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Seeing, Traveling, and Consuming
power. Hollywood, the heart of the culture industry for which Adorno and
Horkheimer reserved such vituperation, was the wellspring of glamour in the
twentieth century. For Europeans, of course, Hollywood was a two-edged sword,
representing both modernity’s promise and the threat of American domination.
After World War II, such fears notwithstanding, many Italians were ready to
embrace things American, just as many other Europeans were. American cinema
and American film stars like Rita Hayworth and Tyrone Power were the seductive
representatives of the glamorous life. While Italian culture eventually produced
its own stars, it could not have done so without the American example, argues
Gundle. When Italian glamour developed home-grown images of pleasure and
consumption, represented by the uncrowned Italian queen Gina Lollobrigida, not
only were they not identical to American prototypes, but also they were not without
their similarities to the original. In the working out of such differences, both in
film and in the growing fashion industry, in the urban spectacle provided by
Roman celebrities living la dolce vita, and in the turn to mass consumption, Italian
glamour and its audiences still held to older notions of family, land, and craft
tradition. Substance rather than image still held primacy even when the language
of glamour spoke (broken) American English.
The cumulative effect of the chapters reinforces the argument of the impressive
multiplicity of histories embedded in leisure culture. This point may seem obvious,
perhaps, but scholarship has done relatively little to map these varied temporalities
and narratives, or to understand their historical dimensions and interrelationships.
Such a mapping will lead to the conclusion that the study of leisure allows for a
much less dichotomized view of social relationships than the topic usually implies.
Leisure practices cannot be assigned to the “private” sphere, for example, in
whatever form scholars render that problematic concept. Nor can tried and true
divisions between work and leisure be maintained in a historical analysis that does
justice to the complexity of the subject. Concepts and experiences of leisure have
always interacted with definitions and practices of work; it is not labor as such
that defines how leisure is conceptualized, either by expert observers or actual
participants, but rather labor and leisure are intertwined, the one reciprocating the
other’s contradictions and tensions. Max Weber argued before 1914 that the
modern work experience had become so debilitating that leisure was necessarily
seen as an antidote to work, or as a necessary escape to steel one for the rigors of
continuous and enervating drudgery in factory, office, and school. 34 Even if one
were to accept this interpretation, it is logical to argue that the historical evolution
of a “leisure society,” to use a misleading but perhaps indispensable notion,
reversed the earlier terms of the relationship between work and free time. It was
no longer the character (or duration) of work that carved out new social spaces
for leisure practice but rather leisure that changed how we defined work, what we
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