“Insidious!”
Like the seasoned scientist, Osip would coolly dissect whatever they had just observed. The musicals were “pastries designed to placate the impoverished with daydreams of unattainable bliss.” The horror movies were “sleights of hand in which the fears of the workingman have been displaced by those of pretty girls.” The vaudevillian comedies were “preposterous narcotics.” And the westerns? They were the most devious propaganda of all: fables in which evil is represented by collectives who rustle and rob; while virtue is a lone individual who risks his life to defend the sanctity of someone else’s private property. In sum? “Hollywood is the single most dangerous force in the history of class struggle.”
Or so Osip argued, until he discovered the genre of American movies that would come to be known as film noir. With rapt attention he watched the likes of This Gun for Hire, Shadow of a Doubt, and Double Indemnity.
“What is this?” he would ask of no one in particular. “Who is making these movies? Under what auspices?”
From one to the next, they seemed to depict an America in which corruption and cruelty lounged on the couch; in which justice was a beggar and kindness a fool; in which loyalties were fashioned from paper, and self-interest was fashioned from steel. In other words, they provided an unflinching portrayal of Capitalism as it actually was.
“How did this happen, Alexander? Why do they allow these movies to be made? Do they not realize they are hammering a wedge beneath their own foundation stones?”
But no single star of the genre captivated Osip more than Humphrey Bogart. With the exception of Casablanca (which Osip viewed as a woman’s movie), they had watched all of Bogart’s films at least twice. Whether in The Petrified Forest, To Have and Have Not, or, especially, The Maltese Falcon, Osip appreciated the actor’s hardened looks, his sardonic remarks, his general lack of sentiment. “You notice how in the first act he always seems so removed and indifferent; but once his indignation is roused, Alexander, there is no one more willing to do what is necessary—to act clear-eyed, quick, and without compunction. Here truly is a Man of Intent.”
In the Yellow Room, Osip took two mouthfuls of Emile’s braised veal with caviar sauce, a gulp of Georgian wine, and looked up just in time to see the image of the Golden Gate Bridge.
In the minutes that followed, once again the services of Sam Spade were enlisted by the alluring, if somewhat mysterious, Miss Wonderly. Once again, Spade’s partner was gunned down in an alley just hours before Floyd Thursby met a similar fate. And once again Joel Cairo, the Fat Man, and Brigid O’Shaughnessy, having surreptitiously joined forces, drugged Spade’s whiskey and headed for the wharf, their elusive quest finally within reach. But even as Spade was nursing his head, a stranger in a black coat and hat stumbled into his office, dropped a bundle to the floor, and collapsed dead on the couch!
“Do you think Russians are particularly brutish, Osip?” asked the Count.
“What’s that?” Osip whispered, as if there were others in the audience whom he didn’t want to disturb.
“Do you think we are essentially more brutish than the French, or the English, or these Americans?”
“Alexander,” Osip hissed (as Spade was washing the stranger’s blood from his hands). “What on earth are you talking about?”
“I mean, do you think we are more apt than others to destroy that which we have created?”
Osip, who had not yet torn his eyes from the screen, now turned to stare at the Count in disbelief. Then he abruptly rose, stomped to the projector, and froze the film at the very moment that Spade, having placed the roughly wrapped bundle on his desk, was taking his penknife from his pocket.
“Is it possible that you don’t see what is happening?” he demanded while pointing at the screen. “Having traveled from the Orient to the docks of San Franchesko, Captain Jacoby has been shot five times. He has jumped from a burning ship, stumbled through the city, and used his final breaths to bring comrade Spadsky this mysterious package wrapped in paper and bound in string. And you choose this moment to engage in metaphysics!”
The Count, who had turned around, was holding up a hand to cut the glare from the projection.
“But, Osip,” he said, “we have watched him open the bundle on at least three occasions.”
“What difference does that make? You have read Anna Karenina at least ten times, but I’d wager you still cry when she throws herself under the train.”
“That’s something else altogether.”
“Is it?”
There was silence. Then with an expression of exasperation, Osip turned off the projector. He flicked on the lights and returned to the table.
“All right, my friend. I can see that you are vexed by something. Let’s see if we can make sense of it, so we can get on with our studies.”
Thus, the Count described for Osip the conversation he’d had with Mishka. Or rather, he relayed Mishka’s views on the burning of Moscow, and the toppling of statues, and the silencing of poets, and the slaughter of fourteen million head of cattle.
Osip, having already aired his frustrations, now listened to the Count attentively, occasionally nodding his head at Mishka’s various points.
“All right,” he said, once the Count had finished. “So, what is it exactly that is bothering you, Alexander? Does your friend’s assertion shock you? Does it offend your sensibilities? I understand that you are worried about his state of mind; but isn’t it possible that he is right in his opinions while being wrong in his sentiments?”
“What do you mean?”
“It is like the Maltese Falcon.”
“Osip. Please.”
“No, I am quite serious. What is the black bird if not a symbol of Western heritage itself? A sculpture fashioned by knights of the Crusades from gold and jewels as tribute to a king, it is an emblem of the church and the monarchies—those rapacious institutions that have served as the foundation for all of Europe’s art and ideas. Well, who is to say that their love of that heritage isn’t as misguided as the Fat Man’s for his falcon? Perhaps that is exactly what must be swept aside before their people can hope to progress.”
His tone grew softer.
“The Bolsheviks are not Visigoths, Alexander. We are not the barbarian hordes descending upon Rome and destroying all that is fine out of ignorance and envy. It is the opposite. In 1916, Russia was a barbarian state. It was the most illiterate nation in Europe, with the majority of its population living in modified serfdom: tilling the fields with wooden plows, beating their wives by candlelight, collapsing on their benches drunk with vodka, and then waking at dawn to humble themselves before their icons. That is, living exactly as their forefathers had lived five hundred years before. Is it not possible that our reverence for all the statues and cathedrals and ancient institutions was precisely what was holding us back?”
Osip paused, taking a moment to refill their glasses with wine.
“But where do we stand now? How far have we come? By marrying American tempo with Soviet aims, we are on the verge of universal literacy. Russia’s long-suffering women, our second serfdom, have been elevated to the status of equals. We have built whole new cities and our industrial production outpaces that of most of Europe.”
“But at what cost?”