The Brooklyn Rail

Between 1927 and 1934, Hollywood underwent a strange golden age. After years of experimentation, sync-sound was finally made commercially viable, and duration had resolved into digestible, plot-sustaining “feature length.” Motion pictures, which had seemed like a baroquely technical hobby at the start of the twentieth century, became one of the most popular pastimes for a rapidly urbanizing, industrialized and self-interested middle class. Cinema idealized such innovations, epitomizing the newly available possibilities of an interlocking world. The movies were a beacon of hope and a symbol of modern progress. Against them, Christian moralism and fearmongering saw its second coming, after the abject failure of Prohibition, with scorching tracts that condemned onscreen depictions of drunkenness and sex. That Hollywood had become a truly indecent place in its extravagance made this crusade seem righteous, and to head off thousands of local censorship provisos the major studios agreed, in the summer of 1934, to stop the party themselves with the establishment of the Hays Code.

Authored by former RNC chairman William H. Hays, the production code censored things that movies had been showing for decades—including casual kissing, premarital sex, references to queerness and any sympathy whatsoever for unlawful behavior. These tenets went on to define the look and feel of a lot of what we think of today as “classic cinema,” from Casablanca (1942) to Psycho (1960)—the first film to ever show a toilet onscreen. Meanwhile, the pre-code talkies that had heralded many of the form’s first achievements were censored retroactively, and today exist mostly in rare and degraded form. Like the art of Weimar Germany, they represent a seemingly anachronistic sliver of time—a lost era of proto-progressivism that appears to us from the span of almost a century as shockingly familiar and fresh. Their attributes, and the collective attitudes that informed them, are the subject of Geoffrey O’Brien’s Arabian Nights of 1934.

O’Brien is a poet and critic with an interest in mass culture before the information age; published by Terra Nova Press as an experimental novel, his Arabian Nights can be read as a marriage between criticism and poetry. It consists of short passages—organized under categories like “Loose Ankles” and “Laughing Sinners”—that follow the frenetic logic of the Jazz Age just before the Depression, as expressed by the movies that bottled that excitement and sold it back to the crowd. In the back of the book is an appendix of over two hundred films O’Brien watched for research, some of whose lines—The public is like a cow, bellowing to be milked; I may be able to scare up some liquid excitement—appear in and inform the tone of his propulsively poetic prose.

The title is unfortunate. Whether prose or poetry, nothing in Arabian Nights of 1934 reads like one of Scheherazade’s fables, and the Old World reference is distracting and misleading to would-be readers. The author refers to his mosaic as a “fantasia,” and while his prismatic portraits of mobsters, robber barons, schoolboys and showgirls bleed into one another, they also lack named characters and even discrete settings. In fact, their constant shifting recalls nothing so much as Nathalie Saurrate’s Tropisms (1939)—a collection of short, experimental passages that dilated moods and impulses into narrative patterns—which is doubly fitting, considering that Saurrate once compared her approach to slow motion cinema, and because O’Brien’s lexia are, at the end of the day, explorations of tropes. While Saurrate’s work is not nearly as well-known as the Middle Eastern folktales, paying homage to the Arabian Nights reveals nothing about O’Brien’s work. It’s a shame that his often excellent writing should languish behind what is essentially a marketing issue.

Instead of a frame narrator, O’Brien’s dreamlike discursions are omnisciently told, though we experience them through the eyes of a kind of frame-subject. This is Dorothy, a small-town girl with big ideas about the world. Her stream of consciousness bookends the novel as she travels to and from the picture show—implying that everything in between is impacting her directly from the screen. O’Brien acknowledges that Dorothy, along with Aloysius, who appears near the book’s end, represent the “astral surrogates” of his own parents, Margaret and Joseph. There’s a touching directness to this; it’s easy to understand the author’s obsession with a half-effaced past as a way of accessing the youthful optimism of the generation before his own. Aloysius thinks Duck Soup (1933) is about the funniest thing ever made, and has a shrewd and informed stance on his Catholic parish’s attempt to condemn pictures like it.

Dorothy, whose narration is bolder and more lived-in, sees movies as a portal not just to adulthood, but to mysteries of the wider world she can otherwise scarcely imagine in small-town Pennsylvania, in the parochial year of 1934. The movies that came out around that time still feel like a live wire, connecting her era to ours in a way that makes both feel equally liberated and backward, benighted and untamed, in a manner that flattens our perception of the progress of time. Film is the future; we who watch it merely live in an interminable present, filled with God-fearing folk who want to make it more like the past. To quote Dorothy, as the theater lights start to dim: “The other world begins here and glides toward distant glimmering cities. […] Where I will arrive when I am done with being here in the meantime, waiting for everything to start.”