Flight from Desire

“There is always at least one more thing claiming to bring a
consumer happiness, and since, of course, this is a psychological obsession, the
chain of alienations and frustrations increases continually, which makes the
consumer more submissive to the addictive system of consumption.
Commercials have one major message for their obsessed subjects: this new
item in particular is the key to your lost happiness; this item is unlike anything
we have offered you before. Commercialism and commodity fetishism turn
the mass individual into an apolitical individual who serves the system of
advanced capitalism even in his or her “free time”.”
Saladdin Said Ahmed

“Extremism and scapegoating is again a throwback to the primal, persisting even in Christianity, according to Freud. As religion declines, the process remains as a kind of social structure, and can be provided with content by pseudo arguments like those involving race. Scapegoating like this provides a negative definition of the group, as a compensation for the lack of positive ones. It is fuelled by narcissism and destructiveness. It turns critique into rage, characteristic of all prejudiced persons. Focusing attention on out groups acts as a safety valve preventing self criticism.”
Dave Harris

“Thought waits to be woken one day by the memory of what it was, and to be transformed into teaching.”
Adorno

It is interesting today to revisit the work of critics such as Frank Kermode, and Kenneth Burke, William Empson, or Carlo Ginsburg, Roberto Calasso, and even F.R. Leavis. This (close reading and textual analysis) is now considered, mostly, a remote realm of literary and aesthetic thought with ever declining relevance. And yet, in the shadow of the current political theatre of the U.S. presidential election I find an acute relevance. And this relevance can be approached in two registers. The first is that such criticism has always been perceived as a reserved domain of the institutions of higher learning. I never went to college (well, I did do a year at a junior college). And I can remember my favorite jobs as a young man being those that allowed me time to read (I was a night watchman at a medical center in L.A. working the graveyard shift where I was on the only person in a very large six story medical building. I loved that job. All I did was read and walk my rounds once every couple hours. I also worked as a projectionist at a porn movie theatre where mostly what I did was read and change the reels on those old 16mm projectors). I was constantly asked, when I did on occasion, run into people, where I was going to school. For nobody in their right mind sat reading City of God for pleasure. The point, though, is that the idea of serious reading is a relic from another long past era of culture. It may be that few ever really read the way I did. I don’t know, honestly. But I know today almost nobody does. And perhaps this partly accounts for the deficit in perception of the U.S. public in reading the political narratives of the era.

The public does not analyze the political in terms of their own social interests. They shop for what Ahmed describes as the ‘key to their lost happiness’. Much as they shop for soda pop or tooth paste. Except that this reality is repressed. And it is additionally filtered through the prism of their narcissistic personality. And this is a key aspect because the domination that Adorno saw in mass culture, the ideological imprint, is connected to knowledge. The current emphasis on *terrorism* is inseparable from culture. The idea of the sublime, or just pleasure — as Kermode describes it — has all but vanished. TV shows such as Breaking Bad, for example, are ideological tools for the ownership class. I will return below to a further discussion of Hollywood. But to stay on the topic of today’s elections and a vanished realm of literacy and what that means, it is useful to examine just one item in the current political circus. And that is the obvious and verifiable theft of the California election primary by the Clinton campaign. This was in essence a soft coup. And they barely bothered to hide it. In fact, it seems quite possible that Debbie Wasserman Schultz wanted the theft to be known. And she did so because it fits with the barely unconscious alignment of Hillary Clinton and gangsterism. The fact that everything the liberal class accuses Trump of doing, with, usually, almost no evidence, is something Clinton has done and done without really trying to hide it. And part of why the Clinton team wants their duplicity to be known is because nothing is taken, in any way, as serious. And seriousness is anathema to contemporary culture. The other fact that allows Clinton to continue toward the Presidency is that most Americans have in very real terms an almost unimaginable lack of historical or geographical understanding. There are countless studies done on high school and college students that demonstrate a stunning ignorance of the world outside their narrow interests.

The second branch of this lost relevance is connected to the class structure of Western societies, today. The working class is discouraged from wanting to learn. They are ridiculed for it. Now, before getting too far into that, I wanted, for a moment, to look at the masculine in terms of U.S. and its tilt toward fascism. The fact that the liberal rhetoric about Trump continues to bring up the word *fascism* is telling for the fact is that the U.S. is for all intents and purposes already largely fascistic. Trump is a kind of delivery mechanism for recognizing what is right before us.

Anthony Easthope wrote…“the masculine myth aims to reconstruct castration on its own ground; it tries to read sexual difference as the difference from *him*”. In other words, the early rebellion against paternal authority is repressed. And this repressed material festers and eventually surfaces as authoritarian aggression. Mike Hill notes (in his book on whiteness in America) that the relative weakening of the Father has led to an unconscious search for a stronger father. The instrumental thinking that began with the Enlightenment has, over the last hundred years, say, arrived at a ‘loss of reality'(per Adorno and Horkheimer). The crisis of knowledge for them was the result (in part) of the world have shrunk down to specialist categories of representation. To data, essentially. And today in 2016 this unreality has reached a sort of fail safe mode. And this maximized instrumental is coupled to class segregation, a deepening narcissistic collective, and increasing paranoia.

What I see as having happened during this election season is a crises, psychologically, in the white educated liberal class. This is that, maybe, 30% that Chomsky once identified as the target demographic for marketing. Now it is also happening across classes to white men, but I don’t think as acutely.

“My argument, simply put, is that in the post-white national imaginary of U.S. men, color is processed in a sexual way.
Moreover, color and sex are linked to a kind of erotic canalization of class conflict. This is what enables the devil’s bargain between the forms of liberal selfexpression
and fascistic self-defense that I will begin to trace shortly. Fascism operates in the name of an exalted race that also posits certain hyperbolic forms
of heterosexual masculine virility, as Theweleit maintains. I want to suggest that this, too, is the way contemporary white men operate in the United States. But
more curious than that, white masculinity responds to the dreaded colorization of America by mirroring the logic of fascism and inverting racial loathing.”
Mike Hill

Hill’s observations above are, I think, exceedingly cogent and exactly echo the current political discourse in the U.S. The educated white liberal now more resembles a rock-ribbed Republican circa Barry Goldwater than a liberal in the traditional sense. And those old guard Republicans are now mostly disappeared, or, oddly, migrating leftward. But their numbers are very small. Hill also notes that the panic of White America is one the encloses both growing economic insecurity and a loss of privilege. The views of white men on almost everything today are influenced by narratives, usually repressed, of race. Hill is suggesting, as he puts it, a libidinalization of race and a racialization of libido.

White liberals today have lurched very far to the right. That historically the liberal, affluent and educated, have always collaborated with the ruling class is fact. But it is today tinged with a deep neurosis and self hatred, and with panic and mania. Looking backward, there is an interesting aspect to the ways in which the family as an idea has deteriorated over the last seventy of eighty years. Of course even further back the shift took place during feudalism transforming under capital. The Father was, as Hill and Juliet Mitchell and Eve Sedgewick and others have written, became an avatar for property in a sense. Or perhaps not property so much as the symbol of dynamic Capitalism. But today, the father is beset by divorce, and lack of purposeful work, and the proletarianization of women as workers in a failing economy. The masculine white ideal is linked indissolubly with family and by extension responsibility. The White male that was the ruler of colonial projects and rejected blackness. That white man is now both economically weakened, and more importantly perhaps, is adrift in a societal landscape that doesn’t need him. Adorno noted that in his phrase *the guilt of life* a kind of fulcrum on which teetered a fragile bourgeois identity and the compensatory virile exaggeration that comes as a response to that fragility. The masculine crisis, in an Oedipal explanation, is that the absent father is both loved and hated. Submission and aggression (Pasolini being the perfect artistic expression of this) are always present, next to one another, in the fascist character.

Hill, in a lengthy discussion of the Christian right group Promise Keepers, writes…

“If the authoritarian personality ineffectively repels castration
and falls negatively in love with the objects it repudiates, then the new
manifestations of white masculinity exemplified by PK proceed to turn that
negation on its head. Remarkably, PK embraces Oedipal failure as race in the
father-shaped “void.” The group’s interest in public outbursts of weeping are
symptomatic of that. The still more remarkable aspect of this psychosexual surrender
is that PK turns heterosexual loss into a post-white racial win by its appeal
to color. The negation of race is not only inverted in PK, but is moved
sideways into a sexual register so that color gives white men a second chance at
getting castration aright.”

The white liberals flocking to Hillary Clinton are weeping inside. It is an act of submission to the fascist father, who is, in perfectly negated symmetry, a woman. This is compounded by the liberal’s unconscious repudiation of non-white America. There is a deep guilt involved in this that takes two forms, and both can happen simultaneously. One is the reversal of this unconscious rejection — the insistence on and expression of their own tolerance. And the other is an internalized self loathing for either not being the *other*, or for secretly admitting this, which is always, I think, coupled to some kind of aggression, or vengeance. The liberal is very much more comfortable with revenge than with self laceration. But both can be and often are present. The white masculine crisis is configured sexually by a historical dynamic that meant a repulsion and attraction to the savage or animal like races they felt it was natural for them to enslave.

White men in America often simply feel emasculated. Their is no work that provides dignity, and so the very notion of dignity is ridiculed. The post sixties residue, culturally, has shifted from anti authoritarian to self produced impotence. The rejection of the authoritarian (Father) becomes a hatred of the weakness in one’s self that is blamed on the missing identification with the Paternal. That missing patriarch induces a kind of mania.

“The idea that enlightenment rationality is deficient in part because it is not libidinally related to the external world but rather only to the self (to the mind, rationality itself) corresponds in psychoanalytic terms to a form of narcissistic neurosis. “
Natalia Baeza

The mania of white liberal America is connected directly to the distance from nature that has been, now, deeply engrained. This is the Adorno and Horkheimer critique of the Enlightenment. This distancing, of course, was also a pre-requisite for civilizational advances in some places. But the compromise entailed a loss of inner nature. A eventually a forgetting of Utopian dreams. This forgetting is reenacted over and over by kitsch desires expressed in commodity stand-ins (whole foods, yoga, eastern disciplines of meditation, and natural fabrics, etc). Suddenly the entire corporate edifice of entertainment is a mirror held up to the paranoid narcissism of affluent white America. It is more than that, of course (and more on that below). There is a natural affinity in these kitsch desires for all things infantile. The infantile narcissism of faux unity (lets join together to stop Trump) and a repudiating of genuine community. For the liberal eschews community, it is too close to the *other* that was once the slave or the servant. It is, once again, operative, too, on the erotic level (per Theweleit).

The projection of the paranoid narcissist is often expressed in tantrums and petulant anger. I have heard liberals express *hatred* for those people who voted for Nader and let Bush win {sic}. This is the theatre of the truncated inner mind. A children’s theatre set up in the backyard of the psyche. Natalia Baeza in an excellent short paper on Fascism, Paranoia and Adorno notes that there is another mechanism besides projection that is often employed in this move toward fascism. And that mechanism is the denial or rejection of the repressed wish. The result of which is the spoken or written expression of the opposite of their desire. In other words, ‘I wish people would stop blaming Democrats’ is really I am fucking happy that people (THOSE people) are blaming Democrats, because then I can hate them.

The historic shift from early animism toward what Horkheimer saw as mythology, allowed for the start of the cunning that developed into rational calculation. And with it the more effective domination of Nature.

“The servant is subjugated in body and soul, the master regresses. No system of domination has so far been able to escape this price, and the circularity of history in its progress is explained in part by this debilitation, which is the concomitant of power. Humanity, whose skills and knowledge become differentiated with the division of labor, is thereby forced back to more primitive anthropological stages, since, with the technical facilitation of existence, the continuance of domination demands the fixation of instincts by greater repression.”
Adorno and Horkheimer

Adorno and Horkheimer both, in their later writings, saw acutely that without the promised bourgeois revolution the repression demanded under advanced Capitalism had stopped even promising future compensation. Its sole role was to reinforce capitalism. And that is, finally, intolerable. I wrote last time that a subtle but important shift occurred in the 80s when science and research, and marketing, stopped positing a future. The focus became on rewriting the past via nostalgic manipulations. There were no more dreams of the future.

“From its inception, the bourgeois mind sought emancipation, but it continually renounced real liberation and instead affirmed the existing order. To compensate for its shortcomings in changing the real conditions of life, bourgeois thought undertook to construct an intellectual order free of all the contradictions, inconsistencies, and deficiencies of lived social conditions. Adorno suggests that bourgeois thought exaggerated its autonomy at the level of its own theoretical self-understanding in order to compensate for the unfreedom of the individual in practical life.”
Natalie Baeza

Trump becomes the perfect scare figure because he is unnatural. The search for happiness in nature, long since repressed and returning as a hatred of nature, or a hatred of those as seen outside the domesticated group that inhabits the structures of social normalcy, are targeted as threats. Trump is not just the wrong class, he is seen as almost unnatural, literally. Orange hair, tanning salon skin, and funny clown faces. He is the Jew, the Gypsy, and the Communist or homosexual of other eras. Nobody who reminds the bourgeoise that an other kind of nature lives is going to provoke rage and scorn. Trump is bigoted but he is the wrong kind of bigot. And this is again where whiteness enters the discussion. Adorno noted that women, too, were to be punished by fascists for their weakness, or perceived weakness. Much as in colonial conquests the Natives were punished for being enslaved. It wasn’t enough to just enslave, but they must be made to feel the punitive power of the white overlord who was angry he was forced to be such an overlord. So women, so Jews later. And today Palestinians.

“Women and Jews show visible evidence of not having ruled for thousands of years. They live, although they could be eliminated, and their fear and weakness, the greater affinity to nature produced in them by perennial oppression, is the element in which they live. In the strong, who pay for their strength with their strained remoteness from nature and must forever forbid themselves fear, this incites blind fury. They identify with nature by calling forth from their victims, multiplied by a thousandfold, the cry they may not utter themselves.”
Adorno and Horkheimer

I have said before that Hillary Clinton is the actual fascist. She is the inverted version of authoritarian Patriarchy, and one of the perfect ironies of this election is the grotesque alignment of bourgeois feminism and its support of Clinton. Liberal white men do it as masochistic atonement. But for the soul sick bourgeois woman, this is the dark side of civilization in a reenactment of ritual destruction. But the masculine atonement is not quite exactly, that. For this symbolism is mediated by both paranoia and an infantile narcissism.

The managerial class today has little to manage. The sense of management is theoretical and almost non conceptual.

“Fascism is the loudest boogeyman of history, its outermost dark and nihilistic undercurrent from which we think ourselves now permanently delivered. But for Adorno, that deliverance from fascism was only an illusion. It is not that Ford, the face of American capitalism, thought fascism viable in its mythical assumptions or its focus purely on power itself. Ford thought fascism was viable because of its method — its intentionality toward control, its will to method. The temporary political alliance denounced itself and assumed instead an alliance with its method, which, unlike the name of fascism, might hope to continue its aims nevertheless. In what kind of world do we in the West now live but a world governed by method, by administration?”
Jeremy Brunger

Today, so stunted is the imagination of the self defined middle classes that I hear, often in fact, the desire to retain the status quo because they cannot imagine anything else unless it is a worse form of the status quo. Someone said to me, I hate Hillary but I worry about the bloodshed if Trump is elected. So in a sense there is bloodshed and there is bloodshed. For what was really being said was ‘I fear white bloodshed’. There is little fear in the bourgeoise about Arab blood, or African blood, or American minority blood. And I can live with American black blood.

“In our own time, on the contrary, the feeling is abroad that free thought is helpless. Mastery of nature has not brought man to self-realization; on the contrary, the status quo continues to exert its objective compulsion.”
Max Horkheimer

The panic is not just the sense of racial superiority slipping away, it is the blank space where dreams used to reside. The loss of imagination. As Brunger notes, we are no longer human beings, we are subjects. The post modern grammar of eradicated humanness. The white liberal man today is no longer able to claim patriarchal privilege, and must deny the frustration of that. When there is proof that Hillary stole California, or sent weapons to Syria or orchestrated a violent right wing coup in Honduras, there is a secret pleasure in the bourgeoise. That is our guy — er — woman. Coups? That just proves she is a badass. Now it should be pointed out that almost any other candidate would lead Trump by thirty points. Hillary is hated by many in the working class. And those on the edge of poverty hate her as well. The Clinton voter is middle aged and older women, older men who used to vote Republican, and the University educated white — men and women both. Her lowest ratings are non University educated white men. Those are the Trump voters. The black vote is much higher for Clinton, but then only 30% or so vote at all. If magically the usual non voter were to wake up and vote Stein/Baraka, in numbers resembling those who voted for Sanders, then Clinton would likely just resort to rigging the totals. Same as California.

There is then another aspect to the delusions of this election and that has to do with those critics I mentioned at the top. For they represented a belief in the basic seriousness of culture. I wrote recently that all stories, today, had to be war stories. There must be enemies to fight. There is an important distinction to be made here, though. It is not that a story is about war per se that is the problem. Shakespeare wrote of war, so did Tolstoy. And the problem is also not depicting violence. Not exactly. In fact stories without a crime tend to be the most criminal, just as stories without any violence tend to be the most violent. In a culture of unseriousness the representations of war take on a quality of both disposability and sadism. In Hollywood the depictions of war and terror take place within a belief system that sees seriousness as dated and obsolete and therefore much bathetic and sentimental justification must be layered over the narrative. And jingoism is always, actually, quite sentimental. The violent soldier is always depicted as family loving and a dog owner or something. He or she loves kids and barbeques on the fourth of July. Take the recent Aaron Sorkin TV show The Newsroom. There was no violence in it. And yet it was a hugely reactionary show that reinforced white supremacy and neo liberal state violence. Sorkin writes approvingly (while always mildly criticizing) of the status quo — while in personal life admitting to industrial levels of coke use. But that’s OK because he is a rich white guy. Sorkin has no personal notion of how the underclass lives, of the violence exercised upon the poor. In the Sorkin world view it is enough to rescue the occasional minority individual, remove him or her from their community and rehabilitate them simply through granting proximity to his class. The superior class. And part of their superiority is their mock and carefully allocated compassion.

The lack of seriousness also encourages and sanctions this collective regression taking place. The white liberal today, and especially white liberal men, feel threatened. And they are forming into a caricature of the masses. And this is both creating and then allowing a drastic turn to the right. Fear of Trump is providing the justification for their own anal sadistic character to emerge.

In cultural matters, then, there is an ambivalence at work that in one sense comes out of the Benjamin critique of mechanical reproduction. Benjamin, for a while anyway, saw mechanical or technical reproduction freeing the viewer from what he described as a parasitical addiction to ritual. But today the loss of that ritual is more the result of the loss of the serious. The faux populism, that also affects much of the left (or faux left) is one that eschews ritual as elitist. In fact it is in rituals of culture that anti-elitism exists today and perhaps only there. For in ritual there is a space free of the distracting monotony of compulsive repetition. And this, too, is a bit contradictory or ambivalent. For rituals are predicated upon familiarity. But there is familiarity and there is familiarity. And this is the distinction between form and content.

“It is not the office of art to spotlight alternatives but to resist by its form alone the course of the world…”
Adorno

The educated liberal class today, culturally speaking, is then caught in the contradictions of capitalist hegemony. The ritual was itself turned into a kitsch ritual. And this speaks to the appeal of various new age *lifestyle* activities and beliefs. The bourgeoisie gravitated toward a *mystical* that was itself manufactured by the system of standardization. The artwork that cleaved to an internal logic based on the non identical was dismissed in favor of either the mass produced entertainments of Hollywood, or works that pandered to the market through their presentation of uniqueness. A uniqueness of the same.

Hollywood film both manufactures ideology and expresses, at times, something that exceeds the templates. Robert B. Ray when discussing Casablanca, for example, sees an anxiety expressed, or a fear, really, of deep commitment. Alliances are encumbering (the old world) and American exceptionalism operates in fluid temporary ways. National ideologies are reduced to single character symbols. And this is usually in the form of the outlaw. The outlaw who is self determining. This is all true up to a point. The problem is that almost all narrative relies on condensation of a kind. That said, the anxiety of loss is real and Ray analyses this in some depth. The germane point here is that the reducing of complex social questions to single character questions anesthetizes audiences to complexity in general. It is also another example of unseriousness. For the individual can reconcile his or her problems or not, because in the end this only matters to the individual. Hollywood has rarely encouraged an idea of collectivity. Past events are never seen as crucial to current actions. In the popular post modern imagination all that matters about Mao is that he didn’t brush his teeth regularly. On the other hand, the character of Rick in Casablanca is the figure of the exile escaping his past (which remains mysterious). And so while the film is basically a bit of jingoism on the one hand, it is also a somewhat, no doubt unconscious, reenactment of the trauma of the exile. As a curious side bar note on Casablaca, my father worked wardrobe on that film and made a mistake when he was washing Conrad Veidt’s overcoat. He left off the epaulets. Hence in that final scene you see the epaulets on in one shot and off in another — a second later. My father’s brief footnote to film history.

It is difficult though to extrapolate too much from a film like Casablanca. First, the director, Michael Curtiz, was a minor figure, really, who made few memorable films (though quite a few very successful ones). And Casablanca came out in 1942, the same year as The Magnificent Ambersons, Val Lewton’s Cat People, To Be or Not To Be (Ernst Lubitsch), and Hitchcock’s Saboteur, all of them probably more important films, but also less useful for Ray’s analysis of American ideology of the period. It is interesting to compare the Curtiz film with the Hitchcock. The latter contained flagrant jingoistic dialogue but there is a dissident mise en scene throughout. The famous circus caravan sequence was, in fact, an anti fascist bit of ambivalence, partly due to the casting of comedian Robert Cummings in the lead role of the wrongly accused aircraft worker. But this raises the question of familiarity again and the curious position of film in the context of culture. Looking at American cinema from the 1940s reveals the staggering changes in Hollywood over the last seventy years. For much of Hollywood film in the forties was made by German emigre directors. For even with highly formulaic scripts, these directors injected a certain level of uncertainty to the whole.

“…distancing devices also operate even in some classic Hollywood films that seem wholly determined by the dominant ideology. According to some critics, the films of Ford, Sirk, Arzner, and others, exhibit an ambiguous relationship to ideology, subverting it by refusing to unify and resolve all contradictions, by exposing gaps in its surface, or by denaturalizing it by making it visible and explicit.”
Thomas Andrae,
Jump Cut no.20

This was the main thrust of Cahiers critics in the 1950s and 60s. Fassbinder and Pasolini grasped intuitively the dissident qualities of 1940s feature films. Especially what came to be called film noir. In Andrae’s essay, though, there is a fundamental error in thinking Adorno denied all discursive meaning and communication. This isn’t true, but it is the basic error of much left critique of art. What Adorno believed was that *if* an artwork was going to resolve something, then it had to interrogate that resolution — in other words the meaning of the work must be questioned as meaning. And this is when he said that Beckett’s plays put meaning on trial. Andrae clings to the idea that art must communicate moral or political instruction or risk retreating to some nihilist cul de sac. The question then is what does one mean by *meaning* in an art work? Before trying to answer that, Andrae quotes Adorno, from an interview he gave shortly before his death.

“It seems that the integration of consciousness and leisure time is not yet complete after all. The real interests of individuals are still strong enough to resist total manipulation up to a point. This analysis would be in line with the prognosis that consciousness cannot be totally integrated in a society in which the basic contradictions remain undiminished.”

This suggests a kind of double consciousness that exists in the public today. And is reminiscent of Reich and Lacan both. Mass culture reproduces a never changing view of reality and society. And this merging of commercial entertainments and political policy and economic policy forms a continuum that demands pleasure is found in acceptance of the status quo. Such pleasure becomes a heavy psychic burden. Only for the bourgeois consumer this acceptance is personally branded. For the white liberal follower of Hillary there is no illusion as to her criminality, quite the contrary. They know what to expect if she becomes president and they are happy with it. Representations of reality include, often, the ugliness and inequality of existence, but the message of these representations, their *meaning* never changes. And this is the white male preserve of a specific kind of fantasy of entitlement. Capitalism isn’t perfect but its the best we have. Such is the constantly repeated message.

Art does not need recognizable ideological meaning to be subversive. And to think that is the by-product of half a century of intense instrumental teaching and propaganda. Art is always operative on several levels and when it’s not, it’s not art.

“Fascist violence is enacted in abandonment to the destructive irrational rage of repressed nature and in this way achieves a satisfaction of the repressed wish for unity with nature, albeit in a damaged way ultimately doomed to fail.”
Natalie Baeza

The fascism of a Hillary Clinton is the unconscious reward to the bourgeoisie for their essential bad faith. They couldn’t be happier that Donald Trump has come along. At the same time, they both hate and fear him, and delight in his appearance. Mass culture has shifted in the last ten years from a system of distraction to one more closely following the propaganda apparatus of National Socialism. At least for the bourgeoisie. They are being mobilized — at least subjectively — to rescue their privilege. And this is a white privilege. And mostly it is also a masculine privilege. Hillary is the perfect post modern Patriarch.

Barbara Ehrenrich in her introduction to Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies, (and quoted by Hill)…writes of the German Freikorps– that they feared…

“the communism of Rosa Luxemburg, promiscuous mingling, breaking down old barriers . . . a dread of engulfment by ‘the other’ { } The Freikorps see the world divided into
‘them’ and ‘us,’ male and female, hard and soft, solid and liquid,{ } They therefore “fight and flee the threat of their own desire.”

The post war American cinema was its golden age. And Ray is correct in observing that the subversive seemed almost only to exist in the B-movies of this era. What Sarris called (quoted by Ray in fact) …“Interior meaning is extrapolated from the tension between a director’s personality and his material”. The post war noirs were directed largely by German Jews. And their training had been at UFA and German expressionist principles. There were American directors, like Welles and Ford and later Aldrich, but the masters of this period were Siodmak, Wilder, and Lang, and to lesser degree Edgar G. Ulmer. The trite formulaic scripts were given disproportionate readings, stylistically, by these directors. Hitchcock too, (who had trained for a period at UFA) invested a deep pessimism visually. Contemporary attempts at nostalgic noir simply borrow the style cues but abandon the social and psychoanalytical critique. The influence of the post war noirs carried over to later crime film but also to westerns. And it was Ford, and Anthony Mann who best embodied this deep ambivalence at the heart of the American society through the arch mythos of the western. Man of the West, which ranks as Mann’s masterpiece I feel, is a westernized version of King Lear by way of Kafka (and must have influenced Cormac McCarthy). It is a far darker film than any of Ford’s and part of the hallucinatory quality is the casting. Gary Cooper was twenty years too old his part and Lee J. Cobb twenty years too young for his. But no matter, the child is the father to man. Ray makes an astute observation about all of this when he says that those B movie noirs were the shadow versions of the prestige big budget studio films of the era. Preminger’s Where the Sidewalk Ends is one of the most genre co-mingled films of all time. But what it ultimately ends up being is — like most of Preminger’s films from the period — an exercise in sado masochism. For the sense of angst in American society as it entered the 50s and an era of McCarthyism and the cold war, was one of hollow pride and even more hollow confidence. The best films of the period reflected the suspicion these German emigre directors felt toward authority, and a sense of the toxic inheritance of Western values handed down, indirectly, though National Socialism. The world is terrifying and nobody can be trusted. And institutional authority is always abusive. The outlaw figure became the victim, usually, of a corrupt system. The lonely self isolating anti hero, in the films of these directors, always paid a heavy price for integrity. The West of Mann and Ford was one of Indian killers and avaricious railroad tycoons or cattle barons. The powerful always won, even when the script said they didn’t.

“It was the auteurists, with their emphasis on the point of intersection between individual filmmakers and their formula subjects, who attention to the locus of interest in the periods popular movies. { } The auteurists studied this tension for its ability to reveal personal and persumably ideosyncratic styles.”
Roert G. Ray

These films, noirs and 1950s westerns were both, in the end, doing the same thing. They were like secret messages that needed to be decoded. Although decoded is not quite the right word. They audience felt, instinctively perhaps, that they were not being told the truth — that the studios (the system) were hiding the real meaning. But on another level, the atmosphere of paranoia and menace was palpable and emotional. I’ve often wondered if Pinter didn’t learn much from both Hitchcock and directors like Siodmak and Lang. And mention should be made here, even if briefly, on the films of producer Val Lewton. For it was Lewton who was the one auteur producer. And his films didn’t even have the budget of B movies. He made RKO micro budget horror films imbued with a disquieting psychoanalytical pessimism. His greatest perhaps, Ghost Ship, was unseen for years because of legal tie ups. I Walked With a Zombie was a voodoo version of Jane Eyre, and one of the most haunting films of all time. The point here is to compare a Lewton film with a Jim Cameron film, or a Lang with the Cohn Brothers. The radical reduction of content is obvious but so is, what Ray called, *duplicity*. The sense of societies lies and betrayal. The Cohns are promoters of the status quo.-

In a sense, Ray’s critique of Hollywood ideology is the perfect treatment for the cartoon narrative of the Presidential election. If Lang were making a film of Hillary vs Trump, the actual narrative would focus on the intrigues and casual violence of the powerful, and a captive public consciousness that have lost the ability to read what is in front of them. The nearly comic villain, lurid and offensive, but who masks the story of the counterfeit heroine; a sociopathic maniac. And the real villain, the system that is killing everyone.