2.3 DISTRIBUCIÓN DE ENERGÍA
2.3.8 TERMINACIONES DE CABLES
I
NTWENTIETH-CENTURYINDUSTRIALSOCIETIES, THEMASSMEDIA and popular arts often do the work theorized as the business of the public sphere. What are the rhetorical implications of conducting public business in the popular arts? This chapter is an examination of how television and film have remembered the Hol-lywood blacklist in fiction films.The Cold War had profound effects on American motion pictures. One of the sharpest instruments prompting those effects was the blacklist, initiated in film, radio, and television as the result of anti-Communist hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in and from to .
Several effects of the blacklist were, however profound, invisible to film audi-ences. Hundreds of suspected people lost their jobs in the industry. Films in general became more cautious about possible charges of insufficient patriotism.
In a very few cases, films depicted HUAC or the blacklist itself. The first of these, Big Jim McLain, was produced by John Wayne in ; it features Wayne as a HUAC agent tracking down Communist spies in Hawaii. Much later, films criti-cal of the blacklist began to appear. The Front (), written by the blacklisted Walter Bernstein and starring Woody Allen, describes blacklisting in television.
Fellow Traveller () and Guilty By Suspicion () depict the blacklist in the film industry. Witch Hunt is a recent allegorical, made-for-cable film about the blacklist. Some of these films are more interesting as films than others; all of them are intriguing examples of the peculiar pressure that public themes impose on popular art, often with disappointing results both for popular art and for public deliberation. The films are characteristically American in proposing private or individualistic solutions to public problems, which is especially intriguing since this stance is both a form of self-censorship in the face of repression and a
decla-ration of independence. Nevertheless, the very tensions that cause these films to seem problematic are instructive, and thus a contribution to contestation for the collective memory.
I propose to examine the rhetoric of these films, using two related senses of the term “rhetoric.” I am interested in () what happens to the art of the fiction film when it is dealing with a controversial issue in the public sphere; and () what happens to the art of rhetoric as civic eloquence when it must find its out-let in fiction film rather than in something resembling an idealized or approxi-mated public sphere in which a variety of voices have access to the forum and where public matters are resolved through public discussion and decision.
Although my frame is thus historical and theoretical, my approach will be primarily critical and interpretive. I propose a close reading of these films to dis-cover the ways in which they combine popular form and public theme. The perspective of rhetorical criticism may help us to notice the ways in which these films theorize the domains of the public, the private, and the popular.
The Hollywood Blacklist, and the Cold War more generally, had such perva-sive effects on American motion pictures that it is hard to know which films to include in a critical survey of the public implications of the popular since World War II. Even the seemingly most apolitical of Hollywood films might be seen as part of a general tendency to avoid controversial social themes, or to disguise them in layers of abasement, analogy, allusion, and allegory.
It might be hard to imagine a less political film than Gene Kelly’s Singin’ in the Rain, for example. And yet the film, released during the second round of HUAC’s Hollywood hearings in , was threatened by a campaign of harass-ment that had been directed at Kelly since at least by HUAC and its coun-terpart in the California Senate, the Tenney Committee.1 The example of Singin’
in the Rain repeated itself throughout the industry, where the direct and indi-rect effects of the blacklist continued to make themselves felt in the generic forms Hollywood developed to survive the Cold War. In writing of Hollywood in the
s, Peter Biskind observes that “every movie that was produced, no matter how trivial or escapist, was made in the shadow of the anti-Communist witch-hunt, subject to the strictures of the House Committee on Un-American Activities that dictated who worked and who didn’t, which subjects were appropriate and which weren’t, how plots could be resolved and how they couldn’t” (). It was not, as Biskind acknowledges, that HUAC directly monitored Hollywood production or issued explicit guidelines, but that the shock of the repeated investigations con-tributed to a culture of conformity and caution. Hollywood had often cooper-ated with the federal government in times of war or crisis.2 Paul Vanderwood writes that in the early Cold War period,
the Producer’s Association promised the federal government that the in-dustry would not release movies which did not accurately portray Ameri-can life and institutions, a deliberately vague catchall that permitted
arbi-trary control of picture content and production. . . . Hollywood had al-ways engaged in assertive self-censorship in order to avoid outright fed-eral government restriction. (–)
From fairly early in the Cold War, some films analogized the McCarthy era through strategies of displacement and allegory. The western High Noon (), the science fiction films The Thing () and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (), Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront (), and other films alluded to the threat of infil-tration, the ethics of informing, or the dangers of conformist hysteria. In a few cases, Hollywood looked directly at HUAC and the blacklist, with peculiar results.3 Big Jim McLain
By , when he produced Big Jim McLain, John Wayne, who had started act-ing in the s, had achieved major stardom with such films as Stagecoach (), The Long Voyage Home (), Red River (), Fort Apache (), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (), Sands of Iwo Jima (), and Rio Grande (). John Wayne and Robert Fellows produced Big Jim McLain for a Warner Brothers release.4
Wayne casts himself as Big Jim McLain, a HUAC investigator who with his sidekick Mal Baxter goes to Hawaii to break up a Communist spy network. Mal Baxter is played by James Arness, who had starred in The Thing and would later go on to star in the Gunsmoke TV series.
The film is anti-Communist agitprop at the height of the McCarthy period and seems highly peculiar today. The film’s Communists are goons, thugs, weirdoes, or creepy foreigners. In contrast, Jim McLain, Mal Baxter, and Nancy Vallon (actress Nancy Olson) are all-American characters. But the casting is not so simple as this. Some of the minor, sympathetic, roles are played as comic vaude-ville stereotypes. Veda Ann Borg, for example, plays the landlady of Namaka, a suspected Communist spy. She is loud, comical, sexy, and drunkenly seductive and makes a play for Wayne despite the jealousy of her comically loutish boy-friend. Hans Conried appears in one scene as a lunatic anti-Communist would-be informer who wants to share his secrets with McLain; the episode is inserted in the film as an isolated comic turn in no way connected to the plot and con-nected to the larger form of the film only by the way it hits some of the zany notes struck by Madge (Veda Ann Borg) and by its comical mirroring of other, more “serious” scenes of informers passing along vital information to McLain.
The issue of casting in Big Jim McLain is further complicated by the film’s use of nonactors. Honolulu police chief Dan Liu plays himself in the film, and mem-bers of HUAC also appear.
The casting of the film may be a clue to its form. Veda Ann Borg (–) was married to Andrew McLaglen, who worked as an assistant director on Ford’s The Quiet Man the same year Big Jim McLain was made. McLaglen was also an assistant director on Big Jim McLain and on Wayne’s Cold War propaganda tale Blood Alley () and himself directed the Wayne films McLintock! (), The
Undefeated (), Chisum (), and Cahill (). Andrew was the son of Victor McLaglen, who was often a supporting player to Wayne and, like Wayne, a part of the circle of drinking pals around John Ford. The practice of drawing on friends and relations, who evidently shared or were willing to subordinate themselves to Wayne’s simpleminded anti-Communism in making Big Jim McLain, may explain in part the film’s peculiar lack of narrative and artistic disci-pline. It does seem striking that when Wayne had achieved the clout to control his own films, he grew increasingly mediocre, political (The Alamo [], The Green Berets []) or preachy (the films he later made with Andrew McLaglen). But it is not clear whether the confusions of Big Jim McLain are the result of its poli-tics or the lack of an artistic talent that could coordinate the production. Screen-writing credit for Big Jim McLain went to James Edward Grant, who often worked with Wayne and who, writes, Garry Wills, “had more to do with Wayne’s blus-tery style of superpatriotism than anyone else” (). Victor Navasky reports that other collaborators on the script were Richard English, “who specialized in writing anti-Communist movies,” and William Wheeler, a HUAC investigator who drew on his own “HUAC experiences in Hawaii” to write the script (n).
The film drew mixed reactions in its own day. Virtually all the reviewers noted the film’s anomalous form. Newsweek found Big Jim McLain “just another spy melodrama saved from being merely that by a certain amount of adroit comedy playing” by Veda Ann Borg and Hans Conried (). In the National Parent-Teacher, Mrs. Louis L. Bucklin conceded that the film “entertains and arouses emotions,” but warned that it “oversimplifies a very important problem” while at the same time adding “extraneous romance [. . .] as well as scenes of violence based on a seemingly incurable belief that fisticuffs solve all problems” (). A reviewer in Variety noted the technical and artistic flaws in the film but appar-ently admired its topicality in showing “the story of the patriotic work going on to expose Communist activities endangering this country and its possessions” ().
Time found that the film “has some pleasingly authentic Hawaiian background, but the action in the foreground is implausible and fumblingly filmed” ().
William Whitebait, writing in the British journal New Statesman and Nation, found that the film’s treatment of “the seamier side of freedom” did not “even with John Wayne, quite make a film” (). Bosley Crowther derides the film as a travesty of its political premise, arguing that “the over-all mixing of cheap fic-tion with a contemporary crisis in American life is irresponsible and unforgiv-able. No one deserves credit for this film” (). Since the film was so transpar-ently inept even in the midst of the anti-Communist hysteria of , we cannot assume that its rhetoric was particularly effective. Nevertheless, the rhetoric of the film is characteristic and has something to show us about Hollywood’s at-tempt to treat public issues through popular genres.
In form, the film is in some ways merely a ho-hum B thriller about spies who happen to be Communist agents, to which is added the obligatory love story.
But a number of burdens and diversions are added to the basic formula,
chal-lenging the coherence of the film experience. In one direction, the film reaches toward a documentary flavor that would have been familiar to viewers of con-temporary crime thrillers. The propagandistic anti-Communism would also have been familiar in the world of McCarthyite hysteria and in the context of a num-ber of other anti-Communist quickies thrown out by Hollywood in the period largely as insurance against further government intrusion into their otherwise studiedly apolitical industry. In another direction, the film reaches toward a tra-dition of performative, vaudevillian comedy that appears in the scenes with Veda Ann Borg and Hans Conried. The mix seems anomalous today, and to some of its reviewers at the time, but it seems important to note from a rhetorical per-spective that the mix did not seem incoherent to all of its contemporary view-ers, perhaps because the combination of patriotism, documentary, comedy, ro-mance, and thriller were all so familiar and appealed in substance to a seemingly unified wellspring of common, popular/populist feeling and tradition. Indeed, though it may be important for a critic to “expose” and debunk the film’s clum-sily brutish superpatriotism, it is equally important to try to re-imagine the film from the point of view of an appreciative spectator.
As potentially confusing as its mix of styles is the film’s political appeal. Big Jim McLain is about politics in the sense that its whole reason for being is to define Communism as the enemy and to warn against its subversive appeal. But in the world of the film, Communism is not political, and therefore our response to it requires not politics but police measures. The film justifies extremes of suspicion and commitment in a world where anyone—even a relative—might be a Com-munist. For this reason, it seems to me that Thomas Doherty misses part of the rhetoric of the film when he argues that “the anti-communist films of –
set priorities, preclude alternatives, and force exclusive commitments. They de-mand choice” (). Doherty is correct, I think, to claim that the films “preclude alternatives,” but in doing this, at the very same time they demand choice, they make choice irrelevant—there really is no choice. Doherty’s analysis is rightly derived from the work of Robert Ray, who argued that a primary ideological function of Hollywood films was to conceal the necessity for choice between independence from and commitment to community.5 Big Jim McLain is differ-ent from the films Ray iddiffer-entifies in A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema,
‒, but not because it makes choice possible. In the world of Big Jim McLain, this problem never arises. Big Jim is in a different world from Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine in Casablanca. Rick’s problem, argues Ray, is to evade the choice between autonomy and community, and the film’s problem is to allow him to act on behalf of the community without having to sacrifice his romantic, mas-culine independence. But this is never Big Jim’s problem. Big Jim is an eager spy-chaser from the outset, never for a moment having to overcome any reluctance to serve his community, as do the heroes identified in Ray’s “certain tendency.”
Hence, Big Jim McLain conceals the “necessity for choice” between autonomy and community by never allowing it to become a problem in the first place.
The only choice in Big Jim McLain is the choice between Communism and Americanism, and that, too, proves not to be a political choice. It is on this point that the film encounters another rhetorical anomaly (anomalous, at least, to the rhetorical theorist), since at the same time it takes patriotism off the list of those things subject to political choice, the film makes choosing patriotism the cen-tral organizing force of its didactic structure. The film attempts to persuade us about matters that are outside the realm of choice. To put it another way, the film implicitly regards its audience as in need of salvation by persuasion, but it regards its diegetic subjects—the characters in the film itself—as more or less in-nately virtuous or corrupt, and hence, as immune to persuasion.
If the film were consistent, it might openly engage in political persuasion about a matter regarded as subject to doubt. This is precisely what Aristotle observes in defining the art of persuasion as dealing with those matters that are not nec-essary or demonstrable.
Since few of the premises from which rhetorical syllogisms are formed are necessarily true (most of the matters with which judgment and examina-tion are concerned can be other than they are; for people deliberate and examine what they are doing, and [human] actions are all of this kind, and none of them [are], so to speak necessary) [. . .] it is evident that [the pre-mises] from which enthymemes are spoken are sometimes necessarily true but mostly true [only] for the most part. (–)
The film achieves its unity, resolving the potential contradiction between its simultaneous appeal to and denial of choice, partly through its appeal to two surrogate arguments. The first argument is the premise that Communism is a defect of character in the individual Communist. The second surrogate argument is that Communism itself is at war with the free world, and that this state of war places Communism outside the sphere of politics.6 But if these are surrogate arguments, what are they surrogates for? The apparent answer, given both the text of the film and the political context in which it emerged, is that the sup-pressed argument of the film lies in its attack on the political wing of American Communism, on the subjects of the blacklist and the McCarthy investigations, and, by extension, on the bleeding-heart liberalism that serves the cause of the Communist enemy. The necessities of character and the extremities required by a state of war are stand-ins for what might otherwise have to be acknowledged as the contingencies of a political debate raging between liberalism and conser-vatism at the outset of the Cold War.
David Zarefsky has described surrogate arguments in the Lincoln-Douglas debates of . Zarefsky argues that both debaters employed the surrogate ar-gumentative themes of law, history, and political conspiracy as a way of suggest-ing orientations to the theme—mostly avoided—of the morality of slavery it-self. According to Zarefsky, the surrogate arguments allowed the discussion to continue, whereas an immediate and exclusive attention to the issue of the
mo-rality of slavery would have stopped the discussion in its tracks and made both debate and the hope of resolution impossible. But if surrogate arguments helped to make continued talk possible in the case of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, the surrogate arguments in Big Jim McLain suggest, on the contrary, that debate is pointless or dangerous. In Big Jim McLain, the surrogate argument is the moral argument, and it is not subject to debate.
The film’s appeal to necessity and extremity in its surrogate arguments pro-vides both unity and persuasive force to what might otherwise seem a self-con-tradictory and disorganized adventure.
In turning its back on public debate and choice, the film does not, however, elevate the private and the personal. Though the film spends most of its time and attention on the romance between Jim McLain and Nancy Vallon, it other-wise explicitly subordinates personal values to public interests. In two separate subplots, the film recommends betrayal of personal and family loyalties for the good of the country. In one scene, a nurse at a leper colony tells how she left her
In turning its back on public debate and choice, the film does not, however, elevate the private and the personal. Though the film spends most of its time and attention on the romance between Jim McLain and Nancy Vallon, it other-wise explicitly subordinates personal values to public interests. In two separate subplots, the film recommends betrayal of personal and family loyalties for the good of the country. In one scene, a nurse at a leper colony tells how she left her