| Nate Logsdon |
Patterns plays at the Trylon Cinema from Friday, August 29th, through Sunday, August 31st. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
Donald Trump sees himself in The Fountainhead. “It relates to business and beauty and life and inner emotions,”1 he explained in 2016, avowing an interest in the writings of Ayn Rand widely shared among conservatives though dubious in his own case considering his notorious disdain for reading. But he’s probably seen the movie. Rand adapted her novel for a 1949 screen version directed by King Vidor and starring a gaunt Gary Cooper as the protagonist Howard Roarke, an architect who insists on creative freedom so absolute that he’d rather detonate one of his buildings than see his designs altered. Rand was similarly attached to the purity of her own artistic creation, objecting to any modifications of her screenplay. The result is a truly strange but powerful film in which virtually every word of dialogue is party-line libertarian ideology delivered through clenched jaws from behind unblinking stares.
Business, beauty, life, inner emotions. Sure. If there’s anything about Howard Roarke that really screams Trump it’s his imperious belief in his own brilliance and the inevitable destructiveness that belief entails. But another post-war, power-challenging, noir-tinted film set in the New York business world is much closer to Trump’s “you’re fired” mentality: Patterns, written by Rod Serling and directed by Fielder Cook.
The film centers on a triangular corporate struggle between a manufacturing company president, his current vice president, and a younger man unwittingly brought on by the boss to replace the aging VP. Due to established company precedent, upper management personnel can’t be fired outright. So, the boss Walter Ramsey (Everett Sloan) has embarked on a daily program of humiliation, castigation, and passive-aggressive needling to pressure his longtime VP Bill Briggs (Ed Begley) into resigning. The new hire Fred Staples (Van Heflin) is slow to realize that he is a pawn in this pressure campaign.
“Patterns is a story of power,” Serling wrote in an annotated collection of his television scripts.2 His writing was famously concerned with social and political issues, usually refracted through a science fiction lens or projected onto seemingly disparate subject matter. He’s best remembered for creating The Twilight Zone and many of the classic episodes he wrote addressed—usually as subtext but sometimes directly—challenging subjects like McCarthyism, totalitarianism, the Holocaust, and the threat of nuclear war. His early teleplays for Kraft Television Theater and Playhouse 90—where versions of later feature films like Patterns, Requiem for a Heavyweight, and The Rack first appeared— stand apart from The Twilight Zone as works of stark realism, but they are similarly concerned with the personal and ethical fallout from the dehumanizing forces in the society of his time. And because of that depth Patterns, in particular, serves as an eerily apposite cipher for reading the brute force politics of our own fraught historical moment.
It’s hard not to see some of Trump in the character Mr. Ramsey, the overbearing boss determined to force out his long-serving VP. He’s an overgrown nepo-baby who inherited wealth and a family business but sees himself as a self-made man; he works in a building bearing his own name; when challenged, he explodes in derogatory tirades; he repeatedly praises his own judgment and intelligence; he consolidates his wealth while resisting labor organization within his businesses. And, most pointedly, he abuses his power over his underlings, wielding employment as a cudgel and sharpening verbal humiliation into a weapon of soul destruction.
Serling was keenly focused on the dangers to human dignity posed by power imbalances inherent in the workplace, although his own interests were in fundamental structures and psychology rather than the economic system undergirding the film’s setting. “[T]here is, in the final analysis, nothing Marxist in the message of this play,” he wrote. “It is not an indictment of our capitalistic system nor an exposé of the evils of big money.”3 But whether or not he deliberately intended to critique capitalism, his early television films repeatedly examine brutalizing labor hierarchies and the painful moral compromises workers make to secure their livelihoods. In addition to Patterns, the theme is also central to Requiem for a Heavyweight (the gutting theatrical version of which will screen at the Trylon alongside Patterns) and The Comedian.
Serling identified those three teleplays as his own personal favorites. Requiem charts the downfall of a boxer forced into retirement by the threat of impending blindness. As he seeks a future career path in a job landscape narrowed by his total lack of work experience outside the boxing ring, he is cynically steered toward a demeaning role as a wrestling heel by his corrupt former manager. The devastating final scene of the theatrical film diverges sharply from the more hopeful originally televised version and seals Serling’s blistering denouncement of labor exploitation. The Comedian similarly careens toward tragedy in a working environment. It opens with a shocking transition from a television variety show host’s genial comic blustering onscreen to his vicious, nerve-shattering derogation of his staff the moment the cameras stop rolling. The comedian is a relentless bully and tyrant who terrorizes his staff and crew and takes particular pleasure in humiliating his own brother, a reluctant but desperate member of the show’s writer’s room. The host’s on and offscreen personas collide during the live broadcast of a comedy special during which his pitiable brother is forced to succumb pathetically to his brother’s twisted will. (Mickey Rooney stars in both films and the distance between the two performances is as wide as I’ve ever seen from any actor.) When put in conversation with Patterns, a clear critique of power emerges from these early television triumphs. Again and again he locates that critique where capital and individual intersect: on the job.
Fred Staples, the new hire in Patterns, is a former engineer with management expertise in “industrial relations,” which for years has been the elder VP Bill Brigg’s specialty. Serling’s dialogue continually turns on the minutiae of business operations; Staples and Briggs are shown throughout collaborating on a comprehensive internal policy document that calls for improving labor relations by honoring workers’ rights and “think[ing] of people in terms of the human factor, not just logistically,” as Briggs puts it. The turning point of the film comes when the pair presents the report at a meeting and Mr. Ramsey refuses to give Briggs credit for his work on the project, a calculated and finally fatal provocation. The characters’ onscreen debates over industrial relations underscore the film’s overriding concern with the inequitable dynamics implicit in interpersonal office politics.
Boris Kaufman’s sculptural cinematography establishes the larger moral stakes of this struggle from the film’s first shot of the imposing Ramsey Building looming menacingly over a cathedral. Church bells chime as the camera locks into a cold frontal shot of uniform rows of empty office windows. The implication is clear: the drama unfolding behind these walls will pit economic against moral values. “I just happen to feel that the atmosphere of a big corporation can’t be constantly churchlike,” Ramsey says in the television version. When, later in the film, Kaufman repeats the opening shot it is from such a severe angle that, through a trick of forced perspective, the two buildings appear to be of equal height. But if this suggests a pictorial representation of humanism drawing even in the battle with capitalism, the outcome is still ambivalent at best.
The visual preoccupation with architectural symbols of life-or-death ideological battles points us back to The Fountainhead. That film, too, is deeply concerned with the hazards overwhelming social and financial forces present to personal integrity. Rand’s uncompromising vision of freedom—untenable as it may be when inflated into a political system—is a valuable counterpart to Serling’s anxieties about threats to the human soul. But where The Fountainhead lingers on the rights of exceptional individuals, Serling stays focused on workers a step down the hierarchy.
If Trump sees himself in Howard Roarke, we might see ourselves in Fred Staples. The reflection is troubling. As in both Requiem for a Heavyweight and The Comedian, Serling pushes his protagonist into a final, failed confrontation with his corrupt, power-mad employer. Patterns lands on an ambiguous compromise between Ramsey and Staples that reeks of capitulation. Staples’s creeping career ambition acts as a counterweight to his strong ethical instincts and the viewer is left with both narrative dissatisfaction and a grudging acknowledgement of the ending’s plausibility. If the shouting, debasing, abusive Ramsey is metonym for Trumpian authoritarianism, Staples is a model of the knee-bending, equivocating self-preservationist in the vein of, say, CBS or Columbia University or the endless parade of centrist legislators—a figure willing to accommodate power to secure a financial interest while yet convincing himself he’s just staying alive to fight another day.
Footnotes
1 Kirsten Powers. “Donald Trump’s ‘kinder, gentler’ version”. USA Today, April 11, 2016. Donald Trump’s ‘kinder, gentler’ version: Kirsten Powers
2 Rod Serling, Patterns (Simon and Schuster, New York, 1957), 85.
3 Serling, 85.
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon