02 · 17 · 26

The politics of images

Alonso Díaz de la Vega

In an interview recorded a few years ago for The Criterion Collection, the Franco-Greek filmmaker Costa-Gavras (renowned for his socially conscious filmography) explains to critic and historian Peter Cowie that all films are political. As a child, the director says, he went to the movies to see Esther Williams, and from there he derived his idea of ​​what the United States was: a cheerful paradise of mermaids and swimming pools. “However,” he concludes, “American life was much more complex than that.” Costa-Gavras begins by quoting the semiotician and philosopher Roland Barthes, but his idea also incorporates a concept from the American thinker Fredric Jameson: the political unconscious. Films (and all other art forms) are nourished by their social and historical context, even if the creators don't intend it. An artist may want to avoid transmitting their ideology, and yet their perspectives will inevitably be reflected in the way they represent women, money, and automobiles.

Since filmmaking is a collaborative art, sometimes the director isn't entirely sure what their own film is saying, as apparently happened to Frank Capra with It's a Wonderful Life (1946). In 1951, the director was accused by the Department of Defense of having associated with left-wing writers, and from then on, the conservative Capra began to ignore the contributions of the screenwriters of It's a Wonderful Life, including radicals like Dalton Trumbo, Dorothy Parker, and Michael Wilson (all of whom were blacklisted in Hollywood), and liberals like Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett. Following these accusations, Capra wanted the film to be understood not as an attack on American monopolists, but as a Christian fable about the importance of clinging to life in the face of the most painful circumstances.

It's easy to see both perspectives in the film, whose plot begins with divine intervention to prevent the suicide of a good man down on his luck, but its protagonists tell us about other things: on one side is George Bailey (James Stewart), the hero of the immigrant community and the marginalized, to whom he grants mortgages; and on the other, Mr. Potter (It's a Wonderful Life), a selfish banker who flatly refuses to provide any assistance. Capra uses color to moralize, showing George in light tones and Potter always in dark ones, as if he were a black hole sucking away the solidarity and decency of the town of Bedford Falls.

Whether guided by his Christian faith or by a greater ideological affinity with his co-authors than he was willing to admit, the morality of both (their political vision, ultimately) was imprinted on the film and worried the anti-communists of the time, as they also perceived what Fredric Jameson would theorize years later: the political unconscious of works also shapes the public imagination.

At the end of World War II, the president of 20th Century Fox, Spyros Skouras, gave a speech on the importance of participating in the Cold War through film: “As an industry, we can play an infinitely important role in the global ideological struggle for the minds of men and dismantle the propagandists of communism.” However, Hollywood, as It's a Wonderful Life demonstrates, was a battleground where certain figures could go in one direction, and others in the opposite, even within the same production. Esther Williams' films may not have been intended as propaganda; however, in the minds of viewers like the young Costa-Gavras, they had that effect.

Williams was a swimmer who missed the opportunity to participate in the 1940 Olympics and decided to turn her talent into a business. That same year, she joined a dance and swimming show called Billy Rose's Aquacade, where she caught the attention of talent scouts at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, who saw in her looks, charisma, and skills an opportunity to make films, most of which ranked among the most popular each year. Watching the most famous of them all, Million Dollar Mermaid (1952), it's easy to imagine that it helped reinforce the public's perception of the kind of wonders being produced in the United States. The protagonist, played by Williams, is Australian, but finds success on a New York stage and, later, in Hollywood. What other industry had the funds, personnel, and distribution capabilities to showcase Busby Berkeley's sumptuous underwater choreography?

As the original title suggests, Williams is no longer a woman in these scenes, but magic incarnate: a mermaid who commands the water and moves through it like dancers across a stage. The images also construct an idea of ​​the kind of people who produced and viewed them. If the cinema of the Classical period is naive (though not entirely), surely—we think today—it's because addiction and horror didn't exist in that world.

Precisely out of a desire to contradict this idea, in 2016 Ethan and Joel Coen released Hail, Caesar!, a film based on the fixer Eddie Mannix, who worked for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. His role at the studio was that of an fixer: an executive who actually functioned as a spy, enforcer, blackmailer, and whatever else was needed to keep the stars, the press, and anyone who might interfere with daily operations in check. In one scene of the film, the fictional Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) seeks out star DeeAnna Moran (Scarlett Johansson) to propose an arranged marriage that would solve the public relations problem of an unplanned pregnancy. DeeAnna is a parody of Esther Williams, who also makes films with lavish aquatic choreography, shot in the same aspect ratio as Queen of the Sea.

Hail, Caesar! aims to undermine the image of innocence propagated by the most popular Hollywood films of the 1950s; its humor is political in its perverse portrayal of that era so heavily embellished by popular iconography. If the past was better, the Coen brothers suggest, it's because it never truly existed; the memory of the film industry's most reprehensible acts is a rebuke to idealizations and a way to cultivate viewers who—as the great filmmaker and theorist Harun Farocki urged us—will distrust images. There are no films without ideology or political affiliation, only audiences unwilling to recognize them.