The Gilded cage: When luxury cinema replaces the communal ideal of the theater

“ Vanity is one source of happiness, but it does not suffice to recompense us for the absence of all others. In leaving England, I leave the scene of everlasting weariness. I am the victim of a feeling of sameness, and I look with hope to the prospect of change.”
“Poor thing!” said the old philosopher, gazing mournfully on a creature who, so resplendent with advantages, yet felt the crumpled rose-leaf more than the luxury of the couch. “Wherever you go the same polished society will present to you the same monotony. All courts are alike: men have change in action ”

“ The stateliness of the castles and palaces where nobles dwell; the luxury of the details; the constantly maintained sumptuousness of the furniture; the “atmosphere” in which the fortunate owner of landed estates (a rich man before he was born) lives and moves easily and without friction; the habit of mind which never descends to calculate the petty workaday gains of existence; the leisure; the higher education attainable at a much earlier age ”

“ We must recollect, that as the greatness of the state was that of the democracy, so its treasures were the property of the free population. It was the people who were rich; and according to all the notions of political economy in that day, the people desired practically to enjoy their own opulence. Thus was introduced the principal of payment for service, and thus was sanctioned and legalized the right of a common admission to spectacles, the principal cost of which was defrayed from common property. ”

“ In considering the theater as one of the properest instruments for furthering the development of society and rendering men more virtuous and more enlightened, you will, I am sure, not allow it to become solely an object of financial speculation, but make it a national enterprise. ”

“ In winter the warm salon, always well-lighted with wax candles, was well-filled with the richest people of Soulanges, who paid for the good liqueurs and the fine wines which came from dear mistress’s cellars, with flatteries to their hostess. These visitors and their wives had a life-interest, as it were, in this luxury; which was to them a saving of lights and fuel. Thus it came to pass that in a circuit of fifteen miles and even as far as Ville-aux-Fayes, every voice was ready to declare: “Madame Soudry does the honors admirably. She keeps open house; every one enjoys her salon ”

“ The dull monotony of idle social functions, shopping and amusement no less than that of sedentary work and an asexual life, impels to a simulated struggle—a theatrical performance, the parts of which are studied from the historical romances of revolution. Each man, woman and child in the world must find the wherewithal for living, food, raiment, warmth and housing, or must die or get some other to find it for him. ”

“ Let the general public but once show a determined preference for sanitary conditions and surroundings in theaters and abandon visits to ill-kept theaters, and I venture to predict that the necessary reforms in sanitation will soon be introduced, at least in the better class of playhouses. In the cheaper theaters, concert and amusement halls, houses with "continuous" shows, variety theaters, etc., sanitation is even more urgently required, and may be readily enforced by a few visits and peremptory orders from the Health Board. ”

“ Improved economic conditions have produced vaster accumulations of wealth than the world ever saw before, and in doing so have brought the spectacle of luxury before the eyes of the multitude in a manner, and with a frequency, only too well fitted to produce envy and unrest. ”

“ Hideous, unrestrained speculation which, year after year, changes the uniform level of storeys, compresses a whole apartment into the space of what used to be a salon, and wages war upon gardens, will infallibly react on Parisian manners and morals. We shall soon be forced to live more without than within. Our sacred private life, the freedom and liberty of home, where will they be?—reserved for those who can muster fifty thousand francs a year! ”

“ Re-baptize the bourgeois theater as the People's Theater! That is all! And so nothing has been changed; art alone is to remain stationary amid an ever-changing society; we are forever condemned to adhere to a lifeless ideal, to a theater whose thoughts, style, acting, possess nothing vital, to the degenerate tradition of a house of mummers! ”

“ But the chief obstacle will always lie in the very nature of such a theatre—a theatre of luxury and vanity, created for a set of snobs, whose least interest is the music, who have not enough intellect to create a fashion, but who servilely follow every fashion after it is thirty years old. Such a theatre no longer counts in the history of French music ”

“ How little is requisite to supply the necessities of nature? And in a view to pleasure, what comparison between the unbought satisfaction of conversation, society, study, even health and the common beauties of nature, but above all the peaceful reflection on one's own conduct; what comparison, I say, between these and the feverish, empty amusements of luxury and expense? These natural pleasures, indeed, are really without price; both because they are below all price in their attainment, and above it in their enjoyment. ”

“ It is only necessary to take a villa at Newport and spend about one hundred thousand dollars in the course of the season. The walls of the city will fall down flat if the golden trumpet blows but mildly. And then, there they are—right in the middle of the champagne, clambakes and everything else!—invited to sit with the choicest of America's nobility on golden chairs—supplied from New York at one dollar per—and to dance to the strains of the most expensive music amid the subdued popping of distant corks. ”

“ The political arguments against luxury bear chiefly upon the two points that it increases the separation between the classes of the population, and makes it more marked; and that it enervates man and makes civilized populations more easily subjects for spoliation by barbarians. ”

“ The simple acceptation of the term, was the most proper for explaining the political effects of extraordinary consumption. I cannot however deny, that the wordword luxury commonly conveys a more complex idea; and did I take no notice of this circumstance, it might be thought that I had purposely restrained a general term to a particular acceptation, in order to lead to error, and to suppress the vicious influence of modern oeconomy over the minds of mankind; which influence, if vicious, cannot fail to affect even their political happiness. ”

“ A person may consume great quantities of superfluity from a principle of ostentation, or even with a political view to encourage industry; him I call luxurious. Sensuality may be indulged in a cottage, as well as in a palace; and excess is purely relative to circumstances. Luxury, therefore, as well as sensuality, or any other passion, may be carried to excess, and so become vicious. Now excess in consumption is vicious in proportion as it affects our moral, physical, domestic, or political interests ”

“ The term luxury, in referring to the state of society before the Revolution, meant the lavish expenditure of wealth by the rich to gratify a refined sensualism, while the masses of the people were suffering lack of the primary necessities. ”

“ But might not the profit takers have devised some way of getting rid of the surplus more intelligent than mere competition to displace one another, and more consistent with humane feeling than wasting wealth upon refinements of sensual indulgence in the presence of a needy multitude? ”

“ What does the decay of societies through luxury—that staple and by no means unreal theme of moralizing historians—mean, if not the corruption that comes of divorcing culture from service? Knowledge grows, art develops, wealth increases ”

“ The odious and disgusting aristocracy of wealth is built upon the ruins of all that is good in chivalry or republicanism; and luxury is the forerunner of a barbarism scarce capable of cure. ”

“ Foreign wines, I shall suppose, become alamode, as a part of the luxury of an elegant table. A statesman, by his example, may discourage this, and introduce many other articles of expence in entertainments sufficient to compensate it. The furniture of apartments may be rendred more magnificent, ornaments of the side board, decoration of deserts, new amusements immediately after dinner might be introduced, which would have an air of refinement and delicacy. ”

“ Whenever the rich prepare a solemn and popular entertainment; 44 whenever they celebrate, with profuse and pernicious luxury, their private banquets; the choice of the guests is the subject of anxious deliberation. The modest, the sober, and the learned, are seldom preferred; and the nomenclators, who are commonly swayed by interested motives, have the address to insert, in the list of invitations, the obscure names of the most worthless of mankind. But the frequent and familiar companions of the great, are those parasites, who practise the most useful of all arts, the art of flattery ”

“ If he still has resolution to persevere, he is gradually numbered in the train of dependants, and obtains the permission to pay his assiduous and unprofitable court to a haughty patron, incapable of gratitude or friendship; who scarcely deigns to remark his presence, his departure, or his return. Whenever the rich prepare a solemn and popular entertainment; 44 whenever they celebrate, with profuse and pernicious luxury, their private banquets; the choice of the guests is the subject of anxious deliberation. The modest, the sober, and the learned, are seldom preferred ”

“ We should inquire if the taste for novelty and change that characterizes luxury does not contribute to keep the general spirit of a society more on the alert, more ready to institute better industrial conditions and make discoveries and improvements; and if, on the other hand, a society always held down to the same kind of monotonous, insipid life would be as productive, even in agriculture and the common arts, as another, excited to incessant activity by luxurious tastes. ”

“ Our great Houses tend also to the refinement of national taste; they have their show places, their picture galleries, their beautiful grounds. The humblest drawing-rooms owe an elegance or comfort, the smallest garden a flower or esculent, to the importations which luxury borrowed from abroad, or the inventions it stimulated at home, for the original benefits of great Houses. Having a fair share of such merits, in common with other great Houses, the House of Vipont was not without good qualities peculiar to itself. ”

“ After reforming the luxury, he assigned two patrimonial estates to supply the decent plenty, of the Imperial table: the contributions of the subject were reserved for his defence; and the residue was employed in the embellishment of the capital and provinces. A taste for building, however costly, may deserve some praise and much excuse: from thence industry is fed, art is encouraged, and some object is attained of public emolument or pleasure: the use of a road, an aqueduct, or a hospital, is obvious and solid ”

“ Very different is the luxury of civilized, intelligent, and thoughtful people, which looks more to the comfortable or to elegance and artistic enjoyment than to magnificence and sumptuousness. It includes and penetrates the whole life, and extends in different degrees over all classes of the people. ”

“ Prices are risen enormously, house-rent doubled within the last five or six years; all articles of luxury are very much dearer; the very gloves I wear cost twenty per cent more than I used to pay for gloves of the same quality. How the people we meet live, and live so well, is an enigma that would defy AEdipus if AEdipus were not a Parisian. But the main explanation is this: speculation and commerce, with the facilities given to all investments, have really opened more numerous and more rapid ways to fortune than were known a few years ago. ”

“ Might have distinguished himself in literature or at the bar, but his parents died fearfully poor; and some distant relations in commerce took charge of him, and devoted his talents to the 'Bourse.' Seven years ago he lived in a single chamber, 'au quatrieme,' near the Luxembourg. He has now a hotel, not large but charming, in the Champs Elysees, worth at least six hundred thousand francs. Nor has he made his own fortune alone, but that of many others; some of birth as high as your own. He has the genius of riches, and knocks off a million as a poet does an ode, by the force of inspiration. ”

“ The wide-spreading social evils which everywhere oppress men amid an advancing civilization spring from a great primary wrong—the appropriation, as the exclusive property of some men, of the land on which and from which all must live. From this fundamental injustice flow all the injustices which distort and endanger modern development, which condemn the producer of wealth to339 poverty and pamper the non-producer in luxury, which rear the tenement house with the palace, plant the brothel behind the church, and compel us to build prisons as we open new schools. ”

“ The accumulation of gold in the treasury of private individuals, says Socrates, in the Republic, is the ruin of democracy. They invent illegal modes of expenditure; and what do they or their wives care about the law?
"And then one, seeing another's display, proposes to rival him, and thus the whole body of citizens acquires a similar character.
"After that they get on in a trade, and the more they think of making a fortune, the less they think of virtue; for when riches and virtue are placed together in the balance, the one always rises as the other falls. ”

“ But it will be ostracized from our art, as something tiresome and absurd. Our People's Theater is led to seek by force of circumstances the freedom of the Greek theater. Broad action, faces with elementary and conventional features, but vigorously molded; the basic passions, throbbing to simple but forceful rhythm: frescoes, not easel-paintings; symphonies, not chamber music—a monumental art for the people, and by the people. ”

“ One of the first cares of the founders of any new people's theater should be the study of the neighborhood in which they plan to begin, and the hall in which the plays are to be performed. In a city the size of Paris, with its manifold complexities, there is as much difference between one neighborhood and another as between two provinces. I do not mean that one cannot change one's public; on the contrary, I think that this is the purpose of all true art; art, that is, that refuses to pander to the public. ”

“ And there were portraits of lovers, distinguished gentlemen, who presided in the houses of their former mistresses, and helped them in their nefarious business. Society women were thieves. The men were bawds, the girls were Lesbian. And all these things happened in the highest society: the society of rich people—the only society that mattered. For that made it possible to offer the patrons of the theater damaged goods under cover of the delights of luxury. ”

“ Art would have everything to gain if it cast aside this childish luxury to which it has become enslaved, that is valueless except to those whose brains are withered and people who can in no wise feel the true emotions of art. Certain performances given by the Œuvre des Trente ans de Théâtre have very easily done without stage-settings; and we know that rehearsals without costumes and scenery have frequently produced an impression a hundred times more profound and lasting than the most elaborately contrived production. ”

“ It will be the task of the architects of the future People's Theater to see that cheap seats are not instruments of inquisitorial torture. It will be the task of the dramatists to see that their works produce joy, and not sadness and boredom. The greatest vanity or else downright stupidity are the only excuses for offering the people the latest products of a decadent art, which produces evil effects sometimes even on the minds of the torpid. ”

“ There are two other parts of the motion picture industry, just as big, and just as important, as production.
One of them is selling or renting the films to the theater-owners who project them on the screens of their movie-palaces the world over. This is known as the distributing end of the business. There are great nation-wide organizations, sometimes embracing a number of associated producing companies, that are formed for the purpose of carrying it on. ”

“ Another thing: besides advertising, the distributing companies can reach exhibitors through salesmen.
In the small town, or the big city, where you have your theater, we will say, a movie salesman visits you. He is a persuasive talker, and convinces you that if you run the latest film of his company, you will “make a clean-up.” So you sign up for it, and pay perhaps a third of the rental in advance.
144
Naturally, each distributing company tries to get the best salesmen it can, even if it has to pay salaries of hundreds of dollars a week for them. ”

“ In three days' time, if all goes well, you can, if you choose, make a man's life a curse to him by putting thirty jokes at his expense in print at the rate of three a day; you can, if you choose, draw a revenue of pleasure from the actresses at your theatres; you can wreck a good play and send all Paris running after a bad one. If Dauriat declines to pay you for your Marguerites, you can make him come to you, and meekly and humbly implore you to take two thousand francs for them. ”

“ When the film is developed and a print made for exhibition, it is run through the projecting machine of a theater: if it were run at the rate of a foot a second, sixty feet a minute, the figures on the screen would move just as fast as they did in real life when the picture was taken—no faster and no slower.
But the custom has grown up of running film through the projecting machines faster than the film was run through the camera. Instead of being run sixty feet a minute, it is usually clicked along at the rate of seventy feet or more a minute. ”

“ So that on the screen everything happens about one-fifth faster than it did in real life, and frequently even faster than that—much faster, since more and more there is a tendency to “speed up” still further, until the feet of marching men in the news reels almost dance along the street, and their knees snap back and forth like mad.
Of course, you see more in a minute, watching26 in a theater where film is run through the projection machine so fast—but what you see is distorted, instead of being quite so much of the real thing, as would be the case if it were run more slowly. ”

“ When a ticket to a theater or concert is sold and bought, can the temporary right to a seat, or the brief sense of pleasure which the purchaser receives in return, and which he can not perpetuate without renewed buying, and can not transfer to another person, be entitled to be called property? "When socialists and communists," says Professor Macleod, "wish to destroy property, it is not the material things they wish to destroy, but the exclusive right which private persons have in them." ”

“ In the Minister's hotel Lucien could see the differences between the great world and that other world beyond the pale in which he had lately been living. There was no sort of resemblance between the two kinds of splendor, no single point in common. The loftiness and disposition of the rooms in one of the handsomest houses in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, the ancient gilding, the breadth of decorative style, the subdued richness of the accessories, all this was strange and new to him; but Lucien had learned very quickly to take luxury for granted, and he showed no surprise. ”

“ And nothing has seemed to me more minatory for the future of our empire than the decay—for there is some decay—of home life amongst us. The affluent classes in great numbers voluntarily resign its charms for the luxurious indulgence of the club and restaurant, and the round of pleasure, as it is called; and the poor, through no fault of their own, are in large numbers deprived of them, for it is impossible for the tender associations of the home to evolve in a temporary burrow in a town warren. ”

“ We stand before a palace-like structure, fronting on Fifth Avenue, whose imposing exterior scarcely gives an adequate idea of the interior magnificence. But few homes, even in that aristocratic quarter, are more sumptuously furnished. Yet it would be difficult to say how far all this splendor contributes to the happiness of its owner. Happiness is quite independent of wealth, and what wealth can procure. ”

“ IX It was a dinner party in one of the up-town houses—palaces—that begin to repeat in size, spaciousness of apartments, and decoration the splendor of the Medicean merchant princes. It is the penalty that we pay for the freedom of republican opportunity that some must be very rich. This is the logical outcome of the open chance for everybody to be rich —and it is the surest way to distinction. In a free country the course must be run, and it is by the accumulation of great wealth that one can get beyond anxiety, and be at liberty to indulge in republican simplicity. ”

“ I cannot sufficiently celebrate the glorious liberty that reigns in the public libraries of the twentieth century as compared with the intolerable management of those of the nineteenth century, in which the books were jealously railed away from the people, and obtainable only at an expenditure of time and red tape calculated to discourage any ordinary taste for literature. ”

“ But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products, that is based on class antagonism, on the exploitation of the many by the few. ”

“ We cannot pretend that we do not see the armed policeman who marches up and down beneath our windows to guarantee our security while we eat our luxurious dinner, or look at the new piece at the theater, or that we are unaware of the existence of the soldiers who will make their appearance with guns and cartridges directly our property is attacked.
We know very well that we are only allowed to go on eating our dinner, to finish seeing the new play, or to enjoy to the end the ball, the Christmas fete, the promenade, the races or, the hunt, thanks to the policeman's revolver or the soldier's rifle, which will shoot down the famished outcast who has been robbed of his share, and who looks round the corner with covetous eyes at our pleasures, ready to interrupt them instantly, were not the policeman and the soldier there prepared to run up at our first call for help. ”

“ Under our system of equal sharing, the wealth of a community is freely and equally distributed among its members as is the blood in a healthy body. But when, as under the old system, that wealth was concentrated in the hands of a portion of the community, it lost its vitalizing quality, as does the blood when congested in particular organs, and like that becomes an active poison, to be got rid of at any cost. Luxury in this way might be called an ulcer, which must be kept open if the profit system was to continue on any terms. ”

“ How will the remaining portion of the community like to have the amusements that shall be permitted to them regulated by the religious and moral sentiments of the stricter Calvinists and Methodists? Would they not, with considerable peremptoriness, desire these intrusively pious members of society to mind their own business? This is precisely what should be said to every government and every public, who have the pretension that no person shall enjoy any pleasure which they think wrong. ”