THE ANTICOMMUNIST IMAGINATION

In the conservative anticommunist imagination--in this culturally important sense very different from the anticommunist liberal imagination--communism bespoils intimacy so thoroughly that the very revelation of communist affiliation can concede an already existing transgressive kind of love. Conservative anticommunist texts of all kinds disclosed communists while willingly risking finding something anticommunists by and large deemed worse. In early April 1952 the ads running for Leo McCarey's anticommunist My Son John, in which a horrified mother (figured in an outsized sketch of Helen Hayes looking vaguely and anxiously into the middle distance) discovers that her son has been a communist all along (figured as a tiny fleeing figure looking back at his mother's non-gaze), textually featured a statement made by John in the film that in the ad is strangely sexually ambiguous, especially for so unambiguous a film. "I was guilty to this extent, Mother. We were very intimate...very intimate indeed." In the context the ad visually provides, aided by the emphatic, suggestive diction of "...very intimate indeed," "We" can only have meant mother and son. Here is Elizabeth Bishop's "Somebody loves us all" with a sexualized fantasy of familial order and generally a political will "Filling Station" made no effort to pronounce. If we trust the ad for My Son John, Helen Hayes "returns to the screen" in this film expressly so that she can show how women "hold the key to the nation's most infamous scandal."