A New Kind of Public: Community, Solidarity, and Political Economy in New Deal Cinema, 1935-1948

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In A New Kind of Public: Community, Solidarity, and Political Economy in New Deal Cinema, 1935-1948, Graham Cassano examines the contending ways in which New Deal cinema attempted to explain the causes and consequences of the Great Depression to audiences shaped by economic struggle and new forms of collective solidarity. A New Kind of Public: Community, Solidarity, and Political Economy in New Deal Cinema, 1935–1948 Copyright Dedication Contents Acknowledgements Introduction: A Sociological Approach to New Deal Cinema The Problem Symbols, Experience, and Overdetermination Interpellative Intention Context The Force of Imagined Things A New Kind of Public Working Class Community The Hollywood Cultural Apparatus Plan of the Work 1 Black Fury (1935) and RiffRaff (1936) Radical Paternalism and Labor’s Solidarity Black Fury and the Construction of Whiteness Black Fury’s Paternalism RiffRaff Women’s Exploitation in the Household Women’s Exploitation in the Cannery Anti-Marx Race, Wealth, and Desire Responsible Unionism Cinematic Contradictions 2 My Man Godfrey (1936) Cinematic Corporatism Forgotten Men Two Communities Responsibility and Recognition Mastery and Servitude Captain of Finance Mask as Mark 3 Swing Time (1936) Recognition and “Schemes of Life” The Power of Fashion The Political Economy of Desire Swing Time’s Realism Immigrants and The Shadows of Blackness Culture and Barbarism 4 The Hurricane (1937) Popular Front and Labor Affiliations Colonial Order and Pacific Passions “I’m Just the same as a White Man” Two Communities “Look at them Dance. There’s the Island’s Answer to your Law” De-Colonized Independence and Enslaved Servility “You’re all Guilty” Contradictions and Paradoxes 5 Ginger Rogers and the (Hollywood) Proletarian Imaginary, 1939–1941 5th Avenue Girl (1939) Bachelor Mother (1939) Kitty Foyle (1940) Tom, Dick, and Harry (1941) 6 John Ford, From Radical Critique to the White Garrison State, 1940–1948 Radical Traditionalism in The Grapes of Wrath Symbolic Domination as Traditional Compensation The Language of Patriarchy Allegories of Race Narrating Trauma as Radical Critique Capital, Class and the Charmed Circle of the State Workers’ Control The Paradoxes of Radical Representation Two Voices From Class Conflict (Back) to Corporate Community All I can See is the Flags We’ll have no more Grapes of Wrath Epilogue: Psycho (1960) and the New Domestic Gaze The Gaze Interpellating Community The Loss of the Collective Spectacle References Films Cited Index