Tim Robbins' Cradle Will Rock :

The Relationship between Art and Power

(versión española)

María Dolores Clemente Fernández

The title of the film Cradle Will Rock was not chosen at random. It was the title of a play by an obscure playwright named Marc Blitzstein. The ever-controversial Orson Welles, then a theater director, decided to stage this musical dedicated to social criticism with the help of his friend the producer John Houseman. The well-known actor and director Tim Robbins centers the plot of his third film, released in 2000, on the long process of the musical's development, from the beginnings of the project up to its difficult but triumphant performance. This “brief anecdote,” a small work among many produced by Welles' genius, becomes a perfect excuse to present an extremely complete mosaic of life in New York in the thirties, a time marked by the rise of Fascism and Nazism, the Spanish Civil War (cited as a stage for opposing ideologies), the still-evident fallout of the Great Depression and the government's attempts to overcome the economic crisis through the New Deal. The subjective treatment of this mosaic, while full of real characters and faithful to historical events, is what makes this film “almost real” (as we are warned in the opening credits). Robbins had already given us examples of his talent and liberal outlook in his two previous films, Bob Roberts (1992) and Dead Man Walking (1995), but with Cradle Will Rock , his best work to date, he shows that the great expectations critics had for his career were not unfounded.

Robbins gives us an Orson Welles (played by the actor Angus McFayden) who is passionate, impulsive, and eccentric, completely focused on the long preparation of The Cradle Will Rock , a harsh pro-labor criticism that would end up causing more than a few difficulties. It caused so many that on June 15 th , 1937 , a day before its premiere, a dozen security guards closed the Maxime Eliott Theater and occupied the building, since both had failed to obey the prohibition against staging new plays before July first. Undaunted, Welles and Houseman rented the Venice Theater, a few blocks away from the Eliott, and invited the audience to see a premiere with neither sets nor costumes, given that union rules did not allow them to be prepared. Blitzstein sat onstage at a piano and explained to the audience what the sets should have been like, playing the music while the actors spoke their lines and sang their songs. The play was a great success and continued at the Venice from June 18 th to July 1 st , moving on to other theaters afterwards.

Robbins shows us all this, and although the gestation of the play seems to be the central theme of the film, the plot is complicated with a parallel storyline that touches on another creative process, in this case pictorial: the production of a mural, commissioned by the magnate Rockefeller (a haughty John Cusack) for the Mexican painter Diego Rivera (played by Rubén Blades). In this way, the film is invaded by a sea of characters, all of them related to art in one way or another, but grouped together and separated according to one of two disciplines: theater or painting. Cradle Will Rock is a great choral work, built on parallel scenes, in which no one character stands out in particular, but in which all who appear on screen achieve their individuality through brief and well-aimed strokes.

A Confronted Society

Robbins constructs a totalitarian and caustic vision of the America of the years after the crash of 1929, years that augured the “witch hunt” that would later shake the film world and be known as the “cold war.” The entire film is tinted by the dialectic between communism and capitalism. This opposition is not merely political, rather it is the dialectic between the real power of the ruling classes (made up of few people) and the dispossession of the rest of the social classes.

In this sense, we can observe a third, latent plot line, submerged under the other two and of an ideological nature. Here appear other characters who, although connected to the worlds of theater and painting, are more politically oriented. This is the case of the director and visible head of the Federal Theater Project, Hallie Flanagan (Cherry Jones), who, in an enlightening preamble to the persecution of a later decade, is presented as the victim of an aberrant system that accuses her of communism. On the other hand, the industrial magnate Gray Mathers (Philip Baker Hall), a promoter of cultural events, represents the opposite pole as he flirts with fascism by striking up a relationship with Mussolini's political secretary, Margherita Sarfatti (a fantastic Susan Sarandon), with the excuse of an exhibition of futurist art.

Thus Robbins presents us with an American society divided into two camps. One, influenced by communist ideology, unites around social theater and Rivera's artistic concepts. The other, made up of lovers of so-called “high art,” is formed by “high society,” the upper middle classes and the capitalist circles that feel inclined towards fascism because of economic motives, seeing in it a future break against the hated communism. The director leads us to the conclusion that this bitter division between popular and elitist art does not spring from the art itself and its artists, but rather from the powerful classes that manipulate, use, or censure it at whim. At the same time, the great majority of the characters do not fall into one camp or the other for ideological reasons, but out of personal considerations, as well as for the sake of their own survival. This is the case of the Italian cultural ambassador, a Jew who achieves a high post by being a fascist and Mussolini's lover, as well as Rivera himself, who, although clearly a leftist, works for one of the major symbols of unbridled capitalism. In fact, these two are the most revealing characters because of the contradiction that exists between what they are and what they do. At one point in the film, Rivera accuses Sarfatti of being “ at the mercy of someone powerful ,” and the Italian intelligently answers him “ we all are, Diego ,” since the painter is not exactly the person in the best position to criticize her conduct. Their attitude, however, will not save them from misfortune, given that we are speaking of a social division made by the real forces of power against which the characters cannot fight, as much as they try to dodge it by camouflaging their ideologies or races. In fact, Rivera's mural would be irredeemably destroyed. The film says nothing about what happened to Sarfatti, but we know she was not able to ascend higher than the role of “lover.” (1)

Art and Prostitution

Tim Robbins uses his film as an excuse to give the audience his own concepts about art and culture, which happen to be very close to Trotsky's. A work of art is full of life, in as much as it is a reflection of every aspect of human thought and feeling. In this way, art is a medium through which man can show his own vision of the world and thus try to change it. This conception of art as a transforming instrument and an educator of society might appear to approximate the vision of art held by classic avant-guard movements, especially those close to communism and socialism, but we must not fool ourselves:

The intellectuals are extremely heterogeneous. At the same time, each recognized school of art is a well-paid school. It is headed by mandarins with their many little balls. As a general rule, these mandarins of art develop the methods of their schools to the greatest subtlety, while at the same time they use up their whole supply of powder. Then some objective change, such as a political upheaval or a social storm, arouses the literary Bohemia , the youth, the geniuses who are of military age, who, cursing the satiated and vulgar bourgeois culture, secretly dream of a few little balls for themselves, and gilded ones, too, if possible. (2)

These harsh words from Trotsky's book Literature and Revolution (1923), written as a criticism of Italian futurism, fit the film director's ideas perfectly. For Robbins feels more inclined towards art that not only directs itself to the people, but also does not allow its intellectual pretensions to impede it from being understood by the people. It is a proven fact that one of the principal problems of the avant-guard is precisely how it distances itself from the public, since the inability of the public to interpret the work results in a complete lack of interest for the artistic phenomenon, thus stripping the art of all its informative and pedagogical potential. As we see in Cradle Will Rock , the ruling classes take advantage of this situation, using the work of art to assume an “avant-guard” and “modern” appearance, in the process ridding the artworks of any subversive intention they might have. That is why only artists like Rivera or Blitzstein, because of the explicitness of their work, are susceptible to being censured. Prohibition is the only resort when the message cannot be hidden beneath the “makeup” applied by the ruling classes.

Blitzstein, played by Hank Azaria, is presented as the paradigm of the politically committed artist. Robbins dedicates much more time to him than to the Mexican painter and amply illustrates his creative process, conceived as a kind of interior conflict. The playwright appears as a visionary musician, visited on several occasions by two figures that inhabit his subconscious: his dead wife and Bertolt Brecht. The musical arises from the fusion of these two influences, one “material”—the spirit of his wife—and the other created by the German writer, which symbolizes the union between art and social commitment. Blitzstein is able to present the real problems and concerns of the people without putting aside his artistic goals, and his work thus transcends the mere political pamphlet. This is why at the end of the performance his two ghosts, previously critical and often cruel, congratulate him. In the same vein, Rivera finds himself kept from creating a living artwork, something more than the simple decoration commissioned by Rockefeller.

Although both Rivera and Blitzstein decide to swim against the tide by creating two artworks with “revolutionary” content, nailing a social reality that the ruling classes prefer to ignore, Tim Robbins cannot hide the fact that as much as he likes art, he does not feel the same appreciation for artists. “Art,” immersed in the capitalist system, has become merchandise, and its creators prostitute themselves to the powers that be in order to survive and continue to create their work. These are vain hopes. The capitalists do the same to the fascists, Sarfatti to Mussolini, the poor to the rich, etc., without it being of any use whatsoever. This prostitution on every level is the central idea around which the entire film revolves. To emphasize it, Robbins uses both the musical and the mural, two ways to sum up the content of his film: the play synthesizes the social situation that we see on screen and the painting is a condensed image of the same. That is why the mural has the same format as the film: panoramic. (3) The fact that the resulting creations are revolutionary, however, does not imply that their authors cannot be ambiguous from a moral point of view: all of them, whether they want to or not, prostitute themselves or are prostituted later on (in the same way the powerful in the film capriciously appropriate, for example, Renaissance art). The critical intent becomes clear in one of the final images, a representation of the syphilis virus, the only part or Rivera's mural that survives, a perfect symbol of the moral illness that later would corrode the country. It is significant that Blitzstein's “phantom guide,” Bertolt Brecht, had to move to Europe in 1947 after accusations brought against him, like those against so many others, by the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Robbins shows us all (or almost all) of this in his film. But there is something he is not telling us that is almost as important as what we see. The film deals with corruption, hypocrisy, conformism, and especially with the prostitution inherent in the capitalist system, and it contrasts all of this with spontaneity, risk, courage, concern for the proletariat and revolutionary ecstasy. Still, after shuffling so many true anecdotes and being quite faithful to history, it is somewhat surprising that the director makes no mention of the situation of the Communist Party. In this sense, he is not as committed as he appears to be . Robbins speaks to us eloquently about widespread prostitution, but he knowingly omits one of its aspects: the corruption in the heart of the standard-bearers of communism. This does not refer to those who, at first faithful to their Marxist ideas, ended up yielding to capitalism and its implicit comforts (we do see that in the film), but to the cruel fight for power between two factions of the same ideology, Stalinists and Trotskyites, that was in full force at the time the story of the film unfolds.

As we have seen, Robbins likes to search out parallels and compare situations. Because of that it is quite curious that, while going deeply into the trial which investigated the alleged communist ties of the director of the Federal Theater Project, Robbins omits other trials that were then shaking the Soviet Union , the only place where the ideas of Marx and Engels had actually taken root. The events in the film take place from autumn 1936 to June 1937, although there are references to earlier and later events of the time. So what about Stalin's Great Purge that from summer 1936 to the end of 1938 ruthlessly hunted down Trotskyite dissidents? When the plot of Cradle Will Rock begins, the protagonist of the terrible “ Trotskyite-Zinovievist terrorist center ,” Leon Trotsky, was in Norway with more than ten years of exile behind him. Many of his friends and followers, such as Zinoviev, Kamenev, Nathan Lurie, Isaak Reingold, and Holtzmann, had already been executed. (4)

It seems even stranger that Robbins does not devote a single word to these events even though one of the main characters, Diego Rivera, was a dedicated Trotskyite. In fact, when Rivera was in New York painting the mural for the Rockefeller Center, his wife, the painter Frida Kahlo (whom we see briefly in the film), returned to Mexico to receive Trotsky and his wife Sedova, who had been accepted as political refugees by President Lázaro Cárdenas after being expelled from Norway. As of January 9 th , 1937 , when he was honored by Kahlo and other comrades and official figures, the revolutionary settled in Mexico , the only country that would accept him, and remained there until one of Stalin's agents brutally murdered him three years later. The director does remark on the need to back the republicans in the Spanish Civil War and, in general, to oppose any European totalitarian regime, but at the same time, he does not mention that the fall of the Spanish Republic had a lot to do with the fierce internal struggles between Stalinist and Trotskyite factions. Nevertheless, Cradle Will Rock is not and does not try to be a documentary, despite its rich contextualization and atmosphere, and thus it occasionally departs from cold objectivity. It is a work of an auteur , and as such, it reflects the particular meditations of its creator about art and its socio-political pillars. It is precisely this subordination to Robbin's view of the

world that gives the work its sheen of originality, removing it far from the stereotypes of “industrially” made cinema.

translated by Liam Moore

(1) Her merits as an art critic and principal ambassador of the avant-guard fascist art, futurism, did not impede her from being affected by the anti-Semitic laws promulgated by Mussolini in 1938.

(2) Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution , Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, 1960, 128-29.

(3) The musical is a play within a play, and the mural is a screen within a screen.

(4) These were five of the sixteen communists prosecuted in the first public trial of Stalin's purge, which began on August 19, 1936 . They were accused and convicted of being terrorists and conspirators who had followed orders Trotsky had sent from abroad, and they were even said to have ties to the Gestapo . On August 23, they were all sentenced to death, and on the 25 th (despite the three-day period allowed for a petition for a pardon), the newspapers announced they had been executed.