Ambivalences of The 'Mass Ornament: King Vidor's The Crowd by Miriam Hansen

Ambivalences of the "Mass Ornament": King Vidor's The Crowd
Author(s): Miriam Hansen

Source: Qui Parle, Vol. 5, No. 2, Distractions (Spring/Summer 1992), pp. 102-119
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20685952
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Ambivalences of the "Mass Ornament":
King Vidor's The Crowd
Miriam Hansen
When, after much delay, MGM finally released The Crowd in

February of 1928, exhibitors had the choice between two different end
ings; seven different endings had been scripted, two were actually shot
and distributed in separate reels.' In one version, the hero's journey of
downward mobility is reversed by an overnight success in advertising
which restores the family to harmony and respectability in a sentimen
tal Christmas tableau. In the other, now familiar ending, John Sims
(James Murray) makes a more modest return from unemployment by
finding a job as a sandwich man dressed up as a juggling clown: he dis
suades his wife (Eleanor Boardman) from leaving him and takes her and
their son to a vaudeville show where the family is reconstituted as part
of the great community of popular entertainment. The second ending
clearly dampens the bland optimism of the first, but is nonetheless in
tended as a happy one. However, in their particular cinematic choreog
raphy, the final shots of The Crowd give the lie to any simple closure,
ending the film on a note of ambivalence if not unwitting cynicism.
This last sequence begins with a dissolve from the nuclear family
reunited on the domestic sofa-little boy on the left, mother and father
on the right-to a matching, slightly closer shot of them in the public
space of the vaudeville theater. The reverse shot shows a burlesque
scene on stage in which a clown and another man are beating each other
up. Returning to the previous set-up, the next shot frames the three
family members, reeling with laughter, for a last time together; subse
quen'tly, the group is split up by a two-shot to the right, showing John
help an unknown man seated next to him recover from a coughing fit,
and a two-shot of mother and child on the left. When Mary, the wife,
Qui Parle Vol. 5, No. 2, Spring/Summer 1992
Ambivalences of the "Mass Ornament" 103
discovers one of John's slogans, "Sleight-of-Hand, the Magic Cleaner,"

used in an ad in the program notes, the camera moves to the right to
grant John a point-of-view shot of the ad (which also features a jug
gling clown) and then further to the right to have John show the ad to
his neighbor who congratulates him with a handshake. After a last two
shot showing the couple kissing, the camera begins to pull back and
upward to reveal an increasingly abstract pattern of bodies swaying with
unheard laughter, until the shot dissolves into a Busby-Berkeleyian
bird's eye perspective and fades out.
This closing camera movement rhymes with an earlier one in re
verse direction, the famous travelling shot up along the fagade of a
Manhattan highrise which tilts and, with a dissolve, sweeps into an
open-plan office to pick from the geometrical pattern of hundreds of
employees no. 137, the film's protagonist, John Sims.2 Between these
two travelling shots, the film unfolds a love story with a realistic set
ting: John meets Mary, they marry, have two children, can't make ends
meet; he wins a contest for an advertising slogan (the "Sleight-of-Hand"
slogan that reappears in the final sequence) which results in a binge of
consumption that gets the baby girl killed; unable to come to terms
with her death, he loses his job, can't find another, and is saved from
suicide only by his cowardice and his little son's declaration of faith in
him.
As "a melodrama that resists being one" (Robert Lang), such a
story fits squarely into a tradition of American films dramatizing the
plight of the "common man" ("populist" films), associated with direc
tors such as Griffith, Vidor and Capra and usually linked to an ideologi
cal stance of socially conscious individual humanism and moral opti
mism.3 Reproducing the terms of this tradition of "social realism,"
readings of the film have pivoted around the basic plot issue of who is
responsible for John's failure: critics either see him as a victim of ur
ban-industrial society or, alternately, blame the hero's naive faith in his
superiority, his inability to recognize how little he differs from the
crowd he despises.4 (Thus, early on in the film John jeers at a sandwich
man dressed up as a clown, bragging to Mary in an intertitle: "The poor
sap-I'll bet his father thought he would be President," which not only
echoes his own father's predictions for his son's great future at birth,
but also foreshadows John's subproletarian come-back as a clown at the
film's end.) Accordingly, the closing scene of the film is read as
resolving the mismatch between individual and society in the glow of
104 Miriam Hansen
popular entertainment: John finally accepts being part of the crowd

psychoanalytically speaking, he accepts his castration5-the slogan no
longer reminds him of the daughter's death but is recuperated into a dis
course of basic human solidarity (his interaction with a stranger) which
reconciles family romance with the norms of social competence.
But beyond the level of narrative closure and individual psychol
ogy, another discourse unfolds on the level of cinematic style, of mise
en-scene, framing and editing, for which I take the final shot to be em
blematic. Again and again, John appears in relation to group figurations
of which he is only a more or less identical element-figurations that
participate in the historical and ideological problematic of what
Siegfried Kracauer, in an essay contemporaneous with The Crowd, has
called the "mass ornament" ("das Ornament der Masse"). In the film,
these group figurations vary in kind, camera range and degree of abstrac
tion: from the geometrically organized overhead shots of the office
workers and vaudeville patrons; through long-shot compositions of se
riality like the group of boys, early on in the film, sitting on a fence
(one black kid among them) and their adult counterpart, the group of fa
thers-to-be waiting in the hospital (one black man among them), or the
even more anonymous lines in front of the unemployment office; to the
unstructured crowd of pleasure seekers in Coney Island and on the
beach. The patterns of seriality are not limited to spatial simultaneity
but also take the form of temporal repetition: John's first encounter
with Mary, for instance, is embedded in an elaborate sequence in which
female office workers peel out of a revolving door one by one to be
picked up by their male dates waiting on the sidewalk-a routine wor
thy of a Busby Berkeley musical.
If the geometrical patterns of sameness evoke the Fordist model of
product standardization and the concomitant dequalification of workers,
the patterns of repetition seem to suggest an analogy with the assembly
line and Taylorized methods of production, the fragmentation and ra
tionalization of the labor process. The film promotes this analogy not
only on the diegetic level, but in its own articulation. When John and
Mary follow John's friend Bert and his date on top of a double-decker
bus, each man gets an identical low-angle point-of-view shot of his
date's legs. The formally identical repetition of an editing convention
usually reserved for a unique discovery of desire or knowledge, as a priv
ileged moment of cinematic subjectivity, marks this moment as a copy
without an original, a mechanical gesture of social-sexual reproduction.
Although this graphic discourse of sameness and repetition is part

of the filmic narration, it exceeds the narrative economy of the realist
genre and offers an analysis of John's plight that goes beyond the hu
manist argument of individual failure versus social responsibility. More
effectively than his personal misfortune and humiliation, the discourse
of the mass ornament undermines the clich6s of bourgeois individual
ism spouted by John, the hollow myths of the American Dream. The
juxtaposition of John's mindless prophecies of personal success (when
his "ship is coming in") with images of mass-cultural multiplication,
repetition and sameness creates an ironic effect throughout the film.
This irony, however, remains a structural one, for it is independent of
any insight, consciousness or self-recognition on the part of the protag
onist. The symmetrical return of the clown costume forced upon John
by sheer economic necessity is one instance of this structural irony.
Another is the scene on the beach in which John is framed alone play
ing his ukulele, singing "All alone / I'm so all alone," and subsequent
reverse shots reveal not only a man who complains but a whole crowd
of people peacefully sharing the beach. Here the juxtaposition of indi
vidualist ideology and mass society also brings into play the blurring of
boundaries between public and private realms which is thematic
throughout the film.
It is in the discrepancy between the continued assertion of a bour
geois concept of personality with social formations marked by an in
creased tendency towards multiplication and sameness that The Crowd
traverses similar territory as Kracauer's writings from the mid-1920s
through 1933, in particular his work on the media, spaces, rituals and
subjects of an emerging mass culture.6 In a serialized study on white
collar workers, (Die Angestellten, 1929), which provides an illuminat
ing intertext to Vidor's film, Kracauer sketches the profile of a new
class that mushroomed in Germany after World War I: the urban em
ployees whose working and living conditions in effect made them prole
tarian, especially with the full onslaught of rationalization and unem
ployment since 1925, yet who deny any commonality with the work
ing-class by flaunting a worn-out ideology of bourgeois individualism.
Their class pretensions are undermined not only by their actual eco
nomic status, Kracauer observes, but also by the very form their striv
ing for difference takes. The ideal personality is the person with a
"pleasant appearance," he reports, quoting the staff manager of a Berlin
department store, "a certain moral-pink color of the skin" ("die
106 Miriam Hansen
moralisch-rosa Hautfarbe, Sie wissen doch..."). "It is not too daring to

state," Kracauer concludes,
that in Berlin a type of employee has developed who

model themselves according to this desired color of
skin. Speech, clothes, gestures and physiognomy in
creasingly resemble each other, and the result of this
process is precisely this pleasant appearance which
can be reproduced extensively by means of photogra
phy. Thus a selection of a species takes place under
the pressure of social relations which the economy
inevitably enhances by fostering corresponding needs
of consumption.7
Rather than attribute such social mimesis to subjective false conscious

ness on the part of the employees, Kracauer sees it as part of a compre
hensive historical process-a process in which the photographic media
are to play a decisive role. This process, in Kracauer's phenomenology
of modernity, is marked, on the one hand, by a growing disintegration,
fragmentation and desubstantialization of the world and, on the other,
by the reorganization of these fragments, this detritus, into new forms
and configurations.8 While the thesis of disintegration is grounded in
Kracauer's philosophy of history and indebted to secularized versions of
Jewish Messianism and Gnosticism, it is elaborated-by the mid-20s
in terms of a Marxist-Weberian critique of capitalism and its impact on
all spheres of social and cultural life. While capitalist rationalization,
Kracauer argues, to some extent advances the historical process of rea
son permeating nature, its demythologizing impulse stops halfway,
generating false abstractions and new myths designed to preserve prop
erty relations and thus preventing the realization of a truly human soci
ety.
Within this historical-philosophical framework (which anticipates,
if with a more optimistic slant, key thoughts of Horkheimer and
Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment), Kracauer analyzes the emergence
of the "mass ornament," epitomized by the products of the American
entertainment business such as the Tiller Girls, as "the aesthetic reflex
of the rationality to which the dominant economic system aspires."9 As
a reflex, however, the mass ornament is as ambiguous as the historical
moment: on the one hand, it offers a practical critique of notions of the
sovereign subject perpetuated by bourgeois culture and, in its
anonymity, prefigures the possibility of human relations emancipated

from the brute pressures of nature and social origin; on the other hand,
the mass ornament persists in the false abstractness of capitalist ra
tionality, because it is not permeated by human needs and conscious
ness but instead naturalizes its capitalist function as a mythical fact.
Kracauer's concept of the "mass ornament" has been criticized for
its simplistic analogy between cultural forms and Taylorized methods of
production ("The legs of the Tiller Girls correspond to the hands in the
factory").10 But this objection does not hold for the larger context of
Kracauer's analysis of mass culture, in particular his essays on amuse
ment parks, bars, hotel lobbies, streets, arcades and shop windows,
tourism and dance, movie theaters, circus and variety shows, newsreels
and photography. On the contrary, what lends these writings a historical
gravity that reaches into our present, is that he sensed early on the radi
cal implications of the economic shift of emphasis from production to
consumption, a process no doubt more advanced in the United States
than Germany (though associated there with the whole issue of Ameri
canism). With a phenomenological openness which included the experi
ence of the observing and writing subject, Kracauer was able to discern
qualitatively new forms of subjectivity attendant upon consumerist
modes of representation and relations of reception which complicate any
reflectionist model of cultural analysis.
The culture of the employees, Kracauer observes in Die Angestell
ten, is directed toward surface glamor rather than substance; it is con
sumed in distraction (Zerstreuung) rather than concentration (Samm
lung). In an earlier essay on Berlin's picture palaces, "Cult of Distrac
tion" (1926), he writes: "the penchant for distraction demands and finds
an answer in the display of pure externality."" Like the "mass orna
ment," the movies and illustrated magazines participate in a historical
"turn to the surface," and the related assertion of what Adorno called,
with regard to Kracauer, the "primacy of the optical."'2 Unlike the
concept of the "mass ornament," however, the concept of "distraction,"
as a category of reception, brings into view dimensions of pleasure,
identification and fantasy-dimensions mobilized by the phantasmago
ria of consumption rather than merely a reflex of rationalized modes or
production.
The withdrawal of substance from the world and the concomitant
erosion of bourgeois individualism have left the subject in a state of
fragmentation and emptiness in which Kracauer perceives the conditions
108 Miriam Hansen
for a productive receptivity, a setting-free of experience. In an essay en

titled "Boredom" of November 1924, he describes the disposition of the
modern flaneur: "In the evening one takes a stroll through the streets,
satiated with a feeling of unfulfiliment from which abundance might
grow." Yet before such autonomous abundance can even begin to de
velop, the vacuum is filled with written images: "Luminous words line
the buildings and already one is banished from one's own emptiness
into the foreign advertising." Mind you, Kracauer does not simply fall
back on the cultural-conservative principle of the "pod" by which mass
culture destroys the otherwise sovereign subject from within like an
alien invasion (as in the polemic by Georges Duhamel quoted by Ben
jamin).13 Rather, Kracauer is interested in the peculiar form of percep
tual identification in which the boundaries between self and
heteronomous images are weakened or barely exist in the first place, al
lowing for a narcissistic fusion with the stream of images. Thus, he
takes the subject of boredom into the movie theater where he "lets him
self be polymorphously projected": "As a fake Chinaman he sits in a
fake opium den, turns into a well-trained dog who performs ridiculously
clever acts to please a female star, gathers himself into an alpine storm,
gets to be circus artist and lion at once." Kracauer knows all too well,
however, that such imaginary metamorphoses of self cannot be had
without a sense of de-realization, isolation and loss: "One forgets one
self gazing, and the big dark hole is animated with the semblance of a
life that belongs to no one and consumes everyone."14
Kracauer's image of film spectatorship returns us to The Crowd, in
particular its figurations of a consumerist subjectivity. These figura
tions mark a third discourse in the film which mediates between the re
alist narrative of individual characters and the graphic discourse of the
mass ornament without necessarily reconciling the two. (It is this third
discourse which I think distinguishes Vidor's film from the stylistic
ideological dualism of Metropolis or the tradition of Neue Sach
lichkeit.) On the most obvious level, The Crowd foregrounds the im
pact of consumer economy by associating its protagonist with the
business of advertising, more precisely, with the fiction that advertis
ing, like screen-writing or the creation of stars, is a popular art in
which everyone can participate; whether a slogan is accepted or not is
just a matter of luck. In that sense, John can be seen as a casualty of
the updating of the American Dream for an age of consumption, in par
ticular the contradiction between an individualism based on a Calvinist
ethic of hard work, self-denial and frugality and notions of self-trans

formation and personal success defined by the promises of pleasure,
sensuality and abundance.15 John fails because he literalizes the ideals of
a production-based myth of self-creation within the ideological
framework of an aesthetics of consumption. In that regard he indeed dif
fers from the crowd because he is not, like his friend Bert, an
"enlightened consumer" in Horkheimer and Adorno's sense, a consumer
who buys into the system even as he sees through the mechanisms of
manipulation.16
In addition to the thematic role of advertising, commercial images
proliferate in the film's mise-en-scene-store signs, billboards, sand
wich boards, ads in public places and magazines. Significantly, they are
concentrated in the early sequences leading up to John and Mary's mar
riage. Not nature, but Coney Island provides the setting for their brief
courtship; the locus classicus of the culture of distraction is represented
as both a playground of self-abandonment and, at the same time, a giant
machine for couple formation. When John kisses Mary for the first
time, they themselves, like dozens of other couples in the "Tunnel of
Love," become an object of spectacle for the patrons waiting in front of
a banner that says "Do They Neck? WATCH!" The most striking in
stance of the consumerist inscription of couple formation occurs on
their way home, when John sees a subway ad with the slogan, "You
Furnish the Girl / We'll Furnish the Home" and proposes; the point-of
view shot indicating his awakening desire is devoted to the ad, not to
Mary.'7 This motif continues into the sequence on the honeymoon
train: the newlyweds' anxiety of intimacy is gently ridiculed by their
reading of more ads (e.g. of a baby announcing it's "Time to Re-Tire")
and John's carrying of a manual, What a Young Husband Ought to
Know-a comedy of awkwardness which the film stages in public, un
der the gaze of other passengers and the black porter.
Consumerist iconography in The Crowd is not extraneous to ro
mance but at the core of it; the libidinal economy of individuals and the
economy of advertising are inseparable. All erotic relations seem medi
ated through images of consumption-through the very process of im
age-making. When we see the couple in front of a picture-postcard set
ting of Niagara Falls, their marriage apparently not yet consummated,
John recognizes his desire for Mary only when he takes her photograph
and she poses accordingly. For most of the film, his love for Mary re
mains largely in the register of the Imaginary, a relationship of narcis
110 Miriam Hansen
sistic specularity rather than reciprocal recognition of the other. Thus,

the marriage is saved from the drudgery of everyday life, poverty and
John's ill temper only by the announcement of Mary's pregnancy, and
when the baby is born-it's a boy, of course-John renews his pledge
"to be somebody" under Mary's knowing assurance, "he's just like you,
Johnny." In a symmetrical reprise, the son will later save his father's
life by repeating the mother's words as his own wish, "I want to be just
like you." A better likeness than Mary or the baby girl, the son pro
vides John with a metaphoric equivalent of the many mirrors in front of
which we see him arrange his "moral-pink" appearance.
The restoration of John's identity is thus marked as illusory from
the start-by the film's systematic linkage of individual narcissism
with a consumerist economy of desire and identification. In its articula
tion of this linkage, The Crowd spells out questions of gender which
Kracauer evades. For Kracauer, the subject of the mass ornament re
mains basically genderless or stylized in the vein of Weimar androgyny
("bodies in bathing trunks without sex"). What is more, in "The Little
Shopgirls Go to the Movies" (1927), he singles out women as most
susceptible to the compensatory fantasies with which the culture indus
try in turn covers up the experience of historical disintegration and
fragmentation.8 In The Crowd, the narcissistic disposition, usually
associated with women and their role as primary consumers, is clearly
linked to the crisis of male identity and self-representation. From the
time we see John as a newborn baby, held up to the world by his father
in front of a mirror, his personal difficulties are related to a failing pa
triarchal lineage, perpetuated over generations through the ever more ab
stract mirages of the American Dream. John is feminized not only by
the psycho-social effects of wage-labor and his further economic degra
dation, but also through the narcissistic, consumerist construction of
his character. However, alongside the suggestion of symbolic castration
(most explicit in John's interactions with his macho brothers-in-law),
the film maintains a clear focus on the effects of this self-absorbed male
identity on the lives of real women: even in the scene of family leisure
on the beach, for instance, domestic work continues for Mary while
John basks in childish ebullience and intransigence.
The discourse of consumerist subjectivity in The Crowd not only
deflates John's rhetoric of personal uniqueness and destiny; it throws
into question the very assumption of a psychologically coherent charac
ter as the subject of narrative motivation, of individual agency and re
sponsibility, which is one of the cornerstones of classical cinema. Born

on July 4, 1900 and mockingly compared to Lincoln and Washington,
John Sims enters the film as an allegory, an "American Anyman" (A
Tree is a Tree). Setting out to "be somebody," John actually succeeds
by becoming a nobody, a malleable puppet, a clown advertising some
one else's travesty of individual choice (his sandwich board reads: "I am
always happy because I eat at Schnieder's Grill"). As I said earlier, this
irony is structural. It reveals itself only to the spectator: there is no
indication of any understanding, recognition and self-awareness on the
part of the character. John's failure to recognize himself in the place of
the formerly despised clown represents the flip-side of his identification
through mirror images, the fall-out of miscognition.
The allegorical construction of the main character does not deprive
him of a certain pathos-thanks primarily to the performance of James
Murray, in particular with Eleanor Boardman as Mary-but more often
than not the viewer's attitude toward the character is suspended between
satire and sentimentality. Nor does the film make him a foil against
which the other characters would appear as models of psychological co
herence and maturity. If they are more successfully socialized than John,
especially the men, their competence is not necessarily tied to a mea
sure of individual consciousness but rather to better skills of adaption,
to their having internalized the role of "enlightened consumers."
At least, that is, if we read the film from its ending. The discourse
of consumerist subjectivity ultimately pushes the film into an abyss of
ambivalence when it converges, in the closing sequence, with the dis
course of the mass ornament. If the narrative wants us to celebrate
John's come-back as a step toward human solidarity, the last two shots
marks his integration into the collective as a travesty. The image of
hundreds of human heads swaying with unheard laughter is a graphic il
lustration of Kracauer's observation that the mass ornament remains
"mute," unpermeated by human consciousness; just as John has finally
accepted being part of the crowd, this equation suggests that the collec
tive is made up of individuals whose psychic structures are not all that
different from his own. After all, their laughter responds to a scene-a
clown is being beaten-which recalls Horkheimer and Adorno's analy
sis of the "iron bath of fun" dispensed by the culture industry: the unre
flected mirror relation between the sadomasochistic rituals on stage and
the social position of the audience which turns their collective laughter
into a parody of solidarity and reconciliation (Dialectic, 140).
112 Miriam Hansen
If one takes the implications of these figurations of spectatorship

to their logical conclusion, The Crowd offers a vision of mass culture
just as ambivalent as, if not even bleaker than, Kracauer's. Like many
of the more ambitious Hollywood products (Sherlock Jr., The Wizard of
Oz, It's A Wonderful Life, The Purple Rose of Cairo, to mention only
a few), Vidor's film includes a dimension of strategic self-reflexivity
towards its own medium and its clientele. A silent film released at the
beginning of the sound era, The Crowd assembles a repertoire of popu
lar media that formed the context of the cinema's early history: photog
raphy and the victrola, amusement park, vaudeville and the burlesque-a
spectrum of the culture of distraction and consumption to be epitomized
and subsumed by the movies.19 Likewise, the film was conceived and
marketed as "an epic of America's Great Middle Class," that class which
Hollywood had been building up as its primary constituency since be
fore World War I. Thus, the image of the audience in the film's last se
quence inevitably held up a mirror to the audience of the film, an audi
ence that probably displayed a similar sociographic profile. Yet, if
John's catastrophic fall into unemployment foreshadowed the impact of
the Depression upon millions of Americans, the ambivalent depiction
of the community of consumption in the final shot twists this analogy
into a mise-en-abime. Either the viewer accepts the homage to the Great
American middle class and identifies with his or her mirror image in il
lusory plenitude and harmony; or the viewer assumes a satirical superi
ority vis-h-vis the shaking boobs and thus repeats the act of miscogni
tion that defines the diegetic audience's relation to the scene on stage,
which corresponds to John's relation to the figure of the clown. In ei
ther case, the strategic self-reflexivity that would have us celebrate
John's integration as the triumph of popular entertainment is under
mined by a textual self-reflexivity-the discourse of the mass ornament,
the logic of consumerist subjectivity-which turns ideological affirma
tion into critical ambivalence.
If the ambivalence of The Crowd could be seen as the revenge of
textual complexity visited upon a basically optimistic message, Kra
cauer's ambivalence toward mass culture has a different foundation and
emphasis. Kracauer's critical attention to the surface phenomena of
modernity developed from within a theological, apocalyptic framework
of world disintegration, loss of substance and transcendental homeless
ness. By 1924/25, however, as Inka Mailder-Bach has pointed out, the
metaphor of the surface assumes a new significance in Kracaucr's writ
ings: against ideological attempts to restore a false unity and hierarchy

drawing on the dregs of bourgeois culture and disregarding socio-eco
nomic realities, he now perceives in the negativity of the historical pro
cess a utopian chance. No longer a locus of lost depth, meaning or sub
stance, the surface becomes a site in which contemporary reality mani
fests itself in an iridescent multiplicity of phenomena; rather than dis
playing an atomized world of mere appearances, it signals a break-up of
the habitual order of things from which "fragments of a different life"
might be improvised.20
Kracauer's avant-garde valorization of the new media's attack on
bourgeois culture by no means preempts a critical perspective. On the
contrary, this radical potential becomes the standard by which, from
about 1926 on, he increasingly castigates contemporary film production
for betraying its affinity with the sundered life, for covering up the
cracks with the warmed-over menu of bourgeois aesthetics. "Precisely
that which should be projected onto the screen is wiped away and im
ages that cheat us out of the image of existence fill up the surface."21
At the same time, Kracauer knows that these images, the "idiotic and
unreal film fantasies [which] are the day dreams of society" are them
selves part of contemporary reality, the medium in which "its otherwise
repressed wishes take shape." "The more [the contemporary films] mis
represent the surface, the more correctly they represent society, because
they reflect its secret mechanisms." In his early writings (as opposed to
his "psychological history of German film written in exile, From Cali
gari to Hitler), Kracauer is less concerned with decoding the content of
these repressed wishes than with elucidating the cinema's role in the
production of a social imaginary. "Film drama and life usually corre
spond to each other, because the typists [Tippmamsells] fashion them
selves after the models on screen; but perhaps the most spurious models
are stolen from life." If The Crowd demonstrates the workings of such
specular form of identification in one individual's quest for upward mo
bility, Kracauer sees this disposition at work across class lines, prefig
uring the direction of an entire society. "In reality it may not happen
easily that a scrubgirl marries the owner of a Rolls Royce; yet, is it not
the dream of the Rolls Royce owners that the scrubgirls dream of rising
to their level?"22
Undoubtedly, Kracauer's observations could be linked to the post
modern topos of the implosion of reality into images, to the reign of
simulation, depthlessness and pastiche. But he can no more be reduced
114 Miriam Hansen
to a Baudrillardian hyperrealist than he can be dismissed as a naive real

ist. For Kracauer, fascination with the cinema's surface effects and its
ideological function are inseparably related.23 Reality can only be
grasped in its contradictions, in the relations between the culture of the
simulacrum and what it excludes-"normal existence in its impercepti
ble horror"-between the glamorous picture palaces and the unemploy
ment agencies, between the banter of the society films and the growing
violence in the streets. What should further caution us against simply
assimilating Kracauer's phenomenology of the surface to a postmod
ernist, posthistorical stance is that he situates his observations in a spe
cific horizon of experience, a violently contested public sphere at a cru
cial historical juncture.
Kracauer insisted that even a "de-realized reality" had to be con
fronted rather than rejected in the name of cultural conservatism or mod
ernist refusal: "the process leads right through the middle of the mass
ornament, not away from it."24 In a similar vein, he analyzes the spell
of consumerism in terms of the constellation of periphery and center on
the map of Paris, contrasting the Faubourgs as the scene of use value
and poverty with the abundance of commodities, images, signs, lights
and publicity of the Boulevards: "Broad streets run from the Faubourgs
into the glamorous center. This center is not the one intended. The hap
piness envisioned for the shabby periphery is subject to a different ra
dius than the present one. But we must take the streets to the center be
cause today its emptiness is real." For Kracauer, social change leads
through this emptiness because only the most advanced form of public
life harbors the potential of breaking up the hierarchy of center and pe
riphery. Elaborating on the image of different national newspapers
("enemies in real life") lying side by side in the temples of the news
vendors yet unable to read each other, Kracauer delineates the contours
of a utopian public sphere: "Where the Yiddish organs resting on Arab
texts come into contact with fat Polish headlines peace is secured." But
their current self-absorption prevents such harmony: "Notwithstanding
the close physical relations cultivated by the papers, their news lack any
relation among each other which likewise precludes them from knowing
anything about themselves. In the interstices, the demon of absent
mindedness [Geistesabwesenheit] reigns absolute.""
Unlike Adorno for whom a utopian dimension resided at best in the
negativity of high modernist art, Kracauer sought the "fragments of a
different life" in the thickening configurations of the masscultural sur
face. And unlike Adorno, Kracauer proceeded on the assumption that, in

principle, the experience of the critical intellectual was available to
others as well-even those who were the subject of capitalist manipula
tion. I wish to conclude with a Denkbild in which Kracauer evokes the
possibility, at least for a moment, that the consumer could relate to the
glamor of the surface in a simultaneously receptive and reflective man
ner. In an article from the Frankfurter Zeitung published, significantly,
on July 14, 1928, "Berg- und Talbahn," Kracauer describes a roller
coaster at the Berlin Lunapark, the counterpart of Vidor's Coney Island.
The facade of the roller coaster shows a painted skyline of New York:
"The workers, the small people, the employees who spend the week be
ing oppressed by the city, now triumph by air over a super-Berlinian
New York." This fagade, however, is incomplete; once the car has
reached the summit, it gives way to a bare skeleton:
So this is New York-a painted surface and behind it

Nothingness? The small couples are enchanted and
disenchanted at the same time. Not that they would
dismiss the grandiose city painting as simply hum
bug, but they see through the illusion, and the tri
umph over the fagades no longer means that much to
them. They linger at the place where things show
their double face; they hold the shrunken skyscrapers
in their open hands; they have been liberated from a
world whose splendor they nonetheless know.2
This vision belongs to the moment, to be sure, and could easily be read
as an instance of "enlightened consumerism." But the double con
sciousness Kracauer sketches as a possibility, a point of departure, dif
fers strikingly from the lack of consciousness which, contrary to the
film's programmatic optimism, makes the ending of The Crowd as
bleak an allegory of American mass culture as Horkheimer and
Adorno's vision of the Culture Industry.
This essay is a slightly revised version of a lecture delivered at a confer

ence on American/German "Mass Culture between the Wars," held at
the Humboldt University, East Berlin, in January 1990. The research on
Kracauer was made possible by the generous support of the Alexander
von Humboldt-Stiftung. Unless otherwise noted, translations are mine.
116 Miriam Hansen
1 King Vidor, A Tree is a Tree (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co.,
1953) 152-153; Nancy Dowd and David Shepard, King Vidor
(interview^) (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1988), 87. Also see Ray
mond Durgnat and Scott Simmon, King Vidor, American
(Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988) 77
87 et passim; Durgnat, "The Crowd" Film Comment 9.4 (July
August 1973); Randy Stearns, "Reading Herd: Hollywood, Mass
Culture, and The Crowd" unpublished seminar paper, Rutgers
University, Spring 1989.
2 This shot, like the entire city-symphony-style sequence bridging
John Sims' arrival in New York, is invoked in Billy Wilder's film,
The Apartment (United Artists, 1960).
3 Robert Lang, American Film Melodrama: Griffith, Vidor, Minnelli
(Princeton NJ: Princeton UP, 1989) 113. On The Crowd in the tra
dition of "social realism," see Lewis Jacobs, The Rise of the Amer
ican Film (1939; New York: Teachers College Press, 1967) 456
457 et passim; on the context of "populist films," see Durgnat &
Simmons 78.
4 Marshall Deutelbaum, "King Vidor's The Crowd," Image 17.3
(September 1974), rpt. in "Image" on the Art and Evolution of the
Film, ed. M. Deutelbaum (New York: Dover, 1979) 166-168.
5 For a psychoanalytic reading of the film, see Lang 114-132.
6 Kracauer wrote close to two thousand articles before his exile in
1933, mostly for the Frankfurter Zeitung, a daily newspaper of
which he became editor in 1921. See Thomas Y. Levin, Siegfried
Kracauer: Eine Bibliographie seiner Schriften (Marbach a.N.:
Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 1989). The majority of Kracauer's
articles in the Frankfurter Zeitung, many of which were published
under pseudonyms or even anonymously, can be found in his own
scrapbooks, Kracauer Papers, Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach
a.N. Volume 5.1-3 of Kracauer's Schriften, ed. Inka M?lder-Bach
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1990), reprints a large selection of these ar
ticles; earlier collections, compiled by Kracauer himself, are Orna
ment der Masse (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1963), forthcoming in
translation from Harvard UP, and Strassen in Berlin und anderswo
(1964; Berlin: Arsenal, 1987). Four of the pieces are printed in this
volume beginning on page 51.
7 Kracauer, Schriften I, ed. Karsten Witte (Frankfurt a.M.:
Suhrkamp, 1971), 223-224.
8 The most extensive critical commentary on Kracauer's early work
is Inka M?lder, Siegfried Kracauer?Grenzg?nger zwischen Theorie
und Literatur: Seine fr?hen Schriften 1913-1933 (Stuttgart: J. B.

Metzler, 1985) 19ff.; on the notion of Weltzerfall (disintegration of
the world), see Michael Schr?ter, "Weltzerfall und Rekonstruktion:
Zur Physiognomik Siegfried Kracauers," Text + Kritik 68 (on Kra
cauer) (Munich: Beck, 1980): 18-40; also see Heide Schl?pmann,
"Phenomenology of Film: On Siegfried Kracauer's Writings of the
1920s," New German Critique 40 (Winter 1987): 97-114; and
Miriam Hansen, "Decentric Perspectives: Kracauer's Early Writings
on Film and Mass Culture," NGC 54 (special issue on Kracauer)
(Fall 1991): 47-76.
9 "Das Ornament der Masse," FZ 9 June 1927, rpt. Ornament 54; tr.
Barbara Corell & Jack Zipes, NGC 5 (Spring 1975), 70. Also see
"Girls and Crisis," this volume, 51-52, originally, "Girls und
Krise,"FZ, 27 May, 1931; "Berliner Nebeneinander," FZ 17
February, 1933.
10 Reinhard Klooss & Thomas Reuter, K?rperbilder: Menschenorna
mente in Reveuetheater und Revuefilm, (Frankfurt: Syndikat,
1980), 71-72; also see Sabine Hake, "Girls and Crisis: The Other
Side of the Diversion," NGC 40 (Winter 1987), 147-164.
11 "Kult der Zerstreuung: ?ber die Berliner Lichtspielh?user," FZ, 4
March 1926, Ornament 314; tr. by Thomas Y. Levin, NGC 40:
94.
12 Theodor W. Adorno, "The Curious Realist: On Siegfried Kracauer"
(1964), tr. Shierry Weber Nicholson, NGC 54: 159-177; 163.
13 "I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have
been replaced by moving images." Georges Duhamel, Sc?nes de la
vie future (Paris, 1930), cited in Walter Benjamin, "The Work of
Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," second version
(1936), Illuminations, tr. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken
Books, 1969) 238.
14 "Langeweile," FZ 16 November 1924, Ornament 322.
15 T. J. Jackson Lears, "From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertis
ing and the Therapeutic Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1880
1930," in The Culture of Consumption, eds. Richard Wightman
Fox & T. J. Jackson Lears (New York: Pantheon, 1983), 1-38;
"Introduction." See also in the same work, "Introduction," ix-xvii.
See also Warren Sussman, Culture as History: The Transformation
of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pan
theon, 1984), 122-131.
16 Max Horkheimer & Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlighten
ment (1944), tr John Cumming (New York: Seabury, 1969) 167 et
passim.
118 Miriam Hansen
17 The slogan echoes an ad satirized in Sinclair Lewis' 1922 novel

Babbit: " 'Mid pleasures and places / Wherever you may roam /
You just provide a little bride / And we'll provide a home." (New
York: Signet, 1980), 34. The slogan used in The Crowd already
appears in the Pickford vehicle My Best Girl (dir. Sam Taylor,
1927) where it prompts Buddy Rogers to propose the female lead.
In his review of that film, "Ladenm?dchen spielen Kino" FZ, 26
January 1928, Kracauer singles out the slogan and its mise-en
sc?ne as an innovative effect.
18 "Mass Ornament" 66 (translation modified); "Die kleinen Laden
m?dchen gehen ins Kino," FZ, 11-19 March 1927 (published
anonymously under the title "Film und Gesellschaft"), Ornament
279-294. On Kracauer's gender politics see: Schl?pman,
"Phenomenology of Film," 99-100, and her essay "Kinosucht,"
Frauen und Film, 33 (October 1982), 42-52; Patrice Petro,
"Perceptions of Difference: Contours of a Discourse on Sexuality
in Early German Film Theory," NGC 40 (Winter 1987), 115-146,
138-140. See also: Hake, "Girls and Crisis," 158-160.
19 This context is elaborated in Lynn Kirby, "Gender and Advertising
in American Silent Film: From Early Cinema to the Crowd," Dis
course, 13,2 (Spring-Summer 1991), 3-20.
20 Inka M?lder-Bach, "Der Umschlag der Negativit?t: Zur Ver
schr?nkung von Ph?enomenologie, Geschichtsphilosophie und
Film?sthetik in Siegfried Kracauers Metaphorik der Oberfl?che,'"
in Deutsche Viertrlejahresschrift, 61,2 (1987), 359-373. See also
M?dler, Kracauer, 86-95.
21 "Der heutige Film und sein Publikum," FZ 30, Nov. & Dec,
1928, rpt. under the title "Film 1928," in Ornament, 296-310;
296.
22 "Ladenm?dchen," Ornament, 280.
23 I differ form Thomas Elsaesser who charges that Kracauer's critique
of Ideology obscures and thereby "falsifies" his proto-postmodern
"concern with the cinema as a marginal sphere of life and its fasci
nation as an experience of surface effects." "Cinema?The Irrespon
sible Signifier or 'The Gamble with History': Film Theory or Cin
ema Theory?" NGC 40 (Winter 1987), 82. For a more detailed
elaboration of this argument see: Hansen, "Decentric Perspectives,"
63-65.
24 "Mass Ornament," 76 (translation modified).
25 "Analyse eines Stadtplans," FZ (c. 1928), Ornament, 14-17.
26 "Berg- und Talbahn" FZ, 14 July 1928, rpt. in Strassen, 35-36,
which appears in this issue of Qui Parle, 58. For a more skeptical
Ambivalences of the "Mass Omament" 119
sequel to this Denkbild, contrasting the organized pleasures of the

Berlin Lunapark with the unruly adventures of the Paris Foires, see
Kracauer's "Organisiertes Gl?ck: Zur Wiederer?ffnung des
Lunaparks," FZ, 8 May 1930.

Ambivalences of The 'Mass Ornament: King Vidor's The Crowd by Miriam Hansen

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Ambivalences of The 'Mass Ornament: King Vidor's The Crowd by Miriam Hansen

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Ambivalences of the "Mass Ornament": King Vidor's The Crowd

Author(s): Miriam Hansen

When, after much delay, MGM finally released The Crowd in

Qui Parle Vol. 5, No. 2, Spring/Summer 1992

discovers one of John's slogans, "Sleight-of-Hand, the Magic Cleaner,"

popular entertainment: John finally accepts being part of the crowd

Although this graphic discourse of sameness and repetition is part

moralisch-rosa Hautfarbe, Sie wissen doch..."). "It is not too daring to

that in Berlin a type of employee has developed who

Rather than attribute such social mimesis to subjective false conscious

anonymity, prefigures the possibility of human relations emancipated

for a productive receptivity, a setting-free of experience. In an essay en

ethic of hard work, self-denial and frugality and notions of self-trans

sistic specularity rather than reciprocal recognition of the other. Thus,

sponsibility, which is one of the cornerstones of classical cinema. Born

If one takes the implications of these figurations of spectatorship

ings: against ideological attempts to restore a false unity and hierarchy

to a Baudrillardian hyperrealist than he can be dismissed as a naive real

face. And unlike Adorno, Kracauer proceeded on the assumption that, in

So this is New York-a painted surface and behind it

This essay is a slightly revised version of a lecture delivered at a confer

und Literatur: Seine fr?hen Schriften 1913-1933 (Stuttgart: J. B.

17 The slogan echoes an ad satirized in Sinclair Lewis' 1922 novel

sequel to this Denkbild, contrasting the organized pleasures of the

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