Recently a lot has been made by progressive commentators and academics in the news, economist Paul Krugman of the New York Times in particular, of the similarities, and differences, between our situation today and the period of the Great Depression.  But a more apt analogy might be made between the present crisis and the post-World War II era in Europe, America and elsewhere.

And who better to remind us  of that tumultuous, transformative time, which also happens to coincide with the peak of modernism both artistically and economically in the West, than the most recognizable face of modern pop culture, Humphrey Bogart?  In 1949 Bogart made a film with director Stuart Heisler that neatly encapsulates the tensions and ambivalence of the period. 

"Tokyo Joe," set in Japan right after the War, starred Bogart, Alexander Knox, Florence Marly and a handful of Japanese actors including Teru Shimada, who later became a regular on U.S. sitcoms,  one of those few Asian actors who were used repeatedly to add an element of the 'exotic' to an otherwise all-white medium.  In "Tokyo Joe" Bogart plays a GI returning to Japan just after end of the war only to find his wife there has betrayed him with another man.  Trapped by a rather complex string of circumstances into working for a corrupt Japanese VIP, the Bogart character finds himself smuggling Japanese war criminals out of the country to avoid the Allied show-trials that were then going on there and in Europe. 

The remarkable thing about the film is the relative sympathy with which the Japanese characters are portrayed, considering their actions during the war, and the contrast this creates with the often racist propaganda about the enemy produced for Western audiences just prior to this time-frame.  The Bogart character in particular, despite his gruffness and initial distrust of all things Japanese, begins to see things from their point of view as the story moves along.  Suffice it to say that the film has a very Hollywood ending where everything is tied up neatly if not exactly without a certain degree of psychological and sociological ambivalence.

The thing that I would like to focus on, though, is the film's materiality,  specifically its material landscape.  Bogart's character and the others move through a dark, forbidding, almost atomic-apocalyptic mise-en-scene, the physical setting and accompanying emotional charge leaving no doubt as to the cause of all this destructiveness and social chaos.  Unlike many war pictures and post-war films about Europe and Japan, "Tokyo Joe" shows clearly the effects of the last stages of the unimaginably massive conflict, including the razing of entire cities like Tokyo and Dresden. 

Compare this with the depiction of the same aftermath more than a decade later, in "Judgment at Nuremberg," starring Spencer Tracy as the dour American jurist assigned the regrettable duty of putting Nazi war criminals to death.  In one sequence, the Tracy character walks slowly through the still bombed-out wreckage of the city including the vast, ruined arena where Hitler held some of his biggest rallies.  But the important thing to note about the scenes of Armageddon in "Judgment" is that the footage is actual rather than the product of a Hollywood set designer's imaginaiton.  When the film was shot in 1960 much of Europe remained in a semi-barbaric state.  However by this time the pop culture of the West had had enough room to construct some very particular narratives about the war and its effects, and not surprisingly, most of them were "positive,"  and all of them centered around the diligence and hard work of the Allies to reconstruct the societies they had just worked so hard to demolish. 

Despite this official post-war media line, which had Europe springing up anew mere seconds after the shooting stopped thanks to the generosity of the Marshall Plan--a legend that is to this day seemingly entrenched in the American pop psyche--the continent remained strewn with rubble for decades.  The Tracy film recuperates these material markers of proof against the official line by squarely placing them within a super-narrative of justice, or just-desserts.  It almost seems as if these images of the still destroyed landscape belong only to the film's juridicial-legal construction, while outside of it a bright, new, sunny, American-made Europe reigns as the order of the day.

The stranger-than-fiction quality of "Judgment" couldn't exist in sharper contrast to the more immediate darkness and ambivalence of "Tokyo Joe," where the creepiness of the landscape bleeds over into the characters themselves.  Bogart played many anti-heroes during his career, but none caught up in so nefarious and so unpatriotic a scheme as the one in "Joe."  Even the use of the familiar 'GI Joe' designator in the title over-signifies the character as being a ruined leftover of the war in his own person.  It almost seems as if it is he who is the one being punished for the excesses of the American carpet-bombing and atomic annihilation of hundreds of thousands of civilians.

The anti-hero, which emerged from the chaos and destruction of World War I, quickly became a familiar construction in modernist fiction and cinema.  After the second World War, though, it took on the primary duty of ridding the West of some of its culpability in the far greater destructiveness of that conflict, especially its final chapters in both Europe and Asia.  Ethicists like Jonathan Glover have pointed out the 'moral drift' at work in the final months of the war, when civilians became the main targets of Allied commanders, many of whom were enraged and embarrassed at earlier treatment by the enemy (Dunkirk and Pearl Harbor).  Churchill even tried to intervene in the RAF's incessant carpet-bombing of German cities, and found some support among military experts who pointed out that it was more productive to concentrate on oil refineries than it was to murder tens of thousands of already impoverished people. 

Therefore the anti-hero develops, mutates even, against a monstrous backdrop of poverty, and the denigration of humanity that accompanies it, during the Great Depression.  Its evolution takes a much darker and more dramatic twist,  however, after 1945.  Lingering on in films like "Tokyo Joe" and Hitchcock's increasingly disturbing thrillers, it approaches something of the level of the sociopath.  The Bogart character in "Joe" murders with his bare hands.  It was a preview of things to come.

So what does all this have to do with the progressive critique of today's global economy?  I would say it shows that there should be a shift from analogies with the 1930's, the still nascently modern World War I-obsessed period, to the late 1940's and even early 1950's.  This was a period when trends of mobility and social chaos still remained strong throughout the West.  During these years even the interior of countries like America, never the actual site of the war outside the bombing at Pearl Harbor, went through profound crisis.   Something very similar is now being forced on people by the material stress of the deep global recession, the economic aftermath of neo-conservative moral drift. 

It remains to be seen whether our narrativizing of this period will be more Bogart or more Tracy.  My guess is that it will be a mixed bag. 

BOKO  Nov 2009