Flowers For Socrates

By ann summers

Hollywood North is not San Francisco South, nor North Hollywood or South San Francisco. But maybe in an age of media crime fascination there can be high-tech tours of location specific cinematic crime, something better than the Alcatraz Island Tour. Here, “location specific cinematic crime” does not mean sneaking food into the movie theater or being more at home with food in the Drive-in; it’s more like the carceral rather than car cereal and represents the true amorality of the Zodiac Killer more than Ted “Carnival” Cruz.

Vigilantism in a democracy can range from online shunning and bullying to the lynch mob where a modern weapon can amplify a mob of one, and the cinema as site and transmitter makes those interactions more complex.The location as represented cinematically can overdetermine a collective consciousness, much like Hollywood is really the TMZ that includes Culver City and Burbank. But it has always been the locus of discourse about controlling culture and propaganda whether wars were hot or cold.

Avenge Me!

 

In the time of the Hollywood Ten, a prisoner’s dilemma occurs for those prosecuted by HUAC, where one of them decided to defect, and provided information to HUAC that unraveled the Ten’s defense and had his career rehabilitated by Stanley Kramer. The collateral effects of the Hollywood Blacklist has had lasting, repeated effects in the current climate of ad hominem fear of socialism promoted by RWNJs.

De facto blacklisting still occurs to this day as both agency and structure, where reputation is manipulated and magnified in the current 2016 election process. These are all aspects of the surveilled world — from DNA, to geneology, to eventually biometric access to toilets, we will all be controlled.

 

Hollywood Blacklist

The growth of conservative political influence and the Republican triumph in the 1946 Congressional elections, which saw the party take control of both the House and Senate, led to a major revival of institutional anticommunist activity, publicly spearheaded by HUAC. The following year, the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPA), a political action group cofounded by Walt Disney, issued a pamphlet advising producers on the avoidance of “subtle communistic touches” in their films. Its counsel revolved around a list of ideological prohibitions, such as “Don’t smear the free-enterprise system … Don’t smear industrialists … Don’t smear wealth … Don’t smear the profit motive … Don’t deify the ‘common man’… Don’t glorify the collective”.

 

The Lineup is a 1958 American film version of the police procedural television series of the same name that ran on CBS radio from 1950 until 1953, and on CBS television from 1954 until 1960. The film was directed by Don Siegel. It features a number of scenes shot in locations in San Francisco during the late 1950s including shots of the Embarcadero Freeway (then still under construction) and the Sutro Baths.

The film The Lineup contains the line, “When you live outside the law, you have to eliminate dishonesty,” of which Jonathan Lethem writes that “Bob Dylan heard it…, cleaned it up a little, and inserted it into ‘Absolutely Sweet Marie‘” (as “To live outside the law you must be honest.”)

Continue reading →