University Times

The cover of Mark Lynn Anderson’s new book “Twilight of the Idols” is a movie production still circa 1924 of sexually and racially ambiguous film star Rudolph Valentino on the set of the lost film “A Sainted Devil” — the perfect image for the book, which evaluates some of Hollywood’s early scandals for contemporary understanding of human deviance.

In the cover image, Valentino is applying makeup, eyes riveted on the mirror, projecting an effeminate look. He’s also wearing what probably is the “slave bracelet” he wore in deference to his wife, Rambova, a set designer he married before the divorce of his first wife was final. In stark contrast, there also are boxing gloves hanging on the wall.

“Valentino was a mass of contradictions and he was marketed as such. The still’s got a bit of tawdriness in it. A ‘sainted devil’ was the perfect title for Valentino in 1924,” said Anderson, an associate professor of English and film studies. He first saw the image in the 1980s as a graduate student at the University of Rochester while working part-time in the archives of the George Eastman House, where Anderson’s study of early cinema began in earnest.

“I was working on my doctoral thesis at that time, which became the basis for the book, and of course I was interested in Valentino images,” he said.

Valentino eventually became the subject of two of the five chapters in the book — Queer Valentino and Black Valentino.

Anderson wrote of Valentino: “I contextualize the so-called ambivalence of Valentino’s erotic identity within a larger social conflict between divergent and competing popular notions of sexual identity.”

This conflict over the meaning of male sexual deviance resulted from differences in the view of the masculine male in working-class culture versus middle-class ideas about gender, sexual identity and love-object choice, he maintained.

“The historical class of these divergent conceptions of sexuality helps to explain how theories of sexual pathology played a significant part in Valentino’s popular reception. I explore how the gender-transitive aspects of Valentino’s star persona were intimately tied to a struggle over the meaning of male deviance and that the primary terms of that struggle were social class and ethnicity.”

Anderson’s research focuses on the pre-World War II American cinema as a mass cultural institution — hence his book’s subtitle: “Hollywood and the Human Sciences in 1920s America.”

“The early 1920s for me in terms of celebrity culture in America, particularly as it relates to Hollywood, is a watershed period where a lot of things got settled that we’ve inherited. There certainly is a legacy there of understanding that the early ’20s and the Hollywood scandals were formative of a modern media situation or environment,” he said.

As Anderson wrote in the “Twilight” introduction: “My aim is to demonstrate cinema’s participation in the popularization of a set of knowledge categories about deviance and identity, a popularization that was made possible, in part, by transformations of film stardom … and by Hollywood’s historical and discursive relations to the modern sciences — psychology, sociology and anthropology. The film stars of the 1920s, either through dramatic roles … or through public scandal, often embodied new popular conceptions of personality and personality disorders.”

Anderson described in detail how the Hollywood system’s promotion of individual stars such as Valentino and other subjects of scandal — Wallace Reid, Mabel Normand and Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle among them — was responsive to a growing popular interest in abnormal personalities and deviant behavior, an interest that was not simply the paranoid imaginings of the era’s many conservative social reformers, but was interwoven into the developing social history of America.

“There are so many ways I became interested in what’s now called early cinema, but probably one of the most important influences on me was my grandmother,” he said. “She was born more or less at the moment of what’s considered the birth of cinema, Edison’s projected moving images. She actually was a moviegoer. She’s the first person I ever heard mention Wallace Reid,” the matinee film idol who died in 1923 at age 31 from the effects of alcohol and morphine addiction, which dominated the news at the time, he said.

“I didn’t know who he was until I went away to college, but I remembered her talking about him when I was about 11 or 12 years old and she was a fan of his clearly,” he recounted. “She lived into her 90s and she lived long enough to hear me express a scholarly interest in films, to do critical studies and film history in particular, which pleased her.”

But an unexpected twist occurred when Anderson was talking to his grandmother shortly before she died. “I said I’m really interested in the silent cinema, and her response was, ‘Oh, what are you interested in those old films for? They didn’t even have sound,’” he said.

“I was very struck by that at the time, and I’m still startled by that response, because here was a woman who was in her 30s when the conversion to sound happened, so she had grown up on silent films. She seems to have bought into the industrial discourse that what came before had been superseded by the addition of sound. I was really struck by her disparaging something that had been so central to her life and her enjoyment. I was struck by her trivialization of her own immersion in cinema.”

In graduate school that exchange reverberated to influence his scholarship, Anderson said. He learned that traditional film histories written from the ’20s through the ’70s — histories that were discredited in the ’80s as non-rigorous — completely ignored cinema patrons.

“I was struck by their sheer dismissal of audiences. So part of what I do, in a large sense, is trying to understand who my grandmother was as a young person. I know that may sound a bit sentimental and even sappy, but my own interest in history, in the formation of American social history, comes from her,” Anderson said.

As an illustration of the importance of mass audiences, he said, the chapter on Wallace Reid is devoted to how the Hollywood industry tried to handle publicity from the Reid scandal. “Indeed, the Hollywood industry did blame the public for his death and tried to talk about how mass public adoration of an idol is a kind of irrational, destructive force, and about how the industry is efficient and rational and the masses are irrational — yet the industry can make the wishes of the masses be realized,” he said.

“I find that highly problematic and unfulfilling. Problematic in that it’s a reduction of individuals in mass culture to an irrational state, and I resist that. Much of the book is an attempt to take mass audiences seriously as involved in knowledge production and capable of engagement with producing new ways of knowing in the world. That’s something the mass cultural industry critique denies, saying instead: Audiences basically are just mesmerized,” Anderson said.

That narrow perspective belies the true role of mass audiences in ways that are revealing particularly about how the film industry views itself, he said.

“It’s considering the notion of the experience of the movie theatre as the central experience of the cinema. But the industry and spectators know or should know that the cinema was an experience that took place in multiple sites: in buying the newspapers, in department stores, in conversations, on the factory floor, at the water cooler,” Anderson pointed out.

Something like the fallout after Reid’s death only makes sense if it is understood that the masses are capable of understanding certain ways of knowing a personality, knowing that individuals are relational, they’re conflicted and they have pressures in their lives, he maintained.

“Instead, we look back at 1920s audiences and say, ‘Well, they were living in an age of innocence.’ I’m not only saying they weren’t innocent, but they were incredibly tied to articulating the very terms of knowledge that today we claim as our own with professional authority, as professional sociologists or cultural critics,” Anderson said.

“Part of the large argument in this book is that cultural expertise, and the ability to say things with authority about culture, initially was a mass audience trait that was taken away from the masses,” he said.

For example, creation of film- and movie star-oriented scrapbooks became a popular hobby dating to the early Hollywood era. The popularity of fan magazines also was a forum for learning about film stars and what was happening in their off-screen lives. The question of whether the stories were true or false are questions of a later generation, because the need to differentiate entertainment news from “hard” news hadn’t gained a foothold as yet, Anderson pointed out.

“And when scandals put the film star on the front page, it was startling in some ways, but it emerged at a moment in time where it revealed the amount of stakes that people held in celebrities. And that had to be controlled by the Hollywood industry,” he said.

The source of most Hollywood histories typically are limited to collections of film industry executives, and not old fan magazines or scrapbooks, Anderson pointed out.

“One’s not surprised by that, but what it means is that the record we have to understand the American cinema is skewed toward those involved in the production of film and not the reception of film,” he said.

“How do you get at that other group? That’s really difficult. My book is not empirical; I’m not really interested in retrieving the scrapbooks and creating a database, although that could be an admirable thing. But I was trying to think of ways we might read the terrain of the way people experience the cinema from a multitude of sources that speak about them, and also moments of popular interests or popular ways of knowing,” Anderson said.

He drew a distinction in film studies between cultural history and social history. In the latter, the cinema plays an important role for people who read films in the context of their particular historical moment.

“But social historians have a difficult time in film studies in that they tend to be too empirical, like drawing neighborhood maps for where films are set, or referencing a historical reality in terms of demographics. Social history of human sexuality, for example, is incredibly important to me in my Valentino work, talking about what was going on in gay urban culture in the ’20s and how visible it was, looking at police records and reconstructing a kind of social milieu from all that,” Anderson said.

“But I call myself a cultural historian. Cultural historians, in contrast, talk about certain kinds of cultural practices in an abstract way. I take that social history work and build on it and try to talk about how celebrity discourses around Valentino would have spoken to people who were conversant with that urban gay culture, immersed in it or had an interest in it,” he said.

“I’m not trying to recover a lost audience, but I am trying to recall what I describe as this terrain of reception, where sexuality, particularly deviant sexuality, is an important axis. This is something a social historian could have a problem with because I’m leaving out the empirical kind of work,” he said.

“I conceived the book as expansive, even though it’s about a very narrow period of American history. But it’s expansive for me in thinking about the cinema as related to histories of knowledge — not just simply intersecting with them, but fully participating in modern ways of thinking. My hope is that the book can shift the thinking, particularly so film historians can be thinking about the cinema in institutional ways.”

—Peter Hart