Michel Foucault’s analysis of the evolution of the western penal system resonates with the 1932 national Burns-inspired urge to abolish the chain gang. Foucault recounts the replacement of the chain gang in France in 1837 “by inconspicuous black-painted cell-carts.” Thus, “punishment gradually ceased to be a spectacle” (Foucault 8-9). However, the lack of visibility of brutality does not displace the sinister effects of a now ambiguously-motivated penal system. Foucault argues that discipline’s growing absence of tangible sources renders the system all the more insidious. For, “punishment, then, will tend to become the most hidden part of the penal process… [and] as a result, justice no longer takes public responsibility for the violence that is bound up with its practice” (9). The chain gang in Georgia was indeed subsequently supplanted by a less visible means of penal correction.

Foucault’s concern regarding the penal system’s move toward discretion reflects national fears of Southern racial integration that the chain gangs both facilitated and made visible to the public. The chain gangs evolved out of an antebellum convict labor system designed to prolong the racial, economic, and cultural dynamics established through slavery. Thus, Warner Brothers responded to national anxieties provoked by whites’ conspicuous subjection to a mode of punishment perceived to be designed for blacks. 

However, the film for the most part ignores arguments that address these racial tensions. Might Hollywood have relished portraying the chain gang as a hyper-visible site of injustice in order to facilitate its manipulation of pre-existing national fears surrounding chain gangs? In other words, the chain gangs – which arguably embodied a tense conflict between Southern modernity and lingering effects of its post-slavery economy – rendered racial tension and physical violence spectacles, thereby generating national anxiety which posed threats to established cultural and economic hierarchies (Hollywood, at the top of these hierarchies).

I do not suggest that a national return to a chain gang penal system would be appropriate. Rather, in 1932, the existence of the chain gang was not purely regressive, but complex and deeply imbricated in modernity. Thus, the film’s structural misreading of the chain gang – a system which in many ways literalizes the studios' symbolic perpetuation of violence and inequality – can be read as motivated by Hollywood’s fears regarding the chain gang’s cultural and economic self-exposure. 

Horkheimer and Adorno argue that civilization represses barbarity by attempting to embody its negation. However, savage brutality does not disappear. They explain this as a process of “progress…reverting to regression. That [industries] are obtusely liquidating metaphysics does not matter in itself, but that these are themselves becoming metaphysics, an ideological curtain, within the social whole, behind which real doom is gathering, does matter. That is the basic premise of our fragments” (Horkheimer and Adorno xviii). This attempt to elucidate the dynamics of contradictory forces in modern industrial societies, – that is, culture represses ritual which resurfaces in barbarity – seems particularly relevant to LeRoy’s dichotomized expression of modern industry and penal savagery in Chain Gang.

Thus, the film can be read as at once enacting and promoting alternative readings of modernity’s relationship to tradition. Lichtenstein’s depiction of chain gangs as trapped between old and new systems (although, he argues, closer to the latter, while occupying a space in the public imagination – thanks largely to Burns’s and LeRoy’s efforts – which links them primarily with the former) reflects Horkheimer and Adorno’s modernity paradigm. Might, then, the film’s repression of cultural-historical complexity signify its participation in generating the very conditions which facilitated and prolonged the existence of unjust systems like the chain gang?

Horkheimer and Adorno’s analysis of “the culture industry” also confirms arguments that any text produced by Hollywood participates in stifling potential political resistance to capitalism. They assert that “under the dictate of effectiveness, technique is becoming psychotechnique, a procedure for manipulating human beings … everything is directed at overpowering a customer conceived as distracted or resistant” (133). In effect, Chain Gang’s purportedly subversive message can be interpreted as co-opting mounting politically-resistant energies in 1932 American culture.

I will also attempt to analyze Horkheimer and Adorno’s scathing criticisms of Hollywood and American capitalism dialogically with arguments promoted by the very systems the Dialectic of Enlightenment decries. If anything, Chain Gang’s example has instructed me to appreciate the nuanced difficulties posed by classifying any one economy, culture, or form of government as either purely repressive or uniquely revolutionary.