Upton Sinclair never had much faith in the movies.
When the great American socialist’s novel The Moneychangers (1908) was adapted for the screen, he was appalled to find that what he had written as a denunciation of JP Morgan was populated by millionaires performing selfless acts of charity. He later bankrolled Sergei Eisenstein’s ¡Que Viva Mexico! (1932), but panicked when the rushes looked too arty and turned it into an artless, contentless box-office bomb. “My own experiences with the moving picture industry have been varied,” he said weightily, “and have so disgusted me that I have given up all idea of ever using the medium to express my ideas.” Forty years after his death, the mighty muckraker’s luck appears to have changed. Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood (released nationally in February), acclaimed as “the first great American film of the twenty-first century”, is based on Sinclair’s Oil! (1927), which itself has been resurrected in an attractive new edition (Penguin, 562pp $24.95). Nor was Anderson first with the idea. Seeking the screen rights, he found they were already owned by the left-wing journalist Eric Schlosser, whose best-selling McJeremiad Fast Food Nation (2001) is a kind of homage to Sinclair’s best-known book, The Jungle (1906), his novel of the toils of Chicago meatpackers Schlosser became the film’s executive producer. Sinclair, meanwhile, is enjoying a bizarre afterlife as a character, the epoch-making American leader who never was, in Harry Turtledove’s alternative-history trilogy American Empire (2001-2003) and Chris Bachelder’s quirky satire US! (2006). If you’re thinking that a high-minded firebrand of the pre-war American Left mightn’t have much to say to modern international audiences, you’d be right. After all, Sinclair’s other enthusiasms, from telepathy to teetotalism, from fasting to Fletcherism, haven’t exactly stood the test of time. Anderson has explained how he commenced a faithful adaptation of Oil!, arrived at page 150, and decided that the novel would be a better “inspiration” than master text. He remixed its formula of blood, oil and religion as something more accessible, dangled the key role of a crackpot plutocrat before Daniel Day-Lewis, and set it all to an ear-dinning soundtrack by Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood. In fact, what it took to turn Sinclair’s old-fashioned fiction into 2008 Oscar bait is disarmingly instructive about the changing nature of political art. In Oil!, the tycoon J Arnold Ross is a surprisingly sympathetic figure, with “features serious but kindly, and a benevolent, almost fatherly voice”, to whom the safety of his men is a matter of “personal pride” and the quest for oil a manifest destiny: “This is an oil age, and when you try and shut oil off from production, it’s jist [sic] like you tried to dam Niagara Falls.” Sinclair modelled him on the oilman Edward Doheny, a figure of legendary financial nerve and personal courage who once fought off a mountain lion with a knife. Ross’s susceptibility is his conviction that “grease is cheaper than steel”: when he needs something done, he thinks nothing of bribing public officials. It was Doheny’s weakness, too: evidence he gave during the Teapot Dome scandal of passing $US100,000 to the US interior secretary in return for lucrative oil concessions helped send that official, Albert Fall, to jail. Paul evangelises in a different cause. After visits to Moscow as a soldier and a political pilgrim, he returns to the US extolling the Russian Revolution as “a spiritual miracle – a hundred million people proclaiming their own sovereignty, and the downfall of masters and exploiters, kings, priests, capitalists, the whole rabble of parasites”. For while Sinclair’s socialism did not run smooth, it came to run deep. Condemned for his apostasy in supporting America’s involvement in World War I, he had rejoined the cause in 1920 with twice his former ardour, describing Lenin and Stalin as overseeing “the greatest intellectual and moral awakening in the history of the human race”.
Oil!’s central character, however, is Ross’s son Bunny, whose soul is subjected to a three-way tug by his father, Paul and Eli. Eli is never really in it, and with his radio rantings at an audience of boobs steadily becomes a figure of fun. Big-hearted Bunny inevitably falls under the spell of big-brained Paul, who finally renounces the ballot box as an avenue to reform: the imperative of breaking “the stranglehold of big business” is “a fighting job” that “can’t be done by democracy”, and legitimate “because nothing could be so immoral as capitalism”. Martyred by a fascist thug, Paul perishes while incanting Bolshevik slogans. But despite believing the “Bolsheviki revolution” to be “the most terrible event that had happened to the world in his lifetime”, Ross cannot deny his son, granting him a million dollars in common stock to endow a labour college for worker education. Mount Hope College is dedicated to resistance of the “evil Power which roams the earth and [would] enslave and exploit Labor”.