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Asymmetric Warfare: Cold War Cinema in the Soviet Union and the United States

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Asymmetric Warfare: Cold War Cinema in the Soviet Union and the United States Andrey Shcherbenok Columbia University Asymmetric Warfare: Cold War Cinema in the Soviet Union and the United States In this paper, I will address the similarities and differences in the way Soviet and American cinema represented and, in the same move, waged the Cold War;1 in particular, I will consider how the enemy – the other side of the conflict – was portrayed. Although this portrayal varied considerably from film to film and from one historic period to another in both cinemas, I will try to demonstrate that it also reflected deeper and much more persistent ideological matrixes. This persistency allows me to claim that each side's Cold War films were not merely ad hoc propaganda statements designed to promote this or that expedient political agenda but also reflected fundamental differences in the way both countries conceptualized the global conflict. Despite the symmetry largely maintained by the two superpowers in military terms, on cinema screens the United States and the Soviet Union each waged its own very different Cold War. *** Richard Hofstadter argues in "The Paranoid Style of American Politics" that in the paranoid style of political thinking "the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He is a free, active, demonic agent."2 This description applies very well to the way the Soviet enemy is portrayed in American films in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s. The main characteristic of this enemy is the total absence of internal differences – Soviet government, Soviet Union as a nation, Russians as the people, former or current members of American Communists Party and other leftist organizations in the United States, are all portrayed as the units of the totality whose main and only goal is the total destruction of the free world and enslavement of freedom-loving Americans. Although the unmasking of this goal is often supported by the reference to Marxian thesis that the global victory of communism is inevitable, this reference strategically omits the supporting argument of the internal crisis of capitalism.3 On the contrary, American society is portrayed as devoid of any inherent contradictions, and any apparent signs of the labor movement or racial conflicts quickly prove to be 1 By Cold War cinema I will here understand the films produced in the two countries in the 30 years between 1946 and 1986 that directly addressed the conflict between the two superpowers. This conflict may range from domestic struggle against the other side's agents (Communists vs. Anti-Communists in the United States, US spies vs. the KGB in the Soviet Union) to diplomatic conflicts to actual military encounters, from small-scale operations to total nuclear war. 2 Richard Hofstadter. The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and Other Essays. New York: Knopf, 1966. P. 30. 3 See, for example, the documentary What is Communism? (1963) 1 provocations organized by Soviet agents. Thus, the bloody fight between workers and the police in I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951) turns out to be staged by the Communists – not only they incite the workers to go on strike, they also play the part of the cruel police by having their disguised members beat the workers with steel tubes wrapped up in newspapers. When in the Invasion, USA (1952) San- Francisco is being bombed by Soviet planes and some workers confront the local factory owner, it is quite clear that the rhetoric of class struggle is nothing but the disguise for their real desire – to deliver America as a slave nation to the Soviet Union. The paranoid demonization of the enemy in these films correlates with the utopian harmonization of the American society which, just like the Soviet Union, is represented as a conflict-free whole.4 This does not mean, however, that the Manichean vision of the Cold War led to the structural analogy between the demonic Evil and the utopian Good. This dangerous analogy was prevented by insistent emphasizing the personal differences between the members of the opposite camps. The overarching thesis that the Soviet Union stands for slavery and the United States stands for freedom is supported in the actual films by the contrast between communist and non-communist characters. While "normal" American people are individually psychologized and prone to independent reasoning (although all of them arrive at the anti-communist consensus), the Communists and the Soviets are either unthinking automatons5 or monomaniacs, whose determination to advance their cause at any price is only nuanced by their in-born preference for lying and foul play. In either case they adhere to the strictest discipline within their ranks and obey orders unquestionably. The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) is a film that drives this tendency of early Cold War films to its logical conclusion – while the body snatchers are obviously mapped onto Soviet Communists, they are not humans but aliens. Their mode of operation is very characteristic – they grow an exact physical copy of an actual person and when this person is asleep substitute the copy for the original. The new humanoid looks and behaves like the human being but he is deprived of any human emotion except rage and is dedicated to converting everyone into his like. Arguably the most striking scene in the film occurs when the main character and his girlfriend – the last humans in town – are hiding in the cave pursued by the frantic crowd of communist humanoids. They know that they must not sleep, because they will be converted as well, and yet the girl, exhausted, closes her eyes for a second. When she opens them again, still lying on her boyfriend's arms, he immediately knows, by her cold and hating expression, that she is no longer his loving girl; she has become one of Them. 4 This, of course, can be regarded as the real political goal of the whole anti-communist hysteria in the United States – the suppression of the labor movement and internal stabilization of American society. 5 The best example is Soviet pilots in Invasion, USA – they determine targets and bomb American cities without showing any emotion whatsoever. 2 The conception of the "communist character" employed in these films does no allow speaking of the Soviet goal of global domination as a political goal. Indeed, any politicizing of this goal, that is, any explanation of why the Soviet Union and its communist agents inside the US want to enslave America, would introduce a difference into the monolithic enemy. Any differentiation of this kind would be, in its turn, subversive to the monolithic unity of the free world as well. Thus, for example, paying attention to the class nature of the communist project and the Soviet society – the dictatorship of the proletariat, etc. – would raise questions about classes and exploitation in America; differentiating between the goals of Soviet leadership and personal aims of rank-and-file Russian soldiers would also mean differentiating between professional Soviet spies and, say, left-leaning members of American labor movement, which, in its turn, would legitimize the movement and lead to the acknowledgement of the existence of social contradictions in America. The representation of the desire of the Communists to enslave America as a natural instinct rather than a conscious political strategy avoids all these unwanted complications. It also has another effect: in the absence of any rationale for the communist doctrine there can be no reason for someone who is not by nature a Communist to become one – except, of course, if his body is snatched or if he is brainwashed.6 The Manchurian Candidate was made in 1962 and is already different from the films of the 1950s, first of all because it complicates a picture by showing a liberal senator, accused of being a Communist, to be an American patriot and his conservative accusers to be actual conspirators. However, the famous question "What have they built you to do?" betrays the unchanged conception of the possibilities of communist ideological influence upon a freedom-loving American – it is only thinkable as coercive subconscious programming that turns a man into a communist agent and, at the same time, a murderous automaton. It is in the conflation of communist agenda and unconscious automatism that the main ideological stakes of the film are placed.7 This conflation is, of course, the direct inversion of Soviet paramount thesis that it is the raising of consciousness that makes someone a Communist. The real shift in American Cold War cinema occurred in the mid-1960s. Such films as Fail Safe (1964), Dr. Strangelove (1964), and The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming (1966) satirized American anti-communist hysteria and, in the same move, humanized the Russians. The destiny of the world in Fail Safe hinges on whether or not the US president will agree that the Russians are reasonable human beings that can be talked to and whose reactions can be 6 An honest person in these films can, of course, be temporarily misguided, but this does not make him or her a genuine communist; such person just does not know what communism is really about. Their calling themselves communists is simply a misnomer – they just do not know what this word really means. 7 The conflation, of course, does not apply to characters like Dr. Yen Lo – as a "natural" Communist, he is quite conscious and even has a sense of humor. Apparently, one can be born a Communist (in the USSR, China, or Korea) but one cannot become one, except through brainwashing. 3 predicted; Dr. Strangelove explains the Soviet apparently demonic plan of creating a Doomsday Machine by the mundane desire of Soviet leadership to save money so that they could supply its people with enough washing machines and other consumer goods; finally, The Russians Are Coming… presents a pretty loveable if sometimes grotesque crew of Soviet submarine and includes a romance between an American girl and a Soviet seaman.
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