Politics & Power Quote by Patricia Highsmith

Highsmith’s sentence lands like a casual aside, which is exactly the point: it weaponizes offhandness. The phrasing is clipped, colloquial, and dismissive, a little spurt of irritation that reveals how quickly aesthetic judgment can become a proxy for ideology and status. “Some fellow” shrinks a person into a nuisance; “from the Third World” turns geopolitics into a sneer, a Cold War shorthand that collapses nations into a single, condescending category. Then comes the real tell: the fear isn’t just that the film is “Communist,” but that someone is “hammering for prizes” for it, insisting the cultural gatekeepers recognize it.

The line stages a familiar mid-century anxiety about art institutions: that awards aren’t rewarding craft, they’re rewarding fashionable politics. Highsmith performs a kind of protective cynicism, defending taste as if it’s being strong-armed by moral posturing. “Which was rotten” is the bluntest possible verdict, a refusal to argue on the film’s terms; it doesn’t merely fail, it’s spoiled.

Context matters because Highsmith is a writer of cool psychological menace, not a public moralist. Her work often dissects obsession and projection; here, the projection is hers. The “Communist film” becomes a screen for resentment about influence, belonging, and who gets to claim authority in culture. It’s not just anti-Communist; it’s anti-claim, anti-plea, anti-anyone arriving at the party and asking to be taken seriously.