110
PARTISAN REVIEW
The hero is always the defender of the right and he is
our
representative.
He rarely changes labels; on the few occasions when he is not an Ameri–
can he demonstrates that those on our side are just like us. (Gregory
Peck's first screen role was in
Days of Glory:
as an heroic Soviet soldier
he fought the evil Nazis.)
The villains are marked by one constant: they are subhuman.
If
the hero of
Night People
did not know that the enemy are cannibals,
he might feel some qualms about the free dispensation of strychnine (he
must feel as sure as Hitler that those opposing him are beyond recon–
ciliation). Film melodrama, like political ideology with which it has
much in common, has a convenient way of disposing of the humanity
of enemies:
we
stand for humanity;
the),
stand for something else. The
robbers who are shot, the Nazis who are knifed-they are cowards or
fanatics and they don't deserve to live. Fear, on the one hand, and,
on the other, devotion to a "misguided" cause to the disregard of per–
sonal safety are evidence of subhumanity. The villains are usually more
expressive than the heroes because their inhumanity is demonstrated pre–
cisely by the display of extreme human emotions. (Gregory Peck, who
is always a hero, is rarely called upon to register any emotion whatever.
The devil can be expressive, but the hero is a stick of wood.) The
villains are not human; if they were, they'd be on our side. When histori–
cal circumstances change and our former enemies become allies, we let
bygones be bygones and they are restored to human estate. Thus the
little yellow bastards are now cultured Japanese; the blood-guilty Ger–
mans are now hard-working people, so akin to Americans in their moral
standards and ability to organize an efficient economy; now it is the
Russians, the courageous pioneers and fighting men of the war years,
who are treacherous and subhuman. (In
Night People
the enemy are
variously described as "the creeps over there," "burglars," "a methodical
bunch of lice.") Political melodrama looks ahead.
This is the level of the anti-Communism of
Night People.
And it
is at this level that the advertising-entertainment medium has political
effect. In a culture which has been movie-centered for thirty years,
films are a reflection of popular American thought as well as an influ–
ence upon it. At the Army-McCarthy hearings, the participants, con–
scious of the radio and television audience, find it necessary to proclaim,
each in his turn, that he
hates
Communists. McCarthy imputes weakness
and political unreliability to the Secretary of the Army by suggesting
that Stevens merely
dislikes
Communists. In other words, if he knew
what they were, he would
hate
them; he lacks the hero's sureness. Mc–
Carthy draws political support by the crude, yet surprisingly controlled,
intensity of his hatred of Communists; the intensity suggests that he,
