Question: How has hard-core communist artist Frida Kahlo been neutralised and transformed into an almost cuddly commercialised icon perfect for mugs and t-shirts?
The 2024 Amazon documentary Frida reignited conversations about how mainstream platforms and cultural industries often give the radical communist aspects of Kahlo’s life and politics an, erm, radical make-over.
The documentary, directed by Carla Gutierrez, is part of a trend seen on streaming platforms such as Jeff Bezos’s Amazon Prime, where 'bums on seats' and, more importantly 'fingers on phones' drives the production of content so that it is easily consumable and, as an extension, pretty superficial.
The Current Affairs outlet highlights how this 'slop', as online commentators have named it, caters to casual viewing habits - where phones are scrolled while watching - rather than offering rigorous explorations of complex subjects. Because how are you going to be simultaneously buying tennis socks with bobbles at the back on Amazon if you have to concentrate on a documentary, right?
The critique uses the example of how Netflix apparently instructs its writers to have characters state explicitly what they are doing, ensuring that background viewers can follow the action while shopping for moisturiser. While the Frida documentary is considered less egregious than some of Amazon’s other productions, it still stops short of taxing viewers on the subject of the political convictions that defined Kahlo.
Underlying this creative dilution could be Amazon owner Jeff Bezos’s documented stance against left-wing politics within his media enterprises. Bezos’s recent directives to the Washington Post, which is part of his empire, dictate that opinion writers endorse 'free markets' and 'personal liberties' (unless those personal liberties extend to left-wing politics, presumably), illustrating forms of censorship that shape which narratives are acceptable and which are very definitely not. Though there is no explicit evidence that Bezos or his executives interfered with Frida’s content, the economic and cultural ecosystem they govern discourages anything too radical, resulting in content that often erases the communist elements of historical figures like Kahlo.
This sanitisation is not constrained to film. It extends deeply into the publishing world, especially children’s literature. Books aimed at young readers, such as Counting With Frida and My Little Golden Book About Frida Kahlo, offer charming, apolitical representations of Kahlo’s life. Even the more scholarly Who Was Frida Kahlo?, aimed at middle school readers, conspicuously removes anything to do with Kahlo’s communist affiliations despite freely discussing other leftist figures such as Fidel Castro and Che Guevara within the same series.
Even in adult literature, Khalo has been de-redded. Arianna Davis’s 2020 What Would Frida Do? A Guide to Living Boldly allocates minimal space to Kahlo’s Marxist-Leninist politics, burying the discussion in a chapter on identity and focusing instead on themes more palatable to mainstream audiences, such as love and personal empowerment. Davis’s interpretation transforms Kahlo’s revolutionary outspokenness into an individualistic message of 'being loud and proud' in order to make Kahlo’s radicalism less threatening and more commercially viable.
The sanitisation of leftist legacies is a widespread phenomenon, not exclusive to Kahlo. Figures such as gay writer James Baldwin and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. are often remembered more for their inspirational qualities than their radical political stances, turning them into icons, completely de-fanged of their revolutionary stances.
Frida Kahlo’s communist beliefs were not marginal to her identity but integral and inseparable. From a young age, Kahlo was radicalised by her experiences during the Mexican Revolution and her opposition to her mother’s conservative Catholicism. At Mexico City’s National Preparatory School, she joined the Cachuchas, a radical student group that championed socialist ideals and revolutionary literature, opposing conservative educators. Throughout her life, she was intellectually engaged with the works of the greatest hits of left-wing politics: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao Tse-tung, proudly describing herself as a follower of 'the pillars of the new Communist world'.
Moreover, Kahlo’s politics were deeply entwined with her lived experience of chronic pain and disability, made worse by substandard medical care following a serious bus accident. Her 1954 painting Marxism Will Give Health to the Sick explicitly shows her faith in socialism as a remedy not only for social ills but for personal suffering. The painting depicts Karl Marx’s head looming large, strangling a vulture symbolising American capitalism, while Kahlo casts aside her crutches, embodying hope for a healthy, equitable future. Can't really see Jeff Bezos going for that. Let's focus more on the mono-brow and the bright colours.
Source: Noah Wire Services