7 - Popular Culture Answers the Hollywood Question

Summary

“THE IDEA OF RIVINGTON STREET”: THE HOLLYWOOD NOVEL AND NATIONAL IDENTITY

By the end of the 1930s, the Hollywood Question became a way to the New Deal, foreign policy, even anti-Semitism. It had shaped film content and censorship. Yet the Question was not simply an activation of anti-Semitism, nor was it only a response to perceived hostility toward Jews. Rather, the Hollywood Question allowed for a series of responses that subsumed ethnic Jewish identity under national identity. If the Question could provide “a little kike” to speak against anti-Semitism, that “little kike” could also point to the failure of the American Dream. Three classics of American literature responded to the Question by inverting its assumptions. Using familiar Jewish characters and stereotypes, these works suggest that Hollywood “kikes” are the product rather than the cause of a failed success myth.

By the beginning of the forties, Day of the Locust (1939), The Last Tycoon (1941), and What Makes Sammy Run? (1941) had mirrored a significant shift in the Hollywood Question. Rather than offering a positive stereotype of the movie mogul, these books marginalize overt, hostile versions of the Question while using certain of its elements as metonymic commentary upon post–New Deal America. Like other Hollywood novels, these books by Nathanael West, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Budd Schulberg comment upon the failure of the American Dream. Critics have accused all three novelists of promoting anti-Semitic stereotypes. Yet the way in which these novels invoke anti-Semitism differs markedly from the tenor of other Hollywood novels.