Peter Biskind: Writing About Reading

When Peter Biskind wrote Seeing is Believing he wrote this to attempt to explain the differences between nineteen fifties conservative and liberal movies. Binskind attempted to make it clear how to see in depth of these great films and how the vaguest scenes should make it obvious to which type of political side the film was taking.

Although Biskind points out both liberal and conservative sides of the movies, he shows very distinct qualities to show the difference between the two. It seems as if after the war, conservatives became more appreciative of the everyday man by saying that more could be accomplished by "just a bunch average Americans working together"(37). In the nineteen fifties , education was not necessary to make a person important in society. Conservatives believed the power was in the people, which is why in conservative films, when the towns were bad, it usually meant it was ran by liberals because the "towns were lawless" (37). This is where the term corporate liberal comes into play.

Most of these nineteen fifties films portray either a liberal or a conservative to be more capable than the other. The difference between the two is usually pretty easy to notice. Conservatives always seem to come off as the professionals who like to resolve their local problems locally. Whereas liberals are the experts who believe that Washington had all the answers. The film Panic in the Streets shows how liberals thought that certain things were too hard for a regular person to understand so they left anyone not in high importance in wonder while the professionals took the problems head on. Then in another film such as My Darling Clementine, had more of a focus on how important consensus was, but still showed that people in authority should be the conservatives. It was showed by conservative professionals such as the police officers being more capable of saving the day than a liberal doctor from Washington. So at this point is when the liberals were convinced that an average person would not understand the problems going on in the world where as a conservative believed that any average person could have been the one to change the world.

As Biskind also mentions, conservatives were more supportive of local issues. To explain this, "conservative films dramatized the breakdown of order"(36). This is what crates an opportunity for a hero, who is usually an ordinary person, to come and save the day. This once again relates back to the conservatives believing that education was not a necessity and that even an average American could contribute