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Demographic Angst Cultural Narratives and American Films of the 1950s
Alan Nadel
New Brunswick (New Jersey): Rutgers University Press, 2018 Paperback. xiii+251 p. ISBN 978-0813565491. $29.95
Reviewed by Steffen Hantke Sogang University (Korea)
December of 2018 saw the passing of artist Michael Paul Smith, whose work consists entirely of photographs he took of an imaginary miniature town, Elgin Park. Forcing photographic perspectives for startlingly realistic effects, Smith painstakingly recreated his memories in miniature and photography of growing up in 1950s America. Though his externalization of a very personal vision of the Fifties is bathed in the golden hues of nostalgia, some of his images register the intrusion of darker forces, of vintage cars overturned at the side of the road, of craftsman homes revealed to be scenes of crimes all the more shocking for being just barely glimpsed in their garish violence. What resonates most of all, however, is the seemingly inexhaustible patience with which Smith labored over his creation, the obsessive attention to detail lavished upon the final product. Though any reading of Smith’s artistic sensibility would likely end up diminishing his work by way of overgeneralization, his Elgin Park is as much a highly personal and idiosyncratic labor of love as it is a recognizable and concrete manifestation of American culture’s lasting fascination with the Fifties. Working alone, as it turns out, Smith was never alone. From the manufactured paranoid construct of the 1950s “Old Town” in Philip K. Dick’s novel Time Out of Joint (1959), to the eponymous 1950s small town in Gary Ross’s film Pleasantville (1998), the Fifties appear as a historical moment but even more so as a perpetually relevant rhetorical construct to be revisited with longing or disdain. Alternatingly, they are a golden age, a model for “making America great again,” or an “air-conditioned nightmare” from which only the following decade would finally offer reprieve or escape. For an artist like Smith or a director like Ross, both born right around the turn from the forties to the fifties, the impulse behind the work might be the attempt to return to childhood as a way to discover and construct their respective origins. For a writer like P.K. Dick, born in the previous generation and thus exposed to the Fifties as an adult, the impulse might have been to track America’s transformation as the Sixties would gradually put an end its predecessor. Whatever their personal motives might have been, however, the work remains relevant because there is something about the Fifties that throws into relief the present moment. If attempts at triangulating the exact position of an artistic representation like Smith’s Elgin Park, Dick’s Old Town, or Ross’s Pleasantville can start with a consideration of their creator’s idiosyncratic motivation, the same is also true, to one degree or another, for the authors of critical commentary on the decade. How much the Fifties retain an ability to compel personal investment even in critical commentators becomes obvious in what appears almost a convention within academic studies—the autobiographical reference at the start of the book. Lizabeth Cohen’s book on 1950s consumer culture, for example, A Consumer’s Republic (2003), features a photograph of herself and her sister taken in 1956 in front of their ranch-style house in suburban Paramus, New Jersey. Bernard F. Dick’s The Screen is Red : Hollywood, Communism and the Cold War (2018) begins with the author’s personal childhood memories of red-baiting in the 1950s. And Alan Nadel’s Containment Culture (1995), recovering the origins of postmodernism in the Fifties, builds its Preface around its author’s memories of being a child during the period. Personal experience also serves to locate the Fifties in Nadel’s new book Demographic Angst : Cultural Narratives and American Films of the 1950s (2018) as an object of enduring fascination within the author’s work. As a commentator on the Fifties—though perhaps with less obsessiveness and more of a cool analytical eye than artists like Smith or directors like Ross—Nadel is returning to familiar ground. Just like his earlier work in Containment Culture (1995), and Television in Black-And-White America: Race and National Identity (2005), Demographic Angst explores the Fifties’ potential for rewriting or generating powerful cultural narratives, some of which resonate long after the decade has passed. If the nostalgia that speaks from Alan Paul Smith’s work is conspicuously absent from Demographic Angst, the sense of unease that lingers around some of the most fondly remembered cultural artifacts from the period is something Nadel is drawn to as well. Casting back to his own childhood, Nadel’s recollections gravitate toward that sense of ambivalence and dread. “I did have the acute sense,” he observes in the preface, “that my home life [during the 1950s] differed drastically from that of the functionally contented American family that was—as television relentlessly assured me—the norm” [xi]. This last word, “the norm,” is central to Nadel’s argument. Atypical and idiosyncratic as his own home life might have been, his observation reveals a broader logic by which cultural pressure to conform to a rigid and narrow set of psychological, social, and political ideals would inevitably produce doubts about anyone’s ability to live up to those ideals. The dogmatic force with which the popular culture of the period would promote these ideals, their tyrannical ubiquity, was exacerbated by the mass media available for this promotion. Inside the home, the family, the most intimate space: there was television; outside, in a space ostensibly more public yet just as intimately tied to the formation of individual subjectivity, there was the cinema. And underneath all of their products, there was a sense of dread. Nadel launches his argument from territory that has been mapped out by previous critical work. As far as his selection of films is concerned, canonical titles prevail, from Singin’ in the Rain, Sunset Boulevard, and All About Eve, to Roman Holiday, On the Waterfront, and West Side Story. Deftly moving from the exegesis of individual films to the analysis of some of the star performers within them, most notably Marlon Brando and Danny Kaye, Nadel branches out into less canonical fare (like Kaye’s The Court Jester and Brando’s Sayonara and The Teahouse of the August Moon). Just as the analysis of these less frequently discussed films often closes the gaps in our understanding of the period, producing a more well-rounded overall picture, Nadel’s reading of canonical Fifties cinema often depends on slight shifts in the conventional interpretive framework and thus invariably succeeds in revealing surprising aspects of these seemingly familiar films. The same mix of familiar and unfamiliar elements also determines the book’s characterization of the decade. America in the Fifties— dominant in the global political arena, a powerhouse of economic productivity, and extending opportunities for social betterment to unprecedented numbers of its citizens—was, by most reasonable standards, a place where happiness was ensured, or at least attainable. And yet, much “evidence […] indicates that the citizenry, despite prolific rhetoric to the contrary, experienced the postwar period with significant angst” [2]. From publisher Henry Luce, to popular commentator and novelist Philip Wylie, from sociologists like C. Wright Mills and David Riesman, to politicians like George Kennan and Arthur Schlesinger—the intellectual consensus coalesced around whatever flies these figures would spot in the ointment of American greatness. But tracing Americans’ unease or outright unhappiness back to the configuration of the individual mind, and thus dismissing it purely as a matter of individual psychopathology, would hardly let politics off the hook. To the extent that the nation would aspire to live up to its claim of being “The Happiest Place on Earth”—Nadel reminds us that Disneyland opened, to great national fanfare, in 1955—the personal would always already be political. Within the cultural logic of the Fifties, “Not Being Happy,” as one of the book’s section headings summarizes this insidious logic, “Is Not Being Normal Is Being Un-American” [8]. In line with Nadel’s approach of reading the decade’s zeitgeist through cinema as its premiere form of mass media, the book frames the key idea of happiness, and its peculiar absence, as a peculiar Fifties construct. Taking his cue from the line “I’m happy again,” in the song “Singin’ in the Rain,” Nadel sees happiness as a presence caught in a state of perpetual precariousness. After all, “[Gene] Kelly is not singing about a moment that produces euphoria, but one that restores it” [33]. Since “being ‘happy again’ represents participating in euphoric postwar prosperity” [68], even the most miniscule fissure that opens up between the experience of happiness and the absence marked by the word “again” thus registers as anxiety or malaise, the curious joylessness that characterizes the decade. While this play of presence/absence is tied specifically into the film Singin’ in the Rain and its notions of cultural recycling and nostalgia, the idea also reverberates through the rest of the book. As much as this part of Nadel’s argument covers familiar territory—Tom Engelhardt’s The End of Victory Culture [1995], for example, follows a similar argumentative trajectory—it does ultimately move in a different direction. This road less taken diverges from consideration of the military side of the Cold War and the argument that the insidious ubiquity of dread beneath the placid façade of the Fifties was primarily the product of apocalyptic anxieties surrounding nuclear weapons and war. Nadel’s rough outline of the Fifties as “a broadly construed era” may still begin with the nuclear bellwether of Nagasaki. It does not end, however, as one might expect, with the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 but the emblematic figure of Lee Harvey Oswald in 1963 [30]. Though the nuclear framework of the Cold War remains in place, and impinges on the lives of Americans in various ways, the argument folds these impingements back onto their domestic effects. Here Nadel focuses on the new demographic map emerging after World War II, on the Baby Boomers and the social changes that accompanied their emergence and entrenchment. Nadel is interested in how, in the Fifties, Americans work, where they live, how they define themselves as sexual beings, as members of a social class, and generational cohort. Just as the transition “from the mid-1960s to the 1980s” would “contribute to a demographic map unimaginable in the 1950s” [222], it is the generational rewriting of the demographic map Nadel sees as the force behind so much American unhappiness in the Fifties. Cuba, to Nadel, is more interesting in the context of Cold War tourism than imminent nuclear disaster. To the degree that the compulsion toward a narrowly defined standard of normality was the unifying force behind this postwar generation’s unease, Nadel tracks down its manifestations around all those demographic figures in the popular imagination least equipped to achieve the social goals. Women might have strayed from the norm by being either too career-minded or too motherly. Teenagers might have teetered on the edge of delinquency, a suspicion, Nadel demonstrates, which increasingly throughout the Fifties would take on racial overtones as minorities would be uncomfortably aligned with urban spaces (like Black characters in Blackboard Jungle or Puerto Rican characters in West Side Story) or the newly redrawn global map of Cold War decolonization under the auspices of the United Nations. Nadel’s readings of Fifties cinema illustrates time and again how the strident ideological machinery enforces a definition of normality that produces the complementary abnormality, perversity, criminality, deviousness, pathology, and marginality. Cinematic genres like the screwball comedy, whose popularity during the 1930s and ‘40s was largely due to their embrace of “the complexity and unpredictability of the social world” [55], tend to lose their subversive bite in the Fifties. Gradually, the task of policing the margins of the normal would become so all-encompassing that the margins seemed to be creeping back toward the center. In the end, not even those who had believed themselves safely at the center would feel assured of their own normality. If, as I had suggested in the beginning, an author’s personal investment in the Fifties provides one point of reference for the triangulation of the work and its position within the larger discourse, some speculative considerations might be called for, in closing, on that second point of reference—the orientation of the work toward its own moment in history, i.e. an accounting for the relevance of the Fifties to whatever the present moment, or its ideologically tinged perception, happens to be. In the case of Elaine Tyler May’s Homeward Bound—a landmark study cited by Nadel (and pretty much everyone else writing about the subject), originally published in 1988—it is perhaps not surprising that May’s main interest is in the home lives of 1950s Americans. Writing at the tail end of the Reagan years and their nostalgia-infused rhetoric of restoring American greatness by way of conservative social values after the malaise of the 1970s, May is likely to have found the Fifties a historical analogy useful for the examination of these very same “traditional” nuclear families and their home lives. Similarly, my own book on the Fifties, Monsters in the Machine, published in 2016, was a response to the foregrounding of U.S. global military ambitions in the wake of the Bush administration’s two wars in the Middle East and their subsequent management by the Obama administration. After a decade and a half of aggressive U.S. foreign policy on display, reading post-9/11 America through the lens of the Fifties militarism seemed like a useful approach to understand both decades better. If contemporary concerns drive the production and reception of such studies of the Fifties, Nadel’s book is all the more interesting, rewarding, and instructive for its refocusing of the debate on the Fifties on the domestic sphere (albeit with an expanded understanding of global contexts that exceeds May’s work). To a large extent, Nadel’s argument touches on a wide array of issues which, at the present moment, fall under the auspices of what one, for lack of a better term, might call identity politics. Chapters delve into race relations, ethnic immigrant communities, the ideological labor invested in the creation of sexual identities, and the ramifications of social class, especially in regard to urban and suburban spaces. Since the book’s production history indicated in the Acknowledgements suggests that work on this project dates back at least to 2014, it is interesting to consider the focus on identity politics in its historical context. With the change of U.S. administrations in 2016, the rhetoric of the Obama years—liberal in its social, neoliberal in its economic agenda—would yield to a conservative agenda so blunt that it no longer even bears the prefix “–neo.” Seeing its victory in the 2016 presidential elections as a refutation of Obama-style neoliberalism (more so as a rhetorical style, than in its actual political substance), this new agenda proudly announces itself with that exact same marker Nadel places at the heart of his own reading of American malaise in the Fifties. Without assuming deliberate prescience on the part of the author, his readers might notice that Nadel’s insistence on the crucial importance of the word “again” in the line from “Singin’ in the Rain” about being “happy again” does resonates uncannily with the prominence of that same word in “Make America great again.” Comedian Bill Maher’s Real Time monologue about Donald Trump being, not just in his demographic origins but his ideological orientation, essentially a “Fifties Man” (2016) had already drawn attention to the reigning in of liberal ideas of individual subjectivity in favor of a nostalgically fabricated ideal of American greatness. Nadel’s meticulously worked out argument puts Maher’s casual polemic on a solid foundation. As much as the book promises to enjoy longevity as an intelligent, well-informed, and insightful study of America in the Fifties, taking its place among landmarks studies like May’s Homeward Bound (and Nadel’s earlier Containment Culture), critical understanding of Fifties-style identity politics as Nadel presents it in Demographic Angst might also inform the debate of contemporary politics—a politics which, incidentally, is similarly rife with “demographic angst” as that in the Fifties.
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