Robert Sklar (1936–2011)

In Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies, Robert Sklar writes of film’s cultural power, “In the case of movies, the ability to exercise cultural power was shaped not only by the possession of economic, social or political power but also by such factors as national origin or religious affiliation, not to speak of far more elusive elements, such as celebrity or personal magnetism” (pg. vi). Sklar’s survey of film history is largely based on how the motion picture business responded to and drove issues of class in the United States. Sklar argues, “The urban workers, the immigrants and the poor had discovered a new medium of entertainment without the aid, and indeed beneath the notice, of the custodians and arbiters of middle-class culture. The struggle for control of the movies was the begin soon thereafter, and it continues to the present day. But movies have never lost their original character as a medium of mass popular culture” (pg. 5).
Sklar writes, “As a business, and as a social phenomenon, the motion pictures came to life in the United States when the made contact with working-class needs and desires” (pg. 16). Further, “It was not what movies were but what they might become that attracted the spokesmen for middle-class culture. They were fascinated by the audience that movies had won over and could command” (pg. 32). Sklar continues, “There is no way to show a cause-and-effect relation between Hollywood’s pleasure principles and the gradual unloosening of sexual restraints in American life; perhaps the two go together as symptoms of social change which affects them both. But Hollywood’s sexual behavior was the most publicized frontier of a new morality – or lack of one – during the 1920s, and there is reason to believe that the Aquarians of Hollywood were a vanguard of the increasingly larger role sexual openness has played in American public behavior during the past half-century” (pg. 81-82).
According to Sklar, “The movies appealed to a large audience untouched by the established media of entertainment; moreover, they provided visual techniques ideally suited to a new and expanded expression of the old comic violence, exaggeration and grotesque imagination. In the movies, audience taste and media form came together in what may have been the one genuine expression of popular feelings in the history of American commercial humor” (pg. 105). Returning to his thesis, Sklar writes, “The struggle over movies, in short, was an aspect of the struggle between the classes” (pg. 123). Turning to the Great Depression, Sklar writes, “The form that movie culture assumed grew out of interrelations with other social and economic institutions and with the state. Behind the dream world on the screen loomed the very real world of the American economy and society” (pg. 161). Of the public discussion, he writes, “Among academics and in literary circles, however, and in the principal newspapers and magazines, the moviemakers were regarded with considerably more respect, awe and even envy, as the possessors of the power to create the nation’s myths and dreams” (pg. 195).
After World War II, the class issue changed. Sklar writes, “The postwar attack on Hollywood could not have got off the ground had it been merely a renewal of old enmities. The familiar charges against moviemakers, although couched in moral terms, had never fully succeeded in masking ethnic, religious and class antagonisms. In the aftermath of a war against Nazism, these traditional complaints began to appear base and repugnant” (pg. 256).… (mehr)