PLAYS ITSELF
(2003, Thom Andersen)
For 41 years "A Sympathetic Worker," Roland Barthes' critique of Kazan's ON THE WATERFRONT (1954), was excised from all English-language editions of his Mythologies (1957). The article only became available in 2013 as part of a new translation by Richard Howard called Mythologies 'The Complete Edition' (Hill and Wang), as if it were marginalia for "completists."
The omission of "A Sympathetic Worker" from all prior English editions of Mythologies is likely far from accident (and continues to be: Richard Brody's review in The New Yorker of the 'Complete Edition' maintains its absence). But, was "a rhetorically perfect piece of Marxist and Brechtian demystification," as the late Philip Watts called "A Sympathetic Worker," something dangerous to anyone? With optimism, I'd like to think it could've been, were it understood as our proper forewarning about the mystifications to come, were it used as an effective tool against the overexposures of the next generation of American cinema's hegemons, i.e. the New Hollywoods influenced by Kazan: Method acting, the furthering of the economic domination of the Star system through it, faux "direct cinema," Paul Schrader, endless individualist redemption themes, American capitalism as eternal, "new Christs," Scorsese, Weinstein, etc. etc. In short, there were those who worshipped ON THE WATERFRONT, who duplicated and furthered its slavish naturalism and new outsider icons––they would be understood as blatantly reactionary here.
For the Barthes of the 1950s, film criticism and Marxism were still newlyweds on honeymoon. This is suddenly clear in Roland Barthes' Cinema by Phillip Watts, from 2016, an essential film book containing roughly nine previously untranslated articles (with commentary by Watts) of a combative, didactic Barthes tending to the cinema of his day and its problems: Cinemascope, Guitry's ROYAL AFFAIRS IN VERSAILLES, Chabrol's LE BEAU SERGE, new Leftist criticism (published in Positif), reaction, etc.
Watts quietly footnotes essentially the same statement that Orson Welles used loudly, definitively, and irrevocably to condemn Kazan in front of a large audience at the Cinémathèque française in 1981, words from Kazan's own autobiography:
'When Brando at the end yells at Lee Cobb, the mob boss, "I'm glad what I done—you hear me?—glad what I done!" that was me saying, with identical heat, that I was glad I'd testified as I had... So when critics say that I put my story and my feelings on the screen, to justify my informing (to the House Un-American Activities Committee), they are right.'"
"A Sympathetic Worker" was originally published in 1955 in Les Lettres nouvelles under the title "Comment démystifier" ("How to Demystify") and was re-titled by Barthes for Mythologies.
Important: Throughout the original essay Barthes misspells Kazan as "Cazan."
—AR.
A SYMPATHETIC WORKER
by Roland Barthes
Cazan's film ON THE WATERFRONT is a good example of mystification. It concerns, as you doubtless know, a handsome, indolent, slightly brutal longshoreman (Marlon Brando), whose consciousness is gradually awakened to Love and to the Church (in the form of a shock priest, Spellman style). Since this awakening coincides with the elimination of a fraudulent and abusive union and appears to involve the longshoremen in resisting their exploiters, some viewers have supposed we've been shown a courageous film, a "leftist" film determined to reveal the worker's problem to the American public.
Actually, we are dealing once again with that truth vaccine whose very modern mechanism I have indicated apropos of other American films: a small gang of mobsters is made to symbolize the entire body of employers, and once this minor disorder is acknowledged and dealt with like a trivial and disgraceful pustule, the real problem is evaded, is never even named, and is thereby exorcised.
Yet it is sufficient to describe objectively the "roles" in Cazan's film to establish its mystifying power beyond a doubt: the proletariat here is constituted by a group of weaklings submitting to a servitude they clearly recognize but lack the courage to shake off; the (capitalist) State is identical with absolute Justice and is the only possible recourse against the crime of exploitation: if the worker can make contact with the State (for instance, by communicating with the police and its investigative agencies), he is saved. As for the Church, in its phony modernist guise, it is merely a mediating power between the worker's constitutive poverty and the boss State's paternal power. Ultimately, moreover, this minor irritation of justice and conscience is soon resolved in the grand stability of a beneficent order, in which the workers resume their labor, the bosses fold their arms, and the priests bless both sides in their manifestly just functions.
It is the ending, however, which betrays the film, at the very moment when many supposed Cazan had cunningly insinuated his progressivism: in the very last sequence we see Brando, by a superhuman effort, managing to present himself as a conscientious good worker to the boss waiting to meet with him. Now this boss is obviously a caricature, and the audience murmurs: See how Cazan has managed to ridicule the capitalists.
Here or nowhere is the occasion to apply the demystification method proposed by Brecht and to examine the consequences of the attachment we feel for the film's main character. It is obvious that Brando is our positive hero to whom, despite his faults, the public gives its heart, according to that participation phenomenon without which, in general, we are reluctant to consider any entertainment possible. When this hero, all the greater for having rediscovered his conscience and his courage, exhausted, injured, yet still tenacious, heads for the boss who will give him work, our communion knows no bounds, we identify ourselves totally and unhesitatingly with this new Christ and participate unreservedly in his Calvary. Yet Brando's painful Assumption actually conduces to the passive acknowledgment of the eternal boss: what is orchestrated for us here, despite all the caricatures, is the restoration of order; with Brando, with the longshoremen with all the workers of America, we put ourselves, with a sense of victory and relief, back in the boss's hands which it serves no further purpose to portray as tainted: we have long since been snared in a fatal communion with this longshoreman who discovers a sense of social justice only to bestow it as a homage to American capital.
As we see, it is the participational nature of this scene which objectively makes it an episode of mystification. Trained to love Brando from the start, we can no longer at any point criticize him or even admit we are conscious of his objective stupidity. Now it is precisely against the danger of such mechanisms that Brecht proposed his method of alienation. Brecht would have asked Brando to show his naiveté, to make us understand that despite all the sympathy we may feel for his misfortunes, it is still more important that we see their causes and their remedies. We can sum up Cazan's mistake by saying that what should have been judged was much less the capitalist than Brando himself. For there is much more to expect from the rebellion of victims than from the caricature of their executioners.
*
The Hollywood movie industry had become such a maze of interlocked labor unions that jurisdictional disputes were inevitable. In September, 1946, a jurisdictional dispute led to one of the most violent strikes in West Coast history. Pickets numbered in the hundreds and frequently engaged in battles with the police. During one of the bitterest of these, cars were overturned and the officer, above, wounded. A fellow deputy sheriff held the mob at gun point while rescuers removed the injured man. –– U.S. Camera, 1947. Photo: Frank Filan.
