Thoughts on Hollywood Highbrow

In the first hundred or so pages Baumann has impressively blended both history and sociology to investigate the historical changes occurring in the perception of Hollywood films as lowbrow entertainment to highbrow art form. To do this, Baumann insists on examining the artistic production and reception of film as a social process contingent upon a thorough contextual understanding of the economic, social, political, and technological changes from the beginning of film’s inception at the tail end of the 19^th century moving into the 1970’s at least at end of the third chapter.

I do have a few critical questions/observations though that might be taken up during class discussion.

In the second chapter “The Changing Opportunity Space” Baumann uses statistics to show how the advent of television had a negative impact on film going. He writes, “Despite the discrepancies found in the historical statistics, it is nonetheless clear that by the early 1950s televisions were to be found in all but the most privileged of homes, including most working-class homes” (39). It would be interesting to shift the focus, though this is not Baumann’s intention, to find out when the upper class started purchasing televisions, and what societal factors could have motivated the legitimation of television viewing in this group.

Continuing in Chapter 2, Baumann provides a contemporary example of how higher status groups associate certain popular musicians with tackiness and bad taste. He writes, “Examples of popular singers and musicians who tend not only to be avoided but derided by high status groups include Celine Dion and Kenny G. These musicians make easy-listening pop music, a “middle America” genre. The alignment of regional designation with bad taste is another interesting side-thread, that although isn’t really a part of Baumann’s project, is intriguing as a phenomenon that needs further investigation. Why bad taste needs a particular locale for those atop the cultural hierarchy, and how “middle America” came to be a suitable and acceptable place for those making the judgments, would be an interesting cultural/sociological/historical study.

In chapter 3, “The Change Within,” Baumann discusses how directors like John Ford, Howard Hawks, and George Cukor, preferred to be associated as technical workers, not as artists. One of the reasons why these directors chose not to identify as artists was because they did not yet have the institutional support to promote themselves in this fashion nor did the language of director as auteur have any representational currency yet. It’s interesting though that these directors seemed to responding to the “do you consider yourself an artist?” question from the media interviewing them. How was it then that the discourse of auteur theory was available and seemingly conversational among the media, but it was slower to gain traction with actual directors?

Matt