Hollywood Fictions: The Dream Factory in American Popular Literature (review)

This is a well-researched and well-organized study of fiction about Hollywood from the teens through the 1940s. It explores that fiction's portrayals of Hollywood's "Janus-faced identity as both the ‘promised land' and the ‘wasteland,' . . . a town that kindles dreams of opportunity, wealth, and fame yet most often produces disappointment, disillusionment, and despair" (3). Further, the study shows how Hollywood and its fictions have served a synecdochal function in some of the past century's key cultural debates, "articulat[ing] larger ideological and social concerns" (4) and offering both "commentaries on" and "critiques of mass culture" (15).

Hollywood Fictions is clearly written and eminently readable (though in its repetitiveness it still bears some marks of its earlier incarnation as a dissertation). The introduction lays out the issues, nicely defining Hollywood as at once place, industry, and idea. Chapter 1 frames the "[p]aradox" of or ambivalence about Hollywood in the twenties, and chapters 2 and 3 explore early stories that emphasize, respectively, the positive face of the myth (the "Hollywood Romance") and the negative face (the "Peril of Disillusionment"). Chapters 4 through 6 move into the 1930s as they treat, in succession, stories about stars, extras, and writers. The final chapter, "Hollywood Crime Novels of the Thirties and Forties," focuses on the works of Raymond Chandler and others. Despite the discussions of Chandler, Edgar Rice Burroughs, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nathanael West, and James T. Farrell, most of the authors covered in detail are relatively obscure, including such figures as Rupert Hughes (Souls for Sale), Harry Leon Wilson (Merton of the Movies), Adela Rogers St. Johns (The Skyrocket, The Port of Missing Girls), Horace McCoy (They Shoot Horses, Don't They?), Carroll and Garrett Graham (Queer People), W. T. Ballard (the "Bill Lennox" stories), and Steve Fisher (I Wake Up Screaming). Springer's investigation of these writers, his attention to magazine fiction as well as novels, and his placement of the fiction in the context of fan magazines, star biographies, and other aspects of what Paul Smith has called the "tributary media" are among his chief contributions to our understanding of the historical record of Hollywood mythology.

That said, however, Hollywood Fictions is likely to be of somewhat limited interest. While its specifics are convincing, the whole is something less than the sum of its parts. Springer offers lots of information but has little to say about it. Popular ambivalence toward Hollywood is old news, and the notion that it reflects reservations about mass culture in general seems right but far from startling. The book breaks little ground regarding larger questions of American culture, and hence is likely to engage only those drawn to its particular collection of specifics.

It is also marred at some points by what comes across (to this reader at least) as an insufficiently examined and somewhat anachronistic acceptance of certain topoi that need to be (and by other commentators have been) problematized. Examples include the invocation of hierarchical binaries such as reality-appearance, authenticity-artificiality, and art-mass culture, as well as such statements as the following:

The figure of the Hollywood writer provided one of the first clear indications of how alienating intellectual work could become under the industrial, profit-driven form of cultural production that the Hollywood studio system represented, and thus served to forecast the fate of the artist in the factory of mass culture. (172)

While it is hard simply to disagree with such observations, I find them somewhat simplistic in a book that comes nearly fifteen years after Andreas Huyssen observed in After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (1986) that the "resilience" of such oppositions as "modernism vs. mass culture or avantgarde vs. culture industry . . . may lead one to conclude that perhaps neither of the two combatants can do without the...