15 - Hollywood and the Rise of Suburbia

Summary

In “Hollywood Reconsidered,” I pinpointed the late forties and early fifties as a decisive turning point in the history of American film:

Hollywood's audience was fragmenting. The older generation, once the audience for classical Hollywood films, stayed home and watched television. Why the men and women of this generation abandoned movies, or were abandoned by movies, is no less a mystery than why they once demanded movies that spoke to them with the greatest seriousness. Surely, they could not have really believed that America in the fifties fulfilled the transcendental aspirations expressed by the movies they had taken to heart. Yet they opted for television's reassurance that what was happening now was not really passing them by, that they were plugged into a human community after all. At the same time, rock ‘n’ roll (with its seductive promise of breaking down barriers now), not film (in which a screen separates the audience from the world of its dreams), fired the imagination of the young. The fate of film in America, and the longing to become more fully human that it expressed, hung – and still hangs – in the balance.

In the present essay, I wish to return – with a bit more sympathy – to this mysterious moment at which the generation that was Hollywood's American audience in the thirties bought into suburbia in the forties and opted to stay home and watch television.