Our Man in Managua

Media History

ISSN: 1368-8804 (Print) 1469-9729 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cmeh20

OUR MAN IN MANAGUA

Tony Shaw

To cite this article: Tony Shaw (2006) OUR MAN IN MANAGUA, Media History, 12:2, 209-223, DOI: 10.1080/13688800600808013 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13688800600808013

Published online: 23 Jan 2007.

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Download by: [The University of British Columbia] Date: 23 April 2017, At: 18:20 OUR MAN IN MANAGUA: Alex Cox, US neo-imperialism and transatlantic cinematic subversion in the 1980s

Tony Shaw, University of Hertfordshire

Throughout the twentieth century, Europeans consistently lamented the malignant effects of ‘Americanization’ on their own indigenous cultures. Hollywood was often singled out as the most powerful instrument in this process, with US-made movies, which dominated so many of Europe’s silver screens from the 1920s onwards, helping to ‘colonise the subconscious’ of the Continent, as a Wim Wenders character famously put it. The cold war, rather than stymieing the onward march of US film imperialism, if anything eased its progress. For all the talk in the West of the conflict being about cultural diversity and the freedom of choice, the cold war saw Hollywood, aided by the US State Department, strengthen its grip on the world’s movie markets outside the communist sphere. Yet ‘Hollywood’ has always been a somewhat misleading term, given the prominent role foreign-born, principally European filmmakers have played in its history. Alongside Germany, Britain stands out in this respect, with Alfred Hitchcock, Victor Saville,

Nicholas Roeg, Alan Parker and Ridley Scott being among the best known directorial examples. To label the work of such outsiders, all of whom plied their trade in the USA at one stage or another of the cold war, ‘American’ is problematic at the best of times. When any such filmmaker actively undermines prevailing American values and interests, it becomes exceedingly difficult indeed.1 Over the last decade or so, we have learned a great deal about the internationaliza- tion of culture during the cold war, and about Hollywood’s ability to traverse geographical and political barriers in particular. Daniel Leab’s paper in this special issue shows, for example, how the ‘Americanization’ of cinematic culture during the cold war could take very direct forms, with US government officials and filmmakers secretly co-opting overseas film industries Á the British, in the case of Animal Farm Á as part of their anti-Soviet propaganda campaign in the 1950s. This paper looks forward three decades and looks in the opposite direction. It considers how one British filmmaker based in the USA in the 1980s, Alex Cox, co-opted Hollywood in a bid to assemble one of the fiercest single cinematic assaults on US foreign policy during the second cold war. Now largely forgotten, Cox’s Walker (1987) was a surreal biopic of a forgotten American adventurer who briefly ruled Nicaragua in the 1850s. The movie’s release coincided with and added to the furore surrounding one of the biggest US foreign policy scandals of the late cold war, the IranÁ Contra affair. Walker is worthy of detailed study not only on account of its timing and the film’s subversive political message, but also because of its highly original take on the historical film genre. Cox’s fusion of the past and present through the explicit use of anachronism was unprecedented, and deliberately designed to challenge aesthetic and political sensibilities. The movie also points to the scope that existed for the Media History, Vol. 12, No. 2, 2006 ISSN 1368-8804 print/1469-9729 online/06/020209Á15 # 2006 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/13688800600808013 210 TONY SHAW

‘Europeanization’ of US culture during the cold war, and for the cross-fertilization of British and American filmmakers’ dissenting views on the conflict in particular. Furthermore, like Alban Webb’s paper on the BBC’s External Services, Walker highlights the international reach of British cultural propaganda during the cold war. In contrast with the BBC’s significant impact during the cold war, however, it will be shown that Walker failed utterly in its political objective. This, I contend, can be attributed to Cox’s over-ambitiousness, his failure to read the market for ‘alternative’ films in America, and Hollywood’s traditional ability to marginalize dissent. For someone revered in the 1980s as one of that decade’s great ‘film anarchists’, Alex Cox had a surprisingly conventional background. Born in Liverpool in 1954, Cox studied law at Oxford, where he began directing and acting in plays staged by the university drama society. Following film production studies at Bristol University, he went to the USA and in 1977 enrolled at the UCLA film school on a Fulbright scholarship. While there, Cox became increasingly politicized and, prompted by the early 1980s anti-Soviet rhetoric of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, ‘obsessed’ (his own word) with the danger of nuclear war. Armed with a video copy of Peter Watkins’ banned 1960s television docudrama The War Game and a subscription to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Cox wrote a screenplay for British director Adrian Lyne focusing on a group of people in Seattle caught up in a nuclear conflict. ‘The Happy Hour’ was unrealized, but in 1983 Cox wrote and directed the black fantasy Repo Man, about two men working in the car repossession business. A critical success and an instant cult favourite, Repo Man outrageously satirized American culture, with consumerism, TV-evangelism and government-inspired conspira-

cies pointedly targeted. Cox linked the film to science-fiction movies of the 1950s, and to public’s past and present anxieties about nuclear weapons Á the mysterious deadly device in the Chevy Malibu trunk, for instance, was a nod to the stolen case of radioactive material in Robert Aldrich’s cold war film noir classic Kiss me Deadly (1955). Cox’s next film emerged out of his interest in the 1970s punk rock scene. Made in Britain and released in 1986, Sid & Nancy recreated the bizarre love affair between Sid Vicious of The Sex Pistols and an American groupie, Nancy Spungeon, which had ended with their sensational deaths in 1978Á79. Cox presented the pair as traitors to a genuinely revolutionary movement, one which rebelled against the social, economic and political climate of the time. This was quickly followed by Straight to Hell (1987), a genre-mixing spoof of the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone, shot in Spain. Despite the added novelty value of punk musicians The Pogues and The Clash’s former leader Joe Strummer dressed as gun- toting bandits, the film was a commercial and critical disaster (Davies 15Á16, 22, 32Á45, 61, 79). While Straight to Hell was in production, Cox was already very much involved in his next project, Walker. This was to be his most overtly political film to date and, at $6 million, by far the biggest budget Cox had yet handled. Walker was to be set in Nicaragua where, in 1979, the US-backed Somoza dictatorship had been overthrown and its place taken by a coalition led by the left-wing Frente Sandinista de Liberacion Nacional (FSLN, or Sandinistas). On entering the White House in 1981, the Republican Ronald Reagan had made Nicaragua the focus of his efforts to ‘roll back communism’ in Central America. In November 1981, the president signed a secret order permitting the Central Intelligence Agency to spend at least $19 million to train and lead the ‘Contras’, who had begun OUR MAN IN MANAGUA 211 fighting the Sandinistas that year. In May 1983, Reagan for the first time publicly acknowledged his administration’s support for the Contras, calling them ‘freedom fighters’ and comparing them to the ‘founding fathers’ of 1776. A year later, an angry Congress, half controlled by Democrats, ordered the cutting off of all military aid to the Contras, and Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega was made president following Nicaragua’s first democratic election. In the mean time, Reagan officials retaliated by publicly encouraging private Americans to send money for the overthrow of the Nicaraguan government and by diverting CIA and other funds to the same efforts. As a result of all this, by the mid-1980s Nicaragua had become a constant source of TV and newspaper headlines, and a byword for US imperialism among many on the left in the USA, Britain and elsewhere (LaFeber 683Á84).2 In November 1984, when presidential elections were being held in both the USA and Nicaragua, Cox paid a brief visit to El Salvador and Nicaragua, with Repo Man’s producer Peter McCarthy. Curious to see for himself whether there was any truth in the US news media’s accusation that the Sandinista government had turned the country into ‘a totalitarian dungeon’, Cox was challenged in Le´on to make a film about Nicaragua by two soldiers who had been wounded while fighting the Contras. Reading an article on US foreign policy in the left-wing Mother Jones magazine a month later, Cox came across a two-sentence reference to one William Walker, an enigmatic adventurer from Tennessee who had ruled Nicaragua in the 1850s. Cox had never heard of Walker but, after a week’s research in UCLA’s library, concluded that ‘he was a great idea’ for the big screen. Born in 1824 in Nashville, Walker had made and abandoned careers in medicine, law, journalism

and politics before going to Nicaragua in 1855. Caught up in the fervour of Manifest Destiny and prompted by the industrial magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, who coveted Nicaragua as a part of a trans-continental transport route, Walker seized power with the aid of a small band of mercenaries (dubbed ‘the Immortals’ by the American press) and in 1856 proclaimed himself President of Nicaragua. A year later, however, due to conflict with Vanderbilt and neighbouring Central American armies, Walker was overthrown and returned home, a hero to a good many Americans. Twice more in the next three years he attempted to land in or near Nicaragua, only to be eventually captured and shot by the Honduran army in 1860. Walker’s exploits made him one of the most famous people in the USA in the years before the Civil War, and the object of adulation in a supremely confident nation convinced that its duty was to dominate the Western hemisphere. A century later, though forgotten by most of his countrymen, Walker was still reviled by the Central Americans he sought to save from despotism, especially the Nicaraguans. With appropriate treatment, Cox believed Walker’s life could serve as the perfect basis for an original and powerful condemnation of the Reaganite approach towards Central America and of US cold war militancy in general.3 Several Hollywood films had recently focused on the politics of Central and South America, and had even highlighted US subterfuge or support for death-squad government-terrorists in the region. Constantin Costa-Gavras’ Oscar-winning thriller, Missing (1982), was closely based on the disappearance of American expatriate writer Charles Horman (played by John Shea) in Chile after the US-backed 1973 military coup. Such was the controversy caused by Missing that Secretary of State Alexander Haig felt it necessary to issue a categorical denial of US complicity in the coup. This was followed, in 1983, by 212 TONY SHAW

Roger Spottiswood’s Under Fire, a drama that focused on the 1979 Nicaraguan revolution and the assistance given by the CIA to the death squads of the Somoza regime against the rebel Sandinistas. Three years later, in 1986, Oliver Stone’s Oscar-nominated Salvador suggested the CIA had been involved in the notorious murder by rightist military thugs of El Salvador’s Archbishop Oscar Romero in 1980 (Toplin 104Á24; Palmer 134Á48; Schwartz 200). Despite their criticism of recent US government actions, movies like Under Fire irritated Cox intensely. In his opinion, their liberalism ultimately allowed Americans to blame ‘the system’ rather than themselves and, in the case of Under Fire, arrogantly even suggested that ‘heroic’ American journalists (played by rugged and rebellious actors like Nick Nolte) had won the revolution for the Sandinistas. His film would seek to challenge this liberal outlook by opening up an alternative space for presenting the USÁLatin American dynamic, one reinforced by the entry of the ‘alternative’ Sandinistas into the process. If anything, Cox had greater respect for the honesty and outwardly propagandis- tic tone of the spate of hyper-patriotic, anti-Soviet Hollywood films produced in the early to mid-1980s that, among other things, depicted the threat posed by communism in Central America. The most popular of these was John Milius’ Red Dawn (1984), which told of a communist invasion of the USA partly through a Soviet military build-up in Cuba and Nicaragua, then revolution in Mexico. Alexander Haig’s fulsome endorsement of Red Dawn on its release, a week before the 1984 Democratic Party Convention, epitomized what film critic Andrew Britton in 1986 called ‘the politics of Reaganite entertainment’ (Davies 95; Palmer 212Á15; Britton 17).

Cox had the comic-book style of Red Dawn and Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo series in mind for his film about William Walker Á albeit with a darkly humorous, punkish twist. This style not only fitted in with his previous productions, he also thought it would help him to reach a broader audience and to compete with Hollywood’s red-baiters on their own ground. ‘If it turns out to be a cult film or an art film’, Cox stated during production, ‘it’s a failure.’4 To help him bring an obscure nineteenth-century figure alive to late twentieth- century cinema-goers ‘beyond the art houses of Wilshire Boulevard’, in early 1985 Cox hired the American scriptwriter and avant-garde novelist Rudy Wurlitzer, whom he had recently met at a film festival in Rotterdam. Wurlitzer had worked with Sam Peckinpah, one of Cox’s favourite filmmakers, in 1973 on the western Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Just as importantly, Wurlitzer shared Cox’s offbeat approach towards movie making, as the eccentricity of Pat Garrett and his script for Monte Hellman’s 1971 Easy Rider-like Two Lane Blacktop proved. Crucially, Wurlitzer also, like Cox, saw the war being fought by the CIA- backed Contras in Nicaragua as a direct continuation of the kind of US interventionism in Central America practised by William Walker a century earlier. As Wurlitzer’s book tie-in with the film’s release makes clear, he and Cox believed that Walker’s actions typified the USA’s racist approach to foreign affairs, one that was still driven by a Puritan fundamentalism and Anglo-Saxon arrogance. Cox was in fact equally opposed to the Soviet Union’s occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, and tended to see international politics through Orwellian glasses, citing in the Wurlitzer’s book the famous line from Nineteen Eighty-Four, ‘imagine the future as being like a jackboot stamping on a human face forever’. Having a base in the USA, however, gave Cox the opportunity to expose from within what he saw as that country’s corrupt foreign policy (Wurlitzer 20Á21).5 OUR MAN IN MANAGUA 213

Wurlitzer, who had initially dismissed Cox’s idea (presciently, as events turned out) as a ‘pretentious message film’, warmed to the project the more he read of Walker’s astonishing story. Wurlitzer’s script and Cox’s outline drew on an unusual range of research material, including nineteenth-century newspapers, Nicaraguan poetry from the 1920s, correspondence between Franklin Roosevelt and the Somoza family in the 1930s, and Walker’s own account of his adventures published just before his death. Wurlitzer consulted several historical accounts of Walker’s life, but seems to have relied most of all on Albert Z. Carr’s The World and William Walker (1963), probably because it fitted his own preconceptions about US foreign policy. At once anti-imperialist and psychoanalytic, Carr’s book had Walker the ideologue of Manifest Destiny portrayed as a semiwitting stalking horse for larger strategic and economic interests. It also emphasized Walker’s religious upbringing and suggested that sublimated sexuality accounted for his will to dominate as well as for his career in Nicaragua (Wurlitzer 63ff.).6 Though happy with the bulk of Wurlitzer’s script, Cox felt that the links between Walker’s antics and modern-day US policies needed to be made more explicit. He therefore imposed various contemporary images and took the script into a surreal pastÁfuture domain, creating a world in which the present Á Walker’s future Á in the form of computers, mass-merchandised cigarettes, and, most strikingly, helicopters, keep invading Walker’s reality. Wurlitzer complained that these anachronistic touches would only alienate the audience, but his warnings fell on deaf ears (Davies 100).7 As director and screenwriter exchanged draft scripts, significant progress was made on the wider production and financial fronts. Given Hollywood’s historical antipathy towards overtly political projects, especially those which criticized US foreign policy, plus the fact that Cox was a relative newcomer to the film industry, getting a studio deal was not likely to be plain sailing for the Liverpudlian. It is a measure of the greater space that had opened up for cold war dissent in the American film industry by the 1980s, however, especially compared with the dark days of the McCarthyite 1950s, that Cox not only got the backing of an experienced mainstream Hollywood producer but a distribution deal with a major studio. Edward R. Pressman had been producing in Hollywood for nearly two decades, during which he had worked on a diverse group of more than 20 films including Terence Mallick’s Badlands (1973) and John Milius’ Conan the Barbarian (1981); while working on Walker he also produced Oliver Stone’s expose´ of corporate financial skulduggery, Wall Street (1987). Pressman hoped that Walker would have an impact comparable to that of Platoon (1986), Stone’s Oscar-winning liberal critique of Vietnam, and succeeded in securing half of the film’s production money (roughly $3 million) and a lucrative distribution deal with Universal Pictures, whose president, Tom Pollock, had once been his attorney. Pollock and Sean Daniel, Universal’s production chief, saw great commercial potential in the cult status achieved by Cox’s Repo Man and hoped that Walker could emulate David Lynch’s recent surreal crossover hit Blue Velvet (1986). Cox was appalled when Pressman chose Universal, believing the company had let him down with a poor distribution of Repo Man. By way of appeasing a suspicious Cox and establishing its own anti-establishment credentials, Universal claimed to have been the only studio ever to have been sued by the US State Department, for implying in Missing that the CIA was involved in criminal actions. The studio also promised Cox the final cut of his film.8 214 TONY SHAW

In December 1985, Cox and co-producer Lorenzo O’Brien made a location-scouting trip to Nicaragua. The Peruvian-born O’Brien, who had made a documentary about the military junta in power in his home country when a student at UCLA, and had since worked with Cox on Sid & Nancy, established contact with Incine, the Nicaraguan Film Commission, and the Roman Catholic Church, which agreed to provide unique locations in the capital Managua and the historic city of Granada.9 These initial contacts soon blossomed, to the point where the Nicaraguan government itself adopted the film as a useful propaganda tool. For generations of Nicaraguans, William Walker had served as a graphic symbol Á the gringo malo Á of the many US occupations of their country. To the Sandinistas, therefore, a movie about Walker provided an opportunity to consolidate its recent electoral successes and to generate sympathy overseas for its cause in the civil war. Consequently, members of the government Á including Minister of Culture Ernesto Cardenal and Vice President Sergio Ramirez Á gladly commented on the screenplay. ‘If this penetrates the commercial market in the United States,’ Ramirez told the New York Times in March 1987, ‘it is going to open some eyes and change some minds.’ When shooting began, Sandinista troops and officers played native Nicaraguans and other Central Americans, and official permission was given, for instance, for the removal of telegraph poles from the streets of Granada to accentuate historical realism, and for the loan of a (blood-stained) Soviet-built helicopter (Wurlitzer 12).10 Cox had in fact set his heart on making all of the film in Nicaragua itself from an early stage. To him and Wurlitzer, shooting a movie in an enemy country in the middle of a war with American capitalists’ money was an act of rebelliousness in itself. Pressman’s lawyers had warned Cox, however,

that if Walker was shot entirely in Nicaragua the filmmakers would be accused of trading with the enemy (the Reagan government finally managed to introduce an economic embargo on Nicaragua in 1986), and as a result Cox had agreed to shoot half of the film in Mexico. In the event, Cox went deliberately over budget when the cameras started rolling and argued convincingly that, because the Nicaraguans had been such generous hosts, it would be easier and cheaper to complete filming there.11 Filming took place over eight weeks between March and May 1987. The cast was made up largely of unknown actors, many of whom had collaborated with Cox on his earlier productions. The exceptions to this were Ed Harris, who played Walker, Peter Boyle, who played Vanderbilt (‘the ‘‘big engine’’ of American free enterprise’, according to Wurlitzer), and Marlee Matlin, who made a brief appearance as Walker’s deaf fiance´e Ellen Martin. Harris, who passed up a $750,000 job to work for much less, plus a share, on Walker, had recently starred as the astronaut John Glenn in Philip Kaufman’s The Right Stuff (1983) and a war-loving mercenary in Under Fire. Part of the reason why he and many other members of the cast and crew agreed to work for a substantially reduced fee was because they supported the film’s political viewpoint. Boyle appealed to Cox due to his previous roles as a heavy in such films as the party-political drama The Candidate (1971) and the sci- fi Outland (1981), and his ability, as Walker’s official press book put it, ‘to project penetrating cunning with malevolence and force’. Matlin, who was deaf, had won an Oscar in 1986 for her role as a deaf woman who falls in love with her speech therapist in Children of a Lesser God (Wurlitzer 14).12 Walker’s soundtrack was the work of Joe Strummer, who also had a small on-screen part as one of the Immortals. Like several other British and American rock musicians in the 1980s Á including Jackson Browne, Billy Bragg and U2’s OUR MAN IN MANAGUA 215

Bono Á Strummer had been campaigning against US interference in Nicaragua for a number of years. The Clash’s 1980 album Sandinista! had celebrated the 1979 Nicaraguan revolution, and in 1985 Strummer, along with The Pogues, Elvis Costello and others, had performed in a London concert organized by Cox in support of the FSLN. Cox had then signed Strummer and other musicians up for a Nicaragua Solidarity Tour in August 1986. This transmogrified into Straight to Hell, which was made for Island Pictures, a division of Island Records, when plans for the tour collapsed after a video deal fell through (Denselow 181Á86; Davies 74). Walker opens in 1853. William Walker Á adventurer, religious zealot, political visionary Á leads an expedition of liberation into Mexico, which ends in defeat in Sonora. Back in the USA, Walker is tried for violating Mexico’s neutrality, and exonerates himself with a ringing speech about the mission of the American people to liberate the Western hemisphere from oppression, and to lead its inhabitants in their new freedom. His fiance´e, Ellen Martin, is scathing when politicians make similar speeches about Manifest Destiny, but Walker ignores her warnings to accept an invitation from Cornelius Vanderbilt to lead an expedition to Nicaragua, which is in need of democracy and is ideally suited for a canal to open up trade routes to the Pacific. Walker returns from his meeting with Vanderbilt to find that Ellen has died, but begins loading his men Á 58 mercenaries dubbed ‘Walker’s Immortals’ Á and supplies for Nicaragua. There they are met by two generals of the country’s liberal party, and Walker lays down the law about how liberators should behave (reinforced with three executions). An ambush as they head for the capital, Rivas, leaves many dead Á including Walker’s friend Timothy Crocker (Keith Szarabajka), who has

confessed he cannot see the difference between the country’s liberals and conservatives Á but the disarrayed Immortals are subsequently surprised to be told that they have won. Entering Rivas in triumph, Walker sets up a puppet government, and becomes involved with Yrena (Blanca Guerra), who secretly hates him for deposing and executing her lover. Walker announces sweeping reforms, but his reign soon degenerates into brutal dictatorship, while he also alienates Vanderbilt by entering into an alliance with other businessmen. Slavery is instituted, and as his followers (including his newly arrived brothers, Norvell (Graham Gerrit) and James (William O’Leary)) fight over the spoils, an insurrection is fomented by Yrena and other conspirators, helped by Vanderbilt’s cutting off Walker’s supplies. Yrena attempts to shoot Walker, after which he orders the destruction of Rivas. As the town burns, and his men go on a last rampage of shooting and killing, military helicopters arrive to rescue the Americans. Walker, having now decided to become president himself, elects to stay. The closing scene shows Walker being executed by firing squad in 1860 in Honduras. As the credits roll, 1980s television footage juxtaposes pictures of Ronald Reagan in Congress and US troops on ‘defensive’ manoeuvres on the HondurasÁNicaragua border, with the bodies of Nicaraguan civilians murdered by the Contras.13 Walker’s bare outline belies the film’s anarchic tone and politically jarring style. Three areas stand out in this respect. The first is Walker’s anachronistic humour. Filmmakers had of course used history as a vehicle for political propaganda for many years prior to the 1980s, in the form mainly of documentary, docudrama and biopic. In the cold war itself, less ‘realist’ examples include Cecil B. DeMille’s Biblical epics of the 1950s and the East German Wild West Indianerfilme of the 1960s (Shaw; Gemu¨nden). Walker moves beyond 216 TONY SHAW

‘realism’ to embrace innovative methods of representation such as surrealism and to probe the limits of rational discourse. By populating the world of the 1850s with computers, television journalists, cigarette machines, Coca-Cola bottles and Mercedes- Benz sedans, the film on the one hand consciously frustrates audience expectations about the historical film genre, and on the other tells viewers that the doctrine of Manifest Destiny remains an axiom of modern-day US foreign policy. Cox and Wurlitzer’s original ending actually made the connection between past and present US incursions into Nicaragua even more explicit. In this scenario, Walker was to be whisked out of Rivas by the CIA aboard the US helicopters and then make a speech in modern-day Florida at a $500-a-plate fund-raising dinner for the Contras, flanked by anti-Castro Cubans and pro- Reagan celebrities like the Reverend Jerry Falwell and Charlton Heston. This ending was dropped on the advice of Ed Pressman, who argued that it would make Walker look ‘a State Department asshole’ rather than a Napoleonic figure, and the speech was moved instead to an earlier Cathedral scene (Wurlitzer 25).14 Cox later regretted not having sprinkled his film with even more contemporary objects from the start instead of from half-way through (baseball bats, TV dinners, even a plane wreckage all appear in draft scripts), thereby lending it greater continuity. Despite this, one historian, Robert Rosenstone, sees Walker as a model attempt to challenge cinema’s representation of history and to alert viewers to the links between past and current events. Certainly, the manner in which Walker utilized the device of anachronism was unprecedented. As Rosenstone put it in 1995, ‘no other historical film has ever used it so overtly and often in an effort to keep us aware of the continuity of historical questions and issues’.15

The uneasy marriage of nineteenth- and twentieth-century images is accompanied by the disjunction between image and sound, in which voice-over narration, dialogue and nondiagetic music are contradicted by the mise-en-sce`ne. This serves to heighten the satirical tone of the movie and to sharpen its criticism of the Americans’ behaviour. For instance, Walker opens with upbeat Latin music that is wholly at odds with the images of violent death and destruction during a battle in Senora. The slow-motion displays of bloodshed in this and later battle scenes, complete with semi-comical Spaghetti-western style sound effects, deliberately ape the work of Sam Peckinpah, Sergio Leone and Akira Kurosawa, and are meant to bring home to ‘the carnage-addicted, Rambo-loving American audiences’ (as Cox labelled them) the violent nature of US interventionism. (In an early script one of the Immortals had the name ‘Captain Schwarzenneger’, in honour of the staunchly Republican muscle-bound star of the mid-1980s hits The Terminator and Commando.)16 Throughout the film, Ed Harris’s lofty voice-over narration, lifted partly from Walker’s memoirs, is repeatedly undercut by actions on screen. When the voice speaks of cultural reforms, for instance, we see natives being flogged. When it proclaims the virtues of regenerating a nation, we see Walker’s motley crew of mercenaries boozing, brawling, stealing from natives, and assaulting females of more than one species (‘The colonel says it’s a democracy’, shouts one Immortal, as he climbs into a sheep pen and lowers his trousers). Walker’s obliviousness to the consequences of his dictatorial actions, together with the Immortals’ depravity, reflected Cox’s penchant for the bizarre and grotesque. This tied in with his assertions that absurdist humour was more likely to shock the audience into action, and that Walker ultimately typified the madness that went hand in hand with OUR MAN IN MANAGUA 217 notions of cultural and racial superiority: ‘a guy completely out of touch with reality, who thought he was acting on Christian principles but who blinded himself to the fact that he was slaughtering the people he came to regenerate’ (Wurlitzer i). Cox clearly thought carefully about how to present Walker and his cohorts for maximum political impact. Prior to filming, one correspondent, Rob Moore, a writer based at the University of Idaho who had recently published a book about Walker, warned Cox that his script had two serious flaws. It depicted Walker as too ‘wacky’ and it overlooked the Immortals’ misplaced idealism. Consequently, it encouraged the audience ‘to dismiss the story as an aberration rather than to recognise it as a stereotype’. Certain parts of early versions of the script highlighting Walker’s zany personality were ultimately cut by Cox Á his obsession with insects, for example. A duelling scene immediately after Ellen’s death that accentuated Walker’s psychological instability and suggested his departure for Nicaragua amounted to a death wish, rather than a desire for American aggrandizement or economic gain, was also shelved. At the same time, the final print heightened the Immortals’ vulgarity beyond what was specified in the script that Moore read. For instance, immediately after setting foot in Nicaragua, instead of marching past a number of bare-breasted women in the river without breaking ranks, the Immortals run amok. Doubtless seen as gratuitous, even pornographic, by some viewers, such scenes in the filmmakers’ eyes functioned as a hilarious commentary on the psychosexual character of American puritans who subordinated women and peoples of colour, and ascribed capitalist exploitation of Third World people to institutionalized racism and sexism.17 Walker opened in the USA in December 1987. Rarely can a major political film three

years in the making have enjoyed such a timely release. In November 1986, four months before shooting on Walker started, in response to newspaper revelations Ronald Reagan told stunned Americans that, unbeknownst to him, elements within his government had been selling arms to an avowed enemy, Iran, in exchange for the release of US hostages held in the Middle East. This made a farce of Reagan’s highly publicized maxim that ‘America will never make concessions to terrorists’. Worse still, part of the profits from the arms had been diverted to provide illicit military aid to the Contras in Nicaragua. The president dismissed National Security Council director John Poindexter and his aide Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, a Vietnam veteran who had directed secret supply missions to the Contras and run a multimillion-dollar fund-raising campaign for the Contras among conservative Americans. Despite this, the political crisis deepened for the White House. During the summer of 1987, joint Senate and House special committees conducted nationally televised hearings on the IranÁContra affair, arousing as much public interest as Watergate. In November 1987, a month before Walker opened, the Congressional committees’ report concluded that the Iran and Contra operations were characterized by ‘secrecy, deception, and disdain for the law’. Moreover, the efforts on the part of administration officials to avoid accountability to Congress for their actions had led to conspiracy, abuses of the intelligence process and the privatization of US foreign policy. Reagan was personally charged with having abdicated his ‘moral and legal responsibility to take care that the laws be faithfully executed’ (Kornbluh and Byrne xv, xx, 408). With the IranÁContra scandal having put Nicaragua and the dirty underbelly of US foreign policy at the very centre of national affairs for most of 1987, Walker looked an odds-on box-office hit. For one thing, the parallels between the scandal and the film 218 TONY SHAW

amounted to a publicist’s dream: the privatization of diplomacy and war, the role of idiosyncratic soldiers-of-fortune, clandestine acts, political back-biting, and so on. It even emerged during the IranÁContra investigations that Oliver North had hired a British mercenary called David Walker to help the Contras destroy the very helicopters that were used in the filming of Walker (Draper 41Á43). Yet, if anything, the affair seems seriously to have undermined the film’s takings. Walker had attracted a considerable amount of interest among American film critics long before news of the IranÁContra connection surfaced. After November 1986, however, political journalists joined the fray, looking for a novel angle on USÁNicaraguan relations and helping to make the film an even greater subject of controversy. Thus, during shooting liberal newspapers like the Los Angeles Times ran lengthy location reports on Walker, linking the film to their own long-standing anti- Contra propaganda campaigns. Other journals more to the political right, such as Newsweek and Time, noted the Nicaraguan government’s enthusiastic support for the project and consequently condemned the film as blatant Sandinista propaganda.18 Ever the opportunist, Cox responded to these barbs in typically aggressive fashion. By openly comparing Walker with the ‘criminals’ Oliver North and Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Elliott Abrams Á ‘all white guys coming down to small countries thinking they can do anything’ Á Cox sought to highlight the relevance of his movie for the public and to express his anger at the fact that, like Walker and Vanderbilt before them, the perpetrators of the IranÁContra scandal would probably get away with a slap on the wrist.19 In an atmosphere of increasing constitutional crisis, one that might result in a

presidential impeachment, Universal executives regarded such statements as ill-advised and inflammatory. Having allowed the filmmakers a relatively free hand in the early stages of the project, on seeing the rushes the executives and the marketing agents began to get cold feet. Walker, they protested, was meant to be a liberal interpretation of nineteenth- century adventurism. Cox’s version was diagnosed as far too alienating, both politically and stylistically. If Cox expected any support from Ed Pressman in the face of these heavy- duty criticisms, he was deluded. Pressman had already succeeded in politically toning down the film’s ending at final scripting stage. During the shooting phase, he then grew exasperated by what he saw as Cox’s wildly extravagant approach to movie-making, so much so that Pressman would later state that he had never worked on a more difficult project (Davies 100).20 The upshot of this political anxiety and rancour behind the scenes was that Universal took the decision to stifle Walker both by limiting publicity and theatrical release. The film opened in eight American cities in December 1987. In Los Angeles, for instance, one of the city’s main journals, the L.A. Weekly, ran only one advert for the film. Although this did play the IranÁContra card Á ‘Before Rambo ...Before Oliver North ...Walker A True Story’ Á on the whole the issue was conspicuously under- exploited. In Los Angeles, the movie was released only on two screens, where it played for three weeks. In New York, Walker could be found on only three screens, where it played for a month. This was a dismal showing for a film that cost $6 million. Universal then forbade Cox from taking Walker to the Havana Festival, the foremost film market in Latin America, and the company’s international subsidiary, UIP, delayed a Central American release.21 Bitterly disappointed, Cox and Wurlitzer were quick to draw parallels between Vanderbilt’s exploitation of Walker and their own treatment at the hands of Universal. The OUR MAN IN MANAGUA 219 director even ventured a comparison between himself and the way dissident filmmakers were marginalized in the USSR. Casting director Miguel Sandoval later suggested that Universal wanted to teach Cox a lesson for having ignored the studio’s advice and for wasting so much money on Walker (Wurlitzer 24Á25; Davies 101).22 There may be some truth in all of these points, but the reality also is that Cox had badly miscalculated. Walker was never likely to appeal to a broad cross section of the film-going public due its nihilistic format. As a film buff, Cox should have known that its postmodernist historical narrative would be unacceptable to a public brought up on realistic representations of the past. Wurlitzer had after all hinted at this when complaining about the addition of anachronistic touches at scriptwriting stage. Many people who saw the film simply did not find it entertaining. With a few exceptions, the trade press in the USA had nothing positive to say about Walker. Variety, the Bible of the American entertainment industry, called it a ‘virtual fiasco’ and ‘completely unconvincing in its presentation of events and how things might have been’. Echoing Rob Moore’s earlier criticisms of the script, the journal found William Walker himself one-dimensional Á ‘a cardboard figure, neither human and multifaceted enough to become involved with, nor sufficiently demented to assume the dimension of a mesmerising villain’. The Hollywood Reporter agreed, dismissing the film as ‘a sophomoric and surprisingly staid blend of realism and surrealism’, while Boxoffice summed it up as ‘very weird’.23 As anticipated, Walker generated more than its fair share of heat in the political press, but there is little evidence of the film having, to coin Sergio Ramirez, opened people’s eyes or changed some minds about US policy in Nicaragua. Thus, those on the

left tended to sing its praises. The New York Village Voice was one: If, both in the endeavor of its making and as a broadly entertaining spectacle, Walker’s metaphorical message makes a fraction of the eventual audience think more closely about what their tax dollars are paying for, then Cox’s extraordinary vision of history returning will have reaped a rich dividend. Right-wingers, on the other hand, tended to lambaste Walker either for being gratuitously anti-American or pretentious, or both in the case of the Catholic magazine Commonweal. More significantly perhaps, some who were hostile to the Contras applauded its message but were either bewildered by its punk elements or alienated by its heavy-handedness. The Los Angeles Herald Examiner, for one, witheringly described it as ‘a wasted opportunity’ and a ‘bloated excess’. Hollywood’s best known liberal, Robert Redford, even announced that he would direct and star in his own film about Walker, to set the record straight (this never materialized). Walker might have succeeded at the box office as an ‘alternative’ film, despite Universal’s lack of support, if it had been more aesthetically accessible to a liberal audience. The fact is it was not.24 In Nicaragua itself, once released, Walker played to packed houses in the capital Managua, despite the highly priced $5 tickets. Even here, though, the film was not without its critics. A number of pro-government newspapers and other commentators objected to the violence and felt that its satirical tone was inappropriate in light both of Walker’s hate- figure status in the country and of the deprivations of the civil war.25 Elsewhere in Central America, such as Mexico and Castro’s Cuba, the film was greeted with considerable enthusiasm, particularly among those familiar with Hollywood’s well-established conservative take on the region. In Mexico, where the left had long campaigned against their 220 TONY SHAW

country’s subordination to ‘colossus of the North’ and during the 1980s Miguel De La Madrid’s government had initiated a crash-course in economic neo-liberalism, articles in journals such as Nuevo Amenecer Cultural depicted the heads of Walker and Reagan superimposed on each other’s shoulders.26 In Cox’s homeland, Walker was not released until March 1989. Here, the film benefited from the director’s fashionable image among students and rock fans due to Sid & Nancy, together with his political and artistic collaboration with Joe Strummer and other musicians. The Financial Times waxed lyrical about Walker (‘full of gleaming, dissident energy’), but the majority of Fleet Street critics wrote along the same lines as the Evening Standard’s Alexander Walker: ‘If you saw Salvador, you needn’t bother with this piece of Punk revisionism. If you didn’t, you needn’t either.’ Though the Communist Morning Star recommended the film to its readers, even it predicted that many of them would be put off by its incoherence. In summary, in Britain as elsewhere, Walker’s role was reduced largely to preaching to the converted and, consequently, its political impact was limited.27 Between 1983 and 1986, the US National Security Council’s Office of Public Diplomacy conducted a special initiative aimed at increasing the American people’s support for the White House’s Nicaraguan policies. Directed principally through the mass media, and including a million-dollar television advertising campaign, this initiative projected an image of the Contras as a democratic nationalist force and the Sandinista government as evil members of a Soviet outpost. In June 1986, the Office of Public Diplomacy congratulated itself on having ‘played a key role in setting out the parameters and defining the terms of the public discussion on Central America policy’ (Kornbluh and 28 Byrne 2Á8). Alex Cox’s Walker attempted to drive a coach and horses through the NSC’s publicity agenda and the American media’s prevailing attitudes towards Nicaragua in the mid-1980s. As such, it was unique in cinematic terms and, depending on one’s point of view, a brave or reckless assault on US foreign policy at the height of the second cold war. Walker reflected Cox’s outsider status, in several ways. First, his artistically unorthodox, confrontational approach towards filmmaking. Second, his ideological standpoint, a vague mixture of socialism and anarchism which eschewed traditional party politics and which sympathized with the disaffected, disenfranchised underdog. Third, his nationality, one which, because of the common language and the long tradition of British directors working in the US film industry, offered him a relatively easy foothold on the Hollywood ladder, but which also allowed him a greater freedom to criticize US foreign policy compared with many American filmmakers. In this latter respect, Cox differs from the majority of British-born filmmakers who worked in Hollywood during the cold war, many of whose movies underpinned orthodox cold war values Á for example, Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959), Torn Curtain (1966) and Topaz (1969) (Wood). Of course, no single film was going to change completely the American public’s perception of its government’s policy in Nicaragua. Both the NSC and Cox knew this. As things turned out, the IranÁContra affair wrecked the NSC’s agenda-setting strategy throughout 1987 anyway, arguably rendering Walker’s release in December redundant in political terms. This helps to explain why the movie has been widely seen since as a curious, postmodern attempt at anti-Reagan propaganda by a cult director renowned more for his love of punk music rather than for his politics. That said, aspects of Walker’s production and distribution should alert us to the difficulties filmmakers in the USA had in OUR MAN IN MANAGUA 221 making politically subversive statements even during the latter stages of the cold war. For Cox himself, this academic point had concrete ramifications. After the hostile reaction to Walker and its disastrous performance at the box office, Cox was labelled a money-waster and a political trouble-maker, and found himself effectively blacklisted by American studios. Tristar Pictures replaced him with the novelist Martin Amis as the scriptwriter for a film based on the bubble-gum card series ‘Mars Attacks’. Then the backers of a film he planned to make about the alleged trade in infant body parts for transplant purposes in Latin America pulled out. This might be tied to the fact that in late 1988 Cox was banned from future membership of the Writers Guild of America and from working as a writer on any future Guild-sanctioned film or television productions, for breaking a bitter 22-week writers’ strike (Davies 104).29 As of 2006, Cox had not directed another Hollywood film.

Notes

1. On Hollywood’s part in the ‘Americanization’ of Europe, including during the cold war, see, for instance, Reinhold Wagnleitner, Coca-colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria after the Second World War. Chapel Hill, NC: U of North Carolina P, 1994; Nicholas Pronay and Keith Wilson, eds, The Political Re-education of Germany and her Allies after World War II. London: Croom Helm, 1985; David W. Ellwood and Rob Kroes, eds, Hollywood in Europe: Experiences of a Cultural Hegemony. Amsterdam: VU UP, 1994; Toby Miller, ‘Hollywood and the World.’ The Oxford Guide to Film Studies. Ed. John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. 371Á81.

On the post-1945 interchange between American and European cultures, including ﬁlm, see, for example, Richard Pells, Not Like US: How Europeans have Loved, Hated, and Transformed American Culture since World War II. New York: Basic Books, 1997. The Wenders’ phrase comes in the German director’s 1976 road movie Im Lauf der Zeit (Kings of the Road). 2. In Britain, the Thatcher government regularly sided in international fora with the US administration’s Nicaraguan policy. Mrs Thatcher even defended Reagan during the IranÁ Contra scandal. The Labour party, elements of the mass media and left-leaning pressure groups such as CND were highly critical of this. John Dumbrell, A Special Relationship: Anglo-American Relations in the Cold War and After. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2001. 90, 95. 3. Walker production notes, 4Á5, Margaret Herrick Library, Los Angeles; New York Times 4 Dec. 1987: C10; Mother Jones Dec. 1987: 31, 38. On William Walker see E. Bradford Burns, Patriarch and Folk: The Emergence of Nicaragua 1798Á1858. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1991. 160Á210. 4. Mother Jones Dec. 1987: 41. 5. Walker pressbook, 4, and production notes, 5, Margaret Herrick Library. On the immense popularity in the USA and elsewhere of Stallone’s Rambo trilogy Á First Blood (Ted Kotcheff, 1982), Rambo: First Blood Part Two (George Pan Cosmatos, 1985) and Rambo III (Peter MacDonald, 1988) Á see Palmer, especially 67Á71, 96Á99, 213Á15. 6. Walker production notes, 5, Margaret Herrick Library; Box 2, Folder 4, Alex Cox Papers, Collection 174, UCLA Arts Library Special Collections, Los Angeles. 222 TONY SHAW

7. Walker production notes, 5, Margaret Herrick Library; Box 2, Folder 4, Cox Papers; Cox’s

interview with Cork City-based ﬁlmmaker, Chris Neill, Oct. 2002, B/http://www.senseof-

cinema.com/contents/03/24/walker.html/. 8. Los Angeles Times 19 Apr. 1987: 16Á23; Interview Dec. 1987: 154; New York Times 22 Mar. 1987: 19, 37; Village Voice 7 July 1987. 9. Walker pressbook, 6, 29 Margaret Herrick Library. 10. Los Angeles Times 19 Apr. 1987: 16Á23; City Limits 23Á30 Mar. 1989: 13; New York Times 22 Mar. 1987: 19, 37. 11. Cox’s handwritten notes, Box 2, Folder 4, Cox Papers; Mother Jones Dec. 1987: 41. 12. Walker shooting schedule, Box 5, Folder 1, Cox Papers; Los Angeles Times 19 Apr. 1987: 16Á 23; Walker production notes, 13, Margaret Herrick Library; New Musical Express 5 Sept. 1987: 22. 13. Walker, directed by Alex Cox, 1987, 95 min. Universal DVD 820857311. 14. Walker script, dated 29 Oct. 1986, Box 2, Folder 5, Cox Papers. 15. Walker scripts, dated 29 Oct. 1986 and 7 Jan. 1987, Box 2, Folder 5, Cox Papers; Cox’s

interview with Cork City-based ﬁlmmaker, Chris Neill, Oct. 2002, B/http://www.senseof-

cinema.com/contents/03/24/walker.html/; Robert A. Rosenstone, ‘Walker: The Dramatic Film as (Postmodern) History.’ Revisioning History: Film and the Construction of a New Past. Ed. Robert A. Rosenstone. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1995. 202Á13 (quote 211). See also in same book Sumiko Higashi, ‘Walker and Mississippi Burning: Postmodernism versus Illusionist Narrative.’ 188Á201. 16. Sight and Sound 56.4 (Autumn 1987): 250Á51; Walker script, undated but between 29 Oct. 1986 and 7 Jan. 1987, Box 2, Folder 6, Cox Papers. 17. Rob Moore to Alex Cox, 11 Mar. 1987, Box 2, Folder 4; Walker script, dated 29 Oct. 1986, Box 2, Folder 5, Cox Papers. 18. Los Angeles Times 19 Apr. 1987: 16Á23; L.A. Weekly 15Á21 Jan. 1988: 41; Cineaste 16.3 (1988): 12Á16, 52Á53. 19. Newsweek 20 Apr. 1987: 44. Abrams was the State Department’s point man on Central America who had lied to Congress when he had told it, in Nov. 1986, that no third-party funds were going to the Contras, even though he had personally begged for some of those funds from the Sultan of Brunei. Abrams became an outcast on Capitol Hill, but Reagan and Secretary of State George Shultz kept him in the State Department. Lafeber 691Á92. 20. Los Angeles Times 19 Apr. 1987: 16Á23; City Limits 23Á30 Mar. 1989: 13Á14. 21. L.A. Weekly listings 10Á24 Dec. 1987 Á Walker advertisement 4 Dec. 1987: 82; Village Voice listings 10Á13 Dec. 1987; City Limits 23Á30 Mar. 1989: 13Á14. 22. Guardian 30 Mar. 1989: 27. 23. Variety’s Film Reviews. Vol. 20, 1987Á88. New York: R.R. Bowker, 1991, 2 Dec. 1987, unpaged; Hollywood Reporter 2 Dec. 1987: 3, 18; Boxofﬁce Feb. 1988. 24. Village Voice, cited in Wurlitzer ii; Commonweal 29 Jan. 1988; Los Angeles Herald Examiner 4 Dec. 1987: 11; Davies 100. 25. Los Angeles Times 5 Mar. 1988: VI, 8. 26. Variety 30 Dec. 1987; Film Comment 23.4 (July/Aug. 1987): 50. 27. Financial Times 23 Mar. 1989: 27; Evening Standard 23 Mar. 1989: 29; Morning Star 31 Mar. 1989: 8. OUR MAN IN MANAGUA 223

28. See also David Thelen, Becoming Citizens in the Age of Television: How Americans Challenged the Media and Seized Political Initiative during the IranÁContra Affair, 1985Á1990. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996. 29. Screen International Oct. 1988: 6.

References BRITTON, ANDREW. ‘Blissing Out: The Politics of Reaganite Entertainment’. Movie, 31/32 (1986): 1Á42. DAVIES, STEVEN PAUL. Alex Cox: Film Anarchist (London: B.T. Batsford, 2000). DENSELOW, ROBIN. When the Music’s Over: The Story of Political Pop (London: Faber and Faber, 1998). DRAPER, THEODORE. A Very Thin Line Á The IranÁContra Affairs (New York: Hill and Wang, 1991). GEMU¨ NDEN, GERD. ‘Between Karl May and Karl Marx: The DEFA Indianerﬁlme (1965Á1983).’ Film History, 10.3 (1998): 399Á407. KORNBLUH, PETER, and MALCOLM BYRNE, eds. The IranÁContra Scandal: The Declassiﬁed History. (New York: The New P , 1993). LAFEBER, WALTER. The American Age: United States Foreign Policy at Home and Abroad since 1750 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989). PALMER, WILLIAM J. The Films of the Eighties: A Social History (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois UP, 1993). SCHWARTZ, RICHARD A. Cold War Culture: Media and the Arts,1945Á1990 (New York: Checkmark Books, 2000).

SHAW, TONY. ‘Miracles, Martyrs and Martians: Religion and Cold-War Cinematic Propaganda in the 1950s’. Journal of Cold War Studies, 4.3 (2002): 5Á30. TOPLIN, ROBERT BRENT. History by Hollywood: The Use and Abuse of the American Past (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996). WOOD, ROBIN Hitchcock’s Films Revisited (New York: Columbia UP, 1989). WURLITZER, RUDY. Walker (New York: Harper & Row, 1987).

Tony Shaw, Reader in International History at the University of Hertfordshire. E-mail: [email protected]