FILM CHRO N ICLE
113
no longer hear arguments on all sides about what causes wars: global
atomic warfare is so big it scems to be something only God can explain.
(Night People
is not a small picture: the closing shot leaves the hero
confronting the heavens.)
The danger in manipulation and cynicism is not that those who
extol the greatness of the democratic idca and the greatness of the com–
mon man while treating the public as common fools are Machiavcllians
scheming to impose an idcology upon the public. The democratic ideol–
ogy has been imposed on
them:
they are driven by economic necessity
(and political necessity) to give the public what it wants. The real
danger is that we may lose the capacity for those extensions in height,
in depth, in space which are the experience of art and thought.
If
the
public becomes accustomed to being pleased and pandered to, the con–
tent is drained out of democratic political life. (The pimp who peddles
good clean stuff is nevertheless engaged in prostitution.)
After dozens of anti-Nazi films and countless slick stories and ar–
ticles, the public had had enough of Hitler. What they wearied of had
only the slenderest connection with the subject of Nazism; they got tired
of the old formula with the Nazi label. But they didn't reject the
formula, they settled for a change of labels. In the same way Hollywood
may well exhaust anti-Communism before it has gotten near it.
Night
People
is just the beginning of a ncw cycle-a cycle which begins by
exploiting public curiosity and ends by satiating it.
All our advertising is propaganda, of course, but it has become so
much a part of our life, it is so pervasive, that we just don't know what
it is propaganda
for .
Somehow it keeps the wheels rolling and that
seems to be what it's for. In Hollywood productions, the American
soldiers and civilians abroad are soft touches, chivalrous under the wise–
cracks, patronizing and generous toward unfortunate little people the
world over, especially toward the littlest, children; aroused by injustice
the American is Robin Hood free by birth from the threat of the Sheriff
of Nottingham. Though this propaganda fails us abroad (too many
Americans having been there) it functions at home as an entertaining
form of self-congratulation and self-glorification: we consume our own
propaganda. Advertising's fixation on images of success, glamour, and
plenty informs American films-and American life-with an unreal
quality: our prosperity looks as empty as an ad. Why don't other
peoples see that we are the heroes and the Russians cannibals? One
reason is that America's public relations romance with itself is a spec–
tacle to the rest of the world.
Pauline Kael
