Seeing is Believing: the most fascinating movie book ever

A book which has increased my understanding and enjoyment of films immeasurably for 25 years now is Peter Biskind’s superb 1983 work, Seeing is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties. The following insights are almost entirely based on what he wrote.

One result of the horrors of the World War II (and, no doubt, other factors) was the rise of the left-of-centre, Liberal-Corporate Hollywood movie dealing with social issues. 

The basic messages are simple: conflict is solved by therapy, not force. Experts – scientists, doctors, psychiatrists, teachers, enlightened business leaders and politicians etc. – provide the answers, not the military (jaw-jaw, not war-war). These experts are also best placed to lead the masses, who are obviously too dumb to think for themselves. The “Forces of Conservatism” are unhelpful, at best – hidebound traditionalists need to be challenged, especially regarding the rearing of children and the roles of the sexes. Therapeutic experts are invariably better placed than parents when it comes to raising healthy, conformist kids, and, darn it! there’s nothing wrong with boys being sensitive and women being tough.

Radicalism – whether the system-smashing left-wing variety, or the ruggedly individualistic, right-wing, “a man’s got to do” variety – is invariably destructive. The head should always rule the heart: life should be organized according to rational principles. Ideologies should be ditched if they prove unhelpful to the individual or the group: dogma is verboten. Liberal-Corporatists – or Pluralists, if you prefer – are afraid of the Id, the source of deep-seated irrational emotions within our subconscious.  

Belonging to the reasonable centre is more important than sticking to your guns – people who don’t agree with those who occupy the centre-ground are usually in need of help, not condemnation. Prejudice - being irrational - is, the worst crime of all. Society is composed of a variety of stakeholder groups, all of whose interests need to be considered - the 1950s equivalent of multiculturalism.

Amongst the best examples of this sort of movie are Twelve Angry Men in which creepily rational Henry Fonda has to persuade his fellow jurors that an Hispanic youth with a list on convictions as long as your arm didn’t stab his father to death. (Heneceforth,  of course, no obvious suspect would ever again be allowed to be the guilty– these days, for instance, Muslims are not allowed to commit terrorist acts in TV dramas.)

Fonda’s main challenge as he jaw-jaws away in rational tones, is Lee J. Cobb, an angry, right-winger who, it transpires, has problems with his own son. Turns out the poor chap needs healing. When another hold-out, played by Ed Begley, turns out to be a racist, all the other jurors, who have already been bored into submission by Fonda, turn their backs on him – excluding him from the centre, where reasonable people live happy, shiny, prejudice-free, rational lives.

Fonda’s success depends on being able to persuade the corporate conservative representative on the jury that he’s right. (Think of David Cameron locked in a room trying to win over David Davies.) This, he achieves, because they are both, under the skin, men of The Centre: in some ways, they’re natural partners, constraining each other’s potential excesses. 

Another classic example is the science fiction classic, The Day the Earth Stood Still on which another creepily reasonable, loquacious skinny  jaw-jaw merchant – Michael Rennie playing the liberal-corporate spaceman Klaatu as a stern senior UN representative – has to persuade Earthlings to stop their silly squabbling, now that they’ve discovered the destructive power of the atom, or super-intelligent, rational space-beings will have to intervene and make us all sit on the naughty step. Klaatu has little time for politicians, the military is so dumb it starts the film by shooting him, and his best hope on Earth is an Einsteinian scientist. 

By contrast, in The Thing from Another World, in which James Arness’s blood-drinking “intellectual carrot” alien terrorizes an Arctic research station, the genius scientist turns out to be a Quisling to his species, low-level soldiers and the non-genius level scientists turn out to be the heroes, and force wins the day – making this a classic conservative film. In Invasion of the Body-Snatchers, the hero is a doctor, true, but an average sort of GP, while the local psychiatrist, who talks soothing twaddle, turns out to have been taken over by the aliens. The hero finds himself isolated against the centre – who are, essentially, communists  who want him to give up self-determination and his individual identity to become part of the emotionless herd. A film where a ranting, conspiracy theory nutcase refuses to adopt the consensus approach, and turns out to be right, is just that – Right. (Other “lone man against the centrist establishment” films of the era include another two of my favourites, both starring Glenn Ford:The Big Heat, in which a cop tracks down the evil thugs who murdered his family, and Ransom, in which a rich businessman refuses to co-operate with the authorities while hunting down the swine who has kidnapped his son – later remade by Mel Gibson.)

In The Day the Earth Stood Still, the intellectually superior alien is the good guy – he’s the ultimate expert, here to convince humanity to forego the raging impulses emanating from its collective Id and join the Galaxy’s sensible, rational centre - Klaatu is the embodiment of the universal Superego. (Close Encounters of the Third Kind was an obvious successor – dang, but those aliens are cute). In a conservative or right-wing film, the aliens tend to be super-intelligent bastards who want to suck our blood or drain our will – the only solution is to bomb the crap out of them.

According to Biskind, pluralist movies gave way to a wave of right-wing – and later left-wing – films in the 1960s, after America suffered a crisis of confidence in the milquetoast therapeutic model when Russia beat it into space by launching Sputnik. The era of the sort of “sensitive”, misunderstood panty-waist characters portrayed by the likes of James Dean (Rebel Without a Cause is another classic of the genre, in which we’re forced to spend two hours supposedly rooting for some whining little misfit who really would benefit from a swift kick up the backside) and his rival in neurotic whingery, Montgomery Clift. After Sputnik, we got Sean Connery and Clint Eastwood cheerfully blowing away anyone they didn’t like the look of.)

As for genuinely left-wing films, well, there weren’t that many made in Hollywood, thanks, one presumes, to the blacklist of communists in the entertainment industry. In High Noon – essentially created by people who had been blacklisted – Gary Cooper’s marshall finds that his town’s solidly respectable citizens are happy to see him blown away by an old adversary, as long as it doesn’t affect business. (Cooper had it both ways, by also starring as a lone-nut architect who won’t compromise his principles in the film version of Ayn Rand’s frankly loopy novel, The Fountainhead.)

Biskind’s classification of films based on their political message is full of holes – he has to spend an awful lot of time explaining away anomalies – but his book is nevertheless the most fascinating essay in film theory that I have ever read. It’s also very funny. For anyone who loves movies and has any interest in politics, it is a must-read classic.