applause, applause
by Douglas Messerli
George Clooney and Grant Heslov (screenwriters),
George Clooney (director), Good Night,
and Good Luck / 2005
Good Night, and Good Luck,
George Clooney’s and Grant Heslov’s movie about Edward R. Murrow, is the kind
of film that audiences always applaud. My companion, Howard, attended the movie
twice before I took in a showing on a weekday afternoon, and at each
performance, we concurred, the audience so responded.
Certainly the focus of this film—Edward R. Murrow’s head-on attack of then-Senator Joseph McCarthy and the Senate Committee for UnAmerican Activities, an act of great bravery on Murrow’s and CBS’s part—is worthy of audience appreciation. Murrow’s reporting, his incisive appeal to his viewers that Americans ought to be able to encounter ideas that threatened their system without censorship or arrest, and his outright disdain for McCarthy’s methods of innuendo and lies is well documented and in this film is represented through a noir-like dramatization of real events interspersed with actual television and film footage of the period. The world McCarthy and his committee had created is brilliantly presented by Clooney and cinematographer Robert Elswit in cinematic terms through extensive use of rack-focus camera shots and a blurring of the background in many scenes, along with jumpy, held-hand camera effects that recreate the sense of early television and suggest the psychological condition of people involved in a time when it was sometimes difficult to clearly see the broader picture of world politics and where even the tiniest of questionable political behavior might jeopardize one’s career. W. H. Auden and others described the period as “The Age of Anxiety”; certainly it was a time when one nervous to do anything out of the ordinary—all of which Clooney and Heslov reiterate through several dramatic episodes, particularly in scenes revealing the hidden marriage of Joe and Shirley Wershba (played by Robert Downey, Jr. and Patricia Clarkson) [studio executives did not permit employees to be married] and the continual need for self-evaluation of personal sympathies or even relationships with those who might have had Communist connections [CBS news announcer Don Hollenbeck (played by Ray Wise) is attacked by newspaper columnists for having “pinko” associations, a slur which brings on his suicide; and, when Murrow (brilliantly played by David Strathairn) and Fred Friendly (played by Clooney himself) demand their staff tell them of any possible communist connections, one staff member suggests he should leave the team for having previously been married to a woman who had attended Communist Party meetings before he met her]. In short, it was a time of deep paranoia that affected everyone.
On that fateful night in 1954, Murrow’s “See It Now” broadcast crowned a
series of events that would lead to the downfall of McCarthy and his years of
destructive effects on the American psyche, effects that still have consequence
in today’s battles between the political left and far right. But if Murrow won
the proverbial battle, he lost the “war,” so to speak. A short year after that
brave journalistic act (the movie unfortunately portrays it coming almost
immediately after the McCarthy broadcast) CBS and its head William Paley
(played here by Frank Langella) cancelled this regular news program, moving its
diminished series of five shows to Sunday nights. And it is this fact that, it
seems to me, is really the issue of this motion picture. Clooney and Heslov
document the McCarthy attack effectively, but they have another, perhaps more
far-reaching theme to present: the general decline of American journalism, and
the rise of MTV-entertainment television and newspaper coverage. The movie
begins and ends a few years after Murrow’s famed show with a lecture he made to
the American press about the ever-increasing lack of serious news coverage.
Accordingly, Clooney’s film, although presented as a kind of realist
drama, is more than that. It is a film of political commentary that continues
to have important significance today. It is unfortunate that the film only
suggests these issues—albeit quite forcibly. When one thinks about the
declining coverage of serious events on US television, where local news
stations now spend most of their time—at least in my city of Los Angeles—on car
chases and disasters; when one perceives that even the half-hour of national
news coverage reveals little about major international events; when one
recognizes that journalists today often do not seem interested in pressing for
the truth behind political statements and presidential edicts that are often
promoted by implanted journalists, or that when they do question the issues,
like Judith Miller, they connive and fabricate the truth; when one understands
that most book sections across the country have been severely limited or
suspended, or that as with the New York
Times Book Review and The Los Angeles
Times Book Review the book review editors have chosen, when it comes to
literature, to refocus their attentions on more popular genres and best-selling
publications; when one puts all of this and more into the context of Murrow’s
impassioned plea for more serious and complex reporting, one is perhaps made
“nervous” again.
Do we as a populace know now when we’re being lied to? Do we even
recognize today that our news is incomplete—or worse—simply nonexistent? I am
always depressed when I return home to my family in Iowa, where in the thin
pages of the Cedar Rapids Gazette—just
as in most smaller cities—the entire news coverage is presented in brief
Associated Press notices? Yet my mother is convinced that she knows everything
that’s happening of importance in the world; “I keep up with the news,” she
proudly says.
Finally, it comes down to a societal and institutional disdain for
Americans themselves, a feeling by a few who believe they hold knowledge (and
often have no better grasp of it than anyone else) that the general populace
cannot and will not assimilate complex information. A few years ago I had lunch
with then-editor of the Los Angeles Times
Book Review Sonja Bolle. When asked what books I was soon to publish on my
Sun & Moon Press label, I replied that we had just published a translation
by the French Oulipo writer, Raymond Queneau. “O, I love Queneau,” she gushed,
much to my surprise. “He’s a wonderful writer. But, of course, we couldn’t
possibly do a review of his work!” “Why not?” I naively responded. “Oh, our
readers couldn’t understand a review about his
literature. You know, most newspaper readers read at the sixth grade level.”
I was appalled, not so much by the journalistic cliché we have all heard
many times, but by the absolute misunderstanding, it seemed to me then and does
yet today, of who her audience was. “Do you think,” I asked, “that it is the
least literate part of your audience who reads the book section? Why even have
a book section if that’s the case?” Inwardly I continued my argument: “We live
in a very diverse time where readers seek out many different subjects and
issues. And furthermore, I don’t believe that any reader of a newspaper is a
complete idiot. Don’t you owe readers something more than your disdain?” I
would have been talking to the wall.
Accordingly, I wonder, when those many audiences applaud Clooney’s
excellent film, just what it is that they are applauding: Murrow’s bravery for
attacking a bigot? Murrow’s advocacy of a more serious journalism? Clooney’s
presentation of these issues? Or perhaps it is for all these reasons and more.
I would like to think that in applauding Good
Night, and Good Luck these audiences are simply asking to be treated as Murrow
treated his, as intelligent adults.
Los Angeles, October 30, 2005
Reprinted from The
Green Integer Review, No. 1 (January-February 2006)
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