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EMANCIPATORY USES OF DRAMATURGY
CHAPTER TWELVE
INTRODUCTION: How to Evaluate Alienation and Authenticity in Dramaturgy.
There are three tests of dramaturgy and theatre which one can apply to gauge the degree to which such uses of make believe are emancipatory. In this paper I would like to present these tests and apply them to several forms of dramaturgical presentations.
Content The first test criterion which one may apply has to do
with the content of the dramatic event. One may say a
dramatic event is emancipatory if the play, film, novel, painting
or poem reflects upon the quality of social life, evaluates it
against some standard of collective and personal good, and offers,
as well, an alternative vision of social life.
There is an analysis of the emancipatory content of three well received movies below which will help flesh out this most important moment of liberation.
Medium A second test has to do with the originality and creativity of the staging of the event; new and creative forms of costuming, of set design, of scenic organization and of scenario development may have emancipatory moments. New ways to use color, line, form, texture, materials, or new ways to combine these provide a radical dimension in art and drama.
The theatre of Antony Lloyd Weber offers a rich lode of creative gold. Kats is one of the most imaginative plays ever to be staged in London or New York. In the New York version, an alley complete with the soft grays of dusk offered a stage upon which the cats could frolic and reflect on a cat's life. Whoever would think of doing a musical in the 80's about Evita and Che. Whoever would think to write a song about Argentina that would become an international hit. In the London staging, Starlight Express required a theatre be rebuilt as no other theatre had ever been built with train tracks running high into the balcony. The staging of Song and Dance in London was original with a full orchestra backstage yet visible as a woman sang of the vicissitudes of love. 'Tell Me on A Sunday, Please,' is one of the most touching acceptances of love lost to be found in a genre known for its melancholy.
One should note that creativity in this second
dimension without the first and third comprise a
false emancipation however original it might be.
Mummenschanz, a delightfully creative mime, magic, and puppet show has almost no emancipatory values at all still it is well worth the time and effort used to stage it. On their own terms, a vast possibility for surprise and delight, genius and insight is opened on the part of such artistic work. Most modern art and drama has this narrow, limited and depoliticized form of radicality and, as such, scarcely deserves the name, radical even though fully deserving of the larger term, art.
Expressionism, cubism, abstract art, realism surpassing reality, impressionism and other schools of art are best understood as a desperate effort to create something new, even if to absorb some of the surplus capital of the owning classes, to provide something of a portable treasury, to offer a way to acquire status outside of the traditional forms of status allocation or to break through the tiny parochial network of established art by artists and owners alike.
Mode of Production Thirdly, the mode of production and distribution are most important factors in a determination of the emancipatory potential of stage, cinema, television or radio drama.
Modes of production in which the artistic function is widely dispersed among workers, actors, authors, musicians, and editors; where the line between artists and audience is scarcely visible, where the art form is widely available apart from tests of class, status or power may be called emancipatory. This third variable, in combination with the first two above, interacts in a wide variety of ways to enhance emancipation. In some instances, content alone suffices to stimulate emancipatory action but to be fully emancipatory, theatre must merge with life and with the people who live it.
We can look at each test factor in detail but first a note on emancipatory knowledge in all its forms: science, art, prose and poetry, cinema, the healing arts as well as critical theory.
Emancipatory Knowledge Emancipatory knowledge judges all existing
social forms in terms of some coherent set
of values. For critical theory, these values include praxis,
community, democratic self-management, social justice and the
integrity of the natural and human environment. Other value
systems which emphasize property rights, individualism, capital
accumulation, competition and elitist forms of production in art,
music, science and theatre are not, intrinsically, emancipatory.
In the latter, emancipation does not extend to all persons but
those selected by chance, talent, or position. Central to all
questions of emancipation is a judgment about how broadly an
emancipatory critique is to be drawn.
In the critique of theatre which follows, I take the Marxist view that critique is in the service of humankind, including the material base for human life: the good earth and all the creatures bright and beautiful therein...rather than a privileged subset of it. There are several reasons for such a preference. First, it is difficult to separate the fate of one set of people from another more privileged set. Secondly, in macro-historical and macro- biological terms, the differences between people are trivial upon whatever variable one cares to score differences. Thirdly, the full humanity of people depends upon specific social conditions. If we wish to encourage the development of that humanity, we must not adopt a social philosophy or social practice which excludes persons from the material base or from the social processes by which one becomes human.
It was truly said by Donne that the death and degradation of any one tolls the death knell of us all. In degrading others, we degrade ourselves. Studies of guards and prisoners; of slaves and slavemasters; of authoritarian leaders and their sycophants; of passive wives and rigid husbands...all these bespeak the truth: self and society are twinborn. For weal or for woe, the mean- spirited things we do to others are registered as a mean spirit in the deep structures of our soul.
Then too, the carrying capacity of the earth is finite. Without wide ranging social justice in production and distribution, economics and politics become a smash and grab operation which reduces the possibilities of future generations. Each time we rip a ton of minerals from the good earth; each time we pour a ton of poison into the air; each time we drain a swamp or cut a forest, we do inestimable harm to all creatures large and small...and to the most dangerous creature of all...ourselves.
It is part of the human condition that each generation must consider the legacy it gets and the legacy it leaves for each successive generation in as much as each generation benefitted from that principle as it was observed by still earlier generations. In the soliptic generation that now rules everywhere, the vast treasury of invention and idea given freely to it is taken without thought of thanks. In this generation, the central existential question is how might I get more, faster, with less effort and keep more of it. How might I take more and share less with the people whose labor produced it.
Life is a seamless whole; human life is part of that whole.
A school of art criticism which severs itself from a comprehensive
approach to the human conditions constitutes itself as an exercise
in technical appraisal rather than one of social judgment. In this
respect, art criticism strips art of its sociology, politics,
economics and its history. Such a technicized art criticism has
all the merits of a well tended cemetery.
As flow the rivers to the sea
down from rocky rill or plain,
a thousand ages toiled for thee
and gave thee harvest of their pain.
The ancient toilers for thee wrought
chaos from primeval clay; and for thee sought
a thousand tools for thee to build
upon the harvest that now they yield.
Just as you, wise and strong,
to other ages, shall pass along.
And of their debt, they will rest,
if as yet, you make the same bequest.
Drama and Democracy There is an epistemological and philosophical point worth mentioning in any discussion of which tries to erase the boundaries between drama and real life; between actor and audience; between politics and pretend...in the interests of praxis.
The orthodox view of human alienation from the knowledge process is that objective reality exists and the human being is limited in his/her capacity to subjectively grasp objective truth. Alienation thus is found in and measured by the size of the gap between the objectively existing laws of nature and laws of society on the one hand and subjective human understanding of those objectively existing laws on the other.
In this model of alienated knowledge, science
is the solution to alienation while the
publication of scientific laws is the means by
which the knowledge process is socialized.
In the Marxist view, alienation and its solution are a bit more complex. Elsewhere in this collection of essays, I have listed a dozen or so varieties of emancipatory knowledge...all of these are pointed toward making possible the collective politics of change and renewal. Drama is radical in the third dimension when it offers one or more of these forms of knowledge about how to make the revolution.
Reality, especially social reality is variable and complex. Alienation is not separation between objective reality and subjec-
tive understanding. It is rather separation for the productive process by which truth is constituted. One knows accurately the meaning of work, family, church, or school by participating actively in the constitution of them. One knows, accurately, the laws of nature by actively working to appropriate nature. One knows, intimately, the laws of society by actively creating and changing them.
Any system of production which excludes people from producing their own realities also alienates people from the knowledge of those realities. Any way of staging drama which freezes people into a passive audience thereby alienates them from full understanding of the play, the movie or the game to which their time and attention is given.
If we accept the broader role of critique, then the structures of class privilege, of racial and ethnic oppression, of gender preference and of age discrimination are subject to critique in terms of the first set of values mentioned. Elitist forms of theatre tend to reproduce those forms of privilege.
Critical theatre examines the negativities of such social relationships and offers alternative visions of egalitarian relations in work, family, play and politics. Critical theatre satisfies the human interest in emancipatory knowledge by, in the first instance, making visible those negativities and opening up those possibilities.
Good radical art provides the social magic by which
people come to a theoretical understanding of
misery and oppression and, inspired by this
insight, act collectively to change social life.
More than radical content is necessary for human emancipation, however. Radical theatre must show how an oppressed population might get from one set of relationships to another. Emancipatory theatre offers a vision of life as it might be rather than as it must be.
Pretheoretical Theatre Pretheoretical theatre shows only the negativities of that which exists. Pretheoretical theatre offers one flight or refuge from the degradations of class, gender or racial oppression. Pretheoretical theatre glorifies the ugliness of power, privilege and exploitation.
Critical art in all its forms motivates, mobilizes,
transforms, evaluates those transformations and leads the way
toward further progress toward the human condition. It leads law
and politics science and economics; it leads religion and
revolution toward social justice. Radical art inspires its artists
and actors to unite drama and grace with the forms of social life.
It destroys the artificial boundaries between art and the kitchen;
art and the classroom; art and the workplace; art and the bedroom.
Radical art suffuses each moment of life; each trajectory of life;
each realm of life with its transcending beauty, grace, wit, joy
and wisdom. Radical art makes it good to be a student, a worker,
a lover or a cook.
Drama and Revolution Emancipatory theatre must have a theory
of social revolution implicit or explicit
in it. Who is going to make the revolution and how is it 1 to be
made. In many forms of theatre, justice triumphs and evil defeated
by impersonal agencies: history, chance, fate, God, or accident.
A theoretically informed theatre invests the revolutionary impulse
in people organized and informed by their own historically located
(and self-created) understanding of what may be done and what
should be done.
Certainly the most significant way in which a relationship to the mode of production is changed is in terms of the way in which radical theatre is related to the means of producing political culture. Ordinarily politics is produced within the narrow limits of institutional governance. Very often, when institutional politics serve the interests of a class, party or tribal elite, social movements arise to create an ad hoc politics. Street politics with its drama of anger and rebellion; with its signs, slogans, curses, rocks and martyrs all offer a revivifying politics.
The drama of street politics with its dances, marches, parades, balloons, flowers, and costumes mocking the oppressors all infuse politics with fun, humor, sarcasm, wit and surprise. In such moments, the artificial (and alienating) line between elite politics and collective art is erased. In the same fashion, the line between theatre and real life; between theatre and politics; between audience and actors vanishes. An authentically radical dramaturgy reunites the separated parts of life and society while it informs the political process.
Radical dramaturgy stimulates praxis broadly understood
as good theory oriented to collective interests.
The Braided Circle Theater in Colorado is an instance of radical dramaturgy. Comprised mostly of women, it offers theatre which asks audience to take the emancipatory message embodied in a play into community political activity. In a play about sexual violence, the players read stories from current news stories about violence done to women in that town. Players walk about reading excerpts from local papers or from local shelters for battered women.
The play dramatizes several points of policy to be taken by men and women from the theatre into city council, into county and state governance and into the home by which women and men can create more supportive and affirmative relationships. Resistance to gender oppressive is a central theme.
There is of course a radical dramaturgy in all three
dimensions oriented to the creation and recreation of the
structures of domination. The mass rallies in Germany during the
30's, the cinema of D. W. Griffith, the sexual violence in Alfred
Hitchcock, the ugly politics in Jimmy Swaggart religious revivals
as well as the anticommunist propaganda of Hollywood in the 50's
all tend to reinforce existing structure of class, race, ethnic or
gender privilege else produce new structures in which one elite
supplants another.
In order for dramaturgy to be emancipatory, it must
identify false politics and make visible those
authentically tied to the human project.
The human project is infinitely variable: there have been 3000 to 5000 cultures in the history of the world so far and certainly will be more. What does not vary widely however is the necessary dialectic between individual creativity and necessary repression; between the collective good and the energizing effect of personal autonomy; between generational sacrifice and generational enjoyment; between the natural world and social consumption; between the heritage of the past and the conditions of the future.
The role of critical dramaturgy is to explore these dialectics, weigh them and suggest alternative resolutions of the tension between contesting goods.. Those alternatives must be real dilemmas else theatre is merely propaganda and the dialectical process is aborted.
The central defect of pretheoretical theatre, poetry, prose and politics is that it leads to false politics. Theatre which focuses in on individual evil suggests that evil ends with the death (or salvation) of the individual. Poetry which suggests a group or a race is at the source of human distress diverts attention from social relationships. Religious prose which calls one toward personal salvation only while it accepts the structural evil of class and racial exploitation and leaves these larger evils intact. Justice after death is a thin comfort to those who suffer injustice in this world. While this life is but a small fragment of eternity, it may be the only portion of eternity that we have.
Drama and History The writing of emancipatory drama entails the
danger of reification. Whether a given social
form is oppressive or emancipatory varies in time and place. While
it is proper to assign an emancipatory role to this or that agent
in a given historical situation, it is improper to set that agent
as emancipatory for all time and all places.
The working class struggles of the thirties may have been progressive; by the sixties, it was clear that working class politics were reactionary. The liberative potential of science and technology appropriately may be celebrated in the Sherlock Holmes novels and movies, in the World War II movies or in any number of movies having to do with doctors and disease. But the negativities of science and technology are rightly condemned in the Frankenstein movies, in the Star War series or in the catastrophic movies of nuclear holocaust.
Violence and terror may be the correct political path to take in opposing villainy in Robin Hood movies, in anti-Nazi movies, or in movies about liberation in Algeria, Kenya or South Africa. But there are other politics suitable for revolutionary social change in other social formations. Marx and Engels, in The Manifesto, preferred the voting franchise, union organizing, tax policies, and land reform.
A given play or movie must always be judged and used historically; in terms of the special historically existing condition in a special time and place. To do otherwise is to act blindly--without knowledge--rather than upon it. What is good theory in one setting may well be bad theory used badly in another setting.
It is a structural characteristic...and a serious limitation of the written novel or play or cinema...that once written or filmed, history is frozen. Alternative endings, alternative interpretations, alternative internal dynamics are set as general form for all time.
While it is true, significantly true, that situations arise again and again in history rending some plays, novels, songs and movies of lasting value; while it is true that shadings of performance give a new and unexpected yet apt insight to such plays as Hamlet, Faust, or Bitter Rice, still our esteem and sense of propriety forbids any great change. One may always use the topics and themes from old plays in new plays but still the old plays remain as ideological tools which preempt history.
So...emancipatory drama must give us a vision of life as it is not; an understanding of the unnecessary limitations of life as it is; as well as a push to move us toward our human potential. This is the core of emancipatory knowledge. It leads toward change and renewal; it stands against power and privilege; it affirms our right to act collectively on values which transcend and yet resonate with our present interests as living human beings.
Commodity Art and Drama First, any art form so packaged and
so distributed such that it can be
appropriated by a private individual or corporation is not
emancipatory. Books, movies, cassettes and other media which are
copyright falsely assert private authorship of plays, dramas, and
tales.
The material base as well as the ideological base from which all communication derives is the collective product of countless generations of unknown authors, inventors, improvers or reusers. For one to claim ownership of a play or novel is as false as a private claim on a language or an alphabet, a printing press or a camera. These are social inventions which are the common heritage of humans as are the ideas contained in politics, religion, sexuality or economics. Ninety-nine percent plus of any product is in the common realm else it would be inexplicable and worthless.
What makes something worthwhile is that it speaks to the common need; to the general interest and in the common language. While the author deserves the resources to create art and drama, the right to exclude significant portions of society from using, sharing and enjoying the dramatic experience until a profit is extracted from each and every consumer too greatly magnifies the small contribution made and too greatly minimizes the collective portion of the created thing.
Art and Ethics Worthwhile art examines and illuminates the contradictions in love, marriage, politics, religion or play. Art worthy of the name gives dimension and dilemma to the events depicted or delineated. Such art becomes the seedbed of wisdom and insight. One dimensional art is mere propaganda however beautifully done; in the end it is boring or irrelevant.
Art and drama without dilemma; art or drama which portrays life only through the eyes of a class, elite or ethnic interest and tends to reproduce that interest at the expense of a more general, more human interest. Art in any format; painting, music, ballet, theatre, cinema, novel, poetry or lecture which does not give honest weight to other views, other interests, other hopes and other troubles is self serving opinion which loses its appeal as its client audience disappears from history. Those which survive create and are recreated by newly emerging social groupings as time goes by.
Three Flicks and a Play The most popular film among children
of any age in the English speaking
world is, most probably, the Wizard of Oz. Among adults inclined
to be romantic, Casablanca carries a continuing fascination. For
those who know theatre and its political uses, Cabaret is a
classic. Probably the least known of any play in America, at
least, is The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, a play by Bertolt
Brecht.
We will look at each of these films and the play in terms of the three dimensions of a critical dramaturgy set forth above. Being romantic, I will start with Casablanca, a town in North Africa under the control of Vichy France [the Nazi collaborators] and to which many French came for reasons set forth in the film.
Casablanca The continuing attraction in the content of Casablanca lies in the dilemma of the Ingrid Bergman character in choosing between two loves honestly held. There is a real dilemma, in social terms, in choosing between the Paul Henried character and the Bogart character. Both are admirable and both have human failings in their own way.
The Bergman character came by the love of each in honest ways. She has a valid social obligation and a valid personal attraction for both. She is not an evil woman for accepting the love of either and she would not be deemed dishonorable which ever love she chooses. That is an honest dilemma and not a situation in which illicit love can be condemned while social values are upheld. It is not propaganda but rather discourse which the film presents us.
The overdone and unmitigated evil of Nazism in the movie is not as universal as the themes of tyranny opposed and invincible power defeated. It is not the various petty defeats to which the Nazis are subject which have enduring appeal, rather these defeats resonate with the petty victories at work and in school in which the tyranny of boss or teacher is embarrassed with impunity. It is the satisfaction we draw from the frustration of arbitrary power which elicits our applause.
A more honest portrayal would have given the Nazi officers some human attributes and the Nazi cause some better grounding. After all millions did find such grounds and millions still do. It is propaganda--not enlightenment to draw such lines of unmitigated evil.
Casablanca is radical in the first dimension mentioned earlier. It offers a case for nontraditional sexuality. A married woman accepts love of a man outside of marriage and we approve. Another married woman offers herself to a venal policeman in order to obtain a needed visa in order that the husband may get to America and is saved by the Bogart character from this degradation- -the traditional sexual monopoly values are upheld.
Casablanca also offers a case for a more international view of politics. Against the isolationist politics of American pacifism, the film pushes for intervention at a time when sentiment for American involvement was problematic (the film was made in 1941 and released in 1942). And, in terms of content, the sympathetic treatment of Jews and the dignity permitted a Black pianist (Dooley Wilson) contribute to the human project. Only the Nazis were presented without human dimension.
As to the other two dimensions, Casablanca failed as radical art: it offers no great creativity in the use of the camera, lighting or casting. It did use song as effectively as any previous cinema: maybe more so. The closing scene in which Rick and the Captain walk away to their destiny was effective but not original...they strolled into the fog...toward an unknown fate. The camera rose above the two men so we could see them as but two small creatures caught up in a big, big war. The personal tragedy a bogart or bergman was reduced to its proper scale...just another incident in a savage convulsion of the world capitalist system.
Casablanca it was produced in the traditional commodity system with the usual stratified system of production and the usual commodity form of distribution. For all that, Casablanca has radical and transforming merit. Another picture, The Overlanders, made in Australia the same year was made with three professionals, eager amateurs, internment camp personnel and people off the street. It was radical in the third dimension but pure propaganda beautifully done in the first dimension.
The movie will continue to draw audience as long as love is lost, found again and as long as sacrifice and choice of love is difficult. Casablanca will facilitate renewal wherever and whenever the insolence of power is flaunted and good people stand against it since both speak to the universal needs for dignity and of commitment.
Cabaret Cabaret focuses upon quite different dilemmas and upon
quite different themes. In that movie, the central story
line is the changing role of theatre. As with all media, Cabaret
holds up a distorted mirror with which a society can see itself.
Critical dramaturgy requires that, however distorted the glass,
however darkly tinted, the medium must present both the
positivities and the negativities of the life it upon which it
reflects.
And, in the beginning, Cabaret does illuminate and mock the negativities of bourgeois mentality; of distorted sexuality; and of politics in pre-war Germany. As the months go by, the Cabaret loses its critical voice as a social critic and becomes a propaganda tool for Nazism. The Nazis cease being the target of emancipatory humor in the cabaret; jews and communists become the target as Nazi street thugs beat those who rebel and resist them.
Cabaret is thus a statement about the role of drama in
society and accepts that that role is problematic.
A subsidiary theme is the temptation and fall from grace of Brian, a young student. There is a faustian theme which we all remember in the deep structure of our morality. In this version, there is an Eve who tempts an Adam and a Lucifer who offers Adam the usual temptations of gold and sex.
Led into temptation by the Minelli character, Sally Bowles, the student succumbs to a variety of sexual pleasures and of social pleasures. The evil of such degradation is embodied by the charming and likeable Count--a vestige of the feudal aristocracy whose only valid social role is exploration of the far corners of human delight. In such a scenario, anyone who be tempted and must accept that they,too, would response to the beauty, charm, sensuality and sexuality of Sally Bowles and the Count. Thus a real dilemma is posed.
A third confounding theme of Cabaret is the dilemma of the Minelli character which must choose between the alienated role of a wife or the more lively and autonomous life in the demimonde of Berlin. She chooses life and sexuality. A Faustian bargain is made when she aborts the child fathered by Brian. She sells her child in order to live more fully. We can accept this even though in other circumstances, such a bargain speaks against our values.
Cabaret is the universal art of the universal artist. It demands that the artist--in the Minelli role and in the Joel Grey role--make a choice between the forces of life and the forces of death. All great artists must one time so choose.
Cabaret is radical in two of the three dimensions. In content, it explores the negativities of middle class morality and Nazi claims of superiority. It explores the positivities of that which is ordinarily viewed as negative. It offers an open and varied sexuality but not without the complexities and consequences of such sexuality. Sally does get pregnant; the Count does walk away and cheapens Sally and Brian by giving them money--but the money is helpful and that is, in part, why it is given.
The Emcee part played by Joel Grey warrants special mention. At a different level, Grey plays the Luciferian part...he welcomes one into the world of magic and make believe, sexual fantasy and tawdry love, overweening wealth and perversions of power...Wilkommen, bienvenue, welcome Fremde, etranger, stranger. And we all are strangers to the view of society and sexuality found mirrored, found created in the Kit Kat klub of one of the most decadent cities in the world...Berlin.
As he offers tarts and slatterns to the bourgeois men who frequent the club, he purrs that each one is a virgin bringing lewd laughter from the customers who have phones on their tables with which to bid the sexual services of well worn women.
With his white, clown face, his formal attire, his plastered down hair and his slurring, burring voice, Joel Grey offers each client...and then Brian...knowledge of the forbidden. His duet with Minelli on money is definitive as a critique of capitalism and bourgeois morality; if it exists, I can buy it, if it doesn't exist, I will manufacture it.
In that role, Grey embodies the fool and the clown in history who have always had a special license to ridicule and deflate kings and popes. That character, in its negativity, is a lucifer; in its positivity, a Prometheus. Both bring light; both shed light. Both reveal that which is unknown and maybe unknowable. Both are dangers to that which exists since they both show that which is not supposed to exist. In each their own way, both often are admirable; both are always interesting.
Cabaret is also an exercise in creative cinematography and editing and thus satisfies the second element of a truly radical theatre. Directed by Bob Fosse, it uses the distorted mirrors in The Cabaret to reflect the distorted sexuality and politics in bourgeois and Nazi Germany. It uses song and dance to mount a savage parody on both. "Money Makes The World Go Around" is a classic critique of bourgeois values comparable in its own way to Shakespeare's soliloquy on Gold in Timon of Athens.
But Cabaret is produced and distributed as a profit-making commodity. Actors and audiences are forever separated. There is no discussion permitted or encouraged by members of the audience among themselves. They come as isolated pairs and singles, watch as insulated individuals and depart as lonely and as soliptic as did they arrive. It is simply a mass produced and distributed commodity. It fails in the third and most important measure of emancipation: people do not leave the theatre, take the liberating content with them, infuse it in creative and prosocial ways at work, church, or classroom.
Instead, they are amused for a moment; distracted for a minute; disturbed for an hour; then they go home to the dark corners of a drab, debilitating life...the light goes out. Without connection to the other side of make-believe, Cabaret is little more than divertissment.
Off to see the Wizard Perhaps the most enduring film is the Wizard of Oz. It has been shown on television each March for more than 25 years. The book was written by L. Frank Baum and published in Chicago in time for Christmas season in 1899. Baum was a reporter who had lived among farmers in the Dakotas and now watched the workers in Chicago set upon by their enemies. He fashioned the story for the children of the neighborhood and told it for years before setting pen to paper.
Set in the form of a child's tale and painted in bright colors, the story identifies four universal needs and gives them flesh and soul in the four main characters of the story: for kinship and solidarity there is the Dorothy part; for love and compassion there is the role of the Tinman; for brains, for competence and praxis, the part of the Strawman. and for courage, properly used, there is a very unCowardly Lion.
A very complex and subtle story, the Wizard embodies class struggle (the Wicked Witch from the East represents finance capital while the Strawman stands for all powerless farmers as the Tinman stands for all alienated workers) in which a revolution (the tornado) overturns the state (the farmhouse) and destroys the enemy of worker and farmers (the Wicked Witch) by crushing her.
In the book if not in the movie, Baum offered the populist theme of gold against silver in his imagery of the Yellow Brick Road and the Silver Slippers (not Ruby). This theme reiterates the class struggle motif: hard money, high interest vs. easy money, low interest money. [In these days we recognize this theme in demand-side vs. supply side economics]. Only those with silver can safely negotiate the yellow brick road which deteriorates as one travels it--an allusion to the recurrent fiscal crises of capitalism.
There is, too, the theme of alienated power in the form of the Wizard in the Emerald City. The Emerald City stands for Washington, D.C. [where green is the color of power] while the Wizard stands for any humbug of a politician who can give people only what they already have.
In the case of the Strawman, long before he met the Wizard, he already had used his brain to save the little troupe on several of their adventures; in the case of the Tinman, he had already wept for all humanity when he wept for the ants upon which he stepped; he had felt anger on behalf of the Mouse Queen such that he slew the wildcat chasing her. The Cowardly Lion had already stood bravely against the Kalidahs and other assorted monsters met on their journey. Dorothy, too, had found family and friend on the journey as must we all.
Even the Hollywood distortions, omissions, and simplifications would not destroy the universal and particular interests embodied in the play. Taken as a whole, the "Wizard" recapitulates the life of a person who grows from innocence and passivity toward knowledge and praxis. The quests in life are for brains, love, courage, and collective struggle.
In the play, Dorothy is told by the Wizard she must destroy the Wicked Witch from the West. She says "I really don't want to kill anyone, but if I must, I must." She comes far from the little girl in Kansas who stands innocently in the grey and grim life of rural docility. She becomes a significant actress in the drama of life. She leads, she understands, she acts, and she triumphs.
And in the cinema as in the story, her life is transformed from the monochrome shades of gray to the Kodachrome colors of Oz through struggle and sacrifice. The original story held many adventures each of which posed a problem common to humanity and each episode set forth a solution embodying brains, courage, love and community in one combination or the other. The Mouse Queen, the China people, the Hammerheads, the poppy field, the Dark Forest, the Great Ditches as well as the Wide River all posed problems which could be solved only by each of the characters acting collectively to surmount the obstacles posed.
Once it is properly interpreted; once it is properly located in the history of class struggle in the 1880's and 1890's, the rich and varied content of the story is most emancipatory. At some level in American political life, the story continues to work toward populist politics in the deep structures of public opinion.
George Bush can hire Madison Avenue; he can use $50 millions to mystify voters for a few weeks, but after the election and after inauguration, those populist politics return to haunt and to discredit Bush and Bushian characters...humbugs who promise the people; who tempt them to a faustian sale but who don't and can't deliver within the logics of class and gender and racial politics.
The movie is also radical in terms of the creative use of the medium. The switch from black and white film in the movie before the tornado to color after the house landed recapitulates the qualitative change in life before and after progressive social change. The use of midgets to encompass the idea of alienated workers made small by the oppression of the Wicked Witch from the East is a stroke of genius. And so is the use of the Strawman to represent the brainless farmers who fail to vote for William Jennings Bryan and for populist politics.
The Tinman, under the spell of the same Witch, is an apt embodiment of the factory worker chained to and made machinelike. The yellow brick road parodies the Gold standard and the silver slippers liberate one economically by allowing one to travel safely, through dangerous places. The songs in the movie added enormously to the story line of the book. Although Samuel Goldwyn ordered the deletion of the Rainbow song, it was retained and captures the promise of a better life sometime after the revolution.
Hollywood managed to divest the story of its socialist content by two devices: first, there was the introduction of amnesia: Dorothy was presented as dreaming while in a coma after hitting her head...not so in the book. In the book, Dorothy finds she can really go home if she has silver slippers, i.e., a good relationship to the means of production. As any woman can tell you, a job brings one more respect from husbands and fathers than does make up and coy flirting.
The second change made by Hollywood involved the transformation of the winged monkeys into Cossacks marching in lock step into the fortress of the Witch to the tune of the Volga Boatman. The monkeys were not Russians in the book, they were anthropoids made captive by the theft of a Golden Cap. Whoever who the cap could demand three wishes from the winged troupe. Such an analysis resonates with the alienation of students who are held hostage by the golden cap of knowledge...and who must give their schoolmasters three wishes before being freed to disport themselves as full human beings. Very subtle is Baum sometimes.
The Wizard is distinctly bourgeois in its mode of production. The actors were hired, paid, then discarded except for those who had some fiscal potential at the box office. The only relationship most of us have is as passive viewers. That role is changed, of course, the moment we explain to our children, our students and our friends how to interpret the movie.
It is possible for Blacks to appropriate the story line to their own theoretical understanding of racism as was the case in The Wiz. It is possible for each and all to sing the song "If I Only Had A Brain" and then to get one. It is possible for all of us to make a journey of discovery in which we realize our own powers to think, to love, and to be brave. In this fashion is the third dimension of radical art realized. After all, we need not remain midgets, morons, cowards or cold to the human project.
The Wizard of Oz belongs to a genre of political fairy tales in which oppressors are transformed into dangerous animals or forces of nature while the forces of life are embodied by small but courageous animals. They have in common the ability to run an endsweep around censors and ideologies in the critical endeavor. In Gulliver's Travels, a normal sized person was immobilized by a tribe of small minded persons...and in one scene, Gulliver puts out the fire [read scandal] in the Queen's bedroom by directing a large stream of urine through her window...a nice commentary on the English Crown made safe be encoding it in a child's tale. The world of make believe and just pretend is a good place to hide in the face of tyranny.
Each of the three dramas discussed above represent emancipatory forms of theatre and cinema in one or more of the tests one might use. They speak a language understood across ages and across cultures. The content of all three films resonates with the lived difficulties of each viewer. There are the problematics of life made visible.
There are honest dilemmas posed--especially in Casablanca and in Cabaret. The Wizard of Oz is less problematic except in the scene where the Wizard validates each character by certifying as to their brains, courage and heart. In that instance, the politician is not an unmitigated fraud. There are alternatives posed; some realistic and some utopian. Other forms of politics, of love, of sexuality, of economics and of social roles are shown to be worthy of consideration. The thrust of each movie is toward collective praxis founded upon authentic human values.
All three movies are creative in staging, in the use of props, costumes, cinematographic devices, casting, and events. The change from black and white film to color film in the Oz film is particularly apt. The use of music in all three films was memorable. The "Rainbow" song in Oz; the two songs in Casablanca, "As Time Goes By," and the counterpoint singing of the "Marseilles" were soul stirring. And in Cabaret, who can forget the Money duet by Grey and Minelli or the young German lad singing "Tomorrow the World."
On the third test, the mode of production variable then, all three fail. All three end up simply as commodity produced by an elite and distributed in mass format by commercial organizations for private profit. "South Pacific," "Oklahoma," "The Music Man" and "Porgy" can be appropriated by high school students, community acting troupes, by amateur theatrical ensembles or by church groups to their own purposes and apply their own talents. Of the three above, we are left only with snatches of songs and fragments of dialogue to appropriate to our own purpose. I expect every male over forty has said, at one time or another to a beautiful lady, "Here's looking at you, sweetheart." I have...several times.
As I read Marx, I understood my dreams.
I discovered that I had not written
a whole collection of Marxist Dramas
without knowing it;
But that Marx was the only audience
I had come across for the dramas.
A man of his interests
would have been interested in them;
Not because they are brilliant,
But because he was....
...Bertolt Brecht
The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. This play contains vintage
dramaturgy a la Brecht.
There were three reinforcing dramas going on at the same time in
the production I saw at Central Michigan University theatre. First
there was the apparent play in which some Chicago gangsters used
bribes and violence to control the cauliflower market there...and
then expanded to Cicero. The head gangster was Arturo Ui. Upon
the back of this thin plot, there was superimposed a heavy handed
critique of the rise of Adolph Hitler. Some of the characters had
names which echoed those of Hitler's assistant dictators: the
notorious Rhoemer became Roma in the play and met a similar death
betrayed by Hitler/Ui.
Upon both and within both plays within plays was a critique of capitalism [the cauliflower trust/Prussian Junkers] as a way of life.
Arturo Ui is emancipatory in all three dimensions. It is a very creative play in its content critiquing the Cauliflower Trust of Greater Chicago...and by extension, all monopolies. It is one of the few plays which do not have a hero or heroine into whose persona we may be inserted...thus the play does not set up a false politics within its cast with which to deflect understanding.
The play is also creative...very creative in staging. The Central Michigan University Theatre presentation used slides and music from the Nazi era to make the connection more closely to the actors and the events set in Chicago in the 20's. The semiotics of the play say that the Nazis are a bunch of gangsters...not very radical given the fact that the Allies won the war, however at the time it was radical to say such things.
The play is designed to be radical in the third dimension as well...as are all of Brecht plays. In Arturo Ui, a woman enters from the last row of seats in the audience and screams for someone to help. Her plea is directed to the audience; the audience is to move out of make-believe and help defeat fascism as they leave the play. At CMU, of course, the plea fell on deaf ears...even if the members of the audience knew how to understand what was transpiring, they would not know how and what to do given the genteel techno-fascism of the dramaturgical society.
All of Brechtian play try to erase the boundary between audience and actor; between play and real life; between history and philosophy. As such, Bertolt Brecht is, truly, a radical playwright in the best sense of the word.
Songs of Renewal and Remembrance Such songs as in Cabaret or Casablanca reunite us with our sexuality and our humanity. Songs from South Pacific, Porgy and Bess, and Riverboat reunite us with our Black, Yellow and Brown brothers and sisters. Songs such as "Oklahoma!," "America, The Beautiful" and "This Land Is My Land" reunite us with soil and geography.
Some songs tend to alienate. Songs of patriotism, of war, of clan and class, of class snobbery and possessive nationalism, of exclusive religiosity and racial superiority divide us and separate us from common humanity. The same is true of art, science, cinema and prose. However beautiful in other terms such art is ugly in human terms. The "Battle Hymn" adopted as the National Anthem of the United States in March, 1931 is one of the ugliest songs penned or sung. "My Country, Tis Of Thee" or "America, The Beautiful" are superior in every respect.
Living Theatre There are plays in which the false line between actors and audience is obliterated; in which the audience stands and sings, has lines to say, and takes the action out of the theatre and into the street. Living theatre, street theatre, guerrilla theatre and some working class plays do so. The British play, "Can't Pay, Won't Pay" sets shoplifting as a social practice for workers disemployed by advanced monopoly capital.
The art of Christos involves whole communities and whole states in draping plastic on building screens. Christmas pageants involve whole congregations. Sports events such as marathons and walkathons involve thousands. Art, drama, music, and dance need not be organized in a mass format with a set of stars, a set of owners, and a set of passive customers. This is not the natural or the only possible mode of production in any art form. It is special to profit and to control purposes and, as such, constitutes an alienating knowledge process. There are more emancipatory forms of theatre, film, science and television. They exist; they can be expanded.
