Like a lot of people my age and older, I first discovered Dalton Trumbo through Metallica. Spurred on by many late night viewings of the haunting video for the band’s anti-war single “One,” I discovered Johnny Got His Gun—Trumbo’s 1939 novel that inspired the 1971 film adaptation, which in turn became the intellectual jet-fuel powering the dueling engines of James Hatfield and Kirk Hammett’s electric guitars.
I soon discovered that Metallica’s aural assault had nothing on Trumbo’s feverish prose. Johnny Got His Gun, which agonizingly details the tortured inner life of Joe Bonham, a World War I veteran who has been confined to a hospital bed for years due to the loss of his arms, legs, and entire face, remains among the most horrific narratives ever committed to paper.
Inspired by a newspaper article he had read about the Prince of Wales’s visit to a horribly disfigured Canadian soldier, Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun drips with a rage so fierce that it makes Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce Et Decorum Est” seem like something written on a latrine wall by a professional milksop. Indeed, Trumbo’s anger would prove to be eternally hot. When Johnny Got His Gun was first serialized in the Communist newspaper The Daily Worker, it dug its fingernails into the veins of the isolationist left and right, both of which were incensed by the very idea of American boys joining yet another European war. But even years after the Second World War and his own blacklisting in Hollywood due to Communist leanings, Trumbo remained defiant and continued to apply the message of Johnny Got His Gun to the American foreign policy that developed during the Cold War.
In the introduction to the novel’s 1970 reissue, Trumbo continues to lecture the American people about their indifference to warfare by sarcastically asking about “our 300,000 wounded” in Vietnam while in the midst of Memorial Day revelers. For all its grandstanding about the horrors of trench warfare and its chiding reminder that “World War I began like a summer festival,” Johnny Got His Gun is really about all wars—past, present, and future. Before the proliferation of bumper stickers declaring that “I am already against the next war , Trumbo created the ultimate expression of unquestioned pacifism on the eve of the 20th century’s greatest conflagration.
This version of Trumbo—politically radical, viscerally doctrinaire—does not appear in Jay Roach’s newly released film Trumbo. Based on the Bruce Alexander Cook’s biography of the same name, Trumbo tells a well-worn tale about the moment when Hollywood woke up to the fact that Tinseltown was underwater. Most of the sea was rosewater, with a vast assortment of pink “co-travellers,” but as Allan Ryskind shows in Hollywood Traitors, there were plenty of hardline Stalinists and admirers of Adolf Hitler working to undermine American culture from within the studio system, as well. And like a lot of the mythologized “Hollywood Ten,” Trumbo was in fact a Soviet lackey who followed the Comintern’s lines like a sacred screenplay.
Of course, this history makes for poor copy in today’s Hollywood, which has increasingly become dependent upon those denizens of the Internet who see politics and entertainment as two sides of the same cudgel. The better story, for their purposes, is that Trumbo was a victim of political bigotry. Like Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Trumbo was a freethinker who did not fall into the atavistic mindset that demanded a puritanical allegiance to God, country, and American capitalism, you see. Trumbo names and shames the protagonist’s “oppressors,” from the fiercely anti-communist gossip columnist Hedda Hopper (played by Helen Mirren) to the ardent American nationalist John Wayne (played by David James Elliott). In other words, the enemies were Republicans—much like today.
Although thoroughly red, Trumbo still has to contend with green. Enter Bryan Cranston, the film’s talented leading man. Until recently, Cranston was not well-known for professing political views in public. But as the release date for Trumbo crept closer, Cranston, like a lot of actors, began to believe that his cinematic performance was enough to justify his own “expert” opinions. As such, Cranston has appealed to the left by calling Obamacare “fantastic,” while at the same time he has (begrudgingly) sung the praises of Donald Trump. By doing all this, Cranston has toyed with the milquetoast middle in order to deflect any potential blowback from conservatives on the lookout for liberal bias.
Unfortunately for Cranston and the makers of Trumbo, it has all been for naught. The film has imploded at the box office, and even by the standards of a sluggish season at the movies, Trumbo is a cold dud. Few Americans can stand Hollywood’s endless self-congratulation anymore, while an enlightened few are well aware that Trumbo, the brilliant screenwriter who wrote Roman Holiday, Spartacus, Gun Crazy, and other classics, did in fact deserve to stand before the House Un-American Activities Committee for pumping his pro-Communist sympathies into scripts. While there were other, more powerful offenders, few were as egregious as Trumbo, who lived the life of a “Champaign socialist” and free speech advocate, all the while defending to his death the most authoritarian regimes in history. In this way, Trumbo should be remembered as the embodiment of Hollywood leftism. He was an anti-American cosmopolitan who used his talents to support a system with a penchant for killing off its intellectual class. And like a lot of intellectuals then and now, Trumbo was blissfully unaware of the obvious.
Benjamin Welton is a writer in Boston.
