Populism

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Populism

THE MYTH OF POPULISM
THE ECONOMY OF POPULISM
CAPRA AND POPULISM
FURTHER READING

In the context of film studies, discussions of Populism tend to downplay the history of the People's Party of the United States, whose organizers themselves helped coin the adjective "Populist" from the Latin populus in seeking a less unwieldy journalistic handle. Rather, film critics emphasize a more generally majoritarian sensibility ("The Folklore of Populism," "The Fantasy of Goodwill") typically associated with the New Deal-era films of Frank Capra (1897–1991), especially the "Populist Trilogy" of Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), and Meet John Doe (1941).

Apart from the Capra-Populism conflation, the only sustained tradition of linking the Populist Party with film involves Victor Fleming's 1939 film version of L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, though the argument that Dorothy's silver shoes refer allegorically to the "Free Silver" platform plank dear to mining state Populists is undercut in The Wizard of Oz by the shift from silver to ruby slippers. Still, it is hard to deny the New Deal resonances of the MGM Wizard's FDR-like pronouncements about the dynamics of courage in the face of soul-daunting circumstances. (By contrast, some see Baum's novel as anti -Populist, with the Wicked Witch of the West standing for "capital-P" Populism, an equation made plausible by the prominence of female orators among Populism's organizers and advocates.)

THE MYTH OF POPULISM

To discuss populism as myth usually means attending to its retrogressive "Agrarian Myth" elements. From the internationalist perspective of classical Marxism, populism is simply the agrarian myth in action—in venues as disparate as Russia, India, and Latin America—and is inherently reactionary for naturalizing "peasantness" as definitive of a "national" or "ethnic" essence. The American derivation of this small-p populism typically sees the Populist Party as a single episode of a much larger political saga pitting Hamiltonian finance capitalists against Jeffersonian yeoman farmers. Nature, in this picture, is pastoral, Edenic, so that rural hardship is chiefly attributed to conspiratorial elites—bankers, rail-road executives, intellectuals—and the urban political machines they control. An obviously influential instance of this agrarian resentment is D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915), where the specter of an alien political regime disempowering a native rural aristocracy leads to the birth of the Ku Klux Klan.

Two literary movements or genres are often invoked in charting the populist conflict between rural and urban interests: the "cracker-box" philosopher-humorist tradition stretching from Seba Smith (1792–1868) through Mark Twain (1835–1910) to Will Rogers (1879–1935), and the middle-brow and middle class, mostly magazine fiction of the 1920s and 1930s (Clarence Budington Kelland, Damon Runyon, Rose Wilder Lane, Joel Chandler Harris, Irvin S. Cobb). Capra's Mr. Deeds Goes to Town combines both strains, in that Gary Cooper's Longfellow Deeds is a common-sense Yankee sage who writes greeting card verse and derives from a story by Kelland.

Scholarship since the 1990s on Will Rogers and Capra alike gives reasons for doubting the strict equation of film populism and political reaction, though Capra's Lost Horizon (1937) has been seen as epitomizing the agrarian desire to eschew the modern "rat race" in favor of an orientalist "Shangri-La"-cum-"chicken ranch." Indeed, some writers have linked the geography of Capra's "Valley of the Blue Moon" Himalayan utopia to Leni Riefenstahl's proto-fascist "Mountain" films (for example, The Blue Light [1932]), as exhibiting the more atavistic strain of the Agrarian Myth. And there is a long list of more natively "American" films in which a near-link of populism and fascism is suggested, including Capra's Meet John Doe and All the King's Men (Robert Rossen, 1949).

THE ECONOMY OF POPULISM

To emphasize the sins of populism—its nativism, its temptation to anti-Semitism in deploring the power of the "money interests" and intellectuals—displaces to the point of denying the economic conditions that gave rise to the Populist Party. After the Civil War, increased production of grains and silver drove commodity prices down and made it increasingly difficult for tenant farmers to make loan payments. In response, self-help farmers' cooperatives advocated (among other things) government control of railroads and a graduated income tax.

Two Hollywood genres depict economic issues relevant to Populism, both associated chiefly with the American 1930s. One is the western, in which banks and railroads and land disputes—many of them historically contemporary with the rise of Populism—come under repeated scrutiny. Though scholarship of the early twenty-first century on 1930s B-westerns points to the conflation of nineteenth- and twentieth-century time cues (cow ponies, motor cars) as confirming the link between the economics of Populism and those of the "Popular Front" New Deal, the best known Populist western is John Ford's Stagecoach (1939), wherein a well-fed frontier banker absconds with a recently received payroll and spouts Hooverite slogans ("The government must not interfere with business") while complaining about bank examiners to his fellow passengers.

Another western often associated with Populism is Jesse James (Henry King, 1939); what sets Jesse on the path to outlawry is the railroad's strong-arm attempt to take over the family farm, resulting in his mother's death, which Jesse repays by sticking up the railroad, and a bank or two for good measure. Later westerns evoking the rural crises that led to the farmers' revolt of the 1880s and 1890s include Shane (George Stevens, 1953) and Heaven's Gate (Michael Cimino, 1980). A resonant instance of this tradition is McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman, 1971), in which William Devane's politically ambitious lawyer invokes William Jennings Bryan, the Populist (and Democratic) Party's 1896 presidential candidate, by way of encouraging McCabe (Warren Beatty) to stand fast against Wild-West corporate thuggery ("McCabe strikes a blow for the little man").

A second strain of movie Populism linked to the 1930s involves films that treat Depression-era agricultural dilemmas directly. Our Daily Bread (King Vidor, 1934) literally depicts an agricultural cooperative, as a city couple organizes other down-and-outs to help work the land they are (effectively) tenanting. Mr. Deeds Goes to Town features a whole army of dispossessed farmers, who see Longfellow's homestead giveaway scheme as their last chance. The "Kansas" portions of The Wizard of Oz evoke Depression-era agricultural anxieties. Ford's Tobacco Road (1941) depicts an almost surreal clan of Georgia farmers who are saved from eviction when the cash-strapped landlord himself pays the banker to let them stay for one more crop. The Southerner (Jean Renoir, 1945) similarly delineates the plight of field hands who turn to tenant farming to improve their lot.

Pride of place in this tradition obviously goes to Ford's The Grapes of Wrath (1940), one of Hollywood's most radical examinations of the kind of agricultural tragedy—narratively the result of "dust bowl" weather but visually the fault of a bank and its Eisensteinian bulldozer—that drove farmers in the 1880s and 1890s to organize. The tradition continues in later films—Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967) and Thieves Like Us (Robert Altman, 1974)—where Depression-era outlawry is sympathetically linked to economic hardship and dispossession. And the agricultural iconography on view in Our Daily Bread is repeated in "Farm Crisis" movies of the 1980s, Country (Richard Pearce, 1984), The River (Mark Rydell, 1984), and Places in the Heart (Robert Benton, 1984), the last of which is also set in the 1930s.

CAPRA AND POPULISM

The equation of Capra and Populism is perennial but distorting. The most direct link involves Meet John Doe, where the montage of the growth of the John Doe clubs emphasizes—via maps and musical cues—the South and the Midwest, regions where Populism was most influential, thus lending chilling credibility to the "iron hand" third party presidential ambitions of media tycoon D. B. Norton (Edward Arnold). In view of Norton's ersatz Populism, it should be remembered that the "pastoral" is itself an urban genre or fantasy. Deeds finds his farmers in New York City, after all, and it is only in Washington, D.C. that Jefferson Smith finds his mature populist voice.

That aside, Capra's "populism" has less to do with the Populist Party than with the "American Dream" version of the Agrarian Myth and its anxious, highly charged belief in the benevolence of Nature and of human nature. To the extent that "Capraesque" and "populist" are synonymous post-Capra, the Capra legacy involves a volatile combination of cosmic benevolence and go-for-broke political idealism.

The political strain is evident in the "neo-Capra" movies of the Clinton era—Hero (Stephen Frears, 1992), The Distinguished Gentleman (Jonathan Lynn, 1992), Dave (Ivan Reitman, 1993), The Hudsucker Proxy (Joel and Ethan Coen, 1994), The American President (Rob Reiner, 1995), and Bulworth (Warren Beatty, 1998)—which self-consciously appropriate narrative situations and democratic iconography from Capra's "Populist Trilogy," though rarely with as great a sense of consequence as Capra and his writers (chiefly Robert Riskin [1897–1955]) derived from their circumstances.

The "cosmic benevolence" feature, obviously, derives from the guardian angel framework of It's a Wonderful Life (1946). Though Capra's was not the first 1940s film to employ an angelic guardian or mentor—Here Comes Mr. Jordon (Alexander Hall, 1941) and A Guy Named Joe (Victor Fleming, 1943) come to mind, each of which was eventually remade, the former by Warren Beatty and Buck Henry as Heaven Can Wait (1978), the latter by Steven Spielberg as Always (1989)—it is probable that the "fantasy of goodwill" phrase stuck to Capra because only heavenly intervention could save James Stewart's George Bailey from himself and also because such narrational sleight-of-hand, for which Wonderful Life's "heavenly projection room" conceit is so wonderfully apt, emphatically confirms the sense in which all of Capra's political morality fables require breathlessly miraculous conversions to arrive at their variously problematic conclusions.

The subjunctive mode of It's a Wonderful Life, in which a given life is depicted as being haunted or redeemed by an alternative existence, is also basic to Capra's political fables—in each his populist hero is effectively kidnapped from his ordinary life into some other one—and the dreamlike aura, always on the edge between nightmare and wish fulfillment, rarely dissipates. Hence the frequency with which "time travel" fables like Peggy Sue Got Married (Francis Ford Coppola, 1986) or Field of Dreams (Phil Alden Robinson, 1989) are described as "Capraesque," and the appellation can as readily be applied to "ghost stories" like Ghost (Jerry Zucker, 1990) or The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan, 1999), or to sci-fi films like Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis, 1985) or Contact (Robert Zemeckis, 1997), or to The Majestic (Frank Darabont, 2001), where cinema is depicted as a source of individual and communal, even political, renewal after a period of personal and cultural amnesia.

It has been claimed that cinema's photographic capacity to "naturalize" fantasy marks the medium itself as "populist" in the regressive sense. It is equally as true that cinema's capacity to haunt our present life with a picture of another world that seems uncannily like our own yet just beyond reach marks it as "populist" in the best sense, as appealing to the better angels of our nature. An American Dream, indeed.

SEE ALSO Great Depression