By Kyle Smith
Saturday, January 16, 2021
‘Socialism is the only thing that will save you,” a
red-flag waving activist promises the protagonist of the movie Martin Eden, which is being praised as a
masterpiece by left-wing writers and was named the best film of 2020 by several
of them. Martin dismisses this advice, and is undone.
So: Viva socialism? This movie has got it all worked out.
Never mind that socialism has been a disaster every place it’s ever been tried:
The sort of people who deride Avengers movies for being childish fantasy are
sticking to their gauzy childlike views about socialism, the ideology that’s
always on the brink of success in some fantasist’s imagination.
Martin Eden
isn’t, however, much of a movie, and doesn’t even do a particularly good job of
defining its rhetorical parameters; to the extent it makes an argument, it does
so poorly. But if socialism fan-service is what you’re after, maybe this will
be right up your alley.
The title figure (Luca Marinelli) is a glowering brute
with a soft side, the standard teen-girl fantasy of a fellow with a body hewn
of granite and the soul of a poet. Martin makes his living on the sea in a
temporally hazy Italy: This guy seemingly grew up in the Seventies yet, as
several decades pass, it never seems later than the Eighties. I think the
technical term for the look of this film is “constrained by budget.” We’re also
in an alternative-timeline Italy: Unless I missed something, the real country
hasn’t had a war in recent decades, but Martin
Eden takes place against a backdrop of lurking militarism.
Martin’s life changes after a chance encounter with a
passing stranger who introduces him to a family of aristocratic types living in
palatial splendor. The young blue-eyed principessa,
Elena (Jessica Cressy) is alluring but out of Martin’s league in class and
education, so he resolves to earn her hand by willing himself to be an
intellectual. Her snooty family vaguely disapproves of his machinations, and
her friends set out to embarrass him at a party — but he turns the tables by
reciting some of his beautiful poetry.
As Martin struggles to make it as a writer (it’s not
clear what he’s writing, but we’re meant to think it’s gritty, engagé stuff about the mean streets of
Povertytown), his fortunes improve with Elena even though he’s so poor that
dirt feels sorry for him. Things turn a bit frosty among her family when his
picture appears in the paper: He spoke at a socialist rally, and the aristos
don’t approve (though they hasten to point out they’re liberals).
Here’s where things take a turn for the weird: Martin
isn’t a socialist. He declares he’s a radical individualist, and though he
spoke at the rally it was only to denounce the Reds, who hate him. Everything
Martin says is absolutely correct, yet the audience is meant to think that his
soul is beginning to turn rancid. “You socialists dream of a revolution that
will make the state your own so that this gives equal rights to all,” he says.
“Who are these ‘all’? The workers’ organizations, through their unions, not
single workers.” Since this is exactly what happened under Leninism — the
unions became the Soviets, Lenin ran them with an iron hand and the only “equal
right” the workers ever enjoyed was equality of misery — this is pretty much a
mic drop. “You can’t pay attention only to the collective,” Martin also says,
warning that workers who seek the warm embrace of socialism will instead find
“the strongest among them will be their new masters. But this time they’ll do
it in secret . . . and worse than what your bosses do to you today.” Again, the
history book says this is exactly what happens. Sign up for socialism, and be
ruled by the Stasi.
The movie is freely adapted from the novel by Jack
London, a raging socialist at the time he wrote it, but the author died in
1916, before the clarifying example of the Russian Revolution, so he at least
had the excuse of ignorance. I’m puzzled why film critics born in the last 75
years seem to have missed the news about how socialism actually turned out,
though. Were they in the multiplex this whole time and missed reality? When
Martin finally achieves fame for his individualist writings, he spends the last
act of the movie as a shouting, greasy, filthy-toothed monster who hates
himself. Among the books he writes that are supposed to signal his depravity is
one called The Dignity of Usury.
Since there’s no such thing as usury (there can’t be an “unfair” price of money
any more than there is an “unfair” price of meat or milk; whenever the price is
too high, consumers simply opt out), this guy makes music I can certainly dance
to.
But I fail to see why his persona is supposed to scare
me, despite the ominous threats of war heard in the closing minutes. What does
war have to do with Martin Eden’s individualist stance? Whenever war is
declared, the first thing that happens is that everyone is told to sacrifice
their petty individual concerns and work for the collective goal. Libertarians
don’t want to invade your country, they just want to be left alone. Adolf’s
boys didn’t call themselves “National Libertarians.”
Critics are united in saying Martin Eden is a timely warning about the perils of fascism. Only
if a fascist is defined as “one who points out the flaws in socialism.” Come to
think of it, that’s probably exactly what they think; it would certainly
explain a lot of their rhetoric. This film’s confused writer-director, Pietro
Marcello, who describes
himself as “an individualist, an anarchist, a socialist and a libertarian,”
also has said, despairingly, that he made this movie as a reflection on 2020
because “no one would have dreamt 40 years ago that Europe would be divided.”
By that he means, I suppose, that today’s Europe is divided between people who
like the direction it’s going in, and people who don’t. But that’s true of all
free countries.
As for 40 years ago, Europe was rather more starkly divided: At the time there were high walls and barbed-wire fences running right down the middle of it, guarded by minefields and soldiers with machine guns — and the purpose of all of it was to murder anyone who sought to flee socialism.
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