Hollywood writers and actors are on strike, the first time both unions have been on strike at the same time since 1960. It’s thrown the industry into an uproar, as both groups are subverting some of the main precepts of not only the Hollywood film and television industry but the way work as a whole is constructed and managed in the digital age.

The first precept being challenged is that unions and union solidarity is a dead letter in the era of Artificial Intelligence and the ever-increasing corporate power and prestige as the twin answers to solving the world’s ills. The high profile of the two striking unions has drawn more attention and produced much more publicity for unions. The news stories in The New York Times, for example, have doubled since the actors joined the writers on strike, with most major publications feeling the need to generate stories from the picket lines, where formerly the major news outlets concentrated mainly on the beginning and end of strikes.

This has produced a kind of reverse Blacklist effect. In 1947 the House Un-American Activities Committee decided that it would launch its campaign against radical elements in the labour force by first attacking Hollywood, and thus ensuring maximum publicity in its campaign of fear. Here the opposite is happening. In the wake of the Occupy Movement, and using some of that language, the coverage of the strikes of the two unions, largely favourable in the press since its readers are avid followers of films and television series, have prompted more favourable coverage of other strikes. Teamsters and nurses have shown up on the picket lines at the Hollywood studios, with the former helping to stop production in some cases, while the leaders of the Writers’ Guild joined hotel workers in a July 4^th strike for higher wages.

Serfs serving corporate lords

On the actors’ picket line Fran Drescher, President of the Actors’ Guild, employed the Occupy language of the 1 percent to criticize executive salaries. She described one of the most powerful men in the industry, Disney’s President Michael Iger who makes $27 million annually, as a dazzling example of the rampant inequality in pay structure. She claimed that she was on the line representing “the 99.9 percent of the membership who are working people who are just trying to make a living to put food on the table, pay rent and get their kids off to school” while labelling the Hollywood executives as “land barons of a medieval time.” This labelling not only echoes the language of the Occupy movement but is also drawn from a popular left characterization of a new Feudalism, with the majority of the population now in the position of serfs serving corporate lords.

The new feudalism

One of the main claims of the writers is that they can no longer afford to live in a city they helped build, as Los Angeles rents skyrocket. This claim in similar to the hotel workers who say they have to live outside the city and sometimes travel 90 to 100 miles to work. The writers’ claim was validated by a studio executive who, anonymously, told Deadline that the studio producers would “bleed out” writers and force them to “start losing their apartments.”

The second major tenant of Hollywood and the television industry which the strikes are challenging is the attempt to conceal profits and keep from paying residuals. For over 70 years the vast majority of television series operated on the principle of deficit financing. Producers and talent (writers, directors and actors) understood that the vast majority of money being made on any television series would come after the series was sold into syndication. The “magic number” that would trigger these sales was 100 episodes. The show would then become profitable in perpetuity with its creators and financiers able to live off of these sales.

Part of the drive toward online subscription services, where the studio or streamer locks content behind a solid wall, is the elimination of these residuals or the limiting of them since the creators can no longer track how their work is being monetized. The streamers, on the other hand, have much more data and can track viewer habits minutely, down to the second where the viewer continues to watch or tunes out. The old system, with the Nielsen Ratings and with syndicated contracts, was much more transparent and allowed creators to track profits, though the studios often tried to conceal their gains.

A major demand of both strikes is finding a way to reclaim residuals in the age of streaming. The battle here goes beyond film and television writers and actors and encompasses the problems with monetizing digital work as a whole. Journalists, for example, often work for less or for nothing on internet publications while search engines such as Alphabet’s Google and Microsoft’s Bing accrue value by appropriating stories from news outlets and only reluctantly pay for this content.

AI Eats Brains 

The third major precept which the strikes are challenging is the parceling of work, a trend that is going on throughout industry as a whole and which is being exacerbated by experiments with Artificial Intelligence and programs such as ChatGPT. The idea of breaking all kinds of work into tasks has of course been around since the Taylorist experiments with assembly lines in the 1920s. What is new, or as the owners say “innovative,” is the potential ability, once the work is broken down into its component parts, to have labourers replaced with robotic replicators of their work, or to reduce work to “smaller, more degraded, poorly paid jobs.” 

From careers to gig work

One of the complaints of the actors, echoed even more strongly by the writers, is that their careers have been turned into gig work. The meteoric rise in streaming has been fed by the work of writers creating television series of high quality and moving themselves into all aspects of production, to make sure, like the Hollywood directors of old, that all aspects of the series (costuming, makeup, set construction) form a seamless whole. This expansion fuelled the rise of more and better showrunners, responsible for the overall concept of the series.

Instead, the producers are attempting to limit the writers to just their time in the writing room, and then release them. Their preferred model is to pay a single creator an exorbitant salary (Shonda Rhimes-Bridgerton, Ryan Murphy-American Horror Story, Taylor Sheridan- Yellowstone) and dispense with the rest. The Writers’ Guild has been tracking this trend and says that writers’ time on a series has decreased because they are let go faster and that in 2022 over half of the writers, stripped of their producing jobs, are being paid at the weekly minimum, as opposed to one-third eight years ago.

Tom Cruise vs. The Entity 

Contrary to the Tom Cruise version of AI in Mission Impossible – Dead Reckoning where an all-powerful “Entity” threatens a machine takeover of the earth, the real challenge of AI, which this Hollywood fantasy version conceals, is that it will be used to un-employ workers in all kinds of industries as well as forcing them to work harder through its monitoring capacities. Thus, warehouse workers describe being tracked minutely, pressuring them to skip breaks, while setting them up for disciplinary actions if their goals are not met. The personal touch of service workers, who one worker described as providing “a kind of therapy” to their clients, is discounted as their work is automated. A recent Biden administration summit to “regulate” AI rather than impose restrictions allowed the seven major makers of the service to voluntarily agree to guidelines. None of the restrictions even mentioned AI’s power to eliminate, tame and discipline the U.S. workforce.

Maverick

A long-term goal for Hollywood’s use of AI is potentially to use the machine to grind out scripts that are then “created” not by the writer, but by the studio/streaming service. The scenario for this goal involves the studio plugging in a basic concept with AI or ChatGPT which then churns out a (highly unworkable) script. A writer would then be hired to turn the script into a workable scenario but the credit, and the profits, would then go to the studio. This is an attempt to turn television production back to the 1950s when, for example, Warners cheated the “showrunner” Roy Huggins out of the “Created By” credits for both Maverick and 77 Sunset Strip, two shows which kept the studio afloat. For Maverick, the studio bought the rights to a book that a plot turn in the pilot employed and thus claimed it owned the property. With 77 Sunset Strip, Warners screened the pilot in a cinema outside the U.S. and claimed the studio then owned the rights to “the film.” Huggins himself addressed this ignominy in his next contract with Universal which granted him the “Created By” credit and established it as a norm for the industry.

An actor on the picket line described AI as “a tool to generate wealth,” noting that the main task of the “Entity” was “cutting jobs for corporate profit.” While another writer’s guild member summoned up the end game as “creating material in the cheapest, most piecemeal, automated way possible” so that “one layer of high-level creatives take the cheaply generated material and turn it into something.” The demand of the Actors’ and Writers’ Guilds to have control of how this process is used, is a crucial attempt to counter this thrust.

Dennis Broe, in  the first of to articles, describes how corporate media in all its forms downplays climate destruction. Above: New York skyline, with soot 

Fredric Jameson’s famous dictum that “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” has been taken up wholeheartedly by the makers of corporate television. In numerous series stretching across different genres and now accounting for its own genre – “post-Apocalyptic TV,” – broadcast, cable and streaming TV (and of course numerous films) have concocted a plethora of “endings” to the world as we know it which have the effect of failing to challenge the climate apocalypse, which would mean immediate action in the present to keep the worst from happening.

In so doing, the makers of corporate TV, largely American but then picked up across the globe using the American prototypes, have found a new way forward in the persistent refusal to challenge the fossil fuel industry that is a more sophisticated approach to the now mostly discredited “climate denial” narrative initiated by that industry. For if the catastrophe is unavoidable, we may as well begin planning for the post-Apocalyptic future. In the industry these are referred to as Dystopian Series but that is similar to calling climate destruction climate change, it’s a carbon-neutral way of labelling the problem without discussing it.

 David Harvey reading Marx’s Grundrisse

This paper highlights the shift from apocalyptic series, which focus on the moment of the end times of the earth, and might be politically more useful, to “Post-Apocalyptic” Series, where the endpoint of destruction has already come and gone and the series is about coping with the aftermath in the best way possible. That is, the genre, for the most part, as David Harvey utilizes these terms borrowed from Marx’s Grundrisse, “presupposes” the end as at this stage inevitable and is about “positing” how to survive after the end, once the presupposition of end times is established.

The material reasons for the preoccupation with apocalypse at this conjuncture are the destruction of the earth, the escalating danger of nuclear war and the decline of the West, all of which is accompanied by a resolute repression in the corporate media which either refuses to engage or downplays the implications of any of these conditions.

However, this also allows for an opening. Whereas, in series based in the present, political content is mostly abandoned or repressed, these series, once the idea that the end time is not nigh but here, may allow a freedom for both pursuing a deep critique of the contemporary order and a positing of alternative orders.

In Season 11 of The Walking Dead, the originator and dean of this genre, the problems of the present resurface, as the neoliberal “perfect world” of The Commonwealth conceals a vicious and violent inner core, a repressive deep state needed to maintain the surface air of gentility.

The Last of Us presupposes at its outset a fascist government, the endpoint of today’s neoliberal experiments as the French, no longer believing in Macron as a bulwark against fascism, since he has used undemocratic techniques himself, now turn to Le Pen. However, in the course of the cross-country travels of the two lead characters, the series posits the creation of a communal compound which is the opposite of this order and which opposes it.

Finally, the class antagonism in Snowpiercer indicates that the post-Apocalyptic world cannot escape the problems of the present, perhaps negating or qualifying the effectiveness of this flight into fantasy, while also suggesting, in the most radical positing of the genre, that a world shorn of capitalists can negotiate its own resurrection.

Oil I Want Is You

“The best thing about the Earth is, if you poke holes in it, oil and gas comes out.” — Republican U.S. Congressman Steve Stockman, 2013

Climate activists denounce COP28, the oil-friendly climate conference 

We are all witnessing the increasing failure to confront climate catastrophe and to rein in the fossil fuel industry, with the next global conference on climate, COP28, being held in the oil rich city of Dubai, chaired by the head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company which is investing billions in pumping more oil next year. It is no wonder there are calls to boycott the conference. With this capitulation depictions of the end times have increased.

At this year’s Series Mania, the largest television festival in the world held at Lille in France, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic series had, along with Me Too female liberation series, become the dominant genre, accounting for 13 percent of the total of 55 series. These included the apocalyptic tone of the endpoint of Western science in Lars Von Trier’s return to The Kingdom; South Korean high-school teens training for an alien threat that hovers over their heads in Duty After School; the Spanish series Apagon where a solar tempest strikes the earth; The Fortress, where Norway, in Trump-style, walls itself off from the world and then must confront a deadly virus; and finally The Swarm, a global series financed by several European public television networks in which the ocean sets out to wreak its revenge on a humanity bent on destroying it.

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has set the Doomsday Clock at 90 seconds to midnight, as planetary destruction looms. This grim future reality though is belied by a most abundant present for oil and gas companies whose profits have never been greater.

Largely as a result of the energy crisis because of the war in the Ukraine, the profits of the five largest producers of oil and gas, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, BP and Total, were $195 billion in 2022, almost 120 percent more than the previous year and the highest level in the industry’s history with the U.S. President Biden accusing these companies of “war profiteering.” Only five percent of these profits went to developing clean energy, with the majority going as Chevron claimed to “shareholders, investing, and paying down debt.”

The war has also occasioned a return to the most dangerous and most polluting methods of extraction, including in the West deepwater drilling and the return of coal, and across the world new nuclear power plants have been announced in Malaysia, Indonesia and The Philippines. Meanwhile France threatens to bring 6 to 14 new plants on line, regardless of the nuclear waste these plants will generate.

In the U.S., now the largest supplier of natural gas, this has meant a return and reopening of the previously unprofitable industry of fracking in a new narrative where this process, which destroys drinking water and leaks methane in a way comparable to coal mining, “saved American democracy.” The day the war began the Bloomberg News Agency ran a story headlined “Fracking: A Powerful Weapon Against Russia,” trumpeting the return of an industry that had almost gone bankrupt.

The carbon imprint of the replacement of Russian oil and natural gas with American fracked gas, with its increased transport distance is twice as great as before. Add to that the imprint of American hydraulic fracking and the carbon imprint is almost three times greater.

In addition, the war has also seen the blowing up of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 Russian pipelines, with the culprit still an object of surmise but with much of the evidence, as marshalled by the U.S. Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, leaning toward the U.S. and Norway, oil producers who have been the major benefactors of the sabotage. The methane emitted from the cloud that passed across Europe was described as described as “the highest release of methane gas ever on the planet.”

The failure to confront the fossil fuel industry

Since the onset of the war, Western governments have caved into the demands of an ever more dominant and omnipotent fossil fuel industry with the U.S. president Biden having implemented all the policy requests of a secretive fossil fuel lobby group, just as Bush in a secret meeting never made public signed on to Cheney’s Haliburton agenda, and as Trump more brazenly named the head of Exxon as his secretary of state. Equally, European leaders have met more than 100 times with the industry since the war began, while industry lobbyists at 2002’s U.N. climate conference far outnumbered “climate-vulnerable African countries and Indigenous communities.”

The effects of this onslaught have already appeared in the U.S. in rising coastal sea levels in the East amid worse hurricanes and storms, Midwestern mega rains and droughts destroying crops and homes, and worsening and more destructive forest fires in the West. The apocalyptic effect by the end of this century if this destruction is not halted will be the drowning of island nations, the inundating of coastal areas from Ecuador to Brazil to the Netherlands as well as huge swathes of South and Southeast Asia and the potential extinction of major cities, such as New York, Los Angeles, Vancouver, London, Mumbai and Shanghai. 

All of this is linked to the failure to confront the fossil fuel industry. As Naomi Klein says:

“We have not done the things that are necessary to lower emissions because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism. The actions that would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe…[threaten] an elite minority that has a stranglehold over our economy, our political process, and most of our major media outlets.”

All of this in terms of the apocalyptic imagination leads to “the acute and painful realization” that our “leaders are not looking after us . . . we are not cared for at the level of our very survival.”

Nuclear war and imperial malaise

There are two other forms of destruction on the horizon and which also are essentially going largely undiscussed and unheeded. These are are the (renewed) threat of nuclear war in the face of the ever-escalating war in Ukraine and what I will call, after Paul Gilroy, ‘imperial malaise’, the decline of the West, which is being hastened by the division of the West and the rise and resistance of the rest of the world prompted also by the war.

Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament poster 

With Russia having announced the stationing of nuclear weapons in nearby Belarus and with the NATO countries continuing the path of escalation (the British supplying depleted uranium weapons which will leave radiation traces on both the Ukrainian users and the Russian targets while destroying swathes of the environment, the Germans sending Leopard tanks east in an ominous suggestion of World War II and with Poland now demanding to be armed with U.S. nuclear weapons) and as the U.S. secretary of state declares that the U.S. will support no peace talks and will not end the war, the threat of a full-scale nuclear war increases daily. This threat, mostly unacknowledged in the corporate press, also feeds the feeling of hopelessness and a sense the world may be coming to an end.

From Apocalypse LA 

The failure of the West, led by the U.S., to enlist the rest of the world in its campaign against Russia, with fully 83 percent of the world refusing to go along with U.S. sanctions, has hastened an already accelerating decline, as the centre of economic activity shifts eastward to Asia. The results have been a cumulative apocalypse which has seen income disparity worsen to the point where the creators of these television series, the Hollywood writers, claim as a primary reason for their strike that they can no longer support themselves on their salaries while profits within the streaming industry soar.

In France inflation from price gouging and the war, the raising of the retirement age and the cancelling of job security is expressed in graffiti on the Left Bank that simply states “greve ou creve,” strike or die.

Finally, there is the crisis of the drug epidemic, as a way of coping with this destruction, that has passed from heroin to Purdue Pharma distributed oxycontin to fentanyl, seven times more potent and addictive than heroin – all three discovered and originally manufactured in Big Pharma laboratories – making the streets of Los Angeles unsafe. It’s no wonder that one of the contemporary Hollywood apocalyptic series From has everyone locked in their homes at night, with living dead, flesh-eating zombies ready to devour anyone who lets their guard down and goes outside.

The full weight of these various apocalypses is never registered in the continuing onslaught of corporate media where we are told that despite it all, the system is coping, doing its best and is still the hope for humanity. The cognitive dissonance and distance between what is said and what the collective unconscious knows to be true but which must remain unsaid is also responsible for the dominance of the terrifying images of post-apocalyptic television.

How can it be, for example, that a country which holds itself up as a shining beacon to the world, sometimes called “the indispensable nation,” supplies B-16 bombers to Ukraine at $550 million per plane but forces its homeless in Los Angeles, epicentre of a national housing crisis, to sleep at night on public buses?

Part 2 will describe various apocalyptic TV series as both promoting and contesting climate destruction.

The Global Crime Novel: Worldwide Corruption and Chiseling

In a 1931 Warner Brothers made the film Blonde Crazy, in the pre-Code period where expression was raunchier and more truthful, before the era of middle-class censorship. As the Depression reaches its peak, conniving bellhop James Cagney is trying to convince new hotel hire Joan Blondel to go on the road with him and work a hustle together. Leaning into the ingenue and laying his cards on the table, he makes his pitch, explaining that “The age of chivalry is over. This is the age of chiselry.”

Cagney and Blondel in Blonde Crazy 

In the evidence of this year’s Quais du Polar in Lyon France one of the largest conventions in the world of global crime writers, the “age of chiselry” is, as the current recession/inflation/austerity continues, back with us, bigger and badder than ever.  And that age is not only perpetrated from below but also from on top as the very rich, with the global pie shrinking, take whatever steps are necessary, lawful or not, to hold onto what they’ve got, whether it was acquired lawfully or not.

Perhaps the star of the conference was India’s Deepti Kapoor whose Age of Vice is now being adapted for series TV by Disney+ and FX. Age of Vice takes place in the early 2000s, a time, the author explained, when India was making a transition from socialism to capitalism. It was also, as she describes it in the novel, a time when gangsters and organized crime entered the government, melding with regional authorities in a level of corruption that exceeded even Russia in the 1990s under its alcoholic “czar” Boris Yeltsin.  In that period, as Nick Harkaway, a crime author himself and John Le Carré’s son who was in Russia at the time, pointed out gangsters profited from the government, but stayed out of it.

Age of Vice is also about developers profiting in this new, “modern” India as whole settlements of the poorest are removed from the Yamuna riverbank in Delhi with everyone’s conscience eased because they are offered resettlement housing. However, the gangster-developer quickly sends his representatives into this area to buy back the resettlement land and to tear down the cheap housing and build on that.

The gangster’s son, who gallivants across the globe with his father’s money, has the vision of making the riverbank look like the Thames, with museums and upscale developments replacing encampments inhabited by the poor, but his father cuts that vision short and opts instead for the pure profit of high rises for the rich.

As Kapoor pointed out, India, with now the largest population in the world, has reached new levels of inequality, in the wake of the corruption she describes in the first decade of this century. According to the latest Oxfam survey, the top 1 percent own 40 percent of the wealth while the bottom 50 percent own 3 percent.

In an opposite way, in a panel that included Kapoor, Jake Adelstein, the author of Tokyo Vice, which Michael Mann has adapted into a series now renewed for a second season, described the overreach of the Japanese Yakuza gangsters, whose power has recently been curtailed in Japan because they attempted to aggressively challenge the police and the government, disrupting a truce that saw each existing side by side with the other. Adelstein, who was a reporter working on the crime beat in Tokyo, also explained that like Roberto Saviano, whose investigative work on the Camorra has entailed him living in constant police protection, now needs police protection when he visits Japan because of his extensive inside reporting on the Yakuza.

Volker Kutscher, author of ten books on which the German series Babylon Berlin is based, with the first five translated into English, described the schlumpy hero of the series Gereon Rath as a “mensch.” Rath is the sometimes less-than-decisive protagonist of the series. He is, though, a staunch defender of the Weimar Republic as we watch as the series, which starts in 1928, progresses or regresses through the years of Hitler’s coming to power.

In The Fatherland Files, set in 1932, Rath is sent to a remote corner of Germany near the Polish/German border as he tracks a wily killer who operates in Berlin. The still unresolved tensions in the border region, which a plebiscite had claimed for Germany, and the nationalist fervor of the Germans in the region, now further deepened by the ominous presence of the brown-shirted SA as well as the supposed patriotic fervor of a prosperous brewer are the seeds from which this violence in Berlin has erupted.

Elsewhere, Dennis Lehane, author of among others Gone Baby Gone and Mystic River, addressed the conference remotely from the U.S. and explained how his latest novel Small Mercies, set in Boston in 1974 at the time of forced bussing to desegregate the public school system, dealt with a racial hatred, not so dissimilar to Kutcher’s borderland Germans, that resulted in the tragedy of the death of a little girl.

Melivina Mestre took the audience on a journey of both time and space as she described her latest novel Twilight in Casablanca, set in the early 1950s where the city was abuzz with spies, including a huge presence of American intelligence, trying to influence the continent. Jurica Pavičić, whose novel Red Water won the European prize for Best Crime Novel two years ago, returned to the conference with the soon-to-be-translated The Woman on the Second Floor.

Red Water described with a sprawling depth the break-up of Yugoslavia, the years of war after that break-up and how the modern Dalmatian coast has now turned into a high-end Western investment haven and tourist paradise – changes that have left the populace gasping as they tried to keep up.

Woman on the Second Floor covers similar territory but this time in microcosm, as a wife looks back on the events and rapid-fire transformations that led her to murder her mother-in-law. As such the novel in its intricate description of the consciousness of a single character and its explanation of what led her to violence, has something in common with David E. Kelley’s masterful Love and Death with Elizabeth Olson in a true crime recounting of how repression in a Texas suburb led her, as she made a valiant effort to escape that repression, to commit a violent act.

Also in attendance at the conference was Thomas Mullen whose trilogy titled “Darktown,” which takes the name of the lead novel, follows the first African American cops on the Atlanta police force in 1948 as they deal with violence, corruption, and racial prejudice in the pre-Civil Rights South. The final novel, Midnight Atlanta, set in 1950 stands on the cusp of that movement and features a cameo by Martin Luther King. The trilogy describes the extent of the discrimination in this earlier era where, as Cornell West described it, “Race is the way class is spoken in America.” It also calls into question how far supposedly progressive communities have come because today racial barriers are maintained through income disparity and high property values such that, in a way that allows for pristine discrimination without having to deal with ethnicity, in a reversal of West’s dictum, “Class is the way race is spoken in America.”

Finally, from Marseilles came the winner of the French prize for Crime Novel of the Year, Gérard Lecas’ Blood of Our Enemies, a “policier,” as the French call it set in that city in 1962, on the eve of the ending of the war for Algerian independence, in a novel that may well soon become a television series.

Two cops of different political persuasions, one communist, one conservative, must investigate the death of an Arab man whose body is drained of blood. The city is filled with representatives of the right-wing terrorist group the OAS, the Algerian independentist movement the FLN, “pied noir,” refugees from Algeria who supported and gained from colonial rule and Harkis, Algerians who served on the side of the French in the war. The two contrary officers must navigate these various groups as they search for the killer in a novel that has intonations of Dominique Manotti’s Marseille 73 where 11 years later the same tensions still erupt in a far-right plan to retake Algeria.

Thus, across the globe and through history, writers of crime fiction, as seen in this year’s Quais du Polar, are tracing an increasingly more malevolent turn toward violence as global conditions break down in the face of worsening poverty and inequality.

***

Dennis Broe is the author of “Calamitous Corruption,” The Harry Palmer LA Trilogy that consists of Left of Eden, A Hello To Arms and his latest, The Precinct With The Golden Arm.

The Invaders: Alien Beings From a Dying Planet. Their Destination: The Earth. Their Mission: To Make It Their World. It began with a landing of a craft from another galaxy. Now David Vincent knows that the invaders are here, that they have taken human form. Somehow, he must convince a disbelieving world that the nightmare has already begun.

That was the opening of a piece of ’50s paranoia that ran on TV in the mid-60s. These creatures from another planet are just like us but some of them have a deformity, a pinkie finger that sticks straight up. Each week architect Vincent tried to tell people that the planet was in danger, launched by a deadly foe that did not mind wiping out all life on earth to make way for this alien life form from a planet whose inhabitants assumed human shape but showed no emotion.

Unfortunately, the Invaders still walk among us. They resemble ordinary politicians except their rhetoric is much more bellicose. They threaten the rest of the planet and at every moment attempt to push war and halt peace. They have ordinary names like Nuland, Sullivan, Blinken and Biden, and you can tell them, not by their extended pinkies, but by their use of the word “democracy” as an excuse for their desire for planetary dominance.

They disrupt the flow of goods and the peaceful development of the resources of that part of earth called The Global South in order to maintain their dominance. They are especially active in what they see as the menace of Eurasia. When they saw the possibilities for shared resources with Russia and Western Europe they immediately went into disruptive mode, in order to further promote their own oil and gas and maintain their dominance over their Caucasian vassals.

Make no mistake about it, they are invaders. They themselves recently revealed they have launched 251 military interventions since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and 469 since the Invaders arrived in the U.S. in 1798. The greater contemporary danger though for these creatures for whom peace is an alien concept, is the coming together to share resources and aid that is the mutual development of the entire land mass of Eurasia. This danger is led by China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which despite its problems, aims to be a bridge between the developing countries and Europe, with the trade on this New Silk Road raising living standards all along the way.

The aliens in the U.S. – already reeling from their failure to decimate Russia in their Ukraine proxy war as 87 percent of the world’s population refuses to commit to the war – have now set their sights on destroying the Belt and Road Initiative which they see as a challenge to their mission to control the earth, to keep it exclusively their world. What they pose as the alternative to the Chinese rising tide which lifts all boats is endless destruction in a kind of mafia protection racket. Either you are with us or against us and if you are against us, we are coming for you and you will be destroyed.

This is the Biden-Blinken-Sullivan-Nuland logic and, as they clamor for a rules based order, behind the braying, lies the power of their alien weapons now spread out in 800 military bases in over 80 countries while China, the country they present as a major military threat, has one foreign base in one country.

The way of life of this alien race is crumbling, as their leader, who they call The Biden, walks the streets of Ukraine with a fake air raid siren to make it seem he is in danger, while they ignore their own people who are dying in a chemical spill and then a purposeful explosion that may have decimated the drinking water and livelihoods of one-third of their own world, making it far more dangerous for The Biden to walk the streets of Palestine Ohio, where he does not dare to go, than those of Kiev.

David Vincent had to go person to person in the late ’60s to warn about these alien invaders, as people refused to wake up to the danger they posed. It is far more difficult for the David, Diane, Dinitia and Damon Vincents of today because the aliens have captured all means of communication in their world, and emit an endless stream of blather utterly out of touch with the geopolitical realities of the world around them.

Behind the wall patrolled by their alien devices which censor all global perspective, they reward their lying media as just recently a daily newspaper now taken over completely by these creatures, which they call The New York Times, was awarded the prestigious Polk Award for its coverage of the war in Ukraine. This was a completely one-sided and often inaccurate view of the war, with almost no reporting on how and why the war started and only one paragraph written about the revelations that their alien masters blew up the Russian Nord Stream pipeline.

Can the drive toward death and destruction by these alien creatures and their mad lust for power be stopped before they destroy the earth in their attempt to make it “their world” and to keep the rest of the world from rising? The architect David Vincent tried to spread the word but it will take all of us to build a peaceful world and rid this one of this ever more dangerous alien menace.

This is a preview of an upcoming episode of I Fought the Law featuring prolific author and historian Gerald Horne and titled “Me Tarzan, You, Are Either With Us Or Against Us: Joe Biden in Africa” 

It’s hardly the ruined, devastated postwar rubble that was the backdrop of the most famous film shot in Vienna, The Third Man (see image above), but in more subtle ways Europe in general and Austria’s capital city in particular is showing signs of deterioration. After two years of a COVID lockdown and with the price cap on Russian oil and natural gas – prompting in return a cutoff of that supply from Russia – there is a general air of belt-tightening and despondency as well as an unleashing of right-wing sentiments in the wake of these twin catastrophes.

The belt-tightening is everywhere apparent. The museums cut back on Christmas blockbusters and instead tried to make up in ingenuity what they lack in budget. The Leopold Museum’s feature “Vienna 1900” displayed works by Klimt, Schiele and Kokoschka in an exhibition that simply looks like a regurgitation of past exhibits using the fin-de-siecle 1900 label to group them under a new heading of the turn to modernism.

The Kunst Historisches (Art History) museum which in the past has featured blockbusters highlighting Titian, Caravaggio and Bruegel this year tried, in avoiding the high price of borrowing and insuring works, to trace the history of competition in art in its “Idols and Rivals” exhibit which featured an array of replicas and reproductions. It’s a topic that might have dealt more strongly with the pressures on artists to produce saleable commodities in a capitalist art market, but which instead focused on individual rivalries. Best moment was an etching of the art historian Georgio Vasari and Michelangelo visiting Titian’s studio at which time Michelangelo, peering over the master’s shoulder, is said to have remarked that the Venetians, famous as colorists, still had not learned how to draw.

The New Year’s celebration was also muted as the city, pre-COVID, had sponsored nine stages with various kinds of music ranging from Viennese waltzes in the city square to hip-hop to rock, but this year cut the display down to five. A highlight of past New Year’s events was a broadcasting outside the world-famous Staatsoper, the national opera house, of the New Year’s Eve perennial Der Fledermaus and the next day on the same screen the world-famous Vienna Philharmonic Concert. This year the events took place but were not broadcast outside, and thus remained only the province of the elite, though the concert in truncated form is broadcast on public television stations across the world.

Surrealism and Psychoanalysis at The Freud Museum 

The most interesting exhibition was one of the smallest, a collection of 50 Surrealist pieces – sculpture, paintings and sketches – at the Sigmund Freud Museum, which recounted the sometimes troubled relationship between Freud and the Surrealist capo Andre Breton. Freud remained skeptical about the Surrealist project, which he claimed dealt only with the manifest, or overt, content of the dream, whereas he was interested in the latent, or hidden, content. But it’s easy to see that in fact the two benefited each other, with Surrealism helping to popularize Freud’s discovery of psychoanalysis, and Freud’s discovery of the unconscious which enlivened and invigorated the art world with a plethora of startling images. 

Also on hand at a revamped version of the museum was Freud’s correspondence with Einstein on the subject of the uselessness and destruction of war in the era between the two world wars. Their warning went unheeded, neither in their time nor today as we draw ever closer to global nuclear war.

The other most interesting exhibit was at the Welt or World Museum on the subject of “Oceans. Collections. Reflections.” The museum featured the work of New Zealand Maori artist George Nuku. The work, in exquisite paintings and sculptures, detailed the interdependence of the Maori on the ocean with each construction of a boat or a whale bounded by plastic bottles, indicating the way waste and the petroleum industry are devastating the livelihood and sustainability of the Maori.

Elsewhere, the exhibition described how in the 18^th century New Zealand tribesmen had visited Vienna as the capital of the Austro-Hungarian empire and asked for aid as they were about to be invaded by the British. The emperor granted them a printing press which they used to print leaflets and testimonies warning of the impending invasion. Helpful, yes, but also a way of exonerating the empire from its colonial role in the conquest and colonization of the peoples of eastern Europe.

The Volksoper's Threepenny Opera 

The Volksoper, or People’s Opera, which performs light opera or operetta and musicals, featured a strikingly modern version of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weil’s Threepenny Opera with the beggars dressed in the gaudy costumes of internet influencers and the thieves arrayed in the equally outrageous apparel of digital entrepreneurs. This element of the production emphasized the continuity between scammers of different centuries. What did not work was the overwrought Don Juan in Hell final death of the lead thief and cutthroat Mack the Knife which attempted to replace with smokescreens and stagecraft Brecht’s more radical ending. Brecht resolved the injustice of the play through a royal decree, which was designed to call attention to the falseness of Dickensian and other deus ex machina endings of  artworks which undercut the social critique in those works. The trope persists today, not only in fiction but also in the belief that billionaire philanthropy will in the end save the world, even as it adds to their own wealth.   

The city is dotted with metros, buses and trolleys, and is often voted the most livable on the planet. It continues to have extraordinary public transportation and affordable housing with the average price of 767 euros for a roomy one-bedroom flat just outside the central ring. Sixty percent of its population live in subsidised housing, a tribute to the post World War I affordable housing boom led by first socialist and then social democratic administrations. But as everywhere on the planet there are ominous sightings of the ever-present monstrous cranes, harbingers of the coming of large condos that will force the prices up everywhere in the city.

Renaissance of the right wing

There is also a disturbing right-wing renaissance even in this most cosmopolitan of cities. It’s perhaps the result of the support for the fascist elements in the Ukrainian government, soon to be aided by the flow of NATO arms that are making their way across Western Europe, where a right-wing planned coup was recently thwarted in Germany. Those arms have surfaced as far away as Africa, with Nigeria’s president announcing they have already reached terrorist groups in that country.

The Austrian History Museum, opened in 2019 and recounting Austrian events from after World War I to the present, featured an exhibit titled “Disposing of Hitler: Out of the Cellar, Into the Museum.” The Austrian criminal code bans any material that could be used to “perpetuate the aspirations” of any Nazi organization, but National Socialist paraphernalia – books, swords, photos, postcards – exist everywhere and can be bought on eBay. The exhibit consists of illustrations of this memorabilia and asks visitors whether it should be preserved, sold, or destroyed. Overwhelmingly the response, aided by the museum itself which presented an argument for a museum being a repository of historical memory, was “Preserve,” with no “Destroy” and an occasional “Sell.”

The exhibit thus functioned as a part of the path on the way to normalising this hateful junk, with the argument that “it’s part of our history” – the same argument propounded almost always by right-wing pundits and used to attack the pulling down of slave owners’ statues in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Elsewhere, the Staatoper’s version of Wagner’s The Master-Singers of Nuremberg, at over four-and-a-half hours the longest opera in the repertory, missed a chance to address the anti-semitism and championing of the Aryan virtues which made it not only a hit but the only opera performed at the Bayreuth Wagner Festival in Hitler’s darkest days of 1943 and 1944.

In the work, the proud German blond clean-shaven novice has to outsing the hard-hearted bearded technical master for the hand of a German maiden. The Staatsoper chose to simply recreate the work, putting its effort into painstaking reconstruction of the 17^th century milieu in which the work is set, seemingly oblivious to its historical uses and its ethnic stereotyping. The opera is a fascinating meta-mediation by Wagner on the art of composing and singing, but it cries out for a modern retelling which ironizes and criticizes its original bigotry and the uses to which it’s been put. Recreating the period does not negate that history but simply suppresses it in an era in Europe where it is more alive than ever.

Mozart in 3D 

Finally, Vienna also has, as is popular everywhere in Europe, a new immersive experience in the centre of the city titled “Mythos Mozart”. These are 3D recreations of Mozart’s death, his city Vienna in 1791 at the time of his writing of The Magic Flute, and the creation of his most famous musical number “A Little Night Music.”

In general, these “immersive” exhibitions flood the viewer with images – but afterwards one knows little more about Mozart and his world at the end than at the beginning. The last room is a kaleidoscope of random images assaulting the viewer on all four walls, the ceiling, and the floor. In response to this stultifying collage a little girl got on all fours, and raised one foot up against the wall as though she was a dog out for a walk doing its business. That little girl is going to make an excellent critic.

The beating heart of the city though, despite the rightward tilt and the wartime austerity, is still its cafes. Café Central, a haven for writers and once the home of Freud, the novelist and journalist Joseph Roth – the subject of an exemplary new biography titled Endless Flight – the anti-war critic Karl Krauss, and Arthur Schnitzler, the playwright and lampooner of the bourgeois. Café Museum was the home of the “1900” artists Klimt, Schiele, and Kokoschka and Café Mozart was the meeting place of composers and opera singers, and perhaps of Arnold Schoenberg and Albert Berg as they created the “new” atonal music.

These are now all packed with tourists but still contain the memories of a time that may hopefully be revived and prevail over the war clouds that now hang so heavily over Europe.

Dennis Broe presents the first of a two-part topical study of Robert Colescott, whose politically committed art tackled issues of unequal racial and gender representation, and the history of racial exploitation and domination in the U.S.

One of the founding members of New Black Art just reaped the rewards of his painterly prowess. Robert Colescott’s monumental George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware (above) recently sold for $15.3 million and is thus far the highlight purchase of the George Lucas’ Museum of Narrative Art, scheduled to open in Los Angeles in 2023.

This was nearly 17 times what any previous Colescott painting sold for and unfortunately the artist, who died in 2009, will not reap the rewards.

The painting, which shows a ragtag band of black workers in their professions and at leisure in a ragged vessel with a patch that could at any moment spring a leak, is a satirical rendering of the 1851 staple of Americana Washington crossing the Delaware. Colescott’s humorous rendition was described by the Lucas Museum head as “racially, socially and historically charged” and “at once a contemporary and historical work of art.”

That description suits Colescott’s art as a whole, which emerges after a long and arduous journey out of the dominant mode of American painting when he entered the field, Abstract Expressionism, through his engagement with Egyptian art, and his own, sometimes hilarious, sometimes painful, observations and experience with the legacy of colonialism and racism. These insights led him to raid the treasure trove of Western art to imprint his own stamp on it in a way that was more expansion of Black representation in line with the work of artists, filmmakers and television showrunners today than simple “appropriation.”

Colescott was born in Oakland in 1925 after a westward migration of his parents described in his painting 1919 (above). In it his mother, an African-American who identified as white, in white dress and green hat with a bow, and his father, with mixed African and Native American heritage in army fatigues bearing the mark of the Buffalo Soldier, face off on opposite sides of the country. His father was a jazz musician who was forced instead to work on the traditional Negro job as a Pullman conductor. Colescott, his mother’s favourite, as a teenager “passed” by enlisting into the army as white, fighting with a Caucasian unit in World War II. It wasn’t until an extended trip to Egypt, where he discovered a history of Black Art, that he stopped passing - denying his African-American heritage - at the same time as he definitively discontinued a flirtation with abstract art. 

A second major influence on Colescott was his study in Paris with the cubist Fernand Leger in 1949, courtesy of the G.I. Bill. After Leger returned from the U.S. after the war, he abandoned the abstract Cubist inheritance for a figurative style that was still highly stylized, with meticulous straight lines crisscrossing the composition. But the compositions themselves now incorporated some of the direct language of advertising, being stark oblongs of figures designed to be accessible to ordinary people. Leger refused to look at Colescott’s Cubist abstract renderings and instead steered the young painter toward the kind of representational exhibited in Leger’s own Construction Workers, a kaleidoscope of workers rebuilding France after the war, including an Algerian worker as a centrepiece. Colescott later reworked this motif in the American context as Hard Hats, showing the hierarchy of white American workers with black workers surrounding them and underpinning their labor.

The major change in Colescott’s work though occurred because of two sojourns in Egypt where he was confronted with 3000 years of Black Art. He was particularly enamored with the paintings in an ancient burial site in the ruins of The Valley of the Queens. These tomb murals of Nubian female royalty had figures floating freely in space everywhere surrounded with splashes of pure colour. Colescott incorporated this freedom and this concentration on the Black female form into a series he did at the time, a highlight of which is 1967’s depictions of one of these queens in Nihad in the New World, with the title suggesting his wish to transport what he learned in Egypt to the African-American context at home. The importance of Egypt to Colescott and Colescott to Egypt was acknowledged in the recent “Robert Colescott: The Cairo Years” exhibit at the American University of Cairo. My exhibition talk on Colescott is available here. 

Along with this immersion in a tradition of Black Art went his being thrown into the turbulence of the 1960s. First he was forced to flee Egypt because of the onset of the Arab-Israeli Six Days War, thus experiencing Middle Eastern colonialism firsthand, and then he returned to the political hotbed of San Francisco as the Vietnam War Protest and Haight Asbury counterculture reached its peak in 1968.

As Colescott made the transition from pure abstraction to a more socially and politically committed art, a journey that was not validated at the time in the art world, he was sustained by his university connections, the last place artists could find public support for their work, due to the dominance of abstract art in the gallery system.

Here though he was also thwarted. He wanted to be full time faculty at Berkeley, where he had gone to school, but was passed over for a job. He finally went to the University of Arizona at Tucson, where he became the first faculty member in the art department to receive the prestigious title of Regent’s Professor.

From Social Expressionism to Abstract Expressionism and back again

The triumph of Abstract Expressionism in the postwar 1940s and 1950s and its subsequent influence on conceptualism, minimalism, serialism etc. was accomplished at the height of the Cold War with the blessing of the CIA, and through the silencing of two other currents of modernism, the American Social Expressionists and the Mexican Muralists, both of whom retained the political thrust of earlier modernist movements.

This suppression, detailed in my book Cold War Expressionism: Perverting the Politics of Perception, subtitled Bombast, Blacklists and Blockades in the Postwar Art World, saw the work of the Popular Front artists of the 1930s and ’40s dumped on the market and sold for pennies. Their work was outlawed in the prestigious galleries which came into prominence with the decline of government support for an art of the people. What grew up alongside what the banker and later vice-president Nelson Rockefeller termed “free enterprise painting” was a privatization of visual art, was designed to be consumed by the burgeoning postwar corporate elite.

The high priest of the movement, the critic Clement Greenberg, urged artists to re-engage with “those to whom…[art] actually belongs – our ruling class.” Tom Braden made the apparently not very arduous leap from the executive secretary of the Rockefeller’s Museum of Modern Art, the temple of Abstract Expressionism, to the CIA’s director of cultural affairs. There he extolled the virtues of the new abstraction which he claimed “constituted the ideal style” now that its artists had “left behind [their] earlier interest in political activism.”

The artists themselves had mixed views about this adoption of their art where once monumental murals that expressed social struggle were replaced by large-scale abstract gaudy color schemes, such as the yellows and reds of Mark Rothko’s 1953 Untitled No 10, colours that announced the global triumph of American consumerism in works that now hung on suburban walls and in corporate lobbies.

Meanwhile, the political artists, who had been supported by the government in the New Deal 1930s were now forced into exile – for example, the artist Alice Neel, currently the subject of a retrospective at New York’s Metropolitan Museum, had to move to Spanish Harlem. There, she painted portraits of its inhabitants and grey, dingy landscapes such as Rag in Window, that expressed the loneliness of her political exile and contrasted with the productivist, corporate spirit of that other symbol of the New York landscape – the skyscraper.

Another prominent political artist, Jacob Lawrence, who described himself as an expressionist painter and whose subject matter centered on ordinary black workers, also fell on hard times and, at the height of this Cold War repression, had a mental breakdown and spent a year in an asylum. His work was scattered to the four winds and a recent painting, ironically of farmers contesting the power of the government in Shay’s Rebellion as part of the series “The American Struggle,” has recently been recovered after it was passed around and sold at a charity art auction.

The other suppressed movement prominent in this period, which Colescott when he came out as Social Expressionist would have affinities towards, was that of the Mexican Muralists, and particularly in the 1950s and ’60s the work and path of David Alfaro Siqueiros. The movement vied for renown with the Abstract Expressionists at the 1950 Venice Biennale. It was a triumph and then toured Europe where it was finally savaged by French critics – with American backing – and re-confined to Mexico. It didn’t re-surface in the American consciousness until last year’s thoroughgoing reexamination at New York’s Whitney Museum in the wake of which it was claimed the Mexican Muralist’s were more important as influences on American modernism than French artists.

Siqueiros was one of the first to represent the female Mexican indigenous body in a corporeal way, in for example 1924’s Peasant Mother. That might have sensitized Colescott in his later representation of many shades of African and African-American female bodies, most notably in his 1986 Picasso takeoff Les Demoiselles d’Alabama (above). Colescott, who had watched Diego Rivera’s painting of a mural of the Golden Gate Bridge, also had in common with Siqueiros the journey to Egypt where in ’65 Siqueiros declared himself to be in favour of the non-aligned movement in an extended stay in Nasser’s Egypt.

Colescott himself satirized the gallery-collector system of privatized and marketized or commodified art in his work Tea for Two (below). Colescott appears as himself, a hip black artist in checkerboard pants, leaning languidly on the fireplace of an affluent home. The artist knows what sells, how to brand himself, and how to appeal to the sexualized white female rich collector who gazes at him. The curlicue wafting of the artist’s cigarette and the tea is picked up in the abstract designs on the canvas the artist is peddling. A black servant delivers the tea, highlighting the structure of racial inequality that underpins the entire arrangement. 

Colescott’s work in breaking free of the legacy of Abstract Expressionism, detailed in Part II (to come), would be a sustained challenge to the still formidable injunction that art should properly remain silent on the world’s increasingly more violent devastation under a form of capitalism where greed knows no bounds; or that art’s sole role must be confined to obscure and wry comments on its place in a certain highly limited and reified area of commodity exchange. In the 1980s and 90s Colescott would move beyond Tea for Two to take on wider issues of unequal racial and gender representation and to put on display the ways the U.S. postcolonial system was built on a history of racial exploitation and domination. 

Dennis Broe reviews Raymond Chandler: The Man Behind The Mask, by Ken Fuller, and discusses how Chandler and others unmasked the capitalist delusion that was - and is? - Southern California

Raymond Chandler, along with Dashiell Hammett before him and Ross Macdonald after, effected a startling change in the crime novel. As Chandler put it, he took the novel away from those who commit murder with "hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare and tropical fish” and returned it to “the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse.”

This passage from Chandler’s essay explaining his technique in “The Simple Art of Murder” is dripping with sarcasm, contempt and class analysis in its explanation of how the genre had been practiced by the upper-class detectives of the Sherlock Holmes/Agatha Christie school.

Chandler is at pains to argue that murder and crime in general is not done for specious reasons and in a way that creates a puzzle for the detectives or as a clever ruse, or, as is still practiced in much of the serial killer literature of today, as expression of aberrant psychology.

A new book by Ken Fuller, Raymond Chandler: The Man Behind the Mask, in its strongest moments concentrates on Chandler’s implied politics in his noir novels. Chandler focuses on a generalized corruption in capitalist society that with his other two compadres opened a space for crime novels to have a strong infusion of the social aspects of crime. As he portrayed it, crime was committed by either those wanting more in a society which gives them less than they want, or by those on top who commit crimes as the way of establishing the fortune that then makes them respectable, or to maintain their position on top.

In Chandler’s world, crimes are committed for profit or out of class antipathy. For my money, the best of Chandler’s novels, the most explicitly class-conscious in this respect, is The High Window. Sometimes called The Brasher Doubloon, this novel focuses most directly on great fortunes and great crimes and reminds us today of the Sackler Family, who have paid almost no price for their role in promoting their drug oxycontin which led to the opioid crisis.

Fuller highlights a change in Chandler in the wake of the House Un-American Activity Committee and McCarthyite purges in which he disavows progressive social content and dawdles for a period on “the non-communist left,” a movement and a moment that, as Fuller describes, was well funded by the CIA.

For Fuller this turn in Chandler’s sympathies aligns both with his Eton-like elite education and ambition to create “literature”, leading to his perpetual disappointment because his work was not accorded that status, and also his secret homosexuality, shown by the way his lead character, the hard-core private detective Philip Marlowe, constantly projects his anxiety around women.

Fuller has a reading of Chandler’s work that sees his literary career as building to The Long Goodbye, seen as Chandler’s only real literary novel, and then suffering a precipitous decline.

Here the book is on more tenuous grounds. Judging Chandler on the somewhat antiquated and elitist assumptions of whether or not his works are “literature” takes us away from his actual literary contribution. Chandler unmoored Hammett’s often critical view of the detective as hired gun of the owner class and instead followed that other impulse in Hammett which allowed the detective to be a kind of interrogator of the class system itself, constantly and smirkingly questioning its assumptions, because of his or her freedom to go anywhere in search of the solution to the crime or to aid a client.

This multilayered examination of a society fractured on class lines – and what manifestation of society is not more fractured than status conscious Los Angeles? – is Chandler’s contribution to opening an entire literary genre to a wider view of the world.

Fuller illustrates Chandler’s literary failures by pointing out minute plot inconsistencies, something which Chandler was well aware of and never overly concerned about. His famous quip about moving the story forward was along the lines of, ‘Whenever I am unsure what to do I have someone come into the room with a gun and start shooting.’ It seems a bit of a timewaster to keep pointing out the ragged edges of Chandler’s plotting when he himself, and most readers, are not overly concerned with it, mostly because the themes and atmospherics are so strong.

The other aspect of Chandler’s work Fuller points to is how his repressed homosexuality plays out in his novels. Fuller does make a strong and original case in both examining the life and the novels for traces of this proclivity, which Chandler may never have acted on. In fact, there is a whole range of criticism which sees noir, or tough-guy fiction, as driven by repressed and unfulfilled masculine relationships. The problem here though is in a way the failure to link what may be an unconscious motivation with the main line of the novels. How does the repressed homosexuality affect Chandler’s views of society?

The Man Behind the Mask is well worth reading for its careful examination of Chandler’s overt politics and how this played out in his novels. The book though doesn’t do justice to Chandler’s achievement in significantly advancing the class consciousness displayed in his predecessor Hammett, and laying the groundwork for an even sharper class critique practiced by his successor Ross Macdonald. In Black Money, Macdonald explored all the dark nooks and crannies of the loathing and disgust generated over the failure of the capitalist delusion that Southern California was a new Eden and land of promise.

Dennis Broe focuses on the global drug pandemic, dealt with in different ways in three new series     

Three new series deal variously with the drug pandemic, that byproduct of the despair that has grown in the wake of neoliberal capitalism. As opportunities shrink because of a global upward redistribution of wealth away from both the working and middle classes and the socially responsible agencies of the state, more people turn to the powerful opioid fentanyl, the old reliable cocaine in both its middle-class (sniffed) and working-class and underclass (heated) form as crack, and to new imagined drugs to remove that pain.

These are the drugs du jour of three series, Hightown, Amo and Homecoming which deal in various ways with the culture, lifestyle and repressive mechanisms which surround their intake. However, because drugs are useful palliatives in societies that do not welcome change, for the most part the series, while offering detailed descriptions of the problem of drugs, do not offer constructive solutions on how to eradicate them.

Drug Dealers in Corporate Suits: Homecoming

 First and foremost is Amazon Prime’s Homecoming, whose second season stars Harriet, the film about the black abolitionist, Harriet Tubman. The first season had Julia Roberts – in this second season still exec producing – playing an at first compliant psychotherapist fronting for a drug and biochemical company, the Geist Group, which used veterans as guinea pigs to test a memory-erasing drug. Her mind was wiped also and she slowly started to wake to the callousness of the drug company’s exploitation of humans, who were already casualties of the corporate war machine.

The series’ first iteration was as a 20-minute podcast and it is exceptionally tightly structured, cramming more storytelling into a half hour than more series manage in an hour.

The second season begins with Tubman, also having lost her memory, waking in a rowboat and desperately attempting to piece together who she is and what has happened to her. There is a fractured storyline, as in the film Memento, that when ironed out is actually quite simple. The strength of the second season though is its laying bare of the ambition of the Geist Group which amplifies its first season program of expunging the memories of ex-soldiers to expand and join with the military to weaponize its memory-erasing drug to use on the battlefield and on the homefront. The effort is led by Joan Cusack’s Pentagon official whose utter lack of morality or responsibility, couched in corporate-military jargon, is striking.

As the series unfolds, we watch a grab for power by Hong Chou’s put-upon underling who quickly grasps that to get ahead in the biological and pharmaceutical corporate world what is required is an innate ruthlessness and a disregard for how the drugs being developed actually affect the users. She also imbibes a milder form of the drug which the company manufactures, a red roll-on – a “take the red pill and chill” – that allows her to live with the anxiety produced by her lack of conscience.

Stephan James’ dogged war veteran pursuing the truth

Fittingly, it is If Beale Street Could Talk’s Stephan James as a war veteran who doggedly pursues the truth who enacts a karmic revenge on the company that is unfortunately more wish-fulfillment that fact, but welcome just the same. A second strong season from one of the few shows to deal with the drug epidemic caused by the seldom discussed corporate and capitalist pharmaceutical industry.

High Times in Hightown

More problematic by far, but a reliable guilty pleasure, is Starz’s and Amazon Prime’s Hightown which describes its locale as Provincetown or P-town, as utterly riddled with drugs to the point that only users, sellers, cops and informers inhabit the space. The series focuses on the struggle of a lesbian Latina working-class addict, Jackie Quinones, who barely holds down his duties on Cape Cod patrolling the coastal waters for illegal catches. Her job is described mockingly by the macho cop she wants to impress as a “fish detective.”

Fish Detective Turned Real Detective in Hightown

She hits bottom in her addiction early in the series, and we watch her in her twin attempts to get and stay clean and to become an actual detective, a job for which she shows an aptitude. Jackie is constantly late on the rent for her dishevelled apartment, uses relationships to secure a next high, and sees nothing wrong with her oversexed life in P-town which she describes to a councillor as a “lesbian Shangri-La.” She finds the body of a young fellow addict and is the first to realize that another young female addict witnessed the murder and is in danger.

The plot cleverly intermixes her struggle to move up in her career with the detritus of her addict life, so that, in tracking a lead on where the witness might be she has to lie to a former lover to borrow her car and then drive carefully, since her licence has been suspended. Jackie’s struggle is intermixed with that of the macho cop she is trying to impress, who begins a relationship with the stripper-girlfriend of the drug dealer he is pursing, and an older-brother type fisherman caught also in dealing and using.

It’s an addictive mix, and the series well illustrates how drugs and drug culture have seeped into every aspect of life in the US, and how their use and pursuit propels the young adults in this series, informing every aspect of their existence.

Now the problems. The series is exec-produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, responsible for C.S.I, one of the most conservative of all series on television, where supposedly unerring but actually highly suspect forensic science negated any use for juries or trials and like Dragnet in the 1950s meant the cops were always right.

This is the new, updated Jerry Bruckheimer but some basic premises remain. The first is that, although treatment centres are a feature of the series, they are largely seen as useless, overruled by the need for drug use to be policed.

The second is the nature of the villains. The series takes the “daring” tack of having black and Latino dealers as its heavies. Daring because Hollywood will usually throw Caucasian dealers in the mix so as not to draw flak, but here we have simply unadulterated racism. The series can point to the prominence of drugs distributed by impoverished communities as an alternative source of income as a rationale for its characterization, but the problem is that the focus stays on the street dealers without any attempt to portray the wider socio-economic environment of a global and highly profitable drug trafficking economy which is sanctioned if not encouraged by many governments.

Recently, because of the Black Lives Matter protests against the police, Cops was cancelled. It was one of the television monuments to racism, a series that launched Murdoch’s Fox network and which viewed poor and minority communities entirely from the front seat of a squad car. Hightown has a lot going for it, most especially the engaging struggle of its Latina lead, but it would be better if it told some larger truths about why drug culture exists and why it is perpetuated, instead of sometimes falling back into C.S.I. police supremacist mode.

Drugs and the Duterte Death Squads

One of the Philippines’ better directors, a global darling of the film festival circuit, is Brillante Mendoza who of late has taken as his major subject the drug crisis fueled by President Rodrigo Duterte. Like Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Duterte has used the omnipresence of drugs in the slums of Manila as a pretext to wage war against its inhabitants.  

Two of Mendoza’s films on the subject present wildly different points of view, and both are in evidence in Amo, his series for the independent TV5 in the Philippines, distributed globally by Netflix. Ma’ Rosa, a nod to Pasolini’s Ma Roma, details the mom and pop desperation of an elderly couple who must sell drugs in order for their shop to survive and whose family is then brutally beset by the police.

Alpha, The Right to Kill, on the other hand, is told almost entirely from the police perspective as we follow a “daring” raid on the heart of the Manila slums that goes wrong. The right of the police to terrorize the populace is affirmed, while one lone cop is chastised for corruption. It is most likely that with the success of Alpha Mendoza was commissioned to undertake Amo, a series about a teen drug dealer and his uncle, a corrupt cop.

Why was Mendoza, whose own perspective seems to mesh with Duterte’s, chosen to fashion a series on this topic? Instead of (for example) the other most well-known Philippine filmmaker Lav Diaz, whose filmmaking style is more oblique but who has proved himself in films like The Halt and The Woman Who Left to be a far more strident and nuanced critic of the contemporary regime? The answer lies probably in commercial reasons, and government censorship.

Nevertheless, Mendoza is an extraordinary filmmaker incorporating in his series aspects of Italian neorealism, in his gritty portrayal of the slums, and European modernism. For example, in a reflexive joke where raps about the desperate situation of the populace appear on the soundtrack and then feature the band themselves as the teenage protagonist walks by them on the street.

Showrunners frequently describe their series as “like a long movie”, but that is seldom the case since they are mostly broken into plot-heavy smaller pieces. The style though that Mendoza employs, using an immediate and intimate hand-held camera and disdaining any kind of explanation, easy identification, or judgement of his characters does make this more like a movie than a series.

The 13-episodes are mostly in Tagalog, the national language of the Philippines, and follow first the high school student Amo, or Joseph, as he falls further into the amoral lifestyle of a dealer. He begins by skipping school and employing a young girl as a drug runner to escape a police barricade, and then moves to distributing all kinds of exotic party drugs at a club where when the drug turns lethal the English-speaking owners disavow him. He ends alone and on the run. It is in this first half of the series that the Duterte line rules, because we watch Amo’s casual corruption turn deadly and contaminate everything he does. This half of the series functions almost as a rationale for tough and lethal police action.

Corrupt Cops and the Drug Trade in Amo 

The second half of the series follows Amo’s uncle, a cop himself, as he and his squad carry out a brutal kidnapping of a Japanese drug dealer, coordinated by their superior, the most ruthless of them all. This half functions much more as a criticism of the police and their invovement in the overall corruption that drugs and money generate. And here it is not a lone wolf cop but an entire squad on the force, connected ironically with the anti-kidnapping unit, that plans the kidnapping and subsequent executions.

This is a very mixed series by an extraordinary filmmaker who has brought both his creative talents and his political baggage to television. What the series indicates in actuality is that Philippine filmmakers themselves are not above being corrupted – in this case not by drugs but by the general manipulation of drug culture by those who are not interested in solving the problem, but in profiting from it.

Dennis Broe reflects on the recent attacks on European colonialism and support shown to Black Lives Matter, through the defacement and removal of statues

The first week of European and particularly French and Francophone protests in the wake of the US Black Lives Matter movement concerned parallel police actions against French minorities. This included the death on his birthday of Adama Traoré, held down by three French cops in a hold similar to that executed on George Floyd. Traoré was pronounced dead on arrival at the police station. The official verdict claimed that asphyxiation was caused by the presence in his blood of marijuana. But the family medical examiners reached the conclusion that he died as a result of the chokehold.

Last weekend protestors memorializing Traoré swarmed the streets, despite the Covid prohibition forbidding gatherings of more than 10 people. In the wake of the protests, the Interior Minister announced the chokehold was now banned. The protests were peaceful and most of the marchers wore masks and maintained social distancing. One effect though was that they broke the embargo on street demonstrations which were in full force before the confinement, opposing President Macron’s underfunding of hospitals and his attempt to reduce worker pensions.

This week the protestors widened their approach and took aim at the legacy of European colonialism, most prominently by scrawling “I Can’t Breathe,” George Floyd’s last words, on the Belgium statue in Ghent of Leopold II who presided over the genocidal exploitation of the Congo, referred to at the time erroneously as The Belgian Congo. Across the continent memorials fell, including the statue of Edward Colston, a Bristol slave merchant at the time when the British empire amassed a good deal of its wealth by transporting slaves from Africa to the Americas.

In Bordeaux, the city removed plaques on David Gradis Street which proudly proclaimed that between 1718 and 1789 Gradis’ company had powered 221 boats carrying African slaves to the Americas. Nantes, the center of embarkation of slave boats in France, was already ahead of this movement, having created a memorial to the cruelty of the slave trade. It’s an impressive monument – but so is the at times ostentatious wealth of the city, built on the slave trade, the legacy of which may outlast the memorial. All of which brings up the question not just of memorials but of reparations, a question that has so far not been raised here.

French president Macron was quick to take advantage of the situation having already proclaimed his African soft power policy of redressing colonialism by promising to restore some of the art the French looted from West Africa over the years which resides in prominent museums like the Louvre. The French policy in Africa though includes the carrot and the stick because the French army is still in Mali, Mauretania, Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad.

This tearful history was also recounted in Statues Also Die, Alain Resnais and Chris Marker's 1950s film about the theft of this art and its repositioning as colonial booty in French museums. In the film the statues, wrenched out of their cultural context, appear to tear up, wither and die in the asphyxiation of colonialism.

The colonial tradition endures, however. Laurent Joffrin, the editor of the supposedly left French paper Liberation, which published Sartre’s salvos against French terrorism in Algeria, turned his back on that legacy in decrying the tearing down of colonial statues as partaking in the dangerous work of erasing history. Joffrin wished instead that the statues remain as markers of the colonial legacy. But most are not mere markers – they are celebrations.

Joffrin needn’t worry. France’s colonial history is very deeply rooted and will unfortunately endure beyond the statues. But this week a first salvo was fired across the bow against that legacy, both in France, in other cities in Europe, and across the globe.

Dennis Broe reviews more series TV, from Germany and from the U.S. Image above: military fascists in Weimar Berlin 

Season three of the German megaseries Babylon Berlin continues the exploration of the tensions in the Weimar Republic, as it moves inexorably toward its demise and its replacement by fascism. The series centres around Inspector Gereon Rath, a sometimes staunch defender of the democracy and Charlotte Ritter – a vivacious character created for the series and not in the Volker Kutscher novels – who is a dirt-poor but brilliant club-girl or flapper, who wants to become an inspector herself.              

In the Weimar mix are Communists, Republicans, brown-shirted fascists and financiers, this last group promoting chaos and themselves supporting and intrigued with the fascist ideals. A very strong aspect of the series is that it does not reduce German fascism to Hitler, but instead depicts the much broader currents of the society that supported it, including the aforesaid banks and investors and those in the army and the police who were appalled by the spectacle of democracy.

Seasons one and two revealed the fascist support at the heart of the Berlin police force, while season three in its multiple strands includes a Nazi conspiracy, fuelled and organized by an ex-army officer and now one of the police commissars, to blame the Communists for a bombing that killed one of the Republic’s defenders.

Another of the multiple strands involves the 1929 stock market crash – the series begins with the collapse of the market and then flashes back – that has the fascist-favouring scion of a wealthy company preaching the good that come from total financial chaos. He then shorts the market and benefits from the global economic destruction wrought by the collapse of the American market.

The other main focus of this season concerns a series of murders in what amounts to a German super-production, an expressionist film musical that will introduce German audiences to sound and that recalls the American first sound film and musical, The Jazz Singer. The high quality production values make the film a comment on what Babylon Berlin is accomplishing in the present. In other words here is a German series, co-funded by German national television, filmed itself at the main German studio Babelsberg, the centre of the renowned era of Weimar production, and co-produced by a German auteur with a global reputation, Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run, Cloud Atlas).  

A Communist Rally in Weimar Germany

In its lavish recreation of the period, complete with long shots of densely populated Berlin streets, notable platz or squares and Caligari-like production numbers, the series is designed to rival megaseries such as HBO’s Game of Thrones and Westworld. Just as the musical is attempting to reposition German film to take on the Hollywood behemoth that had throttled European film production devastated by World War I, so too Babylon Berlin is a successful attempt to put German serial television on the global map, and challenge Hollywood. (Though the series is now distributed worldwide on Netflix.)  

This series also has far more to say about the nature of German fascism and its origin – this is more Berlin Alexanderplatz with its complex analysis of the class tensions that were preyed upon to bring Hitler to power – than more simplistic but bombastic fairy tales like Inglorious Bastards or more exploitative German national epics such as Downfall, about the last days of Hitler. Strong fascist undercurrents percolate around the show, but it isn’t until season three that Gereon becomes acquainted with a strange book titled Mein Kampf. In that way the show implicitly questions more simplistic retellings of the era, which supposedly began and ended with Hitler.  

There are some drawbacks to this third season. The solution to the movie murder plot is not very credible, though it does call attention to a type of fascist personality. Its resolution also fails to take advantage of the mysterious costuming of the villain that has been set up throughout the season. These though are offset by quirky remembrances of cinematic times past (the iris out that starts each episode), by dramatic uses of older film plot devices (the thrilling last-minute attempt by Charlotte to save her friend from the hangman’s axe that recalls The Mother and The Law segment from Intolerance) and by the series’ resolute conviction that multiple layers of the German financial, military and police were implicated in and in favour of fascism.  

'Superstore': the working class versus corporate management

The Coronavirus lockdown occurred in Hollywood just as the final episodes of many series were being shot and so for a multitude of viewers there will be no concluding episode this season. One of the casualties is the last episode of the lead actress of a little-touted but resonant working-class comedy called Superstore. America Ferrera is leaving the show, and that exit will now be carried over into next season.

America Ferrera anchors Superstore 

Ferrera is a second generation Honduran actress who has now successfully anchored two sit-coms, this one and also a Hispanic take on the wonder and horror of the fashion industry called Ugly Betty. Her warm presence has been at the heart of two shows over nine seasons, a remarkable feat for a Latina, or for any actress, and which has mostly gone unnoticed.

The action in Superstore takes place in a Walmart type all-purpose venue set in a shopping mall in St. Louis. Perhaps the reason the show has flown under the radar, gaining little critical attention, is that it is heavily concerned with the problems of survival of a diverse workforce constantly challenged by, as the show puts it, “Corporate.” It’s not a sexy show which deals with middle-class anxiety over wealth but a working-class show which spotlights the everyday problems encountered by that workforce. The show is available to stream on iTunes.

The employees are often pitted against a corporate management which is constantly threatening to fire them if they organize, putting a positive spin on the store’s devastation in a tornado, and planning to replace them with robots.

Superstore’s diverse, working-class workforce 

A crucial episode in the show’s maturation was 'Labour' the final episode of season one. Corporate refuses Cheyenne, a pregnant Asian teen, paid sick leave to have her baby. Jonah, the college-educated new hire proposes the workers organize and start a union. Amy (Ferrera), a manager and also Jonah’s romantic interest, opposes this move, claiming that it will only bring Corporate down on their heads. Glenn, the Christian supervisor, finally gets so frustrated with Corporate’s indifference that he orders Cheyenne home for six weeks and then adds, “with pay.” Corporate’s answer is to fire Glenn and this is too much for Amy, the least rebellious of the workers, as she leads the entire crew in a walkout. The season ends with the workers outside in the parking lot, challenging management.

Season four deals with the cruelty of US immigration policy, as ICE commandos invade the store and eventually corral Mateo, a gay Filipino and Cheyenne’s best friend. The season ends with Mateo led off to custody, and echoes the ending of Ken Loach’s Bread and Roses where a key character is likewise led into exile by a heartless border patrol.

Season five begins to come to grips with the question of automation and corporate’s attempts to replace workers with a store robot, which the workers react to by attacking. There is a confrontation scene as the company president, digitally addressing workers in this global chain which is called Cloud 9, stresses – with his eyes raised toward the heavens – his resoluteness about the company facing the future. He is confronted by a former corporate manager who explains that the future he is actually contemplating instead involves increasing automation and large-scale firings.

Superstore accepts the need for these global corporate chains but in its own resolute focus on the workforce implies they would be better run and function more humanely if owned and operated by the workers themselves, instead of by corporate capitalism. There are, of course, other ways of resisting, as detailed in Stacey Mitchell’s Big Box Swindle where whole towns have zoned these Walmart-type entities from settling in their region.

With the new focus on work conditions at Amazon as a result of the Coronavirus – the company has been shut down in France for unsafe work practices and forbidden to profit off the virus by selling non-necessary items – there are plenty of issues to fuel season six of this overlooked and undervalued series. In just the same sort of way essential workers are overlooked and undervalued in America, Britain, and indeed in the world as a whole.