Director/producer Yael Bridge’s “The Big Scary ’S’ Word” is one of 2020’s do-not-miss films and deserves a Best Documentary Academy Award nomination. As a producer, Bridge was Emmy co-nominated for the 2017 nonfiction film “Saving Capitalism,” featuring former US Labor Secretary Robert Reich. Bridge’s latest work moves further left, asserting that, instead of being rescued, the capitalist system should be replaced by—as Warren Beatty put it in the 1998 movie “Bulworth” — “that dirty word … socialism!”
Contrary to the “reds-under-the-beds” propaganda that automatically links socialism to Stalinism, Harvard University professor Cornel West proclaims: “Socialism is as American as apple pie!”
Bridge’s upbeat documentary opens with a montage of blue-collar and other workers trying to define what socialism is, as the 1950 song “Get Happy,” with the lyrics “Shout Hallelujah … Get ready for the Judgment Day” plays.
“The Big Scary ’S’ Word” explains why and how socialism became such a taboo term in the lexicon of US public discourse, through its glimpses of such notorious redbaiters as Joe McCarthy, Ronald Reagan, Mike Pence, and Donald Trump. More importantly, without getting bogged down in doctrinaire nitpicking and infighting, Bridge’s film explains the basics of this widely misunderstood philosophy, as well as socialism’s history, primarily in the United States.
It employs the tried-and-true talking-head technique of blending original interviews with archival footage and news clips. But Bridge also creatively uses animation (by Phlea TV) and highlights class struggle, putting human faces to ordinary working-class people who have become socialists.
“The Big Scary ’S’ Word” follows Stephanie Price, a woman of color and single mom, who is a beleaguered public school teacher in Oklahoma. Price is shown throughout the film participating in a teachers’ strike, attending legislative sessions at the state capitol building in Oklahoma City, going to a socialist conference, and running for and becoming her local union’s vice president.
Another everyday convert to socialism is ex-Marine Lee Carter, an IT specialist who suffered an on-the-job injury and, confounded by the worker’s compensation bureaucracy, decided to seek public office. The thirty-year-old veteran ran against Virginia’s Republican house majority whip in 2017 and won a seat in the state’s House of Delegates. Carter campaigned as a Democrat but was also backed by the Democratic Socialists of America, to which he belongs.
As an openly socialist politician, Carter fights for pro-worker legislation and is red-baited by colleagues, including one delegate who flashes a hammer and a sickle behind Carter’s back as he speaks at a legislative hearing. In 2019, Carter runs for reelection, endorsed by the individual who is arguably more responsible than anybody for making “socialism” respectable again in contemporary America, US Sen. Bernie Sanders, who appears on screen at various points in historical and current clips.
In an effort to belie the stereotypes of socialism as a “foreign” ideology advocated by elite East Coast academics, the film cleverly casts Price and Carter as its proletarian protagonists. “The Big Scary ’S’ Word” also includes interviews conducted specifically for this project, featuring left scholars and luminaries.
To Bridge’s credit, the documentary presents a range of socialist viewpoints, from social democrats to communists. In the film, these intellectuals discuss socialism’s ethical philosophy.
As venerable historian and Columbia University Professor Eric Foner notes, “Most socialists begin with a critique of inequality and the premise that this is essential to the nature of capitalism and if you want to create more justice and more equality, you’re going to have to change the system.”
Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant denounces a global system where “five individuals own more wealth than 3.5 billion people.” Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, assistant professor of African-American studies at Princeton University, “envisions socialism as the majority of people having a democratic say and control over the direction of this country.” Wisconsin journalist John Nichols echoes this sentiment: “Socialism is really at heart the ultimate expression of democracy.”
For those defining socialism simply as government intervention in the economy, the state-owned Bank of North Dakota is held up as an example. Worker-owned enterprises, such as Cleveland’s Evergreen Cooperative Laundry, are examined, and workplace democracy is extolled by Marxian economist Richard Wolff of The New School.
When Wolff, author of 2019’s “Understanding Socialism,” discusses socialistic New Deal policies such as social security, unemployment insurance, minimum wage laws, and jobs programs, the film cuts to comedian Jimmy Durante performing in a vintage, black-and-white FDR-for-President campaign spot.
Contrary to the “reds-under-the-beds” propaganda that automatically links socialism to Stalinism, Harvard University professor Cornel West proclaims: “Socialism is as American as apple pie!” The documentary includes a section on five-time Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs and other socialists elected to office, including Milwaukee’s mayors, brothers Carl, a Democrat, and Frank, a socialist, Zeidler (the latter’s daughter, Anita—who died at a 2018 Labor Day event—appears).
Foner (whose father and uncle were blacklisted for alleged Communist Party USA affiliation) enhances our knowledge of socialism and the United States, noting Marx’s correspondence with President Lincoln during the Civil War. Nichols, author of The “S” Word, A Short of History of an American Tradition … Socialism, rather remarkably, claims that in 1854 the Republican Party was started by socialists at a Wisconsin schoolhouse.
The 82-minute documentary briskly covers a lot of ground: Occupy Wall Street; the COVID-19 pandemic (ER nurse John Pearson says “our healthcare system is not setup to provide health care as its primary goal, but it’s setup to make money for the industry”); Black Lives Matter protests; and what progressive Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, calls in an MSNBC town hall “our greatest existential threat … climate change.” Author Naomi Klein and Sawant, a member of the self-described Marxist revolutionary organization Socialist Alternative, also denounce capitalism’s role in global warming.
The documentary ends with Lee winning a second term to Virginia’s state legislature, where he passes a minimum wage bill, and Stephanie Price speaking at Chicago’s “Socialism 2018” conference, expressing the film’s radical credo that with “collective power ... together we can accomplish anything!” to a standing ovation. Bridge, who has been director of productions at Inequality Media, Robert Reich’s nonpartisan digital media company, has created a documentary about a profound subject that is absorbing, thought-provoking, entertaining, and uplifting.
By the end of “The Big Scary ’S’ Word,” viewers are likely to ask, “What do we workers have to lose but our chains?”
The Big Scary “S” Word played Oct. 9-18 at the Mill Valley Film Festival in San Rafael, Calif., and at the Los Angeles AFI Fest Oct. 19-22.
Ed Rampell is a film historian and critic based in Los Angeles. Rampell is the author of “Progressive Hollywood, A People’s Film History of the United States” and he co-authored “The Hawaii Movie and Television Book,” now in its third edition. This first appeared at Progressive.org.
From The Progressive Populist, December 1, 2020
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