Resumen de El malestar en la cultura de consumo: Harold Lloyd, Edward Bernays y las angustias del capitalismo
Herbert Hoover’s infamous definition of the ideal consumer as a “constantly moving happiness machine” neatly summarises the essential impulses of twenties America —toward mechanization, rapacious consumerism, and an accelerated tempo of social and economic life. It also suggests the influence of Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud, inventor of public relations, and midwife of the media-obsessed, advertising— dominated consumer-culture which has come to define contemporary Western life today.
Like his uncle, Bernays feared that man’s unconscious propensity for barbarity could easily be mobilised by the demagogues of fascism and Bolshevism; also like his uncle, he believed that the sublimation of mankind’s irrational, destructive nature, the entire civilizing process, could be undone or reversed at any moment. But Bernays also had a solution: if man’s unconscious desires could be tied to the market-place, these urges both stimulated and satiated by images, ideals and luxury goods, then mass culture itself could be used as the means to domesticate and pacify the energies of the unconscious.
And in this action, the union of film and consumerism —the mechanics of escapism— would prove to be the most important tool.
It is in this context that I propose to look at Harold Lloyd’s comedies and his satires on conformism. Psychoanalytic films tend to read the filmic text in terms of the mobilization of anxiety and desire; but how are these modes worked out within a comic context? Moreover, how does film ‘manage’ the subjective and unpredictable forces which slapstick comedy seems to call forth? Lloyd’s films —chiefly Safety Last, The Freshman and Speedy— seem neither to support nor subvert Bernays’ model, but rather offer a rather more complex engagement with consumerism, mechanization, and acceleration than is initially apparent, Lloyd’s ‘happiness-machine’ by no means as controllable as it first appears. My article thus explores themes of embarrassment, obsession and mania in Lloyd’s ostensibly ‘sunny’ oeuvre, and relates these ideas to the tensions and contradictions inherent in Bernays’ idea of tranquillizing the masses
