[Marxism] Bad Capitalists or a Bad System: Hollywood Comes to Blows With Upton Sinclair

[Dbachmozart@xxxxxxx]

Bad Capitalists or a Bad System: Hollywood Comes to Blows With  Upton Sinclair
By David  Bacon
t r u t h o u t | Perspective  

_http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/031408E.shtml_ 
(http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/031408E.shtml) 
Friday 14 March 2008    
I was disappointed Daniel Day-Lewis won an Oscar for  "There Will Be Blood," 
not because he's not a great actor (he is), but because  the movie was such a 
betrayal of the book on which it was based. Movies don't  have to follow 
books. Many don't. But in this case, what we missed were the  things that made 
Upton Sinclair's "Oil" a politically courageous book for its  time. For our 
time, 
it unearths a crucial part of the hidden history of our own  working class 
movement. 
"Oil" could have been made like "Gangs of New York."  That movie explored the 
racial and ethnic conflicts at New York City's birth,  which so frightened 
its moneyed class that, at the film's climax, the rich shell  their own city to 
prevent the upending of their social order. Both movies  allowed Day-Lewis 
full range for the extreme violence of his screen persona. In  "Gangs of New 
York," his power was magnified by being placed in a (relatively)  true social 
landscape. "There Will Be Blood" diminished Day-Lewis by making his  portrayal 
socially irrelevant. 
Actually, a good movie made from "Oil" would have  been more like "Reds," 
exploring not just social conflicts, but the way they  gave birth to unions and 
left movements in much the same period. "Reds" was  painted on a large canvas, 
moving from Oregon to the East Coast, and, finally,  Smolny Institute and the 
storming of the Winter Palace. "Oil" covers the same  period, and many of the 
same political arguments. But they play out instead in a  concentrated look at 
just one city - Los Angeles. 
Upton Sinclair was not just an author who lived in  Southern California or 
wrote about it. He was a political activist who tried to  change it. He founded 
the Los Angeles chapter of the ACLU. He went to jail with  longshoremen in the 
Long Beach harbor, for speaking in defense of their strike.  He ran for 
governor seven years after the novel was published. Incredibly, as a  socialist 
he 
not only won the Democratic Party nomination in the depth of the  Depression, 
but hundreds of thousands voted for his platform to "End Poverty In  
California." He gave the state's corporate elite the biggest political scare  
they've 
had in any election before or since. 
"Oil" gives us a history of the city's economic rise,  even as Los Angeles 
was becoming the economic epicenter of the western United  States. But it does 
more than tell the story of the birth of the industry that  has come to 
dominate this country's politics, as "The Jungle" did for  meatpacking. "Oil" 
is more 
politically sophisticated, and recounts the growth of  the social movements 
that challenged the harsh domination of the oil titans. 
That's what is missing from "There Will Be Blood."  The movie history is 
false, where Sinclair's was true. 
"Oil" unfolds as the story of the political education  of Bunny Ross, and of 
his love for his father, J. Arnold Ross, an oil wildcatter  turned tycoon. 
Sinclair paints his characters in primary colors with a broad  brush, in the 
style of the time. Bunny's nickname signals his character as a  Southern 
California innocent, always motivated by the best of intentions. His  father, 
Sinclair 
tells us, is kind and good. He loves Bunny and spends his life  trying to make 
him happy and keep him from harm. 
The two characters are the keys to the political  analysis Sinclair impresses 
on the reader. Personal kindness, he says, cannot  change poverty, 
exploitation, war or corruption. J. Arnold Ross helps poor  families as he 
takes their 
land for wells. He admires and respects his workers,  but must stick with the 
other oil operators when they bring in strikebreakers to  bust their union and 
evict the strikers from their homes. In a  not-very-fictionalized account of 
the "Teapot Dome Scandal," J. Arnold tells  Bunny again and again bribing 
politicians, even a president of the United  States, is simply what is required 
in 
order to do business. 
It doesn't matter whether a capitalist is a good  person or a bad one, 
Sinclair says. It's the system that grinds one class into  poverty, and allows 
another to reap the benefit. J. Arnold Ross, a loving father  and paternalistic 
employer, commits criminal acts because his social class not  only makes it 
possible, but necessary. His pained justification to Bunny for  hiring gun 
thugs is 
that, if he doesn't, the other oil operators will combine  against him and 
drive him out of business. Capital operates as a class. 
"There Will Be Blood" turns "Oil" on its head. Bunny  basically disappears as 
a character, making only a few appearances to dramatize  his father's cruelty 
and corruption. J. Arnold, now a villain and renamed Daniel  Plainview, 
expropriates Bunny as a child from his dead father, and then banishes  him when 
he 
goes deaf after a well explosion. Plainview's personal degeneration  
culminates in beating an evangelist preacher to death in the bowling lane of 
his  
palatial home. His violence is treated as a defect in his character, a symbol 
of  
his evil nature. His crime is personal, not social. 
As a result, the movie is devoid of the social  conflict that is the book's 
main narrative. There are no unions and no strikes.  Class conflict is out. The 
corruption of politicians becomes the product of a  corrupt personality, not 
a corrupt system. 
And, since there is no class conflict, there is no  room for the novel's main 
achievement. "Oil" takes Bunny through a process in  which he learns not only 
about how the world works, but about how people  organize to change it. Both 
the movie and book show the Ross expropriation of  the farm of the poor 
Watkins family. But "Oil" follows the political  radicalization of Paul Watkins 
- 
drafted as a doughboy in World War I, and then  sent with the interventionist 
armies to put down the Russian Revolution. He  returns and becomes an oil union 
leader, and then a member of the left wing of  the Socialist Party. When that 
party splits in 1919 (a scene dramatized in  "Reds" as well), Paul Watkins 
becomes an organizer in the new Communist  Party. 
Upton Sinclair, whose sympathies were much more with  the right wing of the 
Socialist Party than the left, still draws an admiring  portrait of the worldly 
Paul, showing his courage in facing imprisonment, and  his eventual fatal 
beating by right wing assassins. Sinclair draws out the  political differences 
of 
the day in his debates with Bunny, whose eyes he opens.  Bunny eventually has 
to choose whose side he's on. The more he learns about the  world, the more 
he rejects his father's class, while still loving him as a  person. And that 
class turns against him in the end. 
In "There Will Be Blood" Paul disappears. In his  place his evangelist 
brother Eli becomes the main antagonist to Plainview, a  religious hypocrite 
pitted 
against a violent and powerful oilman. It is a  conflict without social 
relevance, one the movie hardly bothers to explain. In  its lowest point, a 
grown 
Bunny gratuitously returns to announce to his father  that he's going to become 
an investor in Mexican oil wells. Sinclair would have  torn his hair out over 
that one. 
"Oil" recounts just a small piece of what is now a  hidden history of the 
radicalism of Los Angeles's labor movement before and  after World War I. In 
1903 
the city's socialist labor council helped Mexican and  Japanese farm workers 
win one of the state's first agricultural strikes, just  north in Oxnard. The 
Los Angeles unions were then shocked when Samuel Gompers,  president of the 
American Federation of Labor, refused to give the workers a  union charter 
unless they rid themselves of their Asian members. "Oil" shows the  fear the 
oil 
operators had for the Wobblies (the radical Industrial Workers of  the World) 
and their (mostly rhetorical) commitment to sabotage in the  workplace. In the 
city's real history, two prewar labor leaders, the McNamara  brothers, spent 
their lives in prison after a bomb they planted blew up at The  Los Angeles 
Times building. 
This was the most turbulent era for the labor and  radical movements of Los 
Angeles. Sinclair describes how the oilmen defeated the  workers and 
socialists, and created the "citadel of the open shop." Bunny  resists, and 
even makes 
his father put up money to bail out strikers. But he  can't stop the class war. 
Sinclair recreates the era's radical spirit, weaving  political debate, 
action and romance into a complex tapestry. He was a daring  author for his 
time. 
He describes Bunny's sexual awakening as frankly as he  could get away with, in 
an era when books really were banned for open  descriptions of sex. His women 
are mostly foils for men, and they both seem a  little wooden in comparison 
with the intimacy and realism achieved by writers  since. Yet, Sinclair gets 
real drama from Bunny's conflict between his youthful  lust for his studio star 
lover and his growing desire to make a full commitment  to political 
organizing. In the end, he falls for a Jewish Socialist woman who  clearly is 
his equal 
in debate, and greater in her commitment. 
Hollywood today has less of the radical spirit that  made "Reds." It's not 
hard for a studio now to reinvent the war in Afghanistan  as a crusade 
("Charlie 
Wilson's War"), confident that no one will ask why Ronald  Reagan bankrolled 
Osama bin Laden and other extremists, calling them "freedom  fighters," so 
long as they were willing to fight the Soviets. I can't wait to  see what they 
do 
with Central America. 
But Los Angeles? Hollywood's own city? Working class  social and political 
movements get written out of the textbooks all the time.  Writing us out of a 
movie made from "Oil" expropriated one of the most important  works of our own 
history. I hope the producers don't have exclusive rights to  the book. 
Perhaps, a more courageous group will make the movie as Upton Sinclair  wrote 
it.  
  
____________________________________

_David Bacon_ (http://dbacon.igc.org/)  is a California  photojournalist who 
documents labor, migration and globalization. His book "Communities Without 
Borders" was just published by Cornell  University/ILR Press. 





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