Newsreel Newsflash: No.

In John Dos Passos’ novel The 42nd Parallel, readers are forcefully confronted with fragmented narratives tracing the lives of numerous American characters. By intermingling sections of other types of texts, Passos weaves a pastiche of differing perspectives into a single book. He incorporates small snippets of autobiography called the “Camera Lens”, other smaller biographies of people relevant to the time, Newsreels containing true headlines and snippets, as well as the main narratives of his characters.

I would like to focus on the Newsreels of the novel, as they serve an often-debatable purpose to the novel. I first wanted to define the term “newsreel” and see how Passos’ use of them may deepen readers’ understanding of the novel in terms of the narrative or disconnect readers from the flow of the novel by creating a staccato effect to the text. A Newsreel is defined as “a short film of news and current affairs, formerly made for showing as part of the program in a movie theater”. In effect, Passos interlaces headlines and snippets of news articles chronologically throughout his trilogy. What I find particularly interesting is that newsreels are generally visual and are incorporated into visual medias.

He parallels this scheme through physical texts. At the onset of the 20th century, this might have seemed a great Modernistic edge to reforming the novel. However, does it “work”?

John Hodgkins writes in his book “The Drift: Affect, Adaptation, and New Perspectives on Fidelity” that Passos effectively incorporates these newsreels into his texts because they “are structured to suggest the experimental whirl and rush of modern American life while never losing sight of the casual forces propelling history forward” (40). Essentially, because they are curt and reflect the happenings of the world at the time, they successfully capture how speedily the world’s history was changing, and simultaneously forming. These progression of events not only mirror the quickness with which the characters’ lives happen, but also how fast America itself was changing to adapt to technology, capitalism, and modern life.

While I agree with Hodgkins perspective that the Newsreels capture the swift developments of history, I feel as if when I am reading these newsreels, they become ineffective in the sense that they are only subtly connected (if connected) and thus propels readers (especially more modern readers) to quickly skim these sections because it becomes too burdensome to piece them together and form a cohesiveness to Passos’ purpose of including them at all.

Hodgkins includes countering perspectives of those who do not believe the newsreels are effective. He quotes a man named Michael North who believes that they are “not sufficiently visual to be labeled newsreels” (38). The reason why newsreels are newsreels is because they are visual. They bring newspapers and magazines and articles to life by portraying them for us in an easily consumable media. Instead of gaining insight immediately and coherently through a visual media that presents the news spatially, we are left with random headlines and song lyrics and snippets of news that we cannot consume, but rather gloss over because their meaning becomes obscure when structured sporadically and textually.

Though I understand why Passos may have chosen to include Newsreels into his American novel (to trace America’s modernity and thus shifting history of America), it falls short of effecting us the way I believe he would have wanted it to.

One Response to Newsreel Newsflash: No.

  1. Prof VZ February 13, 2018 at 10:20 am #

    You offer a great range of interpretations that we might bring to the newsreels. As a genre, the newsreel is fundamentally visual and filmic. Here’s a definition of the genre:

    “A newsreel is a form of short documentary film prevalent between 1910s to 1960s, regularly released in a public presentation place and containing filmed news stories and items of topical interest. It was a source of news, current affairs, and entertainment for millions of moviegoers until television supplanted its role in the 1950s. Newsreels are now considered significant historical documents, since they are often the only audiovisual record of historical and cultural events of those times.[1]”

    Newsreels were typically exhibited as short subjects preceding the main feature film into the 1960s. There were dedicated newsreel theaters in many major cities in the 1930s and 1940s,[2] and some large city cinemas also included a smaller theaterette where newsreels were screened continuously throughout the day.”

    If you watch an old newsreel, which I hope to do in class, you’ll notice some very intentional differences: newsreels tend to be sanitized; they are often uplifting or humorous; they are often patriotic and nationalistic. They are clear and straightforward. Their goal is to unify attention rather than disperse it. Dos Passos’s newsreels seem to be intentionally subverting this goal by making them clashing, nonsensical, and representative of a global perspective that was increasingly difficult for any individual to really capture. They show, that is, how much bigger time and space and history and culture are to the point that any individual must seem insignificant against that backdrop.

    I like how your source put it here: the reels capture the “experimental whirl and rush of modern American life” without losing sight of the causal forces driving history. But I think these two elements work at cross purposes. I think it’s easy to get lost in the “whirl and rush” here, and that sometimes seems to dull the effect of understanding causation. But I think that was really Dos Passos’s point: to fundamentally dis-orient, to cast the reader on the surface of the news, unable to find the depth and causation.

    In your posts, make sure to use linking and visuals when appropriate. Here, embedding a newsreel from Youtube would be great, and you can also link your sources.

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