Don't usually pay much attention to the Right Wing bloggers, but I agree with Mark Lewis on this one. Whittaker Chambers would make a fascinating subject for a movie and Sam Tanenhaus' biography an excellent basis for the screenplay.
But I don't know why Lewis thinks that such a movie would be a conservative Milk.
Has he read Tanenhaus' book?
I'm sure he's held it in his hands, turned all the pages, and run his eyes over every word. But did he take any of it in?
Conservatives have a habit of missing the points of movies and songs they call "conservative." Maybe they have the same problem with books.
Tanenhaus makes Chambers a sympathetic figure, but he doesn't present him as heroic or even particularly likable, mainly because he wasn't either.
Whittaker Chambers was a strange, creepy, and grubby little person with an outsized man-crush on the friend he would later betray, Alger Hiss. In Tanenhaus' biography, he comes across as something of a fantasist and his motivations for joining the Communist Party and becoming a spy---actually, not much of a spy. More of an agent provocateur---weren't intellectually deep or politically consistent, and the same went for his conversion to the Right. He did what he did because he was acting out a script in his own head in which he was a romantic, mysterious, and misunderstood hero.
Unless the director gave Chambers the sort of whitewashing Raoul Walsh gave Custer in They Died With Their Boots On, Chambers is likely to give the audience a case of the willies. Add to this that the movie would also have to include as a "conservative" hero, Richard Nixon, and I just don't see how the film would advance the conservative cause the way Lewis thinks Milk advances whatever brand of liberal politics it is he thinks Milk advances.
I'm guessing he thinks Chambers' story would vindicate the hysterical anti-communism of the 1950s, in which case it might be better to make it more of a Right Wingers' answer to Good Night and Good Luck and have it try to capture the spirit of a time in which effete and craven Liberals refused to take seriously the threat posed bythe international Communist conspiracy, leaving it up to brave and noble, and picked-on and reviled, conservatives to take a stand against the Red Menace.
In that movie Chambers' unattractiveness would become a defining virtue, the outward signs of his role as an outsider, the inside he's on the outside of being the Northeastern Liberal Intellectual Elite.
Chambers' place as a hero of conservative folklore has a lot to do with the same sense of class resentment and victimization that Nixonland author Rick Perlstein argues drove Richard Nixon, and in fact Chambers himself is actually a bit player in the epic tragedy of Richard Nixon. It was Nixon who got Alger Hiss, Chambers was just what the title of his own autobiography says he was, a witness to history, not a maker of it.
Basically, a realistic movie version of Whittaker Chambers' life would be the story of a not very important, or even interesting, victim of historical events he barely comprehends let alone influences. Harvey Milk made things happened. He did his bit to change the world. Chambers didn't make anything happen. Things happened to him, except when he happened to other people, like Hiss and Nixon.
There is nothing particularly conservative about that story. It's an accident of history that in this case the story was played out by people who identified themselves by their political affiliations. In order to see Chambers' story as a heroic conservative folk tale, you have to ignore the existential and concentrate narrowly on the political.
On the cause of anti-communism.
A lot of conservatives believe that anti-communism is their cause. That's partly because they held onto a world view formed around 1949 for decades after the rest of the country left it behind.
The Right never understood why most Americans weren't still looking under their beds for Communists, even as Richard Nixon opened up China and forged a detente with the Soviet Union, even as Ronald Reagan, shocked and horrified by the "liberal" anti-nuke movie The Day After, decided to do his bit to rid the world of the threat of thermonuclear obliteration by negotiating radical arms treaties with Mikhail Gorbachev.
But it's also because they have a habit of assigning all virtues to themselves and attributing to liberals any and all attitudes they deem insufficiently respectful of those virtues.
A habit that has led to another habit of theirs, mixing up their political interests with morality.
Works like this:
Communism is evil. Conservatives hate Communism. Therefore Conservatives hate evil and those who hate evil must be for evil's opposite.
Communism is evil. Liberals don't hate Communism. Therefore Liberals don't hate evil and those who don't hate evil must be for it.
This is, of course, based on historical nonsense. Anti-communism wasn't inherently virtuous and even if it was it certainly wasn't an exclusive virtue of the Right's.
As a quick trip to the John F. Kennedy Museum and Library will tell you.
More later.
Meanwhile, Roy Edroso offers a few more suggestions for a conservative Milk.
Or, more broadly, the American Right speaks of virtue and good constantly, and yet has no idea what virtue or good actually are.
Posted by: burritoboy | Sunday, April 12, 2009 at 10:28 AM
I agree with you generally, but I feel bound to point out that the “friend he would later betray” and his defenders tried to smear Chambers as a nutjob queer fresh from the loony bin. ( I don’t think calling someone gay is a smear, but they did in those days.) Classic ad hominem attack when the evidence is against you.
And Chambers betrayed far fewer people than Hiss, when you think about it.
You couldn’t make Chambers into a conventional political movie hero but you could make him an interesting anti-hero. It wouldn’t be “Milk” but it could be a better film on every level than “Milk,” although that’s not what Lewis wants – he’s looking for propaganda, not drama. (Which was also true of “Milk,” which was decent propaganda but otherwise mediocre.)
I seem to recall a good PBS movie from years ago with Ned Beatty as Chambers and Edward Herrmann as Hiss. I’d be curious to see it again if it’s on DVD somewhere.
Posted by: Susie | Monday, April 13, 2009 at 10:49 PM