how this originated, but the attitude is certainly present in Calloway’s view of Martins. 2



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to fake his own death and slip through the net. As Calloway admits, he “should’ve dug deeper than a grave.” Toward the end of the film, he proves unable to keep up with the more insightful, penetrating Martins, who for all his shortcomings is positioned as uniquely suited to enact justice. Calloway functions as a sort of well-meaning, competent, logical handler for the more exceptional Martins. The sublime is inextricably linked to the film’s modernist project of selfinterrogation of the possibilities of perception and narrative. The prospect of the sublime ruin—of the violent destructiveness of Western culture with its colonialism, its world wars, its concentration camps—brings about modernist challenges to the epistemic certainties that came before it. Not the least of such accounts is found in the works of Jean-François Lyotard, who in fact locates the sublime as a central site for both modern and postmodern articulations of subjectivity, knowledge, and truth. He reads Romanticism as “completely dominated by (and subordinated to) the idea of the sublime” (Lyotard 1986, 8). Both modernism and postmodernism fundamentally break with what he identifies as the Romantic sublime of Burke and Kant in how they deal with otherness. Rather than seeking to overcome or dominate the other as in the Kantian sublime, the modern and postmodern sublime are more concerned with presenting that which is unpresentable, with gesturing toward that which “the imagination fails to present” (Lyotard 1982, 78). The modern sublime does so in a nostalgic way, mournfully registering the loss of certainties of narrative and power which had previously guaranteed Western domination but which now must be challenged in the face of the ghastly ruins of modernity. The postmodern sublime, by contrast, celebrates the unpresentable, reveling in the irreducibility of competing truths and joyfully tossing away Western epistemic domination. The sublime cityscape of Vienna comes to disrupt both Martins’s and Calloway’s imperialist narrative modes, a quintessential part of the film’s modernist thrust. The terror of the sublime is that it stands outside of and opposed to rationality, which is a tool of colonial domination available solely to white men. Both the American man and the British man are agents of this rationality, albeit in distinctive ways—but neither one wins out over the city itself, which remains unknowable. The film’s ending registers the sublime’s sense of mourning for the final and permanent loss of certainty that happens at the Iron Curtain, the edge of mappable space: Anna walks away, silently repudiating any further attempts by these men to make herself or her city legible. This sense of an ambivalent ending—in which a white American male protagonist “wins,”

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yet his win seems to make little progress against an undefined and amorphous enemy which still abides—would itself become a trope of the Hollywood-Cold War narrative. Yet the film’s uses of the sublime speak differently according to one’s national reference point. In a British-inflected reading of The Third Man, the film’s sublime provocation of modernist doubt fits well with its decolonial moment: decolonization induces the collapse of the certitudes endemic to the imperial narrative, leading directly to modernism’s self-interrogations. Indeed, Priya Jaikumar brilliantly argues that the decolonizations of the mid-twentieth century were precisely what “provoked European modernism’s agitation around existing presumptions of wholeness, wherein progress, teleological history, state rationality, and the representability of reality were interrogated as fictions or illusions” (2006, 166). Yet even as modernist texts register what appears to be colonial self-critique, they paradoxically also work to recuperate the imperial. Such texts function instead to “rehabilitate empire for an era of decolonization” (2006, 190), absolving the European of colonial guilt by aestheticizing his growing uncertainty in the face of the other and reframing it as his own inner struggle. If The Third Man is read as speaking to British decolonization, then it reads as a sort of subconscious, half-expressed apology for colonialism which simultaneously recuperates the colonial self as the center of perception and knowledge. The colonial aesthetics of the sublime, the uncanny, and the modern all contribute to this project, “aesthetically stylizing the narrative’s collapse” (ibid., 168) and thereby recouping it into a politics of interior psychology for the colonial self. The uncertainties and anxieties latent within these aesthetics thus paradoxically generate an enhanced sense of colonial certainty in the face of the specter of decolonization. Such a narrative’s removal from the British colonies to the occupied zones of central Europe functions to further disavow the horrors of colonialism, repositioning them instead as a fight against the threat of totalitarianism. From the U.S perspective, on the other hand, the film takes a turn to the noir, wherein (as we saw in Berlin Express) the sense of an encounter with unmappable, uncontainable horror is paradoxically recuperated into a heightened, increasingly urgent sense of colonial mission. Hollywood produces “innocent” imperial texts, which—much like Martins’s western dime novels— have no way to comprehend the perceptual difficulties of modernism, favoring instead a Romantic mode of cowboy self-aggrandizement that is too ensconced



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in its own colonial epistemology to leave any space for a crack of doubt. In a United Statesian reading, the sublime of The Third Man looks back to the Kantian sublime, an aesthetics which justifies an ascendant imperial power by calling on the white American man to reorder the chaos of the other. Hollywood’s neocolonial imaginary, in other words, takes the borderland of the Iron Curtain as an invigorating challenge, the fount for a sense of national imperial calling, rather than an occasion for modernist self-doubts. Yet the postwar period is also precisely the moment when a “special relationship” was being forged between the United States and the UK, a formation which would play repeatedly into the neocolonial scenes of the Cold War. In both the British and United Statesian readings, despite their differences, the film foments a sense of shared colonial mission with the other imperial power—a sense of alliance in the face of the wild, dark, threatening other of Soviet communism to which each of them brings their own unique strengths. Thus, despite its modernist doubts, the film ultimately functions as an influential recuperation of the colonial.

Conclusion The sublime was the first colonial aesthetic to be appropriated into postwar Hollywood films about Europe. Collectively the ruin films aestheticize and narrativize the early Cold War, showing how a US neocolonial imaginary was built in the cinematic space of central Europe in ways that implicitly justified and moralized the “civilizing” interventions of the white American man. Like arguably all colonial art, they do not merely illustrate or reflect the ideas that were in the air at the time; as Edward Said shows, colonial discourse builds on itself and ultimately has a positive, creative, material effect on how the world is understood. These texts are not reducible, then, to a mere reflection of historical circumstances; rather their colonial discursive meanings must be carefully teased out. In appropriating the colonial aesthetic tradition of the sublime into cinema, notice how the ruin films convert the sublime into a mode of cinematic imperial gaze. Much like the male gaze, the sublime constitutes a structure of looking relations that is imbued with power: centering the perceptual, narrative, and emotional viewpoints of the white American man as he surveys and moves through spaces that are, conversely, placed as other. This gaze implicitly

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constructs the white American man as natural leader, endowed with the capacity to confront the chaos and evil of the other and establish order. The sublime provokes colonial doubts while at the same time providing a palliative for those doubts. Notice, too, that the sublime is a model for hegemonic gazing that existed centuries prior to the birth of cinema; it was merely appropriated and adapted into Hollywood in conjunction with the rise of US imperialism. Considering this fact, it is striking to reconsider how many of Mulvey’s (and other scholars’) primary texts for the study of the male gaze are films noirs. This suggests that we might look to the sublime, along with the other aesthetics examined in this book, as a preexisting model that influenced the development of gendered gazing in Hollywood cinema. In other words, film noir is a liminal space in which the colonial other is converted into the gendered other—and not vice versa, as many theorists of film noir have argued. This suggests that the male gaze itself, even as it is gendered, is inherently colonial, and that Western formations of gender are inseparable from colonial discourses of the self. The ruin films—and perhaps especially The Third Man—were formative of how the Cold War came to be understood and represented in Hollywood cinema for decades to come. Their deployment of the sublime, the uncanny, and modernism as colonial aesthetics ultimately became a dominant aesthetic strategy in many Cold War-themed films, functioning to justify continual global interventions, particularly against the USSR. Their depiction of Russian enemies as hyperwhite was also influential, working to disavow white US neocolonial violence by displacing it elsewhere, to the wrong kind of white person. And their placement of a western-style “cowboy” hero in an urban Cold War context— positioning him as uniquely capable of mapping and countering the threats found in such spaces—has made its way into dozens of Hollywood action and blockbuster-style films, including most recently in the superhero genre, a defining genre of global Hollywood style in the neoliberal era. The United Statesian ideological unconscious of the Cold War—with its discourses of a clash between good and evil, self and other, light and dark—was formed here, in the ruins of bombed-out German cities in the aftermath of the Second World War.

2

The Ethnographic: Imperialist Nostalgia and the American Technological Gaze

In Boy on a Dolphin (Jean Negulesco, 20th Century Fox, 1957), Sophia Loren plays a Greek peasant who, while diving for sponges near her home one day, discovers a priceless, ancient Greek statue at the bottom of the sea. She fails to recognize its value until an English doctor clues her in. Attempting to sell it, she finds two potential buyers: an American archaeologist (Alan Ladd) who has dedicated his career to restoring antiquities to their rightful owners, and a wealthy English aristocrat (Clifton Webb) whose life’s work is illegally acquiring the same antiquities for his private collection. The story plays out against the backdrop of a Greek paradise, shot on location and rendered in CinemaScope and brilliant Technicolor to underscore the vivid beauty of the locale. The Greece of this film, despite its contemporary midcentury setting, is populated largely by uneducated, earthy rural peasants who seem to have been transported from another era. Yet the gorgeous vistas and alluring simplicity of the Greece depicted in Boy on a Dolphin belie the country’s turbulent postwar history and the vital role it played in the early Cold War. Following the end of Nazi occupation, Greece was immediately plunged into a bloody civil war between a liberal capitalist government and a communist insurgency. In 1947, Britain announced that it could no longer afford to aid the Greek government, and the United States debated whether to step in. When President Truman gave his famous speech introducing the Truman Doctrine (the strategy of Cold War “containment” by supporting democratic/capitalist governments around the world—a doctrine which would influence US policy for decades) it was about the Greek Civil War that he was most immediately speaking. Boy on a Dolphin’s Greek setting, then, bears the weight of this geopolitical significance, and the film’s gorgeous vistas and peasant dances can be read in this light as a sort of anti-communist, self-congratulatory, even proprietary gesture for a US audience.

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Another then-recent historical event resonates perhaps even more powerfully within the film: the Suez crisis of 1956. Located just across the Mediterranean from Greece, the Suez Canal had been a key holding of the British Empire, buttressed by the Egyptian monarchy—but in 1956 this monarchy was overthrown, and the popular new leader Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Canal, prompting an invasion by Israeli, British, and French troops to take back colonial control of this key waterway. However, the United States was keen for an alliance with Egypt to secure access to Middle Eastern oil against Cold War competition from the USSR; the United States thus condemned the invasion and supported the Egyptian claim to the Canal. Britain found itself powerless to do anything about this, as it lacked the military or political clout for a conflict with the United States, and it was forced to back down. It was a humiliating moment for the British empire, making crystal clear that they were no longer calling the shots in the new world order. Boy on a Dolphin’s depiction of a predatory old English aristocrat who wants to hoard the world’s treasures, pitted against a young, magnanimous US scientist dedicated to justice and nationstate liberalism, thus takes on an even more immediate allegorical significance, as the film symbolically positions the United States as the new, and far more benevolent, inheritor to British global stewardship. It is perhaps fitting, given the film’s connection with Middle Eastern politics, that Greek characters in Boy on a Dolphin are subjected to what can only be called an Orientalist representation: they are ignorant peasants who are patronized even as they are sexualized, brutally acquisitive yet simultaneously simpleminded; they are portrayed as incapable of running their own affairs or understanding the value of their ancient culture (Figure 16). Although the American archaeologist defends the Greeks from the racist insults of the avaricious aristocrat and other British characters, the film still portrays Greek people as if they were transported from a pastoral, prelapsarian era, requiring help from a benevolent, paternalistic American bureaucrat to learn the ways of liberal democracy and global capitalism. The 1950s saw an explosion in Hollywood films like Boy on a Dolphin, featuring Americans traveling, living, and working abroad. Many were set in European countries, but in other global locations as well. Although, like the ruin films discussed in Chapter 1, these “tourist films” (as I’ll call them) featured American protagonists who were traveling or living abroad and their entanglements with “foreign” cultures, the new films’ style and tone were otherwise completely different: in brilliant Technicolor and often also in the



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Figure 16  Boy on a Dolphin: Sophia Loren as an ignorant Greek peasant who has no concept of the value of Greek antiquities.

widescreen formats that were then emerging in the Hollywood industry, they prominently featured a tourist visuality of sweeping vistas and sightseeing tours. Spectacular and utopian, yet at the same time reflexively proclaiming their own “authenticity,” these tourist films promised the viewer new heights of adventure, romance, and sensory immersion in exotic locales, all the while insisting on both the newfound prominence of US neocolonialism as well as its fundamental benevolence. This chapter and the next will examine two different yet closely related aesthetic traditions at play in the tourist films: the ethnographic and the picturesque. As discussed in the introduction, scholars have often linked the “American abroad” films to the enormous growth in international tourism that arose during the postwar period for United Statesians: the US middle classes finally had sufficient prosperity and leisure time to pursue relatively long, expensive vacations, international air travel was finally becoming commercially available en masse, and other countries—particularly in Europe—needed US tourist dollars to prop up their fragile postwar economies. The tourist films, scholars argue, rode this rising tide of travel as a new postwar US cultural imaginary, both profiting off the craze for European travel and further promoting it. While I don’t contest this argument, my focus in this study is less on the newness of this wave of postwar tourist films than on its oldness (as it were): the ways that these films remobilize older tropes of colonial visuality and aesthetics. The ethnographic is one such tradition that had a significant impact on the specific visual and narrative forms that these tourist films took. It is, at its

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heart, a mode for picturing human subjects in ways that declare a fundamental, enduring distance between “us” and “them”: between the image-taker or -viewer and those pictured within the frame. This is a longstanding Western tradition that clearly influences some key early instances of the postwar tourist film, while in others it is more submerged. It centers the United States within the discursive landscape of postwar geopolitical power as the implicit owner of the ethnographic gaze. In the Europe-set tourist films, Europeans themselves are made into the other through this new ethnographic gaze, thus functioning to “put them in their place” in a new world order. It is significant that the two early innovators discussed as major case studies in this chapter, This Is Cinerama (Merian C. Cooper and others, independent, 1952) and The Quiet Man (John Ford, Republic, 1952), were both released in 1952—the year the Marshall Plan ended. Unlike the ruin films of the Chapter 1, which position the rubble of post-Second World War Europe as the backdrop for the coalescing sense of an American imperial calling, the ethnographic is an aesthetics of a more secure colonial ownership that was then emerging. Rather than dramatizing initial encounters with the other as the ruin films do, this new style attempts to redress the anxieties of colonial power by fixing colonial difference into a tableau of the eternal—and making it a utopian vision. The ethnographic is suited, then, to the moment when US imperial dominance in Europe was perceived to be complete, a fulfilled and stabilized situation rather than a growing project. First discussed will be This Is Cinerama, the first and most successful film made in the eponymous three-strip widescreen format. The film is a travelogue, a major portion of it set in Europe, crisscrossing the continent and arranging it for the visual pleasure of US viewers; through both technological reflexivity and a remarkable mapping of US discourses of whiteness onto Europeans, the film lays out a specifically American gaze on the continent. Second I’ll look at The Quiet Man, a film which transfers the ethnographic gaze to a narrative feature film and demonstrates how this aesthetic functions to implicitly justify US neocolonial interventions abroad.

Defining the Ethnographic The ethnographic is a longstanding and classic tradition within Western colonial visual culture. Beginning in the Enlightenment period, there was an explosion of Western “scientific” inquiry, producing a colonial visual culture in which “other”



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peoples, places, and artifacts were collected and arranged for Westerners’ benefit. At first this was primarily to be found amongst scientists who were busy mapping and taxonomizing the world using increasingly visual means. However, the nineteenth century’s marked proliferation of imagery of various kinds—making its way into popular culture—converged with scientific discourse to produce a popular scientific visual culture which brought the world home for Western eyes to consume, symbolically subjugating the world for Westerners’ entertainment and visual pleasure. By the time cinema was born, this aspect of Western visual culture had become thoroughly ensconced in practices of popular entertainment and leisure. Alison Griffiths shows how, in the decades prior to the birth of cinema, museums of anthropology collected the cultural artifacts (and sometimes, appallingly, the people themselves) of othered, “primitive” cultures into display groups for Western visual consumption; this aesthetics of collection made its way to the museum of anthropology, the world’s fair, and other leisure-oriented exhibition spaces. The travelogue film was an extension of this tradition; in its earliest days it was used by anthropologists and ethnographers, and was soon incorporated into popular ethnographic displays (Griffiths 2002, xxxii). Once it made the leap from museums and fairs to film-exhibition-focused contexts such as nickelodeons, the early film travelogue took on many of the ideological and aesthetic characteristics of the ethnographic tradition, including the actions of collecting and arranging “specimens,” depictions of ethnic dance and ritual, and interest in exotic clothing and decoration. As Fatimah Tobing Rony argues, early cinema thus became a “site of intersection between anthropology, popular culture, and the constructions of nation and empire” (1996, 9) that delineates the “Native” or “Savage” as other to Western culture. Early cinema also extended the preexisting genre of the illustrated travel lecture. This “respectable” middle-class entertainment involved a (virtually always) white male lecturer, renowned as an explorer or world traveler, who would bring images back from his expeditions and present them in clubs and churches. Early travelogue films would be interspersed with photographs and other images taken on the lecturer’s journeys, curated via verbal narration in which the lecturer would tell fantastical, exaggerated tales of adventure and danger. As Charles Musser describes: Offering personal accounts of their adventures, these world travelers were figures with whom audiences could identify and derive vicarious experience

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Indeed, the travel lecturer could be viewed as a late nineteenth century equivalent of the film star—a popular, attractive figure of identification and admiration for both women and men. Once it made the leap to dedicated cinema spaces, the early travelogue film was no longer usually narrated, yet it inherited from this tradition a specific raced and gendered viewpoint on the world which is written into the imagery itself. As Peterson puts it, “the ‘speaker’ in silent-era travelogue films is not a specific person but a kind of ghostly amalgam of the (unseen) cameraman, the production company, and official (or commercial) Western culture at large” (2013, 25). Arising as it does from these histories, what characteristics define the ethnographic in cinema? First, it is an aesthetic of collection. A travelogue film, like a museum, often brings together images of people from various locales within a specified region (which might be as broad as an entire continent). Ethnographic images might be arranged without any particular narrative order, almost as though the spectator is “flipping through an album of snapshots or postcards” (Peterson 2013, 142), or conversely the images might be arranged according to the narrative logic of the Western explorer/traveler as he enters and travels through the space. In any case, images of the inhabitants of a particular locale are often interspersed with, or placed within, shots of beautiful scenery, thus placing the people pictured as “natural” or “authentic” within the scene. Those pictured are tied to the land, contrasting with the geographic mobility of the filmmaker/cameraman/traveler and the mediated visual mobility of the spectator. Anne McClintock points out the similarities between this collection impulse and the panopticon (1995, 37): the varied sights of the world are arranged as a single field of view which the Western spectator might take in from a privileged central position, while never being made visible herself. The second characteristic of the ethnographic is temporal displacement: the human subject of the ethnographic image is distinguished from “us” (i.e., the Western spectator) through a discourse of time which places “them” in the past, far away from the modern. Johannes Fabian has noted this as a long-running theme of anthropology, which continually denies the coevalness of the scientist with his subject, inscribing anthropological study as going backward through



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time to “complete the history of man” (1983, 8) while the anthropologist himself is tied to the present, to modernity. McClintock notes that this temporal displacement is not only found in scientific communities but also makes its way into Western popular culture; the other is imaginatively placed in “anachronistic space” and thus deemed “prehistoric, atavistic and irrational, inherently out of place with the historical time of modernity” (1995, 40). In this manner, imperial progress across the space of empire is figured as a journey backward in time to an anachronistic moment of prehistory. By extension, the return journey to Europe is seen as rehearsing the evolutionary logic of historical progress, forward and upward to the apogee of the Enlightenment in the European metropolis. (ibid.)

Thus the ethnographic separates humanity into two groups: the “us” of the modern Western world, imbued with technological superiority and historical “progress” toward ever-greater heights of “advancement”; versus the other who is eternal, unchanging, stuck in the past, left behind in the march of history, representing an earlier phase of human development. Rony, drawing on Claude Lévi-Strauss, calls this division the “historifiable” versus the “ethnographiable” (1996, 7). The ethnographic aesthetic is overarchingly concerned with delineating time as a site of difference and with recording an encounter between two fundamental halves of humanity that are aligned, respectively, with the present/future and the past. Yet this temporal displacement also has an envious aspect, and this is the third defining feature of the ethnographic. As the other is placed in the past, the past is simultaneously constructed as a site of “authenticity” in which humans are happier or live in greater harmony with nature, and thus made into an object of longing for Westerners. Dean MacCannell, in his classic study of tourism, places this longing at the center of contemporary Western subjects’ conception of self and world: For moderns, reality and authenticity are thought to be elsewhere: in other historical periods and other cultures, in purer, simpler lifestyles. … The concern of moderns for “naturalness,” their nostalgia and their search for authenticity are not merely casual and somewhat decadent, though harmless, attachments to the souvenirs of destroyed cultures and dead epochs. They are also components of the conquering spirit of modernity. (2013, 3)

Renato Rosaldo calls this phenomenon “imperialist nostalgia,” which “transform[s]‌the responsible colonial agent into an innocent bystander” (1989, 70) and thus attributes the destruction of a culture to the supposedly inevitable,

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generic march of historical progress rather than being the direct result of imperialist, “modernizing” interventions. Thus in the ethnographic aesthetic, nostalgia and envy for the non-modern functions as a way of shifting blame away from the Western colonial subject. This temporal displacement is partially accomplished through the very visual technologies which are being used to create the ethnographic images in the first place. This constitutes a fourth significant feature of the ethnographic: its association with—and often reflexive foregrounding of—new technologies of vision, which deploy ethnographic imagery to highlight their own heightened powers of mediation. Walter Benjamin noted that nineteenth-century culture often used “archaic images to identify what is historically new about the ‘nature’ of commodities” (quoted in McClintock 1995, 40). The sense of contrast that results from the placement of the newest, most advanced product of Western commodity capitalism next to the archaic or temporally displaced would function to heighten the spectator’s sense of excitement; they might marvel at the heights achieved by Western society. In ethnographic and other travel images created with nineteenth-century technologies of vision such as the diorama, the panorama, still photography, or the stereoscope, this sense of contrast is doubly heightened: the old and the new are placed not just beside each other but in the same image, with the technology of the new itself positioned as revealing the old. If, following Anne Friedberg, we see early cinema as the culmination of a Western cultural progression toward a more and more “mobilized and virtual gaze” (1993, 2), ethnographic imagery could be deployed to highlight cinema’s heightened powers of mobility and virtuality through this very sense of contrast. This means that there is an element of reflexivity in the ethnographic: it promotes greater immersion, yet paradoxically this very sense of immersion is turned on its head to highlight the visual medium itself. It should be clear by now that the ethnographic constitutes a gaze, in the sense that it inscribes hegemonic looking relations that empower the spectator/subject and disempower the object within the frame. Mary Louise Pratt identifies the “monarch of all I survey” trope in travel writing as a mode for the designation of colonial control through an aesthetics of vision (1992, 197). Similarly, the ethnographic arranges the world as a visual spectacle for Western consumption, placing distance between the “us” of modernity and technological progress and the “them” of the eternal, backward, atavistic, primitive other. Like Mulvey’s male gaze (1975), the ethnographic gaze inscribes not just difference but hierarchy, with the owner of the look placed in a position of power and the object of the



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gaze correspondingly disempowered, objectified. Yet unlike most instances of the male gaze, the ethnographic gaze reflexively calls attention to the very visual technology by which it is created, calling recognition to its own technological prowess through reference to othered, racialized peoples. Hollywood produced a cycle of tourist films just as screen technologies were undergoing a new phase of rapid development. In the postwar period, there were many challenges facing the industry, the largest and most threatening of which was what Charles Barr prominently dubbed “the Television Menace” (Barr 1963, 4; see also Belton 1992, Lev 2003, Balio 1990). Television, as a home-centered entertainment medium, was perceived as a direct rival to cinema, growing more and more popular in the early 1950s in the United States, especially given the number of people moving out of city centers to start families in the suburbs, further away from cinemas (Belton 1992, 73). In the face of this and other challenges such as the 1948 US Supreme Court antitrust decision which broke up the majors, Hollywood studios had to seriously rethink their commercial strategies. One tactic that ultimately had long-lasting consequences for Hollywood aesthetics was the experimentation with and promotion of novel or “improved” forms of the film medium, including color (whose use expanded greatly in this period), 3D (a short-lived trend at the time which has since seen several more waves of popularity), and the advent of widescreen as a mass form. These developments each aimed to differentiate film from television in ever more striking ways. As the early television screen was very small, black and white, and of poor image quality, an emphasis on size, color, and clarity would, it was hoped, encourage audiences to attend the cinema rather than staying home to watch television. Given the long association in Western imperial culture between ethnographic imagery and new technologies of vision, it makes sense that the aesthetics of the ethnographic would be at hand as a mode for promoting and spotlighting these new formats. Indeed, one of the films that I’ll examine as case studies—This Is Cinerama—does so quite consciously, with narrators who take on the role once occupied by the travel lecturer, introducing the images we see and verbally emphasizing the newfangled achievements of their respective widescreen processes as highlighted by travel and ethnographic imagery. Yet, at a historical moment when European colonialism was rapidly devolving, while simultaneously US neocolonialism was rising as the new star on the world stage, such mobilizations of the ethnographic take on a new significance, centering on a specifically United Statesian sensibility and often placing Europeans as the ethnographic other.

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How does this new US-centered deployment of the ethnographic aesthetic speak to changing postwar configurations of global power? And how is the ethnographic itself transformed as it is appropriated by Hollywood to construct a specifically United Statesian worldview rather than a more generic Western one?

This Is Cinerama’s Ethnographic Gaze on Europeans Cinerama was the first widescreen format to be used commercially en masse; its roaring success in 1952 quickly inspired the Hollywood studios to develop their own widescreen technologies such as CinemaScope and Panavision, which ultimately had more commercial viability and staying power. This Is Cinerama was the first film to be released in the Cinerama format, and true to its name, it takes the form of a demonstrative, reflexive travel documentary which continually draws attention to its own heightened mediative powers compared to the “regular” cinema screen. The film contains a series of short sequences designed to show off the best qualities of the medium, followed by a European travelogue, an extended waterskiing sequence set in Florida, and an aerial tour of the United States. Although it is neither a fiction film nor, strictly speaking, a Hollywood film (having been made by people on the fringes of the southern California studio system), This Is Cinerama was so popular, and so widely influential on Hollywood film style in the 1950s and beyond, that it merits an analysis here as a major origin point for Hollywood’s newfound aesthetics of landscape spectacle. Cinerama was actually quite technologically clunky. It involved three cameras, each taking simultaneous, side-by-side pictures that were aligned to give the impression of a single view (though in practice the lines between them were frequently visible). It was exhibited using three projectors, projecting their triptych of aligned images onto an enormous, deeply curved screen with seventrack stereophonic sound. It suffered from alignment problems and performance required four projectionists—one for each projector to pay constant attention to alignment between the three strips, plus a fourth running the sound strip. It was also notorious for focusing problems (since it had three lenses in play at any one time, all facing different directions), meaning it was largely restricted to wideangle shots. Moreover, the camera itself was so heavy that it was cumbersome to move; the only practical way to create a moving shot was to mount the Cinerama camera on a moving vehicle such as a train, boat, or airplane. The travelogue



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format is commonly viewed by scholars as a “natural” fit for the Cinerama medium, interestingly attributed to its technological limitations rather than its innovations. Cinerama proved to be very difficult to adapt to narrative filmmaking because the camera could not be moved in a conventional manner, meaning the varied camera angles necessary for classical Hollywood style were effectively impossible (Shandley 2009, 78; Belton 1992, 107). This claim by scholars—that the travel subject is somehow the only or inevitable choice for early widescreen technologies—raises more questions than it answers. For one, it ignores the fact that travel subjects were chosen across various new screen technologies— including not just Cinerama but also other widescreen formats, 3D, and the expansion of color. In addition, the trend toward travel subjects persisted long after most of the technological problems had been remedied. Perhaps even more importantly, this argument for travel subjects fails to acknowledge the long historical and discursive association between visual technological developments and travel imagery in Western culture. What is really at stake here? Why does this connection seem so natural to so many of us, even today? In fact there seems to have been a conscious intention on the part of Cinerama inventor Fred Waller and his investors to mobilize an ethnographic aesthetic in order to harken back to the technological innovations endemic to the original invention of cinema itself. Their choice of personnel demonstrates this: they initially contracted with Robert Flaherty, the most famous ethnographic filmmaker of the silent era, to direct the first Cinerama feature; when he died just before production began, they instead turned to Merian C. Cooper, another well-known ethnographic filmmaker who had also codirected King Kong (RKO, 1933). Lowell Thomas, the journalist and documentary filmmaker who had risen to fame with his films about “Lawrence of Arabia” in the late 1910s, was an early investor in the technology and ultimately became the narrator of This Is Cinerama. These choices in personnel would have carried deep resonances for at least older audience members in 1952, as they are all men strongly associated with ethnographic filmmaking. Even if they are in fact associated with the late 1910s through early 1930s rather than strictly with the period of early cinema when the travelogue arguably had its heyday, these men were celebrated as pioneers of “exploration” with the camera, bringing back images of exotic peoples and cultures from across the globe for the visual pleasure of the United Statesian spectator. This Is Cinerama’s opening sequence consists of the talking-head narration of Lowell Thomas, sitting in a sumptuously appointed office decorated with maps and globes. For the first several minutes of the film, this is projected in black

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and white onto a tiny section in the middle of the Cinerama screen, apparently representing a “normal”-sized cinema screen; the rest of the screen is blocked off by heavy curtains. Thomas’s opening narration seeks to position Cinerama not just as the latest cinema technology, but as a revolutionary moment within the entire history of human-made images: You are about to see the first public exhibition of an entirely new form of entertainment. We call it Cinerama. It’s a novelty—ah, but it’s far more than that. It’s the latest development in the magic of light and sound. Some twenty thousand years ago, an artist in caveman days drew a picture of a boar on the wall of a cave in Spain. He wanted the animal to be in motion, so he added eight legs. Eight legs—there was a bold pioneer. A man with ideas!

His tone turns sarcastic as he says these last lines, showing a photograph of a boar cave painting as though offering it up for ridicule. From the start, then, he juxtaposes Cinerama, the “latest development” in the history of representation, with an image of an ethnographized, primitive man making laughably clueless and backwards art. These opening lines neatly set up the self-serving dichotomy of primitive versus modern, savage versus civilized, to which so much ethnographic filmmaking is devoted. Thomas goes on to rehearse a rapid Eurocentric history of visual representation (Figure 17). He explains that ancient Egyptian art is inferior due to its “rigid conventions” that give no representation of movement; contrasted to this is the “genius of the Renaissance,” as typified by Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel image of the white male God creating Adam, which is superior because it “appears to be about to move.” Thomas then covers the invention of the magic lantern, the Daguerreotype, Roget’s persistence of vision experiments, the zoetrope, landscape and action photography from the US Civil War, the Muybridge horse photography experiments, and finally on to Edison and his invention of the cinema. In Thomas’s narrative, historical progression is conflated with scientific and aesthetic “progress”: each great man who comes along builds upon the inventions of the previous man, all the way up to the present moment with Cinerama; he thus presents this technology as an illustration of the supposed superiority of Western civilization. This rhetoric is taken straight from early ethnographic cinema. As Griffiths writes: Presented in the motion picture trade press and elsewhere as the pinnacle of Western technological progress, the cinematic apparatus was itself a potent symbol of the ideological power of Western technology and colonial might. (2002, 249)



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Figure 17  This Is Cinerama: Lowell Thomas as narrator, rehearsing a Eurocentric history of image making in the prologue sequence (Academy ratio).

Thomas is clearly tapping into this very same rhetoric of technological progress: otherizing discourses are mobilized to demonstrate the Cinerama technology’s “power,” where power is understood along racist and imperialist lines. Even as Thomas claims for Cinerama the inheritance of motion picture history, he simultaneously criticizes “old” film technologies, describing them as “like looking through a keyhole.” In the passage that follows, this criticism turns to ridicule, as we see excerpts from two silent films and hear his voice-over describe them in scornful, mocking terms. The choice of films is itself telling: The Great Train Robbery (Edwin S. Porter, Edison, 1903), an early Western which capitalized on early film’s fascination with the railroad, and Son of the Sheik (George Fitzmaurice, United Artists, 1926), a classic Orientalist picture about a half-Arab, half-English prince played by Rudolph Valentino. Both these films are, in different ways, about Western expansionism; he seems to be making fun of their antiquated imperialism, which is apparently more contrived and less secure than the imperialism of Cinerama and the power endowed by its superior technology.

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Finally the curtain opens to reveal the full enormity of the Cinerama screen to much fanfare from Thomas. We are now taken through a series of short scenes intended to demonstrate the qualities of the new medium. First is a sequence shot from the front of a roller-coaster car, giving an intense sense of locomotion. Second is a dance sequence in which a ballet troupe enacts an “Oriental” dance, costumed in veils. Third is a helicopter-mounted panorama over Niagara Falls. Each of these connects precisely with three of the most important and welldocumented tropes of the early travelogue: like the Hale’s Tour, the roller-coaster ride mobilizes a thrilling sense of rail-bound locomotion (Fielding 1983); the ethnic dance is a central trope of early-ethnographic cinema (Griffiths 2002, 174–84); and the waterfall is a “perennial travelogue favorite” (Peterson 1999, 258). Cinerama is clearly working quite hard to reenact ethnographic filmmaking for a new, postwar era, this time in widescreen and Technicolor. Moreover, the helicopter sequence, like the extended sequence of aerial views of American landscape that occurs later in the film, taps into the early travelogue’s fascination with various forms of transport as a mode for mapping and regulating a wild landscape. In early cinema, this was primarily about the railroad, according to Lynne Kirby: Insofar as the train has always been a physical extension of an imperialist vision … and of the discipline of heterogeneous territories, its function has been that of coherence, order, and regularity. … The train is a vehicle that imposes sense on what modern Western culture sees as irrational: nature and tradition. It enforces a kind of readability or understanding according to the authority of its codes and its master—the white male entrepreneur. (1997, 27)

This is Cinerama extends this logic with its use of the airplane, which comes to stand in for the railroad as the most up-to-the-minute means of exploring and mapping the US landscape, literally showing it from above as a space to be conquered by Western, white, male technologies of vision. Landscape is discussed, in the US aerial sequence, as something that is above all useful to the white male entrepreneur in his project of empire building; for example, as the camera flies over Pittsburgh, Thomas describes the city as “industrial America, creating the sinews of our economy and of our national power.” Thomas’s use of we/our pronouns is telling here, signaling the effortless way in which the film’s narrative voice constructs the United States as self. I am perhaps belaboring this point about Cinerama’s mobilization of ethnographic and other expansionist tropes from the early film travelogue,



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because it cannot be overstated just how overdetermined this mobilization is. Much more than simply being a natural fit for the medium, This Is Cinerama is precisely tuned to the task of proving the power of widescreen by harnessing it to the early film travelogue’s racist, imperialist worldview, indeed proclaiming itself an improvement. The release of This Is Cinerama in the United States was widely read at the time as a patriotic event, with press releases depicting an approving President Eisenhower attending a screening at the White House, while the film simultaneously traveled internationally to show “the American way of life” to audiences around the world, thus tapping into a Cold War rhetoric of patriotism. This Is Cinerama, it seems, projected an image of United Statesian dominance that resonated profoundly with contemporaneous US structures of power. The film thus galvanized a transformation in the ways American cinema portrayed space, place, and global geography at a time when America’s relationship with the world, as well as its own self-perceptions about that relationship, were being cemented as that of a neocolonialist power. Throughout the film, Lowell Thomas’s patrician and patronizing narration directs our attention and frames what we see within this patriotic context. Like the travel lecturer of an earlier era, it is through the point of view of this white man that we come to understand and map the world. This white male voice, however, is emphatically not European; indeed the film works hard to differentiate itself from a European perspective. It does this, to be sure, through an appropriation of European colonial tropes of otherness and objectification, yet it specifically appropriates these things for the United Statesian white male. This becomes particularly apparent when, after the end of the long introductory sequence, the film embarks on an extended virtual tour of Europe, collecting and mapping European spaces and peoples through the ethnographic/patriotic framework that has just been established. As I’ll show, this opens up some very strange and elaborate twists in the racial politics of whiteness that this ethnographic gaze appears to require. The first stop is Venice, which is telling in itself, as this ancient city has long been positioned as a gateway between West and East, as almost Oriental. The city is traversed on a gondola, which, in this and other tourist films, is a key feature of the Venetian cityscape. This charmingly antiquated mode of transport receives an ethnographic treatment, as the boat-mounted camera lingers on the beautiful, athletic figure of the anonymous gondolier in traditional costume, propelling the boat with his pole (Figure 18). At the beginning of the gondola sequence, we

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see an American couple stepping gracefully into a gondola as we hear Thomas narrate, “Cinerama gives us just about the full scope of vision in which you see so much out of the corner of your eye. That feeling of reality depends on vision off to the side.” The American couple is the audience’s proxy here; it is their view of “reality” that is supposedly being replicated by the camera. Venice, on the other hand, is positioned as a temporally displaced other, an exotic space for the camera to move around and through. Yet equally, there is a sense of envy at work in this sequence. The pigeons swirling around the Piazza San Marco, a gondola passing under the Ponte dei Sospiri, the sunset glimmering on the water: all invoke the great beauty and authenticity of a civilization much older than the United States. This representation of Italy, populated with anonymous, mostly faceless, yet always tanned Italians, refers far more to the complex racial positionality of Italians in US culture than it does to European understandings of race. In the United States of the early to mid-twentieth century, Italians were positioned on the border between whiteness and non-whiteness. Miriam Hansen’s examination of the 1920s matinee idol Rudolph Valentino, for example, shows how his Italian identity positioned him as a “Latin lover”: sexually desirable to white women due to his racial otherness, yet in a way that was ambiguous enough to avoid the illicitness of miscegenation (Hansen 1991, 259; Reich 2004). In This Is Cinerama, the ambiguous racial otherness of Italians in US culture is once again summoned, subjecting Italian people to the temporal displacement

Figure 18  This Is Cinerama: The Venetian gondolier.



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Figure 19  This Is Cinerama: A bagpipe rally in Scotland.

of the ethnographic and insisting by contrast on the technologized modernity of the camera’s gaze. Next we are taken to Scotland for a “rally of the clans” at Edinburgh Castle—a military-inflected rally of bagpipers and a military band (Figure 19). The musicians, wearing kilts and associated Scottish regalia, march in formations around a large field as a cheering crowd looks on. They play familiar Scottish bagpipe tunes such as “Scotland the Brave”; when another military band cuts in rather suddenly with “Rule Britannia,” the crowd’s cheering rises to a climax. Ironically, given Scotland’s arguable status as a colonized nation, the pageantry of Scottish culture is used to invoke British militarism as much as Scottish history, a “stirring scene of the British north with martial reminiscence of the warlike days of old,” as Thomas tells us. The scene is a tribute to Britain’s erstwhile great empire, yet simultaneously positions this empire firmly in the past. The third stop in the Europe sequence is Vienna for a Vienna Boys’ Choir concert, set in the grounds of Schönbrunn Palace (Figure 20). Here admiration for a former empire is made all the more explicit: “Days of imperial glory,” Thomas announces, “are symbolized by Schönbrunn Palace, lordly residence of the emperors of Austria.” Yet in the present, the film seems keen to announce, no such imperial ambitions remain. Thomas narrates, “These lads have just been rounded up hastily from games in Viennese backyards.” This statement is clearly false; the choir’s professionalism is evident from the precision and virtuosity of their performance, the stiffness of their postures, and the uniformity of their clothing. Yet despite these details, the voice-over strives to disarm the boys of

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Figure 20  This Is Cinerama: A boys’ choir performs on the grounds of Schönbrunn Palace in Austria.

the legendary discipline and ambition of Germanic militarism—a crucially important move, given the temporal proximity of Hitler’s imperial invasions— instead framing the country as a peaceful domestic space of children’s play. The Scotland and Austria sequences, like the Italy sequence, place these nations at a temporal remove from modernity, yet with a different inflection in their construction of whiteness. Britons and Austrians/Germans are, in US racial politics, far more securely white than Italians; the former are thus spared somewhat the patronizing treatment of ethnographization and are instead eulogized as the former torchbearers of Western imperialism. These nations and their empires are still positioned firmly in the past, however, making way for the United States as the new owner of Western imperial hegemony. The fourth stop is Spain for a bullfight and flamenco performance; given Spain’s association with Latin America (according to US culture), we return to the ethnographic gaze we saw in Italy. The brief bullfight scene is used once again to highlight the optical qualities of the Cinerama medium as it is filmed “from straight ahead, from the sides, from all those glimpses out of the corner of the eye that bring the height of reality.” The dance sequence is shown in classic ethnographic style: dancers in colorful costumes give strikingly athletic and very practiced performances (Figure 21). Yet the voice-over reminds us again that their dancing does not count as work. As Thomas states, “The dancers are country folk from the villages in the surrounding hills. They appear at festivals and celebrations—so skillful, such artists, that you would think they



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are professionals. But they are villagers come to town for a fiesta.” Thomas is at pains to portray these dancers as yokels and peasants so that their dance can be subsumed into the racist framework of the ethnographic. Despite these racialized differences, one thing shared by all these representations of European space is their insistence on Europe as eternally in the past, as fundamentally distanced from modernity and technology. Europeans enact the same age-old rituals and performances since time immemorial, repeating a past that has become hollow as it has lost any real power. They occupy beautiful, decaying buildings erected by their powerful ancestors. They play rather than work, reduced to happy peasants in the south or to proud yet disarmed former military powers in the north. European history here is seemingly made to stop at the end of the nineteenth century: before the two world wars, before the continent’s simultaneous destruction and modernization. By implication, twentieth-century history belongs to the United States, and in particular to the white American man. Like the early film travelogue, This Is Cinerama converts “other” spaces and peoples into an attraction to bring home and sell. Yet here, Europe itself—once the seat of the West—has become the attraction.

The Quiet Man Merian C. Cooper, the ethnographic filmmaker who was the primary director of This Is Cinerama, was also involved in the production of The Quiet Man, this

Figure 21  This Is Cinerama: A dance performance in Spain.

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time as a producer. Released the same year, this film is another key early example in the formation of the tourist film cycle. It tells the story of Sean Thornton (John Wayne), an Irish-American who emigrated as a young child, returning to the Irish village where he was born. The film to this day inhabits the position of quintessential tourist-fantasy view of Ireland in both scholarship and popular memory, with its lush green pastures, rustic thatched cottages, and quaint village life. In this section I make the case for the film as transitional, illustrating how the aesthetic and ideological principles of the ethnographic move from documentary into the fictional landscape of the tourist film. Much like Italianness, Irishness has a complicated, ambiguous place within United Statesian racial politics. Irish immigrants in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were often poor unskilled workers and were subject to hideous racist stereotypes (O’Neill 2009). Yet unlike Black, Indigenous, Asian, and other people subjected to US regimes of racism, Irish immigrants and their descendants were able to gain full citizenship and were conferred legal rights as white people. By the mid-twentieth century, racist attitudes toward the Irish were well on the wane, as film stars and other figures with Irish ancestry came into the public eye including Bing Crosby, Gene Kelly, John Wayne, and Maureen O’Hara, and as Roman Catholicism became more culturally accepted in the mainstream (McCaffrey 2009). Irishness has ultimately been absorbed almost entirely into US whiteness. Yet, as a film like Man of Aran (Robert J. Flaherty, Gaumont, 1934) shows, the Irish were treated as ethnographiable rather than historifiable well into the twentieth century; this accoladed documentary, much in the vein of Flaherty’s other ethnographic work, depicts the Irish as simple, primitive people in a heroic struggle for survival in a hostile environment. The Quiet Man is often read in light of director John Ford’s identity as an IrishAmerican, and it is thus read through the lens of heritage and nostalgia. While the best of this work is strong and insightful, the ethnographic is an equally or more important path into understanding fully the film’s vision of Ireland. Ford’s Irish heritage presents no obstacle to such a reading; after all, Flaherty was IrishAmerican as well, yet he created the quintessential ethnographic documentary of Ireland. Luke Gibbons argues that “Ford’s life and work may be seen as an attempt to retrieve the American dream by transferring its sympathies from White, European legacies of colonial expansion to the rights of other cultures and indigenous peoples” (Gibbons 2002, 104), attributing these anti-racist sentiments to Ford’s Irish-American identity, having given him sympathy for racial underdogs.



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Gibbons reads The Quiet Man as a central text for understanding Ford’s liberal anti-racism, given the film’s sympathetic views of the Irish. Yet this reading does not square with the ambivalent reaction many Irish people had, and have, to the film: while appearing to take an affectionate, even admiring tone, the film’s “Irishness” is so over-the-top and campy that it seems off somehow, as though aimed toward foreigners rather than speaking to Irish experiences of home and nation. In a historical sense, this is in fact true: it was aimed toward foreigners rather than Irish people. The Irish government of the postwar period was keen to make a positive impression on the US government and audiences, to stimulate tourism as well as to get in on the Marshall Plan and gain entry into the United Nations. This led the Irish government to collaborate fairly extensively on the film, rushing the electrification of the rural region in which it was filmed for the convenience of the production and collaborating on script development to ensure that it sent the right messages, particularly about the Irish War of Independence (2002, 45). Indeed, the film may be one of the earliest examples of a local government collaborating with a Hollywood runaway production in this way, which is now a common practice. Ford, too, intended the film to inspire US tourists to go to Ireland, and the film’s release coincided with the creation of the Irish Tourism Board in 1952. Yet after the film was released in Ireland, many Irish people actually criticized the Irish government for its role in the film in light of its problematic representation of the nation, and thereafter the government could no longer be seen publicly supporting Hollywood productions (though they continued to do so under wraps). This suggests that Gibbons’s auteurist reading of the film as an exemplar of Ford’s liberal tolerance does not quite get it right in terms of its postwar geopolitical contexts and discourses of nation. The ideological/aesthetic lens of the ethnographic can supply the missing link here, getting at the heart of what exactly the problem is with the film. The Quiet Man’s depiction of Irish people is often described as a version of “stage Irish”—meaning that it refers to Irish stereotypes that were stock characters for decades in theatrical contexts in the United States, though it takes a softer, more affectionate tone than usual. The Irishman’s supposed harddrinking, garrulous, impecunious nature (Welch and Stewart 1996, 534–5), the Irish “colleen” with her beauty and fiery temperament, and the stereotyped figure of the meddling rural Catholic priest, for example, all gain expression in the film, though with a warmer, tenderer bent than such stock characters often received. The Quiet Man’s pairing of these stereotypes with location-shot

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Irish landscapes appears to authenticate them; the discourses of the “real” at work in the film’s mise-en-scène and marketing seem to elevate them above the contrivances of the comic or melodramatic stage and enshrine them as reality. This is not a bad way to summarize the ethnographic: as racism accompanied by implicit or explicit claims of authenticity that function to elevate and romanticize it. The combination of patronization with claims of “reality” and a positive affect of admiration and envy is precisely what makes the ethnographic so ambiguous and difficult to unpick. The Quiet Man’s opening sequence illustrates the convergence of these elements. An antique-looking green train pulls languidly into the station at Castletown, “three hours late as usual” according to Father Lonergan (Ward Bond)’s voice-over; it’s accompanied by a lighthearted orchestral version of an Irish jig which rhythmically matches the chugging of the engine, marking it as a vehicle of pleasure and play rather than industrial power. Sean Thornton (John Wayne) alights and asks the way to Inisfree, and a crowd of locals and railway employees gathers around him, arguing about the directions and eventually veering off topic without giving him an answer; this group of Irish are, true to stereotypes, garrulous and silly. There is a distance between Sean and the Irish people here not only in his American accent and well-tailored clothes, but also in his affect, as he stands patiently tolerating their silliness while they crowd around him, all much shorter than him, playfully bickering like children. The evident impossibility of giving sensible directions places Ireland not only out of pace with modern temporality, but also outside the space of modernity—as unmapped and unmappable, a terrain of quaint, almost magical folk knowledge rather than rational navigability. At the end of this sequence, the group of locals line up at an ivy-covered stone wall to watch Sean as he rides off in a buggy. The camera slowly pans across them, dallying on their pondering visages far longer than the narrative requires (Figure 22). This kind of lingering view upon peasants’ faces is a standard trope of the ethnographic gaze, as though to take in the otherness of its subjects’ ethnic “type” and features. Like the gendered gaze, their stillness and silence at the behest of the camera functions to elide their status as people with agency and subjects them instead to aestheticization and fascination. These kinds of extraneous, lingering views of anonymous Irish people, often with a picturesque vista behind them, occurs throughout the film, frequently taking the place of more traditional establishing shots. Repeatedly these are shots of women with shawls or scarves covering their heads (Figure 23)—another standard



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Figure 22  The Quiet Man: A lingering view of the faces of Irish peasants.

ethnographic trope, a visual marker of anachronism compared to the fashion, glamour, and sexual display of the modern Western woman. The glowing, lowangle shot of Mary Kate (Maureen O’Hara) when Sean first sees her tending sheep is another example of the film’s mobilization of this trope, and indeed seems to come straight out of Flaherty but for the Technicolor (Figure 24). Similarly, later on, just prior to the credits at the end of the film, we get a series of shots of the film’s Irish characters and other random villagers who seemingly address the audience directly with their gestures (Figure 25). Often referred to as the film’s “final bows,” these are not really bows at all, lingering as they do on several random villagers of whom we have little to no knowledge. They function as ethnographic portraits, as though restoring us to a proper distance from the village’s inhabitants. When Sean first looks out from the bridge upon the cottage where he was born, the film emphasizes that we are seeing his view of the landscape, both through the use of point-of-view shots and through the very noticeable differences in color and lighting between where Sean stands and the space he is looking at. Gibbons and others have argued that this sequence foregrounds the medium of film and

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Figure 23  The Quiet Man: Women with shawls and scarves covering their heads—a standard ethnographic trope.

momentarily gives us an ironic, Brechtian detachment from its spectacular views of Ireland, as though “the visual equivalent of inverted commas” (2002, 19). While I don’t disagree, this interpretation does not fully account for the relationship between technological reflexivity and the ethnographic gaze. As Sean gazes out from the bridge, he is surrounded by grays—in his coat and hat, the stone wall on which he leans, and in fairly obvious rear projection behind him an image of brooding gray skies and water (Figure 26). This all contrasts sharply with the luminous greens and blues of the landscape on which he gazes. A little later in the sequence, he explains that he is arriving from Pittsburgh’s steel industry, and the visual style with which Sean is portrayed seems to belong to that world; even the obvious studio lights shining on his body and face seem to signify his belonging to a world outside of this picturesque valley, gazing on it from a drab, over-technologized, and claustrophobic perspective. The technological gaze is here transposed to narrative sentimentality, as a longing protagonist directs the gaze of the camera as it penetrates into an anachronistic space and brings its delights home to the viewer. This will come to be a central



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Figure 24  The Quiet Man: A glowing, low-angle shot of Mary Kate (Maureen O’Hara) that seems to draw upon Flaherty’s ethnographic style.

conceit of the entire tourist film cycle: the distilled plotline of most of these films is that a city-dwelling, technologically sophisticated American, finding themself jaded and increasingly dissatisfied with modernity, travels to an anachronistic space and becomes captivated by it, finding in it the answer to their problems. Moreover, throughout the cycle the viewer arrives with this American protagonist in the tourist locale, exploring the space as they do, seeing the landscape from their visual and narrative perspective. Given MacCannell’s admonition that this sort of tourist desire, this search for “authenticity,” is an essential part of the “conquering spirit of modernity,” we ought to be suspicious of the ideological work that this ethnographic gaze is doing in a period of US neocolonial expansion. It offers an idealized, utopian vision of this capitalist expansion, “selling” it to United States and foreign audiences alike. The Quiet Man can be read as a major, influential early case in which the ethnographic gaze is converted to a fictional, sentimental Hollywood narrative. There is also a point to be made here about the film’s use of Technicolor. In previous decades, it had been used in Hollywood not for verisimilitude,

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Figure 25  The Quiet Man: One of a series of shots of Irish villagers directly addressing the camera.

but rather primarily in musicals and costume dramas, painting fantasized or remembered worlds that are bathed in sentiment. Tourist films, including both This Is Cinerama and The Quiet Man, offer early examples of another emergent meaning of color, now reenvisioned as a sort of documentary realism which brings an “authentic” landscape more vividly to life for the viewer. In these films, these two discourses are not yet entirely separate; it is as though the rest of the world has been absorbed into Hollywood’s fantastical imaginary, which the United States alone is able to do thanks to its superior technologies of vision. In other words, Ireland here is mediated through the globally mobile, technologically advanced position of the camera, which is deployed in service of the visual pleasure of a United Statesian audience. Another germane example is how Inisfree’s interior spaces have no diegetic electricity—only candles and oil lamps—yet are quite obviously lit with electric studio lights, as though to lend them an improved, idealized visuality cut to the measure of American desire. The Quiet Man has an ambiguous, complex temporality that makes it even more fascinating as an early example of the tourist film. The story it’s based on,



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Figure 26  The Quiet Man: Sean sits on a bridge surrounded by grays, with obvious studio lighting, gazing upon the Irish landscape.

by Maurice Walsh, is set in the 1920s, and most synopses of the film describe it that way. However, I was not actually aware of this until I read it. Hollywood often mashes-up time periods, incorporating elements of contemporary style into period films, as well as the converse, using period details to lend a sense of anachronism to a film that is set in the present; on first viewing, I thought the latter was the case here. Maureen O’Hara’s costumes in The Quiet Man, for example, are pure early 1950s; they are not high-fashion or modernist, to be sure, but the cinched waists, flared tea-length skirts, and padded shoulders indicate this (Figure 27). While women’s fashion during the postwar period was nostalgic, it was evoking the curvy, hyperfeminine female shape of the fin de siècle—envisioned as the prelapsarian era prior to both world wars—rather than the interwar period (Wilcox 2007). I see little trace of the looser, flat-chested, dropped-waist silhouettes of 1920s style here, as it is seemingly supplanted by postwar fashion with its own separate nostalgic discourses. The men’s suits are likewise cut with 1950s tailoring, though in tweeds and with the addition of flat caps which, again, could be taken either as period details in a costume film or

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Figure 27  The Quiet Man: Costumes show an ambiguous mash-up of time periods.

as aspects of a discourse of ethnographic anachronism in a contemporary-set one. When Sean Thornton is leaving the train station in the first scene, he looks upon Michaeleen (Barry Fitzgerald)’s horse-and-buggy and smiles to himself, as though this mode of transport charmingly evokes a bygone era which he nostalgically remembers. This would hardly have been the case in the 1920s, when horse-based transport was on the wane, to be sure, but was still a daily part of urban life in the United States, which it definitely was not anymore by the 1950s. Sean is thus positioned as taking a postwar perspective and as moving back in time when he arrives in Ireland. My point here is not that the synopses are wrong, but rather that whether the film depicts a literal anachronism or merely a symbolic one, its muddled temporality lends itself to the ethnographic imaginary of the postwar United States. It should be a trivial point that the film speaks to postwar US culture in one way or another, yet I know of no scholarly reading that examines it from this angle. The film contains many oblique references to a past war that is now over. In Walsh’s short story, this refers to the Irish War of Independence (1919–21), of course, but in the film it is much more vague, and for many postwar viewers



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(in the United States and elsewhere, though perhaps not in Ireland), this would have far more immediately evoked the Second World War. Sean Thornton, after all, is haunted by killing a man; like many returning war veterans, he essentially has post-traumatic stress disorder. He seeks to cure his psychological torment through a return “home” to a peaceful, idyllic place, settling down, buying a house, and marrying—an idealized blueprint for the returning soldier, the master narrative in fact for the postwar baby boom and the rapid growth of suburban, single-family homes. Postwar suburban housing in the United States was typically designed as an industrial-scale version of the rural farmhouse, and The Quiet Man delivers that dream of spacious, self-sufficient family living that functions as a psychological and cultural curative to violence, both of the past world war and of the nascent Cold War. Steven Cohan’s classic study of 1950s hegemonic masculinity argues that this was a period of “crisis” for men, with two competing halves of the male self struggling for dominance. On the one hand was the “hard” masculinity of the soldier, with his drive for violence, destruction, and illicit sex; on the other hand was the “soft” masculinity of the stable, dependable father/husband figure who must function, as Cohan puts it, as “the foundation of an orderly, responsible home life” (1997, xii) as well as the corporate office. This “crisis” arose from the pressures of returning from military service and struggling to reintegrate into home life, yet is simultaneously linked to Cold War politics, which required both military defense of the nation and the proper patriarchal-capitalist ordering of home life to ward off the threat of communism. As Russell Meeuf shows, John Wayne’s characters typically represented the violent, psychopathic side of US hegemonic masculinity; in westerns, his prowess is essential to the defense of women and of the domestic sphere, yet he himself does not belong within that sphere and is a permanent wanderer outside of it (Meeuf 2013, 19). Wayne brings the violent, rugged aspects of his star image to The Quiet Man, lending force and pathos to Sean Thornton’s haunting by past violence and longing for peaceful domesticity—as though only a place as idyllic and hermetic as Inisfree could possibly be powerful enough to cure him. Read this way, the climactic final fistfight between Sean and Will Danaher (Victor McLaglen) can be read as a cathartic redomestication of violence, a reintegration of the two competing halves of the male self. The fight is signaled as unserious and playful; the soundtrack brings light, comedic Irish music to the scene, and the haystack brawl, the repeated splashing of their faces with water, the ritualized drinking break, and so on, all function to relegate this violence to

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the realm of play and even celebration, as if declaring a truce between the two halves of the masculine self and making them work together again as a healthy, integrated whole. At the same time, Sean “tames” Mary Kate into a virtuous, compliant wife, as if killing off her proto-feminism. Thus both genders are “cured” of the upheavals of the war and return to (supposedly) previous, nostalgic ideals. This is what is achieved through the film’s symbolic displacement of Sean from industrial center to idealized rural hinterland. Yet Sean Thornton also brings the industrial center to the hinterland, as Inisfree is populated by childlike innocents who need to be taught about modernity. He teaches them about tourism and modern mobility; no one in Inisfree has ever heard of a sleeping bag before, nor has any conception of why one might travel away from home (at least for any reason other than fishing). He teaches them about modern furniture too, ordering a bed which appears to be a normal-size double bed yet of which a village yokel remarks, “A man would have to be a sprinter to catch his wife in a bed like that.” And he also teaches them about capitalism, taking money and assets out of the realm of ritualized kinship and archaic notions of inheritance and into the realm of investing in real estate, furnishing a home with modern conveniences, buying tools for business (in this case a tractor), and generally founding the postwar, patriarchal capitalist nuclear family. Viewed this way, The Quiet Man seems to be offering a utopian vision of global capitalist expansion and its positive effects for both the arriving US tourist/investor and the local community. To Sean, Ireland offers a fantasy of unalienated labor and communitarian living away from the industrial center, a space for sentiment and play whose pleasures are depicted as open and available for his consumption. At the same time, he gallantly brings the wonders of modernization to the locals, “improving” their lives. One wonders, following Rosaldo, if he will later nostalgically mourn the passing of the very same oldfashioned, indigenous life which he himself has helped to destroy, and indeed the tourist films as a whole are already texts of imperialist nostalgia on a mass scale, given how rapidly older modes of European life were disappearing into modernization and the spread of US consumer goods even as these films enshrine affection for that which was being disrupted. This is what is at stake in the films’ valuation of “authenticity”—the more “untouched” a place is by outside influence, the more valuable it is within the hierarchy of imperialist nostalgia. To the Irish (and other local populations), the film attempts—albeit with mixed results—to show the benefits of modernization. Part of this is through



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the figure of John Wayne, who was already one of the world’s most popular stars, embodying and glamourizing a masculinity cut to the measure of globalized capitalism (Meeuf 2013). He’s a beautiful and mesmerizing figure, and here he is also depicted as flexible and respectful in his ability to adapt to local customs. Wayne is a colonial figure—a connotation imported from his westerns—yet here he is given a reassuring makeover, sublimating his usual violent, psychopathic persona. The final fistfight is imperial capitalist violence, let’s be clear about that— it’s about the acquisition of assets on Sean’s terms. Yet the impetus for this is a colonial subject herself, and it’s also portrayed as desirable by the Irish themselves, who excitedly join in as if it’s a festival. In The Quiet Man, even imperial violence is converted to utopian fun—and this is accomplished through the film’s harnessing of ethnographic aesthetics.

Conclusion Released in the same year This Is Cinerama and The Quiet Man are transitional films, illustrating how the ethnographic sets out in the 1950s as a documentary aesthetic which centers a specifically United Statesian viewpoint on the world, and then transitions to fictional narratives about travel which likewise center on the gaze of a “modern” American protagonist. In subsequent tourist films, the ethnographic becomes more submerged, its tropes given a more shorthand treatment. One illustrative example is Light in the Piazza (Guy Green, MGM, 1962), which depicts a wealthy middle-aged American mother, Meg (Olivia de Havilland), and her young adult daughter Clara (Yvette Mimieux), who is both strikingly beautiful and intellectually disabled, on an extended holiday in Florence. Most Italians in the film, particularly those who are working class, are positioned as ethnographized background noise to the narrative: they are waiters and taxi drivers, providing local color mostly by not being able to speak English and other markers of otherness and simplicity. The ethnographic, in this and other tourist films, becomes submerged as a kind of structuring absence, providing atmosphere for a narrative entirely centered on American travelers. Italians in Light in the Piazza at one point hold a traditional Florentine festival involving a procession and football game; Meg skeptically remarks that they probably only do this “during tourist season”—an accusation that the locals are cynically utilizing their traditional culture for fiscal gain.

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This becomes a commonplace feature of later tourist films: as more and more American tourists come to Europe, authenticity becomes “authenticity,” a hyperreal display of culture for the benefit of these tourists, which is then devalued by the very same tourists on grounds that it’s not “real” enough— precisely following the blueprint of imperialist nostalgia. Yet the plot of the film also hinges on Meg ultimately accessing the “authentic” in Italy despite the hindrances introduced by (her own) capitalist tourism, which is framed as a sort of innate mood or magic beyond the reaches of modernity. In one momentous sequence, lying in bed after an argument with her husband, Meg pensively says to herself, “Nobody with a dream should come to Italy. No matter how dead and buried you think it is, in Italy it’ll rise and walk again.” By tourist film conventions, we know that she has now found that inexpressible something that is the authentic Italy, the essence of its temporal and spatial otherness to modernity. Despite this veneration of the magic of Italian culture, the plot of Light in the Piazza hinges on a patronizing and racist view of Italians. Clara, Meg explains to a new acquaintance, has the mental age of a ten-year-old, so she must be protected from men’s advances; when Clara meets a young Italian man named Fabrizio (George Hamilton doing an accent), Meg assumes he is a lecherous “Latin lover” type and maneuvers her daughter away from his grasp. Eventually she gives in when she realizes that Fabrizio comes from an upper-class family, and she sees how happy and well-matched they are. Yet this acceptance comes with a racism (and ableism) all its own. Fabrizio—who is not disabled—and his family do not notice Clara’s disability because, as his father (Rossano Brazzi) observes, Fabrizio and Clara are similar in their “simplicity.” Meg explains to her husband that Italian life doesn’t involve any thinking anyhow, so Clara will fit right in (seriously!). Meg thus finds a home for her daughter away from the pressures of life in the imperial metropole, where the high standards of intellectual productivity in the task of running an empire put her at a disadvantage so severe that it is medicalized, displacing her to a space on the periphery where life is so much slower that Clara can keep up. Yet all this racism is invoked, like so much of the ethnographic, with a tone of admiration and envy, because Florence is beautiful and ancient, and Italian culture is leisurely and charming. The ethnographic, in other words, makes racism appear as liberal tolerance and touristic pleasure—a pattern repeated throughout the tourist films. Hollywood has a history of attempting to appeal to foreign cultures by appropriating them, spinning them into Technicolor spectacles, and then selling



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them back; for an example outside the purview of this book, see the many “Latin American” musicals made in the wake of the Good Neighbor policy of the 1940s. Some of these films, like The Quiet Man, have subsequently become major sources of knowledge about a culture for those outside its immediate region: Brigadoon (Vincente Minnelli, MGM, 1954) for Scotland, The King and I (Walter Lang, 20th Century Fox, 1956) for Thailand, The Sound of Music (Robert Wise, 20th Century Fox, 1965) for Austria, and so on. All these films received (and continue to receive) ambivalent reactions by citizens of the countries which they portray. Why did Hollywood make them? Why do things this way? Aside from their enduring global popularity, these films present a utopian vision of a world symbolically subjugated to US capitalist neocolonialism. Spun into Hollywood’s technologized, sensationalized vision, the world looks like a happy place—with the United States at the top, providing a pleasurable gaze on all others which audiences around the world may find captivating and seductive (except perhaps when it is one’s own culture serving as grist for the Hollywood mill). This is managed, in part, through the ethnographic, whose discourses and aesthetics have been absorbed into Hollywood-style fictional storytelling; the ethnographic makes it possible to simultaneously communicate admiration for a culture, claim accuracy and authenticity in representing it (somehow even in Technicolor spectacles), and implicitly justify “improving” the place via capitalist modernity. This ideological maneuver becomes so fully integrated into the tourist films, so baked into their aesthetics, that it becomes difficult to notice. It is disturbing to observe the degree to which Hollywood-style liberal tolerance and its ostensible celebrations of difference—which, after all, is a common reading of The Quiet Man—actually rest for a foundation on the aesthetics of the ethnographic. It is the ethnographic that makes possible the sleight of hand whereby Hollywood’s portrayals of other cultures can at the same time be so admiring and so patronizing.

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The Picturesque: Italian Landscape Views and the American Female Gaze

In Rome Adventure (Delmer Daves, Warner Bros., 1962), a young American woman named Prudence Bell (Suzanne Pleshette) departs for Rome to escape the strait-laced sexual mores of her Connecticut women’s college. The trip that follows constitutes an ostensibly feminist exploration—both of the possibilities of a freed-up sexuality and more generally of the personal freedoms wrought by solo travel abroad. These explorations are persistently connected to the picturesque scenery of Italy. Upon Prudence’s arrival, an older Italian man, played by Rossano Brazzi in his usual typecasting as a “Latin lover,” shows her around the sights of Rome in his convertible and seduces her on a bridge over the Tiber. Later she falls in love with handsome American graduate student Don Porter (Troy Donahue) against a backdrop of Italy’s most magnificent scenery: a lunch date in a restaurant overlooking the Apennines; a midnight carriage ride through the Roman streets; a sightseeing trip to Florence, Pisa, and the Italian Alps—all filmed in spectacular widescreen (Figure 28). Women’s liberation in this film is envisioned spatially, as the freedom to travel and to enjoy expansive, beautiful views. By this film’s release in 1962, the association between well-heeled white women’s social/sexual liberation and picturesque views of Italy had become a Hollywood cliché. Nearly a decade previously, in 1953, Roman Holiday (William Wyler, Warner Bros., 1953) had inaugurated the formula: a white female protagonist runs away to Italy from a staid homelife and “finds herself ” through both touristic and sexual exploration before inevitably returning home again. This cycle of films also includes Three Coins in the Fountain (Jean Negulesco, 20th Century Fox, 1954), Summertime (David Lean, United Artists, 1955), Interlude (which takes place in southern Germany but has many of the same tropes, including an Italian lover; Douglas Sirk, Universal, 1957), Come September (Robert Mulligan, Universal, 1961), The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (a dark satire of the cycle, based on a novel by Tennessee Williams; José Quintero, Warner

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Figure 28  Rome Adventure: Prudence (Suzanne Pleshette) and Don (Troy Donahue) falling in love in the Italian Alps.

Bros., 1961), Light in the Piazza (Guy Green, MGM, 1962), and Gidget Goes to Rome (Paul Wendkos, Columbia, 1963). These films were often identified both in the contemporaneous press and by subsequent scholarship as “travelogues” due to their unfailingly spectacular displays of picturesque scenery. “Travelogue” in cinema normally refers to a nonfiction form focused solely on the visual display of faraway, exotic places (Peterson 2013). While these Italy-set tourist films are fiction films, their scenery is so breathtaking that it often seems to break free from classical rules of cinematic storytelling, the camera lingering on beautiful views far longer than is warranted by the needs of the narrative; the scenery is a central aspect of the films’ draw. The picturesque—literally “like a picture”—today, typically denotes a vaguely “pretty and reassuring” landscape view (Peterson 1999, 217) of a lake or sea, rolling fields, distant mountains, or the like. It is strongly associated with tourism and, at least for a certain type of tourist, may be regarded as one of the most important pleasures of travel. Yet the picturesque’s current meaning of bland visual pleasantness belies what is in fact a complicated and fraught history laced with gendered, raced, and classed significance. The picturesque first arose in the Enlightenment period in England. In the nineteenth century, it took on special significance for the bourgeois Englishwoman, a feminine landscape aesthetic that connoted safety and was



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therefore deemed “proper” to the emergent practice of women’s travel and the proto-feminist sensibilities with which it was associated. In the British colonial world, the picturesque took on major significance as a mode through which well-heeled Englishwomen experienced and recorded their colonial travels, negotiating their complex positioning as subjects oppressed by Western patriarchy yet simultaneously race and class privileged. At the same time, as women became increasingly positioned as the primary consuming subject in late-nineteenthcentury Western consumer capitalism, the picturesque developed into a major mode for the commodification of visual pleasure, ultimately becoming such a common term in marketing that it came to be almost meaningless, as a vague term for any pleasurable view. All of these complex layers of meaning found in the picturesque—its gendered, raced, and classed significance; its simultaneous, seemingly contradictory connections to colonial violence, consumer capitalism, tourism, and feminism—come to bear on this cycle of Hollywood films set in Italy. The picturesque has come into service of the liberation of the American woman, in an Italy that is subtly envisioned as an American colony. It makes sense that the picturesque would be remobilized by Hollywood cinema in the mid-1950s, as American tourism in Europe was becoming an increasingly established and popular practice. The picturesque, long used in British and French imperial culture to denote the “safety” of a colonized place once the process of subjugation was complete, is here transferred to the American presence in Europe, imbuing this tourism with a sense of neo-imperial triumphalism that announces the security of its imperial ownership. At the same time, this was a period in which feminism was beginning its ascent to the forefront of US culture that would explode in the 1960s; the Italy-set tourist films, then, kill two birds with one stone by addressing contemporaneous United Statesian cultural issues. There is an extra layer of complication, however, in considering the picturesque in relation to these Hollywood films. Many of the primary texts that have been used by feminist and postcolonial scholars in interpreting the picturesque were produced by women: women’s novels, travel accounts, sketchbooks, journals, and so on. Conversely, the films of this chapter were created almost entirely by male directors, producers, screenwriters, cinematographers, editors, and so on. We need to consider not only what the picturesque might mean for women, but also how it has been deployed by and in the service of the US’s patriarchal and neocolonial structures of power. In these films, the picturesque invites white

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American women into collusion with the neocolonial by resurrecting an older colonial aesthetics of feminist liberation. In fact, the Italy-set tourist films examined in this chapter are nearly all instances of the classical Hollywood genre of the woman’s film. Although a few of them are more comedic in tone (Come September, Gidget Goes to Rome, Roman Holiday), for the most part they adopt the woman’s film’s melodramatic pathos in dramatizing difficulties faced by one or more female protagonists. This gives us a way in to considering the films’ negotiations with patriarchy, as much feminist scholarship has focused on the woman’s film in terms of the complex ways it functions to position women at the center of film narratives, yet simultaneously works to subtly disempower and decenter them, cutting the legs off of any genuine critique of patriarchy that such a focus on women might otherwise have produced. On the other hand, few critiques of the woman’s film genre have given much thought to the genre’s colonialism, and it will be a focus of this chapter to consider how white American women’s subjectivities and their complex negotiations with patriarchy are also connected to the colonial. The colonial is deployed in the Italy-set tourist films in ways that are inextricably linked to the patriarchal, functioning to empower white American women in a simulacrum of liberation while simultaneously working to recuperate them back into the fold of the hegemonic order. Why is Italy such a common, repeated site for imaginaries of white women’s liberation? And why is it so persistently connected to the colonial, given that it’s a European nation? In fact Italy has long served as a major counterpoint to Anglo-American culture. This goes back at least to the Middle Ages, increased greatly in the eighteenth century with the rise of the Grand Tour, and influenced Romantic poetry, with Shelley’s famed elegy to Keats after the young poet’s death in Rome (Black 2003, Hornsby 2000, Parks 1954). Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady and E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View trace a similar logic, insistently contrasting the staid, overdetermined domestic life of modernity to the warmth, freedom, and moral danger of Italy—especially for women. Italy, with its hot sunshine, the darker skin tones of many of the locals, and the fabulous antiquity of the architecture, seems to have long inspired Orientalist-style fantasies in Anglo-American writers. Italy, as a European nation, is just about “safe” enough for even young white women to be trusted to travel to, but still carries hints of moral danger and freedom from domesticity as an other to Anglo-American culture, occupying a space at the edge of Europeanness—a border area with the Global South. It does not take much, then, for these Italy-set woman’s films to



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make a similar move, drawing on this tradition and removing England from the equation in the process. In Summertime, the protagonist meets an Englishman on the train as she is arriving in Venice; this Englishman has been to Venice several times and gives her a little introduction to its delights before sending her on her own way. The film thus almost explicitly announces the United States as the inheritor of the English tradition of travel in Italy, and the white American woman is positioned as the new Lucy Honeychurch, finding measured degrees of freedom and sexual experience in Italy even while remaining within the confines of a regime of white patriarchal sexual respectability. In the Italy-set woman’s films, the picturesque plays a fundamental role in managing these various contradictory forces.

Defining the Picturesque The English term “picturesque” derives from the sixteenth-century Italian word “pittoresco,” a term that was used by Renaissance painters to refer to the pleasurable “paintingness” of painted images. William Gilpin, an Anglican priest and amateur painter, was the first English theorist of the picturesque. To him, the picturesque constituted a visually pleasing way to arrange the rugged, rough, or irregular elements of a landscape. In contrast with the beautiful—which Edmund Burke had prominently defined as consisting of smooth, symmetrical, well-formed, and perfectly polished objects (1782)—the picturesque, Gilpin argued, was an aestheticization of that which is imperfect or even ruined. “Should we wish to give [an elegant piece of architecture] a picturesque beauty,” he wrote, “we must use the mallet instead of the chisel; we must beat down one half of it, deface the other, and throw the mutilated members around in heaps” (Gilpin 1792, n.p). Scholars have noted the close correspondence between this aesthetics of ruin and the English enclosures, the period between 1760 and 1820 when upperclass Englishmen threw large numbers of rural peasants off of land that had traditionally been open for communal use. The picturesque aestheticizes a landscape newly emptied of people and finds beauty in the detritus left behind (Bermingham 1986). Indeed, the picturesque as a gardening aesthetic came to function as a reorganizing principle of the English landscape, justifying the ongoing violent ejection of peasants and the destruction of their homes and fields under the aegis of “improvement” (Galt 2011a). Thus the picturesque, like the

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ethnographic, has a close affinity with what Renato Rosaldo terms “imperialist nostalgia,” in which the colonizer grieves that which they themselves have had a hand in destroying (Rosaldo 1989; see Chapter 2 for further discussion). This points to another significant feature of the picturesque: it consists of spaces that are largely devoid of people—save for the occasional shepherdess or other attractive peasant positioned as a part of the landscape—giving rise to its sense of tranquility and easeful spaciousness. Uvedale Price, another English theorist of the picturesque, defined it in relation to the sublime, as an aesthetic strategy by which the terror of the sublime is contained, its power abolished. Infinity is one of the most efficient causes of the sublime … to give [an object] picturesqueness, you must destroy the cause of its sublimity; for it is on the shape and disposition of its boundaries, that the picturesque must in greater measure depend. (Price 1810, 84)

The picturesque composes the landscape in such a way that it suggests the force of nature, yet through framing and visual arrangement simultaneously reassures the viewer that humans are in control. In this way the potentially destructive forces of nature are contained, becoming an object of curiosity rather than power—a thing constructed for human delight (Battersby 2007, 11). Thus the sublime captures a moment of terror that the picturesque seeks to deny; the picturesque celebrates nature by taming it into an object of amusement or curiosity while the sublime revels in nature’s unbridled power. The picturesque, like the sublime, was a classed aesthetic which was only considered available to those with sufficient education. Indeed already by the mid-nineteenth century, some writers were aware of the picturesque’s connections to classed violence; John Ruskin remarked in 1856, “I cannot help feeling how many suffering persons must pay for my picturesque subject and happy walk” (1856). And like the sublime, the picturesque’s classed logic was also raced; as Britain expanded its colonies, the picturesque came to function as a stratifying aesthetic mechanism, wherein non-white peoples and their homes/ lands could be positioned as distanciated objects of a picturesque gaze that was framed as “for,” and belonging to, white colonists. The picturesque became a powerful aesthetic strategy in the hands of colonial artists, who could visually filter the wild impenetrable landscapes of newly “discovered” lands through softening hints of the domestic and familiar that would reassure the Western viewer and lend the view an implicit sense of ownership (Battersby 2007). Via



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the picturesque, a potentially terrifying, sublime virgin landscape could be tamed, made reassuring and safe for the viewer, a kind of visual act of colonial pacification. But unlike the sublime, the picturesque was regarded as available to bourgeois white women—a “safe” and “contained” aesthetic in ways considered appropriate for women’s supposedly weaker constitutions and more delicate sensibilities. Indeed it would ultimately become an aesthetic that was associated with women, the first specifically feminine mode of viewing to arise amid the developing visuality of modernity. Giuliana Bruno somewhat breathlessly traces how the enjoyment of picturesque landscapes became a quintessentially feminine activity that helped delineate a female gaze, writing that in the Enlightenment period, “a female public was being formed on the garden’s grounds, a public that turned into a travelling authorship … By way of garden strolling, the picturesque opened the emotion of travelling cultures to women” (2002, 200). Postcolonial critic Indira Ghose finds fault with scholars who, like Bruno here, become too invested in celebrating the “emancipatory function of travel for women” that is often expounded in women’s travel writing, thus obediently reading along with these texts instead of reading them against the grain (Ghose 1998, 3). The problem with such a move is that these white Western women may have been colonized by gender, but they were colonizers by race (ibid., 5; see also Grewal 1996). Indeed, the picturesque shaped a gaze for white women precisely by positioning the colonial other as the distanced object of this gaze; it gave white women a sense of liberation precisely by putting them in a scopic position of mastery over a colonial landscape that had been “improved” and made safe for them through colonial violence. It would be a mistake to position white women solely as spectators of empire, however, for they acted in various ways that were complicit with imperialism and took an active role in it. Sara Suleri reads the picturesque as an aestheticizing mode for the repression of colonial violence, arguing that it “assumes an ideological urgency through which all subcontinental threats could be temporarily converted into watercolors” (1992, 75). In producing picturesque imagery in their paintings, sketches, and writings, Englishwomen played an essential role in colonial discourse by aestheticizing the colonial landscape, using it to “romanticiz[e]‌… difficulty into the greater tolerability of mystery” and give “the colonial gaze a license to convert its ability not to see into studiously visual representations” (ibid., 76). Thus the picturesque is not only white women’s mode

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for negotiating their complicated positioning in colonialism, but an essential tool in the building of a colonial imaginary. In this light, it becomes very interesting and problematic indeed that the picturesque became such an essential part of consumer-capitalist visual culture, and that it is so wound up even to this day in bourgeois cultures of tourism. Anne Friedberg, Mary Ann Doane, and others argue that the primary spectator figure around which the visuality of modernity coalesced was female, not male— that women must be considered the quintessential audience/consumers for early cinema and other developments in the technology of vision (Friedberg 1993, 37; Doane 1987, 27). So perhaps it is no surprise that the picturesque became commodified, an aesthetic that was foundational to the visuality of modernity and the rise of mass art (Peterson 1999, 193). By the time cinema arose as a mass art form, the picturesque was already perhaps the most well-established and central aesthetic strategy in Western cultures of travel and tourism, and the early film travelogue thus simply absorbed this preestablished prominence and mobilized it in service of early cinema’s claims to “bring the far near,” its colonial mode of visual pleasure. Yet at that point, tourism was in its infancy compared to what it is today; it grew exponentially throughout the twentieth century, with a particularly large boost during the postwar period, particularly by United Statesians. Throughout this period of growth, the picturesque has remained a familiar, by now even a hackneyed, visual aesthetic that is at the center of many people’s desire for travel. Dean MacCannell famously argued that tourism is a foundational activity in and expression of modernity (1999), and the picturesque is at the heart of this practice, the visual expression of Western modernity’s will to expansion. Its sense of bland pleasantness, in this light, is deeply troubling, for it is not merely an incidental feature of the picturesque but the essential reason why it continues to work so well today as a mode for the repression of colonial violence that still underlies touristic practices. Hollywood’s tourist films utilize the picturesque as a mode for appropriating its politics of colonial violence for a specifically American colonialism. Like the other colonial aesthetic traditions explored in this book, the picturesque is used to subvert and smooth over the violence of the US conquest and occupation of Europe (and by extension the rest of the world), justifying it in aestheticizing terms. It is paradoxical that the visual work of raced and classed distanciation at the heart of the picturesque is accomplished precisely via a discourse of “really being there,” of the immediacy and immersiveness of location shooting. We



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must read against the grain of these films’ marketing materials and read runaway production itself as a fundamentally neocolonial practice.

The Feminist Geopolitics of the Woman’s Film In one of the first scholarly articles to be written on the Hollywood “woman’s film,” Thomas Elsaesser explores this genre’s use of space and location, contrasting it with the western. The western is characterized by wide open landscapes and expanding territories—a relationship to space that reflects the dynamics of the plot in that “the drama moves towards its resolution by having the central conflicts successively externalized and projected into direct action” (1987, 55). The woman’s film, by contrast, is characterized by elaborate and stifling indoor spaces, which is equally a reflection of dramatic movement. It more often records the failure of the protagonist to act in a way that could shape events and influence the emotional environment, let alone change the stifling social milieu. The world is closed (emphasis added), and the characters are acted upon. ... The cathartic violence of a shoot-out or chase becomes an inner violence, often one which the characters turn against themselves. (1987, 55–6)

I emphasize the words “the world is closed” because this hints at the potential significance in film melodrama not only of indoor versus outdoor spaces but of geographical space, of the contrast between the domestic/familiar and the foreign/unfamiliar. If “the world is closed” to the melodramatic heroine, then this implies that her escape—the catharsis she is denied—could lie not only outside the repressive home environment but in distant lands. Tania Modleski similarly posits melodrama’s “hysterical experience of time and place” (1987, 330). Her emphasis is on melodramatic time, which, she argues, is formed by repetitions and reminiscences of past events rather than unfolding, progression, departure, or arrival. However, this sense of time is intimately related to the experience of place, as the heroine returns again and again to the same spaces, like “sitting in a train watching the world move by, and each time you reach a destination, you discover that it is the place you never really left” (ibid.). Unable to progress—let alone escape—the melodramatic heroine is confined to a few old, familiar spaces which she is doomed to prowl ceaselessly. The faraway thus typically constitutes a structuring absence of the woman’s film, its possibility relentlessly denied to the heroine—an idea that is borne out

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in some of the most prominent instances of the genre in the 1930s and 1940s. In Stella Dallas (King Vidor, 1937), Stella pretends to leave for South America to get out of the way of her daughter’s marrying into upper-class society—but the trip is a pretense, and Stella actually disappears into poverty and perpetual self-sacrifice. In both versions of Back Street (John M Stahl, 1932; Robert Stevenson, 1941), Rae Smith cannot fulfill her dream of European travel because she is Walter’s mistress, not his wife. When she is finally able to go with him to Paris in old age, it becomes the location of both their deaths. In Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophuls, 1948), during the one romantic night Lisa spends with Stefan, they sit together in a stationary train—an amusement park ride. They watch painted scenes of the world go by in a simulacrum of tourism. Lisa reminisces about the imaginary journeys she used to take with her father, living vicariously through the pages of his travel brochures—yet her life is one of stasis, geographically hemmed into a few familiar spaces in Vienna as she waits for Stefan. There are occasional woman’s films of this era in which the possibility of travel as escape is fulfilled: in Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1942), Charlotte Vale’s cruise to South America cements her escape from the overbearing weight of her mother’s expectations and rules; Jody Norris in To Each His Own (Mitchell Leisen, 1946) moves to London to flee the agony of watching her child be raised by another woman. But on the whole the genre in the 1930s and 1940s dramatizes stasis and entrapment within domestic spaces, with travel as a distant dream of empowerment and freedom that is denied to the heroine. Melodrama has often been viewed in the scholarly literature as a key genre in understanding the relationship between women and patriarchy. Mary Ann Doane’s book The Desire to Desire posits that while 1940s melodrama appears to give a voice to women, this genre actually functions “to deny the woman the space of a reading” (1987, 19), rendering her powerless and mute in the face of patriarchal institutions of family and sexuality even as it seems to represent the woman’s perspective within these institutions. The heroines of these films, according to Doane, are denied subjecthood, punished for the ability to see, gaze, and make choices, and pushed back into the objecthood demanded by the male gaze. However, the 1950s were a time of massive upheaval in norms, behaviors, and perceptions of women, and as Jackie Byars argues, the woman’s film underwent dramatic changes in this decade. During the Second World War, women had entered the workforce in large numbers and contrary to the prevailing norms



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they for the most part did not leave it when the war ended (May 2008, 8). At the same time women’s sexuality became less tied to marriage and reproduction. Birth control became more available to women, and as the 1953 Kinsey Report on women’s sexuality made known, more than 50 percent of women were not waiting until marriage to become sexually active (ibid., 121). May thus argues that the suburban domestic tranquility of the 1950s was really a front concealing the reality that women’s roles in American society were in the process of changing drastically. Byars explores how the 1950s’ quiet revolution in women’s roles gained expression in woman’s films of the decade. “The female-oriented film melodramas of the 1950s call attention to gendered identity construction during a period when precisely what it was to be a woman—and as a result, what it mean[t]‌to be a man—were becoming controversial issues” (Byars 1991, 147). Byars goes on to argue that the 1950s melodrama exemplifies ideological incoherence as the institutions of patriarchy were straining and ultimately beginning to break down. The Italy-set woman’s films are rich sites for examining the shifting areas between, as Byars puts it, “the reinforcement of patriarchy” and the “pleasures of looking with women” (ibid., 171). These films, like those Byars examines, powerfully dramatize the ongoing 1950s upheaval in gender relations. American women in Italy suddenly find themselves relatively free to do as they like— especially in the realm of sex and romance—which prompts them to question the patriarchal order by which they have previously abided, and to envision a life free of such constraints. Italy in these films serves as the location of female emancipation, opposed to the hemmed-in domestic life accorded to middle class and elite white women in the United States. These films, then, respond to and perhaps even fulfill the promises of the faraway in the woman’s films of the 1930s and 1940s—although as we’ll see, this fulfillment is always tentative and qualified. Yet, like the primary historical texts of the English picturesque, these films rely for their depictions of women’s liberation on colonial regimes of space and race. It is a familiar move in the European colonial imaginary to connect white women with the colonial other. European colonialism was deeply patriarchal, and vice versa; the two systems cannot be neatly cleaved from each other. In Orientalism, the Orient is feminized, imaginatively positioned as a space of sensuality and mystery, there for the ravishing by European men. Conversely, white women, and particularly their sexuality, were imagined as an unknowable “dark continent.” In the Italy-set woman’s films, this imaginative linkage between

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the feminine and the colonial is appropriated and adapted by Hollywood. Placed within the woman’s film, this feminine-Oriental connection is refracted through the genre’s appropriation of the picturesque, and is thus made to fit into a distinctively United Statesian inflection of both imperialist and gendered imaginaries. In the following sections, close readings of two films, Three Coins in the Fountain and Summertime, will examine the ways that these dynamics play out, as each film follows women enjoying picturesque scenery while negotiating a tangled web of colonialism and patriarchy. Doane and Byars both dwell on the notion of the female gaze as a site of contestation in the woman’s film, which often centers on whether and how women are permitted to look. Tourism—including female tourism—is inseparable from viewing and gazing upon the world. Women who come to Italy are freed to look in ways that they could never do at home, which often turns out to present challenges to the patriarchal order. Yet this can happen precisely because they are American tourists, a position that carries strong colonial undertones, as the women find themselves endowed with economic power and spatial and visual mobility in relation to Italians and the Italian landscape. So, although it is rightly regarded as a good thing for a film to attempt a genuine depiction of female subjecthood, the Italy-set woman’s films complicate the matter: women’s liberation is inseparable in these films from the picturesque imaginary of Italy as a colonial setting.

Colonial–Patriarchal Negotiations: Three Coins in the Fountain Roman Holiday, the film that established the cycle of Italy-set tourist films, was in black and white and with the traditional Academy ratio. The next film of this cycle to be released, the following year in 1954, was Three Coins in the Fountain, which by contrast was an early Fox CinemaScope production. In color and using cutting-edge widescreen technology, Three Coins draws extensively not only on Roman Holiday but also on the precedent set by This Is Cinerama for deploying widescreen to capture spectacular landscape views (see Chapter 2), adapting its strategies for the depiction of travel subjects to classical Hollywood narrative form. The film follows three American women working as secretaries in postwar Rome, with a rather meandering plot that follows each of them as they fall in love. Made in the Italian capital, as well as a sequence in Venice, many shots



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were emphatically filmed on location; the characters walk and drive through the cityscape in ways that could not have been achieved in postproduction. For entire passages, the narrative pauses altogether so that the camera can focus on the spectacular imagery of these Italian cities. At times during the Venice sequence, Three Coins replicates This Is Cinerama almost shot-for-shot in an attempt to highlight the supposed superiority of the CinemaScope technology through direct comparison. However, Three Coins, in the course of situating this spectacular landscape imagery within a narrative film, also marks the technologized widescreen/ Technicolor gaze as feminine. In one sequence, two of the main characters, Maria (Maggie MacNamara) and Frances (Dorothy McGuire), are flown by Prince Dino (Louis Jourdan) in his small airplane for a day trip to Venice. As they arrive, the airplane swoops through the city’s canals as the characters catch panoramic views of the Venetian cityscape, filmed in a shot-reverse shot sequence with the Prince pointing out the views and the women reacting with amazement. These aerial moments invite direct comparison with This Is Cinerama, as they combine two Cinerama sequences (Venice and aerials) into one; we are seemingly asked to see CinemaScope as equivalent or superior in optical quality. Yet there is a major difference: in this case, the gaze is marked as belonging to the two women (rather than a male narrator), who are being shown around by no less than a handsome Italian prince—a classic figure of female fantasy. Thus in Three Coins the spectator is invited into narrative and visual alignment with these white American women, with Prince Dino functioning as the viewer’s virtual tour guide. The fantasy of a European prince is a romantic, fantastical throwback worthy of a Disney movie (a la Cinderella, which was released in 1950). Though Three Coins is set in the 1954 present, other elements of the film represent Italy in such a nostalgic and maudlin way that its effacement of twentieth-century history, including even the Second World War, becomes downright bizarre. Certain details of the film are deeply at odds with its present-day setting: two of the American characters, Frances and Shadwell (Clifton Webb), have been in Italy for fifteen years, which would mean they arrived in 1939(!)—yet there is no mention of how they could have survived as resident enemies during the war years. Prince Dino, meanwhile, has apparently made it through fascism and the war with his wealth, and his grand residence, unaffected and intact. The film works to erase the trauma of the recent war even at the expense of its own coherence. The Rome of Three Coins is a space in which women’s “reputations”

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are all-important, in which the ruling class’s modernity is expressed primarily through the Prince’s affinity for modern art, and in which the aging, expatriate writers like Shadwell live out their years in contented, aristocratic solitude. It thus seems much closer to the Italy of Henry James or E. M. Forster than to the postwar present. There is a direct sense in which the film must repress a history of violence on the way to creating its picturesque, imperialist-nostalgic representation of Italy. Other elements of the film position Italy as a US colony in quite explicit ways. Italians in Three Coins, where present (and they are often simply absent), are depicted as peasants, living in crowded slums or decaying farm buildings, working as waiters and housekeepers. Their spaces are areas where the American women should not go unescorted. The high culture of Italy—its architecture, its art, its fine food and wine—is available only to US citizens and a few aristocratic Italians, turning Italian culture into a playground for wealthy colonial functionaries. The three American women, who work for a US government agency and are paid in dollars, even discuss how American economic power in the region allows them to live in a gorgeous villa overlooking the city—an advantage clearly not available to the agency’s Italian employees, one of whom is deemed ineligible as a love interest (Giorgio, played by Rossano Brazzi) because he is too poor to support the lifestyle of an American wife. This budding romance is also explicitly forbidden by the agency’s head, who prohibits his white female employees from interacting socially with the Italian men who also work for him. No reason is given for this interdiction, but it seems motivated by a racist, paternalistic desire to “protect” the women from potential sexual impurity at the hands of Italian men. Three Coins thus draws on British colonial narratives, transposing their milieu to the postwar present to position Italy as a colonized, formally stratified, and racially segregated society run by powerful white American men. At the same time, the film fetishizes certain aspects of the 1950s modernity that it associates with the United States. This is particularly the case with modern forms of transport, which again are available only to Americans and wealthy Italians. When Maria arrives in Rome, she walks out of the new, modern Stazione Termini building (completed in 1950). She is met by Anita (Jean Peters) in a shiny new convertible, which becomes their primary form of transport around the city and is filmed numerous times driving past famous sights, an automobile-bound version of flânerie (Figure 29). Italians, by contrast, get around on foot, by bicycle, and in the occasional dilapidated old car; they lack access to the smoothness of modern transport. It makes sense, given the film’s



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Figure 29  Three Coins in the Fountain: The women’s convertible in front of the Trevi Fountain—an automobile-bound version of flânerie.

colonial imaginative framework, that modernity would be visually connected to transport, as this is a frequent visual trope in the early film travelogue (Kirby 1997). The airplane, the railroad, and the automobile allow the American characters to arrive in Italy and to navigate Italian space quickly and smoothly, functioning as an organizing principle of colonized space. The other way the US characters traverse Roman space is by strolling—a leisurely, visually oriented, and class-privileged cousin to walking. Before the credits roll or any characters are introduced, there is an opening travelogue sequence depicting a series of delightful views of Roman fountains. As the first image fades in, a magical, descending musical theme featuring bells and harp begins to play, and we see a shot of a glimmering spout of water shooting into the air, framed by an azure sky. The camera tilts downward to reveal that this is a spout of the Fontana delle Naiadi in the Piazza della Repubblica. We then see a series of angles on this and other prominent Roman fountains, finally moving to the Villa d’Este in Tivoli, whose sumptuous expanses are occupied by leisurely strolling women, couples, and children (Figure 30). In one shot, we see several couples meandering slowly around the fish ponds just below the Water Organ. A slow pan to the right reveals two pretty young women, chatting intimately as they gaze upon this magnificent fountain’s rainbowfilled mists. Another shot reveals a pair of boys and their mother sitting by the fish ponds, framed on all sides by lush greenery (Figure 31). Although there are a few people in this sequence distanced comfortably apart from each other, for the most part the gardens and fountain views depict empty space, without the crowds of tourists or local traffic that we might expect in such spaces in real

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Figure 30  Three Coins in the Fountain: Couples strolling in the gardens at Tivoli.

Figure 31  Three Coins in the Fountain: A woman and two boys by the fish ponds at Tivoli.

life. Highlighting the visual qualities of CinemaScope, the camera becomes a disembodied and idealized stroller around this garden space, inviting the viewer to participate in the sequence’s peripatetic construction of the picturesque. The stroll is an activity fundamentally connected to picturesque spectatorship, with its connotations of recreation, relaxation, and a landscape absent of dangers. This picturesque vision is clearly gendered as feminine. Most of the strollers are women and children, and Frank Sinatra’s mellifluous voice soars throughout the sequence, singing a song about romantic longing in which three hopeful lovers stand at a fountain, hoping to be blessed with love. Sinatra was the archetypal heartthrob of this era, a star whose famous blue eyes and honey voice captivated American women. Bruno identifies strolling itself as connoting



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femininity, indeed as the primary activity that gave rise to a women’s gaze via their enjoyment of the picturesque: The activity of pleasure that picturesque space articulated—its texture of affects—was opened to a body of female spectatorship and was fabricated by women as well. Women strolled the gardens’ grounds and participated in the public spectacles of the (pleasure) gardens. They were also involved in both actual and virtual picturesque voyages. (Bruno 2002, 200)

The picturesque, in opening up public space and travel for women, is a kind of proto-feminist tradition, endowing women with a new sense of mobility and freedom. A similar dynamic is at work in Three Coins. The American women circulate freely through Italian space, enjoying its picturesque views—an experience of space aligned with the power to gaze and to traverse, as the women also earn a good living through work, pursue romance as they please, and live alone together in their own apartment. The women’s economic and sexual liberation is aligned, in other words, with picturesque aesthetics’ possibilities of spatial and visual mobility. Yet, as we see time and again in these Italy-set tourist films, the picturesque’s opening up of space for women’s freedom, with all its progressive possibilities, relies on a vision of their mobility and economic power in an imaginatively colonized space. The picturesque serves as the organizing aesthetic principle of foreign space as it is reenvisioned for enjoyment by, in this case, white American women—but at the cost of colonial violence that has been repressed beneath its gleaming surface. I mean this partly symbolically; as discussed previously, the film goes to great lengths to erase all traces of the war. But I also mean it literally, as runaway production itself can function as a spatial takeover wherein the beautiful sights of Rome are roped off and emptied of Italians so that US filmmakers can shape the space to conform to a colonial imaginary. A later sequence in which the American women stroll through a Roman slum offers a fascinating contrast to the opening travelogue sequence. It is the only sequence of the film in which Rome is given a vibrant, busy street life—yet this proves to be “dangerous” for the women. After leaving a cocktail party given by their boss’s wife, Maria and Anita decide to walk home. Upon leaving the agency head’s palatial residence, situated amid the lush parkland of the Villa Borghese, the women find themselves meandering down the Spanish Steps and into a poorer, more crowded area where Italians live. Many of these Italians are marked clearly as peasants. Maria entreats Anita to turn down an alley

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which, in Anita’s words, “doesn’t look very respectable.” They then proceed to weave through a casual football game played by tanned, sweating Italian men, several of whom whistle at them. While meandering past a café, an Italian man pinches Maria’s bottom (Figure 32). Anita instructs her not to respond to or even look at the man, but, furious, Maria scolds him. The man seems to take this as encouragement and begins to follow the women, speaking rapidly in untranslated Italian as Anita leads Maria away. Just then, by coincidence, Giorgio nearly crashes into them on his bicycle. Discerning that the women are being harassed, he quickly dispatches the man and entreats the women that they “shouldn’t be in this section unescorted … things can happen that American girls don’t understand.” These white women’s safety is invoked as a justification for the racialized stratification of Italian society: the peasants must be “contained” in ghettos so that white American women can be safeguarded from their sexual advances as they stroll about the now-emptied picturesque gardens of the “respectable” parts of the city. The film’s imaginative organization of Rome revolves around the supposed needs of white American women: their safety, their touristic and strolling pleasures, and their sexual purity are all used to implicitly justify US neocolonial power in Italy. Yet at the same time, this treading into “dangerous” territory ultimately enables Anita’s transgressive love affair with Giorgio to begin: she and the other women gain pleasure from breaching the boundaries of this colonial-patriarchal system. Transportation becomes a major metaphor here. In a later scene, the trip to the country and automobile crash that leads to Anita and Giorgio’s first

Figure 32  Three Coins in the Fountain: Pinched by an Italian man.



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passionate embrace rhymes narratively and visually with the Spanish Steps sequence. On their way out of Rome, the crowded jeep carrying the lovers and Giorgio’s myriad cousins nearly crashes into a bus that has, in turn, just hit a fruit cart. The scene is chaotic, full of Romans shouting over each other in untranslated Italian. Later, Anita accidentally becomes trapped in the same dilapidated, brakeless jeep as it rolls down a steep hill. She shouts for help before crashing into a bush, miraculously unharmed. Giorgio runs after her and they embrace (Figure 33). Anita’s sexual transgression is thus enacted as a series of vehicular collisions—first a bicycle, then a bus, then a jeep. These are moments in which the smoothness of colonial mobility in Italian space is symbolically threatened by her sexual transgression with an Italian man. The “danger” of both the Spanish Steps sequence and the later runaway jeep sequence derives from the women’s refusal to stick to the prescribed, “safe” areas and picturesque views of Italy: in both cases, they venture into areas belonging to the subalterns of this imaginatively colonized space. Yet, even as the picturesque functions to delineate the “proper” spaces for American women, the women subtly disobey this colonialist regime of space: they flirt with its boundaries, exploring what is hidden beyond the picturesque views of Rome to which they are supposed to be confined. This exploration is evidently a source of transgressive pleasure: the film offers a glimpse of women’s liberation via these sexual and spatial transgressions, depicting women who subtly disobey the roles in which they are placed, using their relative mobility and financial freedom to seek sexual fulfillment. However, this liberation itself relies heavily on colonial frameworks of space

Figure 33  Three Coins in the Fountain: Anita (Jean Peters) crashes the jeep, leading to a passionate embrace with Giorgio (Rossano Brazzi).

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and vision, as the women’s relative wealth and mobility depends on an impoverished and compliant local population. These gendered transgressions also involve transgressions against American colonial organization of Italian space; Anita and Maria essentially cross the prescribed racial boundaries of a segregated society. Their liberation simultaneously relies on and transgresses against the imaginative colonial regime. Still more contradictory is the fact that, even as the film allows the women to transgress, it is at pains never to put them in any real danger or allow them to do anything too extreme; it always pulls them back from the edge of the precipice of their transgressions. Just as they are being harassed by an Italian man on the street, Giorgio—signaled as an educated “gentleman”— turns up to protect them. And although he and Anita are subtly indicated to have premarital sex when she comes to his apartment after being fired from the agency, they ultimately end up married; her sexual transgression is thus reintegrated into the “respectable.” The same is true of Maria in her dalliance with Prince Dino, who, despite his reputation as a Casanova type, is easily maneuvered into a marriage proposal. The women’s feminist infractions only “work” because of the racist strictures of US-occupied Italy, and even the women’s infractions against this racist regime are recuperated into it again through marriage and a “happy ending.” The film thus insists on the containing function of “decency,” carefully working to prevent the women’s patriarchal and racial disobedience from having any real political implications. It enacts a simulacrum of liberation while simultaneously working to ensure that it remains disempowered. The film ends with the three women’s impending marriages, which function to redirect American women’s subject positions back into the colonizing project: through marriage, the women’s infractions against the picturesque organization of space are re-harnessed to the very hierarchies that had imposed this spatial regime to begin with. The line between Americans and Italians has perhaps shifted slightly, allowing Italians to be let into the spaces of American whiteness a little more freely than previously. But the essential structures of colonialism and patriarchy remain untouched. There is a deep and violent incoherence here: United Statesian women’s safety and pleasure are used to justify colonial domination, and their proto-feminist liberation depends on the economic and spatial freedoms they are granted as white, metropole women within colonized space—yet the transgressions enabled by this quasi-liberation are redirected, made to serve the very same regime of patriarchal colonialism.



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The Female Gaze in Summertime Although Three Coins in the Fountain features three female protagonists, we do not get particularly close to any of them, narratively or visually. The film’s somewhat clunky use of widescreen (which in its early years had distortion problems that made close-ups difficult) frequently puts us at a distance from them; we share their visual viewpoint only loosely. We arrive in Rome “with” Maria and are thus set up to be narratively aligned with her, yet after this arrival sequence, the film doesn’t particularly privilege her perspective. The film centers these women consistently, yet manages to do so in ways that don’t give us much access to their interior selves. Much like the other, earlier CinemaScope film directed by Jean Negulesco, How to Marry a Millionaire (20th Century Fox, 1953), Three Coins is more concerned with positioning the women within the Italian landscape, with their three attractive bodies filling up the screen for the spectator’s visual pleasure, despite the film’s ostensive aim toward a female audience. Summertime, on the other hand, gives us much closer access to a single, female main character. It depicts Jane Hudson (Katharine Hepburn), an unmarried and aging American secretary, on a trip to Venice—a trip for which she has saved up for a very long time. In the first part of the film, Jane is situated amongst a variety of American characters who are staying in her hotel, and we see that she occupies a dire, punishing position as an “old maid” in a culture that has little respect or need for women like her. However, soon she is noticed by a handsome Venetian antiques dealer, Renato (Rossano Brazzi once again). Although she is inexperienced and nervous at first, they begin a steamy love affair, and the sadness wrought by her marginalization within United Statesian society shifts to glorious happiness. This joy is short-lived, however, as Jane learns Renato is married, and she soon decides that she must go home to her life in the United States. The film is extensively focused on Jane Hudson’s point of view, and the spectator is closely aligned with her both narratively and visually. We have as privileged an access to her thoughts and emotions as ever happens in Hollywood cinema. For this reason, Summertime will serve as a case study for how the female gaze functions in relation to the picturesque in the Italy-set woman’s films. I want to spend some time on the opening sequences of the film, in which Jane arrives in Venice and meets the other Americans at her hotel, in order to

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have a detailed look at her rather complicated positioning as a female subject within the film. Other than an establishing shot of a moving train, the first shot of the film is from Jane’s point of view: we see a man (uncredited) on the train, quietly reading a book, as Katharine Hepburn’s distinctive voice asks him to hold up a travel brochure of Venice which her arm then offers to him. The man takes the brochure, and Hepburn’s voice then instructs him: “In a little closer. Up a little higher.” We hear the whirring of a film camera, and finally we cut to a shot of Hepburn/Jane Hudson peering through the viewfinder of a small portable film camera. The brochure reads “Venice: City of Romance”—a trite piece of tourist marketing which nevertheless clearly structures her desires and expectations about her stay there. In a sense, Jane is directing this movie, as we follow her gaze around Venice and her hope for romance comes to fruition. After a chaotic arrival scene in which we visually and aurally follow her through the crowded rail station, Jane finds herself on a waterbus moving through Venice’s canals. She meets a pair of American tourists, the McIlhennys (McDonald Park and Jane Rose; Figure 34), but as they talk, she keeps

Figure 34  Summertime: Jane meets the McIlhennys, a stereotypical American tourist couple.



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interrupting the conversation in order to film passing scenery. This is the first instance in the film of many sequences that we might call a “tourist point of view” sequence, in which shots of a famous tourist sight, often but not always taken from the spatial perspective of a character, are alternated with reaction shots of the character looking awestruck, contemplative, or wistful. In this scene, as in many others, it does a highly effective job of conveying the protagonist’s subjectivity: our attention is focused through hers, and she is granted control over our access to the visual field—in this case quite directly, by the use of her camera, though this is more implicit in other films. Her reactions—facial expressions, verbal commentary (“Isn’t that wonderful?”), the soaring musical score when she first sets sight on the Grand Canal—all serve to cement our alignment and identification with her, as we are granted privileged access both to her optical viewpoint and to her emotional responses. In a sense there is nothing extraordinary about Jane’s gaze here; she is a tourist, and tourism is nothing if not a visual activity. Such tourist point-of-view sequences are the inscription in film of what John Urry calls the tourist gaze, in which famous historical, cultural, or aesthetic objects and locations are, via a ritualized form of looking, appropriated into a structure of meanings, emotions, and memories that are internal to the logic of tourism(2002). Tourist point-ofview sequences within the “American abroad” films often replicate this process of meaning making, inscribing touristic visuality into cinema via a built-in process of focusing our attention on the tourist sight (i.e., screening out all the other things not considered suitable as tourist sights, like garbage or billboards), and showing it in terms of wonder, wistfulness, or interior contemplation. This tourist visuality, often (though not exclusively) inscribed into film via the tourist point-of-view sequence, is a process so common and so internal to tourism that we might expect anyone who has ever been a tourist to find this kind of visual engagement deeply familiar. This makes it easy to overlook just how unusual such sequences are in the context of classical Hollywood: Jane is that impossible article, a woman who owns the gaze. The gaze is one of the primary concepts for understanding subjectivity in cinema—or rather, for women this typically means the lack of a gaze, as Laura Mulvey’s theory states that women are positioned as objects of a male gaze rather than as subjects who can themselves look (1975). The films of this chapter have typical Hollywood style in many ways, but with one big difference: in most of them, women’s capacity to look, to own the gaze, is not just present but is seriously emphasized. The spectator frequently shares point-of-view shots with white

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American female protagonists while they go sightseeing in Italy, and in general the viewer is narratively and visually aligned with them as they experience a foreign land. What are we to make of this? Do these constitute an exception or challenge to gaze theory, or are there other ways that this gaze is gendered female and hence still subjugated? And perhaps even more importantly: what happens when white American women, though disempowered by patriarchy, are empowered in relation to a racial or colonial system in the film text? Does the gendered gaze have a colonial politics? The picturesque may be precisely the place most suited to answering these questions, because the picturesque constituted the quintessential object for a women’s gaze decades prior to the birth of cinema. As discussed previously, several scholars of the picturesque have argued that it was a primary site for the creation of white women’s subjectivity in colonial and/or traveling contexts (Bruno 2002, Ghose 1998, Grewal 1996). Indeed, the development of the picturesque went hand in hand with the development of the Enlightenment concept of “point of view.” This phrase can be traced to the early eighteenth century and initially referred to the spatial position from which one viewed a visual field in, for example, painting or landscape gardening. By the late eighteenth century, point of view had taken on the extended meaning of “mental position or attitude,” and a century later this had been extended further, coming to carry “connotations of the relativity of perception … and ultimately embod[ying] the modern sense that individual point of view shapes our sense of reality” (Pye 2000, 2–3). This is around when “point of view” became a literary concept used to analyze narration and “perspective” in novels and other written texts, as well as a term applied to individuals and their mental states to connote what we would now call subjectivity. The picturesque is not merely coincidental with but foundational to the development of point of view as a concept, being one of the first ideas to which the literal, visual sense of the term applied (along with the sublime and beautiful). Gilpin’s essays on the picturesque, for example, discuss “point of view” in explaining the proper methods for turning a landscape view into a painting (Gilpin 1792, 63). In fact the use of vision and/or visual metaphors to construct individual subjectivity arose out of the very practice of inscribing a colonial relationship between an individual and their surroundings. Mary Louise Pratt traces how travel writing first lent a sense of a “gaze” to written literature via what she calls the “monarch of all I survey” trope, in which a written passage of dense



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visual description reports a moment of colonial “discovery” (1992, 204). Such passages refer to landscape painting traditions, aestheticizing their objects by discussing a foreground and background to the scene, and using detailed descriptions of colors and textures; this creates an empowered colonial subject by implying a “relation of mastery … between the seer and the seen” (ibid., 205). The novel itself—the primary site for the development of the concept of individual subjectivity—has been traced to its roots in similar colonial travel narratives, with Robinson Crusoe as a key early example, and hence the novel is a fundamentally colonial art form built on this tradition of narration from a specific perspective (Said 1994). One of the great powers of cinema is that it brings back the original, visual sense of “point of view” and re-harnesses it to subjectivity. In cinema, vision is literal as well as metaphorical, its photographic images producing a very immediate and powerful sense of a perspective on the world. The medium of film was arguably colonial right from the start, as some of the very earliest films inscribe a position of power into a visual perspective on a landscape. Of course, there is no one-to-one relationship between the visual and narrative senses of point of view in cinema; point-of-view shots are relatively rare occurrences in most movies, and they are neither necessary nor sufficient for the very common cinematic practice of privileging one consciousness (usually the protagonist’s) over others (Pye 2000, Smith 1995). Nevertheless, we can trace a more or less direct line from the picturesque to the cinematic gaze, as both are deeply tied to questions of vision and power in Western culture. Viewed in this light the very concept of the gaze may be even more colonial than it is gendered: it was born from colonial contexts in which it was deemed fitting for Europeans to privilege one point of view over others. The picturesque doesn’t just romanticize a colonial encounter; it also enforces the boundaries between self and other, a mechanism by which the viewer is distanced from the viewed. Gender is baked into this too, of course, since European colonialism was also deeply patriarchal, and femininity is imaginatively linked to the colonial; thus white women are positioned as a fitting object for the white male colonial gaze. Only gradually did a “woman’s perspective” come to be separately defined, and only gradually did the picturesque morph into a realm for the development of a classed and raced proto-feminist subjectivity that could function analogously to white men’s subjectivity as a site for empowerment (Grewal 1996). White women are in a liminal state with respect to the gaze: they may be usually positioned as its object, but they are at least occasionally positioned

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Figure 35  Rear Window: Jeff (James Stewart) with his enormous, and phallic, telephoto lens.

as its controlling subject. A key example of the latter happens when a female protagonist engages in tourist point of view, viewing a picturesque scene: a white woman is permitted to look when this accomplishes a colonial distanciation between herself and the landscape. The aesthetics of the picturesque plays a recuperative function that deems such a gaze “safe,” both for women themselves and for patriarchy generally. Summertime is a woman’s film, which means that even when Jane owns a colonial gaze, this must be managed to minimize the threat to patriarchy. Her gaze in the tourist point-of-view sequence just discussed differs considerably in style and technique to the classic male gaze. Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954) will serve as a good point of comparison, as it is frequently considered to be a paradigmatic example of the voyeuristic male gaze and was released less than a year before Summertime. L. B. Jeffries (James Stewart), the protagonist of Rear Window, is the archetypal voyeur: from the elevated perch of his apartment, he peers down and across into others’ windows, suspicious, curious, investigating the lives of his objects. His work as a photojournalist bears heavily upon his interest in his neighbors; he even uses a camera with a large (and phallic) telephoto lens to get a closer view of them (Figures 35 and 36). Jane’s gaze, by contrast, is directed upwards: she looks up at buildings from the level of the street or canal, with little access to



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Figure 36  Rear Window: A view across the courtyard into the windows of Jeff ’s neighbors.

what’s inside (Figures 37 and 38). Her motivation is not to investigate but to contemplate, noticing and sentimentalizing both the beauty and the otherness of her surroundings and recording these moments for later memories. Her instrument of choice is thus her small portable film camera, not a hefty telephoto lens. As she walks down a narrow alley, peering up at the windows, she cannot see inside, but instead sentimentalizes the superficial, the sights and sounds and smells that signify “Venice.” Jane’s gaze, then, empowers her in certain ways; she is able to direct our vision on the landscape and to move freely around a foreign space, taking us into her point of view. Yet at the same time her gaze is marked as feminine and hence disempowered—centered as it is on memory, repetition, and outsider status rather than investigation, voyeurism, or penetration. This is the work accomplished by the picturesque: it simultaneously grants the white American woman a gaze and stylizes it as marginal. Jane’s gazing shifts as her affair with Renato begins. When they first see each other at an outdoor café in the Piazza San Marco, it is signaled through cinematography and editing as a disruption to her point of view. She is sitting at a table, filming her surroundings with her camera. The (non-diegetic) camera pans to reveal Rossano Brazzi, sitting at the table next to hers and looking down at his newspaper (we don’t yet know him as Renato, but Brazzi would have been

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Figure 37  Summertime: Jane gazes upward as she is led along by a porter.

familiar as a romantic lead). Jane is filming upward at the skyline as Renato glances up from his paper and notices her (Figure 39). There is a cut to another point-of-view shot of the view Jane is filming, a flag waving in the breeze. We then see—for the only time in the film—an extended point-of-view shot belonging to someone other than Jane: we see Renato’s point of view as he looks keenly at her well-formed but awkwardly posed leg. As Renato continues to look at her, Jane happens to glance in Renato’s direction, and seeing his eyes on her, does a double take and becomes agitated. Putting on her sunglasses as though to hide her eyes, she fumbles in her haste to pay her bill as Renato looks on, charmed. She will repeat this gesture of hiding her eyes behind her sunglasses the following day, when she enters his antiques shop (Figure 40). Evidently being an object of a male gaze necessitates putting down her camera and hiding her own eyes, effacing her own capacity of vision. As their affair begins she ceases to film things, even forgetting to bring her camera with her. We lose access to her scopic viewpoint. Instead, she begins to behave as an object of the male gaze, getting her hair and nails done and shopping for sexy new clothes. She is imbued with the one type of gaze consistently



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Figure 38  Summertime: Jane’s view of a Venetian building from below.

allowed to women: the gaze of the consumer, specifically the consumer of beauty products and clothes, that is, the tools for commodifying herself. She is thus brought into line, as it were, by participating in her own commodification, packaging herself for the male gaze rather than herself owning a gaze. In her discussion of the woman’s film, Doane points out that the genre intersects with women’s consumerism in several related ways. First, because it is intended for a female audience, it constitutes the example par excellence of what women are believed and expected to desire in a movie. The woman’s film, that is, sells itself as an entertainment intended for women, offering to show women what they (purportedly) enjoy viewing (Doane 1987, 25). Second, via the female film star, the woman’s film offers women aspirational images of consumption, demonstrating to female spectators images of what they desire, or ought to desire, for themselves (ibid., 24). And third, they offer women a way of consuming “the ‘epic’ rhythms of the earth or the great movements of ‘history,’ ” commodifying history and geopolitics for female consumption and thus positioning women as spectators/recipients rather than actors on the world stage (ibid., 31). Women’s consumption suggests empowerment: it implies both that

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Figure 39  Summertime: Renato (Rossano Brazzi) notices Jane as she films the tourist views.

women’s desires matter, and that they have and control money. Yet this aspect of women’s consumerism is precisely what is excised from classic woman’s films, as their female protagonists are powerless and confined, permitted to do very little but consume. Such films are parables of consumerism without empowerment, envisioning a femininity to which buying the products of the world is imperative yet which is cut off from the spheres of work, decision making, and worldhistorical action that might relate to their production. In Summertime, the tension between women’s consumption as empowerment and simultaneously as disempowerment is ramped up by the film’s foreign setting. The strength of the 1950s dollar—due to the United States’ status as the primary supplier of manufactured products to Europe—meant that any American who stepped off the plane in Europe became de facto wealthy. The Venetians Jane comes into contact with very often see her as a source of cash, for example, in the opening train station sequence when a line of porters greet her, barking out their services and obsequiously holding out their hats to her. Indeed, the possibility that her romance with Renato is in fact a financial transaction is



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Figure 40  Summertime: Jane hides her eyes behind sunglasses before entering Renato’s shop.

nowhere overtly stated, yet it is everywhere hinted at. One of Jane’s key early encounters with Renato is played out as a bargaining session. She enters his antiques shop to purchase a red goblet that seems to function as a phallic symbol for her repressed sexual desire; she agrees to his price immediately, but he insists on introducing her to the Italian style of bargaining. As they proceed to dicker, she becomes uneasy about a possible double entendre, unclear on what is actually for sale here; this understanding is also acknowledged by Renato, although with smooth confidence. There are clear allusions here to Jane’s purchasing power— to the supreme horror, in patriarchy, of her buying a man for her pleasure—yet she and Renato rely on the language of romance to suppress this possibility: he must convince her, several times, that his attraction is genuine and that he is not trying to get money out of her. Jane’s travel abroad enables and is linked to her experience of sexual liberation, while at the same time working to ensure that the financial basis of this liberation is repressed. There is a similar ambivalence at work in the Latin lover myth, which Brazzi plays again and again in the Italy-set woman’s films. The Latin lover was most

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famously inhabited by Rudolph Valentino, a Hollywood star of the late 1910s– 20s who had a large and enthusiastic female fandom. The Latin lover functions within US racial discourse as a figure who simultaneously embodies the threat of miscegenation and wards it off. Italian and lighter-skinned Latinx people were only ambiguously othered within US society, which meant that they could just about be “safely” viewed as a sex object by white women, who were normally denied the possibility of a desiring gaze. It is the Latin lover’s quasi-otherness which simultaneously authorizes a female gaze that is normally prohibited, because of his not-quite-white status that places him “beneath” white women, yet stops it short of being truly illicit because he is not fully other. Valentino was thus positioned as there-to-be-consumed by a female public who, in declaring themselves his fans, were subtextually proclaiming a feminist sexual freedom. Participation in the cult of Valentino was, for white women, a way of declaring oneself to be liberated from patriarchy, free to choose and gratify desires, both consumer and sexual (Hansen 1991, 255). Yet at the same time, this feminist energy could be contained to the faraway: many of Valentino’s most famous roles put him in faraway spaces, indeed very often in characteristically “Oriental” ones, as he plays a sheik, a rajah, and so on. The Latin lover myth also functions, then, to isolate and dismiss women’s desires, confining them both to the faraway and to the silly, feminized fantasy space of the matinee. The Italy-set tourist films mobilize similar strategies of containment; Italy’s very farawayness, its status as (almost) other, functions similarly to dismiss and isolate women’s desires, an inoculation against its threats to white colonial patriarchy even as it simultaneously suggests white women’s empowerment. The picturesque plays a similar role in relation to the Italian landscape: it is a mode for packaging foreign space for white American women’s visual consumption while simultaneously denying the scopic and consumer empowerment that this suggests. The picturesque views of Venice, and Jane’s ability to see them, separate her from the fast-paced modernity of, for example, the McIlhennys. This pair bears the characteristics of stereotypical American tourists: loud, unobservant, tacky, bigoted, in a hurry, with cameras hanging around their necks. The picturesque scenery does not interest them, as their whirlwind tour of Europe has made Venice into just another stop, a “Luna Park on water” as they call it (a reference to Coney Island). Later, the couple is shown to be speeding along the Grand Canal in a regatta of boats, with locals clamoring to take photos of them for tips. This bald consumerism is directly contrasted to shots of Jane’s quiet wandering of Venice’s alleys, where she often pauses



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to contemplate and film the picturesque views. Just as her interaction with Renato is carefully framed as romance in order to deny its feminist potential, the picturesque romanticizes her status as a tourist-consumer of Venice. Via the utopian tourist vision offered in the picturesque, Jane’s liberation is envisioned not as a capitalist transaction, but rather as freedom from money itself—from the capitalist obsession with wealth, from the familiar binaries of what money can and cannot buy. Time plays a key role in Summertime, allying Jane with the “eternal” Venice, far away from fast-paced contemporary consumer capitalism. Indeed, the concept of time is present even in the film’s title (as well as the play on which it was based, “The Time of the Cuckoo”), and the ringing of church bells punctuates the film, chiming in the mornings, signaling the end of each workday as Italians bustle through the streets. Many transitions between scenes involve a panoramic shot of a stunning cityscape with ringing bells for a soundtrack. The bells seem to signify a stillness, as the throngs in the streets below recede into a buzzing mass. As days turn into nights and nights into days, these ancient bells mark Venetian time as an endless and unchanging cycle. They also draw Jane’s eyes, and the camera, upward—toward the tops of the buildings, the hovering pigeons, and the luminous sky. Jane can be seen filming these bells on several occasions, yet frequently in impossible ways; there is no way that her handheld camera could have achieved the close-ups we see, and equally dubious that an average tourist could have filmed from the top of a building. The bells thus serve to free Jane’s gaze from materiality, giving it a perfect mobility, the unimpeded ability to view the beauty of Venice from every angle (Figure 41). The bells signify Jane’s arrival in a place that can ultimately release her from the bind created by her ageing, by the forward passage of time. It is as though the bells of Venice embody, or indeed take to its logical conclusion, a feminine, Modleskian sense of time, characterized by repetition and stillness/immobility. It is this city’s sense of timelessness, of changelessness that allows her to be freed from the constraints of US. culture, as though in Venice she has finally found a place sympathetic to her experience of time and therefore congenial to her happiness.

Conclusion The picturesque plays an essential role in the imperialist nostalgia that is endemic to American tourism: it is an aesthetic that fixes a place as “eternal,”

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Figure 41  Summertime: A figure on a cuckoo clock—one of many shots in which the chiming of bells seems to free Jane’s gaze from materiality.

unhistorifiable, and therefore desirably “authentic.” Through the picturesque, femininity plays an essential role in the imaginative construction of empire: this feminized aesthetic symbolically removes a place from the realms of money and forward-moving time, fixing the colonial landscape as anachronistic space and repressing the imperialist economic underpinnings of the practices of travel and tourism. Theorists of imperialist nostalgia have not, to my knowledge, noted how often this mode of longing is marked as a feminine practice. It is women who, in US culture, are tasked with remembering, with acts of sentimental archiving; women most often photograph and film the tourist excursions of their families, for example, and arrange these images into decorative albums—thus sentimentalizing the “authentic” places visited even in the process of destroying them. Like the Anglo-Indian woman’s watercolors, the picturesque in Hollywood cinema accomplishes an enormous amount of ideological work: it simultaneously relies on and represses colonial capitalist violence via an aesthetic of romanticized, demonetized timelessness; and it relies on the figure of the white woman to accomplish yet also cover for much



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of the perceptual and ideological work of empire, paying her off with the dangled promise of liberation. There is one element of the gaze apparatus that we have not yet considered here: the spectator. How does the white woman spectator that is implied by these films (as woman’s films) function within the system of camera/subject/object/ spectator? Other scholars have suggested that the “American abroad” films offer a vicarious experience of the pleasures of travel, and that is certainly true. But there is also a lot more going on. As the spectator is aligned visually, narratively, and emotionally with a female protagonist, she is also learning about desirable consumption of the other and is directed in ways to encounter it. Perhaps even more importantly, she comes to do the same imaginative work of empire in which the film engages: she looks upon, sentimentalizes, and fetishizes the “authentic” landscapes shown in these films, and she engages in the same modes of imperialist nostalgia as a feminized practice. The “American abroad” films, in other words, directly offer to the viewer all the pleasures of the imperial and instruct her about her own imperialist subjectivity. Overall this chapter has attempted to untangle a complicated nexus of concepts and contradictions that intersect in the Italy-set woman’s films of the 1950s: the picturesque, the woman’s film, the gendered gaze. There are several key takeaways. One is that the colonial aesthetics of the picturesque was appropriated by Hollywood cinema in ways that track to US culture specifically, and not to a more general “Western imperialism.” And it does this in historically specific ways that are connected to the evolution of the US presence in Europe and how this was perceived by United Statesians, as the picturesque arises as a prominent aesthetic in the “American abroad” films at a moment when this presence felt especially strong and secure. This chapter also demonstrates that the woman’s film must be considered as an imperialist genre. In terms of how women in these films inhabit and move through space, how they look (and how they are denied the ability to look), how they function as consumers: gender in these films is always also colonial. Given the similar conclusions reached in the other chapters of this book, one might ask whether this is true more generally across Hollywood texts, and whether a broader revisiting of feminist film theory is warranted. Indeed, this chapter has some important potential implications for theories of the gendered gaze. For one, it offers a way to understand these that doesn’t rely on psychoanalysis as a framework. After all, the picturesque as a gendered practice of gazing not only preexisted cinema but also preexisted Freud. And,

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given the centrality of the picturesque (and the other aesthetics examined in this book, perhaps to a lesser degree) to the development of the very concepts of subjectivity and point of view, this colonial framework may be better suited as a theoretical foundation than Freudian theory is. The picturesque has continued to be influential on later Hollywood style. In fact there was a cycle of films in the 1990s and 2000s that were much the same in terms of their narrative and visual configurations of women’s travel in Europe: films like French Kiss (Lawrence Kasdan, 20th Century Fox, 1995), Under the Tuscan Sun (Audrey Wells, Touchstone, 2003), and Eat Pray Love (Ryan Murphy, Columbia, 2010) each feature similar nexus of women’s desires with picturesque landscapes. But these constitute just one example of the importance of the picturesque in later Hollywood movies; in the conclusion of this book, I’ll discuss how it and the other aesthetics explored here have made their way into the digital era. The influence of the picturesque also goes far beyond cinema. In the introduction, I suggested that the “American abroad” films do not just reflect reality, but shape it. While this is partly about how film aesthetics shape people’s thoughts, perceptions, and desires, it also ultimately means the literal shaping of the physical world, as patterns of tourism and consumption arise around the enjoyment of landscape views, and as real-world spaces are created and preserved to reflect picturesque ideals. Indeed, the picturesque has become so deeply embedded in Western visual culture as to seem like it is not an aesthetics at all, but simply a truism: of course expansive landscapes are pleasurable to look at! But this actually shows just how deeply the picturesque is submerged within late-capitalist practices of space and vision, as the Western world has shifted increasingly into simulacra.

4

Glamour: The Necropolitics of Women’s Fashion from the Bombshell to the Princess

Silk Stockings (Rouben Mamoulian, MGM, 1957) is a standard dual-focus musical in many ways, with Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse as mutual antagonists who fall in love and thus achieve a synthesis between two opposing sets of values. Yet in this film, the central conflict has a geopolitical mapping: Astaire plays Steve Canfield, an American movie producer and capitalist, while Charisse plays Nina Yoschenko, a Russian Soviet commissar who has “formally rejected all bourgeois pleasure and indulgence,” as she explains it. They meet in Paris, here positioned as a liminal and contested space between American capitalism and Russian communism. Through the twin pleasures of heterosexuality and beauty consumerism, Nina is converted and comes to renounce communism, ultimately defecting to the West. In the dance sequence that depicts her transformation, alone in her hotel room, she removes her thick wool tights and rough, old-fashioned undergarments, donning in their stead silk stockings and powder-pink lingerie. The “silk stockings” of the title were an important symbol in war-torn Europe, a synecdoche of the everyday luxuries foregone during the height of the war’s devastation; in this dance number, this symbolism is neatly transposed to the logic of the Cold War, becoming an emblem of the pleasures of capitalist society as compared to the dull deprivations of Soviet life. In Paris—long the capital of the fashion industry, particularly as far as Americans are concerned—women’s adornment thus takes on a complicated nexus of patriarchal and imperial meanings. In Silk Stockings—and, as we’ll see, in other postwar Hollywood musicals set in Paris—glamorous clothes play an important role in the building of a US-led geopolitical consensus. Women’s beauty culture functions as a prominent part of a capitalist utopian vision, smoothly dissolving difference and contradiction by converting all to the “American way of life.” Glamour has rarely been understood by scholars as an imperial aesthetics—perhaps precisely because it is so closely connected to US culture, which has seldom been read through a postcolonial

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lens in the ways that British and French cultural products have. This chapter redresses this gap, developing an understanding of glamour as a quintessential aspect of twentieth-century United Statesian imperial culture. Glamour can be defined as a structure of desire—one that is central to US-style consumer capitalism, inspiring dreams of luxury acquisition. Although the particular styles associated with it change over time, glamour continually occupies the same position at the top, signifying winning in a system of capitalist striving. It is an aesthetics, in other words, of power—in capitalism and, as I’ll show, in colonialism too, since there has never been a capitalism that is not also colonial. It is not associated with democracy but with the worlds of entertainment and celebrity, and with power in authoritarian regimes from the Nazis to the Saudi royal family to Marcos to Trump. Glamour is surface-oriented, its primary point being less to enjoy luxuries than to visually display them, to create a dazzling image of ownership. It is an aesthetics of artifice: a glamorous transformation conspicuously requires technology, labor, and wealth to achieve, converting the body itself into a site for the display of capitalist acquisition and power. The organic aspects of the body are treated as mere raw material in need of shaping into a desirable image. Paradoxically, “naturalness” is both the opposite of glamour and its end goal, as a perfectly glamorous body is one that hides the tracks of its constructedness, making wealth and ownership appear as inherent traits. As Silk Stockings makes clear, glamour’s position as the visual aesthetics of ownership has a geopolitical dimension. This chapter shows how glamour has extensively deployed Oriental and primitivist imagery in the twentieth century, an aesthetic that, at least at one time, denoted the power to appropriate the exotic and incorporate it into the self for one’s own pleasure. It also was (and is) physically built from the raw materials produced in European imperialism, from silk and cotton to furs and gems. Both of these facts associate glamour with death. Its foundation on the deaths of subordinate, non-white bodies and their cultures is the very source of glamour’s power, as a symbolic and literal power over life itself is written onto the white, Western female body. Glamour has a necropolitics; it is a symbol of power built precisely by producing and reproducing the divide between those who live and those who die within a global capitalist regime (Mbembe 2019). Like the other aesthetic traditions explored in this book, glamour thus structurally produces a distancing duality, a situation of self versus other that here runs along the divide between life and death.

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Yet there is an even more direct and material sense in which glamour is geopolitical. Glamour is strongly associated with the United States, for which primary credit has long been given to the classical Hollywood film industry. Indeed, although it has roots in nineteenth-century European culture, glamour may be both Hollywood’s and the United States’ most immediately recognizable aesthetic. Beginning with the rise of global Hollywood in the 1910s–20s, glamour has been popularly understood as one of the primary reasons for the industry’s enormous success both domestically and around the world. Common nicknames for classical Hollywood included “the glamour factory” and, relatedly, “the dream factory,” as glamour provided a structure of capitalist longing both for the pleasures of viewing Hollywood films themselves and for an idealized United Statesian style of good living through consumerism. The phrase “trade follows the film” was at one time in common industry and government parlance—meaning that Hollywood films were successful in opening new markets for US consumer goods, acting as indirect (and sometimes direct) advertisements for the “American way of life.” Much industry-oriented analysis has been carried out by film historians examining whether trade did indeed follow the film, how this worked at various levels of the US industry and government, and the complex ways these dynamics were negotiated and resisted by other nations (see introduction for further discussion). However, little attention has been paid to the specific aesthetics of persuasion that these films so effectively mobilized globally. Perhaps this is because glamour announces itself as obvious, as of-the-surface; it has typically been regarded as an object of derision rather than analysis by Western intellectuals, an aesthetics that is beneath serious consideration. (In this regard it is not unlike “entertainment,” a term that may be used to shut down intellectual inquiry as “thinking too hard” about that which is experienced as a simple, direct pleasure.) This chapter examines how glamour is entangled in the United States’ imaginative imperial project through the lens of the film text. The 1950s brought a cycle of film musicals about Americans in Paris (or on a voyage that ends there) that centered on clothes and women’s beauty culture. This chapter draws case studies from this cycle, which includes relatively wellknown films like Silk Stockings, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Howard Hawks, 20th Century Fox, 1953), and Funny Face (Stanley Donen, Paramount, 1957), but also lesser-known works including Lovely to Look At (Mervyn LeRoy, MGM, 1952), April in Paris (David Butler, Warner Bros., 1952), The French Line (Lloyd

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Bacon, RKO, 1953), Anything Goes (Robert Lewis, Paramount, 1956), and Les Girls (George Cukor, MGM, 1957). All these films are interested in the spectacle of the female body and its adornment, not just visually but also narratively and thematically, as they feature models or showgirls as main characters. As transatlantic stories, they also work to position women’s beauty within new postwar global contexts. As I have discussed elsewhere (Cooper 2017), these films are also nearly all set in a backlot version of Paris. With the exception of Funny Face, none were filmed on location in the French capital beyond brief B-roll establishing shots (and some not even that). Rather than being a “real” city, Paris functions in these films as the space of American glamour discourse, a space for the working through and enactment on the world of glamour’s new postwar significance. Glamour is less of a fixed aesthetic than the other case studies in this book. Although there are some constant through-lines, the fashion world is obsessed with newness and change, and glamour evolves over time in ways that seem to reflect the zeitgeist. The 1950s in particular witnessed a sea change in the visual culture of glamour. This change is aptly illustrated in Silk Stockings in the disparity between the glamorous style that Nina comes to embrace and that of the brassy American movie star Peggy Dayton (Janis Paige), who arrives in Paris to star in Steve’s latest film. Peggy’s signature look incorporates glitzy sequined gowns in a variety of garish colors, with flashy jewelry, and voluminous wraps of fur or feathers (Figure 42). In one number, Peggy sings about the importance of “Satin and Silk” underwear in the construction of a glamorous woman, performing a striptease for a gobsmacked Russian man in which she reveals

Figure 42  Silk Stockings: Peggy Dayton (Janis Paige) in her typical “old Hollywood glamour” look of glitzy gowns and flashy jewelry.

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black lacy undergarments that are seemingly feats of structural engineering, corseting her waist into an hourglass shape and pushing upward her copious breasts to mold her body into the ideal 1950s “mammary woman” shape. Nina, by contrast, adopts luxury clothes in demure and muted colors, such as a white and nude-colored evening gown made of delicate chiffon that is arranged in Grecian layers around her torso and flows down to the floor (Figure 43). Charisse’s slim, athletic figure and natural brunette hair (as opposed to Peggy’s artificial strawberry-blonde coif) denote an emergent new mode of glamorous femininity, one more closely associated with values of restraint and elegance as well as, potentially, feminism. While Nina also strips for the camera in the iconic scene in her hotel room, it has a completely different tone—one of modesty and a dreamy wishfulness that seems to speak more directly to a woman spectator than to the male gaze. By the mid-1950s, what is now often called “old Hollywood glamour”— the glamour of glitz, of slinkiness, of sensuous textures, of eye-popping sex appeal—was increasingly framed as a thing of the past in Hollywood films. It became an object of satire, as with Peggy Dayton or, as I’ll argue, with Marilyn Monroe, whose performative femininity has sometimes been described as having a parodic element. It also became a nostalgic object, as in Astaire’s “Ritz Roll and Rock” number later on in Silk Stockings, and which to an extent it continues to be today (as when a starlet wears a “classic glamour” look to the Oscars). In its place, a new aesthetic was forming, heralded perhaps most iconically by Audrey Hepburn but also by the likes of Charisse, Grace Kelly, Jean Seberg, and (also quite iconically) Jackie Kennedy, centered on clean

Figure 43  Silk Stockings: Nina’s more demure glamorous style, exemplified in a white and nude-colored evening gown of delicate chiffon draped in Grecian layers.

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and simple lines, subdued colors, and exquisite tailoring. With little use for sequins or feathers or other lavish textures, this new style repudiated the kind of glitzy glamour that had by that point been an entrenched element in Hollywood visual style for some thirty-five years—nearly the entire classical Hollywood era. The new styles were often of looser fit, imbuing a freeing sense of movement (by the mid-1960s, the waistline would be almost completely deemphasized), and with the crisper, more modest textures of fabrics like tweed, shantung, and taffeta. The shift between these two modes of glamour is the focus of this chapter. The first is what I call the “bombshell” style. The term “bombshell” was first applied to Jean Harlow in a 1933 First World War flick of the same name. It has connotations of brash class-climbing, of gold-digging, of capitalist ambition by working-class women on the make. The bombshell is also seemingly constructed for a male gaze, and positions women as deriving pleasure— and power—from constructing herself for this gaze. The characteristic hair color of the bombshell figure is blonde—in shades, like platinum, that announce themselves as artificial. This figure has a geopolitics of capitalist expansionism, as the term “bombshell” itself implies—an aesthetic suited to an era in which the United States was rapidly expanding its capitalist influence. But by the mid-1950s, the United States was no longer arriving: it had acquired a position of secure global leadership, its mode of consumer capitalism triumphant. The second style is the “princess” mode of glamour, which was commonly read at the time as the “opposite” of the bombshell: associated with a slender figure and brunette hair (or “natural” blondeness, in the case of Grace Kelly), this figure embodied glamour as elegance. The princess has very different classed significance to the bombshell, as it “democratized what had until then been a clearly class-specific look” (Moseley 2002, 57) belonging to inherited wealth. This new style was seemingly divorced from the male gaze: Hepburn’s body, in particular, was perceived as a potentially feminist, liberated one, and women rather than men constituted her primary address. Yet the princess style, too, has a geopolitics, as it is an aesthetics associated with European aristocracy—literally, in the cases of Hepburn and Kelly— and hence with the more secure sense of ownership that comes with lines of inheritance. Through the princess look, then, glamour wrote onto women’s bodies a new mode of American prestige, of secure belonging in the halls of power.

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Defining Glamour as an Imperial Aesthetic Diamonds may be a girl’s best friend, but only because they are products of European colonial brutality. As Britain consolidated its colonial holdings in South Asia, Africa, and elsewhere in the nineteenth century, Queen Victoria began to amass and display an enormous collection of diamonds and other gems acquired (often stolen) from the colonies, and diamonds became symbols of colonial wealth that spread throughout the ranks of wealthy British capitalists and aristocrats. When large diamond deposits were discovered in South Africa in the late nineteenth century, mines were soon put into operation—the labor carried out by exploited or de facto enslaved Africans, as wealthy British businessmen profited from a continent away. In 1888, faced with falling prices due to the mines’ overproduction, these businessmen—most prominently Cecil Rhodes—formed the de Beers cartel, whose aim was to control the flow of diamonds into the market and thus boost prices. De Beers also began a series of marketing campaigns to boost demand, culminating with the famous “A diamond is forever” slogan, whose aim was to spread diamonds to the masses as accessible consumer luxuries that were endowed with an aura of enduring value (Reid 2006). Through this and other marketing campaigns, diamonds came to symbolize arrival and belonging in the prosperous classes of white Western culture—whether legitimately (through the diamond engagement ring) or otherwise (excessive diamonds were associated with gold-digging and other disreputable modes of class-climbing). Diamonds are just one example among the many material elements of glamour that are the fruits of European colonialism. Silk and to a lesser degree cotton are foundational fibers in the construction of glamorous clothes; both were (and are) extensively produced in British and French (former) colonies and otherwise acquired for Western markets through colonial violence. Animal pelts were supplied from around the world for the production of luxury fur pieces—perhaps most notoriously in North America, where the fur trade was an early and ongoing force in the genocide of Indigenous peoples. Jewels, gold, and other precious minerals; exotic flowers, like orchids and poppies, that were worn or made into perfumes (Dyhouse 2010, 43); even tobacco, for decades strongly associated with glamour (Brown 2009, 2–5): the material building blocks of glamour are products of colonial exploitation on an industrial scale.

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This material foundation in colonial violence is a consistent subterranean impulse in glamour, simultaneously expressed by and repressed from its glittering surface. It covers for and distracts from the death that lies at its core, yet death comes back to haunt it as an echo. Fur outerwear is illustrative. Such items sometimes function as an overt emblem of death, designed to visually highlight the animal bodies that went into making it; for example, one could purchase a fox-fur stole with a fox’s taxidermied head and tail still attached. Fur coats and stoles are typically more abstract and geometrical in design, suppressing and subduing this Thanatos energy, yet the power of fur derives from its symbolic power of death. Fur outerwear’s luxe aura derives not just from its sensuous textures but also from its indigenous origins, appropriated for Western markets through exploitation and murder. By displaying a huge number of small animal pelts—the more pelts, the greater the expense and perception of luxury—the fur coat flouts a kind of power over life and death, a metaphor of colonial domination converted into erotic adornment for the white female body. Glamour’s discursive linkage to death continually returns to haunt its subconscious. Judith Brown discusses this undertow in 1930s “glamour photography.” Analyzing a black-and-white publicity still of Jean Harlow, Brown writes: Laid out against a background of shimmering plastic, Harlow’s hair and flesh likewise appear artificial, synthetic, and otherworldly … Here the face is sculpted from light, it is stylized and static, as if no breath could animate the features that are rendered cold, bloodless, and beyond anything merely human. (2009, 5)

Glamour represses the organic nature of the human body. The concealment of “flaws” with makeup, the removal or dying of hair, the wearing of structured undergarments, in general the molding of the body to the demands of the image: all make glamour inherently “cold, indifferent, and deathly” (ibid). In Western patriarchal-colonial consciousness, femininity and colonial otherness have long been tied together, a shared imaginary. In Orientalism, the Orient is inscribed as a feminine space, its conquest simultaneously colonial and sexual; and from the other side, Western white femininity constitutes a “dark continent” that is equally in need of conquest and control. Freud famously referred to (white) women’s sexuality as a “dark continent” (Doane 1991); for him, woman threatened castration and destruction for (white) man, a truth that lurked just beneath the fetish of her alluring surface. “Fetish” was a term arising from anthropological discourse, coined to describe supposedly occult

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objects revered by African peoples. The terror of woman and the terror of the racial Other are so deeply intertwined for Freud that he uses the same words and imagery to describe them both, and he argues that both constantly threaten to overwhelm white patriarchal “civilization.” But in his language and imagery, Freud was drawing on what were in his time already common tropes linking woman with the racial other. Indeed, the Scottish word from which “glamour” derives, going back to the early eighteenth century, refers to witchcraft and occult magic (Gundle and Castelli 2006, 3): feminine enchantment as a dark and deceitful art. Glamour, then, describes the production of the shimmering, deceitful surface of a woman that tempts a man over to the dangerous feminine/ racialized Other and represses existential masculine anxieties. Marlene Dietrich, often identified as a defining figure of glamour, is illustrative. She is frequently paired with colonial imagery, particularly in her cycle of films directed by Josef von Sternberg in the early 1930s: in Shanghai Express, in her moniker “Shanghai Lily” and her beautiful Chinese servant (played by Anna May Wong); in Blonde Venus, her “primitive” Josephine Bakerstyle dance in which she emerges from a gorilla suit; and so on. Catherine Constable writes of Dietrich’s persona in these films as variously inhabiting three traditional feminine figures of threat: the torturess, woman as caprice, and the seductress (Constable 2005)—in all cases a beautiful woman who enjoys, or is indifferent to, the death or misery of the man drawn in by her charms. For Dietrich, her dark allure is often depicted through the sensuous textures of her costuming: gowns adorned with crystals from head to toe, fur coats with ultrahigh collars that frame her face, diaphanous kimonos, marvelously abundant feather boas, translucent meshwork veils (Figure 44). Glamour, on Dietrich, is the beguiling surface that conceals the feminine occult. We can trace how Orientalist visual culture made its way into women’s fashions in US cinema of the early twentieth century. In the early decades of US cinema, the mode of femininity most visible in cinema culture consisted of the remnants of the Victorian ideal of womanhood. We see this in the likes of Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish, two of the biggest stars of the 1910s. In many of their publicity stills, these stars wore light-colored cotton gowns with dainty detailing like ruffles and lace, with flowers held in their hands or tucked into their bosoms. The emphasis is on their angelic innocence and purity. After the First World War, the fledgling Hollywood industry expanded abroad at a rapid pace; it was in this same period that a new Hollywood style of glamour arose in contradistinction to this older, Victorian ideal. It would

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Figure 44  Exotic fashion on Vilma Banky in Son of the Sheik.

ultimately replace it almost completely. The new glamour drew extensively on Orientalist, primitivist, and/or “tribal” sources, framing femininity as dark and exotic. The flapper of the 1920s declared her independence from Victorian norms through reference to the racialized other. The women who constituted the enormous fandom of Rudolph Valentino, the archetypal Latin lover (see Chapter 3), rebelled against the Victorian heteropatriarchy and declared their freer sexuality through reference to his ambiguous racial otherness, which made him suitable as an object for a developing female gaze. The films of Rudolph Valentino, often set in the faraway, crystallized the trending association between femininity and the exotic that would become the basic building block of glamour for much of the classical Hollywood period. The Sheik (1921) and its sequel, Son of the Sheik (1926), are good examples: these enormously popular films featured white women draped in silks and dripping with “Oriental” jewelry, their heads wrapped in scarves or covered with veils that marked them as adventuresses in an occult space, simultaneously frightening and erotically sensual (Figure 44). The glamorous woman of the 1920s was created in the same exotic image: she would don kimonos made of rich embroidered silks and gowns with ornate beadwork; adorn herself with jeweled headdresses, long strings of pearls, and

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serpent-shaped anklets; decorate her hats and coats with ostrich and bird-ofparadise feathers; wear a turban or cover her face with a veil; and wrap herself in furs made from every conceivable exotic mammal, sometimes drawing on appropriated Native American designs for styling. For her toilette, she would line her eyes with black kohl and wear perfumes with names like Shalimar and Tsang-Ihang. She would smoke Turkish cigarettes. Thus glamorous white women drew extensively on imagery of the racial Other to connote difference from mainstream white patriarchal order and declare sexual and economic independence. Indeed, the very excess of these styles was itself arguably Orientalist, opposing itself to the rationality and restraint of white patriarchal society. In the twentieth century, glamour arose as a United Statesian mode for rearranging the visual spectacles of colonialism into a new spectacle of a “worldly,” liberated white consumer femininity. Hollywood was deeply entangled in this process; indeed, just as Hollywood was cemented as a global powerhouse, glamour was likewise cemented as the dominant aesthetic of Hollywood. In fashions of the 1930s, glamour’s Orientalist visual culture was incorporated into the abstraction and smoothness of high modernism. The turban, for example, became the inspiration for any number of ladies’ hat designs; the veil was made over into a new, abstracted “birdcage” shape. The black bias-cut satin gown, emblematic of 1930s fashion, insinuates the sexuality and dark abundance of the Oriental, its liquid texture suggesting exotic silks—yet done in a way that simultaneously invokes the abstracted smoothness of the machine age, as though to suggest the technologized domination of the feminine/Oriental other. The towering collars on many 1930s coats and cloaks, which in some cases stretched beyond the top of the head, similarly suggest an Orientalist occult that has been abstracted into a modernist geometry. The ways that 1930s fashion experimented with revealing parts of the woman’s body can be read along similar lines. For example, a side slit on a long gown, reaching upward to reveal most of the leg, suggested simultaneous modesty and disclosure, as though the leg is peeking out from behind a veil. This kind of move was also an Orientalist trope, as the archetypal Oriental dancewear (in Western culture) consisted of baggy “harem” pants, a bare midriff and bikini top, and a veiled face, as though the veil’s modesty exists to tease the Western man. The bare-backed gown similarly suggested simultaneous modesty and disclosure. In the 1935 film Roberta (William A. Seiter, RKO)—which was later remade as the postwar Paris musical Lovely to Look At—a major plot point hinges on a black bias-cut satin gown with a bare back (Figure 45). It has a halter top that leaves the

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Figure 45  A black, bias-cut, backless satin gown in Roberta suggests the feminine-as-occult.

back bare down to the tailbone except for a bikini-style band below the shoulder blades (as the term “bikini” itself suggests, the bikini top began as a trope of the exotic, one that was present in many scenes in Son of the Sheik). A blond, all-American character (played by Randolph Scott) throws a fit over the gown’s indecency and breaks up with his girlfriend over it, for it is too suggestive of the feminine-as-occult, of feminine power that challenges the patriarchal/colonial status quo. Stephen Gundle and Clino T. Castelli define glamour in Marxist terms, as the mesmerizing surface through which the value of a luxury object departs from its use value. In an age of mechanical reproduction (a la Walter Benjamin), they argue, the uniformity of industrial manufacture strips commodities of any sense of being special or desirable beyond their use value; it is glamour that steps in to become “the manufactured aura of capitalist society, the dazzling illusion that compensates for inauthenticity and reinforces consumerism as a way of life” (Gundle and Castelli 2006, 9). Glamour is precisely what makes the commodity fetish a “fetish,” in other words. But Marx famously and problematically

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suppressed the colonial from his analysis of capitalism; David Harvey, for example, argues that capitalism always has a geographical dimension, and goes about revising Marxist economic theory through the lens of colonialism and its contemporary neocolonial forms (2000). The commodity fetish must similarly be reconsidered geographically: it is not just the worker’s labor but the colonized, racially othered worker’s labor, and the commodity’s value—both materially and imaginatively—is also tied to the (real or perceived) distance the commodity has traveled to arrive at market. As the term “fetish” again suggests, the commodity fetish paradoxically functions to simultaneously hide and celebrate the violence and death that went into making an object as a product of colonial manufacture. Laura Mulvey argues that glamour is where the Freudian concept of fetish converges with the Marxist one. [Both] the fetishized figure of bodily beauty and the fetishism of the commodity … are constructed, made out of raw material or the body, to acquire value. In both cases, the embellished surface conceals and enables a sliding of connotation from the eroticised feminine to the eroticisation of consumption. (Mulvey 1996a, 47)

In glamour, both types of fetish converge on the woman’s surface image, and “both of them become the unspeakable, and the unrepresentable, in commodity culture” (1996a, 14). Glamour’s perceptual pleasures, then, repress and compensate for the existential terror of the feminine/racialized other, yet it is haunted by an absent presence, with death lying just beneath its glimmering surface and threatening to irrupt into the male psyche. This fear is continually redirected back into the process of repression, as it is “reinvested even more intensely in the fascination of the surface” (ibid., 48). Given US settler colonialism and its founding on the dual genocide of Native Americans and enslaved African Americans, it may be fitting that the United States would have a more robust, and more robustly repressed, necropolitics than the European empires. Death is everywhere and nowhere, always lurking just beneath the gleaming surface of white US culture. At the time of writing, the United States is grappling simultaneously with a pandemic that is disproportionately killing Black and Indigenous people, and with mass protests over the deaths of Black people at the hands of police; both of these are functioning to make newly visible, at least to white people, the racial and colonial hierarchies of life and death that persist to this day in US society. Glamour plays a particularly urgent role in the United States as the gleaming

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surface that distracts from and compensates for the society’s underbelly of genocide, an aesthetics of whiteness that visibly and swaggeringly separates the winners from the losers. It draws on European expansionist and Orientalist aesthetics to do so, but these are deployed for a uniquely United Statesian ideological project. As the Cold War ramped up in the late 1940s and the early 1950s, glamour experienced a particular zenith in its political and ideological significance. Recall that the Marshall Plan, with its economic redevelopment of Western Europe, was explicitly intended to beat back the appeal of communism via the sensuous allures of US-style consumer capitalism. In the aftermath of the war’s privations and violent destruction, glamour would have particularly resonated in Europe, promising new prosperity, modernization, and better living. It would also implicitly offer to recontain and rerepress death into its proper place in the cultural subconscious. Even as it widely continued to rely for its material production on colonial violence, glamour could simultaneously displace death onto the communist system and thus proclaim Western consumer capitalism as the usher of universal prosperity.

The Paris Fashion Musical Despite its strong association with United Statesian culture, in the US imaginary glamour is, paradoxically, often tied to Europeanness. The very spelling of the word indicates this; most United Statesians don’t drop the U in the final syllable in “glamour,” as they do with “color” and “neighbor.” Glamour invokes a faraway, and Europe is the gateway to the faraway in the United Statesian mind, a space that is feminized and over-civilized when compared to the masculine spirit of the New World, and particularly the frontier (see introduction for further discussion). The fashion-oriented musicals of this chapter are all set in Paris, and it’s important to highlight how Paris played (and plays) a powerful role in the US imaginary of the world, especially as regards fashion and the female body. The French capital has been particularly understood in the United States as a place for women to go shopping. After all, Paris was the capital city of the French empire, a gateway through which an enormous variety of goods from around the globe moved. The department store itself was originally a Parisian invention. Through the city’s innovation of haute couture, Paris became identified specifically as a

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center of fashion, a place that set yearly trends for dressmaking in the rest of the world; US women’s fashion publications like Godey’s Lady’s Book (1830–78) frequently reported the latest fashions from Paris. The French capital was also the origin point of the showgirl. French theater and performance dance traditions had given rise to what Gundle calls the Parisian “courtesan-performer” of the late nineteenth century, such as Gaby Deslys, who attracted large audiences through her notorious sex appeal. This figure was imported to New York by Florenz Ziegfeld and, beginning in 1908, the “Ziegfeld Girl” was born: the prototype of what became the iconic American showgirl (Gundle and Castelli 2006, 137; Mizejewski 1999). Through both fashion and the showgirl, by the early-twentieth-century Paris had become thoroughly ensconced in the US cultural imaginary as the center for the adornment and commodification of women’s bodies. The significance of Paris in the US imaginary was both renewed and transformed after the Second World War amid the context of the Marshall Plan—the primary governmental policy which promoted US-style consumer capitalism in Europe (see introduction). During the war, the Nazis had been eager to appropriate the Paris fashion industry for itself, attempting to move it to Berlin, but the plan was successfully resisted by devoted industry workers (Wilcox 2007). After the war, the regaining of access to French fashion was treated as a major symbol of victory, as just after the liberation US women eagerly awaited the arrival of the first Paris fashions in six years (ibid., 35–6). Christian Dior’s New Look, the 1947 style that featured a corseted waist and spreading, tea-length skirt, became a defining look of the 1950s, and for the next decade the city experienced a new heyday as the center of the fashion world. While Paris was the center of design, it was New York that functioned as the center of manufacturing and marketing of these designs for mass consumption; New York firms would copy (either with or without authorization) the work of Parisian designers and translate them into more affordable, accessible products for US department stores. Paris thus played multiple, contradictory roles in United Statesian glamour discourse of the 1950s. It functioned as the literal source for designs that were translated into mass-market US fashion, providing prototypes on which chic “American” looks were based. It was also the imaginative source of the archetypal glamorous American woman, the showgirl. For these reasons, it was widely seen as an elite city for American women to go shopping in, offering the ultimate experience of glamorous acquisition and transformation.

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Yet at the same time, Paris was in western Europe and thus lay within the primary zone targeted by the Marshall Plan—and hence a space in need of economic rescue and persuasion to US-style consumer capitalism, which mobilized glamour as part of its sales pitch. For example, in Lovely to Look At, American businessmen are positioned as the plucky, innovative saviors of an outdated Parisian fashion business on the brink of ruin—suggesting a selfcongratulatory allegory for the Marshall Plan in western Europe. Glamour, which they bring in to complement the French design house’s tradition of “quality,” is situated as the dominant aesthetic both of the United States and of economic success. The Paris-set musicals of this chapter can be read as working hard to imaginatively navigate and reconcile these multiple conflicting positions. Paris in these films is depicted as the traditional center of fashion, but a center that needs something added to it by the American visitor: an American point of view that organizes the spectator’s experience of the city and transforms it in some way that suits US aesthetic, commercial, or political purposes.

The Bombshell: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes At the beginning of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell perform the opening number on a stage in identical red sequined dresses (Figure 46). Split up to the hip and with necklines that plunge down to their waists, these form-hugging gowns show off the women’s ample curves, transforming their bodies into a dazzlingly compelling spectacle accessorized with copious rhinestones and excessive feather headdresses. Their look is an immediately recognizable image of bombshell glamour, which at this point had been the dominant aesthetic of women’s fashion in Hollywood for much of its history: bedazzled, erotic, excessive. Yet at the same time, it is also specific to the early 1950s, with the tightly corseted waist and voluptuous bosom and hips. Marjorie Rosen dubbed this figure the “mammary woman” (1973, 285), pointing to the fact that the 1950s marked the start of the era of breasts as the premiere sexualized female body part (replacing the ankles and legs that had been emphasized in decades prior). This curvy, busty figure was most memorably exemplified by Monroe, but also others including Russell, Jayne Mansfield, and a parade of other curvy sirens intended by the studios to be Monroe competitors, including Mamie van Doren, Sheree North, and Barbara Lang.

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Figure 46  Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: Monroe’s and Russell’s outfits in the opening number are an instantly recognizable image of classical Hollywood glamour.

In Gentlemen, Monroe and Russell play archetypal gold-diggers in many respects: two working-class women from Little Rock who are looking for love in an upper-class milieu. The “bombshell” figure is a classed figure, and this mode of glamour often has subtle connotations of vulgarity, arising from a “mix[ing] of the appeals of class and sleaze” (Gundle 2008, 11). This mode of glamour is often contrasted with “taste” or “sophistication,” which connote values of quality, restraint, and naturalness associated with the more secure ownership of luxury that arises from so-called respectability or good breeding. Bombshell glamour, on the other hand, is a little bit excessive, a little too spectacular to be tasteful. It is more strongly associated with the nouveau riche and with showgirls and movie stars than with inherited wealth. Bombshell glamour, in this sense, has constituted a structure of striving for working-class women who haven’t (yet) made it, a dream of what wealth and comfort supposedly look like—supplied by Hollywood and positioned in stark contrast to the dreariness of their everyday lives. This makes it ideally suited to the period of massive growth of US-style consumer capitalism that it witnessed. The bombshell is a class-climbing new

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arrival, a woman “on the make,” in precisely the period when the United States was itself “on the make,” an ambitious and brash new arrival on the world stage. Hollywood was, economically and culturally, an imperial cinema in terms of how it colonized other cinema cultures from the 1920s onward; it stood as both a prime example of and an emblem for the growth of foreign markets for US goods, and more generally the entry of the United States to world affairs and colonial conquests. The term “bombshell” itself expresses a sense of invasion, of military might—a femininity that would hit the male spectator like an exploding bomb, an erotics of destruction and threat. Another term for this figure was the “knockout,” again suggestive of its power to destroy a man. This is a femininity that turns the head of every man in the room, an object of the male gaze so perfectly attuned to male desire that the bombshell woman could herself use it to accrue power, as Monroe does in Gentlemen; some men literally faint when she enters a room. What’s more, she knows it: she knows how to get what she wants from men by deploying her bombshell body for them, and she does so without hesitation, particularly when her goal is the acquisition of diamonds. Bombshell glamour thus sets up a parallel in which an idealized American femininity stands in for US military power. And industrial power too. The 1950s represented the triumph of the synthetic over the organic in US culture: the age of plastic, used in ever new ways as a material basis for commodities and their packaging, and of synthetic colors in bright and bold hues not seen before. It is nowadays a little difficult to think of plastic as glamorous, but at one time it represented the greatest heights of consumer desire and the triumph of technology over nature. This was a deeply gendered phenomenon, as plastics and other synthetics were used especially widely for consumer products associated with femininity: synthetic cosmetics and soaps, often packaged in plastic or cellophane; plastic home furniture and décor in bright synthetic colors; and clothes made from an array of new synthetic materials. Conversely, it was the white American man who was positioned as the creator of this aesthetics of prosperity and technological progress. As Gundle puts it, “The rise of mechanical productivity and the abundance of capitalism displaced symbolically the fecundity of nature. It was no longer the land and woman that were the source of creativity and plenty, but man and the industrial process” ( 2006, 175). The bombshell is doubly an image of technological progress: herself a consumer of synthetic commodities, she deploys them to convert herself into a synthetic commodity for erotic consumption.

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Women’s bodies were deeply bound up with this dynamic, as the “sex appeal of the inorganic” rose to new heights (Gundle and Castelli 2006, 177). Through fashion design and beauty culture, women’s bodies were reduced to acceptable dead matter … reinvented and rendered alluring by being decked out with attractive clothes and commodities which were divorced from nature. … [Thus] fashion transcended nature by making the inorganic commodity itself the object of human desire. (ibid.)

This, then, was the new necropolitics of glamour, as women’s bodies were denied any independent, organic, or creative capacity—converted into synthetic, unliving objects for erotic consumption by men. After all, this was the age that produced the Barbie doll, a literal plastic woman that became a central aspirational image for girls. Tellingly, synthetic shades of pink were among the most popular of the decade. Pink, in nature, is a color of sex, reproduction, and the organic flesh: found most commonly on flowers; on (white) women’s lips, nipples, vulvas; on newborn mammals; and on healing wounds. The industrial creation of boldly artificial pinks, and their use not only in cosmetics and fashion but also on modern appliances and cars, symbolically functions to harness the creative, reproductive energies of the organic feminine via the technological and industrial prowess of patriarchal capitalism. The bombshell was an idealized configuration of synthetic femininity: the organic nature of the body totally denied, woman became a wholly artificial image, constructed entirely through man-made technologies in the very image of capitalist desire. The 1950s bombshell’s most prominent feature, her copious breasts, do a lot of ideological work here: body parts of reproduction and fecundity converted into inorganic, artificially produced objects of erotic visual display, a conversion accomplished with highly engineered undergarments (or, somewhat later, with surgical interventions). The exceptionally upright, conical breast shape in vogue in this period further emphasizes the breasts’ status as the triumph of the synthetic-erotic. The undergarment that accomplished this shape, the “bullet bra,” like the term “bombshell,” indicates a positioning of the woman’s body as the object of industrial manufacture, reliant on the symbolic death of the woman as organic material being, as well as latently threatening to the male spectator. Monroe is the 1950s bombshell par excellence. She’s commonly identified as the defining example of mid-century United Statesian commodified femininity—in both senses: as wholly constructed via the consumption of

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industrial, synthetic commodities, and as herself a synthetic commodity to be visually consumed. This duality made Monroe the pinnacle of the Hollywood star system, and she was seen as the very essence of the commodified feminine surface (though this changed after her tragic death, likely by suicide). Her erotic allure was such that it affected both men and women—a logical consequence of a culture that has made the synthetic commodity an object of erotic desire; indeed one of the defining features of glamour is that it deploys erotic imagery of women’s bodies not only to rouse the male erotic gaze but also to seduce other women into the erotic allure of commodities. Rising to fame in the early 1950s, Monroe quickly became renowned not just in the United States but around the world, her image coming to symbolize the project of glamour in the growth of United Statesian consumer capitalism abroad and the triumph of US technology and industrial strength. Her body took on not only capitalist but also geopolitical significance as a “weapon” (a bomb, a bullet) in the Cold War, a prime example of the “sexiness that could counter the colourless asexuality of communism” (Mulvey 1996b, 216). Fiona Handyside shows that Monroe’s body and in particular her gleaming blonde hair were read in France as “a sign of modernity and modernization and the cleanliness linked to these” (2010, 293). The color white became particularly connected in the postwar period to soaps and detergents, which were used to institute much more rigorous bodily and household hygiene than had previously been the custom. The connections between soap and empire actually date back to nineteenth-century Britain, where “Victorian cleaning rituals were peddled globally as the God-given sign of Britain’s evolutionary superiority … captur[ing] the hidden affinity between domesticity and empire” (McClintock 1995, 207–8). In the postwar period, synthetic shampoo and the clean, shining hair it produced came to be particularly viewed as American. Blondness, due to its proximity to the color white as well as its reliance on the same sorts of synthetics, was an apt symbol of American cleanliness and everyday technological superiority: a promise of an increased quality of life through glamour. Monroe’s blondeness thus read as a sign of the technologically produced femininity that was made available to French women through US-led consumerism. Another way that Marilyn Monroe represents a technologized US femininity is through her close connection with CinemaScope. Her breakout role was in How to Marry a Millionaire (Jean Negulesco, 20th Century Fox, 1953), among the first films to be released in the new widescreen format. The two most famous images from the film both centered on the widescreen spectacularization of her

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body: one was an image of her reclining lengthwise across the screen, visually displayed for erotic consumption; the other is an image in which she admires herself in a mirror, her body swathed in a form-hugging magenta evening dress and multiplied through mirror reflections that display her simultaneously from several different angles. As Lisa Cohen puts it, “Too big to be contained by the old aspect ratio, Monroe is perfectly framed by the excess of [CinemaScope]” (1998, 278). Not coincidentally, the similarly curvy Jane Russell was also the star of The French Line, which was one of the first features to be released in 3D—her bombshell body likewise positioned as prime object of visual spectacle and a triumph of the technologically produced woman. Widescreen also had neocolonial significance, capturing wide open landscapes for the visual pleasure of the white American and thus scopically subjugating the world. Monroe thus becomes doubly implicated in the US neocolonial project, both as a symbol of the advantages of US consumer capitalism and also, contradictorily, as a stand-in for the exotic colonial other that is spectacularized by the technological gaze. The bombshell, as a technologized and synthetic femininity, also carries raced significance, as an expression of the ideals of whiteness. Richard Dyer points out that Monroe’s light blonde hair and pale skin function to identify her not just as white but as having the most secure whiteness possible, contributing to her supreme desirability as a sex object in a white supremacist patriarchy (1986, 42–3). Elsewhere, in his explanation of the white male muscular body that came into vogue in Hollywood in the 1980s, Dyer argues that “the built body is an achieved body, worked at, planned, suffered for”; this makes it “the most literal triumph of mind over matter, imagination over flesh” (Dyer 1997, 153). The bombshell body can be read as the feminine, more passive equivalent of the built male body: the image of a white woman that is likewise produced through the striving of the white man and his intellectual/technological superiority. Even Monroe’s bottle-blonde hair carries this symbolism: this superlative image of whiteness is constructed by white-invented technology in addition to white genetic lineage. This also adds a potential instability, since bottle-blonde hair is presumably available to racialized others as well, yet even this functions to further confirm whiteness as an “aspirational structure” desired by all (ibid., 152). The glamorous white female body and the built white male body have other features in common as well. For one thing, both involve the near total removal of body hair, thus connoting the removal of the “animalistic” aspects of the body and replacing them with an aesthetic that connotes “striving above nature” (Dyer 1997, 155). Both also conspicuously require wealth

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and leisure to produce, implying security in the identification of whiteness with (supposedly deserved) prosperity and class privilege. Finally, both the bombshell body and the built body are thoroughly surface-oriented. Prior to the 1980s, the white male body was typically totally covered from the neck down in Hollywood cinema, as though ensuring that the white male body wouldn’t be turned into visual spectacle and thus into a disempowered object of the gaze; the built body, on the other hand, functions as its own surface, its own armor, not requiring clothes to protect it from the possibility of being “submerged into the horror of femininity and non-whiteness” (ibid., 153). Similarly the bombshell body becomes its own surface: Monroe’s organic flesh is symbolically converted to the synthetic and thus effectively becomes adorned by its own commodified shape rather than by the clothes covering it. The bombshell then, like the built male body, expresses a fundamental aspect of whiteness: its imperialist control of the physical world, in which “the white [male] spirit organizes white flesh and non-white flesh” and thus symbolically belongs in a position of dominance over all “other material matters” (ibid., 15). Here is another way, then, that glamour generally, and Monroe’s gleaming white image specifically, functions ideologically to buttress the hegemony of the white United Statesian man: it doesn’t just sell (technologically superior) US consumer products abroad, but it also positions this state of affairs as right and natural. Monroe’s star image, centering as it did around innocence, guilelessness, and a sort of naturalness as regards sex (Dyer 1986, 31), functions paradoxically to make the artificial seem natural and pleasurable, as if magically resolving the conflict between them. Of course, Monroe’s star image and acting also have a distinctly satirical element. Lois Banner points out that Marilyn’s persona was a constructed image, a “masquerade” whose bombshell body and mannerisms “confirmed 1950s femininity while burlesquing it” (2008, 8). Monroe, in other words, framed Hollywood-style glamorous femininity as an object of satire, a thing that is no longer direct and serious but is instead viewed through the distancing lens of pastiche. She is a transitional figure, heralding the end of the era of “classic” bombshell glamour. Although the term “glamour” has continued to be used as a generic term for luxury in fashion, its specific associations with vampy, classclimbing women, its connotations of excessiveness and spectacle that go too far to be elegant or tasteful, have disappeared except in relation to a bygone era. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is a primary text in Monroe’s satirical inhabiting of bombshell femininity—a transitional text that marks the end of the era of

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bombshell glamour. The film has frequently been read as a satire of gender roles. In her now-classic article, Maureen Turim reads Gentlemen as a film in which satire functions to place “golddigging [as] justified … as the female form of capitalist enterprise” (1979, 57). Handyside reads its satire in terms of the gendered politics of the gaze: the women utilize the male gaze to accrue power for themselves, as the men of the film have a tendency to “collapse on top of one another” when confronted with these two marvelous beauties (Handyside 2004, 83). They are also shown to gaze upon the male body in ways analogous to how women are usually gazed upon, as projections of desire (ibid.). Dorothy’s number “Is There Anyone Here for Love?,” for example, displays the bodies of beefcake male athletes as abstracted objects of sensuality, like a Busby Berkeley musical sequence but with the genders reversed, while Lorelei expresses lust for a man by fantasizing that his head is an enormous diamond. But as we have seen, the bombshell is not just a gendered configuration, but a colonial one too. Gentlemen’s satire of gender extends to the gendered roles within an imperialist system, as the women parodically assume the roles of soldiers, businessmen, and politicians in their travels abroad. In “Bye Bye Baby,” they dance amongst a group of uniformed men (the US Olympic team) as they depart on a ship, and Lorelei gives a romantic goodbye and a false promise of fidelity to the man she is leaving at home—the perfect mirror of the departing US soldier, who in popular imagery always had a “girl” at home waiting for him. This echoes the idea that the glamorous female body is itself a weapon of US domination. Lorelei and Dorothy are also archetypal gold-diggers, the female version of the ambitious capitalist businessman, bringing United Statesian glamour with them to Europe as their biggest commodity for sale. And as politicians, they work to charm a pair of English aristocrats and later negotiate with them over colonial assets (diamonds). The diamonds function as multifaceted symbols within these satirical dynamics. As previously discussed, diamonds are strongly associated with the glamour of new wealth, so Lorelei’s obsession with them seems to satirize the United States’ imperial designs on the world and its upstart desires for visible global prestige. The gems are explicitly signaled as British colonial products, coming from Sir “Piggy” Beekman (Charles Coburn)’s South African diamond mine. Beekman is himself a caricature of the aging English aristocrat—and in fact he has aged along with the British empire: in Anita Loos’s 1925 novel he was a young dandy, while here (post-Indian secession) he is a silly, decrepit old man. And indeed, the entire plot of the film revolves

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around the question of whether this transfer of an imperial asset—indeed a tiara, an imperial crown—from Englishman to American is legally and morally legitimate. This question hinges on whether Lorelei has acted innocently or as a cynical gold-digger, and this is left very much open to debate. On one hand, Monroe’s character seems to be written as the archetypal “dumb blonde.” This figure is already rife with contradictions, for she is supposed to be simultaneously stupid and calculating, lazy and ambitious, clueless and manipulative. Monroe’s performance of the role seems to add several more layers of complexity to these characteristics, for, as Dyer shows, her star image is centered around innocence, infantilism, irrationality, and guilelessness, particularly regarding sex (1986, 31)—the very opposite of the cynical gold-digger. Her tone of voice throughout the scene in which she asks Piggy for the tiara is a tender falsetto, and her performance suggests either complete sincerity or an extremely good simulation of it. It’s so hard to tell which is the case that her performance becomes “contradictory to the point of incoherence” (Dyer 1998, 146). This effectively functions to collapse the distinction between greedy capitalism and moral rectitude. In Marilyn Monroe’s bombshell persona, the anxious postwar questions over whether the United States constitutes a righteous “leader of the free world” or a ravenous capitalist empire is thus satirically played out. “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” confirms these dynamics. The number starts with a ballet ensemble, the women in long, puffy tulle gowns and the men in tailcoats with bright red sashes that suggest the pomp of European aristocracy. They dance in an old-fashioned ballroom style, too—again visually marked both as “European” and as non-modern. Monroe, emerging from their midst, wears a tight dress in a bold, synthetic pink with ultra-modern lines (Figure 47). After refusing all of these old-fashioned men in a mock-operatic vocal style, she sings these lines in a slow march rhythm: The French are glad to die for love They delight in fighting duels

Here her voice becomes sensuously rubato: But I prefer a man who lives And gives expensive jewels

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Figure 47  Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: Lorelei in a tight dress of bold, synthetic pink with ultra-modern lines, in “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend.”

Then, transitioning to a jazzy double time: A kiss on the hand may be quite continental But diamonds are a girl’s best friend

The whole number positions Lorelei as modern, sexy, American, and passionately capitalist in comparison to stuffy, old European traditions and hierarchies. The song’s instructional bent—as though she is teaching a naive audience about why diamonds are important—further positions her as a modernizing force in an old world. It is notable that the song is addressed to a female audience at least as much as a male one. Alexander Doty gives Gentlemen a queer reading, arguing that it “concern[s]‌itself with simultaneously developing both male-female and femalefemale bonds and affective intensities in ways that consistently encourage bisexual visual and narrative pleasures” (2000, 136). Yet the bisexual energy available in the film is inseparable from the erotics of consumer capitalism, as the glamorous woman is structured simultaneously around a male erotic gaze and a female, consumerist one. Here, the scopic hierarchy is also national/

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imperial: Monroe is specifically an American bombshell giving instruction to a European audience on how to attain glamour. The mêlée over the tiara finally lands the main players in a courtroom— American, British, and French all together, hashing out a legal solution to questions over the ownership of imperial assets. Dorothy, masquerading as Lorelei, takes off a fur coat to reveal a leotard dripping in silver fringe, and shimmies her way around the courtroom in an attempt to derail the pompous seriousness of the proceedings (Figure 48). She succeeds in distracting all the men in the room with her sexy antics, thus meddling with the traditional systems of European law, power, and ownership through the eye-catching allure of American bombshell glamour—a hilariously brazen parody of the Marshall Plan. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes illustrates how the bombshell as a figure of expansionism is now open to parody. The bombshell, once a metaphorical figure for an America that was “on the make” on the global stage, is now too

Figure 48  Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: Dorothy derails the pompous seriousness of the legal proceedings by shimmying around the courtroom.

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baldly capitalist, too disreputable, too unprincipled to continue in a new era of American global prestige. The film also parodies the Hollywood musical’s backlot-produced “dreamworld” style along similar lines. Throughout the Paris-set portion of the film, the city is a caricature of itself represented solely through the eyes of the two American women; it has no independent existence. There are virtually no named French characters in the film; the French people we see are taxi drivers, porters, waiters—servants of (and sometimes spectators for) the American tourists. These workers produce and provide a glamorous experience for the Americans, but are not themselves glamorous, thus illustrating the divide by which glamour bifurcates people into self versus other. Many of the Parisians are racially othered as well; in “When Love Goes Wrong,” when Dorothy and Lorelei find themselves broke and sitting in a working-class café, the locals who function as a chorus largely have brown skin and wear fezzes, appearing to be Algerians (in 1953, colonial tensions were building up to the Algerian War of Independence that would start in earnest the following year). Singing “When love goes wrong, nothing goes right” in this context functions as a commentary on the imminent devolution of the French (and British) empire, once again satirically positioning the Americans as new and better leaders on the world stage (Figure 49). Handyside argues that when they arrive in Paris, the women’s subversive accrual of power within the gendered politics of the gaze starts to serve a new, and quite serious, political purpose: the film’s inversion of the gaze amounts to its realignment “along nationalized rather than gendered lines,” as they enact a “tourist gaze” upon the French capital and are thereby marked as representatives of a more powerful nation, the United States (2004, 80). But this reading doesn’t quite get it right: in fact, the film’s parody extends to its configuration of the geopolitical. The entirety of the “tourist gaze” that happens in the film occurs in one sequence that is less than a minute long, scarcely more than some stock footage establishing shots of the city’s most famous sights—hardly a significant enough sequence on which to base such a claim as Handyside’s. Indeed, the women barely notice these sights, for all they want is to go shopping, represented in the second half of this transitional sequence from the ship to the city. The couture district is presented not so much as an urban space than as an interior dream space for the women. Accompanied by soaring, rubato string music that locates fashion and beauty consumerism as an emotional focal point for the women, we see a series of shots of backlot-recreated

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Figure 49  Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: Lorelei with two Parisian children who appear to be Algerians.

exteriors of the great mid-century Parisian fashion houses—Schiaparelli, Dior, Lelong, Guerlain, Balenciaga—with superimposed, translucent images of the beautiful goods sold therein (Figure 50). These superimposed shots rhyme visually with the moment in which Lorelei envisioned Piggy’s head as an enormous diamond. All are dreamed images that exist only as interior visions for the women. Compare Gentlemen’s Paris sequence to An American in Paris—another film that signals that its dreamy vision of Paris is an image produced by an American mind rather than a real place. In An American, this ability to project the world is depicted as a serious phenomenon of nationalist triumph. In Gentlemen, this self-seriousness is mocked, as the ones doing the envisioning of Paris are these two flashy, shallow, class-climbing bombshells. The film’s parody of bombshell femininity thus extends to become a similarly subversive mocking of the visual style of backlot-produced Hollywood films. The “dreamworld” quality of the typical Hollywood musical, like glamour, is a wholly synthetic object that draws attention to its own technologized constructedness as an indispensable aspect of its dreamy desirability. The film

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Figure 50  Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: The shopping sequence when the women arrive in Paris.

reveals and mocks the artificiality of both the bombshell woman’s body and the geopolitics of US expansionism that it signifies. The phony, overhyped aspect of Hollywood musicals’ visual style is most typically approached through a materialist lens. It is viewed as a function of how the film industry worked at the time: it was easier and cheaper to make phony backdrops of a place than shoot a film in the real place. We must consider this synthetic sensibility as something more—as expressive of a positive, intentional set of values rather than simply due to industrial convenience. The synthetic constructedness of Hollywood sets, particularly in the musical, created an aura of glamour that was experienced as a dreamily desirable fantasy space. Bombshell femininity and this mode of spatial representation go hand in hand, both expressing esteem for the synthetic, the artificially constructed, the industrially produced. But this was shifting in the 1950s: bombshell glamour and the Hollywood “dreamworld” mode of spatial representation were both on the wane, as a new set of values and aesthetics around US global dominance were forming. This

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new aesthetics centered not on artificiality or capitalist acquisitiveness but rather their opposites, naturalness and secure belonging. In other words, runaway production in Europe, far from being just about industry profits, grew at precisely the moment when a decisive shift was forming in Hollywood’s imaginary of US imperialism. This shift itself is satirically expressed at the end of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, when the women walk down the aisle at their double wedding and proclaim: At last we won the big crusade Looks like we finally made the grade

After going through all the phases of the war and postwar periods—as soldiers, capitalists, and finally politicians—the Americans’ status on the world stage is becoming legally and morally legitimate.

The Princess: Funny Face Throughout Rachel Moseley’s (2002) definitive book on Audrey Hepburn, this star is described repeatedly as the “opposite” of Marilyn Monroe. Both Moseley and the participants in her study refer to Monroe over and over again as the primary reference through which to demarcate Hepburn’s “difference” from other stars and from the cultural norms of 1950s femininity. Hepburn is indisputably connected to glamour: she was a fashion icon whose films extensively deployed her body and clothing as visual attractions, and “glamorous” was and is used frequently to describe her. Yet her very slender, nearly flat-chested body, plain brunette hairstyle, minimal makeup with natural brows, and the “strange” or “funny” quality of her face all registered as mounting an opposition to the bombshell mode of femininity, announcing a new kind of glamour. Despite what Moseley calls the “attractionist” aesthetic of Hepburn’s body—displayed frequently for visual consumption—this happens in a manner that seems to refuse the distance of the erotic male gaze, which the curvy bombshell body invites. Instead, her star image promotes intimacy and connection with women via “a pleasurable and non-voyeuristic gaze which emphasizes the details of her dress and accessories” rather than her body (Moseley 2002, 47), thus speaking to women’s competencies and pleasures in clothes, hairstyles, and makeup.

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This sense of difference was further buttressed by the styling of Hepburn’s clothes: looser, freer styles that enabled movement, simple modernist lines, subdued colors, the very highest quality and tailoring, with little use for sequins or feathers or the other classic textures of glamour (Figure 51). Hepburn had a quality of tomboyishness that announced her intelligence and “personality” (a counterpoint to Monroe’s “dumb blonde”), yet at the same time a feminine daintiness that was expressed through her wearing of kitten-heeled shoes and ballet slippers, and dominant fabric choices like taffeta, shantung, and wool. All of this is in direct opposition to bombshell glamour, with its glitzy showiness, slinky textures, and physically constricting, synthetic construction of the female body. Around the same time—and frequently connected with Hepburn— there was a shift in discourses around glamour, toward a new emphasis on “naturalness.” By the late 1950s, girls’ magazines were advising their readers to “be yourself … be natural, gay, and true to [your] type … [rather than] always worrying about trying to be somebody else” (Mirabelle and Glamour 1959, 11; quoted in Moseley 2002, 52). Glamour was redeployed to express a woman’s inner self and enhance her innate physical features rather than the bombshell’s synthetic creation of the body in a preordained image. This would appear to be a positive step in a proto-feminist direction, enabling women to have and express personality through their appearance rather than the requirements of cookie-cutter glamour cut to the measure of the erotic male

Figure 51  Funny Face: An example of Hepburn’s “princess” glamour.

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imagination. However, as many women were and are aware, “naturalness” still requires intensive labor to achieve; it simply places a premium on hiding the labor rather than displaying it. Indeed, the labor of naturalness is of a deeper and more invasive kind: while bombshell glamour is all about the surface, the new “natural” glamour requires a transformation of the whole self in order to turn the body into the right kind of visual curation. The growth of the “transformation narrative” in the 1950s, associated particularly strongly with Audrey Hepburn and with Cinderella (in the 1950 Disney animated film), expresses this new paradigm of the feminine subject, as women’s outer appearance transforms to trace an inner change that is frequently described as the finding of the “true self.” Thus “natural” glamour becomes a discipline in the Foucauldian sense, requiring women’s internalization of glamour’s principles and carrying them out on the entire self, rather than simply following exterior rules for the body. This move toward naturalness amounts to a radical shift in the meaning of glamour. All of these qualities—naturalness, quality, simplicity, comfort—were traditionally markers of secure upper-class status, the opposite of the excesses of the bombshell. Hepburn’s glamour is a distinctly classed aesthetic: she brought “the embodiment of the Vogue couture ideal” together with Hollywood stardom and thus “democratized what had until then been a clearly class-specific look” (Moseley 2002, 57). Hepburn, whose mother was a Dutch aristocrat, projected and popularized a feminine aesthetics of ownership and inherited prosperity, incorporating into glamour discourses of taste and sophistication that were the opposite of bombshell style. The term “princess” sums up Hepburn’s aesthetic well. Cinderella was a frequent point of comparison with Hepburn, who particularly in Sabrina (Billy Wilder, Paramount, 1954) undergoes a process of transformation in which her deserving (kind, unassuming, hyperfeminine) personality achieves its full expression through a change into the right kind of glamorous clothes— in comparison to the wrong kind of showy glamour presented by a romantic rival—and is rewarded by the conferral of aristocratic status through marriage. Initiation into a legitimate, respectable upper class and knowing the rules of “good taste” thus becomes the new aspirational model of femininity, rather than the mere acquisition and conspicuous display of wealth. Hepburn and Cinderella are only two examples of US culture’s increasing infatuation with aristocracy in the 1950s. Americans were fascinated in particular with the British royal family, expressed through the popularity of the royals in the US press (McAlister 2001, 54). Grace Kelly, another star in the “princess”

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vein with her refined appearance and her aura of “difference,” confirmed her aristocratic status when she quit Hollywood stardom and married the Prince of Monaco in 1956. Jackie Kennedy, with her famously simple and elegant sartorial tastes, brought this new glamour into the realm of political power, providing an aristocratic image that was at the same time perceived as accessible and democratic, tailor-made for an era of photographic publicity (Gundle 2008, 269). When she and President Kennedy visited Paris in 1961, her beauty, charm, and fluency in French were perceived as projecting an image of American prestige on the world stage. Hepburn, Kelly, and Kennedy all had connections to Europe and in particular to European aristocracies, which points to the geopolitical significance of the new “princess” glamour in US culture. The bombshell had aided in a United Statesian economic/political takeover of the world from the 1930s through the decade or so following the end of the war—a figure of ambition and gleaming materialism. The princess, on the other hand, signifies the US arrival by the mid1950s to a position of secure ownership, with the United States now installed as the world’s reigning power (at least according to its own national self-image). Through the widespread adoption of a tasteful, elegant, aristocratic feminine style, the United States declared itself the inheritor of the European style of world domination. Audrey Hepburn and her films are often read as allegories for US–Europe relations in one way or another (Shandley 2009, Smith 2002, Krämer 2000), but these analyses do not engage with the changes in United Statesian visual culture to which Hepburn was connected. She does not link the United States to Europe solely via her aristocratic lineage or her pan-European identity, but by heralding a new aesthetics of glamour that announces an affect of global ownership. As I’ll argue, this new mode of glamour, with its discourse of naturalness, is also associated with on location shooting in Europe. There is a further point about the princess, which is that she is specifically white. Despite the bombshell’s strong connections to whiteness, she contains potential instabilities because her wholly synthetic creation makes it implicitly available as an aspirational structure to racialized others. The princess, on the other hand, does away with these instabilities, because her mode of glamour is attributable to natural, innate qualities that are simply brought out for visual display through the practice of glamour. Hepburn’s pan-European identity and lineage were major aspects of her star image. In addition to the Dutch aristocratic lineage on her mother’s side, she was of English and Austrian extraction on her

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father’s, and she had lived in Belgium, England, and the Netherlands. All of this points to a secure, Northern European aristocratic whiteness as an aspect of the new ideal of femininity. In the context of the United States in the 1950s, Hepburn’s sense of connection with and pleasurable address to a female audience can be read as inviting white women into an aristocracy of whiteness. In this period, white people were buying homes in the suburbs and establishing new, middle-class lives based on personal ownership and its conspicuous display via the home (Spigel 1992). These suburban communities were specifically designed to be white; Black people were systematically excluded through a host of racist housing policies at the local, state, and federal levels. At the same time, the Black civil rights movement was gaining momentum. In this context, an aesthetics of secure prosperity and natural ownership would have spoken powerfully to white desires and anxieties. Glamour, as we’ve seen, is always about delineating a privileged class in a colonial-capitalist hierarchy, but this new white aesthetics of ownership was if anything even more insistent about the dividing lines (often literal ones, i.e., between neighborhoods). Audrey Hepburn and the princess figure more generally thus offered a new model of whiteness that eliminated the raced and classed instabilities of the bombshell and portrayed white aristocracy as natural and right. Through women’s fashion, suburban US homeownership is symbolically linked to ancient European royalty and the divine right of kings (“A man’s home is his castle”). In Hepburn’s breakout role in Roman Holiday (William Wyler, Paramount, 1953), she plays a literal princess. Princess Anne is strongly suggested to be British (though her nationality is unspecified in the diegesis); as Peter Krämer points out, the film’s marketing drew on both Queen Elizabeth II’s recent coronation and Princess Margaret’s late-breaking romantic scandal (Krämer 2000, 203–4). The fictional character of Anne, building on Hepburn’s emergent star image, is similarly positioned as belonging to the pure whiteness of Northern European aristocracy. Hepburn’s legendary ability to invite sympathy and intimacy with women positions the white American woman spectator in her shoes, inviting fantasies of being a princess who escapes the castle walls and goes on a freewheeling adventure in a beautiful, bustling European city. Italy and Italians are often othered in mid-century US discourses of race (see Chapter 3), and Roman Holiday is no different; of the film’s very few Italian characters, all are racist caricatures, thus placing Princess Anne and her white American journalist companion (Gregory Peck) in a position of racial superiority. The

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film’s tourist gaze on Rome, visually arranged simultaneously for her pleasure and the spectator’s, provides a sense of symbolic ownership of the cityscape and promises an experience of proto-feminist liberation via a positioning of the white woman as empowered colonial traveler amid a landscape of racial others. Yet this racial politics of women’s liberation became increasingly tenuous as Hepburn’s career went on. Funny Face, Hepburn’s Paris-set backstage musical about the fashion industry, tells a meta-story about the shifting meaning of glamour and its geopolitical significance in the US imaginary. The star plays Jo Stockton, an aspiring-intellectual waif working in a radical, woman-owned bookstore in Greenwich Village in New York City, when she is “discovered” by fashion photographer Dick Avery (Fred Astaire). Persuaded to serve as the “new face” of Quality Magazine, Jo agrees to undergo a makeover, go to Paris, and model for a new campaign—but only because she wants to meet Professor Flostre, the French founder of a hip philosophical movement called Empathicalism. Along the way, she falls in love with Dick, discovers that Flostre is pretentious and predatory, and thus her change in appearance traces a change in her feminine subjectivity: from liberatory/spurning feminine fashion norms to compliant/glamorous. As scholars have pointed out, the film’s transformation narrative has some serious incoherence, appearing belabored and problematic even as it is also pleasurable. Moseley traces the changes in Audrey Hepburn’s transformation films throughout the course of her career: earlier such narratives, like Roman Holiday and Sabrina, are far more satisfying than later films like Funny Face and My Fair Lady (George Cukor, Warner Bros, 1964), in which her characters are increasingly difficult to bring into line through transformations which are less and less joyful and more and more limiting in terms of the representation of their subjectivities and their sense of self. These transformations contain her characters within increasingly traditional femininities and with intensifying urgency. (Moseley 2002, 73–4)

Even as Jo’s transformation into beautiful clothes gives pleasure to the spectator, the narrative also seems to undermine this pleasure and makes us uncomfortable about the sexist implications of her transformation. At one point in the film, Dick outright proclaims that he is completely uninterested in her intellect: an insult disguised as a declaration of love. He also implies that after they return to New York, he won’t see her anymore unless she continues modeling for him—a troubling manipulation, yet she immediately agrees. We are largely denied access to Jo’s subjectivity because her own thoughts and feelings simply disappear in the

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face of Dick’s image of her as pure, glamorous surface. As Dyer puts it, by the end of the film “she is reconciled to him only by capitulating to his definition of her” (2002, 30). Yet these gendered incoherences coalesce into a much greater degree of coherence when one analyzes the film through the lens of US imperial culture. Many details of the film support such a reading. In the opening number, “Think Pink,” Quality Magazine is presented as the face of US consumer capitalism via its aesthetics of artificiality, as not only ball gowns and officewear but also shampoo and toothpaste are converted into a bright, synthetic shade of pink. Maggie Prescott (Kay Thompson), the magazine’s editor, and her gaggle of helpers are all but explicitly presented as imperial conquerors in the following scenes, as they invade the bookstore without permission and virtually destroy it in the process of converting it into an image for US visual consumption. The mise-en-scène in this sequence mobilizes imagery of a ruined postwar Europe: the bookstore is dark, dingy, and claustrophobic—qualities associated with old-world architecture—and when the fashion workers finally leave it looks almost as though a bomb has exploded, with books strewn all over the floor in great piles. Glamour’s death instinct thus rears its head, depicting a violent takeover of a lived space in the name of creating an image for visual consumption. Although the character of Jo seems to be American, Hepburn’s star text marks her as European, and the film’s imagery here also supports such a reading. Her clothing evokes the poverty of postwar Europe: she wears a shapeless brown dress in a rough tweed, a 1940s silhouette that does not fit her and has the look of a hand-me-down; in a later scene she also covers her head with a black kerchief tied beneath the chin (Figure 52). Together with her intense slenderness, she looks not unlike a starving European peasant, about to be transformed through the magic of American consumer capitalism. She also speaks like a caricatured European intellectual, objecting to the capitalist aesthetics of glamour as “an unrealistic approach to self-impressions as well as economics”—an objection that Dick and Maggie sneeringly dismiss. Although the magazine workers repeatedly ridicule her and violate her boundaries, Jo is immediately hooked into the aspirational structure of glamour, her resistance quickly melting away in the face of a fashionable hat of garish synthetic colors that has been left behind in the scuffle. She sings a song about discovering a longing for glamour inside herself that includes the line, “I know how Columbus felt finding another world.” Just like impoverished postwar Europe (in the US imagination), she becomes fixated on the promises of US

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Figure 52  Funny Face: Jo Stockton’s shapeless, ill-fitting brown dress in a rough tweed makes her resemble a starving European peasant to be transformed through the magic of American consumer capitalism.

consumer capitalism and forgets all about any silly intellectual (read: Marxist) objections to it. Later, when she is lured to the magazine’s office, the women immediately begin ripping off her clothes and touching her hair. Jo exclaims, “I find myself being pillaged and plundered!”—again marking the capitalist world of fashion as an invading force and Jo/Europe as the invaded. Chased through the hallways, she attempts to hide in a room that turns out to be Dick’s darkroom, just as he is developing an abstracted, black-andwhite glamour photograph of her face (Figure 53). In the film’s geopolitical allegory, Dick represents Hollywood, the creator of images in service of Maggie/capitalism. The photograph was actually taken at the bookstore, when she was pushed into serving as a prop in a fashion still—thus suggesting a parallel between the appropriation of her bookstore and that of her body, as Dick non-consensually converts both into images that serve his own purposes as a fashion photographer. Both invasions, moreover, involve destruction/ death for the object: the bookstore’s wreckage and the mask-like glamour photo of her face, which erases her organic body. Dick sings “Funny Face,” a love song to his own image of her, and just as in the bookstore, Jo immediately capitulates to the charms of glamour, her previous resistance magically disappearing. Jo’s conversion here—her sudden willingness to become an

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Figure 53  Funny Face: An abstracted, black-and-white image of Jo’s face erases her organic body.

object of the gaze—happens too instantly to “work” as a convincing narrative about a person, particularly if that person is a feminist. Yet as a United Statesian allegory for its own consumer-capitalist takeover of Europe and Hollywood’s conversion of the continent into a dream space for US longing, it makes sense that glamour’s sensuality would be positioned as so immediately persuasive as to overcome all possible objections. When they arrive in Paris, the city too—the real city, shot on location— is fixed as an image existing solely for the visual pleasure of the Americans, continuing the parallels between the woman’s body and the othered landscape in terms of US scopic domination. In “Bonjour Paree,” the three leads playfully appropriate the Parisian cityscape, dancing down the street and climbing atop statues as they exclaim, “That’s for me!”. This is a classic example of the Hollywood musical’s “colonial structure of feeling,” (Dyer 1995, 30), an expansive and playful way of inhabiting space that is specific to white people in a racist society, as the movement of racialized others is constricted in various literal and symbolic ways. Both the characters and the film itself convert lived Parisian spaces into tourist sights, glamorous death masks of the real place. In the other Paris musicals, the city is literally built as a dream space for United Statesians in the studio back lot, but in Funny Face the living city becomes just more grist for the white American man’s imaginative mill, the

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Figure 54  Funny Face: A fashion shot of Jo, taken by Dick.

cityscape scopically subjugated as the passive object of the United Statesian imperial gaze. The film self-reflexively highlights each of Dick’s fashion stills of Jo at various Paris landmarks as created images, paralleling the act of filmmaking itself. At first he “directs” each image, giving Jo detailed instructions on how to act for the camera by giving her a narrative in which to imagine herself: a melodramatic goodbye at a train station, Cinderella meeting her prince, being jilted by a lover at the opera. The non-diegetic music in each scene aligns with Dick’s direction: sad, heavy, dirge-like music for the train scene, a magical fluttering of strings for the Cinderella scene, and so on. Each photograph Dick takes is then manipulated before our eyes and displayed to us with a variety of different postproduction effects, driving the point home that both Jo’s and Paris’s primary existence is now as the object of an imperial capitalist gaze (Figures 54, 55, and 56). Yet Jo, and by extension Paris, comes to collaborate in the process of her own imagification, participating increasingly proactively and joyfully. As Jo gains confidence, she incrementally comes to internalize the process and feel more and more at home in glamour, producing herself in the desired capitalist image rather than waiting for Dick to do this. By the Winged Victory scene near the end of their photo shoot sessions, Jo herself is “directing” her own scene, telling Dick to “just take the picture.” In the final photo shoot, with her in a wedding

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Figure 55  Funny Face: The same fashion shot, as a negative—foregrounding its status as a created image.

Figure 56  Funny Face: The same fashion shot, cropped.

dress at the dreamy, idyllic Château de la Reine Blanche, in soft focus and with beautifully dappled lighting, she fully steps into the romance of the scene, inhabiting his narrative of her wholeheartedly as she confesses her love for him (Figure 57). Just like the “naturalness” of the new princess glamour—which is not actually more natural at all, but rather requires an even more complete and normative commitment of the self—the film’s location-shot Parisian scenery

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Figure 57  Funny Face: Jo steps fully into the narrative assigned to her by Dick, confessing her love for him while dressed as a glamorous bride, in soft focus and with beautifully dappled lighting.

takes the “real” Paris as raw material, spins it into an American-made image, and then insists that it is the city itself that is participating wholeheartedly in this transformation. This scene is then reprised at the end, the romance coming to full fruition. Dyer points out the incoherence in this final scene, arguing that “the representational elements, which bespeak manipulation of romance, contradict the non-representational, which bespeak transparency” (Dyer, 2002, 30). In a feminist/gendered reading of the film, this is true: the scene’s (and the film’s) lush colors, soaring music, and general visual and aural abundance all suggest a capitalist vision of utopia (Dyer 1986), while the plot suggests that Jo has been manipulated into traditional femininity in a highly questionable way. In a geopolitical reading, however, this incoherence disappears: an imperialcapitalist scopic subjugation of both the white woman and the colonized space is utopia, as far as Hollywood is concerned.

Conclusion Although they appear to be opposites, both dominant glamour discourses of the 1950s inscribe the US imperial imaginary onto Hollywood visual

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culture. Both encourage white American women to write national power on their bodies via disciplinary modes of femininity. The nature of this discipline diverges: the bombshell mode requires the curation of the outward appearance while the princess mode requires the curation of the whole self in service of the outward appearance. Similarly, the bombshell showcases the visible accumulation of excessive wealth while the latter is about attaining respectability and prestige, both for the woman and by extension for the nation. Yet both are haunted by US colonial violence and racist necropolitics, as the scopic functions of glamour carry out symbolic violence in the name of national imperial power. It’s a truism that glamour played a key role in Hollywood’s global dominance in the classical Hollywood era—so deeply rooted an aesthetics that it doesn’t seem like an aesthetics at all. This chapter has read against the grain of the supposed transparency of glamour, arguing that it is imaginatively linked to the project of US imperialism in several persistent ways. First, glamour creates a capitalist structure of desire, lending an aura of dreamy desirability to industrially produced American consumer goods through an eroticization of the synthetic. Later, when naturalness takes over as a dominant value within glamour, it is a synthetic simulation of naturalness that in fact recenters and remystifies the products of industry. Second, glamour speaks to a white female gaze, recruiting white women into the project of imperialism. Bombshell glamour accomplishes this through dual means. It projects an image in which the female spectator desires the glamorous items she sees on screen and is thus hooked into the structures of capitalist longing. It also positions white women’s bodies themselves as a “weapon” in the war against communism and totalitarianism, turning beauty labor, consumption, and subjugation to the male gaze into patriotic duties. Princess glamour, despite its supposed naturalness and liberatory energy, in fact functions to recruit white women just as well, using narrative/visual/emotional alignment with a sympathetic star like Audrey Hepburn to invite them into an aristocracy of whiteness that both celebrates the colonization of new spaces at home (in the suburbs) and projects an image of American global prestige. Third, glamour recreates the same distancing dualities of self versus other that we have seen throughout this book, in this case delineating the winners and losers in a capitalist system. It separates those who perform glamour from those whose labor produces it, signifying prestige and a symbolic power over life and death through an aesthetics of ultra-consumption. Princess glamour

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is more successful at hiding the tracks of glamour’s lineage in violence, and proposes the liberal democratization of upper-class white culture—but does not fundamentally alter its nature. Fourth, Hollywood glamour discourse has continuing implications for the imperial-capitalist organization of space both in and out of movies. As this chapter has shown, bombshell glamour’s technologized artificiality applies not only to women’s bodies but also to the synthetic construction of landscapes, as the same aesthetic principles and structures of desire have animated both. With the shift to princess glamour, the new aesthetics of naturalness tracked to the increasing use of location shooting, yet in ways that similarly reproduce an American viewpoint and a celebration of American global dominance. In late capitalism, the effects of this have only grown. Aida Hozic argues that Hollywood began to subsume the world into the United Statesian imaginary as Hollywood production moved from studio backlot to location shooting—a movement that began in Europe in the 1950s (2001, 86–102). Cities and localities, Hozic argues, now metamorphose to better suit Hollywood’s filming needs in order to attract the extra income to be had when a Hollywood production comes to that locality; eventually the world itself has turned into a virtual studio backlot, as reality has been molded to suit the needs of imperialist representation. Anna Minton shows how these kinds of newly built, artificial spaces are often securitized in ways that separate those who “belong” from those who don’t—a delineation that is typically organized around who is buying things versus who is not (2012). Glamour’s mode for separating the winners from the losers in global capitalism thus now increasingly applies spatially, as glamorous spaces of consumption are securitized to literally eject or arrest those who are insufficiently class privileged to merit admittance. Glamour’s necropolitics is thus both an aesthetics and a structuring principle in the development of the hyperreal and the built spaces of the neoliberal era. Finally, and more broadly, glamour inscribes a colonial relationship between whiteness and the physical world. Dyer argues that the supposed superiority of the white male mind endows it with a position of power over the material world, the natural ability to supervise and organize the bodies of racialized others as well as the physical landscape (1997). Glamour reproduces this dynamic in relation to the white female body. It functions to glorify the ingenuity of the white male mind for its ability to design and produce its own erotic ideal, shaping raw white female flesh into a synthetically produced sex object for visual consumption.

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The white woman is thus symbolically recruited simultaneously into patriarchy and imperialism, her normative subjectivity shaped around her subordination in both systems. She is paid off with the promise of consumer pleasures and the safety that comes with being on the winning end of the necropolitics of capitalism.

Conclusion

This book has demonstrated that we must read against the grain of the supposed transparency or obviousness in Hollywood’s utopian mode of depicting the world. Hollywood’s style of representing foreign space draws on a rich variety of Western aesthetic traditions, creatively adapting them for a specifically United Statesian imperial context. This style is not a single, fixed thing, but rather has evolved over time in meaningful ways, as the United Statesian imperial imaginary has developed and shifted. It does not simply reflect industrial or economic realities, but rather is productive in its own right, participating in and building discourses of American imperialist identity. Through a focus on the central figure of the “American abroad,” this book proposes major updates to gaze theory that are suited to the contemporary era of intersectional, anticolonial, and antiracist scholarship. One key finding is that the gaze is fundamentally and abidingly imperial—certainly in the period studied here, and likely throughout the history of US filmmaking. In postcolonial literary and art-historical scholarship, there has long been an understanding that the formations of subjectivity, point of view, and the individual in the West are indelibly linked to colonial encounters, and that gendered subjectivities are inextricably linked to this imperial context. Film studies, on the other hand, has consistently privileged gender as the most fundamental issue within the gaze. This book brings the cinematic concept of the gaze more into line with understandings of subjectivity and point of view from other disciplines. In so doing, this project questions the use of psychoanalysis as the most fruitful basis for theorizing the gaze. Psychoanalytic theory has consistently led scholars to read colonial imagery in Hollywood texts merely figuratively, as though such imagery is really about gender and sexuality. This book demonstrates how we might instead examine such colonial imagery in its own right. Indeed, theories of the gendered gaze have often failed to fully grapple with how concepts of gendered difference are culturally and nationally specific.

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Neither classical film form, with its patriarchal conventions, nor patriarchy itself are culture-neutral; they developed within particular geopolitical contexts. As this book has shown, gender itself is a fundamentally colonial formation in US culture. The male owner of the gaze is not only gendered, but is also raced as white and identified as American in quite specific ways. This white American man is positioned as the right and natural leader of democracy and “the free world,” a figure who is inherently benevolent even in violence. He is also situated as not just the viewer, but the creator of the ideal, eroticized, white female body through his capitalist-imperialist ingenuity. Meanwhile, non-white, ambiguously white, and/or non-American men may function as objects for the eroticizing gaze of a white female spectator. As for the white American woman, she also owns an imperial gaze in classical Hollywood cinema. Her gaze is styled as feminine—based as it is on sentimentality, nostalgia, and outsider status—and is therefore marginalized along gendered lines. But it is still endowed with significant power in relation to the colonial other. In addition, the eroticization and objectification of white women is woven through with geopolitical and nationalist undercurrents. White women’s clothing styles have imperialist significance, denoting belonging to an elite group within a system of neocolonial capitalism. Their modes of displaying whiteness on the body and even the shape of the body itself can contribute to this project. Meanwhile, feminist liberatory energy may be roped into the US imperial project in postwar Hollywood cinema: by engaging the white female spectator narratively and emotionally, these films can invite white women to participate in white American hegemonies and normative modes of encounter with the other. The book has also shown how Hollywood’s imperial gaze evolves over time; the gaze is not nearly as eternal or inflexible as some theorists have assumed. This book has traced the US imperial gaze’s evolution in parallel with the development of the United States’ self-perceptions of its global status over the period from the late 1940s to early 1960s. In the early part of this period, films position the white American man as encountering a dark, sublime chaos that he alone is capable of reordering. Around the end of the Marshall Plan and the rise of US-style consumer capitalism in Europe, the ethnographic emerged as a mode for positioning white Americans as both superior and benevolent. As American global dominance became more established, the picturesque positioned the United States as a secure neocolonial presence in Italy in ways that speak to a white, nascently feminist spectator. And finally, the transformation from

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bombshell to princess glamour invites white Americans into a global aristocracy with a natural right to rule. Yet this period of increasingly confident, secure US global dominance was in fact rather short-lived. By the mid-1960s, the United States would enter a new and turbulent period in its domestic and global politics that would, by the early 1970s, give rise to what would come to be variously called late capitalism, postmodernity, globalization, or neoliberalism. In this period, US consumercapitalist imperialism began to shift into a new mode of fully deterritorialized, globalized capitalism, facilitated by developments in communications technology, which was not answerable to any state. At the same time, protest movements were calling into question the racism, sexism, and imperialism that underpinned United Statesian life. An early casualty in this changing landscape was classical Hollywood cinema itself, as the industry essentially collapsed by 1965. It took with it an older, modernist, and fundamentally conservative mode of storytelling whose sexist and racist conventions made it increasingly unable to resonate with this rapidly changing US public. As discussed in the introduction, the tourist is a critical transitional figure who “acts as a witness to the breakup of modernity … as we move from national to transnational eras,” with its shifting politics and modes of perception and narration (Kaplan 1996, 62). How did the identificatory figure of the American abroad, with its distinctive modes of subjectivity, shape what came after? For one thing, tourism in the “American abroad” films functions as a prime site for the growth of a postmodern cultural awareness about the biases built into mediated images and the power they can exert on the world. These films are not strictly classical texts, but rather they draw attention to and celebrate the constructedness of representation, foregrounding the cinema apparatus itself and exploding the traditional ontological separation between reality and the image. For example, An American in Paris utilizes a studio-built set that is intended to look like an idealized, American artist’s view of Paris rather than the real city—drawing attention to its own synthetic nature and to the subjectivity built into such constructions. The Third Man self-reflexively explores imperialist narratives, their authorship, and the ways that disparate modes of colonial storytelling motivate different characters in the film. This Is Cinerama continually draws attention to its own medium through its use of narration, while The Quiet Man draws a winking attention to its own campy representation of Ireland. The main character of Summertime carries a film camera around Venice, utilized to focus the spectator’s viewpoint directly

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through hers. In Funny Face, images of Audrey Hepburn in Paris are created and manipulated before our eyes. Films about tourism frequently foreground acts of mediation in relation to difference. They thus serve as a fertile site for the opening of spaces in between “reality,” individual perception, and the image—cracks that would become fissures in the turbulent period of the 1960s and the 1970s. These films also expose the ways that created images can shape reality, as some later films in the “American abroad” cycle become increasingly self-reflexive about the problems posed by American tourism in Europe. It Started in Naples (Melville Shavelson, Paramount, 1960), for example, shows a grouchy Clark Gable complaining about how Capri has been destroyed by American tourists. Others are self-reflexive about Hollywood filmmaking in Europe and the problems of representation it brings out: Paris When It Sizzles (Richard Quine, Paramount, 1964), for example, depicts Audrey Hepburn and William Holden as they write a screenplay for a Hollywood runaway production in Europe, with their fantastical ideas playing out for us on screen. As United Statesians watched movies about European locations, then increasingly traveled to those same places and reported back home about their experiences, awareness about both the inaccuracies and potential realworld effects of those movies could flower. Again, these films seem to contain grains of what would evolve into a postmodern sensibility that challenges positivist conventions concerning the relationship between the world and its mediated image. Regardless of these broadening perspectives, such films do not use these kinds of reflexive moves to build a radical politics of any kind. Indeed the opposite is true: they deploy reflexivity in ways that buttress imperialist hegemonies (as with the technological reflexivity of Cinerama and Three Coins in the Fountain); or else they work hard to tamp down the epistemological and ontological dust they’ve kicked up via a recuperative “happy ending.” Yet these films contain the seeds of their own demise—what Priya Jaikumar calls a collapse of the imperial narratives that had served as a foundation for so much of modernism (2006). The “American abroad” films, in other words, unwittingly contribute to the rise of a postmodern awareness of multiple subjectivities and the power of media to shape the world rather than simply reflect it. Indeed, travel itself would become a key trope in postmodernism, in particular the figure of the nomad, a borderless wanderer constantly on the move through new spaces, cultures, and identities. The “American abroad”

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films not only precipitate a move toward the postmodern, but also supply one of its most potent metaphors, depicting travelers who are enabled to look upon their own culture with a sense of distance and unfix their identities and subject positions. The postmodernist concept of what travel can do for the self does not arise from nowhere: it is based in a preexisting cultural imaginary of travel as liberatory, empowering, transformational, and fundamentally benevolent toward the other (ideas that are based on imperialist traditions of representation). The tourist not only witnesses the breakup of modernity, but prefigures the postmodern globalized citizen as a connoisseur of difference and distance. Yet the “American abroad” films also have other, more sinister ramifications for the world we now live in. For one thing, the four aesthetics examined in this book constitute some of the key building blocks in the development of simulacra and the hyperreal environments that have come to dominate many Western cultures. The 1950s in general witnessed the birth of the hyperreal in the United States—defined as the epistemic collapse that occurs when a populace becomes unable to tell the difference between referent and simulacrum. By all accounts, the opening of Disneyland in 1955, with its carnivalesque celebration of the artificial, was a crucial event in this regard. But Disneyland is chock-full of imagery of travel and the faraway, from the iconic Cinderella Castle (picturesque) to “Pirates of the Caribbean” (sublime) to “It’s a Small World” (ethnographic). This is true of the hyperreal in general: it occurred early and often in travel/ vacation contexts, and it extensively mobilizes travel imagery in its celebrations of the artificial. Many of the “American abroad” films indeed engage in a similar celebration: An American in Paris, Brigadoon (Vincente Minnelli, MGM, 1954), and Around the World in 80 Days (Michael Anderson, United Artists, 1956), for example, each depict real-world places in such patently fantastical ways that they seem to collapse the distinction between the real and the Hollywood dreamworld, proclaiming an unlimited power to represent the other. The hyperreal, in other words, is itself imperialist, triumphantly announcing the victory of dreamworld representation over reality itself. Following its collapse, Hollywood eventually reemerged at full force as the dominant popular art form that has, more than any other, shaped a global neoliberal imaginary. How did the geopolitical aesthetics of the postwar “American Century” shape the representational practices of later generations of Hollywood cinema? Although further study is needed, at first glance the four aesthetic traditions examined in this book all make their way

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into contemporary digital cinema in visually prominent ways. For instance, consider highly popular contemporary cycles of science fiction and fantasy films that depict faraway worlds. Star Wars may have pioneered what has subsequently become a prominent contemporary use of the sublime: the overwhelming, existential threat of a dark other (here literally called the Dark Side) that stands opposed to the “good” white male protagonist. Richard Dyer identifies this narrative structure, of a white male self against an evil other, as the archetypal colonial narrative (1997), but he does not note how often the dark threat is visually and conceptually presented as sublime. The Death Star, for instance, is an incomprehensibly enormous black sphere with the awesome power to obliterate entire planets—evoking the same nexus of Nazi/Cold War/ nuclear threat that we saw in the ruin films. We see the sublime again and again in contemporary depictions of fantasy “bad guys,” from the eponymous Alien to Sauron, Megatron, Voldemort, and Thanos. (Note how this appears to be a return to the Romantic sublime of Kant and Burke—not the modern or postmodern sublime theorized by Lyotard.) The ethnographic similarly comes up again and again in depictions of supposedly “primitive” or Orientalized peoples and places in these same kinds of digitally created fantasy worlds, such as the Na’vi in Avatar or the planet of Tatooine in the Star Wars franchise. The picturesque is prominent in the idyllic, peaceful landscapes in these kinds of films: the Shire in the Lord of the Rings franchise, the green spaces around Hogwarts in Harry Potter films, the worlds of Maleficent and Avatar. And glamour is still a consistent feature of female characters’ costuming throughout these movies—often still divided into bombshell versus princess styles, depending on whether the character is evil or good. For instances of the former, look at Cruella, Maleficent, Thor’s sister Hela in the Marvel Universe, Ursula in The Little Mermaid, or Effie in The Hunger Games. For the latter, there are the elves in Lord of the Rings, Princess Leia and Queen Amidala in Star Wars, and Wonder Woman whenever she is not in her combat armor. Clearly the impact of each of these aesthetic traditions has continued, perhaps even expanded, in Hollywood representations of the other. Yet they have gone little remarked, perhaps because they are so common as to disappear from view—the proverbial water we swim in in contemporary Hollywood film aesthetics. The “American abroad” films open a uniquely rich window onto the American Century, which in many ways was the formative period for the neoliberal era— not just geopolitically and economically but also imaginatively. Many were

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highly popular and celebrated texts in their time, and they were central to the development of an increasingly global United Statesian outlook on the world— one whose effects are still visible in the Hollywood cinema of today. I can only hope that this book will bring about an increased awareness of how deeply imperialist this worldview is, and how prominently it is woven into Hollywood film aesthetics both classical and contemporary.

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194

Index 1950s see nineteen fifties 20th Century-Fox 22, 27, 63, 95, 97, 117, 132, 135, 152 A Foreign Affair 27–8, 30 African Americans 10, 31, 82, 145, 166 aerial views 27, 72, 76, 109 America see United States of America American Century, the 16, 54, 181–2 American Film Institute 56 An American in Paris 1–3, 5–6, 15, 160, 179, 181 anachronism 69, 85–90, 130 Anything Goes 136 April in Paris 135 Around the World in 80 Days 181 Astaire, Fred 133, 136–7, 167–9, 171, 174 Auerbach, Jonathan 43–4 Austria 8, 27, 38, 49–50, 55, 79, 80, 95, 165 authenticity 15, 17, 65, 68–9, 78, 84, 87–8, 92, 94–5, 130–1 automobile 11, 42, 110–11, 114, 151 Avatar 182 Back Street 106 Balenciaga 160 Battersby, Christine 26, 32–3, 102–3 beauty culture 125, 133, 135–6, 151, 159, 175 Belton, John 71, 73 Benjamin, Walter 70, 144 Berlin Express 21, 27–30, 38–48 bicycle 110, 114–15 Big Lift, The 27–8 Billy Wilder 27, 164 Blackness see African Americans Blonde Venus 141 blondness 138, 152–3, 156 bombshell 133, 138, 148–56, 158, 160–6, 173–4, 175, 179, 182 Boy on a Dolphin 63–4

Brazzi, Rossano 94, 97, 110, 114–17, 123, 126–7 Breasts 137, 148, 151 Brigadoon 95, 181 Britain see United Kingdom Bruno, Giuliana 103, 112–13, 120 Burke, Edmund 31–2, 59, 101, 182 Byars, Jackie 106–7, 108 capitalism 10–12, 14, 23–4, 57, 63–4, 70, 87, 91–5, 129, 133–5, 138–9, 144–5, 150–2, 155–7, 159, 162, 168–9, 171–2, 174, 176, 179 colonial 16, 22, 53, 95, 130, 156, 166, 171–2, 175, 178 consumer 10–11, 22, 70, 99, 104, 129, 134, 138, 146–9, 152–3, 168–70, 178 late 16, 18, 23, 132, 175, 179 liberal 12, 27, 30, 48, 63 car see automobile Charisse, Cyd 133, 136–7 Churchill, Winston 34, 55 CinemaScope 63, 72, 108–9, 112, 117, 152–3 Cinerama 72–8, 80 Clift, Montgomery 25, 36 Coburn, Charles 155–6, 160 Cohan, Steven 46, 91 Cold War 25, 28, 33, 35, 39, 42–4, 46, 48–9, 54–5, 60–4, 77, 91, 133, 146, 152, 182 colonial structure of feeling 1, 170 colonialism 16, 19–22, 26, 28, 31–3, 39, 45, 48–50, 53, 55, 59, 61–2, 66, 75, 99, 102–3, 108, 121, 128, 134, 145–6, 158, 167, 176–7 aesthetics/visual culture 7–8, 13, 20, 22, 36, 39, 49, 61, 65–6, 69–71, 75–6, 80, 99, 102–4, 122, 130–1, 140–1, 181 and cinema 6, 13, 22–4, 121 decolonization/postcolonialism 7, 12, 13, 55, 60, 71, 133, 159

196 Index European 7, 13, 16, 26, 28–9, 31, 40, 55, 58–9, 64, 77, 79, 82, 107, 131, 134, 139–40, 155–6, 159 gaze see gaze, colonial in film noir 44–8 imaginary 104, 107, 113, 140, 111, 120 narratives 13, 16, 49, 54, 56, 58–61, 110, 121, 179, 182 settler 7 United States see imperialism, US Columbia (film studio) 98, 132 Come September 97, 100 communism 12, 42, 48, 55, 61, 63, 91, 133, 146, 152, 175 Conrad, Joseph 56–7 consumerism 11, 92, 125, 128–9, 135, 139, 143, 150, 154, 174, 176 see also consumer capitalism Cooper, Merian C. 66, 73, 81 costumes see fashion Cotten, Joseph 48, 55–9, 60 Crosby, Bing 82 Cruella 182 Daves, Delmer 97 de Grazia, Victoria 7, 11 de Havilland, Olivia 93–4 Death Mills 27 democracy 12, 23, 30, 33, 44–5, 47–8, 63–4, 134, 165, 175 Deslys, Gabby 147 Deutsch, Ernst 56 diamonds 139, 150, 155–7 Dietrich, Marlene 141 Dimendberg, Edward 41–2 Dior, Christian 147, 160 Disney 109, 164 Disneyland 17, 181 Doane, Mary Ann 18, 44, 104, 106, 108, 125, 140 Donahue, Troy 97–8 Donen, Stanley 22, 135 Dyer, Richard 1, 23, 53–4, 153–4, 156, 168, 170, 173, 175, 182 Eat Pray Love 132 Edinburgh Castle 79 Egypt 29, 64, 74

Eisenhower, Dwight D. 77 Elsaesser, Thomas 105 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 9 England 8–9, 31, 58, 63, 98–9, 101–3, 107, 155–6, 165–6 Enlightenment 22, 26, 31, 66, 69, 98, 103, 120 ethnographic 5, 7, 20–3, 65–6, 68–74, 76–7, 79–87, 89, 90, 93–5, 102, 178, 181–2 Europe 7, 11–13, 16, 19–21, 60 aristocracy 63–4, 110, 138–9, 155–6, 164–6, 175 colonialism see colonialism, European history 5, 11–13, 31–55, 65, 92, 101, 147–8 as idea in US culture 2, 8–11, 17, 21, 100, 146, 148 postwar US occupation see Marshall Plan representations in Hollywood cinema 5–8, 14–15, 23, 35, 61, 64, 66, 77–81, 99, 131, 156–8, 168–9, 180 exotic 3, 9, 65, 67, 73, 78, 98, 134, 139, 142–4, 153 fashion 22, 76, 77, 80, 85, 89–90, 133, 136, 141–4, 146–8, 151, 154, 159, 160, 162, 166–9, 171 femininity 113, 121, 126, 129–30, 137, 140, 143, 145, 150–3, 161–6, 167, 172, 174 imaginative links to colonialism 19, 46, 50, 108, 121, 140–4, 145, 154–5 and landscape 98, 103, 109, 112–13 and gaze see gaze, female feminism 92, 97, 99–100, 113, 116, 121, 128–9, 137–8, 163, 167, 170, 178 scholarship 18–19, 99–100, 131, 172 fetish 140–1, 144–5 film noir 8, 23, 28–9, 38–9, 41–5, 47–8, 60, 62 First World War 138, 141 Fitzgerald, Barry 90 Flaherty, Robert 73, 82, 85, 87 Florence 93–4, 97 Ford, John 66, 82–3 Forster, E. M. 100, 110 France 1–2, 6–9, 11, 43, 134, 136, 139, 146–8, 152, 158–9, 165

Index Frankfurt 30, 38–42, 45, 47 French Kiss 132 French Line, The 135, 153 Freud, Sigmund 19–20, 39, 44–7, 131– 2, 145 use of colonial imagery 19, 44, 48, 140–1 Friedberg, Anne 70, 104 Funny Face 22, 135–6, 163, 167–73, 180 fur 134, 136, 139–41, 143, 158 Gable, Clark 180 Galt, Rosalind 50, 101 gaze, the ethnographic 66, 70–1, 77, 80, 84, 86–7 female 22, 103, 108, 117, 128, 142, 174 imperial/colonial 19–21, 24, 61, 70, 103, 121–2, 171, 178 male 18–19, 61–2, 70–1, 106, 119, 122, 124–5, 137–8, 150, 155, 162, 174 ruins 29–30 theory 6, 18–20, 47–8, 62, 70–1 tourist 17, 119, 159, 167 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes 22, 135, 148– 50, 154–62 Germany 8, 21, 25, 27, 29–30, 34, 38, 38– 41, 43, 45, 48, 55–6, 62, 80, 97 Ghose, Indira 103, 120 Gibbons, Luke 82–3, 85 Gidget Goes to Rome 98, 100 Gilpin, William 101, 120 glamour 5, 7, 20, 22–3, 85, 133–8, 139–46, 147–52, 154–5, 158–76, 179, 182 globalization 5, 7, 10, 12–16, 22–3, 62, 92–3, 134, 138, 155, 159, 161, 175, 178–9, 181 Grand Tour 9, 100 Great Train Robbery, The 75 Greece 12, 55, 63–5 Green, Guy 93, 98 Greene, Graham 55–6 Griffiths, Alison 13, 67, 74, 76 Guerlain 160 Gundle, Stephen 141, 144, 147, 149–51, 165 Hamilton, George 94 Hansen, Miriam 78, 128 Harlow, Jean 138, 140 Harry Potter 182

197

Hawks, Howard 22, 135 Hepburn, Audrey 137–8, 162–9, 171–2, 174, 180 Hepburn, Katharine, as Jane Hudson 117– 19, 122–4, 126–30 Hollywood 3, 5–9, 13–14, 19–25, 27–8, 30, 38, 48–9, 54–7, 60–2, 64–5, 71–2, 87–9, 94–5, 97, 99–100, 104–5, 117, 119, 128, 130–3, 137–8, 142–3, 148–9, 152–4, 159–62, 164–5, 169–70, 172–5, 177–80, 182–3 as “dream factory” 2–3, 23–4, 135, 159, 160–1, 181 as imperial cinema 4–5, 7, 14–15, 19, 24, 62, 150, 162, 173, 175, 177, 183 industry 14–15, 71–2, 83, 135, 141 Holmes, Burton 68 homosexuality 56–7 How to Marry a Millionaire 117, 152 Howard, Trevor 51, 55, 58 Hunger Games, The 182 hyperreality 117–18, 94, 175, 181 imperialism, Nazi 30, 48, 80 imperialism, US 3–5, 7, 11–13, 16, 20, 22–3, 28, 35, 44, 55, 62, 65–6, 71, 77, 87, 93–5, 99–100, 108, 133, 145, 150, 155, 174–5, 178–9 imaginary 5, 6–7, 9, 11, 21–2, 27–8, 35, 48–9, 53–4, 61, 65–6, 88, 90, 93, 100, 104–5, 108, 110, 113–16, 120, 132–5, 143, 146–7, 153, 162, 167–8, 173, 175, 177–8, 181 Interlude 97 Ireland 8, 82–6, 88–93, 179 Irish War of Independence 83, 90 Iron Curtain 21, 34–5, 48, 54–5, 59, 61 Italy 8, 21–2, 78, 80, 82, 93–4, 97–9, 99– 101, 107–17, 120, 127–9, 131, 166, 178 Jaikumar, Priya 13, 29, 60, 180 James, Henry 100 Jameson, Fredric 16, 17, 56–7 Jandl, Ivan 25 Jourdan, Louis 109, 116 Kant, Immanuel 20, 26, 32, 47, 59, 61, 182 Kaplan, Amy 4

198 Index Kaplan, Caren 8, 17, 179 Kaplan, E. Ann 19, 44–5, 48 Kelly, Gene 1, 2, 4, 6, 82 Kelly, Grace 137–8, 164–5 Kennedy, Jacqueline 137, 165 Kennedy, John F. 165 King and I, The 95 Kinsey Report 107 Kirby, Lynne 35, 76, 111 Korea 12 Ladd, Alan 63 landscape 21–2, 27, 33, 35–6, 38, 66, 72, 74, 76, 84–9, 98, 101–3, 105, 108–9, 112, 117, 120–2, 128, 130–2, 153, 167, 170, 175–6, 179, 182 Latin America 12, 80, 95 Latin lover 78, 94, 97, 127–8, 142 Lawrence of Arabia 73 Lean, David 22, 97 Lee, Bernard 57 Lelong 160 Les Girls 136 Letter from an Unknown Woman 106 liberalism 12, 27, 30, 45, 48, 55, 63–4, 83, 94–5, 175 Light in the Piazza 93–4 Little Mermaid, The 182 Lord of the Rings 182 Loren, Sophia 63, 65 Lovely to Look At 135, 143, 148 Lundestad, Geir 12 Lyotard, Jean-François 49, 59, 182 MacCannell, Dean 17, 69, 87, 104 MacNamara, Maggie 109–10, 113– 14, 116–17 Maleficent 182 Mamoulian, Rouben 133 Man of Aran 82 Marshall Plan 11–12, 42, 66, 83, 146–8, 158, 178 Marvel 182 Marx, Karl 144–5, 169 masculinity 10, 33, 46–8, 50, 91–3, 141, 146 McClintock, Anne 13, 68–70, 152 McGuire, Dorothy 109 McLaglen, Victor 91

McMahon, Aline 25, 35 Meeuf, Russell 14, 91, 93 melodrama 25, 36, 84, 100, 105–7, 171 MGM 1, 25, 93, 95, 98, 133, 136, 181 Mimieux, Yvette 93–4 Minnelli, Vincente 95, 181 modernism 16, 28–9, 40–2, 48–50, 55–6, 58–62, 89, 143, 163, 179–81 modernity 11, 16–18, 21, 30, 41, 50, 69–70, 79–81, 84–5, 87, 92, 94, 95, 100, 103– 4, 110–11, 128, 152, 179 Modleski, Tania 105, 129 Monroe, Marilyn 137, 148–56, 158, 162–3 Mulvey, Laura 18, 62, 70, 119, 145, 152 musical (film genre) 1, 8, 22–3, 88, 95, 133, 135, 143, 146, 148, 155, 159–61, 167, 170 Musser, Charles 67 Naked City, The 42 Nazis/Nazism 8, 23, 27–30, 34, 36, 38, 42, 45, 48, 63, 134, 147, 182 necropolitics 134, 145, 151, 174, 175 Negulesco, Jean 22, 63, 97, 117, 152 neoliberalism 16, 18, 62, 175, 179, 181–2 nineteen fifties 9, 14, 21–3, 42, 46, 64, 71–2, 89–91, 93, 99, 106–7, 109–10, 126, 131, 135–8, 146–8, 150–2, 154, 161–6, 173, 175, 181 Novotná, Jarmila 25 nostalgia 17, 29, 41, 69, 82, 178 imperialist 69–70, 92, 94, 102, 129–31 Now, Voyager 106 O’Hara, Maureen 82, 85, 87, 89, 92 Oberon, Merle 45 Orientalism 6–7, 29, 49, 64, 75, 100, 107, 140–4, 146, 182 Oscars, the 1, 15, 137 other, the 9, 13, 26–8, 33, 35, 38, 43–5, 52, 59–62, 66, 69, 77, 78, 84, 93–4, 123, 128, 131, 140, 142, 170, 178, 181–2 Paige, Janis 136 Paramount 22, 27, 135–6, 164, 166, 180 Paris 1–4, 6, 22, 38–40, 42, 106, 133, 135–6, 143, 146–8, 159–61, 165, 167, 170–3, 179–80

Index Park, McDonald 118 patriarchy 19, 21, 91, 99–101 Pease, Donald 4 Peters, Jean 110, 113–16 Peterson, Jennifer 13, 68, 76, 98, 104 picturesque 5, 7, 19–23, 36, 65, 84, 86, 97–105, 107–8, 110, 112–17, 120–3, 128–32, 178, 181–2 Pleshette, Suzanne 97, 98 point of view 119, 77, 85, 117–24, 132, 148, 177 Ponzanesi, Sandra 13 postcolonial studies 4, 6, 13, 19–20, 99, 103, 177 postmodern 16–18, 23, 41, 59, 179–81, 182 Pratt, Mary Louise 13, 70, 120 Price, Uvedale 102 princess 138, 1636, 172, 174, 179, 182 psychoanalysis 13, 19–20, 28, 39, 45, 47, 48, 131, 177 see also Freud, Sigmund Quiet Man, The 66, 81–93 race/racism 6, 9–10, 19–22, 28–9, 31–2, 39, 44, 48, 53, 68, 71, 77–8, 80–2, 98, 99, 102–4, 107, 110, 113–14, 116, 120–1, 128, 141–3, 145, 153, 159, 165–7, 170, 178 railroads 33, 41, 75–6, 84, 111, 118 Reagan, Ronald 35 reality, discourses of 5, 15, 60, 69, 78, 80, 84 Rear Window 122 reason/rationality 26, 28, 31–3, 36, 38, 44, 54 Redmond, Sean 52 Reed, Carol 21, 27, 55–6, 58 reflexivity 28, 65, 70–1, 171, 179–80 technological 66, 70, 72, 86 rivers 36, 37 RKO 21, 27, 38, 45, 73, 136, 143 Robinson Crusoe 15, 121 Roman Holiday 97, 100, 108, 166–7 Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, The 97 Romanticism 22, 29, 59, 60, 100, 182 Rome 29–30, 97–8, 100, 108–11, 113–15, 117, 167 Rome Adventure 97

199

Rony, Fatimah Tobing 13, 67, 69 Rosaldo, Renato 69, 92, 102 Rose, Jane 118 rubble films 27 ruins 25–31, 34–6, 38, 40, 42, 49–50, 59, 62, 101, 168 runaway production 5, 14–15, 83, 105, 113, 162, 165, 180 Ruskin, John 102 Russell, Jane 148–9, 153, 155, 158–9 Russia 21, 28, 34, 38, 48, 53–5, 62, 133, 136 see also Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Ryan, Robert 38–40, 42–3, 45, 47 Said, Edward 6–8, 13, 61, 121 Schiaparelli 160 Schönbrunn Palace 79–80 Scotland 8, 79–80, 95, 141 Search, The 25–7, 35–8 Seberg, Jean 137 Second World War 5, 10–11, 27–8, 34, 62, 66, 91, 106, 109, 147 Selznick, David O. 21, 27, 55–6 Shandley, Robert R. 14–15, 27, 73, 165 Sheik, The 142 Silk Stockings 133–7 Son of the Sheik 75, 142, 144 Spain 8, 74, 80–1 spectator 8, 18, 21, 33, 35–6, 39, 41, 68, 70, 73, 103–4, 109, 112–13, 117, 119, 125, 131, 137, 148, 150–1, 159, 166–7, 174, 178–9 Sound of Music, The 18, 95 Star Wars 182 Stella Dallas 106 Stewart, James 122 strolling see walking subjectivity 16–21, 27, 29, 31–4, 38, 45–7, 56, 59, 70, 93, 99–100, 106, 108, 116, 118–22, 131–2, 164, 167, 176–7, 179–81 sublime 5, 7, 19, 20–3, 26–9, 31–9, 41–2, 44–5, 47–9, 51–2, 54, 59–62, 102–3, 120, 178, 181–2 suburbs 42, 71, 91, 107, 166, 175 Suez crisis 64

200 Index Suleri, Sara 13, 103 Summertime 22, 97, 101, 108, 117–29, 179 synthetic 140, 150–4, 156, 160–1, 163, 165, 168, 174, 176, 179 Technicolor 63–4, 76, 85, 87, 95, 109 Television 11, 71 Third Man, The 21, 27, 29, 48–62, 179 This Is Cinerama 66, 71–81, 88, 93, 108– 9, 179–80 Thomas, Lowell 73–5, 77–81 Three Coins in the Fountain 22, 97, 108– 17, 180 To Each His Own 106 tourism/tourists 8, 16–18, 21, 39–40, 65, 82–3, 87, 92–4, 97–9, 104, 106, 108, 111, 114, 118, 122, 128–30, 132, 170, 179 American 10, 14–18, 21, 94, 99, 118, 126, 128, 159, 180–1 gaze see gaze, tourist sociology of 6, 16–18, 69, 87, 119 trains see railways travel see tourism travel lecturer 67–8, 71, 77 travelogue 66–8, 72–3, 76–7, 81, 98, 104, 111, 113 Truman Doctrine 12, 34, 63 Truman, Harry S. 12, 34–5, 63 Turkey 12, 35, 50, 55, 143 Turner, Frederick Jackson 9, 33 UK see United Kingdom UN see United Nations uncanny 28–9, 44–6, 49–52, 60 Under the Tuscan Sun 132 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics 12, 34, 38, 61–2, 64, 133 United Artists 22, 75, 97, 181 United Kingdom 6–7, 11, 13, 29, 38, 48, 55–6, 58–61, 63–4, 79, 99, 102, 110, 134, 139, 152, 155, 158, 164, 166 United Nations (UN) 12, 25, 36, 83 Universal 42, 97 Urry, John 119 USA see United States of America USSR see Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

utopia 2–3, 5, 7, 23–4, 29, 31, 36, 39, 65, 92–3, 95, 129, 133, 173, 177 Valentino, Rudolph 75, 78, 128, 142 Valli, Alida 49–50, 59 Vasey, Ruth 2, 4, 14 Venice 77–8, 101, 108–9, 117–18, 123–4, 128–9, 179 Vienna 48–50, 57–9, 79, 106 Vienna Boys’ Choir 79 Vietnam 12 walking 39, 102–3, 109–14, 123, 162 Waller, Fred 73 Waller, Marguerite 13 Warner Bros. 97, 136, 167 Wayne, John 82, 84–6, 89, 90–3 Webb, Clifton 63, 109 Welles, Orson 48–58 West, the 3, 6–7, 9, 13, 19–20, 22, 26–7, 29–32, 34–5, 45, 48, 54, 57, 59, 62, 66–77, 80–1, 85, 99, 102–4, 121, 131– 5, 139–40, 143, 146, 177, 181 western (film genre) 39, 54–5, 57–8, 60, 62, 91, 93, 105 whiteness 1–2, 9–10, 20–1, 23–4, 31, 33–4, 45–8, 52–4, 66, 77, 78–80, 82, 102, 116, 139, 141, 145–6, 152–4, 165–6, 170, 178–9 men 20–1, 26–8, 30–6, 38, 42, 44–9, 51, 54, 59, 61–2, 67, 76–7, 81, 110, 121, 140, 150, 175, 178, 182 women 22, 97, 99–101, 103, 107, 109, 110, 113–14, 116, 119–23, 128, 130–1, 134, 140, 142–3, 151, 165–7, 172, 174–6, 178 widescreen 65, 66, 71–3, 76–7, 97, 108–9, 117, 152–3 woman’s film (genre) 8, 21, 100–1, 105–8, 117, 122, 125–7, 131 World War I see First World War World War II see Second World War Ziegfeld, Florenz 147 Zinneman, Fred 25

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