American Ghost Story:
The Shining, The Jazz Singer, Invisible Man
I've been sick recently, and have thus had the time and lack of energy to do two things I rarely do: not think and watch movies.
However, being me, and feeling better, these movies (and a novel I read at the same time) have inevitably sparked an enormous number of thoughts in me, which I will now inflict on you, dear reader.
To be a Ghost
The Shining (1980) is a great horror movie that is centered on the rejection of almost everything that has made horror a popular genre. There are no jump scares in the movie--there is precious little gore--there is even little or no psychological horror in the conventional sense. And yet it is precisely when Kubrick does deploy such elements that the uniqueness of the film becomes most striking.
Put simply, most horror films are based around what may be called a sense of heightened reality: or more accurately viscerality; or perhaps most accurately externalizing and reifying the inward experience of fear and making it intense and immediate and arresting and all-encompassing. Fear is a strong human emotion, but a limited one: most horror is based in principle on taking this partial, temporary inward experience and separating it out, making it more pure, more totalizing, more constitutive and determinative of the very substance of experience, the very logic of plot and event and character and action and world.
This distinction is not at all a matter of quality, good versus bad, superior versus inferior. Many great filmmakers are preoccupied in one way or other with the visceral, totalizing concerns of horror. To take only one example, David Lynch is in his heart of hearts a horror director in the most extreme sense, precisely because he is fixated on, even obsessed with, taking inward experiences, dreams, fear, dread, the experience and aesthetics of gore and disgust and desire and sexuality, and making them overpowering, iconic things that dominate the entire psyches and characters and universes of his films.
Kubrick has, I think, no real interest in such matters, or rather he has, as it would appear, a very strong and deep-seated aversion to them. As a filmmaker, he generally displays the opposite obsession: getting away from the interior of human beings, away from their petty and momentary emotional experiences, seeing both these experiences and the people themselves from a distance, abstracted, alienated, apart. This is why Barry Lyndon is perhaps his best film: because it is a film precisely about seeing human beings from the outside, at a great distance, as historical subjects long dead.
There is another case to be made that The Shining is Kubrick's best film, though, insofar as it is perhaps the only Kubrick film where his distanced, muffled approach to human experience and emotion dovetails almost perfectly with the actual inner human experiences of his characters. In particular, watching the film, I was struck by how profoundly the film actually captures the experience, not so much of fear in the immediate, visceral sense, as of isolation. And since, considered deeply, isolation is in fact the most horrifying thing there is in human experience, there is a case to be made that The Shining is the best horror film ever made.
The inner experience of isolation, whether literal or merely social, is of a gradual, totalizing muffling of the emotionality and intensity of experience in general, a gradual alienation from other people, one's surroundings, and ultimately one's own psyche. And this is in fact how Kubrick goes about portraying the core elements of Stephen King's tale of horror. The haunted hotel itself is simply a place, a particular, mundane sequence of rooms repeated and repeated and repeated in the same sequence over and over again until they grow stranger than any abstract horrorscape; the ghosts are merely strangers, merely there, existing in their own alien ways according to their own alien goals and habits and histories and social system, doing things that appear as strange and inexplicable as all things strangers do when we lack sympathetic access to their inner lives; even the brief moments of sexuality and gore in the film are horrifying precisely because of their brute facticity, making us react not viscerally, with material desire or disgust, but with detachment and confusion. As blood pours slowly from the elevators of the Overlook Hotel, as a naked woman rises slowly from her bathtub in an empty room, we are not drawn in; we are pushed away, alienated, estranged. This is, I think, the key to the film's effectiveness at almost every level.
Yet the heart of the film is neither ghosts nor gore, but the specifically interpersonal alienation among our human characters--in particular the alienation experienced by our male lead, both named Jack and played by Jack Nicholson, in relation to his wife and children. Shelley Duval, playing our female lead, gives perhaps one of the greatest performances in all of American film, precisely by bypassing formal, theatrical conventions to accurately portray the genuinely bizarre and over-the-top and off-putting and indeed usually comical effects of fear and terror and desperation. Danny Lloyd, likewise, gives one of the great child-actor performances in cinema, precisely in coming off as strange and off-putting and laughable and frustrating and impenetrable as an actual child.
On paper, child and wife are the protagonists and main characters of the film: both are emotive and genuine and so sympathetic; the child is the only character who knows what is going on in the Hotel, and the only character who is portrayed as having any agency or control over events; even the wife is in plot terms more commanding and capable than her husband, as she discovers his madness and then physically overpowers him and locks him in a freezer.
Jack Nicholson's character, in contrast, is almost totally cold emotionally, his inner life is more or less totally impenetrable, and he never exercises, seemingly, any moral agency or control over the plot or its events or even his own actions and resulting damnation. As he grows more and more insane, he grows more and more muffled and distant and off-putting and comically strange, until he finally becomes an almost purely exterior being, a mere horror-movie monster with an ax. And yet...in the deepest sense, Jack is the real heart of the film's sense of reality, its actual viewpoint character, and its actual and only protagonist.
It is here that the deepest paradox and deepest truth contained in The Shining is found: that it is a film about isolation and alienation, but also, and for precisely the same reason, a film about fitting in. The lead character, Jack Nicholson, is fundamentally a man trying to be accepted, affirmed in his true, chosen identity, and in so doing be free: and he succeeds. Kubrick famously said that, from a certain point of view, the ending of the film is a happy one. And so it is, if one shares Jack's priorities and goals.
Horror author Stephen King, famously, hated the film The Shining, based on his book: and one of his biggest complaints was in Jack Nicholson's casting and performance and portrayal of his character. The Shining, he complained, was supposed to be a story of an ordinary man, an every-man (and as King has acknowledged acknowledged, in large part of a version of himself during the years when he struggled with the pressures of authorship and addiction to alcohol and conflict with his family) succumbing to the moral temptations of alcoholism and spiritual evil and violence; but Jack Nicholson is not only morally and emotionally impenetrable, but already a bizarre, almost insane person from the film's first frame. Yet here, I think, in reality lies the deepest truth and deepest horror of Kubrick's very different vision of evil. It is very, very important that Jack's alienation from his family and human society and sanity is not merely or fundamentally the result of the ghosts of Overlook Hotel. It was there before, from the first scene and even before it: and its ultimate origins are not in ghosts or any supernatural force, but in his own, very mundane, very ordinary, very American-every-man-ish goals and values.
As we are told practically in the first scene, Jack is looking for work as custodian and caretaker of the hotel for a long winter because, paradoxically, he sees himself as a writer, and because he wants other people to see him that way too. He has been, unsuccessfully, chasing professional success and acceptance for many years, and was for a long time forced to make a living as a teacher. But as he reminds people at several points, he is not a teacher. He is a writer. This is his identity, professional and personal alike, and he wants that fact accepted by everyone, including his family and his potential employers.
His refusal to accept being seen as a teacher led him to quit his job and plunge his family into poverty; and now he is almost gleeful to accept the job as caretaker of Overlook Hotel, precisely because it is a job that will allow him to be a writer. The isolation will allow him to direct all his creative energies toward perfecting his magnum opus, the work that will (finally!) make him accepted as a writer by the world at large--or at least someone, somewhere. While his wife and child wander around and cook and play and watch TV, Jack isolates himself in a distant room with a typewriter, staying up later and later at night and waking up later and later in the morning, seeing his family less and less. It is his obsessive, all-encompassing pursuit of this mundane goal that constitutes the core of Jack's descent into madness and moral evil. In an early scene, Jack is interrupted in his work by his distraught wife, upset over the creepy going-ons in the Hotel, only to respond with total indifference and blind rage: how dare she break his concentration, interrupt his work, bring her distracting and alienating and disgusting human emotion and weakness and fragility into his professional space? Whether Jack here is being in some way affected by the ghosts of the hotel is not really the point: the point is that he is expressing, in however exaggerated or alienated a way, feelings instantly understandable to anyone who has ever engaged in creative work.
In this, the spiritual evil that Jack gradually embraces in the hotel is in closest parallel to alcoholism he had embraced outside the hotel. As we are told, his career frustration had earlier led him to take to alcohol, accompanied by deception and staying out later and later away from his family, and finally to an act of rage and physical abuse that had dislocated his son's shoulder. In the aftermath of this incident, he had sworn off alcohol for good (though not, we learn eventually, without occasional secret lapses): but when Jack first encounters the ghosts of the hotel, after his work-induced isolation and frustration with his family has grown acute, it is in the form of an obliging bartender who offers him a bottle of bourbon on credit and commiserates with him over the frustrations of family and women: "Can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em." For Jack, then, both the ghosts and alcohol initially offer him the same thing: blessed isolation and freedom and relief from the demands and frustrations and emotions of other people and, ultimately, himself.
In the end, though, what the ghosts offer him is something even more all-encompassing, and even more enticing--what he has, in fact, wanted all along, what even the labor and creativity of his writing was, in the end, a mere means to. This one thing is the true inner heart of the film's horror, and its deepest significance. What Jack wants most of all, what drives him away from his family and into the arms of the devil and to madness and murder, is professional acceptance.
The Shining is fundamentally a film about professionalization. The ghosts of the Overlook Hotel are their own self-contained circle of socialites and waiters and bartenders and servants, in which every person has his place, and where everyone lives and dies by a total commitment to the system and organization as a whole. Early in the film, Jack is told by his employers about a former custodian of the hotel who went insane and murdered his family. When Jack finally meets the ghost of this man, it is in the guise of a buttoned-up, emotionless, pristinely professional waiter, who informs him that his murder of his family was not a matter of rage or passion, but rather of professional discipline. His daughters had rejected the social and professional world of the hotel and tried to burn it down; when he tried to discipline them for this sin against the system, his wife had interfered, and so he was forced to discipline her as well. When, later on, Jack is easily overpowered by his wife and locked in a freezer, the waiter returns to admonish his refusal to wholeheartedly pursue the good of the system and remind him that, if he really wishes to be accepted as part of the hotel, he will have to demonstrate his commitment to the organization by doing precisely the same thing he has done. And Jack agrees.
After all, as an unhinged Jack reminds his wife in a fury when she requests that they leave the hotel, he had signed a contract. It is unthinkable that he could go back on this contract, just as it is unthinkable that he could leave the hotel just as he is starting to find success as a writer thanks to it. That his family, with their human fragilities and emotions and fears and sense of well-being, demand that he do so, is merely a sign of how threatening they have become, how much they must be stopped. From his point of view, they are the real monster, and he must defeat them by any means necessary.
Perhaps the most famous scene in The Shining is the wife's discovery that the novel over which Jack has been laboring in the Overlook Hotel for months is in fact reams of nonsense, the single phrase "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" repeated over and over again in different formats ad infinitum. The hotel, then, does not offer Jack genuine creative fulfillment: but it does offer him that thing to which creativity was always, for him, a means to an end. This nonsensical labor may not be great art, but it does what it is supposed to do: it demonstrates his commitment to the profession and thus gains him entrance into the elite social and professional circle of the hotel. Once he gains membership in that circle, everything, including creativity with all its frustrations and demands, can finally be let go of: including most fundamentally his own emotions and goals and frustrations and inner life and humanity.
For this is the dangerous reality of isolation: that while it is the purest and worst form of suffering known to man, it has also its own pleasures, enticements, and temptations. Isolation leads inevitably to de-personalization, to the effacement of all the deepest elements of human nature and selfhood: and all of these deepest elements are relational elements, constituted and defined and determined and controlled by reference to other persons and oneself and God. And these relational aspects are, from a certain point of view, the source of all our passivity, our lack of control, our frustration, and hence our suffering, our pain, our sorrow, our chaining and confinement. Escape from our own personhood thus appears as freedom--the truest and deepest and realest and only freedom there is. We can never be free so long as our entire selves are defined in relation to other people and God: because we can never be alone.
Yet the mundane and horrifying and ironical and even comical reality is that the only practical way to gain such de-personalization is through membership in a de-personalizing system of one sort or another. As a worker in a factory, a soldier in an army, an ant in a hive, a cell in a mass, a professional in a profession, we become in a genuine sense nobody. Our whole selves are defined by our status as a mere part of a part, a mere appendage of a meaningless and purposeless machine, a means to no end; and so our whole selves are wiped away, and we are set free.
This is what Jack gains in The Shining. As a member of a family, he existed in a way defined by emotional, inner, defining relationships with other people. As a ghost in the dead, fixed Roaring '20s staff and socialite circles of the Overlook Hotel, he is merely another face in the crowd, another drunk at the bar, another man in a suit in a picture.
What Jack gains through becoming a ghost, many many Americans gain in more partial ways through more practical expedients. The innermost reality of most of what passes for "professionalism" and "professionalization" in America is in fact in precisely this process of isolation and alienation and de-personalization, sought by its adherents like alcoholics seek alcohol, like socialites seek society, like ants run for the hive, like ghosts return to the past. And the most straightforward, actual reality of this process is the absolute requirement of sacrificing all genuinely personal relationships, all relationships held in preference to or even merely apart from one's professional identity and goals.
Jack is not, then, not so strange a creature after all, nor is his inner life all that difficult to plumb. We have all met people like him--people who have effaced every trace of their non-professional self, their upbringing and background and culture and heritage and the religion they were raised with, and all non-professional relationships, family and friends and unprofessional acquaintances, from their lives, or at least are striving to do so with all their might, people who have willingly sacrificed or are sacrificing their families, their sanity, and ultimately their humanity itself. Free people.
When the ghost comes to Jack in the freezer to set him free and tell him that he will have to murder his family, it is in no sense a typical horror-film moment. The ghost is a waiter with a courteous, professional manner; Jack is a pathetic drooling mess who has just been defeated by a weak, distraught woman with a baseball bat; their interaction is emotionless and formal and restrained, more like a boss interviewing a job candidate than a ghost tempting a lost soul to murder. Yet in my judgment, it is one of the most genuinely horrifying moments in American cinema; precisely because it is so muffled, muted, mundane, so logical, so inevitable. Jack is no longer shocked or frightened or horrified or even tantalized by the suggestion of murdering his family. He merely wants to be accepted by the ghost society and so be free--free precisely from his family and relationships and emotions and humanity. Now that he sees that, he (and we) see how inevitable this always was. To become a true professional, to be accepted, to fit in--in other words, to be a ghost--he will have to sacrifice his family and his humanity. And he is happy to do so. It is just what he always wanted.
This is not a bizarre moment from a horror film: it is an ordinary moment from American life, with the systems running as intended and everything going well. And that is the deepest horror of all.
To be Yourself
The Jazz Singer (1927), America's first "talkie" and a rousing populist tale, has on its surface nothing in common with The Shining. Yet in reality, in their heart of hearts, they center precisely on the same thing.
Comparing a movie by an acknowledged auteur master with a piece of self-conscious hack-work like The Jazz Singer may appear strange. Yet the coincidence, the consonance, the coming-together, of very bad with very good works is a constant feature of art as such, and important to understanding its basic nature.
Put at its simplest, art reproduces, reflects, simulates reality, or at least the human experience of reality. The best, most accomplished artists are those who have the power to carry out this simulation most seamlessly, with the greatest purity, the greatest intensity, the greatest depth and insight. Ironically, though, the very worst artists often do precisely the same, for precisely the opposite reason. Great art reproduces a particular human experience of reality, with great artistry and consciousness and consideration and reflection and insight; bad art at its very best simply reproduces a particular human experience of reality, with no trimmings. More particularly, the role of the artist within society is often to take what is subconcious in a broader culture and society and make it both conscious and explicit. True popular art, though, can in a sense go even further: it can reproduce the subconscious of the broader society, without reflection, without consciousness, and so, often, show it more clearly than the most brilliant filmmaker, burdened with consideration and insight, ever could.
In the present instance, I would certainly not claim that The Jazz Singer is a better film than The Shining, or even that it is a good movie. Most of the film is in fact rather boring, and many of the things that make it effective are definitely unintentional. And yet...I can think of few films I have seen I found so devastating.
Allow me to explain. The Jazz Singer is a film about a child from the Jewish ghetto in New York City who runs away from home after his devout cantor father beats him for singing Jazz at a club. After changing his name from the Ashkenazi "Jakie Rabinowitz" to the American/African-American-coded "Jack Robin," he makes a successful career as a Jazz singer with the help of an obliging Gentile showgirl. Upon returning to New York for his "big break" in a massive revue show where he will perform in blackface, he experiences an intense personal crisis when his mother begs him to abandon the show on its opening night and perform as cantor in their synagogue one last time in the place of his dying father for the High Holy Day of Yom Kippur.
As I said, most of this is fairly tame and uninteresting, yet even in outline it manages to reproduce, in a rather more honest way, the plot of about five hundred American films and novels from the past hundred years, a basic storyline that can well lay claim to being one of the central myths of American modernity itself. This is essentially a story about professional identity versus personal identity, professional ties versus family ties, as well as a story about immigration and assimilation. In most versions of this myth, though, the story is told in a way that is fundamentally and pervasively dishonest, posing the familial authority figure as the clear "bad guy" and problem who just doesn't understand who their child really is, and the clout-chasing ambitious assimilating young person as the hero who is merely innocently expressing their own purely individual innate identity that just happens to coincide with assimilation to the broader society and the demands of their profession and financial success, and culminating in some kind of lukewarm sentimental reconciliation in which the authority figure is brought to embrace their child's rejection of everything they believe in while the child is enabled to be it all and do it all thanks to the magical power of the American public/private, chosen-identity/heritage, American/ethnic, profession/family divide.
At its heart, though, and especially as told more honestly in The Jazz Singer, this is a myth that is fundamentally about a clash between irreconcilables, about the rejection and sacrificing of immigrant heritage and identity and religion for the sake of cultural assimilation and social acceptance and professional success. In this myth, that is fundamentally a good thing: and so it is portrayed in The Jazz Singer.
What makes The Jazz Singer exceptional, though, is how honest and literal it is about this story, and also how devastating that makes it.
To start with, the world of the ghetto is romanticized, not to say stereotyped, but at the same time its brutalities are not sanded off. The early scene in which the Jewish cantor father beats his son with a belt while his mother weeps and begs him not to is, in its maudlin, silent-film way, quite effective. More fundamental, in some ways, is the sheer distance with which the film views the world of the ghetto--a beautiful world of the past, ancient untold generations of cantors and observant Orthodox, that has now become unattainably other, unattainably lost to the younger generation. The main character, Jack Robin, never seriously considers returning to the ghetto and living the same sort of life as his parents; nor does the audience ever expect him to. Whatever has caused this fundamental gap between generations, the film sees no way to overcome it.
More importantly, though, the world Jack Robin enters, while romanticized, is also portrayed with an honesty that is exceptionally rare in American art. In particular, the film makes clear that Jack's quest is fundamentally for and about career, about fitting in, about success, even about money. Jack is no sensitive oppressed misunderstood auteur; he is an ambitious, aspiring careerist. He enters not (as American assimilated life is often portrayed in art) into a world of sensitivity and acceptance and creativity and abundance and freedom, but into a brutal ladder of hard work and total commitment with (usually) little reward, owned by capitalists and run for the sake of money. He participates, not in high art or even "great art," but in the most grotesque, over-the-top sort of variety and revue and cabaret acts, blackface and showgirls and spectacle galore. Even at the end of the story, he has not achieved universal acclaim or fame or glory or wealth: he has merely moved from the lowest rung of the ladder into a somewhat more successful middle rung. He must still toil endlessly for his boss and the public--but now, the audience will applaud him, and he will have more money to do things like buy his mother jewelry and (as he promises in a central scene) even a better apartment outside the ghetto.
And yet...what is most striking about this film, and in a way most devastating, is that despite its honesty in portraying Jack's fundamental status as a professionalized careerist and his devotion to the hard-working, totalizing demands of his profession, the film ultimately and repeatedly underscores that this career is his one and only true genuine authentic identity. Throughout the film, he tells others, and others tell him, that he is a Jazz Singer; that this is simply who he is, and that therefore the rough-and-tumble, racialized world of variety shows is "where he belongs." By the end of the film, his Jewish mother has explicitly affirmed this to be so as well. His change of his name, then, to disguise his Jewish heritage, is in a sense a kind of chosen revelation of his true self; and so is his performing in blackface.
The blackface element of the story is naturally the strangest and most off-putting for modern audiences. Going into the film, I had expected it to be presented very matter-of-factly, as not a question or concern or issue at all. In fact, to my surprise, blackface is absolutely central to the film, and central in particular to its devastating climax.
Our Jewish ghetto-born protagonist as an adult has changed his name, effaced his original identity, and made a career singing Black songs in an explicitly Black genre. It is not, though, until the very climax of the film, the peak of his career, his "big break" in New York City on the eve of Yom Kippur, that we actually see him donning blackface to perform.
Blackface is thus very close to the heart of the film, and key to its themes and conflicts. Yet its meaning is shifting, ambiguous, more a matter of horror-movie-logic than straightforward symbolism.
To begin with, donning blackface is according the most immediate logic a matter of once again rejecting Jackie's born identity and embracing his professional, American identity as "Jack Robin." Performing in blackface is sign and means of his "big break," of his truly becoming an accepted, admired professional in his professional world. Becoming black is thus to Jack of The Jazz Singer what becoming a ghost is to Jack of The Shining. When his mother first sees him in blackface, she reacts in confusion and horror: "This is not my son."
At the same time, though, since in the film's stated belief this professional identity is in fact Jack's true identity, who he really is, donning blackface, like changing his name, constitutes a kind of revelation or fashioning of his true self. Blackface Jack is more genuine than non-blackface Jack, precisely because it is Jack as performer. In this strange American schema, far before what moderns call "post-modernism," the chosen identity, the fashioned, created, artificial identity, even in a sense the socially and professionally-imposed identity, is in fact the trueest identity there is. Identity is neither born nor given; it is made by media and profession and avocation and affirmed by one's professional circles and the general audience. As his mother comes to affirm when she sees him performing onstage in blackface for the first time, her son "now belongs to the world." Jackie Rabinowitz was a nobody, a creature of the ghetto, seen and affirmed by, at best, his family and immediate community and God. As his mother declares, though, his identity as a blackface Jazz Singer is in fact his true identity, bestowed directly by God himself through the mediation of profession and world and audience. It is who he really is.
This is affirmed even more strongly in perhaps the film's most devastating series of scenes, as Jack, after rejecting the request to perform for Yom Kippur, dons his blackface for the first time in the film, to the encouraging murmurs of his Gentile, showgirl professional ally and pseudo-girlfriend, dressed in an elaborate white revue costume. As she reminds him again and again, this is who he is and where he belongs, and he cannot allow anything to stand in the way of his career success, not even his family or his religion. Along the way, she expresses in a nutshell the true heart of American professional identity.
At the heart of this idea of profession is a twisted, Protestantized idea of vocation: the belief, explicit or implicit, that profession gives the true-est identity, the highest goal for which all other things, including religious obligations themselves, must be sacrificed, precisely because it is in fact the most immediately transcendent goal granted to man. After all, the Gentile showgirl insists to the Jew in blackface, it was God who put him there, God who made him into a Jazz Singer and called him to excel in this profession. This is, in effect, the true heart of hearts of Protestantism as a worldview and a belief: the claim that there is no hierarchy of goods, no distinct, higher sacred duties and callings and obligations to which worldly, secular things and professions must be subordinated. God is the direct, immediate source of professional identity and obligations, just as he is of religious identity and rituals and duties. Indeed, given the general Protestant rejection of ceremony and ritual and religious obligation and the concept of the sacred as such, professional identity and goals are more immediately and unproblematically from God than religious duty. When push comes to shove, it is the latter that must yield.
To the showgirl's arguments, Jack submits totally; and he smiles, free and happy, as he affirms that she is right, that his career really is the most important thing there is to him in the whole world. What religious Judaism, its religious rituals and practices and identity, is to his parents, a career as a blackface singer is to Jack. As if in challenge, his girlfriend asks him if his career is more important to him even than her; and Jack again is unbending in his faith: yes, his career is more important to him even than her, even than their mingled professional acquaintance and alliance and personal romantic relationship (cut off, as the film reminds us, from the possibility of marriage and family by the fact of her non-Jewish-ness). Yet this declaration of her secondary status does not infuriate her, like Jack's wife in The Shining, but causes her, unexpectedly nightmarishly, to break into rapturous smiles. Jack is absolutely right. He has passed the test. He is a professional; he is an American.
The scene is in its way a perfect parallel to that in The Shining where the ghosts put Jack to the test by demanding that he murder his family. The acid test of identity is sacrifice; and like Jack in The Shining, Jack in The Jazz Singer puts nothing ahead of his professional identity, and is ready and willing to sacrifice family and every personal relation to it. In this instance, as most instances, that may not require murder: but the sacrifice it demands is no less total.
Here, though, the film takes a further, and even more unexpected, step into the bizarre, and therefore into greatness of a sort. As Jack slips into his blackface persona, embodiment of his true Jazz Singer self, something begins to go wrong. He begins, for the first time in the story, to express misgivings, yearnings, sorrow, pain. As he tells his pseudo-girlfriend, he now feels "the call of his race," of generations and generations of tradition, reaching out to him.
Here, then, is the deepest meaning and paradox of blackface in The Jazz Singer. "Jazz Singer" is for Jack primarily a professional identity; in other words, a mark of assimilation, success, abandonment of ethnic and religious and immigrant heritage; or in other words, "becoming white." Yet to become white, Jack must become black; and in the film's nightmarish surrealist vision of race, blackness is defined first and foremost by its direct connection to all the things Jack is rejecting: family, heritage, tradition, personal emotion, love. To become black, even for performances' sake, Jack must appeal to his own Jewish heritage, and the "authentic" emotion that, as the film acknowledges, comes precisely from and through his family's handed-on role as cantors in the synagogue. The Jazz songs he performs are all paeans to love, to joy, to family and mother and home; they reflect an artistic worldview that is indelibly non-professional, familial, ancestral, and thus (in the film's worldview) indelibly non-white.
When he dons blackface, then, to succeed in his chosen profession and reveal his true professional self, Jack ironically brings all the non-professional aspects of himself rushing to the surface. The scenes that follow, the scenes where Jack appears as his "black" self, are a nightmarish, crushing, devastating, almost Passion-esque crescendo of emotional suffering, as Jack is alternately pleaded with and berated and threatened by both his family and his boss, his mother and his Gentile showgirl girlfriend, torn apart internally by the contradictory demands of his chosen and born identities, the requirements of career and family, weeping and moaning and emoting in full blackface as an icon of American suffering that is inescapably, overwhelmingly racialized.
In the end, the film, while it resolves the plot, does not resolve this conflict. As it turns out, black Jack, the true Jack, the Jack who is a successful white professional precisely because of his ability to adopt the persona of a non-professional black person, simply cannot reject either part of this identity. As a white professional, he cannot reject his boss and professional commitments; but as a black Jazz Singer, he cannot reject his mother, his "mammy." So these two powers solve the problem for him: his boss delays the opening by a day, and he performs for Yom Kippur, as his dying father affirms that they now "have their son back," but his mother, more perceptively, discerns, not the song of a Jew or a cantor, but "a Jazz Singer singing to his God."
The film's last scene, then, is, appropriately, Jack performing in blackface, singing a song about his love for his "Mammy" in "Alabamy," as his own mother from the ghetto of New York watches adoringly from the crowd. What he has achieved is emphatically NOT a true reconciliation between two identities, two contexts, his family and his profession, his heritage and his career. He has simply achieved the career goal he always set for himself: to be a Jazz Singer, to sing black songs for a white audience. And his mother has accepted that this is his destiny, and his one, last performance for God on Yom Kippur has set its seal on that reality and that choice.
The Jazz Singer is simply, then, a more literal version of the story told in The Shining: the story of a man's achievement of professional acceptance through sacrifice of his relationships and family and born identity. It is this strange coincidence that shows Kubrick's insight in selecting his theme. Here, in a work of popular crowd-pleasing entertainment, the first talkie in American history, is precisely the same theme, the same basic underlying narrative, as in an off-putting, resolutely un-visceral work by a genius auteur five decades later.
The Jazz Singer, like The Shining, is ultimately a film about how professionalization creates a new identity for the person who embraces it, liberates him from the troubling and even traumatic family bonds and old-world unfashionable identities and commitments, but requires as its sine qua non the active sacrifice of that identity and all that goes with it. While for The Jazz Singer, this theme is literal but unconsidered, almost subconscious, for Kubrick it is consciously reflected on and refracted through artistic and thematic and aesthetic elements. Still, the overall picture is much the same, as are, in a rather creepy fashion, even a large number of details. Most strikingly, The Jazz Singer is centered on precisely that world of the roaring 20's, with its professional power and its black-tinged entertainments, that is represented by the social world of the Overlook Hotel. Both Jacks are aspiring, not only to the same goal in the abstract, but to the same goal in a much more tangible, aesthetic sense. Both desire to be a ghost in the same world of ghosts.
To be Invisible
From any kind of reasonable perspective, the most remarkable thing about The Jazz Singer is that, despite its effective if nightmarish use of blackface, no actual black persons appear in the film at any point. Indeed, an alien from Mars might well be forgiven if, upon watching the film, he assumed that black people were like Brownies or other mythical creatures of yore. For the film, blackface, black identity, black culture, is merely a means to professional success; or, more deeply, a name and aesthetic and iconic and artistic image for a part of the (ethnic-becoming-white, marginal-becoming-professionalized) American person. The Jew from the ghetto has a black self, a black name, a black face, which he must to a degree affirm but to a much greater degree sacrifice if he is to be a successful professional, if he is to really be himself.
In the context of the film's moral universe, the idea that there might be black people, people who are black and nothing else, in appearance and style and aesthetics and deep interior nature, cannot help seem a disturbing one. And this basic nexus of ideas, this basic polarity and dichotomy and binary between black and white and what they represent, not primarily socially or politically, but symbolically, culturally, aesthetically, even internally, is precisely what made and makes the American conception of race: a conception which--and this cannot be repeated enough--is in fact more or less unique in world-historical terms, and fundamentally different even from most historical racisms belonging to Asia or Africa or Europe. Race for the American is never primarily about the practical task of designating or comparing or reconciling different groups--even inferior or superior groups, conquering or conquered groups, groups to be preserved or groups to be exterminated. For the American, even the contemporary "post-racist" American, race is not a category of difference generally: it is an essential dichotomy between black and white, blackness and whiteness, as natural, emotional, cultural, at time even metaphysical polarities. Blackness and whiteness are not names for ethnic or religious or social or political difference: they are aspects or parts of human nature itself.
This is a long introduction to the fact that I also read Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) recently, one of the more famous (albeit controversial) African-American novels of the last century or so. The theme of this novel, unlike so much of the African-American canon, is not really protest against racial injustice: it is rather the strangeness, the surrealness, of the black experience in America as such. This openly strange and satirical and surrealist and even nightmarish quality of the novel makes it in many ways a fine counterpoint to both The Shining and The Jazz Singer.
I cannot, naturally, speak to the African-American experience as such, but I wanted to at least note the remarkable coincidence of basic theme and worldview between these films and this novel, once more centered on the idea of professionalization. Invisible Man was greatly criticized upon its release by parts of the black community; and to a degree these criticisms are fair. This is, after all, a book about race in America that directs the majority of it's satire and mockery and even vitriol at black people, and in particular at precisely those black people seen as leaders of the race, striving for self-improvement and dignity and respect and power.
In fairness to the book, though, it is important to realize that the novel is not really about the African-American experience as such, in a universal or political or social sense; it is very specifically about the experience of the African-American striver, riser, aspiring leader, and/or budding professional.
In fact, core to the novel and its emotional impact is precisely the fact that the unnamed narrator, who like Jakie Rabinowitz changes his name to find acceptance in a broader white society, spends most of his life being horribly ashamed of his own "blackness," his own origins and heritage and likes and dislikes. In a key scene, he notes his own deep shame, as a black man from the rural South, at the simple fact that he enjoys baked yams.
This process of rising, achieving, leading, improving oneself and the race, is for Invisible Man indelibly and at the same time the process of the effacement of "blackness," understood in virtually the same terms as in The Jazz Singer. It is only by engaging in this process of self-fashioning, self-effacement, and professionalization that our narrator can actually be accepted both by his fellow black people and by white people and the white power structures of his society as a leader of his race. This is true, paradoxically, even for the counter-power-structures, like those of the segregated black community itself and the theoretically colorblind Communist Party. It is even or especially black people who demand that their leaders be something more than black.
The price of such rising above blackness, however, as our narrator intuits early on, is the same fundamental sacrifice demanded of both the Jack of The Shining and the Jack of The Jazz Singer: sacrifice of one's likes and dislikes, one's emotions, one's empathy, and above all one's family and relationships and personal connections.
Our narrator early on abandons his uneducated black Southern family, first by going to college and then by cutting all ties and changing his name in Harlem. An almost more impactful sacrifice is that of his relationship with Mary, an older black woman of an old-fashioned cast, religious, dignified, who he cuts off totally in order to gain acceptance by the Communist Party. Yet the novel's theme is not so much the sacrifice of relationships as the sacrifice of oneself, of all the parts of the self that in any way bear the marks of his and his people's hated, stigmatized past as "field n*****s" and "slaves." To rise from this despised status our hero is relentlessly educated, trained, disciplined, indoctrinated, by both black and white people, black and white institutions, and even by himself. Again and again, he goes along with these processes, embraces them, even, just like Jack in the Overlook Hotel.
This choice to sacrifice one's origins and parts of one self is made, in the narrator's telling, almost entirely for selfish or desperate reasons, because he needs a job, because he cannot bear to disappoint others, because he is obliging and good-natured: yet, as presented to others, as presented by the world at large, it is treated as a noble sacrifice for the good of the race as a whole, for the good even of the world as a whole. When our narrator meets a white wealthy trustee of his college, the trustee reminds him, solemnly, that as a black striver, a leader of his race, he is in fact responsible not only for the destiny of his own people, but the destiny of white people as well, even this wealthy white man's own destiny. He must thus do his best to "rise" and bring others along with him; for to do anything else would be the gravest sort of irresponsibility.
Such a responsibility, though, necessarily involves not only sacrifice, not only self-effacement, but active deception. A little after meeting the white trustee, the narrator is denounced by the President of his college, one of the most respected and powerful black men in the nation, precisely for telling and showing this white man (a little) of the truth about the actual black experience. Don't you know, the President demands, that white people must be lied to? Don't you know that if one does that, one can get power, privilege, professional success, anything one wants? Don't you know anything? At another, later point in the narrative, the narrator, now a successful Communist organizer, is roundly berated by the mostly white leading committee of the "Brotherhood" about the absolute, all-overriding importance of "discipline" and "sacrifice" for the cause. Our narrator had committed a grave sin against both of these values by, without authorization, organizing a funeral and protest over the death of a young black man at the hands of the police--a black man who had left the Brotherhood and started selling racist sambo dolls. Doesn't he know, the leader of the organization demands, that such people, everything they represent and embody and effect about the black people of America, have to be sacrificed?
The last-minute "twist" of the novel [Spoilers] is to take this sacrifice and literalize it in a larger-scale, almost apocalyptic way. As our narrator belatedly realizes, far too late, all his efforts and successes in the service of the Communist Party were in fact, all along, at the service of an act of supreme sacrifice of the black people as such. The Communist Brotherhood had all along wanted merely to rile up and disappoint the people of Harlem, and so spark a bloody race riot that would play into their larger, political and historical goals: and they had used him, his talents, his efforts, his commitment and discipline, to do so. He had been, all along, little more than the "Invisible Man": a helpful token and tool molded and used by institutions and people black and white for their own purposes, the purposes of professionalized, institutionalized sacrifice and bloodshed and destruction. And so Harlem burns, mostly at the hands of its own inhabitants, led by a furious Black Nationalist, Ras the Destroyer, riding a horse with spear in hand, like a rider of the Apocalypse.
Even by this bare description, the consonance with The Shining and The Jazz Singer is obvious--for all three works of art are, in essence, about the same thing, whether we choose to call that thing professionalism or assimilation or whiteness or careerism or some other name. The question posed by all three works is how one achieves such a goal, who can achieve it, why anyone wants to achieve it, and who must be sacrificed for its sake. Paradigmatically, as all three films in their several ways show, this thing is white and male--or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it is in itself nothing, but that it is defined solely by its enemies, and these enemies are family (and so often women and children), and inner, emotional, familial experience and desire and connections (and so a certain American concept of "blackness").
To return to The Shining for a moment, one of the most striking aspects of the film is the presence of exactly one positive, knowing adult character in the film, in the striking, if rather inexplicable, form of the black chef of the Overlook Hotel. When he is introduced along with the other living employees and owners of the hotel, he appears rather threatening, another extension and embodiment of the hotel's ghostly social order. Yet we quickly, if rather puzzlingly, learn that, by some miracle, despite working for the hotel and spending most of his time there, he is in fact not in any sense in thrall to its evil powers, but in active resistance to them.
In the film's universe, this is first and foremost for the highly symbolic reason that he is black. In the scene discussed above, when Jack meets the waiter ghost Grady for the first time, the dead careerist informs the living careerist that his son has committed the ultimate sin: he has summoned an outsider to help him and Jack's wife escape the hotel; and, worst of all, this outsider is a n*****. Jack repeats the word back, and Grady affirms it: and both men understand each other.
To be black, then, both in The Jazz Singer and The Shining, is fundamentally to be an outsider to the professional world and systems, to be incapable in principle, or at least in frequent practice, of actually belonging fully and totally to the system, of actually attaining the status of individual free professional with all its blessings. The chef works for the hotel, spends his time there, is aware of the evil in it, but yet is not and can never be a part of its professionalized world of ghosts. Similarly, while Jack's Jewish heritage poses a real threat to his aspirations to professional success, it is because he is not at the end of the day black that he can both perform in blackface and yet remain a professional committed above all else to his career. Taken in this light, Invisible Man's thesis is, in essence, rather similar: that for all his efforts and even his successes in effacing his blackness and gaining professional and political and social success in the broader world of New York City, our narrator has never been and never will be accepted by the professional systems he encounters: that in the end, inasmuch as he is black, he is inevitably not among the sacrificers, but among the "sacrificed."
Still, the narrator succeeds to a remarkable degree in the novel in gaining professional success; and there are other characters, less honest characters, less naive characters, who succeed far more. Hence, while professional success is coded "white," it is not so in a fundamentally ethnic-racial sense. Our narrator is too black to be a successful communist: but he is successful enough at effacing his own heritage and family ties as to stand almost totally apart from most of the black people he encounters.
Indeed, a large part of Invisible Man is taken up with the narrator's confusion and annoyance and wonder at the ordinary, unwashed, uneducated, unaspiring black people, an utter mystery to him and to his fellow black careerists and Communists alike. Who and what are these people, he wonders, so totally cut off from culture, from education, from history itself? Are they, like the old Jews in the ghetto in The Jazz Singer, merely throwbacks, remnants of a lost past destined to vanish and be left behind? Or, he wonders, are they the true rebels after all, the only rebels, secure in their own identity and their own humanity as no one else, black and white, in America really is?
The novel opens with the narrators' recounting of the dying words of his grandfather, a perfectly obedient and obliging and mild-mannered former slave, who insists, with his dying breath, that all his life he had in fact been a rebel, that he had defeated and overcome the white people and the system precisely with his yeses, his submissions, his conformity to their expectations of him, all the while making them choke on their own poison and so delivering them to destruction. And throughout the whole novel, the narrator, and the author, and us, all wonder: was that true? Is it true?
Put simply: is the truest rebellion, the truest freedom, in fact found not in the effacement and sacrifice of one's shared humanity and its emotional and personal and private ties and duties and loyalties, but in embracing them? Can the world of professional power in America, this world of ghosts and aspiring ghosts, in fact be undermined and destroyed by such a strategy? Or do even the rebels have to fight fire with fire, rise and liberate and aspire precisely by destroying everything that holds them down below the level of American profession and labor and freedom and individuality and power?
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