Global History of Performance Media: Fuckn A’ I gotta do EVERYTHING?

Just goddamit this is NOT ROCKET SCINCE. Every fucking idiot should know this. But apparently not. Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em:

I: The earliest Western drama, going back to the Ancient Greeks, was defined by a binary between Tragedy and Comedy. But even by Shakespeare, who did write tragedy and comedy, you can see people growing skeptical of the distinction. He has pathos in the comedies, and people in the tragedies tell jokes. From what we understand of Shakespeare, the pressure to create works with more elements was economic and not artistic: the guy’s who owned the Globe wanted to be able to sell seats to people who were worried that Hamlet would be too much of a ‘downer’ AND people who thought that the frivolity of Twelfth Night was beneath them.

Serious Western drama persisted, was less concerned with a distinction between tragedy and comedy, and has not really had an effect on culture since maybe the mid nineteenth century. Obviously, people kept on writing plays, but they have all been some combination of obscure (Oscar Wilde, Tom Stoppard, David Mammet) or bad (Eugene O’Niel is the goddam devil), and really have not had any influence that is worth talking about in comparison with the stuff coming up. 

II: What happened on Western stages that MATTERED was vaudeville. The thing about vaudeville is that it was, on every level, utter trash. The audiences, the acts, EVERYTHING about vaudeville was garbage. This was never a secret: vaudeville performers were the subject of a certain amount of prejudice simply for being vaudeville performers. In many instances they had it coming. Merely going to see a vaudeville show said something about you, although what this was exactly is hard to understand in 2024. But it was a type of performance that could change who an audience member was to the people around them. Imagine someone asked what they did last night and they casually respond that they had been at either a strip club or a monster truck rally; depending on where and between whom the conversation is happening it could be either perfectly normal or things are about to get deeply weird. 

A) one significance of this is that vaudeville 1) is not remembered well and does not come up very often and 2) when it does come up, it is frequently in the context of taking a bold stand against the prejudice against vaudeville performers. 

a) plot line that has outlived vaudeville: A wants to marry B, who is, or has been, a vaudeville performer, but A’s family will not allow it. The happy resolution is that they get married and the prejudice against vaudevillians is revealed to be silly. Lost in the shuffle of the realization that it is ok to marry a vaudevillian is the fact that vaudeville was actually profoundly awful. 

B) Vaudeville WAS (as far as the sources*** can show) truly terrible. The acts varied wildly in terms of talent and rested largely on crude humor, titillation, ham-fisted melodrama, and racist stereotypes. It was all driven by an utter contempt for the audience’s taste and sophistication; there was a reason for this-- sources indicate that the average vaudeville audience was truly contemptible. Whenever the opportunity presented, the performers and mangers exploited each other financially, sexually and any other ways they could come up with.

C) In that transformative art emerged from the vaudeville circuit, it was often by accident. There was a young man named Julius who mostly impersonated Al Joleson while backed by a band that included his older brothers. Once the rest of the band did not show up and so, out of desperation because he had to perform something, Groucho did a more comic impersonation of Joleson while Chico and Harpo hit each other in the background. The Marx brothers never looked back.

[another version of the story is that their act was invented when they were doing their milquetoast Joleson impersonation in Texas, and mule wondered into the theater and got a better reaction than the Brothers]

***The major sources for my sense of the vaudeville circuit are 1) an autobiographical book by Groucho Marx 2) the portions of the Jon Dos Pasos novel (s) USA Trilogy that deal with Hollywood and vaudeville and 3) the Wikiepedia entry on the life of WC Fields. Groucho was lier on principal and both Wikipedia and Dos Pasos have both been credibly accused of making stuff up-- but they all agree about vaudeville to the extent that them being versions of some sort of “truth” is the simplest explanation. The fact that Dos Pasos is, among other things, a resounding endorsement of Marx is a pretty good one, if you keep track of those things. BUT the overlap in their descriptions of the both the vaudeville circuit and stock marker in the 1920s is extremely impressive-- and the chances that they coordinated are slim.

III: Western cinema derives from about one and a quarter (1.25) theatrical traditions. There is something in there, somewhere, that is not vaudeville. It is something to do with the racist epic: Wagner’s operas and (mercifully) more or less lost novels like Ben Hur and The Klansman (filmed as Birth of a Nation). But even then, we are dealing with maudlin emotions and racist stereotypes, which seems an awful lot like vaudeville, the only real game in town. 

Early Hollywood was really just screen testing vaudeville acts and putting them in front of a camera. They had barely enough slapstick artists, cowboys, and pretty women to get them through the 1920s, after which the door was opened for another set of vaudeville acts with the invention of sound. This is kind of a thing: because early film was silent, vaudeville and motion pictures coexisted for a few decades, when mechanical reproduction had not yet come for the musicians. 

A: Broadway musicals and film musicals are significant cultural forces that I am not really interested in here. BUT I maintain that they 1) inform each other and 2) both come out of the early interplay between vaudeville and film-- and don’t really do anything to refute my core premise which is that early Western film was essentially an uncomplicated adaption and expansion of existing vaudeville acts for the new medium.

IV: The sum of my knowledge about non-Western performing arts: by the time film arrived in Japan, the Japanese had AT LEAST two distinct and very sophisticated traditions of performing arts. One of them might have been kabuki. There is a TON of stuff to know about what is probably a TON OF STUFF. I don’t know it, though, or even, really, what the stuff is that I don’t know about. Of it’s existence, sophistication, and complexity, I am, however, reasonably certain. 

V: THUS: When the Japanese started making movies they did so with the 1 (Western film) + >2 (Kabuki (?) + other thing(s)) sources of inspiration putting them at an EXTREME (kiwami?) ADVANTAGE WHEN IT COMES TO DOING COOL SHIT WITH MOVING PICTURES THAT PERSISTS TO THIS DAY.

A: 1 + >2 is MORE than 1.25 (the maximum number of performing traditions from which Western film derives)

1) When John Ford started making movies he had a) seen other movies b) seen vaudeville and maybe c) slept through most of an opera or something.

2) When Kurosawa started making movies he had a) seen John Ford movies, b) other more vaudeville like Western movies c) knew something about Western drama-- including, obviously, as profound an understanding of Shakespeare as you’re going to get on this side of Samuel Johnson and d-?) heavily engaged with probably two or more other complex theatrical traditions. INSURMOUNTABLE ADVANTAGE FOR KUROSAWA.

AND THAT’S IT. The ‘obsession with Japanese film’ arrises from the fact their films are technically superior because the technological and cultural logistics of the dissemination of film put them at an advantage by exposing them to MORE SOURCES OF INSPIRATION, while Western culture was actively sabotaging itself by refusing to take other cultures seriously. 

There was NEVER anything SPECIAL about the FUCKING SAMURAI. Why the shit would would the samurai be special? They looked like dopes and made bad decisions. What was special was the movies, and the movies were special because they came from a more sophisticated place than other films. A place that is (should be?) reasonably easy to understand if you have a passing familiarity with culture and history. FUCKING A.