On Your Marx

Original online film essay, 3/10/99

I just saw East Side Story last week on Cinemax. Yes, the popular documentary from last year’s Seattle International Film Festival, which contrasts the untenable fantasy of filmed musical comedy vs. the equally untenable fantasy of the promised socialist future utopia, was shown on a channel dedicated 24/7 to the dissemination of Hollywood’s state-propaganda messages (without those pesky interruptions for Madison Avenue’s rival propaganda).

Despite the proven worldwide popularity of Hollywood musicals (and the examples from France and India of how the musical format could be adapted for Eastern Hemisphere cultures), financial, bureaucratic, and production problems conspired against the form in the USSR (and, after 1945, in its satellites).

According to the documentary, only 40 such films were made in the Soviet bloc from 1933 to 1973; a time period roughly corresponding to about three or four years behind the start and end of Hollywood’s musical era. (This figure doesn’t count period-piece operettas, which were supplied much more plentifully, especially in Hungary.)

Oddly, or perhaps not so oddly, many of the musicals that did get made are, from the documentary’s excerpts, infected with an incessantly “happy” mood. Everybody’s smiling, everybody’s moving and dancing as all-get-out. Everything’s saturated in light. The color films (in the prints shown in East Side Story) have the muted-gaudy tones of old rotogravure fashion advertising.

The overall effect bears little resemblance to Hollywood’s endless rehashes of the song-and-story technique pioneered on Broadway by Rodgers & Hammerstein (whose own works, you might recall, included such less-than-whistle-happy topics as wife abuse, the rise of Naziism in Austria, and the mainstreaming of Asian American culture).

But it does look a lot like the insistently-perky dream world of “industrials,” the musical shows and films commissioned by corporations. Some of the best examples of these are the films made by the old Jam Handy Studio on behalf of General Motors, of which some of the best can be found in the compilation video seriesEphemeral Films, which unfortunately appears to now be out of print except on CD-ROM.

The closing credits of East Side Story contain the dedication, “To Karl Marx, without whom none of this would have been necessary.” The Marxist utopia, or rather the Leninist utopia, imagined a society built around Workers, i.e. around people whose sole purpose in life was to work, to work hard, to work happily, and to work for work’s sake. So it’s not surprising that the Leninist world’s “light entertainment” films portrayed play as intense, ardorous work–when they weren’t portraying work as something more exhilarating than play. (Yes, there is a singing-tractor-driver scene, as well as a singing-wheat-harvesters scene and a singing-coal-press-operators scene.)

The Jam Handy films for GM, shown at auto shows and sales meetings, depict a slightly different utopia: They imagine a society built around Sellers and Buyers. In this scheme, the salesperson is the foot soldier of the entire western economy. All other professions exist to provide salespeople with something to sell, or to support the sales process. (Handy’s sales-training slide films were tributed in Diane Keaton’s appropriately-titled picture book Mr. Salesman.)

And the process of buying, in the Handy universe, is shown as the key to just about every non-economic human need. Any problem that can’t be solved by the acquisition of products is a problem that doesn’t exist. (And Marx dared to call his philosophy “materialist”!)

In the latter-day interview portions of East Side Story, surviving members of the eastern-bloc film industries recall how communist-party censors were always berating entertainment movies for supposedly celebrating western-style decadence, as opposed to the unceasing dedication-to-work expected from all good citizens of the Workers’ States. The closing narration wonders if everything would’ve been different had the Communist bosses only learned to have a sense of fun like that seen in a few of the musicals. I think it wouldn’t have changed much. Just instead of states built around an unending quest to increase production, these countries would’ve become states built around an unending quest to increase consumption.