Against Interpretation (21 page)

*   *   *

The hope for intelligence in the theater is not through conventional “seriousness,” whether in the form of analysis (bad example:
After the Fall
), or the documentary (weak example:
The Deputy
). It is rather, I think, through comedy. The figure in the modern theater who best understood this was Brecht. But comedy, too, has its enormous perils. The danger here is not so much intellectual simplification as failure of tone and taste. It may be that not all subjects can be given a comic treatment.

This question of the adequacy of tone and taste to serious subject-matter is, of course, not confined to the theater alone. There is an excellent illustration of the advantages of comedy, and of its peculiar dilemmas—if I may pass to the movies for a moment—in two films recently showing in New York, Charlie Chaplin’s
The Great Dictator
and Stanley Kubrick’s
Doctor Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The Bomb.
The virtues and failures of both films seem to me oddly comparable, and instructive.

In the case of
The Great Dictator,
the problem is easily discernible. The entire conception of the comedy is totally, painfully, insultingly inadequate to the reality it purports to represent. The Jews are Jews, and they live in what Chaplin calls the Ghetto. But their oppressors don’t display the swastika but the emblem of the double cross; and the dictator is not Adolf Hitler but a balletic buffoon with a mustache named Adenoid Hynkel. Oppression in
The Great Dictator
is uniformed bullies throwing so many tomatoes at Paulette Goddard that she has to wash her laundry all over again. It is impossible to see
The Great Dictator
in 1964 without thinking of the hideous reality behind the movie, and one is depressed by the shallowness of Chaplin’s political vision. One cringes at that embarrassing final speech, when the Little Jewish Barber steps up to the podium in place of Der Phooey to call for “progress,” “liberty,” “brotherhood,” “one world,” even “science.” And to watch Paulette Goddard looking up at the dawn and smiling through her tears—in 1940!

The problem of
Doctor Strangelove
is more complex, though it may well be that in twenty years it will seem as simple as
The Great Dictator.
If the positive assertions at the close of
The Great Dictator
seem facile and insulting to its subject, so may the display of negative thinking of
Doctor Strangelove soon
(if it does not already) seem equally facile. But this does not explain its appeal now. Liberal intellectuals who saw
Doctor Strangelove
during its many preview showings last October and November marvelled at its political daring, and feared that the film would run into terrible difficulties (mobs of American Legion types storming the theaters, etc.). As it turned out, everybody, from
The New Yorker
to the
Daily News,
has had kind words for
Doctor Strangelove;
there are no pickets; and the film is breaking records at the box-office. Intellectuals and adolescents both love it. But the sixteen-year-olds who are lining up to see it understand the film, and its real virtues, better than the intellectuals, who vastly overpraise it. For
Doctor Strangelove
is not, in fact, a political film at all. It uses the OK targets of left-liberals (the defense establishment, Texas, chewing gum, mechanization, American vulgarity) and treats them from an entirely post-political,
Mad Magazine
point of view.
Doctor Strangelove
is really a very cheerful film. Certainly, its fullbloodedness contrasts favorably with what is (in retrospect) the effeteness of Chaplin’s film. The end of
Doctor Strangelove,
with its matter-of-fact image of apocalypse and flip soundtrack (“We’ll Meet Again”), reassures in a curious way, for nihilism is our contemporary form of moral uplift. As
The Great Dictator
was Popular Front optimism for the masses, so
Doctor Strangelove
is nihilism for the masses, a philistine nihilism.

What is good in
The Great Dictator
are the solitary autistic acts of grace, like Hynkel playing with the balloon-globe; and the “little man” humor, as in the sequence where the Jews draw lots for a suicidal mission out of slices of a pie, and Chaplin ends up with all the tokens in his slice. These are the perennial elements of comedy, as developed by Chaplin, over which has been pasted this unsatisfactory political cartoon. Similarly, what is good in
Doctor Strangelove
has to do with another perennial source of comedy, mental aberration. The best things in the film are the fantasies of contamination expounded by the psychotic Gen. Jack D. Ripper (played with excruciating brilliance by Sterling Hayden), the super-American clichés and body movements of Gen. Buck Turgidson, a Ring Lardneresque businessman-military type (put together by George C. Scott), and the euphoric satanism of Doctor Strangelove himself, the Nazi scientist with the right arm that hates him (Peter Sellers). The specialty of silent-film comedy (and
The Great Dictator
is still, essentially, a silent film) is the purely visual crossing of grace, folly, and pathos.
Doctor Strangelove
works another classic vein of comedy, as much verbal as visual—the idea of humors. (Hence the joke names of characters in
Doctor Strangelove,
exactly as in Ben Jonson.) But notice that both films rely on the same device for distancing the audience’s feelings: employing the same actor to play several key roles. Chaplin plays both the Little Jewish Barber and the dictator Hynkel. Sellers plays the relatively sane British officer, the weak American president, and the Nazi scientist; he was originally supposed to take a fourth role as well—that of the Texan, played in the film by Slim Pickens, who commands the plane which drops the H-Bomb that sets off the Russian Doomsday Machine. Without this device of the same actor playing morally opposed roles, and so subliminally undermining the reality of the entire plot, the precarious ascendancy of comic detachment over the morally ugly or the terrifying in both films would be lost.

Doctor Strangelove
fails most obviously in scale. Much (though not all) of its comedy seems to me repetitive, juvenile, ham-banded. And when comedy fails, seriousness begins to leak back in. One begins to ask serious questions about the misanthropy which is the only perspective from which the topic of mass annihilation is comic.… For me, the only successful spectacle shown this winter dealing with public issues was a work which was both a pure documentary and a comedy—Daniel Talbot and Emile de Antonio’s editing into a ninety-minute film of the TV kinescopes of the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings. Viewed in 1964, the hearings make a quite different impression. All the good guys come off badly—Army Secretary Stevens, Senator Symington, lawyer Welch, and the rest, looked like dopes, stuffed shirts, ninnies, prigs, or opportunists—while the film irresistibly encourages us to relish the villains aesthetically. Roy Cohen, with his swarthy face, slicked-down hair, and double-breasted, pin-stripe suit, looked like a period punk from a Warner Brothers’ crime movie of the early thirties; McCarthy, ushaven, fidgety, giggling, looked and acted like W. C. Fields in his most alcoholic, vicious, and inaudible roles. In that it aestheticized a weighty public event,
Point of Order
was the real
comédie
noire of the season, as well as the best political drama.

[
Spring 1964
]

2

The currency of exchange for most social and moral attitudes is that ancient device of the drama: personifications, masks. Both for play and for edification, the mind sets up these figures, simple and definite, whose identity is easily stated, who arouse quick loves and hates. Masks are a peculiarly effective, shorthand way of defining virtue and vice.

Once a grotesque, a figure of folly—childlike, lawless, lascivious—“the Negro” is fast becoming the American theater’s leading mask of virtue. For definiteness of outline, being black, he even surpasses “the Jew,” who has an ambiguous physical identity. (It was part of the lore of the advanced position on Jewishness that Jews didn’t have to look like “Jews.” But Negroes always look like “Negroes,” unless, of course, they are unauthentic.) And for sheer pain and victimage, the Negro is far ahead of any other contender in America. In just a few short years, the old liberalism, whose archetypal figure was the Jew, has been challenged by the new militancy, whose hero is the Negro. But while the temper which gives rise to the new militancy—and to “the Negro” as hero—may indeed scorn the ideas of liberalism, one feature of the liberal sensibility hangs on. We still tend to choose our images of virtue from among our victims.

In the theater, as among educated Americans generally, liberalism has suffered an ambiguous rout. That large streak of moralism, of preachiness in such plays as
Waiting for Lefty, Watch on the Rhine, Tomorrow the World, Deep Are the Roots, The Crucible
—the classics of Broadway liberalism—would be unacceptable now. But what was wrong with these plays, from the most contemporary point of view, is not that they aimed to convert their audiences, rather than simply entertaining them. It was, rather, that they were too optimistic. They thought problems could be solved. James Baldwin’s
Blues for Mister Charlie
is a sermon, too. To make it official, Baldwin has said that the play is loosely inspired by the Emmett Till case, and one may read, on the theater program under the director’s name, that the play is “dedicated to the memory of Medgar Evers, and his widow and his children, and to the memory of the dead children of Birmingham.” But it is a sermon of a new type. In
Blues for Mister Charlie,
Broadway liberalism has been vanquished by Broadway racism. Liberalism preached politics, that is, solutions. Racism regards politics as superficial (and seeks some deeper level); it emphasizes what is unalterable. Across a virtually impassable gulf, the new mask of “the Negro,” manly, toughened, but ever vulnerable, faces his antipode, another new mask, “the white” (sub-genus: “the white liberal”)—who is pasty-faced, graceless, lying, sexually dull, murderous.

No one in his right mind would wish the old masks back. But this does not make the new masks wholly convincing. And whoever accepts them should notice that the new mask of “the Negro” has become visible only at the price of emphasizing the fatality of racial antagonisms. If D. W. Griffith could call his famous white supremacist film about the origins of the Ku Klux Klan
The Birth of a Nation,
then James Baldwin could, with more justice to the overt political message of his
Blues for Mister Charlie
(“Mister Charlie” is Negro slang for “white man”), have as well called his play “The Death of a Nation.” Baldwin’s play, which takes place in a small Southern town, opens with the death of its brash, tormented Negro jazz musician hero, Richard, and ends with the acquittal of his white murderer, a resentful inarticulate young buck named Lyle, and the moral collapse of the local liberal, Parnell. There is the same insistence on the painful ending, even more starkly presented, in LeRoi Jones’ one-act play
Dutchman,
now running off-Broadway. In
Dutchman,
a young Negro sitting on the subway reading and minding his own business is first accosted, then elaborately teased and taunted to the point of rage, then suddenly knifed by a twitchy young hustler; while his body is being disposed of by the other passengers, whites, the girl turns her attention to a new young Negro who has just boarded the train. In the new post-liberal morality plays, it is essential that virtue be defeated. Both
Blues for Mister Charlie
and
Dutchman
turn on a shocking murder—even though, in the case of
Dutchman,
the murder is simply not credible in terms of the more or less realistic action that has gone before, and seems crude (dramatically), tacked on, willed. Only murder releases one from the mandate to be moderate. It is essential, dramatically, that the white man win. Murder justifies the author’s rage, and disarms the white audience, who have to learn what’s coming to
them.

For it is indeed an extraordinary sermon that is being preached. Baldwin is not interested in dramatizing the incontestable fact that white Americans have brutally mistreated Negro Americans. What is being demonstrated is not the social guilt of the whites, but their inferiority as human beings. This means, above all, their sexual inferiority. While Richard jeers about his unsatisfying experiences with white women up North, it turns out that the only passions—in one instance carnal, in the other romantic—ever felt by the two white men who figure importantly in the play, Lyle and Parnell, have been with Negro women. Thus, the oppression by whites of Negroes becomes a classic case of resentment as described by Nietzsche. It is eerie to sit in the ANTA Theatre on 52nd Street and hear that audience—sizably Negro, but still preponderantly white—cheer and laugh and break into applause at every line cursing white America. After all, it’s not some exotic Other from across the seas who is being abused—like the rapacious Jew or the treacherous Italian of the Elizabethan drama. It is the majority of the members of the audience themselves. Social guilt would not be enough to explain this remarkable acquiescence of the majority in their own condemnation. Baldwin’s plays, like his essays and novels, have undoubtedly touched a nerve other than political. Only by tapping the sexual insecurity that grips most educated white Americans could Baldwin’s virulent rhetoric have seemed so reasonable.

But after applause and cheers, what? The masks which the Elizabethan theater proposed were exotic, fantastic, playful. Shakespeare’s audience did not come streaming out of the Globe Theatre to butcher a Jew or string up a Florentine. The morality of
The Merchant of Venice
is not incendiary, but merely simplifying. But the masks which
Blues for Mister Charlie
holds up for our scorn are our reality. And Baldwin’s rhetoric is incendiary, though let loose in a carefully fireproofed situation. The result is not any idea of action—but a vicarious pleasure in the rage vented on the stage, with no doubt an undertow of anxiety.