Hollywood’s Secret: We Can Have it All

Film Friday

In my Film Genre class I’ve just been teaching Meet Me in St. Louis, the 1944 musical where Judy Garland, prior to her family leaving their beloved home to move to New York, sings “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”

The film sent me back to a book that has been instrumental in my thinking, Robert Ray’s A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1980.  In it Ray argues that Hollywood films such as the Vincent Minnelli classic are popular because they show audiences two contradictory sides of America and then assure them that they don’t have to make a choice.  The fabled Hollywood happy ending is an assertion that the two opposites can be reconciled.

The two opposites are America’s individual outlaw side and its communal official side.  On the one hand, Americans idealize outlaw heroes, who represent “a flight from maturity.”  On the other, we like official heroes who embody “the best attributes of adulthood: sound reasoning and judgment, wisdom and sympathy based on experience.”

Since I’ve been appalled at the way that Tea Party activists (not to mention some Republican leaders) have been spouting off recently, Ray’s formulation caught my eye.  And let me add, if I’m sounding partisan here, that I was just as appalled, as a student in the early 1970’s, by the irresponsible rhetoric coming out of the Yippies, Black Panthers, Underground Weathermen, and other leftwing radicals.  I found myself asking then, as I do now, “Where are the grown-ups?”

But I’m not bringing this up so much to make political points as to note that, if the Tea Party seems to have the wind in its sails at the moment, it is because it is tapping into a deep American distrust of government.  Republican leaders sense this energy, which is why they are latching on to the Tea Partiers, even though they often sound nutty when they do so.  (My favorite example: Republican moderate Tim Pawlenty, governor of Minnesota, saying that America should borrow a page from the playbook of Tiger Woods’ wife and “take a 9-iron and smash the window out of big government.”  Huh?)  Tea Party energy is real, even if its facts are cockeyed.  (A “radical socialist” Barack Obama is not.)  It’s the energy that Mark Twain, J.D. Salinger, and Jack Kerouac all tapped into when writing Huckleberry Finn, Catcher in the Rye, and On the Road.

Ray would probably point out that the Tea Party “rebels” want a contradiction: they want to be both in and out.  Elderly Tea Partiers want the government to keep its hands off their Medicare while western states boasting cowboy independence rely heavily on federal government funds. (On a per capita basis, the two most heavily subsidized states in the country are Wyoming and Alaska.) The trick in American politics is to run as an outsider so that you can govern as an insider.  Every election season we see politicians from both the left and the right attempting to appear as responsible mavericks or insiders not tainted by Washington.

Back to movies. Ray’s point about Hollywood genre films is that they assure viewers that they can have it both ways.  They can be both outlaw and insider, libertarian and communitarian.  In Meet Me in St. Louis the conflict is between the women of the household, who want to remain settled in St. Louis, and the father, who wants to pursue promotion and move to New York.  Settled looks very good in this movie, what with its idyllic 1903 Golden Age trappings.  These include a large house, beautiful dresses, a faithful Irish servant, rides on the trolley and the ice wagon, a traditional Halloween, and a Christmas ball.  But they are pitted against a deep American impulse: to better oneself and make a lot of money.

Everything comes to a head in a disturbing scene where five-year-old Tootie, acting out her anger at the upheaval, beheads her snowmen.  As Ray notes,

The context of loss and regret surrounding [the transfer to New York] made Garland’s “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” one of the most heartbreaking of all Christmas songs, sung under the apparent necessity for choosing an alternative to the domestic values on which the film rested. “Someday soon, we all will be together” she sang, without being at all sure of it.

America was at war when the film came out, meaning that settled domestic society looked particularly enticing.  Ray points out that Meet Me in St. Louis also anticipates just how mobile America was to become.  He cites Vance Packard’s A Nation of Strangers, which identifies “constant executive ‘re-locations’ as a principal cause of modern anxiety.”  Moving, Ray says, robs the family

of its roots, of its connection to a past and future, not to mention its present—all of which the Smith family had in St Louis, with its three generations (Grandpa to Tootie) living together and coming to each other’s rescue.

Rays says that the tensions show up in a number of Hollywood genres.  In the western, stable ranchers are often set against roving cattlemen and roving heroes against civilizing women.  In screwball comedies, conflicts between men and women and between rich and poor often fuel the comic tension.

So how does Meet Me in St. Louis resolve the conflict?  Simple.  The father recollects that, as a junior partner, he has job security (now there’s a fairy tale fantasy!) and can do what he wants.  The family can be simultaneously adventurous and settled, entrepreneurial and domestic.  “New York doesn’t have the monopoly on opportunity,” the father says. “Why there are plenty of opportunities right here in St. Louis!”  Then we are shown the lights of the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair as proof.

Ray notes that a couple of Orson Welles films from the same period were unpopular because they refused to indulge in this fantasy: Citizen Kane (1941) shows that fame and family are in direct conflict while The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), set in the same period as Meet Me in St. Louis, concludes (or did before the studio changed the ending) with the modern industrial age destroying community.

As I say, American politicians must learn to promise the happy resolution that the movies specialize in.  How have they fared?  Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan pulled it off pretty well, playing the millionaire populist and the president who wasn’t part of Washington. William Jefferson Clinton did all right too as the redneck from the sticks who, like Jimmy Stewart’s Jefferson Smith before him, goes to Washington and refuses to get rolled by the insiders.  Three less successful presidents had trouble tapping into the populist side of things: Jimmy Carter was the unpopular nerd (despite running as a peanut farmer), George Bush I was the stuffed shirt (despite his populist rhetoric), and George Bush II was the privileged frat boy.  Bush II pulled off the populist side for a while as the brush-clearing Texan standing up to the sophisticated French, but in the end he came off as the spoiled rich kid who drives his father’s Mercedes into a ditch.

And Obama?  Mabe some of his current problems lie in the fact that he is so intent on being the responsible leader that he’s ceded the rebel role to the other party.  It doesn’t matter that Sarah Palin would probably make a lousy president.  At the moment she’s playing the lead role in Annie Get Your Gun and people are cheering.

It may be that the very contradictions that paralyze us also account for some of America’s vaunted flexibility.  I won’t speculate on that here.  I’ll just note that they are leading to a very cinematic politics.