Nordic Exposures: Scandinavian Identities in Classical Hollywood Cinema

Introduction

3 Introduction  T his book is an exploration of how Scandinavian whiteness and ethnicity functioned in Hollywood cinema during the period roughly between the two World Wars. The field of ethnic studies has generally tended to overlook Scandinavians in America as a category worthy of study, assuming it to be comparatively unproblematic , if not invisible. Scandinavian immigrants were presumably so easily assimilated into American whiteness as to hardly deserve mention. Within the American cultural imaginary, the Scandinavian has been marked as the blonde-haired, blue-eyed, light-skinned Nordic (Vikings, winter-sport enthusiasts, or comic stereotypes like the “Dumb Swede” blockhead, for example). At the outset of this study, I had intended to investigate only this presumed “hyperwhite” position that Scandinavians have historically played at the far side of whiteness in an American cultural and social spectrum of color. As Richard Dyer stated in his landmark study White: “Whiteness as a coalition also incites the notion that some whites are whiter than others, with the Anglo-Saxons, Germans and Scandinavians usually providing the apex of whiteness under British imperialism, US development and Nazism.”1 In the American popular imagination at least, Scandinavians ranked with the Germans and English as the paradigmatic Aryan whites. Further examinations of this Scandinavian “whiter shade of pale” category in Hollywood, 4 introduction however, produced a number of unexpected findings and raised a number of questions. How could Charlie Chan be Swedish, for example? Was it possible that some Scandinavians in America might have had to become white rather than being sufficiently or too white already? As one film in my study allegorically suggested, could Scandinavians actually never be white enough in the United States of the 1920s and earlier periods? The Scandinavians-in-Hollywood and Hollywood-on-Scandinavians cases I encountered emerged as both racial and ethnic, creating a dialectical crossroads full of intriguing paradoxes and tensions. To name a few examples, why were émigré Swedish actors like Warner Oland and Nils Asther so popular in and identified with their roles of Asian racial masquerade in the 1920s and 1930s? During World War II, why were the reigning female stars in Hollywood (Ingrid Bergman) and Third Reich cinema (Zarah Leander and Kristina Söderbaum) Swedish émigr és whose Nordic and Aryan “naturalness” was a major component of their marketing appeal? In the early sound period of the 1930s, why was El Brendel (a Philadelphia-born dialect comedian with no Scandinavian heritage at all) credulously considered in the trade and fan press discourses to be Hollywood’s second-most-famous “Swede,” after Greta Garbo? How could Scandinavianness seem so mutable and constructed at moments (allowing for voice impersonations and cross-racial and white-on-white masquerades), and then be deployed as an essential, biological, and natural category at others? In the course of my research, I discovered how little scholarship to date has actually navigated inside and within prevailing paradigms of Hollywood whiteness itself. In order to properly contextualize the goals and stakes of my own project, I therefore wish to address first scholarly directions and approaches to whiteness. The past two decades have seen major contributions to the emergent field of critical whiteness studies as an expansion of critical race theory and cultural studies. Scholars from a range of disciplines have increasingly argued that whiteness and all race formations are powerful mythologies that have no real genetic or biological essence but are instead products of the highly malleable contingencies of politics, ideology, history, and culture.2 Dyer in particular has theorized the naturalized invisibility of whiteness as essential to its hegemonic power as the unmarked, normative, nonraced identity position that is “at once everything and nothing.” introduction 5 Increasingly, cultural critics have also explored the myriad ways in which Hollywood films have historically policed a color line separating whiteness from nonwhiteness. A key anthology, The Birth of Whiteness: Race and the Emergence of U.S. Cinema, for example, both critiques hegemonic racist and racializing practices in the development of American silent cinema (in films by D. W. Griffith, Cecil B. De­ Mille, and Robert Flaherty, for example) and reveals oppositional points of resistance (Oscar Micheaux, Sessue Hayakawa, and the Jack Johnson fight films).3 That collection’s unofficial sequel, Classic Hollywood, Classic Whiteness , further mapped the complex intersections of race, representation, and the Hollywood studio system, from the advent of the sound film to about 1960. One of that anthology’s overriding goals...