Marco Grosoli will be presenting at Discours politique et cinéma de fiction, at the Université de Lorraine (Campus Lettres et Sciences Humaines): “A Political Speech from the Dead. My Son John (Leo McCarey, 1952) and its Spectral Ending”.
Abstract The political speech closing My Son John (Leo McCarey, 1952) is delivered by a dead man. Two, actually. John, the film’s main character, had recorded in a tape the reasons why he had abandoned his communist worldviews and activism, and converted back to capitalism and American values; in the ending, that tape is being played at John’s funeral, after he was gunned down by two fellow communists for his betrayal. This is not, however, what the original script looked like. The original ending had John deliver his speech in person, alive. Before the ending of the shooting, however, the actor playing John (Robert Walker) had died, forcing McCarey to rewrite the script so as to include John’s death (and aftermath). The final political speech thus stands out in the film as a somewhat uncanny foreign body of sorts; all the more so since the audiences from the time when the film came out could not possibly ignore that Walker had died during the making of the film. Uttered by someone twice dead, that speech could not but have a spectral side to it, very much in Jacques Derrida’s or, later, Mark Fisher’s sense: something haunting an otherwise straightforward political message (a staunchly anti-communist piece of propaganda by a convinced pro-McCarthy collaborator like McCarey), sabotaging and subverting the film’s textual closure and ideological agenda despite the filmmaker’s overt intentions. The content of the speech is clear and one-sided, but its form is too awkward not to backfire. My paper will both analyse that speech in its own terms (a “confession” conflating politics and religion quite like the rest of the film conflates them too) and follow primarily (though not exclusively) James Morrison’s Auteur Theory and My Son John in showing that that speech is the logical and ideal culmination of the many schizophrenic tensions permeating and ultimately subverting the film’s ideology (e.g. the fact that American values are impersonated by unmistakeably unlikable characters).
March 17-18, Université de Lorraine (Nancy)
📸 My Son John [1952], by Leo McCarey
