Muscio describes Roosevelt’s collusion with Hollywood: FDR overlooked Hollywood’s oligopoly in exchange for its help propagandizing his administration. Hollywood’s investment in the New Deal facilitated Roosevelt’s assertion of political and economic stability (at least for the already dominant industries), counteracting voices that demanded more revolutionary political changes. In these senses, Muscio depicts Roosevelt politics as rather conservative, in spite of their expression of / appeal to liberal ideologies.

Since Chain Gang was released a week after Roosevelt’s election to office, and in light of the striking myth-making similarities between Chain Gang and Roosevelt’s platform (e.g. emphasis on the plight of the forgotten man), and considering Warner Brothers’ especially friendly relationship with Roosevelt, it seems absurd to argue that Chain Gang did not play a strong role in aligning American popular culture with New Deal politics.

Muscio also takes into account the emergence of sound technology and studio self-censorship codes’ roles in facilitating and defining Hollywood’s relationship with Roosevelt. She cites Lizabeth Cohen’s argument that “the talking audience for silent pictures became a silent audience for talking pictures” (75). Although the critical implications of the industry’s transition from silent to sound warrant more nuanced readings, Muscio’s arguments stress 1932 technology’s essential role in manipulating American political culture. The sound film, by approaching what audiences perceive as verisimilitude, sutures its viewer into becoming a voyeur, all the while naturalizing its own artifice. This basic understanding of sound technology’s impact on traditions of film receptivity in America suggests the singularity of the emergence of the New Deal’s and thus Chain Gang’s historical moment. Chain Gang’s aesthetic, narrative logic, and social arguments articulate a dynamic synthesis of cultural, technological, and political forces unique to 1932.

The Hays Code, which too facilitated Hollywood’s control over the market, further engendered the film industry’s alignment with the government. In the context of Chain Gang, a pre-Code film – i.e. post-Production Code, pre Joseph Breen’s rigid enforcement of said Code – the dynamics of a political and market codified aesthetic generate many ambiguities. Chain Gang’s iconoclastic renarrativization of Hollywood formulae, which actually transgresses censorship regulations in a fairly typical way for this period, aligned its viewer’s plight with the studio’s thereby establishing Warner Brothers as the “socially-conscious studio.” This image facilitated WB’s maintenance of industry control over mounting societal tensions that posed threats to Hollywood and fostered a space in American culture for the popularity of New Deal politics.