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. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 66 View related articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cmeh20 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.

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