Grand Hotel and Hollywood Today

Looking back on the Golden Age of Hollywood classic Grand Hotel I have been struck by how here we had a major studio (MGM) base a major feature film on source material ultimately derived from a fairly recent Austrian novel (Vicki Baum's People in a Hotel) while keeping its German characters and German setting rather than Americanizing them--then went on to have a box office hit and a Big Picture winner, with, so far as I can tell, no one thinking anything about the fact, perhaps not so surprisingly given that the year before the Big Picture winner had been based on another then-recent German-language novel, Eric Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front. Meanwhile a couple of years later we got Hollywood's take on (German) Hans Fallada's story of a German clerk and his wife struggling to survive hard times as their country sinks into the Great Depression, Little Man, What Now?

In discussing this I do not want to downplay Germany's exceptional position at this time as an economic player (greater than it has ever been since), or the extent to which it was more than it would be afterward at the forefront in world culture, or the cultural connections between America and Germany generally, and Hollywood and Germany particularly. (One should remember that twice as many Americans can trace their ancestry to Germany as can trace it to England, and the arrival of many of these in America had then been much more recent, as seen in the way baby names like "Herbert" and "Bertha" were far more popular, with all that meant for familiarity with the language, the culture, feeling toward it.) All in all, it was a striking testimony to an openness on the part of Hollywood, and its American audience, to tales of other people and places, in Grand Hotel or Little Man, What Now?, quotidian tales of contemporary life such as we have not seen since, while All Quiet on the Western Front is still more remarkable as an anti-militaristic film whose story was told from the viewpoint of soldiers of a country that the U.S. had fought--and frankly, demonized--a scarce decade later, as it put the enemy front and center while treating those soldiers sympathetically and empathetically as human beings. (Can you imagine Hollywood making a movie which treated a recent, or even not so recent, enemy the same way? Certainly with any enemy the U.S. fought a war against since 1945?) And the tendency did, in respects, extend beyond Germany and even "the West," to go by the Hollywood version of The Good Earth. A novel by an American (Pearl S. Buck), adapted by Americans, for American viewers, this film, however much some may find it problematic today for these respects, could not have been the critical and commercial success that it was without American viewers having been capable of taking an interest in the lives of characters from a rural China even more remote to their experience.

By contrast with the Hollywood that made such films, and the American audience that saw them (for all their undeniable prejudices and other limitations) today's American film industry and audience seem a good deal less cosmopolitan than they were in that earlier era, less open to and interested of tales by and of other peoples and places. I will not presume to explain the whole development, but it seems to me plausible to think of the obsession with "relatability" as a condition of capturing and holding the interest of people seems relevant. The demand for what is relatable is a demand for what is personally familiar from the standpoint of one's limited life experience--and a tendency to coldness toward what is not immediately recognizable as familiar. There is nothing new in the desire for relatability, but that it should be the sin qua non that it is today implies at the same time the weakening or absence of a great many other things. An appreciation for the existence of a common humanity. An interest in what is not relatable, what is different, precisely because it is different. And implicit in that is a narrowing of sympathy and empathy, a stunting of the imagination, a decline of curiosity about the world and a greater self-centeredness. It all seems to me to be in line with the decline of a literacy that developed the imaginative and empathetic faculties (it may be telling that the films I mentioned here all had their origin in books), and the sense of being overwhelmed by the stresses of a decaying social order, and the tribalism that is so much a part of the epoch with all the mean-spirited Othering that is part and parcel of it, and makes of the rhetoric of "diversity" not respect for the variety of life and humanity but a cynical demand for "more" for one's own group. And altogether both cause and effect are not simply unfortunate, but exactly the opposite of what the world needs right now.