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Reviews / Comptes Rendus
| Justine Brown, Hollywood Utopia (Vancouver: New Star Books 2002).
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| PURSUING AN INTEREST in the utopian communities of North America's West Coast, Justine Brown, who previously wrote on such experiments in British Columbia, explores the visionary aspects of southern California's "movie colony" in this slim, deftly written book. Her story begins, however, a decade before the first motion pictures were made in Hollywood and a hundred miles further south, at Point Loma near San Diego, where in 1897 disciples of Theosophy set up Lomaland as a society in which to practice and espouse their spiritual doctrines. |
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Theosophy in fact shapes the narrative framework and principal themes of the book's concern with Hollywood. This philosophical and religious movement was founded in 1875 by a Russian woman, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, with three key aims: to form a nucleus of the universal brotherhood of humanity without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste, or colour; to promote the study of comparative religion, philosophy, and science; and to investigate the hidden mysteries of nature and the psychical powers latent in man (here I have slightly altered Brown's terminology with wording from other sources). After Mme. Blavatsky's death in 1891, leadership of the Theosophical society passed to a British woman, Annie Besant, among whose beliefs was that California held the potential to become a site for a new age of humanity, more healthy, enlightened, and fulfilled than what had come before. Lomaland was intended as a showcase for these potentialities. |
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After establishing this context, Brown shifts her attention northward to the west-lying suburb of Los Angeles that, at the turn of the 20th century, consisted largely of open agricultural fields dotted with a few residential bungalows. But pre-cinema Hollywood also had its Theosophical aspect, she notes, with its own small community of Annie Besant's followers, called Krotona. In 1909 it also became the home of L. Frank Baum, author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), who was a Theosophist and, in the view of several critics, including Brown, espoused Theosophical principles in his many Oz books. In 1914 Baum established the Oz Film Manufacturing Company and supervised and wrote the scripts for three feature films based on his books produced in that year. |
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Krotona soon packed up and moved north and inland to Ojai, California, and Baum's personal involvement in feature filmmaking encompassed only a single year. Yet a Theosophical thread winds through Brown's further account of Hollywood's rise to world dominance as a moviemaking capital. She contrasts her approach to that of a book that emphasizes, as she puts it, the "dark and uncanny" (28) side of Hollywood's origins, Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon, which chronicles the sexual licentiousness and other amoral excesses that were unleashed in a raw community where beauty, youth, wealth, and unbridled freedom prevailed. Instead, she finds evidence of utopian optimism in Hollywood, of a positive desire to develop humanity's possibilities to achieve a semblance of the divine. "The sun-soaked California dream and the exciting potential of the new medium of film were quickly intertwined and grafted together, soon becoming inextricable," she writes. "What bears emphasis here is the degree to which certain film people became imbued with a sense of mission [her italics]; the prophecies related to California loaned their activities a certain glow of predestination." (58–59) |
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Who were these missionaries, she goes on to ask, and to what degree did they influence Hollywood history? There are five figures on whom she primarily focuses. The first is D.W. Griffith, the pioneer film director whose epic film on the US civil war and Reconstruction period, The Birth of a Nation (1915), established motion pictures as a form for artistic expression and national myth in the United States. Next is Natacha Rambova, a self-made exotic (named Winifred Shaughnessy at birth in Salt Lake City) who married Rudolph Valentino, designed movie costumes and sets, and, according to Brown, played a role in defining Art Deco style. Then comes Sergei Eisenstein, the great Soviet director who visited Hollywood in the early sound era and became involved in an ultimately disastrous project to make a film in Mexico, financed by the California socialist Upton Sinclair. The fourth is William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper tycoon who built his own private utopia, a repository for myriad art treasures of Europe that he collected, at San Simeon up the California coast. Last is Aldous Huxley, the British novelist, author of Brave New World, who became a Hollywood screenwriter and seeker of higher enlightenment through drugs and occult religions, a quest that inevitably brought him into contact with Theosophy. |
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From the perspective of an academic film historian, this is a quirky grouping, but never less than interesting and refreshing. In part they weave together through a series of connections to each other, and, as noted, to Theosophy. Eisenstein might seem out of place, for example, but he's significant in part because of the fascination he developed for Mexican mystical religious practices and also because of Sinclair's role in the tragic and senseless destruction of the Russian's Mexican film. Sinclair becomes a figure of secondary interest as a maverick outsider who unexpectedly won the 1934 Democratic Party gubernatorial primary with his End Poverty in California (EPIC) program, which might be considered a political form of utopianism, and who was then crushed in the general election by, among other factors, the implacable opposition of the Hollywood establishment and Hearst's newspapers. Hearst, besides inviting the Hollywood elite for sleepovers at San Simeon, was caricatured in Huxley's satirical novel, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. Huxley, so to speak squaring the circle, became friends with Jiddu Krishnamurti, who as a teenager in India was anointed by Annie Besant as a kind of messiah-figure for Theosophy, only later to renounce that role and settle in southern California. |
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Outside this chain of connections, Rambova's importance derives from her practice of spiritualism and her role, along with the screenwriter June Mathis, in creating the Valentino myth. "Between them they invoked a thrillingly powerful god: Eros," Brown writes. "Rudolph Valentino was unquestionably the most potent manifestation of Eros that Hollywood had ever produced. In fact, it may still be unrivalled." (74) |
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I have left to the end the first of the author's quintet, because her utilization of Griffith may be the most contestable part of her book. Griffith is central to her thesis because he promoted cinema — historically, of course, silent cinema, with its emphasis on visual communication rather than words — as a Universal Language that could break down barriers among peoples, promote harmony, unite the world in peace: goals Brown links to Theosophy's ideal of universal human brotherhood. Many film historians would question the book's upbeat treatment of this theme, or at least wish to see acknowledged what Miriam Hansen in her book Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA 1991) describes as its "complicity with the most advanced forces of expansion and monopolization," (186) that is, Hollywood's successful drive to become, not part of universal brotherhood, but the overwhelmingly dominant power in world cinema that it is today. Justine Brown does not entirely ignore what she calls the "ugly and uninspired" (152) aspects of Hollywood, but her purpose is to remind readers that there are glimmers of utopian potential in its past, which may yet be made to shine again. |
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Robert Sklar
New York University |
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