From Kathleen Moran & Michael Rogin, "’What's the Matter with Capra?’: Sullivan's Travels and the Popular Front,” Representations 71 (2000): pp. 106-134.

Sullivan's Travels' extreme self-consciousness about the Popular Front motion picture critic's issues-film form, genre conventions, and mass audience-seems to confine motion pictures to being about themselves, a conclusion that would break the connection the Popular Front was trying to establish between Hollywood and the outside world. The director within the film wants to open up a Popular Front window on society; the director of the film turns that window into a self-reflecting mirror. In displaying the movie audience to itself, or so we will argue, the motion picture that results argues against the proponents of consumer democracy, from1930s reform intellectuals and advertisers to contemporary reception theorists. But insofar as Sullivan's Travels forces self-awareness on the mass viewing public, far from rendering itself politically irrelevant it exposes what drives us from outside Hollywood to want to occupy the spectator position. (107)

Far from confirming Sully's admiration for "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?" however, the experience that he and the viewers of Sullivan's Travels have now been put through convinces him to return to making the Hollywood comedies he has been trying so hard to escape. But is the audience supposed to take that ending at face value, as most viewers, reviewers, and critics have done? What are we to make of this strangely self-canceling film? (111)

Does the self-referentiality from which Sullivan's Travels never escapes apotheosize a self-enclosed Hollywood world of motion pictures and their spectators, or does it provide the only path in a mass-mediated society by which Sturges can direct us outside? (115)

This opening repartee triply undercuts Sully's Popular Front desire to employ film as a "sociological" and "artistic medium." Not only is he presented as knowing better than the people what they want, whereas the producers speak for audience democracy, but in addition the rapid comic dialogue sounds more like screwball than serious discussion. The producers finally discredit Sullivan by challenging his credentials: "What do you know about hard luck?" they ask. The force of that accusation, which Sullivan acknowledges, is itself undercut by the exposure of the producers' own pretentions to early poverty as a confidence game. More dizzying yet, the role-playing that de authorizes the producers reauthorizes the director, who will outfit himself in a hobo outfit to go out and live among the poor. Sullivan will discover the real America thanks to the Hollywood method of pretending to be what he is not. The net effect of the rapid-fire exchange of dialogue and clothes is to alienate the audience from both positions that claim to speak in the name of the people and to force self-consciousness upon viewers as themselves the subject of the debate. (116-17)

The brutality of "Mister" on the interracial chain gang culminates in Sully's solitary confinement in the sweat box. "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?" could well entitle this episode. For the establishing train shot has granted us entry to society's outcasts through yet another movie. We are now watching a remake of I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), the film that Sturges borrowed and screened while he was making Sullivan's Travels, except that the director marks the difference between his movie and the original by reminders that Sully is still in a film. "What do you think this is, a vaudeville show?" asks Mister when he orders Sully back to work, and how is the viewer supposed to respond? Are we being reminded that Sullivan is no longer in charge of his vaudeville show, or that Sturges still is? Has the imprisonment of the director shocked the audience out of Hollywood and into the real hidden United States, or is it only the director in the film and neither the one making it nor his viewers who have come up against the reality principle?

Like Citizen Kane, Sullivan's Travels refuses to counterpose the methods by which film achieves its effects to an unmediated world independent of them. The director's display of his bag of tricks only makes more disturbing the appearance--even as we know it's not true--that he has been deprived of them. "It could happen to you," to invoke the title of Nathanael West's failed socially conscious screenplay (1937). What could happen to you in the first instance is the deprivation of freedom, the fall from upward mobility into an imprisoning fixed lower-class identity that was the menace of the depression and that could land you in jail. But the apotheosis of film at the climax of Sullivan's Travels, to which we are about to turn, opens up an even more disturbing possibility of loss, the deprivation of Hollywood itself. (121)

As Sully observes the hysterical laughter of the prisoners, his own laugh is palpably forced out of him in painful spurts and lurches. It is as if, against his will, he has finally crossed over some border, finally stepped out of the movie. Where he has landed, however, is not in some extrafilmic real world but in the motion-picture audience. . . . In this one painful moment, Sullivan’s Travels finds the Archimedian point it has been structured to deny. Sturges has closed the gap between film and the world by invoking our need, as mass audience, for Hollywood. It is our faces, reflected back in the disturbing, needy laughter of the prisoners, that drive the fantasies on-screen. Enclosed within a compendium of Hollywood conventions, the church scene escapes Hollywood confinement by implying that the horror of our own lives, our own need for fantasy, is what generates our collective plots. Like the prisoners chording at their existence played back to them as a joke, Sullivan's Travels invites us, its audience, to laugh at the replay of our own enthrallment to Hollywood. (125-26)

The fall into prison underlines both the distance separating movie audiences outside prison from those inside and the ease of slipping from one state to the other. The expression of solidarity in the film's last laughs raises a still more disturbing possibility, however, that those of us outside prison (no blacks this time) are as desperately in need of Pluto's cave as are the inmates, that we share their condition. (127)