Why Are All The Artists So Damn Liberal?: "Spies Like Us"
In the run-up to the Iraq War in 2003, America's leaders based a good deal of their argument about the danger of the Iraqi state on the anecdotes of a man codenamed "Curveball." He was a drunken, congenital liar – according to his own handlers – who claimed that trucks carrying equipment for making weather balloons were actually mobile biological weapons laboratories. At the same time, across the pond, the calls to action of the British government were buttressed by a report from their own intelligence services that the Iraqis were packaging chemical weapons in small glass containers, a farcical detail their spies had apparently borrowed from the Michael Bay flick The Rock to make their intel feel more dramatic.
Before he was relieved of command in 1951 for failing to obey civilian authority, General Douglas MacArthur was confident he could end the Korean War by dropping a mere 30-50 so-called "tactical" nuclear weapons on the enemy; he also supported a plan to sow the entire border between North Korea and China with radioactive cobalt. This latter ploy is suspected to have originated with the same folks, led by Edward Teller, who came up with the idea of the hydrogen bomb in the first place.
Anecdotes of insanity are, from a certain point of view, not aberrations but endemic to military history. The U.S. and the Russians have long-running programs co-opting dolphins and whales into military service. Winston Churchill wanted to make an aircraft carrier out of an iceberg, the U.S. military has funded projects for making a bomb that would turn opposing soldiers gay, and before the Battle of Antietam General Lee's top-secret, super-genius battle plans were given away because someone wrapped them around a couple of cigars and lost them in the mud.
The absurdity abounds. And the fact that the consequences of this cockamamie scheming – beyond the enrichment of the folks who make and sell both weapons and lies, that is – revolve around unimaginable violence, usually heaped upon either civilians or soldiers who have signed up for earnest reasons, gives that absurdity a tang that tends to linger unpleasantly in the throat.
It's not a surprise that certain folks tend to respond to all of this rather negatively. Artists, for example. There's nothing revelatory in this notion. What's more interesting is the question of why they respond this way, which is in turn tied to the vexing issue of whether, and in what way, artists tend to be liberals.
I'm not here to make the argument that Spies Like Us, from 1985, is a great film. It's an uneven movie, notable for its meandering storyline, dalliances with a deeply fratboy vision of women, and a certain lack of emotional investment in its characters. At the same time, though, it's also notable for the fact that its comedic gags are far smarter, and land far more frequently, than those in many comparable comedies. But most importantly for my purposes here, it's notable for the insights it offers into the relationship between the arts and liberalism.
The plot of the film might be ridiculous...or it might be the exact thing dreamed up by the kind of folks who released the mustard gas at the Second Battle of Ypres as a kind of experiment, not having much idea of exactly how well it would work on the opposing soldiers. The problem faced by the geniuses atop the military intelligence pyramid in Spies Like Us is that the Soviets are deploying a new nuclear missile. The solution to this problem is to recruit a pair of disposable men and send them through Pakistan into Soviet territory. These poor fools will be easily caught and interrogated, thus serving as a diversion for the real spies who will be operating in the same area at the same time.
The saps recruited for the job are Austin Millbarge (Dan Ackroyd) and Emmet Fitz-Hume (Chevy Chase). They are, respectively, a rather nerdy civilian doing decoding work for the Defense Department, and a lovable but not terribly bright minor press secretary working in the State Department.
When these cheerful nincompoops are caught cheating on an advancement test, they're told that instead of being punished they're being promoted all the way up to undercover fieldwork. Elated, and eager to serve their country, they dive into an accelerated military training program which involves things like a careful attempt to measure their ability to stay afloat at high speeds, and a precisely calculated test of whether they can survive being in the cockpit of a plane fuselage dropped from ninety feet in the air onto concrete.
After passing this course, they get parachuted into Pakistan, a country that was notable in 1985 from the American military perspective because it's located next door to Afghanistan, where the enemy Soviets were waging an unjust war to subdue a country merely because of its geopolitical location. (And were one to have the temerity to note that there might be a touch of tragic irony in the American situation in Afghanistan some thirty-five years later, the response from the U.S. military would certainly fall along the lines of: "Stuff it, bub! We're nothing like the Soviets – they were the bad guys, we're the good guys!")
Anyway, Millbarge and Fitz-Hume trek their way into the Soviet Union proper, manage to meet up with the real spies, and proceed to do battle with various agents of the Communist utopia. (One of those minions, in a fascinating twist, is a Soviet soldier played by the Greek film director Costa-Gavras, who’s among the most important directors of politically-furious movies ever to have lived. Oh, and Terry Gilliam, Ray Harryhausen, Joel Coen, Sam Raimi, Martin Brest, Michael Apted, Larry Cohen, and B.B King also show up in bit parts, just for good measure. And there's a cameo by Bob Hope, whose road films much of these proceedings pay homage to. It's a strange film, and one with many small treasures.)
Eventually, the American spies reach their objective and discover the truth about their mission. They're not trying to prevent the Soviets from being able to launch their new weapon at America. They're being used to launch the missile themselves, allowing the U.S. to test its new space-laser missile defense system. If the system works (in the minds of the higher-ups) so much the better – the Americans will be assured that they can kick Soviet ass with impunity. If it doesn't work, so much the even better than the first option – a nuclear war will be started, allowing the world to burn off some of its ponderous nuclear stockpile.
The space-laser doesn’t work. Nuclear war is only minutes away. It's up to Millbarge and Fitz-Hume to re-route the missile out of the atmosphere, where it destroys the satellite of that then-young startup MTV, much to the delight of a pair of stoned high school kids.
The world is saved, and the point is made: the idiots at the top are happy to risk destroying us all for reasons of wealth, ego, and insanity. It’s up to the rest of us, silly as we may be, to prevent them from doing so.
Pretty standard stuff, particularly for certain Hollywood comedies of the nuclear age (ie. everything from Dr. Strangelove to Real Genius). But how does it help us understand the liberalism of artists?
Let's back up a step. Do artists tend to be liberal?
In many ways the answer is sometimes, if by liberal we mean true leftist positions on things like economics or the environment. The proportion of artists who are happy and comfortable with the status quo to those who'd like to depopulate places like Jackson Hole and give them back to the animals or institute redistributionist tax plans that would threaten their own wealth is probably not much higher than it is in certain other areas of the population.
In many ways, though, the answer is obviously yes, in the same way that businesspeople tend to be conservative.
Frustrating as this may be to conservatives who feel that Hollywood is not on their side, there's no big mystery here. Think about the kids you went to high school with: which of them ended up in the arts, and which ended up in business? And, as the situation at your high school was probably more or less replicated across the country, is it at all surprising that many of the kids who liked drama and art and literature ending up being liberals doing things like teaching drama or making music or working in Hollywood, while the kids who were in the business clubs or the Christian after-school groups or simply disdained "artsy-fartsy" enterprises ended up being conservatives, working in straight-ahead "real jobs" or going into business for themselves or making it all the way to Wall Street?
Which is to say that different disciplines attract different kinds of people. Put differently, when you think back to those people from high school, and ask yourself what their jobs and politics were likely to be when they got older, in a lot of ways the reason for these things is that those are the kind of people they were.
This idea – that chasing artistic enterprises attracts liberal people, while staking out territory in the business world attracts conservative ones – is at least a start. But it's also overly simplistic and not quite right: we all know people who started out liberal and got conservative, and vice versa.
So maybe the question is more complicated. And this is where Spies Like Us is helpful.
In Fitz-Hume's State Department job, he does things like deliver press conferences about U.S. agricultural policy in Latin America at which he pretends his microphone isn't working rather than actually answer questions. When we first see him, though, he's watching a musical at his desk – She's Working Her Way Through College, starring Ronald Reagan – instead of either working or studying for the promotional exam he's due to take the next day.
Life at the State Department, in other words, is (like much office life) fatuous, a matter of avoiding responsibility and doing as little as possible. Ronald Reagan poking his head out from between Gene Nelson and Virginia Mayo in a musical number to intone "Hotter than a baker's oven!" extends this ridiculousness all the way to the top, reminding the viewer, as Hollywood loved to do in the '80s, that the exalted leader of the free world was in fact a rather silly fellow who had become famous in a rather silly profession.
This irreverence also undergirds the humor in the way Millbarge is introduced: he announces to his boss Captain Hefling – a very serious military man played with abandon by Stephen Hoye – that he can do just as well with a decoder he found in a box of Fruit Loops as he can using the government's high-powered computers. This infuriates Hefling, who sees it as...ah, here we are getting to the rub. Why, indeed, does it infuriate Hefling?
One of the pillars on which this film rests is an irreverence toward (certain types) of authority. It's not just that Millbarge and Fitz-Hume are free thinkers (in Millbarge's case) or lazy and bad at their job (in Fitz-Hume's): they are both inclined to be suspicious about the rules as laid down from above, suspicious of the standing order. This is, of course, the exact attitude of the filmmakers (the movie was directed by John Landis) toward the virtual nation-state unto itself that goes by the moniker of the "military-industrial complex."
And it is, I think, an attitude not shared by many conservatives, who tend to see things like rules laid down from above (or from before) as exactly the social structures that need to be conserved.
The plot reflects this liberal suspicion: the idea that men would try to bomb their own nation to test their missile defense system is a reflection of a long-standing belief that sometimes obedience to power turns that power itself into the thing that is venerated, at high human cost. These are not serious men, goes the riff, worthy of respect. They are maniacs in suits and ties who hold the rest of us at the mercy of their insane belief in the unassailable importance of the standing order. (The movie is full of details that drip with revolt at such men: two of these men, played by William Prince and Bruce Davison, dip Oreos in milk and eat them as the nuclear missile descends.)
And this irreverence, this suspicion of authority – particularly of the state and its military power – this suspicion of the usefulness of violence, seems to me to be very much a liberal trait. Where it joins with the creation of art is that the artist, to do their job, is frequently forced to work through the human experience of things, and the human experience of war and violence is a terrible one. This is not to say that conservatives are somehow pro-war; simply that art is very much about communication and empathy, and engaging in any depth with those things makes it very hard to be very gung-ho about the virtues of the militarized state.
(I am, of course, eliding innumerable caveats in all of this – and I do not mean to strictly equate "liberals" with Democrats, nor "conservatives" with Republicans – but I think there is a value here in some generalization.)
This ties into a deeper, perhaps more subtle issue. Because art tends to focus on the experience of being human, it finds itself frequently engaged in investigations of identity and of approaching the political (when it does) through the personal. It does not deal particularly well with questions of system-level structure or organization. Artists (as opposed to liberals or conservatives) in general make poor political analysts; one does not, I think, want to put the artists in charge of big complicated systems like governments or businesses.
But as for observing the human, and the effects of those big systems on human beings? This is what artists do well. Take the gloriously absurd training sequences in Spies Like Us. Their ridiculous jokes – like Millbarge and Fitz-Hume being pulled across the surface of the water by a powerboat – land not because they are accurate in terms of military training, but because they reflect what that training feels like: physically punishing, arbitrary, and dangerous. The absurdity of the humor, that is, highlights the absurdity of the activity and its ends.
In the same way, the movie's dozens of small touches work to point out the human experience of being at the mercy of the larger forces at play in the '80s. A pair of Soviet spies in Pakistan, for example, show up dressed in pastel colors and big American smiles, just like that decade's stereotype of Ivy League blue-bloods (compare them to Dan Aykroyd's friends in Trading Places for example, or the rival frat brothers in Animal House.) The gag works because of its discontinuity, of course, but also because of the sly truth of the association it makes: the men who smile at you like that are the same the world over.
Similarly, in Pakistan Fitz-Hume and Millbarge have to pretend to be doctors; when they meet a bunch of real doctors, the dialogue consists entirely of that word, everyone only saying "Doctor," as they acknowledge each other in the chain of introductions. The scene lands because the inane repetition is funny, but it also sends up the way in which so many doctors require people to call them by their profession (as opposed to, say, architects or pro athletes, who tend not to ask you to do this). Here again is that liberal resistance to the imposition of certain kinds of authority, as well as the artists' inability to escape questions of identity: is it strange, or amusing, or worth contemplating that being a doctor subsumes that much of someone's being?
Search through the film and its gags, and the those of comparable movies, and much of the history of Hollywood, and you’ll find a similar set of concerns.
In the end, there is far more to be said on this issue. It's true that there’s no limiting correlation between artists and liberalism. There are certainly reams of conservative artists out there. Nor does imputing some sort of liberalism to artists mean that they cannot, or do not, hold bizarre, unsettling, or destructive beliefs.
But what's revealed by even something as silly as Spies Like Us is that the pursuit of art – as profession, as endeavor, as obsession – often both emerges from and engenders a resistance to the dictates of things as they are. It's a pursuit built to put values into question, to argue for the human in the face of the systemic, and to make us laugh if we can – even if it's graveyard laughter – at the frequency with which we find ourselves at the mercy of the maniacs.
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