POWER GRAB
AS WE PREPARE TO ELECT THE LEADER OF THE FREE WORLD, THE ARTS REMIND US OF THE FORCES THAT REALLY MATTER
The famous politician ambles into the little local drugstore and coyly lines up with all the regular folks, the ones with the shiny foreheads and cheap haircuts, the ones who wait their turn patiently because that’s what powerless people do. They wait.
And then one of the employees spots the politician. She “got a look on her face as though her garter belt had busted in church, and dropped her ice cream scoop.”
The moment comes early in “All the King’s Men” (1946), Robert Penn Warren’s wise and troubling novel about power and politics, but it could have been a snippet from last night’s TV news, as one presidential candidate or the other stumps in a swing state.
Power is the ability to make history — and to make people drop their ice cream scoops. At the presidential level, power is raw clout — hiring and firing, spending other people’s money, ordering troops into battle — but power is personal charisma, too, the gift of leaving ordinary folks agog.
We think we know everything there is to know about power. Especially in an election season, the topic of power seems obvious and elementary, a civics lesson mixed with self-evident human truth: Power is power. We see images of the candidates — President Bush hunched over his microphone, slapping his right palm on the lectern over and over again, and Sen. John Kerry, grinning stiffly, lifting his right fist in the air in city after city — and we assume that whoever wins will have all the power.
But will he?
What we learn from the arts is: Maybe not. Power is a theme that ripples through literature and film, from William Shakespeare’s conflicted kings to Tennessee Williams’ muscular bums, from the densely clotted couplets of John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” (1667) to the stinging ironies of Herman J. Mankiewicz’s script for “Citizen Kane” (1941).
Presidential elections bring the issue of power out in the open again — we’re deciding who’s going to be in charge for the next four years — but at a deeper level, the level of artistic creation, power is always present. Artists are always digging away, trying to figure out what really moves the world.
Power, in other words, is never just power.
How power is depicted is an effective measure of the intellectual breadth of a creative work. Television dramas such as “Dallas” and “Dynasty” and, more recently, “Las Vegas,” and fantasy melodramas such as “The Lord of the Rings” and the Harry Potter series of books and films, portray the powerful as one-dimensional despots, as cartoonishly cruel rulers of artificial universes. These are people who, in Oscar Wilde’s deft formulation, don’t have motives — only appetites. You could argue that so-called “reality” shows such as “The Apprentice” and “The Benefactor” do the same thing — reduce power to bad behavior with fancy trappings.
Ability to destroy
Power, in these works, is just ham-fisted, hardhearted dominion over other people. Power is the power to destroy, to humble, to humiliate. And that’s all it is.
But in more sophisticated works, power is far more complicated, more vexing. No power is absolute; and when the limits of power are acknowledged, a leader reveals her or his character the way a vigorous polish exposes the true grain of the wood.
In Christopher Marlowe’s’ “Edward II” (1592), the title character would seem to possess absolute power — he’s a king, and armies march upon his signal. The phrase “heads will roll,” a metaphor in today’s business parlance, was no metaphor back then; noggins were separated from necks if Edward said the word.
Yet as the play makes tragically clear, in actuality the king has no power at all. His love for Gaveston renders him helpless and vulnerable. “Was ever king thus over-rul’d as I?” Edward muses. When he realizes that Gaveston — despised by the king’s enemies — will be cast out, Edward says to his beloved, “Thou from this land, I from myself am banish’d.” And Gaveston, like the audience, suddenly sees through all the superficial pomp and glamor of royal power, and says with sad astonishment: “‘Tis something to be pitied of a king.”
Every great work of art has its own theme, but all treat, in some way, the theme of power as well. “Paradise Lost” retells the biblical story of creation, but it is also about how the desire for power can be irresistible, corrupting even God’s right-hand angel, who rebels and forms a rival celestial gang.
What, you may ask, has any of this to do with Kerry or Bush? A great deal, perhaps. In a nation that tends to regard power, particularly political power, rather simplistically as a brutal persuasive force, literature complicates the equation. Power over others is one thing; power over oneself is something else. Even the mighty are prone to the same emotional and psychological snares — doubts, irrational loves and illogical hatreds, superstitions — that afflict the powerless.
To recognize the varieties and limits of power is to realize anew just how important reputable biographies of leaders can be, just how significant it is to have an inkling of the interior forces pressing on a president. John F. Kennedy achieved great political power, but as we now know by virtue of superb and unblinking biographies, was apparently powerless in the grip of what seems to have been a serious sexual addiction.
Inner compulsions
The careers of other presidents also juxtaposed great public power with private capitulation to inner compulsions: Richard Nixon’s paranoia; Lyndon Johnson’s insecurities; Bill Clinton’s infidelities. And voters may wonder: Did Bush’s desire for vengeance against Saddam Hussein make him powerless to resist a rush to war?
Certain kinds of powerlessness, of course, are positive. When we follow a religion, we are required to strip ourselves of ego, submitting to a higher power. When we fall in love, we surrender ourselves to another person in a deliberate subjugation of our own needs.
Tennessee Williams gets at that second version of powerlessness in “A Streetcar Named Desire” (1947), a drama that functions as a fulcrum for the teeter-totter power plays between Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski. Stanley seems to be the most powerful character; he’s big and buff and profane and “a little bit on the primitive side,” as Blanche complains to Stella, his wife, later adding, “There’s something downright bestial about him.”
But this rough, hulking brute crumples like a wet bowling towel when he thinks Stella has left him. “Stella!” he cries. “My baby doll’s left me!” He’s a mess.
Just when we think we have Williams’ number — the powerful Stanley surely will crush the fragile, helpless Blanche — the playwright throws us a curve: Power is always relative. Not that Blanche will win, ultimately; but the easy polarities of power and powerlessness are rejected.
Similarly, the public power of Charles Foster Kane, the wealthy publisher whose story is told in “Citizen Kane,” is, at long last, far less important to him than a wisp of a memory from his childhood.
Presidential elections make us think about power and its responsibilities, which is a good thing, but the arts have been there all along, holding power up to the light and asking vital questions.
“All the King’s Men,” which is being made into yet another film, is the record of Willie Stark, a brilliant Southern politician whose soul ends up misshapen by his raging thirst for power. “But maybe it [political power] had taken him too long,” the narrator ruminates.
“If something takes too long, something happens to you. You become all and only the thing you want and nothing else, for you have paid too much for it, too much in wanting and too much in waiting and too much in getting.”
