My first experience of cinema was watching “Battle of Neretva” (“Bitka
na Neretvi”), a Yugoslav-liberation-war spectacle starring Yul
Brynner, Franco Nero, and Orson Welles, as well as domestic actors known
to Yugoslav viewers by their first names (Milena, Bata, Boris, Smoki).
The movie is about the 1943 battle in which our great leader Tito and
his partisans outwitted the Germans and their local collaborators,
crossing the river Neretva to escape encirclement. A major
co-production, it received substantial funding from America and from
fifty-eight Yugoslav state companies, plus logistical support from the
Yugoslav People’s Army, which provided ten thousand soldiers as extras
and built a steel bridge and a couple of villages to be destroyed in
battle scenes. The première took place in Sarajevo, on November 29,
1969, and was attended by Comrade Tito himself, who was accompanied by
Sophia Loren and Omar Sharif. Afterward, Tito declared the
representation of the great battle very realistic.

I didn’t attend the première, because I was five at the time. But I saw
the film at Kino Arena, the movie theatre next door to our apartment
building, in Sarajevo. My parents apparently believed that Yugoslav
pride would protect me; it was the first movie I ever saw all by myself.
It was glorious. On the wide screen, the battle was as real as could be;
the thunder of German artillery shelling the refugees went right through
my chest; and when the freedom-loving people sang in defiance, I was
proud to be a Yugoslav boy. In a scene I’d never forget, Dana, the
partisan nurse attending to wounded comrades during battle, is herself
struck by shrapnel. With a gaping wound on her back, she implores her
brother to keep shooting (“Pucaj!”) and to continue the struggle for
freedom. The music swelling, Dana’s brother (played by Smoki) drops his
machine gun to embrace his sister, who dies in his arms as he weeps. I
wept, too, and subsequently developed a postmortem crush on Dana.

Back then, I was the perfect moviegoer. To me, the film’s propaganda was
invisible, as all good propaganda always is, because it was everywhere,
and the only thing I saw on the screen was the great battle in which
Dana sacrificed her life so that I could watch movies in freedom, all by
myself. Much of the power of cinema is in this visual stimulation, which
overwhelms the mind with emotion, forcing the viewer to suspend
judgment. This is why all the ideologically committed regimes—the Nazis,
the Soviets, the Yugoslavs—have been willing to invest in film
production.

One might argue that a similar ideology is at work in American
cinema—that “Apocalypse Now” is just as loaded with imperialist racism
as is John Wayne's openly propagandistic “The Green Berets”; or that
“Zero Dark Thirty” is drama-coated torture advertisement, just as “The
Hurt Locker” is a war-recruitment movie; or that the preponderance of
superhero movies contributes more to this country’s self-image as a
superpower than does the deployment of U.S. troops around the world.
Still, one would imagine that American auteur cinema, rooted in private
enterprise and inherently antithetical to groupthink, is the opposite of
propaganda, which by its very nature always projects and endorses the
structures of power.

Recently, however, upon watching Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Phantom
Thread,”
I found myself recalling “Battle of Neretva.” Reynolds Woodcock, the
controlling dressmaker played by Daniel Day-Lewis, governs a domain
peopled exclusively by obedient and loyal women. Among them, Alma
distinguishes herself by refusing to be used and discarded by the
couturier. But, for all her relative agency, she exists only within the
world of Woodcock. We have no idea who she was before entering it, where
she might have come from, or what she might have wanted from her life.
Soon after she meets Woodcock, he measures her for a dress. When, in a fit
of internalized misogyny, she apologizes for having small breasts, he
says, “Oh, no, you’re perfect. It’s my job to give you some—if I choose
to.” Just as her body is significant only in his dress, she has value
only in relation to his ever-present, shamelessly metaphorical hunger.

Anderson’s casting effectively reflects this distribution of power: on
the one hand, there is Day-Lewis, in his last film performance ever; on
the other, a newcomer from Luxembourg, Vicky Krieps, who might have
remained unknown had the light of the great star not been cast upon her.
The sexual politics of “Phantom Thread” owe much to Alfred Hitchcock:
the closeup of Woodcock consuming Alma by way of his (Oscar-nominated)
gaze is the most dominant shot in the film; “Vertigo” and “Rebecca” are
obvious references. “Phantom Thread” might appear to some as a critical
exploration of male power, but for that to be the case there would have
to be alternative positions that are not dependent on the hero’s
centrality. The scene in which Alma arranges an intimate dinner seems to
provide space for such a position, as she litigates against “all your
rules and your walls and your doors and your people.” And yet she
remains desperate to remain in the House of Woodcock, where she can be
the well-dressed mannequin muse, replenishing with her emptiness the
great man’s inner life and creativity. When she discovers her
function—to feed the hunger, if perversely—love reigns eternal. (The
only other woman with some agency in the film is Cyril, Woodcock’s “old
so-and-so,” whose life and desire are similarly dictated by him.)

Before Woodcock, Anderson gave us Dirk Diggler and his pronouncedly
phallic masculinity in “Boogie Nights.” And, like “Phantom Thread,” “The
Master” and “There Will Be Blood” are set in masculinized landscapes in
which power is flexed, challenged, then flexed again. In other words,
“Phantom Thread” reveals plenty about the auteur’s obsessions and
self-conception. Like Woodcock, he gives meaning to everything and
everyone lucky enough to be inside his domain. And, like Woodcock,
Anderson creates sumptuously crafted artifacts, inside of which cryptic
messages about himself—phantom threads—are stitched.

Perhaps one man’s sexual politics, however reactionary, do not amount to
an ideology. If they do, they might at least be challenged and
criticized in the forum of public opinion. And yet few critics saw in
“Phantom Thread”—which was nominated for six Academy Awards—a symptom of
the Weinsteinian toxic masculinity exposed by the #MeToo movement.
(Owen Gleiberman of Variety was a notable
exception.)
Nor were they concerned that, in stark contrast with the Englishman upon
whom the mighty House of Woodcock is built, Alma has no past nor origin
of her own. (Christopher Orr, in The Atlantic, determined that Alma
was of “indeterminate non-British
origin,”
while A. O. Scott, in the Times, identified her as “a non-British
waitress.”)
More troubling, it was difficult to find anyone who addressed the
glaring presence of the (Wood)cock at the heart of the film. Just as
propaganda was once invisible to me because it was everywhere, the
film’s spectacle of male power—its woodcockiness—was so embedded in its
every fibre that it was largely missed.

Everyone, however, identified Day-Lewis’s genius, which exactly
matched Woodcock’s genius and, while we’re at it, Anderson’s genius.
Thus frothed Richard Roeper, in the Chicago Sun-Times: “Like Day-Lewis, Reynolds is
a mesmerizing, captivating, mercurial, painstakingly meticulous creative
force who moves to the sound of his own inner music, has a very specific
(and more than a little eccentric) way of doing things, refuses to be
rushed and will not allow outside forces to dictate how he operates.”
Orr wrote that “Anderson directs with an understated elegance worthy of
the House of Woodcock,” while Scott diagnosed Woodcock’s dresses as
“works of art, obscurely and yet unmistakably saturated with the passion
and personality of their creator,” and that is why “Phantom Thread” is a
“profoundly, intensely, extravagantly personal film.”

Personal as it may be, the film is about a male
genius so supreme that it can choose even when and how to be weakened in
the presence of a woman, who, in exchange for monogamy, is ever willing
to serve it. Anderson dazzled critics into believing that they’re not
reproducing power but affirming the art of the personal. Disguised as
art-house cinema, the film spectacularly endorses the inherent genius of
masculinity. “Phantom Thread” is nothing if not propaganda for
patriarchy.