The Political Economy of 'Hello, Dolly!'

Tightly wrapped in gold lamé, Barbra Streisand descends the grand staircase of the Harmonia Gardens restaurant surrounded by a chorus of indescribably camp chefs and waiters. The latter weave between the tables, dancing and grinning as they serve the diners – one waiter shoots a live duck for the benefit of a customer – thus enacting a nightmare-parodic vision of the joy of labour on the front line of the service industry. But despite manifesting the high-gloss glamour of the culture industry that necessarily obscures the labour of its own production, Hello, Dolly! also argues (anachronistically) for the Keynesian economics of the New Deal.

Made in 1969, Hello, Dolly!, was the most expensive movie musical ever, costing around $20m (well over $100m in current terms). Its obscene excess sounded the death knell for Hollywood mega-musicals. The central character is Dolly Levi (played by Streisand), a matchmaker, widow and Mephistophelean granter of wishes. This character trait is illustrated by the business cards she hands to everyone she encounters, upon which her job description is magically transformed to meet the needs of each recipient (thus echoing the Smithian economics under which supply miraculously meets demands that come from… nowhere). As she sings in the film’s first number: 'If you want your ego bolstered, muscles toned or chair upholstered: Just leave everything to me.'

Levi has been employed as a matchmaker by the miserly 'half-a-millionaire' Horace Vandergelder (Walter Matthau), who owns an animal feed business in the sleepy upstate town of Yonkers. Vandergelder’s ideal woman shares his obsessive concern with the accumulation of capital and will function as a sex object and domestic slave: ‘It takes a woman, all powdered and pink, to joyously clean out the drain and the sink.’ Despite his obvious flaws, Levi soon realizes that she wishes to marry Vandergelder herself – for reasons that do not become clear until the film’s conclusion.


Vandergelder has also tasked Levi with guarding his niece Ermengarde, who hopes to marry the painter Ambrose Kemper – a match that Vandergelder considers unpropitious: “A living, Mr Kemper, is made by selling something that everybody needs at least once a year, and a million is made by producing something everybody needs every day. You artists, you painters, produce nothing that nobody needs, never.” This exchange reveals the film’s ambivalence vis-a-vis the place of art within capitalism. As an embodiment of capitalist spectacle, the film itself prostitutes what could – loosely – be called art to Mammon, but in dialogue such as this the act of artistic prostitution is indirectly criticized, favouring instead the bourgeois ideal of autonomous non-functional art.

Having identified Vandergelder as a potential partner, but finding him in need of some political education, Levi introduces her client to Irene Molloy, a New York milliner who dreams of escaping her life of servile drudgery (‘Either I marry Horace Vandergelder or I'm gonna burn this shop down, break out like a fire engine and find myself some excitement’). But Molloy turns out to be unsuitable when Vandergelder drops in on her shop only to discover two men there: a critical breach of his small-town bourgeois sexual etiquette. Fortunately Vandergelder does not detect the identity of these men, who are in fact his two clerks, Barnaby and Cornelius, whom Levi has induced to take a trip to the metropolis by playing on their suburban ennui. Having successfully discouraged Vandergelder from choosing Molloy, who represents Kracauer’s ‘little shop girl’ – the morally dubious female member of the new middle classes who supplies labour to the pleasure industries of modernity – Levi arranges for Vandergelder to meet another prospective bride – an heiress – at the Harmonia Gardens, an expensive downtown restaurant. The heiress represents the nouveaux riches of late 19th century New York – the Vanderbilts and Rockerfellers – to whose status Vandergelder might be expected to aspire. But Levi has again outpaced Vandergelder: the heiress is an actress friend of hers whom she has instructed to act as obnoxiously as possible (‘Anybody can have oysters in season. I want them out of season… Tell 'em to go out and dig for some’), thus discouraging Vandergelder from choosing a mate from this other, icier pole of the social spectrum. Levi herself arrives at the critical moment in which a disillusioned Vandergelder realizes ‘Any man who goes to a big city deserves what happens to him.’ It is at this point that she makes her entrance, singing of her own return like a self-advertising messiah.


Vandergelder’s evening at the Harmonia Gardens is still further complicated by Levi’s Odyssean cunning: she has arranged for his niece Ermengarde to dance with her artist lover Ambrose at the restaurant’s polka context. Levi suggests that if the painter wins the contest, the prize money will convince Vandergelder that there is a living in art (albeit terpsichorean rather than painterly) after all. The plan is a mixed success: Vandergelder concedes Ambrose’s skill as a dancer, but adds ‘no wonder his pictures are so awful. He must paint with his feet.’ In true farcical style, the restaurant scene is disrupted by the arrival of Vandergelder’s clerks Cornelius and Barnaby, who have brought the milliner and her assistant as their dates. Unable to afford the enormous dinner that they have consumed, they too must join the dancing competition, prostituting themselves in leisure as in work so that they can sup at the table of the culture industry. However, Levi’s complex plan is ruined by Vandergelder’s outraged reaction to these decadent metropolitan shenanigans, and the scene descends into slapstick violence. Naturally, there follows a separation between Vandergelder and Levy – during which Levi symbolically wears Vandergelder’s top hat in order to take on the masculine role and bid him ‘So Long, Dearie’ (‘you can snuggle up to your cash register – it’s a little lumpy, but it rings’), and the clerks Barnaby and Cornelius resign from the store and plan – under Levi’s tutelage – to set up their own rival establishment, thus freeing themselves from salaried bondage in accordance with the all-American myth of the 'self-made-man'.



The restaurant scene is one of several tableaux throughout the film embodying the capitalist phantasmagoria, a term used by Adorno to describe Wagner's opera: ‘the occultation of production by means of the outward appearance of the product’. The phrase's use is particularly apposite in this context because the Hollywood musical represents the true destiny of the Gesamtkunstwerk, revealing that the root of this utopian ideal of a unity of the arts lies in the false wholeness of the commodity. In the Harmonia Gardens scene the role of the artist is filled by Louis Armstrong, who plays the restaurant’s bandleader and duets with Streisand. His tokenistic performance (he is apparently the only black man in New York) reeks of Uncle Tomishness, and yet he still retains a magisterial aloofness from the proceedings. As bandleader/conductor his appearance on screen makes visible the work of the orchestra, usually concealed in musicals and opera (Wagner hid the orchestra pit under the stage at Bayreuth, thus making the illusion of 'music from nowhere' complete before the advent of film). Armstrong is not an actor and his presence marks a breach in the apparently seamless production, demonstrating, like the cracks in Wagner's operas, the impossibility of the Gesamtkunstwerk in an era of capitalist production: 'The disintegration into fragments sheds light on the fragmentariness of the whole.'


The formally necessary wedding that concludes the narrative can only take place after a dramatic reconciliation. Vandergelder, alone once more in his shop, finds himself unable to forget Levi. But Levi must await her dead husband’s approval of the match before she can agree to marriage. When she discovers that Vandergelder has employed a decorator to repaint his shutters, Levi recognizes the omen she has desired: “The paint's still good, but that fellow's just set up a business and needs a good start. You see, Dolly, I've always felt that money, pardon the expression, is like manure: it's not worth a thing unless it's spread around, encouraging young things to grow.” With these words Vandergelder relinquishes his obsession with the accumulation of capital. By repeating the essence of Levi’s Keynesian beliefs their union is secured.

Besides her commitment to the redistribution of wealth Levi promises an inversion of the forces of alienation, offering to convert money back into lived experience:

I have always been a woman who arranges things
For the pleasure and the profit it derives.
I have always been a woman who arranges things
Like furniture, and daffodils – and lives.

She does not deny the attraction of profit, but the fundamental motivation for her actions is the pleasure of ‘arranging things’ – she represents the empowered female bourgeois, whose understanding of the value of human relationships counteracts the atomising force of patriarchy. Patriarchy (Vandegelder) understands only the financial benefit of human relationships: ‘And so she’ll work until infinity: three cheers for femininity.’ Instead Levi proposes to de-alienate capital. Her Jewishness is also of crucial significance in this regard. Her character, standing outside the capitalist system and yet remaining a skilled manipulator of the same, could be read as a crude stereotype. But compare Levi’s role to that of Alberich in Das Rheingold: Wagner’s anti-Semitic caricature of the dwarf who denies love in exchange for gold is reversed in Levi, who offers to sell love back to the capitalist. This is, however, emphatically not an act of prostitution: she is not selling her love, but returning to the capitalist his own love of humanity. Her exclusion from this system, as woman and Jew, provides the Archimedean point from which she can 'arrange things'. Even in the film, however, her arrangements rarely go according to plan. Politically, the hokey Hollywood-liberal idea that love can redeem alienation is equally unlikely to succeed.


In 1938 when Thornton Wilder wrote the Merchant of Yonkers (the book upon which Hello, Dolly! is based), the economic argument underlying his narrative was urgently topical. In 1937 the so-called Conservative Coalition of Southern Democrats and Republicans allied themselves against Roosevelt’s New Deal, thus putting an end to liberal reforms. Seen in this light, Levi is pure liberal wish fulfillment: she embodies the American left's hope for a united front, converting the bourgeois (embodied by Vandergelder) to the Keynesian fiscal policy of the New Deal, and reconciling him to the industrial action of his employees, their needs and their humanity. Furthermore, Vandergelder allows the artist to join his New Deal American family – his niece is finally permitted to marry her painter boyfriend.

What relevance, however, did all this have when the film was made in 1969? The Kennedy-Johnson era had come to an ignominious end the previous year in the face of mounting opposition to the war in Vietnam, and Streisand was closely associated with the anti-war movement. But more relevant to the film’s plot was the resurgence in 1966 of the Conservative Coalition that had derailed Roosevelt’s reforms in the '30s. This put an end to Johnson’s ‘Great Society’ programme, a set of social reforms (including the introduction of Medicare and Medicaid) that aimed to eradicate poverty and racial discrimination - policies that had been self-consciously modeled on Roosevelt’s New Deal. Both Streisand and director Gene Kelly were prominent supporters of the Democrats, and Kelly had been a vocal supporter of the unions and an opponent of McCarthyism in the 40s and 50s. The revival of Hello, Dolly! in 1969 was thus politically pertinent, if fatally belated. Worse still, it was compromised medium for a compromised message. On a formal level, its embrace of the spectacular (despite its disingenuous proposal to reclaim the spectacle for the proletariat – “What a knack there is to that acting like a born aristocrat”) replicates the political ambivalence of Keynesianism, and is similarly doomed to failure.