Demographic Angst: Cultural Narratives and American Films of the 1950s by Alan Nadel

Abstract

Reviewed by: Demographic Angst: Cultural Narratives and American Films of the 1950s by Alan Nadel Dennis Bingham Alan Nadel. Demographic Angst: Cultural Narratives and American Films of the 1950s. Rutgers UP, 2017. xiii + 215 pp. In his long career, Alan Nadel has moved from scholarship on authors such as Ralph Ellison, J. D. Salinger, and August Wilson to work in American and cultural studies as well as film and media studies. His influential 1995 book, Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age, explores issues related to America and the Cold War in film and fiction. Nadel combines macro sociology and history with a patina of New Criticism, regarding the text as a closed system for creating meaning that is determined by the critic. Demographic Angst, Nadel's return to 1950s films, reads like a long-deferred sequel to Containment Culture. The new book focuses on the tension between majoritarian culture and the widespread demographic changes felt in America after World War II. Nadel digs into movies made in a postwar Hollywood harried by falling audience numbers due to television, the growth of suburbs, and families busy raising children. The film industry was also racked by the House Un-American Activities Committee-incited blacklist of suspected subversives in the studios and the Supreme Court-ordered breakup of the vertically integrated studio system. The author tells us at both the beginning and the end of Demographic Angst that he is examining "canonical" films (xii). This is a contested concept, given that, say, a film historian might have a different 1950s canon than would an auteurist, a feminist, or a queer theorist. Moreover, he includes forgotten films that are in nobody's canon, such as You Gotta Stay Happy (1948), Susan Slept Here (1954), The Teahouse of the August Moon (1956), and Sayonara (1957). It would have been better to state his purpose as studying films that typify what audiences saw during the era. The book never settles between typical films and any particular canon. This is one of the issues that makes it finally so uneven. Nadel starts out with what appears to be a feminist approach. He regards the portrayals of women in the deathless classics All About Eve (1950), Sunset Boulevard (1950), and Singin' in the Rain (1952) as reflections of the breathtaking misogyny found in postwar writings such as Modern Woman: The Lost Sex (1947) by Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia Farnham, which maintains that first-wave feminism aimed for "the achievement of maleness by the female" (qtd. in Nadel 87). It is plausible to see this famous trifecta of films about Hollywood and Broadway as "reflect[ing] the historically specific conditions of a postwar America that marshals an array of powerful narratives to [End Page 539] discipline women who wish to retain their prewar or wartime agency" (88). However, to view those movies in only these terms is not just to ignore the pleasure they undeniably give to millions but to find cultural import their sole meaning. For example, in the "Moses Supposes" number in Singin' in the Rain, "the tempo accelerates a dozen times" (42) because that was "exactly what the assembly lines were doing in Detroit." Meanwhile, the befuddled elocution instructor in the same number, a comic foil who could have stepped out of the Marx Brothers' Horse Feathers (1932), represents professors teaching veterans going to college on the GI Bill, "men who had commanded planes in bombing raids over Berlin or led platoons through the jungles of Guadalcanal" (43). Of course, none of this can actually be found in a film set in a movie studio in the late 1920s, when the film takes place. Moreover, Singin' would probably still have been made had World War II and its aftermath never happened: the chief causes of the anxiety motivating Hollywood to make the cycle of self-reflexive, introspective films that includes Singin' and Sunset were the court case against film studios' monopoly of the industry and the national launch of television. These threats had been looming since the late 1930s and were put off for several years because of World War II. Thus, 1950s Hollywood was in crisis while the rest of the country...