A complacent Hollywood ignored rightwing radicalism – now movies need to tell the truth

A complacent Hollywood ignored rightwing radicalism – now movies need to tell the truth

By: Paul Mason

Taken From: The Guardian

Social historians will read the list and weep: the top 10 global box-office movies in the year the US elected Donald Trump and self-destructed as a superpower. Five are American superhero films; four are animal cartoons; one is an impenetrable sci-fi comedy that became immensely popular in China but nowhere else.

Faced with a demagogic clown as president – and a white-supremacist as his right-hand man – Hollywood’s moguls will arrive at their offices this week facing a momentous decision. American democracy is in peril; the universal values on which the movie industry has based itself are being called into question by the ethno-nationalism and misogyny of the Trump moment.

So, do they continue to produce a stream of mindless blockbusters starring furry creatures and superheroes – or do they put their talent, resources and justifiable fury into movies that tell us how we got here, and how we escape? Do they attempt, above all, to inject humanity and tolerance back into the narratives Americans consume with their popcorn?

The only comparable reference point is the early 1940s. If you look at the genre of movies produced in the first full year of the second world war – while the US was neutral – there’s a massive backlog of westerns, crime movies and screwball comedies from the 30s. And even the few war movies produced have a troubled relationship with the fighting. In Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent, for example – finished months after the start of the war – the studio can never really decide whether the secret agents that the hero is rounding up are supposed to be German or from a fictional country. It was only when the attack on Pearl Harbor forced the US to fight that Hollywood discovered its soul.

Japan attacked on 7 December 1941. Eleven months later, Warner Bros premiered Casablanca, in which an embittered American leftist, hunched over a whisky glass, berates the US’s complacency. “If it’s December 1941 in Casablanca,” Humphrey Bogart rages, “what time is it in New York?”

Casablanca dramatised, in a way that its predecessors had only promised, all the moral issues at stake for the US in the war. While other early war movies were populated with cheery proletarian cannon fodder, Casablanca is filled with all the social misfits of the noir years: gamblers, refugees, womanising cops, thieves and a (thinly disguised) sex worker. Only now, for all of them, life had just got serious.

It’s all the more of an achievement if you cast your eye over the stage play on which the film was based. In Everybody Comes to Rick’s, the story is the same, but much of its dialogue sounds like Noël Coward. Probably for this reason, it had never been staged. But a studio executive must have said: “Let’s turn this story into a universal narrative that will stand re-watching for ever because it portrays cynical but peaceful people in the depths of a dilemma about when, why and who to fight.”

It would be easy this week for decision-makers in narrative industries across the English-speaking world – the movies, the TV networks and the big theatres – to take comfort in the delusions peddled by the US media. That Trump is just Reagan with bad hair. That the establishment will tame him. That, anyway, it is just four years and then back to normal.

But the revolt that brought Trump to power represents an ideological break with any situation the US’s myth-makers have known. From now on, even in the most inconsequential domestic drama, every character’s ethnicity matters. If they’re a black male, are they one of the 13% who voted for the Ku Klux Klan’s man, or against him. For any actor building a character in a drama set in the present, the question becomes: what does my character think about Trump, Brexit, the collapse of liberal norms in public life?

The mechanisms available to cope with this situation in the movie industry are pretty sclerotic. The reason that five out of the top 10 movies this year are superhero movies is because superheroes sell better than human heroes. Both the Bond and the Bourne franchise (full disclosure: I’ve contributed to the latter) have attempted social relevance and psychological darkness, but the audience is wary. Even Deadpool – a satire on the superhero genre – grossed more than any major movie with a fully human protagonist.

The result of pursuing blockbuster formula is, for the studios, that the development process becomes long, highly commercial and reliant on the intuitions of finance guys. You could argue it was ever thus, but that didn’t stop Warner Bros buying the rights to the Casablanca stage play in January 1942 and getting the whole thing into theatres by November.

In the face of all these obstacles, someone, somewhere, needs to start putting the stories of American working-class people on the big screen. Tell them truthfully – as Michael Cimino did in The Deer Hunter – and the myth of the uniformly reactionary “white working-class” explodes. The modern Deer Hunter, like the modern Casablanca, might not feature a man as its protagonist, so central are women to work, community and resistance in working America.

Ben Urwand, in his book The Collaboration, details Hollywood’s guilty relationship with Hitler in the 1930s. If so, Tinseltown redeemed itself after Pearl Harbor. This time around, if it has been guilty of anything, it is of the liberal complacency that assumed that if you feed the masses with formulaic narratives of redemption and mythic violence, they will ignore rightwing radicalism.

So, it is time we demand that the storytelling industry addresses the truth. A man takes charge of the US on a wave of racial and misogynist hate; he screws up the world order so badly it spirals into chaos. Down these mean streets, as Raymond Chandler put it, a man or woman must go “who is not mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid”. Not a marmoset, nor a native of the planet Krypton, but a human being.