Joe McCarthy

Dennis Hopper Duels With Orson Welles in This Fascinating Documentary

Should actors take a political stance becomes a central question in ‘Hopper/Welles’.

“I never had to clear my throat during the McCarthy era,” says a commanding voice. Dennis Hopper replies, “But you are a fascist!” The voice resumes, “No, I am not Hannaford now. I am talking as …(inaudible)”. The booming baritone is that of Orson Welles, in conversation with actor-filmmaker Dennis Hopper during the filming of The Other Side of the Wind, in November 1970. The film that was in the making for 48 years before its release in 2018.

The new footage titled Hopper/Welles – which premiered at Venice and now at the 58th New York Film Festival – has been put together by those behind Welles’s final film, producer Filip Jan Rymsza and editor Bob Murawski. Almost at every turn, Welles assumes the role of J.J. Jake Hannaford, the fascist, racist Hollywood great, the protagonist of The Other Side of the Wind played by John Huston, and this confuses Hopper, as it does the viewer.

Throughout the conversation, Welles says some objectionable things that make sense only later when we realize he was talking as Hannaford, but he is incisive in grilling Hopper about his political leanings. Welles is fascinated by Hopper, fresh from the success of Easy Rider – a counterculture hit marrying the hippie-commune era with the oncoming volatile 70s – and its independent existence as an escape out of the Hollywood studio system, a game familiar to Welles and the brand of freedom he would admire.

The conversation has the same eerie atmosphere of Jake Hannaford’s birthday party in the film, monochrome with the camera wobbly and moving between Hopper, his aides and the food on the table. Hopper checks himself before continuing, landing on the right camera to throw a glance and then shifting to Welles again. There are two cameras on Hopper, a woman with a clapperboard often accosts the scene in the middle of his answers and announces “camera 8A” and hops back. The film’s title on the board is ‘Hopper Nite’. The interview is impromptu and unrehearsed, but the conversation planned. Hopper lights up several Marlboros to get through and the focus remains on him even when Welles is talking.

Welles is a figure that’s content to stay in the shadows – not a phrase one would usually associate with the legendary figure – but his presence is baronial as ever, Hopper’s eyes tracking him as he moves around the room and only the chiaroscuro giving him away when the camera switches on either side. “He is a lion,” someone says in The Other Side of the Wind about Hannaford. “Lions are cats. He is a cat that walks like a bear,” says another observer. Welles was living the character in 1970.

Also Read: Exploring the Final Years of Orson Welles, the Errant Genius Cast Out by Hollywood

In Hopper/Welles, the master and apprentice exchange notes on everything from editing, politics, god and cinema as magic. They talk about boredom as a social plight. “La Notte got to me,” Hopper declares and adds that L’Avventura put him to sleep. Hopper comes off a little rattled but manages to hold his own. They talk easy in the beginning about what films are about and the allure in European neo-realist cinema of the previous decade. Hopper describes editing in glorious, savage imagery. He says it is like having a child and then cutting its arms off. “Editor is a false word,” Welles agrees. He calls them cutters and therefore Murawski is credited as ‘cutter’ in Hopper/Welles. Films are made and then remade in the editing room, a rare topic both reach a consensus on.

Hopper/Welles has the air of two filmmakers, two critics, two cinephiles sparring over their values, what makes a good film – a concerted effort or magic – and one egging the other to say something nasty. It speaks to the instincts of narcissism in extremely creative people, Welles likening the director to god.

The Hannaford impression especially helps Welles in this case, he talks of the hippies and advocates for people making bombs. It’s shocking but then we realize that this whole conversation was supposed to be part of the film Welles was attempting to make at the time. Hopper isn’t one for aesthetics. He believes to tell a story, sometimes a filmmaker must be less artistic. “This is supposed to be an emotional movie, what am I doing looking at the shots!” a rare instance when Hopper stands up to the legend in front of him. Welles equates sacrificing aesthetics to sacrificing efficacy.

The most interesting parts of the conversation are when Welles is trying to get Hopper to make political statements. As an intensely political figure, who was blacklisted during the McCarthy era, it is no wonder that Welles wants to get to that side of Hopper, someone he thinks could take his place in Hollywood in the near future. But Hopper doesn’t relent, opening up only when he talks of the reaction in the theatres at the end of Easy Rider, when the two bikers get shot. He says the white southerners cheered during that scene, and in Southern California, they shouted, “Kill the pigs.” That disappointed him. “We are a country full of outlaws. Cheating the American tax structure is just as bad as supplying drugs.” Something that prompts Welles to call Hopper a leftist, much to the latter’s amusement.

Yet, Hopper isn’t forthcoming. He denies any intellectual superiority and refrains from counting himself as part of the bourgeoisie, he is just a contented man. Welles calls it a copout. “You can’t talk to leftists these days, can you? They don’t admit to it.” It’s clear that Hopper isn’t as naive as he comes across and he doesn’t want to admit to anything on camera. “You think you can change the world by making movies?”

Hopper/Welles is less of a conversation and more of a lecture from Welles who is aware that his time has come to pass, and he needs to groom the young ones to be as openly political as he used to be. There is a mix of hope and disappointment in his voice, impressed with what Hopper can do and unsatisfied with his refusal to speak his mind. Hopper displays an unhealthy brand of cynicism towards political Hollywood stars like Jane Fonda, questioning the sincerity in her activism. But Fonda’s candour is exactly what Welles expects from Hopper, even if he brings out the derision in his voice usually reserved for Pauline Kael. “If you just keep making movies then who is going to make the changes? Except Jane Fonda, which is a solemn thought.” Despite Welles’s insistence, Hopper repeats that his part is only making movies and change is coming. It did come with a little help from Hollywood artistes like Jane Fonda who didn’t clear their throats in front of any establishment.

Aditya Shrikrishna is a freelance film critic based in Chennai.

In Defence of Activism in Universities

The recent upsurge in protests across universities has led to claims that pedagogy and activism cannot overlap, but that is rarely the case.

Students protest in JNU in February 2016. Credit: Facebook

Over the last year, we have witnessed much dissent and discontent across some Indian universities. There are some who suspect that academics and universities at large are being surveilled by the state. Many, on the other hand, believe that academics should only focus on pedagogy and not get involved in any kind of activism.

Activism, as understood in a myopic, monochromatic way, has earned a pejorative reputation. These observers seem to believe that activism and pedagogy are mutually exclusive of each other.

It is important to anchor any discussion on activism on a consideration of higher education in the country, especially liberal education. The inherent subjectivity of the broad disciplinary categories along with the questions one seeks to answer in each discipline ought to inform the discussion. The goals of liberal higher education need to be understood under the condition that any pedagogical question would be rooted, paradoxically, in subjectivity. For example, suppose a student of anthropology wants to do ethnographic work on the plight of Dalit transgenders in urban India. The choice of the subject – Dalit transgenders – and the questions one seeks to understand are necessarily political choices.

Pedagogy and activism

The noted philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell is an example of being an academic who engaged in political activism. Right from the time of the First World War, Russell had a conscientious objection to war; he went against the grind of the patriotic project of warfare in Britain and opposed it for moral and political reasons. In 1915, he wrote in The Cambridge Review,

“Behind the rulers, in whom pride has destroyed humanity, stand the patient populations, who suffer and die. To them, the folly of war and the failure of governments are becoming evident as never before. To their humanity and collective wisdom we must appeal if civilisation is not to perish utterly in suicidal delirium.”

These words ring as true a hundred years later.

A year later, in 1916, Russell authored a pamphlet speaking out openly against the manner in which the conscription law was enforced during the First World War. He was subsequently convicted and dismissed from lecturership at Trinity College, only to be reinstated later. These events didn’t deter Russell’s continued work as an activist.

The remarkable ‘Russell-Einstein Manifesto‘ released in 1955 became the bedrock of the first Pugwash Conference in 1957. It was written in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War when a large section of the world was shell-shocked by the potential armageddon that nuclear warfare portended. An international conference was called to assess the dangers to humanity due to use of such weapons of mass destruction. Some notable signatories of this manifesto included reputed scientists Max Born and Linus Pauling in addition to Russell and Albert Einstein. All four were Nobel laureates. In the press conference when this manifesto was released, Russell started with a worrying alert, “I am bringing the warning pronounced by the signatories to the notice of all the powerful governments of the world in the earnest hope that they may agree to allow their citizens to survive.”

This statement clearly situates the political positions of the signatories against regimes that were furthering their agenda.

Continuing in the activist tradition of Russell, Pauling questioned the role of the US government and nuclear warfare. The now popular nationalist and anti-nationalist binary had played out against Pauling in the early 1950s. From having contributed to the US efforts during the war, Pauling adopted a path of social activism for peace following the consequences of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. His fearless critique of the state during the McCarthy era prompted the US government to deny him a passport to visit England for a conference. The official reason given was, “Not in the best interest of the United States”.

Science and politics aren’t exclusive of each other

It took a Nobel prize in chemistry for the state to revert its position. Pauling relentlessly wrote about the potential hazards of nuclear wars and condemned the role of the US in the Vietnam war through several speeches and signatures in protest letters. He holds a rare distinction of having won unshared Nobel prizes in two different areas – chemistry and peace. And throughout, he held positions in various universities alongside his continued social activism.

The examples of Russell and Pauling bring to light the artificial boundaries of intellectual and moral engagement some departments in universities have done and continue to do.

Consider an example from the world of science. Hydraulic fracture (fracking) is a popular paradigm put forth by some scientists for oil exploration and as a means to alleviate the impending energy crisis. While a group of scientists are strong advocates of this technique, another group of scientists are working to highlight how the soil geometry would get deformed using this technique, leading to underground water contamination among other potential hazards. The contrarian stance assumed by the latter group is indeed a political position and one could spot some of them in protest marches advocating the stoppage of fracking. The rigour of science isn’t compromised in questioning the status quo and questioning the positions of “going with the flow”.

Thanks to the open source and free software movement, alternate computing paradigms have been created challenging corporate hegemony in technology. For example, the free software R, has become the gold standard among the community of academic statisticians. The birth and the proliferation of this software (and other open source tools) had their origins in questioning the status quo of proprietary software. They were necessarily alternate positions challenging the power structures of the market and questioning the very nature and methods of knowledge production. The sustained efforts of the open source community, which includes several academics guilty of technological activism, have altered the imagination of knowledge production and consumption today.

Evidently, the distinctions between pedagogy and activism seem not only artificial but also pernicious.

Free speech

A close comrade of activism and pedagogy is the right to free speech.

Robert Faurisson was a French academic who famously, or perhaps infamously, published two letters in 1979 in the French daily, Le Monde, claiming that the gas chambers used by the Nazis against Jews didn’t exist. In fact, he has gone on record stating that “Hitler never ordered nor permitted that anyone be killed by reason of his race or religion”. He had also called The Diary of Anne Frank a “forgery.” He was naturally subject to much controversy, public scrutiny and received death threats, for, what are, unarguably, historically fallacious views.

Naom Chomsky. Credit: Andrew Rusk/Flickr CC BY 2.0

A petition, written by the socialist scholar Serge Thion asked the authorities for Faurisson’s “safety and the free exercise of his legal rights”. The petition didn’t contain material about Faurisson’s scholarship. A line in the petition was “Since he began making his findings public, Professor Faurisson has been subject to…”. The word ‘findings’ was misconstrued and misrepresented as ‘conclusions’ and earned the wrath of being “scandalous”.

The petition was signed by around 600 people including Noam Chomsky, professor of linguistics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Chomsky was given inglorious epithets of being anti-semitic and had perhaps put an entire nation at risk when, apparently, accusations were hurled that the US was indistinguishable from Nazi Germany. Chomsky responded to the accusations with a landmark article titled ‘Some Elementary Comments on The Rights of Freedom of Expression’. Chomsky’s response was premised on the idea that the right of free expression is not confined to a codified set of approved notions and, in fact, the right of free speech must be defended precisely when the notions are most offensive. The true test of free speech is only when multiple parties disagree with the content and yet the speakers find it safe to voice their opinions. A genuine democracy should have certain fundamental civil liberties and the freedom of speech without any fear of backlash from the state.

Faurisson’s articles were later published in a book and Chomsky’s brilliant essay on free speech was the preface of this book that contained articles openly denying the Holocaust.

This isn’t just an anecdote. It is a reminder that the same article by Chomsky assumed different avatars at different points in time. The signing of the petition and the publication of the essay in 1980 was activism, and the subsequent reading and interpretation of it by later scholars and students has been an act of pedagogy. One cannot and should not create silos of activism and pedagogy.

Several modern day departments in top universities, by their very construction, encourage activism. Take, for instance, the departments of gender studies or women’s studies. In this manifest madness of separating activism and pedagogy, we may be committing a major blunder because dissent is the essence of examining ideas and creation of knowledge. The few examples illustrated in here barely skim the surface of the need to create spaces for a dialogue between intellectual rigour and articulating public engagement to hopefully create a society that holds the state accountable for its actions. Critical pedagogy and liberal education crucially hinges on being unafraid to ask questions and fearlessly tread the path of discomfort. It is important to inculcate the true spirit of scientific inquiry, not merely to scholastic pursuits but also in the pursuit of a better society – one where democracy and equity aren’t compromised and put in artificially labelled boxes of pedagogy and activism.

This article originally appeared in E-QUALNEWS, Volume 3, Issue 6, November 2016.

The Trump Campaign Tapped Into the White American’s Raw Anger

After the Obama years, Americans were itching to go back to their roots

After the Obama years, Americans were itching to go back to their roots.

US Republican president-elect Donald Trump with his family in 2015. Credit:Reuters/Brendan McDermid

In his masterly study, The American Character, first published in 1944, Professor D.W. Brogan had spoken of how “the American experience” had bred, among other attitudes, a preference for “the temper of the gambler” in the new settlers in North America. In the 2016 presidential contest the Americans abundantly gave in to that temper of the gambler when they voted in as president a man who defied every known parameter of eligibility, competence and character. The rest of the world may find this gamble distasteful but Donald Trump did devise a campaign that catered to the Americans’ visceral fears and anxieties. Simply put, Trump is truer to the American character than his rivals and adversaries.

In the 1956 edition of The American Character, Brogan had explained and elaborated why the Americans fell for Senator Joseph McCarthy and his manic witch-hunting: “He (McCarthy) was, obviously, a symptom of the uneasiness with which the average American watched a world get out of hand and dangerous to a degree that the human race had never known.” McCarthy had tapped into those fears of the Americans and he was particularly successful because he was also appealing to “a tradition of rural radicalism”, which, according to Brogan, included “a faintly concealed anti-Semitism.” Trump had managed to ignite all the ancient and dormant prejudices and passions that rural Americans had long nurtured. Persistently and consistently, his campaign kept honing in on the under-educated, under-employed white male voter and his ugly resentments. And, now we know for sure that very, very many Americans had never cured themselves of those dark attitudes and reflexes of the early 1950s.

Perhaps another way to understand the 2016 American presidential vote is to see it as a joyful rolling back of the post-Watergate morality. When the Americans kicked Richard Nixon out of the White House, they settled for a comfortable assumption that they have exorcised themselves of all the low cunning and baser instincts that man had come to represent. The Democrats/liberals/the “Rockefeller Republicans” all strutted that ‘decency’ and ‘openness’ and ‘truthfulness’ had been restored as core values in the working of the US government at home; and, they asserted that ‘human rights’ and ‘democracy’ and ‘dissent’ should be the guiding principles of American foreign policy. The policy elites among the Republicans and the Democrats behaved as if they had stumbled upon the magic potion that would cure their domestic politics of all its deficiencies as well as entitle them to preach to the other nations how to conduct themselves, at home and abroad.

That post-Watergate morality eventually turned sour, especially for white Americans. Openness brought in too many immigrants who became too ubiquitous as they excelled and outpaced the white Americans in the competitive arenas across the American society and economy. That was not all. The ‘professional politicians’ and their accomplices in the media and entertainment industry had conspired to elect a black man to the White House in 2008. That, dear sir, was nothing but a blasphemy. And, now they wanted a woman to be the Commander-in-Chief. No way. That would not be allowed to pass.

The Americans are obviously tired of political correctness. They seem to be particularly tired of liberals and their fashionable sentimentalities. The liberals themselves have not always behaved honourably or honestly; hence, Clinton’s all too obvious ‘trust deficit’. More than that trust deficit was the ‘I-am-like-that-only-and- you-have-to-take-it-or-leave it’ attitude that, apparently, did not impress that many voters, not even the women voters. On the other hand, Trump did not allow himself to be cramped within the confines of the party system and its corrupted political morality; he mounted an insurgency – first, in the Republican Party and then in the US at large.

Each presidential election becomes an occasion to revisit what kind of society the Americans want or should be allowed to have. The quintessential American character has reasserted itself. They are happy to fall for the resentful nationalism that Trump doled out to them. Take a sample. Two days before the vote, on Sunday, Trump was in Minnesota telling a crowd: “To be a rich nation, we must also be a safe nation and you know what’s going on here. The whole world knows what’s happening in Minnesota. Here in Minnesota, you’ve seen first-hand the problems caused with faulty refugee vetting, with large numbers of Somali refugees coming into your state without your knowledge, without your support or approval, and with some of them then joining ISIS and spreading their extremist views all over our country and all over the world.” And, then, he hopped over to Michigan, which has a sizeable Arab population and told his supporters how the same faulty refugee vetting had “put your security at risk” and how “it puts enormous pressure on your schools and your community resources.” Both these states, traditionally inclined to vote for the Democratic column, ended up witnessing very close contests.

Each presidential election also reaffirms old fault-lines as well as introduces new ones. The Trump campaign got its seemingly indefatigable energy from thinking of itself as a movement, out to overthrow the established order; in particular, the religious right lined up its fanatical exertions behind the Trump banner. The conundrum, then, becomes how will the new president accommodate and appease this worked-up fringe; as a matter of fact, the ‘fringe’ is perfectly within its right to think of itself as the new centre.

Trump cannot possibly pretend that these inspired mad caps did not provide a substantial push to his journey to the White House; nor can he abandon them or ignore their preference in making key appointments and then in crafting policies. Were he now to move to the ‘mainstream’ and centre, he would not only invite the charge of political dishonesty and intellectual duplicity but he would also run the risk of invoking their fury.

Trump’s victory is not just a negative vote, aimed at preventing that “crooked Hillary” and her equally unlovable husband from coming anywhere close to the White House; it is a positive vote, tapping the white Americans’ raw anger, promising to rewrite the Washington rule-book to suit the American character.

It is not that this presidential vote has changed America overnight. The change had been in the making for some time. The vote clearly means that the Americans have abandoned their engagement with liberal imagination that began in 2008. The Obama experiment has left a bad taste in the American mouth. The Americans were itching to go back to the roots. The 2016 contest has merely re-aligned the presidential politics with the American society and its passions and prejudices.

Harish Khare is the Editor-in-Chief of The Tribune, where this article originally appeared.