I Lost It at the Movies

by Pauline Kael

  Melodrama, perhaps the most highly developed type of American film, is the chief vehicle for political thought in our films (Casablanca, Edge of Darkness, To Have and Have Not, North Star). Melodrama, like the morality play, is a popular form; structurally melodrama is the morality play with the sermons omitted and the pattern of oppositions issuing in sensational action. Its intention is primarily to entertain (by excitation) rather than to instruct (entertainingly). Labels stand for the sermons that are dispensed with, and the action is central.

  In some of the war and postwar films the writers and directors seemed to feel they were triumphing over Hollywood and over melodrama itself by putting the form to worthwhile social ends: they put sermons back in. The democratic messages delayed and impeded the action, of course, but they helped to save the faces of those engaged in the work. (Perhaps without the pseudo-justification provided by speeches about democracy, the artists would have been shattered by the recognition that films like Cornered aroused and appealed to an appetite for violence.) While the hypocrisy of the method made the films insulting and the democratic moralizing became offensive dogma, the effort did indicate the moral and political disturbances, and the sense of responsibility, of the film makers. Night People reduces the political thought to what it was anyway — labeling — and nothing impedes the action. The film is almost “pure” melodrama. The author doesn’t try to convince himself or the public that he’s performing an educational service or that the film should be taken seriously. The cynicism is easier to take than hypocrisy, but it also shows just how far we are going.

  Heroism is the substance of melodrama, as of standard westerns and adventure films, but there is little effort in Hollywood to make it convincing or even to relate it to the hero’s character (in Night People a few additional labels — the hero went to a Catholic college, he was a professional football player — suffice). We have come a long way since the days when Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., winked at the audience as he performed his feats; now the audience winks at the screen.*

  The political facts of life may shatter the stereotypes of Hollywood melodrama but economic facts support them. The formula hero-defeats-villain has been tested at the box office since the beginning of film history and it may last until the end. Melodrama is simple and rigid and yet flexible enough to accommodate itself to historical changes. The hero is always the defender of the right and he is our representative. He rarely changes labels; on the few occasions when he is not an American he demonstrates that those on our side are just like us. (Gregory Peck’s first screen role was in Days of Glory: as a heroic Soviet soldier he fought the evil Nazis.)

  The villains are marked by one constant: they are subhuman. If the hero of Night People did not know that the enemy are cannibals, he might feel some qualms about the free dispensation of strychnine (he must feel as sure as Hitler that those opposing him are beyond reconciliation). Film melodrama, like political ideology with which it has much in common, has a convenient way of disposing of the humanity of enemies: we stand for humanity; they stand for something else. The robbers who are shot, the Nazis who are knifed — they are cowards or fanatics and they don’t deserve to live. Fear, on the one hand, and, on the other, devotion to a “misguided” cause to the disregard of personal safety are evidence of subhumanity. The villains are usually more expressive than the heroes because their inhumanity is demonstrated precisely by the display of extreme human emotions. (Gregory Peck, who is always a hero, is rarely called upon to register any emotion whatever. The devil can be expressive, but the hero is a stick of wood.) The villains are not human; if they were, they’d be on our side. When historical circumstances change and our former enemies become allies, we let bygones be bygones and they are restored to human estate. Thus the little yellow bastards are now cultured Japanese; the blood-guilty Germans are now hardworking people, so akin to Americans in their moral standards and ability to organize an efficient economy; now it is the Russians, the courageous pioneers and fighting men of the war years, who are treacherous and subhuman. (In Night People the enemy are variously described as “the creeps over there,” “burglars,” “a methodical bunch of lice.”) Political melodrama looks ahead.

  This is the level of the anti-Communism of Night People. And it is at this level that the advertising-entertainment medium has political effect. In a culture which has been movie-centered for thirty years, films are a reflection of popular American thought as well as an influence upon it. At the Army-McCarthy hearings, the participants, conscious of the radio and television audience, find it necessary to proclaim, each in his turn, that he hates Communists. McCarthy imputes weakness and political unreliability to the Secretary of the Army by suggesting that Stevens merely dislikes Communists. In other words, if he knew what they were, he would hate them: he lacks the hero’s sureness. McCarthy draws political support by the crude, yet surprisingly controlled, intensity of his hatred of Communists; the intensity suggests that he, like Intelligence Officer Peck, knows how to take care of rats, and his lack of scruples becomes a political asset. Further knowledge is irrelevant; the hero does not need to look too closely into the heart of evil.

  Knowledge may even be dangerous. The hero should know that Communists are rats without needing to examine the nature of Communism. Is our thinking so primitive that we fear that a close look will not only expose us to destruction but will turn us into rats, that Communism is contagious? Is that why there is so much fear that people may read Communist literature, and why those who have had no contact with Communism are deemed the only safe anti-Communists? The man of conscience who examines the enemy sees human beings — the primitive explanation is that he got too close and was infected. If you know enough to hate Communists, you know enough; if you know more, perhaps you can no longer hate. The ritualistic nature of this popular anti-Communism was made apparent in the public reaction to Acheson’s remark that he wouldn’t turn his back on Alger Hiss. Acheson spoke as one human being talking about another; he was attacked for his failure to recognize that Soviet agents are not supposed to be regarded as human beings.

  The morality play had meaning as an instructive dramatization, an externalization of the conflict within man. Our popular culture and popular politics and even our popular religion take this conflict and project it onto the outside world. The resulting simplification has immediate advantages: we are exonerated, they are guilty. In contrast with drama which sensitizes man to human complexity, melodrama desensitizes men. No wonder the public has no patience with real political issues, nor with the moral complexities of Shakespeare or Greek tragedy. The movies know how to do it better: in a film, Stevens or McCarthy would prove his case; in a film, Oppenheimer would be innocent or guilty. A reporter who made a telephone survey asking, “Are you listening to the Army-McCarthy hearings?” got the housewife’s response: “No, that’s not my idea of entertainment.” It is the stereotyped heroes and villains of her brand of entertainment who react upon our public figures — so that if Stevens admitted that he had functioned in the real world of conciliation and compromise, he would be publicly dishonored (yet he cannot prove his basic honesty without making that admission).

  Senator McCarthy has not the look of a man in the grip of a fixed idea; rather he has the look of a man who has the fixed idea well in hand. When national issues can be discussed in terms of “ferreting out rats” (and even McCarthy’s political opponents accept the term) the man with the fixed idea is the man who appears to stand for something. He has found the role to play. When Senator McCarthy identifies himself with right and identifies anyone who opposes him with the Communist conspiracy, he carries the political morality play to its paranoid conclusion — a reductio ad absurdum in which right and wrong, and political good and evil, dissolve into: are you for me or against me? But the question may be asked, are not this morality and this politics fundamentally just as absurd and just as dangerous when practiced on a national scale in our commercial culture? The world is not divided into good and evil,
enemies are not all alike, Communists are not just Nazis with a different accent; and it is precisely the task of political analysis (and the incidental function of literature and drama) to help us understand the nature of our enemies and the nature of our opposition to them. A country which accepts wars as contests between good and evil is suffering from the delusion that the morality play symbolizes real political conflicts.

  Some political theorists would like to manipulate this delusion: they hold that the only way to combat Communism is to employ the “useful myth” that the current world struggle is a battle between Christianity and atheism, that the free world represents God on earth and the Communist countries, the anti-Christ. Such a “useful myth” may very likely, however, be purchased (for the most part) just as cynically as it is sold. Is a myth a myth for the public that accepts it without conviction? Or does “Fight for God” become more like the advertising slogan “Always Buy Chesterfields” — a slogan which does not prevent the Chesterfield smoker from having nagging fears of lung cancer and heart disease? The modern man who fights in a mythical holy crusade knows he’s compelled to fight — whether it’s for God or not.

  Cecil B. DeMille, who might lay claim to having falsified history as much as any man alive, is now at work on The Ten Commandments (in Vista Vision). He states: “It’s amazing how much our story parallels the world situation today” — the parallel may be a bit elusive, but no doubt DeMille will make his point. Other film makers, suddenly confronted with CinemaScope, have been raiding his domain; they appear to be so dazzled by the width of the screen they feel it can only be filled by God. Their primitive awe is similar to that of the public which is attracted to “big” pictures. Though it is easy to scoff at the advertising which emphasizes the size of a picture — the cast of thousands, the number of millions spent — magnitude in itself represents an achievement to the public. The whole family goes to The Robe or The Greatest Show on Earth — it’s an event like Gone with the Wind or Duel in the Sun, as big as a natural catastrophe. Primitivism takes many forms. We no longer hear’ arguments on all sides about what causes wars: global atomic warfare is so big it seems to be something only God can explain. (Night People is not a small picture: the closing shot leaves the hero confronting the heavens.)

  The danger in manipulation and cynicism is not that those who extol the greatness of the democratic idea and the greatness of the common man while treating the public as common fools are Machiavellians scheming to impose an ideology upon the public. The democratic ideology has been imposed on them: they are driven by economic necessity (and political necessity) to give the public what it wants. The real danger is that we may lose the capacity for those extensions in height, in depth, in space which are the experience of art and thought. If the public becomes accustomed to being pleased and pandered to, the content is drained out of democratic political life. (The pimp who peddles good clean stuff is nevertheless engaged in prostitution.)

  After dozens of anti-Nazi films and countless slick stories and articles, the public had had enough of Hitler. What they wearied of had only the slenderest connection with the subject of Nazism; they got tired of the old formula with the Nazi label. But they didn’t reject the formula, they settled for a change of labels. In the same way Hollywood may well exhaust anti-Communism before it has gotten near it. Night People is just the beginning of a new cycle — a cycle which begins by exploiting public curiosity and ends by satiating it.

  All our advertising is propaganda, of course, but it has become so much a part of our life, is so pervasive, that we just don’t know what it is propaganda for. Somehow it keeps the wheels rolling and that seems to be what it’s for. Why don’t other peoples see that we are the heroes and the Russians cannibals? One reason is that America’s public relations romance with itself is a spectacle to the rest of the world. In Hollywood productions, the American soldiers and civilians abroad are soft touches, chivalrous under the wisecracks, patronizing and generous towards unfortunate little people the world over; aroused by injustice, the American is Robin Hood freed by birth from the threat of the Sheriff of Nottingham. Though this propaganda fails us abroad (too many Americans having been there) it functions at home as an entertaining form of self-congratulation and self-glorification: it makes the audience feel good. While we consume our own propaganda, other people are not so gullible about us. They have a different way of being gullible: they are influenced by Communist propaganda about us.

  Propaganda — Salt of the Earth

  One wonders if the hero of Night People, so sharp at detecting the cannibal under the Communist tunic, would recognize the Communist position when he saw it. Salt of the Earth is as clear a piece of Communist propaganda as we have had in many years, but the critic of the New York Times saw, “. . . in substance, simply a strong pro-labour film with a particularly sympathetic interest in the Mexican-Americans with whom it deals,” and the critic of the Los Angeles Daily News had this to say: “If there is propaganda in this picture it is not an alien one, but an assertion of principles no thoughtful American can reject.” There are Americans, then, who have not learned that Communist propaganda concentrates on local grievances. They fail to recognize that Communism makes use of principles that no thoughtful American (or Frenchman or Englishman) can reject. Communism in each region appears to be divested of its Soviet accoutrements; its aspect is not alien in Central America, South America, Europe, Asia, or Africa. It is effective because it organizes, or captures the direction of, groups struggling for status.

  Despite the reactions of some critics, it is not likely that the American film audience would react favorably to the publicity campaign, “At last! An honest movie about American working people.” If American working people seek an image of their attitudes and beliefs they will find it in Hollywood films — they have helped to put it there. Though a Hollywood version glamorizes their lives, it does justice to their dreams. If they did go to see Salt it is not likely that more than a small proportion would see anything that struck home, and that perhaps would be only as a reminder of depression days.

  At special showings or at art film houses, it’s a different story. Salt can seem true and real for those liberals and progressives whose political thinking has never gone beyond the thirties. Depression social consciousness is their exposed nerve: touch it and it becomes the only reality, more vivid than the actual conditions they live in. Many Americans felt the first stirrings of political awareness in the thirties, and nothing that has happened since has affected them comparably. They look back to the social theater and WPA art as to a Golden Age. The prosperity that followed is viewed almost as a trick, a device to conceal the truth and to prevent the oppressed workers from joining together to defeat ruthless big business. Prosperity is integrated with so much advertising and cynicism that it seems a sham — it doesn’t look real. In search of something to believe in, they see the hollowness of the films played out in modern apartments and neat little cottages and tend to situate truth in the worst possible setting — in what has been left out of Hollywood films. What looks ugly and depressing must be true, since what looks prosperous is as empty as an ad. (The film that uses a Santa Barbara mansion for the home of its heroine doesn’t advertise its documentary background, but a film using a shack, even if it is a facade, stresses truth and realism.) The depths to which they may fall have a greater emotional claim on them than the prosperity they (fearfully) enjoy. The worst makes the greatest claim to truth.

  Salt of the Earth is not likely to be effective propaganda for overthrowing the capitalist bosses at home, a task which the Communists are not likely to envision in the United States anyway. But it is extremely shrewd propaganda for the urgent business of the U.S.S.R.: making colonial peoples believe that they can expect no good from the United States; convincing Europe and Asia and the rest of the world that there are no civil liberties in the U.S.A. and that our capitalism is really fascism. The American Communists are not so much interested these days in glorifying th
e Soviet Union as in destroying European and Asiatic faith in the United States. Fifteen years ago it would have been easy to toss off a film like Salt with “it’s worse than propaganda, it’s a dull movie.” Flippancy makes us rather uneasy today: Communist propaganda, seizing upon our failures and our imperfections, and, when these are not strong enough, inventing others, has very nearly succeeded in discrediting us to the whole world. The discreditable aspects of American life are realities to be dealt with. Communist propaganda, however, treats them as opportunities.

  The raw material of Salt of the Earth is a 1951–1952 strike of Mexican-American zinc miners in New Mexico. The film, made in 1953, was sponsored by the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers (expelled from the CIO in 1950 as Communist-dominated), and financed by Independent Productions Corporation (the money was “borrowed from liberal Americans”). The writer, director, and producer are blacklisted in Hollywood as fellow travelers.

  What brought these people together to make a film — zinc miners, liberal Americans, blacklisted film makers? This was no mere commercial enterprise, and in our brief history as a nation of film addicts, there has never been anything like a group of several hundred people working together in devotion to film art. If art was their aim, how misguided their effort — for what work of art, in any field, has ever resulted from “group discussion and collective constructive criticism” (“no less than 400 people had read, or heard a reading of, the screenplay by the time we commenced production”). Collective constructive criticism — where have we heard that term before? It is not irony but justice that the artists who chose this method came out with a film as dreary and programmatic as the films made by those who have collective criticism forced upon them.