Democrat tom hanks is number one box office just about everywhere in the world. Democrat Steven Spielberg has recently been knighted. De Niro and Streisand were friends of the Clintons. This year's best film Oscar nominees Traffic and Erin Brockovich are the latest in a long liberal tradition in mainstream Hollywood dating back through Schindler's List, Philadelphia, Wall Street, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, In the Heat of the Night, Spartacus, Citizen Kane, 12 Angry Men and Casablanca. Few stars graced George W Bush's inaugural ceremony.
And further back things weren't much different. Bacall turned Bogie into a Democrat. Gene Kelly, John Garfield, Olivier and Danny Kaye marched on Washington against McCarthy. The icons-Monroe, Brando, Dean, Clift-were all Democrats. It's the same outside the US. In Britain, Thatcher could muster almost no movie supporters. In Spain, cinema exploded after Franco. We all know about outcrops of reaction in the movie world like Ronald Reagan and Charlton Heston but they were the exceptions.
Or so we have long assumed. In fact there's an interesting political secret to be pulled out of the Hollywood cupboard, and it does not concern merely the mild conservatism of many mainstream blockbusters, or the frontier values of the old western and its modern successors. Look, rather, into the very heart of American counter-culture and you will find films like Taxi Driver and Blue Velvet, films which penetrated the mainstream with a spirit of the avant-garde. Yet at the core of their innovative visions there is also a spirit of right-wing libertarianism and rage against modernity. They are reactionary films. And the left has never appeared to notice, or mind.
It may be that in the very flickering nature of its medium, cinema is simply too transient for its politics to stick. The major art form of the 20th century could ultimately prove to have been merely shallow, exploitative, formulaic, sentimental, jejune, sensationalist and kitsch. But it could also be that these are the ingredients that have made cinema, at heart, a right-wing form. No book in the English language has addressed the theme of the right-wing tradition in American cinema. And to my knowledge, no major article has mapped the terrain. The right-wingness of cinema needs to be outed.
The left has had no difficulty identifying the corporate-capitalist nature of the film business. But no one seems to have done the more specific job of pointing out where individual films reinforce right-wing values. Maybe, as Hanif Kureishi wrote recently in this magazine, we are living in "politically torpid" times. But that would explain only why there's no recent treatise on conservative and reactionary cinema, not why there has never been one.
However, in a short critical essay on Francis Ford Coppola written in the 1970s, David Thomson hinted that there was a lot more to be said: "I am being tough on Coppola," he wrote, "for the very reason I have been hard on Frank Capra and John Ford. These are three men of remarkable talent. They shoot riveting, ravishing films... But that genius is not enough. There is a talent in American films that makes for adolescent attitudes, veiled fascism, and a work that leads one to recognise the proximity of talent and meretricious magic."
"There is something in the best of American films," Thomson went on, "that is not good enough and that is dangerous." So much American cinema is spawned from the idea of an individual winning out against the adversity of a harsh world, that the exhilaration of the moving image comes to be the natural vehicle for a universalised struggle for liberty. There's nothing necessarily either left or right wing about that. But the celebration of freedom, taken to an extreme, becomes blind libertarianism. It refuses any concept of solidarity or community, or engagement with other values. It is the liberty of the right.
Let's start with David Lynch, cult director of Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart. His films are the pinnacle of the avant-garde in the mainstream. Martin Scorsese and Bernardo Bertolucci say that he is a master. Blue Velvet was his breakthrough, but Eraserhead, nine years earlier, reveals more about his underlying political ideas. It's about a man in a disturbing urban landscape who gets impregnated by his girlfriend and gives birth to an embryonic mutant. Lynch told me in an interview two years ago that it came out of his time living in Philadelphia. In contrast to his own small-town upbringing, he found Philadelphia "festering with a sickness." He hated its cityness, its industry, its modernity. In films such as The Straight Story and Blue Velvet, he envisaged what he calls "floating" small towns, or islands from the world. Of the rest of the real world, with its interfering social demands, he has a paranoiac distrust.
In 1965 a young Lynch went to Europe on a planned three-year trip to art schools, in what would become a formative experience. He came back after 15 days. He found Europe, "too clean to paint." Philadelphia was too dirty, Europe was too clean. America has an "isolationist" tradition in foreign policy, but it can claim a much purer cinematic expression of the same sentiment in Lynch's attitude to the rest of the world.
Embedded in films like Blue Velvet is Lynch's Dostoyevskian belief that you can find the wisdom of the cosmos without moving from the small town where you were born. But surely you can't discover everything by staying put. How, for example, do you find out about other cultures? "Other cultures," he said, "are just the same as ours underneath."
The more you think about Lynch, the less surprising it seems that he accepted an invitation from Ronald Reagan to dine at the White House. Isabella Rossellini went too. This does not go down well with those who interpret Lynch's avant-gardism as politically progressive. The point here is not to tarnish Lynch's reputation, rather it is to say that it is his very illiberality-his to-hell-with-you go-it-alone libertarianism-which is the source of his artistic frisson. He is untouched by the ironic fringes of liberal culture and this explains why his portraits of Alvin Straight and John Merrick (the Elephant Man) are so open to feeling and, oddly enough, so humane.
The isolationist right in cinema, of which Lynch is the contemporary standard bearer, goes way back. Frank Capra, who co-wrote, produced and directed It's a Wonderful Life, is its patron saint. In that film, James Stewart plays a young man desperate to get away from small-town life. Things do not go the way he planned, he never leaves, considers suicide, is talked out of it by an angel and is eventually saved from financial ruin by contributions from the townsfolk. The famous ending of the film, where the locals pool their small savings and defeat a heartless loan shark, is surely progressive. Isn't it? Didn't Capra intend his film to be leftist and anti-materialist? Isn't that why it plays on television at Christmas?
The truth is not so palatable. Harry Cohn, Columbia studio boss, could see Capra's true colours. The filmmaker was an anti-Semite, who shared the Jewish mogul's enthusiasm for Benito Mussolini. In Mr Smith Goes to Washington, Capra portrays the American capital as a place of fancy ideas, detached from ordinary people, intoxicated with power. This is our old friend-hatred of cosmopolitanism.
These facts cast It's a Wonderful Life in a harsher light. Its collectivism starts to look like right-wing populism. It's final message is that there's no place like home. There is no need for elsewhere; a patriot will find everything he needs in home, family and small-town American life.
The isolationist instinct represents a thick seam in classic American cinema especially, of course, in westerns. Another key figure in the pantheon is Howard Hawks, director of His Girl Friday, The Big Sleep, To Have and Have Not, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Red River and Rio Bravo. A decent career, all things considered. It is often pointed out that the best Hawks films have no social context. Rio Bravo tells the story of a sheriff (John Wayne) and his team (Dean Martin, Walter Brennan and Ricky Nelson) withdrawing into a prison house, waiting for the arrival of a marshal. They are cooped up, relaxed, making jokes, relying on each other when it comes to the crunch. Often voted one of the best films ever made, it has seldom been pointed out that Rio Bravo is the ur-movie of isolationism, a filmic, Shangri La fantasy of right-wing brotherhood.
And Rio Bravo was conceived for a specific-political-reason. John Wayne and Howard Hawks had been angered by blacklisted writer Carl Foreman's script for another western classic, High Noon, which had been seen by many as a liberal response to McCarthyism. Hawks in particular hated the way Gary Cooper's sheriff showed indecision and needed the help of other people, even his wife. So Wayne's sheriff in Rio Bravo was given a scene where he says something like "How good are you? Are you good enough to take the best man they've got? If not, I'd just have to take care of you."
So there you have one type of movie rightism, seen in the work of Lynch, Capra and Hawks three of the greatest directors America has produced-a blue artery of right-wing isolationism running through the culture. More recently, America's official "greatest living filmmaker," Martin Scorsese-known for his support of liberal causes-has also shown himself obsessed with right-wing rage and what can be called "frontierism." Just as Lynch draws from Capra, so Scorsese draws from western director John Ford.
There's no doubt which flag Ford flew. When the American Film Institute gave him his lifetime achievement award, he eulogised the then President Nixon who was in the audience. The director was dying, but this was August 1973. Ford's movies, like those of Capra, can at first appear progressive. Setting aside the slight matter of the depiction of the slaughter of native Americans in his work from 1917 to 1964, his emphasis on a kind of community and on comradeship could seem leftist. The impression fades on consideration. In My Darling Clementine Henry Fonda's Wyatt Earp, former marshal of Dodge City, comes to Tombstone on a cattle drive. He finds an uncivilised, disordered place. His cattle are rustled and his younger brother is killed. As he did in Dodge City, he becomes a lawman, fights the Clantons at the OK Corral and restores order.
Tombstone is morally corrupt, but it's on the way to modernity and cityhood. Fonda arrives and like an old testament patriarch, is disgusted by the immorality, and restores the law. The wildness is tamed. The frontier is made orderly. The film makes him a hero, yet Ford, who knew Earp in real life (the latter didn't die until 1929), must have known that the marshal was far from that.
Ford built his whole system of values on the contrast between solid Earp and the coughing, drinking, dapper Doc Holliday, played memorably here by Victor Mature. Mature's urban, overdressed, troubled, neurotic man is also an intellectual, a New Yorky combination in Ford's eyes, a type he didn't know or trust or understand. My Darling Clementine dreads the coming of city life as much as Lynch hated Philadelphia, as much as Heidegger hated modernity.
At first it seems impossible to call Scorsese a frontier rightist when he lives and breathes Manhattan, but play Taxi Driver against My Darling Clementine and the connections start to show. New York is Tombstone a century on. De Niro's Travis Bickle is precisely a type of Earp. He is disgusted by the immorality of the city gone rancid. He is repelled by the blacks, the fags, the whores and the pimps. Like Dante with Beatrice he falls for angelic blondes, sees in them brightness and purity. He has a Catholic sense of what hell is (Manhattan) and what goodness is-the virginal women (Jodie Foster and Cybill Shepherd) who obsess him. Taxi Driver's screenwriter Paul Schrader talks explicitly of the religious contours of the film. While his own Calvinism doesn't practice worship of the Virgin Mary, Schrader wrote a story for Scorsese, so he once told me, that did.
Of course to show that the film is Catholic does not demonstrate that it is right wing. But Taxi Driver's type of Catholicism, its revulsion at certain types of people, is distinctly reactionary. To quote David Thomson again, it is true that Scorsese "shoots riveting, ravishing film." And, as in the case of Lynch, it is the fact that Scorsese's and Bickle's revulsion is expressed so ravishingly that makes the film such a head spinner, especially for young men.
There is often a complex moral ambiguity about a naturalistic art form like film. In sympathetically portraying Bickle, Scorsese wants us to understand the many real people like Bickle out there, but not necessarily to agree with them. But the truth is that Taxi Driver dignifies immature fears about other people and makes glorious the inglorious instinct to kill what you hate. Taxi Driver is very good, but it is also not good enough, and dangerous.
It's not much of a jump from Travis Bickle to vigilantism. Few would seriously doubt that the money- spinning Death Wish films are of the vigilante right. In them Charles Bronson, a New York businessman, takes the law into his own hands after his wife and child are mugged. The first three films were directed by Michael Winner. The second film's rape scene is revolting. As a quintet the films are an orgy of social reaction. And so it was with Clint Eastwood's films of the 1970s, which were routinely accused of fascism. Eastwood's most famous character, Harry Callahan, appeared in five films (Dirty Harry, Magnum Force, The Enforcer, Sudden Impact and The Dead Pool). He was a misanthropic maverick policeman in 1970s flower power San Francisco. He had no time for feminism, civil rights and the like. Ronald Reagan, who was a friend of Eastwood, took to using Harry's catch phrase "Go ahead, make my day." This was backlash vigilantism gone mainstream. The New Yorker called it "fascist medievalism."
Eastwood's first western as a director, High Plains Drifter, is an even clearer example of right-wing vigilantism. He plays a stranger who destroys a town for no apparent reason. High Plains Drifter detests urban culture. One French critic went so far as to call High Plains Drifter "a Mein Kampf for the west," and even John Wayne had problems with it, writing to Eastwood-in a surprising defence of townies-"That isn't the people who settled this country."
If Dirty Harry was one of first signs that Hollywood would try to revise the history of the 1960s counter-culture, it wasn't until 1994 and Forrest Gump that it really got its teeth into the flower children. This hugely successful film featured Tom Hanks as a simple-minded southerner who goes to Vietnam, becomes a hero, meets presidents, and inspires Elvis to sing and John Lennon to write Imagine. Despite the professed liberalism of its star, Tom Hanks, it has been the most important right-wing film of modern times. Among its most vocal supporters was presidential candidate Pat Buchanan. Gump himself is named after a Klan ancestor and the anti-war movement is shown as rowdy, druggy and incoherent. The hardest political angle of the film is Gump's girlfriend, Jenny. She gets seduced by the counter-culture, becomes drug-addicted, performs songs naked and gets an unnamed 1980s disease from which she dies. The arc of her life runs smoothly from political action to immorality and death.
The revisionist right is, of course, a symptom of culture in general rather than cinema in particular, but several key films of the last 30 years share that desire to reclaim the past. Another of Reagan's favourites, Rambo: First Blood Part II, found an inventive way for it to be OK for an American to go into Vietnam again with all guns blazing. The excuse was to rescue soldiers missing in action. But the film helped to reverse guilt about the war. Apocalypse Now did the same. Where Rambo was gung-ho, and nakedly reactionary, Apocalypse Now did something more subtle and powerful. It aestheticised Vietnam. The war was transformed in the national psyche from a vast political mistake to a vast operatic experience. This case is strengthened by the fact that the film's first screenwriter was John Milius, self- confessed "Zen fascist," writer of Dirty Harry and Magnum Force, director of Conan the Barbarian and Red Dawn and admirer of Ford and Hawks. He had outright contempt for the 1960s. His key idea is the glory of America, its mythic past, its anti-communism, its idealised surfer culture. There is no doubt that Apocalypse Now is glorious, but it has no political analysis. It is massive and not very grown-up.
One of its leading actors, Dennis Hopper, is an arch rebel. Easy Rider, which he directed, is such a pure expression of the 1960s counter-culture that surely, with Hopper at least, we're in safe liberal hands. No. Hopper thinks government is too big, voted for George Bush Snr, and once told me that he is proud that he's the first of his family to switch from Democrat to Republican. I asked him why he had wanted a former boss of the CIA for president, and he replied that it was exactly because Bush Snr held that post that he thought he would be good. "All the other presidents have been paranoid about the CIA," he said. "Bush wouldn't be because he ran it."
Even an signficant slice of gay cinema refuses to fly the progressive flag. Paul Morrissey directed the Andy Warhol films Flesh, Lonesome Cowboys and Heat. Aesthetically austere and socially anarchic, their homoeroticism broke new ground with their worship of Joe Dellasandro's naked body. Yet Morrissey is a right-wing Christian Republican. And the forefather of gay cinema was Vichy-accommodating Jean Cocteau.
So, much of great American cinema since the 1970s, the stuff that dominates movie magazines and cable channels, is right wing, and draws from a deep tradition of conservative American film. Big, illiberal, thoughtless tendencies have been the force behind the aesthetic grandeur of some of the most memorable American films of all. Scorsese, Ford, Hawks, Lynch, Coppola, Hopper and Warhol/Morrissey-George W Bush couldn't ask for better advocates.
And even in the 1990s, there was a lot to please George W Bush. Quentin Tarantino's postmodern gun operas did not come from a rightist perspective, but the Bruce Willis story in Pulp Fiction certainly did and the Tarantinisti lack their master's sophisticated mockery of male rage. David Lynch's window continued to close with Wild at Heart, whose two main characters had retreated so much from the world that it was as if they had regressed to memories of Elvis and the Wizard of Oz. Scorsese's frontierism continued with Casino, a bloody elegy for the time when the mob still ruled Vegas, before the corporations moved in to democratise it.
Vengeance ? la Dirty Harry and Death Wish wasn't absent from 1990s cinema either, and Falling Down, about a stressed out middle-class white male on a spree killing Koreans and others, was its high point. Michael Douglas starred in that film and also in Basic Instinct, a right-wing bisexual cause c?lèbre whose filming was picketed by gay groups yet whose director, Paul Verhoeven, has hardly ever made a purely heterosexual film. The reactionary rightism of Paul Morrissey was alive and well. Coming up to date, punk rightism took a new twist in David Fincher's muddled Fight Club, and the pre-modern spirit surfaced in Terrence Malick's extraordinary war film The Thin Red Line.
But isn't it too easy to indict American cinema in this way? Maybe to list the reactionary tendencies of classic American cinema stories isn't really to get to the crux of cinema's relationship with the right. What about the form of movies as well as their content? Isn't it, after all, the very form of Apocalypse Now, its operatic structure, that glorifies war?
It is a staple argument of the best writers on cinema that movies are inherently worshipful. To photograph something that's five foot tall and project it onto a screen which is 40 foot tall is to make more of it. Photograph De Niro's eyes moving slowly in close-up in Taxi Driver and project them onto a cinema screen and they move 20 feet. Nothing in human culture-apart from the Sphinx or Mount Rushmore or the Buddhas of the far east-giganticises physiognomy as cinema does. And it makes it look as if De Niro or Garbo live forever and glisten on the screen, as if they have transcended ordinary human life. To put them on the big screen is to worship them like pagan gods. Even realist cinema and documentary makers centralise the people or places that they feature. To see old footage of your hometown or of distant historical events is to marvel at how precious are these glimpses of the past. They have been kept alive by the footage and are therefore special. Think of the most purely cinematic moments. Gene Kelly in the rain. The white picket fence and Technicolour flowers of Blue Velvet. Shirley MacLaine running in The Apartment. The slow-burning napalm in Apocalypse Now. The death of the girl in the red coat in Don't Look Now. The opening of Raging Bull. The song Remember My Forgotten Man from Gold Diggers of 1933. De Niro looking in the rear view mirror in Taxi Driver. Everyone can supply their own. They aren't necessarily great plot twists; they are reified, an apotheosis of the moment. The secret of Garbo, says David Thomson, is that she was photographed. Rilke wrote that what a poet does is "praise." That, I think, is what the camera does to the things it photographs.
Even leftist filmmakers seem to understand this. Ken Loach's minimally lit and designed films make heroic the Peter Mullans, Crissy Rocks and Robert Carlyles of their stories. Jean-Luc Godard's interrogations of the language of cinema in the 1960s and 1970s were still about the glories of the faces of their actors. One of the few great filmmakers who could also write well about films, Pier Paolo Pasolini, said that cinema is "the sacred language of reality." For Pasolini, to film a face was to make it religious, like a Fra Angelico painting. If something inherent in cinema means that it praises, reifies, sanctifies, makes epic, then this means that what movies can't do very well is criticise in a rational way. They are temperamentally unable to be objective, to analyse a social situation, to go to the root of problems without finding the hero of the situation. In other words, they are not very good at being left wing.
The most famous right-wing filmmaker of them all was happiest when she sanctified. Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler confidante, inspired documentarist, photographer and nonagenarian snorkeller, made films such as Triumph of the Will, about the Nazi party rally in Nuremberg in 1934, and Olympiad, about the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. For Riefenstahl, the athletes and Hitler alike are heroes. They have superior souls and she films them as if they have superior souls. She is not interested in a Balzacian account of their real social lives. She isolates her characters and worships them with her camera. Here, then, is the uncomfortable truth about Thomson's ravishing film-making "that is not good enough and that is dangerous." Scorsese films De Niro, Coppola films Martin Sheen and Brando, Morrissey/Warhol film Delassandro, just as Riefenstahl filmed those athletes.
Is filmmaking then, in the very nature of its medium, inherently right-wing? The answer turns out to be a very un-Hollywood one. In its tendency to glorify, in the way it transcends, in its preference for emotion over reason, in how close it performs to the spirit of Heidegger (who died in the year that Taxi Driver was made), yes. It is.
