The Talkies /Jogging to the Finland Station
Bayles, Martha
JOGGING TO THE FINLAND STATION by Martha Bayles During the second half of Reds, Warren Beatty's film tribute to John Reed, there is a sequence in which Reed travels with the Bolsheviks through...
...I said a class war, not a holy war...
...Each had birthrates of around 50 in the 1950s and are only down to the mid-toupper 40s today...
...A much larger part of the audience is made up of people who disapprove of such rhetoric from the lips of a Zinoviev, but enjoy the way it sounds in a Greenwich Village cafg or around a rustic kitchen table in Provincetown...
...But the biggest demographic question marks in recent years have con~ cerned the major nations of the "less developed" world...
...This earth will indeed have more people--at Ben ff...
...A t first the returns were disappointing, but like Zinoviev, Beatty is not too concerned about the unguided masses...
...India has had a much more moderate drop in birthrate than has China...
...Most of those missing persons were from the poor countries of the world...
...Census Bur e a u ' s International Demographic Data Center, maestro Samuel Baum presiding...
...That means that in the past 20 years India got about a third of the way to rates that will produce zero population growth...
...In the glowing words of Time: "Diane Keaton's performance shows a species of heroism...
...Lost forever...
...Yet it is a fact at the root of many modern distortions...
...This article is adapted from Mr...
...Like the assembly in Baku, the audience for films is composed of various tribes who do not share priorities...
...that's a bigger decline than India's but not as sharp as China's...
...Bemused, Reed asks an English-speaking bystander for an explanation...
...Unlike Zhivago, who stumbles on frozen feet through a blizzard in the midst of civil war, starving and halThe information specialists at Phillips Petroleum will help you...
...some for rhetoric, some for free speech...
...But by 1978, as birthrates kept falling, the same demographers predicted that those 300 million people wouM not be born by the turn of the century...
...and shortly thereafter becomes the honest-togoodness American dreamer gasping on his deathbed that he wants to go home...
...More attractive than Jill Clayburgh or Marsha Mason, Diane Keaton represents the top of the line of Hollywood's latest stock character: the liberated heroine whose liberation consists of being neither beautiful nor intelligent...
...In Reds the flowers are white lilies, shown over and over in case we miss the point...
...9 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . _9 . . . . . . ''~176176176176 . . . . . ~'~176176176176 . . . . "~176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176 ~176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176176 SPECTATOR'S JOURNAL O ~ I O O O Q O a O . . . . . . . . ~ O O ~ Q . . . . . ~ Q O e D g O g t o ~ l I Q O O g Q g . . . . O O U I O D ~ g I G W O ~ . . . . D S O Q Q D O O ~ m O m l O n Q Q O Q m D l l g D ~ Q Q O U O O I g t Q ~ g Q I D O ~ Q ~ POPULATION LOST by BenJ...
...This film does nothing of the kind...
...Whenever a political debate or discussion occurs, there is usually something else going on in the foreground: coffee being poured, dinner being burned, Diane Keaton's mouth opening in surprise or closing in a pout-or some other Robert Ahman-like distraction...
...As recently as the early 1960s, Indonesia's birthrate was 46...
...In Petrograd they sleep apart to demonstrate that she is his professional equal, which she clearly is not...
...they rattle...
...They are gone...
...The numbers were assembled by the United Nations and analyzed by the U.S...
...Even a lower growth rate still yield~ some growth until and unless it reaches zero...
...But if we consider another sort of politics, those of the box office, then Beatty as the author of this film can be seen playing a role similar to that of Zinoviev...
...The remaining six big nations in the less-developed world break down this way: The birthrates of Thailand, Turkey, and Mexico have dropped about ten per thousand...
...Wattenberg is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute...
...2 in the world with 667 million people...
...But that drop is more significant than it may seem...
...To a degree, he is right...
...Call us...
...Wattenberg Three hundred million people have disappeared duringthe past decade...
...today the rate is about 35...
...But they do suggest a certain priority for the love story...
...No longer an observer, he is now a participant, representing the Communist Workers Party of America, and taking orders from no less a personage than Grigory Zinoviev...
...They are cheering, he is told, because his speech has just called for "a holy war against the infidel...
...Bill Adams Dan Harrison Jere Smith Susan Stoffle Dave Dryden Btll Flesher (918) 661-5224 (918) 661-5204 (918) 681-4982 (918) 661-4974 (918) 661-4987 (918) 661-6760 Research &. Development Jerry Regan (918) 661-8727 ~&R- c%.,qt t E OIzt &~C)MA :4u,~4 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1982 29 lucinatmg, the heroine of Reds proceeds on a smooth track under the blue skies of a peaceful Finland, well equipped with skis and provisions and a fetching wool hat--not to mention a male guide whose sole function is to give her a boost over the snowbanl~s...
...But as Newsweek goes on to say: " S h e ' s also a determined romantic heroine, trekking across the frozen wastes of Finland to try to reach her lover rotting away in a Finnish jail...
...JOGGING TO THE FINLAND STATION by Martha Bayles During the second half of Reds, Warren Beatty's film tribute to John Reed, there is a sequence in which Reed travels with the Bolsheviks through White-held territory to a conference in Baku...
...Some for a class war, some for a holy war...
...Of course the great theme of the novel Doctor Zhivago is the destruction of freedom andprivate life, scarcely done justice in the film...
...They are the United States, the Soviet Union, Japan, Great Britain, West Germany, France, and Italy...
...He sees it...
...Six of these seven nations are already at fertility levels that would lead to actual declines in population in years to come...
...The critics cheer and wave their scimitars because they are congratulating themselves on their tolerance...
...A quick tour of these poor nations shows declines in birthrates everywhere, although at verydifferent speeds...
...Louise Bryant may have been a fool, and there is nothing wrong with portraying a fool...
...For it is now virtuous to suffer fools gladly, as long as the fools are graceless, mealymouthed women who have taken assertiveness training...
...Any skeptics left over will be drowned out by the cheers...
...Those among the moviegoing audience who believe that the mere sound of Communist rhetoric will galvanize the masses may be gratified by having it reverberate in theaters across America...
...Doctor Zhivago/" the critics cry in unison, recalling the daffodils that signified Yuri Zhivago's passion for Lara, and the separation that ends with his trekking across frozen wastes in search of her...
...And for those-who are made uncomfortable by the contradictions, there is Jack Nicholson playing Eugene O'Neill, sending out caustic reminders of how absurd Reed and Bryant are...
...that is about what the United Nations predicts China's will be by the end of the century...
...The lovers' main passions are political: his for Communism, hers for her own emancipation...
...And the separation is not forced but voluntary, the result of an argument in which it is Reed's turn to carve out his own space...
...In Reds this priority is reversed...
...These people were victims neither of a cruel famine nor of a tyrant's repression-but of plunging birthrates...
...Today, when planners in most of these "rich countries" look into the future, they are less concerned about a population explosion than about labor-force shortages...
...It isn't much, but it gets him off the card-carrying hook...
...In the late 1950s, India recorded 43 births per thousand...
...These phrases are so familiar they don't even ring...
...Data for Vietnam does not exist...
...In other words, behold Louise Bryant on the barricades, carving out her own space...
...The UN projections show India's birthrate dropping to 26 within the next 20 y e a r s - - t h a t ' s yet another third of the way there...
...But what is also apparent is that those nightmare scenarios of ever-more non-stop billions of starving people packed like sardines in a can will never come to pass...
...some for self-assertion, some for selfless love...
...Not only placed in the background, it is also speeded up, so that it becomes not rational speech but glossolalia: meaningless in itself but proof that the spirit of authenticity and idealism has descended upon the comrades...
...Now, this does not mean that our planet won't ultimately house more people than it now has...
...and Stanley Kauffmann: "She is the New Woman . . . entering the 20th century with an appetite for every freedom, with the air of a released prisoner's vengeance for wrongful past confinement...
...So the critics have a point...
...today it's about 30...
...Keaton isn't quite that embarrassing, but she does give what Newsweek calls "a rich, complex portrait of a woman one comes to love, but only after struggling through a maze of ambiguous responses...
...It simply sends out conflicting messages, assuming that the audience won't notice until it's too late...
...On the train back to Moscow, Reed learns that the translations were supervised by Zinoviev, and in outrage tells Zinoviev not to change what he writes...
...I~1attenberg's ~l monthly United Feature Syndicate column...
...It doesn't matter what they're cheering for, as long as they keep it up long enough to help Beatty seize power from George Lucas...
...now i t ' s about 36...
...As Vincent Canby puts it: "The movie is essentially as ideological as the puppy that whimpers when Louise stalks out...
...By the late 1970s, just a quarter of a century later, that rate had fallen to 22...
...Reds is not political, if the politics in question are those of the Bolshevik Revolution...
...A nation only has to achieve rates in the mid-teens to get a population stability over time...
...The year is 1919, and Reed has returned to Russia after writing his eyewitness account of the Revolution, Ten Days That Shook The World...
...By comparison, America's birthrate today is 16...
...But they are a small group, too busy grabbing microphones in public forums to spend much time at the movies...
...And for those who are now over thirty but nostalgic for the sixties when they couldn't trust anyone over thirty, there is the reassuring sight of "Witnesses" such as Will Durant, Roger Baldwin, and Rebecca West--whose antique, expressive faces appear against a velvety blackness--recalling their own good old days...
...A brief look at data from the 20 most-populous countries provides a flavor of what's going on...
...Seven of the 20 biggest nations are categorized by the United Nations as "more developed...
...Of course, he is madly in love with the absurd Bryant, which will keep most viewers from connecting his remarks with the rest of the film...
...As for the trek, it is carried out by Bryant under the most clement of conditions...
...But then the storming of the Winter Palace proves too stimulating for them, and the screen fills with their torsos, heaving like a bellows to the strains of the "Internationale...
...In the early 1950s, the mainland Chinese had an annual birthrate of 40 children per thousand people...
...For this large and influential group, the rhetoric is treated as a sort of sound effect...
...For good measure, South Korea, the world's 21st largest nation, has seen a stunning drop in its birthrate, which has declined by 3 0 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1982...
...least several billion more before we level off--and those new billions will cause some problems as they arrive...
...it is surely the Big Daddy of nations when ranked by population...
...At one point a group of Azerbaijani tribesmen bursts into wild cheers...
...For them Reds provides the aforementioned confrontation in which Reed defends truth and individualism...
...So what if he's been a bit slow in seeing the light...
...Such tolerance may have peaked when Jill Claybu-rgh, asserting herself vis-a-vis Burt Reynolds in Starting Over, blew a great quantity of clear snot into her mittens...
...Perhaps the most glaring example of this, next to the treatment of Reed's political convictions, is the portrayal of Louise Bryant...
...But there is more to the comparison than a few ineptly cribbed details...
...What is happening is that around the world, the socalled "population explosion" is receding--and quite rapidly in most places...
...is not Communist propaganda...
...Brazil's was 44 in 1950...
...Then he gets going on the subject of free speech, only to be interrupted wheh White soldiers try to blow up the train...
...Then there is a third category of moviegoers: people who do not feel nostalgic about anyone's radical youth...
...Genuine art presents contradictory meanings, but it modulates between them, either resolving them or deepening their irony into tragedy...
...Mobilizing them all at once requires a calculated labor of multiple translation, so that each tribe will follow the version intended for it, and miss the rest...
...If this is what the critics mean by an "adult" relationship, then it must be left to children like Lara and Zhivago to find passion in each other...
...It has been thought of as a demographic basket case...
...That's still high...
...I t is always hard to know what critics mean by "political," but in the case of Reds they seem to be saying that it Martha Bayles is a novelist living in Cambridge, Massachusetts...
...On the other hand, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Nigeria have all shown much smaller declines...
...These changing projections point up a fact of our modern circumstance that has received very little attention...
...Similar declines in birthrate are apparent in the two next-largest poor countries, Indonesia and Brazil...
...The missing 300 million Third Worlders are, of course, only a statistical artifact...
...These top 20 contain 75 percent of the world's population...
...The point of the sequence is to set up a contrast between Zinoviev, portrayed as an overbearing ideologue by novelist Jerzy Kosinski, and Beatty's warm, enthusiastic Reed-an idealist who would never stoop to manipulating people just to gain their temporary support...
...Reds" is said to resemble Doctor Zhiz,ago in that it is "a great love story set against tumultuous historical events, fraught with conflict and full of passion," (Newsweek...
...No doubt they will heed the New York Film Critics, the National Board of Review, and the Holly-wood Foreign Press Association--all of whom have bestowed awards upon Reds...
...In a Baku mosque Reed addresses a diverse Moslem audience, his speech read in translation by three or four regional leaders...
...Because of this contrast, and the fact that the film focuses on the relationship between Reed and his wife, Louise Bryant, most of the critics have echoed Stanley Kauffmann's decree: "This is not, in essence or intent, a political work...
...Yet the film Doctor Z/~ivago does manage to put human love before political ideology...
...They are people who, back in 1968, UN demographers predicted would be born by the year 2000...
...The Soviets are only a smidgen away...
...The Philippines and Egypt have lost about five per thousand...
...India is No...
...Begin at main land China with almost a billion people today...
Vol. 15 • March 1982 • No. 3
