An Exploration of Intellectual Kitsc

The Purple Rose of Popular Culture Theory: An Exploration of Intellectual Kitsch
Author(s): David Grimsted

Reviewed work(s):
Source: American Quarterly, Vol. 43, No. 4 (Dec., 1991), pp. 541-578
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2713081 .
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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 so-
ciety'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, nov-
els, 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
THE PURPLE ROSE 543
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 "post-
classical" 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 par-
ticular 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 prob-
lem/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 en-
ters 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 en-
grossed 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 watch-
ers 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
THE PURPLE ROSE 551
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, for-
mulaic 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
THE PURPLE ROSE 553
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 amuse-
ment 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 uku-
lele 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.
THE PURPLE ROSE 555
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 whirl-
wind, 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
THE PURPLE ROSE 557
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 conversa-
tions, 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 commer-
cial, 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 ar-
gument 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 dissat-
isfactions 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
THE PURPLE ROSE 559
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 mak-
ing 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 coun-
try'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 stan-
dards 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
THE PURPLE ROSE 561
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 ig-
norance, 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, nar-
rative 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 compla-
cency 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 thought-
ful 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 ro-
mances 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
THE PURPLE ROSE 563
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 con-
cluding 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 in-
telligence, 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
THE PURPLE ROSE 565
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 sug-
gests about the readers of popular romances, whose quoted conver-
sations 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 clas-
sic 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 dom-
inant 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 op-
positional 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
THE PURPLE ROSE 567
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 worth-
while. 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 con-
clusions 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 sug-
gests that both yuppies as a class and their views are so self-evident
THE PURPLE ROSE 569
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 doc-
uments 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 them-
selves and differently from people in other groups; awareness of cultural
shaping sharpens oppositional readings; and wholly accepting or re-
jecting 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 re-
sponse to a new cultural artifact. This underlines the problems of
directing cultural studies toward reader-response strategies. Such dif-
ficulties 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 expe-
rience 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 dif-
ferent 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 con-
versation, casual or critical, alone or with others, can one dredge up
some part of the submerged significance to understand better the mean-
ing 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
THE PURPLE ROSE 571
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
THE PURPLE ROSE 573
the 1940s musical in Crimes and Misdemeanors (marking the time when there was a
film code and, people believed, perhaps even a human one) effectively serve his
argument. Those Allen films intended as homages to Bergman, Renoir, and Fellini-
Interiors, Stardust Memories, A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy, and A Woman's
Life-reflect more stiffness. Fellini's The White Sheik (1953) uses a theme similar to
Purple Rose, (in this case a woman's immersion in the fantasy of illustrated magazine
serials), but treats popular culture only as escapist stupidity. Buster Keaton's Sherlock,
Jr. (1924) features a "real" projectionist entering into his movies in a pleasantly
conventional dream/fantasy format.
9. Tom's speech about being tired of talking about what's reality and what's illusion
when there is life to live strikes a postmodern cord.
10. The 1929 films Broadway and The Dance of Life (sometimes known as Bur-
lesque), have long inventive collage scenes, one establishing romance and the second,
using many of the same symbols, the hero's growing alcoholism. The powerful cul-
mination of these collages was Busby Berkeley's incredible anti-fascist "Lullaby of
Broadway" sequence which was tacked to the wretched Gold-Diggers of 1935.
11. The scene offers an interesting juxtaposition to the powerful climactic scene of
King Vidor's The Crowd (1928), also a comment on mass culture's role in ordinary
lives. Vidor's symbol of modem people caught in a world too big, fast, and heartless
for them to control is the clown at whom the hero laughs when he dreams of making
it big and whom he becomes in desperate recognition of the modest dimensions that
are his lot. The film skirts tragedy, before providing a "happy ending" of family
reconciliation represented by a trip to the theater. Clowns jump on one another, and
the father, mother, and son, all of whom we have come to care about, laugh together
happily-when the camera pans back and we see them as part of a mass, now laughing
en masse, hideously, mechanically, at the comedy of their own lives.
12. Ray B. Browne, "Popular Culture-The World Around Us," in The Popular
Culture Reader (Bowling Green, Ohio, 1978), 12-18; Russell Lynes, The Tastemakers
(New York, 1953); Henry Steele Commager and Richard B. Morris, "Introduction,"
to Lynes, The Lively Audience: A Social History of the Visual and Performing Arts
in America, 1890-1950 (New York, 1985); Dwight Macdonald, Against the American
Grain (New York, 1962), 3-75. Two studies that thoughtfully attack the layering of
culture in these ways are Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel, The Popular Arts (New
York, 1965), and Raymond Williams's broader Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (Lon-
don, 1961).
13. The proto-fascist position is clear in Jose Ortega y Gasset's Revolt of the Masses
(New York, 1932) and the early T. S. Eliot's After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern
Heresy (London, 1934) where he urged Virginians to retain racial homogeneity while
avoiding "any large number of free thinking Jews" and any "spirit of excessive
tolerance," 19-20. Variants of Marxism propel the critiques of Theodor Adorno, Prisms
(London, 1967) and (with Max Horkheimer), Dialectic of Enlightenment (London,
1979) and Herbert Marcuse's One Dimensional Man (Boston, 1964), An Essay on
Liberation (Boston, 1969), and Eros and Civilization (Boston, 1974). A democrat
with standards seems the self-definition of Dwight Macdonald, Against the American
Grain and On Movies (New York, 1981). The later T. S. Eliot, Notes Toward the
Definition of Culture (New York, 1968), and F. R. Leavis, Mass Civilization and
Minority Culture (Cambridge, 1930) represent aesthetic Mandarins, as do Bernard
Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg discussed below. Hugo Mtsterberg probably best
intellectually explains the fundamentalist response, which insists (I think correctly)
on the interplay of moral visions in popular culture with those in society, which of
course makes no better any simplistic moralism and no easier the often demanded
censorship. The Film-A Psychological Study: The Silent Photoplay in 1916 (New
York, 1970), 92-100.
14. Herbert Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation
of Taste (New York, 1974), 69-118, 132-59.
15. Marshall McLuhan's lively but diminishing contribution to the debate can be
seen in The Mechanical Bride: The Folklore of Industrial Man (New York, 1951);
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto, 1962); Under-
standing Media: The Extensions of Man (New York, 1964); and (with Quentin Fiore)
The Medium is the Massage (New York, 1967).
16. Ray Browne, "Introduction," Challenges in American Culture (Bowling Green,
Ohio, 1970), ix; "Popular Culture: Notes toward a Definition," Popular Culture:
Mirror of American Life, ed. David Manning White and John Pendleton (Del Mar,
Calif., 1977), 19.
17. Russel B. Nye, The Unembarrassed Muse: The Popular Arts in America (New
York, 1970), 420; Marshall Fishwick, Parameters: Mass Media Mosaic (Bowling
Green, Ohio, 1978), 4. Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (New York, 1966), 275-
304, with its praise of camp, argues that enjoyment of the bad is in fact both fun and
sophisticated, in another of the numerous twists whereby twentieth-century denizens
prove they are "with it" by laughing at those defined as "out of it." Sontag's On
Photography (New York, 1980) is more Marxist in tone with its stress on art as opiate.
18. Nietzsche most vitally represents this common ground, arguing, brilliantly and
outrageously, on both sides of the issue at various points. Most interesting is his
insistence on the vitality and honesty of the popular, represented by Bizet's Carmen,
compared to the elite pretentiousness of Wagner. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of
Wagner (with The Birth of Tragedy), trans. Walter Kaufman (New York, 1967).
19. Russel B. Nye, "Notes on a Rationale for Popular Culture," The Popular Culture
Reader 19-27; Clement Greenberg, "Avant Garde and Kitsch," Art and Culture
(Boston, 1961), 3-21. Nye's essay has been widely reprinted, sometimes slightly
modified, in popular culture readers and as the introduction to his Unembarrassed
Muse, and Greenberg's essay appears, with many others related to the early debate,
in Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, ed. Bernard Rosenberg and David
Manning White (Glencoe, Ill., 1957).
20. The socially revolutionary suggestions of the novel are well argued in Cathy
Davidson's able poststructuralist Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in
America (New York, 1986).
21. Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White, eds., Mass Culture Revisited
(New York, 1971), 8, 16. White, with some sense of the problem, suggests the next
volume should be called Son of Mass Culture.
22. David Marc, Demographic Vistas: Television in American Culture (Philadelphia,
1984), 39-63. The show ran from 1962-1971, precisely the time when a similar radical
caricature of "the establishment" was at its height. Marc stresses his eclectic com-
monsensical approach, xi-xiv.
23. Hannah Arendt, "Society and Culture," in Mass Culture Revisited, 99; Adorno,
Prisms, 121-32; Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 121-26; Martin
Jay, Adorno (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), 118-29.
24. Allen, "God (A Play)," 13.
25. Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy
in America (Cambridge, Mass., 1988). Levine's historical explanation of this di-
chotomy seems less wholly convincing, both in its insistence on an all-inclusive
nineteenth-century culture, and in its stress on the elite's driving out the common
man.
THE PURPLE ROSE 575
26. Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Lit-
erature (Chapel Hill, 1984); Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and
Working-Class Culture in America (New York, 1987); Clifford Geertz, The Interpre-
tation of Culture: Selected Essays (New York, 1973), 412-53. All three works illustrate
what can be learned by close inspection of texts generally scorned. The first two cases
examine texts with special appeal to nondominant groups.
27. In Hollywood's most famous pondering of its own influence, Preston Sturgess's
Sullivan's Travels (1941), the film's rather coarse overt point-in this sad world, easy
laughter is the gift that should be given-is made through a Disney cartoon bringing
hilarity to a chain gang. Hitchcock similarly uses a Disney cartoon, with much greater
sense of the anarchy-violence mixed with the comic, in the powerful, climactic section
of the otherwise flat Sabotage (1936). Hollywood generally treats its own past in
"elitist" terms as escapist junk, the better to show how sophisticated it now is. This
"progressive" thesis is shared with proponents of popular culture studies such as
Browne, White, and Nye, who like to assure people that, although popular culture
may be poor, it used to be worse. The vacuity of this defense is well illustrated in
Nye's example: once back in the dark ages, there were William S. Hart, Mary Pickford,
and some Charlie Chaplin movies, but now we have climbed to "the sophisticated,
multileveled art" of High Noon and Star Wars (Popular Culture Reader, 26). There
are good and great recent films, but none better than Chaplin's paeans to comic coping
in a hard world; the austere purity of some Hart films; the genial sophistication of
Douglas Fairbank's satire on media-induced macho, Wild and Woolly (1919); William
DeMille's sharp-eyed Americana in Miss Lulu Bett (1921); Lois Weber's harrowing
handling of genteel poverty in The Blot (1921) the only work of art (I think) ever
made specifically in support of the great cause of higher college professor salaries; or
King Vidor's The Crowd (1928), my candidate for the greatest American film and the
richest aesthetic handling of that major twentieth-century theme of the relation of the
individual to mass society.
28. Allen's choice of films for the sisters to chat about both shows his knowledge
of American film and demonstrates the rich possibilities for pedantry in the field. Okay
America (1932) was a tough expose of Walter Winchell radio journalism that starred
Lew Ayres. Cecilia describes James Melton's performance in Stars Over Broadway
(1935).
29. Gennady Smakov, Baryshnikov: From Russia to the West (New York, 1981),
227-34. Dennis Potter is a good example of an intellectual working with mass culture
in ways similar to Allen, but with some abstract arbitrariness that has given him more
intellectual cachet. The Singing Detective richly ties popular mysteries and music to
the exploration of personal pain and puzzlement. His Pennies from Heaven is a much
coarser and deeply dour view of all human ties, something softened but not really left
behind in the American movie version. The latter's integration of its characters into
an Astaire-Rogers dance offers a comparison with Allen's similar tactics in a more
integrative and caring aesthetic framework. Gordon Willis was the cinematographer
for both films.
30. Both liberal and Marxist theorists often suggest that, but for the pablum of
popular culture, oppressed people like Cecilia might march to the ballot box or bar-
ricades for change. While works can influence social attitudes -the reforms encouraged
by Ten Nights in the Barroom or Uncle Tom's Cabin, the racism sanctioned by Birth
of a Nation or the pacifism by All Quiet on the Western Front-art tends to focus
human disappointment more broadly. Hence the justice of the frequent aesthetic icon-
oclasm of radical religious and political groups, palely mirrored in the mistrust of art
in the early United States. Neil Harris, The Artist in American Society (New York,
1970), 28-53.
31. Radway, Reading the Romance, 71-102.
32. Mtinsterberg, The Film, 98-99.
33. Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyper Reality (New York, 1986), 52; John Fiske,
"British Cultural Studies and Television" in Robert C. Allen, ed., Channels of Dis-
course: Television and Contemporary Criticism (Chapel Hill, 1987), 271, 186; David
Morley, The 'Nationwide' Audience: Structure and Decoding (London, 1980), 15;
Stuart Hall, "Encoding/Decoding" in Stuart Hall et al., eds. Culture, Media and
Language (London, 1980).
34. Claire Johnston, "Women's Cinema as Counter Cinema" in Patricia Erens, ed.,
Sexual Stratagems: The World of Women in Film, 128-42; John Fiske, Television
Culture (London, 1987), 21-47, 198-233. E. Ann Kaplan develops a similarly anti-
realist position from a somewhat different perspective in Women and Film: Both Sides
of The Camera (New York, 1983).
35. Johnston, "Women's Cinema," 135; Fiske, "British Cultural Studies," 256.
Christine Gledhill affirms Fiske's reservations about "stereotypes" vanishing "with
the production of images of real women," and about realism in "Developments in
Feminist Film Criticism" in Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellenkamp, and Linda Wil-
liams, eds., Re-Vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism (Los Angeles, 1984), 18-
48.
36. John Fiske, Reading the Popular (Boston, 1989), 178; Television Culture, 310.
The arguments of this school are heavily grounded in continental thought: the Marxism
of Antonio Gramsci and especially Louis Althusser; the structuralism of Claude Levi-
Strauss and Michel Foucault; the psychology (particularly among the feminist critics)
of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan; and the semiotic applications of Christian Metz
and especially Roland Barthes with his steady attack on bourgeois myth which "or-
ganizes a world without contradiction because it is without depth, and a world which
is open and wallowing in the evident" (Mythologies [London, 1972], 137). Such
insistence on absolute simplemindedness in popular bourgeois culture ties this approach
to negative classicism in a way that discourages serious exploration. Wole Soyinka's
vigorous questioning of whether it is the culture discussed or Barthes' discussion that
is "without depth" is amusing and worth reading: "The Critic and Society: Barthes,
Leftocracy, and Other Mythologies" in Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed., Black Literature
and Literary Theory (New York, 1984), 27-57.
37. To think about the variety in these films-even between the two Stallone
movies-is to add cinema to Eco's comment on radio-television, attacking both the
hegemonic text and interpretive group insistence of British cultural studies: "uncon-
trollable plurality of messages that each individual uses to make up his own com-
position," Travels in Hyper Reality, 148. Not specific arguments in the films, but
broad mood and moral universe tie them to the day's politics: the compassion for the
sadness in the lives of people struggling for integrity in a hard world for which there
is no clear programmatic answer in Purple Rose versus Rambo's emphasis on easy,
tough, complete answers in a world divided between good and evil, where failure to
see the simple dichotomy and solution is proof of moral flabbiness and blindness to
those ever popular universal values of self-righteousness, self-complacency, and self-
indulgence.
38. Mark Twain, "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg," Short Stories (New York,
1968), 377-88. The special kind of class antagonism in the United States, based on
money and especially mean because it is vague, seems to be caught better in two films
than elsewhere, George Cukor's Alice Adams (1935) and Lois Weber's The Blot (1921).
THE PURPLE ROSE 577
Somewhat schlocky happy endings detract from the power of both films, especially
Alice Adams.
39. Brookeman, American Culture, 51, 213; Macdonald, Against the American
Grain, 40. Macdonald argues, with his usual lively and honest illogic, "I agree with
everything Mr. Wilder says; but I will fight to the death his right to say it that way."
The aesthetic question, of course, is whether the artist gives a context with enough
weight, richness, or irony to dignify the truisms.
40. Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington, Ind., 1980), 14-28;
Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Women's Film of the 1940s (Bloomington,
Ind., 1987), 2. Others who use Mulvey's ideas are Johnston, "Women's Cinema";
Linda Williams, "When the Women Looks" in Re-Vision, 83-99; Peter Baxter, "On
the Naked Thighs of Miss Deitrich," in Bill Nichols, ed., Movies and Methods, vol.
2 (Berkeley, 1985), 557-65, which reprints the Mulvey and Johnston essays in its
"Feminist Criticism" section, 303-87. Mulvey's "second thoughts" about her influ-
ential essay, first published in 1975, modify her original stark position and permit
more interesting film analysis, Pleasures, 29-48.
41. In Blonde Venus (1932), for example, there is about one minute at the beginning
of the film where the hero and a group of comic-lecherous comrades come upon the
Deitrich character and her women friends swimming naked in a river, a scene made
sensuous by the vague and water-cloaked hints of bodies. After this romantic intro-
duction to the domestic story, the camera never dwells on Deitrich's legs-when a
showman asks her to show what she's got, she lifts the front of her skirt away from
the audience who looks at his coarsely lecherous gaze-and dwells for over twelve
minutes on her judging gaze, always representing the text's "favored" intellectual and
moral evaluation of situations.
42. Fiske, Television Culture, 312; "British Cultural Studies and Television," 271;
Reading the Popular, 132.
43. Fiske, Reading the Popular, 13-93; Marcuse, Essay on Liberation, 38-47.
George Lipsitz offers a contrasting Marxist interpretation, finding that post-World War
II American popular culture incorporated important aspects of the working-class protest
crushed by a "totalitarian oligarchy." Lipsitz finds working-class attitudes and values
alive and well in things ranging from film noir to Rebel Without a Cause to customized
cars, from rock and roll to roller derbies, the latter with special appeal to "working
class women," Class and Culture in Cold War America: "A Rainbow at Midnight"
(New York, 1981), 2, 174-218.
44. Morley, 'Nationwide' Audience, 126; Family Television: Cultural Power and
Domestic Leisure (London, 1986). Fiske comments on Morley's work in some of his
review articles, as does Thomas Streeter, "An Alternative Approach to Television
Research: Developments in British Cultural Studies at Birmingham," in Willard D.
Rowland and Bruce Watkins, eds., Interpreting Television: Current Research Per-
spectives (Beverly Hills, 1984), 74-97.
45. Morley, Family Television, 146-72, 123. Morley, like most other theorists
recently, points out the limitations of traditional American "mass communications
research" associated prominently with Paul Lazarsfeld. The limitations of this approach
for cultural analysis are clear, but little more so than other work that emphasizes
surveys. Lazarsfeld's work at least highlighted a multitude of "sectors" in the audience
given little attention in postclassical theories: age, marital status, region, income level,
profession, ethnicity, party allegiance, religion, etc.
46. This theory derives most clearly from Wolfgang Iser's The Act of Reading: A
Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore, 1978), which continues to treat the text as
a directing reality, as does Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader (Bloomington, Ind.,
1977). Much more text-skeptical are Norman Holland's individualistic 5 Readers
Reading (New Haven, 1975), Stanley Fish's interpretive groups in Is There a Text in
This Class? (Cambridge, Mass., 1980) and Jonathan Culler's anarchistic The Pursuit
of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, and Deconstruction (London, 1981).
47. Of the twenty-four reviews I've read, sixteen were favorable, two neutral and
six negative. Those who most closely present an evaluation-analysis similar to mine
were Michael Wilmington in the Los Angeles Times, 1 Mar. 1985; Terrence Rafferty
in Sight and Sound, Summer 1985; Jack Kroll, Newsweek, 25 Feb. 1985; Richard
Schickel, Time, 4 Mar. 1985; Vincent Canby, New York Times, 1 Mar. 1985; Pauline
Kael, New Yorker, 25 Mar. 1985; David Sterrett, Christian Science Monitor, 7 Mar.
1985; and Kenneth Chanko, Films in Review, 1985. The most negative were J.
Hoberman, The Village Voice, 12 Mar. 1985; Julie Saloman, The Wall Street Journal,
28 Feb. 1985; David Denby, New York, 11 March 1985; Lenny Rubenstein, Cineaste
14 (1985): 60; Stanley Kauffmann, New Republic, 1 Apr. 1985; and Richard Combs,
Monthly Film Bulletin, July 1985.
48. Good examples of close textual analysis of American films related to varying
intellectual approaches are Walter Kerr, The Silent Clowns (New York, 1975); Eugene
Rosow, Born to Lose: The Gangster Film in America (New York, 1978); and William
Rothman, Hitchcock-The Murderous Gaze (Cambridge, Mass., 1982). Rothman's
criticism of structuralist-semiotic models is explicit in "Against 'The System of the
Suture' " in Nichols, Movies and Methods 1:451-59.
49. When counting the gaze minutes in Blonde Venus, I noticed another subconscious
text, this one clear, too, when raised to consciousness. It concerns the toys Helen
(Deitrich) buys for her son Johnny as they flee the court order that would take him
from her. Only the first of these shots calls visual attention to itself, a mask of an
older twisted man on the side of Johnny's head turned toward Helen and the audience
before we see his cute face bent over a desk where he's practicing printing: FATHER.
This mask of unhappy manhood turned toward the mother as the boy learns language
and to identify with daddy is phallically carried out in the other toys in successive
scenes-jerkily hopping mechanical man, arrow, gun, engine-until the final one in
the sequence where Helen holds Johnny to say good-bye, having decided for his sake
to give him up to his father. They look at one another lovingly, he holding his beloved
teddy bear by the legs and oscillating its head between him and his mother, as he begs
her to come and she lyingly says that she will come to him on the next train. If
Sternberg made much of this it would be too much, but, as a submerged text, it is as
subtle as anything Freud or Lacan wrote or could want.

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

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