White Shadows: Hollywood's Global Production of Eros and Race
This series of essays traces the culture-power production that took place in "Hollywood." Eros, race, and violence were core elements of this new culture industry's spectacular growth, and the immense wealth and power that it produced.
Production of Culture
The rise of a visual mass culture is one of the major trends of the 20th century, from origins largely in Los Angeles through the extreme saturation of daily life by images via cel phone networks, broadcasting networks, the Internet, optical and digital recording and reproduction technologies.
We thoroughly depend on image-production to "see" the global billions of human beings who populate the planet. Those billions are now united in a global network of visual exchange that constitutes an entirely new landscape of communication. Those whom we cannot see directly from our embodied selves come to us as representations ideal of what they look like, act like, what they purportedly do.
The motion picture industry is one of the key, unique features of the Los Angeles metropolis. While movies did not begin in Los Angeles, and while other cities of the globe also produced movies, Los Angeles, during nearly the entire 20th century, dominated the global film industry by producing films that set the standard for all other film communities. This Hollywood mass-cultural hegemony probably peaked in the 1920s, when the United States produced 90% of all the motion pictures on Earth, and 80% of those were produced in Southern California. But it maintained a majority of global market share until the late 20th century. Further, the initially near-total dominance in the 1920s gave it the opportunity establish the core institutions, conventions, and forms of the the new medium.
Eros and the Seduction of Power
Seduction is a leading principle of mass culture. The eroticization of visual mass culture proceeds from teh fact that human bodies are the leading subject of all photography. People have two lives in the modern age: corporal and photographic. We live in our wet, fleshy bodies, but we live beyond our skin in a surface of light that has been peeled, as it were, from our faces and arms and torsos and legs, into photographic form.
The globally-exploding image-world of the 20th and 21st centuries is not primarily technological story. It is a matter of content. The techonology always depended on the mass-consumption of the product: audiences who loved the entertainment and news value of moving, audible images. Bodies, human and increasingly naked---The eroticization of
Regimes of Censorship and Propaganda
People occupy landscapes of work, play, and home, within the vast institutional structures of industrial society and nation-states. But they also inhabit a visual landscape, composed of the visual selves of others. This interface is a circuit of influence from the points of production of images to the vast landscapes of consumption. A new layer of political economy has evolved: the production of culture, using all preexisting forms of political economy for its capital, labor, and raw materials.
Along all points in this trajectory of mass visual culture, the increasingly powerful capitalist, socialist, and communist nation-states, and the dominating industrial corporations who dominated the culture industry in a highly concentrated manner for most of the 20th century, had a direct role and interest in the content and meanings circulated in this network.
Specific actors: motion picture, radio and television broadcasting leaders, and government officials of all ranks, shaped this entire sphere of culture and power through regimes of censorship and propaganda, which are essentially two halves of the same coin. Government-Private-sector control over the content and circulation of mass culture played an decisive role in the development of mass media until the escape of information from censorship in the West in the 1960s-1990s period, and so did propaganda, the deliberate production of certain messages based on ideological principles.
Censorship-propaganda rooted in the landscapes of Los Angeles shaped global affairs. Stories of the mass media are are also stories of the fates of nation-states: World wars, the rise of fascisn amd totalitarian nation-states. and the capitalist industries that thrived in the Age of Oil.
Race and Violence
The production of still and motion images, then, has been led by the production of body-images. Race is an ideology about bodies. The 20th century was the century, as WEB DuBois correctly predicted, the century of the color-line. Race as an ideological concept, a social and legal reality, and the leading principle of unequal, unjust social division across global society. As we inquire into the rise and spread of state-sponsored, violently-enforced racism in the 20th century, a trend that peaked in the genocides of the Second World War, Hollywood-centered visual mass culture about bodies is an obviously leading institutional and regional sphere of interest.
I focus in these essays on the role played by Hollywood films in the production and reproduction of inequalities and injustice. Two principles literally embodied the soul of Hollywood: eros and race. Eros seduced while race killed.
This page has paths:
- Narrative Paths Phil Ethington
- Ghost Metropolis: Los Angeles Since 13,000, a Global History Phil Ethington
- Networks Phil Ethington
Contents of this path:
- Infinite Landscapes of the Motion Picture Industry
- Transnational Immigrant Identities: Del Río, Ahn, Hayakawa
- White Shadows in the South Seas: The Making of Imperial Hollywood in the 1920s
- Cinema, Radio, Television
- Tarzana of the Apes
- Populism and Fascism in 1930s Hollywood
- Hollywood’s White Hunters: Los Angeles in Colonial East Africa
- Global Segregation: The Inscription of Racial Injustice from Mombasa to Culver City
- Target Tokyo: Los Angeles and Accountability for U.S. War Crimes in Europe and Japan, 1943-1945
