Films and TV put in their cultural and political contexts.

A talk given in San Diego, Berkeley and Ann Arbor

By David Walsh, wsws.org
1 June 2016

The various writers may step back occasionally to reflect on individual moral issues, or the debilitating impact of the war on their respective central characters, but never to consider the driving forces of the war itself. Not once. No one makes a genuinely profound critique of the society that produces these horrible wars, or ties them to capitalism.

The Cold War: “You can’t fight in here. This is the war room!”

Dr. Strangelove (1964)

The Cold War produced many works, including a great deal of reactionary rubbish. But there were certain films that stood out. Stanley Kubrick directed Paths of Glory (1957), as noted before, a scathing indictment of the First World War. Kirk Douglas plays a French officer whose men refuse to continue a suicidal attack. They then face a court-martial. It is a powerful and disturbing film.

Kubrick, of course, also made Dr. Strangelove (1964), a satire about a lunatic US Air Force general who launches a first nuclear strike against the Soviet Union. Peter Sellers memorably plays three parts, including US president Merkin Muffley and the ex-Nazi, wheelchair-bound Dr. Strangelove. The film is an absurdist reaction to the terrors of the time. Who can forget President Muffley chastising the Soviet ambassador and another US air force general for wrestling in the American military’s sanctum sanctorum: “You can’t fight in here. This is the war room!” A sort of nervous hysteria prevails.

Other films of the time included Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach (1959), based on Nevil Shute’s novel, about a group of people in Australia, in the aftermath of World War III, who are waiting for the cloud of deadly nuclear fallout to arrive and exterminate them; John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate (1962), a delirious, bewildering film about the brainwashing of the son of a right-wing politician unwittingly enlisted in a “communist conspiracy,” with Angela Lansbury as a monstrous political mother-wife; Frankenheimer’s Seven Days in May (1964), with Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, about an attempted military coup; Sidney Lumet’s Fail Safe (1964), from a screenplay co-written by former blacklisted writer Walter Bernstein, about a Cold War nuclear crisis.

I would not go out too far on the limb artistically with any of these films. But they reflected tremendous anxiety about the global (or specifically American) state of affairs, and they tackled the questions directly, or at least as directly as the circumstances allowed.

Vietnam

MASH (1970)

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]ith the Vietnam War, all hell broke loose, so to speak. Generally speaking, the Vietnam-era films are critical of the war, of the military, of the establishment. Of course, they also reflect the contradictions and limitations of the radicalism of the period. Robert Altman’s MASH (1970), set during the Korean War, in fact, but obviously directed at the Vietnam War, the American military and the Nixon administration, established the tone. The film was written by Ring Lardner Jr., another former Hollywood blacklist victim.

One could point to Hal Ashby’s Coming Home (1978), Sidney J. Furie’s The Boys in Company C (1978), Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978), Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), Oliver Stone’s Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July (1986), Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987), Brian de Palma’s Casualties of War (1989) and others.

Those films are overwhelmingly negative about the war, about the military. They come out of, in a number of cases, the anti-war movement. These are honest, often confused films, none of them great works of art, but with some extraordinary moments. They exude the spirit of rebellion. Those who take military rules and pronouncements seriously are deluded or mad …

In discussing these various war films, we are not looking back nostalgically to some golden age—there never was a golden age. America is a very dark country in many ways, the major imperialist power of the past century.

How do we look at films?

How do we look at these films, how do we look at present-day films? This raises the question: What is art? What is our approach in evaluating art?

For Marxists, art is ultimately a means by which we cognize, make sense of reality, it is no less concerned with truth than the objective sciences, although in a different way obviously.

We criticize or reject didacticism, preaching in art, because in a didactic work the artist has a prosaic, cut and dried content and the artistic shape is merely an ornament, something extraneous. Such work does not make a deep or enduring impression; it lacks spontaneity, life.

Art largely shows, it doesn’t explain—except in unusual cases. Filmmakers think in images, they dramatize their conceptions. The conceptions are embodied in the relationships, situations and imagery.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that the artist has no opinions or ideas. He or she works through images, feelings play an important role, but feelings attached to thought. The artist doesn’t assume that the audience is a quivering mass of emotionalism to be manipulated.

The best films I’ve mentioned tended to look at American society critically, with the military viewed as one component of the social order. There was a greater awareness of the society’s faults, weaknesses. A more pronounced realism predominated.

And it isn’t simply a matter of the explicitly political level of consciousness. One watches The Best Years of Our Lives, From Here to Eternity, They Were Expendable and others, or read the Jones and Mailer novels, and they are not necessarily works of genius, but they give a sense of the American people, or at least in certain important aspects. There is a much closer relationship in those films and novels to everyday life, especially the distrust of the military brass, of big shots in general.

In one of the opening scenes of The Best Years of Our Lives, one of those big shots basically elbows the Dana Andrews character out of the way at an airline counter. (Self-importantly: “I arranged to have my tickets here. My name is Gibbons. George H Gibbons.”) The class issues are laid out at the very outset.

The enormous distance of filmmaking today, commercial or independent, from the people, the way it actually thinks and feels, is so striking, and I’m speaking, frankly, even of those films and television series that make a special effort to present “ordinary people.”

The connection to the people was much more organic, despite the social, profit-driven character of Hollywood. It was taken for granted that the rich were less interesting, selfish, lazy, self-involved, that the big dramas lay in the working class neighborhoods or workplaces, or in the more intriguing sections of the middle class, whether past or present—or in the drama of science, or war, or political struggles of the past.

Of course, there were the performers themselves, the human material. They didn’t have to pretend so hard to be “average,” they came out of the hardships of the Depression and the war, and they represented something.

The anti-communist purges, the changes in American economic life, the immense social polarization of recent decades, the decades of ideological reaction, all this has had a great impact. Revitalized filmmaking will come out of a new period of struggles, out of defeats and hard-fought lessons, out of painful and exhilarating experiences.

Where is the work that has captured the horror of the “war on terror”?

Now, we’ve had 25 years of war … by now, you would think a great work would have appeared.

Where is the film or novel (or drama or poem or painting) that has captured for an entire generation the horror of the “war on terror”? This is a central issue in this talk, a central problem …

The McCarthy period in the early 1950s was a time of intense repression, but, in many respects, better film work was being done. The problem is not just repression, or even primarily repression. American capitalism’s most powerful weapon is not repression, but the threat of ostracism, the power of conformism. And this itself is largely a product of the absence of a political, social alternative, a mass-based, anti-capitalist opposition. So that all the countervailing forces act on the filmmakers. Their powers of resistance are weakened.

No one has been able to capture the past quarter-century because none of the artists understand the times through which they themselves have lived or are oriented to that sort of broad historical and social representation. It’s a problem and I’ll return to it.

I want to say a few words about what has been produced in recent decades.

Studies of post-September 2001 cinema, for example, are obliged to confront such tendencies as “porno-sadism” and “torture porn,” in the form of films consumed by unrestrained indulgence in bloody revenge fantasies. Entire franchises have been built out of inflicting pain and terror.

Of course, all this did not begin on September 11. The decay and decline of American bourgeois society and its culture has been a protracted process. The mid- to late 1970s witnessed a proliferation of “vigilante” films (Death Wish, et al.), which already signified a diseased mood emerging in sections of the affluent middle class. Moreover, the “action hero” who took on an army of terrorists or criminals, who somehow single-handedly—and fantastically—overcame America’s decline on the world stage was a film phenomenon that grew more and more prominent in the 1980s and 1990s.

But the terrorist attacks of September 11 gave a license, a legitimacy to the public expression of genuinely depraved sentiments that had been long accumulating.

Kill Bill: Volume 2 (2004)

In “A Culture at the End of its Rope,” written in June 2004, in response to Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, Vol. 2, we made some points that I think still stand up:

This is a film whose subject matter is torturing and murdering and bloody revenge. It has the word “Kill,” as an imperative [a command], in its title. Remove the pointless dialogue, the self-conscious references to countless other films, the various camera and editing gimmicks, the heaps of self-satisfaction and self-aggrandizement, and what remains? A work about a group of psychopaths eliminating one another. The first speech of the film contains the word “sadism.” …

We will be told by some that Tarantino is merely reflecting the violence in the society around him, or even that he is holding it up to criticism. Nonsense. Kill Bill is not a critique of sadistic bullying, it revels in it. A calculated, manipulative (and orgasmic) heaping up of violent acts cannot possibly constitute a rejection or a critique.

It is not necessary to repeat or extend these comments in regard to every example of violence, sadism and cruelty in American popular culture over the past two decades, in film, television, music, video games and so forth.

K. Sutherland played the hero in the despicable Fox hit series “24” glorifying the Deep State’s pseudo war against a terrorism that it cynically created. Do actors EVER exercise their brains or are they just moronic narcissists?

But one more example: Fox Television’s “24” which first went on the air in November 2001, created by right-wing Bush supporters, pioneered the favorable representation of torture.

Brian Finney, in Terrorized: How the War on Terror Affected American Culture and Society, writes “The Parents Television Council calculated that 24 showed 67 scenes of torture during its first five seasons, about one incident of torture every other episode, or 12 times a day in fictional time.

“Torture became at least an intermittent feature on such shows as The Unit, Lost, JAG, Alias, and Battlestar Galactica, and in numerous hit movies such as The Passion of the Christ, Casino Royale, and The Dark Knight … The Parents Television Council researched the number of scenes of torture shown on prime time television. Between 1995 and 2001 there were 110 scenes, an average of 16 a year. Between 2002 and 2005 the number increased to 624, an average of 156 scenes a year, and between 2006 and 2007 there were 212 scenes, averaging 106 a year.” (Brian Finney).

Kathryn Bigelow basking in the spotlight secured by shilling for the imperialist state. Shameless.

We have written extensively about such despicable works as Zero Dark Thirty, the purported story of the decade-long search for Osama bin Laden. Not only did Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal create a new film sub-genre, the “art torture film,” they did it, as journalist Seymour Hersh has revealed, on the basis of a pack of lies.

Films and novels on the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan

Dozens of films have been made about 9/11 or have been inspired by the subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, ranging from the openly reactionary and bloodthirsty to the more thoughtful and critical.

These are a few of the films treating the “war on terror,” the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan:

Jarhead (2005), Syriana (2005), The Situation (2005), Home of the Brave(2006), Death of a President (2006), United 93 (2006) Battle for Haditha(2007), Grace is Gone (2007), Charlie Wilson’s War (2007), In the Valley of Elah (2007), Lions for Lambs (2007), Redacted (2007), Rendition (2007), Stop-Loss (2008), W. (2008), War, Inc. (2008), Body of Lies (2008), Traitor (2008), The Hurt Locker (2009), Brothers (2009), Green Zone (2010), American Sniper(2014). One could add numerous others that obviously reference 9/11 (War of the Worlds, 2005) or the invasion of Iraq, including James Cameron’s Avatar(2009).

Battle for Haditha (2007)

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]here are numerous pointed works here (Syriana, In the Valley of Elah, Redacted, Rendition, The Situation, Death of a President and Battle for Haditha), as well as some truly lamentable ones or worse (Charlie Wilson’s War, Lions for Lambs, Traitor, The Hurt Locker and American Sniper).

In my view, British director Nick Broomfield’s Battle for Haditha—about a massacre carried out by US marines in November 2005—is the strongest of the lot, for its treatment of both the Iraqi civilians and US troops as victims of imperialist war. The final dreamlike sequence, in which an American marine takes the hand of a small Iraqi girl who survived the attack, is deeply moving.

Redacted, directed by Brian De Palma, recounts in fictional form the rape and murders carried out by US soldiers in March 2006 in Mahmudiyah, Iraq. One author writes, “ Redacted concludes with a series of real-life still photographs of dead Iraqis in a sequence called ‘Collateral Damage,’ images that were denied to the American public in the drive to mythologise the war and the reasons why it was being fought.” (Terence McSweeney, The ‘War on Terror’ and American Film: 9/11 Frames Per Second)

As we noted in 2010, there are numerous “pointed films … but if one may say it, these are primarily ‘small-bore’ works, works that take up elements, specific aspects of the situation. If one compares them, as a body, with Apocalypse Now, or even Platoon, for all its histrionics—the latter were movies that attempted to make a broad statement about American involvement in Vietnam, to paint it as a crime, as an imperialist crime. This element is largely missing today.”

Dozens and dozens of novels have appeared that treat the “war on terror” or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, some of them written by veterans of those conflicts.

Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005) and John Updike’s Terrorist (2006), both shallow and contrived novels, essentially adopt the establishment point of view.

Eleven Days (2013)

Lea Carpenter’s Eleven Days (2013) is a deplorable work. It celebrates the efforts of US Special Operations Forces, America’s death squads. Carpenter is a descendant of the original du Pont in America. Her father served in US Army Intelligence in China and Burma. She was previously the deputy publisher of the Paris Review, the literary magazine. She is married to the former managing director of Goldman Sachs, specializing in mergers and acquisitions.

In her novel, the hero, a member of the Special Operations Forces, thinks to himself, after an intervention against Al Qaeda: “Did these contemporary war stories lack the grandeur and arc of their predecessors? Sadr City was not the Somme. That was like comparing Mad Max to Madame Bovary. But they were alike in this simple fact: men were killing other men across a small space to save the lives of millions of others half a world away. Historians would eventually take their pick of the facts and look at the larger questions, but the first wave of understanding would come from the guys who were there.”

Saving the world for Goldman Sachs. This is what passes for the American intelligentsia.

Eleven Days’s author Lea Carpenter: Automatically glorifying her class’ crimes around the world.

Redeployment, a collection of stories about the Iraq war, by Phil Klay, is one of the best known books written by an Iraqi war veteran. Klay enlisted in the Marines and served as a Public Affairs Officer in the surge in Iraq in 2008.

In “After Action Report,” one of the newer members of the narrator’s unit shoots an Iraqi teenager who apparently has grabbed an AK-47. This soldier, “like the rest of us, had actually been trained to fire a rifle, and he’d been trained on man-shaped targets. Only difference between those and the kid’s silhouette would have been the kid was smaller. Instinct took over. He shot the kid three times before he hit the ground. Can’t miss at that range. The kid’s mother ran out to try to pull her son back into the house. She came just in time to see bits of him blow out of his shoulders.”

Kevin Powers, the author of The Yellow Birds, also served in Iraq, as a machine gunner in Mosul and Tal Afar. His novel centers on the efforts of its narrator—a US soldier in Iraq—to prevent the death of a younger, fellow private, an effort that fails. The book expresses considerable disgust and anger. At one point, the narrator is considering suicide:

Or should I have said that I wanted to die, not in the sense of wanting to throw myself off of that train bridge over there, but more like wanting to be asleep forever because there isn’t any making up for killing women or even watching women get killed, or for that matter killing men and shooting them in the back and shooting them more times than necessary to actually kill them and it was like just trying to kill everything you saw sometimes because it felt like there was acid seeping down into your soul and then your soul is gone and knowing from being taught your whole life that there is no making up for what you are doing …

Ang Lee’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk

Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, is essentially a satirical work. The novel, a film version of which is coming out directed by Ang Lee, is not so much a novel about Iraq (Fountain is not a veteran) as it is a sharp look at phony patriotism, hypocritical religiosity and corporate greed in Bush’s Texas. The sentiments are legitimate enough, but the targets are fairly easy ones at this point in history. In the end, despite its decent intentions, the book is a little too light-hearted and “soft.”

One comes across in Fountain’s novel to the only reference in any of the novels to a possible ulterior motive on the part of the US authorities. The central character, Billy Lynn, is home and talking to his sister. She says: “Then let me ask you this, do you guys believe in the war? Like is it good, legit, are we doing the right thing? Or is it all really just about the oil?” Billy replies, “You know I don’t know that,” and, later, “I don’t think anybody knows what we’re doing over there.” That’s it, the only discussion of what the US is doing in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Disparate as they are, these latter novels or stories share certain features. None of them discuss the history of the region or the broader motives for American military intervention. Each prides itself on immediacy and immersing the reader in that immediacy. The various writers may step back occasionally to reflect on individual moral issues, or the debilitating impact of the war on their respective central characters, but never to consider the driving forces of the war itself. Not once. No one makes a genuinely profound critique of the society that produces these horrible wars, or ties them to capitalism.

Is it possible to do artistic justice to events as complex and momentous as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan when one has little or no grasp of their broader significance? Such an approach has an influence on the way in which a given writer treats human psychology and the relationships between people.

The conceptions on the whole are limited. The language tends to be flat, “even-handed,” largely non-committal, matching the writers’ attitude to the war itself.

These novels and stories are efforts at realism, but they evade one of the greatest challenges a fiction writer faces, that of providing historical realism, a general picture of a society and its contradictory parts and an overall sense of the character of the times. In the almost complete absence of that, the movement of individuals inevitably has a flattened, reduced quality. People move about, but only for the most immediate reasons. What is driving them in a more profound sense?

No one is taking on the problems head-on, no one has artistically captured the last quarter century.

Where do some of the difficulties come from?

Where do some of the current artistic difficulties come from?

The unpreparedness of the artists is a matter of concern for our movement. The artistic representation of life is vital to the education of the working class, and this education is our central task.

The anti-communist purges, the decades of political reaction, the increasing indifference of large sections of the upper-middle class to the conditions of the mass of the population—all these have had their impact.

There are many issues, including occupational hazards, so to speak. Art lags behind events at the best of times. But there is a big problem today with the conception of art itself.

I want to refer in particular to the predominance of postmodernism in recent decades, in various forms. A portion of my generation became cynical, complacent or pessimistic, or all three, and eventually regretted missing out on the big money on Wall Street and elsewhere. While these individuals were protesting in the 1960s and 1970s, others were already getting rich. They later turned against everything they had once believed in and adopted everything they opposed.

The postmodernists declared the end of “grand narratives” or “master narratives.” What this really meant was the end to a search for fundamental causes; instead they refer to countless factors, none of them given precedence. There is no underlying truth to be discovered, simply one’s impressions, one’s narrative. This has played a disastrous role, associated as it is with the abandonment of any sense of revolutionary alternative and with accommodation, concealed behind obscurantist language, to the status quo.

By grand or master narratives the postmodernists had in mind, above all, Marxism and its “narrative” of the class struggle. Coherent theories of historical development, which often involve social emancipation, were outlawed. These grand narratives were to replaced, as one commentator puts it, by “mini-narratives” or “stories that explain small practices, local events, rather than large scale universal or global concepts. Mini-narratives are always situational, provisional, contingent, temporary and make no claim to universality, truth, reason or stability.”

Jean-Francois Lyotard [Brach L. Ettinger]

The influences here are Nietzsche, Heidegger and other irrationalist thinkers. This represents not only an attack on Marxism, but on the Enlightenment and the ability to cognize the world in a rational, objective fashion. One is left with fragments and the celebration of fragments.

The art and film of the past several decades has been littered with a multiplicity of “little narratives.” In the case of the artistic treatment of the ongoing wars and the drive to war, this “littleness” jibes all too neatly with the filmmakers’ and novelists’ political and historical reticence, their essential intellectual submission to the official account of the “war on terror” and America’s “humanitarian interventions.”

More than that, the “littleness” justifies and sustains a concern with oneself. The recourse to “mini-narratives” and “small practices” is almost inevitably bound up with the adoption of identity politics, the obsession with one’s race, gender and sexual orientation. The world is incomprehensible, overwhelming, unchangeable, all I know and can know is my immediate, “local” piece of it, my particular narrative. In short, myself. This sort of outlook inevitably encourages selfishness and self-involvement, tedious individualism, which are other characteristics of recent art and film.

Conclusion

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he great novelist Leo Tolstoy—Leon Trotsky pointed out in an obituary—had contributed to the 1905 Revolution in Russia although he was no revolutionary. “Everything that Tolstoy stated publicly” about the cruelty, irrationality and dishonesty of tsarist Russia “in thousands of ways … seeped into the minds of the laboring masses … And the word became deed.”

Leo Tolstoy in 1897

This is our conception too, that art has the ability to alter the thinking and feeling of masses of human beings. To have that sort of influence, however, the artist must know something important about the world, about society and history. To do something one must be something, as Goethe observed.

Art brings into play the subjective impressions and imagination of the artist. But these impressions and this imagination carry weight and endure, in the end, only in so far as they correspond—in accordance with art’s distinctive mirrors—to life and reality as they are.

We are not dictating this state of affairs—but it is a fact that only the art with something to say about the decisive questions facing masses of people, however indirectly or poetically, will be of great interest in the years to come. Self-absorption and social indifference will be looked on with as much astonishment as contempt.

Clearly, we have entered a new stage of development. The economic and social crisis, along with relentless wars and militarist violence, are fueling the discontent of masses of people and blowing up—or threatening to blow up—political arrangements and set-ups around the globe, including in the US.

We know Bernie Sanders and his type. There is nothing of socialism here. He is proposing mild reforms that portions of the ruling elite itself favor. He supports the ongoing wars with certain criticisms, he approves of the drone strikes. He is an advocate of economic nationalism, lining up the working class here with the American ruling elite against China and other rivals of US imperialism. The essence of socialism is internationalism, the international unity of the working class.

But the Sanders campaign and the response it has evoked are objectively significant. It has scandalized the media and the political establishment, it has disrupted the dominant narrative. In a country supposedly dominated by anti-socialism, anti-communism, someone who advertises himself as a socialist is suddenly the most popular politician in America, and among the young, by a wide margin.

The two-party system in the US has been fatally undermined because it is no longer possible to contain the vast, unbearable social contradictions within that structure. Millions have already drawn conclusions about the present system. The task of our party is to transform an unconscious historical process into a conscious revolutionary movement. The Socialist Equality Party is running candidates, Jerry White and Niles Niemuth, for president and vice president, for that reason.

When we discuss the difficulties of the recent decades, it’s not a matter of painting a gloomy picture. To a certain extent, an inevitable clearing of the decks has taken place. Tendencies that pretended to be socialist or left-wing have been revealed for what they are. Organizations that claim to represent the working class have been exposed in the eyes of millions. The same goes for many cultural figures and trends.

These decades of cultural backwardness have also created the conditions for their opposite, for an “epidemic” within the broader population and culture of humanity, compassion and social criticism. We are witnessing an immense movement to the left. We have no illusions about the confusion that exists, but it should also be clear that the course millions have set out on leads inevitably to revolutionary struggles. The elementary needs and interests of masses of human beings will bring them into a life-and-death confrontation with the ruling class.

The social and economic crisis will not be resolved quickly or easily. There will be opportunity for art to reflect on and reveal the truth about the immensely complex, sometimes confusing and enormously intense experiences that vast numbers of people will pass through.

Our concern, again, is with the political and cultural development of the working class. We need a new art committed to telling the truth at all costs. This new art will be incompatible “with pessimism, with skepticism, and with all the other forms of spiritual collapse” (Trotsky) and will have an unlimited, creative belief in humanity and its future. That’s what we’re dedicated to in the Socialist Equality Party and on the World Socialist Web Site. We encourage you to join that effort.

Concluded

About the author

Dave Walsh serves as critic for wsws.org. For our money, he's just about the finest film critic in North America. His use of Marxian analysis makes his analyses especially timely and insightful.

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Nauseated by the
vile corporate media?
Had enough of their lies, escapism,
omissions and relentless manipulation?

By David Walsh
Senior Film Critic (wsws.org)

Directed by Malik Bader; written by Nickola Shreli

Cash Only is an independent American film set in the Detroit area. The city’s environs are home to thousands of Albanians. The film takes place in that community.

Elvis Martini (played by the screenwriter and film’s initiator, Nickola Shreli) is the landlord of a small apartment building. Most of his tenants––including a friend of his (with whose wife or fiancée he is having an affair), a stripper-prostitute and a marijuana grower (whose operations take up most of the basement)––are behind in their rent. The bank is about to foreclose on the property. He also owes $10,000 to a neighborhood hood.

Elvis is generally in a bad state, having lost his wife two years before. He has a beloved daughter, Lena, but can’t afford to send her to parochial school any more.

When a large sum of money more or less falls into his lap, he begins to pay off his various debts. Unhappily, the cash turns out to have been stolen and its “rightful owner” strongly desires it back. The latter abducts Elvis’s young daughter and gives him until midnight the same day to come up with $25,000.

Elvis attempts by various means, fair and foul, to raise the money. When he shows up at the appointed hour with the cash, or a portion of it, things only get worse. He falls into the hands of a psychopath intent on revenge.

There are initially appealing elements to Cash Only. It takes place in a recognizable setting: beat-up, declining America. The chilly, dirty streets, the ugly housing, the “convenience stores” that sell mostly junk, the factories and warehouses that are mostly closed, the uninviting bars and social clubs, the harshness of the relations between people––these are features of everyday life for millions, not just Albanian Americans.

The dialogue too, partly in English, partly in Albanian, rings true for much of the film. Shreli and the other performers are effective.

In a statement, Shreli explains that “I wanted to write a small gutsy street tale about a place and fabric I knew very well.” He describes Elvis as “a conflicted stray,” who “unfortunately barked up the wrong tree trying to right some wrongs.”

Shreli goes on, “That’s what we were trying to capture, regardless of time or budget constraints. We wanted to give the audience a chance to ride shotgun and hang with this guy in the uneasy trenches of underground Balkan Detroit with a really visceral vibe.”

Budget constraints are not an issue, as far as the viewer is concerned. The film is professionally and efficiently––even elegantly––shot, directed and acted. The difficulties lie elsewhere.

It is something to show portions of the recognizably real world in a drama, and perhaps more today than ever, but it is not everything. Given the demands and responsibilities of art, in the end, it is not even all that much. Cash Only operates according to something of a formula. It relies on our curiosity about these streets and these people, not seen on the screen very often, and brings us into their orbit, but then does very little with them. Shreli and director Malik Bader have followed the “edgy,” “independent” cinema recipe for creating an enticing surface, but no more than that.

The final, bloody denouement reveals the filmmakers’ severe limitations. This is simply lazy––and evasive. An encounter with a sadistic lunatic “solves” the dramatic and real-life problems posed by the film’s own logic at the expense, however, of social and psychological truth. Nothing has been solved in any real sense, merely postponed, pushed outside the framework of the film. We still have to consider for ourselves––without the aid of Cash Only, as it turns out––what a human being would actually do if he found himself in the central character’s economic and social bind.

We have not advanced terribly far from films like Nick Gomez’s Laws of Gravity (1992), set in the “gritty” streets of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, or for that matter, Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973), set in the “gritty” streets of Manhattan’s Little Italy, each with its inevitably violent and predictable conclusion.

This reviewer would easily choose Rola Nashef’s semi-comic Detroit Unleaded, about Lebanese Americans in Detroit, which shows greater concern and affection for people, over Cash Only, which postures at being tough-minded and unsentimental, only to end up at the door, both metaphorically and physically, of the Albanian Catholic Church.

[dropcap]L[/dropcap]ife is richer than most art at the moment, which is not entirely the way it should be. In March 2014, for example, the news media reported the case of one Tomo Duhanaj, 44, of Troy, Michigan, an ethnic Albanian from Kosovo in the former Yugoslavia, who pleaded guilty to loan sharking activities within the Albanian community in Detroit.

Tomo Duhanaj—a thug obviously protected by the grateful American state.

According to CBS News, “Duhanaj loaned hundreds of thousands of dollars at high interest rates, sometimes exceeding 100 percent per year, to community members with the understanding that failure to repay the loans would result in violence.” CBS reported “that Federal prosecutors describe Duhanaj, an undocumented immigrant … as a ‘tough guy’ in the Albanian community.” US Attorney Barbara L. McQuade explained, “This defendant used his contacts in his community to prey upon people who were desperate for cash.”

This is clearly the general territory in which Cash Only is operating. But there is another angle to the Duhanaj story, a more intriguing and sinister one.

In 2007 Duhanaj had appealed a decision denying him an application for asylum in the US, and apparently lost that appeal. How he managed to stay in the country and pursue his loan sharking and related money laundering for another half a decade is unclear.

In any case, in his 2007 appeal, Duhanaj claimed that in his younger days he had “devoted his time [to] working for a free Kosovo.” While he lived in Michigan in the 1990s, he explained that he “became involved with pro-Kosovo political organizations and joined the local branch of the Lidhja Demokratike e Kosoves (‘LDK’), the Democratic Party of Kosovo, with which he had been affiliated in Kosovo. Duhanaj testified that he participated in fundraising and demonstrations for the cause of a free Kosovo. After the war broke out in Kosovo in 1998, he attended a meeting in Michigan sponsored by the LDK and the Kosovo Liberation Army (‘KLA’).”

The connection between reactionary communalist, Washington-sponsored “Kosovo liberation” and gangsterism is once again confirmed. As the WSWS noted in 2009, after the BBC presented evidence of torture and murders carried out by the KLA in a secret network of prisons in Kosovo and Albania, “The fact is the KLA played a key role in the United States’ strategy of breaking up the Yugoslav republic into its constituent parts, thus ensuring US hegemony within the Balkan region and threatening the broader geo-strategic interests of Russia.”

In his 2007 court appeal, Duhanaj the loan shark “submitted photos of himself with prominent Kosovar Albanian, American, and UN officials and politicians, including President [Bill] Clinton”! Unfortunately, this fascinating little Detroit-area story, with all its social and geopolitical implications, would not be of much interest to our contemporary filmmakers.

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=By= Denis Oliver Velez

Lawrence singing “I Feel Pretty.” Photo by Fred Fehl, New York. (Public Domain)

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]When I was a teenager I didn’t feel pretty when I saw Natalie Wood prancing around as a Puerto Rican character in the 1961 film version of West Side Story. Marnie Nixon’s vocals and strange accent had no relationship to the familiar (to my ear) sound of Nuyorrican Spanish.

Members of the Asian American Performers Action Coalition (AAPAC) a group started in New York in 2011 “to expand the perception of Asian American performers in order to increase their access to and representation on New York City’s stages” were panelists.

This graphic is from their “Ethnic Representation on New York City Stages” Report.

This report tallies the ethnic make up of cast members from every Broadway show which opened in the last five seasons as well as from productions at the sixteen largest not-for-profit theatre companies in New York City.  It is the first report on minority casting in New York City theatre ever to be released publicly.

Ethnic representation in NY theater

Over 50 years after West Side Story, wherever we look, it’s still happening. I have to laugh bitterly whenever I hear the phrase “post racial or colorblind America.”

It ain’t happening.

It’s not just Hollywood, or television, or the stage. It’s in books, on book covers, in video games, animation, advertising, and in the news.

The irony is that when producers make the attempt to correctly transfer characters clearly described as people of color from a book to the screen, there is also a racist pushback against those efforts. We saw it happen recently around Hunger Games, which was diaried and discussed here at Daily Kos:

The Hunger Games “Racism, Reading Comprehension, and Projection”

Racists Angry That Hunger Games Characters Are Black

Whitewashing isn’t just an issue here in the U.S.

As a kid, I loved the swashbuckling novels written by Alexandre Dumas. My dad, who had played a musketeer on Broadway, made sure I learned about Dumas’ African ancestry.

Portrait of Alexander Dumas. 1855

Gerard Depardieu at Cannes film festival, 2010

The BBC covered the protest around the casting of Gerard Depardieu as Dumas.
Dumas film with white actor Depardieu sparks race row:

The celebrated but fair-skinned screen star, Gerard Depardieu, had to darken his skin and wear a curly wig to play the part in L’Autre Dumas.
Critics argue the French movie industry has deliberately undermined the 19th Century novelist’s ethnicity…Dumas was the grandson of a Haitian slave and often referred to himself as a negro.Historian Claude Schopp says although his books were revered by his contemporaries, he was often mocked for his colour. “In caricatures or in sketches he was always presented with big lips, with Afro hair, as a sort of monster.”

Reactions from blacks in France were vocal:

But France’s Representative Council of Black Associations has objected to Depardieu in the role, saying black actors are not given an opportunity to play white roles in French cinema. “It’s very shocking and it is insulting,” Patrick Lozes, president of the council, told the London Daily Mail. “It is a way of saying that we don’t have any black actors who have the talent to play Alexandre Dumas, which of course is not true. In 150 years’ time could the role of [U.S. President] Barack Obama be played in a film by a white actor with a fuzzy wig?” he added. “Can Martin Luther King be played by a white?”Dumas, beloved author and playwright who died in 1870, is one of few national cultural figures of color in France, although many today don’t know about his black ancestry. “There is a mechanism of permanent discrimination by silence,” said Jacques Martial, a black actor who made his name playing a television police detective.

At the same time, “down-under” in Australia, an iconic historical military hero got similar treatment.Director slammed for ‘white-out’ of legendary Gallipoli sniper Billy Sing

A FURORE has erupted over a new mini-series about the deadliest sniper at Gallipoli, Chinese-Australian Billy Sing, who is played by a white.This portrayal in the The Legend of Billy Sing has been attacked by Australians of Chinese ancestry as a betrayal of their heritage, robbing them of a rare historic hero.

Director Geoff Davis has cast his son Josh in the lead role, while Sing’s Chinese father is played by the veteran actor Tony Bonner, who came to prominence as a blond-haired helicopter pilot in the Skippy TV series.

But here’s the good news. Google “whitewashing.” Young people are pushing back. We don’t have a lot of discussions here on Daily Kos about fan art, or video, or young adult books. Cyberspace has many communities, and the discussions of whitewashing, white as the “normative” and the power of images, is taking place.I have been reading some of these sites and blogs with great interest.

EmpressFunk at deviant.art has a wonderful poster that breaks down whitewashing and racebending. Go take a look.

This impassioned post illustrates to me that some young white folks “get it.”

Whitewashing, Racebending, and Why “We’re All Human” is Bullshit

There are a few things you should know about me before I start ranting. I am a white heterosexual Christian cis male middle-class American. I am a member of the majority in pretty much every area of life. I am privileged in ways that it took me a long time to fully understand.And racism still pisses me off so much I can’t even see straight.

I admit to being fairly ignorant of the concept of privilege for most of my life. And I know that what I’m about to say won’t mean as much as if it had come from the fingertips of somebody who truly understands oppression. But I still have opinions on this, and if you don’t want to read them, get out now. This is mostly related to drama on Katrina’s blog, but a lot of this has been stewing for a while so I’m letting it all out.

Also, if my white privilege causes me to say anything ignorant, feel free to correct me (politely, if you can). I am a member of the Korra fandom. “Racebending” has been an issue in the Avatar fandom since M. Night Shyamalan directed the abysmal The Last Airbender, casting white people in the main roles, erasing pretty much all the references to Chinese culture, and generally making things really awkward for everybody.

Here we have a reaction to a new young adult book series:Today In Racism: YA Series ‘Save The Pearls’ Employs Offensive Blackface & Racist Stereotypes

First off, while she may want to pat herself on the back for creating a story that turns on its head stereotypical tropes about the social value of whiteness and blackness, the very names she chooses to use say that Foyt may still hold those tired tropes dear. “Pearl” as a term for whiteness ascribes high value, rareness, beauty and worth. And Coal as a term for dark-skinned? Low value and dirty. And as blogger Nnamdi Bawse points out, it’s a tried and true racial slur. But even without the shameful history of the slur, choosing such wildly divergent names, holding wildly divergent values, implies a positive value judgement on whiteness and a negative value judgment on blackness.Then let’s take the “Beauty and the Beast” analogy. To refer to a dark-skinned man as “beastly” carries with it negative notions of blackness that are rooted in a historical portrayal of black men as sexually savage beasts. As Dr. David Pilgrim, professor of Sociology at Ferris State University writes, “During the Radical Reconstruction period (1867-1877), many white writers argued that without slavery — which supposedly suppressed their animalistic tendencies — blacks were reverting to criminal savagery.” So essentially, the construction of black men as “beastly” was used to justify slavery. So, awesome. Yeah, NO.

Finally, witness this video Foyt made to publicize her book, featuring a white woman in blackface.

Memo to the world: Blackface is not okay. Like, EVER. Blackface is rooted in bygone minstrel shows, where white actors would play outrageously offensive stereotypes of blackness. As the website Black-Face.com explains, blackface is more than simply the application of dark makeup to a white face. Blackface “originated in the White man’s characterizations of plantation slaves and free blacks during the era of minstrel shows (1830-1890), the caricatures took such a firm hold on the American imagination that audiences expected any person with dark skin, no matter what their background, to conform to one or more of the stereotypes: the coon, the mammy, the Uncle Tom, the buck, the wench, the mulatto and the pickaninny.” These racial stereoytypes are all highly negative and delimiting.

Since I am well past the age for YA fiction, though I do read dystopian sci-fi, I would not have run across this particular critique had I not been paying attention to the online discourse around racebending.This piece gives a bit of the history of the development of the racebending activist community:

Racebending: Fan Activists Fight Racist Casting

In December 2008, producers of the film adaptation of the Nickelodeon cartoon Avatar: The Last Airbender set off a firestorm of criticism when they announced their casting decisions.  Despite the fact that the television show had a distinctly Asian aesthetic and borrowed many elements from East Asian and Inuit cultures, four white actors had been cast in the lead roles.  Many fans became irate, demanding that the roles be given to Asian American actors because they had always imagined that the characters were racially Asian.  When one of the lead actors dropped out of the project he was replaced with Dev Patel, who is South Indian (as is the film’s director, M. Night Shyamalan).  But fans insisted that the nation his character belonged to were the villains of the series, so now the problem was that three white stars were heroes and the South Asian actor and his people were villains.  The backlash continued in heated online debates and has culminated in a number of protest activities, ranging from letter-writing campaigns and the spread of counter-media to a planned boycott of the upcoming film.  The fan activists who mobilized over the casting decisions for The Last Airbender (TLA) continue to work on issues related to the film, but have also shifted their focus toward discrimination in casting more generally.  In many ways they successfully model a mode of activism that is necessarily multilingual, moving between the languages of fandom, activism, and racial politics as it becomes strategically advantageous.  This case study examines their transition between these roles and some of the difficulties that they face in doing so.

These days there are far more books that deal with the pernicious role of media in stereotyping and whitewashing people of color.I’d like to suggest a few for your consideration:

AMERICAN INDIANS: Stereotypes & Realities, by Devon A. Mihesuah

Indians in Unexpected Places, by Philip J. Deloria.

Latino Spin: Public Image and the Whitewashing of Race, by Arlene Dávila.

Latino Images in Film: Stereotypes, Subversion, and Resistance, by Charles Ramírez Berg.

Screening Asian Americans, edited by Peter X. Feng.

We live in a global society where the vast majority of the worlds peoples are not socially constructed as “white.” Changing demographics here in the U.S. are trending toward a majority population of those who are now labelled “minority” or “people of color” in less than 40 years from now.

One would think that various industries that will depend on the dollars of entertainment consumers should have already adjusted to this shifting market. They haven’t. So what would be “smart capitalism” is bogged down by racism.

Take the Oscars:

A Los Angeles Times study found that academy voters are markedly less diverse than the moviegoing public, and even more monolithic than many in the film industry may suspect. Oscar voters are nearly 94% Caucasian and 77% male, The Times found. Blacks are about 2% of the academy, and Latinos are less than 2%.

This pathetic statistic is reflected in the the Emmy awards as well.The NY Times hosted a debate about television, Whitewashing on the Small Screen. Here’s a breakdown for the Director’s Guild.

The only thing that is going to change this is if we vote with our dollars, and raise a louder fuss.

Green will trump whitewashing.

One day.

Denise Oliver Velez – Feminist, Activist, former Young Lords Party and Black Panther Party member, applied cultural anthropologist

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Commentary by Patrice Greanville
“Far more valuable as documentation of very particular time and place in American society than it is as drama”—Don Willmott, Filmcritic.com

In entirely agree with Willmott. Few movies shed more light on a recently bygone America—the America that prefigures our reality today, the postwar period that saw the rise of the American middle class, the “beatific Eisenhower years” of Leave it to Beaver television—than this film with Gregory Peck in the lead as a man with a mild case of PTSD trying to balance the demands of a social climbing wife, aspiring to fill the dream of suburban life, with his revulsion for the corporate way of life, which promises his career advancement.  The movie, based on the novel by Sloan Wilson of the same title (1956) is basically an allegory for the Faustian bargain that so many Americans make, often unwittingly, when joining the ranks of corporate management.

THIS IS A REPOST

Although the Eisenhower era did see an improvement in the economic condition of the masses, the beginning of what was later billed as the age of affluence, this phenomenon did not issue naturally from capitalism’s normal dynamic, which tends to deepening inequality and democratic corruption, but constituted an historical exception, an anomaly. This simple fact cannot be repeated enough. 

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]s many readers know, America emerged from World War 2 in an enviable position. As a powerfully industrialized new imperial nation with factories and cities intact, a huge infrastructure expanded to meet war aims, and a pent-up demand for its goods that circled the globe, American capitalism—then at the peak of its industrial/manufacturing  phase—literally took over without much of a fight from fellow capitalists, whose economies and industrial plant lay in ruins. The enormous demand caused America’s manufacturing base to flood the world with goods labeled “Made in USA”, just like today we find that just about everything bears the mark, “Made in China.”

The near full employment conditions created an excellent ground for labor to negotiate better terms with capital, which it did, albeit within the very narrow confines of “business unionism,” an early form of corporatist collaboration in which the labor bosses—notably the likes of George Meany, head of the AFL-CIO, and an avowed anti-communist and Cold War operative—got contracts that made American workers the envy of the world.  (This new affluence, conjoined with the recently completed war and its immersion in runaway jingoist propaganda made blue collar workers avid participants in the emerging imperial project, a mental vice that has accursed the American population—and the world— to this day.) If for nothing else, this film is important because it focuses on that new phenomenon in American (and soon world) society, “the Organization Man”, the backbone of the corporate executive class.

Below, some film reviews of this production, reflecting various viewpoints. I hope you invest the time to watch it, and reflect. Note we do not call our films “classic” because they are classic from a purely cinematographic point of view, but on account of their value as cultural artifacts. In the case of MIGFS, it’s insights into middle class Americans as they saw themselves.

THE CRITICS—

A RAVE, BY the NY Times

_____________________

 TV Guide hated it

REVIEW

[dropcap]M[/dropcap]iddle-class middle-America…the inside story? Hardly, but nonetheless a surprisingly engrossing, if shallow and overlong, Hollywood vision of 1950s thirtysomethings, with Peck turning in a dignified title role.Tom Rath has a $10K mortgage, three brats, and psycho-Betsy (Jones). Fun. He also has bad memories of WWII, where he knifed a German during a freezing winter for his coat, had a fling with wistful peasant Maria (Pavan), and threw a grenade which accidentally killed his best friend. Oops. Acquiring a new, lucrative position writing speeches for avuncular company president Ralph (March), Tom must choose between working overtime on the job or on his relationship with psycho-Betsy. Hmm. And what about his grandmother’s estate? And that kid he fathered during the war? My! Don’t worry–Lee J. Cobb is on hand to tell us at the finale that “God’s in His heaven and all’s right with the world.” Whew.

Totally hollow trash, with a hysteria-prone Jennifer Jones displaying an odd crease down the middle of her face. So slickly dished up, though, you can feel yourself sliding around on the sofa. Nice to see Ann Harding.

 by RON JACOBS

Poe set the ball rolling but he could never foresee the degree of decadence and criminality the system itself would reach in the next century.

The novel is generally acknowledged to be a bourgeois form of literature. It wasn’t until there were enough literate people with time for leisurely reading that this entertainment came along.  The crime novel reflects the bourgeois obsession with order and usually represents the concerns of that class.  There is a crime against an individual that shakes up bourgeois society.  A detective from the police force or a private investigator hunts down the perpetrator through a series of clues, makes the arrest and all is well again.  Agatha Christie’s novels are perfect examples of this.  Then there are the tough guy novels featuring men like Mike Hammer.  In this type of story, the protagonist easily forsakes the niceties of bourgeois society in his crime solving.  Naturally, this alienates the police and the bourgeoisie, but he still gets the job done, captures (or kills) the criminal, and allows the middle class to get on with their lives.  This representation is occasionally turned around and the protectors of order — the police and courts — are the criminals and by association so is the system they work for. This is noir.  Noir does not pretend that the society their protagonists operate in is worth saving.  It’s just the only one we have.  This is where the novels of a few current writers exist, and where mine are intentionally placed.

Writing about Italian noir for World Literature Today critic Madison J. Davis noted :

The traditional mystery, deriving from Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and evolving through Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie to contemporary practitioners like Carolyn G. Hart and Simon Brett, requires a certain faith in the legal system—or at least in a measure of justice parceled out to those who commit crimes. We live, however, in a skeptical world, in which even those who enjoy the puzzles and deductions of the traditional whodunit cannot see them as realistic. The events of the twentieth century have cracked, often splintered, our faith in the legal system and the triumph of justice, even in the good ole U. S. of A.

I would argue that the twenty-first century has brought us beyond even the skepticism Davis acknowledges.  Indeed, skepticism seems almost quaint, when we read about hundreds of men being released from prison because they were jailed for crimes they did not commit.  Their incarceration was not due to a mistake, but a conscious decision by authorities to match a crime to the victim they chose.  Every time news like this comes out, the credibility of the police as protectors of society diminishes.  When working people see their friends and children going to prison for drug offenses while the wealthy usually avoid doing time, their perception of the legal system being rigged in favor of the wealthy and powerful is reinforced.  Since the police are the most obvious representatives of that system (and the individuals most citizens encounter) they are no longer perceived as much more than enforcers of the rights of the wealthy and powerful.  This perception, long held by those considered The Other in society, is now part of the common parlance.  Indeed, television crime shows assume this in their portrayals of police departments and individual cops.  Certain series, most notably David Simon’s depressingly exquisite take on the corruption rampant in an entire city’s political and legal system called The Wire, create a world where the incorruptible individual has no place.

This does not mean that the police don’t enjoy at least tacit support by a majority of the population; it does mean that the number of people who believe the police are not above criminality is much diminished from just a few decades ago.  The abuse of power by police during the protests of the 1960s and onwards; the revelations of individual cops like New York’s Serpico regarding corruption and illegal arrests (among other things); the militarization of most police forces in cities and towns large and small; and the continued abrogation of civil liberties in the name of the war on drugs and the war on terrorism.  All of these make the line between the police and the criminals they supposedly oppose very thin.  Despite the multitude of cop shows on television attempting to present police as protectors of order and the innocent and even the presence of movies like Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry series (which serve as propaganda for authoritarianism), many residents of modern society are convinced the police are not there for their sake.

Crime/police courtroom docudramas are by now an old staple of television. The Law & Order franchise has proved one of the most resilient. Starting in 1990, and with almost 1100 episodes and 6 different iterations, the show has become iconic.

Nor is the legal system.  Occasionally a clever lawyer is able to keep an innocent person out of prison — in real life and in fiction.  Indeed, certain authors have made a good living writing legal thrillers that feature these kinds of stories.  More often than not, however, the police and the courts conspire to convict the person in the docket no matter what.  It’s not that the conspiracy is intentional; it’s just how the system works.  Police arrest a person for a crime and the courts do the rest.  Without a good attorney — something very few can afford — the suspect’s options are very limited.  If one adds a cop with a grudge, a judge with an agenda, or a politician with a law and order platform to the equation, that person in the docket does not stand a chance.|

 Most noir features a private investigator.  Like the accused, he or she is an individual who lives on the edges of the law…

A few decades ago I was charged with “possession with the intent to sell” because I was sitting in an automobile when an acquaintance sold a small amount of marijuana to an undercover cop.  This all went down not long after the state I was living in had passed a law that rendered the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition on unreasonable search and seizure null and void.  Anyone who was in the vicinity of anything having to do with illegal drugs was as culpable as the person actually involved with the drugs.  So, since I was in the car when the drug deal occurred, I was also involved in the sale.  When I showed up at court on the charge, I asked my public defender if I should challenge the charge and plead not guilty.  His response was simple.  If I challenged the charge I would not win.  He advised me to take a plea deal and do community service.  I took his advice.  The law was not interested in justice, just in throwing people in jail.

---

 

Hard-living, hard-drinking, heavy smoking tough-guys never afraid to use their fists or guns made the private eye antihero a natural for the “Noir” genre. They lived by their own rules, which, shaking bourgeois genteel conventions, titillated the public.  Dashiell Hammet’s Sam Spade, was immortalized by Humphrey Bogart.

[dropcap]M[/dropcap]uch anti-capitalist and antiwar activity is already labeled criminal in an imperial society.  This in itself means that characters participating in activities that fall into this category are already suspect.  Meanwhile, the forces of law and order trying to stifle such characters have a leeway not provided the citizen, no matter what he or she is involved in.  The often violent reaction of the authorities to the Occupy Wall Street protests in Fall 2011 provides a recent example of this fact.  A greater contradiction occurs when the forces of authority engage in criminal behavior in the pursuit of the forces aligned against the rulers the police are hired to protect.  A further complication comes into play when criminal actions by the police are ignored or sanctioned while criminal acts by the targets of the authorities are not.  In a line quite familiar to most rock and roll fans (especially those who listen to the Rolling Stones) that calls every cop a criminal, this contradiction is even clearer.

Mike Hammer (Stacey Keach)  shares the spotlight with Spade and Mickey Spillane, all cynical antiheroes serving their own law in a world overrun by corruption.

Back to that incorruptible individual.  Most noir features a private investigator.  Like the accused, he or she is an individual who lives on the edges of the law. In a world where the law itself can be unjust, only those not in debt to the system designed to bring justice can find that justice.  Most often the investigator is one who works for hire with a set of morals that are immutable. In certain cases, like two of the novels in my 1970s trilogy, the investigators are regular folks determined to help a friend.  Still, they are not without faults.  Alcohol is often a vice these characters deal with.  Most recently, in Thomas Pynchon’s foray into the genre with a book titled Inherent Vice, his private eye smokes a lot of marijuana.  Early on, many of the so-called tough guys like Mike Hammer were sexist and racist.  As the genre has evolved, so have the investigators.  Like the society they operate in, today’s investigators include Blacks, Latinos, Asians, and women.

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]oday’s noir fiction is the story of a system and society in decline.  Marxist Ernest Mandel published a book on crime fiction in 1986 titled Delightful Murder.  In this book, Mandel looks at the genesis and development of crime fiction.  We see the development of the criminal from a lone individual whose exploits shock and dismay, but whom heroic police agents can capture.  As capitalism moves into its monopoly phase, the lone criminal remains a problem, yet the real problem developing is an entire class of criminals.  These are what Marx labeled the lumpenproletariat: that part of society whose sole task is surviving no matter what it takes.  Usually extremely poor, only occasionally employed in conventional jobs, and existing literally outside of society, the lumpen are the truly dangerous ones in the bourgeoisie’s midst.  They provide respectable society with their entertainments such as illegal drugs and sex, but must be controlled at all cost.  The investigator’s position in society is closer to that of the lumpen than to any other stratum.  He or she understands the justice of the streets is often not the justice of the courtroom.  Of course, this position outside of society means there is nothing to lose in fighting the wealthy and powerful.

Mandel published his book before capitalism’s latest phase was truly underway.  That is, neoliberalism.  This stage of monopoly capitalism is the nightmare that Rosa Luxembourg warned us about.  Financiers who produce no product run the world.  Instead of creating work, their actions profit from the destruction of jobs and the impoverishment of millions. They launder the millions made by international drug lords while financing politicians who want to build more prisons and lock up those who use the drugs.  As far as the financiers are concerned, the working class itself is now a criminal class.  Yet, we know better.  It is the financiers and their class that are the true criminals.  Still, they go free while workers go to jail for the crime of being poor.  The conspiracy of the super rich is not an accident.  They built the world that way.

Writers can choose to point this out or they can go along with the status quo.  Good crime fiction on a neoliberal planet chooses the former.  The task of those who write these tales is to point the finger at the true criminals.  The police are only heroes when they bust the big guys.  The system can only be just when it turns on its own.  At this juncture in time, this only seems to happen in stories.  Unfortunately.

---

 

This essay appears as a foreword to all three novels in Jacobs’ “Seventies Series.”(Fomite Press) It first appeared in the March 2013 CounterPunch magazine.

Ron Jacobs is the author of the just released novel All the Sinners, Saints. He is also the author of The Way the Wind Blew: a History of the Weather Undergroundand Short Order Frame Up and The Co-Conspirator’s Tale. His third novel All the Sinners Saints is a companion to the previous two and is due out in April 2013.  He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, published by AK Press.  He can be reached at: ronj1955@gmail.com.

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