Amivalences of the Mass Ornament in King Vidor's The Crowd

Ambivalences of the "Mass Ornament": King Vidor's The CrowdAuthor(s): Miriam HansenReviewed work(s):Source: Qui Parle, Vol. 5, No. 2, Distractions (Spring/Summer 1992), pp. 102-119Published by: University of Nebraska PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20685952 .

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Ambivalences of the "Mass Ornament":

King Vidor's The Crowd

Miriam Hansen

When, after much delay, MGM finally released The Crowd in

February of 1928, exhibitors had the choice between two different end

ings; seven different endings had been scripted, two were actually shot and distributed in separate reels.' In one version, the hero's journey of downward mobility is reversed by an overnight success in advertising which restores the family to harmony and respectability in a sentimen tal Christmas tableau. In the other, now familiar ending, John Sims

(James Murray) makes a more modest return from unemployment by finding a job as a sandwich man dressed up as a juggling clown: he dis suades his wife (Eleanor Boardman) from leaving him and takes her and their son to a vaudeville show where the family is reconstituted as part of the great community of popular entertainment. The second ending clearly dampens the bland optimism of the first, but is nonetheless in tended as a happy one. However, in their particular cinematic choreog raphy, the final shots of The Crowd give the lie to any simple closure,

ending the film on a note of ambivalence if not unwitting cynicism. This last sequence begins with a dissolve from the nuclear family

reunited on the domestic sofa-little boy on the left, mother and father on the right-to a matching, slightly closer shot of them in the public space of the vaudeville theater. The reverse shot shows a burlesque scene on stage in which a clown and another man are beating each other

up. Returning to the previous set-up, the next shot frames the three

family members, reeling with laughter, for a last time together; subse

quen'tly, the group is split up by a two-shot to the right, showing John

help an unknown man seated next to him recover from a coughing fit, and a two-shot of mother and child on the left. When Mary, the wife,

Qui Parle Vol. 5, No. 2, Spring/Summer 1992



Ambivalences of the "Mass Ornament" 103

discovers one of John's slogans, "Sleight-of-Hand, the Magic Cleaner," used in an ad in the program notes, the camera moves to the right to

grant John a point-of-view shot of the ad (which also features a jug gling clown) and then further to the right to have John show the ad to his neighbor who congratulates him with a handshake. After a last two shot showing the couple kissing, the camera begins to pull back and

upward to reveal an increasingly abstract pattern of bodies swaying with unheard laughter, until the shot dissolves into a Busby-Berkeleyian bird's eye perspective and fades out.

This closing camera movement rhymes with an earlier one in re verse direction, the famous travelling shot up along the fagade of a

Manhattan highrise which tilts and, with a dissolve, sweeps into an

open-plan office to pick from the geometrical pattern of hundreds of

employees no. 137, the film's protagonist, John Sims.2 Between these two travelling shots, the film unfolds a love story with a realistic set

ting: John meets Mary, they marry, have two children, can't make ends

meet; he wins a contest for an advertising slogan (the "Sleight-of-Hand" slogan that reappears in the final sequence) which results in a binge of

consumption that gets the baby girl killed; unable to come to terms with her death, he loses his job, can't find another, and is saved from suicide only by his cowardice and his little son's declaration of faith in him.

As "a melodrama that resists being one" (Robert Lang), such a

story fits squarely into a tradition of American films dramatizing the

plight of the "common man" ("populist" films), associated with direc tors such as Griffith, Vidor and Capra and usually linked to an ideologi cal stance of socially conscious individual humanism and moral opti mism.3 Reproducing the terms of this tradition of "social realism," readings of the film have pivoted around the basic plot issue of who is

responsible for John's failure: critics either see him as a victim of ur ban-industrial society or, alternately, blame the hero's naive faith in his

superiority, his inability to recognize how little he differs from the crowd he despises.4 (Thus, early on in the film John jeers at a sandwich man dressed up as a clown, bragging to Mary in an intertitle: "The poor sap-I'll bet his father thought he would be President," which not only echoes his own father's predictions for his son's great future at birth, but also foreshadows John's subproletarian come-back as a clown at the film's end.) Accordingly, the closing scene of the film is read as resolving the mismatch between individual and society in the glow of



104 Miriam Hansen

popular entertainment: John finally accepts being part of the crowd

psychoanalytically speaking, he accepts his castration5-the slogan no

longer reminds him of the daughter's death but is recuperated into a dis course of basic human solidarity (his interaction with a stranger) which reconciles family romance with the norms of social competence.

But beyond the level of narrative closure and individual psychol ogy, another discourse unfolds on the level of cinematic style, of mise

en-scene, framing and editing, for which I take the final shot to be em

blematic. Again and again, John appears in relation to group figurations of which he is only a more or less identical element-figurations that

participate in the historical and ideological problematic of what

Siegfried Kracauer, in an essay contemporaneous with The Crowd, has called the "mass ornament" ("das Ornament der Masse"). In the film, these group figurations vary in kind, camera range and degree of abstrac tion: from the geometrically organized overhead shots of the office workers and vaudeville patrons; through long-shot compositions of se

riality like the group of boys, early on in the film, sitting on a fence

(one black kid among them) and their adult counterpart, the group of fa thers-to-be waiting in the hospital (one black man among them), or the even more anonymous lines in front of the unemployment office; to the unstructured crowd of pleasure seekers in Coney Island and on the beach. The patterns of seriality are not limited to spatial simultaneity but also take the form of temporal repetition: John's first encounter with Mary, for instance, is embedded in an elaborate sequence in which female office workers peel out of a revolving door one by one to be

picked up by their male dates waiting on the sidewalk-a routine wor

thy of a Busby Berkeley musical. If the geometrical patterns of sameness evoke the Fordist model of

product standardization and the concomitant dequalification of workers, the patterns of repetition seem to suggest an analogy with the assembly line and Taylorized methods of production, the fragmentation and ra

tionalization of the labor process. The film promotes this analogy not

only on the diegetic level, but in its own articulation. When John and

Mary follow John's friend Bert and his date on top of a double-decker bus, each man gets an identical low-angle point-of-view shot of his date's legs. The formally identical repetition of an editing convention

usually reserved for a unique discovery of desire or knowledge, as a priv ileged moment of cinematic subjectivity, marks this moment as a copy

without an original, a mechanical gesture of social-sexual reproduction.




Although this graphic discourse of sameness and repetition is part of the filmic narration, it exceeds the narrative economy of the realist

genre and offers an analysis of John's plight that goes beyond the hu manist argument of individual failure versus social responsibility. More

effectively than his personal misfortune and humiliation, the discourse of the mass ornament undermines the clich6s of bourgeois individual ism spouted by John, the hollow myths of the American Dream. The

juxtaposition of John's mindless prophecies of personal success (when his "ship is coming in") with images of mass-cultural multiplication, repetition and sameness creates an ironic effect throughout the film. This irony, however, remains a structural one, for it is independent of

any insight, consciousness or self-recognition on the part of the protag onist. The symmetrical return of the clown costume forced upon John

by sheer economic necessity is one instance of this structural irony. Another is the scene on the beach in which John is framed alone play ing his ukulele, singing "All alone / I'm so all alone," and subsequent reverse shots reveal not only a man who complains but a whole crowd of people peacefully sharing the beach. Here the juxtaposition of indi vidualist ideology and mass society also brings into play the blurring of boundaries between public and private realms which is thematic

throughout the film. It is in the discrepancy between the continued assertion of a bour

geois concept of personality with social formations marked by an in creased tendency towards multiplication and sameness that The Crowd traverses similar territory as Kracauer's writings from the mid-1920s

through 1933, in particular his work on the media, spaces, rituals and

subjects of an emerging mass culture.6 In a serialized study on white collar workers, (Die Angestellten, 1929), which provides an illuminat

ing intertext to Vidor's film, Kracauer sketches the profile of a new class that mushroomed in Germany after World War I: the urban em

ployees whose working and living conditions in effect made them prole tarian, especially with the full onslaught of rationalization and unem

ployment since 1925, yet who deny any commonality with the work ing-class by flaunting a worn-out ideology of bourgeois individualism. Their class pretensions are undermined not only by their actual eco nomic status, Kracauer observes, but also by the very form their striv

ing for difference takes. The ideal personality is the person with a "pleasant appearance," he reports, quoting the staff manager of a Berlin department store, "a certain moral-pink color of the skin" ("die



106 Miriam Hansen

moralisch-rosa Hautfarbe, Sie wissen doch..."). "It is not too daring to

state," Kracauer concludes,

that in Berlin a type of employee has developed who model themselves according to this desired color of skin. Speech, clothes, gestures and physiognomy in

creasingly resemble each other, and the result of this

process is precisely this pleasant appearance which can be reproduced extensively by means of photogra phy. Thus a selection of a species takes place under the pressure of social relations which the economy inevitably enhances by fostering corresponding needs of consumption.7

Rather than attribute such social mimesis to subjective false conscious ness on the part of the employees, Kracauer sees it as part of a compre hensive historical process-a process in which the photographic media are to play a decisive role. This process, in Kracauer's phenomenology of modernity, is marked, on the one hand, by a growing disintegration, fragmentation and desubstantialization of the world and, on the other,

by the reorganization of these fragments, this detritus, into new forms and configurations.8 While the thesis of disintegration is grounded in Kracauer's philosophy of history and indebted to secularized versions of Jewish Messianism and Gnosticism, it is elaborated-by the mid-20s in terms of a Marxist-Weberian critique of capitalism and its impact on

all spheres of social and cultural life. While capitalist rationalization, Kracauer argues, to some extent advances the historical process of rea son permeating nature, its demythologizing impulse stops halfway, generating false abstractions and new myths designed to preserve prop erty relations and thus preventing the realization of a truly human soci

ety.

Within this historical-philosophical framework (which anticipates, if with a more optimistic slant, key thoughts of Horkheimer and

Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment), Kracauer analyzes the emergence of the "mass ornament," epitomized by the products of the American entertainment business such as the Tiller Girls, as "the aesthetic reflex of the rationality to which the dominant economic system aspires."9 As a reflex, however, the mass ornament is as ambiguous as the historical moment: on the one hand, it offers a practical critique of notions of the

sovereign subject perpetuated by bourgeois culture and, in its




anonymity, prefigures the possibility of human relations emancipated from the brute pressures of nature and social origin; on the other hand, the mass ornament persists in the false abstractness of capitalist ra

tionality, because it is not permeated by human needs and conscious ness but instead naturalizes its capitalist function as a mythical fact.

Kracauer's concept of the "mass ornament" has been criticized for its simplistic analogy between cultural forms and Taylorized methods of

production ("The legs of the Tiller Girls correspond to the hands in the

factory").10 But this objection does not hold for the larger context of Kracauer's analysis of mass culture, in particular his essays on amuse

ment parks, bars, hotel lobbies, streets, arcades and shop windows, tourism and dance, movie theaters, circus and variety shows, newsreels and photography. On the contrary, what lends these writings a historical

gravity that reaches into our present, is that he sensed early on the radi cal implications of the economic shift of emphasis from production to

consumption, a process no doubt more advanced in the United States than Germany (though associated there with the whole issue of Ameri

canism). With a phenomenological openness which included the experi ence of the observing and writing subject, Kracauer was able to discern

qualitatively new forms of subjectivity attendant upon consumerist modes of representation and relations of reception which complicate any reflectionist model of cultural analysis.

The culture of the employees, Kracauer observes in Die Angestell ten, is directed toward surface glamor rather than substance; it is con sumed in distraction (Zerstreuung) rather than concentration (Samm lung). In an earlier essay on Berlin's picture palaces, "Cult of Distrac tion" (1926), he writes: "the penchant for distraction demands and finds an answer in the display of pure externality."" Like the "mass orna

ment," the movies and illustrated magazines participate in a historical "turn to the surface," and the related assertion of what Adorno called, with regard to Kracauer, the "primacy of the optical."'2 Unlike the

concept of the "mass ornament," however, the concept of "distraction," as a category of reception, brings into view dimensions of pleasure, identification and fantasy-dimensions mobilized by the phantasmago ria of consumption rather than merely a reflex of rationalized modes or

production. The withdrawal of substance from the world and the concomitant

erosion of bourgeois individualism have left the subject in a state of

fragmentation and emptiness in which Kracauer perceives the conditions



108 Miriam Hansen

for a productive receptivity, a setting-free of experience. In an essay en

titled "Boredom" of November 1924, he describes the disposition of the modern flaneur: "In the evening one takes a stroll through the streets, satiated with a feeling of unfulfiliment from which abundance might grow." Yet before such autonomous abundance can even begin to de

velop, the vacuum is filled with written images: "Luminous words line the buildings and already one is banished from one's own emptiness into the foreign advertising." Mind you, Kracauer does not simply fall back on the cultural-conservative principle of the "pod" by which mass

culture destroys the otherwise sovereign subject from within like an

alien invasion (as in the polemic by Georges Duhamel quoted by Ben

jamin).13 Rather, Kracauer is interested in the peculiar form of percep tual identification in which the boundaries between self and heteronomous images are weakened or barely exist in the first place, al

lowing for a narcissistic fusion with the stream of images. Thus, he takes the subject of boredom into the movie theater where he "lets him self be polymorphously projected": "As a fake Chinaman he sits in a fake opium den, turns into a well-trained dog who performs ridiculously clever acts to please a female star, gathers himself into an alpine storm, gets to be circus artist and lion at once." Kracauer knows all too well, however, that such imaginary metamorphoses of self cannot be had without a sense of de-realization, isolation and loss: "One forgets one self gazing, and the big dark hole is animated with the semblance of a life that belongs to no one and consumes everyone."14

Kracauer's image of film spectatorship returns us to The Crowd, in

particular its figurations of a consumerist subjectivity. These figura tions mark a third discourse in the film which mediates between the re alist narrative of individual characters and the graphic discourse of the mass ornament without necessarily reconciling the two. (It is this third discourse which I think distinguishes Vidor's film from the stylistic ideological dualism of Metropolis or the tradition of Neue Sach

lichkeit.) On the most obvious level, The Crowd foregrounds the im

pact of consumer economy by associating its protagonist with the business of advertising, more precisely, with the fiction that advertis ing, like screen-writing or the creation of stars, is a popular art in

which everyone can participate; whether a slogan is accepted or not is

just a matter of luck. In that sense, John can be seen as a casualty of the updating of the American Dream for an age of consumption, in par ticular the contradiction between an individualism based on a Calvinist




ethic of hard work, self-denial and frugality and notions of self-trans

formation and personal success defined by the promises of pleasure,

sensuality and abundance.15 John fails because he literalizes the ideals of a production-based myth of self-creation within the ideological framework of an aesthetics of consumption. In that regard he indeed dif

fers from the crowd because he is not, like his friend Bert, an

"enlightened consumer" in Horkheimer and Adorno's sense, a consumer

who buys into the system even as he sees through the mechanisms of

manipulation.16 In addition to the thematic role of advertising, commercial images

proliferate in the film's mise-en-scene-store signs, billboards, sand

wich boards, ads in public places and magazines. Significantly, they are

concentrated in the early sequences leading up to John and Mary's mar

riage. Not nature, but Coney Island provides the setting for their brief

courtship; the locus classicus of the culture of distraction is represented as both a playground of self-abandonment and, at the same time, a giant machine for couple formation. When John kisses Mary for the first

time, they themselves, like dozens of other couples in the "Tunnel of

Love," become an object of spectacle for the patrons waiting in front of a banner that says "Do They Neck? WATCH!" The most striking in stance of the consumerist inscription of couple formation occurs on

their way home, when John sees a subway ad with the slogan, "You Furnish the Girl / We'll Furnish the Home" and proposes; the point-of view shot indicating his awakening desire is devoted to the ad, not to

Mary.'7 This motif continues into the sequence on the honeymoon train: the newlyweds' anxiety of intimacy is gently ridiculed by their

reading of more ads (e.g. of a baby announcing it's "Time to Re-Tire") and John's carrying of a manual, What a Young Husband Ought to

Know-a comedy of awkwardness which the film stages in public, un

der the gaze of other passengers and the black porter. Consumerist iconography in The Crowd is not extraneous to ro

mance but at the core of it; the libidinal economy of individuals and the

economy of advertising are inseparable. All erotic relations seem medi ated through images of consumption-through the very process of im age-making. When we see the couple in front of a picture-postcard set

ting of Niagara Falls, their marriage apparently not yet consummated, John recognizes his desire for Mary only when he takes her photograph and she poses accordingly. For most of the film, his love for Mary re

mains largely in the register of the Imaginary, a relationship of narcis



110 Miriam Hansen

sistic specularity rather than reciprocal recognition of the other. Thus, the marriage is saved from the drudgery of everyday life, poverty and John's ill temper only by the announcement of Mary's pregnancy, and when the baby is born-it's a boy, of course-John renews his pledge "to be somebody" under Mary's knowing assurance, "he's just like you,

Johnny." In a symmetrical reprise, the son will later save his father's life by repeating the mother's words as his own wish, "I want to be just like you." A better likeness than Mary or the baby girl, the son pro vides John with a metaphoric equivalent of the many mirrors in front of which we see him arrange his "moral-pink" appearance.

The restoration of John's identity is thus marked as illusory from the start-by the film's systematic linkage of individual narcissism

with a consumerist economy of desire and identification. In its articula tion of this linkage, The Crowd spells out questions of gender which

Kracauer evades. For Kracauer, the subject of the mass ornament re mains basically genderless or stylized in the vein of Weimar androgyny ("bodies in bathing trunks without sex"). What is more, in "The Little

Shopgirls Go to the Movies" (1927), he singles out women as most

susceptible to the compensatory fantasies with which the culture indus

try in turn covers up the experience of historical disintegration and

fragmentation.8 In The Crowd, the narcissistic disposition, usually associated with women and their role as primary consumers, is clearly linked to the crisis of male identity and self-representation. From the time we see John as a newborn baby, held up to the world by his father in front of a mirror, his personal difficulties are related to a failing pa triarchal lineage, perpetuated over generations through the ever more ab stract mirages of the American Dream. John is feminized not only by the psycho-social effects of wage-labor and his further economic degra dation, but also through the narcissistic, consumerist construction of his character. However, alongside the suggestion of symbolic castration

(most explicit in John's interactions with his macho brothers-in-law), the film maintains a clear focus on the effects of this self-absorbed male

identity on the lives of real women: even in the scene of family leisure on the beach, for instance, domestic work continues for Mary while John basks in childish ebullience and intransigence.

The discourse of consumerist subjectivity in The Crowd not only deflates John's rhetoric of personal uniqueness and destiny; it throws into question the very assumption of a psychologically coherent charac ter as the subject of narrative motivation, of individual agency and re




sponsibility, which is one of the cornerstones of classical cinema. Born on July 4, 1900 and mockingly compared to Lincoln and Washington, John Sims enters the film as an allegory, an "American Anyman" (A Tree is a Tree). Setting out to "be somebody," John actually succeeds

by becoming a nobody, a malleable puppet, a clown advertising some one else's travesty of individual choice (his sandwich board reads: "I am

always happy because I eat at Schnieder's Grill"). As I said earlier, this

irony is structural. It reveals itself only to the spectator: there is no

indication of any understanding, recognition and self-awareness on the

part of the character. John's failure to recognize himself in the place of the formerly despised clown represents the flip-side of his identification

through mirror images, the fall-out of miscognition. The allegorical construction of the main character does not deprive

him of a certain pathos-thanks primarily to the performance of James

Murray, in particular with Eleanor Boardman as Mary-but more often than not the viewer's attitude toward the character is suspended between satire and sentimentality. Nor does the film make him a foil against which the other characters would appear as models of psychological co

herence and maturity. If they are more successfully socialized than John,

especially the men, their competence is not necessarily tied to a mea sure of individual consciousness but rather to better skills of adaption, to their having internalized the role of "enlightened consumers."

At least, that is, if we read the film from its ending. The discourse of consumerist subjectivity ultimately pushes the film into an abyss of ambivalence when it converges, in the closing sequence, with the dis course of the mass ornament. If the narrative wants us to celebrate John's come-back as a step toward human solidarity, the last two shots marks his integration into the collective as a travesty. The image of hundreds of human heads swaying with unheard laughter is a graphic il lustration of Kracauer's observation that the mass ornament remains

"mute," unpermeated by human consciousness; just as John has finally accepted being part of the crowd, this equation suggests that the collec tive is made up of individuals whose psychic structures are not all that different from his own. After all, their laughter responds to a scene-a clown is being beaten-which recalls Horkheimer and Adorno's analy sis of the "iron bath of fun" dispensed by the culture industry: the unre flected mirror relation between the sadomasochistic rituals on stage and the social position of the audience which turns their collective laughter into a parody of solidarity and reconciliation (Dialectic, 140).



112 Miriam Hansen

If one takes the implications of these figurations of spectatorship to their logical conclusion, The Crowd offers a vision of mass culture

just as ambivalent as, if not even bleaker than, Kracauer's. Like many of the more ambitious Hollywood products (Sherlock Jr., The Wizard of Oz, It's A Wonderful Life, The Purple Rose of Cairo, to mention only a few), Vidor's film includes a dimension of strategic self-reflexivity towards its own medium and its clientele. A silent film released at the

beginning of the sound era, The Crowd assembles a repertoire of popu lar media that formed the context of the cinema's early history: photog raphy and the victrola, amusement park, vaudeville and the burlesque-a spectrum of the culture of distraction and consumption to be epitomized and subsumed by the movies.19 Likewise, the film was conceived and marketed as "an epic of America's Great Middle Class," that class which

Hollywood had been building up as its primary constituency since be fore World War I. Thus, the image of the audience in the film's last se

quence inevitably held up a mirror to the audience of the film, an audi ence that probably displayed a similar sociographic profile. Yet, if John's catastrophic fall into unemployment foreshadowed the impact of the Depression upon millions of Americans, the ambivalent depiction of the community of consumption in the final shot twists this analogy into a mise-en-abime. Either the viewer accepts the homage to the Great

American middle class and identifies with his or her mirror image in il

lusory plenitude and harmony; or the viewer assumes a satirical superi ority vis-h-vis the shaking boobs and thus repeats the act of miscogni tion that defines the diegetic audience's relation to the scene on stage, which corresponds to John's relation to the figure of the clown. In ei ther case, the strategic self-reflexivity that would have us celebrate John's integration as the triumph of popular entertainment is under mined by a textual self-reflexivity-the discourse of the mass ornament, the logic of consumerist subjectivity-which turns ideological affirma tion into critical ambivalence.

If the ambivalence of The Crowd could be seen as the revenge of textual complexity visited upon a basically optimistic message, Kra cauer's ambivalence toward mass culture has a different foundation and

emphasis. Kracauer's critical attention to the surface phenomena of

modernity developed from within a theological, apocalyptic framework of world disintegration, loss of substance and transcendental homeless ness. By 1924/25, however, as Inka Mailder-Bach has pointed out, the

metaphor of the surface assumes a new significance in Kracaucr's writ




ings: against ideological attempts to restore a false unity and hierarchy drawing on the dregs of bourgeois culture and disregarding socio-eco nomic realities, he now perceives in the negativity of the historical pro cess a utopian chance. No longer a locus of lost depth, meaning or sub

stance, the surface becomes a site in which contemporary reality mani fests itself in an iridescent multiplicity of phenomena; rather than dis

playing an atomized world of mere appearances, it signals a break-up of the habitual order of things from which "fragments of a different life"

might be improvised.20 Kracauer's avant-garde valorization of the new media's attack on

bourgeois culture by no means preempts a critical perspective. On the

contrary, this radical potential becomes the standard by which, from about 1926 on, he increasingly castigates contemporary film production for betraying its affinity with the sundered life, for covering up the cracks with the warmed-over menu of bourgeois aesthetics. "Precisely that which should be projected onto the screen is wiped away and im

ages that cheat us out of the image of existence fill up the surface."21 At the same time, Kracauer knows that these images, the "idiotic and unreal film fantasies [which] are the day dreams of society" are them selves part of contemporary reality, the medium in which "its otherwise

repressed wishes take shape." "The more [the contemporary films] mis

represent the surface, the more correctly they represent society, because

they reflect its secret mechanisms." In his early writings (as opposed to his "psychological history of German film written in exile, From Cali

gari to Hitler), Kracauer is less concerned with decoding the content of these repressed wishes than with elucidating the cinema's role in the

production of a social imaginary. "Film drama and life usually corre

spond to each other, because the typists [Tippmamsells] fashion them selves after the models on screen; but perhaps the most spurious models are stolen from life." If The Crowd demonstrates the workings of such

specular form of identification in one individual's quest for upward mo

bility, Kracauer sees this disposition at work across class lines, prefig uring the direction of an entire society. "In reality it may not happen easily that a scrubgirl marries the owner of a Rolls Royce; yet, is it not the dream of the Rolls Royce owners that the scrubgirls dream of rising to their level?"22

Undoubtedly, Kracauer's observations could be linked to the post modern topos of the implosion of reality into images, to the reign of simulation, depthlessness and pastiche. But he can no more be reduced



114 Miriam Hansen

to a Baudrillardian hyperrealist than he can be dismissed as a naive real ist. For Kracauer, fascination with the cinema's surface effects and its

ideological function are inseparably related.23 Reality can only be

grasped in its contradictions, in the relations between the culture of the simulacrum and what it excludes-"normal existence in its impercepti ble horror"-between the glamorous picture palaces and the unemploy ment agencies, between the banter of the society films and the growing violence in the streets. What should further caution us against simply assimilating Kracauer's phenomenology of the surface to a postmod ernist, posthistorical stance is that he situates his observations in a spe cific horizon of experience, a violently contested public sphere at a cru

cial historical juncture. Kracauer insisted that even a "de-realized reality" had to be con

fronted rather than rejected in the name of cultural conservatism or mod ernist refusal: "the process leads right through the middle of the mass

ornament, not away from it."24 In a similar vein, he analyzes the spell of consumerism in terms of the constellation of periphery and center on the map of Paris, contrasting the Faubourgs as the scene of use value and poverty with the abundance of commodities, images, signs, lights and publicity of the Boulevards: "Broad streets run from the Faubourgs into the glamorous center. This center is not the one intended. The hap piness envisioned for the shabby periphery is subject to a different ra dius than the present one. But we must take the streets to the center be cause today its emptiness is real." For Kracauer, social change leads

through this emptiness because only the most advanced form of public life harbors the potential of breaking up the hierarchy of center and pe riphery. Elaborating on the image of different national newspapers ("enemies in real life") lying side by side in the temples of the news vendors yet unable to read each other, Kracauer delineates the contours of a utopian public sphere: "Where the Yiddish organs resting on Arab texts come into contact with fat Polish headlines peace is secured." But their current self-absorption prevents such harmony: "Notwithstanding the close physical relations cultivated by the papers, their news lack any relation among each other which likewise precludes them from knowing anything about themselves. In the interstices, the demon of absent mindedness [Geistesabwesenheit] reigns absolute.""

Unlike Adorno for whom a utopian dimension resided at best in the

negativity of high modernist art, Kracauer sought the "fragments of a

different life" in the thickening configurations of the masscultural sur




face. And unlike Adorno, Kracauer proceeded on the assumption that, in

principle, the experience of the critical intellectual was available to

others as well-even those who were the subject of capitalist manipula tion. I wish to conclude with a Denkbild in which Kracauer evokes the

possibility, at least for a moment, that the consumer could relate to the

glamor of the surface in a simultaneously receptive and reflective man

ner. In an article from the Frankfurter Zeitung published, significantly, on July 14, 1928, "Berg- und Talbahn," Kracauer describes a roller

coaster at the Berlin Lunapark, the counterpart of Vidor's Coney Island.

The facade of the roller coaster shows a painted skyline of New York: "The workers, the small people, the employees who spend the week be

ing oppressed by the city, now triumph by air over a super-Berlinian New York." This fagade, however, is incomplete; once the car has reached the summit, it gives way to a bare skeleton:

So this is New York-a painted surface and behind it

Nothingness? The small couples are enchanted and disenchanted at the same time. Not that they would dismiss the grandiose city painting as simply hum

bug, but they see through the illusion, and the tri

umph over the fagades no longer means that much to them. They linger at the place where things show their double face; they hold the shrunken skyscrapers in their open hands; they have been liberated from a

world whose splendor they nonetheless know.2

This vision belongs to the moment, to be sure, and could easily be read as an instance of "enlightened consumerism." But the double con

sciousness Kracauer sketches as a possibility, a point of departure, dif fers strikingly from the lack of consciousness which, contrary to the film's programmatic optimism, makes the ending of The Crowd as

bleak an allegory of American mass culture as Horkheimer and Adorno's vision of the Culture Industry.

This essay is a slightly revised version of a lecture delivered at a confer ence on American/German "Mass Culture between the Wars," held at the Humboldt University, East Berlin, in January 1990. The research on

Kracauer was made possible by the generous support of the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung. Unless otherwise noted, translations are mine.



116 Miriam Hansen

1 King Vidor, A Tree is a Tree (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1953) 152-153; Nancy Dowd and David Shepard, King Vidor (interview^) (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1988), 87. Also see Ray

mond Durgnat and Scott Simmon, King Vidor, American

(Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988) 77 87 et passim; Durgnat, "The Crowd" Film Comment 9.4 (July August 1973); Randy Stearns, "Reading Herd: Hollywood, Mass

Culture, and The Crowd" unpublished seminar paper, Rutgers University, Spring 1989.

2 This shot, like the entire city-symphony-style sequence bridging John Sims' arrival in New York, is invoked in Billy Wilder's film, The Apartment (United Artists, 1960).

3 Robert Lang, American Film Melodrama: Griffith, Vidor, Minnelli

(Princeton NJ: Princeton UP, 1989) 113. On The Crowd in the tra dition of "social realism," see Lewis Jacobs, The Rise of the Amer ican Film (1939; New York: Teachers College Press, 1967) 456 457 et passim; on the context of "populist films," see Durgnat & Simmons 78.

4 Marshall Deutelbaum, "King Vidor's The Crowd," Image 17.3

(September 1974), rpt. in "Image" on the Art and Evolution of the Film, ed. M. Deutelbaum (New York: Dover, 1979) 166-168.

5 For a psychoanalytic reading of the film, see Lang 114-132. 6 Kracauer wrote close to two thousand articles before his exile in

1933, mostly for the Frankfurter Zeitung, a daily newspaper of which he became editor in 1921. See Thomas Y. Levin, Siegfried Kracauer: Eine Bibliographie seiner Schriften (Marbach a.N.: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 1989). The majority of Kracauer's articles in the Frankfurter Zeitung, many of which were published under pseudonyms or even anonymously, can be found in his own

scrapbooks, Kracauer Papers, Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach a.N. Volume 5.1-3 of Kracauer's Schriften, ed. Inka M?lder-Bach

(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1990), reprints a large selection of these ar

ticles; earlier collections, compiled by Kracauer himself, are Orna ment der Masse (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1963), forthcoming in translation from Harvard UP, and Strassen in Berlin und anderswo

(1964; Berlin: Arsenal, 1987). Four of the pieces are printed in this volume beginning on page 51.

7 Kracauer, Schriften I, ed. Karsten Witte (Frankfurt a.M.:

Suhrkamp, 1971), 223-224. 8 The most extensive critical commentary on Kracauer's early work

is Inka M?lder, Siegfried Kracauer?Grenzg?nger zwischen Theorie




und Literatur: Seine fr?hen Schriften 1913-1933 (Stuttgart: J. B.

Metzler, 1985) 19ff.; on the notion of Weltzerfall (disintegration of the world), see Michael Schr?ter, "Weltzerfall und Rekonstruktion: Zur Physiognomik Siegfried Kracauers," Text + Kritik 68 (on Kra

cauer) (Munich: Beck, 1980): 18-40; also see Heide Schl?pmann, "Phenomenology of Film: On Siegfried Kracauer's Writings of the

1920s," New German Critique 40 (Winter 1987): 97-114; and Miriam Hansen, "Decentric Perspectives: Kracauer's Early Writings on Film and Mass Culture," NGC 54 (special issue on Kracauer) (Fall 1991): 47-76.

9 "Das Ornament der Masse," FZ 9 June 1927, rpt. Ornament 54; tr. Barbara Corell & Jack Zipes, NGC 5 (Spring 1975), 70. Also see "Girls and Crisis," this volume, 51-52, originally, "Girls und

Krise,"FZ, 27 May, 1931; "Berliner Nebeneinander," FZ 17

February, 1933. 10 Reinhard Klooss & Thomas Reuter, K?rperbilder: Menschenorna

mente in Reveuetheater und Revuefilm, (Frankfurt: Syndikat, 1980), 71-72; also see Sabine Hake, "Girls and Crisis: The Other Side of the Diversion," NGC 40 (Winter 1987), 147-164.

11 "Kult der Zerstreuung: ?ber die Berliner Lichtspielh?user," FZ, 4 March 1926, Ornament 314; tr. by Thomas Y. Levin, NGC 40: 94.

12 Theodor W. Adorno, "The Curious Realist: On Siegfried Kracauer"

(1964), tr. Shierry Weber Nicholson, NGC 54: 159-177; 163. 13 "I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have

been replaced by moving images." Georges Duhamel, Sc?nes de la vie future (Paris, 1930), cited in Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," second version

(1936), Illuminations, tr. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969) 238.

14 "Langeweile," FZ 16 November 1924, Ornament 322. 15 T. J. Jackson Lears, "From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertis

ing and the Therapeutic Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1880

1930," in The Culture of Consumption, eds. Richard Wightman Fox & T. J. Jackson Lears (New York: Pantheon, 1983), 1-38; "Introduction." See also in the same work, "Introduction," ix-xvii. See also Warren Sussman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pan

theon, 1984), 122-131. 16 Max Horkheimer & Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlighten

ment (1944), tr John Cumming (New York: Seabury, 1969) 167 et

passim.



118 Miriam Hansen

17 The slogan echoes an ad satirized in Sinclair Lewis' 1922 novel Babbit:

" 'Mid pleasures and places / Wherever you may roam /

You just provide a little bride / And we'll provide a home." (New York: Signet, 1980), 34. The slogan used in The Crowd already appears in the Pickford vehicle My Best Girl (dir. Sam Taylor, 1927) where it prompts Buddy Rogers to propose the female lead. In his review of that film, "Ladenm?dchen spielen Kino" FZ, 26

January 1928, Kracauer singles out the slogan and its mise-en sc?ne as an innovative effect.

18 "Mass Ornament" 66 (translation modified); "Die kleinen Laden m?dchen gehen ins Kino," FZ, 11-19 March 1927 (published anonymously under the title "Film und Gesellschaft"), Ornament 279-294. On Kracauer's gender politics see: Schl?pman, "Phenomenology of Film," 99-100, and her essay "Kinosucht," Frauen und Film, 33 (October 1982), 42-52; Patrice Petro, "Perceptions of Difference: Contours of a Discourse on Sexuality in Early German Film Theory," NGC 40 (Winter 1987), 115-146, 138-140. See also: Hake, "Girls and Crisis," 158-160.

19 This context is elaborated in Lynn Kirby, "Gender and Advertising in American Silent Film: From Early Cinema to the Crowd," Dis course, 13,2 (Spring-Summer 1991), 3-20.

20 Inka M?lder-Bach, "Der Umschlag der Negativit?t: Zur Ver

schr?nkung von Ph?enomenologie, Geschichtsphilosophie und Film?sthetik in Siegfried Kracauers Metaphorik der Oberfl?che,'" in Deutsche Viertrlejahresschrift, 61,2 (1987), 359-373. See also

M?dler, Kracauer, 86-95. 21 "Der heutige Film und sein Publikum," FZ 30, Nov. & Dec,

1928, rpt. under the title "Film 1928," in Ornament, 296-310; 296.

22 "Ladenm?dchen," Ornament, 280. 23 I differ form Thomas Elsaesser who charges that Kracauer's critique

of Ideology obscures and thereby "falsifies" his proto-postmodern "concern with the cinema as a marginal sphere of life and its fasci nation as an experience of surface effects." "Cinema?The Irrespon sible Signifier or 'The Gamble with History': Film Theory or Cin ema Theory?" NGC 40 (Winter 1987), 82. For a more detailed elaboration of this argument see: Hansen, "Decentric Perspectives," 63-65.

24 "Mass Ornament," 76 (translation modified). 25 "Analyse eines Stadtplans," FZ (c. 1928), Ornament, 14-17. 26 "Berg- und Talbahn" FZ, 14 July 1928, rpt. in Strassen, 35-36,

which appears in this issue of Qui Parle, 58. For a more skeptical



Ambivalences of the "Mass Omament" 119

sequel to this Denkbild, contrasting the organized pleasures of the Berlin Lunapark with the unruly adventures of the Paris Foires, see Kracauer's "Organisiertes Gl?ck: Zur Wiederer?ffnung des

Lunaparks," FZ, 8 May 1930.



Documents

Amivalences of the Mass Ornament in King Vidor's The Crowd