By Joanne Laurier, wsws.org

Directed by Alexander Payne; written by Bob Nelson

American filmmaker Alexander Payne’s new work Nebraska, which follows an elderly man in pursuit of an illusory prize, manages to take a sharp-eyed look at how a great many people in the US live at present.

The comedy-drama, shot in striking black-and-white, centers on Woody Grant (Bruce Dern) of Billings, Montana, who is determined to get to Lincoln, Nebraska, a distance of some 850 miles, to claim one million dollars in a sweepstakes prize.

Family members cannot convince Woody, a former mechanic and long-time alcoholic, that the supposed prize is nothing but a marketing ploy. Wife Kate (June Squibb) and son Ross (Bob Odenkirk) conclude that Woody is losing his mind and would put him in a nursing home if they had the financial means. (Kate: “I didn’t know that the son of a bitch wanted to be a millionaire. [To Woody] You should have thought about that ages ago and worked for it.”)

Nebraska

It’s not that the Grants couldn’t use some sort of miracle. Woody and Kate live in a cramped, rundown house in a dying neighborhood. Ross is a replacement anchorman for a small-town television station and the youngest Grant, David (Will Forte), having recently been dumped by his girlfriend, is going through the motions of selling retail electronics.

Unable to dissuade the ailing Woody, who feels he is “running out of time,” from attempting to walk from Billings to Lincoln, David agrees to drive Woody, who “just needs something to live for,” to the mail-order sweepstakes office. He hopes the journey will help his relationship with the irascible elderly man. Along the way, the few stops they make include Mount Rushmore (Woody: “Washington is the only one with clothes … Lincoln doesn’t even have an ear.”), a town where Woody loses his false teeth along some railroad tracks after a few beers, and a hospital after the older Grant becomes ill. There a doctor tells Woody pointedly that a million dollar bonanza would “just about pay for a day in the hospital.”

Another layover takes place over the course of a weekend in Hawthorne, Nebraska, where Woody grew up. Several of his brothers still remain in the town. Kate and Ross come in from Billings for the impromptu reunion, which takes place at the home of Woody’s brother Ray (Rance Howard—father of Ron Howard), sister-in-law Martha (Mary Louise Wilson) and their delinquent sons Bart (Tim Driscoll) and Cole (Devin Ratray). The focal point of the rambling house is the overstuffed living room sofa that faces a huge television set. Much time is spent in front of the television, because, as Martha complains, “this economy has just torn up Hawthorne.”

In the decaying town, David learns something about why a depressed Woody blankly answers most questions with “I can’t remember,” “I don’t know,” “It doesn’t matter.” According to an early flame (movingly played by Angela McEwan), his heavy drinking began after returning from a tour of duty in the Korean War.

Hawthorne has taverns too, in one of which Woody runs into old friends like Ed Pegram (Stacy Keach), his former partner in an auto-repair shop. Unable to resist boasting about his sweepstakes win, despite David’s protestations, Woody soon finds himself the center of attention, both from well-wishers and those who feel they deserve a portion of the spoils. In the end, Woody receives something more precious than a pot of money.

Payne, born in Omaha, Nebraska to a Greek-American immigrant family, has a history of making films, such as Election (1999) and About Schmidt (2002), that demonstrate a certain acuity about social and psychological life in “Middle America.” It is hard to believe, in the case of the new film, that “Woody Grant” is not intended to remind us of Grant Wood (1891-1942), the regionalist painter who specialized in depictions of the rural Midwest, most famously in American Gothic (1930), the unflattering portrait of an elderly farmer with pitchfork in hand standing beside his unmarried daughter.

Payne’s Nebraska exhibits a genuine (and unusual) interest in real people and real places. It concerns itself with the bleak lives of decent people without prospects, who fill in the gaps with fantasies about striking it rich, stubbornly clinging to a belief in what remains of the tattered American Dream. Everyone in the film is waiting in quiet desperation for some external force or process to change his or her life.

Phedon Papamichael’s beautiful black and white cinematography starkly captures the decomposing social fabric of vast stretches of the American Midwest, conveying a Depression-era feel reminiscent of iconic photographs of that period. A sense of economic and cultural decline pervades Nebraska. It is worth noting that the vast majority of critics, both those who approve and those who disapprove of the film, make no comment about this aspect of the work. The miserable and ever-deteriorating conditions of life for millions and millions of Americans are taken almost entirely for granted and arouse no particular uneasiness within the upper-middle-class layers that pass currently for an “intelligentsia.”

Dern performs his role in a disturbing, bitter and effective semi-silence, like someone whose life has induced a sort of catatonia. We learn about the impact of decades of harsh existence on Woody’s inner (and outer) life from his wife and his former girlfriend. Forte offers up the melancholy of a man resigned for the most part, yet still retaining a semblance of hope. Squibb as Kate gives vent to her deep frustration by rants distinguished by an acerbic wit, at times very amusingly. (At one point Woody says to David: “You’d drink too much too if you were married to your mother.” One can sympathize.) In fact, there is a deliciously dark comic side to the movie.

A weakness in Nebraska is the presence of David’s Hawthorne cousins, so backward they lower the tone of the entire movie. In these misconceived characterizations Payne’s tendency toward condescension and impatience with regard to quite oppressed people, who have been given little or nothing by society, comes through. Even the central situation in the film, that of an individual unsophisticated and unaware enough to believe that a piece of junk mail entitles him to a fortune, might provide the opening for some, perhaps contrary to Payne’s intentions, to dismiss Woody and many like him as “losers” who “deserve what they get.”

What accounts for the director’s occasionally derisive attitude, and not only his? First of all, Payne (born 1961) and artists of his generation have lived their adult lives for the most part in an atmosphere of social quiescence in the US, marked even to this point by the lack of a mass response to the assault on the conditions of wide layers of the population. Living largely on the surface of events, the artists mistake popular shock at the dramatic changes in their lives and the widespread sense of betrayal for submissiveness and eternal passivity. Surprises lie in store.

Furthermore, historical knowledge provides a sense of what people are capable of. During the Great Depression Omaha was the scene of bitter protests by farmers in 1932, when they blockaded roads and fought with police for three nights in a row, and again in 1933, and a lengthy, bloody strike by transit workers in 1935, which resulted in 1,800 National Guard troops being called in.

Payne tends to concentrate on individual failings, rather than on a failed society and a failed culture, or at least treats the matter inconsistently. That being said, Nebraska is rare in its sensitivity to the plight of a neglected and suffering population.

With Gary Corseri                                                                                       

“I had been dreaming a complicated dream about helping poets revise their poems, so that each ending would open like a flower.  I was not arguing, but engaged in a rousing discussion.”

–Diane Wakoski (from the Introduction to Bay of Angels)

Intro: I’m sure that any “literary” person, any then-nascent-feminist, any now-graybeard-hippie remembers Diane Wakoski from the 60s/70s when she was “one of the pillars of the Beat Movement” (with Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, Corso, Snyder, Denise Levertov, Imamu Baraka, et. al.). And many of us have remained loyal fans–joining new fans–as Diane has continued to track our pulsating Culture in inimitable poetry these past 45 years!

I initiated first-contact with Diane a little after I learned that her next book, BAY OF ANGELS, would be published by Anhinga Press (it’s out now). Anhinga had published my first collection back in 1989. About 3 weeks ago, as guest-poetry editor at Counterpunch, I solicited poems, and was happy to post 2 excellent ones from Diane (including, “Frisked for Butterflies,” unpublished/unposted elsewhere): http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/08/30/wakoski-and-smith-ferri/

Over the past year or so, I’ve posted a series of conversational pieces (now called “Prologues” because one builds on, leads into, another). I collaborated with “working-class poet” Charles Orloski and with Russian scientist-poet-translator, Victor Postnikov. My most recent one with Victor Postnikov appeared here: http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/08/12/conversations-on-the-arts-politics-and-science-between-a-russian-and-an-american/

After I posted her poems, I sent Diane a copy of the above. I asked her if she’d like to collaborate with me on such. Her response: “I’m game.”

For me, these conversations are a way to present the Arts, make it “relevant,” and invite the reader to participate. It’s not a prof pontificating on meter, similes and metaphors; but, rather, two adults talking about what’s going on in the world and what they care about! A wonderful book that did for myth what I hope to do for the Arts is Joseph Campbell’s and Bill Moyers’ THE POWER OF MYTH. Based on the PBS hit from the 80s, that NY Times bestseller’s appeal was in the flowing, electric current of words between two educated, interested, down-to-earth participants!—Gary Corseri

Gary Corseri:  You write in your Introduction to Bay of Angels that your own poetry and prosody have been strongly influenced by: “The New Criticism—at least the aspect of it that I interpreted like this: each poem must be a self-contained whole, not dependent on other (often arcane) works of literature.”

That’s a positive interpretation of that form of Lit Crit which established itself as the dominant modality from the 1920s to 1970s, with celebrants and exponents like T. S. Eliot, I. A. Richards, John Crowe Ransom and Cleanth Brooks.  When I was an undergrad in the 60s, and, after a long work-hiatus, a Ph.D. candidate in the early 80s, New Criticism was still the methodological lens for examining a literary work.  (Of course, by the early 80s there were other “contenders”—structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstructionism, and a plethora of other schisms and isms!)

One problem I had with New Critical thought was that it tended to minimize the author, to remove him/her from the political/economic milieu of his/her period.  I could understand that as a reaction against 19^th Century Romanticism which placed the author him/her-self front and center, over-emphasizing Shelley’s capers, or Byron’s  romantic affairs, or Dickinson’s eremitism… but, I often wondered if the New Critics hadn’t strayed too far in the other direction—against the biographical, against personal contexting?  I wondered if a better balance might be struck?  So, I was surprised to read your salute to New Criticism, and even more surprised to find your poems in Bay of Angels quite personal, self-revelatory, and, often interwoven so that one poem is, in fact, dependent on another for its full realization, it’s “opening like a flower.”

I hope you can expatiate on this theme: What does “New Criticism” mean to you?  How do you reconcile your very personal, interwoven poems with the New Critical idea of “self-contained” works of literature?

Diane Wakoski: I first began writing poetry in the late fifties when The New Criticism was new, and it gave young poets permission to become Whitmanian self-heroes/heroines of their own poems. I felt I was no longer minimalized; no longer did I have to pretend I was living in the world of Oedipus, King Arthur, Athena, or any other mythic or legendary figure. I could invent Diane as a persona—there was no stigma to writing in the first person. This was as liberating as free verse itself.

Ironically, in the late eighties, when I began to write The Archaeology of Movies and Books, my quartet of books exploring the Classic myth of Medea and Jason, again casting myself in the role of the mythic heroine, I did not feel I was abandoning New Criticism concepts, but that I was finally using them more originally. I have often quoted Henry James biographer, Leon Edel, who said something like this: “Of course, The New Critics cheated. They all knew each other and, thus, understood each other’s references. They were still alluding to matters and ideas outside the poems, just more contemporary ones.”

Young poets in the sixties were adamant about being able to use contemporary references. This led to using mythologies and legends other than the Classical, ranging from the Native American to movie gods and goddesses. One aspect of this was writing about current events, such as the Vietnam War. My own writing has always focused on the personal, and despite the fact that I grew up with a naval father, I have never written about war or other current events. But I, too, “cheat” in the sense that while I don’t require that my readers be erudite, I do want them to know my references.

GC:.  Bay of Angels, the title of your newest book of poems—your 20^th!— is the English translation of Jaque Demy’s film noir, “La Baie des Anges,” starring Jean Moreau (fetchingly, cinematically pictured on the cover of your book).  In your Intro you write that many of your poems in Angels are about “finding solace in looking at something with a different perspective.”  I found this one of the most interesting aspects of Angels, this flowing between worlds, trying on different identities.  You weave movie “realities” with your personal life—lives, really.  (And vice versa!)  Fantasies about screen lovers like Jean Paul Belmondo merge with blood and flesh highschool boyfriends met again after 50 years!

Writers/poets used to allude to other writers; Angels is allusive to films—actors like Belmondo and Moreau and directors like Orson Wells, Roman Polansky, Jacque Demy and Woody Allen.  This opens another cartography for poetry.  What other poets can you name who have mined this modern common ground?  Do you see yourself doing more mining here?  Would you recommend that students explore these veins of gold?

DW: I, personally, don’t really know of such poets, though I suppose almost every contemporary poet has at least one poem about film.

I started writing poems using film in the Archaeology series in the ‘90s. One of my favorite poems, “Beauty and the Beast,” about the Cocteau film, La Belle et La Bete, can be found online, read by a Canadian actor, accompanied by stills from the black and white film. … I hope when a poet writes a movie poem, it is a real poem, not just a prose description of a movie!

GC: I especially liked the ending of your poem, “La Femme Nikita,” alluding to the 1990 French film.  I like it because it is contradictory—gives me different insights into the (secret) world of women, “dominant-submissive relationships,” etc.:

“… Are you surprised that

I have always wanted an imprisoning world?

One that needed me enough to own me,

and that I have wanted being owned to

actually

be an adventure?  Are you surprised that

I have found myself wishing to be La Femme Nikita,

not because she’s free or strong, but

because

she is bound,

she’s Promethean,

A rebel against all corrupt gods,

yet like all submissives, she

is the one who can change the balance of power?”

This highlights two contrapuntal themes in your book: expansiveness that keeps testing limits (expansiveness encapsulated in ideas like a “parallel universe,” “string theory,” “quantum mechanics”) and a proclivity for wanting to be held, “enslaved” even, “owned,” utterly known and possessed.  Is this a modern female thing or is it your thing?  I don’t think anyone would describe this as a “masculine” trait, but we’ve become so very sensitive about ascribing traits to gender… I confess to being a little perplexed about how to approach this.

I like the flow of language here because the words are straightforward, but suggestive of deeper mysteries.  I think the best of your work does that.  And, as I’ve said, this book can be quite personal—about your childhood diffidence, sense of abandonment by your “sailor-father,” loneliness growing up on the edge of a California orange grove, in a shack of a farmhouse dominated by two lonely women; and then some difficult adult relationships, etc.  Coleridge defined poetry as the “reconcilement of opposites.”  I wonder to what degree you are consciously working with opposites and striving towards “reconcilement”?  Could one have a “rousing discussion” with oneself… and  bottle the genie of poetry from that?

DW: I am always working with opposites, working towards their reconcilement.

I think if I were you–or any great conversationalist–I could have a “rousing discussion” with myself. However, as Diane, I am usually silent, tongue- tied, or a speaker of platitudes. I am busy in poetry trying to choose my words so that they include everything. I think that poetry should be more than just a conversation with oneself, no matter how rousing. That’s probably what our dreams are.

Art? Maybe art is that Zen idea of one hand clapping. I think art is a way of reaching out–to have a dialogue, discussion, conversation with the reader—who, for better or worse, can never be simply a mirror image of the poet. The reader has to want to respond.   By the moment of transformation at the end of a poem, a reader should grasp that the poet is different from what he first thought. Therefore, with the genie out of the bottle, there’s a new wholeness. How can the reader not identify with that? But, it’s not a mirror-image of poet-reader. It is, rather, Cocteau’s poet bursting through the mirror—bloodless–to the place of imagination, taking the reader with him.

GC: My favorite poem from the first half of your fairly long collection is “`The Spiral Staircase’: Apples vs. Oranges.”  Much of Angels is about a gamble, a noir image in shadow; an imagined lover, re-imagined lovers; a merging of celluloid and the scent of gardenias.  This flitting between shadows is actually more effective because in certain poems there is a pause, as herein, and we can catch the real figure—toying, flirting, elusive, allusive, frightened, daring.  Film noir has particular appeal to you, and is used  metaphorically—as in “Some Beauty Needs a Dimness” (“the alchemical chisel of black and white”)– because its stark contrasts actually sharpen, define and clarify.

The mystery revealed in “The Spiral Staircase…,” the unfolding, takes the form of a daily eaten orange plucked from a grove next to your childhood home.  The surprise here is that the mythic world, symbolized by the literary “golden apples of Hesperides” is too vulnerable to smudge-pot soot, harsh rays of California sun…, but the real, globed fruit of orange is protected by a sturdy rind, and the fruit “held destiny” for “this little sorceress” poet, this “little witch-child” who learns to conjure from her life experiences.

Many of the poems in Angels are wholly or partly meditations on poetry—the evolution and development of the poet.  You train an unrelenting eye on yourself, mistakes made along the way, while reflecting, with a sense of wonder, on how you got to be 75, with a successful career as a writer and teacher:

“Had I been less superficial,

I’d have cleaved to the man with the hands

I never found handsome.”

*

“While the others tour ancient churches,

improve their minds and sensibilities at

museums and archeological sites, I

dig into my own so

superficial past,

wondering about the wealth and complexity I rejected

or gave away.”

*

And, in the same poem, “California Eyes: A Meditation From Poitou-Charentes,” we read:

“Superficial Diane.

That’s me, loving the surfaces,

always the surfaces.

That’s how I knew, wheNever rejected,

it was my own surfaces

that had failed.”

That’s three times in a four-page poem, you mention “superficial”!

Well, most sensitive people have dark moods and various occasions to doubt their own sincerity!  Fortunately, these moods and doubts and implacable regrets are balanced by the scrutinies of age, wisdom extracted from failures:

“but when I bathe naked and alone each morning,

behind the navy blue shower curtain, imprinted with gold

figures of the zodiac, I look

at my old body

and I know that all my youthful

cruelties

cover me, clothe me with age’s

cobwebbed skin, my belly swollen as if

I were illicitly pregnant,

and the sight of my own nakedness strips me

of any goddess qualities I might

ever have possessed.”

And so, in “Showering Behind the Zodiac’s Curtain,” a kind of resolution, a kind of cinematic denouement, a washing away of youthful and not-so-youthful follies.

I’ve been trying here to get into the thorny question of how a poet develops.  I’ve taken a few leaps-of-faith and leaps in the dark, and I’m hoping you can set me straight.  I hope you can talk about process now—how you write, what inspires you, how you’ve managed to maintain a vital 50-year career as a poet.  What do you recommend to your students, to youthful mariners just embarking on this, sometimes perilous, voyage?  How does one keep a steady keel?

DW: Thinking about the quotations you’ve selected and the importance that I have always placed on self-criticism, I need to offer the word: balance.

A fellow undergraduate at Berkeley (’56-’60) once bemusedly said to me, talking about that great uncertainty, being a young poet, “Diane, I don’t understand how you can believe in yourself so completely.” I’ve remembered this over the years, because I recognized the truth of his statement, the minute he uttered it. I do believe in myself, I have since childhood, and though I constantly question myself, try to look at my failures honestly, try to be a stronger, better person, at root I believe in myself. Being born poor and from an uneducated family, I learned early that if things went wrong, no one would fix them. I had to say to myself, “How can I fix this, what did I do wrong? If I did nothing wrong, it doesn’t matter; I still have to be the one who finds a solution.”

Self-belief=Self-questioning. If they are in balance, you can progress with some success in your personal life.

Poems have many functions, but one of them is problem-solving. My process is to take some material, which generates a question and that interests me, and try to transform it. You ask what inspires me? Books, movies, food, gambling; female objects of beauty such as butterflies, jewels, flowers, shoes; male objects of beauty such as motorcycles, carpentry & tools; hands; feet; mouths; the Garden Myth; the Orpheus Myth; gold and silver; sun and moon! Things inspire me, though beauty as an idea also can fill me with something to say.

You ask about keeping a “steady keel.” Simple: poetry is my lifeline. It is an essential way I connect with the world. I must keep writing to survive.

GC:  As the music swells, and the lights fade, I’d like to get a little personal again… because, let’s face it, the New Critics were fine in their time, but we’re in a very different era now, and as you write in Angels’ final poem, “nakedness, not invisibility, is one’s best disguise.”

That poem, “Meditation on Flowers,” references Jean Cocteau’s film, “The Blood of a Poet,” and I see Cocteau’s image of a man crashing through a mirror—from the inside out!—as a startling metaphor for your work.  The reader surveys the mirror, finds all in place, when, suddenly—kaboom!  A crashing through from the other side!

Given the richly considered perspective of 51 years—from your first book, Coins and Coffins in 1962 to Bay of Angels now—you’ve witnessed and participated in metamorphoses in the arts—from the “howl” of the Beat movement to the reined-in academicism starting in the 70s, to an amazingly pliable but viable, open form today, this ancient art of poetry transforms itself, crashes through mirrors, then puts itself together again.  You’ve been a professor, a woman of letters, and you dream of “rousing discussions.”  Poets have been oracles since Homer’s day, since Sappho’s.  Can you tell us—Where do you see us heading now?

DW: I don’t think my concept of poetry or the poet’s place in the world has ever changed. Like Robinson Jeffers, I believe poets are Cassandras, prophets who have access to some small splinter of truth, which we feel compelled to utter and, like Cassandra, we have been cursed by the Gods to speak the truth—even if we are not believed.

I believe, as Emerson says, that virtue is its own reward. Speaking the truth may bring us nothing except the joy of speaking the truth, even if no one believes us. I believe my splinter of truth-seeing allows me to understand beauty and, even if no one believes, understands, or accepts my truth, that I am rewarded by that understanding.

Poetry, like any art or literature, should connect the present and past. I am a safe oracle, since no one will believe me. So, Diane, as Pythoness, says that those who pay more attention to beauty–not surface beauty, but to its secrets that underlie even the impure–will save the world.

 Diane Wakoski has published 21 books of poetry, and her work has appeared at numerous periodicals, including Counterpunch. Her most recent book is Bay of Angels (2013, Anhinga Press). A pillar of the “Beat Movement,” her life and work have inspired generations of American and international writers.

Gary Corseri has published novels, books of poetry and a literary anthology (editor). His dramas have been performed on PBS-Atlanta, and he has read his poems at the Carter Presidential Center. His articles have appeared at The New York Times, Village Voice, The Greanville Post, etc. 

The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler—how the studios suppressed films about Nazi crimes
By Charles Bogle, wsws.org

In his prologue to The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler, author Ben Urwand observes that the notion of collaboration between Nazi Germany and Hollywood during the 1930s and 1940s should “shatter a common idea about Hollywood,” that it was “synonymous with anti-fascism during its golden age.”

Based on considerable research in archives in the US and Germany, Urwand proves indisputably that an agreement between Nazi Germany and Hollywood’s hierarchy did exist and, furthermore, that the film executives’ decision to enter into the pact was rooted in their determination to maintain a presence in the lucrative German market.

Carl Laemmle

Urwand, born in 1977 in Sydney, Australia, the son of Jewish immigrants, is a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. His book traces the development of Hollywood’s pact with Adolf Hitler from the latter’s rise to power in 1933 to the end of the Second World War. In the process, Urwand recounts how Nazi Germany came to play an increasing role in determining the kinds of films Hollywood would (and would not) make during those years.

The book, published by Belknap Press, is largely free of the ordinary academic’s formal evenhandedness and timidity, although the author is clearly unwilling to confront the deep commonality of interest between the American ruling elite and Nazi Germany.

Hitler’s obsession with cinema was such, Urwand explains, that the Nazi leader reserved time each evening for movie viewing, and concluded that British and especially American films were superior artistically and as propaganda.

However, when it came to war themes that jeopardized the German national image or what the fascist leader considered German morale, Hitler argued that a war was fought on two fronts: the battlefield and propaganda. According to Urwand, if Hitler understood a film to be threatening Germany, “then he was at war.”

Hitler’s first act in this conflict, although his party had not yet taken power, was to declare All Quiet on the Western Front (Lewis Milestone, 1930, based on the novel by Erich Maria Remarque) guilty of damaging the German image. The anti-war film’s release coincided with the Nazis making political considerable gains in the Reichstag [parliament]. This gave Hitler’s opinion enough weight so that, after two years in which the film was either banned or censored in Germany, Carl Laemmle, president of Universal Pictures, agreed to cut eight scenes and continue making money in the German market rather than resist the Nazi demands.

The groundwork for collaboration had been laid. Universal would also alter a number of other movies after meeting with Dr. Martin Freudenthal, a special agent of the German Foreign Office.

By 1933, Freudenthal could report to Hitler, now chancellor, that Universal would collaborate with the Nazis “for the German market.” RKO had also agreed to operate “in close collaboration” with Germany, and United Artists promised “the closest collaboration.”

This collaboration would deepen throughout the decade of the 1930s. When the Nazis insisted the Hollywood studios fire their Jewish salesmen in Germany, the studio heads, most of whom were Jewish and well aware of what the Hitler regime was doing to the Jews, readily acquiesced to the Nazis’ demand.

Left: Herman J. Mankiewicz

Freudenthal’s replacement as the German government’s agent, Georg Gyssling, added further grounds for the censorship and the outright banning of Hollywood films. In 1933, Herman J. Mankiewicz (who would later co-write Citizen Kane with Orson Welles) wrote a play, The Mad Dog of Europe, which honestly depicted the reality in Germany under Hitler. When Sam Jaffe at RKO agreed to produce a film version of Mankiewicz’s play, the Nazi regime, through Gyssling and the Hays Office (which enforced the Motion Picture Production Code), prevented the movie from being made on the grounds that it would adversely affect the other Hollywood studios’ relationship with Germany and that American audiences would find it anti-German.

Urwand asserts that the blocking of The Mad Dog of Europe defined the terms of the relationship for the rest of the decade, i.e., the Hollywood studios would not portray or criticize the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews. During these years, the Nazis had final approval on over 400 American films.

In 1934 even stricter censorship guidelines were introduced when Tarzan the Ape Man (W.S. Van Dyke, 1932) was found to undermine German propaganda in regard to “healthy racial feelings.”

The Nazis then cast a larger net over Hollywood productions. All gangster and horror films were banned from German theaters on the grounds that they promoted immorality, leading to the censorship of such American films across Europe. Hollywood had no trouble with this action and adjusted its productions accordingly.

Another “adjustment” was made following Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass, the vicious anti-Semitic pogrom) in November 1938. MGM found an effective way to export profits made in Germany (a 1933 Nazi law prevented foreign companies from taking money out of the country) by first loaning the money made from profits to firms that needed credit, then receiving bonds in exchange for the loan, and finally selling the bonds to foreign countries.

However, the firms that received MGM funds in the first place were part of the armament industry; in brief, MGM was helping to finance the production of German weaponry.

Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, did not fundamentally change matters; in fact, MGM donated eleven of its most popular films to Germany to help with the war relief effort.

Ironically, MGM produced the first anti-Nazi film Mortal Storm (Frank Borzage, 1940), and even though it made no direct reference to the Jews, the movie still drew Gyssling’s ire. Shortly thereafter, the one remaining American studio that still had a presence in Germany, Paramount, was forced to leave the country, as well as all the territories occupied by German forces.

The Nazis’ expulsion of the studios, one would think, coming shortly before America’s entry into the war, ought to have freed Hollywood to make more hard-hitting films about the Hitler regime, but Urwand notes that “the years of collaboration with Nazi Germany had marked [the studio heads] too deeply” for a dramatic change to occur. Of the 1000 films produced during the war, 242 made direct references to the Nazis and 190 to Hitler. Urwand argues, however, that only one, None Shall Escape(André de Toth, 1944), “revealed what the Nazis were doing to the Jews.”

A major flaw in The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler is Urwand’s inability to seriously deal with the American establishment’s hypocrisy and duplicity.

Once Hecht learned of the genocide going on in Germany and eastern Europe, he initiated a campaign to educate the American public and demand action to save the European Jews. He wrote “advertisements” in the form of poems and articles that appeared in newspapers; and organized—along with the Committee for a Jewish Army—a pageant in New York that attracted 40,000 people.

Under pressure from Hecht, the Committee, and other Jewish groups and individuals, the Roosevelt administration finally created the War Refugee Board in 1944 to rescue approximately 200,000 Jews—this after the Roosevelt administration had known about the systematic extermination of the Jews for some time without lifting a finger.

Deeply embittered by the lives lost due to Roosevelt’s inaction, Hecht would write years later that, “We [the Emergency Committee] were creating a new school of Jews in the U.S.—one which refused to believe blindly in the virtues of their enemies in Democracy’s clothing.”

Urwand accuses Hecht of making a claim that “may have been too strongly worded,” but the screenwriter had done nothing more or less than state the case exactly and eloquently. By refusing to credit Hecht for correctly characterizing the policies of “American democracy,” the author also fails to acknowledge the shared interests of the powers that be in the US and Nazi Germany.

A continued profit stream for the film studios was certainly a significant motive for remaining silent about the Nazis’ crimes. However, there was more than immediate economic gain at stake. The studio heads reflected broader moods within the US ruling class. The ruling elites of Europe and America were generally sympathetic toward Hitler’s brutal repression of left-wing parties and all independent workers’ organizations, and also hopeful that Nazi Germany would invade and destroy the Soviet Union. They feared the prospect of social revolution in Germany far more than they did a fascist regime in power in Berlin.

The record demonstrates irrefutably that the studio heads, Jewish or otherwise, were more consumed by anti-communism and the desire to defend the profit system than they were by concerns about the deadly consequences of anti-Semitism. After all, they pursued the same course in the US after World War II, allying themselves with “anti-red” witch-hunters such as the rabid anti-Semite John Rankin, Democratic Congressman from Mississippi. (Similarly, the film studios accommodated themselves to Southern racists in the US by avoiding films that dealt with racial bigotry, oppression and lynchings, or that treated such events as the Civil War in a forthright manner.)

Urwand’s refusal to draw the sharpest conclusions from the history he so meticulously presents, which would have provided the reader with a deeper understanding of the pact between Hollywood and Nazi Germany, mars what is an important work of scholarship. Nonetheless, The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler is a valuable exposure that should be read.

By Christine Schofelt and David Walsh, wsws.org

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, the sequel to The Hunger Games (2012), opened with a weekend box office take of more than $161 million in the US, and approximately $308 million worldwide.

With the trilogy of novels by Suzanne Collins, on which the films are based, also selling in the millions of copies, it is clear that some sort of a chord has been struck. Issues raised by The Hunger Games, including social inequality and the build-up of police-state measures, certainly weigh on the minds of many, especially young people, all over the world.

The first book in the science fiction series (The Hunger Games), released in 2008, ignited a controversy as to what exactly was being argued, with both left- and right-wing commentators claiming the stories for their own. Collins has indicated that her outlook is a left-liberal one; she is concerned with the environment, war, and economic deprivation. Her stories inspired a following, however amorphous their message is.

The overarching motif is the emergence of Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) as a symbol of revolt in Panem, a post-apocalyptic North American nation ruled by a violent dictatorship. In the first film, she survives her involuntary participation in the “Hunger Games,” an annual event in which 24 young people between 12 and 18 (two from each District, chosen by lottery) are pitted in a fight to the death against one another as punishment for their Districts’ rebellion against the wealthy Capitol some 70-odd years earlier. Katniss’s acts of kindness and solidarity toward her fellow “Tributes” during the Games are considered a dangerous flashpoint by the authorities, which give “hope” to the angry and oppressed masses, who to commence rioting.

Katniss is unaware of this, through a combination of her isolation by government design and her own self-absorption. Her main concerns, at least initially, are solely for the safety of her family and her own continued survival. As Catching Fire (directed by Francis Lawrence) opens, Katniss and her District partner, Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson), are about to embark (unwillingly) on an officially sponsored Victors’ Tour—for the first time a plural, since only one Tribute is supposed to survive. That two did survive, through Katniss’s unwillingness to kill Peeta, has incurred the wrath of President Snow (Donald Sutherland), who threatens to destroy everyone Katniss loves if she does not come to heel and participate in the pacifying of the population.

While Katniss wants to flee, those around her are apparently starting to stand up and think about their situation, in the form of the “Mockingjay revolution.” As the authorities proceed with the tour, she is horrified and frightened by the violence of the ever-present riot police.

Ultimately, angry at the continuing calls for rebellion and “hope” inspired by Katniss—however unwittingly—President Snow calls for a “Quarter Quell.” This involves another lottery-type reaping from among the surviving Tributes of each district. As Katniss is the only female Tribute from her district, she is forced back into the Games. The second half of the film treats the competition among the 24 competitors, as well as the machinations of Snow and his associates, who are determined to discredit Katniss in the eyes of the rebellious population and, ultimately, exterminate her.

Veteran actor Sutherland told the Guardian recently, “I want Hunger Gamesto stir up a revolution.” Leaving aside what Sutherland, prominent in the radicalization of the late 1960s and early 1970s and now aged 78, might precisely mean by a “revolution” (he also admits in the interview to being a supporter of Barack Obama), and taking him at face value, we socialists are entirely in favor of works that will encourage such a vast social transformation. The question that needs to be asked, however, is: Will The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, in fact, help to bring on a social revolution?

No doubt, the intimations of a mass social response to poverty and authoritarianism have a certain significance. It is difficult to envision a film like this emerging two decades or perhaps even a decade ago. That a major Hollywood blockbuster depicts a popular revolt erupting on American soil suggests that something about the current situation is sinking in. Moreover, there is a growing recognition that the powers that be promote celebrities, brutal entertainment and other forms of spectacle to divert the public’s attention from the ills devastating society. Stanley Tucci is effective as a dreadful television host, grinning and glad-handing his way through human tragedy.

The chief difficulty with the film is that its supposed central concerns, inequality and political repression, are not the driving force of the drama.Catching Fire is constructed, to a large extent, as a series of red herrings, dead ends and arbitrary elements. The very fact that, according to the logic of the film, a presumably historic, world-changing social revolution is to be staved off by the ability of two young people (Katniss and Peeta), at the peril of their lives, to pretend to be in love with another in public provides some indication of the level at which the work is operating. In any event, once the Games get under way, this element is largely forgotten about.

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

The Games themselves are something of a red herring, or come from a different film. The competition is tedious and relatively pointless. The question of who survives and who doesn’t has little to do with the social and political issues supposedly fueling Catching Fire (except in the meager sense that the competitors learn the virtue of cooperation). How does Katniss’s skill with a bow and arrow relate to the problems of poverty and dictatorship? Or the structure of the game as a clock, which is disposed of almost as soon as it raised? These are simply action film ingredients, which don’t enlighten anyone about anything.

What if Spartacus (1960), the historical drama about the famed first century BC slave revolt against the Roman authorities, had spent half its time focused on the various encounters among the gladiators (and, incidentally, Catching Fire makes numerous reference to ancient Rome)? What would it prove if Kirk Douglas’s Spartacus were victorious in every conflict?

The brutality of the training and contests in Spartacus is a subordinate element, meant to give some indication of the rottenness of the entire social order. The film then moves forward to the social conflict between the oppressed and the authorities, the rich. There is a coherence in Spartacus, whatever its degree of artistic success, and the various elements make sense in relation to the social picture as a whole.

There is no such coherence in Catching Fire. The filmmakers strike at certain social realities (poverty, hunger, the games as social diversion), but they leave out or avoid critical elements. The film makes reference to wretched economic conditions, even “starvation,” but provides almost no evidence of these conditions, and they are not, in any important sense, what advances the story. Those circumstances are not the principal source of interest to the filmmakers. Family, personal relations, various machinations take center stage.

Indeed, even in relation to the first book and film, inequality and hunger seem to take a back seat here. Although the preparations for the upcoming Quarter Quell are lavish, there is not the pointed contrast to the poverty in the Districts offered in those previous works. The audience, like Katniss, is largely isolated from the oft-referred-to growing rebelliousness against these conditions, portrayed in brief glimpses of television footage and hurriedly exited situations.

Moreover, Catching Fire and the entire series depict a reactionary, almost fascistic regime, but emerging from which social process and serving which economic interests? We see people going to work in the mines. But who owns the mines, who owns the corporations, what is the content of the social relations? This is entirely sidestepped. We simply have an evil president and his henchmen. But who gives the (real) orders to them? Where are the bankers and corporate chiefs? Collins, consciously or otherwise, has accommodated herself to anti-socialist prejudices in avoiding this. And this is one reason why even the extreme right can lay claim to the film. It is not a criticism of capitalism. It is a criticism of authoritarianism existing in mid-air somewhere. Presumably, a political coup or putsch, removing the evildoers, will right things.

The one glimpse we get of the Capitol, in a party scene, does little to suggest the gap between rich and poor. The sated guests, who drink some sort of cocktail allowing them to vomit and eat more, seem more representative of the Hollywood high life than the financial-corporate elite, although Peeta does point out with quiet disgust that there are people starving in their home District while the Capitol’s denizens engage in such behavior. But the sequence as a whole could easily fit into the propaganda of right-wing populists inveighing against “cosmopolitan,” immoral, out-of-touch “big city” folk.

The performances are perhaps superior in Catching Fire as opposed to the first film. Elizabeth Banks’s portrayal of Effie Trinket’s transformation from perpetual cheerleader of the Games into someone who realizes the unfairness of the Tributes’ forced return to the arena, and into an active conspirator in the effort to overthrow the system that has provided her a good living, is well done and convincing. Likewise, Woody Harrelson’s Haymitch goes from being just a battle-scarred alcoholic to someone who has a reason to fight, in a powerfully wrought performance. His discussion of the other Tributes that Katniss and Peeta will face is done with enough bitter humor to bring out the horror involved in the very idea of being forced to kill to survive.

The array of personalities involved in the Quarter Quell, who range from the very young to the aged and possess varying intellectual and physical abilities, suggests what is lost in war and repression. Their reactions to being called back to the Games vary from glee on the part of the more psychopathic to fear, resignation, and in a few cases, open hostility.

One of the film’s strengths and the source of much of its appeal, in addition to its references to social problems, is Jennifer Lawrence. Lawrence is one of the most sincere, expressive performers currently working in the film industry and has a genuinely riveting, commanding presence. One fears what may come of her in the Hollywood meat grinder, where even the limited social concerns of Catching Fire are still an exception. Jena Malone, Jeffrey Wright, Amanda Plummer and Lenny Kravitz, among others, acquit themselves with dignity.

Sutherland hopes the film will “stir up” a revolution. However, even if one were to grant Catching Fire a degree of social insight that it lacks, it is a serious misunderstanding of the process of social revolution to suggest that a work so banal in much of its dialogue and many of its relationships could contribute to the sort of critical-revolutionary climate conducive to social upheaval. The greatest possible contribution to such a climate would be the encouragement of complex thinking about complex problems. A revolution is something more than the combination of harsh conditions and a secret salute.

It would be wrong and unnecessary to mistake the initial, confused fumblings about big social questions, well-intentioned or otherwise, with the sort of artistic work that can enlighten and galvanize masses of people in a historical instant. Such works still lie in the future, although perhaps not so distant.

The authors write arts and film criticism for wsws.org, information arm of the Social Equality Party.

Weekend Treats—
The opera CARMEN  presented spontaneously at a popular restaurant in Grenoble.