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 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Representations. http://www.jstor.org 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* I 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 tar- getsof 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 work- ers,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 demonol- ogy,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 for- eigners 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