Grind house cinema, and cultural distaste for the "other"

This week, we watched the 1922 film Nosferatu, and read two pieces of related literature by David Church and Harry M. Benshoff. Personally, I found Church's piece on the cultural phenomenon of so-called "grind house" cinema to be particularly interesting. Church examines the genesis, the "othering" by mainstream society, and fall of the grind house cinema through articles, records, and photographs dating from the 1920s through the 1980s. The subsequent reemergence of the romanticized grind house aesthetic (as in the 2007 film Grindhouse) is also touched upon. In its heyday, grind house was a definitively out-cultural movement. Though publications sought to deride the cinemas as culturally inappropriate, dirty, sordid and otherwise worthy of contempt, Church argues that this was not exclusively due to the quality of films shown there; the cinemas themselves, and the environments in which they existed played just as much a role in their cultural perception.

In the production code of 1930, Hollywood production studios came together to decide and mandate what would thereafter be deemed "socially acceptable" cinema. Among the regulations were the outlaw of directed sympathy with murderers or criminals, the outlaw of the obscene in most forms, and the outlaw of sexual content deemed "non-essential" or otherwise deviant. It was precisely the films which failed to comply with this production code which grind house cinema would come to be known for (even though their showings often expanded far beyond the narrow categorizations of the "pornography", "slasher", or "exploitation" genres). Due to their perception as "bad objects", the grind houses were often scapegoated as agents of cultural and societal degradation. Ignoring other factors, a New York Times article in 1960 alleged that grind house was the primary culprit behind the 42nd street area's perceived decline in the 1930s: "Much criticism is directed at the ten motion picture theatres... known as 'grind joints.' Some of these theatres emphasize sex and violence in their street displays, and it is suggested that these displays tend to attract undesirables...".  

As Church examines the reasons for the emergence of these grind houses, he comes to an interesting, yet inevitable conclusion. Rather than a purely ideological cultural movement, the grind house's origins were chiefly economic: "... it was precisely the commercial conditions of many of the films... which encouraged their more outlandish features...". Many of these cinemas found it vastly more profitable to run "lower quality" showings non-stop all day, rather than running the typical five or so "higher quality" films. In fact, as time went on, more and more cinemas started making the transition from typical showing practices to the grind house style in order to remain profitable. Why, then, did this style of cinema evade the mainstream despite its increasing popularity? By this time, grind houses and all their connotations had been thoroughly entrenched in the public consciousness. They were a low, dirty, obscene place, adjectives that the public would subconsciously apply not only to the venues themselves, but to all the films that graced their screens. Thus, this perception could not help but color opinion of otherwise reputable cinemas running a grind house "routine", regardless of the actual films that were shown there. 

Finally, Church covers the modern nostalgia-fueled resurgence of the modernized grind house aesthetic. Kick started by Grindhouse (Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino), grind house (or the idea of it) was propelled into what might be its most mainstream acceptance since its inception. The film's audiences were so distanced from the original grind houses that a definition had to be provided to maintain audience interest. Now divorced from the negative connotations of the early days, the grind house aesthetic began to flourish in mainstream circles, albeit with the nostalgic tinge of the past. Now, grind house is economically near synonymous with other films "... within the borgeois social fabric with which grind houses historically had such a tenuous relationship." In a sense, grind house has come full circle, from rebellious, deviant social outsider, to fit for mainstream consumption. 

The rise of fall of the grind house cinema raises many important questions about the continual change of society, deviance, "other"-ness, and our perceptions of these elements. Personally, it makes me wonder what cultural phenomena of today, now seen by the general public as vapid, socially repugnant, or otherwise distasteful and unfit for academic discussion, will be seen through a profoundly different lens by the societies of the future. Likewise, what socially acceptable practices today will be condemned by the societies of the future? 

The continual "othering" of the grind house cinema sees many parallels to the concepts of othering discussed in Benshoff's piece, The Monster and the Homosexual. Benshoff likens the deviance displayed by the monstrous, evil entities in many horror films to the homosexual, and other queer qualities in an age before overt expression of these qualities was remotely socially acceptable. In the same way that the "monstrous" is to the "normal, the homosexual is to the heterosexual, and the deviant is to the normative, the grind house was to mainstream "bourgeois" theatres.