Learning to Hate

Abstract

Abstract With the return of the thriller genre onto Soviet screens in the late 1930s, cinema took a direct role in cultivating feelings of paranoid hatred for enemies. A body of films staging conspiracy, sabotage, and dark plots deployed the image of a persecutory ‘other’ to draw the defensive contours of Soviet identity. The Stalinist thriller’s mechanisms of paranoid projection and ‘splitting’ manufactured a sense of narcissistic self-mastery by directing outwards the ego-hostile forces internal to the subject. These paranoid defence strategies depended, however, on a risky process of negotiation. To create an image of a unified and harmonious social order, the thriller vividly represented threats to Soviet borders and identity, exposing their precariousness and fragility. Focusing on the genre’s deployment of the figure of duplicitous enemy and the narrative strategy of suspense, this chapter shows how the thriller’s characteristic unsettling of familiar patterns of identification turned the enemy’s ‘otherness’ into an object of fascination as well as repulsion. The thriller’s capacity to collapse boundaries between ‘Soviet’ and ‘unSoviet’ was nowhere more apparent than in the body of ‘dark’ films that emerged during the post-war period. Gesturing towards film noir’s pervasive sense of enclosure, loneliness, and anxiety, post-war thrillers like Secret Mission (dir. Mikhail Romm, 1950) and A Scout’s Exploit (dir. Boris Barnet, 1947) no longer permitted the spectator to identify with a position of narcissistic self-mastery. These ‘dark’ post-war thrillers conjured up a universe in which systems of knowledge proved unstable and identity structures vulnerable to contamination.