2. Cosmopolitanism the Hollywood Way
This chapter will look at Bergman’s Hollywood films, to examine how they position Bergman’s characters as other and how the films articulate the exoticisation of the foreigner through Bergman’s characters. Through a survey of her Hollywood films, as well as case studies of Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942) and Indiscreet (Stanley Donen, 1958), I will specifically examine how the Hollywood films present an Anglo-centric cosmopolitanism by placing American-ness at the core of the idea of a global culture, and explore how tensions in the relationship between the USA and Europe are expressed by the Hollywood studio system through Bergman’s films and the positioning of her characters in them. Notions of transnationalism and globalisation will be employed as a method to understand the position of Bergman’s characters in different national contexts, to examine the representations of the relationship between Hollywood as a typically American institution and Europe as symbolising otherness.The Hollywood-centred approach of this chapter presents an opportunity to explore a system popularly considered the dominant influence for creating images of and for the entire world, and to examine how it engages with the reality of transnationalism. A large number of Bergman’s Hollywood-produced films are set in countries outside of the USA. Some of her most successful and memorable films, such as Casablanca, Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock, 1946), and Gaslight (George Cukor, 1944) were all produced in the USA but are set in Morocco, Brazil and England respectively, as well as Spain in For Whom the Bell Tolls (Sam Wood, 1943), China in The Inn of the Sixth Happiness (Mark Robson, 1958), Sweden in Intermezzo: A Love Affair (Gregory Ratoff, 1939), England in both Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Victor Fleming, 1941) and Indiscreet, and France in Joan of Arc (Victor Fleming, 1948), Goodbye Again (Anatole Litvak, 1961) and Anastasia (Litvak, 1956). In addition to the various national settings of her films, Bergman plays characters of various national origin, ranging between Norwegian, Spanish and Russian. The films that are set in the USA are often also imbued with a sense of European-ness; the connection to the Irish Catholic church in The Bells of St Mary’s (Leo McCarey, 1945), in which Bergman plays a Swedish nun, and the European connotations that are brought to Spellbound (Alfred Hitchcock, 1945) through its use of psychoanalysis as one of its main themes, distinguish them from that which might be considered typically American. Ingrid Bergman’s presence in these films can be seen if not to provoke, then certainly to strengthen and emphasise these attributes of European-ness. Transnationalism in these films takes its expression as a negotiation of foreignness leading to its suppression and containment in the Hollywood system, rendering the American perspective the norm. This is expressed by the exoticisation of Bergman and the tendency to have her play ‘foreign’ characters positioned in contrast to American characters.
In debates around globalisation and transnationalism, Hollywood as an industry has often been mentioned in negative terms as symbolising an Americanisation of the world.[1] Richard Pells attempts to define what he sees as a misrecognition of mass culture as specifically American, emphasising the reciprocity between American cultural production and the rest of the world. Stating how the USA has “habitually drawn on foreign styles and ideas”, he claims that “Americans have specialized in selling the fantasies and folklore of other people back to them. This is why a global mass culture has come to be identified, however simplistically, with the United States.”[2] It is true that Hollywood has always drawn on “foreign styles and ideas”, but this can be taken ever further when considering that much of the personnel in the Hollywood film production themselves had roots outside the USA.[3] Thus, the distinction between exoticisation of the other and representations of the experience of displacement becomes more problematic, as otherness is represented by someone who him/herself might be seen as other. One may thus contest the view of Hollywood as a symbol of homogenising Americanisation not only by pointing at the reciprocity of ideas and styles, but also by looking at the exchange of personnel across countries and film industries. Ingrid Bergman is but one example of how this mobility problematises the notion of Hollywood’s exoticisation of the nationally other. As many of Bergman’s Hollywood films were made by European émigrés, her otherness in the films can be considered a method to represent a self-experienced otherness by these filmmakers. It may, however, also represent a distance-taking to this otherness; if Bergman is othered in contrast to an accepted norm, it is this norm that is identified with, and not the other. Despite the otherness visible in these films, sympathies are aligned with the normalised American-ness, which in turn can function to confirm the successful integration of the émigrés into the Hollywood system and American society.
One of the defining characteristics of Hollywood’s classical era is its emphasis on moral propriety. Thomas Patrick Doherty states that “[w]hat makes Hollywood’s classic age ‘classical’ is not just the film style or the studio system but the moral stakes.”[4] Bergman’s characters, however, subvert the strict demands of propriety. Her exoticisation enables her to play characters who do not conform to notions of the ideal woman, but which through their otherness could be accepted in Hollywood. Film scholar Christian Viviani argues that because of their foreignness, female European actresses in classical Hollywood were forgiven moral ambiguities to a greater extent than American actresses. This is visible in a number of Bergman’s films, such as Intermezzo: A Love Story, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Notorious. Viviani states that “all these roles verged on the forbidden; we owe their existence and the truth drawn from them to the sweetness of Bergman’s features, her naturalness and her proudly proclaimed otherness.”[5] By remaining other, Bergman’s characters are relieved of the role as role-model; their exoticisation renders them not to be identified with, but to be fascinated by.
Cosmopolitanism remains a pervasive approach to connect Bergman’s films and their positioning of her characters. While cosmopolitanism is usually understood as an ability to integrate into any cultural context,[6] it has been defined by Ulrich Beck and Natan Sznaider as “the erosion of clear borders, separating markets, states, civilizations, religions, cultures, life-worlds of common people which…implies the involuntary confrontation with the alien other all over the globe.”[7] It does not in this sense erase otherness, but makes it a reality only more visible by confrontations with it. This describes Bergman’s films remarkably well, in their emphasis on transnational mobility and displacement as a natural way of life for her characters. While Bergman is repeatedly cast as a foreigner in various contexts and surroundings, the films do not represent this as the unproblematic integration of the foreigner into a new surrounding. Her foreignness is kept intact through her positioning against other, usually male, characters, who in contrast to Bergman are represented as integrated in their surroundings. This is illustrated for example by Paula’s helplessness and dependence on her husband in Gaslight, Robert Jordan assisting Maria along the mountain path in For Whom the Bell Tolls, or Rick Blaine’s final speech to Ilsa Lund in Casablanca, when he explains to her why their romance must end (figs. 11-13). Although these examples do not illustrate social or cultural difference per se, they do function to keep Bergman from being fully naturalised in her surroundings. While this can be interpreted from a feminist perspective, where Bergman’s otherness is caused by her being female in contrast to a male perspective, tensions around national belonging remains a strategy to highlight her characters’ otherness. In these films, Bergman’s presence thus presents the male characters with a “confrontation with the alien other”.[8] Cosmopolitanism in Hollywood, then, seems to build on this tension of representation between transnationalism and border-crossing as a modern way of life, and the need of locating the other and controlling it by clearly marking it as such–for example through exoticisation of characters and settings.
Despite the reciprocity between the USA and the rest of the world, as argued by Pells, then, Bergman’s Hollywood films build on the notion that her characters’ otherness needs to be justified by national otherness. There is a need to distinguish American from European through a representation of Europe and Europeans as other, while the American remains the norm represented as the modus operandi of the world. This is illustrated by the opposition of Bergman’s otherness to the integration of American characters in several films. The cosmopolitan American male is present in films such as Casablanca, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Bells of St Mary’s, Goodbye Again and Indiscreet. In For Whom the Bell Tolls, for example, Robert Jordan’s role as protagonist strengthens the representation of the central role of America and Americans in a global culture. Cosmopolitanism is represented as something inherently American through the male characters, as Americans can travel and integrate into any part of the world. From this perspective, Bergman’s characters are not cosmopolitan per se, not fully integrated in their surroundings, but represented as the other against which American cosmopolitanism may define itself. Bergman remains transnational, however, in her characters’ representation of national difference and transnational mobility.
The foreign influence on the Hollywood films discussed in this chapter primarily derives from Europe. This is visible in the film texts as they mainly use European countries either as their setting or the origin of key characters. That Hollywood seems to find it easy to represent Europe as a coherent unity might derive from a tradition of opposing America with Europe. This is not as much a geographical opposition as it is an opposition of values; Susan Sontag outlines these oppositions, represented in American literature by such authors as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman and Mark Twain, as being:
American innocence and European sophistication; American pragmatism and European intellectualizing; American energy and European world-weariness; American naiveté and European cynicism, American goodheartedness and European malice; American moralism and the European arts of compromise.[9]
Although not all of these categories are appropriate to describe Bergman’s Hollywood films and their relationship to Europe, they are illustrative of the opposition of America and Europe that seems a well-established stance in American consciousness, reproduced by Hollywood. This dichotomy is evident in Hitchcock’s Spellbound. In her emotional development, Bergman’s Dr Petersen moves from the category of “European intellectualizing” to that of “American pragmatism”. Initially adhering strictly to the closed-room conversations promoted by psychoanalytic practice, she turns to concrete action as she becomes emotionally involved with her patient, taking him skiing to relive a traumatic experience. She thus “forg[es] a new identity by tapping a suppressed capacity within herself for feeling and committed action”[10]–a “new identity” with American, rather than the previous European, connotations, based on action rather than intellectualising. The narrative may be resolved only when Dr Petersen confirms her American values.
Bergman’s characters’ nationality is most often revealed through a line of dialogue as a brief acknowledgement of the otherness which her characters display. In Rage in Heaven (W. S. Van Dyke, 1941), for example, Bergman’s Stella is described to be a refugee “from the continent”, as the alluring, exotic other, whom the two male characters but cannot help fall for. In Gaslight, Bergman’s Paula Alquist’s nationality is not made explicit, but her otherness is acknowledged when an English woman whom Paula encounters on a train in Italy asks “You’re not from England, are you?” to which Paula replies “No, I was brought up there.”
Before the dialogue reveals a specific nationality, however, Bergman’s otherness is signalled specifically through her speech – the accented voice. The melody of her non-native English voice distinguishes her from other characters and locates her in the narrative. Michel Chion discusses the importance of the human voice in films, stating how upon hearing a voice “the ear attempts to analyze the sound[…]and always tries to localize[…]the voice.”[11] Although Chion uses the word ‘localize’ to mean to identify the body to which the voice belongs, this localisation can also be thought of as localising an accent to its geographical origin. For an audience proficient enough in English to distinguish accents, then, this is an efficient way in which Bergman’s characters are positioned as nationally other.
In For Whom the Bell Tolls Bergman’s Maria is contrasted to other characters principally through her voice. She lives in the mountains with a band of thieves, having been taken prisoner by the nationalists after her parents are shot for their support of the republic of Spain, and rescued by the band. While the thieves speak English with a distinctly Spanish-influenced accent, Maria’s cannot be labelled so. Although she is not nationally separated from the group, she becomes so through her speech. The roughness of the thieves is signalled through their speech in a narrative where American English is represented as the norm. Maria is thus distinguished by her accented voice, but without being associated with the brutality of the thieves.
If voice is one method of defining Bergman’s otherness, language, too, is a persistently recurring element that illustrates Hollywood’s approach to cosmopolitanism as something inherently American. In The Inn of the Sixth Happiness Bergman’s Gladys travels through Russia on her way to China, and encounters trouble when the military embarks on her train. As the only civilian among the military, she is harshly shouted at in Russian. The problem is solved, however, by the appearance of a man who speaks English. This is a presumption that recurs in various ways in the film; that English is the cosmopolitan language above all others, spoken all over the world. Another instance of this Anglo-centric approach of the film is its way of replacing a foreign language with English. As Gladys has arrived in China, English is made to stand in for Chinese in scenes where Chinese-speaking characters speak to each other. This first happens between the male protagonist Lin Nan and the judge in the village Gladys settles in, and then once Gladys has learnt Chinese, English represents the Chinese she is speaking with local inhabitants. The claims of cosmopolitanism are thus undermined, as the representation of the foreign retains its Anglo-centric approach.
In the relationship between characters and setting in The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, there is a double sense of othering and exoticising. The Russians with whom Gladys travels are represented as different and strange in their identical uniforms and through their language, with no distinction between them apart from the man who happens to speak English wearing a different uniform. The train itself marks cultural difference, with its bare wooden compartments with no signs of the comfort earlier displayed in the European trains. In this strange setting, however, Gladys is simultaneously made other, being an English woman, which in the eyes of the military is exotic and alluring (fig. 14). Similarly, when she arrives in China, there is a tension between the otherness of the English-woman in the eyes of the local inhabitants and the exoticisation of their community by the Western perspective of the film. The local inhabitants stare and point at her, while the camera pans to show details of rural local life, displaying its quaintness to the spectator. This tension is only resolved as Gladys through her missionary work imposes western ideals on the locals, and is accepted into the community through the goodness these ideals supposedly bestows upon the local community.
In the case studies of the two films Casablanca and Indiscreet I will expand the discussion so far to look at how Ingrid Bergman’s characters embody certain values and attitudes which may inform their position as nationally other, and examine how this relates to Hollywood’s strategies of representing and containing otherness through exoticism. I will explore how these films retain American-ness as the modus operandi of transnational culture, and explore how transnationalism is negotiated through Hollywood’s Anglo-centric approach to the concept of otherness, as represented through characters, settings and narratives.
Casablanca serves as an example of a film where national identity is highly important for the plot, determining the characters and their actions. The Second World War setting inevitably brings European connotations to the film, and the plot attains its force from the tensions between nations and nationalities caused by the war. The USA is made the counterpart to this European-ness in several ways. Firstly, the ultimate goal of these characters is to cross the Atlantic to the USA. The USA is made the ideal, where freedom can be attained, against which everywhere else becomes other in comparison. Secondly, through the character of Rick Blaine–the former lover of Bergman’s Ilsa Lund–who through his American-ness distinguishes himself from the other characters in Casablanca. Everyone is a stranger in Casablanca, an other, except for Rick, who as an American, the film seems to suggest, may integrate into any context, like a true cosmopolitan. In contrast to Ilsa’s determination to cross the Atlantic, Rick displays no clear sense of belonging, and as an American is not restricted in his mobility by national belonging but may settle anywhere in the world. Similarly, Rick’s Café Amèricain is represented as a refuge for anyone and everyone, its American connotations placing it as a neutral space where all nationalities may interact.
Ilsa, of Norwegian origin, is only one of many nationally ‘other’ in Casablanca, but is singled out by her association with Victor Laszlo, one of the most prominent leaders of the resistance against Germany. As such, he and Ilsa are kept under strict observation by the police, thus being distinguished from the mass of Europeans in Casablanca. It is also through her marriage to Laszlo that she is kept othered from Rick. The flashback of Rick’s and Ilsa’s romance in Paris gives no clear reason for her abandoning Rick–something which has left him cold and bitter. It is only later, in Casablanca, that it is revealed to Rick and to the audience, that Ilsa found out that Laszlo had survived his imprisonment in a concentration camp, and she returned to him. The inexplicability of her action in Paris when abandoning Rick, as well as the unreliability of her intensions in Casablanca as she goes from threatening Rick with a gun to declaring her love for him, is thus explained by her attachment to Laszlo.
Both Ilsa and Laszlo are othered in contrast to Rick, their European-ness positioned against his American-ness. That this gap between European and American cannot be bridged is illustrated by the ending of the film. Rick realises that his and Ilsa’s romance is impossible, and allows Ilsa to leave Casablanca with Laszlo. This can be seen to express an incompatibility between the European and the American, an irresolvable divide that keeps Ilsa and Rick apart. Telling Ilsa, “where I’m going, you can’t follow, what I’ve got to do, you can’t be any part of”, Rick taps into the fundamental difference between him and Ilsa – his American cosmopolitanism allows him to go to places where her European otherness would be an obstacle. This again reinforces the notion of the American cosmopolitan’s ability to settle anywhere in the world.
Indiscreet presents Bergman in a different manner than most other films. Bergman’s Anna Kalman is presented as a Londoner, and with its London setting this is one of only a few films where Bergman’s character despite her accented speech is an English native speaker–the others being for example Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Under Capricorn (Alfred Hitchcock, 1949), The Inn of the Sixth Happiness and Goodbye Again. That these films are all set outside America, in what for Hollywood might be seen as ‘exotic’ or at least foreign locations, might allow for the hint of Bergman’s Swedish; it is not as much of a disjuncture for Bergman to portray a native English speaker in a foreign setting, as her foreign accent is justified by it, be it England, Australia, China or France.
Apart from her accent, however, Anna is distinguished by her success as an actress, which impacts on how she negotiates space. She is constantly stopped, even followed, by fans wanting her autograph, so that navigating the streets of London becomes difficult and makes her stand out even in her home city. Most of the narrative takes place indoors, however, in the room where Anna lives, and the outdoors scenes seem to function mainly to illustrate Anna’s otherness and the impossibility for her to be fully integrated into society. This is used to a comic effect, for example when Anna and her romantic interest decide to walk home after a night out, and are closely followed by her chauffeur (fig. 15), but functions also to distinguish Anna from the ‘ordinary’ Londoners.
An awareness of the outside world is however displayed in various ways, through the character of Philip Adams, an American with whom Anna becomes romantically involved. Philip, due to work with NATO, travels the world, mainly between the USA, London and Paris. While Anna seems restricted to London, the world is presented as easily accessible for Philip. Anna’s restriction is illustrated first as she at the start of the narrative returns from an unsuccessful holiday abroad, which she has cut short to return to London. Then, after beginning her romance with Philip, Anna plans to go to New York to surprise him there, but this is deferred when she learns that Philip has decided to stay in London. The decision for mobility and travel remains in Philip’s hands, and Anna’s actions are limited by his mobility. Cosmopolitanism is thus again represented to be a privilege limited to the American.
The cosmopolitan notion of the blurring of national borders, described by Beck and Sznaider, is illustrated rather literally in one scene in Indiscreet in particular.[12] A split screen shows Philip who is in Paris on one side, and Anna in London on the other, as they are in bed talking to each other on the telephone. While the split screen emphasises the geographical distance between them, their movements are made to coincide so that it seems they are lying next to each other. Borders are thus suggested to be crossed through Anna’s and Philip’s interactions, while remaining intact by the split screen (fig. 16). This imagined crossing of borders can be carried out without breaking Anna’s restriction to London, while Philip retains his cosmopolitan appeal.
This idea of borders being crossed while remaining intact is highlighted by Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie. Referring to political theorist Benjamin Barber’s claims that “globalisation and nationalism in many cases are two sides of the same coin” they suggests that “film scholars should be intent, not so much on avoiding concepts of nationhood and nationality, but on refining them and clearly identifying their continued, although changing pertinence for film studies.”[13] This notion will be developed in the next chapter, which examines Bergman’s work with some major film directors who are generally understood as representatives of their national cinema. While this chapter has explored the interaction of nationalities and national context in Hollywood films, which take an overtly American approach to cosmopolitanism, the next chapter illustrates the continued importance of national identity despite, or due to, the reality of transnational mobility.
[1] Constantine Verevis, Film Remakes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 3.
[2] Richard Pells, “From Modernism to the Movies: The Globalization of American Culture in the Twentieth Century,” in European Journal of American Culture, vol. 23, no. 2. (2004): 144.
[3] Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, “Introduction,” in Hollywood & Europe: Economics, Culture, National Identity 1945-95, eds. Nowell-Smith; Steven Ricci (London: BFI, 1998).
[4] Thomas Patrick Doherty, Pre-code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930-1934 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 5.
[5] Christian Viviani, “The ‘Foreign Woman’ in Classical Hollywood Cinema,” in Journeys of Desire: European Actors in Hollywood, eds. Alastair Phillips and Ginette Vincendeau (London: BFI, 2006), 99.
[6] Sean Cubitt, The Cinema Effect (Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press, 2004), 335.
[7] Ulrich Beck and Natan Sznaider, “New cosmopolitanism in the social sciences,” in The Routledge Handbook of Globalization Studies, ed. Bryan S. Turner (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), 636.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Susan Sontag, ”Literature is Freedom: Speech on the Occasion of the Award of the Peace Price of the German Booksellers Association, Frankfurt Book Fair, October 2003,” in Old Europe, New Europe, Core Europe: Transatlantic Relations After the Iraq War, eds. Daniel Lévy; Max Pensky; John C. Torpey (London; New York: Verso, 2005), 210.
[10] Thomas Hyde, “The Moral Universe of Hitchcock’s Spellbound,” in A Hitchcock Reader, eds. Marshall Deutelbaum and Leland A. Poague (Malden; Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 157.
[11] Michel Chion, The Voice in the Cinema (New York: Columbia University Pree, 1999), 5. [Italics in original]
[12] Beck and Sznaider (2010).
[13] Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie, “Introduction,” in Cinema & Nation, eds. Hjort and MacKenzie (London: Routledge, 2002), 2.
