Movies and Politics

The Dynamic Relationship

James E. Combs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317928997
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Collecting together some of the best thinking about the relationship between movies and politics, this book, originally published in 1993, encourages an awareness of the political dimension of film, both for film scholars and those entering the film industry. Eight essays are grouped into four parts addressing political ideology and movie narrative, political myth in the movies, political history and movie culture, and political communication and the movies. An introductory essay, as well as prefatory remarks to each of the four parts, brings additional insight and perspective and puts the essays into context.

PART I

Political Ideology and Movie Narrative

The two articles included in this section on political ideology in the movies represent well the complexities of contemporary thinking about the role of ideology in society. John Cawelti and Douglas Kellner are sensitive to both the power and the problems of ideological analysis. Cawelti clearly sees that the easy labeling of a film, an auteur, or a studio as “liberal” or “conservative” falls short of complete analysis and may actually be misleading. Further, the explanatory power of ideology often is less than persuasive, since it attempts to trace ideas, and the representation of ideas, back to economic structures and interests. In a sense, the attempt to explain things by relating the subjective and objective is a difficult task at best But it is made easier, and more palatable, by examining the representation of ideas that express the view of an identifiable objective interest, or is shared as something valuable by a large segment of a population. In fact, a cultural artifact like the movies can be both, but it need not be. Following Gramsci, Cawelti suggests that we limit the use of “ideology” to those patterns which are demonstrably serving some hegemonic purpose. The key term here is demonstrability: for movies can be shown to further some hegemonic purpose, either one imposed or one accepted, or both. During World War II, for instance, war films clearly served a national hegemonic purpose supported by both political and motion picture elites; but it was also widely shared by large segments of the American populace. On the other hand, that popular support was enhanced through the mystification of warfare—soldiers engaged in daring adventure, wives and lovers faithful and sacrificial on the home front, the enemy stigmatized as an evil to be exterminated without remorse. The war was justified in the ideology of righteous nationalism and anti-fascism, but largely depicted as the “G.I. war” won through democratic camaraderie and individual bravery. However, war films do not always serve an elite hegemonic purpose, but actually can serve a mass hegemonic purpose, at least in the sense of catering to what it is about warfare people wish to believe. The war films of the 1920s had a very different perspective on World War I than the films made during the war. More recently, the Vietnam War movies have tried to fathom the meanings of that experience. But in neither of these two instances is it correct to say that the films served a demonstrable elite hegemonic purpose. It is likely more accurate to say that these films represented widespread desire for a retrospective on the wars that imbued them with some kind of meaning. To the extent that such war films accurately represented mass feelings about wars that seemed to have gone wrong, they can be said to be a cultural artifact with mass hegemonic overtones. The hegemony of public opinion that so impressed Tocqueville made for the creation of popular fare that did not necessarily serve certain elite interests. In some measure, the “Vietnam syndrome” was movie-made.

Cawelti is also acutely aware of the consequences of such multiple ideological sources and interests, namely that this tends to make popular culture such as the movies “ideologically anti-ideological.” But it is also clear to him that this has made the movies’ ideological content ambiguous, suggesting that what we must understand more fully is the continued predominance of formula in the movies and the relationship of formulaic stories to hegemonic ideologies. Formulas have their ideological uses, as movie genres such as war movies, women’s movies, and so on often attest. The question before us is whether these flexible and persistent movie formulas represent different ideologies which emerge in response to social change (a woman’s movie from the 1990s, such as Thelma and Louise, is different in some ways than, say, Mildred Pierce or Way Down East). There may be formulaic ways in which prudently anti-ideological moviemakers do after all express ideologies that are either archaic or incipient, allowing people to bask in nostalgia for a prelapsarian world of ideological consensus and rectitude, or adopt new ideologies in the making. It may be the case that simply by depicting things, the movies make an ideological difference, either relegating to the past ideological stances (e.g., Jeffersonian pastoralism) or subverting current dominant thinking through inadvertent and often unintended formulaic depictions (1920s flapper movies which became an agency of female independence). Cawelti suggests, however, that political meanings can be manipulated by those who understand the power of dominant ideological formulations without the public, or the movie audience, being aware of it. Further investigation into how such manipulation can be imported into or out of film is needed, as well as the extent to which publics and audiences are covertly manipulated, and indeed are willingly amenable to pleasurable manipulation.

Douglas Kellner makes a major effort to incorporate popular film into a “multiperspectival” cultural theory, recognizing the power of ideology but also that popular culture is “polysemic” and demands “multivalent readings.” Even with this multiplicity of meanings, popular films can be usefully studied in their historical “conjuncture” with politically charged struggles and debates, including not only those events that are obviously political, such as warfare, but also processes and conflicts that are not so obvious, such as gender relations, treatment by organizational powers, and the like. Through the critique not only of economic relations, but also the representation in popular culture of all forms of social relations, the student of ideology discovers how power and the relations of power are “encoded.” Reading those codes, and how “transcoding” over time works, becomes a major research task, one that will not only reveal the mystifications of power imbedded in film by the dominant ideology, but also the demystifications of power written into those movies with an “oppositional” or subversive ideology and theme. Through incorporating a multiplicity of perspectives that inform each other—Marxism, feminism, structuralism, post-structuralism, and psychoanalysis—the inquirer can use an arsenal of analytical tools in understanding ideological codes.

Kellner is also sensitive to “reading texts against the grain,” observing multiple and confused meanings in movies that often make for strange interminglings of “progressive” and “reactionary” themes and actions. Examining such subtexts or plural texts in the context of historical change reveals something of the ideological confusion and yearnings of both moviemakers and movie audiences. Some movies may even express a tension between hegemonic purposes in the making of movies and mass purposes in the understanding and use of movies. It may be the case that movies often serve as an instrument of ideological mediation, a process of ideological learning from both “parties” to the transaction. Following the neglected work of Ernst Bloch, Kellner reminds us that ideology is “Janus-faced,” with both dominative and emancipatory “moments” that characterize popular artifacts such as the movies. In often conflicting ways, movies may express both hegemonic and Utopian elements, moments of human folly and potential (the classical Western, after all, included both the use of raw violence against native aborigines and outlaws, and the creation of democratic community). Movies may help mediate, or “transcode,” the ideological mix of a political system undergoing great stress and likely great change. In historical retrospect, the movies may well tell us a lot about what we were learning about ourselves and the people who rule us in the process.

Following the work of scholars such as Cawelti and Kellner, students of political ideology in the movies will have such questions to investigate. Building on them, they might well ponder the question of ideological authority. As students of high art have long pointed out, in some measure such art has lost its authority, simply because of its easy availability and with the multiplicity of many art forms and fashions from which to choose. Thus the role of art as an ideological ally of entrenched elites, always a tenuous relationship, becomes untenable. Perhaps the movies have lost something of the ideological authority they might once have had (again, during wartime or economic crisis) with the demise of studio control, the star system, and their function for audiences. Or, conversely, perhaps they are now acquiring a new kind of ideological authority as a means of expression of alternative, and in some cases anti-social, desires and frustrations. Changes in ideological function of a popular art such as the movies may make at least some movies a bastion of emancipatory expression that hold out hopes, however Utopian, of transcending the present.

WHO’S RUNNING THIS SHOW?

Ideology, Formula, and Hegemony in American Film and Television

John G. Cawelti

University of Kentucky

Some movies are obviously political.* Films like Z, Missing, Country, or Advise and Consent are explicitly concerned with historical or imagined political events. In these movies, the story itself is about politics to the extent that any discussion of plot, character, or theme must deal, in some way, with social and political issues. Another group of movies is implicitly political: the story itself may be about romance or adventure, but the setting is political or there are political issues in the background. This tends to be the case with most war and spy movies. Casablanca, for example, centers around the romance of Ilsa and Rick, but the fate of that romance and of its protagonists is shaped by the wartime setting of their love. Still another class of films—Murphy’s Romance, Fatal Attraction, In the Heat of the Night, and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner are instances—don’t seem at first to be political at all, but if we extend the conception of politics to include “sexual” or “racial” politics, these films, too, assume a political aspect Though there are political events in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, or Star Wars, it seems a bit much to say that these films are primarily about politics. Certainly Snow White can be said to have an implicit sexual politics as some feminists have argued, but does it have a sexual politics in the same sense as Murphy’s Romancel

Yet many critics would insist that, even in this last instance, politics, in the form of ideologies, is a vital element and must be analyzed or deconstructed or otherwise ferreted out.¹ Still, though it can and has been done, it seems to me problematic to talk about the ideologies of Walt Disney and Steven Spielberg as if the most important things about their delightful romances, comedies, or adventures are the way in which they reflect the ideologies of capitalism. Many otherwise excellent studies of individual films and genres are marred by an oversimplified and reductive explanation of their supposed political implications. Will Wright’s Sixguns and Society, for example, sets out a persuasive analysis of the changes in plot, character, and theme which have occurred in the western film since World War II, but when he attempts to show that these changes are direct reflections of structural changes in American capitalism in the same period, his discussion seems unfortunately arbitrary. One could easily come up with many kinds of changes in American society and culture that could be implied or reflected by the story patterns Wright defines.

It is this arbitrary quality of so much ideological analysis that makes it so often unsatisfying as if any one of a hundred other interpretations might do as well. High Noon, for example, has been often interpreted as a statement about Hollywood redbaiting (liberal) as it has been described as a reassertion of the old American ideal of rugged individualism (conservative). The plot of the movie easily accommodates either interpretation (which may be one reason why it was so successful). However, if it can be either liberal or conservative or possibly both, it would not seem to be making a clear ideological statement. Much the same thing might be said about Howard Hawks’ “answer” to High Noon, the John Wayne film Rio Bravo. This film could be interpreted as liberal in the degree to which it stresses the significance and cooperation of women and Chicanos and attacks the ruthless land baron’s attempt to substitute his own power for the town’s law. On the other hand, the film could be described as conservative in its portrayal of the heroic sheriff whose rugged individualism saves the day.

It seems to me that the problem lies in confusion and ambiguity about the way the concept of ideology is used in the analysis of popular culture. In this essay, I would like to explore a way of thinking about the ideological analysis of works of popular culture like films and television programs that I find clearer and more flexible in its application both to individual films and genres and to their larger cultural context.

Some critics, especially those in the Marxian tradition, think that all patterns of communication and thought are ideological, and even that we are imprisoned in our ideologies, like the men in Plato’s cave, with little hope of ever breaking out² But if this is so, the very idea of ideology must itself be ideological, a notion which seems self-contradictory, or, at least, paradoxical. For, if the idea of ideology means anything at all, it must imply that we can recognize and analyze the limitations and self-deceptions involved in such structures of thought and communication, that there is a “true consciousness” against which the “false consciousness” of ideology can be measured. If ideology is really everywhere and inescapable, then we might as well give up the attempt to understand it.

Fortunately, I think there is a way out of these difficulties if we follow a brilliant suggestion about ideology by the Italian Marxist thinker, Antonio Gramsci.³ Gramsci perceived that ideology was invariably related to hegemony. Ideologies, in other words, are patterns of thought connected with the establishment and maintenance of power and status in society by a particular combination of social groups. Ideological patterns thus consist of such things as stories, myths, beliefs, symbolic patterns and other mental structures which function to unify a grouping of social power and to establish, justify and otherwise maintain its hegemony over other groups in the society. I would suggest that we limit the use of the term ideology to patterns which are demonstrably serving some hegemonic purpose. This is, I believe, a very important consideration, because it implies that the same patterns of thought and communication may be ideological in some contexts, but not in others, and also that some patterns such as stories may be partly ideological, partly not

Of course, this threatens to confuse the issue again, but I think we can begin to clarify the fog by going at this problem from the other end: by defining kinds of structure which are not ideological. One such kind is the archetypal or transcultural pattern. Presumably archetypal structures exist because they embody some fundamental aspects of human life or consciousness. We use them because they are widely understood to appear to generate similar responses among many different people at different times. Indeed, the concept of archetypes which apparently began to develop out of the traditional typological interpretation of the Bible sometime during the Renaissance, has become one of t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Political Ideology and Movie Narrative
• Part II Political Myth in the Movies
• Part III Political History and Movie Culture
• Part IV Political Communication and the Movies
• Afterword
• Contributors
• Index
• Film Index