Election Post

Mostly about a movie from 67 years ago.

Like, I imagine, most people with a… project? like this one (I remain unsure what exactly Garden Scenery is, what to describe it to people as, aside from “a Substack”, which is unpleasantly Brand-coded – it seems wrong to call it a “newsletter” when I only occasionally write about the news, and “blog” seems a bit slight and hobbyist relative to my ambitions, although I don’t think I could really dispute the label against a hostile critic. “Project” will have to do), I’ve been wondering if I should write something about the American presidential election that just happened. The main reason for my hesitancy is that I don’t think I have much to say about it; it doesn’t seem that interesting, or that significant. The voting public was asked to choose between two right-wing candidates, both of which endorsed the ongoing genocide in Palestine, the ongoing mass deportation of immigrants and concomitant militarization of the border, the ongoing (manufactured) backlash against gender nonconformity, and the death penalty. Among other things. One tried to win the votes of both liberals and “moderate” conservatives with this overtly conservative platform, the other only tried to win the votes of conservatives. Unsurprisingly, the conservative who ran as a conservative beat the conservative who ran as a liberal. What is there to say about such an outcome? It’s the most obvious and unremarkable thing in the world. Liberals don’t want to vote for conservatives, and so they didn’t. Any honest analysis encroaches upon tautology, so self-evident is the nature of the situation. It’s true that, if left to its own devices, it is the natural tendency of the American citizen to drift towards fascism, but any proclamations about “realignment” or what have you seem, to me, premature after an election between two candidates whose own alignments were offset by only a few degrees. That the attempt to reframe enthusiastic support for xenophobia and genocide as compatible with the stated principles of liberal humanism produced such a spectacularly pathetic electoral failure should, if anything, be seen as a positive sign for the state of the electorate – although so long as being to the right of “Crime Bill” Clinton continues to be a requirement for securing major-party nomination, such speculation will remain essentially untested.

I watched the movie Zero Hour! (Hall Bartlett, 1957) last week. To the extent that it’s remembered at all, Zero Hour! is remembered as the thing Airplane! (Jim Abrahams / David Zucker / Jerry Zucker, 1980) is a “remake” of, the tacky B-movie that it repurposed as rigging for its grand satirical tapestry – which is perhaps a shame, because it’s a perfectly solid, professional film, no worse, no more ridiculous than a thousand others produced that decade. It’s not particularly good, either, but there were aspects of it that I found interesting, that have been jangling around in my head since I watched it. The premise is very simple: after the pilot and co-pilot on a commercial flight across Canada both fall ill, an RCAF veteran must somehow bring the jet airliner over the Rocky Mountains and down safely at the Vancouver airport in dense fog – even though he’s never flown a plane anywhere near its size, and, even worse, he’s now afraid of flying, following an incident where six men under his command were killed in an arial raid in, of course, dense fog. Dana Andrews plays the pilot, Sterling Hayden his former Captain, now tasked with guiding him down over radio. Linda Darnell plays the pilot’s wife. The rest of the characters aren’t that important; the wife is only barely important, mostly symbolic. The pilot (who has the cartoonishly masculine name of Ted Stryker) is played by Andrews as a sort of emasculated alpha, a strong, virile fighting ace rendered weak and impotent by “guilt” – which is to say he has PTSD, and because of his PTSD he stammers like a pussy, and struggles to make eye contact, and can’t keep a job, and his wife doesn’t respect him anymore, and she’s leaving him, which is why she’s on the plane, which is why he’s on the plane, chasing after her. So, we can say that, in a sense, if his wife didn’t think he was a pussy, everyone on the plane would have died. There was certainly no one else aboard that could have taken his place, done what he did. But, of course, to save their lives he must stop being a pussy, overcome his fear, assert control over his life, and symbolically demonstrate to his wife (operating as co-pilot, naturally, subserviently) that going forward, he will be able to maintain an erection despite all those men he killed.

What I find most interesting about Zero Hour! is the arbitrary banality of its crisis. The illness which affects the pilot and co-pilot (along with about half the passengers) is food poisoning, contracted from one of the two in-flight dinners; it’s pure chance that Andrews choose the other one and didn’t become sick as well. But the point is not the contrivance of this, but its utter lack of meaning. There is no particular reason why the fish was contaminated – no one did it on purpose, the flight wasn’t intentionally targeted, there was just a failure to adhere to food safety regulations somewhere in the supply chain; it’s impossible to say where, and it doesn’t matter. No one’s really to blame, accidents happen, etc. The consequences, in this particular case, are just cruelly, exceptionally dire. I think this is interesting because it essentially figures what is, technically speaking, a man-made disaster, a disaster of industrial failure, as a natural one, refusing every opportunity to suggest some place for the audience to point their blame. It’s not that I expect the B-movie about spoiled fish to offer a cogent critique of political economy, it’s that it’s very strange, today, to watch a disaster movie, especially a disaster movie set on a commercial airline, in which there is no antagonist. There is no bomb, no gun, no corrupt bureaucrat or company man, no terrorist or saboteur, just a bunch of people sweating and holding their stomachs, hoping they don’t die in a tin can thousands of feet up in the sky. I think the way to make sense of this is to note that Zero Hour! came out in 1957 – the height, more or less, of American post-war prosperity, when the Cold War was already well underway, of course, but before it became the all-consuming paranoid fixation of the body politic. At this particular historical moment, and not before, and not after, it made sense to make a disaster movie where no one is to blame, where there is no external threat to be defeated, because this was the only historical moment in which it was possible, in America, to believe that no such external threat existed, not a serious one, anyway, that American power and prosperity would simply continue to ascend forever, that capitalist modernity had triumphed, embodied by Eisenhower and Uncle Sam (yes, Zero Hour! is technically about Canadians; I hope I don’t need to explain why this doesn’t matter). There are no more really political problems, just technological ones, logistical ones – the system is still imperfect, yes, there’s still work to be done, flaws to be ironed out, but certainly there can be no question that this is the system, that henceforth history is a matter of its incremental improvement, its slow, inexorable triumph. The only true threats that remain are random chance and our own irrational fears, the ghosts that would be better left behind in the rubble of Europe. You have to forget them if you want to land this plane. You have to forget it all. Become an airman again, an ace pilot, but forget the bad dreams and burning wreckage, forget the destruction you wreaked. The war is over now. Don’t think about Korea. Become useful to society, and stop being a pathetic, weepy freak. Become the man you were meant to be.

I don’t mean to make it sound like Zero Hour! is some arch-conservative film, or that Hall Bartlett is an especially right-wing filmmaker – in fact, a brief perusal of his filmography suggests an earnest, social-issues-liberal of the Stanley Kramer variety. Which makes sense, actually, because this is ultimately a utopian vision, or as close to utopian as a disaster movie can get – a world in which bad things only happen by accident, accidents everyone agrees are serious, and everyone works in good faith to mitigate, and to try to prevent in the future. It’s a fantasy, of course, completely detached from reality, but then all utopias are, even (perhaps especially) ones as blandly pragmatic as this one. And it’s not as though the hijackers and saboteurs that would come to populate aviation thrillers of later decades were any less fantastical, any less of a projection of certain ideas about society. It’s easy to be touched by the quaintness of Zero Hour!’s belief in (North) American society, its confidence in its stability and rationality, its “we’re all in this together”-ness – but don’t forget all this is an illusion, a story it’s telling itself. That society was cruel and stupid then, just as it is cruel and stupid now. There is only the matter of how clean it imagines its hands to be, how clean it wants to imagine them to be. In this sense, it must be admitted, things have changed. It is much more accepting, now, of the blood and grime it’s caked in. More than that, it should be recognized that at this point, it’s proud of it. It wants more. And, no doubt, it will get it.