"I Don't Know How It Works": The Wizard of Oz and the Technology of Alienation

JOSHUA DAVID BELLIN "I Don't Know How It Works": The Wizard of Oz and the Technology of Alienation What devices does Hollywood use to persuade moviegoers that it is satisfying their desires, to convince them that they are getting what they want? Margaret Farrand Thorp, America at the Movies (1939) Nineteen thirty-nine was the year of the New York World's Fair, in which corporate America triumphantly unveiled its "World of Tomorrow," an imagined future of prosperity through technological (and commercial) advance. It was also a year of continuing Depression in America, with millions at the mercy of assemblylines and bread-lines, and of the beginnings of war in Asia, Africa, and Europe, with machines of mass destruction gearing up for global holocaust . The year before, Orson Welles had convulsed the nation (or at least New Jersey) by fusing two mechanical invaders of the American home, the radio and the Martians; a year earlier, the Roosevelt administration had issued Technological Trends and National Policy (1937), a prescription for curing the nation's ills through the salve of technological savvy. While art critics Sheldon and Martha Cheney's Art and the Machine (1936) enthused over contemporary artforms that reflected the "peculiar beauty" (xi) of "machine-age speed, precision, and efficiency " (97), artist Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times (1936) portrayed Arizona Quarterly Volume 6o, Number 4, Winter 2004 Copyright © 2004 by Arizona Board of Regents issN 0004- 1610 66 Joshua David Beilin the machine age as a peculiarly ugly realm ofmanhandling feeding contraptions , devouring gears, and Big Brother bosses. While mass-market periodicals such as Popular Mechanics and Scientific Monthly pitched the latest gadgets, gimmicks, and gewgaws, sci-fi pulps such as Amazing Stories and Astounding painted grim portraits of automatons, computers, and doomsday devices run amok. And amidst the hoopla and hysteria, the obsession with technology as either messiah or nemesis, an event took place that seems at first glance far removed from the technological climate of the 1930s: a children's story came to the screen in glorious Technicolor and went on to become one of the best known and best loved movies of all time. And yet, in one specialized but significant sense, Metro-GoldwynMayer 's The Wizard of Oz (1939) is quite overtly symptomatic of the era's technological utopianism, its faith in technology to lift the nation from the dire realities of the Depression to imagined realms of wonder and plenty: from its deployment of the pricey and cumbersome Technicolor process to its spectacular cyclone effects, Oz represents a high point in the history of the Hollywood cinema as (dream) machine.1 Contemporary reviews, though stressing the film's appeal as otherworldly fantasy, were at the same time awed by its command of the technologies of this world: Daily Variety praised the film for its "technical wizardry," Picture Reports lauded it as "a towering achievement in the technical magic of motion pictures," and the Hollywood Spectator pronounced it "one of the greatest technical feats the screen has to its credit" (qtd. in Fricke, et al. 173, 174, 183). Like the Wizard of Menlo Park, widely regarded in Oz's day as the originator of the cinematic apparatus and industry, the behind-the-scenes wizards of The Wizard of Oz were hailed as pioneers in harnessing technology for the welfare of all. At the same time, ifOz projects an image of technological wizardry, the images it projects recall the other strand of its era's technological thought: the dystopian strand, a cautionary or even apocalyptic tradition that charged technology with spawning isolation, dislocation, and dehumanization, and that promoted the core values of heart and home over the perilous phantasm of technological advance. I will argue that it is by placing The Wizard of Oz within the context of Depression-era debates over technology, debates that had significant repercussions for 1930s Hollywood as for the nation as a whole, that one can approach Oz and the Technology of Alienation 67 the film's ideological operations—its part, specifically, in defending structures ofeconomic privilege from the putatively malcontent masses. To view Oz in these terms, I recognize, might threaten to overlook its genial tone and innocent posture. To...