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

[Sean Andrews]

Thanks for this.  I've been thinking of writing something about this.
These themes of the origins of the working class movements and unions
in general would have been very relevant to the moment of the movie's
release, at the height of the writer's strike, when there was, for a
brief moment, some interest in a broader solidarity (cf. Jerry
Monaco's posts on LBO during that time).  The character of Ross is
certainly painted  as a small operator who must break the rules and
the strikes in order to compete with the big guys: Sinclair has many
moments in the early part of the book where Ross carefully explains to
his son how he really doesn't have any choice.

One passage in particular which I have often thought about in relation
to present events consists of Ross explaining how dependent his
business is on credit, how he relies on large injections of cash from
financiers, and, how, if he were to do anything that showed solidarity
with the workers, these big money players would refuse to give him
credit and ruin him.  He is left, in other words, with little choice
in the matter.

As the author below mentions, there are several interesting passages
commenting on the Russian revolution and the opinion of the time as
well as several passages where Bunny discusses sexual politics.  There
wasn't just a threat of being banned, however: the book actually was
banned because of this.  One of his girlfriends makes several implicit
statements about birth control and what this meant in terms of sexual
liberation for her.  Bunny doesn't embrace this wholeheartedly, but he
also doesn't condemn it.  As some evidence of where the country stood
at the time, it was these passages (not the stuff on unions) that got
the book banned in parts of the US.

Add to this the nascent suburbanization of Los Angeles--the model on
which the rest of the southwest would be based--and, in short, the
book really is a social document about a historical moment.  I half
expected the reinterpretation in film to be an update of this
critique, commenting on the place of oil and, the other movement of
the time covered closely in the book, evangelism in current politics.
It could have been a nice historical allegory even if, as I expected,
it didn't include the more radical aspects of the moment.  By opting
for a shallow morality tale, P.T. Anderson might have made a fine film
in and of itself, but he ultimately plays directly into the very
forces Sinclair was critiquing, most of whom are always willing to
admit a few bad apples exist in their otherwise moral midst.  Being a
fan of most of his work, I was a bit let down.

Did I miss the Proyect review of this one movie or is it forthcoming?

s

On Fri, Mar 14, 2008 at 8:40 PM,  <Dbachmozart at aol.com> wrote:
>
>  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.