Bad Capitalists Or a Bad System

As a result, the movie is devoid of the social conflict that is the book’s main narrative. There are no unions and no strikes. Class conflict is out. The corruption of politicians becomes the product of a corrupt personality, not a corrupt system.

And since there is no class conflict, there is no room for the novel’s main achievement. “Oil” takes Bunny through a process in which he learns not only about how the world works, but about how people organize to change it. Both the movie and book show the Ross expropriation of the farm of the poor Watkins family. But “Oil” follows the political radicalization of Paul Watkins – drafted as a doughboy in World War One, and then sent with the interventionist armies to put down the Russian Revolution. He returns and becomes an oil union leader, and then a member of the left wing of the Socialist Party. When that party splits in 1919 (a scene dramatized in “Reds” as well) Paul Watkins becomes an organizer in the new Communist Party.

Upton Sinclair, whose sympathies were much more with the right wing of the Socialist Party than the left, still draws an admiring portrait of the worldly Paul, showing his courage in facing imprisonment, and his eventual fatal beating by right wing assassins. Sinclair draws out the political differences of the day in his debates with Bunny, whose eyes he opens. Bunny eventually has to choose whose side he’s on. The more he learns about the world, the more he rejects his father’s class, while still loving him as a person. And that class turns against him in the end.

In “There Will Be Blood” Paul disappears. In his place his evangelist brother Eli becomes the main antagonist to Plainview, a religious hypocrite pitted against a violent and powerful oilman. It is a conflict without social relevance, one the movie hardly bothers to explain. In its lowest point, a grown Bunny gratuitously returns to announce to his father that he’s going to become an investor in Mexican oil wells. Sinclair would have torn his hair out over that one.

“Oil” recounts just a small piece of what is now a hidden history of the radicalism of Los Angeles’ labor movement before and after World War One. In 1903 the city’s socialist labor council helped Mexican and Japanese farm workers win one of the state’s first agricultural strikes, just north in Oxnard. The L.A. unions were then shocked when Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor, refused to give the workers a union charter unless they rid themselves of their Asian members. “Oil” shows the fear the oil operators had for the Wobblies (the radical Industrial Workers of the World) and their (mostly rhetorical) commitment to sabotage in the workplace. In the city’s real history, two prewar labor leaders, the McNamara brothers, spent their lives in prison after a bomb they planted blew up at the LA Times building.

This was the most turbulent era for the labor and radical movements of Los Angeles. Sinclair describes how the oilmen defeated the workers and socialists, and created the “citadel of the open shop.” Bunny resists, and even makes his father put up money to bail out strikers. But he can’t stop the class war.

Sinclair recreates the era’s radical spirit, weaving political debate, action and romance into a complex tapestry. He was a daring author for his time. He describes Bunny’s sexual awakening as frankly as he could get away with, in an era when books really were banned for open descriptions of sex. His women are mostly foils for men, and they both seem a little wooden in comparison with the intimacy and realism achieved by writers since. Yet Sinclair gets real drama from Bunny’s conflict between his youthful lust for his studio star lover and his growing desire to make a full commitment to political organizing. In the end, he falls for a Jewish Socialist woman who clearly is his equal in debate, and greater in her commitment.

Hollywood today has less of the radical spirit that made “Reds.”. It’s not hard for a studio now to reinvent the war in Afghanistan as a crusade (“Charlie Wilson’s War”), confident that no one will ask why Ronald Reagan bankrolled Osama bin Laden and other extremists, calling them “freedom fighters” so long as they were willing to fight the Soviets. I can’t wait to see what they do with Central America.

But Los Angeles? Hollywood’s own city? Working class social and political movements get written out of the textbooks all the time. Writing us out of a movie made from “Oil” expropriated of one of the most important works of our own history. I hope the producers don’t have exclusive rights to the book. Perhaps a more courageous group will make the movie as Upton Sinclair wrote it. (Bulatlat.com)

David Bacon is a California writer and photographer. His new book, Illegal People: How Globalization Causes Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants, will be published by Beacon Press this fall. To preorder, call: 617-742-2110

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