Making the Blacklist White: The Hollywood Red Scare in Popular Memory.

This essay analyzes the three major feature films that have retold the story of the entertainment industry blacklist—The Front (1976),Guilty by Suspicion (1991), and The Majestic (2001)—to make an argument about the way that “consensus” ideology has circumscribed the memory of the blacklist. In gradually increasing degrees, the three films are representative of, and complicit in, the erasure of the radical, antifascist, multiracial causes of the blacklistees from their stories. Such recognition suggests the need to rethink contemporary understandings of how collective memory is produced in popular culture. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]