VLVL (6) Sasha: Hollywood blacklists

[jbor]

on 29/9/03 6:50 PM, Mike Weaver at mikeweaver at gn.apc.org wrote:

> Otherwise perhaps you would like to return to the point
> I was making, that Sasha and Hub stayed broadly on course while Frenesi did an
> about turn.

Sure. Just point out the passages I've missed which demonstrate that Sasha
and Hub were "politically active" rather than simply lying low, trying to
stay in work, and bitching at the tv during the '50s. And meanwhile, I take
it that the points I've made below stand?

> I'm not sure how "politically active" the text indicates they were. In fact
> we're told that Frenesi had grown up not as a "red-diaper baby", but "more
> on the fringes of the political struggle in Hollywood back in the fifties":
> 
> Her mother then had worked as a script reader and her
> father, Hub Gates, as a gaffer, always under dreamlike
> turns of blacklist, graylist, secrets kept and betrayed,
> grown-ups acting like the worst kind of kids" (74.28-30).
> 
> If they're still able to work in Hollywood in the '50s then they can't have
> been all that politically active. Reads to me more like they were trying to
> lie low and hold on to their jobs.
> 
> Friends of Hub's had sold out friends of Sasha's, and vice
> versa .... To Sasha the blacklist period, with its complex
> court dances of fuckers and fuckees, thick with betrayal,
> destructiveness, cowardice, and lying, seemed only a
> continuation of the picture business as it had always been
> carried on, only now in political form. Everyone they knew
> had made up a different story, to make each of them come
> out looking better and others worse. (81.7-15)
> 
> Sasha's judgements here seem to cut across both sides of the ledger.

And, just like her folks, Frenesi retains her "left" values and beliefs all
the time she's working within the system. I'm still waiting to see where and
how "qualitative distinctions" are made in the text.

best