Irving Howe 1948
Source: Politics, Spring 1948. Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.
When we glance at the pseudo-cultural amusements that occupy the American people’s leisure time, we soon wonder: what happens to the anonymous audience while it consumes the products of mass culture? [1] It is a question that can hardly be answered systematically or definitively for there is no way of knowing precisely what the subterranean reactions of an audience are - and it will certainly not do merely to ask it. We can only speculate, and the answer to our question, if one is to be had at all, can be found only within ourselves.
Here we meet our first difficulty: the only people who can analyse the effects of mass culture on an audience are those who reject its uncritical acceptance of mass culture. ‘Contaminated’ by art standards, the intellectual must necessarily hesitate when he tries to decide which of his reactions to mass culture are similar to those of the audience and which are the product of his private cultivation. He may overcome this difficulty by frankly admitting to himself that, like it or not, he is part of the mass audience and is influenced by mass culture. If he is to speculate fruitfully, he must reach that precarious condition where he can identify himself with the audience’s reactions while yet retaining his critical distance.
To some extent the intellectual can dispense with mass culture, though far less than he knows or is willing to admit. So long as we live in a class society, mass culture will remain indispensable even to those who have learned to scorn it; we cannot escape what is so much a part of the atmosphere in which we live. Nor would such an attempted escape be particularly desirable: the price of public experience may be a kind of contamination, but in view of the alternative it is not too high a price to pay.
Mass culture is an urban product. Confined to the close spaces of a city, members of an industrial society must always face the disturbing problem of what to do with their leisure time, how to organise it in relation to their work day.
One thing seems certain: except during brief revolutionary intervals, the quality of leisure-time activity cannot vary too sharply from that of the work day. If it did, the office or factory worker would be exposed to those terrible dualities of feeling that make it so difficult for the intellectual to adjust his job to himself. But the worker wants no part of such difficulties, he has enough already. Following the dictum of industrial society that anonymity is a key to safety, he seeks the least troublesome solution: mass culture.
Whatever its manifest content, mass culture must therefore not subvert the basic patterns of industrial life. Leisure time must be so organised as to bear a factitious relationship to working time: apparently different, actually the same. It must provide relief from work monotony without making the return to work too unbearable; it must provide amusement without insight and pleasure without disturbance - as distinct from art which gives pleasure through disturbance.
Mass culture is thus oriented towards a central aspect of industrial society: the depersonalisation of the individual. On the one hand, it diverts the worker from his disturbing reduction to semi-robot status by arranging ‘relaxing’ amusements for him. The need for such amusements explains the ceaseless and hectic quest for novelty in the mass culture industries (for example, the ‘twist’ in popular songs, the melodic phrase the audience remembers.) On the other hand, mass culture reinforces those emotional attitudes that seem inseparable from existence in modern society - passivity and boredom. Precisely the frenetic chase after novelty, after something new that might rise above routine experience becomes the means of moulding leisure time activity according to work-time patterns. What is supposed to deflect us from the reduction of our personalities actually reinforces it.
In a fascinating study, ‘On Popular Music’, Theodor Adorno makes some remarks on the standardisation of popular music that seem a specific working-out of the views expressed here:
... the harmonic cornerstone of each hit - the beginning and the end of each part - must beat out the standard scheme... Complications have no consequences..., regardless of what aberrations occur, the hit will lead back to the familiar experience, and nothing fundamentally novel will be introduced... The composition hears for the listener. This is how popular music divests the listener of his spontaneity.
Boredom has become so great that only the brightest colours have any chance of being lifted out of the general drabness. Yet it is just those violent colours which bear witness to the omnipotence of mechanical, industrial production... the means used to overcome reality are more humdrum than reality itself.
To escape boredom and avoid effort is incompatible... They seek novelty but the strain and boredom associated with actual work lead to avoidance of effort in leisure time... That means boredom again... [2]
What is true for popular music is also true for the movies. The movie theatre is like a dark cavern, a neutral womb, into whose soothing and dissolving blackness we can escape from our frayed selves. In a non-religious age, the movie theatre is one of the few places that provides a poor man with a kind of retreat, a place where he can throw off the shackles of his social responsibility, relationships and personality. Here, at least, he does not have to acknowledge his irritating self.
It is interesting to compare the movie theatre with the baseball park. In the theatre one ceases, in a sense, to exist. One seldom talks, one is seldom brought to those heights of consciousness that a genuine work of dramatic art can arouse. (Even the adolescents necking in the back rows do so with a kind of grim anonymity.) The movie house is a psychological cloakroom where one checks one’s personality. But baseball, one of the few mass urban activities that seems to retain some folk spontaneity, is different. The game is so paced that one usually has enough time to return to oneself, and the entire atmosphere of the ball park allows for some spontaneity: the audience argues, eats, shouts, participates as an independent group that is reacting to the events on the field. As a result, one encounters a kind of rough and pleasing wit in the ball park, as well as an easy-going camaraderie. The ball park, I find, is one of the few public places where one can converse uninhibitedly with total strangers.
If only because it must conform to the psychological patterns of industrial society, mass culture is inseparably related to common experience. The notion that it concocts a never-never world of irrelevant fantasy is nonsense spread by the kind of people whose only complaint about Hollywood is that it isn’t ‘realistic’ enough. In actuality, the audience accepts both mass culture and daily experience precisely to the degree that the two blend. By now neither can be maintained without the other, which is one reason why there prevails in this country such a blurred notion of what human experience is and such an inadequate notion of what it should be.
But, it may be objected, don’t the movies create atmospheres and situations totally removed from the experience of the audience? How many people are in a position to lead the kind of lives Van Johnson and Bette Davis, Ronald Colman and Ingrid Bergman portray on the screen? Precious few, of course; and if the comparison between the life of an audience and that portrayed on the screen is made simply in such formal terms, it will yield us nothing. Furthermore, there are obviously many films whose major purpose is to construct an atmosphere or environment characterised precisely by its complete irrelevance to the audience’s life. But I think that the majority of films do have strong psychological contact with our lives. From the tough guy films we find so exciting because they rouse our unexpended sadism to the sophisticated comedies that play on our yearning for charm and grace, from the musical comedies that make taffy of our tensions to the socially conscious films that seek to exorcise our guilts - more movies than we know are comments on our experience and help us to ‘adjust’ to it, that is to acquiesce in it. They may not be truthful or authentic or profound comments, but they do touch on essential aspects of our relationship both to society and ourselves. The movies help us remain at peace with ourselves by helping us to suppress ourselves.
By now daily experience and mass culture are so interlaced that it would be futile to seek causal relationships between them. Does Gregory Peck model himself after the American Lover or does the American Lover model himself after Gregory Peck? It would be hard, and unnecessary, to say. All we need know is that the relationship between mass culture and daily experience is so intimate that millions of people seem hardly able or willing to distinguish between the two. They send letters of advice to comic strip and radio characters. Little Orphan Annie has for years been receiving letters from readers that tell her how to get out of her endless difficulties. (She never seems to follow the advice.) Some years ago when the creator of Terry and the Pirates was rash enough to kill a favourite character, the New York Daily News was besieged with letters of complaint. And the movie magazines establish relationships between millions of American women and idealised versions of movie stars in which it is impossible to distinguish between reality and fantasy, so closely are they interwoven.
Mass culture elicits the most conservative responses from the audience. So long as the audience feels that it must continue to live as it does, it has little desire to see its passivity and deep-seated though hardly conscious boredom upset; it wants to be titillated and amused but not disturbed. For those moulded in the image of contemporary society, art has many dangers: its effects are unpredictable and its demands tremendous. Art demands effort, a creative response from the audience. Joyce makes it hard for us, but he offers us the tempting possibility of reaching his heights of sensibility. But mass culture makes things ‘easy’ and does not ‘upset’ us; mass culture is safe, for its end is already present in its beginning.
A common item of experience tends to confirm these observations. When we feel vaguely upset and dissatisfied with ourselves, we ‘take in’ a movie. If we are somewhat intellectualised, we know the movie will not provide us with the fundamental satisfactions that, say, a Dostoyevsky novel might, but because of our attachment to our disturbance we are unable to summon the effort a work of art would demand. In an act of self-destructive bravado we even deliberately look for a ‘bad’ movie; we punish ourselves for ‘feeling bad’ by doing something that must ultimately make us feel worse. The analogy with neurosis, in which the sufferer clings to the source of his disturbance, is obvious.
Mass culture seems always to involve a pact between medium and audience to suppress the free play of the unconscious. Where art stirs a free and rich passage of materials from dream to experience and from experience to dream, mass culture tries to cage the unconscious. It cannot of course succeed, but it does often manage to dissociate conscious from unconscious life. The audience therefore responds on two unintegrated levels: surface consciousness ('having a good time’) and suppressed unconscious (the distorted evocation of experience by popular culture themes). On the surface the Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse cartoons seem merely pleasant little fictions, but they are actually overladen with the most competitive, aggressive and sadistic themes. Often on the verge of hysteria, Donald Duck is a frustrated little monster who has something of the SS man in him and whom we, also having something of the SS man in us, naturally find quite charming...
This discrepancy between conscious and unconscious reactions to mass culture seems inseparable from the audience’s need for social approval. Whoever has attended a jam session or gone to the Paramount Theatre when a favourite bandleader is featured, knows how compulsive the seemingly spontaneous audience responses can be. No doubt the audience believes it is ‘enjoying’ itself, but a central component of that enjoyment is the very powerful pressures towards social conformism. How can a bobby-soxer admit to not enjoying Vaughn Monroe?
(In fairness, it should be admitted that there is probably nothing more conformist about the mass audience’s feeling that the famous bandleader or the all-star picture must be entertaining than the intellectual’s analogous feeling that the great writer must be profound.)
In the comics, this dissociation of personality is taken for granted. Comic characterisation consists of persistent identification of each name with an outstanding personality trait: Tillie is always the toiler, Joe Jinks always worries, Little Orphan Annie always suffers, and Maggie always wants to break into society. Dissociation of personality has been institutionalised in the ‘balanced comic section’ of the McCormick-Patterson chain:
The Gumps represent gossip, realistic family life; Harold Teen, youth; Smitty, cute-kid stuff; Winnie Winkle, girls; Moon Mullins, burly laughter; Orphan Annie, sentiment... Dick Tracy, adventure and the most up-to-date sophisticated type; Smilin’ Jack, flying and sex. [3]
The comics further dissociate personality by erasing the distinctions between adulthood and childhood. (Popular songs revert to baby-talk to relieve adult tension.) The first comic strip in this country was The Yellow Kid, a creature half-man and half-child, full of premature and malicious wisdom. Little Orphan Annie and Kayo are both of uncertain age, neither children nor adults, and show no sign of growing older (or younger, for that matter) in the next few decades. Harold Teen is blessed with the secret of eternal adolescence, than which his readers find little more desirable. Such strips allow adults to sink, for the moment, into the uncomplicated ways of childhood. On the other hand, the numerous comics that are little more than schematised abstractions of violence and sadism quickly push children into premature adulthood. [4]
Like comic strips, though seldom so simply, movie stars also tend to become identified in the mass mind with one personality strand. Their status as stars is seldom secure unless they have developed one dominant emotional characteristic which serves the audience as an identifying sign. It is this characteristic that determines the emotional essence of a movie, as distinct from the surface subject. Although The Hucksters was presumably a satire on advertising, it was actually about Clark Gable, the irresistible male. Every Gable film has sexual aggression as its dominant inner theme no matter what its ostensible plot. Similarly, no matter which role he plays Ronald Colman is always the man of the world. In no picture has the divergence between inner theme and apparent subject been so wide as in the film Crossfire, which while ostensibly an attack on anti-Semitism, was actually about a tough guy who violates social convention and in passing accidentally kills a Jew.
At most, Hollywood allows several characters in a movie to represent conflicting emotional strands. Like all mass culture media, it is neither able nor interested in grouping conflicting emotions within one character. From its point of view, that would be dangerous.
‘Mit dose kids, society iss nix’, says the Inspector about his juvenile tormentors, the Katzenjammer Kids. The adult-baiting that is the main theme of this comic strip seems never to weary its audience, since children and adults are always at war and adults often secretly sympathise with children. To children the strip appeals directly and for obvious reasons, and to adults it offers the possibility of vicariously rejecting their own adulthood and of safely breaking the laws of social life. While perpetuating passivity and shredding personality, mass culture yet allows the audience the limited freedom of vicariously breaking social law which, in turn, satisfies ‘a perpetual latent craving in the American psyche for physical expression, for a type of energy that humdrum factory and office jobs have no way of releasing’. [5] But even this safe violation of social law in the audience’s reactions to mass culture serves ultimately to reinforce real life adherence to social law.
Krazy Kat, the one comic strip intellectuals have admitted to liking, won wide favour with mass audiences simply because Herriman satisfied this deep craving for safe violations of traditional orders. He obeyed neither the conventions of social life nor the internal requirements of his medium; he simply did what he pleased. To the audience there was something immensely gratifying when for no apparent reason the background of the strip moved while its characters remained still. The knowledge that no matter what else happened Ignatz would for no discernible reason always throw his brick was both reassuring and consoling. For once, when straphangers glanced each evening at Krazy Kat, they could escape from the tyranny of causality. In a world too cluttered with reasons, there seemed no reason for what happened to Officer Pup, Ignatz and Krazy - and this very lack of order helped the audience re-establish order in its own life.
What happens when a mass culture product does not conform to this pattern of safely violating social law I learned in a rather terrifying incident several years ago. I was then stationed at an army reception centre where new recruits were prepared for military life. After they exchanged civilian for army clothes, their behaviour often took a sharp turn to a kind of lawlessness, a break from old patterns. Feeling that they had to live up to a new role, they indulged in a fantastic amount of profanity and wild sexual boasting. They had to show they were men.
One evening at a showing of the film The Ox-Bow Incident, I could not help noticing that most of the new soldiers were volubly identifying themselves with the film’s lynch mob as it tracked down and murdered three innocent men. The feelings they had about their new status in life were apparently projected into sympathy for the lynchers, also men of violence. And they assumed that this film would allow them, as might most Hollywood products, to cheat out of the consequences of their vicarious violence.
When, however, at the end of the film the lynching was sharply condemned - not merely in formal terms but in psychic and visual images the audience could not escape - the soldiers openly jeered. They were as perplexed and disoriented as the lynchers in the movie. For once, they discovered, they could not identify themselves with the lawbreakers without suffering emotionally. And they felt that in this way the movie was ‘cheating’ them, as in a sense it was.
The motif of unpunished violation of social law is strongly emphasised in the most important recent development in mass culture - the ‘tough guy’ movies. When we go to see the old-fashioned detective (Sherlock Holmes, Ellery Queen) and western films, we are hardly involved emotionally; such films are put together along strictly stereotyped patterns that permit us the pleasure of relapsing into passive spectators. Their crimes and their punishments provoke no violent reactions since they concern relationships to law that no longer count. In fact, their major source of pleasure is their frank irrelevance.
But we react both violently and with some complexity to the tough guy films. (The detective film is concerned with patterns of deduction, the tough guy film with situations of existence, even if distorted ones.) When we project ourselves into the position of the tough guy who is often not quite clearly on either side of the law, our enjoyment in this identification is deep since it is so close - for does not modern life force all of us to be at least part-time tough guys? And our pleasure in the inevitable denouement is equally deep, since the greater the evil by which we have been tempted the greater our relief at escaping it. Like the Christian who views the Jew as both murderer and murdered, the spectator can gain from the tough guy film the symbiotic pleasure of being both hunter and hunted.
I think this can best be illustrated by going back to a movie made several years ago, Double Indemnity. In this film an insurance agent named Neff is attracted by a woman, Phyllis, who lures him into a plot to kill her husband and share his insurance. In the end they are trapped by Keyes, the insurance company’s claims investigator. As played by Barbara Stanwyck, Phyllis is a remarkable sexual woman: frank, aggressive, bitchy. To the spectator’s mind she therefore represents lawlessness, the violation of traditional sex mores. She is what the audience might like to be or like to possess, but she is too much so to allow us readily to identify ourselves with her. Keyes, on the other hand, is a creature of sheer intelligence: the supervisory mind that investigates and punishes us for our hidden transgressions. With neither can we fully identify ourselves.
But Neff, the hapless victim in the middle, is just another little guy, as bumbling as you, I or Fred MacMurray. We could fall for Phyllis and we could be trapped by Keyes. Neff is a passive transmission belt through which runs the conflict between Phyllis and Keyes - lawless instinct versus lawful conduct. Since Neff’s feelings about that conflict are as ambiguous as those of the audience itself, he is, in a sense, the audience brought directly into the film, the modern anonymous movie-goer torn between what he takes for lawless sexual desire and intelligent lawful suppression. Farther in the violation of social law, mass culture cannot go. And this, too, is the deepest identification we can feel towards a mass culture hero - an identification that, unlike a genuine work of art which brings into play a variety of emotions and character components, rests largely on the least individualised and most anonymous aspects of ourselves. The identification is ultimately with our role of social anonymity.
But this is as far as mass culture can go in the direction of art - much farther incidentally than the more pretentious or ‘socially significant’ products of Hollywood. The next step is the crucial step, and Hollywood, like all other mass culture industries, cannot take it. Here it has reached the great divide.
1. As used in recent discussions, ‘mass culture’ refers to the production of synthetic, easily accessible amusements for mass audiences, as well as to the products themselves. In mass culture the materials of art are exploited, although artworks, except very rarely and that by accident, are not created. Mass culture allows art neither to thrive nor to perish, since art is at once its most dangerous competitor and its one indispensable source of ‘ideas’.
2. Theodor Adorno, ‘On Popular Music’, Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, Volume 9, 1941.
3. This rather naïve list is taken from a naïve but useful book: Coulton Waugh, The Comics, Macmillan, New York, 1947.
4. The idea for this paragraph has been developed from a note on the comics by Dwight Macdonald, Politics, April 1945.
5. Parker Tyler, The Hollywood Hallucination, Creative Age Press, New York, 1944.