NOTE: This isn’t a blog post but rather one of my academic essays. I hadn’t intended to post any of my academic essays on my blog (this is the second one I’ve published) but have changed my mind for some of them, essays that are either too long to be published elsewhere or, in the case of this essay, that I think work better for my blog, e.g., in terms of creating necessary links that clarify points in it and controlling links and images I want to use for it.
Tim Robbins’ Cradle Will Rock (1999) offers us a cogent example of the potentiality of a working class (oppositional) aesthetic, an aesthetic that is largely based on a pre-modernist didactic model. In the film, we get three working class oppositional art forms: Marc Blitzstein’s play The Cradle Will Rock, Diego Rivera’s mural “Man, Controller of the Universe” (called “Man at the Crossroads” in its original form —more on this later), and, of all things, ventriloquism, a key arm of the defunct vaudeville aesthetic. What Robbins so brilliantly conveys is how this unusual window in time (depression era America 1936) offered the struggling working class powerful discourses to fully engage the entrenched hegemonic forces oppressing their lives. More specifically, Robbins emphasizes how real life working class mobilizations against the “cradles” of power intricately intersect with oppositional aesthetics that give voice to the besieged working class. In this vein, Robbins gives us a vehicle that diagnostically gives us a way out of our present dilemma: How to best awaken people from their ideological indoctrination and consumerism slumber, how best to give them a “cognitive map” of a transnational (globalized) corporate apparatus that has cunningly misdirected people from even seeing the chains that still keep them firmly in their oppressed condition, much less engage it.
Though Robbins’s focus is on more marginal art forms (theater, art, and ventriloquism), Robbins’s film itself tellingly gives us our primary vehicle for oppositional potentialities today, film and new (popular) media channels. More particularly, the oppositional possibilities of cinema – and especially mainstream cinema – reside in what I have elsewhere called the “political didactic.” In recent past times, following Kant’s “purposiveness without purpose,” a didactic aesthetics has been frowned upon, displaced more for a “disinterested” sensation than anything utilitarian. However, in the postmodern moment, when the subject is so utterly deposed from any sense of centered agency, the didactic potentially removes the ideological and consumerism blinders from the subject so as to re-engage a (transnational, globalized) corporate/capitalism apparatus that has so entrenched its mechanisms of power that all avenues of contestation – including political and media avenues, both corporatized – have largely been closed off, leaving few options for oppositional forces. Stepping into this void is a growing body of (mainstream) political didactic films that have begun to coalesce oppositional voices into a potential chorus of discontent and activism, films such as Bulworth (1998, Warren Beatty), Fight Club (1999, David Fincher), American Psycho (2000, Mary Harron), The Edukators (2004, Hans Weingartner), V for Vendetta (2005, James McTeigue), Children of Men (2006, Alfonso Cuarón), Sleep Dealer (2008, Alex Rivera), Moon (2009, Duncan Jones), Reality (2012, Matteo Garone), Snowpiercer (2014, Joon-ho Bong) to name just a handful of prominent examples. (For my thoughts on Bulworth, see my essay on the film; for my thoughts on Fight Club, see my essay “The Cognitive Mapping of Phallocentrism, Patriarchy, and Hypermasculinity in Dr. Strangelove, Full Metal Jacket, and Fight Club“; for my thoughts on American Psycho, see my essay on the film; for my thoughts on V for Vendetta, Children of Men, Sleep Dealer, and Moon, see my blog post “Favorite Science Fiction Films”; for my thoughts on Reality, see my blog post on the film; for my thoughts on Snowpiercer, see my blog post on the film…or wait and I’ll be publishing an expanded analysis/essay of the film soon!)
Cultural and Marxist studies scholar Fredric Jameson affirms this crucial (didactic) component. He has said that we need an aesthetic that allows for “the reinvention of possibilities of cognition and perception [and] that allow social phenomena once again to become transparent, as moments of the struggle between classes” (Afterword in Aesthetics and Politics 212). Jameson has come back to this need for “transparency” repeatedly in his work on the postmodern. Indeed, Jameson’s influential concept “cognitive mapping” advances an aesthetic application with a “deeply pedagogical function [that] teaches us something about what would be involved in positioning ourselves in the world” (Wegner, Life Between Two Deaths 167) a pedagogical art “in which we may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion” (Jameson, Postmodernism 54). While Cradle Will Rock cannot squarely address the extremely complex “spatial” and “social confusion” of transnational, globalized capitalism, I would argue that it does didactically “allow social phenomena once again to become transparent, as moments of the struggle between classes” – a crucial crystallization that has been lost in recent times.
Further, the film reclaims the prerequisite of didactic mainstream art in the engagement of a system that wants to elide such oppositional modes of discourse, which is a key rupture in collectivity and determining agency. In contradistinction to didactic discourses that “cognitively map” subjectivity, instead we have systematic (ideological, consumerist) discourses that psychically fragment us. Allen D. Kanner and Renee G. Soule get at this devastating consumerist identity formation: “[O]ur intention is to show that globalization and corporate efforts to commercialize and commodify American society lie at the heart of modern consumerism…. Corporate policy and actions often compromise both outer and inner freedom, with dire psychological consequences” (50). In short, when consumerism permeates our existence, we lose our “freedom” to determine self. That is, like other toxic ideologies (patriarchy, hypermasculinity, heteronormativity, gender normativity and so on) that we are indoctrinated (born) into, consumerism determines self–psychically fragments self. (For more of my thoughts on how this “psychic fragmentation” works, check out my blog posts on The Bling Ring and Reality and my essay on American Psycho, films that are to my mind three of the most important anti-consumerism films ever made.)
In his monumental diagnostic cultural-historical text The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century, Michael Denning cites this ingredient – a didactic (or agitprop) aesthetic – as crucial for the “flowering” (actualizing) of the “cultural front’ culture of the 1930s and the radical push back by the working class against power. Denning sums up the importance of this didactic (or agitprop) element:
“Agitprop—the contraction of agitation and propaganda in political jargon—is the name for a variety of forms of directly political art: topical songs and poems, street theater, manifestos, works of journalistic and documentary immediacy. There is no question that much of the art of the cultural front fell into this category….one cannot imagine radical culture, indeed any cultural flowering at all, without them; they are the crocuses of a radical culture.” (57)
Robbins effectually actualizes this sentiment by showing how radical art threatens power in its many manifestations, and how power uses various means to silence these agitating expressions.
To better get at these ideas, I will use Robbins’s film as an example of the importance of these agitating texts. Moreover, I want to further stress the importance of mainstream aesthetics as a way to reach the public, which closely intersects with a working class (oppositional) aesthetic.
In his film, Robbins fictionalizes real life characters and events and temporal markers from the 1930s, focusing on a more re-imagined, coherent unity of forces and events that emerged against the growing power of moneyed (capitalistic) hegemony. In terms of why the film “telescopes” temporally separate events, Phillip E. Wegner emphasizes the (cognitive mapping) efficacy of such a choice:
“That the film telescopes into a single time frame these events scattered over nearly a decade underscores the fact that this film is not intended as a documentary portrait of the times or even a postmodern nostalgia film. Rather, it offers up another way of doing history: fundamentally allegorical in nature, much like the classical historical novel of Walter Scott, the film thereby brings into sharp focus cultural and social forces, movements, and tendencies normally not available to the naked eye and which would utterly transform in the subsequent decades the US landscape, and ultimately global, cultural production.” (“The Ends of Culture” 248)
To inform this view of history, Robbins specifically focuses on theater players getting Marc Blitzstein’s play The Cradle Will Rock (1937) performed and Diego Rivera’s struggle to keep his mural “Man, Controller of the Universe” intact. In addition, ventriloquist Tommy Crickshaw must wrestle with an identity crisis that is brought on by a highly destructive mode of censoring (more on this in a moment) and Hallie Flanagan (Cherry Jones), Director of the Federal Theater Project, and her associates struggle with keeping the Federal Theater Project running in the face of communist witch hunts. What all of these threads have in common is how an arguably inchoate working class aesthetic is emerging to coalesce oppositional forces against an even more daunting emerging power structure attempting to silence these voices – forever. What is so, so crucial here, is that Robbins reveals just how “dangerous” art – especially mainstream political art – can be to those in power. What those in power want is to keep people slumbering, so they are free to carry on their greedy machinations. Oppositional art works such as the play The Cradle Will Rock, Rivera’s mural, and Tommy’s ventriloquism act resist such ideological processing (misdirection) of the masses, instigating and sustaining political awareness and collective empowerment and potentially (latently) installing at the very least a sense of collective unity and agitation if not actual praxis.
Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock
{Note: I just want to address here that going back and forth between the FILM Cradle Will Rock and the PLAY The Cradle Will Rock (note the lack of the article “the” for the film) can be confusing. I always note when I am referring to one or the other by saying “film” or “play.” For the below, I am largely focusing on the play, though I do at times talk about the film.}
Denning cites Blitzstein’s play The Cradle Will Rock as one of the “powerful emblems” of the “cultural front” counterculture (121) and that “Blitzstein’s labor musical came to embody the hopes spawned by the new industrial union” (287):
“The first performance of The Cradle Will Rock is one of the legendary events of the cultural front, often overshadowing the musical itself. Marc Blitzstein’s ‘proletarian opera’ about union organizing in ‘Steeltown, U.S.A.’ was to be the third production of Orson Welles’s Federal Theater unit, Project 891, scheduled for mid June 1937. However, a few days before the opening, the WPA canceled it as one of the general cuts in the relief projects. Welles defied the order and went ahead on 16 June; when the company found their theater locked, the actors Will Geer and Howard da Silva entertained the audience out front while Welles and Houseman rented a theater and a piano. They then led the audience to the Venice Theater twenty-one blocks away, and performed The Cradle Will Rock without sets, costumes, or pit orchestra. Indeed, since union regulations prevented the actors from appearing on stage, Blitzstein took the stage at the piano, and the actors delivered their lines and sang their songs from the audience. The evening was so successful that they continued staging it in that manner for another nineteen performances at the Venice between 18 June and 1 July.” (285)
The play was considered “dangerous” because it became a “labor battle song” for the working class and interconnected (integrated) real life labor fights with the play’s concentration on organized labor:
“The musical’s ending, in which the bugles, drums, and fifes of the boilermakers, roughers, and rollers were a sign that ‘Steel’s gettin’ together tonight,’ seemed to be echoed in reality. The struggle against the companies of Little Steel—Jones & Laughlin, Republic, Bethlehem, and others—dominated the spring; after the Supreme Court upheld the National Labor Relations Act in April…a huge two-day strike in Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, won a contract from Jones & Laughlin. The Jones & Laughlin strike was the final success, however; the 26 May strike against the other Little Steel firms met bitter opposition and increased violence. ‘In the period between the onset of the strike for recognition that began on May 26 and the middle of July,’ one labor historian has written, ‘lethal violence, most of it perpetrated by company guards and city police, swept the Midwestern steel centers. On Memorial Day 1937, Chicago police killed or wounded dozens of steelworkers and sympathizers. In Cleveland, Youngstown, and Massillon, lawmen also killed steelworkers. All told, the summer of 1937 added 18 dead to the long list of labor’s martyrs.’ Paramount’s suppression of its own newsreel footage of the Memorial Day massacre in Chicago was followed a few days later by the federal government’s shutdown of The Cradle: a WPA production on the struggles in steel was, as Hallie Flanagan, the director of the Federal Theater, recalled too ‘dangerous.’ The Venice Theater performances coincided with the steel strike and the La Follette Committee’s highly publicized investigations of the massacre. The stripped-down agitprop version of The Cradle Will Rock was taken to the steel towns of Pennsylvania and Ohio in the summer of 1937: ‘an audience of steelworkers represents a new public,’ Blitzstein told the Daily Worker, ‘wide awake and extremely critical.’ In the next year, amateur performances were staged by radical groups around the country, often with the support of CIO unions: the Chicago Repertory Group’s Cradle was supported by the United Mine Workers. Scenes from The Cradle were used in a Newark CIO fundraising evening, and the Mercury Theatre received a letter of praise from the CIO’s national office.” (286-287)
This multi-stage integration of art and working class agitation echoed a larger assimilation of culture into the vernacular of the working class, what Denning refers to as the “laboring of American culture”:
“[The laboring of American culture] refers to what a more technical usage would call the ‘proletarianization’ of American culture, the increased influence on and participation of working-class Americans in the world of culture and arts…. In this sense, there was a laboring of American culture as children from working-class families grew up to become artists in the culture industries, and American workers became the primary audience for those industries.” (xvii)
Thus, Blitzstein’s play is “dangerous” not only because it shines a light on big business corruption and exploitation of the working class and how the working class can fight back by unionizing but, as Denning cites above, because of this dialectical “reuniting of work and culture, manual and mental labor” (461) and the “profound sense that the dialectic between work and art, labor and beauty, was fundamental to human culture” (462). As I will illustrate more specifically below, Robbins’ film beautifully captures this dialectical “laboring of American culture” through many mechanisms, first through the permeation of a “worker” sensibility in general – working class struggles are laced throughout the film and many of the artists and actors themselves are represented as working class figures – but also through the dialectical creative process of Blitzstein, through Olive Stanton’s emergent and terribly risky activist choice to perform her role, through the audience participating in the “performance” of the play, and, most prominently, through Aldo Silvano (John Turturro), an Italian-American who, along with Olive, most clearly represents a working class sensibility, as we see with his living conditions and his working class ethos throughout. Note too that it is not a coincidence that it is Aldo who plays “Larry Foreman” in the play, his working class ethos informing his performance.
The other striking part of the Aldo Silvano thread – informing the “children from working class families” idea above – is how his newborn child (along with another one of the theater players being pregnant) resonates a secondary meaning of the “cradle” metaphor, “cradle” here meaning not the “cradle of power” but rather the “cradle” of this birth of a “laboring of American culture.” Further amplifying this idea, Aldo’s other three children become a prominent part of Aldo’s narrative, especially in terms of participating in the play, the intimation being what Denning says above, that in this creative process and materialization, we get the “birth” of a generation of potential oppositional figures/artists.
In terms of the content in the play, in addition to a general didactic message on the need for labor to organize and agitate, Blitzstein also highlights how in a capitalist system, social “prostitution” is a way of being, where literally every societal institution – the law, the church, the media, universities, even artists – “prostitute” themselves, e.g., sell their morals and ethics for mercenary gain. Blitzstein especially emphasizes this prostitution motif through allegorizing the representations of societal institutions, figures such as “Reverend Salvation” (religion), “Editor Daily” (the media, which, as Mister Mister says, “[S]ome news can be made to order”), Dr. Specialist (Medicine) and “President Prexy” (universities). Robbins takes and runs with this didactic motif in his film, spelled out in the scene where in an imagined conversation with one of Blitzstein’s muses – Marxist playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht – Brecht talks about how everyone is a social “whore,” including the wealthy/big business, sacred institutions (e.g., the church and universities), and even union leaders.
In this mode of being, Moll, the ostensible “prostitute” in the play who sells her body for money, is in fact NOT a prostitute, since she doesn’t sell herself for gain but for survival. The play begins with her being propositioned first by a “Gent” and then by a cop (“Dick”), Blitzstein semantically converting the terms “Gent” (short for “gentleman”) and “Dick,” re-signifying figures who ideologically signify positive values in the dominant social order, upholders of social/family values (“Gent”) and the law (“Dick”), to figures who “prostitute” their values and prey on Others, in this case Moll, a line of subversion that both Blitzstein and Robbins play out on a larger scale, where big business/capitalist forces will also prey upon Others (more on this in a moment). Throughout the play, Moll is juxtaposed to the “Liberty Committee,” her status as “prostitute” here too called into question, Blitzstein again semantically shifting the definition of “prostitution” from one of prostituting the body – another recurring motif that extends beyond women selling their bodies but also including how the working class in general are objectified, turned into alienated (disposable) bodies for big business machines – to one of prostituting the “soul.” This shift in meaning is especially played out at the end of the play when, while Mister Mister tries to get Larry Foreman to prostitute himself, Moll is “humming” her tell-tale song “Nickel Under My Foot,” a song that emphasizes just how destitute she is, erroneously thinking – hoping – that there is a “nickel” under her foot. By juxtaposing this song with Mister Mister’s attempt at getting Larry Foreman to sell out, Blitzstein offers us his most telling message: Selling out most directly and disturbingly hurts the underprivileged – that’s what is at stake in Larry Foreman’s response. In this climatic moment, Blitzstein hyper-emphasizes his “prostitution” focus, again reminding us who the REAL “prostitute” is – Mister Mister – and how his avaricious, predatory actions create the “molls” (a term meaning “prostitute”) of the world.
In the course of the play, the “cradle of power” is shaken by the rise of unions and individuals who refuse to “prostitute” themselves for gain. In terms of the latter, it is in the climax of the play when Larry Foreman is offered money and a prized place on the “Liberty Committee” (the play on “liberty” itself signifying how American democracy itself has “prostituted” its ideals for capitalistic gains—terms such as “liberty,” “freedom,” “democracy” used rhetorically to misdirect, manipulate, and cover-up for more mercenary objectives) to capitulate to Mister Mister’s union breaking drive where we see how these two threads are inextricably connected, unionization contingent upon individuals unwilling to “prostitute” themselves to power. Larry’s response and the ensuing exchanges are telling:
LARRY:
Listen once and for all, you scared bunch of ninnies!
Outside in the square they’re startin’ somethin
That’s gonna tear the catgut outa your stinkin’ rackets!
That’s Steel marchin out in front…but one day there’s
gonna be… Wheat and sidewalks.
Cows and music…
Shop…houses…
Poems…bridges…drugstores…
The people of this town are findin’ out what it’s all about…
They’re growin’ up…
And when everybody gets together
Like Steel’s gettin’ together tonight,
Where are you then?
Listen, you Black Legions, you Ku Kluxers,
You Vigil-Aunties hidin’ up there.
In the Cradle of the Liberty Committee…
When the storm breaks…
The cradle will fall.
(They watch his pointing hand descend slowly)
(Blare of bugles outside, left)
LARRY:
Listen! The boilermakers are with us! That’s
the boilermaker’s kids!
(Beat of drums)
LARRY:
The roughers!
(Sounds of fifes)
LARRY:
The rollers! Steel! Your steel! They done it!
(All the music and voices come nearer, back stage and in the house)
COP:
They’re marchin’ down here. They got no permit to march!
CLERK:
Arrest them!
Arrest them? There’s thousands of ‘em! They’re right
here…Standin’ in front of the court house!
MISTER MISTER:
My God! What do they want with me?
LARRY:
(Sheepishly)
Don’t worry, that’s not for you. That’s just my
Aunt Jessie and her committee.
(Joins in with the song and music)
That’s thunder, that’s lightning,
And it’s going to surround you.
No wonder those storm birds
Seem to circle around you…
Well, you can climb down, and you can’t sit still;
That’s a storm that’s going to last until
The final wind blows…and when the wind blow…
The cradle will rock.
This final exchange not only punctuates Larry Foreman’s refusal to prostitute himself, it also highlights several important motifs and themes in the play and film: The emphasis on nature (“storm,” “thunder,” “lightning,” “wind”) as a metaphor for the ineluctable (natural), unstoppable “wave” of working class solidarity and agitation, and how this force of nature sensibility didactically amplifies and directs audience energy towards agency and praxis. In the segment where Larry talks about “wheat and sidewalks, cows and music, shop…houses…poems, bridges…drugstores” (“drugstores” a reference to the sympathetic “Druggist” and his non-prostitute son Stevie, who died in a union busting bomb scheme), Larry begins to formulate an alternative (utopian) society, not unlike what we see in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) where Frank Capra offers us dueling visions of society, a bleak capitalistic world of prostitution, gambling, and predatory, self-centered individuals (Pottersville) versus a more utopian vision of collectivity and egalitarianism (Bedford Falls). (For more of my thoughts on It’s a Wonderful Life, see my blog post on the film.) This alternative vision is particularly compelling in light of Robbins’s astonishing (Brechtian) ending moment where he too offers us an all too real alternative to Larry Foreman’s more utopian vision of humanity (more on this later). Finally, in the wave of workers (“boilermakers,” “roughers”) coming to the collective call of unionism, Blitzstein highlights the real power that collective solidarity can have against power, an echo that materializes in the actual performance of the play in the film when the audience becomes part of the “performance” of the play in effect instilling in the players a larger sense of collective power in the face of Congress shutting their play down and their unions (here Robbins bringing in unions as potential “prostitutes” as well) attempting to coerce them into not performing the play. This collectivity is especially echoed in the moment in the film when performers and audience alike march towards the theater and Steel tycoon Gray Mathers (Philip Baker Hall) fearfully flees, proclaiming that the “revolution” is upon him! The “revolution” was not “upon him,” but the moment perfectly echoes Mister Mister’s panicked response (“My God! What do they want with me?”) at the prospect of such collective power going against him, both moments then emphasizing the latent and potential power of the working class and how, when that collectivity is mobilized, just how small and breakable these tycoons of power are.
Bertolt Brecht
Intersecting the play and the film are two principle figures: Olive Stanton and Marxist playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht (played by Steven Skybell). I’ll come back to Olive in a moment. Brecht’s role in the film as one of Blitzstein’s muses (the other is his deceased wife) has enormous implications. In effect, Robbins injects Brecht into the film as another device that links film and play and both texts’ agitating sensibility. Brecht was a major influence on Blitzstein (the play was dedicated to him); more specifically, Brecht preached the importance of using the theater as a space for political change, stressing the need for theater and art to call attention to social injustice and the plight of the working class. Brecht’s “epic” theater eschewed character identification and a transparent representation for modernist (“estrangement”) strategies that provoke “active,” critical thinking interactions such as characters directly addressing the audiences and stage props that call attention to the simulation of the representation. Most important for my project is Brecht’s pedagogical component. Brecht believed that the didactic must be a part of theater’s attempt to get audience members to “act” in the world, to change it: “With the learning-play, then the stage begins to be didactic. (A word of which I, as a man of many years of experience in the theatre, am not afraid.) The theatre becomes a place for philosophers, and for such philosophers as not only wish to explain the world but wish to change it” (80). But Brecht wasn’t satisfied with just injecting “instruction” into his plays. As a good Marxist, he believed that “learning” must be invested in the social injustice and exploitation of Others, invested in the “class war”:
“Without opinions and objectives one can represent nothing at all. Without knowledge one can show nothing; how could one know what would be worth knowing? Unless the actor is satisfied to be a parrot or a monkey he must master our period’s knowledge of human social life by himself joining in the war of the classes. Some people may feel this to be degrading, because they rank art, once the money side has been settled, as one of the highest things; but mankind’s highest decisions are in fact fought out on earth, not in the heavens; in the ‘external’ world, not inside people’s heads. Nobody can stand above the warring classes, for nobody can stand above the human race. Society cannot share a common communication system so long as it is split into warring classes. Thus for art to be ‘un-political’ means only to ally itself with the ‘ruling’ group.” (196)
Also critical for my purposes is Brecht’s emphasis to “speak [the working class’s] language”:
“The words Popularity and Realism…are natural companions. It is in the interest of the people, the broad working masses, that literature should give them truthful representations of life; and truthful representations of life are in fact only of use to the broad working masses, the people; so that they have to be suggestive and intelligible to them, i.e., popular.” (107)
Brecht goes on to extrapolate on the importance of what he means by “popular”:
“Our conception of ‘popular’ refers to the people who are not only fully involved in the process of development but are actually taking it over, forcing it, deciding it. We have in mind a people that is making history and altering the world and itself. We have in mind a fighting people and also a fighting conception of ‘popularity’…. ‘Popular’ means intelligible to the broad masses, taking over their own forms of expression and enriching them/adopting consolidating their standpoint/representing the most progressive section of the people in such a way that it can take over the leadership; thus intelligible to other sections too/linking with tradition and carrying it further/handing on the achievements of the section now leading to the section of the people that is struggling for the lead.” (108)
All told, Brecht is zeroing in on several crucial ingredients to what a working class art should be, at least in large measure: It should not just “represent” in the fashion of some abstract notion of the sublime, it should represent (political, activist) “knowledge” and at least in some measure inform class consciousness, less it reinforce the “ruling group.” And a working class art must be “intelligible” to the working class, the very definition of what “popular” means, at least in a political context, e.g., when working class art moves working class people to agitate, it is by definition then enacting a “popular” movement. Finally, most importantly, a working class art “makes history and altering the world” and the people in it a primary aim.
Further reinforcing the importance of the “popular,” Denning cites Gilbert Seldes’ claim that “the popular cultures of the early decades of the twentieth century, including comic strips, jazz, vaudeville [of which Tommy Crickshaw is a good example], newspaper humor, and the movies, particularly slapstick comedy” were “used and celebrated…as weapons against the genteel tradition” (40).
Blitzstein adopts all of these Brechtian practices for his play: As just discussed above, the play didactically takes a stand in the war on the working class, addressing big business’s attempt to prevent the unionization of the working class and attempt to “prostitute” Larry Foreman, the lone working class holdout to selling out. The play packages this instruction in a “popular” form, an entertaining (comedic-allegorical) mix of working class representations, settings, and issues, linear narration, and realistic settings. Most importantly, Blitzstein created a “proletarian opera” (Denning 291) grounded in “proletarian music” (Denning 288). As Denning conveys, Blitzstein attempted to frame the music in working class “colloquial” and “vernacular” language (Denning 289). Blitzstein also injects modernist touches in the play via self-referential (allegorical) names (“Mr. Mister,” “Daily Editor,” and so on). As Welles meant it to be performed – experimenting with unrealistic stage props (lots and lots of glass!) – the play would have been even more modernist. As it ironically turns out, the play was performed in a modernist fashion, albeit via what I think could be called a populist sensibility as well, as the players begin their performance from the audience and emerge out of the audience, exactly what Brecht means when he says that “popularity” means the rising up of the working class in an act of collectivity, solidarity and enactment of agitating (coalescing) art.
Brecht’s presence in the film then offers us several additional levels of signification, as muse and influence to Blitzstein (Robbins then offering a secondary “dedication”) but also as a point of emphasis on the importance of a Marxist injection into the “political didactic,” couched in “popular” structures accessible and relatable to working class (mainstream) audiences.
Olive Stanton
Perhaps no other mechanism in the film reflects how Robbins gets us to relate to working class causes and art than homeless character Olive Stanton (Emily Watson), a real life historical character. Olive not only offers us a relatable character but, in her echo of fictional Moll and all that she represents, she also begins an echo of the play, an echo that extends to the film playing off the play’s themes by not just resonating them but amplifying them. In a remarkable opening scene, Robbins creates an extremely complex long take to not only set up our deeply integrated bond with Olive, but also to synchronously set up many of the themes and political polemics in the film.
The scene begins with a medium close-up of Olive sleeping, again hyper-emphasizing her importance in the film. Like Moll in Blitzstein’s play, Olive is the heart and soul, the muse, the working class embodiment of our entrance into having a voice in this struggle with power. In this opening moment, she is set against all that will come into play in the film: Signifiers of power and powerlessness, dominant social order and Other, rich and poor, predators and prey, consumption and survival. After the initial shot of Olive sleeping, Robbins then cuts to a long shot of her sleeping space, behind the movie screen of an opulent movie theater. Olive uses an old disposed velvet theater curtain for her cover, further emphasizing her disposed status.
As she puts herself together, a current events news reel plays behind her, the content of which further informs the political polemics of this scene and film: Mussolini (Italy) invading Ethiopia (Mussolini referencing the Roman empire and “reclaiming lands that rightfully belong to them”); Hitler condemning “degenerative” art “that portrays Germany in a negative and unsympathetic fashion”; Washington/Roosevelt putting Americans back to work via his “Work Progress Administration” (highlighted by the Tennessee Valley Dam), Roosevelt saying that “fear is vanishing and confidence is growing on every side” and the announcer chiming in that “things are looking up indeed for Americans as we look to the future with hope and high vision”; a fashion interest story on fashions for children and women (creating swim suits, evening gowns and other clothing wear to gain the “attention and discerning eye of the female consumer”). Juxtaposed against destitute Olive, each of these signifiers take on a meaningful play: Mussolini, Hitler, and the Roman empire reference take on general signification of power (fascism) over Others (Ethiopians, Jews, conquered peoples); the Hitler reference highlights the censoring or silencing of voices of artistic expression.
The fashion industry reference underlines a fashion industry that is already beginning to expand its profit margin by marketing to women and children, which, in turn, is also already a key sign of how consumerism “distracts” the masses from more meaningful (activist) pursuits, Olive’s strategic opposite placement playing as this counterpoint, her destitution not only jarringly contrasted to more affluent pursuits but also signaling how the destitute are ignored by a consumerism-distracted middle class.
The Roosevelt reference adds to the jarring disconnect between marketing a successful capitalism (the marketing fashion industry reference paralleling this clip, a subtle hint that in both cases, something is being ideologically marketed) and the realities of the destitute (Olive), the optimistic words by both Roosevelt and announcer seeming a far cry from Olive’s depressed condition. Moreover, though Roosevelt provides the working class with, yes, much needed jobs, these are jobs that merely keep intact the deep inequities between the working class poor and those in power, a point that is further reinforced by another jarring divergence, the seeming contentment of Roosevelt’s working class and the working class attempting to unionize in the face of power’s violent oppression, as highlighted in the above Denning selection of steelworkers brutalized by Steel, an echo touched on in Robbins’s film, e.g., in the scene where workers protesting get brutalized by the police.
Throughout this current events reel, Olive is juxtaposed against it, largely in shadow or silhouette, suggesting that in the wake of such plays of power and marketing, the working class poor such as Olive are in the shadows, unseen and unheard. Further reinforcing this meaning is how the words on the screen (seen backwards from our point of view – from Olive’s behind the screen/[scene] position) –such an inversion of the images and text only further reinforces how the Real “current events” (e.g., behind the scene) are NOT the institutions of power and fashion but rather are lower class people simply struggling to survive. That’s what Robbins’ film does so well, reveals the Real behind the ideologically constructed veneer of what seems.
As Olive flees from one of the theater workers who has discovered her, she falls hard against the brick wall of a back alley, where her status as preyed upon (being chased), low (back alley), fallen (falling against the brick wall), and stuck against a life of unyielding adversity (brick wall) all become hyper-emphasized.
Olive passes more signifiers of poverty (e.g., worn out clothes hang on a clothes line), and she stops to urinate, further emphasizing her degraded state of being, which is yet even further reinforced by her drinking water and cleaning herself from a water hydrant, associating Olive with a low animal station.
Robbins leaves her for a moment to pick up what will be another thread in the film – Hazel Huffman (Joan Cusack) is posting flyers for her anti-Federal Theater, anti-Communist crusade – which also already juxtaposes Olive from Hazel, who, though a working class individual herself, has assented to power’s anti-communist, anti-union propaganda, which is all self-interestedly geared to protect power’s privileged position. Hazel, and those working class individuals like her, become a powerful (socially prostituted) tool for power, as the film will go on to show when Hazel is showcased (exploited) at congressional hearings, her voice given more prominence than other working class individuals.
After Hazel passes by, Robbins then fixes on a man walking by, who Olive asks: “Song for a nickel, mister?” Olive’s act is not an act of a prostitute and yet the associations are there, especially in terms of the “nickel” reference that comes back again in Blitzstein’s play The Cradle Will Rock, where, again, the main character Moll is a prostitute and sings about a “Nickel Under [Her] Foot.” Here, then, Robbins inextricably links Olive and Moll together: As Moll is Blitzstein’s beating heart in the play (again, especially emphasized in her background refrain of a “Nickel Under My Foot” while Mister Mister tries to get Larry Foreman to sell out), so is Olive Robbins’ soulful allegorical working class every woman/man.
As Olive cleans herself from the fire hydrant, Robbins cranes the camera up to a bird’s eye view of her, again punctuating her “low” depressed state. After that, Robbins does something remarkable, moving his camera into Blitzstein’s room, who is writing the play The Cradle Will Rock, which is also when we finally get our first cut! And here, then, is the climax of the long take sequence: Robbins intricately links Olive to Marc Blitzstein (Hank Azaria), the two characters then dialectically encompassing a symbolic union of Others, homeless everywoman and (gay) Marxist artist, the culmination of which is an oppositional aesthetic that takes on the power that is oppressing both figures. In other words, it isn’t just that Olive-as-everywoman encompasses the kind of Other voice that Blitzstein injects into his play but that the two figures offer spectators our two most defiant voices in tandem, each signifying two different poles of opposition to power, artist and an emerging “multitude,” those working class individuals who find their voice in aggregate eruptions of praxis and agency against that which has kept them feeling powerless and invisible.
To better understand this connection, we must first understand how Robbins also intimately – intricately – connects Blitzstein to the working class in general. Just after we first meet Blitzstein, he goes to a union rally where we see him literally create his play as he simultaneously takes in the stand of working class peoples at the rally and the ensuing crackdown by police, in effect making working life experiences an integral part of his creative process, that “dialectic between work and art” that Denning cites as so central to the “laboring of American culture.” This movement of infusing agitating working class energies and voices into his play makes the play more than his voice but rather him also becoming the conduit for their voices, voices that are already making their sentiments known through their own modes of expression, organized labor and agitating strikes and protest movements.
Similarly, this link between Olive and Blitzstein signifies how her voice is in the play as well, again, not directly, as Blitzstein never meets her until later, when she tries out for the part Moll. No, not directly, but indirectly as Robbins himself – via this early scene – makes Olive the embodiment of all that the play and film stands for, attaching her to Blitzstein as an allegory for the aggregate voice of the working class, the unemployed, and the homeless, Others who have been degraded and disposed of by capitalistic (big business) power. Later, at the end of the film when the play is actually performed, when she rises first to perform her role – refusing to “prostitute” herself like John Adair (who attempts to prostitute her by coercing her into not performing) – she also comes to allegorically embody the collective working class will to stand up to power. In this way, Robbins intricately links the play and film through Olive – as she represents Moll and as Moll had already represented her – both women then becoming our stand in for the “multitude,” those emergent voices that spontaneously emerge against power.
The play becomes a “voice” for the disenfranchised in another way as well: When Congress shuts the play down the players persistently go forward anyway. As I mentioned previously, as they walk their way to their new theatrical venue, people join them in their march to the theater. Later, when Blitzstein begins to perform the play single-handedly, the players – again, beginning of course with Olive – begin their performance from the audience, a hugely symbolic act. Via these two participatory moments – first on the street as the foreplay of the performance becomes a procession (with attendant mogul Gray Mathers proclaiming them a “revolution!”), and then later as the play erupts from where it was largely born in the first place, the people – Robbins further reinforces (A) the powerful part art can play in peoples’ lives, e.g., as voice and enactment of desire and agency; and (B) the part that the people can play in the creation and enactment of art.
Rivera’s Mural
Even more so than Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock, Diego Rivera’s (Ruben Blades) mural “Man, Controller of the Universe” (originally called “Man at the Crossroads”) explosively “rocked” the “cradle” of power by directly challenging it. By Robbins using Rivera’s mural, he can more clearly reveal how power reacts to truly threatening art.
Historically, it would seem that Nelson Rockefeller (John Cusack) principally objected to Rivera’s insertion of Vladimir Illich Lenin, Lenin at the time embodying the principles and philosophy of Communism, an insertion that was not in the original sketches provided by Rivera to Nelson. However, Rockefeller’s management team of Todd, Robertson, and Todd, and especially Nelson’s father John D. Rockefeller, objected to the mural in its entirety, as suggested by what John D. Rockefeller said after the mural’s destruction: “The picture was obscene and, in the judgment of the Rockefeller Center, an offense to good taste” (“Biography: Diego Rivera”). A Joseph Lilly article in the New York World-Telegram (“Rivera Paints Scenes of Communist Activity and John D. Rockefeller Foots Bill” ) would seem to indicate the furor over the mural’s explosive polemic: One side of the mural revealed the evils of Capitalism, including images of (presumably, capitalism driven) war; brutal police crackdowns of working class protestors and union rallies; a statue of Jupiter with a rosary cross, signifying the destructiveness of the Roman Catholic Church or institutionalized religion in general (not to mention that Rivera may be associating mythical gods with a Christian God); an incredibly provocative image of a monkey holding the hand of an infant surrounded by images of other life forms, from the lowest (images of the ocean) to the highest (primate and man), which I believe suggests that from birth, man is subjected to an “evolutionary” survival of the fittest (capitalistic) conditioning (the latter version of the mural included an image of Charles Darwin, more blatantly linking Capitalism to an evolutionary “survival of the fittest” sensibility); and, of course, most famously, images of the gluttonous rich living a debauched lifestyle (in the later version, Rivera gets a bit of revenge by famously including an image of John D. Rockefeller to the image of highbrow revelers), punctuated by the syphilis cell hovering just above them, suggesting – as Rivera conveys in the film – that the rich/capitalism is the disease that infects us all, a point that Robbins comes back to at the end of the film (more on this later).
On the other side of the mural, we get the exact opposite, the utopia of Communism, with the Russian May Day rally countering the images of war (suggesting a peoples’ war against the forces of capitalism) and working class peoples collectively united around Lenin (and, in the later version, Leon Trotsky, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels) and the ideas (ideals) of Communism, all revolving around the centered figure of Lenin (Lenin stands at the center of working class individuals from different fields and races holding hands). Topping all of this off is the toppling of fascist power, embodied by the decapitated Greek statue of Caesar (the workers are sitting on his head!), which suggests a general toppling of (capitalism) power by the working class and a specific toppling of power by the working class in the historical moment, as suggested by the Nazi symbol on the statue.
At the center of the mural, Rivera gives us not some famous figure or some embodiment of a sacred institution (e.g., state, law, science, education, religion) but rather the working embodiment of the working class, a Communist signifier itself, which, in turn, speaks to the didactic message of the mural (and again echoes the recurring motif in the film), that it is the working class that drives our progress, not the elites. Compounding this message is the motif of how (hu)man “controls” time and space itself, the time portion signified principally by a large hand of power emoting out of a metal encasement, grasping a globe of clocks, signified secondarily by the circle motif in the center part of the mural, punctuated by what looks like another large clock as the back drop of this center image. In terms of the space element, simply by placing (hu)man at the center of the universe (not just signified by the man but the hand of power), Rivera spatially places (hu)man as controller of space; compounding this move, Rivera has spatial properties also exuding from the center, (hu)man controlling space itself, as signified by the spatial properties in the center image, and (hu)man breaking down the body itself into its complex constituent parts, as signified by the biological elements of the body in the center image. Of course, these images do not necessarily have negative connotations, as these images signify the enormous advancements of (hu)man, in terms of exploring and grasping the enormity of the universe and the body, both of which have advanced our species in profound ways. However, the complexity of Rivera’s image offers us twin messages (emphasized by the clock motif and the hand of power), that with (hu)man’s achievements also comes (hu)man’s (power’s) exploitation of these advancements, an enslavement to categorization, compartmentalization, objectification, commodification–dehumanization. In other words, a capitalist system wholly exploits advances for its own gain, whether that be in terms of the work place, whereupon workers are then placed and utilized in the most systemized fashion, the very definition of the expedient, efficient Fordist assembly line, bodies spatially and temporally (productively, unnaturally) utilized, compartmentalized into the most efficient alienated work cogs; or whether that be in terms of creating perfect consumers, whereupon individuals are reproduced as consumers, marketed, conditioned, programmed to consume what, where, and when they are told to.
In short, in this incredibly ambitious political work, Rivera created an alternative vision of humanity, a didactic attack on capitalism (dystopia) and an embrace of Communism (utopia), yet another echo of Blitzstein’s (coming out of the mouth of Larry Foreman) and Robbins’s vision of alternative systems. More specifically, like Blitzstein, Rivera gave voice to the disenfranchised masses, a voice inevitably silenced by power, in effect, an attempt at offering a “working class” (Communist) version of history. More provocatively, the mural offers us a galvanizing counterpoint to the more pacifying art we typically see in public and private spaces. Robbins didactically spells out one of power’s most devastating means of silencing the voices of opposition, by not allowing didactic (political) art to ever even see the light of day. In his essay “The Ends of Culture; or, Late Modernism, Redux,” Phillip E. Wegner stresses how Robbins’s film specifically reveals how “cultural spaces” have been appropriated “by the powers of state and monopoly capitalism” and a “depoliticized late modernism”:
“The brilliance of Robbins’ film thus lies in the ways it concretely spatializes these struggles over cultural production. Indeed, the film helps us recognize how the production of a depoliticized late modernism fundamentally involved an abandonment of these fields of conflict and a reclamation and reorganization of culture space by the powers of the state and monopoly capitalism—acts that, as we should never forget, always involve real state violence. The film stages these transformations in two ways. First, as we see the beginnings of the efforts of the federal government to restrict the range of cultural productions available in the public space by a defunding of the various WPA arts projects: not only will an end of this funding dramatically decrease the range of art works that will be produced, it will further constrict the distribution of these productions. At the same time, the film is able to illustrate these changes in stunning visual shorthand. The destruction of Rivera’s mural literally erases the artist’s attempted ‘appropriation’ of this space, reasserting the private nature of this apparently public domain. Even more provocatively, the film shows the destruction of the mural transforming it into something else altogether…. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the whole appears to have been transformed into something not unlike Jackson Pollock’s postwar abstract expressionist paintings. In the film, abstract expressionism quite literally comes to occupy the place held by Rivera’s ‘representational’ work.” (251-252)
Thus it is that power brokers such as Rockefeller, coupled with a “late modernist” shift towards “abstract expressionism,” would explicitly “break with the deeply political and even revolutionary vocation of an earlier ‘high’ [didactic] modernism” (252). Wegner goes on to sum up this fundamental shift:
“[W]hat the film is centrally concerned with is the ways historically that the rise of the ideology of modernism and of later modernist practice, coupled with politically motivated assaults on public art funding, a new policing of content, a reassertion of the private control over cultural space, and a bending, as in the culture industry itself, of the ends of all cultural production to profit, restrict the vibrancy and diversity of artistic and cultural production.” (254)
What Wegner gets at here is how in neat shorthand fashion (with a tell-tale crosscutting ending), power conspires to rub out agitating (didactic), oppositional (working class) art through numerous channels, from the complex cultural and ideological shift in modernist practices – again, generally speaking, from politicized representational (didactic) art to de-politicized abstract art – to, as we see so vividly in the film – Congress’ and our allegorical trio of power figures’ (e.g., Mathers, Rockefeller, and Hearst) actions and future actions (Rockefeller’s destruction of Rivera’s mural and the three men’s planned control of art). The Brechtian ending scene of modern day Times Square punctuates this radical shift of cultural production from a “vibran[t]…diversity of artistic and cultural production” to a space that illustrates the end result of this de-politicalizing (privatized) shift by these mechanisms of power. I will examine all of these later drives in the rest of my essay.
Tommy Crickshaw
No “policing” mechanism was as effective – or repellent – as the oppressive censoring of deeply committed left wing political individuals that emerged at this time, and this silencing was not just targeted at so-called “Communists” but extended to left wing activists in general, as Dan Georgeakas says about Hollywood productions: “Liberalism, not Communism, may, in fact, have been the true target of the [House Committee on Un-American Activities] investigators. The Right wished to discourage any Hollywood impulse to make films advocating social change at home or critical of foreign policy.” As Denning says, “the repression of labor and the left…the witch-hunts and the un-American activities committees, shadowed the Popular Front from its beginnings” (466), a concerted effort to “purge” not only Communist influences but left wing influences in general.
Robbins inserts the Tommy Crickshaw (Bill Murray) thread to specifically incorporate this destructive historical drive in the film. While the meaning of the destruction of Rivera’s mural and the attempted stoppage of the play The Cradle Will Rock is more obvious, the Tommy Crickshaw thread also plays into this “death of free artistic expression.” Apparently at one point, Tommy believed in the ideals of Communism, but due to the coercive, oppressive tactics of the anti-Communist movement, he “prostituted” himself and compromised his own beliefs and values and betrayed friends and colleagues. His extreme anti-communist rhetoric then becomes a self-hating condemnation of self and Other. What particularly reinforces this idea and offers a secondary level of meaning is the visual “sign” of the dummy itself, red haired, and, at the end, becoming not just a voice of his subconscious but also a mirror image of Tommy (which is also reinforced by Robbins using mirror images of Tommy in key moments), Tommy literally becoming split in two, the former “red” Communist Tommy and the broken man he has become. Further punctuating this idea, I read that last sad moment of him on stage as a kind of confessional, him being who he is one last time, Tommy performing his “old” act, his dummy taking on the role of a Communist activist relaying his Communist polemic via the more easily digested popular art (entertainment) form of comedy and ventriloquism, a crucial point for it is indeed through, as conveyed above, popular art forms that the political becomes most digestible for mainstream audiences and thus more dangerous to power.
The point, and the link, is that our capitalist system will not tolerate popular expressions that seriously challenge it. The play The Cradle Will Rock, Rivera’s mural, and Crickshaw are all silenced in different ways. In the case of Tommy and those like him, artists who favored a communist belief system – or, as suggested above, a left wing agenda – were either coerced into silence or ostracized or forced into exile (many artists, such as fellow Communist and left wing political polemicist Charlie Chaplin took this route). Historically, we have seen this most tangibly magnified in the Hollywood Communist witch hunts where the larger Communist witch hunts led Hollywood to crack down on any whiffs of Communism in Hollywood, a movement prefigured in the film, Congress “grilling” Hallie Flanagan in a way that portends the “House Committee on Un-American Activities,” which, in turn, led to the “Hollywood blacklist,” again, part of the “policing” of political content that Wegner conveys above.
That is why the “death” of the Federal Theater Company correlated to the “death” of Tommy Crickshaw (represented by his puppet) and the “death” of real “free expression” because even more so than the silencing of actual works of art (Diego’s mural and Blitzstein’s play), the silencing of Tommy equates to not only censoring (silencing) art forms but also equates to the breaking of the will of a human being, an egregious form of violence to the self, and, allegorically speaking, to the silencing of progressive political voices in general.
The Ending of the Film (Tell-Tale Crosscutting Sequence)
Though we initially get a crowd pleasing “victory” of the play The Cradle Will Rock being performed (and, as I conveyed previously, this was no one night victory since the play went on to be performed nineteen times), this victory is undercut by Robbins’ crosscutting of the destruction of Rivera’s mural (and the only signifier NOT destroyed, the lingering syphilis cell) and the funeral procession of Tommy’s puppet, which, in turn, correlated to the “death” of the Federal Theater Company and the “death” of real “free expression” (and the disease of corporate power/capitalism untethered from any real push back).
Spliced into this crosscutting is also a masquerade ball where our three principals of power – Mathers, Hearst and Rockefeller – have dressed up in 18th Century garb and discuss the future of art. As our three emblems of didactic, working class (oppositional) art are destroyed – or in the case of The Cradle Will Rock attempted to be destroyed – in one way or another, Hearst, Mathers, and Rockefeller conspire to “control” (“prostitute”) art by installing puppet personages on museum boards and sponsoring, exhibiting, and marketing only pacifying, non-political art, e.g., portraits, landscapes, abstracts, and “nudes,” again, part of that “control” and “bending” that Wegner mentions above.
In addition to the didactic message of how power (allegorically represented by Mathers, Hearst, and Rockefeller) takes this key avenue to retain their power – again, by eclipsing oppositional art – the cross cutting between rich and poor, power and powerlessness punctuates a crucial thematic in the film, the way that so-called “class warfare” is ultimately a losing battle for the poor since it is the those in power who hold all the cards. This control is strikingly reinforced by Mathers, Hearst, and Rockefeller’s costumes, a historical signification of figures who have historically dictated events throughout history, echoing their own power in the present to do the same thing, as we see with their drive for apolitical art, as well as their power over life necessities such as jobs and wages and how these two intricately connect. To take just one example, Blitzstein’s play is a play that advances organized labor and what organized labor can do for the working class, get them higher wages, benefits, better working conditions, protection from company abuses, and so on, which, of course, is why it has to be elided from existence. What is also so telling about this crosscutting moment is just the sheer excess and pomp of the wealthy compared to the working class’ drive to just struggle for their fair share of the means to live, a disparity that seems particularly egregious when we think of Olive’s (and Moll’s) opening destitute condition.
The emphasis on “masquerade” and “outward appearance” in contrast to the “plainclothes” (Real) nature of the working class suggests yet another rich and powerful layer of meaning: The rich and powerful disguise their greed and thirst for control and power with “masks,” which, in this film, is best understood by these three men’s seeming cultural awareness and art appreciation, where they seem to care about art but in actuality use art for their own ends, e.g., they “mask” a business transaction with Mussolini with purchases of art pieces, funneling money to Mussolini to support his “cause.” Rockefeller in particular is telling, in that, unlike Mathers and Hearst’s lack of even any pretenses of appreciating art, Rockefeller seems to genuinely appreciate art, but then when confronted with a truly subversive piece of art, he destroys Rivera’s mural. Even more telling is the signifier of Hearst’s garb, dressed as a Roman Catholic priest, which, not only is telling in terms of the sheer symbolism of Hearst – the most conscienceless man of the bunch (and who would later attempt to destroy Welles’s masterpiece Citizen Kane) – dressed up as a religious figure when he is anything but selfless, also speaks to how power comes in all guises, the religious garb reciprocally speaking as much to Hearst’s false front as it does the false front of other institutions of power, here isolating the Roman Catholic Church.
Like “Mr. Mister” in the play The Cradle Will Rock, these men of power and privilege use their power to protect their power and swell it, even if it means extinguishing free (artistic) expression, breaking the backs of unions, degrading the working class into destitution, and encouraging social prostitution, the latter of which is not only encouraged but enabled via the need to sacrifice ethics and morality to just survive, as we see with Moll.
In terms of the latter, Robbins complicates this idea of social prostitution by showing the complexity of life for an artist in a Capitalist system, yet another controlling mechanism of political art: Though one could argue that Rivera should not have even taken the Rockefeller commission or whether Welles’ decadent lifestyle reveals his hypocrisy, the bottom line is that in a capitalist system, a system that has as its foundation mercenary or monetary gain, not becoming a “prostitute” to some degree is extremely difficult, again, either because artists are human and are conditioned to desire the same material pleasures as everyone else, or also because they are subject to the same demands of financial security and survival as anyone else. The film takes this complex “prostitute” motif and sub-divides along lines of most to least egregious, suggesting that there are “prostitutes,” figures who tilt the balance of their artistic endeavors on the side of progressive directions (Welles, Rivera) and then there are “prostitutes,” figures who have completely sold out (Margherita Sarfatti, John Adair). Standing on the far left (evolutionary-progressive) side of these figures, though, are more altruistic figures such as Olive and Aldo Silvano, figures who have the most to lose by standing up for principle and against power despite career and perhaps even life threatening repercussions.
Conclusion
Towards the end of the film, Robbins gives us another one of his telling juxtapositions, one that I think informs his explosive concluding frame. Hallie Flanagan and her colleagues discuss the ramifications of the congressional investigation of the so-called Communist infiltration in the Federal Theater. The head of the congressional committee is Congressman Martin Dies. After Hallie has been “grilled” by the committee – which means them largely controlling the proceedings and thus the content and not allowing Hallie to give a final disquisition on the subject – Hallie resigns herself to the end of Federal Theater, yet another mechanism of control over the content of art, taking away public funding for truly free artistic expressions. In a strategic move, Robbins places Hallie in the chair of Congressman Martin Dies’ position, his placard signifying his former place at the center of the investigation. The signifier “Dies” (as in “death” as Hallie so appropriately says earlier in the film) juxtaposed against Hallie speaks volumes: Dies (and Congress itself, a key power player in the Communist witch hunts that purveyed from 1938 to 1954 when McCarthy’s furor was finally quelled) is not only about the “death” of free artistic expression and a working class aesthetic, his move to destroy the Federal Theater means the end of a key oppositional component to capitalism/power, his power, which, in turn means the death of a crucial check and balance to our corporations and government doing whatever they want, which means a lot as I will soon elucidate.
Hallie’s placement in Dies’s space (notably between two American flags, which, though we see them in the shots of Dies, are made more prominent in the Hallie shots due to Robbins’ darker lighting and Hallie’s singular positioning) speaks to her own oppositional sensibility, in effect, her and Others’ work and efforts giving “life” to an oppositional aesthetic that seeks to not just give a voice to the disenfranchised but also create a working class apparatus that entails an educated, critical thinking, informed working class intent on working towards a society that works for them and not just corporate/capitalist power, Robbins’s not-so-subtle message that it is this sensibility that incarnates Americanism. Even Robbins’s placement of the children’s program The Revolt of the Beavers – a not inconsequential insert in the film (!) – suggests a working (societal) curriculum of critical thinking that begins at an early age.
Hallie proclaims that though Federal Theater has died, they have “launched a great ship” of working class theater, one that power cannot stop. Unfortunately, that is one prediction she got wrong. In one of the most provocative endings in all of cinema, Robbins has the ending (funeral) processional of theater and vaudeville players escort Melvin, the “deceased” puppet, into modern day Times Square. In this last telling (Brechtian) statement, Robbins seems to be upping the ante in the stakes that this film maps out: As I suggest above, a working class oppositional aesthetic is not only important to give voice to the marginalized multitude, it is also one of the few elements that stands in the way of a globalized, transnational capitalism run amok. That is, without a working class aesthetic to empower and educate the masses, corporate power (capitalism) fills that void with a (ideological) consumerism that disempowers and distracts people from not only agency in the world but, concurrent with that, letting corporate/Wall Street (capitalistic) power do whatever it wants. So, as depicted by the sea of commercialism in Times Square, we see in the most dramatic fashion the impact of this loss of a working class aesthetic where people are utterly commodified, mass produced like the objects they consume, reified into un(critical) thinking, uninformed, uneducated tools for corporate masters who only care about their profit margin.
In that last shot of modern times Times Square, instead of seeing the “great ship” that Hallie says was “launched” – instead of seeing a rich tapestry of working class theaters and artistic (vaudeville) venues where the working class can nurture themselves on the milk of creativity that flourishes agency and self-determinism and an enriched life that eschews the invisible chains of their (consumerism, alienated) enslavement – we see a sea of garish corporate logos (Kodak, Coke, Hertz, Sony). In this way, Robbins offers us his most accomplished realized metaphor: In contradistinction to Hallie’s “great ship,” the syphilis cell is all that remains of Rivera’s mural, Robbins zooming out from it, the diseased (corrupted) cell suggesting that with the end of an oppositional working class aesthetic (Rivera’s mural in particular but oppositional art in general) – the cure to the (prostitution) disease of corporate power/capitalism – with this sea of corporate logos, we can see that the disease has spread, metastasized into a full fledged (corporate) plague.
Works Cited
“Biography: Diego Rivera.” American Experience. PBS. 1996-2013.http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/biography/rockefellers-rivera/
Brecht, Bertolt. Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. Ed. and trans. John Willett. New York: Hill and Wang, 1964.
Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. London: Verso, 1997.
Georgeakas, Dan. “The Hollywood Blacklist,” Encyclopedia of the American Left. Eds. Mari Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle, and Dan Georgeakas. Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1992. http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/mccarthy/blacklist.html para 2.
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