A Gorgeous Movie—An Audacious Political Act

Reds movie poster

"A Gorgeous Movie—An Audacious Political Act" is a self-described "highly personal response" to the film Reds—directed and co-written by Warren Beatty, who also starred—published in Vogue in April 1982.

Summary

Vonnegut's friend Betty Dodson—a painter of El Greco-like pieces of naked figures, sexual and happy—once invited her mother to her studio without telling her the nature of her work. Her mother remarked that maybe if "the boys back home could just look at pictures like this as much as they wanted", it would be easier to keep their minds on what matters. Americans could thus think of sex with "calm and proportion" since it would appear so natural. Warren Beatty's film Reds can do the same about the Russian Revolution and those Americans who found it promising. Marxism in the United States is as horrible as masturbation once was, a sign of insanity or criminality. This film then is one of the most "unexpected political acts" of Vonnegut's lifetime by making a movie about Communist sympathizers.

Stars Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton with Nancy Reagan at a showing of Reds at the White House

The director Milos Forman, who grew up under Nazism and then Communism in Czechoslovakia, once said that people can only live in a jungle or a zoo. However, Vonnegut says we must create new possible alternatives, just as America's founders created the Constitution, if there are to be enough resources for future generations. The government of the United States encourages support for the Solidarity movement in Poland, which has merely done what Marx advised—to form a union against their bosses, demanding that "there are a lot better ways than this to run a zoo". While the cinematic techniques employed in Reds are the same used by Leni Riefenstahl to glorify Hitler and by D.W. Griffith to make racism honorable, it is the use of humor within this drama—acknowledging that "even the noblest of human enterprises are doomed to be often clumsy... inappropriate... ludicrously or tragically misinformed"—that humanizes the film. This irony is best encapsulated in the "humorless Russian Communist bureaucrat" played by writer Jerzy Kosinski, who also grew up under Nazism and Communism. His sympathetic portrayal of a monster is the most effective since Charles Laughton played the hunchback of Notre Dame.