Hail Caesar - McCarthyism, metatextuality, and why Hollywood is sacred (Patreon)

Happy New Year Everyone! Let’s Start 2019 the best way possible shall we? Let’s talk about Hail Caesar and why it’s about Cultural FUCKING MARXISM.

So let’s talk about Hail Caesar, but also about Hail Caesar: A Tale of The Christ. There are some films that really just teach you how to read them, and Hail Caesar might be the one of the best examples I’ve encountered. Like a cryptic crossword, there are certain things in the language of cinema that don’t simply mean what they appear. For example in the crossword any word that vaguely means “shuffle” or “change” should make you look for an anagram. For example in a movie, if you see a movie in the movie alarm bells should be going off. We aren’t dealing with any regular degular film any more. This ain’t your grandfather’s movie, this movie is going metatextual.
Metatextuality is generally when one text makes commentary on another, for example if one person talked about a video game on YouTube for an hour and then another person made a 12-part 14 hour response series criticising the criticism of the game. That discussion is metatextual. What’s great about movies within movies qua Hail Caesar is that here the metatextuality is concerning the movie itself. The movie is about the movie.

So when Eddie Mannix sits down to check out new footage from Hail Caesar we should pay attention.  The first two scenes shown from the film are of the Roman cavalry returning to Rome, and then of the Roman man Saul being struck by a vision of the divine and converted to Paul the apostle. There’s kind of an intense amount packed into these two scenes. 

“The emperor, Caesar, is god here. Lord of every man’s body and spirit.”

First, the narrator informs us that in Rome, Caesar is god - yeah guys it’s 2019 now, men can be gods too ffs - and Autolycus Antoninus is introduced. Autolycus is a name that means “lone wolf” and may be a reference to Autolycus from Homer’s Odyssey. In the original Autolycus is just a man but in later versions he was written as the son of a god. The second scene shows Saul travelling the road to Damascus and being converted by a divine presence. The card put up in place of God says “DIVINE PRESENCE TO BE SHOT”. This seems like a simple joke but turns out to be a recurring touchpoint: the notable visual absence of the divine.

The Rabbi in the scene with the four religious men explains to Eddie Mannnix: “For we jews, any visual depiction of the godhead is most strictly prohibited. But of course for us the man, Jesus Nazarene, is not God.” Of course in a film by the Coen brothers this line could be a bit of an authorial-insert. The Coen brothers are telling us “For we jews, any visual depiction of the godhead is most strictly prohibited” not in a sense necessarily that they themselves would be morally against depicting God in their film, but at least in the sense that that is what they’ve done. They are metatextually informing us “this film will not be visually depicting the divine”. This is reinforced by the repeated joke that Todd Haukaiser, the actor playing Jesus is depicted from behind and below, and heard speaking off-screen, but is very clearly an ordinary person. There is even a joke asking Todd if he’s an extra or a principal. They have applied both “any visual depiction of the godhead is most strictly prohibited” but also “for us the man, Jesus Nazarene, is not God.”

It’s interesting, then, that Mr. Skank from New York, God in A Tale of The Christ and almost all of the USSR communist machine are all notably absent from the film. Eddie Mannix describes Autolycus Antoninus, the character Baird Whitlock is playing in A Tale of The Christ as an “Ordinary man, skeptical at first, but who comes to a grudging respect for this swell figure from the east.” Of course in the film the east refers to palestine, and the swell figure from the east is Jesus. If we see Baird Whitlock as a real life analog to his character, the east is the USSR, and the swell figure as it were, is the spectre of communism, the Russian government, or perhaps Marx or Lenin. Baird even tells Eddie when he has been sweet-talked by the communists that they have a “special book” with “all the answers” called Capital, but with a K. The last reading of Eddie’s description of Autolycus’ character is of himself. Eddie is the skeptical ordinary man who comes to the grudging respect. Eddie is Saul who becomes Paul, as is Baird, as is Autolycus. Eddie’s arc in the film is that he is struggling to find purpose and finds his job too stressful, but in the end realises that the studio is the higher purpose he wants to serve. For Eddie, the east is New York, and the swell figure is Mr. Skank.

Mr. Skank is never on screen, dictates his will to his follower, Eddie, and works in mysterious ways: he is the one who suggests Hobie Doyle be on set and it’s Hobie Doyle that Eddie is able to confide in about the kidnapping situation, leading to the resolution overall.

It’s not just A Tale of The Christ that plays with the lines between the films being made in the film, and the film itself. The actors are oddly tied to their films; they exist in disparate worlds and align perfectly to them. Hobie Doyle doesn’t just play a cowboy - he is a cowboy. Burt Gurney the sailor actually gets into a submarine in the third act of the film. 

The scene where Hobie Doyle tries to act in a serious drama Merrily We Dance is total genius. Really just spectacular comedy, but every bit of the scene leads back to one funny idea: What if a cowboy tried to play an aristocrat? Hobie Doyle walks and talks and sings and acts like a cowboy, so it’s funny to see him so out of place. Baird is drugged by a secret powder slipped into his wine goblet - very roman - and even kidnapped in his set costume, so he’s stuck as this weird anachronism in every scene. He’s like Buzz Lightyear. Altogether there is a funny similarity between Hail Caesar and Toy Story - films about characters from incompatible, clashing universes working together.

In this I feel the film is again telling us what it’s about, telling us how to read it. It’s not that the characters’ individualism is melded into one combined reality - instead all the worlds of the film exist alongside each other. They are all valid and real systems, separate realities. 

This, as it turns out is essential to what the film is really about. Yeah, I was gonna follow through with how it's really a cultural Marxist propaganda piece, what with the Hollywood and the Jews and the professor from the Frankfurt school as a character (literally) but…. I dunno, it's a new year. Maybe 2019 is the year where we just leave this shit behind? #nonazis2019? Maybe?

McCarthyism has been compared before to the Salem witch trials. Although the communist hunts weren't as deadly by far as the witch hunts, the parallel is interesting, since often the USSR's atheism was used to point out how opposed they were to everything American, and after all, the witch hunts and christian and proto-capitalist purge of another religion, a people's religion.

So in Hail Caesar, communism is framed as a religion, as is the capitalism of Hollywood. When the submarine appears it is framed like a divine force, or a miracle. The accompanying choral music is unambiguously soviet here, but in the end credits, a chorus of voices start by singing something clearly more christian, and as the track progresses, turn more and more into the soviet style.

The conflicting trinity of faiths in Hail Caesar run somewhat parallel to the comic scene with the four religious men. The different sides can't agree on the specifics or details of what they all believe. So what does the film think we should favour?

“eh, I haven't an opinion”

Hail Caesar doesn't suggest a clear winner, it just says that we should take the best parts, common across everyone's philosophy. All people believe the same basic things about helping one another and being kind, no matter their other beliefs, economic or political or spiritual. At least, I hope they do. That's the 2019 I'd like us to have.