SCRAPPY PRINCESSES AND ETHNIC ODDBALLS

 In the first part of TOTALITARIAN TOKENISM, I said that the essay-series would focus more on art than politics, though I had to set up some of the political background for the very idea of tokens. In that essay I concentrated only upon the political background for racial conflicts, but the series as a whole will address two other categories of conflict: those revolving around gender equality, which we usually label "feminism," and those revolving around sexual proclivities. The last of these three categories has no place in this essay, though, because sexual-proclivity conflicts essentially did not exist in the era I'm addressing: the era of 20th-century American art from roughly 1900 to 1960.                                                                                      

One might call this era "Before Tokenism," because there really wasn't an established practice of signaling one's virtue by appealing to marginalized groups. If the tendency did exist in politics, anything comparable in the fiction of the era seems nugatory, particularly in the new forms of media that blossomed during the 20th, principally movies, radio, comic strips, comic books and television. In that era as in eras previous, it was a given that creative authors wrote for the majority in most cases, and that meant that most American productions defaulted to the use of White characters, usually of Ango-Saxon extraction. This default in itself was not part of a dastardly scheme to keep "people of color" down, though there were specific narratives designed to promote racial disenfranchisement, as with Thomas Dixon's novel THE CLANSMAN. Dominantly the motive for authors to use White characters was that (a) Whites comprised the majority of the readership, and (b) White people in the real world had fewer restrictions on their behavior within many though not all possible story-settings. One may call this state of affairs a "status quo" but not entirely a conspiracy.                                                                                                                                       

 Nevertheless, White readers of the early 20th century were well aware that not all races or ethnicities dissolved into the melting pot of cultural assimilation. Though some ethnic characters outside the bounds of the Status Quo might be villainous, many were more on the level of "oddballs" who amused readers with their eccentricities. It's important to remember, though, that popular entertainment often targeted Caucasian characters as ethnic oddballs. In the BLACKHAWK cover above, the Chinese cook Chop-Chop-- whose status with the heroic pilots is ambivalent since he fought with them on the ground but did not fly a plane-- is clearly set up to look funnier than the other members. Yet some of the "straight" members evinced linguistic curiosities that was also used for humorous purposes, with Hendrickson the German expostulating "dunder" all the time or Andre the Frenchman making remarks about "mam'selles." Some racial and ethnic portraits were unquestionably as deprecating as those of Dixon's CLANSMAN novel, and Black characters in comics were drawn as almost non-human caricatures of actual Black people. But even if the majority of "ethnic oddballs" were not mean-spirited, the Status Quo probably discouraged a lot of authors from depicting ethnic types as anything but amusing curiosities. So in America there was hardly any movement against the Status Quo vis-a-vis ethnic depictions until the 1950s, though the larger wave of tokenism, good or bad, did not begin until the 1960s. We tend to remember the "good tokens" of the period, such as Alexander Scott of TV's I SPY, or The Black Panther as a member of Marvel's AVENGERS, because as I specified earlier, these "tokens" were unquestionable representations of the ideals professed by Classic Liberals. What the bad ones would be I leave open for speculation.                                                                                                                                 

Now the fictional emancipation of women followed more of a zigzag course. In the late 19th century there were a variety of prose fiction adventure-books so resolutely aimed at male readers that either women did not appear at all (Stevenson's TREASURE ISLAND, Verne's 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA) or women only performed minor functions. Doyle's 1912 LOST WORLD exemplifies the latter pattern. Reporter Ned Malone only becomes involved in adventure because the woman he wants to marry claims he's not adventurous enough, and when Malone returns, covered in glory, the jezebel has married an entirely ordinary suitor. But reading prose was a single-person experience, and it seems that both films and comic strips sought to impress female patrons as much as male ones. Thus, when LOST WORLD was adapted to film in 1925, a female lead was imported into the story, making the movie more potentially popular with feminine patrons by the inclusion of a strong romance angle. I would not define any of these "princesses in need of rescue" to be tokens of belief in feminine equality. and even the more tomboyish heroines like Sheena and Nyoka don't necessarily represent any such belief. Only the William Marston Wonder Woman might be fairly seen as a pure token, since her character incarnates Marston's beliefs about female empowerment-- though I tend to doubt most of the comic book's readers engaged seriously with the author's theories.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      I'm obviously skipping over many potentially pertinent examples in both of these categories, but this is only intended to be a sketch of the social realities of the Status Quo, which would begin to suffer its first real challenge in the decade of the 1960s.                                                                                                                 

TOO ILLEGIT TO QUIT PT. 2

The remarks in this essay dealt with the ways in which popular art is or is not viewed as legitimate. Of course "is not" proves far common than "is," despite those infrequent works that receive both great critical and commercial success. The cinema, even in its formative years, proved subject to the same elitist critical attitude that dominated other, older media.

In BATTLE PT. 1, I asserted that "serial melodrama" was not granted any particular legitimacy by critics of the silent-film era, and that the only ways in which it ever come close to such legitimacy was when the serious works of the period were being parodied:

If Berlatsky is correct that at some point "highbrow" critics venerated any sort of melodramas, it would only be through this arguably distorting lens, as ironic or comic takes on material that was originally meant to be taken seriously, at least in terms of rousing strong emotional involvement.

I will admit that I'm no expert on the era of silent films. However, I do know where to find experts, and I found three in the 2004 collection of academic essays ACTION AND ADVENTURE CINEMA, edited by Yvonne Tasker.

First up we have Jennifer M. Bean, whose essay "Trauma Thrills" examines in part the use of shock tactics in early action cinema, which the trade papers of the period labelled "sensational melodrama" or "thriller melodrama." Bean's express interest in "hysteria, or shock, or astonishment as a key aesthetic effect of early film" is rooted in her "dissatisfaction with the way that both traditional and revisionist historians have told the story of cinema's turn to a predominantly narrative form." She examines, among other things, the series THE HAZARDS OF HELEN, and concludes that "far from a homeostatic model that "aims at... the regulated order of the spectacle," this narrative machine is calibrated for spectacular excess"-- a remark that I find to be in line with my own observations about the relevance of Bataille's concept of "expenditure" to popular fiction.  She also notes that the highbrow film-maker Sergei Eisenstein is known to have studied HAZARDS OF HELEN for the purpose of "his experiments with shock-like montage techniques."


Second, Richard Abel examines "The Culture War of Sensational Melodrama," asserting that according to the trade papers of the period, most of the audience for "sensational melodramas," whether in serial form or not, was "the ordinary moving picture audience," as opposed to the more well educated upper classes. He mentions, too, how cinematic melodramas usurped the popularity that had once belonged to stage melodramas of the late 1800s and early 1900s, though his chief concern is to point out how American audiences had an early flirtation with melodramatic movies from France. However, the audience's interest in exotica waned in deference to home-made products, and Abel notes that the audiences of the time rejected what is probably the only silent French film that's anything to conjure with these days, 1913's FANTOMAS.


Finally, Ben Singer offers the most complete picture of "serial melodramas" within the greater context of general film melodramas. Today one of the greatest short-hands for silent-film thrills is that of the feminine beauty tied to the train-track-- winsomely spoofed in the cartoon DUDLEY DO-RIGHT-- but Singer mentions a male character, a "tenderfoot," who gets tied to a train-track in 1907's THE BAD MAN, and is for good measure rescued by his girlfriend.

More importantly, Singer points out that D.W. Griffith, "the finest director of melodramas in the feature-film era," learned his craft while working on "blood and thunder melodrama" with his short films for the company Biograph, roughly from 1908-09. Many of these have not survived, but Singer, drawing on trade journals, presents a panoply of effects that are not especially comic in tone: "extreme moral polarity, abduction, brawling, brutality, binding and gagging, murder, and 'infernal machines' (intricate death-dealing contraptions used to prolong suspense.)"  In keeping with Bean's remarks on the transition from early sensational melodramas to films with a "predominant narrative form," there's something satisfying about knowing that Griffith, often lauded as the Father of Film-as-Art, once did a melodrama, THE FATAL HOUR, in which a detective was doomed to be killed by a pistol tied to a ticking clock.

Singer provides a summing-up that ought to put paid to any notion that sensational melodramas were regarded, by audiences or contemporary critics, as comic in tone. Rather, "they epitomized a new, or at least newly accentuated, cultural appetite for powerful stimulus." It was an appetite that did not conveniently disappear once the relatively more sophisticated works of the feature-film era, for even the more restrained dramas never entirely got away from the need to stimulate and thus direct its audience with the allure of the forbidden and the illegitimate.