FILM CHRONICLE
307
or
Modern Times,
or even such unpretentious and disorganized enter–
tainments as the movies of the Marx Brothers.) This disciplined clarity
is used to control the explosive possibilities of the subject: where every
statement is complete, clear, and limited, it can with less difficulty be
made false. (The more Hollywood "matures" and tries to Jive up to
its responsibilities as a major expression of our society, the more we
shall see of this empty and extremely skillful precision.
Boomerang
is
the most recent example, somewhat more acceptable than
The Best
Years of Our Lives
because the actual limitations of its subject are more
in accord with the limitations
of
the realistic technique.)
The falsehood has many aspects, but its chief and most general
aspect is a denial of the reality of politics, if politics means the existence
of real incompatibilities of interest and real
social
problems not suscept–
ible of individual solution. The choice of subject is itself an evasion
of politics, for the "veterans' problem" is not an issue, or at any rate
it is a false issue, since nobody is against the veterans and since they
do not constitute a social group, except temporarily and very vaguely.
And even the rudimentary elements of politics that have in fact attached
themselves to this problem are excluded from the movie: there is ·no
mention of veterans' organizations, for instance, or of any general eco–
nomic insecurity (one of the three main characters has to hunt for a
job, but it is assumed that this is merely a matter of getting properly
"located" somewhere at the bottom, working hard, and starting the
automatic climb up the economic scale). Nor is there any hint of the
veterans' harboring bitterness at what they have been forced to go
through or resentment at those who stayed home (a minor character
is in fact set up as a target to encourage this kind of resentment in the
audience: "With all these veterans coming back," he says in fussy and
effeminate tones,
"nobody's
job is safe!").
A conscious effort is made to show that class differences do not
matter. The infantry sergeant is a banker in civilian · life ("Don't 'sir'
me," he says to one nervous applicant for a GI 1oan, "I'm a sergeant");
the Air Force captain has been a soda-jerker, living with his workingman
father in a miserable slum. The two men are presented as culturally
equal: the soda-jerker can call the banker's wife by her first name and
eventually marry the banker's daughter; this, too, is made possible by
the technique of presenting everything as a surface, for the social equal–
ity of bankers and soda-jerkers
is
real--on the surface. (But both men
are made culturally superior to the third veteran, the sailor from the
lower middle class, who has been neither a banker nor an officer. )
In addition to these obvious evasions and distortions, the chief
means of concealing the reality of politics is to present every problem
as a problem of personal morality. (This device seems to
be
common
to all forms of political obscurantism: when we are asked to feel guilty
