Capitalist Realism

international | arts and media | opinion/analysis Tuesday December 09, 2003 22:58 by Robert Looby robertlooby at yahoo dot com

The private detective with the torturous personal life is a standard cliche of modern television and cinema. But he was also to be found sleuthing away behind the Iron Curtain. Similarly, devious intellectuals and honest sincere workers have thrived on both sides of the divide. This article compares the effects of communist censorship on popular culture with the effects of market pressures on modern popular culture, finding some striking similarities.

Capitalist Realism

We are no strangers to the detective whose private life is a mess. “The Job” is summarised on one website as follows: “Denis Leary … stars as Mike McNeil, an unorthodox New York detective who’s trying to juggle work along with his complicated personal life,” /1/ and in a review of In a Dry Season by Peter Robinson Maria Parker tells us of its hero’s “increasingly complicated personal life, which includes actual or potential relationships with his estranged wife, almost estranged son, and several attractive women…” /2/ Then of course there are the drinkers and the smokers, like Robbie Coltrane in “Cracker,” to say nothing of “unorthodox cops,” who outnumber their orthodox partners by three to one. Or take “Fish,” whose hero, by its script editor’s own admission, “has the requisite complicated personal life in the form of a wife who has deserted him to try to turn him into a better father, and a demanding young son.” /3/ A personal favourite, though, is the TV series “Detective Monk,” starring Toby Shalhoub as a neurotic detective capable of amazing feats of deduction from the evidence at the scene of the crime, but pathologically afraid of bacteria and frequently unable to overcome his fear of blood and get close to the evidence. His assistant and therapist is his nurse – how complicated a personal life is that? This man cannot even wear as shirt unless it is check.

The good guy with the tortured personal life is old hat, old fedora hat – but not all that old. Hammett’s Continental Op has no such ostentatious hang-ups and while Philip Marlowe is as lonely as he is a loner and appears sometimes to flirt with alcoholism, he is married by the opening pages of Poodle Springs. It was later that detectives started going to work with their baggage. The following book review comes from the 1970s: “There are various ways of livening up positive characters in … crime novels. A cold is excellent. It is enough to give Lieutenant Zieliński or Major Grabowski a strong dose of catarrh and the investigation is made more difficult and the novel more lively. Another well known method is to have the hero give up smoking or, alternatively, to have him smoke too much. Another good trick is the … ‘neglected wife’ … who from time to time complains about the irregular life of her industrious husband, immediately giving the novel a powerful jolt of living warmth and authenticity.” /4/

As you might have guessed from the surnames of the hapless detectives, this is not a discussion of the American hard-boiled detective novel. It refers to its Polish version, created and published – and this is my point – under the watchful eye of the censor. Elsewhere its author, Stanisław Barańczak, wonders why the (positive, communist) heroes of socialist realist “production novels” so often have complicated personal lives. These novels typically featured a young working class hero battling against the elements (both natural and bourgeois) to bring to fruition some heavy industrial project with a similarly heavy handed moral message. A variant of this formula was to have a flawed hero who matures into a sense of socialist responsibility, but generally speaking these Stakhanovs had “had no personal life, dividing their time between production and social work.” /5/ Barańczak’s conclusions are interesting and by no means – sadly – limited in scope to communist bloc countries. At a certain point, he claims, the makers of these socialist realist novels realised the formula was worn out. In a vain attempt to combat the schematism of socialist realist novels they gave the protagonists complicated personal lives, made them smokers, drinkers, divorcees, irascible, or gave them wives who still had some petty bourgeois traits… /6/ But the formula remained essentially the same. No matter how heavily the hero smokes or how badly he neglects his wife, in the end the black marketer is punished, the factory saved and the forces of socialist good triumph.

Tinkering around with popular culture formulas without ever really changing them is not limited to writers attempting to operate within the constraints of an official, imposed ideology. Today the nasty corporate lawyer is punished, the Mom and Pop business saved and the forces of capitalist good triumph, even if the hero or heroine is head of a one-parent family. In short, the observations made by Stanisław Barańczak some thirty years ago about popular culture in communist Poland are disturbingly relevant to modern day, globalised popular culture. Essentially the same mechanisms are at work now as then. When Barańczak refers to sensational elements being added to stories out of a sense of obligation the parallel with modern, uncensored popular film and literature is unmistakeable: just try typing the phrase “tacked on love interest” into an internet search engine.

Characteristic of much socialist realism was admiration of the working folk and denigration of the intelligentsia. In one review Barańczak writes “and what fine fellows the intellectuals depicted in the novel are! … a group of constantly complaining wiseguys from a Warsaw pseudo-salon (each and every one of them a degenerate…)” /7/ In a review of another hack he writes “Z. Zeydler-Zborowski’s speciality is describing life in the upper circles and an exceptional lack of intelligence in all of his heroes,” /8/ heroes also marked by “manly candidness” and a dislike of “fops with soft, womanly movements and languishing looks.” /9/ He describes how in one socialist realist novel the immense technical problem of the excavator is solved not by the professor (who built the thing), not the engineer, nor the manager of the mine, but by a simple mining foreman. /10/ “Instead of dividing people into good and bad, honest and dishonest, the production novel divides them into productive workers and parasites. This division coincides almost exactly with another: ‘plain working people’ and ‘over refined intellectuals’.” /11/ In one wonderful scene in a now forgotten novel (publisher: Poland’s Ministry for Defence) a lieutenant forces some student army conscripts who have been caught defacing military property to engage in a “sincere and spontaneous” discussion of the army. Shamed, the students later return and spontaneously erase their graffiti. Barańczak comments: “It would be difficult to find a better example of the triumph of simple sincerity over the miasma of the intelligentsia.” /12/

Difficult but not impossible. Try “Sweet Home Alabama,” “Erin Brockovich,” “Legally Blonde,” “Dumb and Dumber,” “Pretty Woman”… The American version is only slightly different. Intelligence is alright, but only if of the folk-wisdom variety, and education is suspect, unless gained “on the street.” In “Patch Adams” the main character (played by Robin Williams) bemoans the fact that as a medical student he will not get to meet real patients until he is in third year. Two whole years of learning before he can get stuck in: it’s more than a plain, sincere etc. man can take. Or witness “Erin Brockovich,” smiter of the Big Bad Corporation: she joins a law firm not as a qualified lawyer, but as a humble filing clerk, takes on the suits, and wins. Then there is “Die Hard,” which pits John McClane, an ordinary, straight-talking, working cop, against a fiendishly clever gang of Euroterrorists. The highly-trained suit-wearing anti-terrorist specialists from the FBI are outsmarted by the criminal gang, but not the sweating McClane, who also sees the folly in the smarmy yuppie hostage’s attempts to cut a deal with the terrorists. Other enemies of the plain people of America – the perfidious media – also get their comeuppance: too clever for their own good, their success in getting an interview with McClane’s family jeopardises the lives of the hostages. It need hardly be said that McClane’s personal life is complicated, but he wins his back his estranged wife from the lures of the corporate life. Socialist realist admiration of the working folk and denigration of the intelligentsia is well documented – but has enough attention been paid to capitalist realist lip service to the working man?

How many times have we seen the girl almost fall for a university-educated high-flying habitué of exclusive (frequently French) restaurants and cocktail bars in Manhattan when we know that the man for her is the rough-hewn, inarticulate plain bloke who, baseball cap on head, swigs beer from the bottle in a roadhouse with mandatory pool table and jukebox and peopled by the lower classes (tarts with hearts, truckers, factory workers who have just been laid off by educated people, wearers of checked shirts etc.)? In American films the rich-poor, sophisticated-simple, devious-direct divide often falls along urban-rural or North-South lines or both, as in “Sweet Home Alabama.” The girl in such films spends almost the whole film getting it all wrong about which one is right for her – the lawyer or the trucker – but the unfortunate viewer is in no such doubt, for, as one commentator writes, the recipient must not be allowed to form his own opinion of whether something is good or bad; it must be spelled out. True, the reference was to the state-controlled press in 1980s Poland, but it has a wider application. /13/ Edward Możejko also draws attention to the black and white nature of judgements in socialist realist literature. Questions raised are answered unequivocally. Sound familiar? He likens socialist realist poetics to the Western. /14/

Jerzy Kwiatkowski writes of Mrożek’s parody Postępowiec (The Progressive) that it lampoons the naiveté of Communist Poland propaganda, a naiveté stemming from the authorities’ ignorance of the living conditions of the people. /15/ Ludwik Flaszen also complained of the writers of formulaic socialist realist novels that, often coming from narrow, intelligentsia circles, they know about problems from the point of view of ideological decisions, not of real life observation and experience. /16/ It is often hard to escape the impression that modern American propaganda is also out of touch with reality, also – despite the glorification of the common man – manufactured by wealthy sophisticates who are wildly misinformed about the reality of the rich-poor divide. Sure, when it comes to the rich they’re spot on with their luxury cars, clothes and condominiums, or so the majority of us, not part of this world, must assume. But the poor? The simple folk? If they are urban and black and appearing in music videos they usually live in a ghetto inhabited exclusively by models where no one works but everyone has a big car. Away from the gritty realism of the hip hop video the poor live in – maybe not palaces – but comfortable, rambling old properties with a lorry (sometimes affectionately known as a “pick-up” and with a token dent or two to indicate its extreme decrepitude) parked out back. In “Sweet Home Alabama” Jake (the name alone should be enough to peg him as working class) is the proud owner of an aeroplane! Propaganda, Michał Głowiński notes, is to be constructive even at the cost of being absurd and primitive. /17/ “Notting Hill” is the tale of a love affair between a rich, sophisticated actress and an ordinary, regular bloke. A bloke who owns a bookshop. Lots of regular blokes own bookshops, don’t they? Or if not, then some small business in imminent danger of being swallowed up or pushed aside by a giant corporation – such as a chain of video stores renting blockbusting, commercial films, for example. In all this there are hints of Orwellian doublethink: we sit watching films made by massive corporations consisting of highly-educated accountants and lawyers that extol the virtues of the simple folk in their struggle against accountants and lawyers.

Another explanation for communist propaganda’s detachment from reality is that it sought to project an ideal future rather than describe the far from ideal present. /18/ Certainly if advertising is considered a part of pop culture this explanation is particularly apt in today’s conditions. No one needs to be told that advertisers project an ideal world. Suffice it to mention that staple, the three generation family, with the grandparents portrayed by two 45 year old models made to look TV old by having their hair dyed almost as white as their teeth.

The similarities between Poland then and everywhere now do not end there. Product placement, it turns out, is not so new after all. In one 1970s potboiler, Barańczak notes, its hero “as a matter of principle drinks Budafok rather than Martineau or Napoleon.”/19/ The preference for homegrown, eastern bloc brands over western drinks is there for obviously ideological reasons. (Budafok was produced in Hungary.) When the camera lingers on Jake in “Sweet Home Alabama” drinking Budweiser beer (the western, not the eastern variety) with the label clearly visible the reason is similarly obvious and hardly any less ideological. Likewise when Ben Affleck drinks Heineken in “Daredevil” and when Pierce Brosnan does just about anything in a James Bond film.

None of this is to say that good quality films and books don’t exist in the modern marketplace. A brief look at the history of censorship should lead us to expect this: Andrzej Wajda and Krzyszytof Kieślowski made fine films under communist censorship and Russian literature attained a golden age under czarist censorship in the nineteenth century. But it was not easy to gain the public’s ear. The simplest way to control the flow of information was to control the means of producing films and books – a given in a command economy. Thus, the novels so mercilessly reviewed by Barańczak enjoyed massive circulation while more deserving authors were given often ridiculously low print runs. No such state control exists in the west, but it seems to be unnecessary: at one point this summer the critically acclaimed “In This World” was showing on one screen in Dublin, for example, while “2 Fast 2 Furious” (sic) could be seen on at least eight, and “Dumb and Dumberer” (warning: “patrons may find part of this film offensive”) on no less than ten. /20/ The combined duties of the censor, the propagandist and the “engineers of the human soul” are now carried out by the market.

“The simplest duty of the writer is to enter the market and understand and feel its raucous significance.” These words do not come from a primer for budding airport novel writers; they were spoken by communist publicist Stefan Żółkiewski at the second convention of the Writers’ Trade Union of Poland (ZZLP) in the late 1940s and anticipated the government’s demand that writers draw inspiration from the experiences of the working masses. /21/ In a 1949 article Poland’s minister for culture wrote that internally divided characters, heroes bordering between positive and negative were unacceptable in literature because they “artificially confuse the problem” instead of “showing the inexorable logic in both man’s fall and his march forward.” /22/ Here then, at the very beginning of the communist regime in Poland is a blueprint for modern popular culture: know your market and give the public good guys and bad guys instead of complex, ambiguous characters. All that remains is to throw in some shallow moralising and the inevitable happy ending so typical of both socialist and capitalist realism. /23/


Sources

1. http://zap2it.com/shows/showlist/utl.html?3438 (April 6th 2003)
2. www.mysterynet.com/mystery-books/reviews/paperback/000703.paperback.shtml (April 6th 2003)
3. www.observer.co.uk/screen/story/0.6903.213230.00.html (April 6th 2003)
4. Stanisłąw Barańczak, Książki Najgorsze i parę innych ekcesów krytycznoliterackich, 2nd ed., a5, Poznań, 1990, p. 61.
5. Edward Możejko, Realizm socjalistyczny. Teoria. Rozwój. Upadek, TAiWPN, Kraków, 2001, p. 229.
6. Stanisłąw Barańczak, Poezja i duch Uogólnienia. Wybór esejów 1970-1995, Znak, Kraków, 1996, p. 10.
7. Barańczak, Książki Najgorsze, p. 28.
8. Barańczak, Książki Najgorsze, p. 43.
9. Barańczak, Książki Najgorsze, p. 51
10. Barańczak, Książki Najgorsze, p. 19.
11. Barańczak, Poezja i duch Uogólnienia, p. 23
12. Barańczak, Książki Najgorsze, p. 29.
13. Jadwiga Puzyna, “O dyskursie oceniającym i dyrektywnym w tekstach prasy codziennej,” Poradnik językowy, 1984, nr. 2, pp. 69-78, (71).
14. Możejko, Realizm socjalistyczny, p. 229.
15. Jerzy Kwiatkowski, “Ad absurdum,” Twórczość, 1960, nr. 12, pp. 123-127, (125).
16. See Możejko, Realizm socjalistyczny, p. 246.
17. Michał Głowiński, Mowa w stanie oblężenia 1982-1985, Warsaw, 1996, p. 89.
18. Michał Głowiński, Nowomowa po polsku, Warsaw, 1990, pp. 8-9.
19. Barańczak, Książki Najgorsze, p. 36.
20. Irish Times, June 23rd 2003, p. 21.
21. Henryk Markiewicz, Polskie teorie powieści. Od początku do schyłku XX wieku, Warsaw, 1998, p. 147.
22. Markiewicz, Polskie teorie powieści, 157.
23. Możejko, Realizm socjalistyczny, pp. 252, 229 and 248.