[In the following review, See offers a positive assessment of Hollywood.]

Someone has said that when you put the events leading up to World War I into a computer they do not “compute” into a war: The situation was too farfetched; the mindset, too irrational. In Hollywood, the newest volume in Gore Vidal’s American chronicle, the author attempts to place this debacle within its “American” context, and also—as a kind of glorified subplot—to record the shifting and changing of power within the United States from Washington, D.C., to Hollywood.

The novel begins on the eve of American entry into the Great War. Woodrow Wilson, the president who bills himself as “too proud to fight,” who ran for re-election as the man who “kept us out of war,” is caught, in 1917, in a scenario of thoughtless frivolity, life on an ordinary plane, where the uppermost thought in Washington is: Who’s going to run for president in 1920, and who’s going to win?

In a masterly blend of thought patterns, Vidal mixes Henry Adams and his theory of runaway “dynamo” energy, Teddy Roosevelt’s crackbrained war mania and the overriding flaw of Wilson himself—his sense as a Presbyterian of being morally right, no matter the cost, coupled with his sense, as a former university professor, of being right, on an earthly level, no matter the cost…

Crazy, mindless energy, a love of war for its own sake and that American mania about being right: Put them all together, they spell barbarism, stupidity and the end of civilization as we knew it. The finest scene in this novel shows Wilson declaring war to a room full of dignitaries drunk, asleep or dressed to go out for dinner. Wilson coins the phrase, “The world must be made safe for democracy,” and from then on, during this narrative, characters wearily ponder “democracy’s” meaning: A country with far too many millionaires, where women—at least those without wealth—are denied everything. Where, during the war, the government can charge any journalist or filmmaker with espionage. A “democracy” where, for heaven’s sake, you can’t get a drink unless you sneak it out of a teacup. A world where young men, by means of “selective service,” are used as cannon fodder in a totally meaningless war.

But the second theme, or subplot, concerns a transfer of power far more subtle. Who really rules America? Up until 1917 (Vidal would have us believe), elected officials and print journalists in Washington made up history; told the mob what to think. But with the advent of movies in America, the seat of power shifted. Again, this change is barely perceived at first. William Randolph Hearst sees it as “the best fun there is, making a movie.” The heroine here, Caroline Sanford, co-publisher of the Washington Tribune (who develops a second career as a silent film star) thinks of the movies as “the most exciting of all the games their country had yet devised.” Only an eighth-rate person, self-appointed propagandist for this great country of ours, opines that through motion pictures, “we can control world opinion. Hollywood is the key to just about everything.”

This transfer of power is achieved, in fictional terms, by focusing on two media giants, Caroline Sanford and her half-brother Blaise, both of the Tribune. Caroline, 40, is the smarter of the two. Widowed, independent, wealthy, she has made the paper what it is. Blaise is always a half-step behind her. The novel opens with William Randolph Hearst asking Blaise to join him in a movie-making venture. Blaise refuses. But Caroline, restless, ambitious and looking for a new life, visits Hearst, works in a movie, realizes that the camera loves her and suddenly embarks on a new life as a film star, Emma Traxler. She finds a new lover, begins to see the whole world from a new perspective.

In a sense, no one, not even the reader, is meant to notice this sea-change effected by motion pictures. The Woodrow Wilson years, the carnage of World War I, the president’s longing to form a League of Nations, his stroke, the subsequent nomination and election of Warren Harding, are attended to in excruciating detail. We see passing events through the eyes of Blaise, Caroline, Sen. Burden Day and also through those of Jess Smith, a timid pol far, far down President Harding’s ladder—a nice man whom no one remembers at dinner parties, who, when he gets rich from the Harding administration, buys a vulgar brown suit.

“My, how the money rolls in” is the song that plays over and over in Jess’s head, but his own head is set to roll in the scandals and corruption around the Harding administration. Meanwhile, out on “the Coast,” director William Desmond Taylor is murdered. Coming on the heels of the Fatty Arbuckle disgrace, this could mean the end of Hollywood as an American influence. Taylor, though probably killed by a male lover, is made to appear as a ladies’ man. Cocaine-sniffing Mabel Normand and teenaged Mary Miles Minter are made to take the rap, just as blood flows in the Harding administration, in two gigantic cover-ups.

Vidal delights in parallels: After World War I, a jittery American mob invented a Red Menace and then a Black List. When all else failed, the Japanese Yellow Peril was conjured up as bogey man. After the First War the country devoured cocaine. Movie stars (then as now) were, mostly skinny dwarves with enormous heads. (Not fond, Mr. Vidal, of Nancy Reagan).

Plus ça change, plus ć est la même chose: Corruption will always be covered up, however ineptly. Politicians, at the top level, are in the game for power, and, at the next level, for bucks. A few “aristocratic” families still rule. If this is a “democracy,” we are all Miss America. The only thing that has changed, in the '20s in particular and this century in general, is the increasing hegemony of a new empire—Hollywood. So says Gore Vidal, who sometimes neglects his characters, but gives his ideas, his theories, full reign.