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The Faces in Lonesome's Crowd: Imaging the Mass Audience in A Face in the Crowd Courtney Maloney In 1958, Raymond Williams asked readers: "who are the masses?" Williams had two answers. First he asserted that, "in practice," in the specific location of mid-century British society, the masses "can hardly be other than the working people." At the same time, however, Williams notes the emergence of the use of the term "mass" as one of opprobrium, and observes: "The masses are always the others, whom we don't know, and can't know." Ultimately, Williams comes to the conclusion that there are no masses, "there are only ways of seeing people as masses" (299-300). I begin this study of Λ Face in the Crowd with Williams' ruminations on the term "masses" because the three ways of thinking about "masses" he outlines suggest the issues at stake in reading a film which makes a representation of a mass audience of television central to its narrative . Director Elia Kazan and screenwriter Budd Schulberg collaborated closely on A Face in the Crowd, a film conceived by both of them as "a warning to the American people" about the dangerous power of television to manipulate a mass audience (qtd. in Neve, Film and Politics 197). A Face in the Crowd does indeed make a number of sharp critiques of the television industry's ability to sway public opinion, focusing especially on its propensity to allow the control exerted by advertising sponsors to influJNT : Journal of Narrative Theory 29.3 (Fall 1999): 251-277. Copyright © 1999 by JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory. 252 JNT ence the political realm. In order to make this point, the filmmakers' characterization of television's mass audience relies on assumptions corresponding to Williams' first two formulations of "the masses" (that is, as working people and as other people), and simultaneously enacts a process of "seeing people as masses." Here, "the masses" carries its negative, dismissive connotation. In Culture and Society, Williams critiques the common discursive elision of "masses" as the majority and "masses" as the mob, noting that such references projected the majority of the population as a threat to culture and democracy. On the contrary, Williams argues, it is this use of the terms "masses" and "mass" as a label of opprobrium which is anti-democratic (297-300). The idea of "the masses" in Williams' discussion is contrasted with that of "community," and especially the foundation of community embodied in working-class institutions and organizations: the ethic of solidarity (328). Although in Culture and Society "mass" and "solidarity" are contrasting ways of conceiving of the social aggregate, in Keywords, Williams acknowledges the positive sense of "mass" as "directly comparable to solidarity. It was when the people acted together, 'as one man,' that they could effectively change their condition" (194). Reflected in Williams' treatment of "masses" is the term's polysemy: one usage with dismissive and demeaning connotations, and another to describe a collective of people with social agency. A Face in the Crowd represents "the masses" in the form of a television audience possessing intriguing hints of an agency which is ultimately undermined. Most critics, such as Thomas H. Pauly, Lloyd Michaels, and John Yates, for example, agree that the film portrays the television-viewing public as a mass of gullible dupes. None, however, have looked closely at the nature of this representation: the imaging of the mass audience as specifically working-class, and the ways some of the responses of this fictional audience to its TV idol could be interpreted as acts of power and resistance. It is worth tracing these ambiguities to show how this film, so often dismissed for what Pauly calls Kazan's "overblown styling" (220), reflected the contest of meaning in the polysemous term "masses." In the end, however, the force of the narrative carries the negative sense. The actions of the TV audience are moot; "the masses" that Kazan and Schulberg imagine are indeed powerless as well as duped. The Faces in Lonesome's Crowd 253 Why does A Face in the Crowd represent the "mass audience" the way it does? One way of answering this question would be to look at...

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