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Ilf & Petrov on the American Character
Sep. 23rd, 2019 09:40 am“America is not the first night of a new play, and we are not theater critics. We transmit to paper our impressions about that country and our thoughts about it.
“What can be said about America, which simultaneously horrifies, delights, calls forth pity, and sets examples worthy of emulation, about a land which is rich, poor, talented, and ungifted?”
Ilf and Petrov write about America and the American character at some length in Little Golden America. They have, as the above quote suggests, quite mixed feelings - probably inevitably, as America was and is a place of very mixed character.
On the one hand, they have some complaints. They’re particularly annoyed by American advertising and publicity, and this in the broader sense includes American movies, which they see as propaganda by the rich studios. “The cultured American does not recognize his native motion pictures as an art. More than that, he will tell you that the American motion picture is a moral epidemic, no less harmful and dangerous than scarlet fever or the plague,” they explain.
Or, as a fellow who worked in the motion picture industry told them: “American motion pictures are perhaps the only industry into which capitalists have come not for profit alone. It is no accident that we make idiotic films. We are told to make them. They are made on purpose. Hollywood systematically stuffs the heads of Americas, befogs them with its films. Not one serious problem of life will be touched in a Hollywood film - I’ll guarantee you that. Our bosses will not allow it. This work of many years has already yielded a frightful harvest. American spectators have completely unlearned how to think.”
(This is of course a case of the pot calling the kettle black - the Soviet film industry had to toe the Communist Party line, after all - but that doesn’t mean they don’t have a point.)
In Ilf & Petrov’s view, Americans were much too susceptible to this sort of thing. “The average American, despite his outward show of activity, is really a passive person by nature. He must have everything presented to him in finished form, like a spoiled husband. Tell him which drink is best, and he will drink it. Tell him which political party suits him best, and he will vote for it. Tell him which god is the true god, and he will worship him.”
There’s an interesting bit, which unfortunately I didn’t copy, where they discuss the church in America in the context of advertising: someone comments enviously, I don’t have the exact quote, but it’s something like “God has the best publicity in America. They sing his praises at 20 million pulpits every Sunday.”
They’re also baffled by the American habit of smiling all the time and amused by the American obsession with health, a pair of twin habits that they finally synthesize in this passage that ties the two together: “It is better to laugh than to weep. So, he laughs. No doubt, in the past he forced himself to laugh, just as he forced himself to sleep with windows open, to indulge in gymnastics, and to brush his teeth. Subsequently these things became daily habits. And now laughter rattles in his throat, irrespective of his circumstances or his wishes. If you see a laughing American, it does not mean that something strikes him as comical. He laughs only because an American must laugh.”
But, on the other hand, there are a number of American habits that they admire. This comes up a number of times throughout the book - they’re very impressed by the way that Americans will stop to help stranded motorists, for instance - but there’s a passage in the conclusion that sums up what they consider best about the American character.
“Should an American say in the course of a conversation, even incidentally, ‘I’ll do that,’ it is not necessary to remind him of anything at all in the future. Everything will be done. The ability to keep his word, to keep it firmly, accurately, to burst, but keep his word - this is the most important thing which our Soviet business people must learn from American business people.
“We wrote about American democracy, which in fact does not give man freedom and only masks the exploitation of man by man. But in American life there is a phenomenon which should interest us no less than a new machine model. That phenomenon is democracy in intercourse between people, albeit that democracy, too, covers social inequality and is a purely outward form. The outward forms of such a democratism are splendid. They help a lot in work, deliver a blow to bureaucratism, and enhance human dignity.”
“What can be said about America, which simultaneously horrifies, delights, calls forth pity, and sets examples worthy of emulation, about a land which is rich, poor, talented, and ungifted?”
Ilf and Petrov write about America and the American character at some length in Little Golden America. They have, as the above quote suggests, quite mixed feelings - probably inevitably, as America was and is a place of very mixed character.
On the one hand, they have some complaints. They’re particularly annoyed by American advertising and publicity, and this in the broader sense includes American movies, which they see as propaganda by the rich studios. “The cultured American does not recognize his native motion pictures as an art. More than that, he will tell you that the American motion picture is a moral epidemic, no less harmful and dangerous than scarlet fever or the plague,” they explain.
Or, as a fellow who worked in the motion picture industry told them: “American motion pictures are perhaps the only industry into which capitalists have come not for profit alone. It is no accident that we make idiotic films. We are told to make them. They are made on purpose. Hollywood systematically stuffs the heads of Americas, befogs them with its films. Not one serious problem of life will be touched in a Hollywood film - I’ll guarantee you that. Our bosses will not allow it. This work of many years has already yielded a frightful harvest. American spectators have completely unlearned how to think.”
(This is of course a case of the pot calling the kettle black - the Soviet film industry had to toe the Communist Party line, after all - but that doesn’t mean they don’t have a point.)
In Ilf & Petrov’s view, Americans were much too susceptible to this sort of thing. “The average American, despite his outward show of activity, is really a passive person by nature. He must have everything presented to him in finished form, like a spoiled husband. Tell him which drink is best, and he will drink it. Tell him which political party suits him best, and he will vote for it. Tell him which god is the true god, and he will worship him.”
There’s an interesting bit, which unfortunately I didn’t copy, where they discuss the church in America in the context of advertising: someone comments enviously, I don’t have the exact quote, but it’s something like “God has the best publicity in America. They sing his praises at 20 million pulpits every Sunday.”
They’re also baffled by the American habit of smiling all the time and amused by the American obsession with health, a pair of twin habits that they finally synthesize in this passage that ties the two together: “It is better to laugh than to weep. So, he laughs. No doubt, in the past he forced himself to laugh, just as he forced himself to sleep with windows open, to indulge in gymnastics, and to brush his teeth. Subsequently these things became daily habits. And now laughter rattles in his throat, irrespective of his circumstances or his wishes. If you see a laughing American, it does not mean that something strikes him as comical. He laughs only because an American must laugh.”
But, on the other hand, there are a number of American habits that they admire. This comes up a number of times throughout the book - they’re very impressed by the way that Americans will stop to help stranded motorists, for instance - but there’s a passage in the conclusion that sums up what they consider best about the American character.
“Should an American say in the course of a conversation, even incidentally, ‘I’ll do that,’ it is not necessary to remind him of anything at all in the future. Everything will be done. The ability to keep his word, to keep it firmly, accurately, to burst, but keep his word - this is the most important thing which our Soviet business people must learn from American business people.
“We wrote about American democracy, which in fact does not give man freedom and only masks the exploitation of man by man. But in American life there is a phenomenon which should interest us no less than a new machine model. That phenomenon is democracy in intercourse between people, albeit that democracy, too, covers social inequality and is a purely outward form. The outward forms of such a democratism are splendid. They help a lot in work, deliver a blow to bureaucratism, and enhance human dignity.”
