Crowds, Power, and Transformation in Cinema

Concluding Thoughts

187 This book argues that attending to representations of crowds, power, and transformation can lead us to new or clarified perspectives on the cinema. Although Crowds and Power does not serve as the only guide for the analyses in this study, it is by far the most important one. With its examination of the drive to form crowds, its articulation of the kinds of crowds and their dynamics, and its inspection of their origins in packs, Crowds and Power offers film studies a multitude of productive insights. Perhaps the most precious metal cinema scholars can mine from Canetti comes from his understanding of the radically opposed relation between crowds and power. The human talent for transformation allows crowds to form; but dealers in power must try to suppress it, for crowds realize the profoundest possible equality. Movies depend upon and celebrate transformation and, therefore, crowds; both comprise central, recurrent themes in the history of cinema—as does their antagonist, power. The identification of movie audiences with actors and actions on screen may be experienced as a crowd phenomenon, an individual one, or both. Comic films usually encourage mass identification —that is, a sense that one is participating both with the crowd depicted or implied in the film and with the audience in the theater . Tragic or ironic pictures, given their emphasis on alienation or ambiguity, elicit a more individualistic response. All movies, of whatever genre, facilitate the imaginative experiencing of others as ourselves. They encourage, in short, transformation. Crowd themes appear with special clarity in film comedy. Most comedies, as Northrop Frye showed, end with the reintegration of the protagonists into a new or revived society.1 Moreover, comic protagonists usually exhibit an extraordinary capacity for Concluding Thoughts CONCLUDING THOUGHTS 188 transformation, a talent often crucial to resolving the conflicts that drive the plot. The gift of film comedians for metamorphosis signals their readiness for change and their ability to experience other personae. This readiness has an important social component: “It is the influence of one man upon another which stimulates the unending succession of transformations” (375). Comic metamorphosis usually erupts in response to another person; the aptly named “double-take” serves as a good example. Most film comedians rely on an aptitude for rapid transformation . Typically, they have startlingly mobile faces and body language that is expressive and eccentrically graceful. Recall performances of Charlie Chaplin, Imogene Coca, Lucille Ball, Red Skelton, Joe E. Brown, Richard Pryor, Peter Sellers, or Jim Carrey (add your own examples). On their extraordinarily mobile faces, transformations occur as quickly as they are often extreme. The silent film demanded especially communicative body language, which it got from such stars as Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton. The athletic, inventive Keaton was sometimes called The Great Stone Face, but his subtle modulations of expression suited the capability of motion pictures to magnify small gestures and achieved a paradoxically great effect. Mae West mastered a similarly expressive facial economy in the early sound era. Because of the frequent transformations of comic heroes and heroines, one could say that the welcoming or newly created crowd surrounding them at the end of their films represents an outward manifestation of crowds already existing within them. The externalization of “the spots” in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek makes literal that merging of an internal with an external crowd. Henri Bergson famously emphasized the importance of adaptability to human identity, and inflexibility as the cause of certain sorts of ludicrousness. For Bergson, flexibility comes from the élan vital; for Canetti, as we have seen, the power to experience multiple identities underlies what makes humans human (and humane). Comedians often behave with mechanical inflexibility, as Bergson notes, but their power to ultimately prevail in comic narratives results from overcoming their rigidity and achieving its opposite. The fulfilled romantic love that usually accompanies their triumphs at once rewards broadened identity and embodies a sexually achieved transformation. It is the essence of fusion with another. Comedies imitate the creation of a crowd, typically achieving at their conclusions maximum human density and equality. At the CONCLUDING THOUGHTS 189 beginning of most comedies, an old crowd has stopped growing, has become exclusionary, and is wont to issue commands—often in the form of manifestly ridiculous laws or rules. It has become one side of a pair of antagonists: the old versus the young, men versus women, the corrupted and disillusioned versus the innocent, the givers...