“The most problematic sense of man's life is embodied in the history of twentieth-century Communism. It was through Communism that, in our time, one could grapple most fiercely with what it means to be a human being.” [1]
“How can I really explain to you what it was like to fall in love in the Communist Party? I can’t. It’s impossible to capture the full flavour, to make you experience as we did emotions and circumstances that streamed together and were so strong you literally could not sort them out. Our love affairs blossomed, entirely entwined with the Party and Party affairs and our identities as Party members. We felt tremendous surges of comradeship, political excitement, the pity and beauty of human suffering, the mad wild joy of revolutionary expectation. We lived with these emotions daily. We shared them with each other. That was our intimacy. And, often, when a man and a woman shared these emotions things got all mixed up, and they took these feelings for romantic love.” [2]
Communists often do not like to talk about our feelings. Marxism is concerned with the “macro,” the objective forces, the dynamics of society and history. As such, especially traditional Marxists had a tendency to downplay the importance of the personal. But I think if we’re honest with ourselves, our political lives are more colored by emotional impulses and interpersonal dynamics than we’d care to admit. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. It is where the blue sky of the historical meets the red dirt of the personal at the far horizon that we reach the apex of political life. It is this encounter that undergirds Warren Beatty’s Reds (1981).
Reds was (somehow) produced at the height of the Cold War; Beatty even screened the movie privately for the White House. (The Reagans astonishingly enjoyed the film, albeit with apprehensions.) And yet, Reds is a romantic, sympathetic Communist melodrama of epic stature. Clocking in at a staggering 195 minutes, Reds tells the tale of John “Jack” Reed (Warren Beatty) and Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton) and their encounters with the earth-shattering events of 1917 and beyond. For most Hollywood historical melodramas, politics is a backdrop for a love story. Reds is almost the reverse: the historico-political exerts itself through the trials and tribulations of Jack and Louise, star-crossed lovers navigating the stormy seas of love and revolution.
Although John Reed, as the famous author of Ten Days that Shook the World, is the household name in the film, the real centerpiece is Louise Bryant. It is through her thoughts, actions, and feelings that this explosive historical moment is lived. Of course, in real life it cannot be any other way: global events and structural dynamics can only exert themselves onto and through concrete individuals and through their social relations.
It is unclear the extent to which Louise is a True Believer of Historical Materialism. She maintains interests outside of Communism, for which she receives scorn from Jack, such as when he chides her for writing articles he deems unimportant in the historical moment. But clearly, she has a penchant for intellectual thought, a love of love, and an enchantment with the crashing waves of political upheaval and the conquest of freedom.
Jack, on the other hand, is a consistent adherent to the shibboleths of the movement, to the extent that when for him Bolshevism begins to falter, he criticizes it essentially on its own terms, for failing to live up to its own ideals. With this ethos, Jack’s righteous (and justified) indignation towards the Socialist Party apparatchiks leads him down a path both principled and potentially sectarian. As an intellectual, Reed is imbued with a self-importance that allows him to genuinely believe that he knows what’s best for the international workers’ movement. Even if he mostly got it right, his inflated self-importance puts him on a potentially dangerous path. As one of The Witnesses said of Jack Reed, “a guy who's always interested in the condition of the world and changing it either has no problems of his own or refuses to face them.”
The brilliance of the film is how compellingly and accurately it depicts the Communist experience: love, hope, and pie-in-the-sky idealism; but also fear, doubt, and disillusionment. In Reds, October is the crescendo of a political moment in which the entire edifice of global economy and political institutions was drawn into question. Working people really had an opportunity to change the world, to take hold of their own political destination as a cohesive subject.
The heroic belief in progress that animated the spirit of ‘17 is certainly no longer tenable after the short 20th century and the collapse of official Communism. But Reds suggests that even in its own time an alternative cynicism challenged Marxist heroics, represented by Eugene O’Neill (Jack Nicholson). The playwright whispers ambient skepticism, temporarily garnering the attention of Louise while Jack is physically and emotionally absent, caught up in journalistic excursions and anti-war agitations.
But this skepticism also finds life within the Communist movement itself, embodied in Emma Goldman’s disillusionment with the Bolshevik regime. The rising tide of doubt eventually reaches Jack Reed himself, a True Believer if there ever was one. His conflicts with both the Comintern and the Socialist Party of America dull his enthusiasm for the official movement, but he squares the circle by turning instead to the more radical IWW and his own splinter group, the Communist Labor Party.
Political disillusionment parallels romantic rift. As Louise’s affair with Gene O’Neill comes to light, she and Jack come to physical blows over their revealed mutual infidelity. Louise’s first initiation of intimacy with Jack (“I’d like to see you with your pants off, Mr. Reed,”) is negated: “You love yourself! Me, you fuck!” Louise feels that now she sees Jack only with his pants off. But as much as unfaithful behavior was an apparent flashpoint for the couple, it’s clear that this tension had been building for quite some time. While Jack is split between his love of Louise and love of The Masses, Louise lives her enchantment with each through the other: Jack embodies the romantic charm of Revolution, Revolution represents the world of giants that Jack inhabits. It almost feels more accurate to say that Louise cheats on Jack with non-revolutionary endeavors (playwriting with Gene O’Neill) while Jack cheats on Louise with the likes of Max Eastman and Emma Goldman. Jack contends that his extramarital transgressions are “meaningless,” something he would never say about his political life which has made him so neglectful of Louise.
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| Louise and Jack arrive in Russia |
The first half of the film concludes with the heroic high point in the Revolution, the storming of the Winter Palace. Workers and peasants rally, march, and celebrate in the streets. The revolution’s giants, Lenin and Trotsky, come into view only from a distance. For those who experienced the Revolution with both personal commitment and distance from its centers of power, the revolution was only “about” Lenin and Trotsky insofar as they were men of towering political stature, prefigured representatives of a new society. But for Jack and Louise, they themselves, alongside the workers and peasants of Russia, were the real protagonists of the Revolution, not Lenin nor Trotsky.
In the second half of the film, Reed comes into conflict with the existing Communist movement, both at home and in Russia. After a spat with the SPA leadership over what kind of concrete action they would take to oppose the Great War, tensions flare over how to orient to the Bolshevik Revolution. The Bolshevik-aligned faction of the SPA is expelled, and while Reed is determined to take back control of the party, Louis Fraina advocates a split.
At this point, Jack starts to lose his bearings, acting ruthless towards his comrades for simple mistakes, fully breathing in the grandeur of the moment. Jack’s egotism grows dialectically with his disillusionment with the established institutions of Communism: the movement is corrupt, so we must return to first principles. But the film refuses to paint Jack purely in a negative light as a self-important despot. The opportunism of the SPA leadership is laid bare when they sicc the police on their pro-Bolshevik rivals, utilizing state violence to settle a conflict with a faction they consider politically distasteful.
In the wake of the controversy, Reed is won over to building a new party, as the SPA clearly won’t have him or his compatriots. They form the Communist Labor Party and elect Jack as their delegate to the Comintern. Jack’s high hopes in Bolshevism as an alternative to the SPA are, however, quickly proven naive. His trips to Russia also cause further tension with Louise, who is reluctant to follow the life of an international political apparatchik.
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| Jack resists the betrayals of the SPA |
With Jack in Russia, Louise runs once again into Gene O’Neill, who again expresses skepticism towards their political project. But she tells him, “Gene, if you’d been to Russia, you’d never be cynical about anything again.” Gene then reveals the full extent of his critical attitude:
You and Jack have a lot of middle-class dreams for two radicals. Jack dreams that he can hustle the American working man, whose one dream is to be rich enough not to have to work, into a revolution led by his party. And you dream that if you discuss the revolution with a man before you go to bed with him, it'll be missionary work rather than sex. I'm sorry to see you and Jack so serious about your sports.
Louise volleys back:
Boy, you've become quite the critic, haven't you, Gene? Just leaned back and analyzed us all. Duplicitous women who tout free love and then get married, power-mad journalists who join the revolution instead of observing it, middle-class radicals who come looking for sex and then talk about Russia. It must seem so contemptible to a man like you who has the courage to sit on his ass and observe human inadequacy from the inside of a bottle. Well, I've never seen you do anything for anyone. I've never seen you give anything to anyone, so I can understand why you might suspect the motives of those who have. But whatever Jack's motives are, how…
Gene responds by simply saying, “I seem to have touched a wound.” Gene’s monologue is overly cynical, but not without a kernel of truth. While Louise cannot confront the pretensions and delusions of the life of a Communist intellectual, Gene, more tragically, cannot see the heroic, inspiring side of Communism, that which “could grapple most fiercely with what it means to be a human being,” something he seems to have little interest in.
Meanwhile, the US Government is prosecuting Jack for sedition. And as Jack’s mind and political spirit continue to crumble, this is paralleled by his deteriorating physical health in the form of kidney disease. All of these factors come to a head when Zinoviev requests his assistance in the Propaganda Bureau. Zinoviev delivers a speech steeped in the classic values of heroic Marxism:
You have a place on the train of this revolution. You have been like so many others, the best revolutionaries. One of the engineers on the locomotive of this train that pulls this revolution on the tracks of historical necessity laid out for it by the party. You can't leave us now. We can't replace you.
Reed refuses the assignment because he misses his wife, and flees Russia, after which he is arrested in Finland. Louise sets off to release Jack from jail, but during her journey he is released and returns to Russia. There, Emma Goldman shares with him the full extent of her disillusionment with the regime. Meantime, the Comintern, led at the time by Zinoviev, refuses to consider Jack’s resolution to support the IWW over the AFL. After a brief trip to Baku and a bloody encounter with the White Army, Jack returns to Russia once again, where Louise is waiting for him. By this time, Jack’s kidney condition has reached a new level of severity. He dies in the hospital with Louise at his bedside. There, the film ends.
Reds traces the career of John Reed, from anti-war activism to witnessing October to disillusionment. In Reds, the personal and the political, the emotional and the world-historic, intermingle in a dangerous dance through history. Where most depictions of Communism falters, Reds succeeds. Despite Jack’s disenchantment with Communism and Louise’s disenchantment with Jack, Reds never depicts Communism as “The God that Failed,” as the tragedy-farce of utopian intellectualism. What makes Reds so incredible, then, is that it is unafraid to confront the Communist experience in all its high hopes and doubts, ambitions and failures.
[1] Ehrenpreis, quoted in Vivian Gornick, The Romance of American Communism p. 242
[2] Gornick, p. 57.