Culture and Society Hollywood's Class Act Stephen P. Powers, David J. Rothman, Stanley Rothman E urope has built a larger and more spacious wing of its imaginative literature on the foundations of class conflict than has America. This makes sense, as Europeans have tended to be more tortured, and there- fore more fascinated, by class than have Americans. No American playwright has exploited class divisions for satire as productively as Alan Ayckbourn, one of England's most successful playwrights over the last twenty-five years. This may be the reason why his plays have had trouble crossing the Atlantic, despite their tremendous popularity at home. They are topi- cally British in a particular way that does not appeal to most Americans. Much of the humor of a farce like How the Other Half Loves is lost in translation. One may respond that many American novels and movies do deal directly with class, if less overtly. What is The Great Gatsby if not a meditation on class in America? But Gatsby, we recall, began life as James Gatz. It is exactly because class in America has always been so much more fluid than in Europe that we believe he is able to transform himself into the American equivalent of an aristocrat, which is a bank roll, and be more or less accepted by society even if he has virtually no past. As the character Nick Carroway puts it, "The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself." The Great Gatsby is about a typical American self-fashion- ing, which blithely crosses supposed class boundaries. As Nick muses in the famous closing lines of the novel, America is the place that brought "man...face to face for the last time in history with something commensu- rate to his capacity for wonder." This wonder, the novel suggests, is that an entire world could be so lacking in a past, so new and socially empty, that anything was possible--a condition that no longer pertained in the old world. In the end, Gatsby fails to win back Daisy from Tom Buchanan not because he is merely a "self- made man," but because his business deals have been shady, involving him in bootlegging and gambling. This is his tragedy--not his low origins--the fact of so much wonderful self-confidence gone to waste and corruption. It is hard to imagine George Bernard Shaw's Eliza Doolittle, a character created only twelve years before Gatsby (in 1913), crossing on her own the boundaries that separate her from her "betters," under any circum- stances. The walls are too high, too solid; she cannot even talk the lingo. The point of Pygmalion is to reveal that those boundaries, which appear so insurmount- able, are not "natural," but the product of social con- ditioning. Yet, whereas Gatsby is his own creation, and seems to have been able to grasp that for himself in typically American fashion, Eliza can only be trans- formed by her upperclass mentor Higgins. Yet, despite the fluidity of social and economic status in American society, it is still unquestionably true that class and its boundaries have always figured in American literature and movies, as they have in society. If anything, the more fluid status of American class divisions has meant that "class" has always had a mysterious quality, one that calls for definition and redet%ition--hence the fascination with Gatsby's mys- terious past in Fitzgerald's novel. From a sociological perspective, movies are partic- ularly instructive in the ways that they portray social facts such as class, because, as Karl Marx noted long ago, perceptions of class are just as important as the material conditions that make those perceptions possi-