Notes on The Devil and Daniel Webster
Horkheimer's Letter on William Dieterle's Script: "All that Money Can Buy" (1941)
Translator’s note. Max Horkheimer’s letter of March 20th, 1941, to the director William Dieterle (1893-1972), a longtime associate of the ISR1 with whom Adorno and Horkheimer would become closer friends in their shared California exile, recapitulating the results of intensive discussions conducted by the Institute for Social Research about the script of Dieterle’s film All That Money Can Buy—based on Vincent Benét’s 1936 short story, “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” inspired by the Faust legend—which would be released later that same October.
Horkheimer and co.’s point of departure is the conviction that greater insight into the structural dynamic of the opposition between town and country in modern (capitalist) society provides an essential key for interpreting the ongoing cascade of social crises (the concentration of landownership, proletarianization of the petty bourgeoisie, mass unemployment of the masses) and the reactionary pseudo-solutions offered in consolation (nationalist mass mobilization of the downwardly mobile, the traditionalist defense of the old way of life for the independent farmer and small businessman, the formation of political groups that blame money-men, usurers, or cultural decadence for their decline), all of which derive from the laws of the accumulation of capital.
In a recent study, of the late-process revisions Dieterle and the movie writers would make to the script after March 1941, Simon Richter (2013) argues that Dieterle not only took Horkheimer’s concern about a possible nationalist misreading of the film very seriously, but had changes made to the end of the film to convey the stronger vision of human solidarity Horkheimer suggested the film was missing.2 Admittedly, this did not take the form of adding “a few sentences […] about human solidarity and the abolition [Aufhebung] of socially conditioned suffering,” thereby indicating the socialist alternative beyond the empty promises of liberal progress and the false fulfillments of fascist reaction.
The remarks by the inner circle of the Institute, based on the town-country dialectic and oriented towards a possible socialist alternative, range from suggestions that are over-subtle to severe. However, Horkheimer makes a point to highlight the way that Dieterle’s script already has a strong relationship to not only his own past films but to a tradition of avant-garde formal experimentation in theater and film (from Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt to Chaplin’s Dictator) that makes another, indirect-direct mode of address possible, one through which the director would take responsibility for the content and form of the film as much as for his own role as filmmaker.
Though not in the form Horkheimer and co. imagined, Richter argues that this is precisely what Dieterle would do in adopting a “Mephistophelian function” from Goethe’s prior reception of the same Faust-legend:
Like Mephisto, who accuses the Lord and accuses Faust, Dieterle’s Scratch lodges accusations against American history (genocide of the Indians, Medford rum, slavery) and continues to do so in the present of the film narrative (the Missouri Compromise, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850) and, by analogy, in the present of the film’s production and reception. My suspicion is that this Mephistophelian function is essential for Dieterle’s Hollywood practice of critical theory. Perhaps that is why Dieterle had Walter Huston pointedly wear gloves during the course of his performance. Dieterle was well known for his idiosyncrasy of never appearing on the set without gloves. With this self-referential gesture, Dieterle avows the task of the director as a matter of social and political critique, of practicing critical theory.3
The letter seemed worth translating because, like Horkheimer’s Thomas More (1948) pitch to Fritz Lang, it is a singular document of the kind of intervention the critical theorists thought they—or someone of their circles and disposition—could still make in the American culture industry, possibly even to the end of the ‘positive function of mass culture’ Adorno (and Horkheimer) once promised as a continuation of their work in the “Culture Industry” chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947).
Notes on “The Devil and Daniel Webster” (1941).
[Excerpt from: Horkheimer to William Dieterle, 3/20/1941.]4
The last week was extremely busy here. This was partly due to the project [viz., Cultural Aspects of National Socialism]—which is being sent to you with the same post—and partly due to the routine work for the university and the Institute. But there were in-depth discussions about “The Devil and Daniel Webster”! First and foremost: the script makes an excellent impression in terms of its form. It seems shaped by a unified vision. The quality that distinguishes it from what is usually on offer is its intellectual seriousness. The best films today are so often only lightly stylized reportage. In essentially restricting themselves to the presentation of factual relationships, they evade the responsibility of interpreting the events they portray.
“The Devil and Daniel Webster,” on the other hand, takes a step in the direction of philosophy, i.e., towards the question of meaning. This cannot be stressed enough at the present hour. What human beings lack today, that want from which the dangers of civilization derive, has nothing to do with the knowledge of facts. Even the children are in the loop about economic conditions, and in which social circles, progressive or backwards, is the topic of social misrule not discussed! It is rather the concern for the unconditioned, the anguish of human beings over their eternal destiny, which is eaten away by illness. The more they know, the less they think; in the age of the radio and the news agency, knowledge is perverted into sheer information.
The choice of milieu also seems particularly fortunate to us. To a much greater extent than the average urban observer is conscious of, the present upheaval of the world can be comprehended on the basis of the opposition between town and country. Heaven help us if the material and intellectual despair of the farmers in this country should one day form the stuff of the ‘national awakenings’ Europe knows so well. Certainly, we have to acknowledge that modern industry is the active factor on which any explanation of the present must rely in the first instance. The destructive violence the lawful regularities of industrial society assume, however, appears not only in the social struggles of urban centers but also in the disintegration of forms of life in which bourgeois culture was decided. Connecting this to problems of the livelihood of farmers or agrarian existence is thus more relevant than ever.
If I now add a few specific suggestions to these more general remarks, I draw the courage to do so from the great responsibility that derives from the object itself. Otherwise, shyness over our lack of familiarity with the technical aspects of production, not to mention our unreserved trust in your own evaluation of the film’s effect, would have kept me from adding any such marginal notes. First of all, I would like to state that I was particularly gratified with the discretion with which you’ve handled Belle. Is it too vain of me to tell myself this stems from our conversation? Were a critic to remark that Belle is portrayed in too fragmentary a manner, this accusation strikes me as less serious than if they were to point to the overused and at present overburdened schema of an honest farmer’s scorn against French sensuality, which might otherwise be possible. Mister Stevens could still seem to be cut from this pattern. It is true that the usurer was a socially significant figure a hundred years ago; today, however, his relevance is that of a component in nationalistic [völkischen] ideologies. Neither the modern urban public nor the rural can be expected to think of a figure like Stevens to be a purely historical one with any constancy. But they might feel confirmed in their false belief that “interest slavery” [“Zinsknechtschaft”] is to blame for everything. Perhaps this could be remedied by making it clearer at one point or other how the plight of Jabez and the other farmers does not ultimately stem from the money-people, but from a universal crisis under which the cities suffer as well.
The clarifying force of the film could be further intensified by slight corrections to the passages which deal with the politics of the farmers. Jabez, Van Brooks, Tom Sharp and Higgins are, from an economic point of view, victims of capitalist accumulation and constitute the rural or agrarian counterpart to the small business enterprises of the cities; Zola created a monument to the downfall of the latter in Paradise des Dames. The flip side of the triumph of technology is the sad story of the small self-employed entrepreneur. Today it is being decided whether such progress, which has led from the expropriation of the weaker entrepreneurs to the perpetual unemployment of the masses, will spell the downfall or salvation of humanity. Everything relating to these conditions deserves to be handled with the highest degree of exactitude, even if it only plays a rather small role for the plot. In the manuscript, however, the few indications of possible solutions to the problems it presents are at the very least ambiguous, and could even be misunderstood as if they were directed at farmer self-help, “direct action.” “It’s the debt and the lien and the mortgage that eats up the farmer... we farmers ought to put through some of our own laws at regular meetings... we have got a right to get ourselves organized like city folks.” And then, Jabez (p. 15) responds to the sheriff’s threat of expulsion with: “Let him try it.” All of this is no doubt intended as a natural reaction, as simple self-defense, but objectively—particularly if it comes out strongly in the recording itself—this might point rebellion in the wrong direction. Even if such passages escape the masses in Radio City Music Hall, there are those who will hear them in earnest. Even the slightest possibility of a misunderstanding in the spirit of reactionary farmer’s associations and other organizations of that kind should be ruled out, all the more so since even progressive critics have all too keen an ear for things like this today.
Couldn’t a re-shaping of the sermon (p. 64) and a more principled version of Webster’s big speeches at the trial also contribute to the effectiveness of the film? Contrary to so many of our friends, I do not consider Chaplin’s closing speech in The Dictator was amiss. What may once have been aesthetically questionable is today entirely in the right. Chaplin, without knowing it, draws an artistic conclusion that was first established in Wedekind and Sternheim and elevated by Brecht into principle: falling out [Herausfallen] of the presentation in the speech, which, though thinly veiled, is nevertheless directed at the spectator. Webster says, “You took the wrong turn and so did Jabez Stone” (p. 198). Perhaps here a few sentences could be added about human solidarity and the abolition [Aufhebung] of socially conditioned suffering. The misunderstanding of nationalism that the speeches in the manuscript risk here and there can be precluded in advance with a clear, anti-fascist word. The creator of the Zola, Pasteur and Ehrlich films has a devoted audience and, therefore, obligations which other artists might otherwise evade.
But this digression into the details has gone on far too long. What is fundamentally decisive is what I said about the whole thing at the outset. However, I suspect that the specific content of our conversations will also be of interest to you, and we really got into the particulars—we are unconditionally serious about what we’ve received from you, for we know you are just as concerned with the truth as we are ourselves.
Cf. William Dieterle, “Hollywood and the European Crisis.” In: ZfS/SPSS, Vol. 9, No. 1 (1941), 96-103.
Simon Richter, “Practicing Critical Theory: William Dieterle, Max Horkheimer, and Goethe’s Faust in The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941).” In: IASL; 38(2) (2013), 376–402.
In: Ibid., 400-401.
In: Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften. Band 17: Briefwechsel 1941-1948. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. (1996), 20-23. Author’s translation.