[Marxism] Re: From Marxmail home (Clancy Sigal and Frida)

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Has Clancy Sigal really been seething since 2003 about that review,
which I didn't read or don't remember?

I found "Frida" an enjoyable movie basically, a good performance by
Hayek.  It probably helped boost knowledge about Frida Kahlo's talents
and may even have increased interest in the Mexican muralists. (My
personal favorite of the great Mexican painters is Orozco.)

While the movie does try to build up Kahlo as perhaps a greater artist
than Rivera, it is definitely fairer to his talents than "What's Love
Got to Do With It" was to the disturbed bluesman Ike Turner. And Rivera
does come across as a basically decent and fair-minded person. (Good
work by Alfredo Molina, too, in my opinion.)

Politically, however it is chopped liver, and chopped liver left in a
warm place for a prolonged period.  The Trotsky portrayal is absurd and
politically completely misleading. It is the standard liberal portrayal
of Trotsky as the vanguard (rightly or wrongly) of anti-Sovietism. I
could actually place the sentences attributed to Trotsky somewhere in
his works but they are selected completely apolitically, and moreover in
a way that effectively concealed his real politics, making him look like
a third-camp opponent of the Soviet Union  motivated by intellectual
snobbery toward and aesthetic distaste for Stalin, and preferring
Hitler.  (Trotsky did think that Hitler was a more effective mass leader
than Stalin, which is for sure a defensible assessment. But this is
presented out of context as his approach to Fascism and the Soviet Union
and so on.)

I admit that the make-up artists, wig- and moustasche makers who created
this simulacrum of Trotsky did a pretty good job, but the director and
script writer screwed up, and the poor actor was left with nothing to do
but act stiff and look silly.  I don't care whether Trotsky and Kahlo
had an affair, but if Kahlo had an affair with THIS Trotsky, she was
definitely trading down from Rivera.

Even more unpleasant to me was the coverup -- it is hard to call it
anything else -- of the May 24 assault on Trotsky's home (which was
actually better handled in Godfather II, by pure analogy, than in this
movie). The assault on the Trotsky household was led by the major
muralist David Alfaro Siquieros, who is a character in the movie
(portrayed as a REAL, HARD revolutionary in contrast to the soft,
dilettante-ish Rivera.

The assault resulted in one death, the murder by the attackers of
kidnapped guard Robert Sheldon Harte. The tendency in the movie is to
identify Siquieros' gangsterish leftism is identified with being a real
revolutionary.

But even though Siquieros is a character in the film, his participation
in the Stalinst assault -- also portrayed in the film -- is completely
suppressed, even though it is a proven fact.  And of course there is no
hint of the Stalinist role.  Indeed, the possibility is left open that
Rivera might even have been involved in the assassination because of
sexual jealousy.  Everything about responsibility of the assassination
-- and the the connections of Mercader with the Stalinist secret police
became fully established -- is kept quite vague.

The assault was actually better portrayed artistically in Godfather II,
although I think the model here was more the attack on Malcolm X's home.
The core of Michael Corleone's description of the assault "on my
bedroom, where my children play" was, I believe, based on a quote from
Malcolm's news conference on the assault.

I am not trying to restart the Stalin-Trotsky debate here, and I don't
care whether some list members think killing Trotsky was A Good Thing.
(I don't care because they have clearly lost the historical battle. If
anyone gets off on "ice-picking Trotskyites," and so on, they are free
to enjoy their declining years accordingly.  It is merely the factual
issues here that caught me.

I was actually a little shocked that the author of Going Away produced a
script so shallow.  He should at least Blame Hollywood, but apparently
Sigal, not wicked and corrupt Hollywood, is to blame this time.

By the way, I want to endorse Louis' indirect plug for Norman Mailer.  I
really think that Naked and the Dead, Barbary Shore, and The Deer Park
constitute a very powerful contribution to artistically grasping the
United States in the first decade after World War II.  An accomplishment
in danger of being lost in his subsequent career as Professional
Celebrity (he was one of the creators of this role, by the way) although
some things he wrote since then do have substance.
Fred Feldman


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