Hollywood's 'Commercial Moments': Seeing Difference in the Postwar Era

Commercial Moments: Cinema, Capital, and the Formation of Postwar American Identity examines the ways in which Hollywood films from roughly 1945-1960 adopted the visual and affective rhetoric of postwar commercial culture. I argue that, predating product placement and independent of narrative function, these "commercial moments" reflected the period's reevaluation of collective and individual identity. For postwar audiences, advertising language referenced the extra-diegetic formation of identity politics, recalling class-driven labor disputes and consumption-based political acts such as boycotts and sit-ins. At the same time, it also alluded to Madison Avenue's segmentation of the mass market into age-based categories (such as children and teenagers) and thus a growing awareness of the distinct phases of human development. Through films such as Niagara, Pillow Talk, and Destination Moon, I argue that commercial moments broadened Hollywood's classical projection of mainstream identity, forcing popular film to acknowledge difference within its once-homogenizing representation of the ideal "self"-both national and personal. This project looks beyond product placement in order to focus on the cultural connotations of both the visual language and the material commodities that commercial moments cite. Since I suggest that the commercial moment represents a particular postwar visuality (and thus the social, material, and historical elements that comprise this era's "way of seeing"), I have organized the dissertation around the various directions in which postwar Americans trained their sight; four fields of vision that came to signify the politics of collective selfhood while providing a mirror to the newly distinguished stages of human development. Chapter 1, "Looking In," situates the cinematic appropriation of commercial rhetoric in relation to growing popular focus on one's mind and body; Chapter 2, "Looking Back," explores how commercial moments' infantilization of grown men provided a template for postwar Americans to re-imagine collective history; Chapter 3, "Looking Forward," addresses the commercialized representation of teenagers and the ways in which a new emphasis on adolescence served as a metaphor for imminent social change; Chapter 4, "Looking Beyond," examines how the commercial moment's articulation of old age lent form to the era's fear of an unknowable future.