The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part I: Filters
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M. Christine Boyer
The movie captured the ethos of the Depression years. Its opening
coincided with the inauguration of Franklin D. Roosevelt as president; opportunistically,
Warner Brothers advertised the film with the slogan “Inaugurating
a New Deal in Entertainment.” 13 Upon taking office Roosevelt
said, “If I have read the temper of our people correctly, we now realize as we
have never realized before our interdependence. ... If we are to go forward,
we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good
of a common discipline.” 14 Cooperation was the new deal, and Peggy Sawyer,
the heroine of the movie, embodies this new sense: she works hard, resists
temptation, and gets her break, but she does so as a cog in a vast machine,
cooperatively following orders.
Commenting on Americanism and Fordism in the 1920s and
1930s, Gramsci noted that
American industrialists are concerned to maintain the continuity
of the physical and muscular-nervous efficiency of the worker. It is
in their interests to have a stable skilled labor force, a permanently
well-adjusted complex, because the human complex (the collective
worker) of an enterprise is also a machine which cannot, without
considerable loss, be taken to pieces too often and renewed with
single new parts. 15
The New Deal in Entertainment was a lullaby on Broadway, a dreamworld
of escape from the repetitions and fragmentations of the conveyor belt and
the assembly line. Sergei Eisenstein noted the same mechanism of escape in
the animated cartoons of Disney in the 1930s, labeling them compensation
for the suffering and the unfortunate whose lives were graphed by the cent
and the dollar and divided up into squares:
Grey squares of city blocks. Grey prison cells of city streets. Grey
faces of endless street crowds. The grey, empty eyes of those who are
forever at the mercy of a pitiless procession of laws, not of their own
making, laws that divide up the soul, feelings, thoughts, just as the
carcasses of pigs are dismembered by the conveyor belts of Chicago
slaughter houses, and the separate pieces of cars are assembled into
mechanical organisms by Ford’s conveyor belts. 16
But now, as the global economy shifts and turns, information or
data processing has replaced the production of goods; the computer stands
in for the machine; and leisure time, not work time, is on the rise. Thus
Americanism has turned into consumerism, transforming the landscape of
cities into new imagescapes for the display of commodities, while leisure time
has been utilized to stitch the worker into a commodified network of plea-