There's a very smart review in Salon of Paul Buhle and David Wagner's new book, Radical Hollywood. Written by Michelle Goldberg, the review is basically a hilarious account of how two Marxist scholars--one a lecturer at Brown, the other a former political editor at Arizona Republic--accidentally demonstrate that McCarthy had a point. Radical Hollywood is a study of Hollywood leftism during the 1930's and 40's that aims to show how very radical (and thus very chic and relevant and important) film was then. But in being totally obtuse about the implications of such an argument, all the authors really manage to do, according to the review, is broadcast the utter bankruptcy of their own project.

Basically, the point of the review is this: in trawling through Hollywood for evidence of subliminal cinematic leftism (e.g., the joy in Munchkinland after Dorothy does in the Wicked Witch signifies "the feeling of liberation that [the screenwriter] and his fellow Popular Front artists dreamed for a Europe free of fascism and for colonial citizens across what became known as the Third World, free of colonialism, both political and economic"), the authors unwittingly make a retroactive case for McCarthyism. Hollywood was crawling with Reds, they argue, and their work was filled with deliberately subversive messages about the evils of capitalism and the joys of collectivism. So far so radical: sniffing out the ideological subversions and complicities of cultural "texts" via painfully farfetched overreading is standard methodological procedure in leftist scholarship. The problem is that when you are employing this technique on the material that McCarthy was so interested in, it doesn't look so radical anymore. In fact, it starts to look positively reactionary.

When your critical practice is leading you to do readings that both confirm McCarthy's premises and replicate the good senator's penchant for willful misreading, then you aren't doing radical intellectual work and you aren't serving progressive aims. What you are doing is indulging in embarrassingly--and dangerously--wishful thinking that has more in common with the worst impulses of a censorious neo-fascism than with anything that might reasonably be called responsible scholarship. As Goldberg puts it, the book "reveal[s] the weird intellectual netherworld where academic wishful thinking meets right-wing hysteria":

...the analysis [the authors] employ to tell the story of the Hollywood left in the '30s and '40s is one borrowed from the most stultifying corners of academia, and it leads them into a critical dead end with surprising parallels to the worst Cold War thinking.

Cultural studies has long made a fetish of "subversion," lionizing pop phenomena like skateboarding, sampling and Madonna videos -- anything that seems to stick it to the Man, however obliquely. Often this sort of lionizing is vapid but harmless. Here, though, it has real consequences, lending weight (at least retrospectively) to a crazy witch hunt that eviscerated lives.

It's become common for conservative commentators to compare contemporary academic leftism, with its love of speech codes and its puritanical delight in vilifying those who deviate from its righteously correct orthodoxy, with McCarthyism. Now a pair of putatively radical scholars have devoted an entire book to proving the justice of the comparison.