White Collar

Deadline Hollywood says a deal may be struck. Writers strike may be settled by X-Mas! If not, let them write graphic novels! (Guardian article about "film-makers themselves branching out into graphic novels, incorporating that art form as an alternative storytelling tool rather than simply an adjunct or cash-in." Eh. Sort of interesting.)

But what if you want to combine your love of graphic novels with support for artists on strike? Then your best bet is a really great new book: Graphic Witness: Four Wordless Graphic Novels [amazon], edited by George A. Walker. The four are: The Passion of Man (1918), by Frans Masereel; Wild Pilgrimage (1932), by Lynd Ward; White Collar (1938), by Giacomo Patri; and Southern Cross (1951) by Laurence Hyde. I bought it for the Masereel. (see what his stuff looks like here.) I was curious about the Ward (you can see some here.) If you will direct your gaze to the right, you will see a nice example of Ward’s style (click for larger). These woodcut ‘wordless novels’ were popular enough to parody for a while.

Hyde turns out to be great, too. But what really impressed me was the Patri (1898-1978). Never heard of him. Almost nothing about him on the web. He was an Italian immigrant to the US, who taught at the California labor School after W.W. II, until it was shut down due to pressure during the McCarthy hearings (so the preface tells me). Apparently the novel was on the web briefly. The Wayback Machine remembers just a bit.

"Largely undiscovered, because the images of class struggle, unionization, and abortion were controversial for their time; Patri was forced to print and publish White Collar privately in limited numbers. Even now, the copies that survive are few and far between." 

The ‘novel’ – consisting of 120 linoleum cuts – narrates the plight of a commercial artist, during the Great Depression, sinking into professional failure. Loses his job, starts a small business, is squeezed out by the chains, family troubles, is blackballed. But emerges, standing shoulder to shoulder with his fellow workers. (Click the images for larger views.)

Getting back to the current strike: there have been some amusing rants – by Joss Whedon, for example. Here he is complaining about NYTimes coverage:

"All the trappings of a union protest were there …But instead of hard hats and work boots, those at the barricades wore arty glasses and fancy scarves."

Oh my God. Arty glasses and fancy scarves. That is so cute! My head is aflame with images of writers in ruffled collars, silk pantaloons and ribbons upon their buckled shoes. A towering powdered wig upon David Fury’s head, and Drew Goddard in his yellow stockings (cross-gartered, needless to say). Such popinjays, we! The entire writers’ guild as Leslie Howard in The Scarlet Pimpernel. Delicious.

Except this is exactly the problem. The easiest tactic is for people to paint writers as namby pamby arty scarfy posers, because it’s what most people think even when we’re not striking. Writing is largely not considered work. Art in general is not considered work.

I don’t think that’s right. The problem is that people think of unions as being for people who do a different kind of work . Patri’s novel is a good example of how to back yourself into that corner: he’s got this heavy allegory of escaping the noose of the white collar. But there’s a danger of trading it in for a blue collar noose. Obviously the value of collective bargaining isn’t about the kind of work you do at all – or whether you are poor, let alone wear boots. It’s something to do with the conditions under which you bargain.

What do you think is the best way to conceive of – and (bonus question!) effectively frame – issues of economic justice and unionization? What are unions for? To fight inequality? Fix market failures? Build a strong middle class? The ‘markets are all we need’ side of the argument has a lot of simple considerations that don’t sound so bad to the average voter. The pro-union side has arguments that aren’t any over-simpler, maybe, but sound that way to lots of folks, causing those folks to reach for their ‘free market’ response.

The Kung Fu Monkey, who works in the screenwriting biz, has had smart things to say about the strike – here, for example, concerning market failure. "Listen, before you spout off the usual "The free market will out" along with "Hey, I’m smart enough to negotiate my own contracts, why aren’t you?" with a side order of "just go somewhere else if you don’t like it", you need to understand some things." Specifically: "Six companies control almost all mass media in America. They control all, and I mean all, the standard distribution channels in America. They are also negotiating as a single entity, the AMPTP. If you’ve read your Adam Smith, you know that this is actually one of the situations he notes in Wealth of Nations which will indeed break the fingers of the invisible hand." He’s got finger-breaking stories of Hollywood Hell. But in a more recent post, he executes a semi-reverse, linking to an argument that the "writers’ strike, and the studios’ response to the strike, may radically accelerate a structural shift in the media industry a shift of power from studios and conglomerates towards creators and talent." The idea is that in order to get to point B, from present point A, the strike may be necessary. "The answer is stochastic tinkering – small evolutionary steps along the way." The strike may make tinkering possible. Whether that’s true or not – how the hell would I know? – it’s sort of hard to frame effectively as a general pro-union argument. Because it’s a peculiarity of a particular industry. People understand how markets can be generally good and how unions can be locally good, as it were. But that leaves the union side without a compelling general story.