Introduction
If we are looking for the relations between literature and society, we cannot either separate out this one practice from a formed body of other practices, nor when we have identified a particular practice can we give it a uniform, static and ahistorical relation to some abstract social formation.
—RAYMOND WILLIAMS
In December 1913 Cecil B. DeMille abandoned a stage career that was his family legacy and boarded a train for California to assume a post as director-general of a recently organized film studio, the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company. A year later, his indomitable mother, Beatrice, who continued to manage his debt-ridden finances and to make useful contacts in New York, wrote: "Who should walk into the office this morning but Mary Rinehart. She has a fine idea about a combination of Movie and play. . . if you want it pipe up quick. She is pretty valuable these days the only writer [sic ] except London and Tarkington who can and does get $6000 for the serial rights alone of a short story."[1] A business opportunity for a noted theatrical agent who was also a devoted mother, this episode illustrates the strategy developed by the Lasky Company, subsequently Famous Players-Lasky, to resituate cinema for "better" audiences with adaptations of literary works. At the time the studio was founded, the motion picture industry was just beginning to showcase feature-length films in lavish downtown movie palaces to acquire cultural legitimacy. Indeed, an argument repeated in trade journals representative of industry discourse called for upgrading production and exhibition practices to attract "high-class" as opposed to "low-class" patrons to film theaters.
DeMille, who represented cultural capital as a member of a distinguished Broadway family, quickly won acclaim by producing feature film adaptations of stage melodramas, novels, and short stories as intertexts familiar to middle-class readers. The director, in other words, inserted the photoplay into genteel culture by exploiting parallel discourses deemed highbrow in an era characterized by conspicuous racial, ethnic, and class distinctions. An adaptation of Carmen (1915), starring Metropolitan Opera diva Geraldine Farrar, for example, attracted a blue blood audience to its Boston premiere.
Although emphasis on the intertextuality of feature film, legitimate theater, and grand opera at first precluded recognition of DeMille's own claim to authorship, by the time the Lasky Company merged with Famous Players in 1916, he had established credentials in his own right. Critical discourse on film authorship in fact constituted a sign of the increasing recognition of motion pictures, at first compared to theatrical productions and paintings by famous artists, as a separate art form.
Why was DeMille—today mostly remembered, if not dismissed, as the director of overblown biblical epics—an exemplar of genteel culture in the early twentieth century? What confluence of economic, social, and cultural forces enabled him to construct feature film as spectacle articulating middle-class ideology? Why was the legacy of Victorian pictorialism that characterized his signature as a filmmaker so influential in classic Hollywood cinema, and how is it still evident in today's postmodern electronic age? And why did the director, having legitimated film with reference to intertexts in highbrow culture during the Progressive Era, become a fashion trendsetter who influenced consumer behavior in the 1920s? Answers to such questions require an interdisciplinary perspective based on close readings of film as texts—a practice eschewed in traditional historical works—in relation to studies of the genteel middle class by American cultural and social historians. Acknowledging the failure of the historical profession to develop a vocabulary to analyze visual media, Neil Harris nevertheless asks a pertinent question: "What use is the demonstration of changes in visual coding unless some larger implications can be developed?"[2] I focus therefore on the relationship between texts as cultural commodities and the social world in which they circulated as a sign of gentility. A scrutiny of middle-class culture, moreover, provides evidence of how the dynamics of social change influenced the construction of feature film, addressed first to cultivated readers and then across class and ethnic lines to a mass audience consisting increasingly of women.
Perhaps most significant in the evolution of the middle class, increasingly differentiated between "old" property owners and "new" salaried professionals, was the privileging of sight in a cultural formation dominated by spectacle. An enthusiastic clergyman reacting to a DeMille epic stated rather succinctly that sight constituted "the most royal of all the faculties." Genteel response to a pluralistic urban milieu populated by threatening strangers thus stressed visual codes such as self-theatricalization in social rituals as a sign of good breeding, as Karen Halttunen argues.[3] Yet social entertainment as well as the staging of private theatricals were hardly confined to the well-appointed interiors of the domestic or private sphere. Indeed, the spectacle of elaborate parlor games became interchangeable with displays mounted by department stores, museums, world's fairs, and civic pageantry, as well as sets designed for stage and film melodrama. Antithetical to such
an emphasis upon appearances, the mechanism of production in genteel culture was tucked behind living room drapery in fashionable homes and hidden from view in spectacular venues in the public sphere. The moral legacy of sentimentalism and evangelical Protestantism, so essential to the formation of an "old" middle class characterized by probity and self-restraint, was thus diluted as home and marketplace became indistinguishable. Although the cinema was associated with storefront nickelodeons for the lower orders, the moving image became a crucial text in a consumer culture that was at first an expression of the social ambition of the respectable middle class. A filmmaker who capitalized on the congruence of cultural forms in genteel society, DeMille not only replicated the familiar sights of both the private and public spheres in his pictorial mise-en-scène but was so innovative that he left his own stamp on "the society of the spectacle."
DeMille quickly achieved product differentiation for Lasky Company films through dramatic low-key lighting effects marketed as "Lasky lighting" or "Rembrandt lighting." Although he borrowed the Victorian trope of darkness and light from a rich tradition of pictorial realism, the director achieved international renown with inventive lighting in combination with color tinting in The Cheat (1915), an early feature starring stage actors Fannie Ward and Sessue Hayakawa. Critics acclaimed his feature films as artistically superior productions that equalled or surpassed legitimate stagecraft. Yet, to the extent that film language was articulated with respect to established forms of genteel culture, stylistic or technical advances became part of status quo discourse. The evolution of feature film in relation to existing cultural practice thus meant the articulation of middle-class ideology in an era that stressed Americanization as a response to cultural diversity. An essential aspect of representations that commodified the urban "Other" as spectacle for voyeuristic consumers, for example, were Orientalist fantasies. A Western discourse that projected a taste for sybaritic luxury and depraved sexuality onto new immigrants perceived as threats to the existing body politic, Orientalism pervaded DeMille's texts.[4] Such was especially the case in the Jazz Age films that rationalized consumption in the sacrosanct terms of cultural refinement, on the one hand, and bizarre Orientalist behavior, on the other. Contrary to the earlier films of the Progressive Era, however, DeMille challenged middle-class mores by setting consumer trends in fashion and home furnishing during the 1920s. As a matter of fact, his spectacles provided the advertising industry with valuable intertexts to promote consumption, albeit in mise-en-scène increasingly noted for outré set and costume design rather than innovative lighting.
At the center of the director's famous sex comedies and melodramas was the transformation of the sentimental heroine into a sexual playmate in a childless marriage. A symbol of the consumer culture, the "new woman" was no longer a thrift-conscious and resourceful housewife but a fashion
plate who embodied market forces invading the privatized domestic sphere. Abstraction or reification of social relations that earlier characterized performance rituals as a coded sign of gentility in well-appointed parlors now permeated the boudoir or back region of respectable homes. DeMille's Jazz Age films thus represented matrimony as a game of musical chairs with spouses as interchangeable parts, a scenario that exemplified the dominance of exchange value in commodity production. According to Georg Lukács, who articulated the notion of reification as a dominant force in bourgeois existence, "the essence of commodity-structure has often been pointed out. Its basis is that a relation between people takes on the character of a thing [my italics]." Furthermore, the production of oversized spectacle itself constituted a form of consumption uniting filmmaker and spectator alike in commodity fetishism, that is, the displacement of desire from human relations onto material objects. Assessing "the society of the spectacle," Guy Debord argues that "the tangible world is replaced by a selection of images which exist above it, and which simultaneously impose themselves as the tangible."[5] As DeMille demonstrated in the Biblical Prologue of The Ten Commandments (1923), even religious or spiritual uplift was subject to commodification. At the end of his tenure as director-general of Famous Players-Lasky in 1925, his texts had become a primer not only on the reification of social relations in a consumer culture but on the religious spirit itself as a consumable image inspiring awestruck audiences.
Any study of DeMille's silent film career must take into account an embarrassment of riches with respect to source materials accruing from singular efforts to create an industry persona. Convinced, but scarcely assured, of his stature in motion picture history, the director built a vault on his hilltop estate to house the nitrate prints that constituted his filmography. With respect to the silent era, a total of twenty-four out of seventy films were produced in the brief period of time before the Lasky Company merged with Famous Players in 1916. When DeMille left Famous Players-Lasky in 1925 after protracted disagreement over his escalating production budgets, he had made all but four of the fifty-two films that comprised his silent productions. Aside from prints of most of his films, the director amassed a vast collection of documents, including correspondence, contracts, financial statements, interview transcripts, scrapbooks, scripts, production and still photos, preproduction artwork, memorabilia, movie trailers, and radio broadcast recordings. An invaluable resource, much of this material has been bequeathed to research institutions, notably Brigham Young University, although correspondence dating back to the earliest years was lost for decades and has only recently been recovered.[6] Unfortunately, the director's personal possessions and collections of objets d'art, which comprised valuable sources for material culture studies, were auctioned by Christie's in 1988.[7]
In sum, DeMille left enormous traces of his authorship long before François Truffaut and Andrew Sarris made the term auteur fashionable in cinema studies. Precisely because I am interested in the relationship between early feature film and genteel middle-class culture, I chose not to employ auteurist reformulations such as recent Foucauldian concepts of an author-function , in which the director is displaced by textual processes as these construct an implied narrator. The filmmaker has been disembodied, as David Bordwell argues, as components of a signature style, and thus reappears in many studies as the text's mise-en-scène or editing. As a cultural historian who acknowledges the value of critical theory, I nevertheless subscribe to a belief in human agency, however restricted, and do not construe the relationship between a film director and a specific historical context as a theoretical abstraction; thus I write about DeMille not only as a figure who was shaped and influenced by the forces of his era but as a filmmaker who left his own signature on the culture industry.[8]
Since DeMille was such a prolific filmmaker in the silent period, the selection of specific texts for close readings proved to be a challenging task. I concentrate more on the lesser known but acclaimed features of the Progressive Era because these are more informative about the ways in which cinema was legitimated as art, more varied in terms of genre formulations, more daring in the development of film technique such as lighting effects and color processes, and more revealing as representations of a middle-class culture in transition. Discussion of the better-known sex comedies and melodramas of the Jazz Age has been restricted to a single, lengthy chapter. Absent are analyses of films like The Girl of the Golden West (1915), which circulated in the exemplary Before Hollywood archival film series, and Male and Female (1919) famous for its bathroom sequence, as well as lesser-known efforts such as Till I Come Back to You (1918) and Triumph (1924), justifiably excluded at the DeMille retrospective at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto.[9]
Although it would surely be useful to expand the intertextual approach of this study by comparing DeMille's texts with those of other directors, notably D. W. Griffith, or analyzing Carmen in relation to movements such as Film d'Art, or scrutinizing Lasky Company and Famous Players-Lasky features with those of other producers, I have chosen instead to ask different questions. "The concept of inter-textuality, " as Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott argue, need not refer to "the system of references to other texts which can be discerned within the composition of a specific individual text [but may refer] to the social organisation of the relations between texts within specific conditions of reading."[10] I concentrate therefore on the relationship between DeMille's feature films and traditional forms of genteel culture during a significant moment of transition not only in the film industry but also in American history.[11] Assessing a lack that characterizes the three volumes in the prizewinning History of the American Cinema —and
in my view, film history in general—Dana Polan states in an otherwise laudable review that texts are unrelated to context as American society recedes into the background.[12] Unlike film historians who analyze the evolution of film langauge and/or production, distribution, and exhibition practices, I focus on DeMille's texts as these relate to class, ethnic, and gender hierarchies signifying the exercise of power in the "real" world. A film history that takes into account the dynamics of social change outside the studio gate, this study explores the issue of intertextuality from a perspective that emphasizes the congruence of feature film with established cultural forms as a sign of gentility. Such an approach best clarifies the director's significance both as an auteur who legitimated cinema and as an architect of modern consumption. Straddling the late Victorian era and a consumer culture that shifted into high gear in the 1920s, DeMille personified a transformation in genteel middle-class culture whose trajectory he first mapped and then influenced as a major filmmaker.