Theocratic Blues: Life During Wartime

 

Unlike many of you out there in InternetLand I  lived in a theocracy in the United States, yes the United States the country that supposedly has and has had a separation of religion and state, church and state. How did I manage that? Well once upon a time I once lived in a place where religion, in this instance the Christian religion, and politics, in this instance conservative and right wing populist politics, were intertwined.

When I say I lived in a theocracy I don’t mean that I lived in Saudi Arabia where Sunni Islam is intertwined with the monarchical Saudi state. Nor do I mean that I lived in Iran where Shia Islam is intertwined with the Iranian state. Nor do I mean that I lived in Russia where once again the Orthodox Church and the Russian state commingle. I mean that I lived in Mormon Utah.

When I lived in Utah between 1991 to 1993 some 72% plus of the state was Mormon. The legislature of the state of Utah was dominated by Latter-day Saints. Some 90% of Utah legislators were Mormon. While the Mormon population of Utah has declined since 1993, in 2021 it was around 60%, the number of Latter-day Saints in the state legislature has remained about the same, around 86% in 2021. The Mormon theocracy that dominated the Utah of the early 1990s, in other words, remains intact.

Many will tell you that when I lived in Utah Zion was not a theocracy. That would be, they point out and despite many who believe the contrary, unconstitutional. It would be a violation of the US Constitution, the founding document of the American state. And while I agree that Utah was not a Mormon theocracy officially, it was one in practise. In this it parallels nineteenth century America, an era when the United States was unofficially (and illegally) a theocracy.

I say that Mormon Utah was a theocracy for a number of reasons. I had, to backtrack a bit, moved to Provo, Utah to do research on Mormons (Provo is to Mormondom what the South is to the US religiously, it is, thanks to Brigham Young University,  the LDS Church run university, the buckle of the Mormon Bible Belt).  When I lived in Provo the city was around 95% LDS. BYU was around 97% LDS. BYU had rules that everyone, student, faculty, and staff alike, had to abide by. Men could not have hair below their ears or their necks. Beards were forbidden for males. Women could not have dresses or skirts that rose more than one inch above their knees. Alcohol was forbidden. Caffeinated beverages, whether coffee, tea, or soda pop, were verboten. Smoking was prohibited. Unmarried men or women could not live together in "sin" on campus or off.

Of course, one might wonder whether these rules were followed. After all couldn’t I get 3:2 beer at local grocery stores in Provo if I wanted? Couldn’t one go to Provo’s one pub? Couldn’t one get coffee and tea at one of the few local coffee houses? The answer, of course, is yes. I would point out, however, that according to information I heard though the samizdat mill the police force of Provo and the BYU Police, which could operate state wide, kept an eye out for BYU students who violated the “honour code”. The Provo cops supposedly even kept an eye out for students coming out of the lone pub. 

I would also note anecdotally (ethnographically) that when I was on campus everyone I saw was following the dress and grooming standards the Church commanded. I did run into “Jack Mormons”, those who were only nominally LDS, in Salt Lake City. I saw "Jack Mormons" who smoked. I saw some Jack Mormon males with long hair. I saw all this during one of my monthly visits there to bookstores (Sam Weller’s Zion’s Bookstore, in particular) and to Squatters, where one could get a beer for a reasonable price since they brewed their own (I sometimes, I have to admit, went to Temple Square after getting a beer buzz at Squatters and listened to the sister missionaries there; Gentle entertainment in Utah). I could do all this because Salt Lake City was only barely dominated by Mormons at the time and thus was, despite the presence of the Church bureaucracy there, a less theocratic place (less not absent) than Provo or the rural towns in the state where nearly everyone was LDS and nearly everyone practised what the Church preached (the plan of salvation or eternal progression, the ideology around which all Mormon practise flows).

I would describe the unofficial Mormon theocracy as a kindler and gentler version of a theocratic state. No one was burned at the stake when I was in Zion, No one was tortured on the rack. No one was killed for their beliefs of lack of beliefs. Mormondom, in other words, was different in these regards from Christian Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant theocracies in Europe during the so-called Middle Ages (ironically Christians had been killed for their beliefs in the Roman Empire but then the group persecuted often replicates what happened to it in kind) and beyond. On the other hand, there were some of the feminist variety who taught at BYU who were fired. There were people, including Mormon historians, who were excommunicated from the Church. And there were individuals, Mormon historians, for instance, whose scholarly work and published presentations drew the ire of true believers who threatened them with bodily harm and even death via email and the telephone. Again, kindler and gentler theocracy.

I have been thinking about my life in theocratic Utah because the United States, thanks to right wing populist "Christian" nationalists who worship at the altar of the American state rather than the Christian god ignoring, in the process, almost every aspect of Jesus’ supposed Sermon on the Mount (so-called in one of its two versions), not to mention the prohibition against having gods other than YHWH, are on the verge of turning the United States again into a theocracy, though this time an official theocracy. One can reasonably argue that they have already established theocracies in certain US states. And that is scary given the history of religious intolerance.

It is scary because these theocrats are people convinced of their own absolute rightness. They, they believe, after all have god on their side. They are people who, because of this, are inherently intolerant and inherently fascist (fascism goes back to authoritarian monarchs who claimed that they were god or the representative of god; theocracy). They cannot be reasoned with because of this holier than thou attitude. Backed by Big Money, particularly from big oil sources, they are taking over school boards and cleansing school libraries of books which they regard as pornographic (meaning books characterised by sympathy toward gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transsexuals, and other "outcasts") and which don't fit with their narrow and narrow minded ideology, and they are actively working for the firings of those who speak out against those they regard as saints (according to Reuters and the Guardian over 600 people were fired for freely speaking their piece about the theocratic and intolerant Charlie Kirk, for example). They are running for local offices, state offices, and federal offices. And they have an ally in that multi-divorced, bully, misogynist, arrogant, narcissist, and mentally ill bloke named Donald Trump. Their theocracy, I suspect, won’t be as kind and gentle as that of the Mormon Utah in which I lived. I only hope I can get out before the stone age horror begins yet again.

Is yet another Civil War in the American future? Should states like New York, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, New Jersey form a union of their own? Should California, Oregon, and Washington do the same? Should all of these explore union with Canada, a nation, like any nation, with flaws but nowhere  near the flaws of the theocratising United States)? Should Margaret Atwood be considered a secular prophet? Time, as always, will tell.

The Books of My Life: Hollywood Cinema (Maltby)

 

In Hitchcock’s Films, Robin Wood's seminal study of several of the American films of director Alfred Hitchcock, Wood opens the book by asking what at the time, was a very important question, why should we, he asks, take Hitchcock seriously? Richard Maltby opens his book on  Hollywood cinema, Hollywood Cinema (Oxford: Blackwell, second edition, 2003) by asking a similar question. Why should we take Hollywood seriously? While Wood argued for taking Hitchcock seriously to sceptics for whom Hitchcock could not be taken seriously because he worked in a commercial medium, 

Maltby, giving us a preview of coming historical, commercial, cultural, and theoretical attractions in the book, answers his own question about why we should take Hollywood seriously in his introduction to Hollywood Cinema. We should take it seriously because Hollywood is an industry, a corporation, an industry and corporation that sells dreams to willing consumers who wish to “purchase" its product.  In the rest of the book, which is divided into four parts,  "The Commercial Aesthetic", “Histories", “Conventions", and “Approaches", Maltby tells us what Hollywood is, a  dream factory which sells its commodity. It uses, Maltby argues, technological and cultural strategies to sell willing consumers pleasure. 

Hollywood, as Maltby notes in part one of the book, “The Commercial Aesthetic", was and largely still is, much like any other corporation that arose in the corporate era of American capitalism. It was and is a vertically integrated (capitalist pop linguists call this synergy today) managed corporation which is structured hierarchically and whose goal it is to turn a profit and make monies for its stockholders. It does this like any other modern corporation, it sells a commodity, pleasure, dreams, utopian fantasies. Genres, Maltby argues, such as the Western, with their conventions, stereotypes, and repetitive visual motifs, is one of the things Hollywood uses to sell pleasure and to essentially pre-sell films to waiting audiences who were familiar with genre repetitions and enjoy them and also enjoy the novelties Hollywood seeds into these genre repetitions.

In the “Histories” section of the book Maltby  takes readers on a journey from the Hollywood of the Classic era of 1910 to 1948 with its vertically integrated studios that produced, at least in its big studios, A pictures, B pictures, shorts, newsreels, cartoons, and distributed and exhibited their product, to the Paramount decision by the US Supreme Court, a decision that marks the end of the classic Hollywood era since it forced Hollywood to divest of its theatres and made it easier for other companies to distribute product. Next Maltby takes us to the era of the New Hollywood from 1948 to the 1980, a period characterised by roadshow films and spectaculars like Ben Hur and Jaws, and an increasing reliance on expensive advertising. Finally Maltby takes us to the era of the conglomerate Hollywood since 1980, with its, studios as distributors of largely high stake big budget spectacles, its big and spectacular advertising budgets, and its horizontal integration or “synergies”, an era that also brings us full circle back to the age of vertical integration. 

In the technology chapter of the “Histories” section Maltby takes aim at a prominent theoretical approach to film and Hollywood cinema since the 1950s, Bazinian realism. While Bazin argued that technological changes were the product of Hollywood’s seeking after increasing realism, Maltby instead argues that Hollywood realism, such as it was (movies cannot, as Maltby notes, be fully realistic given their manipulations of time, space, narrative, and performance) and is, was the product of technological developments that were not teleological but piecemeal and which ebbed and flowed. These technological innovations, Maltby argues, had to do one thing, they had to fit into the dominant industrial, hierarchical, and aesthetic practises of Hollywood. Technological changes such as sound, colour, widescreen, and digital forms, the four case studies Maltby offers, had, in other words, to intersect with preexisting and standardised, routinised, rationalised, and bureaucratised (all these, as Max Weber notes, were was central to mass business and American mass corporate capitalism) Hollywood genres, styles, and editing strategies. The moral of this story seems to be that the more Hollywood changed the more it had to stay the same. 

Next in the Politics chapters in the "Histories" section Maltby argues that Hollywood has generally preached the gospel of political neutrality. He also notes, however, that at certain times the social problem film, for example, has been significant in Hollywood. It was significant, as Maltby notes, during the New Deal and the post-World War II era, despite the McCarthy witch hunt. It was also important, as Maltby tells us, during World War II when Hollywood, just like the US, went to war with its allies including the USSR against the evil Axis nations. Finally, Maltby rightly notes that though Hollywood has typically sought the widest possible audiences for its films in order to maximise profits Hollywood is also embedded within a culture in which ideology, the fetishisation and universalisation of capitalist economic notions and notions of American exceptionalism, are present and universalised. 

Something else Maltby takes aim at in the “Histories” section of the book is auteur theory, the notion that there are film authors, mostly directors, who have worked within the Hollywood industrial and profit making machine. Emphasisng that Hollywood is a dream factory, Maltby raises questions about the auteurist theory that has dominated film theory into the 1970s and which has continued to prove a useful way of organising the study of Hollywood ever since. 

In the “Conventions’ section of Hollywood Cinema Maltby explores how Hollywood uses space, time, performance, and narrative to produce the product it wishes to sell to consumers. Maltby argues that Hollywood strategies like camera placement, the centring of shots, “invisible” editing, star personas, the emphasis on action, self-censorship, and reading movies between the lines, to note a few examples, are means that Hollywood uses to manipulate audiences into purchasing and watching their product often a second time. Along the way Maltby argues against the crystal ball textualist approach to film, one that assumes everything you need to know about a text is in the text (an odd kind of contextualism) noting that film is not a text; it moves.

In the final section of the book Maltby explores the history of criticism and scholarly analysis of Hollywood product. He divides this section of the book, Approaches, into two parts: Criticism and Theory. 

I was quite impressed with Malby’s book on Hollywood cinema. That said, and in the critical spirit of F.R. Leavis and Robin Wood I had several buts. I would like to have seen more discussion by Maltby of tone (melodrama, drama, tragedy, comedy, satire, parody) in Hollywood movies, aspects of the movies that are just as important as genre. In fact, I think many of what are thought of as genre forms are actually tonal forms. 

I did not find Maltby’s argument against auteurism, an old argument, by the way, one which parallels the main criticisms of auteurism during the 1950s and 1960s, namely, that Hollywood was too commercial to have an author, compelling. Hollywood, as Robin Wood notes, can be both a commercially oriented medium engaged in commerce and still have a few authors, like Alfred Hitchcock and Frank Capra, working within it. 

Maltby could have done a better job of exploring how Hollywood’s economies of scale have helped it become successful in overseas markets and how its restoration of control over exhibition in the United States has squeezed not only foreign movies out of the domestic market but domestic “independent” films out of the marketplace. Remaking foreign movies, of course, was and is also a strategy Hollywood has used to squeeze foreign movies out of the market (something Hollywood TV has sometimes done). 

I liked Maltby’s contention that different groups of spectators read Hollywood films differently, some read them more literally and fundamentalist like while others read them, as Hollywood also intended, between between the lines. Reading between the lines, however, requires a degree of cultural capital and different caches of cultural capital exist leading to different readings of these between the lines. Some spectators pay attention to mise-en-scene (cultural capital acquired via schooling) others pay almost exclusive attention to special effects (the effect of socialisation to the popcorn spectacle movie). Maltby could and should have paid more attention to the issue of cultural capital and the different degrees of cultural capital readers have.

Maltby could have done more exploration of qualitative and quantitative studies of how audiences actually read film texts. Speaking of how audiences “read” texts, while I liked Maltby’s discussion of the literal and “sophisticated” readings of the film Casablanca his reading of the readings of the film is too simplistic. Many readers of Casablanca today on YouTube, self proclaimed reactors, don’t know enough about World War II to grasp the propaganda, Rick as a metaphor for the US, in the film, while others literally hate Ilsa through much of the film because they do not pay attention to her gestures and her mention that she thought her husband Laszlo was dead. I should also note that many “readers” of Bringing Up Baby read the film literally and not between the lines and criticise it for being ‘unrealistic”. Many readers of the film, in other words, are embedded within ideologies of realism, something prominent in amateur film “criticism” these days, and aren’t “entertained” by Bringing up Baby's comic and intentional unrealism. Additionally, given the historical amnesia of many “readers” they don’t really comprehend how Hollywood movies were made for maximum consumption and could and were sometimes read against the Code since they aren’t really aware of the Code.

All that said Hollywood Cinema is one of, it not, the best English language introduction to Hollywood I have ever read. I agree wholeheartedly with Maltby that academic criticism has generally become not only too focused on aesthetics and dominated far too often by notions of political and ideological correctness. I wholeheartedly applaud Maltby for doing something too many of these academic critics don’t do; focusing on the industry, the dream factory, that produces films in order to make profits and the means (genre, narrative strategies, use of space, manipulation of time, performance strategies) it uses to produce films that appeal to audiences, mostly 14 to 25 year olds in the post-Jaws and Star Wars era. I agree with Maltby that Hollywood has tried to insulate itself from governmental interference in its affairs not only through lobbying efforts and through self-regulation but by making its films ambiguous enough to be appreciated and read in multiple ways by those who go to see see Hollywood films. And, as I said earlier, I liked, really liked, how Maltby argued that spectators were central to Hollywood’s strategies and that movies were made to be “read” literarily, akin to how religious fundamentalists read the Bible (if selectively) and more complexly by readers with more expansive degrees of cultural capital. I appreciate Maltby’s contention that Hollywood has sold the American dream and the notion of American exceptionalism to audiences at home and abroad. In general, I think Maltby deserves praise for his descriptive approach, his sociological, ethnological, historical, physiological, anatomical, and cognitive science approach to Hollywood cinema, something often lacking from both film criticism and film scholarship these days and, therefore, something which is much needed. Kudos. Very, very, highly recommended despite its sometimes too reductionist economic approach. It must always be remembered that the infrastructure that undergirds economic ideologies is cultural.