Lou Pr writes:
> Carrol thinks that "Salt of the Earth" will have a longer shelf-life than
> "Roger and Me." This is a spurious comparison. The first movie is tied
> esthetically and politically to the tug at the heartstrings Steinbeck
> novels, while Moore's flick seems much more closely related to James T.
> Farrell, Nathaniel West or Jon Dos Passos. The depression era novel of the
> latter group had more bite and more honesty in many ways. No heroes in
> these novels.
Let's see if we can move toward identifying what the issues are here. And I'm trying to make them issues of principle (abstract criteria of action) rather than of specific judgments of either *Salt of the Earth* or of *Roger and Me*. I saw the former when it was first (briefly) released into general circulation (1953?), and at the time I had not the slightest idea that it was in any way a "marxist" film (and I had even less idea that I would ever become a marxist: at the time I was in the USAF attached to the National Security Agency as a cryptanalyst). Now what grabbed me at the time (though I don't know what vocabulary I would have used to articulate it) was (in my current language) its overriding emphasis on conflicts among the "good guys." It is *this* aspect of the film that gives it its greatness, not Lou's silly classification of it with "tug at the heartstrings Steinbeck novels," and it is the total absence of such internal conflict that makes such a description accurate for Steinbeck's novels. Here is the point at which, one might say, Allen Tate and Karl Marx overlap: there is a "tension" (Tate's term) in the movie that is entirely absent in Steinbeck, making Steinbeck's novels more or less worthless for political purposes, but not only making the movie serviceable for political purposes but giving it an artistic power that will perhaps outlast the need for its political power. (And incidentally, many scenes in it were funny as hell: who could not chuckle at the scene in which the anglo organizer does not recognize the protrait of Juarez, not to speak of the wailing infants driving the sheriff nuts.)
"This is a spurious comparison. The first movie is tied esthetically and politically to the tug at the heartstrings Steinbeck novels, while Moore's flick seems much more closely related to James T. Farrell, Nathaniel West or Jon Dos Passos."
Farrell and Dos Passos impressed me when I read them a half-century ago, but as I recall the most impressive scene in *USA* was the Joycean mini-biography of Ford, while in Farrell I remember Danny O'Neil shagging flies in the twilight and Studs lying in his own vomit in the gutter. Very powerful images of the isolated abstract individual of bourgeios society, marvellous footnotes to Milton. But where is the mass bite? Neither author was very popular with "the masses."
Now to Moore. I'm willing to be convinced. When this thread began, my only particular thought on Moore was regret that I hadn't seen his films. The more Lou and others praised him, the more I began to wonder if I had really missed anything. For one thing the framework keeps shifting. Moore's work first appeared on stage as a candidate to have a political impact, because of its humor, that the crabbed humorless forces of the actual left could not achieve. Then some raised questions of whether his films forced his audiences to confront the issues of sexism and racism which are the primary barriers to working-class action. At this point the grounds seemed to shift: we were imposing political standards on artistic creation.
Now simple sympathy with the working class (or sectors of it) or antipathy to capitalists *can* sometimes help give a work aesthetic force. And such sympathy can also set on edge the teeth of reactionary literary critics, which is probably why Farrell and Dos Passos did not appear on grad school reading lists in the 1950s. I would like to see an appreciation of Moore in such terms, which Lou seems to suggest in his comparison of Moore with these writers. But that, in itself, would not contribute to a *political* judgment of Moore, and only marginally to a more complex political-aesthetic judgment. And by "political judgment," I don't mean a judgment of whether Moore's ideas are correct or incorrect. As Yoshie has noted, that is so irrelevant, that sometimes explicitly reactionary works can be politically effective. (Historically, the most important film of the 1960s was *Operation Abolition*, made by HUAC to attack its enemies. It became a wonderful take-off point for mocking the anti-communism of the 1950s and thus for justifying the refusal of the new SDS to stick to the anti-communist constitution of the old SDS. But *please note*: irony and mockery worked best with a constituency of students, not Walmart clerks or welfare mothers.)
And a political judgment has to be based, first of all, on a fairly clear perception of political need, which in turn is based on an assessment of the political balance of forces. In terms of politics, the first question to ask of Moore is not "What does Moore offer?" but "What do we need?" And quite frankly, I don't think we need, really need, movies or stories or music of any kind right now. We need Father Gapon, or his equivalent in 1998 USA, and even more we need the equivalent of those to whom Father Gapon appealed. And that equivalent would be in motion, not sitting on their thin or fat arses watching a movie or TV show, and they would constitute the "audience of the already converted" who make the only usable audience for revolutionary or radical art of any kind. Good art requires to be contemplated, and bad art appeals to no one, and it is by political struggle that the audience(s) get created that will *demand* the kind of art they need.
The only volume of Lenin I can't locate right now on my shelves is Vol. 8, which contains his polemic against Trotsky on the subject of the need for many many Father Gapons, and so I'll put off continuing this argument until I can put my hands on that volume.
Carrol