Trumbo: Hollywood’s Anti-Communist Tribute to Itself
February 2, 2016
Trumbo: Hollywood’s Anti-Communist Tribute to Itself
by Eric Mann
Trumbo, produced and written by John McNamara and Bruce Cook and starring Bryan Cranston, is billed as a courageous defense of Dalton Trumbo, a well-meaning communist writer. According to the film, Trumbo was little more than a courageous democrat who was Black-listed by Hollywood, went to prison, spent a decade in screenplay exile, and triumphantly returned through his own true grit and talent—as the good guys in Hollywood, Kirk Douglas and Otto Preminger, finally got him re-instated. His life is portrayed as a story of how truth, justice, and the American way win out over narrow mindedness and knee jerk anti-communism. It vilifies and caricatures those like Senator Joseph McCarthy, gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, actor John Wayne, and the heads of the Hollywood studios as those who sullied our wonderful first amendment. It’s enough to make you sing America the Beautiful and sign up for the U.S. army on the way out of the theater.
Not surprisingly, we can’t expect Hollywood to tell the true story of Dalton Trumbo the radical communist or to expose capitalism or itself. It does not have the courage to present U.S. communists in any of their toughminded, courageous splendor—as the leaders of the fight against fascism, “the Party of the Negro,” the driving force for trade unionism, the defenders of the foreign born, the party that challenged the Democrats, the passionate friends and defenders of the Soviet Union, the true victors of World War II, and the best and the brightest of their generation.
There is a pathetic scene in which Trumbo’s daughter asks him, “Dad are you a communist?” He answers, “Would you share your sandwich with someone who did not have one?” to which she dutifully replies, “Of course” and he answers, “So that makes you a communist too.” If only communists were people who just wanted to share their sandwiches the entire witch hunt against them would truly be bizarre and unjust. But what if he said, “Honey, if you want to share your sandwich, seize the means of production, and smash the capitalist state yes, that would make you a communist.”
After all, do we really expect Hollywood to urge people to become communists or to challenge the Democratic Party and capitalism itself? Hell no, they want to re-package the fight against the Hollywood Blacklist as a feel-good story that would be better run on the Hallmark Channel. A film the presents the real Dalton Trumbo and other hard-assed communist writers like Richard Wright, Howard Fast, Langston Hughes as socialist revolutionaries who had great influence on their fellow travelers, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, and many others is crying out to be made.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/02/trumbo-hollywoods-anti-communist-tribute-to-itself/
