Rassegna stampa di Upton Sinclair

Scrittore statunitense profondamente influenzato dagli ideali socialisti. È stato autore di saggi e romanzi in cui ha denunciato le condizioni dei lavoratori americani. Tra le sue opere più conosciute King Coal, La metropoli, Little Steel, Oil, Boston. Da Oil è stato tratto il film Il petroliere interpretato magnificatente da Daniel Day-Lewis. Ha fondato la comunità cooperativa Helicon Hall, nel New Jersey.

The best moments in Paul Thomas Anderson’s film “There Will Be Blood” and in “Oil!,” the 1927 novel by Upton Sinclair on which it is loosely based, are identical. They depict the fiery immolation of an oil rig. “There was a tower of flame,” Sinclair writes, “and the most amazing spectacle — the burning oil would hit the ground, and bounce up, and explode, and leap again and fall again, and great red masses of flame would unfold, and burst, and yield black masses of smoke, and these in turn red. Mountains of smoke rose to the sky, and mountains of flame came seething down to the earth; every jet that struck the ground turned into a volcano, and rose again, higher than before; the whole mass, boiling and bursting, became a river of fire, a lava flood that went streaming down the valley, turning everything it touched into flame, then swallowing it up and hiding the flames in a cloud of smoke.”
Anderson’s magnificent film fire bursts with the same kind of destructive energy — and the fascination with the hard, gritty detail of social and industrial processes — that marked Sinclair’s writing at its best. Indeed, Sinclair was not without big-screen ambitions of his own. He flirted with Hollywood for most of his long life, beginning in 1914 with a six-reel silent movie of his most famous novel, “The Jungle” (1906). After moving to Pasadena in 1916, he made friends with Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and other movie people. Through Chaplin he met Sergei Eisenstein in 1931, and he ended up footing the bill for Eisenstein’s aborted documentary about Mexico. In 1932, an MGM film version of his novel “The Wet Parade” was modestly successful. And in 1967, the year before Sinclair died at the age of 90, Walt Disney released “The Gnome-Mobile,” based on the author’s only children’s book, the story of a brother and sister who band together with some forest gnomes to save a stand of ancient redwoods from a logging company.

But Sinclair, the author of more than 90 books, never made the big movie strike he hoped for. Anderson’s version of his long-forgotten novel, however, has been nominated for eight Academy Awards, including best picture and best adapted screenplay. What is there about “Oil!” that has made it, by proxy, such a gusher?
Like most of Sinclair’s books, “Oil!” was larger than life in subject and in theme. Set during the early Southern California oil boom and encompassing World War I, the Red Scare, the Teapot Dome scandal and the rise of the evangelical movement, it’s about an oil baron who rips wealth from the earth, drives other men to do his will, fights off competitors and builds an empire through vision, courage, ruthlessness and the general greasing of palms.
The story of J. Arnold Ross, called “Dad,” is told through the eyes of his loving but increasingly skeptical son, nicknamed Bunny; in fact, “Oil!” is more Bunny’s story than Dad’s. Following what for Sinclair was a familiar (and partly autobiographical) plot, the novel describes how a naïve, idealistic youth, born to privilege, becomes converted by degrees to a position of radical socialism. That transformation begins when Dad buys a remote Southern California ranch, where he will later strike oil, at a distress-sale price. Mr. Watkins, the owner, is a dimwitted religious fanatic with two sons, Paul and Eli. Paul, the older boy, rejects his father’s religious views in favor of social activism. Honest and direct, Paul becomes a carpenter, working for Dad even as he becomes Bunny’s friendly tutor and guide in the ways of social justice. Eli, by contrast, is sick in body and mind, an epileptic who claims to have religious visions and the power of healing. Modeled after the famous evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, Eli is cunning, devious and ambitious, a gifted misuser of words that mislead and delude those who heed them.
While Bunny attends school in “Angel City” (Los Angeles) and Eli builds his church, Paul continues to work for Dad until America enters the war in Europe. Drafted into the Army and sent at the end of the war to fight the Bolsheviks in Russia, Paul is outraged and radicalized by what he experiences there. He joins the Communist Party of America upon his return home and becomes a labor union organizer in the California oil fields. As a former working man, Dad is unusually solicitous of his employees, but the more powerful oilmen in the region pressure him to resist Paul’s union efforts. In the end, Paul is murdered by a right-wing mob, and Dad, who is not involved, dies of pneumonia (in reality, a broken heart), ruined by the oil cabal. “Oil!” closes with Bunny’s sad realization that an “evil Power” “roams the earth, crippling the bodies of men and women, and luring the nations to destruction by visions of unearned wealth, and the opportunity to enslave and exploit labor.”
Anderson’s self-sufficient and misanthropic Daniel Plainview (as he renames Dad Ross) has no truck with Sinclairean theories of cause and effect. “I don’t like explaining myself,” says Anderson’s Plainview, perhaps reflecting the director’s own wish that his poetic and ultimately rather cryptic film speak for itself. Upton Sinclair, to the frequent detriment of his novels, loved explaining himself, especially his ideas about what was wrong with capitalism. Although “Oil!” is one of Sinclair’s better novels, it still suffers from the author’s insistence that literature should lead to the solution of social problems. Less interested in human psychology than in ideas, he blamed the capitalist system for all social ills and directed his literary and other energies (he ran for governor of California as a Democrat in 1934) toward changing that system to socialism. Sinclair’s critics gibed that he had sold his birthright for a pot of message, and even his admirers wished that he had paid more attention to his art.
By contrast, “There Will Be Blood” is ingeniously artful in many ways, not least in its enthralling re-creation of the oil-boom era that Sinclair evoked in his novel. But where Sinclair could be overly didactic, Anderson’s film suffers from a lack of thematic clarity, compounded by some of his shifts in emphasis. Paul, the avatar of honor in “Oil!,” appears in the film only briefly, selling the secret of his father’s oil to the rapacious Plainview before disappearing entirely. Eli the evangelist, who is presented satirically and largely fades from view after the novel’s opening section, becomes Plainview’s primary antagonist, and a wholly unredeemed villain, in the film. Sinclair would hardly have objected to the punishment Anderson ultimately inflicts on this charlatan — just a few years before “Oil!” he wrote “The Profits of Religion,” a scorching broadside against organized churches, which he saw as “a source of income to parasites, and the natural ally of every form of oppression and exploitation.” But for Sinclair, the problem was not with outright villains, of which there are few in his work, but with the system itself, with the false beliefs that cause people to behave badly.
In a crucial moment in the film, Paul and Eli’s father asks Plainview about his religion. Amused, he responds vaguely that he admires all religions. In “Oil!” Dad teasingly claims adherence to an entirely new religion, the Church of the True Word. He suggests to Mr. Watkins that his son Paul looks to him like “the bearer” of “the true spirit of the Third Revelation.” Eli then falls into a convulsive fit and rises born again as the prophet.
Eli’s new religion, in Sinclair’s novel, is not so much inspired by greed, as it is in the film, as by delusion. In the film, he’s already on the make when Plainview first appears. Here, Sinclair’s version is the richer; it’s one of those moments when we understand that despite his limitations as a novelist, he could be witty and clever in getting his ideas across — in this instance, that it is vital to know when words are true and when they are false. A hint of this playful wit, critical but not malicious, would have been welcome in Daniel Plainview, allowing him to be regarded as something more than the destructive and ultimately unexplained villain and victim of “There Will Be Blood.”
Da The New York Times, 24 Febbraio 2008

Strano destino quello di Upton Sinclair, riportato in auge dal 'Petroliere', la trasposizione di 'Oil!', romanzo del 1920. Romanziere, polemista, utopista, Sinclair (1878-1968) con la sua passione politica animata da ideali socialisti e anarchici ha avuto un ruolo di primo piano nella coscienza sociale americana del Novecento. Con 90 titoli dall'esordio con il romanzo 'Courtmartialed' del 1898, alla sua 'Autobiografia' del 1962, non ha mai cessato di mettere in mostra contraddizioni e soprusi del sistema capitalistico. Quando a 27 anni scrisse il suo capolavoro, 'La giungla', che denuncia le condizioni degli immigrati lituani nei macelli di Chicago, il presidente Roosevelt ordinò un'ispezione in quei louoghi di lavoro e il Congresso promulgò una legge per controllarne le condizioni igieniche. Con i 30 mila dollari di diritti cinematografici Sinclair fondò una colonia socialista a Helicon Hall, nel New Jersey, che però fallì in pochi mesi. Dopo 'La giungla' (il suo unico romanzo disponibile nelle librerie italiane, per le edizioni Net), Sinclair continuò a scrivere libri ispirati all'attualità sociale e politica, come 'Boston', del '28, su Sacco e Vanzetti, e saggi che denunciavano la corruzione in vari campi, dal giornalismo alla religione. Tentò anche una carriera politica: non fu eletto, ma contribuì a porre le basi per una serie di riforme tuttora in vigore. Per il cinema collaborò con Eisenstein a 'Que Viva Mexico!' e il suo romanzo 'The Gnomobile' divenne il soggetto di un film musicale della Disney. A ravviare l'interesse per il personaggio sono arrivate l'anno scorso due biografie, 'Radical Innocent' di Anthony Arthur e 'The Other American Century' di Kevin Mattson.

Da L’Espresso, 21 Febbraio 2008