Hollywood Intellect takes off from the wide-spread hand-wringing over the fate or disappearance of so-called public intellectuals. An account of the title phenomenon, Hollywood Intellect challenges assumptions on which such discussions have rested. James D. Bloom argues that such assumptions are the result of misleading inattention to the intellectual work that mass culture performs.
Much of America's influential intellectual work has come out of Hollywood, which has long helped shape America's intellectual agenda. Bloom shows how Hollywood movies often do intellectual work as ambitious as the intellectual work in "art films," poems and novels, museums and erudite quarterlies. Hollywood Intellect prompts its readers to reflect on the impact of a variety of Hollywood movies with some of the same assumptions, expectations, and questions customarily applied to literary writing. Hollywood Intellect also illustrates how, in examining the emergence of Hollywood and stardom in general as shapers of the public mind, some of our most renowned poets and novelists enriched our experience of mass entertainment and of elite culture. Drawing on a range of literary works and movies, as well as on the careers of both Hollywood and literary celebrities, Bloom documents how Hollywood regulates curiosity, arbitrates civilization, construes and probes stardom, polices genre, and shapes our language.
Industry Reviews
James D. Bloom has written a stimulating and important account of Hollywood and its history, showing how movies think, and think in systematic and complex ways. Rather than mirrors on the world or images of ourselves, movies, especially classic Hollywood movies, create sites of reflection and dispute about the very things they seem only to describe-wealth, power, glamor, and all the idealizations to which human desire succumbs. Buttressed by a very considerable use of star biography and studio history, Bloom's argument is neither speculative nor nebulous. It is specific, and it is deadly-it shows how implicated we all are in the kind of critical thinking that the School of Hollywood has taught us unawares. -- Perry Meisel, New York University
James Bloom is an incomparable guide to-and peacemaker between-the high and the low in American culture. In Hollywood Intellect, he gives us a breathtakingly comprehensive vision of what the movies really have in mind. Bloom's frame of reference is wider than Cinerama. -- James Kaplan, author of Two Guys From Verona and co-author, with Jerry Lewis, of Dean & Me?A Love Story
Just when I thought that serious, enlightening criticism was dead, along comes James Bloom's Hollywood Intellect to help me see poetry, poets, movies, movie-makers, American culture-and myself-in a new illuminating way. Poetry and movies? Who would have thought it? Tarzan, Shirley Temple, and John Milton all in the same book? But that's the wonderful thing about fine minds at work on old subects-they make us see things differently. -- Alan Cheuse, George Mason University
