An American Zola

Theodore Dreiser was a Naturalist in the tradition of Emile Zola, but with a twist.  Maybe it was American puritanism, that Calvinist strain, or perhaps some other element of his personality, but man, could he lay on the doom.  Having just finished An American Tragedy, all 900+ pages of it, I feel as if I was run over by a steamroller.  And I’ve been feeling that way since page 100!

Clyde Griffiths (George Eastman in the Stevens’ film adaptation) has had a stunted youth, the child of impoverished street preachers who include him, even as a very young boy, in their curbside music and proselytizing.  Clyde doesn’t feel comfortable with this life from an early age – he always is restless and wanting something different.  Eventually, he breaks away, becoming a bellhop, and he enjoys the taste of the highlife that the job, and the tips that come with it, brings.  During a wild night out with some friends in he is a passenger in a car that runs over and kills a little girl:  he has to skip town, severing his relations with his family yet more deeply.

Eventually, he connects with his very rich uncle, who, feeling guilty about the way his evangelist brother was shafted in the matter of the family inheritance, decides to give the kid a chance in his factory, working from the bottom up.  He tells his family that there is no need to admit him to their provincial circle of the social élite, but Clyde besides being handsome and possessed of charming ‘soft’ manners, bears a striking resemblance to his cousin, the heir apparent at the factory.  It just wouldn’t do to shun him completely:  his face would give the story away and cause talk.  He is granted limited access to the Griffiths family.

Eventually, he breaks the rules and forms a romance with a factory girl:  she is pretty, and Clyde is subject to powerful sexual urges.  He also becomes a regular in the young-smart set of the Griffiths circle, and a powerful flirtation, then a romantic infatuation develops between him and a beautiful girl in that set.  He keeps his multiple romantic relations a secret, dooming him when the factory girl becomes pregnant.  At his wit’s end, his dream of marriage into society, wealth, ease, material opulence threatened, he plots her murder.  She is drowned, mostly through his actions, but there is, to the end, a little shred of ambiguity regarding his intent at the very last fatal moment of he life.

He is immediately caught, despite his ‘careful’ planning, tried, and convicted.  He dies in the chair.  It is all incredibly slow, detailed, crushing in its inevitability.  The characters in this tale are all presented as sympathetically as could be, while the author, from an Olympian perspective, dissects them coolly and dispassionately.  It was written and takes place in the 1920s, so some things are not discussed so freely as today, but more so than they were not long before.  Clyde’s visit to a brothel while working as a bellhop:

Prepared as Clyde was to dislike all this, so steeped had he been in the moods and maxims antipathetic to anything of its kind, still so innately sensual and romantic was his own disposition and so starved where sex was concerned, that instead of being sickened, he was quite fascinated. The very fleshly sumptuousness of most of these figures, dull and unromantic as might be the brains that directed them, interested him for the time being. After all, here was beauty of a gross, fleshly character, revealed and purchasable

And later:

 His was a disposition easily and often intensely inflamed by the chemistry of sex and the formula of beauty. He could not easily withstand the appeal, let alone the call, of sex. And by the actions and approaches of each in turn he was surely tempted at times, especially in these warm and languorous summer days, with no place to go and no single intimate to commune with. From time to time he could not resist drawing near to these very girls who were most bent on tempting him, although in the face of their looks and nudges, not very successfully concealed at times, he maintained an aloofness and an assumed indifference which was quite remarkable for him.

Everyone is ruled by their nature, formed by genetics and the social petri dishes in which they were cultured.  The unconscious, and sex, lurks unacknowledged, but powerful.  Not just Clyde, but the lawyer who sends him to the chair, the jurors, his defense, the doctors who refuse to give his girlfriend an abortion – they are all locked into the suffocating confines of the social machine.  Here’s Mason, the district attorney, determined to see him fry for his crime, and to make a political coup for himself in the process:

Mason was a short, broad-chested, broad-backed and vigorous individual physically, but in his late youth had been so unfortunate as to have an otherwise pleasant and even arresting face marred by a broken nose, which gave to him a most unprepossessing, almost sinister, look. Yet he was far from sinister. Rather, romantic and emotional. His boyhood had been one of poverty and neglect, causing him in his later and somewhat more successful years to look on those with whom life had dealt more kindly as too favorably treated. The son of a poor farmer’s widow, he had seen his mother put to such straits to make ends meet that by the time he reached the age of twelve he had surrendered nearly all of the pleasures of youth in order to assist her. And then, at fourteen, while skating, he had fallen and broken his nose in such a way as to forever disfigure his face. Thereafter, feeling himself handicapped in the youthful sorting contests which gave to other boys the female companions he most craved, he had grown exceedingly sensitive to the fact of his facial handicap. And this had eventually resulted in what the Freudians are accustomed to describe as a psychic sex scar.

In his dreaminess, he has something in common with Clyde, but he was deformed, and now he has that “sex scar.”  And there is the town, the jurors, the face of stolid morality, the herd mentality of the Christian rubes, which Clyde’s defense attorney scorns, but treats gingerly by necessity, as he questions Clyde on the stand:

He was a college graduate, and in his youth because of his looks, his means, and his local social position (his father had been a judge as well as a national senator from here), he had seen so much of what might be called near-city life that all those gaucheries as well as sex-inhibitions and sex-longings which still so greatly troubled and motivated and even marked a man like Mason had long since been covered with an easy manner and social understanding which made him fairly capable of grasping any reasonable moral or social complication which life was prepared to offer.

“Oh, I can’t say not entirely afterwards. I cared for her some — a good deal, I guess — but still not as much as I had. I felt more sorry for her than anything else, I suppose.”

“And now, let’s see — that was between December first last say, and last April or May — or wasn’t it?”  “About that time, I think — yes, sir.”

“Well, during that time — December first to April or May first you were intimate with her, weren’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Even though you weren’t caring for her so much.”

“Why — yes, sir,” replied Clyde, hesitating slightly, while the rurals jerked and craned at this introduction of the sex crime.

“And yet at nights, and in spite of the fact that she was alone over there in her little room — as faithful to you, as you yourself have testified, as any one could be — you went off to dances, parties, dinners, and automobile rides, while she sat there.”

“Oh, but I wasn’t off all the time.”

Clyde done wrong, but what were his chances in life?  Society stinks.  Capital punishment is brutal and inhuman.  Public officials are self-serving and venal.  (Mason is honest, but one of his staff plants evidence to further incriminate Clyde.  He needn’t have bothered, but he does anyway.)  The social élite are shallow, smug, and uncaring.  Society is a machine to grind you down, and it starts on page one and goes on, and on, and on…It’s a pretty damn impressive literary feat, if you can stand it!  Dreiser can create a stem winding dramatic courtroom oration as well as he can reproduce the  baby talk of a society princess teasing her beau.

When I began the book, I was struck by how unsympathetically Clyde was portrayed (or at least, without sympathy) compared to the film.  As I read on, however, I came to feel that George Stevens had done a remarkable job of adapting the book and bringing forward to the 1950s, both as a narrative, and in its approach to the audience.  One of the principal differences that I did find a little bit too much to accept in the film, is that Angela Vickers (Liz Taylor) visits Clyde just before his execution, after being kept completely out of view and out of the testimony of the trial.  She still loves him.

In the book, she sends him a brief anonymous, typewritten note that makes clear that she is emotionally distant from him now, although she recognizes how in love they were, and she will not forget him.  It is  in keeping with the ruthless presentation of class relations that is part of the book – she will get on with her social role in the world – and it is the final, crushing blow to Clyde.  As I noted in my post on the film, it is a social melodrama, and such uncompromising realism would have been out of place.

Soldier Blue

Solider Blue (1970), another one of those films I heard about when young, but never saw.  It made quite a stir with its depictions of savage violence against the Indians, one of the first ‘revisionist’ westerns, in the line of Little Big Man, Dances with Wolves, etc.  The film has been ruthlessly criticized in these two blogs:  Celluloid Wall; and Nothing is Written.  The second writer went so far as to call it a “tacky piece of filth.”

It’s really not a very good film, it’s true.  Candice Bergen somehow manages to keep her golden hair and white skin despite two years captivity with the Cheyenne, and the middle part is taken up with a silly romantic ‘comedy’ between the escaped soldier and her.  All told from the vantage point of the white man, yes.  Still, calling it “filth” seems extreme.  The writer says the violence at the end, depicting the Sand Creek Massacre is cartoonish and nearly’ laughable.’  Reading historical accounts of the events should dispel that notion.  One reviewer says the gore is ‘nearly exploitative.’  Nearly?  It is, or it isn’t.  Perhaps he meant that it made him uncomfortable, partly because he realized its representation was justified.

The film was  a flop.  The resemblance of the final, climactic atrocities to the recently reported Mai Lai massacre in Vietnam probably didn’t help, but again, it’s mostly of historical interest than an engaging piece of cinema.

The Fountainhead?

For a critical judgment of The Fountainhead (1949), I bow to the courtly derision of Bosley Crowther’s review from that year:

…a more curious lot of high-priced twaddle we haven’t seen for a long, long time.

With little to go on in the way of drama, he [Vidor] has worked for his emotional effects with clever cutting, heavy musical backing and having his actors speak and behave in solemn style.

I watched this film on the suggestion of Ducky’s Here who made this comment on my post regarding my abandoned attempt to read Atlas Shrugged. I agree; it’s a must-see.  There’s nothing like it, and since Ayn Rand was directly involved in creating and approving this film treatment, it sheds yet more light, if any is needed, on the essential kookiness of her ideas.

At the core of the story is a tale of sexual dominance and submission.  In the scene above, Dominique tells Roark that she will not, cannot be subdued.  He, the Male Principle, replies that it depends on the strength of the adversary.  She’s doomed, and she knows it. Nothing can keep her from going to his apartment, where he calmly awaits her submission.  But she cannot endure her slavery to passion, so she ‘escapes’ by marrying a man she doesn’t love, and whom she regards as corrupt.

Roark is supposed to be the noble man of ideas, suffering the derision of the Mob.  He wanders, solitary, like a samurai, following his code, not caring about his enemies.  His arch detractor, Toohey (rhymes with phooey) accosts him, and tries to engage him dialogue, just for the satisfaction of it, but Roark doesn’t even give him the time of day.

Toohey is an evil, hypocritical, power-hungry, ‘collectivist’ who despises people, loves humanity, and spares no means in pursuit of his ends.  In short, a socialist, and a sort of comic Stalin-in-waiting figure.  How amusing that the picture on the wall in his office here is a portrait of John Locke.  Rand getting cute with the production team, no doubt.

This scene also gets at the essential absurdity of this film and its story.  Toohey convinces a hack architect, a former classmate of Roark’s, to try to design a big project.  The hack can’t do it, and he begs Roark to design it for him, “just like you did in school.”  So, this habit of academic and professional fraud is natural to Mr. Roark, the honorable egoist?  And when his design is changed, he blows up the buildings, careless of property (John Locke would vomit) and human safety.  He gets off after an amazing speech to the jury in which he regurgitates Rand’s cockeyed philosophy.  (The speech is amazing for its length – Rand must have insisted on it.  The delivery is wooden.)

We may also wonder why, if “the masses” are so stupid, which is the point of much of Roark’s speech (they always denounce the geniuses who bring them gifts), why do they acquit him?  Apparently they can think?

The fountainhead refers to the spirit of the individual from which flows all human good.  Roark’s is polluted with plagiarism from his schoolboy days.  And maybe I’m asking too much from a Hollywood flick, but why is Roark’s trashy work seen as so avant garde, when by 1949, the International Modern Style was the favorite of corporate tycoons everywhere?

Dark Passage

Vincent Parry is on the lam after escaping from San Quentin where he was doing time for the murder of his wife.  Irene Jensen knows he didn’t do it, just as her father didn’t kill his wife, and she just happens to drive by during his escape from prison.  They become close.  He gets his face rearranged.  He goes to her house to recuperate.

The doc says he has to sleep on his back, with his arms tied to the bed to make certain he doesn’t turn over.  Good morning, Vince. Guess you’re feeling like you’d like to be untied now.

Engineer Hero addendum

In my post regarding engineers as heroes in popular entertainment, I neglected one movie that might not come up on everyone’s list.  I missed it!

Steve McQueen plays a chemical engineer in The Great Escape.  The sequences of him on his motorcycle, especially at the end, jumping the border wire into Switzerland, contain many iconic images, to use a much abused and overused word.  The fact that he is an engineer is not important to the plot as in the other films - it’s only mentioned in passing, but it is a piece of his characterization, emphasizing his no-nonsense, individualist, American practicality, in contrast to the smooth, worldly Brits who want to run the escape operation.  He just keeps trying to bust out on his own, until he finally joins the group effort.  A classic meme from Westerns; the loner and the community.

The moment when the camera zooms in on him, gunning the engine at the crest of a hill, as he says…”Switzerland!” is, well, iconic of heroic male individualism.  Best part of a movie that has its share of schmaltz.

Waste, Italian Style

Gomorrah (2008), a film by Matteo Garrone, is based on a journalistic account of crime families in the Naples region of Italy, by Roberto Saviano, who is certainly a very brave man, and whom Berlusconi denounced as unpatriotic.  It follows five stories of people whose lives, as are all lives in the region…in Italy? are touched by the mob:  two stupid young kids who dream of big time success as mobsters, and fancy themselves the new Scarfaces of Naples; a master tailor working in the illegal knock-off industry that produces counterfeit haute couture gowns; a young kid who wants to find his future with the local gang while a turf war rages; a mousey accountant who handles payouts and who finds himself in the middle of the same war and wants no part of it;  and a young college graduate who gets a job in the waste disposal business.

The film uses non-professional actors and is produced in a neo-realist, or vérité style:  it is profoundly disturbing.  I suggest it as a pendant to Mafioso for those in thrall to the Coppola-Scorsese melodrama view of the mafia.  Scorsese ‘presents’ this film, and I’m sure he thinks Goodfellas is similarly hard hitting, but in Gomorrah, an MTV soundtrack is notably absent.  For those with a special interest in waste, American or Italian style, this film is informative.  The northern industries send their toxic waste to the south, where it poisons the land.  The managers look the other way, assured that the disposal is clean,as the Americans say.  The price is irresistible.

The action takes place mostly in a neighborhood with architecture that looks like something out of the futurist dreams of Antonio St. Elia.

Slightly Scarlet?

Why, oh why is this film called Slightly Scarlett?  With two bombshell redheads, Rhonda Fleming and Arlene Dahl, Technicolor that seems almost lurid at times, and enough sin for a few films, Positively Scarlett would have been a better name!  Based on a James M. Cain novel, and released in 1956, it stars John Payne as the man in a full-blown noir maelström.

First a cranky note about preferences:  I know that The Postman Always Rings Twice, perhaps the most famous Cain-film noir adaptation, is revered as one of the greats, but I found it pretty tame and weak.  Then there are a lot of films that are billed as ‘noir’, at least on Netflix, that seem to me hardly to make the grade.  Union Station, with William Holden, is one of these:  Black and white, police work, suspense, but basically a procedural melodrama.  The only noir aspect, remarked by many, is the singularly rough treatment given the crooks, including a staged near-murder of one of them to scare him into talking.  In the end, the good guys win, everyone is happy, the crooks are dead.  Not in Slightly Scarlett!

Maybe it’s the Technicolor that causes the filmmakers to go slightly round the bend.  Think of Leave Her to Heaven, another color-noir that is mind-boggling.  John Payne also starred in Hell’s Island, a crazy and enjoyable color romp through the catalogue of film noir themes.  As for Scarlett, my Encyclopedia of Film Noir refers to it as ‘one of the most bizarre noir films‘ made while the Hollywood production code was in force, and it identifies many of its strange elements as the result of attempting to accommodate the censors.  That, and the director Allan Dwan’s taste for perversion.

Dorothy just got out of jail and there’s sister June to greet her.  Ben Grace is spying on them with a whopper of a lens. He works for the local mob boss, Solly Caspar, and he’s trying dig up dirt on a mayoral candidate running on a clean government platform.  June is the pol’s secretary and, platonic, love interest.   All Ben gets is some female cuddling.   What was Dorothy doing time for, I wonder?

How does June afford that house on a salary?  Solly was probably onto something thinking there was some hanky panky with Mr. Squeaky Clean.  When Dorothy gets there, she goes right for the booze, and something seems fishy between the girls.  We learn that June is a completely co-dependent family member, enabling Dorothy’s dispsomania, kleptomania, and nymphomania.  Maybe Dorothy doesn’t need a shrink…maybe she’s just bad!

Solly gets steamed watching that mealy-mouthed reformer call him names on the nightly news!  He’s angry that Ben didn’t get any material to use against him.

Ben has limits to what he will do, leading to a dressing down from Solly, who refers to him as ‘Genius,’ presumably because he went to college and speaks standard English.  Ben is a real noir type – Solly has his number:  “You’re not crooked, and you’re not straight.  You’ll take what crumbs you can get, but you don’t want any trouble.”

After humiliating Genius - Hey guys, remind me never to send my son to college…if I ever have a son!  Har har! – Solly shows how things are done by throttling the newspaper owner who supports the reform group.  Oops, he used a little too much force.  He’s dead!  Ben informs on him, and Solly has to skip town, leaving Genius to take over the rackets.

Will Solly gone, the Goo-goo get elected mayor, and Ben moves in on his secretary.  Tight clothes and lots of skin a part of the suburban scene, 50s style.  Check the view through the window.

Dorothy isn’t about to let sister have all the fun.

Just butting in…

Wow, that’s between a rock and a hard place!

Genius takes over the rackets, and does quite well with them.  He runs a tight ship, with a minimum of violence.  It’s just gambling anyway – somebody has to give people a place to have fun.

Ben gets wind that Solly has returned from being on the lam, and it’s time to scram.  There’s a lot of money in the safe at Solly’s beach house, enough for him to skip the country. The scenes of the ocean remind me of my childhood in southern California.  Dorothy tags along with Ben while he searches the place:  maybe he does a little exploring of her secret places too, but it’s only hinted at.   Dorothy is pretty looped, as usual, and with that interior, those colors! – who could blame her?  Anyway, she’s always running riot in somebody else’s house – her sister’s, Solly’s beach house, Solly’s mansion, now lived in by Ben – that’s what she likes to do.

She goes a little too far, playing the pretty mermaid with a harpoon gun.

One last shoplifting run and the cops are on to Dorothy.  She’s all set up to head back to the joint because this store detective isn’t taking any excuses – “She’s ill.  She needs a doctor! – from June.  Poor June – she’d ruin her own life to save Dorothy.  Maybe the morality squad just couldn’t stomach a really evil woman:  just say she needs a shrink and it’s okay for public consumption…

The latest run in with the law sends Dorothy over the edge.  She ends up at Solly’s beach house and finds him there, waiting to take revenge on Ben.  Meanwhile, he has a little fun with the fetching nympho, watching TV, running barefoot through piles of money… that sort of thing.

June shows up, and Solly is all set to plug her and dump her over the terrace into the sea.  After all, she must have been part of sending him on the lam so her boyfriend could be the Mr. Clean mayor.

Dorothy is just loving it!  She’d love to see Solly plug her sister – it would be fun!

Doesn’t work out that way…June shoots Solly with the harpoon, Ben rushes in to save the day, but he’s got to hold off the hoods until the cops arrive.  Solly tells his thugs to take care of Ben, but he taunts Solly for being not ‘big enough‘ to do it himself.  Do what?  Not big enough where?

Genius takes a few bullets in his body to protect the ladies.  Pretty masochistic.

As Genius bleeds on the rug, the cops and the mayor arrive.  Cops wear fedoras, pols wear homburgs:  I have both.  Mr. Clean and the cop confer.  June weeps over Ben’s not quite dead body.  Mr. Clean and June share an awkward moment:  can they get together again?

The ambulance takes Ben away and Mr. Mayor goes to retrieve hysterical Dorothy.  It’s all going to be okay.  June will be with the mayor, Dorothy will go to a mental hospital, Solly is headed to Alcatraz, and Ben… nowhere to be seen.

Pollack Paranoia

Three Days of the Condor (1975) is a conspiracy thriller by Sydney Pollack about a renegade CIA section.  There were a lot of movies then about that sort of thing:  Watergate; JFK’s assassination; Vietnam – any nutty theory seemed to have some traction.  Unlike The Parallax View of 1974 by Pakula, which is darker and takes itself much, much more seriously, I thoroughly enjoyed this film, while I found the Pakula number predictable and pretentious.  I guess I like Redford more than Beatty too.  (I still want to know how they filmed that scene on the Seattle Space Needle at the start of Parallax though!)

Redford plays Joe Turner, a CIA researcher who returns from a lunchtime errand with the office’s sandwiches to find everyone murdered.  Why would  anyone rub out a bunch of nerdy intelligence analysts?  He may be an egghead bookworm, but he’s also Redford, so he can fight and think on his feet like James Bond:  not quite believable.

He forces Cathy (Faye Dunaway) to shelter him, she falls for him, of course, and they sleep together.  The next day, she’s feeling a bit skittish.  He tells her, “You don’t have to help me.“  She replies, “Oh no, you can count on me, the old spy fucker…“  He’s annoyed.  A funny bit; part of what makes this thriller a little quirky.

The film is shot in New York City, and it’s a real treat to see the locations.  It’s NYC in the 70s, the NYC I remember, even when I’m walking around the spic-and-span streets of today near Central Park – The NYC of humungus cars lumbering down potholed streets, garbage on the sidewalk, and grime.  Several of the shots of CIA headquarters in NYC are in the World Trade Center, a deliciously sick irony, given the fate of those structures and the CIA ineptitude that helped bring it on.  Here, the Hoboken train station take on a noir/Casablanca atmosphere as Turner walks away from Cathy, maybe to his death.

Cliff Robertson (sporting a massive, windblown rug) plays Higgins, the CIA guy trying to get Turner:  is he on Joe’s side, or does he put The Company first?  Here he stares at a primitive version of Google Maps trying to locate Joe from a phone call, but Joe was too clever to be tracked.

Joe finds the CIA guy who rubbed out his friends so that a secret rogue CIA plan to invade the Middle East wouldn’t be uncovered.  Turner realizes it was all about oil.  Sounds familiar.  The 1973 oil crisis was a recent memory.

John Houseman is the old CIA hand who craves “the clarity” of yesteryear.  Max von Sydow is  Joubert the hired murderer who has found clarity in “the precision” of his work.  He doesn’t have to worry about which side pays.  He has found peace.  He and Joe have a little man to man outside of the renegade’s house.  Joe seems cool with the fact that Mr. Death (yep, Max has a lot of experience with The Grim Reaper) knocked off his colleagues:  he’s a bit overwhelmed by it all, and asks for a lift to the train station.  This was another of the enjoyable, unpredictable elements in this film.

Joe is not quite through with The Company.  He meets Higgins again, who tries to justify the whole dirty business, although, of course, that renegade went too far.  They have a little debate about democratic accountability with Turner taking the high road, “ask the people what they want,” and Higgins telling him that when they are out of gas, hungry and cold, they will just want the ‘authorities’ to get it done, and not ask why.  He has a point, doesn’t he?

The moral ambiguity of the ending, the unresolved romance, the unknown future of Joe Turner is what makes this movie really fun.  Joe tells Higgins that the New York Times now has the whole story.  He thinks that will protect him:  he doesn’t quite trust Higgins to be gentle with him, despite Higgins’ show of concern for his welfare.  After all, Joubert told him not to trust anyone.  Higgins is aghast – another Pentagon Papers debacle – but as Joe walks away, he calls to him.  How far can you walk?  “How do you know they’ll print it?“  “They’ll print it,” shouts Joe, but he doesn’t seem totally convinced.

Sydney Pollack turns up at the end of Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick’s final work, and a terrible disappointment to me.  He gives the low down to Tom Cruise who cannot fathom the corrupt orgy he’s witnessed.  Pollack tells him that the high and mighty, the secret governing class, they do things you wouldn’t believe, if you only knew.  Yeah, yeah, I read the papers, we know.  It’s a pretty silly denouement.

Oops…what if they don’t print it?

La politique noir

From film noir to la politique noir, and I don’t mean ‘black politics’, as in Black Power.   My reading and viewing have converged at what Philip Pomper, in his biography of Sergei Nechaev, calls, “[the] striking lesson in the disastrous possibilities of revolutionary politics.”  Extreme disturbed personalities, fantastic rhetoric, and violence.  Patty Hearst, Dostoyevsky’s Demons, Ed Begley as a lunatic Texan Cold Warrior, and Nechaev, fact and fiction.  Let’s start with Ms. Hearst.

Patty Hearst, a film from 1988, directed by Paul Schrader, with Natasha Richardson in the lead, is hard to find, but you can get it on DVD.  It doesn’t seem to be an official release, whatever that means, but it is a very fine dramatization of this crazy episode in revolutionary fringe politics.  Schrader is sympathetic to, but not sentimental about Hearst:  a young, sheltered girl who thought she knew a thing or two about the world is kidnapped and kept in a closet for weeks, blindfolded and gagged, treated like a dog, and raped (made a sperm receptacle) by her captors, male, and it seems female as well.  We would all like to think that we would come through this okay, and escape at the first opportunity, rather than imploding and joining the gang, so, as she tells us at the end, her survival, ‘rescue’, and trial were mightily inconvenient for the mass audience following every sordid minute of the tale.

I’ve written about the Symbionese Liberation Front and their rhetoric before, and the film does a great job of dramatizing it.  Ving Rhames (Marsellus in Pulp Fiction) uses that deep voice of his to convey the  incantatory and delusional charisma of Field Marshal Cinque.   The thing is, that as I’m watching it, I’m thinking of Dostoyevsky’s novel, Demons.  After Patty has joined The Cause, and is helping plan a bank job, she asks, “Will the rest of The Army help us with it?“  Everyone chuckles, and Cinque replies, “It’s just us, there is no army.“  Did Pyotr Verkhovensky really have a network of cells communicating with him?  Some characters wondered.  The similarities multiply.

The members of Hearst’s cell are all white, except for their leader, Cinque, and they all have a major case of white radical guilt.  When Hearst complains that she is hungry, they tell her “This is how black people in our country live every day!  You don’t know!”   Every word Cinque utters is considered brilliant.  At one point, a cell member responds to a rather inept and non-sequitur comment with, “Brilliant, that’s brilliant!  Goddamn it , goddamn I wish I was black!“  Later, he is shown in blackface makeup, the usual disguise they use, attempting to strike a streetwise pose.  This corrosive guilt and lack of self-esteem it brings to political thinking was not new in the 60′s:  Nechaev was very successful in exploiting it in his recruitment of middle-class and upper-class Russians of his own time.

It is well-known the Demons draws heavily on the trial record of Sergei Nechaev, who had a brief period of power within the chaotic Russian revolutionary movement.  He was a manipulator, a liar, a thief, and totally – that’s actually an understatement – unprincipled.  When he started his own journal, it was called The People’s Revenge.   He bilked Herzen and his daughter out of thousands, tried to seduce her after the old socialist’s death, played Bakunin like a fiddle, and committed so many frauds – he was always claiming to have legions of followers at his beck and call – that Bakunin’s association with him gave Marx the leverage to get Bakunin kicked out of the International, that pesky, infantile, anarchist!  (In fact, I have discovered, there is a scholarly literature on the Russophobia of Karl Marx.  He thought they, the Russian revolutionaries, were a bit nuts – how’s that for communist irony!)

What I found  surprising regarding Demons, is how closely some parts of the novel are modeled on Nechaev’s life.  The central murder of the book, in fact, conforms almost exactly to the facts of the case – the botched disposal of the corpse in a pond; luring the victim with a story of a buried press; and the almost comic disorganization of the killers.  We must recall, after all, that Dostoyevsky originally was planning a comic burlesque of nihilist politics when he began his story.  The Wise Serpent of Demons, combines many of Nechaev’s personality traits with a cunning and slyness that the real-life figure lacked.  Nechaev moved with clumsy and ill-concealed cynicism towards his goals, eventually disgusting most of those he worked with in the revolutionary underground.  Still, he was committed to the cause, fanatically, so they cut him a lot of slack.

Pomper dissects his life with a lens tinted with psychoanalytic hues, but not intrusively so:  the Oedipal, infantile anti-authoritarian, and perverse sexual mental contortions of his thinking are quite plain in his writings.  One of his favorite propaganda tropes was to depict the orgiastic and revolting sexual activities of the Tsar, the nobles, or of whomever he was attacking.  Obviously, this sort of rhetoric has a long history – often turned against Jews – and it had a grand future, being part of the revolutionary stock in trade right up to 1917.  His language makes use of religious themes as well, particularly martyrdom, for which he planned, and is in this way curiously linked to the imagery of What Is to Be Done?

I originally bought Pomper’s  biography hoping to find more writings of Nechaev’s, but apart from some letters, and excerpts from articles he wrote, and, of course, the full text of his Catechism, there was not much.  I was particularly disappointed by the absence of a translation of his Foundations for a Future Social Order, the document in which he lays out his plans for society after the revolutionary transformation.  From the bits I have read of and about it, it is a grim vision of a militantly regimented society that seems drawn from the history of ancient Sparta and Fourier’s utopian plans.  What particularly upset some (according to Nechaev) were his notions of communal dining.  This led to Marx’s famous contemptuous dismissal of his ideas as “barracks communism.”  In his world, Pechorin would be less than superfluous:  he would be a pest to be exterminated.

Was Nechaev on his mind when Italo Calvino wrote Beheading the Heads?  In this short story, a tourist happens upon a land where the leaders are ritually executed periodically (as were some kings in ancient times, if The Golden Bough is to be believed).  The action then jumps back in time to show us the nihilist cells planning for The Revolution, after which there will be no leaders other than those who agree to die, and so prevent tyranny.  One man questions whether they should not ritually execute the leaders of their cells since that is what they plan for society.  Are they not hypocrites if they do not?  Naturally, there is some hesitation on this point amongst the revolutionary heads.  They hit upon a compromise:  they will ritually mutilate the leaders at suitable intervals, leaving the post-revolutionary society to fully implement their plan.  It concludes with descriptions of revolutionary activity led by men with no fingers, missing ears, sometimes a wooden leg, each vanished appendage a testament to their zeal for the New World Order.

Finally, we have Ken Russell’s film, Billion Dollar Brain (1967), with the always enjoyable Michael Caine.  It’s basically, a mediocre spy film that followed Caine’s work as Harry Palmer in The Ipcress File.  The film is enlivened by Karl Malden playing an utter sleaze of an ex-agent gone ‘entrepreneur’  working for ‘General’ Midwinter (Ed Begley), a fanatical anti-communist zillionaire from Texas.  Midwinter is angry at the world, at the government (the password between his men is always, “now is the Winter of our discontent“) and most of all at the commies.  He has a secret plan to use germ warfare against the Russians while his private army of rebels in Latvia begin the dissolution of the Evil Empire.   He mixes Christian fundamentalism with anti-Russian hellfire to work up enthusiasm among his ‘employees’, while his plans are being completely undermined by Malden’s diversion of the mercenaries payroll into his own pocket.  The Russians are onto him too, and they efficiently dispose of his army in an air attack on the frozen Baltic that brings to mind Alexander Nevksy’s victory at Novogorod.  Perhaps it takes a Brit to penetrate to the center of the American Texas phenomenon.  In this case, Russell’s exaggeration was no exaggeration.