Genosko - The Bureaucratic Beyond - Roger Caillois and the Negation of the Sacred in Hollywood C

8/13/2019 Genosko - The Bureaucratic Beyond - Roger Caillois and the Negation of the Sacred in Hollywood C

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Economy and Society Volume 32 Num ber 1 February 2003: 74-89

T he bu reau cratic beyond:Roger Caillois and thenegation of the sacred inHollywood cinema

Gary Genosko

A b s t r a c t

In a short paper written in the early 1950s, 'The representation of death in theAmerican cinema', Roger Caillois theorized the representation of the afterlife inAmerica through the Hollywood cinema of the late 1930s and 1940s. Caillois main-tained that the American afterlife is fundamentally bureaucratic and represents aprolongation of the world of the living. T hi s prolong ation is understood as a negationof the separation of the sacred and the profane domains in favour of a desacralized,profane pan-bureaucracy. Caillois's essay is read in the context of a sociology of thesacred in the tradition of the College de sociologie, with special attention given to hisdescriptions of how the sacred tends to wane in ordinary life and to his hybrid

methodological strategies. Th e films Caillois used as evidence are critically reviewedand the Hollywood invasion of French film markets in the 1940s and 1950s is devel-oped as a critical historical context for grounding Caillois's claims about American'origina lity': the negation of the sacred dimension of the afterlife, th e power of cinemato replace oral tradition in collective life, and the consequences of a powerful,'exported' mythology that negates the sacred.

Keywords: American cinema; representation of death; sacred sociology; post-warFrench film policy; funeral rites.

Roger Caillois 's short study 'La representation de la mort dans le cinema ameri-


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Gary Genosko: The bureaucratic beyond 7 5

of one way in which American culture represents death and the afterlife to itselfCaillois studied the American afterlife through the lens of the Hollywood cinema

of the 1930s and 1940s, in addition to relying on the French translation of EvelynWaugh's (1903-66) novel The Loved One (1948) (translated into French as LeCher disparu in 1949), for a description of the Forest Lawn Cemetery in LosAngeles and Californian funeral rites, which Waugh had researched for hisnovel. Caillois also introduced a few French films into the mix, as well as selectAmerican cu ltural ephemera as points of contrast and com parison. Taken as awhole, the resource materials he used for this study were remarkably diverse.

Critical consideration of Caillois's argument is greatly aided by screening the

films at issue since these were the texts through which he wanted to discover, atleast in the first instance, the 'originality' of the American self-representation ofdeath and the afterlife. A critical review of the films from which Caillois derivedhis key examples is also necessary because of his extremely selective use of thesecinematic materials. Any reader of his essay may be left wondering not onlyabout the content of the films n question but also about the many neglected, yetrelevant, dimensions of them. Only the first half of Caillois's essay focuses onselect Hollywood films. He then turns his attention to Forest Lawn and usesWaugh's novel and undocumented journalistic and advertising sources as toolsof interpretation. Caillois used these cultural products to support what hediscovered in his film studies: the American afterlife is bureaucratic andrepresents a prolongation of the world of the living, just as the representation ofdeath in the Californian mortuary cult is accomplished by means of signs of life,a prolongation of life by semiotic means. Together these factors negate theseparation of the sacred and the profane worlds in favour of a profane pan-bureaucracy.

Caillois's little essay may be profitably read in the context of a sociology of thesacred. Inspired by both D urkheim and Mauss, Caillois published his import-ant statement on the sacred, L homme et le sacre, in 1939, with two subsequenteditions. The question Caillois posed was inspired by the classical sociologicaltradition . Following D urkheim (1912: 37), Caillois (1939: 20) recognized thatthe two worlds of the mutually exclusive domains of the sacred and profane donot mingle in unmediated ways, that is, in the absence of collectively recognizedrites of passage and acknowledged risks of admixture. Caillois took great care tooutline how the profane needs the sacred, and the regulation, through rites, of

the process of consecration in the passage into the sacred from the profane;likewise, he also explained expiation in the process of desacralization in the


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7 6 Econom y and Society

lamented that the collective ferment of festival had given way to individualized,isolated vacations (1940 version). Ten years later, in 1950, he found this old

alternation replaced by periods of peace and violence. The festival, as a ritemarking a passage from the regulated everyday to the paroxysm and excess ofthe sacred, has a tendency to wane under the pressure of ordinary life:

Social existence in its entirety slides towards uniformity. More and more,flood and d rought are channeled into a regular and even flow. The multiplenecessities of the profane life less and less tolerate the simultaneous reserva-tion of the same time to the sacred.

(Caillois 1939: 170)

Caillois examined the fragmentation of the sacred in the eclipse of a distinctalternation between the two domains. The sacred 'appears to become abstract,interior, subjective, attached less to beings than to concepts' (ibid.: 172). Thesacred, in short, becomes conceptual. It persists, but in new forms, and itspersistence is based in part on negative criteria: for example, the incompleteliheration and independence of the individual.

Although Caillois sough t, in the successive editions oiL homm e et le sacre, todiscover new examples of festival (for example. Carnival in Rio, total war as theparoxysm of modern society), he did not detect the absence of the sacred. Thelittle essay under consideration here presents a finding that expresses onepossible result of the trend toward uniformity in modern societies, noted above,under the demands of profane life. In the USA, as Caillois shows, these pres-sures have carried the profane into the otherwise sacred dimension of the after-life. And the Hollywood cinema shows that it is no longer the case that the sacredis death's door: 'the sacred is always more or less "that which cannot beapproached without dy ing "' (Caillois 1939: 19, citing in the quote the words of

a D akota Indian). This is precisely the feature that makes Caillois's paper signifi-cant for a classical sociology of the sacred.

Continuity between the two domains or the failure of alternation, as it isrepresented in the films in question, disables the seminal distinction betweensacred and profane. T he U nited S tates of America is allegedly a society w ithouta sacred, a thoroughly profane country. Th e consequences of this absence of thesacred are somewhat unclear since Caillois ends his paper with a series of ques-tions. Still, there is no mistaking the claim that this is an 'original' condition. It

would be difficult to predict, Caillois noted (128), that this trend in popular cine-matic imagery would continue. S till, the power of the Hollywood cinema as 'thei il d i f ll i ibili ' (128) i i d b


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Gary Genosko: The bureaucratic beyond 11

article between American cinema, British novelistic parody of America used asethnographic evidence and a sociological categorization of the representation of

the afterlife as a bureaucracy familiar to the living is a strange hybrid typical ofCaillois. Through this strangeness, Caillois posed a classical sociologicalquestion: do certain myths of Hollywood cinema, especially the representationof the afterlife, con tribute to social cohesion, even if they do so paradoxically bydemonstrating the continuity between profane and sacred worlds? In the 1940rewrite of the College text on 'Festival' cited above, Caillois remarked: 'Is asociety with no festivals not a society condemned to death? While suffering fromthe gnawing feeling of suffocation vaguely provoked in everyone by theirabsence, is not the ephemeral pleasure of vacation one of those false senses ofwell-being that mask death throes from the dying?' (Caillois 1988: 302).Caillois's implicit answer was yes on both accounts. And Caillois posed the samequestions of an entirely profane country: 'Can a civilization persist withoutappealing to a sentiment of the sacred? W hat sort of masks might the sacred wearin a civilization whose originality consists precisely in eliminating it as much aspossible?' (129) But the answers are not so obvious, even if the parallels arestriking.

In my conclusion I shall, in addition, consider the socio-political context inwhich Caillois's essay was produced because it was the moment at which thepost-war American cinematic invasion of France, which gave rise to nationalis-tic and protectionistic protests between allied forces in the C ommunist Party andthe French film industry, began to wane. The question I want to consider iswhether this was Caillois's version of former College colleague GeorgesBataille's (1991[1976]) reading of the Marshall Plan in the first volume of TheAccursed Share. Th e American dumping of film into France was very much partof the post-war regeneration of the French economy.

The continuity of life and death

For Caillois, death is both a great equalizer and educator. All humankind is equalbefore it and the impending event imposes the need to understand not only whatit entails and how to face it, but also what follows from it. Caillois uses the meansby which a culture represents death to itself, including all the negotiations,

education, emotions and comportment involved in facing it, as well as images ofthe afterlife, as a means to define American cu lture (115), for Caillois's m ethodo-


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7 8 Economy and Society

Caillois concludes his introductory remarks in this way: 'O ne can thereforeadmit that a society paints a rather good picture of itself by the manner in which

it represents the passage from this world to the next and this other world' (116).Caillois's search for 'significant constants' (117) in the representation of the

beyond in the Hollywood cinema begins under the sub-heading of 'An admin-istrative beyond' with the negative example of The Devil and Daniel Webster (dir.William D ieterle, 1941). For Caillois, there is nothing original about the themesin this film since it borrows folkloric imagery familiar from at least the period ofthe M iddle Ages. Essentially, the figure of the D evil, a 'crafty and sniggeringgossipmonger' named 'Snatch', and the themes and characters in the film are

readily available in European literature and cinema, and he cites, as an exampleof latter. La Charrette fantome (dir. Julien D uvivier, 1940) and, as an example ofthe former, the novels of Dostoevsky and Bernanos. Indeed, his next example.Death Takes a Holiday (1934) fares only slightly better; although the figure ofdeath, dressed as 'a kind of Balkan prince', may have origins that are less well-defined, it is hardly innovative, and Caillois considers the characterization to beout-of-place with reference to the culture (American). Hence, one searches invain among such folkloric 'importations' for the 'originality' of the Americanvision. American originality is dampened the more the representation of deathresembles traditional European folklore and all its variations, to which one mayadd the Faust story (including doppelgdnger fantasies along the lines of The Deviland Daniel Webster, regardless of the uniqueness of their setting, in this case ruralNew Hampshire during the 1840s). The point of these negative examples is tocontrast them with the 'coherent and original mythology' (118) present in otherfilms, to which Caillois then turns his attention.

Regarding film as a medium, Caillois believed that themes original toAmerican culture may be present elsewhere, as, for example, in literature,providing the cinema with material for adaptations, but 'in all cases it is thescreen that fixes the collective representations' (118) and delivers them toAmerican and foreign audiences. Film is, then, a medium that distributesmythologies for mass consumption; it is not necessary for a filmic concept to beoriginal in itself, since it may rely on existing material. Moreover, since film isprimarily a vehicle as a representational medium , it is subordinate to the collec-tive representations that it delivers. Caillois's sense of film is limited to certainkinds of content that he organizes under the heading of 'administration',

captu ring the specific character of the American representation of the hereafter.The transition from the negative to positive examples, that is, from what is


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its version of heaven in which the recently deceased finds himself appearing ina vast terrain vaguely resembling an airfield shrouded in fog, with the outlines

of hangars in the background. Initially, the deceased does not appear to knowthat he is dead; the change was 'insignificant'. It soon dawns on him that he istruly dead and he begins to dwell on it, in fact, questioning it, arguing with theunsympathetic, inexperienced and somewhat overzealous messenger whoinsists: 'Th at 's what I said, Mr. Pendleton, you are dead ' D espite the m ilitaryorderliness of this reception facility on the airfield of heaven, the functionarieswearing officers' caps, the queues and clipboards, as it were, something is amiss.There has been a mistake, a mistaken identity: the deceased, Joe Pendleton, a

saxophone-playing pilot and boxer known as the 'Flying Pug ' is not on the deathlist; it turn s out that the messenger intervened before Joe's plane actually bit theground and that he was, as the official register eventually shows, not scheduledto die and join his parents for another fifty years on 11 May 1991. This isconfirmed by the Mr Jordan of the film's title who oversees the administrationof this gigantic bureaucracy. The mistake must be corrected, and the filmconsists of the efforts to put right the situation by returning Joe Pendleton to acompatible body, that is, the body of a boxer; it is impossible to return him tohis original body since it was cremated.

Under the direction of Mr Jordan, the newly dead body of a wealthy busi-nessman is found but, after a great effort to adapt is made on the part of theboxer, with the inducem ents of potential female companionship dangled beforehim by Mr Jordan, the situation becomes intolerable and he requests a changeof bodies, a request M r Jordan obliges. Ultimately, the body of a promising boxeris found and Joe is put on his right road and is able to fulfil his destiny ofbecoming the champion; Mr Jordan even patches up Joe's interpersonal affairswith his love interest and professional re lationship with his manager, which werestrained during his occupation of the businessman 's body - a businessman, inci-dentally, whose unscrupulousness was legendary but which Joe tried to correctwith good works completely out of character. 'S o long, champ ' Mr Jordan saysonce the situation has been righted and Joe's memory of recent complicationshas been erased. 'This administration is accommodating, but upright', Cailloisobserves (119), adding tha t its 'functionaries are affable'. The administration is,however, constrained by an individual's 'destiny', which, above all else, it musthelp one to fulfil.

In Here Comes Mr. Jordan, the next world has a 'bureaucratic appearance' thatis 'similar to reality and prolongs it'. The uniformity of the two worlds of life


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8 0 Econom y and Society

shifting films. Just as, in life, one rarely has the opportunity to interact directlywith the heads of large and complex organizations, in the other world it is 'excep-

tional that one meets D eath in person' (119). But this is precisely what happensin the more 'ambitious' film On Borrowed Time (dir. Harold S. Bucquet, 1939).In this film D eath works alone and, as far we know, has no assistants, whereas inHere Comes Mr. Jordan, he employed messengers, although complicationsrequired the intervention of Mr Jordan himself In a more positive formulation,Caillois's analogy suggests that, in life, we deal with front line staff (subalterns)of large organizations, just as in the afterlife we norm ally also deal with messen-gers; this is like the case of The Devil and Daniel Webster in which the D evil sendshis colleague Belle, a seductive maid, to co rrupt Jabiss S tone and ru in his familyand community life.

Th ere are, of course, exceptions. In On Borrowed Time, D eath - known as M rBrink since he assures the smooth passage of those who are on the brink of death- is a very formal, correct, severely elegant and rather cold character who is heldprisoner up in a tree by a grandfather and his grandson. Caillois writes: 'His waysare so modest tha t we take him for some inspector touring his distr ict' (120). Wetake him, then, not for D eath, bu t one of his minions. When M r Brink firstappears to the grandfather, Julian N orth rop , the latter resists his entreaties andchases him away in disgust; D eath eventually takes N orthro p's elderly wife, justas at the beginning of the film he took Julian's son. Th e elderly N orthrop has noone left but his grandson Pud, on whom he dotes, and whom he protects fromthe nefarious designs of his upstanding and righteous aunt. Most of the actiontakes place around the impressive apple tree in the grandfather's yard. It seemsthat Julian's tree was often raided by neighbourhood children whom he wouldchase away. He made a wish that anyone caught in the tree would be held thereuntil he released them . S trangely, his wish comes true and the tree begins to show

a tendency to hold onto anyone who climbs it. When Mr Brink again appears,he urges Julian to co-operate; the latter pretends to resist and slyly asks Mr Brinkif he would grant a last request: would he climb the tree and get from the highestbranches a ripe golden russet apple? Mr Brink obliges and finds himself unableto climb down. Having suffered what he considers to be a great indignity. D eathremains invisible much of the time, and becomes quite melancholy.

As Caillois explains. D eath's predicament creates serious problems becausewhile he is indisposed nobody dies; suffering becomes interminable without the

blessed relief of death. D eath is colloquially, after all, up a tree. Julian will not lethim down because he will be the first taken by Mr Brink and, despite the argu-


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is no match for D eath who intervenes in his attempt to run away by challenginghim to climb atop the fence surrounding the tree. The young Pud falls and

injures himself severely, losing the use of his legs. Grandfather realizes he is nomatch for D eath and asks him to please come down and take both himself andhis grandson. 'In the end, the grandfather and grandson agree to die', Cailloisnotes, and 'they liberate their p risoner and, in his always obliging manner. D eathleads them toward the decisive serenity', that is, as the grandfather used to tellhis grandson in response to his questions about the hereafter, to the place 'wherethe honeysuckle grows' (120). Caillois concludes: 'The meaning of the film isclear: It is a matter of presenting death as reassuring and beneficial' (120).

As Mr Brink leads Julian and Pud towards the place 'where the honeysucklegrows', the last scene of life and the first glimpse of the afterlife are identical.N othin g seems to have changed. However, not only does grandfather get upfrom his wheelchair, but the prone body of his grandson, whom he carried inhis arms, suddenly appears light as a feather. Mr Brink remarks: 'That's betterisn't it?' To which no objection can be made since there is no need to resist atransition that is hardly a transition at all.

If this is heaven, what, Caillois wonders, is hell like? In order to answer thisquestion he turns to another film. H eaven Can Wait dir. Ernst L ubitsch, 1943).Hell, it appears, is also 'hum anized', if bureaucracy may be so considered (note,however, that bureaucracy always has a human face in these films) . In this film,Satan, referred to as 'your excellency', resembles the 'president of a board ofdirectors, comfortably ensconced in his directorial office' (120). Amid numerousfiles, attentive secretaries and ringing telephones, he issues orders and receivesvisitors, one of whom, a certain Henry van Cleve, has crossed 'the great divide'and descended a staircase into Satan's office, before whom he pleads his case.The re is hardly anything of traditional representations of the D evil in the behav-

iour of this Satan, whom Caillois describes as a 'consummate bureaucrat' whodisplays no malice or menacing intentions; the only traditional touches are hisgoatee and arched eyebrows. It is not easy to get into Hell, as Henry van Clevequickly realizes, for there are requirements that must be met before a 'passport'is issued. Satan rigorously applies the regulations while reviewing the case ingreat detail, hearing van Cleve tell the story of his life as a womanizer. Cailloisobserves that this Satan is in no way Evil (121); he is characterized hoth as a'judge who does not always find reason to condem n and an immigration officer

ruling on the fate of travellers requesting entry to a country on a permanentbasis' (121). In the end, van Cleve is refused entry, with S atan's definitive ruling:f


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second class, a guardian angel without wings in a military-like beyond. At thebeginning of the film, when he is called to work on the case of a discouraged

man, a certain George Bailey, he is introduced as Clarence 'the clockmaker'Oddhody: the impression is that we should not expect much from him eventhough he is on call. S till, his task is to impart a taste for life to a man contem-plating suicide, and he devises a scheme that will prove to Bailey that his life hasnot been useless and that he has friends and family willing to help him in hishour of need . Clarence offers Bailey what is presented in the film as a 'great gift':to see what the world would have been like if he had never been born. The angelwalks him through the town in which he lives - here, Caillois underlines that

it has 'imperceptibly changed' (121) like the hereafter of On Borrowed Time -and Bailey witnesses unhappy lives, unrealized dreams, corruption and meanspiritedness:

He notices how different the destiny of those would have been whom he knewor whose paths he simply crossed - including parents, friends, neighbours andstrangers. Seeing how things would have unfolded without him, he glimpsesthe place he occupied among his fellows and the unsuspected value of theservices that he rendered by the simple fact of living among them. He under-

stands that he is surrounded by feelings of sympathy and decides not tocommit suicide. (121)

And, in the end, Clarence wins his wings. It is on this note that Caillois ends hisanalysis of the bureaucratic hereafter in select Hollywood films, an admittedlyincomplete picture, he notes, and one that was unlikely to have been 'unani-mously recognized' by the viewing public, but, nevertheless, it is certainly notreducible to 'pleasing diversions and individual fantasies' (12 2). Caillois believedthat, despite the vicissitudes of his analysis, he uncovered in these works simi-larities, in inspiration and image, that respond to, express and illustrate the spiritand needs of the American public regarding the afterlife. In other w ords and ina weaker negative formulation that Caillois used to set up a positive claim basedon a pair of double negative cons tructions, the administrative beyond 'could notbe' an arbitrary representation. He continues: 'In reality, it [this representation]transposes not without exactitude the comportment of Americans toward death'(122, emphasis added). And to understand this attitude is, Caillois thought, tounderstand a great deal about a civilization.

Caillois's reading of these films and development of the continuity they repre-sent of the administrative here-and-now with the hereafter in American society


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ultimately, even when he finds an adequate body with which to fulfil his destiny,the saxophone follows along, courtesy of Mr Jordan. In the second film the angel

leaves his copy of Tom Sawyer with George Bailey as a token of thanks afterreceiving his wings; indeed, these precious things pass between the domains ofthe living and dead and provide continuous threads with the assistance of angelsand administrators who are, as Caillois discovered, on the one hand, front-linefunctionaries and, on the other hand, high-ranking officials (even if they seemotherwise) in the bureaucratic beyond with whom we are unlikely to deal directlyin the parallel institutions of our lifetime. S ince the satisfaction of their chargesis of great concern, the company of a precious belonging or gift smoothes the

transition and establishes continuity.Caillois's lack of interest in these things themselves is somewhat surprising.

This valorization of personal things is, of course, a sign of the reach of theprofane and, in his own words, reveals the 'N ega tion of the sacred[ness] of death 'in American culture. The saxophone is an anti-sacred object for contact with itis in no way perilous, as one finds with sacred objects in general. The traffic inthese accessories helps to undermine the distinction between the sacred andprofane and underline continuity between the domains. Hollywood cinema filled

what D urkheim called the 'logical void between them ' (1912: 378). The bureau-crats of the Hollywood beyond are also expert baggage handlers. In at least oneinstance their role is to make an unknown future better known through thepresence of a personal object, a kind of emotional security that travels the otherway as well as a reminder of the lessons of not-so-far beyond. Absent is the ritualby means of which objects are venerated and contact with them is prohibited.The only trace of this prohibition, and the 'dangerous energy' of the sacredobject (Caillois 1939: 21), is the golden russet apple in On Borrowed Time.

Across the little divide: signs of life am ong the dead

Caillois then turned to a detailed consideration of American funeral parlours,noting that Europeans have been struck by their atmosphere, and describedthem in great detail. He emphasized that these places devote themselves tomasking death through cheerful, agreeable and reassuring surroundings: 'it is amatter of combating grief by means of admiration' (123) and even of'div ertingthe gathering from every sad or macabre impression' (123). The very richnessand luxury of the parlours, from vestibule to smoking room, seems to raise the


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relations ride along with the casket in the hearse en route to the cemetery. Inshort, death is made to signify life rather than transience and decay, just as thehereafter is barely distinguishable from life in its cinematic representations.

The cemetery that interested Caillois was 'the famous Forest Lawn in LosAngeles'. In this section of his essay he focused on English novelist and arch-ironist Evelyn Waugh's descriptions of it. Caillois's reliance on Waugh's novelin French translation raises important questions about what sort of evidence hebelieved himself to have found. W augh's novel is an indictment of the Californ-ian mortuary cult and the plot revolves around activities at the fictionalized greatnecropolis, renamed Whispering Glades, and its poor relation and im itator, a pet

cemetery named Happier Hunting Ground. The descriptions in the novel arefull of remarkable detail, none of which may be divorced from the satiricaldescriptions of Los Angeles and the ironic plot structure, in which chiefembalmer, M r Joyboy, of Whispering Glades and D ennis Barlow, erstwhile poetand former film studio employee, now employed by the pet cemetery, vie for thehand of Aimee Thanatogenos ('loved one born of death'), mortuary hostess atWhispering Glades. D ennis made the acquaintance of Aimee while arrangingthe funeral of fellow ex-pat. Sir Francis Hinsley, who hung himself after being

sacked without notice from his long-time position as scriptwriter at one of thebig studios. In the end, the confused Aimee commits suicide in the embalmingroom of her employer after learning that D ennis actually works for the petcemetery, which she holds in con tempt, and having received bad advice from herguru, who is actually a recently dismissed, alcoholic letter writer for a religionbusiness. Ultimately, like Mr Joyboy's mother's parrot, at whose funeralD ennis's true vocation was revealed to Aimee, she, too, is cremated like ananimal at the pet cemetery so as to avoid any injury to the reputation of Whis-pering Glades and the brilliant career of Mr Joyboy that her suicide may havecaused.

In this novel Waugh's ironic critique is so grim and unrelenting that itprovides ready-made support for Caillois's position. But is it an answer to thequestions posed earlier? Is a society without a sacred condem ned to a death onlyworthy of ridicule? In general, the connection Caillois makes between selectedthematics in Hollywood films and American mortuary practices owes a greatdeal to Waugh's novel. Waugh visited Los Angeles in the spring of 1947 todiscuss the filming of Brideshead Revisited and he became fascinated with F orestLawn Memorial Park in nearby Glendale. It is in this mundane respect thatHollywood and Forest Lawn are united; indeed, Waugh characterized meetings


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(Beaty 1992: 172-5), there are two false 'sets' under attack in The Loved One:the mortuary and filmdom.

Armed, then, with Waugh as well as undocumented journalistic reports ofcasket exhibitions, packets of matches advertising funeral services and assortedpromotional ephemera for funeral parlours whose effect is to neutralize death,Caillois concludes that 'the reassuring mythology of death which is outlined inthe films urn s out to be exactly in agreement w ith American cu lture. Th e imagethat it presents of a familiar, administrative beyond, secularized to the extremein which m an has no reason to feel exiled or unhappy, is not gra tuitous: it consti-tutes a true measure of this civilization' (1256). O r, to quo te Waugh from a jour-

nalistic version of his visit to Forest Lawn, 'D r. Eaton [Chairman of ForestLawn] has set up his Credo at the entrance. "I believe in a happy Eternal Life"he says .. . . "Happy because Forest Lawn has eradicated the old customs ofD eath and depicts Life not D ea th" ' (Waugh 1984: 335-6). A 'stuffed simu-lacrum of life' (Baudrillard 1993: 181), it would appear, is a true measure ofAmerica.

Under the final heading of'S tyles of civilization', Caillois treats the Americanvision of the hereafter as an 'export' product whose influence may be seen in the

French and British cinemas. However, while in the case of the latter (in A Matterof Life and Death, dir. M. Powell and E. Pressburger, 1946), the beyond is agigantic administration with impressive archives and control systems, there is atendency for this version of the beyond to deviate from the American modelsince the deceased retains the trappings of class, dress, nation and history: 'theother world appears as an immense museum conserving and contrasting irre-ducible singularities' (126). Furthe r, in this film there are elements of the fantas-tic (a 'vertiginous escalator on whose banisters statues of great men endlesslyslide by' [127]); and, ultimately, for Caillois, this vision is 'neither familiar norcomforting' like the American one (127). It is full of anguish and tradition,which does not mix well with its 'bor row ed' American elements. D espite thisoverall incoherence, it is the style of the civilization that is retained; theAmerican vision of a bureaucratic beyond and more traditional 'naive illustra-tions of history manuals and legends'. This mixture is less original and morederivative than the American example.

Caillois asks himself whether or not American images of the beyond consti-tute 'a sort of modern substitute for myths', which is itself a 'mythology in anascent state ' (128). Perhaps, he suggests, but it is too soon to tell - if they persistand develop, eventually supplanting oral tradition , Caillois thinks: 'In any case,


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speaking', he remarks, in the collective's recognition of the cinematic illustrationof its own needs and tendencies. Such an illustration remains 'entirely profane'

(129), as do its values. Caillois concludes: 'S uch are the fundamental problemsthat modern civilizations pose, especially that of the United States of America'(129). To follow up this point in D urkheimian terms (D urkheim 1912: 2 15-16),perhaps American civilization will create new sacred things from hithertoprofane things to which a collective respect, perhaps short-lived, will beaccorded, such as the collective rapture of movie fans before their stars -divinized amalgams of actors and characters? This is the direction in whichCaillois's analysis sends us, but he has not provided a map of how we might reachsuch a destination. In French film criticism focused on America written in the1950s, Edgar Morin (157: 106) developed this point in his analysis of The Starsin terms of his discovery of 'a new religion of love' and the possibility of anethnography of'n ew primitives': 'Every village in France is dominated by a belltower, but in the back rooms of cafes in these very villages, in the barns andgarages of the common adoration, in the cities, wherever there is a white screenin a black room, a new religion has been established.'

Conclusion

Anyone who has screened the films upon which Caillois relied in the first partof his presentation will have noticed that there are no funerals in them; that is,scenes relating to such rites are at best incidental. The passage across the so-called 'Great D ivid e' is not so great after all, and it is usually accomplished withthe aid of a functionary of the hereafter. As we have learned, the differencebetween the worlds of the living and dead is not so great; sometimes it is diffi-

cult to know that one is dead. Indeed, even when he turned to Forest Lawn andthe Californian mortuary cult, the activities in the funeral home are used byCaillois to further illustrate the thesis of continuity and accommodation, ofbodies more beautiful and comfortable in life than in death (recall Mr Brink'ssuggestion in On Borrowed Time - 'That's better isn't it?'). If it turns out thatthe collective ritual of going to the movies is a new religion with the white screenas altar in darkened room of worship, the absence of a residual sense of the sacredin what is otherwise a scene of communification would require a substantive

resacralization. This would also require a change in the needs of the Americanmasses and a turnabout of the process of secularization. As it stands, Hollywoodf f


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members of a society better than novels? Caillois's con tempt for the individuat-ing and anti-social elements of reading does not translate into straightforward

praise for the cinema. He may have condemned the novel on sociologicalgrounds circa 1940 (see Hollier 1979: xii; Hollier 1997: lOff), but his ambiva-lence towards th is view grew steadily as he eventually penned his own historicalfiction. Indeed, Caillois is not at all convinced that filmgoers would recognizehis interpretation of popular cinematic works that supposedly spoke to the'collective' needs of Americans. He seems more certain that he has not uncov-ered exceptions resulting in individualized diversions.

Penultimately, one of questions that H ollier's (1997) approach to the relation-

ship between French literature and the threa t of war does help us address is thepost-war fallout: what was the effect of the threat of peace as Cold War onFrench literature? What was Paris like in the immediate post-war year towardsthe early 1950s whose air Caillois breathed as he re turned from his wartime exileabroad in Argentina? Caillois had left France in the summer of 1939 and spentthe war in Buenos Aires. In July 1945 he began the journey back to Paris viaNew York and London. In 1946 he visited the US in a public relations role forFrench culture (a few years later he would join U N ES CO ).

Peace was one thing, but colonization by American consumer culture wasquite another. Coca-Cola culture - which French wags ironically dubbed coca-colonialization - had established itself in France. Ads for goods 'made in the U S 'were commonplace as France was on its way to becoming a consumer culture.American films were screened widely, but F rench television held out, due largelyto its technical specifications. Between the ads for performances in the dailies byPiaf and Montand, announcements for stagings of plays by Sartre (who spentthe war years spinning out screenplays for Pathe; see Connor (2001)) andcommentaries on existentialist posing, were the worlds evoked by Jockey under-wear, whose briefs were modelled, no less, on French swimsuits of the 1930s,and the American after shave Aqua Velva, Colgate-Palmolive toothpastes andsoaps, etc. In th is environment the critical essay blossomed as it found fertileground upon which to exercise its intelligence. American bombardments ofconsumer goods made peace an ideal ground for the kind of cultural critiquethat blossomed in France in the 1950s. Caillois's essay may be counted amongearly examples of the little essays of French cultural criticism responding to thenew conditions ushered in by the consumerism of post-war Europe under

American economic tutelage.Ultimately, though, Caillois's little essay was written in the context of the


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88 Econom y and Society

to American films, but mostly due to lack of choice. As Hubert-Lacombe wrote,'even if they always had a weakness for their own wines, French stomachs

became very used to C oca-Cola' (1986: 313).Bataille's reflections on the historical events of the post-war years focused on

the Marshall Pan as a non-isolatable gift (Richman 1990: 154) embedded in acycle of reciprocal exchange that was variously a 'negation' of capitalism or'exterior' to it. Bataille (1991[1976]: 183) notes, however, that, even though theopening and stimulation of the French market by American aid and surp lus mayhave been in the interest of the world, 'it is possible th a t . . . it will be warped inthe direction of the American interest.'

O ne of the best examples of overt American imperialist cu ltural policy wasthe Blum-Byrnes accord on the cinema. In some cases this accord, albeit incor-rectly, has even eclipsed the Marshall Plan in the French memory, especially infilm history (Portes 1986: 315). Jacques Portes has argued that French negotia-tors were able to win quotas (albeit small ones) for French films and thusprevented uncontrolled American cinematic hegemony. But the ideologicalfurore unleashed by the accord, especially through the alliance betweenmembers of the French film industry and the Communist Party who ralliedagainst it, cobbled together all the threads of anti-Americanism available at thetime, which constituted an impressive resource base. Portes asks: 'Was theMarshall Plan presented as the final rampart perm itting the continuous arrivaland guarantee of "third-rate" American films on French screens?' (1986: 327).With few exceptions, the answer was yes.

Caillois's essay does not need to appeal to such Cold War sentiments. Bysimply aligning American 'originality' with the negation of the sacred dimen-sion of the afterlife, Caillois made available a certain kind of evidence of thepower of cinema to replace oral tradition in collective life and trans late tenden -cies and needs. Although he hedged his bets on the question of the influence ofhis reading of a highly specific collection of largely B-movies, the export of this'mythology' to France, even if it did not supplant European folkloric represen-tations of the afterlife in popular imagery, suggests that th is invasion of a mythol-ogy of the end of the sacred posed a fundamental challenge of the first order tothe goals of an 'activist sociology' in a protracted struggle against the forces ofuniformity. Caillois later reflected on what animated his book L homme et le sacre:'the need to restore an active sacred to society, a sacred that is indisputable, im-

perious, devouring, that has a taste for cold, correct, scientific interpre tation ofwhat we then called, without doubt naively, the profound forces of collective


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sacre, Paris: Gallimard, 1950.(1951) 'La representation de la mortdans le cinema americain', in QuatreEssais de Sociologie Contemporaine, Paris:O livier Perrin.

(1958) Man, Play, and Games, trans.Meyer Barash, New York: The FreePress, 1961.

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(1988[1939]) 'Festival', in Hollier(1988 ), pp. 2 7 9-303.Connor J D. (2001) 'S artre and cinema:the grammar of comm itment', MLN 116:

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'L'accueil des films Americains en Francependant La Guerre Froide (1946-1953)',Revue d histoire moderne e t contemporaine33(1): 301-13.Morin Edgar (1957) The Stars, N ewYork: Grove Press, 1961.Portes Jacques (1986) 'Les origines dela legende noire des accords Blum-Byrnessur le cinema'. Revue d histoire moderne e tcontemporaine 33(April): 314-2 9.

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Gallagher, Boston: Little, Brown,pp. 331-7.Weber Max (1958) The Protestant Ethicand the Spirit of Cap italism, trans. TalcottParsons, New York: Charles S cribner'sSons.


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Documents

Genosko - The Bureaucratic Beyond - Roger Caillois and the Negation of the Sacred in Hollywood C