An Exploration of Intellectual Kitsc

The Purple Rose of Popular Culture Theory: An Exploration of Intellectual KitschAuthor(s): David GrimstedReviewed work(s):Source: American Quarterly, Vol. 43, No. 4 (Dec., 1991), pp. 541-578Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2713081 .Accessed: 14/12/2012 04:20

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The Purple Rose of Popular Culture Theory: An Exploration of Intellectual Kitsch

DAVID GRIMSTED The University of Maryland

WHEN CECILIA TRIES TO EXPLAIN "GOD TO THE HANDSOME, PITH- helmeted explorer, Tom Baxter, who has stepped off a silver screen somewhere in depression New Jersey to woo her, she gropes: "The, the reason for everything. The, the world. The, the universe." Tom is puzzled and then answers: "O, I think I know what you mean: the two men who wrote The Purple Rose of Cairo, Irving Sachs and R. H. Levine...." Cecilia corrects him. She's thinking of "something much bigger than that," but, as her explanation develops, it's clear that her religious faith, sincere as it is, is an adjunct to her regular deep worship at the movies. "No, think for a minute. A, a reason for everything. 0-otherwise it would be a movie with no point. And no happy ending." 91

Through creating the world of Sachs and Levine, Woody Allen ponders the ways in which popular or mass or mechanical culture interacts with the lives of ordinary people who enjoy and consume it, are drugged and stimulated by it. Because the movie is both an example and an exploration of the influences of mass culture, it offers a way of judging the richness of the emotive and intellectual understanding that popular art may possess and encourage. As a voice in the twentieth- century discourse about the influences of popular or mass culture on society, the film also questions some of the definitional simplicities and dubious presuppositions of most intellectual-academic contributors to this cultural conversation. When it was released, it was a movie

David Grimsted has had a long interest in popular culture and is currently working on a book on rioting in nineteenth-century America.

American Quarterly, Vol. 43, No. 4 (December 1991) C 1991 American Studies Association 541


542 AMERICAN QUARTERLY

that appealed reasonably broadly, made money and an argument, was both readily accessible and (by any definition of the term that's been offered) avant-garde, and was lightly entertaining and entwined with subtle social reflections on class and sexual roles as well as on how popular culture reverberates in the lives of people as ordinary as any of us.

The hero of Allen's film-who is the juvenile lead in that of Sachs and Levine- searches "in vain" for the purple rose of Cairo: "A pharoah had a rose painted purple for his queen, and now, the story says, purple roses grow wild in her tomb." Like many symbols in the film, the purple rose is an amusing Hollywood escapist cliche and a touching icon of both the ideal love Tom and Cecilia seek and the satisfying art audiences want. How does human artifice, the gilded lily or purple rose of creativity, Allen asks, flower toward a cultural product that large numbers of people find engrossing? Much of the film's flavor grows from the way Allen encourages his audience to laugh at people taken in by and giving out cliches, popular and intellectual, even while he encourages them to respect the aspiration underlying the inevitably large limitations in all creation and consumption of art or of ideas.

Films, like all cultural-intellectual creations, participate in their society's public conversation, and Allen's comment in Purple Rose per- tains most directly to broad twentieth-century theories about the nature and effects of mass culture. This theorizing has gone forth in large degree segregated from the closest studies of popular American culture, first produced in numbers in the 1930s, as the scholarly adjunct of the positive emphasis on American traditions that cushioned the shock of the depression. Perry Miller's The New England Mind became the towering study of popular culture, based on the Puritan era's sermons and religious tracts, both previously neglected as beneath intellectual consideration.2 Since the 1930s, there has run a rippling brook-par- alleling the mighty, murky river of texts on politics, diplomacy, ec- onomics, social groups, and great art-of explorations of popular art, religion, newspapers, magazines, songs, humor, stories, symbols, novels, entertainments, habits, and fads. Such studies, of course, vary in quality, but all call attention to significant aspects of popular taste and reality. Each work argues simply, and sensibly enough, that the chosen subject is something which many people find significant and so provides telling glimpses of those who draw interest or amusement from it.

Most of the better studies of popular culture have been peripheral


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to the theorizing about the field that has engaged many twentieth- century intellectuals and academics, especially those involved in the highly evaluative argument that I'll dub the "classical" pop culture debate, in part because it has moral roots in Greco-Roman allusions and in part because it suggests how quickly classics come and go in the twentieth century.3 To a lesser degree, it is also true of the "postclassical" theoretical argument, so labelled here because of its ties to poststructuralism, which promptly (often in alliance, loyal or uneasy, with feminism and a modulated Marxism) usurped and incorporated the brief academic authority of semiotics, structuralism, and decon- structive Derridadaism. While every side in this theoretical war over popular culture made contributions, substantial understanding of particular artifacts has generally been proportional to interest in the text and its readers rather than in general theory. Like the theoretical works, Allen's film is not a study of a strand of popular culture, but a reflection on its broad influences. It uses movies as its illustrative example to explore the meaning of the mechanical arts for its dedicated consumers.

To understand and evaluate any cultural comment, one has to listen as closely as one can to what is said and to understand as far as possible how that reverberates within the general cultural conversation in which it occurs. I'll follow this structure of observant eavesdropping as I attempt to "hear" the film accurately and then to integrate its voice into modem popular culture discourse, most of which is spoken from academic-intellectual pages.' My general argument is that, if one reads Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo well, one comes to read the "elite" or "less popular" voices discussing the same issue more warily.

The Comment

Much of Allen's work explores art's relation to life through illusion- reality devices. Play It Again, Sam on stage (1969) and screen (1973) had the Bogart of Casablanca provide the macho advice that compli- cates the romantic life of a mild Everyman. In Allen's God (A Play) of 1972, the performers and the alleged writers both played and argued about their roles and options, while the audience-performers similarly disputed and defined their illusion of reality. A 1975 Allen short story featured a "box" that let a contemporary lecher and Madame Bovary shuttle between nineteenth-century Yonville and present-day Manhattan for an affair. The best joke involved the consternation in college



literature classes when leisure-suited Sidney Kugelmass appeared in the Flaubert novel and when Emma Bovary left it for her mad Manhattan weekend. "Well I guess the mark of a classic," ponders a Stanford professor (one probably committed to the school's sanctified syllabus), "is that you can reread it a thousand times and always find something new."5

Purple Rose is a more sustained, thoughtful, and caring handling of the role of art in people's lives through the fantasy of fictional "real" people interacting with fictional "fictional" ones. The film comedy is less brittle because it is less dependent on the central intellectual problem/joke and more focused on exploring culture's role in bridging the gap between human and aesthetic aspiration and accomplishment. In contrast to the most obvious theatrical predecessor of the film, Pir- andello's plays, Purple Rose is much less infatuated with the illusion- reality idea and more interested in the limitations of life and art and their interaction.6 Pirandello makes his "real" characters and situations grossly stagy and melodramatic, while Allen's context is that of social realism -not the glitzy Manhattan and Hollywood of culture's creators but the shabby New Jersey midlands of its consumers. This makes Purple Rose both moving and funny, a comedy peculiarly gentle and touching without sacrifice of intellectual vigor in the handling of theme. Allen reverses what William Dean Howells said Americans liked- tragedies with happy endings -and offers a comedy of compassionate ambiguity about life's sadness ending where it begins.7 The film, like the season it's set in, is not a green but a winter comedy.

The film is encased in one of Allen's film quotations, Fred Astaire singing Irving Berlin's "Cheek to Cheek" -a ballad affirming a car- dinal tenet of American popular culture: that love alone matters. The first quotation is only aural, but Fred Astaire's small but gracefully unstrained voice perfectly evokes the movies. We hear "Heaven-I'm in heaven" as the Orion picture's symbol of star-lit sky flashes, and the song continues during the credits, printed simply so as not to distract from the listening. And perhaps this helps one catch subconsciously the undertone of realistic sadness that accompanies the song's platitudes about romantic love:

My heart beats so that I can hardly speak, And I seem to find the happiness I seek....

Yes, seem-the fantasy partly admitting its grounding in wishes as much as actuality, and continuing:


THE PURPLE ROSE 545

And the cares that hang around me through the week Seem to vanish like a gambler's lucky streak.

"Seem" again, but now tied to everyday worry that seems to disappear not like a losing streak but a lucky one. Winning, climbing the highest peak, that lucky streak-in short, high aspirations -are given up for the seeming fulfillment of love.

The credits end with a change in the song's tempo. Astaire begs, "Dance with me" and the film opens on a theater's Hollywood movie poster with its siren call of exotic pleasures and wealthy graciousness: a sphinx in the desert with a man in a pith helmet. The camera then pans up the poster to a champagne glass and an elegant roadster in front of a New York skyline with the black shape in the center turning into an elegantly gowned, elongated, art deco woman. As Astaire's voice fades into the final "Heaven," Allen cuts to a close-up of Cecilia, who sees her heaven in the advertisement. With a mittened hand to her mouth, she stares dreamy-eyed, poorly dressed, and radiantly lovely in her worship. And then a letter dropped by a man putting up the new title on the marquee almost hits Cecilia; the thud breaks her dream. Like Cecilia, the spectator is both transported and then threatened: the first words of the film become its theme and the audience's wish throughout, "Oh, Cecilia, be careful. Are you all right?"

She leaves, followed by the manager's promise that she's "gonna like this one because it's more romantic." And Allen cuts to the scenes that compose the other major parts of Cecilia's life, work and home, which make clear why the movies matter to her. The first ten scenes of the film alternate among these three parts of Cecilia's existence; this quarter of the film provides a real-life prologue that smooths acceptance of the device when Cecilia's Hollywood-made illusion enters and briefly transforms her life. Through these scenes that develop Cecilia's situation, her limitations, and her gentle integrity, Allen turns the film's gimmick into a moving, as well as amusing, exploration of how mass culture interacts with those most deeply involved with it.

The second scene takes place in a restaurant. The camera focuses on the full-screen face of an unhappy woman customer complaining that she'd ordered oatmeal before her eggs, while a harassed and hard- working but barely competent Cecilia offers the most common words in her work life, "Oh, sorry . . . sorry." While working, Cecilia rambles on with Jane, her sister-waitress, about films and stars. The



dreamworld on screen is no more important to Cecilia than her vicarious involvement with the people who embody real fantasy. When she mentions Lew Ayres, Jane interrupts "I love Lew Ayres' looks. Do you think he's married?" Cecilia is shocked at such ignorance. "Is he mar-Are you crazy? Yes, he's married to Ginger Rogers. God. They got married on a boat off the island of Catalina. . . . He used to be married to Lola Lane, but Ginger's much better for him. She's so lovely." Rather than confusing screen stories with real life, dedicated moviegoers bring to their watching a rich array of the "facts" of real life, drawn from Screen Stories. Even the names of fictitious characters are replaced by their impersonators in memory: Lew Ayres, Ginger Rogers, Mia Farrow's sister. As the waitresses work and talk, their boss, the voice of capitalism, intrudes, "Let's go, girls. Let's go, Cecilia." After another "sorry," the boss tells Jane, "Your sister is slow." When she apologizes for Cecilia, he informs her and us, "La- dies, there's a depression on," and threatens that there are "others who would like this job." Visually underlining the point of dividing labor, he squeezes between the women twice and makes a threat in his off- screen line as the scene closes, "Come on, Cecilia. Shape up."

Allen cuts to the third part of Cecilia's life, her husband Monk pitching pennies with his buddies in front of a grimly closed factory. Told of Cecilia's approach, Monk moves toward her, his outstretched arms turning to an outstretched hand. "Boy, am I glad to see you. You got any dough?" Cecilia, looking tired and cold, grasps a bag of laundry, part of the work she does to pay the bills because Monk has been out of a job for the two years since the factory closed. Neither Cecilia nor the audience believes Monk when he says he's looking for a job, but there's truth in his self-justifications: "Did I close the factory? ... Do you think I like scratching around for work? Livin' like a bum these last two years?" Cecilia's plaint, less financial than psychological, is that Monk never pays real attention to her anymore. Their funda- mental argument is over leisure choices: Cecilia wants him to go to the movies to share her dreams of gentle love where "you could forget your troubles a little."

Monk makes excuses and finally lays down the law: "Cecilia, you like sitting through that junk, okay? I'm gonna shoot crap, okay?" He rejects mass culture for the male working-class culture of craps and cards, beer and broads, sometimes punctuated with a smack to the wife


THE PURPLE ROSE 547

to prove to her "you're not my boss." He cajoles Cecilia, even loves her, but for him she is more a source of funds and comforts than basic concern. When he takes the laundry from her so Cecilia can get money out of her purse, he glances over his shoulder at the boys, embarrassed that they might see him even briefly supporting woman's work. It's a gesture as subtle as any in the works of Jane Austen or Henry James that reveals basic moral orientation a quiet counterpart to Monk's calculated enthusiasm when he runs to Cecilia and his real commitment as he runs back to the boys clapping his hands, "Let's go."

So Cecilia goes to the movies alone, saying a little embarrassedly after the two customers ahead of her each ask for two tickets, "just one tonight, please Doris." She enters happily, buys popcorn, goes into the crowded theater, and awaits the magic to begin, which it does, in black and white, of course. The RKO logo and credits proceed fully except for the omission of a director- with one cut to Cecilia's engrossed face. Here the parallel titles of film and the film within a film, and the lengthiness of the excerpts from the latter, make clear that this is a movie about people watching movies -in fact, about us as audience.

The film that we watch the 1930s audience watching, the central illustration in the movie's discourse on popular culture, is a product of both Allen's sharp knowledge of earlier films -their look, their plots, their types, even the hard, more mechanical edge to their sound and of his affection for them that allows his example to be honest in acknowledging substantial simplemindedness without turning it into a caricature of stupidity.8 Allen's strategy is very different from that of Shakespeare in his Pyramus and Thisbe episode or of Dickens in his descriptions of the Crummels or of Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen in Singin in the Rain's reprise of silent movies, all of whom provide rich farce with plentiful nudges assuring audiences of their vast aesthetic superiority to those who could enjoy such stuff. The 1930s Purple Rose aims at simple entertainment, not art. But it entertains with sufficient competence so that those who enjoy it become not a parcel of fools or yokels, but peers from an earlier period, in search, like the 1980s audience, of an evening's amusement. Allen ties the film watchers to the filmed watchers not only visually -we watch it first over their heads as we watch the 1980s film over the heads of those in front of us -but in essential vision and response as well.

Only after the inner movie's hero ensconced in his luxury, art deco



penthouse, announces, "Jason, I'm bored. I'm bored with cocktail parties and opening nights" -after we glimpse the film world with its attenuated dissatisfactions so different from Cecilia's problems -does the audience disappear as buffer between actual watchers and what the filmed audience is watching. Allen again focuses on Cecilia only when a character in the 1930s film toasts with champagne "to all the exotic and romantic places in the world," the verbal equivalent to the sphinx at the bottom of the poster at which Cecilia had initially gazed. We see the rest of the audience engrossed and focus briefly on a middle- aged couple-the woman smiling and the man reaching to hold her hand, wife and husband warmed by the pleasant fantasy and by re- membered love-who reflect Cecilia's wish for such intimacy with Monk.

The RKO movie jumps to the tomb scene. When Tom Baxter in pith helmet enters with a sweet "hi there," Allen again cuts to Cecilia, mesmerized in the film world even while she puts popcorn in her mouth. The 1930s film continues with Tom coming back to New York on a lark. He accompanies the group to the Copacabana where the elegant girl on the poster sings. Tom is so entranced that the hero observes, "I think our poetic little archaeologist is about to make a discovery." The song with which this scene ends is sung with brittle sophistication, but the words fit Allen's gentle theme, too: "Ours could be a different sort of love affair. . . . Let's just take the dare, dear . . . and who cares how it turns out?"

The second restaurant scene begins with Cecilia dreaming of the film and neglecting a customer's gently repeated request for a check. Her boss angrily awakens her to her duty and she offers another opening, "Oh sorry." Cecilia talks her sister into going to see the film with her and the scene ends with the boss's injunction, "Come on, girls. Come on." They go to the movies, and, with them, we see an intermediate bit of the black and white film where Tom arrives in the penthouse and identifies himself to the audience. "Twenty-four hours ago . . . I didn't know any of you wonderful people, and here I am now on the verge of a madcap Manhattan weekend." Like the audience, this Chi- cagoan is simple and unsophisticated, not up to "martinis very dry," but willing to wait for "that glass of champagne at the Copacabana."

The next scenes mark the sad climax of Cecilia's domestic and working life. She returns home from the movies earlier than Monk had expected and she finds her husband and another woman, Olga, in


THE PURPLE ROSE 549

the bedroom. With uproarious laughter, Monk introduces Olga as "an acrobat," and Cecilia as "my ball and chain, or she tries to be." When Cecilia begins to pack, Monk cajoles -he loves her meatloaf, even her, and he needs her and offers excuses for his occasional brutality: "I drink, I get crazy. It's not me, it's the whiskey." He tries barking orders and threatens violence. When all fails, he yells down the stairs, another motif of the film, "You'll be back."

She returns to the bleak room and the sound of his snoring after a short scene in the near-deserted night street. Cecilia, pathetic and wind- blown with her suitcase in hand, passes the Jewel theater. The lights are now out on The Purple Rose of Cairo marquee. She faces blackness, except for music and laughter and some male shapes behind the blinds of a tavern window. Two other women suggest her only alternative to going home. One highly rouged, sad-faced prostitute, whose head fills the screen, says wearily, "Oh, jeez, look at all those guys. C'mon honey, we're gonna make a buck." The two women walk toward their destination and Cecilia, no less weary than they, turns back toward her dark doorway. The next day, over another broken plate, she' s fired. Standing next to her sister in the center of the diner, Cecilia pleads that she'll "be more careful" and Jane threatens "if she goes, then I go too." When the boss says "fine," Cecilia assures him that her sister didn't mean that and reminds Jane, "No, you've got kids." So Jane stays on. Class, family, and female solidarity are broken by the primary demands of children and by capitalism's final words (as they earlier had been by the boss's body): "You're fired."

Cecilia, of course, has nowhere to go but to the movies. She cries softly at first, but as the film plays over and over again she forgets her grief in her involvement. Suddenly, Tom, in his "wonderful people" speech, glances at Cecilia and stumbles over "I'm on the verge of a madcap . . . Manhattan . . . weekend," and begins to talk to Cecilia. Soon he slips off his sharply bright, black-and-white screen into her drab, technicolor New Jersey.

The 1930s film characters try to call him back- "listen, old sport, you're on the wrong side" -and reach for him, but can't escape the plane of the screen. Only Tom's true love, of course conquering all, allows him to break through. When Cecilia gently explains to Tom that he's in the movie, he answers, "Wrong, Cecilia, I'm free. After two thousand performances in the same monotonous routine, I'm free." So Tom Baxter, "poet, adventurer, explorer," escapes the



constraints of popular culture to start exploring real life. As the plot of the Sachs-Levine film halts, Allen's begins with what Cecilia the next evening will call "a whirlwind of a day, don't you think?"

Allen's remaining scenes alternate among four sets. 1) In the first, the characters stranded on the black-and-white screen and people in the audience bicker with each other as they reflect on life and art. The projector continues to run because how else could Tom ever return? 2) Hollywood folk are seen first on their home ground, and then in New Jersey at the theater where they come to try to restore their control over, and profits from, their mass medium. 3) In scenes between Tom and Cecilia, Tom introduces her to perfect love and Cecilia introduces him to a very imperfect world. 4) There is the interaction between Gil Shepherd, the actor who played Tom, and Cecilia whom he woos hoping she'll reject Tom, who will then have no alternative but to go back to the film, to Manhattan, and to the elongated singer, whom Cecilia can't believe Tom finds "too bony."

The "stranded" actors and audience become Allen's intellectual- comic Greek chorus. They present interpretations of popular culture. The characters left on screen, and Tom and Gil when they join them, bicker most heatedly over their relative importance to the story. They also snarl at audience complaints about the lack of action, and indulge in philosophic discourse that allows Allen to tease ideas that higher artists and intellectuals have sanctified. For example, a communist actor denounces the "fat cats of Hollywood," and urges escape from "some stupid scenario" of the bourgeoisie. The hero offers the Pir- andello speech about everything being a "matter of semantics . . . let's, let's just readjust our definitions. Let's redefine ourselves as the real world and them as the world of illusion and shadow. You see, we're reality, they're a dream." The other actors find such intellectual profundity, Marxist or existential, unconvincing, as audiences usually do. The Countess tartly tells the semanticist: "You better calm down. You've been up on the screen flickering too long.9

The audience is irritated, as people tend to be when what they see strays too far from what they expected: "This isn't what the paper said would happen." One woman complains, "They sit around and talk. No action. Nothing happens"; a man whines that his wife "likes a story"; and a woman who saw the film previously explains, "I want what happened in the movie last week to happen this week, otherwise what's life all about anyway?" A few people, however, find things


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interesting even when they're told, "We can't continue the story until Tom gets back." One is a student of the human personality who prefers characters who aren't human, his wife announces, giving as proof his boredom with his son-in-law Donald who never makes conversation. Allen suggests how involvement with art, canonized or popular, formulaic or formless, is partly the result of not wanting to draw out this world's Donalds who don't have much to say anyway.

The scenes with the Hollywood contingent, centered around producer Raoul Hirsch, are the flattest in the film. These power brokers of popular culture are not manipulative villains, but simply businessmen who want to make money by avoiding trouble. They realize the "threat to the industry" if Tom's walking off the screen were to be "the start of a new trend." The group is more concerned about hype than hegemony, though Hirsch grows angry when one of his employees, locked on screen in his RKO penthouse, suddenly decides, "I want to be free." Hirsch responds, "I'm warning you, that's communist talk." One of the Hollywood press agents sums up the sad irony of the film and much of the world of art: "The real ones want their lives fiction, and the fictional ones want their lives real."

It is, of course, Hollywood's and, to a degree, the nation's central fiction that creates the chaos. While a reporter suggests that Tom's disappearance may be "the work of Reds or anarchists," Allen makes clear that the problems grow out of the most popular of bourgeois nihilistic principles: Love levels all barricades. Tom is the dream of American popular culture, the man who gives up everything and over- runs all barriers for true love. As Cecilia recognizes, "He's fictional but you can't have everything." He himself states his credentials suc- cinctly: "I love you. I'm honest, dependable, courageous, romantic and a great kisser." He fully represents Cecilia's dreams, both personal and mass-produced, and because of this she uneasily knows that he must be "some kind of phantom." Like many heroes in thirties films, Tom does not realize the importance of money or know that there's a depression on; he's sorry, he must have missed the Great War, and doesn't recognize a world where, as Cecilia explains, "pe-people get old and sick an-and never find true love." In the world Tom's come from "people, they don't disappoint," but Cecilia tells him, "y-you don't find that kind in real life," the realism of the observation un- derlined by her gentle, dreamy tones.

Tom's rival is his creator and alter ego, Gil Shepherd, who is



desperately worried about his career should Tom cause him "to get a reputation for being difficult." When he meets Cecilia in a coffee shop, she understandably mistakes him for Tom, and he, after a conversation about where he got those clothes- "uh, a little store on Sunset and Vine" -concludes that she's the woman Tom ran off with, a few beats after she calls him Tom. After Gil cons Cecilia into taking him to Tom, Tom insists he can learn to be real and Gil threatens him with the actor's union, the police and the F.B.I. -but he knows love is his only possible effective ally.

The tension in this triangle grows from some uncertainty about Gil's motive. There's no doubt that his chief loves are himself and his career, but this shallowness sharpens his attraction to Cecilia as an adoring fan. Cecilia, if a bit surprised by a character leaving the screen to woo her, is overcome with wild delight at meeting a real movie actor she's seen in "lots of movies.... Broadway Bachelors right? Right? Hon- eymoon in Haiti? Honeymoon in Haiti? You were a scream," she screams. Gil's relieved to learn that Tom is neither marauding nor raping.

"No, gosh, no, no. He's as sweet as can be." "Well, I played him sweet. I was well reviewed." "Well, it comes across."

Gil is enamored because Cecilia so fully shares his unquestioning vision of himself. She tells him not to worry, he'll "always be a great star," he's "not just a, uh, a pretty face, you're also a peach of an actor" with "a magical glow." She thinks he should have serious acting ambitions-even play roles such as Daniel Boone or Charles Lind- bergh-because of his "lone, heroic quality." Cecilia can see he is "deep, and probably complicated." Gil is delighted to hear such self- evident truths "from a real person" who's not one of "those movie colony bimbos" -which we know he is. There's nothing calculated about his "I love talking to you" or that he "would love to just take you around Hollywood." By the end of the scene, Cecilia's enthusiasm has fanned Gil toward some realization that he is a real person. He blurts out his "real name," Herman Bardebedian, and that he once was a cab driver. He even finally really notices Cecilia, "Boy, do you have a pretty face." Can love conquer even terminal narcissism? We wonder, as Gil's earlier conning "Trust me, Cecilia," and the film's first line, "Oh, Cecilia, be careful" recede in our consciousness.

Three love scenes, all creatively warm and funny, with only necessary


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trace elements of the pathos and intellectual jokes found elsewhere, give weight to Cecilia's choice of suitors that marks the climax of this and most other "romantic" movies, plays, and operas. Bracketing the one with Gil are two scenes with Tom. The first features Tom's intro- duction to Cecilia's real world and the second portrays Cecilia's en- trance into his film world.

After Tom and Cecilia go dancing, an idyll interrupted by Tom's lack of real money, they go to Tom's waiting place, a deserted amusement park. Allen uses this setting to reverse other films' frequent invocation of brightly lit, densely thronged amusement parks or fire works displays which suggest sexual climax. Here Tom pleads with Cecilia to come away with him, to Cairo, to live in the desert. "We'll live on love. We'll have to make some concessions, but so what?" Cecilia knows where she heard that before: "That's movie talk." But when he kisses her, she knows where she felt that before, too: in films. "You, you kiss perfectly. It's what I dreamed kissing would be like." After their second kiss, technicolor Tom looks at us, the audience, the way the black-and-white Tom looked at Cecilia earlier, and asks "Where's the fade out?" In movies-in 1930s movies anyway-we all know that when "the kissing gets hot and heavy" there's a fade- out so the characters can make "love in some private, perfect place." Cecilia admits that her "heart faded out," and Tom is fascinated by that, in this world, real sexual fade out comes later: "Well, I can't wait to see this."

The love scene with Gil occurs appropriately in a context of remem- bered Tin Pan Alley songs and movies. We quickly learn that the couple share an enthusiasm for music. Gil's other "ambition in life is to be a great classical violinist, thousands cheering me night after night," and Cecilia can play the ukulele. The scene shifts to the interior of a music store, "here since I was a kid," Cecilia says. The audience hears "Alabamy Bound," then sees Cecilia's hand strumming the ukulele Gil has bought her, before the camera gently pans back, into a scene of an earlier era, she playing and he singing in a tiny cluttered store full of musical instruments, sheet music, and memorabilia, pre- sided over by a tiny silver-haired lady obviously as sweetly out of date as her business. The scene is, as Cecilia says, "just wonderful," so much so that the proprietor starts playing and Gil and Cecilia join in.



I love my ba-by, My baby loves me I don't know no-body, As happy as me.

This celebration leads to talk about how wonderful Gil would be in a musical and to memories of the one, Dancing Doughboys, in which he had a part. Cecilia remembers the conclusion as well as he. They recite to each other the parting lines, where the man goes off to settle a little score "on the other side of the Atlantic."

"Does this mean I won't be seeing you ever again?" "Well, 'ever' is a long time." "When you leave, don't look back."

Cecilia asks Gil if he liked kissing Ina Beasley, and, when he answers it was just a "movie kiss," she sighs, "It looked like you loved her." And Gil kisses Cecilia lingeringly as romantic music swells. It looks like he loves her, and ever is a long time. Both audience and Cecilia are "not offended," just "uh, . . . confused."

Cecilia's feelings are still "jumbled" when she meets Tom who bears a gift: flowers he's picked, beautiful but dried in accord with the season and the film's late autumn comment on springtime romance. Having no money, Tom can take Cecilia to only one place to go "stepping." They return to the movie house, and Tom, with the film's second " Trust me, " leads the ever-trusting Cecilia by the hand into the screen's Manhattan penthouse. The thirties cast is no more welcoming than a family is when rich boy brings poor girl home, but Tom threatens, "I'll sock any man on the jaw who makes her feel unwanted!" And anyway, not having "eaten in ages," the cast are happy to fall in with Tom's plan to go to the Copacabana. At a table "for seven" -"It's always six," says the puzzled waiter -Cecilia warns Tom that the champagne he's paying for is really gingerale, and Rita tells us what we all know: "That's the movies, kid." Kitty sings her sophisticated version of the film's theme:

So let's not speak of love sublime Because time brings on a breakup. There'll be no tears and no emotional Scenes to spoil my make-up.

When she goes to meet Cecilia, she's furious at the intrusion of "the skirt," but, like an audience woman when Tom first left the screen, she faints when she reaches out and touches a three-dimensional person.


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Tom and Cecilia leave as the little waiter, delighted that the plot is being chucked and he can at last do as he wants (dreams in Hollywood being as improbable as elsewhere), yells, "Hit it, boys," and breaks into an ebullient, oddly heart-warming tap dance. There follows the one sequence in the film with insistent cinematography, a zippy collage with pictures often superimposed of club signs, the couple dancing, bottles popping, bubbles rising, glasses overflowing, piano keys tin- kling, and marimbas shaking, the kind of visual shorthand for a whirlwind, romantic fling directors, especially of the early sound era, in- dulged in when they could unleash their cameras from the microphone cord.'0 In precise homage, Allen's version closes with a view of the entwined happy couple shot through the back of the taxi window, champagne bubbles rising and popping over it.

Tom and Cecilia return to the empty penthouse, kiss in front of the Manhattan night skyline all moviegoers know well -and Gil enters the theater, enticing Cecilia into technicolor New Jersey with his promise of love, "the real thing." Tom follows, and the Purple Rose cast returns to the penthouse, the actors on the screen airing their favorite solutions the way audiences encourage Claudette Colbert or Katherine Ross to run from their weddings to Clark Gable or Dustin Hoffman. But here, for those on the silver screen and those in the real theater, there is doubt about the proper choice in the New Jersey Jewel. After the renewed bickering about who's a minor character and the practical difficulties attending a movie priest's marrying Tom and Cecilia- "The Bible never says a priest can't be on film," Father Donnelly argues on behalf of all the Barry Fitzgeralds of the screen-Cecilia's choice is not easy. "Go with the real guy, honey," advises the old countess. "We're limited." "Go with Tom," urges the younger Rita. "He's got no flaws." Lulled partly by Gil's flattery and his mention of what we have long noticed, that she's the one "with a magical glow," Cecilia decides, as sane people do, "I have to choose the real world."

The real world, where things disappoint, is what she gets. In a final scene with Monk, she packs for Hollywood while he cajoles, orders, threatens- "I'm the guy who can slap you down" -but she won't change her mind. The scene ends when he again yells downstairs after her, "It ain't the movies. It's real life," and concludes prophetically once more, "You'll be back."

Outside the Jewel once again, Cecilia knows she will be back when



the manager explains that the Hollywood people, including Gil, who "couldn't wait to get out of here" after "the close call for his career," have left. But Cecilia should be happy: an Astaire-Rogers film is the Jewel's new attraction.

Tears well in Cecilia's eyes. Her stricken face dissolves into Gil's, equally afraid of planes and not playing Lindbergh, as he flies back to Hollywood. He has betrayed the one person he cares about, the fan, and looks as pensively sad and isolated as Cecilia. We hear Astaire sing the song which began the film about the true love which Gil squandered. Allen cuts to the tuxedoed Astaire dancing with the elab- orately feathered Rogers in a club of impossible elegance. While Astaire continues to sing, Allen shows Cecilia entering the sparsely filled theater, putting down her pathetic suitcase packed with hopes she'll never wear, sitting down, clutching her ukulele, and lifting her teary face to the screen. The lyric ends, and Allen quotes the wonderfully vibrant dance and shows us Cecilia twice, the last time just beginning to smile, transformed by the enchanting grace of this expression of perfect unity and love. She cradles the ukulele, symbol both of her sweet cultural dreams and of how they have failed her."I Still, the movie Astaire will not disappoint. And maybe the real Ginger Rogers is much better for Lew Ayres in that dream-land of beautiful people out west. And Cecilia does have "a magical glow," born partly of the love of beauty and gentle integrity supported by her "more romantic" movies.

The Conversation

Allen's film comments on several issues in the broader discourse on popular culture. It raises questions about both sides in the "classical" debate which often staggers between the alternatives of despairing over or delighting in the influence of popular or mass or mechanical-and often specifically American -culture. It illustrates how reading popular (and any other kind of) culture requires looking closely at the text, a process as often impeded as impelled by those postclassical theories that define all mass culture as illustration of the dominant, self-evident ideology of capitalism and/or patriarchy. Allen, through his film, speaks about the most important, difficult, and elusive issue in the ongoing debate, recently labelled "reader response theory": how can one de- termine what the artifact said to the several million who watched Purple


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Rose, to the hundreds of millions who have watched or read Romeo and Juliet, or -for that matter -to the tens or hundreds who may glance at this essay. In each of these cultural conversations, The Purple Rose of Cairo voices some ideas worth attention.

The classical debate, the least wholly academic of these conversations, has attracted broad popular and intellectual comment. Here Al- len's contribution lies in respecting the complex nature of cultural consumption by avoiding the sharply drawn dichotomies that have neither the clarity nor usefulness their devisers presume. Divisions between high and low, avant-garde and kitsch, creative and commercial, personal and mechanical, comforting and questioning, elite and mass, stimulating and anesthetizing, and serious and popular are offered by opponents of popular culture with portentous finality, generally to evaporate at the first touch of thought. The more complicated schemes tend to move on to trinitarian complexity, doubtless to vie with more influential thought involving Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; feudal, bourgeois, and proletarian; or id, ego, and superego; elite, folk, and mass; lowbrow, middlebrow, and highbrow; fine, popular, and vulgar; and masscult, midcult, and highcult.'2 And such bundling has less to do with meaningful divisions than with asserting the superior discrim- ination of the critics, most of whom despise or despair over mass culture's emptiness and baleful influence from political perspectives ranging from Mandarin to fundamentalist, from proto-fascist to Marxist to democratic.13

The murky intellectual contours of these negative classicists' dim view of popular culture has its reflection in much of the enthusiast literature as well. Herbert Gans's sociological contribution to the argument is primarily to make the list of vague categories longer: "high culture, upper-middle culture, lower-middle culture, low culture, and quasi-folk culture," all of which rest on a wholly muddled definitional mix of art forms, media varieties, quality distinctions, and sociological groups. Gans claims to be striking blows for popular culture in the name of egalitarian democracy by promoting this coarse group-aesthetic hierarchy and his "solution" of "subcultural programming," where cadres of sociologists would precisely measure taste and taste dissatisfactions to tell the media when and how culturally lower sorts can be raised to slightly higher things.'4

The opposite sides of intellectual coins commonly tend to be equally flat. This reality is well illustrated in the response of much pro-popular



culture thought to opponents' jeremiads. No one has done more to call intellectual attention to the mass media than Marshall McLuhan. But McLuhan's cleverness has led him toward such heavy-handed and -headed put-ons as The Medium Is the Massage-and Allen to his amusing put-down of the media sage's punditry in Annie Hall.'5 No one has done more to create an institutional foothold for studying popular culture than Ray Browne. But his intellectual contribution has been to substitute "elite," presumably a democratic pejorative, for "high" or "fine," and to define his field, "safely" he claims, as "those areas of our lives that are not narrowly intellectual or artistically elitist. " Surely it is no aid to careful thought, and some aid and comfort to the enemy, to confine an area of inquiry to those works lacking conspicuous intelligence or creativity. 16 Defenders of popular culture at times imply acceptance of the favorite notion of its critics: interest in the area requires assault on all judgments about quality. Russel Nye urges his readers "to erase the boundaries created by snobbery and cultism" - except of course popcultism and the snobbery of camping out with Susan Sontag -and Marshall Fishwick makes this aesthetic nihilism explicit. "Aren't relativity and tolerance required in culture," he asks breezily, "as well as in moral and political judgments?" So let's hear it for Charles Manson, Adolf Hitler, and The Texas Chainsaw Mas- sacre! Fishwick, always generous, grants that we need not love them all; sometimes we can just "enjoy the process while dismissing the product. " 17

Despite this argumentative Armageddon between those dedicated to Maginot exclusiveness and those demanding absolute inclusiveness, between teleological visions based on mass apocalypse or McLuhanite millennium, the intellectual common ground of the two classical ap- proaches is substantial.'8 For example, Clement Greenberg's definition of kitsch and Russel Nye' s of popular culture are pretty much identical. Both critics argue that popular culture began sometime after the French Revolution and that it was essentially a democratization of the arts in which control was wrested away from a cultural elite by the emerging middle and lower classes. Both claim that high art once was, as Nye writes, produced by "known artists" working under "the authority of an accepted set of rules," and judged precisely by an "established normative tradition" concerned with "new ways of handling human experience with technical and thematic complexity." Both agree that kitsch or popular art attempts to provide the wholly "predictable" and


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to give "the largest possible audience in the marketplace" whatever they wish. Greenberg differs from Nye's description only in his tone of disgust for this new art that is mechanical, formulaic, and intended only to divert determined dullards from the boredom of their lives with some popular pap that "predigests art for the spectator." Greenberg sees this new audience that demanded cultural junk food as clods, while Nye views them as just folks. Greenberg sees little hope in a system where quality is the enemy, while Nye, mildly millennial, glimpses gradual improvement over the years. The only other difference relates to Nye's professional background; only Greenberg argues that "all kitsch is academic, and conversely, all that's academic is kitsch. "19

Anyone who reads many of the philosophic-academic arguments on mass culture is likely to find more truth in Greenberg's equation of kitsch and the academy than in his and Nye's shared description of popular culture. Neither author seems to have dreamt that there was a vigorous popular culture, much of it tied to the mass-produced printed word, prior to the French Revolution. Neither seems to have known or noted that what we now label this age's high culture was romantic, scorned by the critics, neglected by the cultural elite, and often damned by those in political power. To mention William Blake or Lord Byron or Charles Brockden Brown is to smash the Greenberg-Nye conviction that great art was made for the critics, according to some unmentioned eternal standards and savored by the remnant of richest connoisseurs. Nye and Greenberg fail to note that no hack could have pursued money with more rapaciousness than Ludwig von Beethoven, and they are unaware of the poverty Samuel Woodworth endured for a lifetime to write "The Old Oaken Bucket" and a host of other immensely popular and, for him, almost wholly unprofitable songs and plays. Nor do they heed how critics, elites, and masses neglected for long years the author who did most to develop the then exemplar of the mass media, the novel, into a form that most fully represented the accepted wisdom of the emergent bourgeoisie. Jane Austen created an aesthetic world making amply clear that pursuing greatness was folly and affectation, pride and prejudice, while the great goods of life were love and perceptive integrity, both depending on a balance of sense and sensibility and an income of at least 500 pounds a year.20 There's scarcely a mote of the Nye-Greenberg foundations of modern popular culture left when one tries to lay a few beams of fact on it.

Kitsch seems a properly pejorative description of the increasingly



shopworn twaddle that makes up much of the classical battle over mass culture. Once upon a time, it was worthwhile to think about the issue in terms of the tidy, if total, war that Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White offered to general. But to "revisit" that battlefield, with only louder rhetoric to powder the popgun cannons, is to underline the dangers of sequels in mass culture. To learn that The Beverly Hillbillies is not Shakespeare (Rosenberg's revelation) or that it's not the only or the best thing on TV (White's defense) is to study kitsch: wholly expected truisms recycled-probably for money or whatever prestige academics bank on in its stead-to fit perfectly the audience's expectations without jogging anyone toward thought.2' Better to watch a rerun of The Beverly Hillbillies which, however coarsely, offers some reflection on American hopes that the older virtues of an imagined past can survive when money buys access to the mass-mess society in extremis of modem southern California. Better still, read David Marc's description of the basic intellectual design of the 1960s best liked comic show, the product of the honest ruralism of Missourian Paul Henning, auteur of several of the era's popular weekly bouts with the bucolic. Then think about how closely this series' social vision of America- decency resides only in the out-of-date folk, uncontaminated because their money comes wholly by luck, who expose the coarse manipulative greed and emptiness of the establishment-paralleled that of the country's radical critics.22 To do that is to learn in a way almost never encouraged in the classic debate: to see better, to make some unexpected connections, to have to reshape a bit one's history, memory, and judgment of those years.

One learns so little from the classical debate, especially in its negative mode, because the extreme fears attached to or blamed on mass culture lead intelligent people to insist on unintelligent, sometimes unintelli- gible, things. It is Hannah Arendt who informs us, "Culture relates to objects and is a phenomena of the world, entertainment relates to people and is a phenomena of life." This is interesting information to those of us simple enough to have thought that entertainment involved various things in this world and that culture had something to do with people and life. Often this emptiness reflects the need to uphold standards by paying no attention to what's being discussed. Thus Theodore Adomo predicts that the walls of western civilization are endangered by the "vicious rhythms" of jazz, always the product of "assembly- line procedure" representing "castration symbolism." He, with Max


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Horkheimer, assures us that film "leaves no room for imagination or reflection on the part of the audience, who is unable to respond . . . without losing the thread of the story; hence the film forces its victim to equate it directly with reality."23 The kindest explanation of such silliness is that Adorno and Horkheimer avoided becoming victims by never watching a film and escaped contagion by not talking to those so victimized. Their view is one that upholds the virtue of total ignorance, like that of an adolescent barbarian announcing, "Shake- speare's a jerk. Nobody ever talked that way." Given the difficulty and arguability of most positive judgments, there's nothing surprising or wrong in people's asserting their finer sensibility by what so proudly they scorn. Yet intellectual kitsch is the proper pejorative for the vac- uous categories, contrasts, and conclusions that Rosenberg, Arendt, Adorno, our adolescent, and Cecilia's husband Monk use to decry "that junk" and to deify their odd interpretive credentials: not looking, not listening, not thinking, not caring.

Part of the war in the classic argument over popular culture concerns the possession of Shakespeare, uniformly accepted as the big cannon of the canon. A character in one Allen play laments "It's terrible being fictional, we're so limited," and another answers, "Unfortunately you were written by Woody Allen. Think if you had been written by Shakespeare."24 Of course, no characters have ever spoken with the richness of Shakespeare's language, and this was partly why the spir- itual predecessors of today's intellectual Mandarins fought to protect the citadel of good taste by refusing his plays entry. Where would it lead, they asked sensibly enough, if one gave up the sanctity of the Aristotelean unities and if one praised the worth of plays in the vulgar vernacular which street people and shop boys, no more sophisticated and less educated than Cecilia, found exciting fare? Of course, it did lead to Jane Austen and Rosina Meadows, the Village Maiden, to James Joyce, Paul Henning, and the two Purple Rose of Cairos.

Allen's contribution to the classical debate comes, first, through the example of the 1980s Purple Rose and, second, through that film's rich comment on the meaning of movies to his everywoman, Cecilia. Allen's film meets all of the criteria negative classicists have used to try to fence off wide ranges of culture from serious thought: popular, mechanical, commercial, mass-marketed, readily understandable to anyone who can see and hear. At the same time, to read this piece of popular culture intelligently requires and rewards attention to a huge



list of things: visual and verbal metaphors, mis-en-scene, motifs, narrative structure, dialogue, repetitions, characterization, camera move- ment and angle, Allen's oeuvre, and the film's sociohistorical setting. Here, as with canonized culture, observation can add endlessly to a better understanding of how various things, not consciously noted at first glance, underline the argument and effect of the work. For example, the jaunty jazz score connecting various scenes keeps up audience hope and high spirits even when the sections themselves foreshadow sadness. The music functions precisely the way popular culture operates in the film. The hard, screen-filling, close-up frames of minor characters in the technicolor film-faces of a prostitute and a customer-underline the harshness of Cecilia's world and contrast with the comfortable middle distance of classic Hollywood shooting in 1930s films. In the darkened New Jersey theater when we and the camera briefly look neither at screen nor audience, two lights are visible, summing up the fable: the beam projecting the illusion and the red EXIT sign marking the reality to which all return. And so on, and on.

Of course, I go on because I judge the film to be extraordinarily good, the best piece of aesthetic culture from the past couple of decades that I've encountered. However nearly correct or crazy that judgment is, its virtues or vices have nothing to do with the popularity of the film. There is no tenable argument against Lawrence Levine's basic point: for people to blind themselves to areas of rich aesthetic and social meaning by creating empty categories to fence in their complacency is willed stupidity, a truism that ought to be amply clear to anyone who has "read" Psalms or Sophocles, "Simple Gifts" or Steam- boat Bill, Jr.25

To say that the value of any cultural analysis is related to the thoughtful intensity given to the artifact is both to say the obvious and to say what needs to be said most in the classical and postclassical popular culture debates. This platitude applies equally to works to which no one attributes any glimmer of greatness such as Janice Radway's romances or Michael Denning's dime novels. To get some sense of what Rambo and Friday the 13th mean for their audience and our culture, one needs the stomach to digest the works as often and as finely as good scholars do Dante or Chaucer. In short, scholars who won't read their cookbooks as carefully as their Kant should stay out of kitchen studies, and those too gentle to watch cockfights intently need to avoid that interpretive pit.26


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While Allen steers clear of Hollywood's favorite examples when recounting its past escapist sins -Keystone cops, comic chases or cartoons-the 1930s Purple Rose makes no pretensions to peculiar quality.27 The virtues of Allen's ponderings of how popular culture reverberates in the lives of its audience comes from his recognition of motivational variety in Cecilia's film addiction. The escapism is made clear from the first shot where we see her shabby mittens below her frosty breath as she absorbs the icons of exotic elegance in the movie poster. She herself argues that the purpose of films is to let people forget their troubles a little. The long prologue of alternating scenes among film, family, and work underlines the same theme: when the marquee is unlit, there is no place for Cecilia, rejecting tavern and brothel, to go but home.

The films she sees do not encourage profound social or moral pon- dering. Social comment of a direct sort is suggested only in the film her sister likes, Okay America, one of the early 1930s films exposing shoddy journalism. Cecilia likes "more romantic," escapist fare: Broadway Bachelors, Dancing Doughboys, Astaire and Rogers films, The Purple Rose of Cairo. What Cecilia gets from these films is one central thing everyone seeks in art, a sense of beauty, grace, and human possibility. Cecilia describes one film she liked about a hotel porter who became a radio singer and then an opera singer: "The music was beautiful. "28 Probably it was, since opera star James Melton sang it, and Cecilia, unindoctrinated with popular culture theory and unaddicted to low- or high-class snobbery, could enjoy a good voice applied to both popular and operatic songs. For the same reasons, Cecilia's concluding vision of Astaire dancing is, for her and us, both forgetfulness and aesthetic transcendence. She, unlike serious critics, could respond deeply to the innovative pure grace of a great dancer, without worrying about his cultural status before Baryshnikov, Dennis Potter, and Woody Allen assured intellectuals it was fully respectable to respond.29

For Cecilia, the 1930s Purple Rose offers escape from a troubled life, contact with a world she can't know directly, and a source of encouragement for her gently humane values. It offers her dreams of "a penthouse, the desert, kissing on the dance floor," and contact with a world where people are " so beautiful" and speak " so cleverly." Such possibilities are partly material (she tells Tom with gentle yearning in the penthouse, "Oh! the white telephone. Oh! I've dreamed of having a white telephone"), partly scenic (the exotic desert with its pyramids),



but primarily romantic and human. As Monk tells her, it's the movies that mislead her, that put notions into her head, that create dissatis- faction with her life and his authority. The movies teach her that love and respect and fair treatment are the proper human values. These lessons complicate her life, but give her a place to go and to stand outside of Monk's coarse working-class patriarchy. Her rebellion, though it provides no escape, makes her a less acquiescent victim because she has friends, people she admires for their beauty and intelligence, who reinforce her gentle integrity. Monk may knock them down, as he bashes Tom and sometimes Cecilia, because he doesn't fight fair, but she knows that Monk is wrong and that she has the right and duty to resist him, at least at his worst. Partly because the movies support her judgments of human decency, she often is, as Tom tells her, "brave too." The bravery she draws from popular culture is real but also limited and nontransformative, the kind that staves off total defeat without winning wars.30

Allen's argument about the meaning of popular art to its audiences, both in his quick comments on the variety of responses to the playing and the halting of the 1930s film and in his case study of Cecilia, sensibly disputes the dichotomous approach to audiences in the classic debate. Scholars who defend or attack mass culture usually suggest that high art is involved with personal and idiosyncratic vision and explores the new and unconventional, while popular art lulls, sanctifies the accepted pattern of things, and comforts with formulaic familiarity. Allen suggests the way all aesthetic experience involves things the audience expects combined with something else that gives it freshness and vitality and that consumers of "low" entertainment are often more venturesome or tolerant than those whose tastes are elite. The symphony audience, for example, noticeably shrinks when forewarned a work less than fifty years old is to be heard, while the first unexpected notes of anything more "modern" than Mahler or Stravinsky occasions a small stampede of politely proper people who choose rudeness over ten bars of something that doesn't coddle their expectations. A com- monplace of cinema studies is that the purpose of popular American films is to give comfort, but there is the complementary half-truth that the purpose of art films is to give a comforting sense of superiority to their audience. Both audiences have some clear expectations and some wish for a surprise or twist or two to give zest to the experience, some solace and stimulation, some escape from the everyday, and some art to transcend or explain away what's puzzling and disappointing in that


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experience. Art on all levels offers some forgetfulness combined with hope that the boring, messy, and scary can be formed toward the soothingly meaningful, affirming both new possibilities and old values. Allen's audience discourse closely parallels what Janice Radway suggests about the readers of popular romances, whose quoted conversations show much of the involvement, zest, and limitations one finds in the movie memories of Cecilia and her sister and in almost all casual aesthetic judgment.31

The argument Allen and Radway make contrasts sharply with most intellectual descriptions of audiences for popular culture. Cecilia is an addicted fan, but she understands the fantasy of her films, as well as their truth for her. Their values protect her from cynicism and despair, even though she knows that chatter about the unimportance of money if you're in love is "movie talk," that anyone who only fights fairly would not last long in this world, and that a love as pure as Tom's is too good to be true. Hence, the alleged " sourness" of the film's ending is an essential element in its gently humane integrity. Cecilia has to choose life and then to accept the folly of her belief in the fantasy of the real Hollywood, wholly willing to betray her if betrayal makes a buck. Yet, she retains her integrity, her ukulele, her Jewel, her Astaire and Rogers, and proves that elegant grace can sometimes be found in art, popular and/or canonized, even in the bleakest houses in which we live. Cecilia's story is a personal exemplification of what one of the earliest and best film analysts, Hugo Mtinsterberg, in 1916 called the greatest contribution of movies: "Hardly any teaching can mean more for our community than the teaching of beauty where it reaches the masses" with its gift, or perhaps its needed deception, of sensed "harmony, unity, true satisfaction."32

The modulated complexity of Allen's view distances his argument as much from postclassical theories of popular culture, set out most explicitly in the work associated with "British cultural studies," as from the classical ones. While avoiding what Umberto Eco calls the "secondhand Frankfurt-school moralism" about aesthetics of the classic debate, postclassical theories substitute their own moralism about the "ideology of patriarchal capitalism." The theory argues that all popular culture, as the commercial creation of society's power elite, is by definition in service to society's dominant ideologies of capitalism and patriarchy. Any questioning of the "hegemonic force of the dominant classes" never occurs in a popular text, but only in audience response where the intended meaning may be accepted, negotiated, or



opposed, not by individuals, but by groups in " subcultural formations." These groups occasionally avoid becoming "cultural dupes" by oppositional reading of the text out of some understanding of their social- ideological oppression or subordination.33 Any sharp awareness that culture is humanly created for particular ends is likely to free groups to move toward oppositional readings. Hence the "distancing" avant- garde style is tied to liberating honesty, while the aesthetic mode of realism, incapable of irony (we learn), is the favorite way hegemony hoodwinks its audience, once again (like that of Adorno-Horkheimer) incapable of distinguishing between what is on the television or the big screen and reality. 3 Early hopes that once the "constructed" nature of myth was revealed myth would disappear- "when it is made visible it vanishes" -have given way to a more sober evaluation of the tough- ness of capitalist patriarchal hegemony, which has thus far proved remarkably resilient despite being floodlit by British cultural studies. "History casts doubt," John Fiske now says, "on the possibility of a society without ideology, in which people have a true consciousness of their social relations."35

Allen's film questions several aspects of the way British cultural studies has manipulated this discourse. Perhaps central is the doubt it casts on the reiterated contention that all popular culture is by definition representative of dominant ideology and that all suggestion of "liberal pluralism" in the messages offered is delusory. This makes every popular artifact, aside from minor "accents," the same.36 This is hard to swallow even if one considers only such a limited group of texts as those films of 1985 much more popular than Purple Rose: Back to the Future, Rambo, Rocky III, Beverly Hills Cop, Witness, Desperately Seeking Susan, all of which "vote" very differently on particular social issues. Rambo most clearly sides with the Reagan-Bush majority of the previous November and Allen's film most clearly with the Mondale- Ferraro minority.37 Not that Purple Rose was a film one went to see expecting and inspecting overt political comment like that of The Foun- tainhead or Country or Red Dawn or Roger and Me or Allen's The Front, each a film whose creator attacked the dangers/degradations of what their most enthusiastic supporters see as the current hegemonic ideology.

Yet in Allen's film, as in much popular culture, there is questioning, serious if unobtrusive, of American sexual and class politics, telling enough without telling the audience what to think or even to think consciously about them. In a casual comment, Allen has his heroine


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offer some explanation of why she and her sister are so socially marginal when Cecilia mentions that her father taught her to play the ukulele "before he left us." In a society where more power-earning and otherwise-is given to men, the sins of the fathers do ramify, even when they first offer caring gifts of art. When Cecilia says she can't run because her ankles are swollen from waitressing, we are reminded of the costs of many lower-class jobs. Allen also stresses woman's limitations in traditional working man's culture which centered around the fraternity of the tavern. There is class anger, too. In one of the arguments between the 1930s actors and their audience, the screen countess tells an obviously wealthy woman who wants her money back to "stop yapping." To this her leading-citizen husband retorts: "You can't talk to my wife that way. Who do you think you are?" The regal woman on screen snaps back, "I'm a genuine countess with a lot of dough. And if that's your wife, she's a tub of guts." The audience cheers this brutal comeuppance of the town's first family just as Mark Twain's Hadleyburg had some decades earlier. 38 This may not be what the British cultural Marxists want, but it is class antagonism, and it is intense. More central to the film's vision is the affirmation of the American belief in the dignity of the common woman represented by Cecilia and of the common experience represented by Tom's intro- duction to real life. When Tom is enticed to a brothel, he tells the "lovely ladies" some of his deep thoughts:

about God and his relation with Irving Sachs and R. H. Levine . , about life in general. . . The, the finality of death, and how almost magical it seems in the, in the real world as, uh, as opposed to the world of celluloid and flickering shadows . . . the absolutely astonishing miracle of childbirth with its attendant feeling of humanity and pathos. I stand in awe of existence.

The prostitutes are touched by this version of what Dwight Macdonald scorned as the "cracker barrel . . . nostalgia" embedded in Thornton Wilder's plays and what Christopher Brookeman decried as the "crude and sentimental humanism" and "folksy populism" of much American culture.39 The context and open admission of cliche let Allen both gently mock and movingly assert what democracy needs to believe: the life humans choose can involve the beautiful, decent, and worthwhile. When the prostitutes understand that Tom won't betray his true love even for free fun, one ends the scene with the question, "Are there any more out there like you?" They know the answer, as do we. If such sentiments are not notable assaults on patriarchy, they are even



less principal props for it. The irony that laces such comments is proof enough that the aesthetic realism of this film and most films -if proof were needed for anyone who's read Austen, Twain, or Tolstoi -is fully compatible with rich strands of ironic ambiguity about reality and current cliches, right, left, and center. In fact, Allen's film makes hash of the alleged antithesis of avant-garde and realist modes by seamlessly uniting an avant-garde structure with an "outer" realism.

Allen's Purple Rose raises questions especially about the basic scorn for the popular text that grows from the postclassical judgment that prior knowledge of hegemony precludes the need to look seriously for answers within the text. One can see this in the most influential article in the feminist-cinema studies wing of British cultural studies. Laura Mulvey contends that movies, intended for the male gaze, represent castration fears, turning women on screen into "fetishistic" and "vo- yeuristic" body parts interrupting the narrative to control the dangerous "other" that threatens male narcissistic identification with patriarchy. Mary Anne Doane recently summarized the influence of Mulvey's Freud-Lacan derived position:

Feminist film criticism has consistently demonstrated that in the classic Hollywood cinema, the woman is deprived of a gaze, deprived of subjectivity, and repeatedly transformed into the object of a masculine scopophiliac desire.40

Mulvey rests these expansive claims primarily on the Joseph von Stern- berg-Marlene Deitrich American films of the early 1930s, not by analyzing them but by neglecting them. In these films the camera never dwells "on the naked thighs of Miss Deitrich," but on her eyes, her gaze that represents that of the text and the director: she is the person in the film who sees clearly, understands accurately, evaluates correctly. The men in the films gaze as well, but the stupidities and limitations of their vision are the second emphasis in the films, whether the males look lecherously, lovingly, or moralistically. The texts mentioned not only deny but defy the interpretation put on them.4'

One finds in less extreme forms the same separation between conclusions and examples in the works of John Fiske, the most prolific of these authors. Fiske frequently offers excellent detailed descriptions, but these are cut off from or loosely attached to his conclusions. For example, Hill Street Blues, Fiske concludes, is "built around the yuppie view of class, social conscience and moral responsibility." This suggests that both yuppies as a class and their views are so self-evident


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no definition of them is necessary. Madonna, he tells us, is a capitalist- created fashion invented to make "a lot of money from one of the most powerless and exploitable sections of the community-young girls," and, in another version, concludes she "is a material girl as well as a semiotic one," surely good news to all her fans.42 In his more recent works, Fiske moves away from even such cursory interest in the works to emphasize "the pleasure of the flesh" as the best escape from bourgeois hegemony. He makes a logical extension of Herbert Mar- cuse's claim that "the liberating beat" of black music might let us disco toward unrepressed classlessness. "The politics of pleasure," Fiske argues, is the only escape from "the empire" of bourgeois myth and hegemony. His revolutionary hopes now lie in women's power of the gaze and of the purse in the mall or youth's evasion of ideological control on the beach or in video arcades, glorified as "the semiotic brothels of the machine age."43 Surely no one has defined a Marxist revolution with deeper appeal to the bourgeoisie than his suggestion that communism has not died but merely gone shopping or surfing.

If the postclassical theory has tended to blur textual analysis by insisting on its own self-evident truths, it has stressed the importance of audience response. David Morley's two studies are the prime documents reflecting this emphasis. Both are highly honest, highly limited, and richly suggestive of the problems in the theory that motivated the books. Morley's evidence raises several questions about postclassical presuppositions: members of groups respond similarly among themselves and differently from people in other groups; awareness of cultural shaping sharpens oppositional readings; and wholly accepting or rejecting interpretations based on group affiliation are more common than personally negotiated ones. In one instance, Morley has to deny that bankers' views of a television show are oppositional, although the great majority attacked the program's viewpoint, because bankers are by definition the elite and hence could not oppose their own hegemony which, again by definition, the program represented.44 The expected fault lines of response on the basis of class and sex proved hazy in the first study related to a public affairs program and nonexistent in the second study of general family viewing among people in an area of London. This supports Allen's point that different choices in viewing are quite probable among two sisters similarly situated and employed one liking "more romantic" or escapist films and the other preferring the social comment of Okay America.

Most valuable in Morley's work are the unexpected findings, such



as the discrepancies between male and female "styles" of watching television, and the rich personal responses suggestive of the difficulties people have in codifying aesthetic views. Morley's people often sound much like those in Allen's 1930s audience, such as the woman who complained East Enders was too graphic: "I know it happens in life, but it's not true to life, if it's supposed to be a soap opera."45 Such befuddled fumbling for words and ideas marks almost everyone's response to a new cultural artifact. This underlines the problems of directing cultural studies toward reader-response strategies. Such difficulties have nothing to do with the undeniable truth of the basic premise of this theory: each reader of any text brings to it and takes from it varied impressions that correspond only loosely with authorial intent or close critical exegesis.46 Simply to read the reviews of The Purple Rose of Cairo is to learn the great discrepancies in aesthetic evaluation and intellectual interpretation of the film among professional critics. To talk about it with family, friends, or students is to experience similarly wide-ranging responses. Yet such interpretive criss- crossings take place on the common ground of shared contact with the text, which permits the diverse discussion to go forth in ways that allow everyone to hear and to judge alternative opinions about it. The text is the lodestone that permits discourse, the sifting and shifting of personal perspectives in contact with it and with oppositional or different responses to it. The "group response" of British cultural studies is every bit as much (though no more) a fiction of analytic convenience as the illusion that the text itself dictates uniform conclusion. Yet, in fact, the only wholly shared experience among the community of readers of a particular text is the act of reading it, and, like all other experiences, this integrates with the individual's totality in ways richer than anyone can say or fully know. Only through text-centered conversation, casual or critical, alone or with others, can one dredge up some part of the submerged significance to understand better the meaning of any human event, act, or artifact in one's own or others' lives.48

The intellectual flatness of audience surveys occurs because people always see more than they can say, sense more than they consciously see, and incorporate more than they sense. The scene from Allen's film with which I began this essay-where Cecilia explains God in terms that reflect her faith in films -opens with the camera concen- trating on a visual metaphor as Tom and Cecilia begin their conversation off-camera. As the camera moves from its focus on a crucifix down


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to the characters, the image of Christ is forgotten consciously, but subconsciously reverberates through the experience, as all signs do.49 Most obviously, it has set the scene, in this case the church, and it also ties religion to film, the king of the Jews to Sachs and Levine, Jewish lords of Hollywood creativity who have made Tom's, and less directly, Cecilia's world. It also sets up the joust between Tom and Monk over Cecilia, with traditional church and culture firmly on the side of marriage and of Monk-though the latter neither fights fairly nor treats his wife decently-while this movie and the movies side with Tom's more humane, as well as more romantic, option. And finally, as the camera connects crucifix with Tom, there is a hint (making linkage at a level deeper than consciousness) of the parallels, in fact and in irony, between the two myths about the suffering of those who come into the world to bring salvation to lost souls, only to be rejected for things that seem more real, as "troubles seem to vanish...

Allen's Stanford professor was right, but only in a very partial way: the mark not just of a classic but of all culture is that you can reread it a thousand times and always find something new. The problem with academic-popular intellectual purity crusades is not that anyone's hun- dred greatest books or canonized curricular texts are unworthy of close attention; nor is there any question that education, formal and personal, demands choice and always involves much more exclusion than in- clusion. The difficulty lies in any implication that advanced minds have drawn a sacred circle around what humans need to consider and that all within their Caucasian chalk circle is hallowed and all outside it not worth thought. This theory makes learning essentially a matter of advancing self-complacency-what I know is holy, and what I don't know is further proof of my virtue-rather than of cultivating that curiosity, critical gaze, and caring that marks all education dedicated to understanding rather than status. To watch a historian watch himself watching Cecilia watching Astaire and Roger's dancing to Irving Ber- lin's and Woody Allen's tune can be, I've tried to suggest, worthwhile. Thought about any human creativity and experience allows one to wonder as one wanders toward "something new," if one develops eyes to see, ears to hear, a mind to think, the heart to care, and freedom from theories that rein in perception in the service of prejudgment or in odd proof of intellectual prestige.



NOTES

1. The movie quotations are taken from Three Films of Woody Allen (New York, 1987), which has the script for Purple Rose (along with those of Broadway Danny Rose and Zelig). This is really a "transcript" of the film, not the script Allen initially wrote, about half of which was changed in the filming. Eric Lax, Woody Allen: A Biography (New York, 1991), 354.

2. Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1938). Comparison with Miller's immediate predecessors, Samuel Eliot Mor- ison and Kenneth Murdock, demonstrates how firmly Miller's contribution was grounded in his respect for sources others scorned. Among important contributors to American popular studies in the 1930s-in academic parallel to the socialist realism in art and literature-were Constance Rourke, Gilbert Seldes, Frank Luther Mott, Carl Wittke, George Pullen Jackson, and E. Douglas Branch.

3. Patrick Brantlinger, Bread and Circuses: Theories of Mass Culture as Social Decay (Ithaca, 1983) is especially interesting in its exploration of the classical roots of this continuing debate; and Christopher Brookeman, American Culture and Society Since the 1930s (New York, 1984), offers a Marxist-European critique of the United States as mass culture center.

4. I use some structuralist vocabulary here-text, sign, discourse, "reading" in the broad sense covering all forms of cultural absorption-because at times these terms allow more graceful generalization about cultural studies than words tied to particular aesthetic genres. At the same time, I use them interchangeably with traditional terms- work, book, film; word, image, symbol; conversation, debate, argument; and hearing, seeing, understanding, exploring-because I think the more modish terms in no way change the essentials of the intellectual work of groping toward meaning, explaining, and evaluating. I avoid the more rarified spheres of structuralist vocabulary because they seem to me signs that less aid understanding than advertise advanced intellectual superiority.

5. Woody Allen, "God (A Play)," in Without Feathers (New York, 1976); "The Kugelmass Episode," Side Effects (New York, 1981), 72. Two competent academic works on Allen's comedy were written before The Purple Rose of Cairo: Maurice Yacovar's Loser Take All: The Comic Art of Woody Allen (New York, 1979) stresses Allen's use of comedy and art to deny death and limitation, and Diane Jacobs's ... But We Need the Eggs: The Magic of Woody Allen (New York, 1982) emphasizes his magic/reality theme, especially convincingly in the concluding analysis of his play The Floating Lightbulb (New York, 1981). Three subsequent studies are Douglas Brode's Woody Allen: His Films and Career (Secaucus, N.J., 1985), working with a realist-idealist dichotomy; Robert Benayoun, The Films of Woody Allen (New York, 1986); and Nancy Pogel's Woody Allen (Boston, 1987), with an excellent bibliography and a good discussion of Purple Rose, 200-213.

6. The less intellectually brittle quality of Allen's films owes much to the fact that by this time avant-garde is old hat, while Pirandello was close enough to laugh at melodrama's absolute truths without escaping its influence. Illusion-reality is always in large part a debate in Pirandello, while in Allen it is a device to explore one aspect of reality.

7. Howells is quoted in R. W. B. Lewis, Edith Wharton (New York, 1975), 172. 8. The "documentary" footage in Zelig is handled with similarly remarkable sim-

ulated authenticity, and Allen's frequent American film quotations, such as that of


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the 1940s musical in Crimes and Misdemeanors

An Exploration of Intellectual Kitsc

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