Politics, Desire, and the Hollywood Novel

Chip Rhodes. Politics, Desire, and the Hollywood Novel. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2008. 198 pp. $35.95 hardcover. Fiction about Hollywood has long been recognized by critics of the genre as a discursive site particularly suited for an exploration of the relationship between high art and mass culture. For the popular audience of such fiction, questions concerning sexual morality and behavior in the film industry were often intertwined and conflated with larger questions concerning the moral and aesthetic value of motion pictures and their impact on society at large. Such issues, familiar as they are to students of Hollywood fiction, receive a close examination in Chip Rhodes's Politics, Desire, and the Hollywood Novel, and though he brings some new insights to these themes and issues, there is much here that will sound familiar to those conversant with the critical literature on this subject. A study of this sort requires, in my view, extensive contextualization, both in regard to the film history referenced in these works (such as the studio and star systems) and in regard to the huge body of short stories, magazine serials, and novels that comprise the genre of Hollywood fiction. In most respects Rhodes's study disappoints on this score, only providing a cursory description of the crucial institutional and literary contexts for this category of American fiction. Most conspicuously absent in Rhodes's work is a nuanced, detailed understanding of the "literary tradition" of Hollywood fiction, which is a discourse comprised of more than just Hollywood novels. Critics of Hollywood fiction have a long history of offering generalizations about their subject based on the reading of a relatively small number of works, and Rhodes's book suffers from this same methodological flaw. It is simply reductive to make arguments about the Hollywood novel based largely on West's The Day of the Locust; it represents a relatively late and certainly familiar set of observations and complaints about Hollywood and the film indus-try-or mass culture. The Day of the Locust is clearly more self-conscious of itself as "literature" than most Hollywood fiction, but it certainly depicts Hollywood widi what were, by 1939 (the year of its publication), already well-defined-even-cliched-cultural tropes and narrative conventions. To construct a series of general arguments about the "Hollywood novel" based upon a canonical work like The Day of the Locust ignores the fact that Hollywood fiction has always been a popular literary genre, something that, despite its excellence, West's novel never was until being recognized for its literary merits years after its publication (and even then it was appreciated and understood as an example of American modernism, not as a "Hollywood novel"). In my opinion, Rhodes's book fails to adequately position a work like The Day of the LocustvAthin the discursive tradition of Hollywood fiction, a tradition that has been overwhelmingly popular in its appeals and orientation. That tradition provides the most salient cultural context for the understanding of any specific Hollywood novel. In part, my differences with Rhodes no doubt stem from the fact mat I am a literary historian working within a cultural studies perspective, whereas Rhodes's work seems much more tied to a critical tradition of "close-reading" and psychoanalytic hermeneutics. Rhodes's analysis of individual works is illuminating, and his application of psychoanalytic concepts to these works often produces insight. But his generalizations about the larger subject here-the Hollywood novel-supported as they are by discussions of only six or seven works, seem less persuasive to me. This is to say there is an inaccurate sense of the history of Hollywood fiction in Rhodes's book. Fiction about Hollywood no more originated in West's The Day of the Locust than it did in Harry Leon Wilson's Merton of the Movies, yet throughout Rhodes treats these two works (alternately) as marking a kind of origin of the Hollywood novel. …