Emma Smith – Core Response #2

Eckert’s essay on how Hollywood became a major needle mover of the American economy, citing the importance of fashion and cosmetics and also specific placed products.  What becomes incredibly interesting is the role women serve in its wake, becoming the target audience for many Hollywood films and the subsequent products Hollywood attempts to sell its viewers, especially in the 1920s.  


If we think about the media climate in the 1920s, post WW1 and well into the advent of Hollywood and film as a medium and art, print and film capitalism boosted this idea of the national consciousness, of a shared national identity across the country. The rise in reproducible media such as newspapers, novels, and films allowed for the apprehension of time and a new vernacular that helped develop the understanding of simultaneity.  People in different places in the nation could now identify with each other and create a community based on the media they were consuming, and similarly, the products they were purchasing (that were often pushed by fan magazines and studios.) 


In relation back to Eckert’s essay, this commodification of the costumes and appearance of specific film stars adds to Karl Marx’s idea of fetishization of the commodity. To summarize , Marx believes that the fetishization of the object leads to the illusion that the value of an object is inherent and not a product of the social relations the object must go through, like manufacturing, mining, or distributing, that often exploits other humans, before it is sold to the public. From Marx’s perspective, commodities reinforce capitalist tenets by hiding the social relations between consumers and producers. After all, Eckert is making the argument about Hollywood’s contributions to the form and character of consumerism itself.


With this knowledge of the market and Hollywood’s effect on the fetishization of commodities, new questions arise: What’s the relationship between commodities and labor and advertising? To what extent can the exchange between the filmmaker and the product film be mutually beneficial? What role or effect can purposeful advertising have when relayed on a screen to an audience?


 

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