The Upton Sinclair classic is filled with labor relations, leftist struggle sessions, and disproving American imperial propaganda, but we get a movie about mean oil man doing mean things. What a travesty and an erasure of Sinclair’s message. The man could layer irony on so thick that it would make Chapos jealous. Has anyone here read the book, and, if so, what are your favorite passages? Mine is:
Someone mentioned another stunt of the returned soldiers—their setting up a censorship of moving pictures. One Angel City theatre had started to show a German film, “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” and this Hun invasion had so outraged the Legion men, they had put on their uniforms and blockaded the theatre, and beaten up the people who tried to get in. Tommy Paley laughed—the courage of each of those veterans had been fortified by a five-dollar bill, contributed by the association of motion picture producers! They didn’t want foreign films that set them too high a standard!
Then Schmolsky. He was too fat to comprehend such a thing as irony, and he remarked that the directors were mighty damn right. Schmolsky, a Jew from Ruthenia, or Rumelia, or Roumania, or some such country, said that we didn’t want no foreign films breaking in on our production schedules. An hour or so later Bunny heard him telling how the Hollywood films were sweeping the German market—it wouldn’t be three years before we’d own this business. “Vae victis!” remarked Bunny; and Schmolsky looked at him, puzzled, and said, “Huh?”
Vae victis, indeed. The entire text can be found here for free:
I don’t disagree with your analysis, I just don’t enjoy a lot of movies like that anymore. Honestly I’d usually rather just watch a kind of dumb, fun movie most of the time.
I barely watch movies or TV anymore though.
Fair. I was just kinda thinking out loud via words. I guess I was mentally trying to tie a knot, or whatever, of why people (broadly, because this media is beloved after all) who are probably relatively decent people day to day enjoy this stuff. Why I enjoy it, for that matter. And that’s the best I could up with in addition to the obvious of the creators are purposely manipulating the audience into caring. My concern isn’t so much the empathy you can build through story telling though. That’s normal and fine. My issue is the people who walk away, think about it a little bit, and arrive at the conclusion that Daniel or Tony Soprano, etc. were the good guys or justified. That actually worries me a lot, tbh. Because it shows, probably, wtf do I know, either complete incompetence/ability to comprehend media (which, given, is a huge problem) or that the “American exceptionalism” Do what you gotta do! Type shit is, for some fucking reason, still around. Unfortunately I know the truth that it is… to some degree.
Just more thinking.