Frank Sinatra and American Culture

Week 1

Intro

Presentation topics

Week 2: seminars and film criticism professionalization and LFF

November 23-24 Rick Senat

Assessment and review

Culture

“[A] culture must finally be interpreted in relation to its underlying system of production.” --Raymond Williams

“Everyday life is defined contradictions: illusion and truth, power and helplessness; the intersection of the sector man controls and the sector he does not control.” -- Henri Lefebvre

“Mickey Mouse may in fact be more important to an understanding of the 1930s than Franklin Roosevelt.” --Warren Susman

Forces of modern American culture: industrialization, urbanization, immigration

Culture IndustriesFormation of national culture post 1865

Tension between middleclass and working-class cultures (folk to mass)

Racial appropriation and exclusion

Interlocking roles of advertising, publishing, theatre

Reliance on female artists and consumers; performance of gender

Motion pictures and working-class entertainment

Resistance to cultural hegemony?

High Art, Popular, and Mass Culture

Culture as adjective, 1870-

Transformation of low European culture (Opera, Shakespeare, etc.) into “high” art for wealthy American elites

Culture becomes ‘incorporated’ when small group dictates standards

Educating and spiritually uplifting aspects of culture; search for “great” literature, art: the canon

Key historical events and figures repackaged as bedrock of national culture: potential ambivalence of text and audience

Potential of popular/working-class culture vs. capitalist mass culture (1920-)

Is popular culture an alternative/form of resistance to hegemony or an acceleration of the dominant

ideology?Hobsbawm’s “optimism”: “The cultural revolution of the latest twentieth century can thus best be understood as the triumph of the individual over society, or rather, the breaking of the threads which in the past had woven human beings into social textures.”

Williams’s faith in the ordinariness of culture and a ‘painless’ Marxist cultural criticism: “Culture includes the organization of production, the structure of the family, the structure of institutions which express or govern social relationships, the characteristic forms through which members of the society communicate.”

Frankfurt School traditionally sees only cultural productions’ manipulation of audiences and complicity rather than agency and capacity for critique (unlike variants of classic Marx): however, globalization may prove Althusser right: one cannot escape ideology: “ideology has no history”

Gramsci: cultural hegemony of the middle-class and the revolutionary proletarian alternative

Traditional Marxist cultural criticism inadequate in handling questions of race and gender

Integration and exclusion of folk cultures

German immigrants create Tin Pan Alley and New York music industry; Ragtime (1893)

Blackface mistrelsy and vaudeville (1880s): white cultural theft

Amusement parks like Coney Island (1895) and World’s Fairs (Chi, 1893) spaces for working-class audiences

Mass-produced dime novels for working class

women’s literature dominates publishing industry

National League 1876; 1884 black Cincinnati player Moses Walker fired

Sinatra

Centenaries, canons and popular culture

Documentaries and the construction of history

Public history and museum exhibition

Middlebrow culture– decline and preservation

Hegemony reconsidered: immigration, working cultures of the Left

Issues in licensing and the reconstruction of history: http://www.sinatra.com

Italian Immigration

Settlers in America date from 17th C

650,000 Italians emigrated between 1890-1900

2 million arrived between 1900-1914

1891 11 Italian Americans lynched in New Orleans

1920-1933 Prohibition– cultural consequences

1924 Immigration Act

1927 Sacco and Vanzetti executed

Immigration product of modernist forces in America framed by exclusionary arguments about ethnic essentialism and assimilation

The Problem with Self-Made Gangsters

Sinatra and Roosevelt

The House I Live In (1945)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woZVlroHqPU

From Here to Eternity (1953)

Maggio and Critique

Prostitution another form of ‘enlisting’

Homosexuality in Army

Officer incompetence

Sadism and graft

Racism

Mixed-race unions between soldiers and Hawaiians

American military incompetence leads to Pearl Harbour

Takes place at margins of American empire

American ‘misfits’ tell their own stories

Prewitt’s failed belief in army’s romantic past

Mythmaking of Pearl Harbour

The Man With the Golden Arm (1955)

The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

Establishment Style

MiddlebrowsJoan Shelley Rubin (1992) notes that cultural study focuses on either high or low, but not the median culture Middlebrow writers in 1920s at odds with Lost Generation, high-art moderns

Longstanding contempt for middlebrows (women writers) by cultural conservative Dwight MacDonald

Middlebrow culture more powerful than either—heritage of Mathew Arnold (Culture and Anarchy, 1882) and persistence of Victorian values of cultural improvement

Book-of-the-Month Club, Saturday Review of Literature, Pulitzer Prize, Alexander Wolcott’s radio show, historical films, Clifton Fadiman’s “Great Literature,” BBC Radio 4 lists all 20th-century outcroppings of “middlebrow culture.”

Contemporary middlebrow tv has masculine structures and address (Slate): Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Sopranos, etc

The Path to Reagan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5Gcy6JY5Rg