Amivalences of The Mass Ornament in King Vidor's The Crowd

Ambivalences of the "Mass Ornament": King Vidor's The Crowd Author(s): Miriam Hansen Reviewed work(s): Source: Qui
Parle, Vol. 5, No. 2, Distractions (Spring/Summer 1992), pp. 102-119 Published by: University of Nebraska Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20685952 . Accessed: 16/11/2012 14:42
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Ambivalences
of the "Mass Ornament":
KingVidor's The Crowd

Miriam Hansen
When, after much delay, MGM finally released The Crowd in February of 1928, exhibitors had the choice between two different end ings; seven different endings had been scripted, two were actually shot and distributed in separate reels.' In one version, the hero's journey of
downward mobility is reversed by an overnight success in advertising which restores the family to harmony and respectability in a sentimen tal Christmas tableau. In the other, now familiar ending, John Sims (James Murray) makes a more modest return from unemployment by finding a job as a sandwich man dressed up as a juggling clown: he dis suades his wife (Eleanor Boardman) from leaving him and takes her and their son to a vaudeville show where the family is reconstituted as part of the great community of popular entertainment. The second ending clearly dampens the bland optimism of the first,but is nonetheless in tended as a happy one. However, in theirparticular cinematic choreog
space of the vaudeville theater. The reverse shot shows a burlesque scene on stage inwhich a clown and another man are beating each other up. Returning to the previous set-up, the next shot frames the three family members, reeling with laughter, for a last time together; subse quen'tly, the group is split up by a two-shot to the right, showing John help an unknown man seated next to him recover from a coughing fit, and a two-shot of mother and child on the left. When Mary, thewife,
raphy, the final shots of The Crowd give the lie to any simple closure, ending the film on a note of ambivalence ifnot unwitting cynicism. This last sequence begins with a dissolve from the nuclear family reunited on the domestic sofa-little boy on the left, mother and father on the right-to a matching, slightly closer shot of them in the public
Qui Parle Vol. 5, No. 2, Spring/Summer 1992
Ambivalences
of the "Mass Ornament"
103
unheard laughter, until the shot dissolves into a Busby-Berkeleyian bird's eye perspective and fades out. This closing camera movement rhymes with an earlier one in re verse direction, the famous travelling shot up along the fagade of a Manhattan highrise which tilts and, with a dissolve, sweeps into an
gling clown) and then further to the right to have John show the ad to his neighbor who congratulates him with a handshake. After a last two shot showing the couple kissing, the camera begins to pull back and upward to reveal an increasingly abstract pattern of bodies swaying with
discovers one of John's slogans, "Sleight-of-Hand, the Magic Cleaner," used in an ad in the program notes, the camera moves to the right to grant John a point-of-view shot of the ad (which also features a jug
ting: Johnmeets Mary, theymarry, have two children, can't make ends meet; he wins a contest for an advertising slogan (the "Sleight-of-Hand" slogan that reappears in the final sequence) which results in a binge of consumption that gets the baby girl killed; unable to come to terms with her death, he loses his job, can't find another, and is saved from suicide only by his cowardice and his little son's declaration of faith in
him.
open-plan office to pick from the geometrical pattern of hundreds of employees no. 137, the film's protagonist, John Sims.2 Between these two travelling shots, the film unfolds a love storywith a realistic set
ban-industrial society or, alternately, blame the hero's naive faith in his superiority, his inability to recognize how little he differs from the crowd he despises.4 (Thus, early on in the film John jeers at a sandwich man dressed up as a clown, bragging to Mary in an intertitle:"The poor bet his father thoughthe would be President," which not only sap-I'll echoes his own father's predictions for his son's great future at birth,
As "a melodrama that resists being one" (Robert Lang), such a story fits squarely into a tradition of American films dramatizing the plight of the "common man" ("populist" films), associated with direc tors such as Griffith,Vidor and Capra and usually linked to an ideologi cal stance of socially conscious individual humanism and moral opti mism.3 Reproducing the terms of this tradition of "social realism," readings of the film have pivoted around the basic plot issue of who is responsible for John's failure: critics either see him as a victim of ur
but also foreshadows John's subproletarian come-back as a clown at the film's end.) Accordingly, the closing scene of the film is read as resolving themismatch between individual and society in the glow of
104 Miriam Hansen
popular entertainment: John finally accepts being part of the crowd psychoanalytically speaking, he accepts his castration5-the slogan no longer reminds him of thedaughter's death but is recuperated into a dis course of basic human solidarity (his interactionwith a stranger) which reconciles family romance with the norms of social competence. But beyond the level of narrative closure and individual psychol ogy, another discourse unfolds on the level of cinematic style, of mise
tion: from the geometrically organized overhead shots of the office workers and vaudeville patrons; through long-shot compositions of se riality like the group of boys, early on in the film, sitting on a fence (one black kid among them) and theiradult counterpart, the group of fa thers-to-bewaiting in the hospital (one black man among them), or the even more anonymous lines in frontof the unemployment office; to the unstructured crowd of pleasure seekers in Coney Island and on the beach. The patterns of seriality are not limited to spatial simultaneity but also take the form of temporal repetition: John's first encounter with Mary, for instance, is embedded in an elaborate sequence inwhich female office workers peel out of a revolving door one by one to be male dates waiting on the sidewalk-a routine wor picked up by their a Busby Berkeley musical. thyof If the geometrical patterns of sameness evoke theFordist model of product standardization and the concomitant dequalification of workers, the patterns of repetition seem to suggest an analogy with the assembly line and Taylorized methods of production, the fragmentation and ra tionalization of the labor process. The film promotes this analogy not only on the diegetic level, but in its own articulation. When John and
en-scene, framing and editing, forwhich I take the final shot to be em blematic. Again and again, John appears in relation to group figurations that of which he is only a more or less identical element-figurations in the historical and ideological problematic of what participate Siegfried Kracauer, in an essay contemporaneous with The Crowd, has In the film, called the "mass ornament" ("das Ornament der Masse"). these group figurations vary inkind, camera range and degree of abstrac
Bert and hisdateon top a double-decker of Mary followJohn'sfriend

bus, each man gets an identical low-angle point-of-view shot of his date's legs. The formally identical repetition of an editing convention usually reserved for a unique discovery of desire or knowledge, as a priv ileged moment of cinematic subjectivity, marks thismoment as a copy without an original, a mechanical gesture of social-sexual reproduction.
Ambivalences of the "Mass Ornament"
105
Although this graphic discourse of sameness and repetition is part of the filmic narration, it exceeds the narrative economy of the realist genre and offers an analysis of John's plight that goes beyond the hu manist argument of individual failure versus social responsibility.More effectively than his personal misfortune and humiliation, the discourse of themass ornament undermines the clich6s of bourgeois individual
onist. The symmetrical return of the clown costume forced upon John by sheer economic necessity is one instance of this structural irony. Another is the scene on the beach inwhich John is framed alone play ing his ukulele, singing "All alone / I'm so all alone," and subsequent reverse shots reveal not only a man who complains but a whole crowd of people peacefully sharing the beach. Here the juxtaposition of indi vidualist ideology and mass society also brings intoplay the blurring of
ism spouted by John, the hollow myths of theAmerican Dream. The juxtaposition of John's mindless prophecies of personal success (when his "ship is coming in") with images of mass-cultural multiplication, repetition and sameness creates an ironic effect throughout the film. This irony, however, remains a structural one, for it is independent of any insight, consciousness or self-recognition on the part of the protag
boundaries
class thatmushroomed inGermany after World War I: the urban em made themprole ployees whose working and living conditions in effect tarian, especially with the full onslaught of rationalization and unem ployment since 1925, yet who deny any commonality with thework ing-class by flaunting a worn-out ideology of bourgeois individualism.
between public and private realms which is thematic throughout the film. It is in the discrepancy between the continued assertion of a bour geois concept of personality with social formations marked by an in creased tendency towards multiplication and sameness thatThe Crowd traverses similar territoryas Kracauer's writings from themid-1920s through 1933, in particular his work on themedia, spaces, rituals and subjects of an emerging mass culture.6 In a serialized study on white collar workers, (Die Angestellten, 1929), which provides an illuminat ing intertext to Vidor's film,Kracauer sketches the profile of a new
Their class pretensions are undermined not only by their actual eco nomic status, Kracauer observes, but also by the very form their striv ing for difference takes. The ideal personality is the person with a "pleasant appearance," he reports, quoting the staff manager of a Berlin department store, "a certain moral-pink color of the skin" ("die
106 Miriam Hansen
moralisch-rosa Hautfarbe, Sie wissen doch..."). state,"Kracauer concludes,
"It is not too daring to
that in Berlin a type of employee has developed who model themselves according to this desired color of skin. Speech, clothes, gestures and physiognomy in creasingly resemble each other, and the result of this process is precisely this pleasant appearance which can be reproduced extensively by means of photogra phy. Thus a selection of a species takes place under the pressure of social relations which the economy inevitably enhances by fostering corresponding needs of consumption.7 Rather than attribute such social mimesis to subjective false conscious ness on the part of the employees, Kracauer sees itas part of a compre hensive historical process-a process inwhich the photographic media are to play a decisive role. This process, inKracauer's phenomenology of modernity, ismarked, on the one hand, by a growing disintegration, fragmentation and desubstantialization of theworld and, on the other, by the reorganization of these fragments, this detritus, into new forms
and configurations.8 While the thesis of disintegration is grounded in Kracauer's philosophy of history and indebted to secularized versions of themid-20s JewishMessianism and Gnosticism, it is elaborated-by in terms of a Marxist-Weberian critique of capitalism and its impact on all spheres of social and cultural life.While capitalist rationalization, Kracauer argues, to some extent advances the historical process of rea son permeating nature, its demythologizing impulse stops halfway, generating false abstractions and new myths designed to preserve prop erty relations and thuspreventing the realization of a trulyhuman soci
ety.
Within this historical-philosophical framework (which anticipates, if with a more optimistic slant, key thoughts of Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment), Kracauer analyzes the emergence of the "mass ornament," epitomized by the products of theAmerican entertainment business such as theTiller Girls, as "the aesthetic reflex of the rationality towhich the dominant economic system aspires."9 As a reflex, however, themass ornament is as ambiguous as the historical moment: on theone hand, itoffers a practical critique of notions of the culture and, in its sovereign subject perpetuated by bourgeois
107
anonymity, prefigures the possibility of human relations emancipated from the brute pressures of nature and social origin; on the other hand, the mass ornament persists in the false abstractness of capitalist ra
ment parks, bars, hotel lobbies, streets, arcades and shop windows, tourism and dance, movie theaters, circus and variety shows, newsreels and photography. On the contrary,what lends thesewritings a historical gravity that reaches into our present, is thathe sensed early on the radi cal implications of the economic consumption, a process no doubt thanGermany (though associated canism). With a phenomenological
its simplistic analogy between cultural forms and Taylorized methods of production ("The legs of theTiller Girls correspond to the hands in the factory").10 But this objection does not hold for the larger context of Kracauer's analysis of mass culture, in particular his essays on amuse
tionality, because it is not permeated by human needs and conscious ness but instead naturalizes its capitalist function as a mythical fact. Kracauer's concept of the "mass ornament" has been criticized for
shift of emphasis from production to more advanced in theUnited States
sumed in distraction (Zerstreuung) rather than concentration (Samm lung). In an earlier essay on Berlin's picture palaces, "Cult of Distrac tion" (1926), he writes: "the penchant for distraction demands and finds an answer in the display of pure externality."" Like the "mass orna ment," themovies and illustratedmagazines participate in a historical "turn to the surface," and the related assertion of what Adorno called, with regard to Kracauer, the "primacy of the optical."'2 Unlike the concept of the "mass ornament," however, the concept of "distraction," as a category of reception, brings into view dimensions of pleasure, identification and fantasy-dimensions mobilized by thephantasmago ria of consumption rather thanmerely a reflex of rationalized modes or
therewith thewhole issue of Ameri openness which included the experi ence of theobserving and writing subject, Kracauer was able to discern qualitatively new forms of subjectivity attendant upon consumerist modes of representation and relations of reception which complicate any reflectionistmodel of cultural analysis. Die Angestell The culture of the employees, Kracauer observes in ten, is directed toward surface glamor rather than substance; it is con
production.
The withdrawal substance of from worldand theconcomitant the
erosion of bourgeois individualism have left the subject in a state of fragmentation and emptiness inwhich Kracauer perceives theconditions
108 Miriam Hansen
for a productive receptivity, a setting-freeof experience. In an essay en titled "Boredom" ofNovember 1924, he describes the disposition of the modern flaneur: "In the evening one takes a stroll through the streets, satiated with a feeling of unfulfiliment from which abundance might grow." Yet before such autonomous abundance can even begin to de velop, the vacuum is filled with written images: "Luminous words line the buildings and already one is banished from one's own emptiness into the foreign advertising." Mind you, Kracauer does not simply fall back on the cultural-conservative principle of the "pod" by which mass culture destroys the otherwise sovereign subject from within like an alien invasion (as in the polemic by Georges Duhamel quoted by Ben jamin).13 Rather, Kracauer is interested in thepeculiar form of percep tual identification in which between the boundaries self and heteronomous images are weakened or barely exist in the firstplace, al lowing for a narcissistic fusion with the stream of images. Thus, he
tionsmark a thirddiscourse in the filmwhich mediates between the re alist narrative of individual characters and the graphic discourse of the mass ornament without necessarily reconciling the two. (It is this third discourse which I think distinguishes Vidor's film from the stylistic or the tradition of Neue Sach ideological dualism of Metropolis lichkeit.) On themost obvious level, The Crowd foregrounds the im
however, that such imaginary metamorphoses of self cannot be had without a sense of de-realization, isolation and loss: "One forgets one self gazing, and the big dark hole is animated with the semblance of a life thatbelongs to no one and consumes everyone."14 Kracauer's image of film spectatorship returns us to The Crowd, in particular its figurations of a consumerist subjectivity. These figura
takes the subject of boredom into themovie theaterwhere he "lets him self be polymorphously projected": "As a fake Chinaman he sits in a fake opium den, turns into a well-trained dog who performs ridiculously clever acts to please a female star, gathers himself into an alpine storm, gets to be circus artist and lion at once." Kracauer knows all too well,
pact of consumer economy by associating its protagonist with the business of advertising, more precisely, with the fiction that advertis ing, like screen-writing or the creation of stars, is a popular art in which everyone can participate; whether a slogan is accepted or not is just a matter of luck. In that sense, John can be seen as a casualty of the updating of theAmerican Dream for an age of consumption, in par ticular the contradiction between an individualism based on a Calvinist
109
ethic of hard work, self-denial and frugality and notions of self-trans formation and personal success defined by the promises of pleasure, sensuality and abundance.15 John fails because he literalizes the ideals of a production-based myth of self-creation within the ideological framework of an aesthetics of consumption. In thatregard he indeed dif fers from the crowd because he is not, like his friend Bert, an "enlightened consumer" inHorkheimer and Adorno's sense, a consumer who buys into the system even as he sees through themechanisms of manipulation.16 In addition to the thematic role of advertising, commercial images signs, billboards, sand proliferate in the film's mise-en-scene-store wich boards, ads in public places and magazines. Significantly, theyare
Love," become an object of spectacle for thepatrons waiting in frontof The most striking in a banner that says "Do They Neck? WATCH!" stance of the consumerist inscription of couple formation occurs on theirway home, when John sees a subway ad with the slogan, "You We'll Furnish theHome" and proposes; thepoint-of Furnish theGirl / view shot indicating his awakening desire is devoted to the ad, not to Mary.'7 This motif continues into the sequence on the honeymoon train: the newlyweds' anxiety of intimacy is gently ridiculed by their reading of more ads (e.g. of a baby announcing it's "Time toRe-Tire") and John's carrying of a manual, What a Young Husband Ought to Know-a comedy of awkwardness which the film stages in public, un der the gaze of other passengers and theblack porter. Consumerist iconography in The Crowd is not extraneous to ro mance but at the core of it; the libidinal economy of individuals and the economy of advertising are inseparable. All erotic relations seem medi
concentrated in the early sequences leading up to John and Mary's mar riage. Not nature, but Coney Island provides the setting for theirbrief courtship; the locus classicus of the culture of distraction is represented as both a playground of self-abandonment and, at the same time, a giant machine for couple formation. When John kisses Mary for the first time, they themselves, like dozens of other couples in the "Tunnel of
the of ated through processof im images consumption-through very

age-making. When we see the couple in frontof a picture-postcard set ting of Niagara Falls, theirmarriage apparently not yet consummated,
and she poses accordingly. For most of the film, his love for Mary re mains largely in the register of the Imaginary, a relationship of narcis
whenhe takes photograph her his John Mary only recognizes desirefor
110 Miriam Hansen
sistic specularity rather than reciprocal recognition of the other. Thus, themarriage is saved from the drudgery of everyday life, poverty and John's ill temper only by the announcement ofMary's pregnancy, and when the baby is born-it's a boy, of course-John renews his pledge
mains basically genderless or stylized in the vein ofWeimar androgyny ("bodies in bathing trunkswithout sex"). What ismore, in "The Little
the start-by the film's systematic linkage of individual narcissism with a consumerist economy of desire and identification. In its articula tion of this linkage, The Crowd spells out questions of gender which Kracauer evades. For Kracauer, the subject of themass ornament re
life by repeating themother's words as his own wish, "I want to be just like you." A better likeness thanMary or the baby girl, the son pro vides Johnwith a metaphoric equivalent of themany mirrors in frontof which we see him arrange his "moral-pink" appearance. The restoration of John's identity is thusmarked as illusory from
"to be somebody" underMary's knowing assurance, "he's just like you, Johnny." In a symmetrical reprise, the son will later save his father's
(1927), he singles out women as most Shopgirls Go to theMovies" susceptible to the compensatory fantasies with which the culture indus try in turn covers up the experience of historical disintegration and fragmentation.8 In The Crowd, the narcissistic disposition, usually associated with women and their role as primary consumers, is clearly linked to the crisis of male identity and self-representation. From the timewe see John as a newborn baby, held up to theworld by his father in frontof a mirror, his personal difficulties are related to a failing pa triarchal lineage, perpetuated over generations through the ever more ab stractmirages of theAmerican Dream. John is feminized not only by the psycho-social effects of wage-labor and his furthereconomic degra
dation, but also through the narcissistic, consumerist construction of his character. However, alongside the suggestion of symbolic castration (most explicit in John's interactions with his macho brothers-in-law), the filmmaintains a clear focus on the effects of this self-absorbed male identity on the lives of real women: even in the scene of family leisure on the beach, for instance, domestic work continues forMary while John basks in childish ebullience and intransigence.
deflates John's rhetoric of personal uniqueness and destiny; it throws into question the very assumption of a psychologically coherent charac ter as the subject of narrative motivation, of individual agency and re
The discourse consumerist of in subjectivity The Crowd notonly
111
Tree is a Tree). Setting out to "be somebody," John actually succeeds by becoming a nobody, a malleable puppet, a clown advertising some one else's travestyof individual choice (his sandwich board reads: "I am
sponsibility, which is one of the cornerstones of classical cinema. Born on July 4, 1900 and mockingly compared toLincoln and Washington, John Sims enters the film as an allegory, an "American Anyman" (A
always happy because I eat at Schnieder's Grill"). As I said earlier, this irony is structural. It reveals itself only to the spectator: there is no indication of any understanding, recognition and self-awareness on the part of the character. John's failure to recognize himself in the place of the formerlydespised clown represents the flip-side of his identification throughmirror images, the fall-out of miscognition. The allegorical construction of themain character does not deprive him of a certain pathos-thanks primarily to the performance of James
Murray, in particular with Eleanor Boardman as Mary-but more often than not the viewer's attitude toward the character is suspended between satire and sentimentality. Nor does the film make him a foil against which the other characters would appear as models of psychological co herence and maturity. If they are more successfully socialized than John, especially themen, their competence is not necessarily tied to a mea sure of individual consciousness but rather to better skills of adaption, to theirhaving internalized the role of "enlightened consumers." At least, that is, ifwe read the film from its ending. The discourse of consumerist subjectivity ultimately pushes the film into an abyss of
marks his integration into the collective as a travesty. The image of hundreds of human heads swaying with unheard laughter is a graphic il lustration of Kracauer's observation that themass ornament remains
ambivalence when it converges, in the closing sequence, with the dis course of the mass ornament. If the narrative wants us to celebrate John's come-back as a step toward human solidarity, the last two shots
"mute," unpermeated by human consciousness; just as John has finally accepted being part of the crowd, this equation suggests that the collec tive ismade up of individuals whose psychic structures are not all that different from his own. After all, their laughter responds to a scene-a clown is being beaten-which recalls Horkheimer and Adorno's analy sis of the "iron bath of fun" dispensed by the culture industry: the unre flectedmirror relation between the sadomasochistic rituals on stage and the social position of the audience which turns their collective laughter into a parody of solidarity and reconciliation (Dialectic, 140).
112 Miriam Hansen
If one takes the implications of these figurations of spectatorship to their logical conclusion, The Crowd offers a vision of mass culture just as ambivalent as, if not even bleaker than,Kracauer's. Like many of themore ambitious Hollywood products (Sherlock Jr., The Wizard of Oz, It's A Wonderful Life, The Purple Rose of Cairo, tomention only a few), Vidor's film includes a dimension of strategic self-reflexivity
raphy and the victrola, amusement park, vaudeville and theburlesque-a spectrum of the culture of distraction and consumption to be epitomized and subsumed by themovies.19 Likewise, the filmwas conceived and marketed as "an epic of America's Great Middle Class," thatclass which Hollywood had been building up as its primary constituency since be fore World War
towards its own medium and its clientele. A silent film released at the beginning of the sound era, The Crowd assembles a repertoire of popu larmedia that formed the context of the cinema's early history: photog
I. Thus, the image of the audience in the film's last se quence inevitably held up a mirror to the audience of the film, an audi ence that probably displayed a similar sociographic profile. Yet, if John's catastrophic fall into unemployment foreshadowed the impact of theDepression upon millions of Americans, the ambivalent depiction of the community of consumption in the final shot twists this analogy into a mise-en-abime. Either the viewer accepts the homage to theGreat American middle class and identifieswith his or hermirror image in il lusory plenitude and harmony; or the viewer assumes a satirical superi ority vis-h-vis the shaking boobs and thus repeats the act of miscogni tion that defines the diegetic audience's relation to the scene on stage, which corresponds to John's relation to the figure of the clown. In ei
tion into critical ambivalence. If the ambivalence of The Crowd could be seen as the revenge of textual complexity visited upon a basically optimistic message, Kra cauer's ambivalence towardmass culture has a different foundation and critical attention to the surface phenomena of emphasis. Kracauer's modernity developed fromwithin a theological, apocalyptic framework of world disintegration, loss of substance and transcendental homeless ness. By 1924/25, however, as Inka Mailder-Bach has pointed out, the metaphor of the surface assumes a new significance inKracaucr's writ
ther case, the strategic self-reflexivity thatwould have us celebrate John's integration as the triumph of popular entertainment is under mass ornament, mined by a textual self-reflexivity-the discourse of the turns ideological affirma the logic of consumerist subjectivity-which
Ambivalences
of the "Mass Ornament"
113
ings: against ideological attempts to restore a false unity and hierarchy drawing on the dregs of bourgeois culture and disregarding socio-eco nomic realities, he now perceives in the negativity of the historical pro cess a utopian chance. No longer a locus of lost depth, meaning or sub
the habitual order of things fromwhich "fragments of a different life" might be improvised.20 Kracauer's avant-garde valorization of the new media's attack on
stance, the surface becomes a site inwhich contemporary realitymani fests itself in an iridescent multiplicity of phenomena; rather than dis playing an atomized world of mere appearances, it signals a break-up of
for betraying its affinitywith the sundered life, for covering up the cracks with thewarmed-over menu of bourgeois aesthetics. "Precisely thatwhich should be projected onto the screen is wiped away and im ages that cheat us out of the image of existence fill up the surface."21 At the same time,Kracauer knows that these images, the "idiotic and unreal film fantasies [which] are the day dreams of society" are them selves part of contemporary reality, themedium inwhich "its otherwise repressed wishes take shape." "The more [the contemporary films]mis
bourgeois culture by no means preempts a critical perspective. On the contrary, this radical potential becomes the standard by which, from about 1926 on, he increasingly castigates contemporary film production
specular form of identification in one individual's quest for upward mo bility, Kracauer sees this disposition at work across class lines, prefig uring the direction of an entire society. "In reality itmay not happen easily that a scrubgirlmarries the owner of a Rolls Royce; yet, is itnot to their level?"22
more correctly they represent society, because represent the surface, the reflect its secret mechanisms." In his early writings (as opposed to they his "psychological history of German filmwritten in exile, From Cali Hitler), Kracauer is less concerned with decoding the content of gari to these repressed wishes than with elucidating the cinema's role in the production of a social imaginary. "Film drama and life usually corre spond to each other, because the typists [Tippmamsells] fashion them selves after the models on screen; but perhaps themost spurious models are stolen from life." If The Crowd demonstrates theworkings of such
the dream the of RollsRoyce ownersthat scrubgirls the dream rising of
Undoubtedly, Kracauer's observations could be linked to the post modern topos of the implosion of reality into images, to the reign of simulation, depthlessness and pastiche. But he can no more be reduced
114 Miriam Hansen
ment agencies, between the banter of the society films and the growing violence in the streets.What should furthercaution us against simply assimilating Kracauer's phenomenology of the surface to a postmod ernist, posthistorical stance is thathe situates his observations in a spe cific horizon of experience, a violently contested public sphere at a cru cial historical juncture. Kracauer insisted that even a "de-realized reality" had to be con fronted rather than rejected in thename of cultural conservatism or mod ernist refusal: "the process leads right through themiddle of themass
grasped in its contradictions, in the relations between the culture of the existence in its impercepti simulacrum and what it excludes-"normal the glamorous picture palaces and the unemploy ble horror"-between
to a Baudrillardian hyperrealist than he can be dismissed as a naive real ist. For Kracauer, fascination with the cinema's surface effects and its ideological function are inseparably related.23 Reality can only be
into the glamorous center. This center is not the one intended. The hap piness envisioned for the shabby periphery is subject to a different ra dius than the present one. But we must take the streets to the center be cause today its emptiness is real." For Kracauer, social change leads through this emptiness because only themost advanced form of public life harbors the potential of breaking up the hierarchy of center and pe riphery. Elaborating on the image of different national newspapers
ornament, not away from it."24 In a similar vein, he analyzes the spell of consumerism in terms of the constellation of periphery and center on themap of Paris, contrasting the Faubourgs as the scene of use value and poverty with the abundance of commodities, images, signs, lights and publicity of theBoulevards: "Broad streets run from theFaubourgs
("enemies in real life") lying side by side in the temples of the news vendors yet unable to read each other, Kracauer delineates the contours of a utopian public sphere: "Where theYiddish organs resting on Arab
anything about themselves. In the interstices, the demon of absent mindedness [Geistesabwesenheit] reigns absolute."" Unlike Adorno forwhom a utopian dimension resided at best in the negativity of high modernist art, Kracauer sought the "fragments of a different life" in the thickening configurations of themasscultural sur
relation eachother which likewise them from among precludes knowing
texts come into contact with fatPolish headlines peace is secured." But their current self-absorption prevents such harmony: "Notwithstanding the close physical relations cultivated by thepapers, theirnews lack any
115
face. And unlike Adorno, Kracauer proceeded on the assumption that, in principle, the experience of the critical intellectual was available to those who were the subject of capitalist manipula others as well-even tion. I wish to conclude with a Denkbild inwhich Kracauer evokes the possibility, at least for a moment, that the consumer could relate to the glamor of the surface in a simultaneously receptive and reflectiveman ner. In an article from theFrankfurter Zeitung published, significantly, on July 14, 1928, "Berg- und Talbahn," Kracauer describes a roller
coaster at theBerlin Lunapark, the counterpart of Vidor's Coney Island. The facade of the roller coaster shows a painted skyline of New York: "The workers, the small people, the employees who spend theweek be ing oppressed by the city, now triumph by air over a super-Berlinian New York." This fagade, however, is incomplete; once the car has reached the summit, itgives way to a bare skeleton:
So this isNew York-a painted surface and behind it The small couples are enchanted and Nothingness? disenchanted at the same time. Not that theywould dismiss the grandiose city painting as simply hum bug, but they see through the illusion, and the tri much to umph over the fagades no longermeans that them. They linger at the place where things show theirdouble face; they hold the shrunken skyscrapers in their open hands; they have been liberated from a world whose splendor theynonetheless know.2 This vision belongs to themoment, to be sure, and could easily be read as an instance of "enlightened consumerism." But the double con sciousness Kracauer sketches as a possibility, a point of departure, dif
fers strikingly from the lack of consciousness which, contrary to the film's programmatic optimism, makes the ending of The Crowd as bleak an allegory of American mass culture as Horkheimer and Adorno's vision of theCulture Industry.
This essay is a slightly revised version of a lecture delivered at a confer ence on American/German "Mass Culture between the Wars," held at theHumboldt University, East Berlin, in January 1990. The research on Kracauer was made possible by thegenerous support of theAlexander von Humboldt-Stiftung. Unless otherwise noted, translations are mine.
116 Miriam Hansen
King Vidor, A Tree is a Tree (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co.,
5 6
7 8
(interview^) (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1988), 87. Also see Ray mond Durgnat and Scott Simmon, King Vidor, American (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988) 77 87 et passim; Durgnat, "The Crowd" Film Comment 9.4 (July August 1973); Randy Stearns, "Reading Herd: Hollywood, Mass Culture, and The Crowd" unpublished seminar paper, Rutgers 1989. University, Spring This shot, like the entire city-symphony-style sequence bridging John Sims' arrival inNew York, is invoked inBilly Wilder's film, The Apartment (United Artists, 1960). Robert Lang, American Film Melodrama: Griffith,Vidor, Minnelli (Princeton NJ: Princeton UP, 1989) 113. On The Crowd in the tra dition of "social realism," see Lewis Jacobs, The Rise of theAmer ican Film (1939; New York: Teachers College Press, 1967) 456 457 et passim; on the context of "populist films," see Durgnat & Simmons 78. Marshall Deutelbaum, "King Vidor's The Crowd," Image 17.3 (September 1974), rpt. in "Image" on theArt and Evolution of the Film, ed. M. Deutelbaum (New York: Dover, 1979) 166-168. For a psychoanalytic reading of the film, see Lang 114-132. Kracauer wrote close to two thousand articles before his exile in 1933, mostly for the Frankfurter Zeitung, a daily newspaper of which he became editor in 1921. See Thomas Y. Levin, Siegfried seiner Schriften (Marbach a.N.: Eine Bibliographie Kracauer: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 1989). The majority of Kracauer's articles in theFrankfurter Zeitung, many of which were published under pseudonyms or even anonymously, can be found in his own scrapbooks, Kracauer Papers, Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach a.N. Volume 5.1-3 of Kracauer's Schriften, ed. InkaM?lder-Bach (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1990), reprints a large selection of these ar ticles; earlier collections, compiled by Kracauer himself, are Orna ment der Masse (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1963), forthcoming in translation fromHarvard UP, and Strassen inBerlin und anderswo (1964; Berlin: Arsenal, 1987). Four of thepieces are printed in this volume beginning on page 51. I, ed. Karsten Witte Kracauer, (Frankfurt a.M.: Schriften Suhrkamp, 1971), 223-224. The most extensive critical commentary on Kracauer's early work zwischen Theorie is InkaM?lder, Siegfried Kracauer?Grenzg?nger
1953) 152-153;Nancy Dowd and David Shepard, King Vidor
117
of on of notion Weltzerfall Metzler, 1985) 19ff.; the (disintegration

theworld), seeMichael Schr?ter, "Weltzerfall und Rekonstruktion: Zur Physiognomik Siegfried Kracauers," Text + Kritik 68 (on Kra cauer) (Munich: Beck, 1980): 18-40; also see Heide Schl?pmann, "Phenomenology of Film: On Siegfried Kracauer's Writings of the 1920s," New German Critique 40 (Winter 1987): 97-114; and Miriam Hansen, "Decentric Perspectives: Kracauer's Early Writings on Film and Mass Culture," NGC 54 (special issue on Kracauer) "Das Ornament derMasse,"
und Literatur: Seine fr?hen Schriften 1913-1933
(Stuttgart: J. B.
(Fall 1991):47-76.
10
11
12 13
14 15
16
"Girls and Crisis," this volume, 51-52, originally, "Girls und FZ 17 27 May, 1931; "Berliner Nebeneinander," Krise,"FZ, 1933. February, Reinhard Klooss & Thomas Reuter, K?rperbilder: Menschenorna mente in Reveuetheater und Revuefilm, (Frankfurt: Syndikat, 1980), 71-72; also see Sabine Hake, "Girls and Crisis: The Other Side of theDiversion," NGC 40 (Winter 1987), 147-164. "Kult der Zerstreuung: ?ber die Berliner Lichtspielh?user," FZ, 4 March 1926, Ornament 314; tr. by Thomas Y. Levin, NGC 40: 94. Theodor W. Adorno, "The Curious Realist: On Siegfried Kracauer" (1964), tr.ShierryWeber Nicholson, NGC 54: 159-177; 163. "I can no longer thinkwhat I want to think.My thoughts have been replaced by moving images." Georges Duhamel, Sc?nes de la Walter Benjamin, "The Work of vie future (Paris, 1930), cited in second version Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," tr. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken (1936), Illuminations, Books, 1969) 238. "Langeweile," FZ 16November 1924, Ornament 322. T. J. Jackson Lears, "From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertis ing and the Therapeutic Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1880 1930," in The Culture of Consumption, eds. Richard Wightman Fox & T. J. Jackson Lears (New York: Pantheon, 1983), 1-38; "Introduction." See also in the same work, "Introduction," ix-xvii. See also Warren Sussman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pan theon, 1984), 122-131. Max Horkheimer & Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlighten ment (1944), trJohnCumming (New York: Seabury, 1969) 167 et
passim.
BarbaraCorell& Jack Zipes,NGC 5 (Spring1975),70. Also see
FZ 9 June 1927, rpt.Ornament 54; tr.
118 Miriam Hansen
17 The slogan echoes an ad satirized in Sinclair Lewis' 1922 novel " 'Mid pleasures and places / Wherever you may roam / Babbit: You just provide a littlebride /And we'll provide a home." (New York: Signet, 1980), 34. The slogan used in The Crowd already appears in the Pickford vehicle My Best Girl (dir. Sam Taylor, 1927) where itprompts Buddy Rogers to propose the female lead. In his review of that film, "Ladenm?dchen spielen Kino" FZ, 26 January 1928, Kracauer singles out the slogan and its mise-en sc?ne as an innovative effect. 18 "Mass Ornament" 66 (translation modified); "Die kleinen Laden 1927 (published m?dchen gehen ins Kino," FZ, 11-19 March anonymously under the title "Film und Gesellschaft"), Ornament see: Schl?pman, On Kracauer's 279-294. gender politics of Film," 99-100, and her essay "Kinosucht," "Phenomenology und Film, 33 (October 1982), 42-52; Patrice Petro, Frauen "Perceptions of Difference: Contours of a Discourse on Sexuality in Early German Film Theory," NGC 40 (Winter 1987), 115-146, 138-140. See also: Hake, "Girls and Crisis," 158-160. 19 This context is elaborated inLynn Kirby, "Gender and Advertising inAmerican Silent Film: From Early Cinema to theCrowd," Dis course, 13,2 (Spring-Summer 1991), 3-20. 20 Inka M?lder-Bach, "Der Umschlag der Negativit?t: Zur Ver von Ph?enomenologie, und schr?nkung Geschichtsphilosophie Film?sthetik in Siegfried Kracauers Metaphorik derOberfl?che,'" in Deutsche Viertrlejahresschrift, 61,2 (1987), 359-373. See also M?dler, Kracauer, 86-95. 21 "Der heutige Film und sein Publikum," FZ 30, Nov. & Dec, 1928, rpt. under the title "Film 1928," in Ornament, 296-310; 296. 22 "Ladenm?dchen," Ornament, 280. 23 I differ formThomas Elsaesser who charges that Kracauer's critique of Ideology obscures and thereby "falsifies" his proto-postmodern "concern with the cinema as a marginal sphere of life and its fasci nation as an experience of surface effects." "Cinema?The Irrespon sible Signifier or 'The Gamble with History': Film Theory or Cin ema Theory?" NGC 40 (Winter 1987), 82. For a more detailed elaboration of thisargument see: Hansen, "Decentric Perspectives," 63-65. 24 "Mass Ornament," 76 (translationmodified). 25 "Analyse eines Stadtplans," FZ (c. 1928), Ornament, 14-17. 26 "Berg- und Talbahn" FZ, 14 July 1928, rpt. in Strassen, 35-36, which appears in this issue of Qui Parle, 58. For a more skeptical
Ambivalences of the "Mass Omament"
119
Denkbild, contrasting the organized pleasures of the sequel to this Berlin Lunapark with the unruly adventures of theParis Foires, see des Kracauer's "Organisiertes Gl?ck: Zur Wiederer?ffnung Lunaparks," FZ, 8May 1930.

Amivalences of The Mass Ornament in King Vidor's The Crowd

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Ambivalences of the "Mass Ornament": King Vidor's The Crowd Author(s): Miriam Hansen Reviewed work(s): Source: Qui

of the "Mass Ornament":

KingVidor's The Crowd

Qui Parle Vol. 5, No. 2, Spring/Summer 1992

of the "Mass Ornament"

104 Miriam Hansen

Bert and hisdateon top a double-decker of Mary followJohn'sfriend

Ambivalences of the "Mass Ornament"

106 Miriam Hansen

moralisch-rosa Hautfarbe, Sie wissen doch..."). state,"Kracauer concludes,

"It is not too daring to

Ambivalences of the "Mass Ornament"

shift of emphasis from production to more advanced in theUnited States

The withdrawal substance of from worldand theconcomitant the

108 Miriam Hansen

Ambivalences of the "Mass Ornament"

the of ated through processof im images consumption-through very

110 Miriam Hansen

The discourse consumerist of in subjectivity The Crowd notonly

Ambivalences of the "Mass Ornament"

112 Miriam Hansen

of the "Mass Ornament"

the dream the of RollsRoyce ownersthat scrubgirls the dream rising of

114 Miriam Hansen

relation eachother which likewise them from among precludes knowing

Ambivalences of the "Mass Ornament"

116 Miriam Hansen

1953) 152-153;Nancy Dowd and David Shepard, King Vidor

Ambivalences of the "Mass Ornament"

of on of notion Weltzerfall Metzler, 1985) 19ff.; the (disintegration

und Literatur: Seine fr?hen Schriften 1913-1933

BarbaraCorell& Jack Zipes,NGC 5 (Spring1975),70. Also see

FZ 9 June 1927, rpt.Ornament 54; tr.

118 Miriam Hansen

Ambivalences of the "Mass Omament"

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