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Popular Culture Review
good, uninformed people who needed protection, and who could be easily
shaped by government-directed media.
Frances Stonor Saunders’s book, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the
Cultural Cold War, describes in detail the entertainment industry’s connections
to the U.S. government. Saunders describes the use of psychological warfare by
the CIA and others to promote, through various artistic mediums, American
interests at home and in Europe (Saunders). To ensure their political and
economic dominance, American policymakers needed the Lilies of Europe and
America to embrace the messages conveyed through their media.
Contemporary responses to Lili confirm the story’s connection to the
postwar world. Cay McGowan from Brooklyn, New York, wrote these astute
comments in a letter to the editor of the New York Times:
. . . [Lili] might almost be an allegorical treatment of post-war
France’s sometimes poignant, sometimes pleasant relationship
with other nations. Casting naive, wishful Lili as a symbol of
the world, the unreal carnival atmosphere might represent
escapism, neutralism. The French themselves, in the
handsome heroics of “Marc the Magician,” might inspire
memories of France’s romantic and glamorous past, when
magic feats of statecraft, art, (and) finance were the rule. The
complex “Paul the Puppeteer” might be the role France seems
to play to outsiders—sometimes charming, sometimes caustic
and crippled with suffering and sorrow from war’s wake
(McGowan).
This astonishingly insightful commentary from a consumer, who clearly
remembered World War II, and France’s role in it, make it easy to extend the
comparisons, with a few modifications, to America’s Cold War policies.
Even Leslie Caron saw a connection between her life and that of the orphan,
Lili. Caron, who grew up in France during World War II, saw the horrors of
Nazi brutality as she grew and studied ballet. She said in an interview with
Turner Classic Movies host, Robert Osborne, that Lili “. . . represented, a little
bit, the inner self that I was then. I could put in that character everything I had
lived through in the war, and the need for love and the desperate loneliness of
this little half-wit felt very close to me”(Caron, qted. in Kisselgoff, 4 ). Caron’s
personal stake in the character, Lili, made the character real and very believable.
Lili, indeed, represented Europe, or postwar France. She was traumatized,
vulnerable, and unable to survive on her own. Her immediate needs were for
food and shelter. Beyond that, she needed a way to sustain herself. She also
needed protection from the dangerous entities surrounding her. Early in the film,
a gruff shopkeeper tried to rape her and put her to work in his shop. Perhaps he
represented Great Britain—the great “nation of shopkeepers.”