Culture and Mythos: Remembering the Hollywood blacklist

Taylor, Priscilla. (2005). Culture and Mythos: Remembering the Hollywood blacklist (Doctoral dissertation, Pacifica Graduate Institute, 2005). UMI 3187920.

The anti-Communist purge in Hollywood in the 1940s and 50s is connected to a larger cultural mythology, a collective dream of humanity. This dissertation explores the American historical and cultural climate at the time and intersperses archetypal themes throughout to highlight the premise that culture is mythos. Memory plays a vital role in this work. In addition to the theoretical component, I include a memoir that re-imagines the life of my mother, a blacklisted screenwriter, and utilizes thematic aspects of the dual-natured god Dionysus to explore our relationship.

The culture of Hollywood is steeped in the myth of paradise: it grew out of a semitropical landscape where money and carnal pleasures were abundant, filled with people who idolized eternal youth and beauty. Many artists who came to Hollywood in the 1920s-40s were from Europe and New York, identified with the values of marginalized and countercultural people, and brought utopic political ideologies to add to the cultural mix. The extreme polarization of political ideologies in post-World War II America was characterized by "splitting," separating good and evil, a practice central to the Genesis myth. Proponents of a particular ideology, whether liberalism, conservatism, socialism, or fascism, became blind to their own shadows and projected all shadow aspects onto an "Other."

This study shows how the Red hunts and blacklists of the 1940s and 50s in the United States contained traces of sacrificial rituals that began as religious practices in ancient societies and have transformed over time into secular, sociopolitical mechanisms. In the Old Testament a goat was sacrificed to atone for the sins of the people. In modern Western societies scapegoats---like the Communists and left-wingers---have served as a symbolic sacrificial antidote against catastrophe.

Those who were labeled as Communist contagion and refused to repent their past and name other fellow travelers were blacklisted, suspended in a liminal phase of the rite in which all aspects of social standing and identity were erased, their voices silenced. Many blacklistees experienced depression, divorce, or early death. Some, like my mother, were drawn to the creative power of alcohol, represented by the god Dionysus, to cope with their losses, and were consumed by the coexistent destructive force of the archetype.