Hollywood Intellect

By (author) James D. Bloom

Hardback - £93.00

Publication date:

10 September 2009

Length of book:

254 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9780739129234

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.
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.