| The American film industry during the years 1936 to 1945 sought a newly-elevated standing in American culture in order to legitimize its monopolistic business practices. Through sympathetic press coverage, its own publicity discourses, and the use of novel cinematic cycles, the biopic and the empire-building Western, the film industry told a heroic story of the centrality of the movies to American society. The Hollywood Restoration melded two narratives: the post-Depression recovery of the nation and the story of the technical and social progress of the movies to a pinnacle of significance in American cultural life. Wartime offered the motion picture industry an opportunity to fit its monopolistic structure to the task of tutoring audiences in the tale of American exceptionalism which was the characteristic national mythology of the New Deal period.;In harmony with the renewed interest in an affirmative Americana that characterized New Deal-era culture, the films of the Hollywood Restoration added specificity to this folkloric impulse by presenting a unified "American character," based on rugged individualism, scientific progress, anti-statism, and "free enterprise," in accord with the industry's own anti-regulatory agenda. In its signal rhetorical accomplishment, the Hollywood Restoration reconciled these ideals with a corporatized culture and mass social organization. In 1936-1945, the Hollywood motion picture became a leading voice of American middle-class cultural edification and affirmation. During wartime, the motion picture theater itself became a national community center, its "scrap matinees," war bond sales, and war-themed lobby decorations complementing bond trailers and war-related screen fare in an acknowledgement of the movies' new-found status as a vessel of middle-class American mythologies. The ideological structures formed in the Hollywood cinema of this period, in turn, have become essential to the post-1980 conservative political ascendance in America.;This study uses archival sources and industry trade sources in historical discourse analysis, linking the political economy of the Hollywood studio system to evolving ideological formations. Over 200 films are referenced, and close textual analysis and ideological analysis of key films are utilized in this cultural study of the reciprocating influence of media and politics. |
