Penelope Spheeris | I Don't Know / 1970

linda, jimmy, jennifer, and dana

by Douglas Messerli

 

Penelope Spheeris (screenwriter and director) I Don't Know / 1970

 

Lesbian Linda Spheeris, the director’s sister, has fallen in love with Jimmy Michael, who identifies mostly as a male, is attracted to men and has a penis, but also has breasts and suffers from menstrual cramps. Linda, who herself is somewhat sexually confused, as she puts it, feels that if she could have a relationship with Jimmy, a man, permitting them a more traditional relationship. It would solve both their problems, she argues, believing that they would be good for each other.

 

    And, in fact, the couple just walking, talking, bathing together, and hanging out do seem both to be full of life and are quite charismatic, particularly the self-deprecating Jimmy.

     At one point he actually talks about the possibility of going through with a complete sex change, but it’s also apparent that he enjoys sex with other men, describing himself as a screaming queen, implying that he identifies more as a transexual than being transgender. And the confusion causes real problems underlying his on-screen presence. At one point he admits to performing in a porno film as both a man and woman, the shock coming when he shows his “true nature.” But when Penelope asks what that true nature is he says he hasn’t figured that out yet.

     At several points in the past, he has attempted suicide. And the fact that Linda’s brother Andy highly dislikes him, describing him as a “flipped out faggot” doesn’t help the matter, particularly when Andy suggests that if he had Jimmy’s problems he’d surely take his own life.

     This is, after all, 1970, a time in which being transgender or simply somewhere in between was a lonely place in which to be. And it’s clear that for both Linda and Jimmy gender dysphoria is painful and disorienting. Soon, as Andy develops a quite violent hate for Jimmy, things between Linda and Jimmy become even more complicated as threats from both Andy and Jimmy spill over even into their shooting sessions.

     When asked if Jimmy would like to live with Linda like a married couple, he replies “Definitely not. …She just doesn’t have that touch. It’s quite a lot lacking.” Penelope asks him, “You want a man,” he answers, “Of course.” Yet he suggests they could live together if they had separate rooms,she having her girlfriends and he his boyfriends. A moment, when asked who’s his best friend, Jimmy quickly answers “Linda.”

     Linda even attempts to keep him close by creating a motorbike in her own garage, which when she starts up, he jumps on as the rider.

     Eventually, Linda laments that Jimmy has returned to New York to be with his boyfriend who doesn’t treat him very well and sometimes breaks his nose. Love is tough to find for people like her and Jimmy, she observes. But she has new girlfriends and might get a job dancing at a topless bar. “Sometimes I wonder who I am. I’m beginning to realize that I don’t know.”  

    This 20-minute film ends oddly, with a female, Dana Reuben, who we’ve just previously spotted in the mirror into which Linda is staring. Dana, dressed in odd apparel that looks half Arabian, half Romani, has a face that features a large handle-bar moustache. She tells of how she took Jimmy to a friend, an arts patron who became very sad. “She couldn’t understand why Jimmy was the way he was, or is. And I tried to explain to her that well, it’s Jimmy’s choice of life, I mean, he’s a freak, you know? He kind of digs being a freak. And of course he has that choice. He can always be a girl or a boy. But, Jimmy is a freak and he tends to lose his friends. …He doesn’t have any friends. There’s no one. No one at all but me. I’m his friend.” Dana smiles broadly into the camera. And we can only wonder whether Dana might not be a new manifestation, or at least different manifestation of Linda.

 

    In 1972, Dana appeared in a new Spheeris film, Hats off to Hollywood, which explored Jimmy, now known as Jennifer, and Dana as a bickering couple. And we begin to ask how much of this work is actual documentary and how much is fiction.

 

Los Angeles, July 5, 2024 | Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog.

Woody Allen | Annie Hall / 1977

needing the eggs

by Douglas Messerli

 

Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman (screenplay), Woody Allen (director) Annie Hall / 1977

 

Although Woody Allen had long played himself as a character in his stand-up comedian performances, Annie Hall was his first foray into a version of self-representation on screen that would continue throughout the rest of his directing career.

   In this film his self-based character—although Allen has long denied that the film was truly autobiographical—is named Alvy Singer. Alvy is a true “insider” New Yorker (born in Brooklyn who lived as a child under a Coney Island roller-coaster), who, yet, in his paranoia about being Jewish in a world of gentiles, feels as a permanent “outsider” in the world. Although one might easily perceive Annie Hall as a valentine to Manhattan, it is also portrayed as a raucously annoying world of imminent danger, wherein every query such as “Do you,” can be read as a racial baiting of the world “Jew.” People in movie lines pontificate on Bergman, Fellini, and Marshall McLuhan (the real man whom Alvy pulls from behind a nearby poster board to prove the loud smock behind him is mistaken in his views). And almost everyone he meets talks, endlessly talks. In short, it’s lot the family scenes that Allen portrays in Alvy’s childhood. Indeed, the movie was originally titled Anhedonia, from Greek word meaning the inability to experience joy.

      Yet Alvy, much like Allen, is often attracted to the “other,” something so very different from the world he has embraced. At the center of this film, which was to be devoted simply to the fragments of Alvy’s life, is Annie (perfectly personified by Diane Keaton, whose childhood name was Diane “Annie” Hall, and who had a romantic relationship with Allen), the polar opposite of Alvy. She is an insecure would-be singer, while he writes jokes and does stand-up comedian gigs; she is totally curious and committed to the new, while he is an opinionated pessimist fixated upon death—after all, as a child he has discovered that the universe is forever expanding, and human life is necessarily doomed.

 

    Most importantly, Annie and her family are near-Wasps whom Alvy imagines see him as a Hassid with Tallas and a tall Russian hat on his head.  The scene in which he dines with Annie’s family, replete with Annie’s Jew-hating “grammy,” her possibly suicidal brother Duane (Christopher Walken)—he confesses that he often has a desire to turn his car into the headlights of passing autos—and an over-inquisitive mother (Colleen Dewhurst), is certainly among one of the film’s best, reminding one a bit of scenes from Allen’s later Hannah and Her Sisters.

      Annie Hall, in its final version, centers upon Alvy’s attempt to comprehend why these two opposites have fallen out of love, but we discover almost immediately that, in fact, they were never truly compatible, he self-centered and determined to keep his space, she far more easy-going and emotionally responsive. Even their costumes, Annie dressed in casually chic male-female attire, he in standard shirt, kakis, and loafers. Is it any wonder that, by film’s end, Annie has drifted off to the antithesis of Alvy’s world, California? Perhaps the only thing these two do share is a fear of

multi-legged creatures, he of lobsters, she of spiders.

      Calling up the major events of their affair and his central character’s two previous marriages, Allen’s work is squarely in the romantic movie genre, lacking great experimentation. Yet he tricks his audience into believing that this work is someone adventurous by throwing in what later will would be described as postmodern tropes such as the scene described above with Marshall McLuhan, schoolroom children standing to announce in what professions they were later employed, direct and sudden questioning of passersby on the New York streets, split-screens portraying completely different realities, subtitles that express the real fears behind the characters’ everyday dialogue, cross-cuts that break the somewhat realist plotting, and, most importantly, the direct embracement of the audience-goers, which force us to feel that this movie is truly engaging us. Allen also employs the Robert Altman device of introducing real-life celebrities into his film, including McLuhan, Truman Capote, Paul Simon, and others.

      And then, the film has the major asset of Diane Keaton, who, if she isn’t truly Annie Hall, is, even today, completely comfortable in embracing that role. While Alvy/Allen is constantly whining, she, in the old-fashioned meaning of the world, is constantly gay, “La-de-da,” being her most common phrase. Clearly the sunshine she has brought into the mostly gray skies of Alvy’s beloved New York not only charms us but warms Allen’s diatribe against life with a kind a golden glow that he would return to in later films such as Hannah and Her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Midnight in Paris, and Café Society.

      And, in the end, it moderates Alvy’s incessant howling with a warmer view of life and love. As one of the women he queries in the street replies to his question about love: “It’s never something you do. That’s how people are. Love fades.”

      Or, as Alvy himself perceives by film’s end:

 

Alvy Singer: [narrating] After that it got pretty late, and we both had to go, but it was great seeing Annie again. I... I realized what a terrific person she was, and... and how much fun it was just knowing her; and I... I, I thought of that old joke, y'know, the, this... this guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, "Doc, uh, my brother's crazy; he thinks he's a chicken." And, uh, the doctor says, "Well, why don't you turn him in?" The guy says, "I would, but I need the eggs." Well, I guess that's pretty much now how I feel about relationships; y'know, they're totally irrational, and crazy, and absurd, and... but, uh, I guess we keep goin' through it because, uh, most of us... need the eggs.

 

     Yes, this film too reminds us of just how much Allen, throughout his career, has portrayed himself as a proliferate womanizer, and as a man who used others to get what he wanted, in most cases sexual satisfaction. But history is filled with such sad stories. And the Gods themselves, in nearly every mythology, suffered such desires. I know, given how much women suffered in such pillages, it’s now very difficult to forgive such actions. I do think men have to alter their ways forever. There’s something even slightly slimy about some of Allen’s films, particularly his next, Manhattan. But I think Allen and co-writer Marshall Brickman’s simple admiration for the Keaton character says a lot. If nothing else, this film, dominated by Keaton’s version of “Seems Like Old Times,” demonstrates that Allen, at heart, is a nostalgist, dedicated to a past that perhaps never truly existed, a world which might wash away his innumerable sins.

 

Los Angeles, January 30, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2018). 

Kon Ichikawa | Otōto (Her Brother) 1960

a kind of nun

by Douglas Messerli

 

Aya Koda and Yōko Mizuki (screenplay), Kon Ichikawa (director) Otōto (Her Brother) 1960

 

Most people in Gen’s situation—with a penurious father (Masayuki Mori) who spends most of his life separated from the other family members as he writes hidden away in his home office, a rheumatoid mother-in-law (Kinuyo Tanaka) who does little housekeeping, yet has plenty of time to gossip each day with her fellow religiously-inclined friend, and a younger brother,  Hekiro (Hiroshi Kawaguchi) who shoplifts before going on the racking up debts in the local billiard hall and riding a horse to its death—would have left this dysfunctional family at the very first opportunity. Instead, Gen (Keiko Kishi), a beautiful high-school student, is forced to return home each day to clean house and cook meals, and spends the rest of her little free time caring for her almost criminal brother, paying off his debts and attempting to parent him in the absence of any help from her father, who dotes on his son, and the ineffectually complaining mother. Throughout the film she is forced to travel from police station, to gambling halls, to a horse rental service, testifying to her brother’s best intentions while he mostly teases and mocks her devotion.

      Gen must even fend off the attentions of a parole officer who uses Hekiro’s bad-boy behavior as a way to attempt to seduce the young woman. The only man who shows her any real signs of love, a poor local factory workman, is scared off by Hekiro and his gang.

      In Her Brother the great Japanese director, Kon Ichikawa, is not so much interested in the “story” of this family’s life as he is in studying their dynamics, where, in the patriarchal system of the day, everything centers around the youngest boy’s well-being and his father’s solitude.

 

    Ichikawa’s greatest films have to do with large moral battles, and even his later domestic drama, The Makioka Sisters, is epic in the complexity of the sisters’ family life and their importance in the culture in which they live.

     Her Brother, however, is a far more tepid expression of family life, focusing, as it does, on Gen’s near-saintliness, and family healing after the young center of their attentions, Hekiro, slowly dies of tuberculosis. By the time of the boy’s death, Gen has seemingly lost her youthful beauty, having had to transform herself into the unappreciated third parent, willing even to share Hekiro’s dishware which might likely lead to her own infection with TB.

     Yes, Ichikawa’s beautifully filmed work, subtly expresses the difficulties of being a woman in this period of Japanese society, but Gen is hardly represented as a model of any rebellion against that world. And, finally, we can only suggest that in her meek obedience she has brought the tragedy of her life upon herself.

 

    Only in a few instances do we see that she has a spark of self-recognition that might carry her away from the smothering world in which she lives: a moment when she triumphantly hits the  billiard balls, blushes at the attentions of the young factory worker, or rails against Hekiro’s lecherous parole officer.

      Most of the time, however, like the last hours of Hekiro’s life in which she ties a ribbon between his arm and hers so that he might awaken her to “celebrate” for one last time, she willingly ties herself to his life. If we are saddened by this would-be juvenile delinquent’s death, we also celebrate it, while doubting that Gen will ever be able to discover a more fruitful way of living. As her religiously obsessed mother-in-law might have wished, she has already become a kind of nun.

      It is hard to imagine why this film was remade in 2010 by Yoji Yamada, even though it was seen as a celebration of Ichikawa himself.

 

Los Angeles, August 16, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2017).

        

 

 

Paul Preston | Now You Know / 2017

a father comes out to his son

by Douglas Messerli

 

Paul Preston (screenwriter and director) Now You Know / 2017 [12 minutes]

 

10-year-old Oliver (Jayden Louth) is getting the opportunity to spend the weekend with his rapper Dad (Jurrell Carter) during a new filming session. The boy asks his father if he can be in on the shoot, but his father promises him “next” time. Yet Oliver is puzzled by the fact that the cameraman Luke’s daughter Scarlet is performing in the musician’s song.

       Obviously, the divorce between Oliver’s mother and his father has been fairly recent, and he’s hasn’t been told any of the reasons. And it appears the precocious boy is a bit shy around the new people with whom he is expected to share his father. Luke’s daughter, Scarlet, moreover, seems to be slightly sulking and not at all that friendly.

     Given this film is only 12-minutes long, what Oliver rather quickly begins to perceive—and the viewer along with him—is that the relationship between his father and the cameraman is a bit more intense than he might have imagined. Rising up from a later afternoon nap, the boy peeks out the window to see his father at the dinner table kissing Luke.

      Later, he reports this to Scarlet, who does not at all seem surprised, although she’s never actually seen her father and Oliver’s kiss. The quick-thinking boy immediately confronts his father: “Dad, are you gay?” A question which those of my generation would surely not have known how to even ask of their fathers.

      That question results in an intense background argument between the two men, with the rapper making it quite clear that he’s not at all ready to explain the situation to his son. Luke scoops up his daughter and they leave in anger, clearly in disagreement with his lover’s inability to explain the situation to his son.

       The two, father and son, are left in the darkening trailer in almost a face-off, the father refusing to explain his consternation. On his hand computer the boy watches a scene from another video of the two men together who look very much in love and happy, and suddenly the entire situation becomes quite apparent. The child grabs the cellphone and runs from the trailer, calling up Luke and Scarlet before handing the phone back to his father.

      Obviously, he has forced his father to ask Luke and his daughter to return. Meanwhile, Oliver explains to the elder that he’s still his Dad and he continues to love him, what can only be described a reversal of the usual coming out situation. The two hug, just as Luke returns, a man who Oliver now accepts into his life, as Oliver’s father hugs his lover. Apparently both the kids are now in the video.

      British filmmaker’s Paul Preston short nicely hints at what is likely the positive shifts to LGBTQ acceptance between the younger and older generations. But it might have been more fascinating and complex as a short feature, in which we watch the boy come to the discover over a longer period of time, presenting his confusions, his fears, and misapprehensions before the sudden revelation. Children often perceive things quite quickly and are far more accepting to change, in many cases, than their parents. But the discovery of his father’s radical shift in sexuality in what appears to be a single day condensed into 12 minutes is simply too much to be believed. And this film leaves us wanting to know more. How long his Oliver’s father known he was gay? How did his wife discover it? How is she dealing with that revelation? And will this radical discovery affect the relationship between mother and son?

 

Los Angeles, July 4, 2024 | reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog.

Sidney M. Goldin and Ivan Abramson | Ost und West (East and West) (aka Good Luck) / 1923

the boxer becomes a married lady

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sidney M. Goldin and Eugen Preiß (screenplay), Sidney M. Goldin and Ivan Abramson (directors) Ost und West (East and West) (aka Good Luck) / 1923

 

This silent Austrian classic which appeared originally in Yiddish and German, according to The Women’s Jewish Center is the oldest surviving Yiddish film.

     The work centers around the return of Morris Brownstein (Sidney M. Goldin), known in the New World as Brown, and his daughter Mollie (Molly Picon) from their home in the US to the father’s native Galicia* to attend a family wedding.

     For most of the film, the young American female Mollie behaves like a roughhousing tomboy, causing havoc among the Galician family and the local yeshiva boys equally. On the holy Day of Atonement, where the family fasts while spending the entire day in the synagogue, Mollie, who has grown terribly hungry, sneaks out of the services, returns home, and eats almost the entire chicken and other ingredients that her uncle’s cook as pre-prepared for the evening’s breaking of the fast. Having left the others nothing to eat, she is severely spanked by her indulgent father.

     But before she’s even recovered from those pains in the ass, she is ready to box in the ears of the servants who reported her as the culprit. Mollie is a big fan of boxing and has brought along her own gloves.

      At an early pre-wedding celebration, the rabbi arrives with several yeshiva boys. Her father begs Mollie, as she proceeds into the room where the boys have gathered, don’t play rough, “these are nice boys” he pleads, knowing that she could easily out wrestle and corrupt the innocent students. But before any of the adults know what’s happened, Mollie has jumped upon a table top to teach the yeshiva boys, the cook, and the cook’s boyfriend how to dance Western style. Again she is spanked by a father who has evidently no success in controlling his spoiled American daughter.

      In another incident, Mollie is nowhere to be found, and the adults look everywhere in an attempt to stop whatever antics she may be up to. She is discovered dressed as a yeshiva boy, singing and drinking as one of their kind. 

      What no one realizes, meanwhile, is that the jeshiva bucher boy, Jacob (Jacob Kalich), a rabbinic student who lives in the house and, as a “freeloader” is maltreated by the cook and butler, has fallen in love with wild American Mollie.

 

      When Mollie sees the bride-to-be dressed in a trial run in her wedding dress, she begs to borrow the veil, pretending to be a bride herself. Everyone goes along with the idea, quickly creating a huppah and scooping up Jacob from the kitchen to participate in the mock wedding ceremony with Mollie as the imaginary bride. They go through the basic elements of the ceremony, ending with a ring which the bride-to-be loans her, the cook, the butler, and others egging Jacob on to put the ring on her finger. The yeshiva boys, however, try to warn him, but eventually after holding back for several moments, he drops the ring upon her finger.

      When the rabbi and adults finally appear, they are horrified by the fake ceremony, not just because of the mockery of a holy rite, but because by Jewish law once a man puts a ring on the finger of a young woman he is legally married to her.

     At this very moment, the film turns from a comic work centered upon the attempts of a wild Westerner to defy the fustian traditions and values of the East, to a far more serious exploration of the consequences of that attitude.

       Mollie and her father are horrified by the realization that she is now married to a traditional student of the Torah. The wild Western woman cannot imagine her life as a traditional Jewish bride. The rabbi insists that Jacob renounce his marriage so that they can divorce. But strangely, without giving his reasons, he defies the rabbi.

       Because he has gone against the authorities, Jacob is ousted from his school and sent away from the Galician Brownstein household. Living for a while with a loving, poverty-stricken couple, Jacob eventually takes up the offer of his wealthy Viennese uncle to come live with him, announcing to Mollie and her father that, if after five years she still does not wish to live with him, he will grant her a divorce.

       The Browns, Mollie and her father, are forced accordingly to travel throughout Europe, the father hoping to keep his daughter’s mind from the dreadful reality that she may be facing. After a continental tour, in which Brown is absent from his business responsibilities, they arrive in Vienna.

       Jacob, meanwhile, entering the city as an outsider himself, and being mocked for his traditional Talmudist garb, gradually becomes assimilated, like his uncle, into Viennese society just as had so very many thousands of others during the very same years. But Jacob is, after all, a truly brilliant young man and eventually becomes a noted writer under the name of Ben Ali.

      Hearing that his wife and her father are now in Vienna, he arranges that his uncle invite them to his reading at the Oriental Society, which at the same event awards Ben Ali an honorary membership.

     Taken with the now quite handsome man whom she vaguely recognizes as being familiar, Mollie quickly becomes one of his fans. And meeting him for dinner at his uncle’s house and other activities, she begins to fall in love with Ben Ali.

    The five years are now about to pass, the uncle and his wife inviting the Browns to a special breakfast. Suddenly, Jacob appears in his Talmudic garb saying that he will gladly divorce Mollie is she desires. 

     She is about to claim that right and sign the contract, but the boy suddenly pulls off his costume revealing that he is now Ben Ali, she finally coming to the realization that she is already married to the man who she truly loves.

       The first long portion of this film clearly reveals Picon’s character as a dangerous outsider, perhaps even a young woman with more masculine behavior than female traits. And in some respects, this work is even more rowdy and truly sexually transgressive than her later Yiddle with a Fiddle (1936), where she is dressed for most of the film in male drag. Here she appears in drag only for a few moments, but her behavior throughout serves basically as a mockery of the paternal and male-centered Yiddish and Jewish traditions, something almost unthinkable in 1923. It is only when she is accidentally married and comes to be controlled by circumstances, turning from a tomboy in a mature woman that redeems her behavior and likely permitted her audiences to perceive her previous behavior as simply an example of childlike Western mischief. 

      But in a sense, both Mollie in Galicia and Jacob in Vienna share a deep kinship in being outsiders in worlds they inherently disrespect. In both instances, Picon’s and Kalich’s characters come to terms with those new worlds in which they have relocated by assimilating and learning to respect values and individuals different from their own selves.

     The film, accordingly, becomes almost a primer for both the new and old worlds to find a way to marry and embrace both the laws and traditions of the past and the rapidly changing and ultimately totally altering world of the present. Like the works of Sholem Aleichem such as Tevye and His Daughters (טבֿיה דער מילכיקער, the source of Fiddler of the Roof) which appeared in 1894, one might argue that Ost und West served an important educational role for Jewish assimilation while the later Yiddle and His Fiddle worked more as a nostalgic view of what was already nearly lost and would fully disappear in only a few years.

 

*Considered the poorest region of the former Austria-Hungarian empire, Galicia was located between Poland and Hungary, with its major city being Lviv; it is now part of both Ukraine and Poland.

 

Los Angeles, October 12, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2023).

 

George Clooney | Good Night, and Good Luck / 2005

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)