The Mass Culture Workshop is pleased to present:

Neil Verma, PhD, The University of Chicago: “‘Peek-A-Boo!:’ Psychological Testing in 1950’s Radio Drama, and the Twilight of the Radio Age,” a chapter from Theater of the Mind: Conceptualizing Interiority in Radio Drama and American Culture, 1936-1956, forthcoming from The University of Chicago Press.

Friday, Nov. 20
Cobb Hall 310, 10:30-12:30am
Download paper here.

ABSTRACT: Since at least the 1930’s, enthusiasts of American broadcasting have referred to radio drama as a “theater of the mind,” an idiom whose ubiquity has framed the study of the genre and popular nostalgia for it. But what work might this phrase itself accomplish? On the one hand, it impedes deep understanding of technique in aural drama. By celebrating how listeners “make” radio stories, we unduly dismiss the broadcaster’s ingenuity in tasks that orient the imagination. On the other hand, the theater of the mind idea also suggests an alternative way to approach radio – to consider it as a historical phenomenon that was really about the mind during a period in which Americans came to believe that the mind and mass media are mutually constitutive entities. In fact, by taking more seriously the notion of radio as a theater of the mind, a new kind of cultural history of radio becomes possible, one that uses the evolving themes and practices of dramatists as echoes of the imaginary life of the mid-20th century, including how many Americans of the period conceptualized the imaginary process itself.

This book will draw on my research into more than 6,000 recordings of radio plays, as well as a number of trade publications and directing manuals, focusing on three overlapping periods in the evolution of network drama in the United States. During the Depression, I argue, dramatists set themselves the challenge of evoking complex settings, using aural techniques to sketch “pictures in the mind” that convey the values of New Deal society. Soon after Pearl Harbor, the central preoccupation of American radio changed, as dramatists neglected social relations and became interested in interiority and the way that minds joined with vast communication networks, a scenario that reflects a fascination with war propaganda and its purchase on inner belief. In the postwar, both the spatial and psychological aspects of radio drama were reimagined in programs that seemed to “think about” questions and anxieties of the self in 1950’s society. By describing these three phases in the cultural history of the radio play – a theater in the mind, a theater about the mind, and a theater for the mind – this study tries to find processes behind a neglected tradition in the history of entertainment, thus rehearsing a series of ways to critically read one of the definitive cultural forms of the 20th century. Blending aesthetics with cultural history, I also prove that the radio age contributed to a persistent modern notion that the mind and the media are coterminous, a myth well-promulgated on the airwaves, and one that continues to resonate in modern understanding.

This chapter of the book studies perhaps the most striking feature of 1950’s radio – the extraordinary number of “psychological tests” that took place in programs as varied as I Was a Communist for the FBI, X Minus One and Escape. Whether they were undercover men in Red front organizations, housewives obsessed with dreams, or children falling under the spell of voices from other dimensions, postwar characters seem to spend all their time trying to prevent second-selves from bursting forth into the exterior aural world of the fiction. These narratives of the subconscious mark the point at which vulgar psychology and psychiatry replaced models of the self derived from communications research. As radio drama ended its domination over the American mind, it’s obsession with interiority had reached a kind of endgame in harrowing tales of multiple personality, repression and brainwashing – tales that would test the limits of what radio drama could both powerfully conceptualize and successfully evoke.

Neil Verma is a cultural historian who writes about radio aesthetics and cultural history.  He is a graduate of The University of Chicago’s PhD Program in History of Culture, and currently teaches in the Media Aesthetics Core at Chicago and in the History Department at Roosevelt University.  His article “Honeymoon Shocker: Lucille Fletcher’s ‘Psychological’ Sound Effects and Wartime Radio Drama” will appear next year in the Journal of American Studies, and his book Theater of the Mind will be published in 2011 by the University of Chicago Press.

The Mass Culture Workshop is pleased to present:

Christina Petersen, Graduate Student in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies: “The Mass Production of Flaming Youth:  Flappers, Kinaesthetics, and the Construction of the American Youth Spectator.” Co-sponsored by the American Cultures Workshop.

Friday, Nov. 6
Cobb Hall 310, 10:30am

Marion Davies in THE PATSY (1928), imitating actress Pola Negri.

ABSTRACT: Thirty years before the advent of the 1950s “teenpic,” Hollywood had already recognized the importance of the adolescent youth audience by courting America’s young with a new genre. The 1920s “youth picture” focused on the exploits of young flappers and collegians, sparking a wave of adolescent emulation of its fashions and flirting techniques. In the wake of Progressive-era discourse that adolescence was the “acme” of imitation and the young were particularly susceptible to emulating what they saw on the screen, I argue that these films constructed their youthful spectators as mimetic subjects, although not naïve ones.  Flapper stars Colleen Moore, Clara Bow, and Joan Crawford may have been offered up as models for 1920s adolescents to mimic, but their films, including Flaming Youth (1923), It (1927), and Our Dancing Daughters (1928), also lampooned the idea that the young mindlessly aped the clothing and mannerisms of young stars. At the same time, these films provided another source of imitation – unconscious, bodily imitation – through the incorporation of images of dancing and the frenetic pace of modern life.

Lori Landay has similarly argued that the flapper film engendered “a distinctly modern experience of spectatorship,” not only through the mimetic and memetic spread of youthful styles, slang, and demeanor, but also by providing a means of somatic innervation for the young female moviegoer who may have “experienced a particularly active subjective identification with the flapper actress because of her experiences of doing similar dances.” Taking The Patsy (1928), a flapper Cinderella story starring Marion Davies as my main example, I read the 1920s flapper film as a synecdoche for the 1920s youth picture in general, as it drew on both forms of imitation, conscious and unconscious, in order to construct its spectator. This chapter further considers how the flapper film constituted another instance of what Linda Williams has termed the “body genre” in its principal address to the spectator’s body rather than their gaze. Through the incorporation of images of dancing meant to innervate the viewer, these films redefined the meaning of the term “youth spectator” to signify not only those who were physically young, but those of any age who experienced the rejuvenating effects of watching young bodies cavorting on the screen.