Fascism and Millennial American Cinema

Leighton Grist

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781137595652
• eBook ISBN: 9781137595669
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This book examines a spate of American films released around the turn of the millennium that differently address the actuality or possibility of domestic fascism within the USA. The films discussed span a diversity of forms, genres and production practices, and encompass low- and medium-budget studio and independent releases (such as American History X, Stir of Echoes and The Believer), star and/or auteur vehicles (such as The Siege, Fight Club and American Beauty), and high-budget, high-concept science-fiction films and franchises (such as Starship Troopers, Minority Report, the Matrix and X-Men trilogies and the Star Wars prequels). Central to the book is the detailed analysis of the films, which is contextualized historically in relation to a period that saw the significant rise of the far Right. The book concordantly affords a wider insight into fascism and its various manifestations and how such have been, and continue to be, registered within American cinema. 

© The Author(s) 2018

Leighton GristFascism and Millennial American Cinemahttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59566-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Fascism, and American Cinema

Leighton Grist¹

(1)

University of Winchester, Winchester, UK

End Abstract

I

Some 30 minutes into the melodrama Magnificent Obsession (Douglas Sirk, 1954), playboy Bob Merrick (Rock Hudson), having drunkenly crashed his car, and found himself in the house of painter Edward Randolph (Otto Kruger), awakens on a couch, the coverlet of which displays, in the forefront of shot, as part of its design, a swastika. Formally, the moment invites consideration with respect to the critical distanciation that the American filmmaking of German émigré Sirk has been seen to effect, being a practice that has been likened to the analogous distanciation theorized by and evidenced within the work of playwright Bertolt Brecht.¹ Narratively, with the swastika associated with fascism in general, and National Socialism in particular, the moment invites reflection upon, and tacitly critiques ideologically, the self-denying yet spiritually enhancing ‘Christian’ philosophy that is subsequently espoused by Randolph, who promptly hides the swastika by sitting on it.² Contextually, there is, further, invited reflection upon, and suggested an ideological critique of, the conformist, reactionary, Cold War-era USA out of which the film emerged. Institutionally, however, the implication is of the intimation of and/or engagement with the threat or actuality of domestic fascism that within American cinema has been recurrent since the 1930s.

This book explores such intimation and engagement regarding American cinema at the turn of the millennium, a period during which the issue of domestic fascism attained notable filmic attention. As much is reflected in the spread and variety of the film texts that are discussed, which span a diversity of forms, production practices and genres, ranging from low- and medium budget studio and independent releases, through star and/or auteur vehicles, to big-budget, high-concept science-fiction films and franchises. Preparatory to examining this body of filmmaking, this chapter, as it seeks to afford a foundation for subsequent discussion, has two main, interconnected purposes. First, to provide a clarifying definition of fascism, and, second, to afford an (unavoidably selective) account of how its potential or manifest domestic occurrence within the USA has been registered previously within American cinema, and of how this relates to that cinema’s wider historical situation. Most of the films that are considered within the chapter have received critical attention, as has their contextualization. Fascism has also not infrequently been adduced. This adduction, however, has tended to be loose and undeveloped, with fascism being mainly presumed or asserted. By contrast, while this chapter covers some well-trodden ground, it seeks, regarding fascism, to do so with focus and precision, conceptually and ideologically.

II

Fascism is a much, even obsessively discussed particularity, which has spawned what David Renton describes as ‘a bewildering array of rival models and definitions’ (1999: 18). Correspondingly, Renton – apart from referring to three Marxist theories of fascism that emerged contemporaneous with its rise in the 1920s and 1930s (3–4), within whose lineage one can place more recent, revisionist Marxist conceptualizations afforded by the likes of Martin Kitchen (1976), or Renton himself – makes mention of, among other attempted explanations, ‘psychological definitions’ (Renton, 1999: 18), some of which as well combine the psychoanalytic and the Marxist, as witness the output of, say, Wilhelm Reich (1942) and Erich Fromm (1942); ‘Weberian definitions’, which, operating within the sociological framework instigated by the writings of Max Weber, links ‘fascism to the crisis of the petty bourgeoisie’; ‘“idealist” theories’, which examine ‘the mythical and ideological character of fascism’; and ‘“structuralist” theories’, which regard ‘fascism as a political response to the failure of economic development’ (Renton 1999: 18). The last three approaches are typified for Renton by the work of, respectively, Seymour Martin Lipset (1960), Eugen Weber (1964) and Barrington Moore (1966). Neither is there necessarily a consensus within the study of fascism in terms of what constitutes its object of enquiry. Whereas for most Italian Fascism and Nazism embody what Peter Davies and Derek Lynch call ‘core fascisms’ (2002: 3),³ others, such as Zeev Sternhell, who states that fascism ‘can in no way be identified with Nazism’ (1989: 5), view Nazism as an entity that is separate from fascism, while still others, such as Gilbert Allardyce (1979), declare that the differences between the far-Right regimes and movements that are usually considered as exemplifying fascism are such that they preclude grouping under the term.

For this project, however, Nazism is, no less than Italian Fascism, a core fascism. It also concurs with Robert O. Paxton that we ‘need a generic term for what is a general phenomenon, indeed the most important political novelty of the twentieth century’ (2004: 21). The conception of fascism that shapes this book is, in turn, to a degree informed by what Roger Griffin has characterized as the ‘new consensus’ (1998: 14) within the academic study of fascism that, building on the work of Juan J. Linz (1976) and Stanley G. Payne (1980), has worked to stipulate its basic constituents, and is exemplified by, for example, the writing of Griffin (1991) and Roger Eatwell (1996).⁴ Fascism, in what follows, is considered to be a peculiarly modern, and modernist, political actuality that comprises conjoined ideological premisses and social and cultural instantiations. Fundamental ideologically is the person’s self-abnegation before a transcendent ideality that, conferring a sense of identity, and bearing unanswerable, immutable authority, is predominantly founded upon unreflexive, essentialist notions of nation and/or race. There is, accordingly, an acceptance of hierarchy and autocracy, a denial of the intellectual before the emotional – and of the rational and the material before the mystified and the mystical – as well as, indivisibly, an emphasis on the mass rather than the individual. Etymologically, the term ‘fascism’ derives from the Latin fasces, which denotes a ‘bundle of rods’ that ‘was a symbol of discipline and unity’ (Davies and Lynch, 2002: 2). The fascist mass further defines itself through its positioning in alterity and perceived superiority to variously determined others. A positioning that is underpinned implicitly by an investment in Social Darwinism,⁵ it can in addition be regarded to inform fascism’s much-promulgated idea of will, of the readiness to act in the name of the motivating ideality, irrespective of extant (and themselves inescapably ideological) scruples and restraints, which, granting an assumed exceptionality, reciprocally serves to validate the alterity and superiority of the fascist grouping. Moreover, if this returns us to the fact of fascist self-abnegation, then Sternhell contends that ‘the identification of the individual with the collective will’ is ‘the very cornerstone of fascist social and political thought’ (1976: 366).

Fascism’s ideological premisses innately shape its social and cultural instantiations. Hence the familiar fascist figure of the ‘charismatic’ leader, through whom the governing ideality is expressed, or even personified. Through this he correspondingly partakes of the unanswerable authority of that ideality, to which his followers can only accede.⁶ This again invokes the self-abnegation that is at the heart of fascism ideologically, but, in combination with the cultist affirmation of the leader that near inescapably attends him, also brings us back to fascism’s emphasis on the anti-intellectual and mystifying. Likewise that which Walter Benjamin was the first to recognize, ‘the introduction of aesthetics into political life’ (1935: 234) – the parades, rituals, uniforms and general pageantry that are a mark of fascist political expression. Functioning emotively to unify the fascist mass, this aestheticizing of the political also often involves the importuning of the elemental, and thus, tacitly, incontestable. ‘National Socialism’, as George L. Mosse observes, ‘appropriated all that was eternal’ (1999: 142). Politically, the acceptance of hierarchy and autocracy finds, in turn, reflection in fascism’s disdain regarding, and at best disingenuous relation with, parliamentary democracy, as well as its associated tendency towards dictatorship, and the establishment of an all-encompassing, one-party state. Impositions proclaimed in the name of the fascist mass, these inculpate the ideological coupling of assumed exceptionality and the investment in will, which in addition underlies fascism’s disregard for legal process, its generation of a context of threat and fear and, buttressing this, its unhesitating recourse to violence – apropos of which, the bundle of rods that comprised the fasces were ‘frequently accompanied by an axe’ (Davies and Lynch, 2002: 2). Further, if the institutionalized violence of fascist regimes is but an elaboration of the street-level brutishness that has been an historically constant facet of emergent fascist groupings, then that violence finds extension in the fascist glorification of war, which, according to Benito Mussolini and Giovanni Gentile, writing in 1932, ‘alone brings up to the highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have courage to meet it’ (163). War in addition enables territorial expansion, itself another expression of presumed exceptionality and the warrant of will, which no less sanction the facility with which fascism has, domestically, or within conquered areas, oppressed, incarcerated or extirpated those who are designated as different and/or undesirable, be they identified as such by virtue of their race, ethnicity, culture, politics, sexual orientation, criminality, physical or mental health or any other capricious reason. Finding its most extreme exemplification in the Holocaust, the same has found fascism pursuing eugenics, euthanasia and, in more recent years, ethnic cleansing.⁷ The fact of the Holocaust, and the magnitude of the racial obsession and violence that it actualizes, has besides been central to the distinction made by some between National Socialism and fascism. The excesses of National Socialism are, however, from the perspective of this study, an admittedly unconscionable intensification of the frequently murderous abuses that have been committed by fascism since its inception.

Modernity, as it emerged out of the nineteenth-century rise of democratization and industrialization, and is typified phenomenally by shifts from, among other things, craft to rationalized production, traditional to commodified culture and rural to urban life, can, within a longer historical view, be considered the culmination of the Enlightenment, the coming to dominance of rational, secularizing thought. Effecting the breakdown of well-established ideas, norms and structures, it has been, accordingly, the agent mutually of emancipation and uncertainty, opportunity and turmoil. Modernism, as it emerged within and as a rejoinder to modernity, articulates that which is within modernity repressed and inadmissible. Thus the weight granted – across modernism political, social and aesthetic – the illogical and the irrational, the aleatory and the numinous. However, as an epistemological fracture, modernism presents progressive and reactionary strands. Consider, for example, the work of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. Positing, respectively, that society less evidences logical, positivistic development than a site of constant struggle, and that the individual is less a conscious, rational being than driven by unconscious, irrational impulses, they nevertheless offer the basis for enfranchising political change and liberating psychic understanding – this as, like all progressive modernism, they implicitly embrace the manifest contingency and unfixedness of existence. Reactionary modernism, by contrast, seeks not to embrace but to deflect and ameliorate such conditionality and unsureness. With respect to this, Griffin proposes that fascism is ‘palingenetic’ (1991: 26), that it seeks to foster a sense of cultural and political rebirth and regeneration.⁸ Central to this process is an appeal, as the basis for the construction of an exemplary, model state, to a supra-historical, and expressly mythic, order – as consider the myth...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Fascism, and American Cinema
• 2. Skinheads, Racism, (Neo-)Nazism and the Family
• 3. Patriots and Militias, Fascism and the State
• 4. A (Fascist) New World Order/A (Fascistically Contested) New World Order
• 5. The Übermensch, its Avatars and the Ordinary
• 6. Conclusion: The World Turns
• Back Matter