Film-Philosophy 15.2
2011
Review: Boaz Hagin (2010) Death in Classical
Hollywood
Cinema.
Basingstoke:
Palgrave
Macmillan
Richard Armstrong
British Film Institute
Boaz Hagin’s account of death in classical American cinema is a
workmanlike and fastidious study. The author deploys an extensive range of
examples where plot details are thorough and usefully recalled as and when
they suit Hagin’s theses and observations. Drawing upon the generic glut of
Hollywood studio output from 1925 to 1955 and observing it through the
prism of the theme of death, Hagin is tilling a fresh and important furrow in
the study of mainstream cinema. Yet, given the gravity of this perspective, we
get little sense of what death entails as experience. Rather, the writer is
content to view human finitude as a plot device and not as an event with real
and devastating consequences for characters and spectators.
The author begins by setting out the importance of death as a universal
condition, outlining the paradox in which, whilst death and life are
incommensurable and the living can know nothing of what death is like, this
fate nevertheless unites all and will inevitably catch up with each individual,
constantly exercising the human need to comprehend, to identify meaning in
this nonsensical event. The relationship between death and cinema is rich and
complex. Film-Philosophy itself has seen work published on this issue:
Cholodenko 2010, Freeman 2004. As Hagin argues, death has not been
meaningless for film studies, some essential relationship between death and
cinema having been identified by a range of theorists as residing in such
devices as the single frame, the finite or infinite shot, and cinema’s ability to
vanquish death and enable immortality. Hagin quotes Friedrich Kittler, who
writes of cinema as: ‘an immeasurable expansion of the realms of the dead.’
We are reminded of that paradox of presence/absence which abides even in
the mise-en-scène of the cinema, the séance at which a typically adoring
audience gazes up at they who speak to them yet are not present, or are in
reality already dead. The relationship between the cinema ‘séance’ and the
spiritualist gatherings which appeared contemporaneously with cinema’s
infancy seems compelling.
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This essential paradox at the heart of cinema’s spectatorial condition,
its natural propensity to expand the realms of the dead, the ‘Kingdom of
Shadows’ as Maxim Gorky called it, bears heavily upon what is missing from
this book, and is, ultimately, why it does not succeed. Citing a plethora of
examples from the western, the gangster movie, the melodrama (specifically
its ‘woman’s picture’ precinct), and the war film, Hagin seeks to show: ‘how
the event of death meaningfully functions in relation to events that come
before or after it in a personal linear causal narrative.’ Yet the paradox of
this approach is that, whilst focussing upon how death figures in say, The
Public Enemy (William A. Wellman, 1931), this film, along with a great
many other generic exemplars cited, is not about death as such. In The
Roaring Twenties (Raoul Walsh, 1939), Scarface, Shame of a Nation
(Howard Hawks, 1932), Little Caesar (Mervyn LeRoy, 1930), Angels with
Dirty Faces (Michael Curtiz, 1938), death serves to fulfil the ideological
injunction that ‘crime doesn’t pay’ reproduced in numerous censorship
diatribes and codified in Hollywood’s self-regulating Production Code from
1934. We get little or no insight in any of these films into how the death of
the gangster affects characters who were close to him, not least the doting
mother, a stock figure of the genre.
Hagin’s aim to reveal how ‘meaningful’ death is in the classical
paradigm comes up against the fact that few Hollywood studio films of the
period explicitly convey death as the central theme. The classical decades are
strewn with films in which deaths occur, but few in which loss occurs. The
distinction is important and not exhausted by the perennial fear of demise
expressed in that infamously dark descendent of the gangster genre, film
noir. Arguably, the author misses opportunities to ponder the era’s innermost
instincts regarding the reality of human demise by overlooking the horror
genre, a corpus which explores as a condition of its being the inevitability of
death and characters’ feelings about this. Hidden within the shadowy
insinuations of the Val Lewton horror cycle of the war years, for example, is
a thoroughgoing contemplation of loss and mourning. Despite Hagin’s
paying some lip service to the genre which, more frequently than any other in
the 1940s revolved around characters facing loss and trying to make sense of
it, from the ranks of the ‘woman’s picture’ come such titles as Tender
Comrade (Edward Dmytryck, 1943), Since You Went Away (John Cromwell,
1944), and Portrait of Jennie (William Dieterle, 1948), barely mentioned
here. Compared with loving recollections of gangster movies, westerns and
war movies such as - Angels with Dirty Faces, Shane (George Stevens, 1952),
A Walk in the Sun (Lewis Milestone, 1946), narrative examples from
melodrama are few and far between.
The schematic and somewhat impoverished reading of the
‘meaningfulness’ of death in this book can be felt in the author’s discussion
of those texts – The Crowd (King Vidor, 1928), My Darling Clementine
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(John Ford, 1946), and White Heat (Raoul Walsh, 1949) in which
‘intermediary’ deaths occur, reported but not seen, generating effects and
causing actions within the storyline. The difference between the meaning of
death in these films and that of classical titles with a greater investment in
treating death as loss such as Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940), Curse of the
Cat People (Robert Wise & Gunther von Fritsch, 1943), and The Spiral
Staircase (Robert Siodmak, 1946) is that, whilst in Hagin’s examples offscreen deaths motivate fresh plot twists, in these the invisible unknowable
spectre of demise, again reported but not seen, is always already a condition
of the protagonist’s life to the extent that the films become narratives about
death and its consequences for the protagonist’s interiority.
Hagin explains that his book was motivated in part by his perspective
on the Middle East conflict with which as an Israeli he grew up. Meant as a
kind of riposte to that tendency in the Israeli and Palestinian media to fix the
cycles of violence within particular discourses of blame and retribution, thus
reducing their real-world consequences, this book seeks to escape the mediasponsored ‘meaningfulness’ of the media sound-bites and face up to the
outcomes of death as an important cinematic paradigm has characterized it.
But in doing so, Hagin reduces the experience of death in another way. This
book does not make death meaningful, it simply acknowledges a handy
narrative bridge which prompts, causes or ends a classical storyline which
will always revolve around active goal-oriented characters, in other words,
characters who are not going to die, and are not, as mourners often feel they
are, living some death-in-life. Taken as a narrative paradigm, classical
Hollywood is not a very promising model for the exploration of the
incommensurability of life and death, of agency and inertia. It would take the
relaxation of censorship in Hollywood in the 1960s and the rise of the
European art film of the post-war period to find death treated in a richer,
more realistic and more moving fashion.
To observe the representation of so grave a theme in an artistic
endeavour of any kind, that is to approach aesthetics from the perspective of
a real-world situation, as Hagin claims he is doing, must avoid trivializing
theme and subject, in this case reducing death to a plot device, and the
classical Hollywood paradigm to pure narrative. The merest perusal of
therapeutic literature on the subject will show that mourning people have a
massively diminished sense of goal-direction, getting through a single day can
seem heroic, while the condition of mourning is as full of layer, nuance and
consequence as a film noir is of light, shadow, inference and suggestion.
Steeped in the enthusiasm of a very boyish cinephilia, a perspective borne out
by the smoking gun on the book’s cover, this book opens up cinema
scholarship but it does not expand the realms of the dead.
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