Advertising for Affluent Consumers: Demille's Texts as Intertexts

In their study of Middletown, Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd claimed, "It is perhaps impossible to overestimate the role of motion pictures, advertising, and other forms of publicity" in the rising level of expectations sought in living standards.^[60] Indeed, film distribution and exhibition practices capitalized on the interrelatedness of these promotional forms to interest female spectators in the latest style in fashion and home furnishings. A closer scrutiny of intertextual issues shows, moreover, that contrary to the prewar years when DeMille sought to legitimate feature films in terms of genteel culture, he himself set trends for advertisers targeting middle- and upper-class readers in the 1920s. The director's visual style, in other words, became associated with escalating levels of conspicuous consumption rather than with technical advances in film as an art form. DeMille remained ambivalent about this transition in his career and objected to ad campaigns that marketed his films as spectacle. Assuming a defensive and contradictory tone, he protested to Lasky in 1922:

The handling of my pictures, from an advertising standpoint, is not in proper proportion to the importance of the productions nor the amount of money expended thereon . . . . The attitude of the publicity and sales department. . . seems to be that the only thing that there is to talk about in a DeMille picture is the size of the sets and the spectacle generally . . . . I make far more stills than any other company and there is greater attention given to gowns, detail, story and direction than in any pictures made today.^[61]

Yet the mise-en-scène of such productions as Forbidden Fruit and The Affairs of Anatol demonstrates that the director was in effect orchestrating spectacle that displaced the realist aesthetic of his Progressive Era films.

The decline of realist representation in DeMille's Jazz Age films characterized significant trends in the advertising industry as well. An accelerating pace in consumption as well as diminished middle-class sympathy for workers and immigrants were developments related to the waning of realism as a reponse to shocking inequities in urban life. Contrary to the fantasies that pervaded his Jazz Age spectacles, DeMille had earlier stated in a fan magazine that "realism. . . is the most insistent demand of the public."^[62] As he had once vitiated realist aesthetic in favor of sentimentalism in films such as the Chimmie Fadden series and Kindling , DeMille now showcased the life-style of the wealthy. An unusual film like Saturday Night (1922) that

reiterated prewar discourse regarding class and ethnic divisions, interestingly, upgraded the set decoration of the homes of the poor as well as the rich. Yet the legacy of Victorian genteel culture remained evident in the director's representational strategy' throughout the 1920s, albeit pictorial-ism now served to authenticate the commodified self. DeMille's early Jazz Age films thus provided advertisers with a primer on how to sell consumption as an American way of life. A closer focus on the intertextuality of the director's mise-en-scène and magazine ads first requires a brief overview of the consumer revolution and related developments in the advertising industry.

As Martha L. Olney demonstrates, a consumer durables revolution stimulated by credit financing and massive advertising, which became a fully deductible corporate expense after enactment of a 1917 excess profits tax, occurred during 1929-1929. She argues that a decrease in savings correlated with an increase in expeditures for major durables such as automobiles, household appliances, and radios despite a relative increment in their cost, whereas the purchase of minor durables such as home furnishings, china, artwork, and books declined in the same period. Although Olney does not explore the social significance of this shift in family expenditures, the status symbols of the middle class most likely changed from goods such as furniture and tableware, signifying gentility in social rituals, to an invention that led to a further collapse of separate spheres, the automobile. A big-ticket item, even lower-priced cars like Chevrolets cost 20 percent of a family's annual income and had to be financed on an installment plan. But automobile ownership, as the Lynds point out, was the mast important sign of a family's social standing among the younger generation. Within the context of a consumer durables revolution, then, the cultural war of the Jazz Age was a continuation of a basic conflict in values that had been occurring within a broad middle class differentiated between "old" and "new." Since social historians emphasize that working-class and immigrant groups subject to periodic layoffs had neither the disposable income nor the predilection to purchase consumer goods on credit, the democratization of luxury was for them restricted to visual appropriation.^[63] By contrast, the respectable middle class not only enjoyed increasingly seductive forms of spectacle, as exemplified by DeMille's feature films, but also had access to levels of consumption that signified a superior social status.

Although filmmakers courted a mass audience in the 1920s, in contrast to advertisers who addressed an upper-middle- and upper-class readership, Famous Players-Lasky developed an exploitation strategy that emphasized premieres at first-run theaters patronized by more affluent filmgoers. Why were DeMille's spectacles major attractions at downtown movie palaces during the Jazz Age? Why, indeed, did the director's mise-en-scène provide a useful intertext for advertisers? As Roland Marchand argues in a study in

which he singles out the director, magazine editors and copywriters borrowed from the film industry its image of a public bored with humdrum lives. DeMille articulated a viewpoint regarding the function of spectacle for the lower class that advertisers found relevant in addressing the well-to-do: "Your poor person wants to see wealth, colorful, interesting, exotic—he has an idea of it many times more brightly colored than the reality." An earlier statement reveals that the director also understood the function he performed for audiences as a showman: "The desire [for beauty] is greater than the means of gratification . . . . Give beauty to the world, and you'll be successful."^[64] Apart from glamorous representations of upper-class life in widely circulated magazines like Saturday Evening Post and Ladies' Home Journal , the influence of filmmakers like DeMille on advertising is observable in a number of industry developments during the 1920s.

Particularly significant in the evolution of advertising during the decade was the seductive and streamlined image of the "new woman." As opposed to World War I posters that emphasized maternal and nurturing qualities, the image of a young woman seated before a dresser, a standard shot in Old Wives for New, Don't Change Your Husband, Why Change Your Wife?, Forbidden Fruit , and The Affairs of Anatol , became formulaic in ads that defined the modern woman. Ladies' Home Journal —a Curtis Publishing Company product that pioneered ad stripping in 1896 so that ads were placed in a format with fiction and feature articles—increased its fashion content from 16 percent in 1918-1920 to 30 percent in 1922-1923. A major breakthrough in the use of color in magazine ads for such domestic products as bathroom towels occurred between 1924 and 1928. An emphasis on ensembles in women's apparel and accessories became popular in 1926-1927 and also served as an important theme in home furnishing, especially the decoration of bathrooms as a conspicuous showcase. DeMille's feature films served as significant intertexts for several of these developments. A trendsetter, the director featured elegant table settings, novel bathroom scenes, and ensemble, woven cane bedroom furniture in Old Wives for New in 1918. A medium close-up of Swanson sleeping on an embroidered pillowcase trimmed with lace in Don't Change Your Husband stressed the importance of fine linens in 1919. For advertisers, the streamlined Art Deco design that DeMille used so inventively with the Handschiegl color process in The Affairs of Anatol in 1921 became a signifier of modernity. An increasing use of elements of fantasy in representational strategies was countered, however, by a tradition of realism that was still persuasive in ads as opposed to film spectacle. Without question, the intertextuality of feature film and advertising was most evident in the use of narrative to sell products. Copywriters created social tableaux in the pictorial tradition and employed the conventions of melodrama to dramatize consumer desire for commodities. As Motion Picture Nays observed, DeMille engaged in a reverse practice by

inserting product labels in Why Change Your Wife? , surely a blatant mode of incorporating advertising in filmic narration. Undoubtedly most important in these narratives was the rationalization of a consumer ethos in terms of the Victorian rhetoric of uplift. Ad men, as Marchand argues, thought of themselves as "apostles of modernity" with a mission to assuage anxiety, provoked by modernization and to educate the public, especially women, about the advantages of using products to achieve a distinctive life-style. Ads created by these men were "secular sermons" that bestowed upon goods spiritual qualities transcending the mere satisfaction of material needs. The sacrosanct tone associated with the refinement of highbrow culture, ironically, was transferable to mass cultural forms that stimulated the growth of consumption and commercialized leisure.^[65]

A filmmaker who shared the elite socioeconomic background of men in the advertising business, DeMille, too, spoke in terms of a mission that was part of his family's theatrical legacy to use the stage as a pulpit. At the beginning of the 1920s, he articulated a faith in cultural stewardship that belonged to the Progressive Era: "I believe that the people who make up the middle and sometimes the lower elements of human society have a keen grasp on the essentials of drama and life; that their appreciation is worthy of our cultivation." Similarly, he summed up his achievement toward the end of the decade: "I believe I have had an obvious effect upon American life. I have brought a certain sense of beauty and luxury into everyday existence, all jokes about ornate bathrooms and de luxe boudoirs aside."^[66] Such sentiment was undoubtedly shared by advertisers who reproduced the director's representational strategy to mediate the experience of modernity for affluent consumers. DeMille himself set an example, as he not only preached uplift through consumption but led a baronial life-style that included a hillside mansion, chauffeured limousine, yacht, and Western style ranch.^[67] Yet in response to critics who began to dismiss his productions as ostentatious exercises in set and costume design, he returned to the Bible as an inspiration for The Ten Commandments (1923) and articulated a nostalgic vision of America that still resonated in a consumer culture.