What do the four following lines of dialogue have in common?

1. "(Scream) Don't let me go: hold on to me." Tarzan the Ape Man (1932, Dir. W. S. Van Dyke)
2. "Boys, boys and girls, and you too Honey." Flying Down to Rio (1933, Dir. Thorton Freeland)
3. "Pardon me if I seem to intrude." Manhattan Melodrama (1934, Dir. W. S. Van Dyke)
4. "Yes, yes, in a belligerent sort of way." Woman of the Year (1942, Dir. George Stevens)

Quite a lot. Each is the first line of dialogue exchanged between an onscreen couple that proceeded to knit itself into the public imagination as a fundamental part of the cultural capacity to imagine both erotic intimacy and human connection. Each of the above quoted lines of dialogue resonated far beyond its filmic moment, or even the film in which it appeared. In each case, a partnership was generated that took on a life of its own, beyond the plans of the individual actors, the creative teams that made the movie, and even the studios that theoretically controlled all the materials and personnel concerned. The disparate tones, contents, and resonances of the lines are indicative of the divergent destinies that governed the making of the series of films that ensued. However, in each case, screen chemistry was the catalyst, and in each case screen chemistry resulted in a partnership that was much more than the sum of its parts.

The first line of dialogue, spoken by Maureen O'Sullivan as Jane to Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan, is little more than a cliche of the exotic action picture genre, a stereotypical female call to a strong male for protection, but it masked the gender-bending, generally unconventional, and purely serendipitous Tarzan series that would ensue. Somewhat more predictive, the second line, spoken by Fred Astaire as Fred Ayres to Ginger Rogers as Honey Hale—separating Honey out from the "boys and girls," playfully leaves her in gender limbo. This line suggests the ludic strangeness that would make RKO all but bludgeon the reluctant pair into their nine-picture partnership under its auspices, not counting the last picture they made together ten years later, once again because studio pressure, this time from MGM, made it a reality.

The third line is spoken by Myrna Loy as Eleanor Packer to William Powell as Jim Wade, as she, a perfect stranger, flings herself into the backseat of a taxicab with him. This line is still more prefigurative, tinged with the arch couple humor invented for the screen by these two highly harmonious actors, who contentedly collaborated with MGM's plans for their repeated pairing, after they recovered from the surprise of their amazing compatibility, a surprise quite similar to Eleanor's sudden eruption into Jim's life. Finally, the last line is spoken by Spencer Tracy as Sam Craig while looking at Katharine Hepburn as Tess Harding, responding to a question by a third party inquiring whether the two had met. This line prefigures quite vividly the combative attraction that Hepburn and Tracy would themselves consciously cultivate in nine films, while a bemused MGM hierarchy gave them their lead. However belligerent or intrusive, willing or unwilling, the merged energies of these acting pairs inspired the creative teams around them toward onscreen ironies and even luminous challenges to conventional filmic representations of love, courtship, and marriage that elevated often pedestrian scripts to unconventional eloquence. These four couples combined the unexpected with the immense popularity usually reserved for predictable cliches in the mass media as the hallmark of their special kind of Hollywood pairing, widely acclaimed both in its own time and now, here called the Synergistic Couple.

The Synergistic Couple, with its vortex of wild forces, is a natural outcome of the American mass media insofar as it has made its enigmatic, major creative contributions by what might seem to be its greatest limitation, the triumph of energy over craft, a situation that deserves a closer look. The craft of the popular has always been dazzlingly effective at distraction, or escapism as it is generally called, but limited in its capacity for expression about the human condition. By contrast, the raging energy released by Hollywood has, under certain conditions, become a distinctive vehicle of expression. The chemistry of the onscreen media couple is one important aspect of commercial filmmaking that can create those special conditions through which the torrents of popular culture energy are channeled as a form of intelligent communication. The energy circulating between certain acting pairs, their chemistry, can become a singular mode of contemplating intimacy, its mysterious fusion of two into a manifold one, that terrible and wonderful sliding of individual boundaries. How to deal with this kind of connection that often grabs us without permission and leaves us confused about where self ends and the beloved begins? How to deal with its vertiginous pleasures that, as the song says, make us forget the "ordinary things that everyone ought to do" and thereby may make us run up against established cultural values and priorities? The wordless chemistry of onscreen couples, widely recognized as a source of pleasure and even seduction, is also surprisingly effective at enabling Hollywood to say much on the subject. This is particularly true of the Synergistic Couple, the kind of movie couple that this study will distinguish as the most dangerous, fascinatingly powerful type of couple in commercial, mass media film.

The energy of the onscreen couple, which becomes at its most intense a form of synergy between two actors, has been relatively easy to recognize, but difficult to discuss, if only because of the abundance of acting pairs to consider. The Hollywood studio era of the 1930s and 1940s produced a fairly large number of screen couples, and audiences immediately reacted. The post-studio media have produced a much smaller group, but still substantial in number, and these too have commanded powerful audience response. Audiences have room for spontaneous engagement with a virtually infinite number of such experiences, but critical exploration into the fascination of the screen couple requires selection and some sorely needed distinctions, to be made in these pages. Among the best and worst cases of what Hollywood screen couples have told us about our need for intimacy will be represented of necessity by a chosen group of captivating acting pairs.

The most focused attention will be given to the quartet of onscreen acting teams evoked above in their introductory exclamations: Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O'Sullivan as Tarzan and Jane; William Powell and Myrna Loy as Nick and Nora Charles; Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers; and Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. Our travels will begin and linger with them, and their contrasts with other onscreen acting teams of their day that were neither as enduring nor as complex in their depiction of love and emotional closeness. Ultimately, we will also hazard the terrain of the contemporary media. To speculate about what post-studio era screen couples have inherited from the great screen couple traditions, we will look at the work of Woody Allen and Diane Keaton; Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman; and the character pairings of Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson) on The X-Files, Luke (Tony Geary) and Laura (Genie Francis) on General Hospital, Maddie (Cybill Shepherd) and David (Bruce Willis) on Moonlighting, and Cliff (Bill Cosby) and Claire (Phylicia Rashad) Huxtable on The Cosby Show. The beauty and danger of the four screen couples from Classic Hollywood on which this study will initially—and primarily—focus spans the spectrum of the kinds of films produced in Old Hollywood: comedy, musical, melodrama, mystery, and exotic action adventure. It also spans the length of the heyday of the studio system. Weissmuller and O'Sullivan worked together from 1932 to 1942. Powell and Loy worked together from 1934 to 1947. Astaire and Rogers worked together from 1934 to 1939 and then again in 1949. Finally, Tracy and Hepburn worked together from 1942 to 1967. These discussions will provide a basis for exploring today's media screen couples.

Each of these couples was bigger than the films they made together, the beauty of their several rapports seeming to break free from the constraints of any particular story, the relationship itself becoming a freestanding energy vortex. Their too great impact on moviegoer sensibilities imperiled the public's social grounding in reality, often blurring the boundaries between actuality and illusion, as in some part of the audience's mind the real personhood of the actors slipped into the identities of the onscreen lovers, and chemistry slipped into history. The public imagined the screen couples as offscreen intimates, without actually marking the place where slippage had taken place. Today, removed from the white-hot glare of momentary celebrity into abiding cultural significance, their transcendence no longer disorients our historical sense of the real. All the purely sociological motives offered by critics that explain audience interest in their charisma as escapism—relief from particular political and economic conditions, the influence of marketing pressures—exhausted themselves as the films left their immediate circumstances. In the long run, we know them to be seminal imaginative experiences. If moviegoers long ago used these couple fantasies primarily as trivial distractions, that is not the full extent of their import. They are a cultural legacy of how we thought (and think?) about desire and love. Their enduring strength is a phenomenon that is ripe for contemplation in terms of meaning.

The Great Couple Tradition

Studying these four couples affords many opportunities for renewed appreciation of their achievements, and it affords clarity about the nature of their difference from the large number of insignificant screen couples produced in Old Hollywood. Close scrutiny also promotes understanding of how they built a foundation for those impressive and expressive screen couples of today that similarly generate audience loyalty, exhilaration, and sometimes outright frenzy. This appreciation and clarity, however, will depend on the evolution of a precise definition of the screen couple—an amorphous category that is due and overdue for rigorous articulation—and on the articulation of a historical perspective on the way the great couple tradition developed in commercial entertainment. For the purposes of this articulation, a significant distinction will be made between screen couples that bear narrative and psychological weight and those that are trivialized. Movies and television shows dominated by action relegate the couple relationship to a few strategically placed scenes, and cannot be said to contain a screen couple in any important sense, but rather to feature a shorthand for romance that adds color or sizzle. The screen couple of the weighty type, by contrast, is the kind that is of interest to this study. The first crucial characteristic to be discerned about this kind of significant popcult, onscreen pair is that it is not a perfunctory narrative element but rather depicts an intimate relationship that is the central dynamic of the movie or television show. Its nuances are as crucial to the storytelling as the outcome of any action in which the characters may be involved.

Weight and importance in screen couples will also be distinguished in terms of the heft of repeated collaborations of specific actors who together spark chemistry. The media have for a long time featured co-stars who work together numerous times as the narrative and psychological core of a series of movies or a television series. Ostensibly, there is little more to this couple phenomenon than its commercial value as a box office attraction. However, the importance of this kind of repetition is not only economic; in fact their commercial success is, from a long-range perspective, the least interesting feature of such a professional association. This study will distinguish the capacity of some acting pairs to create a body of work for the media that, because of their synergy, establishes in its totality a comprehensive, dimensional portrait of intimacy for mass audiences. The result of these ensemble images of connection is a widely accessible, extended, and sometimes surprisingly cogent meditation on the relationship between the couple bond and social pressures.

The chosen quartet of "golden age" screen pairs have this weight and heft, and although they might not include everyone's favorite choices, they will be universally recognized as prime examples of those screen couples from Old Hollywood whose repeated work together articulated a multifaceted fantasy universe in which the various couples they played reflect off each other to create a nuanced portrait of passionate connection as one single movie could never do. That is, there is an intertextual Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers universe made up of their many performances together that forms a multi-perspectival portal for mass audiences into a complex understanding of love, courtship, and the human capacity for bonding. The same is true of the movies made by Weissmuller/O'Sullivan, Loy/Powell, and Tracy/Hepburn. As exemplars of the most intense portrayal of the couple in the mass media, they are useful and revealing about the great tradition of the screen couple as an ongoing and widespread industry phenomenon.

The present examination of their films and the production conditions that brought them together will show how the significant screen couple—including its descendant the television couple—differs from more trivialized couple representations, even though both types emerged from the same economic and cultural roots. Historically, both significant and trivial onscreen pairs evolved as an efficient and cost-effective business practice. In an industry organized into studios, the deployment of contract actors as couples to attract audiences was economically feasible and rewarding. At the same time, the historical development of all onscreen romantic pairs was also a matter of storytelling practice: audiences were generally unsatisfied unless the joinings and separations of couples punctuated the plot conflict in some respect. In fact, as David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson have estimated in The Classical Hollywood Cinema, between 85 and 95 percent of mass culture movies before 1960 contained a significant romance element. Most of these were perfunctory screen pairs, which I will classify as the Functional Couple, the most trivial kind of screen couple, which fulfills only the minimum economic and narrative functions. This kind of screen pair will hover in the background of this study, forming the mass of duo presences whose contrast to the chosen quartet of couples from the studio era, and a selection of couples from the post-studio era that will be discussed at the end of the study, establishes the richly nuanced qualities of the latter. The screen couple, in its most significant form, has a significance beyond business and basic narrative issues. It is about the way we process information about eroticism and intimacy. That process is not divorced from business and narrative issues, but is in its fundamental identity a matter of the energy by which the intertextual world of the significant popular culture couple is created, star chemistry. Star chemistry is crucial to our understanding of the major issues surrounding the weighty onscreen couple: the star system, the slippage between art and life, and the conflict between image and story text in cinema.

Star couple chemistry is the primary element that separates the trivial from the weighty screen couple and that determines the potential for films about couples to establish meaning. It is a troublesome fascination that in the short run beguiles us. But certain manifestations of couple chemistry also have an interesting, often happy, astringent quality. Star chemistry can be manipulative, burying the audience in escapist illusions about love. Yet it can also work in the reverse way. It can liberate the film from the illusions otherwise fostered by the kind of simplistic plot favored by the commercial film industry under the studio system.

A very early development of mass movie culture in Hollywood was its emphasis on plot over image as the primary structure of the movie, despite the visual nature of cinema. This emphasis on plot remains with us today. Critics and audiences overwhelmingly talk about the meaning of a film in terms of its story. Easy absorption of simple plots was and is more consumer-friendly than a complex modernist formation of narrative out of the juxtaposition of images. Any attempt to establish meaning for mass audiences through visually based narrative, typical of avant-garde and artistic cinema, appeared (and still appears) to threaten them with confusion. However, another early commercial film interest, the star image, reasserted and still reasserts the power of the visual for mass audiences. Mass audiences are not threatened by star images, which reduce story to second place behind the attractions of the star, as attention shifts to the glance of an eye, the turn of a head, an expression, and away from the logic of the plot, which can go to hell in the process. For this reason, the pleasure of the star image is generally assumed to work against meaning in a film. However, the power of the visual reasserted by star chemistry can sometimes work not against meaning but against the reductiveness of the typical mass culture story, particularly when the core of the film deals with intimacy.

When an onscreen couple generates powerful energy and boosts the image to prominence as a structural element in the film, chemistry becomes an important part of storytelling, a phenomenon about which serious study of popular culture has been silent, primarily because chemistry is a part of Hollywood history that film studies has rarely dealt with. Chemistry, though a central feature of the mass media concept of entertainment, lurks vaguely on the periphery of informed discussion. For good reasons. It is unquantifiable, a given rather than a constructed phenomenon, difficult to study—much like the challenge for physics of dealing with smoke and clouds. To the mind trying to pin down its smoke-like elusiveness, it is a disturbing phenomenon. But it is that very disturbance that has proven to be the key to its importance. And one of the most disturbing aspects is the sense of it as an almost invincible enemy of truth. Yet, as we shall see, a more precise understanding of this phenomenon involves making distinctions between its existence as escapist distraction and its existence as the antidote to escapism. Making that distinction requires a clear mental separation of the three types of couples produced by Old Hollywood: those that had star chemistry—Synergistic Couples and Iconic Couples—and those that didn't—Functional Couples. These distinctions will, by the end of this study, help us to understand a new type of couple that evolved in the post-studio era, the Thematic Couple.

The most basic, largest, and least inspired category of screen couples was the Functional Couple, a simple cog in the wheel of the churning plot, adding little if any screen chemistry to the experience of the movie, and therefore interesting to this study only as a matter of contrast. Nothing could be clearer than the distinction between a sparkling star pair and a plodding Functional Couple. The Iconic Couple lies in between the magical Synergistic Couple and the plodding Functional Couple: such pairs, though they may have some degree of star power, tend to reiterate empty cliche. The Thematic Couple, a post-studio descendant of the Iconic Couple, differs from the latter in its tendency to be yoked to more dynamic and more socially realistic scripts than the old Iconic Couple. Another feature of the Thematic Couple is its tendency for image to be subordinated to rational purposes as opposed to tapping into the subconscious level. With the Functional Couple as a contrast or background, we will examine the subtle, interesting, and important distinctions among Synergistic, Iconic, and Thematic Couples, three types of screen pairs built around stars that furnish varying amounts of chemistry. These three types each have significantly different relationships to the typical Hollywood plot, and use the star image differently in connection with the values carried in the formulaic stories common to Old Hollywood, and to some extent the post-studio mass media.

Of the star pairings under the studio system, the most important and influential category of star couples for this study and for the implications of popular culture's contribution to human understanding is the provocative Synergistic Couple. The stars that formed Synergistic Couples empowered popular culture to make genuine expressions about intimacy by breaking up conventional narrative recipes for storytelling. A simple way of speaking about the difference between the Synergistic Couple and other star pairings is through a partially negative definition: Synergistic Couples were never closely connected with a narrative recipe by means of which a variety of partners might produce similar effects. Their effect was uniquely possible only with each other. The narratives of the films of Synergistic Couples might easily be analyzed for formulaic elements, but none of the routine story elements was particularly instrumental in the success of the film. In fact, what was characteristic of Synergistic Couples was that their energy tended to disrupt the formulas in interesting ways so as to create highly distinctive perspectives on the social practices embedded in the usual narrative pattern. The Synergistic Couple brought a healing energy to a world of cliches. The Astaire/Rogers characters, for example, would typically stumble around a mazelike world of superficial distractions that stood as barriers to their desire for intimacy with each other, though their wholeness as a couple was always manifest in dance. Typically, the energy finally released in dance brought them to the moment of clarity that released them from a still dysfunctional culture. Weissmuller and O'Sullivan's Tarzan and Jane combined into a potent couple energy that enabled them to cope with a world shattered into hostile camps because of greed, redeeming the situation by their enduring completeness, while the world remained as rapacious as ever. Powell and Loy's Nick and Nora, similarly, redeemed the family by their integrity as a couple, while dysfunction (generally also related to greed) ravaged families around them. Finally, the Tracy and Hepburn characters, in their best work, transcended through the organic bond between them a world lying in political, economic, and ethical ruins. As the exception to the rule, the Synergistic Couple gave the audience a way to stand at a distance from the more repressive aspects of society and to think about themselves and their desires in a new way.

Synergistic Couples showed Old Hollywood at its most creative and stood apart from the largest category of star couples, the Iconic Couple, which was really a showy and charismatic version of the Functional Couple. The Iconic Couple succeeded in making cliches glamourous and established dramatic and comic recipes that could work for comparatively large numbers of interchangeable star partners: glamour, replaceability, and cliche were the hallmarks of the Iconic Couple. If the Functional Couple worked as a mundane cog in a plot that in Hollywood fashion chugged along well-defined tracks, the Iconic Couple, no less a part of the obligatory formulaic movie plot of the studio era, made cliches seem more exciting and truer, more entertaining because of the technology of the glamourized star images involved. The difference between Synergistic and Iconic Couples is the difference between star power that rocks old ways of thinking and star power that gilds tired old cliches. This distinction requires a complex comparison between the almost fully manipulated image of stereotype and the substantially raw image powered by wild energy.

The Iconic Couple is a powerful form of Hollywood illusion, lending to stereotypes a seductive charm. Energizing the clichéd plot of the typical Hollywood movie, the Iconic Couple gives enchanting bodies and faces to the gender stereotypes that the mass media catered to. The unofficial king of Iconic Couples was Clark Gable. And so I will call the usual pattern of casting Iconic Couples the Gable Plus One phenomenon. Then, as now, the men tended to be the primary consideration in the formation of the couple, though occasionally there were female actors who might be in the dominant position: it would be possible to speak of a Dietrich Plus One formula and much later, in the fifties, of a Crawford Plus One casting decision. During the studio era, it would also be possible to rename the Gable Plus One phenomenon for John Wayne, Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart, Gary Cooper, Melvyn Douglas, Maurice Chevalier, or the less enduring but once quite popular Joel McCrea, Randolph Scott, John Payne, and Dennis Morgan.

But Gable makes a convenient focus, both for his abiding popularity and for his distillation of the Iconic Couple male. He played the male partner in a number of couple series with several actresses who had powerhouse images themselves: Joan Crawford (eight films), Lana Turner (four films), Myrna Loy (six films), and Jean Harlow (six films). Perfectly adaptable to a large number of acting partners, Gable required only that they be sexually attractive, possessing a headstrong femininity that could serve as a foil for his stereotypical but thrilling patriarchal lessons in love—lessons that were inherent in the less colorful Functional Couples, but not nearly as much fun. Gable brought a special energy to his three-part taming process, lending a charm to the first step, in which he established that women need a firm hand; the second step, by which they learned that he was right; and the third step, whereby they learned the joys of internalization of lessons one and two, indicated by the smile on their formerly wayward faces. Many of the Gable formula films are now all but forgotten—Dance, Fools, Dance (1931, Dir. Harry Beaumont), Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise (1931, Dir. Robert Z. Leonard), Dancing Lady (1933, Dir. Robert Z. Leonard), Test Pilot (1938, Dir. Victor Fleming); others have made it into film history and maintain a modest reputation—Red Dust (1931, Dir. Victor Fleming), Cain and Mabel (1936, Dir. Lloyd Bacon), Honky Tonk (1941, Dir. Jack Conway). One or two classics used Gable's image to enduring advantage: It Happened One Night (1936, Dir. Frank Capra) and Gone with the Wind (1939, Dir. Victor Fleming). However, more powerful than any of the films themselves, the pattern lingers on. The Iconic Couple in classical Hollywood energized a formulaic script and makes submission to cultural stereotypes seem like a party.

As cultural stereotypes increasingly lost favor as a mode of characterization in the post-studio era, the Iconic Couple became an iffy proposition, though it did not disappear. In the last chapter of this study, we shall see how it became both duller than it had been under the studio system and less important, though it still continued to feature stars. At the same time, a new category of onscreen star pair, which I will call the Thematic Couple, partially filled the vacuum it left, emerging in the post-studio era. I will discuss this type in depth in Chapter Seven. As more freedom became available to moviemakers, scripts stopped unequivocally enforcing traditional stereotypes and began to tentatively question them. Actors energizing this kind of script often disrupted traditional stereotypes without disrupting the script. This type is most meaningfully represented by Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, in their numerous screen collaborations; Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd, in the television series Moonlighting; and Bill Cosby and Phylicia Rashad, in the television series The Cosby Show. But thoughts about the Thematic Couple in the post-studio era take us ahead of our story. To critically appreciate that kind of star coupling, and the fin de siècle version of the Synergistic Couple, it is necessary to first consider in depth and detail the foundation for the couple tradition in mass media entertainment built during the studio era.

The chemistry of the Gable Plus One package is as undeniable as the chemistry of the Astaire/Rogers series. Yet the differences between these two categories of chemistry go to the heart of my attempts to understand the possibilities and limitations of the Hollywood that existed between 1930 and 1950. Primarily, attending to these two kinds of couple chemistry helps us to see with fresh eyes not only the figure of the couple in Classical Hollywood, but also the expressive consequences of the relationship between filmic sound and visual elements and the literary/formulaic/ideological elements in the popular culture movie.

Raw and Cooked Image in Hollywood

There has been a dearth of thinking about couples in Hollywood movies. Astoundingly, there is no serious, extended criticism of the work of any of the four classical Synergistic Couples identified here, a situation that has left this study almost completely dependent on primary sources. Moreover, in what criticism exists about the couple phenomenon, the tendency has been to address the content of the script, the concept of the love story, and their cultural and ideological implications. This kind of study, though important, leaves out the most telling aspect of the screen couple: image. In this investigation I will consider the stories too, but the main emphasis will be on the relationship between the story and the image imprinted by charismatic screen couples. Screen couple chemistry is an energy issue, by itself a conceptually neutral element of moving pictures, the release of high-impact images into Hollywood movies. Screen couple chemistry is not inherently attached to any particular social values; rather it becomes attached to values depending on the way it is narratively used. It is necessary to discriminate among the possible ways of invoking values through screen chemistry. That discussion must be based on an understanding of the way chemistry is processed industrially through the filmic image, its vehicle, and how the processing affects absorption of the image by the spectator.

Most discussions of Hollywood assume that the processing of images is always through cases and that in all cases spectators read these images through social codes that subtly glamourize the conventional values promulgated by scripts supervised by the conservative/reactionary Production Code Administration. But in the case of screen chemistry, when its force turns into screen couple synergy, there are raw documentary elements in the image as well as elements fabricated by studio manipulation of technologies. That uncontrollable aspect of the Synergistic Couple contains not only fascination but also the potential for spectators to receive impressions that go beyond socially devised languages and systems. When this potential is realized, meanings that challenge formulaic cultural understanding are forged. In the specific case of the screen couple, an understanding of chemistry goes to the heart of why stereotypical representations of intimacy are connected with the more processed Iconic Couple, while unorthodox representations of intimacy follow from a more intense raw presence in images generated by Synergistic Couple chemistry.

In the case of the Iconic Couple formed by the Gable Plus One package, Gable's macho manhood chemistry is itself subordinated by an aggressive structure of stereotype and formula that objectifies the sensuality of Gable and his partners through a narrative of a domination/submission pattern of love. By contrast, in the case of the films made by the focal synergistic quartet, chemistry plays a more primary role. In, for example, the Astaire/Rogers series, Astaire's offbeat indeterminate masculinity, Rogers's equally ambiguous femininity, and the odd mutuality of their battle of the sexes forced their vehicles to adopt less aggressive narrative structures that took oddly indeterminate forms to accommodate their deluge of screen chemistry. Such synergy as theirs both disrupts a formulaic script and evolves a counterpointed visual continuity that forms the basis of a new perspective on old stereotypes.

The same can be said for the association between offbeat gender definition and the raw aspect of image in the other three couples in the focal quartet. Weissmuller/Tarzan's strange combination of male physicality with a whimsical, even receptive, nature usually associated with women fuses in a dynamic pairing with O'Sullivan/Jane's oddly unthreatening combination of receptive, fragile English Rose beauty and aggressive openness to difference and adventure typically associated with men, all of which erupted in a synergy requiring an unusually pliant narrative. Powell and Loy, both of whom had been cast as evil characters in earlier films, brought this edgy legacy to bear in the Thin Man mystery series, making for a darkly shaded, somewhat unsettling portrait of their intimacy. Finally, Hepburn's androgynous energy paired with Tracy's stolid bourgeois patriarchal energy charges with visual expressiveness and unique psychological complexity their often simplistically overwritten films.

Documentary image as a raw element of photography doesn't exist as a pure entity in any form of photography as, even in the most naked of photographic glances at the external world, there is always the issue of framing, which is inevitably connected with the values, ideas, and background history of the photographer. The studio-created Hollywood image is in general far more managed than it is documentary in character. However, the term "documentary" can, and should, also be applied to Hollywood movies, albeit as a highly qualified concept, particularly in relation to the Iconic Couple. There is a documentary element even in Gable's highly manipulated image. He was in front of the camera and there was a specific magnitude and tone to the energy that his body projected, but it was consistently subordinated to the purposes of molding and maintaining Gable's stardom, encased, unshifting, a thinglike, dependably consistent icon, one that never revealed the ineluctability of the body. Gable's energy was the foundation of his image, which proposed a false, glamourized idea of body, as an armor that his inner force illuminated but never animated. The patent-leather hair, with one or two wayward strands; the dark, hostile eyes sometimes shot through with a gleam of warmth that registered the minimal recognition that the narcissist can have of the presence of another who pleases him for a moment; the dimples in the tightly sculpted face; the thin moustache above the cherubic lips; the one oddity that perhaps energized his charm, his protruding ears: the composition was never stirred by any emotion that rearranged the sculptural effect. The preservation of that image superseded his delivery of lines and emotions in a scene, which, subordinated to the static image, was always mechanical; never a surprising improvisational gesture that could not be imagined by the spectator before it was performed. Much the same could be said for the stars he worked with. Joan Crawford, for example, exuded a raw chemistry that had a documentary origin in her, but it too was packaged to fit a static iconic image: her sultry, enormous eyes and full, sulky mouth, all molded into a characteristic expression of cruelty and pathos: the victim/adventuress. Crawford's large-boned body swaggered through the film frames as well defined as a statue, calling attention to itself, offering itself to be dominated. She clicked into place with Gable, but she clicked into place within any story formula tailored to her goddess/sacrifice image.

But if Hollywood fame often depended on the ability of an actor to find such a reproducible image to contain and delimit the necessary star energy, and the Hollywood couple might often mean a matched pair of icons, there were star couples that altered the logistics of the artificial star package. Fred Astaire, for example, when he worked with Ginger Rogers, to take perhaps the most cliche-shattering and abiding of the four pairs to be studied here, entered the frame with more raw energy than fixed image. "Being debonair" became a rigid pose for Astaire with other partners. But with Rogers, his image armor was in the immaculate, but ultimately removable tuxedo, which the audience knew was only a covering. In the Astaire/Rogers series, the Astaire tuxedo brings into conjunction both the external constraints of social order and an almost indescribable inner energy of resistance to all the formality to which his character is subjected. Moving along a spectrum of changing shapes, the inner protean Astaire is sometimes light enough to escape into the air through his white-tied collar, sometimes as physically obdurate as a balking mule. In his synergy with Rogers, he sometimes meets her with a puckish, elfin pliancy, maneuvering to soften her hard-edged self-protectiveness through play; other times he prods her and coaches her physically as an animal speaks to another (intractable) animal, drawing from within her rhythms she is rejecting. There are still other times when he meets her with an Oberon-like force, surprising her like a lightning strike. If Astaire's formal clothes satisfy the Hollywood mandate for reproducible images, when he worked with Rogers, there was that within the uniform that amplifies the documentary, mysterious energy of the human body.

On her part, Rogers, too, had a synergy with Astaire that complicated the standard glamour of her obligatory Hollywood feminine allure accessories. Rogers's cloud of blond hair, her clingy gowns, her feathers, satins, lamés, sparkles, and high heels may be the uniform of Hollywood seduction, but with Astaire, she exuded an energy from within the glamour drag, unreproducible by any starlet or female impersonator; the energy was inimitable, even by her. Her shifts in body and emotional tone matched, provoked, and answered Astaire's in a documentary surge of life force. Rogers ran the gamut from ice queen implacability to irrepressible effervescent playfulness. But she could also exude a searching energy of earnest intention to pursue her own agenda that excluded him completely, as well as a kind of openness to him that verged on ecstasy. Her permutations existed in immediate, spontaneous response to his; in the case of raw synergy, there can be no standard blueprint.

The differences between the Iconic Couple, represented by the Gable Plus One phenomenon, and the Synergistic Couple, represented by the work of Astaire and Rogers, were not the result of a studio decision, but rather of the opportunities created by the collaborative conditions of the studio system. As far as explicit studio policy was concerned, from the earliest days of the studio system, screen chemistry was a commodity. But if the studios had to see chemistry in that way, its reality evaded them. It was not a commodity, even in Hollywood, but an energy that sometimes was generated by the spontaneity that marked the collaborative commercial film process. In an effort to understand the Synergistic Couple phenomenon, which was permitted because it was thought of as a marketable commodity in Hollywood, this study will explore the emergence of screen chemistry as the result not of the decisions of the studio hierarchy but rather of the vortex of multiple perspectives that was an everyday part of the fragmented studio structure. The inability of any one point of view to dominate the collaborative process built into the studio system, combined with its fostering of situations in which stable acting partnerships could be formed that involved highly conflicted energy, is at the basis of screen chemistry. Studios permitted, and even forced, performers to explore the interesting, if on occasion exasperating, results of working through the dynamics of difference.

The fact of onscreen chemistry in movies must be closely read in terms of the production conditions from which those films evolved, in terms of both studio policies and the particular creative teams that made them, for it is no small point of interest that couple chemistry is an inherent and spontaneous quality that flourished in spite of and in some ways because of a manipulative industry formed by highly specific historical conditions. The historical conditions are almost as important as the innate energy in considering couple chemistry, as there was a symbiotic relationship between screen chemistry and the studio-generated star system. If the star system became a feature of the American culture industry by virtue of screen chemistry, screen chemistry moved from a notable phenomenon to force majeure because of the star system. During the studio system years in Hollywood, the star system and screen chemistry fed each other. Painted with the broadest brush, the situation was this: The political and economic power accorded to a star created a dynamic whereby that actor became increasingly at liberty to release the inner force more freely, which etched the performer more deeply into the public imagination and promoted stardom more indelibly, which led to more emphasis on the power of the screen energy in the actor's instrument, and so forth. This was true for all stars and all star pairs; the distinction of the Synergistic Couple was that its energy was more resistant to the control of studio technology over its release.

Nonetheless, the significance of the Synergistic Couple depends on the energy with which the studio sought to process it. Ironically, the energy of the star couple image became a significant element of meaning because of the presence of the artificial features of movies so cultivated by the studio system: the formulaic narrative and idealizing costumes, makeup, and lighting. In non-Hollywood films that use loose, personally imagined narrative elements, improvisation, and a desire to reach for the purity of unlabeled documentary image, actor chemistry is just another form of raw image. In contrast, studio products heighten the impact of star chemistry by the extreme tension created between that raw energy and the multitude of artificial technologies used by Hollywood. The effect of the synergistic actor's raw energy is magnified on the screen when it is virtually the sole raw element of the composition of mise-en-scène and story that are formed by the highly artificial Hollywood formulaic plot, as well as manipulated lighting, costume, and makeup. The star's raw energy, and especially the combined energies of a star couple, appears even more powerfully because of its inevitable resistance to the artificiality, as elemental life forces in ordinary situations will appear even more intense if there is an attempt to cultivate them. So let us say it is the imposition of the formal, quasi-military, somewhat repressive, and certainly ideologically resonant lines of the tuxedo on Fred Astaire, combined with the artificial glamour of Rogers's wardrobe, that ratchets up the power and the visibility of the non-ideological force of the energy of their chemistry. And the synergy of Astaire and Rogers is ratcheted up by the artificiality of the script and setting. Detractors of the studio system and of Hollywood in general give the men in charge of the mass media high marks for effective manipulation of the movies in terms of the ideologies they transmit and economic successes they create. And often these evaluations are correct. Yet studio politics and their attendant cultural ideologies have never been successful at fabricating the real magic of Hollywood, such as that given to them by the accident of Rogers and Astaire.

Serious consideration of the clash between the manipulated technologies of Hollywood and the raw energy of couple chemistry that the studios tapped into but never could create forces us to rethink how the spectator receives the image and the potential for Old Hollywood to make meaning in ways that confounded studio control. Much of current film studies has approached the making of meaning in the movies as a function of ideology. That is, film has been widely explored in terms of how it re-inscribes the value systems of Western society in general and capitalism in particular through its visual modes of storytelling. Ideology is understood to be a powerful set of assumptions built into the structure of our institutions, which set the boundaries to our beliefs and behavior. Much of American ideology embedded in the structure of government, education, business, religion, and the armed forces has been identified as an inevitable limitation on our thought and actions. The dominant ideology is said to coerce beliefs in hierarchy, patriarchal entitlement, a preference for competition over cooperation, dominance/submission over mutuality, and the rational over the emotional. While it is accurate to say that ideology often functions in this way, however, ideology is too frequently seen as a total form of tyranny, and this is not correct. There are many fissures and ruptures, of which film studies must take heed. The tendency in film studies toward an anxious certainty that the rational supersedes the emotional, preventing us from thinking beyond the parameters established by ideology, has created unnecessary blind spots, particularly with regard to screen chemistry. The overemphasis on the power of ideology has made it impossible, heretofore, to discuss screen chemistry as anything other than a socially manipulated weapon in ideology's arsenal. However, all evidence in the films themselves points toward a form of chemistry quite independent of ideology, and cutting-edge experiments in neuroscience support this observation. Reason and the ideology it creates, this work suggests, are but one of a number of modes of making meaning. The implication of these experiments for film studies is that they establish theoretical support for a raw, non-ideological image, which, along with learned ideology, plays a role in the way we make meaning as we view and make meaning of films—including our engagement with screen couples.

As neuroscience has been making clear, the rational constructs of ideology are not necessarily the final determinants when it comes to making meaning; nor are the non-rational areas in the mind that are more linked to inherent body and emotional processes totally in control. Rather, these different brain functions are mutually important in the process of making meaning, possibly differing to the greatest degree in terms of their positions in different parts of the cycle of making meaning. The raw image may be understood as that part of the screen image that speaks to the subcortical, preconscious mind, which seems to initiate the process of making meaning. In this initial engagement with the screen image, the spectator is responding below the level of rational awareness. (For a more detailed discussion, please see Appendix Two: "Theorizing Chemistry in Entertainment via Neuroscience.") By contrast, those aspects of the screen image associated with Hollywood technologies that are part of the social coding may be understood to be read by the reasoning centers of the mind, which have a second-cycle involvement in thinking. In this light, the raw energy of screen chemistry may be theorized as part of the way movies make meaning. In its ability to replicate the first stage of thinking through body image, screen couple chemistry is plausibly one aspect of the entertainment industry that produces a cycle of relationship between image and concept so rapid that it comes as close as we can ever come to infusing an uncoded experience into the meaning of the Hollywood movie. Paradoxically, then, chemistry, despite its reputation as the mark of the repressiveness of the Hollywood system, may also be the sign of potential resistance to the constraints of escapist storytelling. The juxtaposition of the raw image with the artificiality of Hollywood technologies will be explored in the films of the Synergistic Couples in Chapters Two to Five, as a way of creating a new perspective on the way the mass public reads, enjoys, and is stimulated by the clash between chemistry and formula in Hollywood movies. A larger goal of these discussions is to explain why the culture forms enduring attachments to the screen couples that embody the irritant juxtaposition of convention and unbound energy, while it forms only temporary interest in screen couples that are purely conventional/ideological.

Synergistic and Iconic Star Couples

The two categories of couple chemistry that I have labeled the Iconic Couple and the Synergistic Couple can be best distinguished by examining the degree to which they create a dynamic between coded information and raw energy in a Hollywood film. The more numerous kind of star couple, the Iconic Couple, was, of the two types, less rich and exciting in its dynamic. It was composed of two icons, one star image linked to another star image in a way that left each a discrete separable module that could be plugged into a reasonable facsimile of the partnership with another actor. By contrast, the energy interchange of the Synergistic Couple, which could not be reproduced at will, exerted a disruptive influence on the formulaic elements in the film and emerged from an unpredictable process of combination, a multiplication process in which a third entity was created, a hyphenated identity, from which neither could be extricated as a discrete portion of the couple. There was no comparable recombination possible. Synergistically linked actors became third-entity pairs by virtue of their psychological balances or imbalances, by virtue of accident, or by virtue of luck, which resulted in the reduction of blockage of energy flow between the two partners and also between partners and spectator.

A comparatively rare phenomenon, but one strikingly important to the American culture industry, the Synergistic Couple distills the paradox of mass culture. Neither a mechanical reproduction nor a subversive attack on industrial culture, synergistic chemistry was at the same time an economic foundation of the Hollywood studio, and a live, unpredictable energy that made Hollywood capable of authentic expression about human existence. This form of couple chemistry occurred unpredictably between actors, as we shall see in chapters to come, in a number of different forms, generated by a variety of different historical circumstances, but consistently as a function of the fate of that sort of spontaneous kinship within the parameters of the studio system. The images created by Synergistic Couple chemistry generate a system of relations on the screen that, in a substantial way, proposes a narrative of its own, the chemistry no longer a matter of a single element in the screen frame, but of a small energy ecosystem that collides with the verbal narrative as well as the composition of the mise-en-scène. This creates an unusual (for mass entertainment) powerful subconscious engagement of the spectator with the narrative as well as with the image, the primary significance of which is its demonstration that popular culture can produce profoundly meaningful rather than only trivial escapist pleasures for a mass audience. Although it has been supposed that the greater the subconscious involvement of the spectator, the greater the chance for the traducing of the spectator with the simplistic and repressive formulations of the narrative, the films made by Synergistic Couples show the opposite to be true. Because of its disruption of the rational elements of the narrative, Synergistic Couple chemistry lessened the ideological stranglehold of entertainment on the audience.

By this light, the pleasures of Synergistic Couple chemistry show up as the opposite of the escapist fascination they have been presumed to be because they have been confused with the escapist pleasures generated by the Iconic Couple. Their films have been mistakenly lumped in with the usual Hollywood film, managed by studio executives in collaboration with the Production Code Administration to ensure a product that would appeal to the lowest common denominator and that would include no ideas that would disturb or turn away potential ticket buyers. The usual Hollywood narratives tended to be stories that, in the despairing words of screenwriter Ben Hecht, "have slapped into the American mind more human misinformation in one evening than the Dark Ages could muster in a decade. One basic plot only has appeared daily in their fifteen thousand theaters—the triumph of virtue and the overthrow of wickedness." Worse still, the naive, simplistic Hollywood concept of conquering virtue and defeating vice was generally imagined through a particularly narrow and exclusive ideology that regarded virtue as the exclusive property of moneyed white Christians and vice as the likely option of all others. However, if Hecht gives a reasonably accurate description of the customary Hollywood plot, he does not describe Hollywood movies, to which there was, in the more important films, abundantly more than the plot. This is a truth that escaped an entire industry that, in its production and creative communities, and especially in the adjunct to the Hollywood studio system known as the Production Code Administration, never seemed to understand how much information is carried by image and how complicated the relationship was between simplistic plot and highly indeterminate image.

What we think of as Hollywood—so often exclusively associated with assembly-line production of standard items—actually often involves elements of disturbance, as well as formula. What is more, the history of Hollywood has been affected more powerfully by what has jarred its formulas than by what reinforced them. While Iconic and Synergistic Couples were both comparatively successful in their day, Synergistic Couples have proven to be enduring, while by and large Iconic Couples have proven to be limited in appeal to the times in which they were produced. Moreover, the kind of Iconic Couple movie that does endure as a powerful popular culture force, like Bringing Up Baby (1938, Dir. Howard Hawks), Gone with the Wind (1939, Dir. Victor Fleming), and Casablanca (1942, Dir. Michael Curtiz), notably involves one-time star pairings that either demonstrate how potent the anti-recipe factor is in creating powerful mass media fiction or suggest that the pair might have become synergistic had they been appropriately cultivated by the industry. What makes Gone with the Wind an enduring power, despite the standard Gable Plus One dynamic between Gable and Leigh, is the atypical, disturbing indeterminacy at the end of the film, which drew from the actors an energy that went beyond the formulaic macho man/uppity woman recipe that informs the bulk of the film. Gable's Butler reaches an unusual place for the actor in the last scene, in which there is a flicker of something more raw and documentary as he grapples with a battle that can be neither lost nor won. Leigh, an actor infinitely greater in scope than Gable, is given a chance to break formula, to some extent, as Scarlett reaches a moment that takes her beyond the obligatory formula for Hollywood's all too headstrong, sexy heroine/villain. Had Gable's Butler killed or tamed Leigh's O'Hara in the prescribed Hollywood manner, despite the film's big-budget production, GWTW would probably like most of the Gable hits, have been popular in its day but then would have faded into history. Somewhat different in composition, Casablanca, despite the inordinate number of cliches in its script, opens up an indeterminacy in the relationship between Humphrey Bogart's Rick and Ingrid Bergman's Ilsa, with his anti-hero refusal to act and her steel fist in a velvet glove assertiveness that in the movie dwarfs the heroism of the reputed resistance hero to whom she is married. The atypical gender configurations bring out something not quite formulaic in the actors' relationship with each other that raises questions about what might have been accomplished between them had they been rematched several times. Similarly, the pairing of Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby, in most ways a formulaic comedy, demonstrated their capacity in this film for creating a synergy that drew brilliantly both on Grant's unusual combination of iconic star image and the physical freedom to render it pliable and bending as wax and on Hepburn's similarly unusual freedom to unleash powers that disrupt the iconic star female image. Though highly regarded now, it was decisively rejected by the public in its time. Perhaps it threatened so much gender bending that unfortunately the nascent Hepburn/Grant synergy exhibited in Baby (they worked together four times, but never as excitingly) alienated the mass audience (unlike the case of Astaire and Rogers) and so was not nurtured by the film industry.

The industry failure to support the destabilizations of gender revealed in Baby is indicative of the irony (and maybe tragedy) of popular culture. In the short run, except when luck intervenes, institutionally, it favors its least dynamic aspects. The popular culture production hierarchy has always been more comfortable with the typical Iconic Couple, which Hollywoodizes the raw energy of chemistry by shunting it back into stereotype, as a mechanical blueprint for sexual tension between a dominant male and an uppity female. The misplaced confidence in manipulatively defined couples is encouraged by their commercial success in the short run. When the energy of actor chemistry is contained in this way, it continues to exert its own kind of attractions but favors the formulaic plot and is used by the Hollywood creative team for predictable results in a predictable, if momentarily exciting, story. Iconized chemistry is embryonic platitude, culturally captivating in its appeal as long as historical conditions embed the relevant cultural ideologies, but lacking the strangeness and shifts that bleed formulaic stories into more culturally enduring representations of the clash between the ideal and the ungovernable in human life.

We have already considered how the Gable Plus One phenomenon is acutely expressive of the pleasures of actor chemistry reduced to formula. A closer look at Gable's films is instructive in terms of the bound and free elements of his charisma. Gable's consistent clichéd presence in apologist narrative for male violence, insensitivity, and pigheadedness now can be examined for its obnoxious and even boring qualities; yet the undeniable appeal of Gable's energy remains. In Dancing Lady, his cheerful force disguised the phallic sadism of the protagonist, cynical choreographer Patch Gallagher, who slaps dancer Janie Barlow (Joan Crawford) on the buttocks after hiring her for a job in the chorus, in what became a typical Gablesque act of gratuitous mastery and possession. She, with fawning, spaniel-like devotion, thanks him, ostensibly for the job, but in a way that helps the audience understand it as a grateful reaction to his abusive touch. Later in the film, Gallagher works out with Janie in a gym—in the film he is identified by his last name, she by her first—and repeatedly alternates between injuring and massaging her, to which she also responds in a spaniel-like fashion.

In Test Pilot, as test pilot Jim Lane, Gable raises his image to a godlike level as he makes the analogy between the sky, which draws him toward the possibility of death, and a seductive woman in a blue dress, whom he survives by slapping her into place. Myrna Loy, as his wife, Ann, is represented as longing to be slapped by him, so that she can do better in the importance category than sitting beside him as he gets drunk after returning from his missions or watching anxiously from the ground. In Gone with the Wind (1939), as Rhett Butler, he expresses the conviction, when Scarlett (Vivien Leigh) says she will faint if he continues to kiss her, that that's just what she needs, to be kissed until she faints. He rapes her when she withholds sex after the birth of her daughter. And when Scarlett tries to tell him how deluded she has been about her love for him, he leaves her without listening to the words he has purportedly longed to hear. At the time of the production of these films, Gable's energy disguised, through its charm, the abuse in all these scenes, not to mention the formulaic conclusions of the films, in which male domination is firmly established over a defeated, once uppity woman. In his time, Gable could pull off his signature gender routine with a remarkably large number of female colleagues.

Other kinds of clichéd domination/submission patterns could be provided by Iconic Couples who, though more effective with each other than with any other partner, still lacked the unsettling energy of the Synergistic Couple and existed to glamourize Hollywood cliches. For example, Olivia de Havilland and Errol Flynn were not as appealing to audiences with other acting partners as they were with each other, but were strikingly formulaic in their repeated relationships with each other in the seven films in which they co-starred. The group of Iconic Couples that showed a particular affinity for each other within the almost machine-tooled repetitiveness of their formulaic pattern is equally represented by the numerous collaborations of Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy (eight films). This category of Iconic Couple created a form of static repetition, which unlike the repeated partnerships of the Synergistic Couple, did not grow but rather gave the public an industrial replication of the pattern that abundantly offered the short-term satisfactions of predictability and familiarity.

The recipe for the Errol Flynn/Olivia de Havilland film will serve nicely as an example. Within a space of six years, this Iconic Couple became encrusted in a familiar combination: Flynn's insouciant derring-do, scorning the injustices of the powerful who would oppress him and all God-fearing men, and de Havilland's ladylike playfulness, challenging Flynn's masculine prerogative until he humbles her to his will and simultaneously raises her to the level of his acquired power. They constructed this relationship as the gender pattern of choice in the medieval period (The Adventures of Robin Hood, 1938, Dir. Michael Curtiz), seventeenth-century England (Captain Blood, 1935, Dir. Michael Curtiz); the nineteenth-century American West (Dodge City, 1939, Dir. Michael Curtiz, Santa Fe Trail, 1940, Dir. Michael Curtiz, and They Died with Their Boots On, 1941, Dir. Raoul Walsh); Victorian England (The Charge of the Light Brigade, 1936, Dir. Michael Curtiz); and twentieth-century America (Four's a Crowd, 1938, Dir. Michael Curtiz). Their repeated teaming as a movie couple created an image of historical inevitability in the stereotypical dynamics of their relationship, while reducing the historical events through which they courted and loved to a pile of nonsense.

Their first film, Captain Blood, set the pattern. Despite the grittiness of the film's violence, atypical for the studio system period but permitted by Warner Brothers, the studio that produced the Flynn/de Havilland films, Blood is a clichéd production. Flynn steadily entombed his charisma behind the constructed Flynn image; his charmingly engineered gestures threaded their way through English and American history, bringing to heel the ever pert yet refined de Havilland. A conventionally phallic Hollywood hero, Flynn managed his energy to produce more subtlety and a more nuanced European quality about aggression than there was about Gable's bluster. Flynn masked his bravado with a thin veneer of civility, which was proudly flaunted in his films as the difference between him and the crudely phallic boors who opposed him. He had a charming lyrical smile that belied a quiet, iron will that he imposed on bullies who made unreasonable demands. His small, chiseled facial features were not particularly distinguished except for their clean modeling, and he eventually articulated the drama of his face with a pencil-thin moustache à la Gable. Flynn cultivated the gestures of heroic nonchalance in his body, which was more distinctive than his face. His feline grace gave him the air of a tomcat; his voice, even more distinctive, had a calculated, purrlike, soft lyrical lilt. Probably his most deliberate strategy was his smile, with its brilliant white flash of teeth that intimated the bite and sneer of defiance ready beneath his soft manners. The Flynn situation required (and got) an adversary on whom that irony was never lost; Flynn's acting armor would have cracked had he been forced to deal with an imperceptive or too overtly brutal antagonist. The smile also served him well in the context of command. When he was surrounded his loyal crew—men who would follow him anywhere—the flashing smile expressed a "good old boy" exuberance as he dashingly issued orders.

He formed a matched pair with de Havilland, with her catlike daintiness, her softness always ready to make way for righteous indignation, and her kittenish enthusiasm. She joined him in a coupling of civil ferocity and grace, though his scenes with her tended to be subordinated to his action plot, aggressively suggesting the stereotypically subordinate role of women in the typical, man-centered Flynn movie. For example, Captain Blood purports to take place in the seventeenth century in England, a time of religious and political tyranny when Englishmen were scooped up on the flimsiest of pretexts and either executed or transported as slaves to Jamaica for the economic gain of the Crown. Among these is Dr. Peter Blood (Flynn), transported for ministering to the wounds of a rebel against the Crown. Most of the movie is spent on action scenes in which Peter mobilizes his men and intimate scenes with heroine Arabella (de Havilland), thrown in sparingly to suggest Blood's ultimate destiny once he wins the day. Even the intimate scenes, however, tend to take place as a sidebar on the manly field of action rather than in private, secluded, intimate spaces. The scene in which Flynn is auctioned off as a slave before de Havilland's eyes is what passes for personal contact in a de Havilland/Flynn film. In this very public scene, the irrepressible Blood offends Colonel Bishop (Lionel Atwill), the better of the two slave owners in Jamaica, by being too independent about the routine physical inspection of newly arrived slaves. When Colonel Bishop pounds on Blood's chest and smacks him across the face for not opening his mouth for a tooth inspection, Blood smiles and then imitates Bishop's inspection posture, looking Bishop up and down. For his arrogance, Blood is almost sold to the mines, the worst fate for a slave. Bishop's niece Arabella (de Havilland), who, appropriately for a heroine, takes a dim view of buying and selling people, takes pity on Blood and buys him herself. This saves his life but violates the domination/submission pattern for heroes and heroines. He resents her interference, bowing to her before joining the other Bishop slaves and saying, with lyrical irony, "Your very humble slave, Miss Bishop." In order to maintain the necessary gender recipe, which is played out with relish between them, all subtlety in the situation is sacrificed.

The definitive and public nature of each of their gestures ignores the complexity of Arabella's position as a woman in seventeenth-century society, and the complexity of any erotic interplay between men and women of any time. It also trivializes the terrible bondage into which Blood and the other men have been sold as a charming excuse for flirtation. The simplemindedness of the couple construction also dominates the outcome of the film, when Blood becomes the governor of the island and makes all well, suggesting that class injustice can be eliminated by the right couple, rather than acknowledging how complexly it is built into the fabric of society. The escapism and anachronisms are compounded by Arabella's behavior with her abusive and extremely powerful uncle, toward whom she acts as if she were a spoiled teenager in Marin County today.

The stage is set for not only a trivialized and eroticized battle of wills but also a trivialized and eroticized picture of class warfare. The sporadic meetings between Arabella and Blood are recipe encounters that use a slave society as the background for ritual courtship. If de Havilland has somewhat more spontaneity than Flynn, there is no chance for it to engage any free energy on Flynn's part, possibly the reason why Curtiz edited the slave auction scene so precisely, cutting back and forth between the two instead of using two-shots, which would have made painfully obvious the modicum of energy between his hero and heroine. The sexual "chemistry" between the two is predominantly fabricated by the juxtaposition of shots of Flynn's shamrock-scented posturing with shots of de Havilland's flashing-eyed, perky defiance of social customs. Smooth and polished, the rapport has nothing of the improvisational or wild energy about it. As such, the couple pairing does nothing that touches the profound non-reasoning centers in the mind, in a way that might have disturbed the spectator about the unexamined racism of Arabella's family and friends or complicated the simplistic portrayal of this highly stratified and brutal society. On the contrary, because it lulls the spectator's senses, the canned if attractive nature of the Flynn/de Havilland byplay lures the audience into accepting the escapist, conventional Hollywood logic of the satin-clad, ringlet-tossing maiden who dares and the rebel and pirate who becomes governor of Jamaica. This pattern of charming and intense endorsement of plot stereotypes is reproduced in all the films of this couple series.

By contrast, because of the unpredictable and uncontrollable energies of the synergistic acting pairs, repeated castings proved to be anything but a pure Hollywood version of mass production. Unorthodoxly countering heavy pressures to mechanize and formulate the movies in each series, the reengagement of energies in the Synergistic Couple series represents a very different form of repetition. At various points in their cycles, these acting pairs fell into the trap of consumer commodity, but more often they brought us repetition as exploration, renewal, and regeneration. The repetition became, at its best, an exploration of the attraction/repulsion of Otherness, and its implications for social institutions. The crucial factor was whether the charisma in the acting team could reverse the typical industry imbalances that emphasized the logic of the screenplay over the image. The more closely the film was tied to a powerfully articulated story, the more likely that the mysteries of human connection would be circumscribed by cultural ideologies inevitably promoted by the storyline. The more energy behind the couple image, the more likely that a film could complicate its vision of human relations.

In the chapters to come, as we examine the synergistic partnerships in films like Tarzan and His Mate (Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O'Sullivan), Top Hat (Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers), The Thin Man (William Powell and Myrna Loy), and Adam's Rib (Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn), we will find less editing and less harmony among the filmic elements and more dissonance analogous to the disruptive energies between the couple partners. There will be more than a few slippages in the images that record the characterization of the male and female protagonists. The fluid transformational energies of the Synergistic Couples challenged the clichéd romantic images and the ritualized sexual power games mandated in Hollywood scripts, which yielded time and again to their dynamic improvisational interactions, which were transmitted almost wholly by the non-narrative aspects of film image, sound, light, darkness.

Hollywood's zero degree aesthetic, which strives to erase the inherent conflicts among filmic elements, also tries to close the door on facets of representation that might trouble conventional ideas, like unsynchronized or wild sound, shadows, evocative lighting, disruptions-of-continuity editing. Shot patterns were supposed to bring a sense of clarity to the spectator about the details of the story. A close-up was intended to emphasize a story point, just as the lighting was supposed to indicate realistic images of times of day and year, and make visible what needed to be seen so that the story could be followed with the least amount of difficulty. Any attention to sound or image as a thing in itself disrupted the reassuring dependability of narrative (arguably a metaphor for the assumed dependability of masculinity) with the shifting, mysterious materiality of sound and image (arguably a metaphor for the assumed anxiety associated with the attractions of the feminine). On this basis I will argue for the significance of the presence of all these destabilizing visual and aural elements in the films of Synergistic Couples, and for the connection between this "wild" presence and the unconventional parity between the synergistic partners.

It is necessary to emphasize at this point that the categories I have constructed for the purposes of this study are primarily heuristic in nature, and not at all tidy. Purity is not a pronounced characteristic of the collaborative, commercial film industry. All couples in the mass media are somewhat formulaic in nature, and many have moments when they disrupt and dazzle with untrammeled energy. The categories used here denote the significant differences in proportion in these elements. Iconic Couples generally domesticate their star energy through formula; Synergistic Couples generally release it. While significantly more tensions operate within the films of the Synergistic Couple, such tensions may also crop up occasionally in the films made by the Iconic Couple, because the energy domesticated by the screen icon can never be completely checked. Visual and sound images can never be completely synchronized through editing and manipulation, nor can they be completely reduced to the film's pure story purpose, because there will always be an image that pops out of the film by virtue of a beauty or ugliness that goes beyond what is needed for narrative comprehension. In the same way, actor chemistry cannot be completely suppressed to suit escapist needs. There can always be a line of dialogue delivered in a tone that is arresting in itself, in a way that briefly disturbs the mass media control over its elements. In the otherwise formulaic Test Pilot, there is a stunning moment during which Myrna Loy, as Ann, jolts the viewer with the raw energy of a line delivery. Ann and Jim (Gable) engage in some otherwise clichéd banter about his stereotypical fantasy about the sky as a treacherous woman in a blue dress who one moment "sits in his lap and purrs" and the next tries to kill him. Ann, jealously, tells him she wants a blue dress, that she looks good in blue. "What do I get for it?" asks Jim, in a smooth setup for Ann's next line, which Loy delivers in a way reminiscent of the raw chemistry she continually displayed in the Thin Man Series: "I'll purr in your lap." The line suddenly crackles with a primordial power and the film jumps off track, but just for a second. Immediately, Gable and Loy return to their customary, polished line delivery. When Loy worked with Powell in the Thin Man series, such moments were the pattern on which the film was built. However, Loy's momentary rupture in a film in which she was being used as an icon exemplifies how this kind of tension among the materials of filmic representation is one of the main conditions of film production, and thus is never totally absent from the filmic medium, whether it is worked by experimental and independent directors of the collaborative teams or the commercial film industry. Experimental and independent filmmakers producing films for an elite audience may more often play with and emphasize this tension. Commercial studio practice may more customarily suppress it. But there are elements in the commercial film industry, like the Synergistic Couple, that bring the tension forward, ripping the seamless illusion with which Hollywood films are associated.

Space limitations unfortunately prevent me from embracing the full range of couple irritants in commercial entertainment. For example, I regret that I will not be able to discuss camp couples in movies—the pairing of Dick Powell with Ruby Keeler (seven films), Mae West and W. C. Fields (one film), Rock Hudson and Doris Day (three films), and Jon Hall and Maria Montez (six films)—which throw an interesting light on the tension between the energy of image and narrative formulas in commercial entertainment. So do the repeat pairings of some very popular and somewhat indeterminate screen pairs—neither quite iconic nor quite synergistic—that were not able for various reasons to work together enough to give them the kind of heft demonstrated by the chosen quartet, like Cary Grant and Mae West (two films), Jeanette MacDonald and Maurice Chevalier (four films), and Gene Kelly and Judy Garland (three films). Among the other interesting screen couples who do have abundant heft and the potential for providing valuable nuances for our understanding of how mass media define intimacy that could not be discussed here because of the demands of space, some of the more interesting include Groucho Marx and Margaret Dumont (seven films) and Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney (ten films). Then there are the few examples of movie couples that might have been included here simply because they are truly marginal as Hollywood products, and it is a shame they don't have more influence today, such as the teaming of James Gleason with Edna May Oliver in a delightful but virtually forgotten series about a pair of "sixty plus" aficionados of mystery—Hildegard Withers and Oscar Piper—which was continued by the teaming of Gleason with Zazu Pitts and with Helen Broderick after Oliver left the series. Simply because of the spectacle of two utterly unglamourized senior citizens cavorting with style, relish, and pizzazz, it is unfortunate that these have been virtually erased from cultural consciousness. The more couples studied, the more complete becomes the picture of not only the spectrum of commercial images of intimacy, but also the relationship between the mass media and ideology.

Onscreen Couples and Ideology

My approach to couple chemistry, only a step toward exploration of the range of onscreen couples, seeks to expand on the range of screen couple issues explored in Virginia Wright Wexman's Creating the Couple: Love, Marriage, and Hollywood Performance, the only other serious book-length study of the phenomenon of the couple in Hollywood films. Creating the Couple focuses on the ideological effects of the star system on Hollywood's representation of sexuality and marriage, and to specific, distinctive stars rather than to actors who were coupled onscreen. Wexman's conclusion that the couple is yet another way Hollywood has of reinforcing conservative social values and stereotypes is based on her very narrow focus on Hollywood movies. While I am inclined to agree with Wexman's conclusions about her material, her discussion is partial in nature. Wexman speaks not at all about those pairs that I identify as Synergistic Couples and their capacity to disturb, nor does she imagine the possibility of thinking beyond ideology. Focusing on the capacity of the Hollywood couple for formula and cliche, Wexman is mistrustful of the pleasure they create as the bait for swallowing ideological assumptions that are repressive and demeaning to many of the constituencies in its audience, notably women and people of color. I too am mistrustful of a particular kind of Hollywood couple. But I am also mistrustful of Wexman's emphasis on the link between the great interest in the couple in the American mass media and capitalism. The films themselves, as well as studio documents, show that the economic system was not as decisive an influence on the creation of Hollywood couples as she indicates, nor is intense interest in fantasies about couples limited to any one economic system.

The movie pair is a central feature in films produced by countries organized by a wide variety of economic systems. Observation of films made in Communist countries in their earliest and most idealistic stages—historical periods in which the prevailing idealization of group camaraderie could not have been more different than the individualism of the United States—suggests that there is no simple and unassailable connection between capitalism and the couple. In fact, such films may even suggest that the prevalence of couples in movies is more related to pan-cultural response to dramatic storytelling than to the ideologies of the producing countries. Film directors like Alexander Dovzhenko, writing within the context of the Communist ideology, also use the union of the romantic couple as a powerful narrative element onto which the triumph of Communism and the structural element of narrative closure are displaced. The rupture of a romantic couple in Earth (1930, Dir. Alexander Dovzhenko) is every bit as much of a metaphor for the wounding of the community and collective farming as John Wayne's betrayal of Marlene Dietrich in Pittsburgh (1942, Dir. Lewis Seiler) is a metaphor for the wounding of individualism and capitalism. And just as Wayne's recognition of his sins toward Dietrich is a healing that facilitates the capitalist war effort during World War II, so the triumphant rebirth of the romantic couple in Earth brings hope for collective farming (and humanity's relationship with nature) at the end of that film. In even more extreme ideological circumstances, Viktor Ullman, in the chamber opera The Kaiser of Atlantis, set in the concentration camp at Theresienstadt, also displaced onto the romantic couple his passion for the assertion of the potential for life in the face of the threat of annihilation. Ullman was not constructing screen drama, of course, but his inclination toward the figure of the couple in drama in circumstances of such extreme suffering must makes us think again about the role of the romantic pair in dramatic structure.

This study, however, is not just about the role of the couple in drama, but about our misunderstanding of screen chemistry and our oversimplification of the pleasures involved with screen couples. A clear look at screen chemistry and screen couples is not only beautiful but also dangerous—to the more conservative notions about the mass media. Synergistic chemistry represents danger to the script, which it disrupts with its seminal power, not to the audience, which it is erroneously believed to have misled about the nature of love. This danger has not been recognized principally because Synergistic Couples have not been properly distinguished from less interesting and more manipulative pairs created by mass culture.

In much of Hollywood's output, both old and new, the couple image is manipulated into a form of idealization that short-circuits analysis. In the formulaic script couple and in the Iconic Couple, the chemistry of the acting pairs is harmonized or even homogenized to form one seamless, captivating image. By contrast, in the Synergistic Couple, two forms of idealization are brought into collision in a way that disrupts each ideal and stimulates vision and thought. Yet such disruptions ensure that the film will be propelled rather than arrested by the seamlessness of the couple. The Synergistic Couple represents energy in a dialogue between two powerfully matched male and female partners whose images depict interchange rather than sudden, heart-stopping paralysis. The disruptive energy dialogue of the Synergistic Couple also enters into a secondary dialogue with the constraints and defining articulations offered by a script. It pours a regenerative and hopeful energy into one of the most static parts of Hollywood fantasy, the domestic formula, which, particularly in the studio era, tended to present the home as a distinct area cut off from the larger society and the universe. The Synergistic Couple reconnected the domestic realm to the larger reality, suggesting that beauty (in both men and women) was a metaphor for the rich bounty of the pleasures of intimacy, with its capacity to confound the constricting incursions of social structures upon the human spirit. In the hands of the creative teams that built movies around these couples, metaphors for the intimacy of the couple became a form of resistance to threats against humanity involved in the urban mysteries (the Thin Man series), the mysteries of the organic world (the Tarzan series), the mysteries of temporal and spatial forms (Astaire and Rogers), and the enigmas of cinema itself (Tracy and Hepburn).

As we confront, encounter, engage the films of the Synergistic Couples in abundant detail, we will discover that there is a kind of filmic physics in the forces that are put into play through narrative, the movement of bodies, words, and gazes, when Astaire and Rogers, Powell and Loy, Weissmuller and O'Sullivan, and Tracy and Hepburn enter the filmic field. While, in a literal and simple way, all movie couples represent the relationships between the two sexes and can be construed as models for our behavior, the ones that can go no further may indeed be considered problematic, provoking no more than direct imitation that often leads to disillusionment, since life cannot and should not be like a movie. By contrast, these Synergistic Couples that became part of popular culture between 1930 and 1950 exist beyond such limited uses as those of mechanical imitation; they exist as a form of poetry that offers hope. They embody in poetic form the possibility for balance among opposite and contrasting forces as they work through their stories toward closure in a way that satisfies our longing for understanding of the conflicting elements in our lives. Such longings also drive neuroscientists to experiment with left and right brain impulses and chemists and physicists to experiment with the combinatory drama of matter and energy. Synergistic Couples thus are misunderstood as models for behavior. They are more accurately comprehended as meditations on the larger picture of human existence when questions of intimacy, connection, and love are given priority.

Studying the mass media couple tests our seriousness about exploring popular culture because the pleasure connected with the screen couple presses all the hot buttons of the film scholar: The wariness of the onscreen couple's seductive powers. The connections the onscreen couple has with old, discredited social, sexual, and class ideas. The belief that we know that the managers of the culture industry are simply manipulating the audience for profit. The desire to cut through harmful illusions. While the study of beauty may be dangerous, it is worth the risk. Exploring what excites our desire as spectators promises many rewards in teaching us how we read mass entertainment when we are most enthralled, and in freeing us to discriminate among various kinds of enchantments so that we may conceive of a healthy kind of pleasure and celebrate its contributions to cultural survival. Exploring what excites our desire as spectators also gives us the opportunity to probe the uncomfortable and even frightening situation of our manipulation by the media, for the managers may not be as powerful in this respect as they seem, nor the pleasure that they seem to make possible as much under their control as they would wish. The major value of the exploration that follows is its attention to these issues.