Abstract
A second way for death to be meaningful in relation to the past is by destroying someone who could not be stopped in any other way. It is a death that is meaningful, indeed, morally justified, by bringing an end to an evil that has been shown to be immutable so long as the perpetrator is alive. Those who die are bad guys who refuse to abandon their evil ways; they are, in Slavoj Žižek’s terms, incarnated drives, creatures who persist in an unconditional demand with no trace of compromise or hesitation to the end.1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 1991), 21–22.
Peter A. French, Cowboy Metaphysics: Ethics and Death in Westerns (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), 127.
Robert Warshow, “Movie Chronicle: The Westerner,” The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre & Other Aspects of Popular Culture (Garden City: Doubleday, 1962), 143.
The other characters, the gangster’s friends, rivals, and the police, as Robert Sklar notes, are all capable of “greater dishonesty and disloyalty” than the gangster (Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies, revised and updated [New York: Vintage Books, 1994], 181). They can change and some of them remain alive throughout the film; the deaths of those who do perish are meaningful in other ways.
Stephen Prince, Classical Film Violence: Designing and Regulating Brutality in Hollywood Cinema, 1930–1968 (New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 90.
Thomas Leitch, Crime Films (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 35;
Jack Shadoian, Dreams & Dead Ends: The American Gangster Film, Second Edition (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 175;
Martha P. Nochimson, Dying to Belong: Gangster Movies in Hollywood and Hong Kong (Malden and Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 122.
If not explicitly The Bomb, the ending was described at the very least as an “apocalyptic demise […] in a towering mushroom cloud” (Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System [New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981], 105).
Gerhard O. W. Mueller, Crime, Law and the Scholars: A History of Scholarship in American Criminal Law, vol. 26 of Cambridge Studies in Criminology (London: Heinemann, 1970), 74.
Carl N. Degler, In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), parts I and II.
David E. Ruth, Inventing the Public Enemy: The Gangster in American Culture, 1918–1934 (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 24;
on the changing social beliefs about the causes of crime, and particularly biological, environmental, aspirational (free will), and psychopathological explanations, see Kirsten Moana Thompson, Crime Films: Investigating the Scene (London and New York: Wallflower, 2007), 6.
On his stardom following this film, see Thomas Schatz, The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era (London: Faber and Faber, 1998), 138.
Being “yellow” is a common issue in gangster films. Proving he ain’t yellow motivates Rico in Little Caesar to disclose his location to the police and in a rather startling turn of events Scarface’s Tony turns out to be yellow at the very end; on this strange shift near the end of the film, see Richard Maltby, “The Spectacle of Criminality,” Violence and American Cinema, ed. J. David Slocum (New York and London: Routledge, 2001), 117–152, 136–137. On endocrinological theories of criminality (“something to do with the glands”) see Mueller, Crime, Law and the Scholars, 85–86.
Richard Slotkin writes that the film’s opening sequence emphasizes how “the inadequacies of his family shape” Tom’s “fate,” particularly the overindulgent mother and brutally authoritarian father (Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America [New York: Atheneum, 1992], 262). This still does not explain why only one brother turned to crime and has complicated affairs with women.
David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960 (London, Melbourne and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), 13.
Harold B. Segel, Body Ascendant: Modernism and the Physical Imperative (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).
Peter Gay, “Pathologies,” The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, volume III, The Cultivation of Hatred (London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1994), 128–212;
Sander L. Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race and Madness (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985);
Frank J. Sulloway, Freud Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1992).
Simon A. Cole, Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2001).
Cesare Lombroso, Crime: Its Causes and Remedies, trans. Henry P. Horton (Montclair: Patterson Smith, 1968), 447.
Cesare Lombroso, L’Homme criminel: Étude anthropologique et médico-légale, traduit par G. Regnier et A. Bornet (Paris: Félix Alcan, Turin: Bocca Frères, 1887), 225.
Even Lew Ayres in The Doorway to Hell (Archie Mayo, 1930), which precedes the three “classical” gangster films.
Thomas Doherty, Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema 1930–1934 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 146.
Cf. the tropes of inversion and gender separatism in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 86–90.
See Robert A. Nye, “Heredity or Milieu: The Foundations of Modern European Criminological Theory,” Isis 67.3 (1976): 334–355, esp. 340 on the “eugenical service” of Lombrosoian criminal science.
See also Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1995), 71;
Martin S. Pernick, The Black Stork: Eugenics and the Death of “Defective” Babies in American Medicine and Motion Pictures Since 1915 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 48; and Thompson, Crime Films, 8–11.
Qtd. in Garland E. Allen, “The Social and Economic Origins of Genetic Determinism: A Case History of the American Eugenics Movement, 1900–1940 and Its Lessons for Today,” Genetica 99 (1997): 77–88, 78.
The closest in the films I have studied is the Jarrett family in White Heat, which is said to have insanity running in it. But this film from the late 1940s is already quite distant from the heyday of American eugenics. The film’s protagonist, Cody Jarrett, is always under the threat of going mad like his father, who died in an institution. Yet, his criminality seems to be encouraged by his mother who does not come from the insane side of the family. In fact, it is acknowledged by everyone, including Cody, that she is the one who keeps him sane and his extremely close relationship with her might be more amenable to a Freudian explanation, not a merely hereditary one (Dana Polan writes that White Heat “is explicitly psychoanalytic in its replaying of the oedipal situation as constitutive of the criminal mind” in Power and Paranoia: History, Narrative, and the American Cinema, 1940–1950 [New York: Columbia University Press, 1986], 177. See also Schatz, Hollywood Genres, 108. On Hollywood’s shift to psychodynamic explanations in Westerns so as not to be perceived as making any dangerous social criticism during the postwar “Red Scare,” see Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 381–382). Madness is not the cause of Cody’s criminality but seems rather to mark the expiration date on it. Evans, the Treasury Department man running the investigation on Cody, feels that he is under pressure to get an undercover agent to approach him because Cody will become useless once he does go insane. The only signs of insanity so far are Cody’s headaches. These, as Evans explains, were faked by him as a child in order to get his mother’s attention and have since become real. Suspiciously, however, they only seem to appear when Cody is in a difficult situation he is in no other way able to alter, such as his mother’s death, an attempt to kill him in jail, or signs of rebellion in his gang. His going “nuts” seems to scare all those around him into obedience and mothering him. While perhaps caused by bad blood, his insanity is also extremely effective at altering his world. Is it any coincidence that Cody truly acts in a “mad” way only at the end of the film, when the police corner him and knowing that if he is caught he will surely be executed? He blows up a chemical plant and hollers to his dead mother that he has reached the top of the world. But what would be a sane reaction of someone who has always managed to outsmart the police when he knows he cannot get away and will be nut to death if he surrenders?
Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes, Catholics, and the Movies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 108. See also Sklar, Movie-Made America. 174–175.
Henry James Forman, Our Movie Made Children (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1933), 193. See also chapter XV on a “congested” area of New York City.
Nevertheless, as Richard Maltby notes, the major film companies “consistently sought to defer public attention away from anxieties about oligopoly control and trade practices onto issues of film content” (“‘Nobody Knows Everything’: Post-Classical Historiographies and Consolidated Entertainment,” Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, ed. Steve Neale and Murray Smith [London and New York: Routledge, 1998], 21–44, esp. 27–28). So creating a scandal about organized crime films and not about the organized block-booking and vertical integration of the studio system might actually have been advantageous for the film manufacturers.
On the Catholic criticism of the movement which seemed to violate many of its beliefs see Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 118–119, 168; and on the absence of Jews in the American branch of the eugenics movement, 172. The Production Code Administration and the Legion of Decency are discussed in Black, Hollywood Censored. The influence of Jews, including the Easternand Central-European first- or second-generation immigrants who ran many of the studios, is discussed, for example, in Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own (London: W H Allen, 1989);
William E. H. Meyer, Jr., “An American ‘Precedent’? Propaganda in American Movies: The Case of the Hollywood Jews.” Literature/Film Quarterly 27.4 (1999): 271–281; Schatz, Genius of the System.
Copyright information
© 2010 Boaz Hagin
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Hagin, B. (2010). Embodying the Past. In: Death in Classical Hollywood Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230275072_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230275072_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-31439-3
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-27507-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave Media & Culture CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)