Likewise, Sullivan can distract the masses, but he is not effecting real, systemic change, and the film knows it. Sullivan’s butler, Burrows, scolds that “the poor know all about poverty”—it is the rich who want to glamorize and theorize it, a point quickly proven when the studio turns the endeavor into a media circus. Even with this warning, it still takes a series of wrong turns, bad decisions, and plain old frustration for Sullivan to realize that he simply will never truly understand. He only experiences an actual lack of a safety net when thrown into the carceral system, and even that is temporary and resolved with the help of his Hollywood contacts. His is a failed, aborted odyssey (with a little sex in it).
Sullivan’s Travels is invested in considering layers of class belonging and fluency. For all that, the down-on-her-luck “Girl” (Veronica Lake) is more streetwise than the privileged Sullivan; she also does not belong to the underclasses they move through, her discomfort with riding the rails and sleeping on the floor of a crowded shelter is evident. It’s telling that the audiences for the special screening of Playful Pluto—a Black congregation and the men of the chain gang—occupy overlapping states of racial, economic, and social dispossession tied, in many ways, to the systems that enable Sullivan’s power and shape his contributions as a creator. The legacy of such a gesture as emotional and thematic catharsis is evident in one of the film’s most famous byproducts: O Brother, Where Art Thou?. Sullivan may have never made his realist masterpiece, but in 2000 Joel and Ethan Coen realized his vision with their own epic odyssey of (who else) escapees from a Southern chain gang.
It’s unsurprising that Sullivan concludes, in a rousing endorsement, that his comedy work “isn’t much, but it’s better than nothing.” Preston Sturges, after all, was in the business of the gag and the laugh (“If they knew what they liked, they wouldn’t live in Pittsburgh!”). Why wouldn’t his mislaid protagonist affirm the very work that made his name? Yet, what I find so sticky and interesting about Sullivan’s Travels is that, for all of its celebration of cinema and its power to invoke joy, it remains somewhat ambivalent about the purpose of art. Sullivan, to put it plainly, is a fool. So perhaps we should insist that art effect real change and invoke deep, sustained empathy, or is it enough to make ‘em laugh (or that’s what filmmakers like to tell themselves). Maybe we continue to revisit Sullivan’s Travels as a Hollywood look at Hollywood because it understands that films, at their core, are “marvellous lullabies,” for worse or for better.
Screening on 35mm at Ambler Theater Wednesday, June 17th at 7:15 PM, Tickets here
Credit: Source link