The City in Cinema Mini-Documentaries Reveal the Los Angeles of Blade Runner, Her, Drive, Repo Man, and More

in Film | December 29th, 2014

What do movies like Blade Runner, Her, Drive, and Repo Man, separated by the years and even more so by their sensibilities, have in common? All come from auteur directors, all have accumulated considerable fan followings, and all have styles all their own. But to my mind, one important quality unites them more than any other: all take place in Los Angeles. What’s more, all take place in a distinctive vision of Los Angeles, that most photographed but least understood city in the world. Every feature film that uses Los Angeles as something more than a backdrop, whether it tries to represent or reimagine it, also acts as an accidental documentary of the city: of its built environment, of its people, of the ever-shifting ideas we have of it.

On that premise, I created Los Angeles, the City in Cinema, a series of video essays meant to examine the variety of Los Angeleses revealed in the films set there, both those new and old, mainstream and obscure, respectable and schlocky, appealing and unappealing — just like the contradictory characteristics of the city itself. At the top of the post, you can watch my episode on Blade Runner, Ridley Scott’s 1982 proto-cyberpunk future noir that remains, to this day, the popular idea of the Los Angeles of the future (as evidenced by the pejorative currency of the term “Blade Runner-ization” among NIMBYs): denser, darker, thoroughly Asianized, and taken back to a third-world industrial phase it never really passed through in the first place.

But more recently, a competing vision of Los Angeles’ future emerged in the form of Her, Spike Jonze’s tale of a mustachioed, ukulele-playing milquetoast who falls in love with a sentient computer operating system. He does so in the high-rises and high-speed trains of, by comparison to Blade Runner, a glossier, gentler, future Los Angeles not only free of killer android replicants but — even more surprisingly to many an Angeleno — free of cars. My video essay on Her compares and contrasts Scott and Jonze’s ideas of what lies ahead for the city: would you rather live in the former’s Los Angeles, hybridized with a grittier, less orderly Tokyo, or the latter’s, hybridized with a sanitized Shanghai?

Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive gave us a new take on the old tradition of European filmmakers examining Los Angeles with a kind of perplexed fascination, as previously exemplified by John Boorman’s Point Blank, Jacques Deray’s  The Outside Man, and Jacques Demy’s Model Shop. English cult director Alex Cox added his own rough-edged volume to that shelf with 1984’s sci-fi punk favorite Repo Man. In 2000, Cox’s countryman Mike Figgis pulled off his real-time, four-screen experiment Timecode on the Sunset Strip, not far from the strip club where John Cassavetes set much of The Killing of a Chinese Bookie more than twenty years earlier. You can find video essays on these movies and others on the list of those I’ve produced so far:

New videos, including episodes on this year’s solid Los Angeles pictures, Nightcrawler and the Thomas Pynchon adaptation Inherent Vice, will appear regularly. If you live anywhere near Portland, Oregon, note that I’ll give a talk and screening there entitled “Los Angeles and Portland: The Cities in Cinema” at the Hollywood Theatre, featuring never-before-seen video essays on both Los Angeles and Portland films, on January 25, 2015. Keep an eye on their site for details.

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Chaos Cinema: A Breakdown of How 21st-Century Action Films Became Incoherent

Watch 7 New Video Essays on Wes Anderson’s Films: Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums & More

A Drone’s Eye View of Los Angeles, New York, London, Bangkok & Mexico City

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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Werner Herzog Plays Himself in Cartoon That Satirizes Obama’s 2008 Election & Race in America

in Comics/Cartoons, Current Affairs, Politics | December 29th, 2014

The United States has two important cultural means of self-examination—the work of foreign observers and of domestic satirists. In the former category, we have the longstanding example of political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville and the much bleaker, contemporary vision of Werner Herzog. As for the latter, we have venerable literary heroes like Mark Twain and more populist, contemporary voices like Chris Rock, Stephen Colbert, and cartoonist Aaron McGruder, creator of the comic strip-turned-animated series The Boondocks. In 2010, the Season 3 debut episode of the biting Adult Swim show brought these two traditions together, as McGruder took on the election of America’s first black president by imagining a German documentarian—Herzog—who examines the nation’s response through interviews with the show’s characters.

The clip above will give you an idea of the general tone. Herzog plays an exaggerated version of himself, complete with stereotypically German expressions of existential despair. The Freeman family, the show’s center, represents an also-exaggerated range of responses from black Americans to Obama’s election. Huey, the young black radical (“retired”), expresses a deep, cynical skepticism. His brother Riley has a total disregard for the social and political import of the election, confident instead that a black president will give him a license to do what he wants. And the brothers’ grandfather Robert, a Civil Rights veteran, displays an unqualified optimism and nostalgic pride for his activist days. The full episode also satirizes a certain ill-informed rapper with a character called Thugnificent and certain superficial white progressives (“Obama Guy” and “Obama Girl”). And, of course, belligerent reactionary Uncle Ruckus gets his say.

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By the time of its airing, the episode was already nearly two years late in its comment on the events, making it feel, wrote the A.V. Club’s Todd VanDerWerff, “like an instant period piece.” Perhaps now it seems downright paleolithic in the timescale of political commentary. Making this kind of cultural critique seem relevant outside of the immediate moment is a challenge writers on The Daily Show confront, well, daily. But here, the content holds up, not only because Herzog has a way of making everything timeless, but also because “the episode takes us back to… the way [Barack Obama] managed to make almost every single one of his supporters believe that he was going to do what THEY most wanted him to do and not what he had actually promised to do.” In many ways, the country is still recovering from a brutal hangover after this post-2008 election high.

Whether the president is fully to blame for encouraging false hopes—and fears—is highly debatable. In any case, the characters’ outsized expectations or expressions of apathy or virulent outrage mirror many of the responses of both liberals and conservatives. But it seems that both the left and right shared at least one hope: that the election of the country’s first black president would put an end to its oldest, deepest, most persistent ill. “At the end of the episode,” writes VanDerWerff, “most of the characters seem disappointed that Obama didn’t completely rewrite the space-time continuum, that America still struggles with race.” An understatement perhaps even in 2010, the phrase “still struggles with race” is even more so today, for reasons both obvious and less so.

That the United States—despite the continued efforts of a great many activists and some few legislators—is still riven with deep racial divides, and that these represent the persistence of a historical legacy, should not be matters in much dispute. A multitude of academic analyses on “staggering disparities” in policing practices, imbalances in the justice system, and profound wealth inequality and discrimination in housing and employment bear out the claim. How we talk about these issues, who is authorized to do so, and what can be done about it, on the other hand, are matters of considerable, seemingly unending debate. It has always seemed particularly ironic that many comedians—from Richard Pryor to Chris Rock and Louis CK—have achieved much of their mainstream success by telling hard truths about the state of race in America, truths few people seem to want to hear. When those messages come from non-entertainers, for example, the backlash can be swift and vicious.

But this is nothing new. From the candor of Shakespeare’s jesters to Swift’s poison pen to, yes, The Boondocks, humor and satire have served as vehicles for what we would otherwise suppress or repress. (No need to be a Freudian to acknowledge the point). In this episode, the satirical target isn’t only Obama’s supporters and detractors at home—though they get their due. Herzog’s editorial intrusions also satirize some woefully naïve, ahistorical expectations of a global, or at least European, community. As the Herzog character puts it in his second question to Huey, “now that it looks like Obama is going to win, as a black African American Negro, are you merely excited, or are you extremely excited that everything is going to change forever.” VanDerWerff reads Huey’s apathetic response to such grandiosity as an expression of McGruder’s view that idealism is “both an unsustainable tragedy and the only rational response to a world that’s hopelessly screwed.” But in the face of unbridled idealism, Huey’s hard-bitten realism is tonic: “Hope,” he says, “is irrational.” So also, perhaps, is despair.

Watch the full episode here and read a complete summary here.

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Steven Spielberg’s Obama, Starring Daniel Day Lewis as the President

David Remnick on Obama

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Watch a Music Video & Hear Tracks From Maya Angelou’s Posthumous Hip-Hop Album, Caged Bird Songs

in Music, Poetry | December 29th, 2014

Before she died earlier this year, Maya Angelou was working on Caged Bird Songs, a musical collaboration that features Angelou reciting her poems and producers Shawn Rivera and RoccStarr blending them with modern day hip-hop. After her passing, Angelou’s estate continued nudging the project along. Eventually the 13-song album was released in November, and now comes a music video. The video (above) centers around “Harlem Hopscotch,” a poem Angelou wrote in 1969. The text of the poem is available over at the Poetry Foundation. You can hear more tracks from the album below, or purchase the complete album here:

via Metafilter

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Kurt Vonnegut Reveals “Why My Dog Is Not a Humanist” in His Humanist of the Year Award Speech (1992)

in Life, Literature, Philosophy, Religion, Sci Fi, Science | December 26th, 2014

Note: Vonnegut starts talking at around the 3:40 mark.

This is humanism, as explained by biochemist, science fiction author and former president of the American Humanist Association Isaac Asimov:

Humanists believe that human beings produced the progressive advance of human society and also the ills that plague it. They believe that if the ills are to be alleviated, it is humanity that will have to do the job. They disbelieve in the influence of the supernatural on either the good or the bad of society, on either its ills or the alleviation of those ills.

There’s a widely disseminated Kurt Vonnegut quote that puts things even more succinctly:

I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without any expectation of rewards or punishment after I’m dead.

It’s a definition Vonnegut, Asimov’s honorary successor as AHA president, a scientist’s son, and, famously, a survivor of the firebombing of Dresden, embodied, though surely not the only one he coined.

In his 1992 acceptance speech for the association’s Humanist of the Year award, above, he recalls how a student pressed him for a definition. He chose to fob the kid off on better paid colleagues at the University of Iowa, but privately came up with another take:

…a humanist, perhaps, was somebody who was crazy about human beings, who, like Will Rogers, had never met one he didn’t like. That certainly did not describe me. It did describe my dog, though.

As the title of Vonnegut’s speech implies (“Why My Dog is Not a Humanist”), Sandy, his undiscriminating Hungarian sheepdog, ultimately fell short of satisfying the criteria that would have labelled him a humanist. He lacked the capacity for rational thought of the highest order, and moreover, he regarded all humans – not just Vonnegut – as gods.

Ergo, your dog is probably not a humanist either.

Characteristically, Vonnegut ranged far and wide in his consideration of the matter, touching on a number of topics that remain germane, some 20 years after his remarks were made: race, excessive force, the treatment of prisoners…and Bill Cosby.

For introduction to humanism, please see:  Stephen Fry Explains Humanism in 4 Animated Videos: Happiness, Truth and the Meaning of Life & Death

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Ayun Halliday is an author, homeschooler, Hoosier and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday

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David Lynch and Moby Talk Blues Guitar, Meditation, Quinoa & the Joy of Los Angeles

in Film, Music | December 26th, 2014

Electronic musician Moby and maker of disturbing films David Lynch might, at first, seem an odd conversational pair. What could the shaven-headed Generation Xer from New York who made the album Play have in common with the messily yet elaborately coiffed Baby Boomer from Montana who made the movie Blue Velvet? But as the recorded event from this year’s International Music Summit demonstrates, they’ve got a lot to talk about. Enthusiasts of both creators may know that they actually do have professional connections: Lynch directed the music video for Moby’s “Shot in the Back of the Head,” Moby has made his music free to filmmakers, and Lynch has even recorded an album of his own, complete with troubling video.

They’ve even become friends, ones close enough that Lynch just calls Moby “Mo,” and Moby once gave Lynch a slide guitar as a present. They’ve got such a rapport, in fact, that Moby can ask Lynch, leadingly and admittedly so, if Lynch considers that slide guitar the best present he ever received. He asks it, in fact, right up there onstage at the IMS, along with such other questions, pre-written on a sheet, as “Have you ever grown maggots?,” “Is Inland Empire my favorite movie of the last ten years?,” “What would your favorite birthday meal be, keeping in mind this is a conference about electronic music?,” “Do we fear death?,” and “Would you like to grow quinoa in your backyard?”

Though both Moby and Lynch love their quinoa, they make even more of a connection over their city of residence, Los Angeles. The former points out that three of the latter’s pictures — Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, and Inland Empire — star not any particular human actor, but Los Angeles itself. “Anything goes,” Lynch explains about the city that inspires him (sometimes, no doubt, during the meditation sessions he also discusses here) with its light and its jasmine-scented air. “You’re free to think and do things” — two pursuits that both of these guys have engaged in, unceasingly and fruitfully, over their entire careers.

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David Lynch Teaches You to Cook His Quinoa Recipe in a Weird, Surrealist Video

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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How the “Paul McCartney is Dead” Hoax Started at an American College Newspaper and Went Viral (1969)

in Music | December 26th, 2014

Next time you see the still-youthful and musically prolific Paul McCartney, take a good hard look and ask yourself, “is it really him?” Can you be sure? Because maybe, just maybe, the conspiracy theorists are right—maybe Paul did die in a car accident in 1966 and was replaced by a double who looks, sounds, acts, and writes almost exactly like him. Almost. It’s possible. Entirely implausible, wholly improbable, but within the realm of physical possibility.

In fact, the rumor of Paul’s death and replacement by some kind of pod person imposter cropped up not once, but twice during the sixties. First, in January, 1967, immediately after an accident involving McCartney’s Mini Cooper that month. The car, driven by Moroccan student Mohammad Hadjij, crashed on the M1 after leaving McCartney’s house en route to Keith Richard’s Sussex Mansion. Hadjij was hospitalized, but not killed, and Paul, riding in Mick Jagger’s car, arrived at the destination safely.

The following month, the Beatles Book Monthly magazine quashed rumors that Paul had been driving the Mini and had died, writing, “there was absolutely no truth in it at all, as the Beatles’ Press Officer found out when he telephoned Paul’s St. John’s Wood home and was answered by Paul himself who had been at home all day with his black Mini Cooper Safely locked up in the garage.” “The magazine,” writes the Beatles Bible, “downplayed the incident, and claimed the car was in McCartney’s possession.”

In 1969, rumors of Paul’s death and a conspiracy to cover it up began circulating again, this time with an impressive apparatus that included publications in college and local newspapers, discussions on several radio shows, a university research team, and enough esoteric clues to keep highly suspicious, stoned, and/or paranoid, minds guessing for decades afterward. The formless gossip first officially took shape in print in the article “Is Beatle Paul McCartney Dead?” in Iowa’s Drake University student newspaper, the Times-Delphic. Cataloguing “an amazing series of photos and lyrics on the group’s albums” that pointed to “a distinct possibility that McCartney may indeed be insane, freaked out, even dead,” the piece dives headfirst into the kind of bizarre analysis of disparate symbols and tenuous coincidences worthy of the most dogged of today’s conspiracy-mongers.

mccartneyhoax

 

Invoked are ephemera like “a mysterious hand” raised over Paul’s head on the Sgt. Pepper’s cover—“an ancient death symbol of either the Greeks or the American Indians”—and Paul’s bass, lying “on the grave at the group’s feet.” The lyric “blew his mind out in a car” from “A Day in the Life” comes up, and more photographic evidence from the album’s back cover and centerfold photo. Evidence is produced from Magical Mystery Tour and The White Album. Of the latter, you’ve surely heard, or heard of, the voice seeming to intone, “Turn me on, dead man,” and “Cherish the dead,” when “Revolution No. 9” is played backwards. Only a college dorm room could have nurtured such a discovery.

The article reads like a parody—similar to the subversive, half-serious satirical weirdness common to the mid-sixties hippie scene. But whether or not its author, Tim Harper, meant to pull off a hoax, the Paul is dead meme went viral when it hit the airwaves the following month. First, a caller to Detroit radio station WKNR transmitted the theory to DJ Russ Gibb. Their hour-long conversation lead to a review of Abbey Road in The Michigan Daily titled “McCartney Dead; New Evidence Brought to Light.” With tongue in cheek, writer Fred LaBour called the death and replacement of Paul “the greatest hoax of our time and the subsequent founding of a new religion based upon Paul as Messiah.” In the mode of paranoid conspiracy theory so common to the time—a genre mastered by Thomas Pynchon as a literary art—LaBour invented even more clues, inadvertently feeding a public hungry for this kind of thing. “Although clearly intended as a joke,” writes the Beatles Bible, “it had an impact far wider than the writer and his editor expected.”

Part of the aftermath came in two more radio shows that October of 1969. First, in two parts at the top, New York City DJ Roby Yonge makes the case for McCartney’s death on radio station WABC-AM. Recycling many of the “clues” from the previous sources, he also contends that a research team of 30 students at Indiana University has been put on the case. Yonge plainly states that some of the clues only emerge “if you really get really, really high… on some, you know, like, mind-bending drug,” but this proviso doesn’t seem to undermine his confidence in the shaky web of connections.

Was Yonge’s broadcast just an attention grabbing act? Maybe. The next Paul is Dead radio show, just above, is most certainly an Orson Welles-like publicity stunt. Broadcast on Halloween night, 1969, on Buffalo, NY’s WKBW, the show employs several of the station’s DJs, who construct a detailed and dramatic narrative of Paul’s death. The broadcast indulges the same album-cover and lyric divination of the earlier Paul is Dead media, but by this time, it’s grown pretty hoary. But for a small contingent of die-hards, the rumor was mostly put to rest just a few days later when Life magazine published a cover photograph of Paul—who had been out of the public eye after the Beatles’ breakup—with his wife Linda and their kids. Paraphrasing Mark Twain, McCartney famously remarked in the interview inside, “Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated,” and added, “If I was dead, I’m sure I’d be the last to know.”

In later interviews, the Beatles denied having anything to do with the hoax. Lennon told Rolling Stone in 1970 that the idea of them intentionally planting obscure clues in their albums “was bullshit, the whole thing was made up.” The hoax did make for some interesting publicity—even featuring in the storyline of a Batman comics issue—but the band mostly found it baffling and annoying. Certain fans, however, refused to let it die, and there are those who still swear that Paul’s imposter, allegedly named Billy Shears and sometimes called “Faul,” still walks the earth. Paul is Dead websites proliferate on the internet—some more, some less convincing; all of them outlandish, and all offering a fascinating descent into the seemingly bottomless rabbit hole of conspiracy theory. If that’s your kind of trip, you can easily get lost—as did pop culture briefly in 1969—in endless “Paul is Dead” speculation.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Fill Your New Kindle, iPad, iPhone, eReader with Free eBooks, Movies, Audio Books, Online Courses & More

in Audio Books, e-books, Film, iPad, Online Courses | December 25th, 2014

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Santa left a new Kindle, iPad, Kindle Fire or other media player under your tree. He did his job. Now we’ll do ours. We’ll tell you how to fill those devices with free intelligent media — great books, movies, courses, and all of the rest. And if you didn’t get a new gadget, fear not. You can access all of these materials on the good old fashioned computer. Here we go:

Free eBooks: You have always wanted to read the great works. And now is your chance. When you dive into our Free eBooks collection you will find 700 great works by some classic writers (Dickens, Dostoevsky, Shakespeare and Tolstoy) and contemporary writers (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov, and Kurt Vonnegut). The collection also gives you access to the 51-volume Harvard Classics.

If you’re an iPad/iPhone user, the download process is super easy. Just click the “iPad/iPhone” links and you’re good to go. Kindle and Nook users will generally want to click the “Kindle + Other Formats links” to download ebook files, but we’d suggest watching these instructional videos (Kindle – Nook) beforehand.

Free Audio Books: What better way to spend your free time than listening to some of the greatest books ever written? This page contains a vast number of free audio books — 630 works in total — including texts by Arthur Conan Doyle, James Joyce, Jane Austen, Edgar Allan Poe, George Orwell and more recent writers — Italo Calvino, Vladimir Nabokov, Raymond Carver, etc. You can download these classic books straight to your gadgets, then listen as you go.

[Note: If you’re looking for a contemporary book, you can download one free audio book from Audible.com. Find details on Audible’s no-strings-attached deal here.]

Free Online Courses: This list brings together over 1100 free online courses from leading universities, including Stanford, Yale, MIT, UC Berkeley, Oxford and beyond.

These full-fledged courses range across all disciplines — history, physics, philosophy, psychology, business, and beyond. Most all of these courses are available in audio, and roughly 75% are available in video. You can’t receive credits or certificates for these courses (click here for courses that do offer certificates). But the amount of personal enrichment you will derive is immeasurable.

Free Movies: With a click of a mouse, or a tap of your touch screen, you will have access to 700 great movies. The collection hosts many classics, westerns, indies, documentaries, silent films and film noir favorites. It features work by some of our great directors (Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Andrei Tarkovsky, Stanley Kubrick, Jean-Luc Godard and David Lynch) and performances by cinema legends: John Wayne, Jack Nicholson, Audrey Hepburn, Charlie Chaplin, and beyond. On this one page, you will find thousands of hours of cinema bliss.

Free Language Lessons: Perhaps learning a new language is high on your list of New Year’s resolutions. Well, here is a great way to do it. Take your pick of 46 languages, including Spanish, French, Italian, Mandarin, English, Russian, Dutch, even Finnish, Yiddish and Esperanto. These lessons are all free and ready to download.

Free Textbooks: And one last item for the lifelong learners among you. We have scoured the web and pulled together a list of 200 Free Textbooks. It’s a great resource particularly if you’re looking to learn math, computer science or physics on your own. There might be a diamond in the rough here for you.

Thank Santa, maybe thank us, and enjoy that new device….

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Ayn Rand Helped the FBI Identify It’s A Wonderful Life as Communist Propaganda

in Film, History, Politics | December 25th, 2014


If you wanted to know what life was really like in the Cold War Soviet Union, you might take the word of an émigré Russian writer. You might even take the word of Ayn Rand, as the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) did during the Red Scare, though Rand had not lived in her native country since 1926. Nonetheless, as you can see above, she testified with confidence about the daily lives of post-war Soviet citizens. Rand also testified, with equal confidence, about the nefarious influence of Communist writers and directors in her adopted home of Hollywood, where she had more recent experience working in the film industry.

The 1947 HUAC hearings, writes the blog Aphelis, led to “the systematic blacklisting of Hollywood artists.” Among the witnesses deemed “friendly” to capitalism were Gary Cooper, Walt Disney, and Ayn Rand. Prior to her testimony, the FBI had consulted Rand for an enormous, 13,533-page report entitled “Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry” (find it online here), which quoted from a pamphlet published by her group:

The purpose of the Communists in Hollywood is not the production of political movies openly advocating Communism. Their purpose is to corrupt non-political movies — by introducing small, casual bits of propaganda into innocent stories and to make people absorb the basic principles of Collectivism by indirection and implication. Few people would take Communism straight, but a constant stream of hints, lines, touches and suggestions battering the public from the screen will act like drops of water that split a rock if continued long enough. The rock that they are trying to split is Americanism.

Rand and her associates helped design a “film regime” that dissected other post-war movies like William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives and George Cukor’s Keeper of the Flame. These McCarthy-era film critics sought to root out “ideological termites” in the industry; they were especially distrustful of movies that elevated what Rand called, with contempt, “the little man.” One of the films identified as particularly pernicious to the “rock” of Americanism was Frank Capra’s classic It’s a Wonderful Life, a movie that today seems built on bedrock U.S. nationalist values—commitment to family, redemption through faith, contentment with modest small-town living….

Listening to Capra’s motivation for the film—as quoted in The Los Angeles Times—makes it hard to believe he had anything like promoting a worker’s paradise in mind: “There are just two things that are important,” he said, “One is to strengthen the individual’s belief in himself, and the other, even more important right now, is to combat a modern trend toward atheism.”

But in the FBI’s analysis—and possibly Rand’s, though it’s not clear how much, if any, of the report she authored directly—the tale of George Bailey manifested several subversive tendencies. Flavorwire sums up the charges succinctly: “Written by Communist sympathizers,” “Attempting to instigate class warfare,” and “Demonizing bankers.”

Wonderful Life FBI File

We live in odd times, such that this rhetoric—which seemed so quaint just a couple short decades or so ago—sounds jarringly contemporary again as the politics of the mid-20th century reappear everywhere. The charges against the seemingly innocuous Capra film hinged in part on the alleged Communist ties of its principle screenwriters, Francis Goodrich and Albert Hackett. In their report, part of which you can see above, the FBI wrote that the screen writers “practically lived with known Communists and were observed eating luncheon daily with such Communists as Lester Cole, screen writer, and Earl Robinson.” Palling around, as it were.

In addition to naming the writers’ acquaintances and lunch buddies, the report quotes a redacted individual who “stated that, in his opinion, this picture deliberately maligned the upper class.” Another blacked-out source “stated in substance that the film represented a rather obvious attempt to discredit bankers by casting Lionel Barrymore as a ‘scrooge-type’ so that he would be the most hated man in the picture. This, according to these sources, is a common trick used by Communists.” Finally, a third redacted source compares the plot of Capra’s movie with that of a Russian film called The Letter, screened in the U.S. fifteen years earlier.

We cannot say for certain, but it’s reasonable to assume that many of these hidden FBI sources were associates of Rand. In any case, Rand—in vogue after the success of her novel The Fountainhead—appeared before HUAC and re-iterated many of the general claims made in the report. During her testimony, she focused on a 1944 film called Song of Russia (you can hear her mention it briefly in the short clip at the top). She chiefly critiques the film for its idealized portrait of life in the Soviet Union, hence her enumeration of the many evils of actual life there.

Curiously, many critical treatments of It’s A Wonderful Life have said more or less the same thing of that work, calling the film “sentimental hogwash,” for example, and a representative of “American capitalist ideology.” These readings seem persuasive to me, but for those like Rand and her followers, as well as J. Edgar Hoover and his paranoid underlings, no film it seems—no matter how celebratory of U.S. nationalist mythology—could go far enough in glorifying heroic capitalists, ignoring class conflict, and minimizing the struggles of “the little man.”

As Raw Story notes, testimony from others at the HUAC hearings brought “redemption of an odd sort” for Capra’s movie, which “has been more than redeemed as it slowly became a sentimental and beloved holiday perennial.” But even if It’s A Wonderful Life may now look like apple pie on celluloid, Flavorwire points out that it’s still liable to raise suspicions among certain aggressive pundits and culture warriors who push a “war on Christmas” narrative and see socialist subversion even in acts of charity, like those displayed so extravagantly in the film’s mushy ending (above).

It’s A Wonderful Life “is a holiday movie that doesn’t mention Christmas until the 99-minute mark…. It takes a mostly secular reading of the holiday as a time to take stock of your life, of the true blessings of family and friends. To those obsessed with the preferred holiday greeting or the color of Santa’s skin… this must sound like quite the Communist subversion indeed.”

Read much more about the HUAC investigation of Hollywood at Aphelis, who include links to a redacted version of the FBI “Communist Infiltration” report and many other fascinating documents.

Related Content:

How the CIA Secretly Funded Abstract Expressionism During the Cold War

When Ayn Rand Collected Social Security & Medicare, After Years of Opposing Benefit Programs

Free Audio: Ayn Rand’s 1938 Dystopian Novella Anthem

The CIA’s Style Manual & Writer’s Guide: 185 Pages of Tips for Writing Like a Spy

Bertolt Brecht Testifies Before the House Un-American Activities Committee (1947)

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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