Busby Berkeley at Warner Bros

"Busby Berkeley's big-production numbers are emblematic of the Hollywood dream factory. Exploring the tensions between escapism and ideological overcoding in the Warner Bros. musical, this book tracks the ways in which Berkeley created spectacles that are both critical and complacent in relation to the society that produced and received them. It makes the case that the Warner Bros. musical, with its attention to the specificity and containment of the aesthetic dimension, has corrective lessons to impart for the aestheticized politics not only of the 1930s, but also of the current age"--