Why the Drama Never Ends

It is the war--or, more accurately, the skirmish--that never ends. Nearly 50 years later, the protagonists and antagonists are still rousing themselves for battle as if the issues were fresh, the wounds raw, the stakes high.

This time it is Elia Kazan’s honorary Oscar, to be awarded tonight, that has reenergized the debate over the Hollywood blacklist and incited everyone to parse the morality of naming names yet again. In 1952, at a time when he was one of the country’s leading film and theater directors, with “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” “Gentleman’s Agreement” and “A Streetcar Named Desire” in his filmography and “Death of a Salesman” among his Broadway credits, Kazan gave the names of eight communist friends and colleagues from the Group Theater to the House Un-American Activities Committee, then investigating subversion in the entertainment industry.

But in Hollywood, it is not just the moral dilemmas that have kept the debate over the blacklist alive. In other sectors of the society, where witnesses named names and careers were shattered--in government, journalism, academe, even theater--the fury has died, the wounds have healed. For example, when choreographer Jerome Robbins died last year, the fact that he, too, had named names before HUAC was scarcely mentioned. No one seemed to care. So why is Hollywood still so exercised by the blacklist?

The answer may have to do with the nature of Hollywood, generally, and the nature of Hollywood politics. specifically. A community dedicated to producing drama for the screen, Hollywood has always been a community of self-dramatists off-screen as well. There is little reserve in the film industry. Instead, there is a flagrant self-display and the constant fight to be the center of attention--that is, to convince the world of one’s importance.

Politics in Hollywood is no different from anything else there. It was, and is, an opportunity for self-aggrandizement, whether it was the first generation of film moguls embracing Republicanism as a form of political conspicuous consumption, to demonstrate that they were aristocratic Americans; or their employees, embracing left-wing politics to demonstrate they hadn’t sold out and still had a conscience.

Of the latter, from whose ranks the blacklisted were drawn, many, if not most, were writers from the East, come to reap the rewards of the talkies or, as screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz wired his friend, then-newspaper columnist Ben Hecht, in 1925: “Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots.” As products of the more socially conscious urban East, and as Jews (which many were), they arrived, however, with vague pangs of guilt for making so much money, and with more fully articulated pangs of alienation as their work was passed down the studio assembly line and turned into what they saw as a product.

The guilt and alienation fused into a discontent that would fuel a powerful political engine. The Communist Party not only made these guns-for-hire feel as if their work were important in promoting social justice; it made them feel as if they were part of something larger: the grand march of history. It was no wonder that Hollywood had so many willing recruits to the Communist Party, 300 by one estimate. The party gave conscience-stricken writers purpose, justification and, perhaps most important, a big narrative. In short, the party wrote an irresistible script for putative heroism.

In truth, however seriously they might have taken themselves as political provocateurs, it was because these Hollywood left-wingers were so marginal in everything except fund-raising, so irrelevant to the real political struggle, that they insisted on heightening the level of their involvement and inflating their importance. It was their way of showing they mattered, though, to some degree, it was more a function of playacting than ideology.

Perhaps there was something terribly attractive to these self-dramatists about the party’s secrecy and intrigue and, later, when many were called before HUAC, something morbidly attractive about the martyrdom either of refusing to name names or of naming them and so recanting one’s past. Whichever they chose, it made them, like the characters they wrote, heroes, and no one surrenders heroism easily.

While it is certainly unfair to say that anyone on the Hollywood left invited victimization, and while the tragedies many leftists suffered were all too real, it is also no doubt true that some did accept the role of victim and that the role was satisfying, perhaps because it was all they had after their profession had been taken from them. One has only to look at the orchestrated response of the Hollywood 10 to the HUAC investigation--the invoking of the First Amendment rather than the Fifth against self-incrimination; the shouted demands to be heard; the disturbance they knew would inevitably lead to their bodily ouster--to see how consciously their testimony was devised as drama. They were staging the scene in a Frank Capra movie, in which the corrupt authorities silence the idealistic hero.

This, then, was the world Kazan inhabited when he named names. It was a histrionic rather than an ideological world in which “On the Waterfront” and “The Crucible” weren’t metaphors, they were models of action. In testifying, Kazan must have thought he was Terry Malloy, the Marlon Brando role in “On the Waterfront,” braving calumny and abuse for principle, standing up to the thugs, just as Arthur Miller, in refusing to name names, must have thought he was John Proctor, resisting the witch-hunt hysteria and clinging to some remnant of human decency. Both were writing their plots for and asserting their stardom in the national tragedy.

If so, that also meant it wasn’t only politics that made Kazan a pariah among so many of his fellow workers, if not the studio heads who employed him. It was Kazan’s odd sense of dramaturgy, his reversal of the roles of informer and victim and his dogged insistence on his own heroism. To his enemies, Kazan was a stoolie, a man who sold out his friends to save his own skin, which, to his revilers, didn’t need saving. It was a role in which Kazan seemed to have far less nobility than those he fingered, who were not racketeers, like the murderous louts Malloy faced down, but, at worst, only misguided idealists. If, in life as in movies, sympathy went to the sufferers, then Kazan was not sympathetic. He was the villain, not the hero as he would have it. So he has been portrayed ever since: a great artist but a craven man.

It is said that politics dies hard, but it isn’t politics that dies hard, it is drama. It is the endurance of drama that may help explain why there has been forgiveness or at least forgetfulness elsewhere, while Hollywood, the drama capital, still nurses its grievances. Drama, in rendering the blacklist controversy in blacks and whites, villains and heroes, acts of cowardice and bravery, makes it difficult to soften positions.

Yet, paradoxically, the primacy of the theatrical in Hollywood may also explain why Kazan is at long last being welcomed back into the fold. Twenty-seven years ago, the Motion Picture Academy, which represents the great, safe Hollywood middle, honored Charlie Chaplin after keeping him at arm’s length for two decades for his leftish positions, though anyone watching could see that Hollywood was less interested in saluting Chaplin than in staging a show of its own bigheartedness. Now, in honoring Kazan, Hollywood is staging another boffo ending with neither Kazan nor his victims as the heroes but once again its own magnanimous self.

On this night when “Saving Private Ryan” ’s likely statuette for Best Picture will attempt to reconcile the antiwar activists of the new left with the John Wayne patriots of the right, Kazan’s Oscar will attempt to reconcile all but the most unregenerate old lefties with the HUAC collaborator they hate. It should be a great scene, an example of the high drama that helped inflame the Hollywood political wars in the first place.

Welcome back, Elia. And thanks for the denouement.