This is something I only became aware of a few days ago, on a recent trip to the Museum of Modern Art. On September 1, 1966, artist Öyvind Fahlström staged and filmed a work of street theatre that involved a small parade of citizens walking up and down Fifth Avenue carrying Communist style propaganda placards bearing the likeness of Chairman Mao Zedong — and American comedian Bob Hope. Meanwhile radical radio personality Bob Fass (of free form station WBAI) went around with a mic asking passers-by “Are you happy?”, a reference to the promise of “the Pursuit of Happiness” in the Declaration of Independence.
A Swedish national, Fahlström was a painter and poet before becoming interested in theatre and film. He’d moved to the U.S. in 1961 and had been influenced by such contemporary forces as The Living Theatre, Pop Art, Jean-Luc Godard, and John Cage. For context, Mao had just launched his Cultural Revolution a few months earlier. At the same time, the U.S. was heating up its war in Vietnam. Hope was naturally summoned as the provocative image representing America on account of his frequent U.S.O. tours and his support of the war. The brilliance of choosing him (as opposed to L.B.J.) is that it reminds us of the corporate powers that pull the strings under capitalism. Bob Hope wasn’t pulling those strings, but he was the face of the system, an avatar of Americanism employed by commercial television networks. Besides, it’s funny. A kind of middle finger to conventionality.
But let’s get real. Who’s happier? An American in 1966? Or a Chinese person living under Mao’s Cultural Revolution? As an overall proposition I’d say it was no contest. It might have been more pointed to ask a citizen of Vietnam if THEY were happy at that time. Fahlström was apparently a Marxist, the pampered kind we breed in the industrial west, who enjoy all the benefits and freedoms of capitalism, while wistfully waxing poetic about the totalitarian governments they curiously show little interest in actually living under. And he came from Sweden, which at the time had that mixed socialist-capitalist system that for many progressives is basically the sweet spot one would think would be the sought-after Shangri-La. But Fahlström had also spent his first eleven years living in Brazil, a nation which had just experienced a U.S.-backed right wing coup. In other words, the message here as I interpret it has less to do with economics directly than than the colonialism that proceeds from it.
Anyway, I find it thought-provoking, stimulating, and entertaining. And well, you must admit, it’s the weirdest Bob Hope movie since The Road to Hong Kong.