I remember some of the things that John said tonight very well.
- Make love your priority. Find someone, love him/her truly, and let the rest of your life spin out from there.
- Do what your passion tells you to do. Be true to yourself.
- When I asked him how NYU Dental School became such a success after it had almost been closed down, he gave me the story of the dean of the school. A charismatic personality seemed to be what counted most, along with the ability to work with people and make them work for the same goal.
- John is a deeply religious man, who believes in the soul, God, the love of his wife, his love for her, and last but not least, the humanities.
- Facts don't tell the truth.
- John respects women, taught at a girls' school, and hired many women to be the deans at various schools of NYU.
Isabella Tianzi Cai
H72.2123 Hollywood Cinema to 1960
Professor Moya Luckett
March 1, 2010
- How do Pre-code films treat race? How persuasive is Doherty’s account that racial difference relates to fears about a society fundamentally destabilized by the Depression?
Unlike post-Code films, pre-Code films treat race rather unabashedly. Between 1930 and 1934, Hollywood productions enjoyed more latitude in terms of film content and casting than Hollywood productions after 1934. Although non-white actors and actresses appeared on screen much less often than whites, it was nothing close to their near total disappearance in classical Hollywood period. African Americans, Native Americans, and Asian Americans all showed up –their presence sometimes even surpassing that in real life. Racial stereotypes were often affirmed, but occasionally they were ridiculed and challenged too. In Doherty’s account of pre-Code Hollywood, racial difference often mixed fears with desires, and they were linked to other social tensions in the worst years of the Depression. However, I would like to think that some of the fears coincided with, rather than causing or adding on to, other social tensions.
The portrayal of African Americans in early 1930s Hollywood films was bold, especially if we take the existent Jim Crow laws into consideration. Blacks often appeared as servants, the fact of which defied the separate but equal status for blacks and whites that the Jim Crow laws mandated. For instance, in Baby Face, Lily (Barbara Stanwyck) and Chico (Theresa Harris) shared more than a mere master-servant relationship together. Besides exploitation, there was protection from the master to the slave as well as the other way around. En mass, blacks compromised of a cultural background in many films too. While this may be thought of as a realistic approach and is arguably innovative, some scholars argue that it creates formal inconsistencies that bring down the artistic value of a film. As for blacks, seeing their fellow countrymen on screen was first and foremost a celebration because their presence in society was at least acknowledged. However, the fact that the camera always stayed a distance from them reduced this kind of acknowledgement to its bare minimum. It was as if no one had any interest in getting to know the conditions of black livelihood. The camera’s position reinforced the cultural attitude towards blacks at that time.
Asian Americans appeared on screen in similar ways as African Americans, but there was a fundamental difference too, which centered on the combination of exoticism and eroticism. Asian Americans were immigrants rather than slaves when they first came to America. Working as gold miners, railroad workers, plantation workers, and laundry men, Asian Americans made their own livings, but none of these jobs were considered prestigious. Chinese immigrants typically congregated in their enclosed enclaves like Chinatowns, where outsiders had little knowledge of. Language difference further distanced many Asian immigrants from mainstream Americans. All these factors helped create the impression that Asians were mystical. In the early twentieth century, Chinatowns were often known for its drug dens and brothels, despite other kinds of businesses that thrived there. Chinese women, therefore, exuded erotic flavors in the popular imagination because of their immediate association with the evils of Chinatown. Movie businesses, in need of making profits, exploited this aspect of Chinese Americans. For example, Hollywood allowed Anna Mae Wong to rise as a star in the silent era. Her stardom, like other Asian Americans’ stardom, ended shortly with the advent of sound because there was the fear that talking Asian women’s eroticism would no longer be shrouded in silence (Doherty 268). White actors and actresses took over major roles in films that dealt directly with Asians.
Native Americans received a slightly more privileged treatment than the other two minority groups in movies. Often, they appeared in adventure films, which harbored nostalgia more than anything else as they reminded people of the recent past when the country was still growing into its shape. Because they were geographically more remote, and that they were most often associated with nature, Native Americans were admired for a range of skills that modern men did not possess, given too that they were figures of defeat. Erotic desires was present in films that featured Native Americans, but similar to African American and Asian American roles, authentic Native American roles were ceded to white and Latino actors and actresses.
The reason that minority groups hated being played by people other than their own was two-fold. On one hand, even though movie businesses were declining in the Depression and both major and minor studios were struggling to keep themselves in business, movie stars were still considered prestigious jobs with salaries way above the average. On the other, none of these minority groups would readily accept that among them there were no talented actors and actresses to take up roles that were essentially about themselves. To be denied the right to compete against whites for acting in movies was like to be denied the right to earn a living. Feelings of aversion against such blatant inequality could be aroused rather naturally.
The reason that mainstream Americans hated seeing whites playing other ethnic groups had more to do with the cultural prejudices than economic ones. When whites attacked such films, they circumvented their criticisms with morality. In their opinion, having a white actor play a black or an Asian man stripped the white actor of his superiority over people of color. And any film with an attempt to ridicule white’s superiority degenerated into burlesque. Ultimately, they were afraid of such suggestive table-turning on screen because they also knew that their superior status in reality was arbitrary and could be overturned. Having the minority groups succeed in moving up the social ladder, which had been set according to skin color, was too big a threat to existing social orders for which whites were enjoying.
One specific such threat was miscegenation. Most people in the 1930s believed that desiring someone of a skin color other than one’s own was morally wrong because it was against nature. If movies portrayed or suggested miscegenation in a positive light, this belief would be challenged or ridiculed. However, morality aside, the concrete impact on people’s lives when they did marry someone of a different ethnicity were less about morality than about a range of economic concerns, such as inheritance, social welfare, educational privileges, and business benefits. People’s fears for changes in these areas are apprehensible, but they are not entirely rational because American society was moving toward desegregation and equality no matter what—these changes would help accelerate and improve rather than hinder and destroy the existing social structure and institutions.
Interestingly though, off screen, racial difference was already starting to collapse. Movie theaters were segregated public places in the 1930s, especially in the south. However, because theater owners had to minimize cost and maximize profit from every one of their screenings, many defiantly ignored the segregation laws. Whites, blacks, and other ethnic groups all attended movies at the same setting. Doherty also points out in his book that racial mixing among the young was quite widespread. Before the age of sex, children played with one another on the streets of America regardless of their ethnic origins. Furthermore, with a bad unemployment rate, whites lost jobs that were thought to be exclusively theirs and competed against blacks and other ethnic groups for less prestigious jobs. Along with the jobs that whites lost was their superiority. Conversely, a market in its ruins allowed innovative individuals regardless of their ethnic backgrounds to rise up as long as they grasped the right opportunities, such as the famous duo Amos ‘n’ Andy.
In July 1934, the Production Code Administration was formed. The Code proved to stabilize racial difference on screen under Joseph I. Breen’s supervision. Around the same time, American economy also started to convalesce slowly. Despite the fact that these two things happened at around the same time, they were not the direct result of each other. Although racial segregation laws were not lifted until the Civil Rights Act of 1964, across America between the 1930s and 1960s, educated blacks were speaking up for themselves and accomplished many things, which were destabilizing to the exiting social hierarchy in many ways. For example, Willa Brown, the first female African American pilot, founded the National Airman Association of America. She and her friends trained black pilots and lobbied the Congress for abandoning racial segregation in the U.S. Army Air Corps. Apparently, what films stopped showing and refused to show about the advancement of ethnic groups in society happened rapidly in reality. Fears based on intuition from what one could perceive in movies, therefore, should not be considered a major contributing factor to social instability. The fact that racial difference stabilized in all Hollywood productions after 1934 is never an accurate reflection of what was happening in reality, and to think that racial difference on screen could imply social instability off screen is very naïve, for the relationship between the two can be extremely complicated.
Doherty has done a good job to differentiate the treatment of racial difference in pre-Code Hollywood and Hollywood after the Code in his book. He makes us aware of the insurrectionist impulses in pre-Code productions as well as their contexts. It is, however, always problematic when a film historian tries to use the content of movies alone as cultural evidence for real social issues. Doherty does provide statistics to support his arguments, such as the percentage of African Americans in American population. He also discusses the movie-going experience for people in the pre-Code era. His arguments, as a whole, still offer very little in terms of the extent and the impact of the fears that were relatable to a society fundamentally destabilized by the Depression. In fact, rather than fears, if we agree with Stan Brakhage that to see is to behold and to behold is to fear not (Brakhage 228), pre-Code films actually offered reassurances. They rendered racial difference visible, so instead of inciting fears of racial difference, they eliminated such fears.
Works Cited
Doherty, Thomas. Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema 1930–1934. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.
Brakhage, Stan. “From Metaphors of Vision.” Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. 5th ed. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
