PRESSURE POINT
Directed by Hubert Cornfield and Stanley Kramer
Written by Hubert Cornfield and S. Lee Pogostin
Starring Sidney Poitier and Bobby Darin
Released in 1962
Directed by Hubert Cornfield and Stanley Kramer
Written by Hubert Cornfield and S. Lee Pogostin
Starring Sidney Poitier and Bobby Darin
Released in 1962
I write most of these entries as quickly as I can so as to capture and communicate the psychological rhythms of my personal creative process, the idea being that those of you perhaps share some alpha and beta waves with Your Humble Narrator. These articles fly from my brain to the electronic page in mere minutes, despite the occasional stumble for research purposes and--believe it or not--fact checking.
This particular entry will take longer, I suspect.
In my heart, I believe that Veiled Threats is not the forum for self-analysis. First of all, that type of thing is all too often precious. Secondly, I'd rather write about movies, or music, or even the ghastly specter of politics. Yes, I am aware that I have on several occasions lured you, Tonstant Weader, into dipping your big toe into the unsettled pond of my life via many a heartfelt story of destitution, delirium or delight. I have, however, always been most studious in pulling back so that I wasn't required to crack open the nut to find out what was inside. That would have been unpleasant. That would also have made for much more interesting reading. For that deliberate omission, I apologize, at least this once.
All the same, I still plan to have as much of my own way as possible. I will use the occasion of my viewing of the spectacular Pressure Point (1962) as the jumping off point for a bit of the old self-psychoanalysis. I realize that could end up being the most self-indulgent bore in the history of the world. Yet somehow I suspect you will not drift off. I'm sure of it. We all know one another by now.
Without going into the specifics of it just yet, I will tell you that Pressure Point makes the dramatic argument that fascism is a form of serious mental illness. As ideas go, that's one big head full of snakes. Imagine, if you will, that all those goosestepping neanderthals who fell under the charm of Hitler or the propaganda of Goebbels were actually just a bunch of psychologically diseased middle class stooges with that once in a lifetime opportunity to act out their antisocial compulsions within a system where to do otherwise would, paradoxically, be antisocial. Think about it. You take your typical German merchant class Aryan, circa 1935. He's been projecting his own insecurities onto the concept of enterprise and nationhood for as long as he can remember. Then his country and his enterprise gets the shit kicked out of them by a war. He is left with two broad options. He can conclude that his entire personal philosophy, which guided his behavior, has always been ridiculous, or he can blame someone else, some grandiose group of conspirators, for wrecking his dreams. As Nietzsche wrote, "My memory says I did that. My pride says I cannot have done that. Eventually, memory yields."
This is essentially the argument made by the movie Pressure Point, the fascinating film to which we will eventually get around to discussing in some detail. Before we do, however, this subject requires a bit of digging.
One of the ideas that has rolled around in my own mind for years now is that mental illness, like mental health, is actually a spot on a continuum, a spot that often re-positions itself based on circumstance. When external stress is minimal, the individual will typically suffer less psychiatric symptoms. But introduce heavy stress--whether real or imagined--into his life, and the individual will find his needle sliding steadily into the danger zone of psychosis. What I am suggesting is that each person, through a likely blend of socio-biological factors, has a given predisposition to aberrant thoughts, most often manifesting, when and if they do, in actions that we might reasonably call fascist. I'm defining fascism in this narrow scenario as actionable intolerance of others based on a specific type of paranoia, one that seeks to absolve the paranoiac by conversely blaming one or more other groups based on the identification of that individual's own determination. In other words, I'm saying that the person in question may decide that the reason he is acting with such hatred and violent inclinations is that he is experiencing what is to him a reasonable terror of The Other, in some cases an identification based on race, gender, sexual orientation, age, religion, or whatever it may be.
I am also arguing that every person on this planet has that kernel of confusion inside him.
I will not ask you to agree with that last statement. I will instead tell you about a couple of my own terrors. I will speak of a few bits of fertilizer that have nurtured the dreaded fascist within me. A more difficult disclosure I have never undertaken.
I was twenty or twenty-one. Ruth Ann and I were waiting in her car parked outside a 7-Eleven in a ghetto part of town. It was dark out. About a dozen African-American young adults were milling around in the parking lot. They were just walking around in no particular manner and without evident purpose. But they were also making it impossible for Ruth Ann to back out of our parking space without running into some of them. The car's back-up lights were on. Our windows were rolled up. We saw that maybe four of five of these young men were snickering while looking in our direction. No one made to get out of our way.
I'm still fascinated by this thing all these years later. The guys in that parking lot lived nearby, I assume. After all, convenience stores cater to local traffic and there were no other cars in the lot, so they must have been from around those parts, those particular parts being, as I said, poverty-stricken in the extreme. In their day-to-day lives, these men wielded very little power. Yet that very moment on that very dark night, they controlled that parking lot. They controlled the two of us sitting in that car in that parking lot.
It was bad enough to get my own ass kicked. Add to that my much stronger fear that Ruth Ann might get hurt as well and you get some sense as to the pressure. Now let's add some more. I figured that Ruth Ann would kind of expect me to deal with this situation myself so that no harm would come to her. I wasn't very big, but I was "the guy" and what the hell good was I if I couldn't fight off a dozen street thugs? Then again, there was always the worry that I might overreact and bring down upon us the fury of a gang, if that's what they were, when simple frightened patience might be all that was required. If this sounds exaggerated and over-complex, well, we were college students at the time.
We could have rolled down a window and politely asked the fellows to allow us to exit the majesty of this glorious old parking lot. I could have stepped out of the car and shouted, "Hey! Tryin' to back up here! What the fuck, man?" I could have grabbed a tire iron from the trunk and come out swinging. Or we could have just hit the gas and hoped that most of them got out of our way.
Since that night, I have asked myself many times if I would have felt differently had those dozen young men been white. The answer--and I hate this--is yes, absolutely. And that, my friends, is one of those kernels of fascism inside me. You see, the question itself is loaded. If those guys had been white, what does that mean? Hell, the members of the Manson Family were white. The rolls of the KKK are teeming over with white guys. The German-American Bund was white as sunshine. But the question takes for granted that the white guys in the hypothetical would be a group of white-shirt-wearing, black tie-dangling, bicycle pumping Mormon missionaries, or something of that ilk, rather than, say, a band of drunken pool hall rejects ready to relive the days of the Vikings. So even my own liberal-guilt question has a trace of the Reich about it.
(Not to leave you all in undue suspense, cooler heads prevailed and we simply waited the group out. I think it lasted five minutes. When we got out of there, we talked about how easily fear translates into that one great big ugly word.)
Here's the other personal story, along with another instance of latent fascism. I was walking through the same exact neighborhood on my way to somewhere else. When I got even with the most dilapidated block, I felt an arm snake itself around my shoulder. I turned to see a tall, skinny black man, probably about my own age, stinking of booze. He smiled at me as one silver tooth shimmered. He said, "I needs money fo whiskey. An don't even think 'bout sayin no."
Because a year had come and gone, I had grown just a wee bit more sophisticated in dealing with things that scared me. On pure instinct alone, I replied, "Man, I was just on my way to get a drink myself. I'd love some company. Come on."
Well, bite my mother if that guy didn't saddle up next to me and escort me to my favorite neighborhood bar just across the tracks in the "better" section of town. We walked in together and I even bought him a beer, which was all this bar served. When he drained that glass and demanded another, I said, "Nope. That's all I'm buying."
There was nothing he could do. We were on my turf now.There wasn't another black face in that barroom and it wouldn't have mattered anyway because this was more about economics than race. He just shrugged and left.
For the longest time I felt pretty clever about what I'd done. It took me a long time to realize what an asshole I'd been. You see, I could have just refused, or lied, or given him a dollar. But I'd been scared, which you may notice is one common denominator here. I even rationalized that I'd taught the guy a lesson. What a dope.
Where does this horrible shit come from? I mean, hey, I was part of the generation that was expected to be somehow beyond color, aloof from fear and hatred, enlightened and free. Yet there I was, a stinking sophomoric coward, plain and simple.
A few years later I went driving through that very same neighborhood with my friend Donnie. He looked out the car window at the run down conditions and at the men hanging out in front of abandoned stores. He said, "We're gonna have to do something about this one day."
"What are you talking about?"
"Those people. They're taking over. If we don't stop them soon, it'll be the end of us."
I never had another conversation with Donnie because I decided I didn't want to hang out with a racist son of a bitch.
And yet, if I'd been fair, I would have recognized some of my own earlier emotions in what my friend had said. He was just voicing his own fear. Where Donnie came from, African-Americans were the minority, to the extent that they existed at all. Don could have gone his entire life, had he chosen to do so, without ever once interacting with a person of color. So when he saw those men sleeping outside the stores, or guzzling booze from a paper bag, or just walking from one place to another, he got scared. After all, there were a bunch of them and only two of us.
Them. Us. What a pair of stupid words.
I could tell you how I believe I have become a better person since those college days. Hey, it might even be accurate. But I also know that poison never really leaves the system, once it's introduced. It;s like a virus that keeps mutating away from the cure, becoming more and more resilient. More and more frightening. More and more psychotic.
This is where the excellent Pressure Point comes in. I could talk for a while about how no one other than Stanley Kramer could have so successfully produced this movie or how I wish that director Hubert Cornfield had made more movies or how this is the single greatest performance in the life of Sidney Poitier as the conservative psychiatrist in a prison where he has been handed the unenviable task of treating a Nazi bastard played to perfection by singer Bobby Darin. What I need to talk about instead is the assumption this movie makes, which comes out again and again, that fascism is mental illness.
In this film, liberalism is its own perfect foil. The administrators are like the desk cops in a Dirty Harry film and Poitier sounds like Clint Eastwood, which is one hell of a turnabout.
Again, the assumption is that Darin is nuts because he is still a Nazi. In other words, no matter what the DSM-IV says, fascism itself is a sign that a person is predisposed to harm himself or others, whether consciously or otherwise. As such, it is something that must always be guarded against. And we cannot protect ourselves from it if we fail to recognize the symptoms.
You know the symptoms, right? Fear, terror, paranoia, anger, hatred, all cloaked within a cloud of "common sense."
Whew.
I appreciate your patience with my vituperation. Self-analysis that's worth anything is always painful. I'm drained. I've been writing this for three solid hours and possibly one gaseous half-hour. I am done.
This particular entry will take longer, I suspect.
In my heart, I believe that Veiled Threats is not the forum for self-analysis. First of all, that type of thing is all too often precious. Secondly, I'd rather write about movies, or music, or even the ghastly specter of politics. Yes, I am aware that I have on several occasions lured you, Tonstant Weader, into dipping your big toe into the unsettled pond of my life via many a heartfelt story of destitution, delirium or delight. I have, however, always been most studious in pulling back so that I wasn't required to crack open the nut to find out what was inside. That would have been unpleasant. That would also have made for much more interesting reading. For that deliberate omission, I apologize, at least this once.
All the same, I still plan to have as much of my own way as possible. I will use the occasion of my viewing of the spectacular Pressure Point (1962) as the jumping off point for a bit of the old self-psychoanalysis. I realize that could end up being the most self-indulgent bore in the history of the world. Yet somehow I suspect you will not drift off. I'm sure of it. We all know one another by now.
Without going into the specifics of it just yet, I will tell you that Pressure Point makes the dramatic argument that fascism is a form of serious mental illness. As ideas go, that's one big head full of snakes. Imagine, if you will, that all those goosestepping neanderthals who fell under the charm of Hitler or the propaganda of Goebbels were actually just a bunch of psychologically diseased middle class stooges with that once in a lifetime opportunity to act out their antisocial compulsions within a system where to do otherwise would, paradoxically, be antisocial. Think about it. You take your typical German merchant class Aryan, circa 1935. He's been projecting his own insecurities onto the concept of enterprise and nationhood for as long as he can remember. Then his country and his enterprise gets the shit kicked out of them by a war. He is left with two broad options. He can conclude that his entire personal philosophy, which guided his behavior, has always been ridiculous, or he can blame someone else, some grandiose group of conspirators, for wrecking his dreams. As Nietzsche wrote, "My memory says I did that. My pride says I cannot have done that. Eventually, memory yields."
This is essentially the argument made by the movie Pressure Point, the fascinating film to which we will eventually get around to discussing in some detail. Before we do, however, this subject requires a bit of digging.
One of the ideas that has rolled around in my own mind for years now is that mental illness, like mental health, is actually a spot on a continuum, a spot that often re-positions itself based on circumstance. When external stress is minimal, the individual will typically suffer less psychiatric symptoms. But introduce heavy stress--whether real or imagined--into his life, and the individual will find his needle sliding steadily into the danger zone of psychosis. What I am suggesting is that each person, through a likely blend of socio-biological factors, has a given predisposition to aberrant thoughts, most often manifesting, when and if they do, in actions that we might reasonably call fascist. I'm defining fascism in this narrow scenario as actionable intolerance of others based on a specific type of paranoia, one that seeks to absolve the paranoiac by conversely blaming one or more other groups based on the identification of that individual's own determination. In other words, I'm saying that the person in question may decide that the reason he is acting with such hatred and violent inclinations is that he is experiencing what is to him a reasonable terror of The Other, in some cases an identification based on race, gender, sexual orientation, age, religion, or whatever it may be.
I am also arguing that every person on this planet has that kernel of confusion inside him.
I will not ask you to agree with that last statement. I will instead tell you about a couple of my own terrors. I will speak of a few bits of fertilizer that have nurtured the dreaded fascist within me. A more difficult disclosure I have never undertaken.
I was twenty or twenty-one. Ruth Ann and I were waiting in her car parked outside a 7-Eleven in a ghetto part of town. It was dark out. About a dozen African-American young adults were milling around in the parking lot. They were just walking around in no particular manner and without evident purpose. But they were also making it impossible for Ruth Ann to back out of our parking space without running into some of them. The car's back-up lights were on. Our windows were rolled up. We saw that maybe four of five of these young men were snickering while looking in our direction. No one made to get out of our way.
I'm still fascinated by this thing all these years later. The guys in that parking lot lived nearby, I assume. After all, convenience stores cater to local traffic and there were no other cars in the lot, so they must have been from around those parts, those particular parts being, as I said, poverty-stricken in the extreme. In their day-to-day lives, these men wielded very little power. Yet that very moment on that very dark night, they controlled that parking lot. They controlled the two of us sitting in that car in that parking lot.
It was bad enough to get my own ass kicked. Add to that my much stronger fear that Ruth Ann might get hurt as well and you get some sense as to the pressure. Now let's add some more. I figured that Ruth Ann would kind of expect me to deal with this situation myself so that no harm would come to her. I wasn't very big, but I was "the guy" and what the hell good was I if I couldn't fight off a dozen street thugs? Then again, there was always the worry that I might overreact and bring down upon us the fury of a gang, if that's what they were, when simple frightened patience might be all that was required. If this sounds exaggerated and over-complex, well, we were college students at the time.
We could have rolled down a window and politely asked the fellows to allow us to exit the majesty of this glorious old parking lot. I could have stepped out of the car and shouted, "Hey! Tryin' to back up here! What the fuck, man?" I could have grabbed a tire iron from the trunk and come out swinging. Or we could have just hit the gas and hoped that most of them got out of our way.
Since that night, I have asked myself many times if I would have felt differently had those dozen young men been white. The answer--and I hate this--is yes, absolutely. And that, my friends, is one of those kernels of fascism inside me. You see, the question itself is loaded. If those guys had been white, what does that mean? Hell, the members of the Manson Family were white. The rolls of the KKK are teeming over with white guys. The German-American Bund was white as sunshine. But the question takes for granted that the white guys in the hypothetical would be a group of white-shirt-wearing, black tie-dangling, bicycle pumping Mormon missionaries, or something of that ilk, rather than, say, a band of drunken pool hall rejects ready to relive the days of the Vikings. So even my own liberal-guilt question has a trace of the Reich about it.
(Not to leave you all in undue suspense, cooler heads prevailed and we simply waited the group out. I think it lasted five minutes. When we got out of there, we talked about how easily fear translates into that one great big ugly word.)
Here's the other personal story, along with another instance of latent fascism. I was walking through the same exact neighborhood on my way to somewhere else. When I got even with the most dilapidated block, I felt an arm snake itself around my shoulder. I turned to see a tall, skinny black man, probably about my own age, stinking of booze. He smiled at me as one silver tooth shimmered. He said, "I needs money fo whiskey. An don't even think 'bout sayin no."
Because a year had come and gone, I had grown just a wee bit more sophisticated in dealing with things that scared me. On pure instinct alone, I replied, "Man, I was just on my way to get a drink myself. I'd love some company. Come on."
Well, bite my mother if that guy didn't saddle up next to me and escort me to my favorite neighborhood bar just across the tracks in the "better" section of town. We walked in together and I even bought him a beer, which was all this bar served. When he drained that glass and demanded another, I said, "Nope. That's all I'm buying."
There was nothing he could do. We were on my turf now.There wasn't another black face in that barroom and it wouldn't have mattered anyway because this was more about economics than race. He just shrugged and left.
For the longest time I felt pretty clever about what I'd done. It took me a long time to realize what an asshole I'd been. You see, I could have just refused, or lied, or given him a dollar. But I'd been scared, which you may notice is one common denominator here. I even rationalized that I'd taught the guy a lesson. What a dope.
Where does this horrible shit come from? I mean, hey, I was part of the generation that was expected to be somehow beyond color, aloof from fear and hatred, enlightened and free. Yet there I was, a stinking sophomoric coward, plain and simple.
A few years later I went driving through that very same neighborhood with my friend Donnie. He looked out the car window at the run down conditions and at the men hanging out in front of abandoned stores. He said, "We're gonna have to do something about this one day."
"What are you talking about?"
"Those people. They're taking over. If we don't stop them soon, it'll be the end of us."
I never had another conversation with Donnie because I decided I didn't want to hang out with a racist son of a bitch.
And yet, if I'd been fair, I would have recognized some of my own earlier emotions in what my friend had said. He was just voicing his own fear. Where Donnie came from, African-Americans were the minority, to the extent that they existed at all. Don could have gone his entire life, had he chosen to do so, without ever once interacting with a person of color. So when he saw those men sleeping outside the stores, or guzzling booze from a paper bag, or just walking from one place to another, he got scared. After all, there were a bunch of them and only two of us.
Them. Us. What a pair of stupid words.
I could tell you how I believe I have become a better person since those college days. Hey, it might even be accurate. But I also know that poison never really leaves the system, once it's introduced. It;s like a virus that keeps mutating away from the cure, becoming more and more resilient. More and more frightening. More and more psychotic.
This is where the excellent Pressure Point comes in. I could talk for a while about how no one other than Stanley Kramer could have so successfully produced this movie or how I wish that director Hubert Cornfield had made more movies or how this is the single greatest performance in the life of Sidney Poitier as the conservative psychiatrist in a prison where he has been handed the unenviable task of treating a Nazi bastard played to perfection by singer Bobby Darin. What I need to talk about instead is the assumption this movie makes, which comes out again and again, that fascism is mental illness.
In this film, liberalism is its own perfect foil. The administrators are like the desk cops in a Dirty Harry film and Poitier sounds like Clint Eastwood, which is one hell of a turnabout.
Again, the assumption is that Darin is nuts because he is still a Nazi. In other words, no matter what the DSM-IV says, fascism itself is a sign that a person is predisposed to harm himself or others, whether consciously or otherwise. As such, it is something that must always be guarded against. And we cannot protect ourselves from it if we fail to recognize the symptoms.
You know the symptoms, right? Fear, terror, paranoia, anger, hatred, all cloaked within a cloud of "common sense."
Whew.
I appreciate your patience with my vituperation. Self-analysis that's worth anything is always painful. I'm drained. I've been writing this for three solid hours and possibly one gaseous half-hour. I am done.
