Lecture 8 de mille's consumer
- 1. Cecil B. DeMille The Consuming Audience
- 2. By 1920s • Between 1880 and 1930, the number of salaried employees increased eight fold, coming to compose over 60% of the entire middle class. • Household expenditures tripled between 1909 and 1929 with the most dramatic rise in consumer goods: amusements, leisure pursuits, clothes, appearance, furniture and automobiles. • The amount spent on cosmetics, beauty aids, and home decorations increased eightfold from 1914 to 1924.
- 3. At the same time.. • voter turnout declines from approximately 95% in the 1890s to less than 55% in the 1920s • participation in civically concerned church and voluntary organizations decreased • the work week shrank 4 hours every decade between 1900 and 1950
- 4. In the home... • From 1900 to 1930, the size of the average household declined from 3.82 children to 2.82 • Of 700 college educated women in 1939, 74% born between 1890 and 1900 had been virgins at marriage. Of those born after 1913, the number dropped to 31%. • Men and women married younger and in greater proportion, but divorce rates doubled. Women, in particular divorced when men could not provide for them.
- 5. Move from Production Ethic to Consumption Ethic • “The business world became less a moral testing ground and more a supply house for new desires. From the twenties on, no leader could afford to ignore the fact that urbanites had turned away from vice crusading, and wanted a pragmatic approach to a smooth-running economy.” Lary May, Screening Out the Past
- 6. 1) Less preoccupation with Progressive values • An analysis of 6600 films made during the 20s • 15 dealt with labor • 51 with modern politics • 66 with religion • 198 with environment for the poor or immigrants
- 7. 2) Roles for women changed • Motherhood, as an ideal which had lasted for a century, virtually disappeared from films as the main aspiration for women. Now heroines become flappers or erotic wives...this expressiveness was gained at the expense of women’s role as social guardian.
- 8. 3) Movies became “how to spend your money” manuals “More and more is the motion picture being recognized as a stimulant to trade. No longer does the girl in Sullivan, Indiana guess what the styles are going to be in three months. She knows because she sees them on the screen…The head of the house sees a new golf suit. The housewife sees a lamp of a new design…down they go to the dealers to ask for the new goods.” William Harrison Hays (President of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America)
- 9. During the twenties, government, sociological, and business reports began to verify that the prime audience of middle-class urbanites was modeling its purchasing habits on images spread by the movies. One such report found that as the fashion capital moved from New York to “Hollywood,” there was a “revolutionary change” in buying at the major department stores of the Northern cities. Adults were now enhancing married life by purchasing victrolas, clothes, and cars geared toward leisure fun. What is more, they looked to “youth” as the trend setters.
- 10. Cecil B. DeMille
- 12. Billy Graham “a prophet of celluloid”
- 18. 1918
- 21. “Ladies, if you want to be your husband’s sweetheart, you must simply forget when you are his wife.”
- 22. 1919 1920
- 23. To afford this type of woman, a man could not shed the work ethic.
- 27. The Godless Girl • What is the film about? • Who is the opposition in this movie? • How does the role of “woman as moral guardian” change in this • What humiliations do the youth movie? What cause does she suffer when they first go to prison? champion? • How is reform school portrayed? • What is the significance of the monkey? • The main characters are high school students. Is this a teen • How are Judy and Bob’s flick? characters defined in the movie? • What is the significance of the electrical fence?
- 30. The “New Woman”
- 32. Serial heroines… Cut adrift from conventional family New revelations of impressive lineage or wealth
- 34. “Kathlyn can bake cherry pies and many other kinds of pies after she comes in from the lion’s cage.”
- 35. “At home the moving picture star, who will dare anything to make her last picture the greatest, reads and plays and cooks and eats and primps like any other girl.” Motion Picture Classic
- 36. “We don’t want to be marble; besides there would not be enough pedestals to go around, anyway…Why not give our men the same comradeship that many of them never find outside of their clubs?” Response to the New York State Federation of Women’s Clubs objection to women as “pals”
- 41. “Her new, wide knowledge of values, her new ability to decide for herself, is one of the wonders of the world we live in.” By selecting products off the shelf with “no clerk to persuade her,” proclaimed Piggly Wiggly, “she has astonished her husband…and the world.”
- 42. In a tone of scientific assurance, advertising leaders of the 1920’s and 1930’s added that women possesses a “well- authenticated greater emotionality”: and a “natural inferiority complex.” Since women where characterized by “inarticulate longings,” advertisements should portray idealized visions rather than prosaic realities. Copy should be intimate and succinct since “women will read anything which is broken into short paragraphs and personalized.”
- 43. “The percentage of men in the motion picture audiences began to decline in the 1910s, whereas the number of women rose from 60% in 1920 to 83% in 1927.” Sumiko Higashi, The New Woman and Consumer Culture
- 46. “During the early decades of the 20th century, the rate of divorce doubled while expenditures for personal grooming, furniture, automobiles, and recreation tripled.” Sumiko Higashi
- 51. Why does Cecil choose people’s hands to introduce the characters? What is Murdoch’s chief complaint with Sophie? What is the significance of Juliet’s job? What types of scenes happen in nature? Compare the décor of Sophie’s home with Viola’s home and Juliet’s shop. How do men treat women in this film? How do women treat women? How do women treat men? How do parents treat children? What’s the deal with the baby doll? How is the gun treated?
- 53. discontent with work and loss of power can be alleviated through consumption
- 54. virtue and vitality off screen youth “We are our own sculptors. Who can deny that passion and unkind thoughts show on the lines and expressions of our faces...young people seldom have these vices until they start getting old, so I love to be with them. The impulses of youth are natural and good.” “No woman can be a success on the screen if she dissipates even one little bit.”
Editor's Notes
- #2: \n
- #3: What does that mean? Prior to this time people didn’t get paychecks. Made money from land.\n\nIncrease in consumption\n
- #4: satisfaction from production decreased, consumption increased\n
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- #6: What did this mean for movies?\n
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- #8: Means that men change as well. What happens with women indicates larger social change.\nWomen were sexualized within the context of home.\n
- #9: President of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America\n
- #10: Already talked about how Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks in their own way had contributed to this both on and off screen. In some ways, the offscreen influence is even stronger.\n
- #11: One director would capitalize on these changes more than any other.\n
- #12: The Ten Commandments, King of Kings\n
- #13: Billy Graham called Cecil B. DeMille...\n
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- #17: DeMille was famous for his bath scenes – bathrooms were the ultimate luxury\n
- #18: bedroom scenes\n\n
- #19: Consumption did not stay confined to things. Cecil B. DeMille directed a triology of films in \n
- #20: Based on a novel by David Graham Phillips called OLD WIVES FOR NEW about a couple, Charles and Sophy Murdock – Sophy’s disorderly, unkempt household – neglect of self and husband. A sympathetic Charles, aware of her rural upbringing, still is eventually drawn to other women whose fashion sense is more pleasing. In the novel, divorce is still undesirable, but the circumstances or reasons aren’t really questions.\n
- #21: David is poised to marry Juliet, when she is innocently mixed up in a sensational murder case. Hoping to avoid scandal, David weds another woman named Viola (Marcia Manon), who in turn walks out on David in favor of his much-younger personal secretary. Suitably chastened, David begs Juliet to take him back, which she does. Cecil B. DeMille would take this book and turn it into a movie. \n\n\n
- #22: It was very risque for its time and not without controversy. The women viewers were very upset with Cecil which provoked him to create\n
- #23: Don’t change your husband – reversed roles\nLeila is bored with onion eating, slovenly, business pre-occupied husband. Divorces him for a playboy who ends up with equally bad habits and DEBT. Her husband, James, cleans up his act and woos Leila back.\nWhy Change Your Wife - frumpy, but consumptive wife divorces husband when she smells perfume of shopgirl on husband. She overhears that people assume marriage ended because of her frumpiness. She eventually wins husband back when it becomes apparent that shopgirl is devious and money grubbing. Interesting scene... (Richard, having earlier injured himself is ordered bedrest for 24 hours - exwife overhears and kidnaps Richard - the three of them are locked in the room together...\nThe two women argue over whether Sally will move Richard against doctor's orders. Beth locks the three of them into the bedroom, which leads to a physical struggle over the key during which Sally breaks a mirror, inviting seven years bad luck. Beth threatens to burn Sally's face with acid, which leads to a stalemate. The three stay in the room until Richard's crisis is over. A doctor pronounces him healthy, but Richard refuses to go home with Sally. Sally throws the vial of acid on Beth's face only to discover that Beth was bluffing; the vial contained only eye wash.\nWhy change your wife – warning to young wives that if they don’t keep themselves up, they could lose their husbands\nWhy didn’t they object this time?\n
- #24: Her expensive tastes spurred him on to achieve.\n
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- #26: The incident that inspired The Godless Girl was reported in the Los Angeles Times in 1927 and involved the discovery, on the campus of L.A.’s Hollywood High School, of pamphlets for an atheist student group. Tensions subsequently erupted between Christian-identified students at the school and those associated with the group, leading to a noisome confrontation at one of the group’s off-campus meetings.\n
- #27: Tensions subsequently erupted between Christian-identified students at the school and those associated with the group, leading to a noisome confrontation at one of the group’s off-campus meetings.\n
- #28: not really about atheism. about the passions of youth, the mis-directed enthusiasms.\n\nthe monkey - probably a reference to the scopes trials which were currently happening.\n\nshe suffers for her passion\n
- #29: But the surprising fact is that, while DeMille certainly doesn’t advocate the atheist position, he takes pains to present zealotry on the part of the film’s believers as being equally divisive and intolerant as that of the atheist students. In addition, he clearly takes the position that the apparent ferocity of these beliefs, as expressed by his characters on either side, is merely the product of youthful enthusiasm, and in no way cancels out those characters’ essential decency (and certainly doesn’t make them deserving of the punishment that is meted out to them). The end effect is of a plea for calm and understanding, as if DeMille is trying to assure the adult America of 1929 that, yes, the kids really are alright\n
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- #31: An icon of changing gender norms, the "new woman" first emerged in the late nineteenth century. Less constrained by Victorian norms and domesticity than the women of the 19th century. I’m specifically drawing a distinction between the women of the 19th century, because as we discussed in class – the Victorian era was much more restrictive than the generations that preceded it in the 18th century – largely because of why? What was the Victorian era a response to the Industrial Revolution – work hard – distinction of middle class\n\nthan the new woman had greater freedom to pursue public roles and even flaunt her "sex appeal," a term coined in the 1920s and linked with the emergence of the new woman. \n
- #32: She challenged conventional gender roles and met with hostility from men and women who objected to women's public presence and supposed decline in morality. Expressing autonomy and individuality, the new woman represented the tendency of young women at the turn of the century to reject their mothers' ways in favor of new, modern choices. \n
- #33: De-sexualized women\n
- #34: The Exploits of Elaine (also played by Pearl White) is a 1914 film serial in the genre of The Perils of Pauline. It tells the story of a young woman named Elaine who, with the help of a detective, tries to find the man, known only as "The Clutching Hand", who murdered her father.\n
- #35: Enjoli\n
- #36: \n
- #37: Women no longer want to be placed on pedestals\n
- #38: The women’s movement has been criticicized for many things. The “new woman” was always in danger – overcome with physical strength – a woman had to be good at being a man and a woman. And it made it look like we could. Damaging – we could have it all started in the earliest images of the 20th century – long before we started challenging traditional family roles, etc. – in a lot of ways – this was more damaging and much more difficult to overcome.\n
- #39: As we moved into the 1920s, consumption would hit a feverish pitch and ultimately crash by the end of the decade in 1929. But ignorant of our future, the jazz age would reign for the next 10 year\n
- #40: While men brought home the paycheck and still held the pocketbook, they did not dominate the advertising.\n
- #41: She was HEAVILY present in ads because the research of the time suggested that women made at least 80% of the purchases. She was the GPA – The General Purchasing Agent. This didn’t score her points though in the workplace.\n
- #42: If you can look past the condescension, this was to a certain degree, an empowering thing. Purchasing power gave women a chance to define themselves that productivity never had.\n
- #43: This isn’t to say that she really gained much in stature socially, but her presence in the market place did give her a certain distinction – if nothing else – manufacturers began to cater to her \n
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- #46: . Divorce was especially common in urban areas – wartime unions dissolved. Many women grew dissatisfied with husbands who couldn’t provide for them.\n
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- #48: David Graham Phillips was a muckraker reporter and a popular novelist of the early 1900s. He was particularly interested on how modern times were affecting social structure. \n
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- #50: was a woman’s obligation to maintain her beauty.\n
- #51: More innocent, palsy would shift into a more erotic definition of roles\n
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- #53: They would throw scandalous cocktail parties - a la The Great Gatsby\n
- #54: Fairbanks brought a youthful message.\nWhat would the female counterpart to this be?\n
- #55: easy to see why she and Douglas Fairbanks got along so well. Her beauty and exercise regimen was widely publicized.\n