Schmaltz

In the 1930s, “icky” referred to any popular music (jazz, big band, swing) that was considered overly “sweet.” For someone to dismiss a band’s music as “sweet” was a gesture of utmost contempt, meaning the music was “commercial,” that is, commercially compromised and “schmaltzy.” Decades later, the term “saccharine” had replaced “icky” to describe music that was overly sweet, although the term “saccharine” dates back to the late nineteenth century. The popular meaning of “schmaltz” is used to described something that is excessively sentimental, or “maudlin.” Maudlin, an alteration of Magdalene (as in Mary Magdalene) is used to describe someone who expresses sadness or sentimentality in an exaggerated way, as in a “maudlin drunk,” someone whose heavy alcohol consumption has caused them to be tearful, histrionic, and perhaps morbid. An analogous term for excessive sentimentality is “corn” or “corny.”

To be clear, an expression of sentimentality is not “saccharine.” It is “saccharine” when it is inauthentic, when it is manufactured authenticity. Both movie and music critics tend to disparage sentimentality, for reasons Charles Affron describes in Cinema and Sentiment (1982): “Art works that create an overtly emotional response in a wide readership are rated inferior to those that engage and inspire the refined critical, intellectual activities of a selective readership” (1). But as Affron correctly points out, it is the affective (emotional) power of cinematic narrative that has been responsible for the cinema’s massive popular appeal. “Their [the movies’] promptness to elicit feeling offends those who consider being moved equivalent to being manipulated, victimized, deprived of critical distance” (1).

Affron’s insight applies to popular music as well, which also has based its popular appeal on its affective or emotional power. The sentimentality expressed in songs such as The Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows” (for example) stands in stark contrast to songs that seek “to manufacture authenticity—to signify belief in the face of unbelief—through intense virtuosity . . . [these songs] create rampant ‘affective inflation’ that subverts its own efforts . . . and become audible expressions of what Lawrence Grossberg calls ‘sentimental inauthenticity.’” (Michael Jarrett, Sound Tracks, 82-83)

 

While I am fully aware that lists are made in order to provoke, I offer the following list only to illustrate the idea of commercially compromised music, of sentimental inauthenticity. Most all of them were commercially successful, but the reasons for that will have to be explored in a future post:

 

The Beatles – Love Me Do

Debbie Boone – You Light Up My Life

The Carpenters – (They Long to Be) Close to You

Vikki Carr – With Pen in Hand

Bobby Goldsboro – Honey

Whitney Houston - I Will Always Love You

Cyndi Lauper – True Colors

John Lennon – Imagine 

Wayne Newton – Dreams of the Everyday Housewife

Minnie Ripperton – Lovin’ You

Tommy Roe – Sweet Pea

 

For Further Reading: H. Brook Web, "The Slang of Jazz." American Speech 12: 3 (October 1937), pp. 179-184.

What the Dead Men Say

In Philip K. Dick’s short story, “What the Dead Men Say” (1964), businessman Louis Sarapis dies unexpectedly. According to the terms of his will, his corpse is to be deposited in a mortuary where his consciousness can be immediately (but only temporarily) restored, a post-mortem state similar to suspended animation. Dick termed this post-mortem state “half-life.” He later used the idea of “half-life” in one of his greatest novels, Ubik (1969).

Eventually, the consciousness of those in half-life begins to deteriorate, becoming garbled and incoherent—rather like the dying words of gangster Dutch Schultz, whose delirious non-sequiturs and novel collocations such as "French-Canadian bean soup" inspired William Burroughs to write a screenplay about Schultz's dying moments.

Consider the following songs as occurring during the singer’s half-life, or alternatively, concluding at the moment of death; "D.O.A." is the classic example. There is, of course, a certain degree of self-consciousness in these songs, unlike the last words of Dutch Schultz.

What the Dead Men Say:

Lefty Frizzell – Long Black Veil (1959)

Marty Robbins – El Paso (1959)

Porter Wagoner – Green, Green Grass of Home (1965)

Fleetwood Mac – Blood on The Floor (1970)

R. Dean Taylor – Indiana Wants Me (1970)

Bloodrock – D.O.A. (1971)

Al Kooper – Nightmare #5 (1971)

Fashion

Oscar Wilde reportedly said, “Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.” Typical Wildean wit, perhaps addressed to the smart London world of snobs and social climbers, in which worth and station were not given, but asserted. They were asserted through notions about clothes (“fashion”), but also attitudes toward illness. As Susan Sontag observes in Illness as Metaphor (1978), “Both clothes (the outer garment of the body) and illness (a kind of interior decor of the body) became tropes for new attitudes toward the self.”

Sontag goes on to write:

Shelley wrote on July 27, 1820 to Keats, commiserating as one TB [tuberculosis] sufferer to another, that he has learned “that you continue to wear a consumptive appearance.” This was no mere turn of phrase. Consumption was understood as a manner of appearing, and that appearance became a staple of nineteenth-century manners. “Chopin was tubercular at a time when good health was not chic,” Camille Saint-Saëns wrote in 1913. “It was fashionable to be pale and drained; Princess Belgiojoso strolled along the boulevards…pale as death in person.” Saint-Saëns was right to connect an artist, Chopin, with the most celebrated femme fatale of the period, who did a great deal to popularize the tubercular look. The TB-influenced idea of the body was a new model for aristocratic looks—at a moment when aristocracy stops being a matter of power, and starts being mainly a matter of image. (“You can never be too rich. You can never be too thin,” the Duchess of Windsor once said.)

Indeed, the romanticizing of TB is the first widespread example of that distinctively modern activity, promoting the self as an image. The look of TB had, inevitably, to be considered attractive once it came to be considered a mark of distinction, of breeding. “I cough continually!” Marie Bashkirtseff wrote in the once widely read Journal which was published, after her death at twenty-four, in 1887. “But for a wonder, far from making me look ugly, this gives me an air of languor that is very becoming.” What was once the fashion for aristocratic femmes fatales and aspiring young artists became, inevitably, the province of fashion as such. Indeed, twentieth-century women’s fashions (with their cult of thinness) are the last stronghold of the metaphors associated with the romanticizing of TB in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

For Additional Reading: Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978.

 

A Few Songs About Fashion And Self As Image:

David Bowie – Fashion

Lady Gaga – Fashion!

Green Day – Fashion Victim

The Kinks – Dedicated Follower of Fashion

Suede – She’s In Fashion

Kanye West – Dark Fantasy

ZZ Top – Sharp Dressed Man

On the Road to Shambala

As is well-known, James Hilton's Lost Horizon (1933) is the origin of Shangri-La, the fictional utopia nestled high in the remote mountains of Tibet. Apparently, President Franklin D. Roosevelt admired the novel—and perhaps the 1937 Hollywood film adaptation as well. In 1942, given increased German submarine activity along the Atlantic coast, the Secret Service, concerned about the President’s safety, requested FDR discontinue his frequent cruises aboard his yacht, the USS Potomac, along the eastern waterways. Seeking a retreat that would not interfere with the President’s medical conditions of asthma and polio, FDR's physician recommended a summer camp for federal employees as well as Boy Scout groups called Camp Hi-Catoctin, located in Maryland’s Blue Ridge Mountains. Upon seeing his mountain retreat in 1942, President Roosevelt named it Shangri-La. In 1953, several years after President Roosevelt’s death, the retreat was renamed Camp David by President Dwight Eisenhower, after his father and grandson, the name it retains to this day.

That the utopian promise represented by Shangri-La (Shambala) captured President Roosevelt’s imagination is certain. Pure speculation, but I wonder whether the film adaptation of Lost Horizon (1937), directed by Frank Capra, was perhaps more influential on Roosevelt in its conception of Shangri-La than the novel. Capra’s adaptation makes several (important) changes to the novel, one of them being to intensify Conway’s internal conflict about whether to stay in Shangri-La. In Hilton's novel, Mallinson is his protégé, vice-consul to Robert Conway’s role as consul in the British diplomatic service, but in the film adaptation he is replaced by George, Conway’s brother. In the film adaptation, there are two women who live in Shangri-La, Maria and Sondra. Maria’s role is similar to that of Lo-Tsen’s in the novel, but Sondra is introduced in order to develop a love interest for Conway. Robert Conway’s love for Sondra makes his decision to leave even more difficult: he is torn between his protective and filial affection for his younger brother and his romantic yearning for Sondra, along with his conviction that he has found his utopia and place in the world. Hence, the stakes for Conway are far higher in the adaptation than in the novel.

Perhaps the most important change in Capra’s film adaptation, though, is the addition of the character of Gloria, who replaces the kind but largely ineffectual missionary, Miss Brinklow. As the terminally ill, cynical consumptive, Gloria recovers her health, an indication of the restorative quality of the (magical) “air” in Shangri-La (mountain cures were a common belief). The magical quality of Shangri-La is represented by the High Lama, who dies at the age of 249. He was originally a Christian missionary monk who became converted to the east, although Shangri-La, with its motto of “moderation,” is ecumenical rather than dogmatic in its approach to spiritual tenets. I believe it was these features of Shangri-La, its restorative, healing powers, and its ecumenicalism, that appealed to the polio-stricken Roosevelt. I am sure this is not a startling new insight. Rather, what it does suggest is the power of Frank Capra’s film adaptation in influencing our (mis)conceptions about James Hilton’s Shangri-La. Certainly we can see it in popular music, such as “Shambala” (1973), in which the healing powers of Shangri-La are invoked: "Wash away my troubles, wash away my pain / With the rain in Shambala / Wash away my sorrow, wash away my shame / With the rain in Shambala."

Here are some other songs inspired by Shangri-La/Shambala (not to mention the 60s pop group, The Shangri-Las):

Shangri-La – Matty Malneck and Robert Maxwell (1946) (covered by numerous artists)

Shangri-La – The Kinks (1969) (from the album Arthur)

Shambala – Daniel Moore (covered by B. W. Stevenson and The Three Dog Night, 1973)

Shangri-La – Electric Light Orchestra (from the album, A New World Record, 1976)

Our Shangri-La – Mark Knopfler (from the album, Shangri-La, 2004)

 

I must not neglect Johnny Mathis’ album, The Wonderful World of Make Believe (pictured, 1964), a collection of songs largely about imaginary, utopian places (Shangri-La, Camelot), the longing for a place in the world (I’m Always Chasing Rainbows, When You Wish Upon a Star), and the hope for everlasting love (Beyond the Sea, Beyond the Blue Horizon) – all fulfilled by a utopian Shangri-La.

Hollywood Before the Code

Depending upon which pop cultural dilettante you choose to read, “Pre-Code Cinema” is confined to the first few years of the sound era, the period from the industry adoption of sound in 1929 to the enactment of the Motion Picture Production Code that began on July 1, 1934. Some may expand the period to include Hollywood’s early silent era, arguing the pre-code era should include films made from 1921 through 1934. In any case, the term has become synonymous with a time period (narrowly) characterized by cinematic expressions of the forbidden, daring subject matter, and certain deliberate provocations. In this view, the Hollywood movies of the so-called “pre-code era” blended a daring social consciousness with a certain frankness in its portrayals of the American social scene, not unlike the “problem pictures” of the post-World War II era (e.g., The Best Years of Our Lives, The Pride of the Marines, Crossfire, Pinky, The Snake Pit). Warner Brothers in particular made such pictures in the pre-code era, with “hard-hitting,” “socially conscious” films such as I Was a Fugitive from a Chain Gang and Wild Boys of the Road.

However, unlike many of the “problem pictures,” the most daring pre-code films never made the yearly Top 25 box office hits list. For example, the “problem picture,” The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. Thus, the designation, “Pre-Code Cinema,” seems perilously close to a marketing ploy, the assumption being that the daring, socially conscious films of the pre-1934 period are valuable precisely because they were, if not exactly avoided, neglected by moviegoers, who preferred more traditional, old-fashioned entertainment. The Criterion Collection’s forthcoming box set, Freaks / The Unknown / The Mystic: Tod Browning’s Sideshow Shockers, trades on the pre-code era as having a certain cultural cachet, the films’ significance a consequence of their daring, outré subject matter (a tautology), but—most importantly—due to the fact that they were neglected at the time of initial release (always an essential feature for any project of rehabilitation). I have seen two of the three films in the “Sideshow Shockers” box, Freaks (many times), and The Unknown (I have taught the film on a couple of occasions in order for students to study the performance of Lon Chaney, above), but I have never seen The Mystic (1925) and look forward to seeing it.

The reduction of “Pre-Code Cinema” to “forbidden” topics or to “hard-hitting” provocations impoverishes the films, ignoring how film genres evolved due, in part, to experimentation—the aforementioned films of Tod Browning were made possible because there was not yet a tendency toward genre consolidation or homogenization. If one wants to make the argument that “pre-code” Hollywood films differ from the films made after July 1, 1934, then it is possible to argue that genre homogenization (stereotypical narrative units, predictable conclusions, etc.) may have been an unintended consequence of the production code. It is naïve to believe that sex and violence vanished from Hollywood films after 1934; after all, sex and violence was (and is) Hollywood’s bread and butter, and the studio heads knew it. It is important to remember that the Motion Picture Production Code came about because the Hollywood studio heads endorsed it: the Hollywood film industry chose self-regulation as a way to protect itself from government regulation and censorship. “Pre-Code Cinema” simply names an earlier way of doing the same old business.

The Matrix at 25

Filmed in the first half of 1998, released in 1999, The Matrix is now 25 years old. The movie that was once considered the exemplar of avant-garde pop cinema has become déclassé. In his Variety review of The Matrix Resurrections (21 December 2021), Peter Debruge observed, “a property that was once so appealing for being cutting-edge is now being mined for its nostalgia value.” Clearly, in the pop cinema world, a quarter of a century is a long time: heavy-handed symbols such as red pills, blue pills, and disposable batteries have aged as poorly as non-fungible tokens. Few of those born after 1999 understand what a phone booth was for, the purpose or function of a (telephone) “operator,” or why this “operator” has to search for an available telephone in order to enable a character’s “exit” from the matrix (or “insertion” for that matter). The dial-up internet access that informed The Matrix is now as antiquated as a 1960s telephone switchboard. The green numerals of the opening credits, inspired by archaic CRT computer monitors, now appear self-consciously arty, and the greenish hue that influenced the color scheme of the film now seems quaint and affected. The virtual reality plot can now be seen for what it is, a variation of the time-travel plot, or asynchronous parallelism—co-existing parallel worlds on different time tracks—one time track being “subjective” reality, the other “objective.” The cumbersome dial-up access to the matrix occasionally gave rise to narrative implausibility, for instance, the betrayal scene, in which Cypher secretly meets with Agent Smith: how is Cypher able to insert himself into the matrix without the aid of an operator, and subsequently extract himself from the matrix without an operator’s assistance? However, given that its plot shifts are as abrupt as someone cutting the hard line, and given that its visual stylizations (e.g., "bullet time") take precedence over narrative coherence, one lasting achievement of The Matrix has made asking such questions seem improper.