Abstract
This essay examines Mel Brooks’s famous 1967 satirical film, The Producers, as a study on the ruination of “History” enabled both by the inevitable dependence of historical truth on ruins whose incompleteness lays history open to (mis) interpretation and also by the anti-intellectual, ahistorical spirit of American capitalism manifest in the show-business sector. The term “hystery” is introduced to encompass both a trauma-induced failure of the senses (as in hysteria) to perceive historical fact and the pursuit of the “hysterical” joke in the entertainment business that leads to a fragmented, decontextualized and travestied presentation of history that ruins its organic significance. Thus in the film, the moral ruination of the innocent Jewish accountant by the wily producer is seen as a parable on the perils of reading ruins piecemeal to pave an amnesiac Broadway triumph with those very fragments.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
See also Louis Marin (1994).
- 2.
The idea of the ghost after-image nevertheless aligns itself with Baudrillard’s notion of “recyclability” of history which ends up producing a “ghostly” version of “cloned events, farcical events, phantom events” and such distortions and caricatures of the original (1997, 452, 453).
- 3.
Defining “reversibility … a model that can be detected as an underlying pattern intrinsic to post-modern culture,” Botz-Bornstein explains: “All systems based on techniques, science, and logic are bound to run empty sooner or later because technical perfectionism kills the enigmatic surplus or the quantity of the ‘unknown’ that philosophical investigations should maintain if they want to be interesting and fruitful as philosophies and not merely as scientific accounts of realities” (2013, 2).
- 4.
I thank the anonymous reviewer who suggested this larger possibility to me in her/his astute remarks on my paper.
- 5.
For an alternative cinematic representation of the Holocaust through the absence of ruins, see Chapter 13 by Angeliki Tseti.
References
Arendt, Hannah. 2006. Eichman in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, introd. Amos Elon. New York: Penguin.
Ashkenazy, Ofer. 2011. Ridiculous Trauma: Comic Representations of the Nazi Past in Contemporary German Visual Culture. Cultural Critique 78: 88–118.
Baskind, Samantha. 2007. The Fockerized Jew?: Questioning Jewishness as Cool in American Popular Entertainment. Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 25 (4): 3–17.
Baudrillard, Jean. 1993. The Transparency of Evil, trans. James Benedict. London and New York: Verso.
Baudrillard, Jean. 1996. America, trans. Chris Turner. London: Verso.
Baudrillard, Jean. 1997. The End of the Millennium or the Countdown, trans. Chris Turner. Economy and Society 26 (4): 447–455.
Bonnstetter, Beth E. 2011. Mel Brooks Meets Kenneth Burke (and Mikhail Bakhtin): Comedy and Burlesque in Satiric Film. Journal of Film and Video 63 (1): 18–31.
Botz-Bornstein, Thorsten. 2013. Book Review: Jean Baudrillard: From the Ocean to the Desert, or the Poetics of Radicality, by Gerry Coulter. LSE Review of Books, April 10: 1–4. http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2013/04/10/book-review-jean-baudrillard-from-the-ocean-to-the-desert-or-the-poetics-of-radicality. Accessed 6 Nov 2017.
Breuer, Josef, and Sigmund Freud. 2000. Studies on Hysteria, trans. James Strachey. Basic Books Classics. New York: Basic.
Bruhle, Paul. 2014. Review of Theatrical Liberalism: Jews and Popular Entertainment in America, by Andrea Most. American Jewish History 98 (2): 81–82.
Burston, Jonathan. 2002. Review: The Producers. Theatre Journal 54 (3): 467–469.
Chomsky, Noam. 2014. Interview: Why Americans Know so Much About Sports but so Little About World Affairs. Alternet, September 15. http://www.alternet.org/noam-chomsky-why-americans-know-so-much-about-sports-so-little-about-world-affairs. Accessed 6 Nov 2017.
Clarke, David B. 2010. Hysteresis. In The Baudrillard Dictionary, ed. Richard G. Smith, 97–99. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Cocks, Geoffrey. 2015. Hollywood Über Alles: Seeing the Nazi in American Movies. Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal 45 (1): 38–53.
Coulter, Gerry. 2010. Jean Baudrillard and Cinema: The Problems of Technology, Realism and History. Film-Philosophy 14 (2): 6–20.
Crick, Robert A. 2002. The Big Screen Comedies of Mel Brooks. Jefferson and London: McFarland.
Fermaglich, Kirsten. 2007. Mel Brooks’ The Producers: Tracing American Jewish Culture Through Comedy, 1967–2007. American Studies 48 (4): 59–87.
Freud, Sigmund. 1990. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious: The Standard Edition, trans. James Strachey. The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. New York: Norton.
Glassberg, David. 2001. Sense of History: The Place of the Past in American Life. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
Griffin, Dustin. 1994. Satire: A Critical Reintroduction. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky.
Kline, Kip. 2016. Baudrillard, Youth, and American Film: Fatal Theory and Education. Lanham: Lexington.
Marin, Louis. 1994. Disneyland: A Degenerate Utopia. In Contemporary Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Studies, 3rd ed., ed. Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer, 283–295. New York and London: Longman.
Mayer, Jean. 1983. Young Americans with No Sense of History. The New York Times, April 24. http://www.nytimes.com/1983/04/24/opinion/l-young-americans-with-no-sense-of-history-118262.html. Accessed 6 Nov 2017.
Milton, John. 2003. Paradise Lost: A Poem in Twelve Books, ed. Merrit Y. Hughes. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett.
Most, Andrea. 1999. “Big Chief Izzy Horowitz”: Theatricality and Jewish Identity in the Wild West. American Jewish History 87 (4): 313–341.
Ruiz, Nicholas, III. 2005. Interview with Gerry Coulter. Kritikos 2 (September). https://intertheory.org/coulter.htm. Accessed 6 Nov 2017.
Schrank, Bernice. 2007. “Cutting Off Your Nose to Spite Your Race”: Jewish Stereotypes, Media Images, Cultural Hybridity. Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 25 (4): 18–42.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Dokou, C. (2019). Springtime for Defaults: The Producers as the Ruin of History and the Triumph of Hystery. In: Mitsi, E., Despotopoulou, A., Dimakopoulou, S., Aretoulakis, E. (eds) Ruins in the Literary and Cultural Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26905-0_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26905-0_12
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-26904-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-26905-0
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)