And so the debate continues, with Sullivan arguing for something that will "realize the potentialities of film as the sociological and artistic medium that it is," and the executives arguing for the profitability of entertainment. Partly through the power that his position as a successful director allows him, partly through sheer stubbornness, Sullivan eventually gets his way, and, disguised as a tramp, he embarks on a trip to gather material for his picture at first hand. An unlikely chain of events leads him to confront contemporary social conditions rather more forcefully than he had anticipated, as a prisoner on a chain gang. A night at a picture show, the prisoners' only form of "escape" from their imprisonment, convinces Sullivan of the importance of entertainment cinema. He eventually returns to Hollywood with renewed commitment to musicals and comedies.

Sullivan’s Travels is itself a product of the multiple logics that shape Hollywood's commercial aesthetic, as well as a discourse upon them. It rationalizes a commitment to entertainment cinema as socially responsible. It acknowledges the world of the audience's response while framing that world within its own conventions. Like Sullivan, it enacts a compromise, and ends up operating somewhere between social commentary and slapstick comedy. It satirizes Hollywood and the studio system, but endorses its capacity to bring pleasure to even the most oppressed. It portrays the misery of the chain gang with at least as much authenticity as any other Hollywood movie, and then abandons its critique of American judicial institutions as soon as Sullivan regains his identity. It is neither slavishly "escapist" nor unremittingly dedicated to the social realism toward which it intermittently gestures. Its drive toward profitability has to be balanced against any social statement it wishes to make.

As a network of competing and conflicting impulses, Sullivan’s Travels helps to break down our more monolithic conceptions of Hollywood. We see Hollywood divided against itself, its various agents in competition and conflict with each other. As Lebrand, Hadrian, and Sullivan debate the most appropriate social role for cinema, contradictions are raised and explored, and aspirations set against each other. The resonances of these multiple logics inform our understanding of the subsequent story at every level. At the end of the plot the contradictions are tidied up, and Sullivan returns to making Ants in Your Plants of 1941. We are left with an image of Hollywood as a site of conflicting voices, held together in tension by the forces that cross it. In this complex network, a movie is most usefully understood as an object crossed and shaped by many (often contradictory) intentions and logics, each transforming it more or less visibly and more or less effectively. As opposed to auteurism, which supposes and expects a movie to be narratively, thematically, and formally coherent, a view of the production process that acknowledges its multiple logics and voices will recognize that Hollywood's commercial aesthetic is too opportunistic to prize coherence, organic unity, or even the absence of contradiction among its primary virtues.

This is not, of course, to argue that Hollywood prizes incoherence, disunity, or contradiction as virtues in themselves. Like most Hollywood movies, Sullivan’s Travels tells a perfectly comprehensible (if absurd) story, in which characters' desires motivate their actions and causes have effects. It provides a good example of what Kristin Thompson sees as "the glory of the Hollywood system," its unobtrusive craftsmanship and "its ability to allow its finest scriptwriters, directors, and other creators to weave an intricate web of character, event, time and space that can seem transparently obvious.” None of the technical facility of its narrative construction, however, can resolve the contradictions embedded in the movie's exploitation of poverty and glamorization of suffering. Sullivan's Travels retreats from the implications of its satire, abandoning its caustic critique to celebrate "the motley mountebanks, the clowns, the buffoons ... whose efforts have lightened our burden a little." Its retreat does not, however, eradicate the critique that preceded it. As critic Robert Stam argues, the movie appears to endorse the dichotomy of art and business in Hollywood, "between serious message pictures (what Veronica Lake disparagingly calls 'deep dish movies') on the one hand, and mindless entertainment on the other ... between 0 Brother, Where Art Thou? and Hay Hay in the Hay Loft!" In its own enactment of this dichotomy, however, “Sullivan’s Travels is itself both instructive and pleasurable, entertaining and comic."

Maltby, Hollywood Cinema, 51-52