The Relationship Between The Civil Rights Movement And Hollywood

Because entertainment such as film inevitably “contains, reflects, and promulgates” ideology (Grant 32), the shift of the film genre is almost always interrelated with the shift of the myth. This social ideology that derives from the entertainment is what Roland Barthe, a french literary theorist, describes as the myth. Barry Grant borrows the Barthe’s argument of the myth in his critical essay talking about film genre: “[He] argues that the very principle of myth is that ‘it transforms history into nature’— that is, cultural myths endorse the dominant blues of the society that produces them as right and natural, while marginalizing and delegitimizing alternatives and others” (Grant 35). This correspond with Glen Jeansonne’s view of Hollywood’s
war films after WWI and before the end of WWII. The co-author of War on the Silver Screen: Shaping America’s perception of History describes that prior to the modernist era, Hollywood’s depiction of war closely relate to the government’s attitude rather than the civilians (Jeansonne Luhrssen 27). Indeed, the shift perceived by Casablanca and M*A*S*H mirrors the individual awakening due to the Civil Rights Movement— the rebellious spirit that respond to a dystopian worldview.
However, the nexus between the social movement and Hollywood’s response cannot be overlooked. Hollywood experienced the magnificent shift from the classical period to the modernist period during 60s. The imposing meaning of producing a film like Altman’s M*A*S*H signifies that studios are no longer political propaganda machines that produce entertainments that soothe the uneasiness of life (Keyssar 102). Entertainments like film now speaks the voice of the millions. Instead of going to the cinema and being imprinted by some messages, one goes to the cinema to find a resonating voice that speaks the truth of their heart. Indeed, with the vivid visual imageries showing on the silver screen, film becomes a truly powerful media in terms of shaping one’s worldview of the past, establishing one’s ideology of the good and vice, and as Dr. Casper repeatedly stresses, in its later days, self-consciously questioning the social and moral
values.
ANOTHER LOOK AT CASABLANCA: THE NOVELTY IN A GENRE FILM
The convention and myth of the war films, different from other genres such as Westerns, Comedy or Detective Thriller that it carries historical responsibility. To specifies using Curtiz’s Casablanca model, this genre film sets a clear line distinguish the heroes from the villain, glorifies the power of love that transcends during the time of inhuman warfares, and concludes with a positive and hopeful attitude for the future. However, these goals are not pre-established in the film Casablanca as one assumes for any other typical war genre movies. The film develops its story and the audience witnesses the process in reaching these goals. Even though Humphrey Bogart will be easily categorize as a typical genre casting for a classical hero based on his other famous personas in films like The Maltese Falcon (1941), Bogart’s character Rick carries a great deal of human flaws. In Casablanca, Bogart plays the conflicted character Rick Blaine, who starts as a neutral, carefree character and gradually transforms into a typical, generic Hollywood hero. The climax of the film, as well as the pivotal moment when Rick gives the Band his permission to play the La Marseillaise in oppose to the German Rally song Die Wacht am Rhein, signifies the change that occurs in Rick. Rick, a person who “stick neck out for nobody” at first, then transforms to a fighter for who is willing to self-sacrifice and fight for democratic peace. The movie stresses the transformation at the latter part of the film because Rick symbolizes the true nobility of american ideology, as Aljean Harmetz, a Hollywood journalist describes Casablanca:
There are better movies than Casablanca, but no other movie better demonstrates America's mythological vision of itself - tough on the outside and moral within, capable of sacrifice and romance without sacrificing the individualism that conquered a continent, sticking its neck out for everybody when circumstances demand heroism. No other movie has so reflected both the moment when it was made - the early days of World War II - and the psychological needs of audiences decades later (Harmetz 56).

“The psychological need of the audience” references to the extraordinary love story in the movie. The film includes love as the key element that both create and resolve the conflict. Unlike other War Romances in which directors try to capture the brutality of war and at the same time weave in the tenderness of love, often times, making the film turns out gratuitously violent or unrealistically romanticized, Casablanca mainly ignored the warfront imageries. The elimination of the classic iconography of the films like trench warfares, human bodies and explosion and the addition of icons and cultural elements of the Gatsby roaring twenties sets the film in a less dreadful tone. The film focuses on depicting a group of powerful elites from all over the world being powerless under the rule of the crippled Vichy France. Asides from the comic effect that lightens up the audience, the movie reaches two other goals: first, it solidify the romance story and the film seems to be more complete and non-distracted as a whole; second, the story connects more with the american audiences who did not experience the war first-hand in their homeland.
ALTMAN’S AMERICA IN M*A*S*H If Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca is a success for bringing novelty into the familiarity, Robert Altman is an individual who has no interest of being a genre bender, but only aims to become a genre breaker.
According to Robert Self, a Historian scholar at Brown University, “Robert Altman constantly restates the heterogenous, the contradictory,the plurality which threaten, delimit, define it as that apparent unity sought by the auteur theory” (Self 4). M*A*S*H overthrows every single traditions of the war genre movie. However, Altman practices formalism in which that he utilizes the familiar iconography just to ask the audience to deliberately realize how different his work is set apart from the traditional genre film. The film sets fairly close to the battlefield, and thus repeated iconography of blood and human flesh constantly appear in the movie. It is Altman’s vision for the story makes M*A*S*H a revolutionary work. Not only did one find it hard to state the content, he or she may not even see the point behind the story’s construction. This quality is what exactly Robert Altman sees in a “good movie”. In an interview with the director, he confesses to reporter Harmetz that his vision for a good movie “takes the narrative out of it” (Sterritt 8). Altman further explains that a good movie enables the audience to “sit and see the film and understand the movie’s intention without being articulate it” (Sterritt 8). But the movie is meaningful even people struggle to put words
to describe it. The absurdity behaviors of the protagonists, a group of Surgical hospital officers, symbolizes the uncertainty of the heroic vision during that period that we normally expect from the war genre in previous years. American ideology of democratic freedom is fragmenting, as one witnesses the murder of human justice during the period: as a consequences of a series of unjustified wars, assassinations of political figures, societal riots, and polarized racial opinions (Nachbar 12). Altman is among one of the american pioneers to shift interest from the “signified of films to the practices of signification— that is, from what a film ”means” to how it produces meaning” (Grant 32). War films are ultimately commentary on history and determine how we feels about our self as individuals or collectively in the aftermath of the war.
CONCLUSION
After the overview of the evolution of the war film genre, as well as close examination of the two films Casablanca and M*A*S*H, one can conclude that there is really no superiority between the two works since both works celebrates the cinematic success and great influences that last generations, whether by upholding the genre convention and wrestling with the tradition or subverting every aspects of the genre and keeping the same iconography. However, there is significance in such genre shift when the change in conventions and myth of the war film witnessed the alternation of the american ideology as well as change of emphasis on the political actors. Casablanca, delivers a pro-war message builds from the top to the bottom when M*A*S*H coveys the anti-war message that forms from the bottom to the top. From this perspective, if genre movie should be interpreted as “ritualized endorsement of dominant ideology” (Grant 32), wouldnt this just proved both Curtiz and Altman’s films work genetically within the genre? Thus, going back to the debate that is exhibited at the beginning of the essay, not only did the debate prove to meaningless, it is also self-contradictory. Instead, if one only focuses more on the study of how the shift of the genre delivers the social myth can one better understand the constructivist idealization of an ever-changing American Ideology.