Politics, Literature, And Film Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Unlike the law and literature movement, which credits The Legal Imagination (1973) by James Boyd White as its epiphanic text, there is no such author or coherent institutionalized approach that speaks to the effect of literature or film on politics. This is likely because until the nineteenth century, there was no serious doubt that authors, and especially poets, spoke authoritatively on political issues.

The common thread that runs unbroken between the political impact of literature and film is the narrative. Narratives become political when the stories they tell have the potential to alter the social and cultural assumptions informing the viewer or reader’s political imagination. Not all literature, and even less film, has overt political significance defined in terms of audiences altering their political imagination upon contact with the artwork. However, when works do have such an impact, it is usually as profound as it is immeasurable. Empiricists therefore usually consider literary thinking to be peripheral and dispensable, an activity reserved for recreation and certainly not as the basic functional unit of the mind. In The Literary Mind (1996), Mark Turner makes just this bold yet persuasive claim. Without narrative, one cannot imagine one’s self in the future, one cannot plan, predict, or explain what one has predicted. In fact, rational capacities rely on an individual’s ability to construct a narrative in which the individual, and all the surrounding human beings, can be ordered and acted upon coherently and humanely. Since humans think in narratives—even when engaged in quantitative analysis, scientific endeavors, or mathematical constructions—literary constructions are revealed as the most persuasive way to gain access to the human mind. That said, there is little theory that effectively engages in a sociohistorical critique. The dominant approaches remain the new historicist and the Marxist methods.

New Historicist And Marxist Approaches

New historicism sees the sociopolitical context as a fruitful and potentially life-altering context against which to set a human drama. The contextual background provides a series of “markers” that indicate how the reader is to understand the broader meaning of the character’s utterances. German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) identified the problem that the “contemporary audience” sees historical contexts as too far removed to be understood, leading the author to either grossly romanticize the past or use the historical background as merely a colorful backdrop against which to address contemporary issues.

For the politically focused critic, this is much less of a problem, but for this very reason, new historicism has little explanatory work to do outside of the literary critic’s circle. If a modern work about black soldiers in the U.S. Civil War (1861–1865) confronting and overcoming their racist officers is historically anachronistic, it is less important than the impact that such a novel has on the contemporary debate over race relations in the United States. This problem surfaced in the 1989 film Glory and in 2007 with The Lives of Others, which featured an East German Stasi officer working to save a suspect he was spying on after being moved by the music of Beethoven. The director of the memorial at Hohenschönhausen prison, Hubertus Knabe, refused permission for filming at the original location because there was no record of a Stasi officer ever being inspired to aid a dissident, by Beethoven or anyone else. Nevertheless, audiences did not care enough to have their enjoyment of the film compromised, and the film went on to win an Oscar, as had Glory two decades before.

The Marxist approach focuses more on the problem of production of a work than its consumption or, as Terry Eagleton states, the task of Marxist literary criticism “is to show the text as it cannot know itself, to manifest those conditions of its making (inscribed in its very letter) about which it is necessarily silent” (43). A Marxist reader explores how the text reveals ideological oppression of a dominant economic class over the exploited worker(s).

While more explicitly political than new historicism, this rather limited concern highlights how neither critical approach offers much in the way of analytical breadth to understand the political impact artists have on their audience. To ask whether Jane Austen’s Emma (1815) affirms or resists bourgeois values is to miss the potential epiphanic moment of recognition that a sympathetic reaction to the character Emma’s own understanding can create in a reader. Neither approach illuminates the truism of Emma’s opening lines: that “the real evils of Emma’s situation were the power of having rather too much her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself ” cannot be simply stated in order to be understood. The reader needs to walk a metaphorical mile in Emma’s shoes before any real understanding can take place. Filmmakers have recreated the characters in Emma thirteen times since 1932, not counting 1995’s Clueless, to successive generations of filmgoers. There were no complaints of transgressing new historicist criteria, but the filmmakers did manage to analyze contemporary problems such as social class barriers, materialism, solipsism, and race.

From Poetry To New Media

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) declared the poet to be the “unacknowledged legislator of society” on the grounds that the poet had historically demarcated the parameters within which the cultural—and thereby the political—imagination was per mitted to function. Although unelected, poets maintained their influence for as long as they articulated the public’s mood in times of social, political, or economic unrest. By the nineteenth century, poets were enjoying the benefits of a dramatically increased level of literacy among the lower orders, encouraging them to investigate the romantic allure of individual liberty, universal suffrage, alienation within the urban landscape, and democratic rights.

By the twentieth century, growing interest in more visual—and thereby passive—media such as television and film meant that political poetry, such as it was, returned to the hands of highly educated elites with more rarified ambitions but dramatically reduced political influence. In the West, post nineteenth-century poetry has largely lapsed into the solipsistic indulgence of autobiographical exegesis, which negates the broader political influence once enjoyed by Victor Hugo, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, or Alexander Pope.

Canadian philosopher and educator Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) insightfully noted that the content of a new medium is the preceding medium’s output. Speech is the content of literature, literature is the content of film, and film is rapidly becoming the content of the Internet. An inevitable consequence of this rule is, as Marshall McLuhan noted in1964, that those who strive for a deeper content always end up enmeshed in the tropes of an earlier medium (23). This is as true for political film as it is for all other genres.

Political films fall into three broad categories: they either undermine or satirize social stereotypes (e.g., Bob Roberts, 1992; Wag the Dog, 1997; Erin Brokovich, 2000); they allegorize social and political phenomena such as the fascism (e.g., Lord of the Rings, 2001–2003; Star Wars, 1977–2005); or they confront an audience with a social or political reality that they only feel safe examining from the discrete distance of a movie theatre seat (Boyz‘n the Hood, 1991; Trainspotting, 1996). Political literature is similarly demarcated: Social stereotypes are challenged in Les Miserables (1862) by Hugo and satirized in The Eagle’s Throne (2002) by Carlos Fuentes. Political allegory is highlighted in George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) or Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1980), and confrontational social exposés are the basis for Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1837) and Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857). Although journalists have supplanted the latter form with a concomitant lessening of their long-term effects, it is alive and well in the drama departments of the film and television studios.

Literature, Satires, And Allegories

Pedagogically speaking, it is much easier to teach students who are uncomfortable with how new concepts challenge their preconceived notions of how the world works; it is a technique called pedagogical disequilibrium. Skilled authors with a political message inevitably resort to this method when persuading a reader of the value of a previously maligned or misunderstood member of society. This disruption of social stereotypes is a prominent feature of Dickens’s Hard Times (1854), a novel of class division in a factory town. The happily married, socially solid factory owner and the shiftless, politically radical worker were social stereotypes that Dickens’s own factory experience had caused him to doubt. That he had to almost overemphasize the natural nobility of Stephen Blackpool in the face of extreme systemic indifference to his happiness or personal goals speaks to the distance cultured nineteenth-century readers had to cover to appreciate the humanity of the workers who were responsible for their elevated wealth and international status. The three failed or failing marriages in the novel serve to critique the social conventions that kept even the elevated classes in loveless unions against their will. The savage attack on the char ity schools, symbolized by the pedagogical prejudices of Thomas Gradgrind, caused questions to be asked in parliament and reforms to be undertaken across the country.

Hard Times was titled “Black and White” in some early drafts, and as Karen Odden has noted in her 2004 introduction to Hard Times, it is this very concern with Dickens’s fellow Victorians’s binary approach to social and political matters that make it an exemplary novel of the political imagination. Dickens is profoundly disturbed by the absence of human pity, sympathy (in the Smithean sense), and compassion that lie outside the purview of the capitalist enterprise—all that has made everybody materially wealthy yet spiritually bankrupt. The socially concerned novelist makes a quest to humanize the characters that other forms of media have turned into cartoon scapegoats, such as single mothers, criminals, immigrants, and the dispossessed.

Satire has retained its edge even as poetry has lost its relevance, and this longevity is worth investigating. Jonathan Swift’s Tale of a Tub (1704), Gulliver’s Travels (1726), and A Modest Proposal (1729) satirize religion, technological progress, and human society, along with the state and most of its citizens. However, a sneaking suspicion remains that the satirist is only capable of half of the job of “constructive criticism.” Orwell describes Swift as “a Tory anarchist, despising authority while disbelieving in liberty, and preserving the aristocratic outlook while seeing clearly that the existing aristocracy is degenerate and contemptible,” all of which might equally apply to Greek playwright Aristophanes and to English actor and comedian John Cleese. However, several noble exceptions have overcome the tendency to toothless criticism, including Maurice Joly’s 1864 pamphlet The Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, which uses a satirical dialogue between the Frenchman and the Florentine to effectively expose the political ambition of Napoleon III.

In its simplest form, allegory is a literary device that clothes abstract concepts with the exterior form of human beings, objects, or animals in order to allow that concept a temporal and spatial presence in a narrative. In this way, the virtue of chastity might take on the form of a pure and naive maiden, perspicuity might be represented as an eagle, and knowledge as a book. The value of such a literary move is that the author can create an extended metaphor, permitting the reader to extract a broad range of meanings that lie outside of the overtly literal details of the story itself. The political author can make social and political statements by having these anthropomorphicized figures interact with human characters in a narrative. The allegory remains a rich genre for political subversion for the simple reason that unpacking an allegory makes demands on the reader that inevitably lead to a greater degree of engagement with the potential results of such a labor. Political allegory is rarely about finding universally valid answers to politically contingent problems; instead, it illuminates aspects of broader, potentially critical, political probabilities and encourages an investigator to examine them from a multitude of different perspectives on at least three levels.

Political allegory was at its zenith in the Renaissance when readers expected a complex layered narrative structure. The most obvious narrative was at the literal level, which presented a variety of characters of differing personality or social status interacting with a given allegorical figure that had assumed some recognizable form. For example, in the opening of Niccolò Machiavelli’s L’Asino or The Ass (1517), the hero wakes up in a dark and frightening wood and meets an allegory of politics in the shape of a servant of Circe.

The second, or typological, sometimes confusingly called allegorical, level develops new layers of meaning when associations caused by other literary works resonate with the reader and are then read “between the lines,” as it were, of the literal narrative. An earlier Florentine poet, Dante, who wrote in exile after being falsely accused by his political party, opens his Divina Commedia (ca. 1308–1321) with the terrified author waking up in a dark wood. Later in canto 13, the reader sees Dante enter a second dark wood, this time made up of trees embodying the spirits of souls who had committed suicide. Dante speaks to one, a Pier della Vigne, who was a courtier before his suicide.

Each typological exercise might present different outcomes, through which the tropological or moral level of the text can be explored. Tropologically speaking, one interpretation is that both Machiavelli and Dante began their literary self-examination in a state of suicidal despair brought about by a political wrong. However, like Pier della Vigne and unlike Cato, whose presence on the shores of purgatory means that he will be saved despite his suicide, both Dante and Machiavelli have made the mistake of contemplating suicide on the basis of a temporal loss of money, honor, or political reputation. The political lesson derived from the combination of the previous two levels is that one should never allow the temporal and pecuniary side of politics to cause one to lose one’s focus with respect to the grander and timeless aspects of life.

The fact that commentary on Dante’s master allegory has not failed to produce a major contribution to the critical corpus in every decade since it was first published in 1308 suggests the almost infinite number of literal, typological, or tropological reads that are possible when intelligent readers engage with an allegorical text. Through an ongoing process of contemplation, it allows new and uncertain outcomes to be continuously evaluated and best-case scenarios worked out in advance of an actual crisis. This constant working out of possibilities, testing of defensible hypotheses, bringing to bear of one’s past experiences, failing when the stakes are low, and preparing for success through endless speculation is the correct pedagogical approach for both the prospective ruler and the allegorical reader.

Films, Documentaries, And Political Thrillers

Following from McLuhan’s dicta, in one sense cinema simply updates the narrative possibilities of literature, despite the claims of film critics such as Pauline Kael and Jonathan Rosenbaum that movies stand alone as purveyors of identity and desire. Notwithstanding that there are important differences in the reception of film to literature, especially for a generation for whom a book is an increasingly curious artifact, there is little fundamental difference between the range of narratives expressed in films and those employed by literature. However, there needs to be a strong imperative to separate the figure from the ground if that new media content is to be properly recognized. It is telling, for example, that film allegories have rarely been accepted or even noticed as such by the general public. Readers of Dante’s Commedia did not need a mediator to tell them that they were entering a world of allegorical significance, yet it took Mike Rogin to point out to America the disturbing allegorical subtext at the heart of Independence Day (1996) or King Kong (1933). Film is much better than literature at directly featuring politicians, lawyers, or members of the general public engaged in political action (Bulworth, 1998; A Civil Action, 1998; The Insider, 1999). Most of these works were originally written for the screen or adapted from autobiographies rather than from novels, so to amend Kael and Rosenbaum’s assertion, film presents some aspects of the content of literature in a much more compelling manner than literature could ever do alone. Two of those more compelling genres are documentaries and the political thriller.

Documentaries really became politically relevant in the 1960s and 1970s with the work of Frederick Wiseman. He was the first filmmaker to document the power relationships between people and institutional authority. Eschewing music, commentary, or sound effects, he offered grainy monochromatic glimpses behind the walls of a High School (1968), Hospital (1970), and Juvenile Court (1973). Despite the real-time social situations, he understood the rhetorical effect of framing nonactors engaged in their everyday lives, naming his works “reality fictions” rather than documentaries. However, his cinéma vérité style was impossible to ignore, and his films were cited as motivations for change in several of the institutions he documented. He is the cultural ancestor of contemporary political documentarians, such as Michael Moore or Morgan Spurlock, in that he was the first to demonstrate the political impact of real people confronting the systemic horrors of postindustrial institutional ideologies.

The political thriller came into its own with the jittery sensibility that defined the politics of the 1970s. After Watergate, citizens believed that the technologies of the cold war, including listening devices, the computer, and the telephoto lens, were being turned inward on the population they were supposed to protect. Even nonradical cinema goers noticed the increasingly intrusive bureaucracy that controlled their lives. Costa Gravas probably instigated the 1970s political thriller with the widespread commercial success of Z (1969), which criticized the Greek military’s cover-up of the murder of a prominent leftist. Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974) tapped into a public sensibility that anyone could be under surveillance at any time without their knowledge. Three Days of the Condor (1975) confirmed the belief that agents of the state could eliminate anyone with impunity if they posed even a tangential threat to state security. Films such as these created the cinematic language seen in Enemy of the State (1998), Syriana (2005), and the Bourne trilogy (2002–2007).

Bibliography:

Barnouw, Erik. Documentary: A History of the Non-fiction Film. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Barrell, John. Poetry, Language, and Politics. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1988.
Eagleton,Terry. Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory. London:Verso, 1978.
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media:The Extensions of Man. New York: Signet, 1964.
Nussbaum, Martha C. Poetic Justice:The Literary Imagination and Public Life. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995.
Rogin, Michael. Independence Day. London: British Film Institute, 1998.
Turner, Mark. The Literary Mind. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Veeser, Harold. The New Historicism. London: Routledge, 1989.
White, James Boyd. The Legal Imagination. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1973.

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