Love Rules: Silent Hollywood and the Rise of the Managerial Class (review)

The business of the Hollywood love story is business. This, in a phrase, is the claim of Cooper's Love Rules. However, Cooper is not simply saying that silent-film producers developed the Hollywood love story in order to make money and build the burgeoning film industry. He asserts that early film love stories participated centrally in the consolidation of a society based on corporate capitalism and the mediation of social life by professionals and experts. Cooper's goal is ambitious: He endeavors to connect an analysis of visual narrative strategies in film (as opposed to simply plot content) to the broad changes in the U.S. economy and society of the 1910s and 1920s. He argues that the silent-era Hollywood love story supplanted print as the mechanism by which the "public" was constituted, "revised the traditional categories of American national culture[,] and legitimated a rising professional managerial class" (5).

Key to Cooper's argument is his analysis of how the love story works visually in Hollywood. He rightly states that early film narrative is not a mere transplant of nineteenth-century fiction forms; rather, visual conventions had to be created and popularized in order for a visual plot to be comprehensible to audiences. He argues that the Hollywood love story is based on overcoming a spatial separation between one man and one woman by allowing their eye-line gaze to meet across frames and, at the story's conclusion, within one frame. This is the shared look that audiences learn to read as love. Spatial disarray and distance are transformed into an orderly, clean, and rational shared space. Cooper shows that no action on the part of the lovers can make this transformation happen; it must happen via unseen forces. The implication, for Cooper, is that an off-screen authority, such as a manager or expert, must arrange space to make a successful personal life possible, just as managers in the early twentieth century promised to shape and reform social spaces—such as tenement districts or motion-picture theaters—in ways that individuals could not. Cooper sees the Hollywood love story as cinematic training in the emerging position of the subject in twentieth-century life in the United States—a subject who accesses "the public" via professional mediation. Ethnicity and race became reinterpreted in silent film to permit the emergent professional class to admit certain ethnic groups, such as Jews, while simultaneously reinforcing a valuation of whiteness.

Cooper's interdisciplinary strategy is to weave analyses of films like Birth of a Nation (1915), Why Change Your Wife (1920), and Jazz Singer (1927) with intellectual history. Film producers and accountants, contemporary social theorists such as Walter Lippman and John Dewey, and public-relations professionals such as Edward Bernays all debated and shaped the changing nature of the public sphere under corporate capitalism as motion pictures become integral to it. Cooper's goal is not to explore how films participate in this historical shift from the perspective of the audience, which would have entailed exploring the relationship of film to other legitimating discourses consumed by ordinary people, like the wildly popular 10� magazine, or the address of social service agencies to their clients. Likewise, his focus on experts rather than audience leaves unexplained just why viewers would associate the unseen transformations that remove obstacles and unite two lovers with managers and experts rather than with the old standbys of fate or the invincible character of love itself. Nonetheless, readers will find Love Rules a thought-provoking and significant contribution to the analysis of visual narrative and its undeniable connection to the functioning of corporate capitalism.