Movies and North Atlantic Life “Movies and North Atlantic Life,” The Nashwaak Review volume...

Movies and North Atlantic Life

The starting point of critical elaboration is the conscious-

ness of what one really is . . .

—Antonio Gramsci

And give us the life of the moving-pictures’ promise

—Robert Frost

When I was “at the cinema age” (it should be recognized

that this age exists in life—and that it passes) . . .

—Andre Breton

I begin with our maternal grandfather’s world because hewould have been the first of our family to witness that hypnoticcarnival known as the Hollywood moving picture show. It is al-most all speculation, of course, amateur archeology and anthro-pology: John Joseph (Jack) MacLellan died at the age of 56 in1946 long before any of his grandchildren entered the world andtwo years before our mother married our father. But Big Jack, orat least his story, was destined to enter our lives, and he camecrashing through the Highlands of our childhood like Paul Bun-yan or a latter day Finn McCool, sometimes from the anecdotesand asides our mother accidentally dropped before us in her griefor laughter; sometimes from her few surviving siblings like auntShirley or their uncle Long Bill MacLean; but mostly it was ourcousin Johnny MacDonald who cherished and kept sacred thelegend that he was for those who knew him North of Smokey.Jack had fought at Vimy Ridge during the First World War: hehad originally signed up as a miner who would be laying trackand digging trenches, but he soon found himself going over thetop and participating in a battle that many of his country men andwomen (wrongly or rightly) would come to regard as a definingmoment in their national identity. He did less heroic things aswell, including the playing of the pipes for the King on SalisburyPlain, winning recognition as a champion wrestler, and standingguard as part of the Watch outside Buckingham Palace. But asrich and dramatic as these overseas adventures were, they seemedonly to add to the legend that he had already laid down, begin-

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ning, according to the Sydney Record of Sept 5, 1912, with thisheadline: Cape North Brothers Attempt to Seize the Steamer

Aspy. Yes, the brothers were Jack and Allan. There was talk oftreason to the crown at the time and, naturally enough, talk ofhanging as well. After the affair, Wild Allan, Jack’s youngerbrother (the victim and perp as the crime dramas would have it)had to flee to the recently tamed Wild West (British Columbia inthis case) from where he would never return. Surely this materialwould have been worthy of a film or as at least a script or treat-ment by Raoul Walsh if not the soon-to-be-formidable JohnFord?

I like to think of my grandfather in Europe after the war,strolling the cobblestone alleys of London, wandering the waste-land world of T.S. Eliot as one of those lonely men in shirtsleeves or coming out of a pub into the high modernists streetssoon to be made literary by Virginia Woolf and her stream-of-consciousness characters like Mrs Dalloway. Did he know thatEzra Pound had cooked a Christmas Turkey in his London flat forColonel Lawrence of Arabia soon to be unknown simply as air-craftsman Shaw? And in Paris did he pass by Sylvia Beech’sbookstore Shakespeare and Company where Joyce would publishhis Ulysses in ’25 and Serge Eisenstein wander on tour with hisPotemkin? Probably not. Our grandfather was a miner and a fish-erman whose people came from Bay St. Lawrence, Meat Coveand Black Point, all on the northern tip of Cape Breton Island.Out ports as isolated as the Hebrides or the Orkneys, those coastalislands that bookend the land of his grandfather who is said tohave thrown his cap on the ground when he first stepped off theboat in Sydney, saying as he did, “I will serve the Laird no more.”He would, of course, have said this in his native tongue, Gaelic,which was also the first language of his son, our grandfather. BigJack, like most working–class Gaelic speaking fathers in thecolonial English world, did not pass his language on to his chil-dren, it was seen as a handicap in the dominant culture. But theold language, its stories, songs—and even the skirl of his home-made pipes—would help to protect him to his dying days fromthe onslaught of a freshly canned celluloid culture. An entertain-ment industry soon to be embraced with all its production and

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distribution possibilities by an ambulance driver named Walt Dis-ney who was among the first to see the assembly line promise inall those mess tents of the Marne.

And the result of these observations would be made man-ifest within a decade or so: the unholy alliance, as David Thom-son1 has phrased it, of business man and artist would come todominate this new animated children’s culture of the west: thesun soon would never set on the empire of Hollywood or, for thatmatter, on the empire of the mouse.

Although some critics and theorists saw possibilities—household art without aura, portholes of freedom from class—inthis mass mechanical reproduction2, others such as TheodoreAdorno3 sent out warnings about the top-down creation of a uni-form culture that intensified the commodification of artistic ex-pression; and others too warned against the loss of traditionalculture as they watched in fascination and abhorrence while Hol-lywood and its fledgling attendants (advertising, product place-ment, and endless consumer goods) helped to record, distort,exploit and destroy the few remaining local cultures the west was

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heir to. It’s true of course that they were ripe for the picking andcould never have resisted the seduction of the image—thevoyeur, like some primordial being, or original sin to be Catholicabout it, was within us all. That, of course, and the power of cap-ital employed by the ruling class—i.e. watching these middleclass films with middle class values is good for you coal miners.And the Hayes Code4 encouraged by the Catholic Legion of De-cency would soon declare (as it prematurely shortened the ca-reers of Mae West, Jean Harlow, W.C. Fields and others) that weknow, too, what is good for you and what is good has nothing todo with sex. But often even the critical and enlightened amongus, think of Grahame Greene and his Pleasure Dome5, forgavethemselves for a while and indulged the heady optimism of cin-ema if not Hollywood. Green of course, with that fierce politicalmind, would get in trouble when he accused the Studios of ex-ploiting Shirley Temple for a voyeurism not associated with po-lite company. Hollywood sued and Green lost, the paper he wrotefor had to close its doors. But Sergei Eisenstein’s declaration thatcinema was the synthesis of all the arts still held promise in thosehalcyon days. Even though we know that the French would notlet him show his socialist film about revolution for fear of whatit might do to the “masses”. And the Americans? Well, they in-vited him to the land of the free all right, but there was no wayHollywood would let him make a film. He would have to settlefor Mexico.

After the war our grandfather was safe, his culture im-pregnable, the ephemeral world of Hollywood could not pene-trate the out port shores of Bay St. Lawrence, Meat Cove andMoney Point, poverty and isolation kept the circus from coming,for awhile at least. And even if Robert Flaherty6 had decided tofilm them instead of their distant cousins on the isle of Aran ortheir Inuit countrymen and women in the north with Nanook, thestories, songs, and language of his ancestors would have re-mained sacred and inviolable. But Big Jack, like most of his gen-eration, was forced to move to the city or at least to the sizeabletown of Sydney Mines. There is a photo of him and his family in1929—the year of the Great Crash—our mother is an infant sit-ting on her father’s knee while the cousin I was named after, who

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died of meningitis at age of twelve, sits on the running board ofwhat looks like a Model T. It has all the appearance of a JohnFord film and they look like Okies from The Grapes of Wrath,but their journey began in the highlands of Cape Breton not onthe plains of Oklahoma and my grandfather’s socialism of thepits remained intact and unsanitized—true to Steinbeck’s visionnot Ford’s. They were on the move because Jack could not makea living at fishing off the shores of Margaree so he returned, onceagain, to the only wage labor work he had ever known and en-tered the mines once more.

In his monumental biography of the great CanadianLabour leader, J.B. McLachlan7, the historian David Frank faith-fully and lovingly describes the Cape Breton coal-town of Syd-ney Mines. His description of this once vital but desperatesettlement is infused by the moral spirit of McLachlan himself,and as such Frank is able to restore or reclaim a sense of auraand nostalgia for the streets and houses if not for the very pitsthemselves. For our mother, Sarah Anne, there was no such nos-talgia: it was not the poverty (though the wolf was there) but theslow death of her father through a series of debilitating strokes,coupled with the battle to get a pension for his valour at Vimy,that left her so detached from these streets of her childhood.There was however one place in the town, one building, that she

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did recall with affection and nostalgia, and she recalled it oftenover the years—Cushner’s movie theatre.

This cinema paradiso of our mother’s childhood andyouth contained all the names and events one would expect frommatinees, double features and newsreels which she mostly gainedentrance to with blackened hands from the blueberries she pickedfor fifteen cents a quart. Did she get her fierce sense of socialjustice from all those thirties crime melodramas dramas withCagney and Sheridan that directors like Michael Curtiz and theWarner Studios were turning out? Probably not. But she did re-call many of those actors, if not the films themselves, with greataffection before life, her 15 pregnancies, and her own angels withdirty faces, eventually wore her down and out. But back then, inthe fullness of her youth and with the world at war, our motherbecame—like so many of her class and sex— a factory girl. Atthe age sixteen, in 1944, she journeyed with her sister Lila, byway of the Coastal Steamer Aspy III (a later version of the one hi-jacked by her father and uncle), to the out port village of Ingonishwhere both girls would get work in the local fish plant.

In 1944, the year our mother made that adolescent jour-ney to Ingonish, her future husband, Leo Donovan, was watch-ing a film with his father in the Paramount Theatre on CharlotteStreet in Sydney. The movie was entitled The Fighting Sullivans,

the true story of five brotherswho died together in 1942 whentheir US navy ship, the Juneau,was sunk in the South Pacificduring the fierce Battle ofGuadalcanal.

So impressed was ourgrand dad with the heroics andsacrifice of these five IrishAmerican sons that he tried toconvince his own son to join thenavy, no doubt to win a similarglory. Our Dad, who had a fulltime job in Glace Bay for thefirst time in his life, remembered

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thinking that his father must be crazy. We might be reminded hereof the scene in All Quiet On the Western Front when the fatherproudly appraises the son in uniform after the mother has driedher tears in sorrow. Perhaps our father was being a little harsh onhis Dad who, after all, was experiencing for the first time the fullbrunt of a new kind of cinema. The US military, like all militariesof course, understood the power and potential of cinema as aninstrument for recruitment and propaganda very early on in thegame. The Oscar winning Wings (1927) starring Gary Cooperobtained major support from the US War Department as did thesoon to be lauded Hollywood director, Howard Hawks, whowould make two very successful war films: The Dawn Patrol

(1930) and Sergeant York (1941). Although accused by many ofmaking war-mongering propaganda, Hawks had served in theArmy Air Corp in World War I and so would have felt very muchat home with this material. But while Hawks was no EdmundWilson, he was no John Ford either. Ford never met a war he did-n’t like, or at least liked portraying, which is not quite the samething. Hawks on the other hand, while not anti-establishment,made his contribution to American cinema by filming that gen-dered underclass known as women, with honesty, wit and real-ism, the spirit of his wife Slim providing the raw material fromHepburn to Bacall.

During the Second World War, as every school childknows, the military was seen as heroic in the extreme, and so onthe surface The Fighting Sullivans was legitimate elegy; it wasalso the first—and literally—“band of brothers” wartime propa-ganda film. And for our fourth generation Irish Catholic (Cana-dian) grandfather it was Irish Catholic (American) propagandaof a most intense and welcomed kind.

Our paternal grandfather’s culture was vibrant, vital, andcompelling, but unlike our maternal grandfather’s Gaelic worldthere was little to shield it or him from outside forces except itsisolation. That isolation was considerable prior to the 1950’s andeven a decade later Cape Breton’s Cabot Trail was not somethingto be taken lightly between October and May; it literally was atrail, not much more passable really than an Andean mountainpass for campesinos. But our father’s people were Irish and the

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language they now spoke and had spoken for over a hundredyears was English, the language, as my Dublin professors werewont to remind me, of the conqueror and the colonizer. This factcoupled with their rural Catholicism would make them ripe forthe picking when Hollywood inevitably came knocking to colo-nize them yet again.

There are only two photographs of our paternal greatgrandmother, Ellen Elizabeth (Doyle) Donovan: in the first oneshe is in middle age wearing a formal Victorian dress with a silkor cotton scarf wound tightly about her neck as a collar, shewould not look out of place in Kandahar.

In the second photo she is very old, nearing the end ofher journey, as they were wont to say, standing in a white dressnext to her home on what would soon become the 16th tee ofHighlands Links golf course; in the background, the black andwhite gothic structure of St. Peter’s Parish church casts its longshadow over her.

Next to the church of course was the Parish Hall and here,with help of a small generator hooked up to his truck or car,movies would be shown by an itinerant businessman from Syd-ney making his down north rounds. Electricity would not come

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to village until the National Park and Keltic Lodge arrived in thelate thirties, then a power plant was built and diesel generatorswere installed, engines that our father would run after the warwhen he got a job with the Nova Scotia Power Corporation. Didmy pre-Freudian great-grandmother or her daughter, Flora,(1892-1830) our grandmother who died at the tender age of 38from a hemorrhage after childbirth, get to see the tragic “plat-inum blond”, Jean Harlow, or her great predecessor Mae West, inthat same parish hall? Probably not.

Jean Harlow’s life was even shorter than our grand-mother’s, and when she died from kidney failure at the tenderage of 26 her career had already been curtailed by our fellowCatholic Americans. It was through the actions of the CatholicLeague of Decency (mostly out of Chicago) and Joe Breen thatthe infamous Hayes Code, or Hollywood production code, cameinto being on July 1st, 1934. Though the code was ostensibly in-troduced to curb the amount of violence on the screen from“Gangster Films” of the Depression era, Howard Hawk’s Scar-

face being the most notorious, its real target from the outset wassex. John Ford’s film of Liam O’Flaherty’s novel, The Informer

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(1935) released one year after the Code is the most famous andnotorious example of the Code and its supporters in action.8

From the beginnings of the celluloid image, the CatholicChurch, in all its shrewdness, cunning and experience, knew thatmovies had the iconic potential to do what the great cathedrals andchurches of Christendom had done for a millennium: illustrate agood story while supplying a moral and dogmatic message. Fromthe stations-of-the-cross to the Pietas to the hideous gargoyles anderotic Sheila-na-gigs, the stones and paintings served MotherChurch and her children. With the possible exception of the military,no other institution seems to have understood—or believed in—theraw power of cinema to influence the course of collective humanlives. It was propaganda and instruction on the grand scale for the

grand narrative and Catholics were in on the act from its genesis.

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It may have been because our mother came from the city,or rather the sizeable town of Sydney Mines, that she knew somuch about movies, or at least so much more about them than ourfather. Of course it wasn’t simply that she had seen more cellu-loid than he had, but rather that she had better, much better, tasteas such things go. This may have been because she was more in-terested in them; at any rate, she seemed to know instinctivelywhat was good and what was not. This probably, like almosteverything else, had to do with her politics, with growing up asa miner’s daughter and with being on her own from the age of fif-teen. Although she loved to watch Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, andHumphrey Bogart, to mention a few, she was also drawn to theoften fierce, independent (though circumscribed) roles grantedto certain Hollywood divas from Katherine Hepburn to IdaLupino. She could recall specific films as favourites includingDark Victory with Betty Davis, Johnny Guitar with Joan Craw-ford and the Lauren Bacall performances in To Have and to Have

Not and The Big Sleep. My sister-in-law, Barbara, my cousinColleen, and many of their child-hood companions, often recalledhow our mother would join themon the floor and watch movieswith them in the 1950’s, some-thing their own, more conserva-tive, village mothers would neverhave felt comfortable with andtherefore would never think ofdoing9. I don’t ever recall seeingmy mother read a book and, inlater years, it was mostly the ad-vertising flyers that caught her at-tention, looking for bargains forthe ever increasing hoard (brood istoo benign a term when seven sons

are involved) that too soon surrounded her with begging handsand hungry mouths. Our father read all the time—newspapers,magazines and pulp fiction—his favourites were westerns. Hewas like the English sergeant in the Third Man who loved the

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work of Holly Martins. Dad couldnever get enough of Zane Grey. Ofcourse he went to movies as well,but it would have to be somethingspecial to attract him back to theparish hall, especially after he wasmarried and had children. Therewas also the fact that he had beena full time unpaid projectionist forSt. Peter’s Parish for too manyyears in the forties and fifties and,unlike Philippe Noiret’s Alfredo inCinema Paradiso, he was fed upwith spending all his time in thedark, especially when he now hadto work the backshift at the power plant.

His time was precious because he worked both full timeand overtime and, so, naturally enough, the Royal Canadian Le-gion beckoned to him and his fellow veterans on their days off;it attracted or tempted them the way a British pub would haveduring the war or, one imagines tobe cinematic about it, the way theirresistible Sirens called to KirkDouglas and his men in the 1954version of Ulysses, a movie mostof them would eventually see ei-ther in the parish hall or on theirtelevision sets.

A few years earlier, in1947, in the suburbs of Los An-gles, not far from Hollywood’s stu-dios, two expatriate GermanJewish philosophers, TheodoreAdorno and Max Horkheimer,forced into exile by Hitler and hisNazis, finally completed their joint project, Dialectic of Enlight-

enment. Unbeknownst to my parents, or my far away village, thefinal chapter of this magnum opus “The Culture Industry: En-

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lightenment as Mass Deception”10, spoke directly about, if not to,their situation as citizens of this relatively new, mass producedand commodified culture from the cosmopolitan world. It was nota message, of course, that they would receive anytime soon11 . Afew years later, overseas in Paris (a city several of my fathers fel-low veterans still fondly recalled) a handful of mostly French filmcritics, writers and directors, were taking a different stance on thecommodified culture, especially on movies from America12. Manyof the Hollywood films my parents and grandparents had beenwatching as pure commercial entertainment were, in fact, art. Notonly was it something that could be good for them, but it also hadthe added bonus that instead of destroying traditional culture it

might in fact be preserving or pro-moting it. Of course, this revela-tion, too, was not news they wouldreceive for sometime. It would,however, have come as no sur-prise to my mother if she had beentold that Howard Hawks was agreat artist13 or Nicholas Ray forthat matter, who had directedRebel Without a Cause. She prob-ably would have objected to in-cluding John Ford but my fathercertainly would have been happyto see the Duke’s favourite direc-tor on the list.

There were people in the village, however, who understoodthese things. Though the vast majority of the first generations to en-counter the new media were largely uneducated, they were verymuch culturally literate and sophisticated because of an oral andmusical tradition they and their ancestors had been living in, addingto, and passing down for centuries. They also had, for better orworse, what cultural theorists are wont to call common sense, es-pecially, but not only, in relation to cultural hegemony14.

When television first arrived in Ingonish in 1954 it wasone of the elder members of the community who had an epiphanyabout village life worthy not so much of Adorno or Horkheimer

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as Antonio Gramsci, Raymond Williams or our own MarshallMcLuhan. Commenting on the impact of the tube with the bluelight, Pius Burke remarked (and he used this refrain for sometime) that a three hour conversation in Ingonish had been reducedby television to “good evening and good night”15. The story of theimpact of television not only on traditional cultures, but on theworld as a whole—rural and urban—is a different, if related, nar-rative to the one we are concerned with here. But though it is astory for a different book, it is probably wise to state somethingfor the record, especially in relation to my village for, as PiusBurke noted, once the furniture began to talk no one was goingto get a word in for some time. And when they did start storytelling again the stories would be very different16. It is importanthere, too, to evoke the spirit of Marshall McLuhan both for hisown sake as our greatest philosopher/theorist and for our sake asCanadians. While we must not be complacent in relation to whatis happening to our greatest trading partner, as the economistsand right wing think tanks like the Fraser Institute are wont tosay, we must also understand the nature of our world in relationand comparison to theirs, and not just to honour the memory ofTommy Douglas or to confirm the feel-good things MichaelMoore says about us in his documentaries.

Marshall McLuhan (probably because of his Catholicbackground, or not) christened the television a pagan by callingit Cyclops, the one-eyed-son of Poseidon named Polyphemuswho chased Kirk Douglas around the set of Cine Cittá Studios inRome17. McLuhan knew this Cyclops would use the electronicimage as propaganda so he warned us against it—emphasizingthat the medium itself was the message18. In later life, McLuhanhimself became a victim of Polyphemus when all that was broad-cast about him was a sound byte and he was accused of at bestseeing the box as neutral and at worst as promoting it as the wayforward. Though he taught at the University of Toronto McLuhandid most of these things, good and bad, in the United States, aplace Theodore Adorno knew from experience that televisionwould one day wreck havoc upon19.

There have been many essays and some books writtenabout the culture of villages like the one I come from in Cape Bre-

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ton and the debate on the good and ill of the television and the de-gree to which it has destroyed, enhanced or changed culture is farfrom being settled anytime soon20. The film critic David Thomp-son is on record about a conversation he once had with a Deanfrom Harvard. He had asked the Dean which had had the worsecultural effect on America: television or the constant threat of nu-clear annihilation during the Cold War. The Dean replied the ColdWar because of the Sword of Damocles that constantly hung overthem. Thompson replied television because it was a war carriedon day by day that no one paid any attention to. There is of courseanother response to the coming of television put forward by MontyPython: John Cleese standing in a bucolic English village with twosizeable stones in his hands announces to the camera that beforetelevision came to the village they bashed their heads with stones,which he then proceeds to do. It is a comment of course about thefresh air brought into the squinting windows of parochialism fromthe world “out there”. Many of those living under the social andpolitical oppression of church, state and capital, or a combinationof all three, always speak highly of the coming of the tube21.Thompson and the Dean of course were speaking about the UnitedStates, not Thompson’s native England, where Python were work-ing, or even our Canada. In Britain the BBC had long ago— in the1930’s in fact— recognized the nature of the Cyclops and that itwould have to be controlled. In Canada a similar attitude wasadopted (largely because of the British experience) though our tel-evision has never had the commercial freedom or rather the free-dom from commercialism enjoyed by our radio22.

In one of his recent books, Empire of Illusion: The End of

Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (2009), Chris Hedges, anAmerican journalist and social critic who now teaches at the Uni-versity of Toronto, laid down some frightening statistics abouthis homeland, the United States, that we traditionally associatewith the third or developing world: “Nearly a third of the nations’population is illiterate or barley literate—a figure that is growingby more than 2 million a year. A third of high-school graduatesnever read another book for the rest of their lives, and neither do42 percent of college graduates. In 2007, 80 percent of the fam-ilies in the United States did not buy or read a book.” 23 Hedges’

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lament for the death of the book (which is not the same thing asthe death of reading) brings the Jewish American poet FrederickSeidel24 to mind, in a masterful lyric entitled “Heart Art” he sumsup one side of the conquest of cyberspace:

Man has the takeover impact Of an asteroid—throwing up debris, blotting out the

sun—Causing the sudden mass extinction Of the small bookstoreAt the millennium. The blood from the blast cakes And forms the planet’s new crust: A hacker in Kinshasa getting it on with one in Nome.

Hedges raises some alarming issues and he is right to doso, but the statistics he quotes, while accurate, may need somequalification. Just as Seidel laments the death of the local book-store so Hedges laments the death of book reading, but does thismean that people are not reading poetry or books? Or if they arereading at all are they reading on line? There is also the questionas to how they now absorb their culture. In his collection of es-says, Rocking the Boat (1962), Gore Vidal in “A Note on theNovel,” originally published in 1956 in the New York Review of

Books, noted that even though their were many good novelistsstill writing, the novel itself wasdead or dying because readers nolonger gave the form the kind ofcultural weight they once did. TheAustralian Robert Hughes, longtime art critic for Time Magazine,

had a similar reflection on thedeath of painting and sculpture.They died with the advent of filmbecause they lost their social sig-nificance.25 Where, we might ask,does this leave us culturally; and,more crucially perhaps, politically.For critics like Chris Hedges,

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much of the blame lies squarely on the shoulders of the box or,as Ray Bradbury predicted in his now classic dystopian novel,Fahrenheit 451 from 195326, on the flat screen on the wall.

Television, a medium built around the skillful ma-nipulation of image, ones that can overpower reality,is our primary form of mass communication. A tele-vision is turned on for six hours and forty-seven min-utes a day in the average household. The averageAmerican daily watches more than four hours of tel-evision. That amounts to twenty-eight hours a week,or two months of uninterrupted television-watchinga year. That same person will have spent nine years infront a television by the time he or she is sixty-five.Television speaks in a language of familiar, comfort-ing clichés and exciting images, its format, from re-ality shows to sit-coms is predictable. It provides amass, virtual experience that colors the way manypeople speak and interact with one another. It createsa false sense of intimacy with our elite—celebrity ac-tors, news people, politicians, business tycoons, andsport stars. And everything and everyone that televi-sion transmits is validated and enhanced by themedium. If a person is not seen on television, on somelevel he or she is not important. Television confersauthority and power. It is the final arbitrator for whatmatters in life.27

All of what Hedges writes here about the tube is true andwe have known it for some time now; decades in fact, but the po-litical weight and freight that it carries beyond the borders ofAmerica is somewhat subject to challenge. Hedges book is alament for literacy but it is also a lament for a nation. Unlike Hol-lywood movies, American television was not, primarily, bottledfor export. Of course it did go about the world: I remember, forinstance, being in Ireland in 1980 when the cliffhanger episodeof the TV show Dallas (where it is revealed who shot J.R.) ar-rived at Heathrow Airport accompanied by security guards, andsoon to be televised on BBC. For the most part, however, Amer-ican TV never had the budget, even if it had the ambition, of film

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and of course it had to compete with homegrown domestic prod-ucts. This of course is not the central or salient point when itcomes to social critics like Hedges and their warnings against thedangers of television culture. There is a disconnect between thecultural and political influence the United States has had beyondits borders. While Hedges correctly warns Canadians that 42 per-cent of our population is illiterate or semiliterate28, he fails orchooses not to acknowledge (perhaps for his own purposes ofemphasis) the fact that the social contract in Canada is still intact.What makes the United States so vulnerable to the newspeakworld of Orwell’s 84, and the entertainment horror of Fox News,is their increasingly vulnerable status as a country whose socialcontract has been slowly eroded, so much so now that certainstates and cites meet the criteria of developing or third world sta-tus29. It is a world that Chris Hedges, as a former war correspon-dent of Bosnia and the Middle East and now a reporter for The

Nation, knows all too well30. This theme about the dangers of American commercial

television and the failure of the government and the educatedelites to take it seriously was brought to the big screen by RobertRedford in his film Quiz Show31 in 1994. Redford’s film, basedupon Richard Goodwin’s book with a screenplay by Paul At-tanasio, has telling moments about education, class, advertizing,intellectuals, the military industrial complex and, of course, theentertainment industry. There is an especially telling and

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poignant moment when the patrician Van Doren family and theirprominent intellectual friends, including Edmund Wilson andThomas Merton, are seen to ignore and have contempt for themedium of television, while at the same time they are surprisedby the amount of cash the young Van Doren, played by RalphFines, is receiving for his role in the game show. The scene ofcourse is unfair to Merton and Wilson as they are meant to berepresentatives not only of the American intellectual tradition,but of Academia as well. Wilson was an autodidact with a B.A.who had contempt for academics and Merton was a monk out ofhis cloister. But the Van Doren’s— represented by Carl the fa-ther, Charlie the son and Mark the uncle (who appears in nameonly)— are there to represent class, education, the academy andits subsequent failure to battle the Cyclops McLuhan would soonbe warning them against.

Although based on a true story, few critics of the film get,or are willing to engage, its subtext and real subject—the politi-cal impact of television on American democracy, education andculture. Theodore Adorno years before—in the early 1940’s infact—while working on the Radio Project32 was shocked at theextent to which American mass culture, or as he and MaxHorkheimer later termed it, the culture industry, was given overto capitalism, consumer exploitation and commodification. Hehad seen evidence of this trend in Europe, but it was nothingcompared to the wholesale exploitation America was undergo-ing. Ironically, his only point of reference for such mass decep-tion and manipulation of a populace was the propaganda machineused by the Nazis, including the movies of Joseph Goebbels,Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda.33

With Adorno on the one hand and Pius Burke, on theother, we might be hard pressed to say anything in defense of thebox. Did it slowly, depending on your point of view, take the vil-lage hostage and erase its traditional culture or did it free us froma quaint and often repressive pre-Freudian world? Most of us, re-flecting back from the age of cyberspace, might agree it didboth—and other things as well. One of the other things was tomake our uncle Traynor Donovan a celebrity, or at least famousin rural Cape Breton terms, which was plenty fame for us. It is

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hard to describe the impact that our uncle’s success had upon usas children—we were in awe of him, if not star-struck. Self-edu-cated and self-taught as a musician, public speaker and performer,he became a regular on a radio show in the 1950s and then in theearly 1960s the host of his own television program, T.R. Ranch or,as we knew it, Traynor Donovan and the Ranch Boys.

Nashville and the culture of the cowboy, the myth of thefrontier, had come East? When television arrived only one showever competed in popularity with Hockey Night in Canada andthat was Gunsmoke. I remember as a boy that only one thingcould get the tough men and boys to abandon the eight ball tableswe coveted at the local pool hall and head home to the shore orup to the hills and that was James Arness and Amanda Blake, thestars of Gunsmoke. Of course years earlier before television,Wheeling West Virginia, WWVA, had a radio station signal sostrong Maritimers, it was said, need only hold a frying pan totheir ear on the front porch to pick it up34. But the real reason ouruncle became a singing cowboy was not because of those famous

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Americans Gene Autry and RoyRogers but rather because of alocal Nova Scotian from thesouth shore who had made goodin that wider, southern world.Uncle Traynor was recognized, ifnot billed, as a Hank Snow imi-tator, and the venerable Snowhimself regarded him highly andwas a good friend, always speak-ing of Traynor and his wife Annewhenever and wherever he

toured in the Maritimes or Canada generally. Our uncle of courseloved television and always spoke with great affection of NateNathanson from Sydney who had established the local CJCB tel-evision station. Eventually, Traynor ended up on the other side ofthe lens spending the last half of his career as an accomplishedand honoured member of the station’s camera crew.

Music on Cape Breton Island is nothing if not serious,and the debate about the impact of television upon it—traditional,country, rock, blues and otherwise—is far from being settled, butit is on its way to being researched and recorded35. I never askedour mother what she thought of the so-called Scottish Hollywoodfilms. Though she participated in the Robbie Burns days organ-ized in the 1960s by Mary Helen Lord-Doucette, this would havebeen remote from the gen-uine, non-tartan, Gaelicculture of her father andmaternal grandfather36.Hollywood came in secondin the promotion of tar-tanry during my mother’slifetime, though its tartanand Kailyard films fromthe 1930s may indeed haveinspired the man responsi-ble for its relatively lateimmigration to our shores.

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It was the beloved if sentimental Premier, Angus L. MacDonald,who almost singlehandedly decided to tartanize the world of mymother and her fellow Cape Bretoners and Nova Scotians. Kail-yard, by the way, for those of you who don’t have Google, meanscabbage patch and, though there were other writers involved, itwas J.M. Barrie, the man who wanted to leave the pubescent boyin our basements forever (yes, Peter Pan), who helped send theScots popular imagination back to a stone age sentimentalismthat could easily compete with Barry Fitzgerald and John Ford37.

If there was fear for traditional Cape Breton music in the1950’s and early 60’s no one, or at least no one under the age of25, voiced it in the village or, I imagine, in the villages on thewestern side of the island where the Gaelic language and the fid-dling tradition (with benediction to Scotty- Fitzgerald) was somuch stronger. The fiddle in the 1950’s and 60’s was about as farfrom rock and roll as you could get; it was also light years—if nota supernova, from sex38— or sexy. And we all know now that thesexual revolution of the 1960’s was intimately connected to rockand roll; it was also connected to the movies, and it was moviesthat still drew us to the parish hall, misinformed or educated usin the classroom, and kept us quiet and transfixed, howeverbriefly, in front of the box—that is whenever there wasn’t a rockn’ roll dance going on.

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1 David Thompson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, 20042 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art In the Age of Mechanical Reproduc-tion.”Benjamin was altered to the dangers of celebrity culture, of fame in thetwentieth century, very early on: “The cult of the movie star, fostered by themoney of the film industry, preserves not the unique aura of the person but the ‘spell of the personality’ the phony spell of commodity.” http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm.3 Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer were all members of the FrankfurtSchool. Among other things, these Marxists theorists were the first to critiquethe new mass medium of film. 4 There are many texts on the code, Hollywood Censored is a good introduc-tion.5 The Pleasure Dome: The Collected Film Criticism, 1935-40.6 Flaherty of course was notorious for staging his “documentaries” and criti-cized, too, for risking the lives of his participants. 7 J.B. McLachlan: A Biography, by David Frank, James Lorimer & Company,Toronto, 1999.8 The story of Ford’s The Informer and its confrontation with the Chicagobranch of the Legion of Decency is well documented by Gregory Black in hisHollywood Censored (1994). Black discovers that the film was condemnednot so much for its communist content (which was entirely written out for thefilm script) but rather because several Irish priests in Chicago found the movie‘‘insulting to all the time-honored traditions of Celtic womanhood’ becausethere was a scene of an Irish prostitute in the film.”pp.297-298.9 Interview with Barbara Donovan, 2008.10 The book was published in Amsterdam in 1947 though much of it was writ-ten earlier during the war years. It was not translated into English until 1972.For a transcription of the last chapter see: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1944/culture-industry.htm and http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/index.htm11Adorno and Horkheimer believed that the culture industry had underminedthe revolutionary movement. Adorno’s idea was that the mass of the peoplehad become objects of the culture industry. Adorno of course was a classicallytrained musician and very much a product of an elitist “high culture”. Unlikehis friend and colleague, Walter Benjamin, he had little time, and saw littlevalue, in the mass produced and commodified celluloid that was being shippedaround the world by Hollywood. He failed, or simply chose not to see, that hishigh culture (especially in its imperialist role as later defined by Said) also jus-tified and depended upon capitalism. DuMaurier Opera, British Petroleum Bal-let and Single Malt Shakespeare all make a similar point. But this does notdiminish the radical and seminal nature of their critique of mass culture. It isfrom them that we first got the modern view of mass culture as a single mar-ketplace in which the most popular works dominated. The consolidation ofmedia companies centralized power in the hands of a few multinational cor-porations who control production and distribution. Remember Canada’s battlewith Gulf and Western when we tried to get control of some of our cinemas.

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The culture industry claims to serve consumers but what we get is standardi-zation and commodification, i.e. we are all Disney’s children in the Empire ofthe Mouse. Getting emancipated from the producer may have been a pipedream for Adorno and Horkheimer but it was a legitimate pipe dream.12 Cahiers du Cinéma was (some argue that it still is) an influential film jour-nal founded by Andre Bazin in 1951. The magazine included amongst its writ-ers young cinephiles who would become leading directors in the la NouvelleVague (the French New Wave) of the 1960’s, Jean Luc-Godard and FrancoisTruffaut, the most prominent among them. 13 In a 1954 article for Cahier du Cinema, Francoise Truffaut came out swing-ing against homegrown, French cinema. La qualité française (“the FrenchQuality”) was in fact a not so mini-manifesto for ‘la politique des Auteurs’which the U.S. film critic Andrew Sarris later termed the auteur theory. 14 Antonio Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony, where the values of thebourgeoisie, or middle-class, become the “common sense’ values of all andtherefore both bolster and protect the capitalist state. Creating, in fact, a con-sensus culture in which people in the working class identify their own goodwith the good of the middle class and help to maintain the status quo as op-posed to challenging it. Gramsci looks at the role of the intellectual, of edu-cation, of the media and of the Catholic Church, among other institutions, inthis ideological construction. His writings both complement and amplify theworks of the Frankfurt School and theorists like Fritz Fanon, especially in re-lation to adult and popular education. Like Adorno and Horkheimer, however,much of his theory was stillborn and did not surface until the 1970’s. In Gram-sci’s case, of course, it had to do with his persecution by Mussolini and theFascist Italian state. When he was tried for the made up crimes of sedition,Mussolini’s prosecutor had famously said, “We must stop this brain fromworking for twenty years.”15 From an Interview conducted with Emerson Barron by the author in Au-gust, 2008 and 2009. 16 The oral tradition would have to accommodate what was being watched andheard in the new media. David Adams Richards has a rural character in oneof his novels refer to the Dieppeanemese War. The conflation is comic but itmakes the point, among other things, about media influence. 17 Hollywood often used these studios in Rome for their Sword and Sandalepics. 18 McLuhan first used this phrase in his best known book UnderstandingMedia (1964). McLuhan proposed that a medium itself, not the content it car-ries, should be the focus of study. He said that a medium affects the society inwhich it plays a role not only by the content delivered over the medium, butalso by the characteristics of the medium itself. The Frankfurt School, in-cluding Benjamin, Adorno and Horkheimer wrote about the power of the newmedia but it was McLuhan who first articulated the revolutionary change thatwas made from print culture to mass culture. He spoke of us being re-tribal-ized by the mass media. His book The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) was about thefounding of the printing press and an exploration of what he called linear man.

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19 In recent decades, a series of books from Amusing Ourselves to Death(1985) by Neil Postman and A is for Ox: the Collapse of Literacy and the Riseof Violence in an Electronic Age (1995) by Barry Saunders to Chris Hedges’recent bestseller Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph ofSpectacle (2009) outline, among things, the devastating effect television as atool has been for democracy and education, especially in the United States.Hedges goes further than most and quotes from Theodore Adorno and his1967 essay entitled “Education After Auschwitz”: ‘He argued that the moralcorruption that made the Holocaust possible remained “largely unchanged”and that ‘the mechanisms that render people capable of such deeds’ must beuncovered, examined, and critiqued through education. Schools had to teachmore than skills. They had to teach values. If they did not another Auschwitzwas always possible. “All political instruction finally should be centered uponthe idea that Auschwitz should never happen again,” he wrote: “ This wouldbe possible only when it devotes itself openly, without fear of offending anyauthorities, to this most important of problems. To do this, education musttransform itself into sociology, that is, it must teach about the societal play offorces that operates beneath the surface of political forms.” If we do not graspthe “societal play of forces that operates beneath the surface of politicalforms,” we will be cursed with a more ruthless form of corporate power, onethat does away with artifice and the seduction of a consumer society, andwields power through naked repression. I had lunch in Toronto with HenryGiroux, professor of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University inCanada. Giroux was for many years the Waterbury Chair Professor at PennState. He has long been one of the most prescient and vocal critics of the cor-porate state and the systematic destruction of American education. He wasdriven, because of his work, to the margins of academia in the United States.He asked the uncomfortable questions Adorno knew should be asked by uni-versity professors. Giroux, who wrote The University in Chains: Confrontingthe Military-Industrial-Academic Complex, left in 2004 for Canada.”20 see John Grierson: Life, Contributions, Influence by Mr. Jack C Ellis, (2000)for a good survey about the coming of film and tv to Canada. 21 The Irish writer Brinsley McNamara wrote a novel entitled, The Valley ofthe Squinting Windows(1918). Quebec and Irish Nationalists from the Northof Ireland have written and reflected often on the political impact of television,of those other worlds.22 There have been many studies about the founding of both the CBC and theNational Film Board. Jim Leach’s Film in Canada (2006) is a good survey andintroduction.23 Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle(2009), p. 44.Other books and essays of interest include, Mark Kingwell “Beyond theBook” Harpers, August 2013, http://harpers.org/archive/2013/08/beyond-the-book/ and Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows.24 Frederick Seidel, Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009)25 Robert Hughes, Nothing If Not Critical (New York: Penguin Books, 1992)

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26 I like the fact that Bradbury’s Dad, like my own, was a lineman for most ofhis life. Francoise Truffaut’s film, which also starred the Irish actor Cyril Cu-sack, was not a success. The subject did not seem to suit Truffaut’s style. 27 Hedges, p. 44-45.28 Hedges, p. 44.arpers’s29 Recent reports in The Nation (January 10/17, 2011) highlight massive un-employment as high as 26 million people and over 100 American cities on theverge of declaring bankruptcy. 30 See his recent report with the artist Joe Sacco: “City of Ruins”; Camden, NJ,stands as a warning of what huge pockets of America could turn into. The Na-tion (November 22, 2010), p. 15. http://www.thenation.com/ 31 Quiz Show was nominated for several academy awards but it was up againstpopular junk, Forrest Gump, and the avant-garde art of Tarantino, Pulp Fic-ton. It remains one Redford’s better films.32 The Radio Project was a social project funded by the Rockefeller Founda-tion to look into the effects of mass media on society. Hosted by PrincetonUniversity, Adorno quickly became disillusioned with the project, question-ing the claim that radio was bringing serious music to the masses and seeingtoo that there was no interest in critiquing the driving force behind mass mediain America—commodification, consumerism, and mass exploitation for cor-porate profit. He was shocked by how quickly and completely the mass cul-ture had become commercialized. Far beyond anything in Europe, Adornocould only compare it to the fascist propaganda of the Reich. The Radio Proj-ect for Capitalism might have been a more appropriate name for the project.Adorno and Horkheimer later changed their original term “mass culture” to the“culture industry” because, as PBS would have it, of their American experi-ence. Adorno also embraced the insights and experience of Brecht in Amer-ica: “The cultural commodities of the industry are governed, as Brecht andSuhrkamp expressed it thirty years ago, by the principle of their realization asvalue, and not by their own specific content and harmonious formation. Theentire practice of the culture industry transfers the profit motive naked ontocultural forms.” In what is clearly a tipping of the hat to Brecht, Robert Red-ford and Paul Attanasio use the upbeat, commercialized (and obscene) BobbyDaren version of “Mack the Knife”. No doubt it would have made Adornosmile but also spin in his grave. A final detail: Frank Stanton a researcher forthe Radio Project sent in by CBS went on to become its president.http://www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes/DATABASES/SWA/Some_writings_of_Adorno.shtml33 Qunetin Tarantino’s latest critically acclaimed film, Inglorious Basterds,takes this propaganda, among other things, as its subject.34 I owe this comic reference to Frances MacDonald whose brother Bill, a hamradio operator, coined it to describle the power of the station. Bill and Francesgrew up in Nepisiquit Falls outside of Bathurst Mines where their father ranthe power station connected to the dam. The population of the falls was nevermore than five, depending on who was home at the time.

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35 The most famous television broadcast in relation to music happened later:“In 1972 the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) aired a half-hour doc-umentary that conveyed the message that traditional Scottish-style fiddlemusic in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, was in decline and would soon die out.The film, Vanishing Cape Breton Fiddler, argued that modern music was morepopular with the young generation of the 1960s and 1970s and that, as a re-sult, transmission of the style and tunes handed down from 19th-century Scot-tish immigrants to Cape Breton would be broken. Following the broadcast,momentum gradually developed to counter the message in the documentary.The first Festival of Scottish Fiddling was held in July 1973, a Cape BretonFiddling Association was established and opportunities to learn traditionalmusic became more widely accessible to people of all ages, thus allowing theCape Breton music tradition not only to survive but also to evolve in new andexciting ways.” This abstract is from Maria Thompson’s essay based on herM.A. thesis work, “The Myth of the Vanishing Cape Breton Fiddler: The Roleof a CBC Film in the Cape Breton Fiddle Revival”, Acadiensis, Vol. 35, No.2, Spring, 2006. 36 See Richard MacKinnon’s Discovering Cape Breton Folklore (Cape BretonUniversity Press, 2009).37 Scotch Reels: Scotland in Cinema and Television (BFI, 1982)38 Ashley MacIsaac and Nathlie MacMaster would both make the fiddle sexybut that would be closer in time to the age of internet than to television.

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