Let Them Eat Images

Abstract

Let Them Eat Images Daniel J. Singal (bio) Stuart Ewen and Elizabeth Ewen. Channels of Desire: Mass Images and the Shaping of American Consciousness. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. xxii 247 pp. Notes and index. $14.95 (paper). Channels of Desire begins with a sketch of a young woman from Puerto Rico named Maria Aguilar riding the subway to her job in New York’s garment district. Discomforted by the noise and jarring motion of the train, her attention is captured momentarily by an advertisement for Preparation H that promises to keep her comfortable for hours while she sits sewing dresses for the well-to-do. The scene soon shifts to La Jolla, California, where Bill O’Connor (whether these characters are real or fictional we are never told) is drinking espresso on his oceanside deck and reading a newspaper account of political troubles in Zimbabwe. The story triggers a racist stereotype in his mind, which he repeats to “five white business associates” at lunch (p. xvi). Put together, these two vignettes make manifest the underlying moral question that most deeply engages Stuart and Elizabeth Ewen. How, they implicitly ask, could American society have arrived at the point where a decent, hard-working immigrant woman like Maria is consigned to a life of blight and drudgery while a racist upper-middle-class suburbanite like Bill gets to enjoy his magnificent view and his espresso? Surely, they believe, history can help to explain why this is so. The answer, we soon discover, lies in the clever manner in which the capitalist elite has learned to use verbal and visual images to control the American people, channeling their desires away from incipient political revolt and toward the acquisition of consumer goods. Each time that the masses have threatened to rise up in righteous wrath, according to the Ewens, the elite has employed this strategy to divert them. It is a tale of perpetual co-optation, continuing right up to our own day. The story begins back in the fifteenth century with the invention of the printing press, a piece of technology whose impact, the authors explain, cut two different ways. (The Ewens, following what postmodernists would call “binary thinking,” are forever presenting things in terms of either/or categories.) Printing, we are told, could facilitate “the accumulation, reproduction, [End Page 342] and transmittal of information essential to an unfolding world market” and thus become a tool of capitalism, or it could foster the “dangerous vernacular tradition” of subversive writing exhibited by radicals like Gerard Winstanley and Thomas Paine (p. 10). These two possible uses of the press competed with each other for a time, until the issue was decided, the Ewens claim, with the invention of the so-called penny press newspaper in the 1830s, “a mass medium that was commercial in outlook and orientation, but that absorbed a vernacular idiom” (p. 11). A half-century later, publishing magnates William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer perfected the technique by pioneering the use of photographs and racist stereotypes to manipulate the populace, foreshadowing “the essential role of the image within the new, social strategy of capitalism” (p. 16). The con game had begun in earnest. Another medium in which the Ewens’s study of history discloses that game unfolding was motion pictures. The first silent films, we learn, were addressed in large measure to urban immigrants and spoke to the realities of their lives. Audiences that gathered at neighborhood nickelodeons could see their own struggles for survival shown on the screen in a melodramatic format, with the bosses and landlords invariably the villains. But this subversive cinema could not last; by the early 1920s director Cecil B. De Mille had contrived a new formula that focused on the lives of the very rich, presenting a fantasy world designed to lure the immigrants into the realm of conspicuous consumption. Instead of inspiring them to fight back, according to the authors, Hollywood was now teaching them to emulate their oppressors. The foremost arena in which such co-optation took place was fashion. In a long chapter, comprising almost half of their entire text, the Ewens detail the battle they believe has been waged ever...