Kiss Me Deadly: Communism, Motherhood, and Cold War Movies Author(S): Michael Rogin Source: Representations, No

Home , Jean Peters, Laurence Harvey, My Son John, Philip Wylie, Queeg (Red Dwarf), Song of Russia

Kiss Me Deadly: Communism, Motherhood, and Cold War Movies Author(s): Michael Rogin Source: Representations, No. 6 (Spring, 1984), pp. 1-36 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2928536 Accessed: 04-03-2015 22:18 UTC

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This content downloaded from 169.234.53.127 on Wed, 04 Mar 2015 22:18:06 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions MICHAEL ROGIN

Kiss Me Deadly: Communism,Motherhood, and Cold War Movies*

THE HISTORY of demonologyin Americanpolitics comprises three major moments.The firstis racial. "Historybegins for us withmurder and enslavement,not with discovery," wrote William Carlos Williams.' He wascalling attentionto thehistorical origins of theUnited States in violenceagainst peoples of color.The expropriationof Indianland and exploitationof blacklabor lie at theroot not only of America's economic development, but of its political conflicts and culturalidentity as well.A distinctiveAmerican political tradition, fearful of primitivism,disorder, and conspiracy,developed in responseto peoplesof color. That traditiondraws its energy from alien threatsto the Americanway of life, and sanctionsviolent and exclusionaryresponses to them.2 Classand ethnicconflict define the second demonological moment. The targetsof countersubversionmoved from the reds and blacksof frontier,agrarian Americato theworking-class "savages" and alien"reds" of urban,industrializing America.The defenseof civilization against savagery still derived from repressive conditionsof laboron theone handand frominternal, imperial expansion against autonomouscommunities on the other.But the termsof the struggleshifted fromracial conflict to ethnocentricclass war. The cold war introducesthe thirdmoment in Americandemonology. The SovietUnion replaced the immigrant working class as thesource of anxiety,and thecombat between workers and capitalists,immigrants and natives,was replaced byone betweenMoscow's agents (intellectuals, government employees, students and middle-classactivists) on theone hand,and a statenational security appa- ratuson theother. The classand ethnicred scare defined American politics from the 1870sto theNew Deal. The thirdmoment has had itsvicissitudes, its surges and declines;we stilllive within it. Each red (or red and black)scare has revolvedaround a differentcore: first individualfreedom, then class conflict, finally mass society and thestate. At each momentthe free man has bothdepended on and definedhimself in opposition

REPRESENTATIONS 6 * Spring 1984 ? THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

This content downloaded from 169.234.53.127 on Wed, 04 Mar 2015 22:18:06 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions to his subversivetwin. The discourse of expansion and slaveryacknowledged that dependence, for proslaveryapologists made black slaverya condition for white freedom, free labor ideology counterposed itselfto slavery,and the free man created himselfin Western,Indian combat. Capitalistsdepended on workers,just as free men needed Indians and slaves. But the persistenceof freelabor ideology and the influxof immigrantsburied that dependence, shiftinga class opposition into an ethnicone thatpitted Americans against aliens. Defenders of the national securitystate invoked their Soviet counterpart,thus returningto antebellum America's clarityabout the source of doubleness, muddied in the industrializingage. Now, however,countersubversive doubling justified not the freeman but a centralized,secretive, inquisitorial state. Although liberals blamed McCarthyism,the rise of a security-orientedstate bureaucracy was the most importantnew factorin the modern historyof countersubversion. American historyin each countersubversivemoment has constituteditself in binaryopposition to the subversiveforce thatthreatened it. Demonology begins as a rigidinsistence on difference.That insistencehas strategicpropaganda pur- poses, but it also derives from fears of and forbidden desires for identitywith the excluded object. In countersubversivediscourse, therefore,the opposition breaks down. Its cultural and political productions register the collapse of demonological polarization in a return of the politicallyand psychologically repressed. The subversivein all three stages has threatenedthe family,property, and personal and national identity.But subversivesmelted into their surroundings as the racial and cultural differenceswhich stigmatizedthem disappeared, and the imagined danger shiftedfrom the body to the mind. Instead of representing only loss of restraintand disorder,the subversivesignified control by a sophis- ticated,alien order. That danger was met in two new ways,each of which mir- rored the enemyarrayed against it. One was the rise of the nationalsecurity state. The other was the production and surveillanceof public opinion in the media of mass society. This paper examines the representationsof American demonology in the filmsof the cold war. It analyzes movies made between 1943 and 1964, the years surroundingthe cold war consensus. These movieshelped produce thatconsen- sus. It fragmentedafter the Kennedy assassination,as we shall see, but by then it had done itswork. The 1960s antiwarmovement challenged cold war practices but did not do awaywith them. The 1980s presidentwho, as we shall see, moved frommovies to politicsin cold war Hollywood has revivedthe demonologywhich gave him politicalbirth. Cold war cinema will give us access, at its founding,to the cold war discourse withinwhich we continue to speak. As conscious anti- Communistpropaganda, and as unintentionalregister of anxiety,these movies reflected,shaped, and expessed the buried dynamics of a repressive political

2 REPRESENTATIONS

This content downloaded from 169.234.53.127 on Wed, 04 Mar 2015 22:18:06 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions consciousness.They display both the cumulativehistory of American demonology,and the specifichistorical circumstances of the 1950s which placed the ob- sessions of that historyunder pressure. Like other productionsof American demonology,cold war movies sharply distinguishedsubversives from countersubversives.But the movies also made visible three developments which threatened to collapse that distinction.The firstdevelopment was the rise of the national securitystate, which counteracted Sovietinfluence by imitatingSoviet surveillance.The second, whichwe willintro- duce in part II of this essay,arose fromthe simultaneousglorification and fear of maternalinfluence within the family.The thirdwas the emergence of a mass societywhich seemed to homogenize all differenceand make subversivesdifficult to spot. Before Americaentered WorldWar I, WoodrowWilson had attacked"citizens of the United States ... born under other flags... who have poured the poison of disloyaltyinto the very arteriesof our national life."After the war those foreigners were blamed for the great strikewave of 1919 and the radical agitation surroundingit. AttorneyGeneral A. MitchellPalmer and his youngsubordinate, J. Edgar Hoover, rounded up thousands of Americans born abroad for depor- tation.Palmer describedthe targetsof his raids as "alien filth"with "sly and crafty eyes ... lopsided faces,sloping brows,and misshapen features."3"Communists," agreed Harry Truman's attorneygeneral, J. Howard McGrath,thirty years later, "are everywhere-in factories,offices, butcher shops, on streetcorners, in pri- vatebusiness, and each carriesin himselfthe germsof death forsociety."4 McGrath was echoing Wilsonand Palmer.But invisibleinternal Soviet agents had replaced the alien workingclass as the targetof cold war countersubversion.When Pal- mer's aliens returnedfrom outer space, in the science fictionmovies of the cold war,they looked like everyoneelse. The invisibilityof Communistinfluence distinguished the CommunistParty fromlegitimate opposition groups. But just because Communistsmasqueraded as ordinary citizens,it was necessary to insist they were not. Truman and his liberal anti-Communistsupporters contrasted mundane politicalconflicts to the struggleagainst Communism.The CommunistParty, they argued, was a secret, internationalconspiracy to overthrowAmerican government; the Party took orders froma foreignpower, and its memberscommitted espionage. The transformationof political dissent into criminal disloyaltywas fed by sensational accusations of espionage in the late 1940s and early 1950s against Alger Hiss, Judith Coplon, and Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Hiss, accused of transmittingconfidential State Departmentdocuments, was convictedof perjury. The Rosenbergs were executed for,in Judge Irving Kaufman'swords, "putting into the hands of the Russians the A-bomb."Judge Kaufman accused the Rosen- bergsof responsibilityfor Communist aggression and Americandeaths in Korea.

KissMe Deadly:Communism, Motherhood, and Cold WarMovies 3

This content downloaded from 169.234.53.127 on Wed, 04 Mar 2015 22:18:06 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Hiss and the Rosenbergs may well have passed confidentialinformation to the Russians; their guilt is stillin dispute. But they neithergave Russia the atomic bomb nor caused the Korean War.Their highlypublicized trials,and the unprecedented Rosenberg death sentences, helped identifyopposition to American policies in the cold war withcriminal, treasonous, disloyalty.5 Anti-Communistsrightly called attentionto the monstrous crimes of the Soviet state against its own and other subject peoples, and to Moscow's direction of the American CommunistParty. Some members of the Partywere probably spies and murderers,just as were some agents of the American state. But the assault on Communists and Communist sympathizersfocussed not on actual crimes but on memberships,beliefs, and associations. It therebyspread by its own logic to so-called "fellowtravelers," those who associated withCommunists, shared their beliefs, and might secretlybe responsive to Party direction. The atomicspy trials of the late 1940s merged withthe House Un-AmericanActivities Committeeinvestigation of Communistinfluence in Hollywood. Becase HUAC exposed both Hiss and the Hollywood Ten, and because the accused spies, writ- ers, and directorsall wentto jail, the distinctioncollapsed betweenmicrofilm and film.The celluloid medium of secret influencebecame the message. The Red (i.e., Communist)scare joined togetheras one danger atomic spying,revelations of confidentialgovernment proceedings, Communist Party membership, mem- bershipin "Communistfront" organizations, manipulation of mass opinion, and subversiveideas. In that chain reaction of guilt by free association, the ideas became the source of the atomic contamination.As if to reverse the only actual use of nuclear weapons, thatby the United States,the Red scare made un-Amer- ican ideas radioactive.The "germs" which spread the "poison of disloyalty"jus- tifieda state-initiatedcounter, anti-Communist, epidemic. The free man's dependence on the state,at the centerof cold war ideology, goes back to the origins of America. American countersubversionhas always defended the individualby mobilizingAmerican nationalism.Both Indian con- quest and slave labor were enforced not so much by heroic, individual achieve- ments as by the armed mightof the state. The free man and the militarystate are neither two alternativepoles in American ideology,nor are they merelya recent symbiosis.Their marriage goes back to the beginning. Nonetheless, the growingpower of American public and privatebureaucracies placed particular pressureon the freeindividual during the cold war.Those bureaucracies,whether corporateorganizations or the national securitystate, were presented as the free man's allies. They comprised his free enterprisesystem and defended it against Communism.Still, if the free man was one polar opposite of the subversive,the national securitystate was the other. And the New Deal, the war, and the cold war had all given that state an unprecedented presence in American life. The

4 REPRESENTATIONS

This content downloaded from 169.234.53.127 on Wed, 04 Mar 2015 22:18:06 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions boundary separating the free man's state fromits subversivetwin was alwaysin danger of collapsing in an implosion thatwould annihilatethe free man. Cold war ideology establisheda double division,then, between the free man and the state on the one hand, the free state and the slave state on the other. Cold war movieswill show how the historicaldisplacement of the firstopposition by the second called into question an even more fundamentaldivision, and then offereda solutionto the problem of itscollapse. That divisionis the one between motherhoodand Communism.

The same processof insecureopposition which troubled public history also infected private life. Just as the free man was the polar opposite of the subversivein society,the subversive'sopposite in the familywas the mother.But just as the boundary between the free man and the state was a permeable one, so also the line dividingmothers from Communism proved to be no Iron Curtain. Since appearing on the American scene, the subversivehas made the home into his or her central target. Indians kidnapped and massacred mothersand children;blacks raped women; revolutionariespromoted free love; and the Com- muniststate invaded the family'ssanctity. In each image, the American mother was a passive victimwhose violationsdemanded revenge. But while the freeman who needs the stateis not so independent as the countersubversivepretends, the motherturns out to be too powerful.Domestic ideology,which developed in the nineteenthcentury to give women social functionswithin the home, was double- edged in itsimpact on both familyprivacy and femalepower. Traditional methods of paternalcoercion, as domesticideologists saw it,failed to create self-disciplined children. They punished the body but did not reform the heart. Domesticity replaced physicalforce with loving, maternal influence.The domestic mother created moral character by giving and withholdinglove. She entered the self, formedit, understood its feelings, and therebyat once produced it and protected it fromcorruption.6 The motherin domestic ideology made the familya refuge and spread its influencethroughout society. Domestic ideologyjustified women's confinement in the home by makingmothers into the guardians of public morality.However, domesticitydid not so much enrich privatelife as socialize it. Denying the truly private character of the home, it made the familyless a haven for protecting eccentricitythan an arena for formingand standardizingpersonality. By wiping out the trulyprivate, domestic ideology threatened the familyit was supposed to support.

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This content downloaded from 169.234.53.127 on Wed, 04 Mar 2015 22:18:06 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Womenwere empowered morally,in domesticideology, in returnfor accept- ing their economic and political subordination.Confined to the home, women were promised substantialindirect power in return; it was the power to sacrifice their identitiesin service to others and live through the achievementsof men. But the sons and husbands whose intimateneeds women served feltdependent for their freedom on the women who attended to them. At the same time,the emphasis on female virtue generated female reformmovements. Transferring domestic ideology from the home to society,such movements claimed direct politicalpower. Opponents of female reform,in turn,invoked domestic ideology to returnwomen to the home. They fearedwomen who easilyslid fromnurturing influenceto emasculatingpower.7 For a societyanxious about maternal power,World War II created a crisis. As the Depession deprived men of confidentpublic lives, women came to play more important,nurturing roles. Then the men wentoff to war. Encouraged to replace their men on thejob, women were promised significantwork, independence, and even sexual autonomy.Resurgent postwar domestic ideology attacked motherswho abandoned their children to work; it also attacked female sexual aggression.Women were drivenback to domesticsubordination in response not only to their husbands' return from the war, but also to their own newfound independence.8 The femininemystique came to dominate American culture and societyat the same time that the cold war took over politics. Cold war cinema emerged fromthat conjunction. I introduced the problem of the free man and the state in the masculinemode, bymaking large, historicalclaims. Let me turnto mothers and Communismin a more intimate,private manner, by offeringa synecdoche. In 1942, Philip Wylie,the immenselysuccessful writer for women's maga- zines, published a book of social criticism.The book, Generationof Vipers,was an immediate bestseller.The American Library Association selected it in 1950 as one of the major nonfictionbooks of the firsthalf of the twentiethcentury. The book made Wyliea celebritybecause of its attackon "Momism."Mom, in Wylie's depiction, was a self-righteous,hypocritical, sexually repressed, middle-aged woman. Having lost the household functionsof preindustrialwomen, according to Wylie,mom got men to worshipher and spend moneyon her instead.America, insisted Wylie,was "a matriarchyin fact if not in declaration,"in which "the women of America raped the men" Mom dominated her husband and encouraged the dependence of her son. She elicitedhis adulation to represshis sex, and transferredthe desire thatought to go to anotherwoman into sentimentalityfor herself."I give you mom. I give you the destroyingmother," Wylie concluded. "I give you Medusa."9 Momism is the demonic versionof domesticideology. It uncoversthe buried anxieties over boundary invasion, loss of autonomy,and maternal power gen-

6 REPRESENTATIONS

This content downloaded from 169.234.53.127 on Wed, 04 Mar 2015 22:18:06 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions erated by domesticity.Philip Wyliehad been obsessed withthe dangerous attrac- tionsof women since the beginningof his career. He flirtedwith free love in his early fiction,but his men were as vulnerable to sexually liberated women as to moms.10Although Generationof Vipersrelinquishes free love, it stillfalls outside the boundaries of acceptable domesticattitudes. In making mothershis targets, Wylieexposed anxieties that the mass public could not normallyacknowledge. Generationof Vipersfound an audience in the special circumstancesof the war. During the 1950s motherswere sanctified,not vilified.Although the United States Army had endorsed Wylie'swarnings about mom, the Voice of America removed Generationof Vipersfrom its overseas libraries.Nonetheless, the book's attackon women was an instrumentin the battle to return them to the home. For so long as Wyliestayed within the family,he could offeronly more domesticity to assuage anxietiesover mom. Wylie, like other 1950s domesticideologists, opposed careers for women and advocated companionate, sexually fulfillingmarriages. The American mother was to support her husband and let go of her son; she was not,like mom, to dominatethem. " Wyliewas seekingthe solutionto momism in the domesticconfinement that had generated the problem. When Philip Wylieis stillremembered, it is as the inventorof momism.Wylie had another obsession besides mothers.however-the menace of Communism. The author visited Russia with his half-brotherin the 1930s. He blamed the Russians for the cholera he contracted upon leaving the country,and for his brother'sfatal fall from a window.Smoke Across the Moon, serializedin TheSaturday EveningPost, warned against Communism. An anti-Fascistas well an an anti- Communist,Wylie wrote a militarymanual in 1940 forsoldiers entering the army. He advocated continued militarypreparedness after the war, and warned that Americans (softenedby moms) were not takingseriously the Communistthreat. (He also blamed mom for McCarthyism.)12 The answer to Communism,Wylie believed, lay in nuclear armament and civildefense. Wylievisited the Nevada bomb testsite in the late 1940s, prepared an imaginativelist of nuclear weapons for the navy,and served as a special con- sultant to the federal Civil Defense Administration.He became an adviser to the Commission on Atomic Energy, a friend of its chairman, Senator Brian McMahon, and an advocate of building the hydrogenbomb.'3 But as he supported atomic weapons, Wylieworried that the countrywas unprepared for nuclear war. He had collaborated in 1930 with the editor of Redbookon a science fictionnovel, WhenWorlds Collide. This tale of the earth's destructionbecame a classic; Hollywood filmed it in 1951. Wylie himselfhad writtenscreenplays for Hollywood. After the success of the movie version of WhenWorlds Collide, he began a screenplayon atomic war. He rewroteit as the novel, Tomorrow,and published it in 1954. Wyliededicated Tomorrow"to the gal- lant men and women of the federal Civil Defense Administration."Tomorrow

KissMe Deadly:Communism, Motherhood, and Cold WarMovies 7

This content downloaded from 169.234.53.127 on Wed, 04 Mar 2015 22:18:06 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions presentscivil defense as a protectionnot onlyagainst Communism but also against momism,and offersrearmament and nuclear war as the way to lay momismto rest.14 The atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki was called "Little Boy."The plane thatdropped the Hiroshima bomb was named "Enola Gay,"after the command- er's mother.'5 Mom fillsher son with destructivepower in the nuclear naming ceremony.Tomorrow pays silenthomage to thathope by invertingit. Wylie'smoms disempowertheir husbands and sons. Mom is stillthe source of the bomb, as on the "Enola Gay,"but only in Wylie'sunconscious. In his consciousnessmom is the target. There are three moms in Tomorrow.Two dominate theirweak husbands; the third,whose husband is dead, controls her son and runs the whole town. All three moms oppose civil defense. They discount the Soviet threat,and resent the disruptionsthe drillscause in theirshopping rounds and social engagements. These moms are punished by nuclear war. None takes shelter,and each suffers the consequence. The firstwatches the blast of lightfrom a window: "Her face, her breast, her abdomen were sliced to red meat." The second is saved by her baby'sbody, pressed up against her. The baby "received a pound of glass in her back; she was torn almost apart." This mom's other children are all gruesomely destroyedas well. The thirdmom, who has dominated everyonearound her and orchestratedan anti-civildefense campaign, suffersa humiliatingrescue. Crip- pled by the blast,her helpless fatbody is wheeled throughthe panic-filledstreets in a wheelbarrow.Tomorrow blames moms for, and punishes them with,body destruction.16 Philip Wyliewas drawn to the apocalypse he claimed to be warningagainst. Tomorrowpresents civil defense as a method not of deterringatomic war but of survivingit. The Russians follow their atomic bombs with germ warfare,and demand an American surrender.But the Americans have a secret weapon, an atomicsubmarine rigged as a cobalt bomb. Some scientiststhink that if that bomb is set offin the Baltic Sea it willdestroy the world; othersclaim it willonly destroy Russia. Ten years later, in Dr Strangelove,the submarine will have become a doomsday machine. In 1954, however,the presidentbelieves the optimists.He explodes the submarinewithout warning, and America winsthe war.Those "able to dream and put the dreams on paper" preside over the rebuildingof a better world. The dreamer,Philip Wylie,has builthis own betterworld on paper, in the act of destroyingmoms. 17 Liberated women representthe Communistthreat in Wylie'searlier fiction. The left-wingcollege studentin SmokeAcross the Moon believesthat women should have careers. She rejects the role of supporting a husband and motheringhis children.This subversive,who favorssex withoutcommitments, seduces a min- ister.He hangs himselfwhen she refusesto marryhim.'8 SmokeAcross the Moon

8 REPRESENTATIONS

This content downloaded from 169.234.53.127 on Wed, 04 Mar 2015 22:18:06 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions makes the familiarassociations among independent women, sexual danger, and Communism.Female libertinesare typicallypolarized againstAmerican mothers. But Wylie'sobsession withmomism breaks down thatbinary opposition. In The Disappearance(1951) Wylie imagined that women vanished one day from the men's world, and men fromthe women's.One consequence (in the male half of existence) is nuclear war.19Women are both essential and menacing in Wylie's world. He links both their absence and their presence to boundary invasion, body destruction,and apocalypse. Merging Communism, mothers, and scientificcatastrophe, Philip Wylie introducesthe movies of the cold war. The motion picture industryrefused to filmTomorrow. 20 Perhaps thatwas because thescript made connectionsgruesomely explicit that are present but buried in the movies. Cold war filmsdepict the Communistthreat as an invasive,invisible, deceptive, enslaving conspiracy. The filmsconstruct a Manichean universeto protectAmerican boundaries frominva- sion. But they registerthe breakdown of effortsto polarize not just free men against the statebut mothersagainst Communismas well. Cold war filmspresent themselvesas defending private life from Commu- nism. Like domestic ideology,however, these movies promote the takeover of the private by the falselyprivate. They politicize privacyin the name of pro- tectingit, and therebywipe it out. Domestic and cold war ideologies not only dissolve the private into the public; theyalso do the reverse. They depoliticize politicsby blamingsubversion on personal influence.That influence,in cold war cinema, is female. The filmssubordinate political consciousness to sexual unconsciousness. They inadvertentlylocate the need to make boundaries to protect identityin the fear of being swallowed not so much by Communism as by the mother. In their simplestform, the movies identifyCommunism with sexual seduction. But polarizing the mother against the seductressdoes not redeem mom, forthe motherbecomes the source of bad influencein these films.Having examined the politicizationof privacy in cold war cinema, and the role of sexual seduction,I shall then trace the progressivedeepening of domesticanxiety. That deep destructuringhas three layers,family, state, and society;each is a response to the layer above. The firstidentifies Communism with secret,maternal influence. The second replaces mom's surveillance by that of the national security state.Hollywood sacrificesthe freeman to the stateto protecthim frommaternal invasion.But the symbiosisof stateand familyfails to defend against the deepest fear of maternity.Indifferent female reproductivepower, in cold war science fiction,proliferates interchangeable identities. The aliens of cold war science fictionare deliberate stand-insfor Communists.But the filmssuggest that the menace of alien invasionlay not so much in the power of a foreignstate as in the obliterationof paternal inheritanceand the triumphof mass society.

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This content downloaded from 169.234.53.127 on Wed, 04 Mar 2015 22:18:06 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions III

The filmwhich introduced cold war demonologyinto Hollywood was a hot war movie,Mission to Moscow (1943). It was made to create sympathyfor Soviet Russia. Missionto Moscow employed the imageryof national defense and internalconspiracy to justifyStalin's purge trials.The filmblamed a Trotskyite- Nazi alliance for weakeningRussia against imminentGerman invasion.Mission toMoscow became a targetof the House Un-AmericanActivities Committee after the war. Its screenwriter,Howard Koch, was blacklisted.2'The blacklistimitated the purgesjustified by the film.HUAC's appropriationof a pro-Sovietmovie was emblematicof the larger historicalrelationship between the war against Nazism and the cold war. Though cold war filmmakersclaimed to be protectingthe American way of private life against Communism, they actually revived and inverted the politicized popular-frontculture of the struggle against fascism. Climaxing during World War II, the popular frontsubordinated private existence and internalpolitical conflict to a sentimentalAmerican nationalism. World War II, moreover,provided the occasion for the emergence of the national securityapparatus; pro-Communists,who were to be the major targetsof thatappa- ratus, helped develop the countersubversiverationale. That is less a paradox than it seems,for countersubversive theory mirrors the enemyit is out to destroy. Since twinningdominates the countersubversiveimagination, I shall begin by treatingcold war moviesin oppositional pairs. That method elevates the double featureof the 1950s movie house to a structuralprinciple of analysis.It will at once illuminatethe boundaries these filmstry to maintain,and also charttheir breakdown.(Those boundaries break down, in the analysispresented here, when the mother of a Communisthas a breakdown. Her collapse provides an entry forthe stateand mass society,where the methodof doubling filmsis abandoned.) The double of Missionto Moscow is I Was a Communistfor theFBI (1951). In I Was a Communist,Warner Brothers reversed the ideology of its Mission toMoscow. Both filmsused a documentaryvoice-over to give fictionthe sound of news; both showed factorysabotage; both glorifieda secret,internal police; and both warned against imminentforeign invasion. A conspiratorialcabal in both filmsthreatened the national defense, played upon divisive social discontents, and undermined the nation'swill. The differencewas that the threatportrayed was now fromRussia, not to it. (Matt Cvetic,the man who actuallydid play the role of Communistfor the FBI, had named hundreds of Communistsand Com- munistsympathizers in western Pennsylvania,costing many theirjobs. He was later revealed, not in the film,to have had a historyof mental illness.)22 Missionto Moscow,derived from Ambassador Joseph E. Davies' book, presented itselfas fact. Walter Huston played the ambassador, but Davies himself appeared at the beginning to introduce and sanction the film.Matt Cvetic was

10 REPRESENTATIONS

This content downloaded from 169.234.53.127 on Wed, 04 Mar 2015 22:18:06 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions also real, and Pittsburghproclaimed Matt Cvetic Day for the premiere of I Was a Communist.The film,fictional both in Cvetic'sfantasies of Communistinfluence and in the movie fictionalizedfrom those fantasies,was nominated for an Acad- emy Award as the best feature-lengthdocumentary of 1951.23 Anti-Communistfilms like I Wasa Communistwarned against a politicaldan- ger. But theydepoliticized the appeals of Communismby using the conventions of the gangstermovie and equating Communismwith crime. Such filmsdisplayed the confusioninstitutionalized in the FBI betweencriminal activity and political dissent. (Alone among Westerndemocracies, America united political surveillance and criminaldetection in a single agency.The head of the agency for fifty years,J. Edgar Hoover, had built his career on countersubversionrather than fightingcrime.) But in equating Communism and crime,cold war filmsshifted sympathyaway from the individual criminalof the gangstermovie and toward the forcesof law and order. Depression-era gangstermovies had sympathyfor the devil; theirprotagonists were outsidersand underdogs, self-mademen who rose to the top. The racketeersand murderersMatt Cvetic exposes in the film are men in greyflannel suits who merelyplay upon sympathyfor the underdog The lonely heroism of the free man in I Was a Communistconsists in the protagonist masquerading as one sortof organizationalman when in facthe is another. Both Davies and Cvetic entered Communistterritory on the orders of their government.Davies enjoyed the luxuryof supportingSoviet Russia as an Amer- ican governmentofficial. Cvetic outdid him. He masqueraded as an actual Party memberand lost the protectionof his patrioticidentity. Davies was rewarded for his mission; Cvetic made himselfinto a pariah. Sacrificinghis private life to patrioticwork, Matt Cvetic introducesthe anxious relationshipof the personal to the politicalthat pervades cold war cinema. Communism not only threatened public stabilityin cold war films;it also turned familymembers against one another and endangered privatelife. The loving familyrepresented America in cold war movies. Communistssubverted the family,sometimes in the person of a sexual seductress,sometimes as the representativeof an intrusivestate. The twofigures enter cold war cinematogether, dressed in innocentclothes, in the pro-RussianWorld War II film,Song ofRussia. Song ofRussia (1943) elicited romance, then sacrificedit to patriotism,and leftits American hero bereftand alone. An Americanconductor on Russian tour fallsin love witha young Russian woman, a pianist.But she chooses her country over her husband aftertheir marriage. She leaves the conductorwhen the Nazis invade Russia, and returnsto fightfor her village. One of Song ofRussia's screenwriters, Richard Collins, named the other,Paul Jarrico, before HUAC; Jarrico was blacklisted. Robert Taylor was also called before the Committeefor starringas the American conductor.Taylor played a victimof Russian patriotismon film.He blamed the American Office of War

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This content downloaded from 169.234.53.127 on Wed, 04 Mar 2015 22:18:06 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Informationfor pressuringhim into thatrole. Taylorapologized for appearing in a Communistfilm. He urged that those Hollywood figureshe named as sus- pected Communistsbe blacklisted. "The American people," Taylor reassured questioningCongressman Richard Nixon, "willgo along withanybody who pre- fersAmerica and the American formof governmentover any other subversive ideologies."Taylor's unacknowledged "other" made the American form of gov- ernmentas subversiveas the Russian. That apparent slip, in the contextof the actor'senthusiastic cooperation withthe Committee,faintly echoes Nikolai Buk- harin'sdeliberate subversion-by-overcooperation in his Moscow purge trial.Tay- lor may have been recognizing,unconsciously or even consciously,that HUAC was substitutingone intrusivestate for another,and thatsuch politicalinterven- tion subverted his desire to be leftalone. The actor rejected propaganda films in his testimony,in favorof entertainment.But thatformula was too privatizing for the Committee.To make sure that Americans were protectedfrom subversion, Taylor agreed with HUAC that "the motion picture industry... should make anti-Communistpictures."24 The motion picture industrydid. NeverLet Me Go (1953) took back Song of Russia. Clark Gable playsan Americanwar correspondentwho marriesa Russian ballerina during the war. But the Communistswon't let her out of Russia after the war is over. In Song of Russia Taylor'swife died fightingthe Nazis and he returned to America alone. But Gable secretlyinfiltrates Russia and brings his woman home. Susan Peters,playing the pianist,chose her countryover her husband. Gene Tierney,playing the ballerina, chooses her husband. The femme fatale in Kiss Me Deadly (1955) masquerades as a Tierney,the helpless victimof atomic spies; in factshe is more deadly than they.Although Mike Hammer is no familyman, he is stillseduced by a woman's apparent helplessness.To turn MickeySpillane's detectivethriller into a cold war movie,Hollywood added atomicradiation. Ham- mer is on the trailof a stolen box containingradioactive material. The slightest opening of the box emits rays which burn and disfigurethe body. The woman gains possession of the box in the film'sclimactic scene; she knows its value, but is ignorantof its contents.Unable to restrainher curiosity,Pandora opens the box and a glowing fire leaps out. Since the woman is facing the camera from behind the box, the fireseems to leap out of her body. It consumes the woman and destroysthe house to whichshe and the detectivehave come. Only Hammer escapes the holocaust.Kiss Me Deadlylocates Pandora's box as the seat of apoca- lypticdestruction. Less seamy and violent anti-Communistfilms domesticate the subversive woman. In I Was a Communist,the Partysends a seductiveschoolteacher to spy on Cvetic,whose son is in her class. Cveticrejects the schoolteacher'sadvances in their firstprivate encounter.Once she learns to mistrustthe Communistsand

12 REPRESENTATIONS

This content downloaded from 169.234.53.127 on Wed, 04 Mar 2015 22:18:06 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions chooses the FBI over the Party,she is no longer a threatto him. That is partly because he now protectsher fromCommunist efforts at murder.It is also because when she leaves the Partyshe leaves her sexualitybehind. Joseph von Sternberg'sJet Pilot, made in 1951 and released in 1957,25is a comic-stripvariation on the same theme. (Its lack of seriousness may have con- vinced Howard Hughes not to release it at the heightof the cold war.) A female Russian jet pilot, masquerading as a political refugee, seduces and betraysthe Americanassigned to discoverher secrets.This victory,of Janet Leigh overJohn Wayne,reproduces Marlene Dietrich'striumph in Sternberg'sBlue Angel.In both movies a male sexual innocent is at firstresistant to overt displays of female sexuality,and then succumbs. Each hero discovers his woman's disloyaltyafter having married her. But the American refuses to accept his humiliation.Like Gable in NeverLet Me Go, Wayneenters Russia. He is now playingLeigh's role, of a spy masquerading as a defector.Pretending he is stillin Leigh's sexual power, Wayneoutwits both her and the Russian state. His prowess is too much for the Russian Mata Hari. At the film'send she chooses Wayneover Russia, and the two jet pilotsfly off to freedomtogether. Patriarchy and love inJetPilot prove stronger than Communismand sex. "I woke up one morningand found I had a Partycard," explains a contrite Communistin WalkEast on Beacon (1952). It is like "findingyourself married to a woman you hate."26Anti-Communist films seem to pose the classic opposition between the free man, family,and love on the one hand, female sexuality,the state,and the invasionof the familyon the other.They seem to stand withprivate lifeagainst threatsfrom without. But the filmsactually suggest that such a polar- izationis too simple,for they also express anxietyabout the internalvulnerability of the family.Both Cvetic'srole and Taylor'stestimony show thatcold war cinema politicizedprivacy in the name of defendingit. That paradox is not to be explained simplyby the externalthreat of Communism.Cold war filmsimply that domestic ideology,far fromprotecting America against alien ideas, generated aliens from withinits bosom. The 1950s movie which comes closest to blaming mom for Communismis My SonJohn (1952). Two sons toss a football with their fatherin the opening scene of My Son John.The fatherdrops the ball. "I was a tackle,"he jokes. "They ran through you, dad," responds one of the sons. The camera pans up to a bedroom window. It reveals the mother,played by Helen Hayes, dressed onlyin her slip. The family is late for church,and the fathercan't get her to come on time. He's never been able to, he says. When mom finallyjoins her family,she walks betweenand flirts withher sons. These sons are twins,and theirinterchangeability aggravates the disorientationof the opening of the film. Leo McCarey,who directedMy Son John,normally made Hollywood come- dies. He had a comic intentionin the opening scene of this movie. But the

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This content downloaded from 169.234.53.127 on Wed, 04 Mar 2015 22:18:06 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions appearance of the absent son, John, transformscomedy into surrealism,and casts a retrospectivecold eye on the movie'sbeginning as well. John's brothersare off to fightin Korea; they are their father'sboys. The mother'sbond is withJohn, the Washingtonintellectual, who staysaway from theirsend-off. John will also make fun of his father,as his brothersdo, but his ridiculehas an edge thattheirs lacks. Robert Walker,who died while makingthis film,plays John. His distancing,de-realizing persona calls the values of his family into question. Walker'sirony is meant to expose John'scontempt for wholesome American life. But his brilliantperformance draws director and viewer in, so that the film presents the American familythrough John's detached and discredited eyes. My Son Johnmay want to stand withthe father,but it exposes his American Legion costume and his simple-minded,patriotic slogans to ridicule. John'sfather, speaking the message of the film,warns that Communistsare no longer foreigners,but Americans.These internalenemies resemblepatriots, the filmtells us, whom theyimitate in order to subvert.Communists were aliens in the firstRed scare; they assaulted the American family.John's familyhas produced a subversive,and it is powerlessagainst him. John'sfather makes him swearon the familyBible thathe is not a Communist. Then, provoked by John's mockery,he smashes the Bible over his head. The father'sold-fashioned, coercive methods fail to disciplineJohn, just as domestic ideology predicted theywould not.John's father does not command respect; he is reduced to forcingthe Bible on his son. John's mother insinuatesit into him byinterchanging it with food. "I'd make you a cake,cookies and jam," she reminds John,"if you'd read Matthew,Luke and John."But the newer maternalmethods of lovinginfluence only make mattersworse. John has become a Communist,the filmimplies, because of the liberal ideas and sexual availabilityof his mother. "You are part of me,"John's mother tells him, and even as that line points to John'sbetrayal of his mother,it insistson the lack of boundaries between them. John has imbibed his mother'snaive humanitarianismand, to distance himself fromher, taken it in a sinisterdirection. Helen Hayes plays a flaky,independent, sympatheticwoman. The family doctor prescribespills when her youngersons go offto war,and we applaud her refusal to take them. But Hayes' feistinessbecomes a sign of her disturbance. Her intimacywith John gets her in trouble in the course of the film,and her eccentricitiesturn to madness. My SonJohn capitalized on theJudith Coplon spy case. The filmmakes John not merelya Communistbut a spy,and therebymerges atomic and sexual secrets. John has betrayedhis mother for a female spy,but he inadvertentlyleaves his key to the spy's apartment in a pair of torn pants that he gives his mother for charity.Mom turnshim in to the FBI only aftershe fliesto Washington,tries the key,and it fitsthe otherwoman's lock. "Mothers... Our Only Hope," announced

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This content downloaded from 169.234.53.127 on Wed, 04 Mar 2015 22:18:06 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions I(I RF1I. Above:Nfom (fielen I laves)with her soil (RobertWaKlker) in Mx SouiJfoh; below:MN()e (ihelnia Ritter)with lneof her bIo)Oy's' (Richard W\idmark)in Pikup on SotithStveet.

KissMe Deadly:Communism, Motherhood, and Cold WarMovies 15

This content downloaded from 169.234.53.127 on Wed, 04 Mar 2015 22:18:06 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions J. Edgar Hoover's articleenlisting domestic ideology in the fightagainst crime.27 But in My SonJohn the special bond betweenmother and son engenders psychological and politicalbad influence. By psychologizingthe appeals of Communism,My SonJohnlocated the problem in the very familythat was supposed to provide the solution. Psychological explanationsfor Communism, like the reductionof Communismto crime,diverted attentionfrom social injustice.But psychologypointed away fromsociety not to the gangster,but to the family.It located the threatto the free man less in the alien Communiststate than in his loving mother. The familyconstellation in My Son Johnconsisted of an intrusive,sexually unsatisfiedmother, a weak father,and a cold, isolated son. The ManchurianCan- didate(1962) repeated that triangleand made it demonologicallyexplicit. The ManchurianCandidate is a brilliant,self-knowing film. But far frommocking the mentalityit displays,it aims to reawaken a lethargicnation to the Communist menace. Capitalizingon itsimprobabilities by mixingrealism with science fiction, TheManchurian Candidate is the most sophisticatedfilm of the cold war. Laurence Harvey is the Manchurian candidate. The Communistscapture his batallionin Korea, take the men across the Chinese border,and programHarvey forpolitical assassination. During these brainwashingsessions, the American soldiers hallucinate that the Communistswho give them orders are middle-aged club women. The playing card, the queen of diamonds, the residue of these moms,is Harvey'scontrol card. He goes into a trancewhen he sees the queen of diamonds, and obeys the orders of the next voice he hears. Harvey's mother,played by Angela Lansbury,connects the fantasizedMan- churian clubwomento the queen of diamonds. "She is a middle-aged puffinwith an eye like a hawk,"Philip Wyliewrote of mom;28he mighthave been describing Lansbury.Harvey hates his motherbut he is in her power. Her incestuous love for him, which repels Harvey but which he cannot escape, is the source of the Party'shold on his unconscious. Helen Hayes is sympathetic,as Lansbury is not. But both moms bringto the surfacethe entrapping,repressed, Oedipal love that Wyliemade the source of momism.As ifto confirmWylie's claim thatmoms won't let theirsons go, Harvey is programmed to kill his own fiancee. John's father,the simple-mindedpatriot, has become Harvey's stepfather, and TheManchurian Candidate relinquishes the sympathyfor that figurethat My SonJohn tried to retain. Lansbury is married to a drunken, ridiculous,malevo- lent,right-wing, anti-Communist senator, a charactermodeled on Joe McCarthy. AlthoughLansbury masquerades as a superpatriot,she is secretlya Communist, and controlsher husband. Afterhe is nominated for vice president,the Party orders Harvey to kill the man at the head of the ticket.If Harvey succeeds, his McCarthy stepfatherwill be elected president and his Communistmother will run America.

16 REPRESENTATIONS

This content downloaded from 169.234.53.127 on Wed, 04 Mar 2015 22:18:06 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions But incestis strongerthan Communismin thisfilm, as it was in My SonJohn. Furious thatthe Sovietshave made her son theirsacrificial instrument, Lansbury vows to turn against them once her husband is president.She seals that pledge to herselfwith a long kiss on Harvey's lips. Kissing her son in closeup, as she faces the camera, Harvey's mom is kissingthe audience. We feel as sickened as he does by her inappropriatedesire. But just as her incestuouslove is stronger than Communism, so is his incestuous hate; it frees him from Party control. Frank Sinatra, playing the army intelligence officer pursuing Harvey, does not reach him in time to prevent the assassination. But after climbing the stairsto the top of the convention hall, and gettingthe presidentialcandidate in his sights,Harvey turns his rifleon his stepfatherand his mother and kills them instead. Domestic ideology promised that the American familywould triumphover Communism.The Manchurian Candidate, by subordinatingCommunist to maternal influence,showed what that promise entailed. The familydefeats Commu- nism only by firstgenerating Communism and then self-destructivelyreplacing it. The incest fantasywhich reduced Communism to momism is shown to be a wish. For the familynightmare defends against havingactually to come to terms with politics.Freed from its roots in momism,Communism (and anti-Commu- nism) would have to be seen as having lives of theirown. TheManchurian Candidate is a Kennedy Administrationfilm. Sinatra, a member of the Kennedy entourage, plays a ravaged, lonely Kennedy hero. He tries to rouse a credulous army bureaucracy to the danger posed by Harvey. The Presidentialcandidate is asking Americans to sacrificefor their countrywhen Harvey trainshis sightson him. Like Kennedy,The Manchurian Candidate warns against both right-winghysteria and bureaucratic complacency.Both the film and the administrationaimed to breathe new life into the cold war. The cold war needed reanimatingin the early 1960s. Eisenhowerseemed to turn pacificduring his second term, the Korean war was over, and McCarthy had been reduced to impotence. As if in acknowledgmentof the shiftin the national mood, Hollywood had released no anti-Communistmovies since 1957. Moreover,Jet Pilot, the last to be shown, had a comic ambience alien to vintage cold war cinema. TheManchurian Candidate, with a politicaland technicalsophis- ticationabsent from its models, was supposed to initiatea politicalrenewal. Instead it was the last cold war movie, for the assassinationto which it pointed brought the cold war consensus to an end. TheManchurian Candidate was released in 1962. The verynext year a young man who had returned frombehind the Iron Curtain carried a riflewith tele- scopic sightsup severalflights of stairsin a building.Like Harvey,he firedthrough a window on a targetbelow. Unlike Harvey,he did not shifthis aim. No doubt the assassinationwhich imitated art was an eerie coincidence.But in 1981 another

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This content downloaded from 169.234.53.127 on Wed, 04 Mar 2015 22:18:06 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions troubledyoung man acted out his identificationwith a movie assassin. TaxiDriver led John Hinckley to shoot at one President;29did Laurence Harvey stimulate Lee Harvey Oswald? The coincidence in names, whichunsettles the observer,may also have taken possession of Oswald. If the Russians did not program Lee Harvey Oswald, perhaps The ManchurianCandidate did. One has the additional fantasythat the filmwarned Oswald (or whoeverprogrammed him) to avoid themistake (merging motherhood and Communism) of those who programmed Harvey. No doubt Oswald was neither stimulatednor alerted by The ManchurianCandidate. His successnonetheless did have the consequence againstwhich the filmwas warning. By killinghis president where Harvey had failed, Oswald initiatedthe breakdown of cold war demonology. In the absence of a young hero who could reinfuse the cold war with meaning, and in the presence of a violence which overwhelmedanti-Communist simplifications (or so it seemed), the cold war consensus temporarilydisintegrated. The ManchurianCandidate was followedby Dr. Strangelove(1964), a movie entirelyfaithful to the filmtradition it brings to an end. Sterling Hayden, playing Gen. Jack D. Ripper, who sets the holocaust in motion, was making reparation for cooperating with HUAC.30 Dr. Strangelove derived anti-Communismand nuclear holocaust from the free man's fear of female sexuality.Ripper protectshis bodily fluidsfrom women by withholding his seed. He uses the initialsof "purityof essence" as the code which locks the bombers on theirtargets. George C. Scott plays a sexual cowboy,General Buck Turgidson,the mirrorimage of Ripper. Slim Pickensis the pilotwho, wavinghis stetson,rides the bomb between his legs down to Russia. The bomb will set off a Russian doomsday machine that will wipe out notjust momismand Commu- nism (as in Tomorrow)but the entireworld. Strangelovemakes gallows humor fromthe sexual politicsof cold war cinema. It also brings to the surface the two other cinematicsubtexts to which we now turn.One is the freeman's displacementby the technologicalstate. Men are weak and falliblein Strangelove;technology takes over fromthem. Just as in its treat- ment of sexual politics,Strangelove here mocks a wish withincold war films.The second subtextis the buried fear of nuclear holocaust. That anxietyis doubly displaced in cold war cinema. It moves fromanti-Communism to science fiction and, withinthat genre, fromreal bombs to fantasymenaces-radiation-caused mutationsin Them!,an alien invasion(which occurs at the siteof a nucleardefense complex) in Invadersfrom Mars. We shall firstexamine the technologicalstate in cold war movies,and conclude withscience fiction. The cold war cultural consensus produced political power in the 1950s. It helped build a national securityapparatus. That apparatus survived the breakdown of the consensus and dominated the 1960s. By the time the culturalcon-

18 REPRESENTATIONS

This content downloaded from 169.234.53.127 on Wed, 04 Mar 2015 22:18:06 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions sensus stopped producing power,the powerfulinstitutions were in place. We can see their genesis in our films.The national securitystate, absent thus far from our reading of cold war cinema, is not absent fromthe movies themselves.Cold war filmswhich exposed familyweakness were not merelyunintentionally reveal- ing troubles at the heart of American private life; they were exploring those troublesin order to promote theircure. Help for the insecure familylay in the national securitystate. Two filmsdirected by Edward Dmytrykintroduce that state. He made the first,Crossfire (1947), before he was jailed as one of the Hol- lywood Ten. He made the second, The Caine Mutiny(1954), after he recanted, named names, and was allowed to work again.3' Crossfire,set in the years of the emergingcold war,warns against the demonizationof culturaland politicaldif- ference. The Caine Mutinyreturns to World War II in order to justifycold war America. Just as I Was a Communistwas the mirrorimage of Missionto Moscow, and NeverLet Me Go took back Song ofRussia, so The Caine Mutinywas Dmytryk's unwritingof Crossfire. Crossfirewas one of a handful of sociallyconscious filmsthat got Hollywood in trouble. Its subject was antisemitism.Robert Ryan plays a character named Montgomerywho kills a Jew,and tries to pin the crime on a confused young soldier. We see the Jew in flashback,explaining the feelingsof purposelessness and violencethat are emergingwith the end of the WorldWar II. His talksoothes the young soldier; it enrages the ex-soldier,Montgomery. But although Mont- gomerysilences one voice of sympatheticunderstanding, there is no danger in thisfilm of a world out of human control.Two strongmen are in charge of the action. Once theystart working together, Montgomery rather than the accused innocentis the man caught in the crossfire. Robert Mitchum plays a tough sergeant, Kelley, the good counterpart to Montgomery.Robert Cummings plays Finlay,the more intellectual,soft-spoken policeman. Although both Kelley and Finlaywork in law-and-orderbureaucra- cies, the filmignores the institutionsin favorof the individuals.In a filmwhich claims to stand againstauthority, a policeman and a sergeantnonetheless become its heroes. Crossfireis populated by attractive,reliable, strong men. There is a tough, authoritativeofficer in The Caine Mutiny.He is the captain of the minesweeper,the Caine, and he exits at the beginningof the movie. That captain is replaced by the dictatorial,pathetic, paranoid Captain Queeg. Fred MacMurrayplays the tough-talkingcynical intellectual, Lt. Tom Keefer,who has no use for naval discipline. He plants in his fellowofficers the idea that Queeg is insane. Keefer combines the figuresof Montgomeryand Kelley; he is Kelley in his apparent concern for the film'syoung protagonist,Montgomery in his alienation.Sympathy in Crossfirehad shiftedto Montgomery,in spite of the movie's ideology,once the trap closed around him. Keefer inheritsthat sympathy for the rebel, in order,by the end of Caine Mutiny,to forfeitit entirely.Keefer insti-

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This content downloaded from 169.234.53.127 on Wed, 04 Mar 2015 22:18:06 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions gates the mutinybut refusesto take responsibilityfor it. Instead he succeeds (as Montgomerydid not) in making a young,innocent military man stand trialfor a capital crime. Van Johnson plays Lt. Steve Maryk,the neophyte officerof the deck who relieves Queeg of command during a storm. Maryk has a mom, one of Wylie's overstuffed,intrusive, middle-aged mothers.He emancipates himselffrom her influenceduring the movie and marries the young woman of whom she disap- proved. Crossfire'ssoldier is also restoredto his wife,but the authoritieswho take care of him are absent fromCaine Mutiny. Maryk has no father.Queeg resembles John's fatherand Laurence Harvey's stepfatherin his patheticclaims to power and in his embarrassingdesires to be loved. He is hardly an adequate father- substitute.Maryk overthrows Queeg. But in the absence of a strong,male authority,that act does not free him from his mother; instead it threatenshim with capital punishment.Maryk grows up though the interventionand support of the state. The crucial figurein Maryk'srescue, as in the Crossfiresoldier's entrapment, is a Jew.Both Jewsexplain a bewilderingworld to theirneophytes, but while one is a kindlysmall-businessman victim, the other is an angry lawyerin service to the navy.Jose Ferrer plays the lawyer,Barney Greenwald, who exposes Queeg's paranoia during Maryk'scourt martial. But outside the courtroom Greenwald stands withQueeg, not against him. He turns to Keefer at the partycelebrating Maryk'sacquittal, and tellshim, "The author of the Caine mutinyis you."Green- wald is accusing not only Keefer,but also theJew, Herman Wouk,who wroteThe CaineMutiny, and the ex-Communist,Dmytryk, who directedit. Wouk and Dmy- tryk (through their representative,MacMurray) must atone for their earlier rebelliousness.Queeg is pathetic,Greenwald agrees; he is a victimof the ravages of war. Just for that reason the crew and its natural leaders must rally behind him. Keefer and Maryk should have responded to Queeg's appeals for help instead of treatinghim with contempt.Crossfire had room for Kelley,the irrev- erent,cynical man of the world. No longer splitinto good and evil halves, Kelley and Montgomeryare merged into Keefer and expelled fromthe Caine's moral universe. Kelley allied himself with Crossfire'spoliceman to save the innocent soldier.Keefer endangers both authorityand the innocent.The innocentshould have rescued authorityon the Caine. When the captain is weak, the filmtells us, his troops must sacrificetheir criticalintelligence. They must bolster authority from below, and cooperate with the hierarchyabove. When the fathers lack authority,says The Caine Mutiny,we must subordinate ourselves to the military state. Explicitlyanti-Communist films like I Was a Communistand My SonJohn con- tain the same message. In such movies the state steps in to restore not simply social order but sexual hierarchyas well.John's betrayal drives his motherto a

20 REPRESENTATIONS

This content downloaded from 169.234.53.127 on Wed, 04 Mar 2015 22:18:06 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions breakdown, and his fatheris powerlessto help her. The FBI tracksJohn down and saves his parents; weakened paternal authorityrequires the help of the state. Where the parents themselvesare guilty,as in the real life Rosenberg case, they mustconfess to the stateor be killed.But here, too (and contraryto the evidence), mom was seen as the person in charge. "Juliusis the slave and his wife,Ethel, the master,"insisted Morris Ernst,co-counsel of the ACLU. His theoryformed the basis fora "psychologicalstudy" which reached PresidentEisenhower's desk. Repeating the momism fantasyas he refused to grant clemencyto the Rosen- bergs,Eisenhower wrote that Ethel was "the more strong-mindedand the apparent leader of the two."32 Robert Warshow,the liberal anti-Communistfilm critic, thought My SonJohn stood withthe father,and he hated the movie for glorifyinga stupid anti-Com- munism.Unwilling to see his own statistpolitics reflected back at him in vulgar propaganda, Warshow was blind to the fact that My Son John discredited the fatherto create a need for the FBI. The only figurenot undercutby the end of the movie is the FBI agent, Stedman, played by Van Heflin. To use Catherine Gallagher's terms,The Caine Mutinyand My Son Johnmark the victoryof social paternalismover domesticideology.33 A patriarchalstate does not replace the family,however. Men comprise the state,to be sure; but theyuse the techniquesof motherhoodand Communism- intrusion,surveillance, and secretdomination. Moreover, they use thesemethods to save the family,not to destroy it. In a militaristversion of reformistand therapeuticpractice, the familyrequires help fromexperts in order to maintain itself.The private feelingswhich constitutethe subject also constitute(in Fou- cault'spun) the means for his subjection.The familyis constructedin the name of privacyas a fieldfor social control.State and familyinterpenetrate in mutually supportiveanxiety. The desire for privacycreates nervousness about the intrusion of the state. But anxietyover intimateprivate relations generates state sur- veillanceand protection.Better the interpenetrationof stateand familythan that of motherand son.34 Momism, presented as the source of Communism in a filmsuch as My Son John,may thus appear exposed as the source of anti-Communism.But thatsimple reversal,by assigningpower to mom, itselfparticipates in cold war distress.Fears of boundary invasion do point to infantileanxieties over maternal power,to the state of dual union with the mother.35In addition, by encouraging maternal surveillance,domestic ideology augmented anxietiesover boundary breakdown, particularlyin so far as actual motherscarried out its precepts. Moreover,the specificversion of domesticideology current in the 1950s, the femininemystique, played upon fears of the sinisterpower of women in societyto drive them back into the home. The femininemystique failed to assuage those fears,for it made the home at once the arena of mom's influenceand the confinedspace against

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This content downloaded from 169.234.53.127 on Wed, 04 Mar 2015 22:18:06 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions which,in fantasiesof female vengeance, she would rebel. The insistence,at one and the same time, on rigid boundary divisions and maternal influence thus created an unstable,contradictory masculine identity.Cold war movies blamed Communistsfor thatexplosive mixtureas a cover for blaming mothers. The resort to momism,nonetheless, was itselfan escape frominvestigating invasivestructures which, though theyintruded on the family,were located outside the home. Filmmakerswere under pressures that may have reawakened infantileanxieties, but those pressures came from Moscow, Washington,and Hollywood, not frommom. Soviet expansion on the one hand, American state invasionof the motionpicture industry on the other,lay behind cold war cinema. Seeing Communistspies everywhere,cold war moviesglorified the double agents of the American state.That filmicstate, to be sure, was a wish as well as a reality. The movies presenteda ubiquitous,intrusive American stateapparatus, an ideal typeto whichthe actual nationalsecurity bureaucracy made an imperfectapprox- imation.The American state ostensiblydefended us fromSoviet Russia; in the subtextof the films,the statedefended us frommom. At a deeper level still,that state was itselfthe problem. The movies disguised that problem by shiftingthe locus of anxiety from the American state to the American familyon the one hand, the Russian state on the other. By mergingmotherhood and Communismas the source of secretinfluence, moreover,the filmsdeflected attention from themselves. Film, as HUAC inves- tigatorsunderstood, was an intruder.It entered the unconscious of those who watched movies in darkened theatersthroughout the land. The men controlling the hidden cameras were agents of Hollywood, not the FBI. But the Hollywood agents who controlledfilms were not the men who made them. Those in charge of movies were emissariesof larger politicaland economic structures,structures whichpressed particularlyhard upon filmmakersduring the cold war.The intrusive statedepicted on filmmay represent the filmmakers'anxiety about theirown influenceand their susceptibilityto influence,and, therefore,their Kafka-like rush into the arms ofjust those powerfulforces, in Washingtonand the motion picturebusiness, that the filmmakersfeared. The Communistsintend "to deliverAmerica to Russia as a slave,"Matt Cvetic warns. I Was a Communistends with the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" on the sound track,as the camera closes in on a bust of Lincoln. Anti-Communistfilms attacked the police state,yet they glorifiedan FBI whose agents, cameras, and electroniclistening devices, controlled from a centralsource, penetratethe deepest recessesof privatelife. Agent Stedman uses a car accidentto insinuatehimself intoJohn's mother's home. (He pretends to want her insurance company to pay for the damage.) He wins her confidenceby his interestin her boys, and elicits informationwithout telling her his real identity.The FBI followsJohn's mother and filmsher humiliationat the other woman's apartment.Although the Com-

22 REPRESENTATIONS

This content downloaded from 169.234.53.127 on Wed, 04 Mar 2015 22:18:06 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions munistskill John afterthe Bureau convertshim, we witnesshis redemptionfrom beyond the grave. The stock Irish familypriest, last shown sortingthrough old clothes given to charity,is supplanted by the technologicalstate. A (spot) light shines down upon a tape recorder,which has replaced John's absent body. His recorded voice addresses a college graduatingclass and deliversJohn's confes- sion. In Leo McCarey's technologicalversion of modern Catholic anti-Commu- nism,tape recorder equals mysticbody and tape equals soul. Like I Was a Communist,Walk East on Beacon (1952) also celebrates the technology of surveillance. WalkEast on Beacon, another pseudo-documentary,was based on a book by J. Edgar Hoover and made withthe FBI's "technicalassis- tance."At the beginningof the movie a narratorextols the Bureau for "protecting" us. Soon we watch agents opening our mail. Both movies reassure us with scenes of tape recorderswhirring, agents listening,and cameras observing.Even if there is a single hero, like Matt Cvetic in I Wasa Communist,technology fills the supportingroles. Thus it is oftendifficult in such filmsto tell the facelessCom- munistsfrom their counterparts in the FBI.36 Cold war familiesare endangered by anti-Communistpublic opinion as well as by the state.Matt Cvetic, the secretagent who playsCommunist, is repudiated by his immigrantbrothers. His son gets into fightsand loses his friendsbecause theythink that his fatheris a Red. Unable to tell his son the truth,Cvetic loses him too. In the name of showing Communism'sthreat to the family,I Was a Communistexposes the ravages sufferedby familieswhose memberswere accused of subversion. Anti-Communistfilms also violated the sanctityof the familyfrom within. They justifiedthe informerwho betrayedsubversive members of his or her own family.In the figureof the informer,anti-Communist films mobilized societyin the serviceof the state.Both MySon John and WalkEast onBeacon made informing on Communistfamily members an act of moral heroism. StormWarning (1951) and On theWaterfront (1954) moved the defense of informinginto other walks of life,southern violence and labor racketeering.The effortto turn the informer intoa culturehero had particularresonance in Hollywood,where naming names had become a conditionof employment. On theWaterfront was writtenby Budd Schulberg,directed by Elia Kazan, and starred Lee J. Cobb. All named names before HUAC, and the filmhas rightly been seen as a Hollywood parable.37Storm Warning, starring Ronald Reagan, has escaped similaranalysis. Perhaps thatis because Reagan playsa southerndistrict attorneywho exposes the Ku Klux Klan. The filmeven confused a recentBerke- ley audience, for it seems to make Reagan into a hero. But the Klan was a stand- in for the CommunistParty in justificationsof FBI surveillance.Storm Warning gives itselfaway by entirelyavoiding race; the targetsof its Klan are not blacks. Like the Partyin I Wasa Communist,Storm Warning's Klan is merelya racket.The

KissMe Deadly:Communism, Motherhood, and Cold WarMovies 23

This content downloaded from 169.234.53.127 on Wed, 04 Mar 2015 22:18:06 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions filmwants to warn against a violentsecret conspiracy without raising the spectre of racial injustice.(Communists try to stirblacks to riot in I Wasa Communist;the black crowd is menacing, and the movie blames the Communist Party for the Detroitrace riotsof 1943 in whichblacks were actuallythe victims.) As president of the Screen Actors' Guild, Ronald Reagan led the fightto drive subversivesout of Hollywood. He opposed, as he later put it, "The Com- munistplan ... to take over the motion picturebusiness." "Its gradual transfor- mation into a Communistgrist mill," he wrote,"would have been a major coup for our enemies." Reagan wore a gun during his battle against Communism,to protecthimself against Red reprisals."I mounted the holsteredgun religiously everymorning and took it offthe last thingat night,"he wrote.Pioneer heroism and Indian war had moved from American historyinto Hollywood political fantasy.Shifting from one red enemy to another,Reagan brought fantasiesof individualismback intohistory again. But the lone man in Hollywoodwas actually a victimof corporate,countersubversive cooperation. HUAC, the motionpicture business,the unions, and privateagencies all worked together,blacklisting those who refused to name names. (Hollywood's threatto the lone individual is alle- gorized in Carl Foreman's High Noon [1952], made when he was refusing to cooperate withHUAC.) As presidentof the Screen Actors'Guild, Reagan helped orchestrateand enforce a blacklistwhose existence he denied.38 Reagan playshimself, as DistrictAttorney Burt Rainer,in StormWarning. He is asked at the outset of the filmif he plans to "name names" and expose the respected members of his communitywho secretlybelong to the Klan. District AttorneyRainer responds thathe standsfor "law and order."(Reagan had starred the yearbefore in a movie withthat title.) Later a committeeof prominentcitizens asks Rainer to leave the Klan alone so that outsiders will not divide the community.The actors speak the lines of the Hollywood Committee for the First Amendment,trying to protect the Hollywood Ten. StormWarning's committee membersare fellowtravelers of the Klan. The committeewants a Klan murder to go unpunished; Rainer insistson prosecution.Marsha Mitchell,played by Ginger Rogers, has witnessedthe murder in the film'sopening scene. Rogers' mother had recentlyplayed a leading role before HUAC, protestingCommunist influence in Hollywood and wishing she could name more names.39But the characterplayed by Ginger Rogers refuses to name who she has seen, in spite of Rainer's efforts,because her brother-in- law pulled the trigger.She is brutalized by the Klan as a result of her family loyalty,and her pregnant sisteris killed. The sistersare punished fortheir sexuality as well as theirsecretiveness. The older sister,played by Rogers, is a career woman. She rejectsthe advances of the salesman travelingwith her at the beginning of the film.The movie wants to approve of her refusal, yet it marks her as sexually in charge of herself.The

24 REPRESENTATIONS

This content downloaded from 169.234.53.127 on Wed, 04 Mar 2015 22:18:06 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions FIGURE 2. Ronald Reagan unmasks the secret members of the Ku Klux Klan in StormWarning. youngersister, played by Doris Day, representsthe contrastingdanger contained withinfemale sexuality,not independence but pleasure. She is turned on by,and in thrall to, the Klan thug she marries. If StormWarning's justification of the informerprefigures On theWaterfront, its two sistersecho another Brando film, A StreetcarNamed Desire. The husband in both movies sexually assaults an older sister.He wears a t-shirt,she wears a slip. The two attacksare meant not simply to condemn the husband, but also to expose the victim.Combining sex with countersubversion,Storm Warning collapses the two Brando movies into a reduc- tionistwhole. The Ku Klux Klan kidnapsand publiclywhips Marsha. That whippingindicts Klan sadism,to be sure. But it also punishes the woman who thoughtshe needed neithera man nor the state. And the Klan bullet that kills the pregnant sister punishes her forher sexual bondage. DistrictAttorney Rainer (who is unmarried and lives withhis mother) is restoringlaw and order to the familyas well as to the community.His investigatorymethods imitateand supplant mom's moral influenceand justifythe forcewhich ultimatelydestroys the Klan.

KissMe Deadly:Communism, Motherhood, and Cold WarMovies 25

This content downloaded from 169.234.53.127 on Wed, 04 Mar 2015 22:18:06 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions NeitherStorm Warning nor the explicitlyanti-Communist films were box office successes during the cold war. Perhaps that was because they forced together theirtwin themes, of alien invasion and endangered privatelife, in too political a way.Movies popular during the 1950s eitherretreated entirely to privatelife, or posed the dangers to the American familyin science fictionterms. After he moved from president of the Screen Actor's Guild to President of the United States, Reagan explained, "It is the motion picture that shows us not only how we look and sound, but-more important-how we feel."Anti-Communist films tell us how Hollywood opinion-makerslike Reagan feltin responding to pressures from Washingtonand Moscow. They represent the feelings Hollywood wanted the rest of us to mirroras our own. But such movies are not evidence for a mobilized, popular anti-Communism.Cold war liberals like Richard Hof- stadter,S.M. Lipset, and Daniel Bell feared that a mass McCarthyiteuprising endangered the liberal state. That view is supported neitherby the contentof anti-Communistcinema nor by its reception. Cold war America sufferednot froman active popular threatto politicalfreedom, but rather frominstitutions which formed a public opinion fearfulof unorthodox politicalideas and quies- cent at their suppression. Hollywood, like Washington,was an arena of institu- tional,not mass, power.40 By insistingthat movies show us how we feel, President Reagan collapsed the distinctionbetween the producers and consumers of movies. That collapse had a social and psychologicalas well as a political intention;it absorbed the world outside movies into film. We were to learn how we already did feel by seeing our (ideal) selvesreflected on the screen. That process,if successful, would obliterate our subversive,hidden interiorsand render the need for political surveillanceobsolete. (Should movies failin showingus how we felt,an emissary from Hollywood not altogethersuccessful in them would have to enter politics and go to Washington.)But thatvery process, the loss of the self to its manufac- tured and controlleddouble, recurred as nightmarewithin one movie genre of the 1950s. Cold war science fictiongeneralized filmas secretinfluence from the restrictedhomologies of familyand state,and depicted the spread of thatsecret influencethroughout society. If we use movie attendance figuresto chart the intersectionof popular feelings and Hollywood anxiety,then we mustturn fromexplicitly anti-Communist filmsto science fiction.The Americanmasses wentto moviesthat raised anxieties not about politics,but about mass society.Science fictionfilms presented an undifferentiated,homogeneous, social world in which realityoffered little resistance to the takeoverby dream. Having examined mom'sinfluence in anti-Communist cinema, and her replacement by the state,we look finallyat the return of the repressed. For just as cold war movies made mom a condensation symboland

26 REPRESENTATIONS

This content downloaded from 169.234.53.127 on Wed, 04 Mar 2015 22:18:06 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions scapegoat for political and familialworries, so science fictionfilms generated mass societynot frommovie but fromfemale influence. Aside fromits anti-Communistfilms, Hollywood avoided politicalthemes in the 1950s. Monogram Studios dropped plans fora movie on Hiawatha; it feared that his effortsfor peace among the Iroquois nations would be seen as aiding Communistpeace propaganda. Judy Holliday,called before HUAC for supporting Henry Wallace, insisted,"I don't say 'yes' to anythingnow except cancer, polio, and cerebral palsy,things like that."Listing diseases as the only safe evils to oppose, Holliday unwittinglyexposed the logic of countersubversionwhich equated Communism withdisease. She also inadvertentlyexplained the popu- larityof those filmswhose alien invaders came not from political conspiracies but fromouter space. JackWarner attacked "ideological termites"before HUAC, "subversivegerms hiding in dark corners."Gordon Douglas, who directedI Was a Communistin 1951, made Them!,the giant-antmovie, three years later. It was one of Warner Brothers'highest grossing movies of 1954. The "germs of death for society"that Truman's attorneygeneral said were carried by Communists spread fromHollywood throughscience fiction.4' Biology is out of controlin such movies as Them!,The Thing,and Invasionof theBody Snatchers. Promiscuous, undifferentiated, vegetable reproduction threat- ens familybonds. Reproduction dispenses withthe fatherin BodySnatchers and The Thing.The aliens multiplypromiscuously, through detachable body parts in The Thing(195 1) and throughgenerative pods in BodySnatchers (1956). Like the opened box in Kiss Me Deadly,the ovarian pods spread destruction. The monsterwas sympatheticin the classic monstermovie. Embodyingsav- age or aristocraticmasculine desire, he stood against genteel, feminineculture. The Thing seems at firstto carry on that tradition. Its monster,a lone, male descendant of King Kong, is menaced by the forces of civilization.But while Dracula and the werewolfare hungry males who feed off female bodies, the Thing reproduces himself;severed parts of his own body grow into new mon- sters.When we are shownthe planterboxes in whichthese Things are multiplying, we lose all sympathyfor the monster.We do not see simalcramumsof the male Thing, moreover,but plants withovarian pods. The movie has transformeda single male monsterinto multiple,reproductive vegetables.42 The Thingis a transitionalbetween the classic movie monsterand his 1950s female descendants. Male insectsare present in Them!(1954); theyfertilize the queen ants and die. A mutationfrom atomic testing has produced the giantants, and a scientistworking with the police destroysmost of them.But a singlequeen, fertilizedby the male members of her court, can give birth to enough ants to destroyall humanity.The danger of reproductiveworld destructionhangs over the movie.

KissMe Deadly:Communism, Motherhood, and Cold WarMovies 27

This content downloaded from 169.234.53.127 on Wed, 04 Mar 2015 22:18:06 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Female ants undergo the transformationPhilip Wyliedepicted for women, from"Cinderella" to mom. Each female, a "princess"until she mates, then lays eggs for fifteenyears. Never leaving her nest, she presides over an aggressive collectivistsociety. Ants are "chronic aggressors,[who] make slave laborers out of theircaptives," and a scientistshows movies to emphasize the "industry,social organization,and savagery"of the ants. "Unless the queens are destroyed,"he warns, "man as the dominant species on thisplanet will probablybe destroyed." The scientistis warning the audience withinthe filmabout ants; he is warning the audience outside the filmabout Communism. As in My Son John and The ManchurianCandidate, however, the sexual threatabsorbs the politicalone. Two survivingqueen ants flyoff with their "consorts"after the firstgiant- ant colony is destroyed."They are gone on their wedding flight,"explains the scientist.These ants are enacting the dark side of the John Wayne-JanetLeigh romance in JetPilot. The flyingplanes engaged in sexual foreplay,which first threatenedthe man but finallydomesticated the woman. The male ants will die in the serviceof the mother.An observerwho sees one of the airborne wedding parties describes"one big one [the queen] and two littleones [her consorts]."He is hospitalized for hallucinating,and his belt is removed so he cannot escape. The man who saw the queen ant clutchesat his pants as he tellshis story;he has become, like the male ants,her victim.We are shown the ants' world deep within the bowels of the earth early in the movie, deep withinthe Los Angeles storm drain systemat its climax. That world is a matriarchy. Traced to their cloacal sanctuary,the giant ants are finallydestroyed. "Has the cold war gottenhot?" a reporterwants to know when the armyis sent to Los Angeles. His words name the politicalallegory, anty-communism, but the action supplants it withthe sexual allegory.Modern firepoweris mobilized against the reproducing monstersas flame-throwingweapons as well as long guns invade the ants' inner space. The army penetratesto the "egg chamber,"with its strong "brood odor,"and destroysit in a holocaustof fire.Soldiers rescue twoboys whom the ants have kidnapped and brought to the queen's chamber. The ants have killed the boys' father;they also kill the policeman (James Whitmore),the pro- tagonistof the movie. But by restoringthe boys to theirmother, the army saves the (truncated) American family. The ants are bad motherswho breed in storm drains instead of the home. But breedingitself is the problemin thesefilms. The ants,the pods, and the Thing proliferateidentities. The creaturesthey create are interchangeableparts, members of a mass society.Freed of the name of the father and of the mother's singularlove, these creatureslack the stamp of individuality.They replace individual identities(identity as difference)with identities identical and out of control. The motherin domesticideology made her son feel loved by sacrificingher identityto his.My SonJohnexposed thatspecial bond as the source of Communist

28 REPRESENTATIONS

This content downloaded from 169.234.53.127 on Wed, 04 Mar 2015 22:18:06 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions influence.But if unique individual identityis suspect, its obverse is just as bad. Mothersin Them!claim directpower. The consequence (seen also in BodySnatch- ers)is the multiplicationof identicalselves. Deprived of maternallove, one identityis no differentfrom another. The divisionof the productsof labor has entered the reproductivelabor process,mobilizing fears of procreationwithout love. The body snatchersreplicate townspeople, who now functionefficiently and interchangeable. Both Them!and BodySnatchers evoke the nightmareof uncontrolled femalegenerativity. The twofilms join nature'srevenge against man to the triumph of mass society. BodySnatchers, unlike Them!, is a self-awarefilm; Don Siegel made it in protest against McCarthyitepressures for conformity.Since socializationis triumphant both in McCarthyismand Communism(in the 1950s liberalview), "the malignant disease speading throughthe country,cell forcell, atom foratom" can represent eitherinterchangeably. "I wanted to end the pictureat the pointwhere McCarthy is standing in the highway,"Siegel has said. "He turns, points his fingerat the audience and yells,'You're next.?'43Siegel was referringto Kevin McCarthy,who starredin the movie; but the actor has the politician'sname, as if to raise doubts about whetherJoe McCarthyis the movie'shidden hero or villain.Body Snatchers may have been commentingon 1950s anxieties, not merely reflectingthem. Nonetheless,its politicalconsciousness, like thatin cold war cinema generally,is subordinateto its sexual unconsciousness. Anti-Communistfilms demand eternal vigilanceto protectself and country from invasion. Self-surveillancein BodySnatchers makes sleep itselfimpossible. Humans muststay awake forever,for they are replaced by pods when theysleep. The filmdeprives sleep of itsfunction as social escape, forsleep makesthe relaxed selfvulnerable. Danger maycome fromwithout, in BodySnatchers, but whatneeds to be defended against is the wish fromwithin. The unconscious takesover from self-vigilancein sleep. And the dream wish of the 1950s was to escape fromthe anxietyof separate identityand to merge withsociety. "Societyis the . . . nourishingmother," wrote Durkheim,44and a woman is the source of unconscious temptationin BodySnatchers. The film'sheroine succumbs to sleep. Now a pod, she trieswith a kiss to draw the hero into sleeping withher. Her kissis deadly,however, as he can tellfrom the dead feel of her lips. Totally alone, McCarthy must flee the sleep that would cost him his identity. Advertisementsfor Body Snatchers depicted the kiss as if it united the lovers. But alongside the copy,which presented them alone against the world, a menacing femalereaches out to envelop her man (see Fig. 3). BodySnatchers, like Manchurian Candidate,united deceit with bodily invasion, and locatedboth in femaleinfluence. Human beings are "hosts to an alien form of life" in BodySnatchers. Just as the Communists,in I Wasa Communist,want "notjust our bodies but our minds;' so the body snatchersare "takingus over,cell by cell."45Matt Cvetic,pretending

Kiss Me Deadly: Communism,Motherhood, and Cold War Movies 29

This content downloaded from 169.234.53.127 on Wed, 04 Mar 2015 22:18:06 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions FIGURE 3 Left:The kiss of fenmaleinfluence in Inz'a- sioti of the Body Snatlchers; 90%AL 8S As below: the kiss of male f ~ ~ ~~~~~ ~ dominationin Pickuponi SouthStreet.

30 REPRESENTATIONS

This content downloaded from 169.234.53.127 on Wed, 04 Mar 2015 22:18:06 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions to be takenover bya Communistcell, representsCommunism's threat to personal identity.That threatis deepened in BodySnatchers and Invadersfrom Mars (1953). Cvetic alienated his familyby masquerading as a Communist.The pods in Body Snatchers,and the people implanted with electroniccontrol devices in Invaders fromMars, alienate theirfamilies by pretendingstill to be themselves.Reds were visiblyalien in earlier red scares; theywere the others. They moved inside our minds and bodies in the 1950s, and one could not tell them fromanyone else. The vulnerabilityof the self to influence,upon which domestic ideology had hoped to capitalize, resulted in Communistinfluence instead. Surveillance and inquisitionexposed domesticforces that had taken possession of the nation and the self. No longer part of a conflictbetween contrastingclasses, 1950s Com- munistswere the invisible member of (and therebyexposed anxieties about) American mass society. Hollywood both responded to and encouraged the retreatto privatelife, the depoliticizationof America encouraged by the Red scare. But in the Hollywood filmsof privatelife the promised familysanctuary is problematic;it is threatened by invasion fromwithout and seduction fromwithin. Families under siege generated anxieties about who was to blame, anxieties that could take the form of anti-Communism.But anti-Communistfilms, in spite of their conscious inten- tions,exposed the connectionsbetween an endangered privatelife and a fear of politicalsubversion. Film criticsRobert Warshow,Manny Farber,and Pauline Kael, writingin the earlyyears of the cold war,contrasted the falselyfelt, pious, middle-brow,liberal filmsof the 1940s and 1950s to more honest, violent,B movies. These critics located the formerfilms in moralizing,popular front,mass culture.The B movies, they thought,opened a window to the heart of America.46Cold war films reversepopular-front political values, but theyinherit the aestheticand political contamination.The only genuine work of art among the filmswhich promote the cold war is a right-wing,anti-liberal B movie. It is Sam Fuller'sPickup on South Street(1953), and it stands against the familyand the state. Fascismaestheticized politics,in WalterBenjamin's famous epigram; Communism responded by pol- iticizingart.47 Anti-Communism politicized art in the American 1950s. Silent in politicallife but visiblein thismovie, the anarchofascismof Pickupon SouthStreet succeeded in making politicsinto aesthetics. Pickup on SouthStreet opens into a crowded subway.The camera followsa hand as it creeps into a woman's purse. Our eyes move back and forth,from the purse to the woman'sface to the faces of two male onlookers.There is no talking at all. It is as if thistense, sexy lady, nervously licking her lips,were being aroused by the intrusion.Her unconsciousnessof the hand intensifiesthe sense of sexual invasionand arousal. The two plainclothesmenwatching the girlcan't figureout what is going on. Neither can the audience. Later we shall learn that the purse

KissMe Deadly:Communism, Motherhood, and Cold WarMovies 31

This content downloaded from 169.234.53.127 on Wed, 04 Mar 2015 22:18:06 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions contained stolen microfilm,and that the woman was nervous about its delivery. Stilllater she willlearn, afterthe audience does, thatthe industrialcrime in which she thoughtshe was complicitwas actuallythe theftof atomic secrets.The name of thisfilm has a sexual and doubly criminalmeaning. Candy (Jean Peters)looks like a pick-up and plans to participatein one. But the pickpocket'shand thwarts the pick-upon South Street.Without intending it, a pettycriminal has acquired the secretof the atomic bomb. Like I Wasa Communist,Pickup on South Street derives from the gangstermovie. But the formerfilm makes Communistsinto gangstersand shiftsits loyaltyto the FBI. The lattermakes Communistsinto bureaucratsand remains faithfulto the outlaw.Instead of equating Communismwith crime, Fuller makes crime the alternativeto Communism.Pickup on SouthStreet is, in its rhetoric,a virulently anti-Communistfilm. But by deliberatelydoubling the Communistand police bureaucracies,it makes explicitthe unintendedblurring of boundaries in ortho- dox cold war movies between the CommunistParty and the FBI. Fuller'shero is the pickpocket(Skip McCoy, played by Richard Widmark),and he is as hunted by the police as Candy willbe by the Communists.McCoy lives in a boat beneath the piers on the East River. He is a criminal outsider; and the film,which is photographed almost entirelyat night,48stands withhim against the police. Instead of invokingthe family,Fuller celebratesthe sexual relationshipthat develops between Candy and McCoy. The film'sopening scene prefiguresthat relation; it is based on male domination. He slaps her around when she comes to retrievethe film,and that turns her on. Their combat ends with a kiss (see Fig. 3). McCoy's sexual violence saves Candy from her pansy Communistboy- friend.(It doesn't save her frombeing badly beaten by him for not tellinghim where to find McCoy.) Kisses are deadly in the other cold war films,where sex causes violence. Violence causes sex, in Pickup. Both versions make women on top into targets.But while Pickupstimulates a sadisticallycharged eroticism,the other filmswipe all eroticismout. (JetPilot, made by the directorof Blue Angel, cannot help but be a partial exception. Nonetheless,eroticism ensnares Wayne; he establisheshis dominationagainst Leigh's seduction by physicalforce. Violence is an antidote to sex inJetPilot, not its generator.) Other anti-Communistfilms stand forlove, law and order.Pickup closes with a promised happy ending, in which McCoy and Candy will marry and go straight.That surelywould be the end of thisfilm, for it stands withviolent sex, outlawry,and disorder.Pickup celebrates an urban underworld, not some pas- toral domestic retreat.It glorifiesa brutal, unencumbered male individualism. Pickup and Kiss Me Deadly (the other anti-CommunistB movie) are the most violent cold war films.But the others also justifyviolence. Because they mask that commitment,their violence (as in StormWarning) is not so much absent as prurient.

32 REPRESENTATIONS

This content downloaded from 169.234.53.127 on Wed, 04 Mar 2015 22:18:06 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Other anti-Communistfilms claim to defend the American individual. But theydo so bymarrying him to supportive,entrapping institutions-motherhood, mass society,and the state.These institutions,which the filmmakerscan neither believe in nor resist,spread a fog throughcold war cinema. By contrast,Fuller finds a place to stand with an impious, violent, antibureaucraticRed-baiting. There is nothingat all attractiveabout such politics.Pickup on SouthStreet harks back to a nineteenth-centurypredatory individualism, moved fromthe frontier to the city and placed openly outside the law, in which property is acquired throughtheft. That individualism,always masked in politicaldiscourse by appeals to civilization,produced the veryworld fromwhich Fuller was alienated. Making bureaucratsinto enemies, Fuller brought fantasies of individualismback intofilm. His sexual politics,outside the cold war consensus, offeredno politicalalterna- tive. But by tapping an authenticcore of American feeling,buried by cold war pieties,Sam Fullercreated a workof art.Pickup exploited, as in the film'sopening scene, the viewer'sguilty complicity with the intrusivecamera eye. The voyeuristic momentsin othercold war filmsfail to acknowledgethat complicity. Fuller invented characterswith rough edges and style,whose gesturesand dialogue contrastto the mass-produced figuresof other cold war movies. The most interestingof those charactersis an individualizeddouble of mom. Mom's double is an informernamed Moe, who sells her "boys" to the police fora price. (Figure 1 shows her ironingas she talkswith McCoy, one of her boys.) John's mother also informson her son, but while she informsas a sign of her dependence, Moe informsto serve her autonomy.John has a familymother who loses power to the state.Moe livesalone and, so long as she remainsan informer, is in charge of her own life.She flourishes,like McCoy,in an amoral marketplace in which propertyis stolen and children are sold. Moe sells informationabout the gangstersand pettycriminals of the street.The fictionwith which the police are forced to cooperate is that she is really selling ties. Moe makes the police pretend to don the clothingof civilized virtue; McCoy wears no tie. Although Moe lives outside the home and makes money from selling her boys, she is an entirelysympathetic figure. Unfortunately,Moe is also a patriotwho, likeJohn's mother, fails to recognize the interchangeabilityof the Communist Partyand the FBI. That faithin difference makes John'smother an informer.But it closes Moe's lips, and thereby turnsher into mom. No longer willingto let one of her boys take his chances in the marketplace,Moe decides to protecthim. She refusesto sell McCoy'saddress to the Communists,and they kill her. Like John's mother,Moe is sacrificedto anti-Communism.Her death marks the defeat of a glorifiedunderworld, however,not a demonized domesticity.Moe's death saves McCoy's life,only to serve him up to marriage and the state. Her murder,like John's, cements the alliance of the state and the family.But the ending that fulfillsMy Son John is slum

KissMe Deadly:Communism, Motherhood, and Cold WarMovies 33

This content downloaded from 169.234.53.127 on Wed, 04 Mar 2015 22:18:06 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions clearance forSouth Street.Pickup on SouthStreet protests against the world which the other cold war filmswere registeringand helping to bring into being. Pickupis the singleanti-Communist film in whichCommunism seems detachable from the plot. A dubbed French version, made for audiences who would have laughed at the cold war politics,replaced the microfilmwith heroin. That substitutionwas possible because, unlike its counterparts,Pickup is bound by no moralistic,anti-Communist straitjacket. But Fuller's filmis not merely an old- fashionedgangster movie masqueradingin anti-Communistclothes. Rather, Fuller takescold war moviesthough the lookingglass. The second halfof a 1950s double feature,Pickup on SouthStreet doubles and invertspious, anti-Communistcinema.

Notes

* This paper interpretsmovies screened during the PacificFilm Archive series, "Hol- lywood and the Cold War,"Sept. 29 to Nov. 20, 1982. I am indebted to Linda Myles (formerdirector of the Archive) and Nancy Goldman for arranging the series, and to Judy Bloch for her notes on the films(printed in the UniversityArt Museum Calendar). I also benefited from conversationsabout these filmswith Linda Myles, Nancy Goldman, Judy Bloch, and Paul Thomas, fromJim Breslin's reading of an earlier version of the paper, and fromcomments by membersof the Representations editorialboard. 1. WilliamCarlos Williams,In theAmerican Grain (New York, 1956 [1925]), p. 39. 2. The interpretationof countersubversivehistory which introducesthis essay is based on my entry,"Suppression, Intimidation,and Control,"forJack P. Greene, ed., Scrib- nersEncyclopedia of AmericanPolitical History, forthcoming. I am gratefulto Charles Scribner'sSons for permissionto use materialfrom that entryhere. 3. Robert Justin Goldstein, PoliticalRepression in ModernAmerica (Cambridge, Mass., 1978), pp. 100, 158. 4. Ibid., pp. 328-29. 5. Michael E. Parrish, "Cold War Justice: The Supreme Court and the Rosenbergs," AmericanHistorical Review, LXXXII (Oct. 1977), 805-42. 6. On domestic ideology,cf. Barbara Welter,"The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820- 1860,"American Quarterly, XVIII (Summer 1966), 151-74; Ann Douglas, The Femin- izationof American Culture (New York, 1977); Jay Fliegelman,Prodigals and Pilgrims: The AmericanRevolution Against Patriarchal Authority (New York, 1982); KathrynKish Sklar,Catharine Beecher: A Studyin AmericanDomesticity (New Haven, Ct., 1973); and Catherine Gallagher, The IndustrialReformation: English Fiction and Social Discourse, 1832-1867, forthcoming,chaps. 5-7. CatherineGallagher has deeply influencedmy understandingof domestic ideology and its relation to cold war movies, here and throughoutthe essay. 7. On the relationshipbetween female power in male-dominatedsocieties and images of female pollution, cf. Mary Douglas, Purityand Danger (New York, 1966), pp. 140-53. 8. On 1950s domestic ideology,cf. Betty Friedan, The FeminineMystique (New York,

34 REPRESENTATIONS

This content downloaded from 169.234.53.127 on Wed, 04 Mar 2015 22:18:06 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 1963); and Sara Evans, PersonalPolitics (New York, 1979), pp. 3-23. Cf. also Molly Haskell,From Reverence to Rape: The Treatmentof Women in theMovies (New York,1974). 9. Philip Wylie,Generation of Vipers,2nd ed. (New York, 1955 [1st ed., 1942]), pp. xii, 51-53, 191-216. 10. Philip Wylie,Finnley Wren (New York, 1934); Truman FrederickKeefer, Philip Wylie (Boston, 1977), pp. 72, 85. 11. Wylie,Generation of Vipers,p. 194n; Keefer,pp. 73, 78-79, 122, 127. 12. Keefer,Philip Wylie,pp. 55, 77-78, 85, 95, 108-109; Wylie,Generation of Vipers,pp. 196n, 216-17n, 318-20n. I am gratefulto Todd Gitlinfor calling my attentionto Wylie'santi-Communism. 13. Keefer,Philip Wylie,pp. 109, 125. 14. Ibid., pp. 62 -63, 125; Philip Wylie,Tomorrow (New York, 1954). 15. RichardJ. Barnet, Rootsof War(New York, 1972), p. 17; American Heritage,History of Flight(New York, 1952), pp. 191-92 (cited in Julie H. Wosk, "The Airplane in Anti-WarPoetry and Art,"unpublished paper, 1983). 16. Wylie,Tomorrow, pp. 30, 50-59, 141, 161-64, 268-69, 296-97, 329-30, 359-60. 17. Ibid., pp. 230-35, 350-53, 369, 372. 18. Keefer,Philip Wylie,p. 85. 19. Ibid., pp. 121-22; Philip Wylie,The Disappearance(New York, 1951). 20. Keefer,Philip Wylie,p. 125. 21. VictorS. Navasky,Naming Names (New York,1980), pp. 167-68; Nora Sayre,Running Time: Films of the Cold War (New York, 1982), pp. 57-62. Both books have been indispensablefor this project. Peter Biskind'simportant study of 1950s movies,Seeing Is Believing(New York, 1983), appeared too late for me to benefitfrom its analysis. 22. Goldstein,Political Repression, pp. 344, 347; Navasky,Naming Names, p. 12. 23. Navasky,ibid., p. 12; Sayre,Running Time, pp. 86-9 1. 24. Navasky,Naming Names, pp. 225-26; UniversityArt Museum, Calendar,Oct. 1982, p. 8; GarryWills, "Introduction," in Lillian Hellman, ScoundrelTime (New York,1976), pp. 4-6. 25. UniversityArt Musem, Calendar,Oct. 1982, p. 5. 26. Sayre,Running Time, p. 91. 27. Ralph de Toledano,J. Edgar Hoover(New Rochelle, N.Y., 1973), p. 260. 28. Wylie,Generation of Vipers,p. 201. 29. Cf. my "Ronald Reagan's American Gothic,"democracy, I (Oct. 1981), 52. 30. That is my surmise, based on Navasky,Naming Names pp. 100-10 1, 129-30, 151, 280. 31. Ibid., pp. 232-38. 32. Cf. MurrayKempton, "DishonorablyDischarged," The New YorkReview of Books, XXX (Oct. 27, 1983), 42. 33. Robert Warshow,The ImmediateExperience (New York, 1975), pp. 163-71; Gallagher, IndustrialReformation, chaps. 5-7. 34. Michel Foucault, TheHistory of Sexuality (New York, 1980); ChristopherLasch, Haven in a HeartlessWorld (New York, 1977); Jacques Donzelot, The Policingof Families (New York, 1979). 35. Cf. Melanie Klein, ContributionstoPsychoanalysis (London, 1948); DorothyDinnerstein, The Mermaidand theMinotaur (New York, 1977). 36. Sayre,Running Time, p. 91; UniversityArt Museum, Calendar,Nov. 1982, p. 8. 37. Navasky,Naming Names, pp. 16, 210, 280; Sayre,Running Time, pp. 151-66. 38. Ronald Reagan, Where'sthe Rest of Me (New York, 1965), p. 162; Michael Rogin, "Ron-

Kiss Me Deadly: Communism,Motherhood, and Cold War Movies 35

This content downloaded from 169.234.53.127 on Wed, 04 Mar 2015 22:18:06 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions ald Reagan: Where'sthe Rest of Him?" democracy,I (April 1981), 35; Navasky,Naming Names,pp. 86-87, 144-95. 39. Navasky,ibid., p. 79. 40. Ibid., p. 15; Sayre, RunningTime, pp. 99-149; Rogin, "Ronald Reagan's American Gothic,"democracy, I (Oct. 1981), 52; Daniel Bell, ed., The New AmericanRight (New York, 1954); Michael Rogin, The Intellectualsand McCarthy:The Radical Specter(Cam- bridge, Mass., 1967), pp. 1-7, 216-60. 41. Goldstein,Political Repression, pp. 362, 377; UniversityArt Museum, Calendar,Oct. 1982, p. 9. 42. On the contrastbetween the classic monstermovie and the 1950s creature feature, cf. Andrew Griffin,"Sympathy for the Werewolf,"in Charles Muscatine and Marlene Griffith,eds., The BorzoiCollege Reader, 4th ed. (New York, 1980), pp. 508-12. 43. UniversityArt Museum, Calendar,Nov. 1982, p. 9. 44. Quoted in Lasch, Haven, p. 13. 45. Sayre,Running Time, p. 201. 46. Warshow,The ImmediateExperience, pp. 33-48, 127-203; Manny Farber,Negative Space (New York, 1971), pp. 32-87; Pauline Kael, I LostIt At theMovies (New York, 1965), pp. 3-94. 47. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,"in Illuminations,Hannah Arendt,ed. (New York, 1968), p. 242. 48. Farber,Negative Space, p. 129.

36 REPRESENTATIONS

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