All Art is Propaganda: Reflections on Orwell and Netflix Noir
Finnish title screen for Deadwind – Fair Use
Born in 1942, a month after Pearl Harbor, I was unable to experience the Thirties directly, but I experienced it vicariously in the afterglow of an explosive era rattled by the Spanish Civil War, the anti-fascist cause, the young Black men known as “The Scottsboro Boys” and lefty books by writers such as Howard Fast (Patrick Henry and the Frigate’s Keel ), Erika Mann (author of School for Barbarians and the sister of the German novelist Thomas Mann) and the songs and music of Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly with his 12-string guitar. I plead guilty to nostalgia for a time and place I never actually knew and that can be as dangerous and addictive as any drug.
I remember my mother, a CP member, telling me about battles with landlords and about a performance of Clifford Odets’ play Waiting for Lefty which brings to life a group of New York taxi drivers and their cause. At the end of the drama, actors on stage, along with members of the audience who cry, “Strike, strike, strike” which made me want to go on strike. I would not do that until 1968, a good year to go on strike.
I spent much of my boyhood waiting for Lefty, or someone like him and eager to meet striking taxi drivers. What I got was Beckett’s existentialist play Waiting for Godot, and later the TV show Taxi. In the 1950s I wanted to go back to the 1930s when, my mother explained, art was supposed to advance the class struggle and unite the exploited and the oppressed against the exploiters and oppressors. I cheered Rebel without a Cause, which was better than no rebels at all, and The Wild One which was superior to the Doris Day/ Rock Hudson kitsch movie Pillow Talk.
In college I accepted and echoed George Orwell’s notion that “All art is propaganda, but not all propaganda is art.” The trick, if you can call it that, was to make something that was both artistic and propagandist and didn’t compromise one or the other. Orwell’s notion landed me in trouble with the anti-communist ex-communist professors at Columbia who hailed the Orwell who gave the world Nineteen Eighty-Four not the Orwell who wrote Homage to Catalonia, an imperfect work that captures the factionalism that afflicted Spain during the civil war.
Professors such as Lionel Trilling endorsed art for art’s sake or art that gave the appearance of being apolitical such as the novels of Henry James, but were embedded with messages about class, sex and money and about the American bourgeoisie and the European aristocracy. In 1968, when those same professors denounced the student strike at Columbia, I endorsed “agit-pop” as Yippie Abbie Hoffman called it, a contemporary version of agitprop, which included guerrilla theater actions like tossing money to the floor of the NY stock exchange and running Pigisus, a pig for president. In the 1970s I also wrote leaflets and pamphlets and aimed to walk the walk that journalist John Reed had walked when he left bohemia in Greenwich Village, bounded to Russia and chronicled the Bolshevik Revolution in Ten Days that Shook the World, a classic of reporting about revolution.
These days with a kind of “quiet desperation,” as Henry David Thoreau would call it, I follow my own drummer and look for both agitprop and agit pop and for forms of cultural expression that are both artistic and propagandistic. I look closely at film noir which I once assumed was inherently subversive, but which now looks and feels like it has found a respectable nitch in mass media empires like Netflix. As Jack London, the author of the dystopian novel, The Iron Heel, observed, “Yesterday’s heresy is today’s orthodoxy.” Noir is now more than ever before an industry.
Mostly, I don’t find what I want and think I need. Maybe I’m looking for subversive art in all the wrong places, much as the Miss Lonely Hearts of the world look for love and “Mr. Goodbar” in all the wrong places. I have binged on two Netflix cop dramas: Marcella, which is British noir, and is set in London, and also in Belfast, a natural environment for noir; and Deadwind which takes place in and around Helsinki and in neighboring Estonia, with the Estonians cast as the baddies.
Both Marcella and Deadwind feature fearless and seductive female cops who break the law and who are played seductively well by two actresses (Anna Friel in Marcella and Pihla Viitala in Deadwind) who inhabit a wide range of emotions and attitudes, from rage to tenderness and madness.
In old noir from the 1930s and 1940s, the women characters were almost always the “femme fatale” (beautiful but deadly) who seduce and mislead male detectives like Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) in The Maltese Falcon and Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum) in Out of the Past. In the third series of Marcella the undercover woman detective doubles as the femme fatale. In Deadwind the female cop is a step-mother and a killer who trusts no one, takes the law into her own hands and shoots and wounds her male partner in an attempt to rescue her kidnapped son. Marcella has far more fucking than Deadwind; Deadwind has more violence than Marcella.
Both shows make attempts to create believable evil characters who are drug dealers and petty criminals as well as characters who belong to wealthy, powerful families of the sort lodged in Roman Polanski’s neo-noir classic, Chinatown from 1974. Chinatown focuses on the twisted incestuous relationship between a father (Noah Cross) and a daughter (Evelyn Cross Mulwray), who is also the mother of their daughter. Polanki’s LA is polluted, toxic and poisonous. In Deadwind and Marcella the dramatic tension is driven by the entanglements that exist between mothers and daughters, with good mothers doing bad things, and bad mothers doing good things.
No one in Deadwind and in Marcella is pure and innocent. Everyone is guilty of something, including the cops. That’s what my private investigator brother told me about the cases he handled, and not everyone, he added, was guilty of the crime for which they were accused. In Chinatown, the political element is water, which makes perfect sense since it’s set in California where water is king. In Deadwind and Marcella, the political element is corporate greed and government corruption, plus the smuggling of drugs and arms across borders and boundaries.
It has probably been unrealistic of me to expect a mass media empire such as Netflix to make and distribute films that are subversive. They probably wouldn’t get past internal censors. If they did, the Trump administration would likely charge them with endorsing terrorism. It’s probably more difficult now than at any time in the past 75 years for Hollywood to make a film like Chinatown. Still now and then subversive lines surface. They’re a small consolation.
In Marcella, Marcella says, “rich people don’t go to jail.” The film reinforces her statement. The Maguires— a wealthy, ruthless and powerful Irish family, headed by a matriarch, implodes— Marcella herself escapes with a child who is the only surviving member of the criminal clan and with all their money which she has transferred electronically from their bank account to one of her own. Computer and phone savvy is essential in today’s noir.
In Deadwind a minor character tells the detective’s daughter, who is a drug addict, a drug dealer and a killer, that in the wake of climate change and global warming she ought to stop eating meat and become a vegetarian. Coming from his lips the words sound cynical. “Rich people don’t go to jail” also sounds cynical, coming as it does from Marcella.
The two female detectives, Marcella and Sofia Karppi, both work for corrupt police departments; so they have little or no choice but to work mostly alone, or to be practical and expedient and to team up with tainted officers. Both shows pay homage to the cult of the individual and offer propaganda about the solitary and the lonely souls of the world . Marcella and Sofia are both supercops who, like Superman, fight never ending battles. They don’t travel faster than speeding locomotives or leap taller than skyscrapers, but they extricate themselves from impossible traps, dark prison-like tunnels and labyrinth-like underground passageways. You want to scream at the screen, “Don’t go there.” But they go there again and again and have to be rescued. It’s all too predictable,
I wouldn’t mind a Netfix show in which the community plays the part of the detective, solves the crimes, while the terrorists belong to a cabal that includes the fictionalized likes of Putin, Trump, Netanyahu , the corporate heads at Fox and a cast of thousands who cry “Strike, strike, strike” or simply shout “Fuck You.” I’ll probably keep on watching noir on Netflix hoping against hope for something that George Orwell would have raved about.
