Summer Reading, 16.

Summer's just about come to an end, and with it, our little series of summer readings. One more for now while I think up another way to occasionally post pointers to good, meaty reads that aren't necessarily buzz-worthy today but forgotten tomorrow. If the following looks like it'll be a little more heaviosity than you're up for today, I can recommend a leisurely browse through TASCHEN's line of film books, a light but genuine pleasure.

To set this one up. "Stalin at the Movies" is the title of Peter Wollen's review of J. Hoberman's The Red Atlantis: Communist Culture in the Absence of Communism for the London Review of Books. Wollen calls the book "a cinematic montage of reflections on the long-drawn-out demise of the former Soviet Union," and he seems to have been inspired to draw many disparate elements from outside the book at hand into a montage of his own. I can't tell whether this snippet from Milovan Djilas's "record of his experience as a patron of the Kremlin cinema" is quoted by Hoberman or not, but it hardly matters:

Because of Stalin's remark that he was tired of gunfire, they put on, not a war film, but a shallow, happy collective-farm movie. Throughout the performance, Stalin made comments - reactions to what was going on, in the manner of uneducated people who mistake artistic reality for actuality. The second film was a prewar one on a war theme: If War Comes Tomorrow. The war in that film was waged with the help of poison gas, while at the rear of the invaders - the Germans - rebellious elements of the proletariat were breaking out. At the end of the film Stalin calmly remarked: "Not much different from what actually happened, only there was no poison gas and the German proletariat did not rebel."

(Emphasis mine.) Then Wollen writes:

Djilas's apparently innocuous phrase, "people who mistake artistic reality for actuality," seems to carry within it the secret that underlay Socialist Realism, in art as in life. Stalin not only mixed up actuality with artistic reality himself, but he sought to impose the same confusion on everybody else, compressing together document and reverie so that everyday existence and wish-fulfilment were magically combined. In the terms of this amalgam, "socialist" represented the reverie, "realism" the impression of actuality. The reverie, of course, was articulated in the first instance by Stalin himself as he imagined what the Soviet Union would be like, if only... if only... Millions were punished - exiled, put in camps, tortured, shot - for their failure to fill in those dots, so to speak, so that the happy coincidence of life and dream was endlessly delayed, only to be realised in films and paintings and novels. Meanwhile, in an effort to capture that troublesome "if only," revolutionary violence was normalised and generalised until it produced a society of informers, torturers and cronies, each of whom wondered in his private moments when he would awaken to the rapping on the door.

This passage on the "artistic reality for actuality" problem, a sort of blind spot, short circuit or malfunction shared by true believers in any ideology (since every ideology conjures its own imagery and/or iconography because it requires it, just as it requires murderers and/or martyrs) got me thinking about that entry back in May, "Mr. Bush Goes to the Movies." Now, let me leap to say that I'm not about to make some bone-headed comparison between Bush and Stalin. For one thing, I think that Brian Eno did a fine job about a week ago of explicating the difference between Russian propaganda and what he calls "prop-agenda":

It's not so much the control of what we think, but the control of what we think about. When our governments want to sell us a course of action, they do it by making sure it's the only thing on the agenda, the only thing everyone's talking about. And they pre-load the ensuing discussion with highly selected images, devious and prejudicial language, dubious linkages, weak or false "intelligence" and selected "leaks."

But "prop-agenda" requires both a greater degree pervasive power (i.e., it can't be a bottom-up tool for change, only a top-down method of solidifying an already well-established power base) and finesse than mere propaganda. What I'm hoping is that the Bush administration has been so clumsy, so lacking in that finesse that Americans are beginning to lose focus on the agenda.

Posted by dwhudson at August 26, 2003 5:31 AM