In light of the criticism of There Will Be Blood on political grounds, I recommend watching this documentary about the lives, trial and deaths of anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. The events take place contemporaneously with those depicted in TWBB (from just before World War I until 1927), and Upton Sinclair wrote another book, Boston, that is a fictionalized account of the trial. Here the focus is much more clearly workers, collective action and revolutionary movements – and the state repression that they engender – as emblematic of the “golden age†of American capitalism.
The documentary is short, 80 minutes, and utterly conventional, relying upon some archival footage, and a lot of commentary from assorted historians (with Howard Zinn featured). There are some powerful moments as letters and diaries written by Sacco and Vanzetti are read, though Tony Shalhoub is an odd person to be portraying Sacco with a thick Italian accent. John Turturro offers a very dignified and moving reading of Vanzetti’s letters.
But what the documentary does quite effectively – beyond reminding us of a particularly egregious miscarriage of justice – is to draw parallels between denial of civil rights to immigrants then (the interwar period) and now. There is imagery of Italian immigrants being herded into cages to face deportation juxtaposed with Guantanamo Bay today. I was also struck with how important a moment this was for the radicalization of the artistic left in the 1920: the number of painters, poets and novelists who found inspiration in Sacco and Vanzetti is remarkable.
I too find the choice of Shalhoub odd (wasn’t Don Novello available?), but I look forward to this doc.
Okay, everyone–keep this quiet. I don’t want Arnab to hear.
In waiting for TWBB, I couldn’t really stomach reading Sinclair–he’s someone I always feel I should like, then find insufferable. So instead I picked up and loved Chris Bachelder’s loopy novel _U.S.!_, which I herewith recommend highly as well, as a counterpoint to Blood‘s reduced/altered vision of politics. The novel’s plot, such as it is: Sinclair is endlessly resurrected by artists and politicos in need of his inspiration, and is repeatedly assassinated. The novel is told in various textual snippets (from a syllabus of a course on creative writing Sinclair teaches to ebay item listings to various different people’s engagements with the man).
And now I’ll plagiarize myself from another site–Example: Sinclair apparently wrote jokes for cash early on in his career, a biographical detail that runs counter to intuition, given the couple novels I’ve read. But Bachelder shows off a signal accomplishment of his own novel here: on the one hand, it’s a great joke itself, this humorless prig mechanically building his riddles from the punchline backward. Then CB makes a very fine point about how this method of craft probably came to bear on Sinclair’s (mechanical) fictions, too. Even as he fizzes with pomo irony and pastiche, CB teases out a lovely lovely portrait of this man.
And he uses that portrait as an allegory for the collisions of politics and art throughout, the best joke nailing home this theme, as Upton Sinclair finds a magic lantern with a genie, who grants him three wishes. After using his first to escape a precarious situation, Sinclair then asks “that our cruel and greedy capitalist nation would transition peacefully into a just and cooperative Socialist state within one year’s time.” The genie balks, ranting about the impossibility of such a vision given the many, many conditions currently militating against such political change. After a long, funny paragraph, he finally yells that he’s “not fucking Zeus” and Sinclair will have to come up with something else. So Sinclair sits for a while, then asks “sheepish[ly]” to “get just a couple good reviews on my next book.” And the genie thinks for a while before responding, “would you settle for eighteen months on that Socialism deal?”
That joke nails it–the book is sympathetic but unidealistic yet wildly funny and wonderfully, sincerely concerned with the possibility of a political art.
And I think it’s a great complement to the film.
Sorry to hijack your thread, Chris. Now back to Sacco & Vanzetti…
It sounds great. I’ll overcome my antipathy towards the printed word and pick up U.S. from the library.