Mark Garrett Cooper,
Love Rules: Silent Hollywood and the Rise of the Managerial Class.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
ISBN 0 8166 3753 9 US$19.95 (pb)
ISBN 0 8166 3752 0 US$59.95 (hb)
304 pp
(Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press)

Mark Garrett Cooper’s title could lead one to think that his book is dedicated to the history of the development and the rise of the managerial class in Hollywood and how it influenced the progress and consolidation of the American film studios in the 1920s. The kind of history, now popular, which focuses on the development of a new division of labour where areas of expertise were created such as scriptwriting, editing, camera work, visual effects, costume and set designs, to name a few. A history that, warts and all, further demystifies Hollywood’s early period. However, this is far from the truth.

Cooper tries in this book to understand how an institution such as Hollywood can still represent eighteenth and nineteenth century ideals of wealth, racism and sexism even if American society went through diverse cultural, political and economic revolutions over the last hundred years. He proposes that this paradoxical proposition finds its explanation “not in some mystical capitalist, racist, or sexist essence of the modern state but by the way cinema appropriated and revised earlier forms of mediation” (212). Cooper proposes a model to understand Hollywood feature films, their global domination, and their new type of mediation. This model is based on the development of the new managerial class (a new division of labour) that came to create a particular type of narrative form (the love story and its spatial regime).

In his first chapter, Cooper examines some of the basic concepts related to the field of film studies. Through the filmic analysis of several Hollywood silent films: The Big Parade (1925), Enoch Arden (1915), the serial The Exploits of Elaine (1914-15), The Wind (1928), Birth of a Nation (1915), Life of an American Fireman (1903) and Battle at Elderbush Gulch (1913), Cooper pushes aside the “shot” as the locus of meaning for the viewer. He argues that it is how space is created and composed around the union of the white heterosexual couple presented in the movies’ happy ending, where meaning can be found. He specifically criticises the prevalence of theoretical models based on the “shots” such as the classical Hollywood paradigm proposed by David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson and Janet Staiger in their book The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (Columbia University Press, 1985). He goes on to discuss the diverse theories relating to the representation of women and the portrayal of race, particularly how whiteness has been represented on the silent screen. He argues that it is by understanding the spatial transformations in these films, which ultimately conclude in the gazes of the two white lovers meeting, that the audience can extract meaning from the narrative. Moreover, Cooper’s main contention is that this meaning is possible for the audience via a new non-corporeal narrative agency which is the one ordering these spatial transformations. This agency is formed by experts of this new managerial class.

In the three following chapters, the bulk of the book, Cooper elaborates on the rise of the experts and their impact on the American national consciousness. Each of these chapters opens with a film which illustrates the author’s main points. In chapter two, Cooper uses The Crowd (USA, 1928) as an example of how cinema came to mediate in a new way the relationships between “the Public”, “The Mass”, “the Public Sphere”, “the Private”, “the Individual”, and the American democratic processes. He criticises principally the positions (such as Habermas) which relate these concepts to an eighteenth and nineteenth century print culture. In his third chapter, Cooper uses Why Change your Wife? (USA, 1920) to illustrate how the public, through the experts’ eyes, came to be associated with the image of the woman consumer. For him, this vision of the public became the focus of the dispute between experts to control the movies’ influence over such a susceptible subject. Coopers focuses on two of the fighting factions, the studios’ executives and the reformers, and their main discourses. In the fourth and final chapter on the experts, Cooper explores in more detail the nature of this new managerial class that lead Hollywood. Using The Jazz Singer (1927), Cooper examines the different discourses related to the figure of the Jewish movie-mogul and how the arrival of this type of expert redefined the notion of race and ethnicity in the American consciousness.

In his conclusion, Cooper returns to films and the film industry and looks at the ways in which Hollywood established a global dominance. He acknowledges the importance of the economic and political factors as the base of such domination but also argues that there was an exchange of influences between Hollywood and other national film industries. He notes that there was a similar rise of the managerial class in European countries such as France and Germany. However, even if the rise of this new managerial class shared some similarities with the American, there were also differences and these can be located in a distinct national expression found in the spatial regimes of their silent films. Cooper uses Jean Epstein’s Coeur fidèle (France 1923) and Fritz Lang’s Der müde tod (Destiny, Germany, 1921) to illustrate this argument. However, his most convincing example regarding the national difference in the rise of a managerial class and its impact on the narrative spatial regime is his discussion of Eisenstein’s The General Line (old and new)  (USSR, 1929). Here he argues that the development of a new expert class in a dissimilar social system, the communist state, led to a narrative form that was so different to Hollywood silent films.

The strength of Cooper’s book is to be found in his use and analysis of his chosen filmic texts and how he relates these analyses to his arguments on the spatial regime and its articulation to portray the union of the American white heterosexual couple. However, his main argument fails to convince. His main thrust, the definition, functions and discourses of the new managerial class and his proposal that “Hollywood’s narrative agent can be neither the director, nor the camera, nor a disembodied ‘gaze’, but must be something that never had a body in the first place” (71), that is the new class of experts, needs further elaboration. In particular, more explanation is required regarding the links between the audience and these experts and how the audience understands that it is through the experts’ position that filmic meanings are articulated.

In Love Rules , there is no gossip, no tall stories about flamboyant characters rising in the new managerial class, instead it is filled with challenging arguments where Cooper’s in-depth analysis and critique of the major positions on classical narrative provides a starting point for a new way of understanding how Hollywood film came to dominate the global cinematic market, and continues to do so today. Readers who want to go beyond the proposed theoretical frameworks expounding the notion of classical Hollywood narrative and their hegemonic grasp on film studies will discover an important critical tool in this book: a great departure point.

Nathalie Brillon
La Trobe University

Created on: Monday, 6 December 2004 | Last Updated: 30-Nov-04