CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

All Art is Propaganda: Reflections on Orwell and Netflix Noir

Finnish title screen for Deadwind – Fair Use

Born in 1942, a month after Pearl Harbor, I was unable to experience the Thirties directly, but I experienced it vicariously in the afterglow of an explosive era rattled by the Spanish Civil War, the anti-fascist cause, the young Black men known as “The Scottsboro Boys” and lefty books by writers such as Howard Fast (Patrick Henry and the Frigate’s Keel ), Erika Mann (author of School for Barbarians and the sister of the German novelist Thomas Mann) and the songs and music of Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly with his 12-string guitar. I plead guilty to nostalgia for a time and place I never actually knew and that can be as dangerous and addictive as any drug.

I remember my mother, a CP member, telling me about battles with landlords and about a performance of Clifford Odets’ play Waiting for Lefty which brings to life a group of New York taxi drivers and their cause. At the end of the drama, actors on stage, along with members of the audience who cry, “Strike, strike, strike” which made me want to go on strike. I would not do that until 1968, a good year to go on strike.

I spent much of my boyhood waiting for Lefty, or someone like him and eager to meet striking taxi drivers. What I got was Beckett’s existentialist play Waiting for Godot, and later the TV show Taxi. In the 1950s I wanted to go back to the 1930s when, my mother explained, art was supposed to advance the class struggle and unite the exploited and the oppressed against the exploiters and oppressors. I cheered Rebel without a Cause, which was better than no rebels at all, and The Wild One which was superior to the Doris Day/ Rock Hudson kitsch movie Pillow Talk.

In college I accepted and echoed George Orwell’s notion that “All art is propaganda, but not all propaganda is art.” The trick, if you can call it that, was to make something that was both artistic and propagandist and didn’t compromise one or the other. Orwell’s notion landed me in trouble with the anti-communist ex-communist professors at Columbia who hailed the Orwell who gave the world Nineteen Eighty-Four not the Orwell who wrote Homage to Catalonia, an imperfect work that captures the factionalism that afflicted Spain during the civil........

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