Working Class Self-Fashioning in Swing Time (1936)

Introduction

Fred Astaire makes a posthumous appearance in Werner Herzog’s recent documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010), as a blackface minstrel. In order to evoke the unity of the ‘primitive’ and the ‘modern’ aesthetic imaginations, Herzog appropriates the blackface sequence from George Stevens’s Swing Time (1936). The voice of one of Herzog’s commentators: ‘I think this image, dancing with its shadow, is a very strong and old image of human representation. Because the first representation was a wall, the white wall and the black shadow.’ While the narrator speaks, Astaire dances. But Herzog shows only a snippet of the scene. Admittedly what he shows – Astaire struggling with his own huge shadows, three of them, until the shadows lose control and walk away in disgust – is the most interesting piece of the routine. But through this editorial re-contextualization, the original blackface has been scrubbed. ¹ Herzog dislocates the object, turns it into a purified, trans-historical expression of the human aesthetic impulse. Perhaps Astaire’s dance does represent such an expression, but his blackface is the mark of history upon aesthetic experience. While Herzog’s art obscures history’s impression, recovering the traces of the past left upon an aesthetic object is the task of a critical sociology of culture (Benjamin, 1999; Williams, 1973).

This article argues that the Depression era musical, Swing Time (1936), provides access to understanding some of the forms of socially constructed desire that shaped working class solidarity in the 1930s. One of the most popular films of the year, Swing Time is a simple song and dance picture with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. As a Hollywood production, Swing Time’s central concern is to make money for its producers. But this popular genre picture nonetheless offers a fiery indictment of the values of the leisure class, while, at the same time, portraying an oppositional working class community in the language of protest and the Popular Front. In the first part of this article, I explore the roots of Swing Time’s representation of vested forms of desire in Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class (1994 [1899]). I argue that Swing Time offers an extension of Veblen’s theory by analyzing the power of mass communication to rewire social circuits of desire. I then explore the meaning of the stylistic realism and the language of protest operating in Swing Time’s narrative. From this I conclude Swing Time offers a critique of capitalism precisely in order to affiliate itself with a new, working class oppositional culture. But in affiliating itself with this oppositional community, Swing Time accepts and reinforces the language of racial privilege circulating within the ‘white’ working class. With a final critical act, however, Swing Time symptomatically reveals the invidious character of white privilege, as well as the fact that the cultural heritage of the (white) working class (swing music itself) comes from the theft and plunder of African American originality. ²

The years 1934–7 produced evidence of a profound shift in the attitude of working class Americans toward labor and capital. While the 1936 and 1937 sit-downs might seem the symbolic pinnacle of ‘the Age of the CIO’, already in 1934, with the national textile strike, as well as the general strikes in San Francisco and Toledo, and later, in 1935, with the formation of the Popular Front and the original organizing drives of the early Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), the stage was set for a new drama of identifications. American workers were drawn into new modes of solidarity and new kinds of formal and informal political struggle. A new common ground made these new forms of solidarity possible; and this common ground came from shared conditions of work, shared forms of poverty and exclusion, from shared forms of collective action, but also from shared forms of leisure, shared entertainments, shared normative practices. In short, a population of working Americans largely made up of second and third generation immigrants became a political, social, and cultural force. (On the textile strikes of 1934, see Roscigno and Danaher, 2004; for an overview of class struggles during the 1930s, see Levine, 1988; on the Popular Front and the ‘Age of the CIO’ see Denning, 1998, 2009; Cassano, 2009c; on the immigrant character of the American working class see Barrett, 1992; Cassano, 2008b, 2009b; Guttman, 1987.)

Hollywood cinema, or the producers and executives behind Hollywood, consciously attempted to promote a more or less classless kind of ‘common cultural ground’ free from politics (Rogin, 2002: 89), and free from the struggles of everyday life. But to the degree that writers and directors (often unintentionally) allowed history, and their audience’s expectations, experiences, and desires to penetrate the cinematic object, a different kind of common ground was created, a common space for the expression of a new, oppositional modes of desire. ³ Swing Time was one of the most popular films of 1936, making Variety’s top grossing film list, just below Charlie Chaplin’s phenomenally successful Modern Times (1936) ⁴ (Balio, 1995: 405; Variety, 6 January 1937). And, like Chaplin’s picture, it attempts to represent the common world and to affiliate itself with an audience of laborers in conscious opposition to the leisure classes. A seemingly generic musical, Swing Time builds its entire narrative upon a radical critique of desire under capitalism. But in affiliating itself with this oppositional culture, Swing Time also posits imaginary cultural boundaries. It represents a working class community that is, at the same time, a normatively ‘white’ community in which immigrants are relegated to a secondary status, and African Americans are hidden from view even as their culture is pillaged and their cultural forms appropriated. (For a related analysis of the relationship between anti-semitism and working class solidarity, see Worrell, 2009: 253–78.)

Swing Time is quite different from Astaire and Rogers’s breakthrough musical of the previous year, Top Hat (1935). Many Depression era musicals incorporated themes of poverty, hunger, and desperation, if only to romantically resolve those ‘social problems’ in the final reel. The opening scene of Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933) is emblematic. The picture begins with Ginger Rogers, dressed in over-sized gold coins, dancing on a stage and singing ‘We’re in the Money’. The number comes to an end when the Sheriff closes down rehearsal because the producers hadn’t paid the bills. Economic reality bites into the film’s imaginary texture. Top Hat, on the other hand, represents an almost clichéd version of the 1930s musical fantasy. The action takes place among the elite. The spaces of action, London and Venice, are self-consciously conjured dreams. While some early scenes in London include a few exterior shots that look as if they were taken from a tourist reel, most of the action happens in a ‘Venice’ magically imagined, surreal, utopian. True, at one point, Ginger Rogers threatens to leave a suitor, go back to America, and ‘go on the dole’. The scarcity of such remarks, however, suggests history is somehow suspended within cinematic space, put under erasure. But even Top Hat is not simply ‘escapism’. Rather, it is a camera obscura, offering an inverted image of the world beyond the projector’s lamp. Outside, hunger, depression, ‘the dole’. Inside, a veritable ‘Heaven’, as the film’s recurring theme, ‘Cheek to Cheek’, constantly reminds the viewer (‘Heaven, I’m in heaven …’). The narrative concerns problems of identity, trust, and love, not of hunger, unemployment, and homelessness. Top Hat became the most successful RKO picture of the 1930s (Balio, 1995: 222). The film certainly seems to confirm Michael Rogin’s (2002) thesis that labor and labor struggles were present mainly in their insistent absence from Depression and New Deal era cinema screens. While no other Astaire–Rogers collaboration equaled the success of Top Hat, Swing Time came closest. Swing Time, however, is the reverse image of Top Hat’s camera obscura. It appropriates Top Hat’s themes, costumes, and scenarios, but puts them to new use. Swing Time subverts the fantasy elements that make Top Hat possible, and anchors its own narrative in a world where the stakes of struggle are more than heartstrings.

The film begins with an exchange that highlights its central theme, ‘fashion’. After the credits, the screen goes black, strings give way to an arrangement that emphasizes horns syncopated to a high-hat’s distinctly swing beat. Fade into a stage with John ‘Lucky’ Garnett (Fred Astaire) dancing center, a men’s chorus dancing behind. Cut backstage: a stagehand lounges, while ‘Pop’ Cardetti (Victor Moore) performs a card trick. The stagehand ignores the old magician’s sleight-of-hand, looking out, instead at the dancing men.

‘When did you change the act, Pop?’

‘I didn’t. He did,’ nodding his head toward Lucky.

‘He did?’

‘Yeah, he says “straight magic is too old fashioned”.’

For the audience Swing Time addresses, old fashioned magic is no longer sufficient; what is required for the modern world is a new kind of magic: the magic of the mass media. This exchange foreshadows the argument of the film’s first act. For its first 30 minutes or so, this musical confronts the power of fashion, of the mass media, of the leisure class, in a language that echoes Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class (1994). Swing Time begins with a Veblenian theory of desire. Lucky’s desires for specific commodities, and for his fiancée, are shaped by his desire for recognition from America’s ruling elite. And this desire for recognition by the leisure class is exemplified in Lucky’s fashion choices. To the extent that fashion, as an expression of desire, and desire as an expression of leisure class power, are central to the narrative, the film remains close to Veblen’s original text. But the film complicates Veblen’s theory through its analysis of the relationship between fashion and mass communication.

In Swing Time, representations of leisure class desire are mediated by mass communication. The film makes a two-fold argument: First, the mass media functions to inculcate hegemonic forms of desire, represented by dominant modes of fashion that affiliate the subject to the ruling desires of the leisure class. But, second, because the film posits the power of the mass communication itself to re-shape social forms of desire, it represents mass media as potentially liberating forces that can free the subject from the yoke of leisure class sensibilities. In the place of the dominant desires of the leisure class, Swing Time offers an oppositional ‘scheme of life’ through its use of working class cultural forms. Thus, while for Veblen, ‘fashion’ represents the dominance of leisure class desire, Swing Time suggests that working class fashions (especially, swing music itself) can also represent affiliation with oppositional forms of desire.

Recognition and ‘Schemes of Life’

Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929) lived long enough to witness the birth of sound pictures, but never wrote about this new cultural form. This is remarkable, especially given the fact that The Theory of the Leisure Class is about socialized paths of desire. But whatever the reasons for Veblen’s silence on cinema, he articulates a theory of desire central to Swing Time’s argument. Veblen’s work was notorious enough in the 1930s to have exercised some direct influence on Swing Time’s screenwriters and director. Kenneth Burke (1984 [1935]), John Dos Passos, and New Deal economists were remembering the old man’s name and recycling or revising his central ideas (Diggins, 1999: 213). ⁵ But whether the artisans behind the picture had a conscious intention of conveying Veblenian themes or not, the film’s representations of the leisure class, the barbarian status of women, and the dialectic of social desire directly parallel Veblen’s theories. Further, in Veblenian fashion, the film reflects upon its own power to shape the social dialectic of desire.

Veblen’s best remembered phrase is ‘conspicuous consumption’. But in The Theory of the Leisure Class, ‘conspicuous consumption’ itself is driven by yet another social psychological force, the desire for ‘prestige’ through recognition by the community. ⁶ This drive for recognition emerges from Veblen’s conception of the interactive character of the ‘self’. The ‘self’ is a social structure, developed through communal interaction, and shaped by a multitude of others. Put another way, there is an other (representing the community) at the heart of every self. I come to know myself only through the gaze of this internalized other. If the other greets me with approbation, I have self-respect. If the other offers me scorn, I come to hate myself. Thus, in a society in which consumption and wealth are conventional markers for prestige, ‘Those members of the community who fall short of this … normal degree of prowess or property suffer in the esteem of their fellow-men [sic]; and consequently they suffer also in their own esteem, since the usual basis of self-respect is the respect accorded by one’s neighbor’ (1994: 20; emphasis added).

Using the theoretical foundation provided by this almost ‘looking glass’ theory of the self (cf. Cooley, 1922), Veblen constructs a model of social domination legitimated through desire. The ‘neighbor’ within demands respectable behavior. If I violate community norms, I lose my ‘good name’ (Veblen, 1994: 19). Since I see (and judge) myself through my neighbor’s eyes, the internalization of my neighbor’s desire generates (and legitimates) dominant social norms. In the United States the conventional prestige awarded the leisure class is more than a motive for economic behavior. It is the means through which the normative ideals promulgated by the leisure class become a force among those excluded from privilege. In other words, the desires of the leisure class shape the desires of the ‘common lot’. ⁷ While, Veblen argues, the vast majority of the working population will live lives of ‘chronic dissatisfaction’ (1994: 20), because they can never achieve a reputable standard of consumption, nonetheless, ‘among [the] highest leisure class … decorum finds its fullest and maturest expression … [and] serves as a canon of conduct for the classes beneath’ (1994: 33). This system of privileged desire produces a ‘canon of conduct’ for respectable behavior that becomes a veritable ‘scheme of life’. The ‘members of each stratum accept as their ideal of decency the scheme of life in vogue in the next higher stratum, and bend their energies to live up to that ideal’ (1994: 52; emphasis added). Exploited industrious workers attempt to live according to an unserviceable system of desire precisely in order to receive (imaginary) recognition from the privileged. Because of the power of the leisure class over the desires of other social strata, because to retain one’s good name one needs recognition from these leisure classes, whatever social practices, commodities, ideals, and fashions the privileged endorse become normative forces in society. And the ‘base-born commoner delights to stoop and yield’ (1994: 34) to the scheme of life offered by the leisure class because to ‘affiliate themselves by a system of dependence … to the great ones’ provides an ‘increment of repute’ (1994: 48). I retain my good name by attaching myself to the worldview, the system of desires, and the scheme of life produced by the leisure class. Thus, style and fashion are markers of allegiance to leisure class desire. Style is an emblem of power ⁸ (cf. Cassano, 2006, 2009a for a more extensive discussion of Veblen’s theory of desire).

‘Last Year’s Trousers’: The Power of Fashion

As the number that opens the film comes to an end, Lucky rushes off stage, saying ‘I’ve got to get married’. Pop tries to talk Lucky out of the wedding, and out of leaving the troupe. But Lucky has his mind made up. ‘My talent is gambling, Pop. Hoofing is alright, but there’s no future in it.’ The film sets Lucky’s gaze firmly on the future. He represents the quintessential ‘modern man’, and, throughout, the film uses modernity as a trope, emphasizing the here and now of the narrative. Lucky may have a past, but he has no visible roots.

The film begins with abandonment as Lucky prepares to leave his co-workers to marry a wealthy woman. Lucky’s hunger is for leisure class respectability. The mechanism through which this hunger reveals itself is his obsession with dress, with looking modern, and above all, with living a fashionable existence. The film plays on the multiple meanings of fashion: fashion as the latest style, and fashion as a kind of (self) construction. Lucky’s self is fashioned, but, as the film begins, his self-fashioning remains subservient to the fashionable gaze of the leisure class.

A pivotal sequence that drives the rest of the narrative begins backstage, with Lucky, dressed in tails, but already late for his wedding. The ‘fellas’ gather around. One finds a copy of Squire, ‘A Man’s Magazine’, on the dressing table. He opens to a fashion ad. A man, dressed in Lucky’s same outfit, stands beside a chauffeured limousine, lighting a cigar. For the audience in 1936, the ad immediately evokes Top Hat and its fantastic world of wealth. But Swing Time subverts the fantasy promulgated both by the ad and by its own precursor, and dramatizes the consequences of Top Hat’s fantasy as a force in the material world.

Taking pencil in hand, the chorus line dancer alters the magazine illustration, adding cuffs to the trousers. Meanwhile, Lucky literally evokes the prior film for the audience by donning his top hat and asking:

‘How do I look?’

At first, murmurs of approval, then: ‘You’re not going like that?’

‘Why of course. Church wedding, first family, very social, whole town there.’ Lucky snaps and clicks his heels.

‘I guess it doesn’t matter …’

‘What doesn’t matter?’ Lucky shows concern on his face.

‘Last year’s trousers … No cuffs.’

The ‘fellas’ convince Lucky he’s wearing last year’s trousers and when Pop takes the garment to the tailor, Lucky is left without his pants, thus delaying his wedding and setting the film’s narrative in motion. In this game of deception and desire, the ‘fellas’ play off Lucky’s hunger to be an image, his desire for an imaginary other’s approval. More than that, the ‘other’ whose approval the film first posits comes from a world of wealth and privilege. Lucky wants to mirror the ad in order to please the leisure class gaze. His fiancée, Margaret, and her family are means for achieving the new identity he seeks. (Lucky hopes to marry into his hometown’s ‘first family’.) But, using a Veblenian rhetoric, the film argues the seemingly decorous community to which Lucky aspires is actually decadent, and its enchanting gaze is both corrupt and corrupting.

Lucky identifies with and desires the world of privilege painted in the imaginary pages of Squire and imagined in the real film Top Hat. Thus Swing Time also offers a theory of cinema: The mass media captivates the desires of its audience, shapes them, binds them to an imaginary community and set of social norms. While the film demonstrates the power of the mass media to disseminate leisure class desires, it says something else as well. When the chorus dancer takes his pencil to the ad in Squire, he re-purposes the artifact, transforming it into a weapon of opposition. The ad becomes a vehicle for subverting the system of class-based desire the film posits. ⁹ In articulating this oppositional possibility, the film provides space for its own work as an oppositional commodity. Through this use of the ad to undermine Lucky’s affiliation with wealth and power, the film represents the mass media as an arena of class struggle. In this sense, Swing Time supplements Veblen’s argument that style is an emblem of power. Style can serve such a function. But Swing Time also argues that style and the mass media have the potential power to disrupt established norms, taken for granted schemes of life, and even vested circuits of social desire. More than simply a sign of power, style is an emblem of community affiliation; and the struggle between two communities plays out in a struggle over style.

Swing Time dramatizes the ambivalence in Lucky’s desire for recognition as a struggle between two identities. In fact, he is ‘Lucky’ to Pops, to Penny, to the dancers in his troupe, but to Margaret and to her world of repute and wealth, he is ‘John’. These two names represent two possible directions for the character’s desire, two possible communities from which he craves recognition, and, ultimately, two possible schemes of life. It wouldn’t be too much to say that Lucky’s ambivalent desire signifies a class conflict between two radically different worldviews: one represented by the leisure class style, Father, and Margaret, the other by jazz, blackface, and Penny. By the end of the film, Lucky’s original scheme of life is inverted and he surrenders his dream of leisure class respectability for a cheap song (or penny carol) played to a swing time beat. ‘I always admire any young man who can make money’.

The Political Economy of Desire

Having missed his wedding, John Garnett arrives at Margaret’s family mansion. Father is yelling: ‘we’ll be the laughing stock of this whole town’. Clearly, like Lucky/John, Father’s concern is community esteem. What follows is an exchange between Father and John so remarkable that it bears reproduction in full. ¹⁰

‘I wouldn’t let you marry her for $10,000,’ says Father.

‘How ‘bout 20?’

‘Not for $20,000.’

‘25’ says John, extending his hand in the motion of a bid.

‘Not for twenty-fi,’ Father breaks off, the briefest smile crossing his lips, ‘say young man, where could you get $25,000? By dancing? And there’s another thing, coming back to your own hometown in a dancing act.’

‘I’m going into a new business. Why only this afternoon I made $200,’ John doesn’t mention he made it gambling.

‘$200?’

‘Yes, that’s why I was late for the wedding.’

‘Well … that makes it a little different. Now I’m not consenting to your wedding, but I always admire any young man who can make money. It shows … Well it shows character.’ …

‘Then Margaret and I can get married?’

‘Well, if you go to New York and work hard at your business and if you’re successful you can come back here and ask me for my Margaret. And in all probability, I’ll be very happy to give her to you.’

As he’s leaving, Margaret asks John, ‘Come back soon, won’t you?’

‘That all depends upon the stakes um the stocks uh the business,’ he answers as Father shakes his hand goodbye.

As in Veblen’s Leisure Class, reputability (here ‘character’) comes from property (here in the abstract form of money), but Lucky’s work as a professional dancer brings disreputability. By the last reel, the film definitively associates dance with ‘blackness’ and this association could be reason enough for Father’s initial disapproval. At the same time, the film associates dance with work. As a dancer, Lucky is a common worker. As a gambler, however, John gains Father’s admiration. In a slip of the tongue, Lucky calls gambling ‘stakes’, ‘stocks’, and so plays upon the popular idea that there is little difference between a stock speculator and a gambler. Both make something from nothing and live more by luck than hard work. The slip of the tongue hardly matters. Father admires ‘any young man who can make money’.

But the film’s critique doesn’t end with the fact that Father’s admiration is calculated in dollar amounts. In a strikingly Veblenian vein, Swing Time offers a picture of gender relations in which Father owns Margaret, but is willing to sell her to John for $25,000. The point of this sequence is to demonstrate, once more, the emptiness of the scheme of life offered by Father and his community. Even in its fragmentary form, however, this critical representation of gender relations raises fundamental questions about masculine domination as it intersects with class privilege. ¹¹

Swing Time’s narrative couldn’t properly be called a ‘critique’ were it not for the fact that the film goes beyond the pillory of the wealthy. Lucky’s aspirations are initially anchored in the leisure class scheme of life. But Penny Carrol (Ginger Rogers) represents a different scheme of life. From her first appearance, she is located as a worker, and more than that, as working class, at least in terms of the treatment she receives from those with power. This representation offers a vivid contrast to the role she played in Top Hat.

‘Guys like you pay me to protect them from screwy dames’: Swing Time’s Realism

Stylistically, the first act of Swing Time evokes cinematic realism. Compared to the leisure class life in a picture post-card London and a surreal Venice presented by Top Hat, Swing Time’s portrayal of working women struggling in New York City is brutal. Again, it’s worth recalling Gold Diggers of 1933, which also portrayed women workers in the entertainment industry who were unemployed, hungry, and cold. Echoing that earlier film, Swing Time goes further and connects these themes to a political economy of desire that indicts the very leisure class portrayed so effectively in Top Hat. And unlike Gold Diggers, Swing Time utilizes the rhetoric of labor and the left. True, Popular Front language and imagery are deployed for comic effect. But viewed in the context of the times, this use of left ideology, even only as a kind of fashion, indicates a shift in the schemes of life animating Swing Time’s audience. In an attempt to speak to (and perhaps for) a working class audience, Swing Time built a cinematic rhetoric from tropes familiar to workers engaged in labor struggles. At least for part of the narrative, this labor rhetoric intersects with a continued critique of gender relations; and the central women characters enter the scene as workers.

In conventional social problem dramas like I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), Black Fury (1935), or Dead End (1937), cinematic ‘realism’ is a trope, a stylistic device that attempts to evoke reality, and not, of course, a direct representation of the struggles workers face. But Swing Time’s is a ‘realism’ of the second order, a meta-realism meant to evoke not ‘reality’, but the ‘realistic’ style of social problem films, without actually entering their terrain. Consider Chaplin’s great hit of the same year, Modern Times. At first it would seem wrong to put Chaplin’s film in the same stylistic category as Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath (1940). Scenes like the Tramp trapped by the automatic feeding machine, or the sequence where the machine operator becomes enmeshed in the gears of his own device, certainly seem more surreal than real. But when Chaplin portrays the suffering of Gamine (Paulette Goddard) or the labor struggles that hover about the edge of the narrative, he does so to mobilize his audience. Like The Grapes of Wrath, Modern Times is constructed with a self-conscious political intention to turn popular sentiment against the excesses of modern capitalism, even against capitalism itself (Cassano, 2008a,d). Swing Time, on the other hand, uses the politics and language of the left almost as costuming, like one of the gowns Ginger Rogers wears. I might put it like this: whereas ‘realism’ styles ‘reality’, Swing Time uses ‘realism’ as a kind of designer label. Through its evocation of the style and subject matter of social problem films, it claims the allegiance of the ‘common lot’ against a perverse ruling ‘leisure class’. And while Swing Time’s ‘realism’ might be called ‘mere fashion’, the film has already taught its audience how to think about ‘mere fashion’. Through the mass media, fashion itself has the power to re-fashion life.

Swing Time’s play with the social problem genre begins in a rail yard. After he loses everything but his lucky quarter in a bet with ‘the fellas’, Lucky jumps a flatcar bound for New York. He’s still in his wedding tails and top hat. Pop follows suit. Poverty doesn’t seem to touch Lucky, but the audience sees its own suffering in Pop’s hunger for a cigarette as he walks the city streets. Once again, in striking contrast to Top Hat, the New York represented in this sequence is crowded, loud, dirty, and, most importantly, full of class injustice. This injustice appears in the form of a police force whose central purpose is to protect the wealthy from working people.

When Lucky chances upon Penny Carroll, he trades her his lucky quarter for two bits, so Pop can buy some cigarettes from a vending machine. While Lucky flirts with Penny, Pop steals the quarter back. Lucky doesn’t realize the theft until Penny has already called a cop. The cop smiles and salutes the man dressed in a top hat.

‘Good morning, Sir.’

‘Good morning,’ says Lucky.

‘This man stole a quarter from my purse,’ says Penny, ‘make him give it back.’

‘Now does he look like a man who would go around stealing quarters?’ asks the cop.

… ‘I don’t care what you happen to think he looks like, I know he stole my quarter.’

The cop takes a couple of steps back and calls Penny away from the men.

‘Now you run along sister before I run you in for disturbing the peace.’

The cop forces her to ‘move along,’ but not before she retorts: ‘why you … Cossack.’

By this time, Pop has managed to tell Lucky about the theft.

Lucky says: ‘Officer, you know you had no right to speak to that little girl that way.’

‘Listen,’ says the cop, ‘guys like you pay me to protect them from screwy dames…. Why you ought to thank me for what I done!’

Here the film continues its Veblenian critique of American society. It doesn’t matter that Lucky is broke. His top hat and tails put wealth into evidence. In turn, the image of wealth provides access to power. Both the cop and Penny recognize the function of the police, to ‘protect’ the wealthy from the common lot. As her name makes clear, Penny Carrol represents the common lot, living in a world of work and workers. The film places its audience on Penny’s side, by portraying wealth as empty desire, corruption and show, and by dramatizing the power the privileged wield through their Cossacks. And the film genders inequality, demonstrating the intersection of class privilege and masculine domination. For the cop, Penny is just another ‘dame’ after a rich man’s pocket book.

When Penny storms into work at the Gordon Dancing Academy, still angry at the exchange with the cop, her boss, Mr Gordon (Eric Blore), says:

‘No wonder this school is losing money, everybody late every morning. Any more of this dilly-dallying and some of you are going to lose your jobs.’

Then to other passing instructors: ‘Yes, and that goes for you girls too.’

This brief exchange brings into the cinema the arbitrary power of management, the condescending attitude managers often had toward women workers, and the constant fear of unemployment that affected so many Depression era workers. These ‘realistic’ elements have a dual function in Swing Time: first, in contrast to Top Hat, they locate Swing Time in the here (1936) and the now (New York); second, they locate the film in the common world of a working class audience. Before Lucky and Penny join as lovers, they unite as workers. But first, they engage in collective bargaining.

The scene begins with a close shot of a man’s feet as he walks a picket line. The camera pulls back to reveal Pop and Lucky wearing sandwich boards. ‘PENNY CARROL UNFAIR TO JOHN GARNETT.’ Lucky’s slouched fedora, his grim, determined expression, and even the lighting of the shot itself evoke the image of the striker in Joe Jones’s canvas ‘We Demand’ (1934). Penny’s friend Mabel (Helen Broderick) sticks her head through the transom to say: ‘Keep up the good work boys, the public is with you.’

Penny says to Mabel: ‘How could I fall in love with a common gambler?’

‘Penny, when a man takes a little quarter and turns it into a bank roll that would choke a horse … I’d call him an uncommon gambler.’

Moments later, Mabel opens the door for the men, saying: ‘come in comrades.’ Then, ‘you’re a big success. She’s willing to arbitrate.’

Once again, in utilizing the imagery and language of labor the film offers, simultaneously, a political statement that can be read as a fashion statement, and a fashion statement that is itself political. In other words, Swing Time’s fashion statement is a claim to community. The audience it claimed for itself was an audience that understood references like ‘come in, comrade’, or ‘she’s willing to arbitrate’. True, it wasn’t only among working people that these expressions had currency, but the film already clearly articulated its class allegiance. It stands with the common lot, in the common world of work, struggle, and love; and, just as importantly, it stands against the empty desires of the leisure class.

Yet despite the imagery of protest, Lucky remains an uncommon gambler. Swing Time’s portrayal of gambling is free from the usual stigma. Lucky’s gambling isn’t a habit. His gambling is a gift, providing access to money, and, through money, to respect. Early on, Lucky connects gambling to stock speculation. And once Lucky earns 25 thousand dollars through his gambling, he’s bound to go back home and marry Margaret. Thus, the film connects gambling to the decidedly uncommon world of wealth and privilege. ¹² This connection is certified in the final shot of the film. Throwing away his lucky quarter for a mere Penny, Lucky breaks his attachment with a community of privilege in exchange for the solidarities of the common working life. Swing Time is a film for and about working class communities of solidarity emerging out of the struggles of the mid-1930s. At the same time, in its final reel, the film also defines the boundaries of this new community. Swing Time’s common workers live in a world of unspoken white privilege.

‘I now own you’: Immigrants and The Shadows of Blackness

Midway through the second act, the critique of the leisure class and the colorful use of labor rhetoric fall into the background. Instead, a different set of issues of direct concern to Swing Time’s working class audience take center stage. These themes revolve around questions of ethnic identity, racial masquerade, and the social function of blackface for a new immigrant working class community. Through the use of blackface, the common world becomes the ‘white’ world. But Swing Time’s whiteness has ambiguous contours. Some characters are on one side of the color line, some are on the other, and some are ‘inbetween’ (Roediger, 2005). And while the role of blackness seems at first simple and formulaic, Swing Time devotes its final critique to the color line by figuring swing music itself as a cultural form stolen by a white community that unconsciously trumpets its own guilty conscience.

Swing Time builds two separate worlds, one marked out by leisure class desire, the other by the desire for what is common and for a common world based in work. From the motto of the dance academy (‘To Know How to Dance is to Know How to Control Oneself’) to Penny and Lucky’s struggle to get and keep shows, dance becomes a trope for labor. Hardly surprising, then, that a film that locates itself within the common world of work, and claims the side of the working class against the leisure class, would take up themes of racial and ethnic belonging. The working class emerging during the age of the CIO was a community largely made up of immigrants (Barrett, 1992; Denning, 1998; Gutman, 1987). And within that working class community was a ‘second generation’ youth culture for whom the feeling of ‘inbetween-ness’ made the question of racial identity burn (Roediger, 2005: 177–98). In Hollywood, the psychological and social struggles of ‘second generation’ immigrants caught in a white America were repeatedly dramatized. From the first sound picture, The Jazz Singer (1928), analyzed so well by Michael Rogin (1998), to social problem films like Black Fury (1935), gangster pictures, especially Scarface (1932), to melodramas like Frank Borzage’s Mannequin (1938), second generation immigrants were portrayed as caught between old and new worlds. Some films, like Michael Curtiz’s Black Fury (1935) and Borzage’s Big City (1937), go much further, taking a stand for social justice by vividly portraying the racism and oppression experienced by immigrant workers (Cassano, 2008b, 2009b). While rarely exposed to the level of vicious racism experienced by African Americans, Asian Americans, and indigenous peoples, the racism, forms of exclusion, and racial domination these ‘new immigrants’ did experience within the normatively ‘white’ culture of the US shaped their assimilation and Americanization. For the new immigrant population, their children and grandchildren, assimilation meant accepting American values, and this Americanization simultaneously meant the acceptance of white supremacy and normative racism. As Barrett (1992), Mink (1996), Roediger (1999, 2005), Rogin (1998) and others have demonstrated, the Southern and Eastern European immigrant became ‘whiter’ to the extent she or he acknowledged the socially constructed racial boundaries that made white supremacy possible.

Both David Roediger (1999) and Michael Rogin (1998) argue that blackface minstrel performances sometimes played a unique role in the Americanization, and consequent whitening, of immigrant performers and their audience. By ‘blacking up’, Irish American minstrel performers of the 19th century affirmed their ambiguous whiteness. Every performance ended with the burnt cork wiped away, revealing a ‘white’ face. Minstrel performance was thus an assertion of white supremacy (through its parody and attack on stereotyped Black culture), and, simultaneously, an assertion of the ‘whiteness’ of the performer. Through their attack on Blacks, Irish minstrels achieved some measure of recognition from the normatively ‘white’ American community (Roediger, 1999: 133–63). Rogin finds this same process at work for second generation Southern and Eastern European immigrants in the early 20th century. The Jazz Singer (1928) portrays a racial ‘other’ (in this case, the Jewish son of a cantor) achieving fame and recognition through an appropriation of African American cultural forms (jazz) played out behind blackface. But if blackface performance was one element in the process of the whitening of non-white immigrants like the Irish and Eastern European Jews, it was never a simple racist parody. In fact, both Roediger and Rogin argue that blackface performances were shot through with ambiguities and ambivalence. Blackface performances attacked African Americans as stupid, lazy, ignorant, and wild, but at the same time celebrated the perceived excellence of African American cultural forms like music and dance. Precisely because Blacks were stereotyped as wild creatures of nature, Black cultural forms came to represent the inversion of the bourgeois values of thrift, sobriety, and self-discipline that shaped the lives of so many industrial workers. ‘Just as the minstrel stage held out the possibility that whites could be “black” for awhile but nonetheless white, it offered the possibilities that, via blackface, preindustrial joys could survive among industrial discipline’ (Roediger, 1999: 118). (On the function of ‘blackface’ performances for American working class formation, see also Lott, 1995.)

If for immigrant workers and their children, ‘whiteness’ represents a metaphor for industrial discipline, and the experience of social domination and exclusion, it is simultaneously an aspiration, a sign of acceptance. ‘Blackness’ represents rejection and exclusion, but also signifies freedom, pleasure, and life. While the deep desire for success in a white supremacist culture pulled the second and third generations toward an idealized whiteness, the accoutrements of African American culture (swing music, tap dancing, the blues) represented freedom from the constraints of industrial discipline. In Swing Time, blackface performance is the inversion of industrial discipline. And African American culture is the hidden heart whose beat makes white working class culture possible. As its very title suggests, the film posits swing as central to working class cultural self-formation, and, at the same time, it symptomatically recognizes this ‘white’ culture’s debt to African American originality.

The racial subplot begins with a love triangle. Ricardo Romero, bandleader, crooner, and Mediterranean lothario with accented English, pursues Penny. Again, a contrast with Top Hat: in the earlier film, there is an Italian suitor involved with the Ginger Rogers character. But the Italian character is a European effete and fallen aristocrat, not, as in Swing Time, an immigrant entertainer on the make. While Romero’s motivations for pursuing Penny are never explicitly articulated, they parallel Lucky’s desire for the common world and, simultaneously, resemble the racial dialectic of desire played out in so much 1930s cinema. Racial and ethnic ‘others’ pursue white lovers precisely in order to gain access to that whiteness, to be allowed into the common world (Cassano, 2008b, 2009b). And whatever Romero’s motivations, one thing is clear: he stands below Lucky in the social hierarchy. This invidious comparison emerges from another remarkable scene.

Romero refuses to play for Lucky and Penny’s dance number. But Lucky wins Romero’s contract in a card game with the gambler and gangster ‘Dice’ Raymond, another Mediterranean immigrant.

‘I wonder if you’d be kind enough to play something for Miss Carroll and myself?’ asks Lucky, ‘If you don’t mind?’

‘But I do,’ responds Romero.

‘Well, I’m afraid you’ll have to, because, you see,’ says Lucky, ‘I now own you.’

‘What do you mean you “own me”?’

‘He just won you,’ responds Penny. ‘At the gambling table.’

‘Oh, I see. Congratulations on winning such a valuable piece of property,’ responds Romero.

‘Now will you play your waltz for us?’

‘Oh, no, no, no. If you read the contract, you’ll see I don’t have to play after this hour unless I want to.’

What matters here is the language of contract and ownership. Romero is, by his own admission, a ‘valuable piece of property’. He is a kind of commodity, bound to an owner. A bond (in bondage) symbolically connects Romero to blackness. But this comparison to blackness only goes so far. Romero, like other skilled immigrant workers, has some capacity to control and direct his labor (Barrett, 1992). Through the use of popular stereotypes (the Latin lover, the dark-skinned immigrant gangster), the film marks some immigrants as unassimilated ‘others’. But to mark them as unassimilated is not the same as to mark them as Black. Indeed, the one African American character in the film is Romero’s butler (Floyd Shackelford). And his step-and-fetchit performance whitens Romero through comparison.

Romero, the crooner, and Raymond, the gangster, are not the only ‘ethnics’ portrayed in the film. Early on, Pop takes Lucky’s trousers to an immigrant tailor for mending. But that scene, played for laughs, doesn’t tell the viewer much about the film’s attitude toward the new immigrants. In fact, that attitude remains the most ambiguous aspect of the narrative precisely because Lucky’s own ethnicity is unmarked and, ultimately, ambiguous. As a modern (mass media made) man, Lucky becomes the part he plays. In this, could Lucky be the representation of a second or third generation Mediterranean immigrant? Consider, especially, Lucky’s relationship with Pop. At the very least, Pop is a foster father, but the narrative suggests more. ¹³ The audience learns Pop’s last name is Cardetti. Does this make Pop a second or third generation Italian immigrant? Not necessarily. Pop is a magician, and Swing Time’s audience would be familiar with the convention of magicians of all ethnicities adopting Italian stage names. But he calls himself ‘Cardetti’ even though his career as a magician is apparently long over. The film never resolves these ambiguities, never explains Pop’s name, never specifies the nature of his relationship with Lucky. Lucky himself has multiple identities. For one community, he is Lucky; for another, John. In both cases, ‘Garnett’ suggests a stage name. Like Penny, he’s a common gem. But is there a genealogical line from Cardetti to Garnett? From the second generation immigrant to the third generation ‘American’? The names are similar enough to suggest an ambivalent inheritance. Perhaps Lucky altered his last name for the same reason he pursued the wrong trousers: he wants a ‘good name’. All of these questions remain (centrally) obscure in the narrative, allowing the audience to imagine its own narrative substructure.

One thing is certain: John/Lucky stands between two communities. By the end of the film, his inbetween-ness will be resolved in favor of the common world. But only after Lucky’s climatic ‘tribute’ to Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson danced in blackface. Before the dance sequence, Penny steals away to Lucky’s dressing room, and out of camera shot, they kiss. The only evidence of this off-camera escapade, lipstick traces on Lucky’s face. In a sense, the kiss is an initiation ritual: through it, Lucky enters into a new community. His shift in identity is solidified by a mark, a ritual tattoo of sorts – the lipstick stain. And with the stain still visible, Lucky sits down in front of his mirror, sings ‘old Bojangles of Harlem’, and begins to apply the burnt cork. Penny’s lipstick merges with the cork, establishing a kind of metonymy in which the entry into the common world marked by the lipstick traces becomes the entry into a white community marked by performance in blackface.

But the function of blackface in Swing Time is more complex still. True, through this assumption of a racist disguise, Lucky affiliates with the common world (now an unambiguously ‘white’ world) and rejects the leisure class. The dance sequence that follows, however, reveals another connection between the white world celebrated by Swing Time and the blackness the film both romances and attacks. Without Black culture, without swing music, both the film and the community it imagines would be impossible. The culture celebrated by Swing Time is working class culture, but also Black culture, or at least a whitened version of Black culture. Lucky and Penny’s own labor depends in turn upon a fundamental cultural appropriation, upon theft (Lott 1995). But while African American culture is figured as part of the American vernacular, African Americans themselves remain excluded from the ‘common lot’. Lucky’s tribute to Bill Robinson gives visible form to this contradictory figuration that simultaneously excludes and (symptomatically) includes. Through his blackface dance, Lucky shows the audience that the common white world he’s joined depends upon and exploits the shadows of blackness.

The number begins with a full orchestra playing, and two rows of dancers, half dressed in black, half in white, tapping and singing. The curtain opens to reveal a huge black face, with bowler hat, thick red lips, and a polka dot bow tie. The minstrel face then dissolves into huge shoes, and the women dancers take hold of enormous phallic legs, separating them to reveal Lucky in stripped suit and blackface, his arms extended in a classic minstrel pose. At first Lucky dances to orchestral accompaniment with the chorus of women, but the orchestra fades and eventually the chorus line disappears. A solo stride piano plays as Lucky dances alone, with three huge shadows in the background. For most of the sequence, the huge shadows are mirrors, accurately reflecting Lucky’s foreground dance. But at one point, the shadows break free and begin to dance on their own. A dance contest between Lucky and the shadows ensues. When Lucky seems to win the contest, the shadows wave him off in disgust and leave.

Following Marshall Berman, Dave Roediger shows the connection between the cinematic ‘shadow’ and blackness in The Jazz Singer.

In the film, Yudelson the ‘kibitzer’ from the ghetto falters on seeing Jakie in blackface. ‘Jakie, this ain’t you,’ he begins, before turning to comment to the audience, ‘It talks like Jakie, but it looks like his shadow.’ In the shooting script, Yudelson’s lines ended instead with, ‘but it looks like a nigger’. (Roediger, 2005: 184)

Just as in The Jazz Singer, the shadows here are blackness, the image of Bill Robinson transformed into a symbol of Black culture itself. And while Lucky’s dance celebrates white supremacy – after all, he beats his shadows – it also signifies a remarkable admission, an understanding that the cultural forms that make the common world possible are stolen.

Finally, the sequence marks blackness as resistance to industrial discipline. The shadows signify the literal loss of control, but in loss of control there is symbolic victory. When the shadows walk away in disgust, they walk away from the white world of industrial discipline symbolized by the Gordon Dance School motto, ‘To Know How to Dance is to Know How to Control Oneself’. ¹⁴ This sequence illustrates the meaning of those words. After all, these three parts of Lucky’s ‘self’ refuse his control and walk away. The blackness at the heart of swing is, indeed, the other of industrial discipline: that which refuses to be subjected to control. To the extent that the working class culture represented by the film refuses to be subjected to the scheme of life imposed by the leisure class in the first reels, cultural resistance (and class struggle) is figured as Black. Jazz becomes a symbol of a new working class culture. And, in his blackface, Lucky not only affirms white supremacy, but celebrates the resistance of new cultures of solidarity (Fantasia, 1988).

Rather than overturning white supremacy, however, Swing Time symptomatically reveals its own guilty conscience in one final sequence. After breaking his engagement to Margaret, Lucky learns that Penny plans to marry Romero. He and Pop manage to prevent the union through the same trick that set the narrative in motion. Finding a Squire magazine in Romero’s dressing room, Lucky pencils in cuffs and convinces Romero that he’s got the wrong trousers. Later, when Romero appears at the wedding, and after Lucky’s already won his prized Penny, the crooner is wearing trousers two sizes too big. While Romero looks ridiculous, beside him stands his Black manservant, wearing an overcoat, but no trousers. Pop, Penny, Mabel, and Lucky break out laughing. Romero may not have gotten Penny, but he joins in the laughter, whitened by his Black servant’s humiliation. Most important, when Romero appropriates his Black worker’s trousers, he echoes and amplifies the message of Lucky’s blackface dance. A successful bandleader and composer of music in ‘swing time’, Romero achieves status (becomes whiter) by standing on the back of Black culture.

Conclusion

In January of 1936, an item appeared on the front page of daily Variety under the heading: ‘Esquire’s Show-Cause Order in Astaire’s $25,000 Damage Suit’: ‘“Esquire” magazine has been given until Thursday to show cause why it should not be restrained from using the photo of Fred Astaire in a jewelry advertisement in the January issue’. The ad, for ‘Top Hat Evening Jewelry as inspired by Fred Astaire’, irritated the actor enough that he filed suit against Esquire, the jewelry manufacturer, and the advertising firm. Apparently understanding the power of the mass media to shape public perception and desire, he argued: ‘I am being exposed to public ridicule and contempt’ (Variety, 29 January 1936). This event only has historical significance because George Stevens and Astaire take a kind of wry revenge on Esquire early in Swing Time. Lucky is captured by the image from Squire magazine, and his imagined insufficiency (‘no cuffs’) is nothing other than an imagined ‘public ridicule and contempt’. Indeed, Astaire’s suit anticipates the $25,000 price Lucky has to pay for Margaret. ¹⁵ Swing Time uses this reference to the world beyond the film as an anchor in the present. The joke is yet another meta-realistic marker, trumpeting the ‘relevance’ of the picture that’s about to unwind. And the joke focuses the audience upon the power of images circulated by mass media.

Through the sequence involving Squire magazine, Swing Time reflects upon cinema’s social function. The unmistakable references to Top Hat in the ad further suggest the magazine, as one form of the mass media, represents the double of another form, cinema. They both function in similar ways to shape social desires and norms. At the same time, in narrative and thematic terms, Swing Time sets itself in conscious opposition to Top Hat. ¹⁶

Yet the film also takes refuge in ambiguities, the most salient having to do with the ‘race question’. By 1936, second and third generation immigrants made up much of the working class, and thus much of Swing Time’s audience. Swing Time understands the power of the mass media image, and thus understands that through its representations of race, the film participates in generating dominant images of immigrants and African Americans. At the same time, the film subverts the immigrant stereotypes it employs (the Gangster, the Lothario) by suggesting, through Pop Cardetti, that ethnic identity itself changes over time, that ethnics can Americanize, and, thus, whiten. The question of ‘blackness’ is more complicated. But here the film goes beyond other portrayals of the period by inserting its minstrel routine within an ironic context. That irony begins with the picture’s title itself. The film appropriates ‘swing’ music to use as a symbol for (white) working class culture. But, as the audience understood, this cultural form came from Blacks. Thus the film addresses the central paradox at its heart, the near total absence of Black performers in a movie about swing, with Astaire’s ‘tribute’ to Bojangles Robinson. The ‘tribute’ announces swing’s lineage and the film’s debt. When placed in context beside the final scene of the film, both the shadow dance and the stolen trousers signify an acknowledgement of the crime at the heart of (white) working class culture. In cinematic language, the film prefigures Walter Benjamin’s 1940 remark: ‘There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism’ (2003: 392).

Let me return, then, to ‘last year’s trousers’. From the beginning of the picture, these trousers are a figure for the power of mass media representations to shape perception. When the film ends with a Black man standing without his trousers, ‘exposed to public ridicule and contempt’, it offers an allegorical analysis of the representation of blackness in the media. Swing Time both participates in the humiliation and subordination of Blacks, and critiques the very representations of blackness it puts on display. In this sense, both participating in racial domination and recognizing its injustice, Swing Time approaches the experience of its working class audience, many of whom participated in white supremacy while understanding, perhaps from bitter personal experience, its injustice.