Good night and good company
Last night we previewed "Good Night, and Good Luck," the new George Clooney film about Edward R. Murrow's "See It Now" encounter with Joseph McCarthy, at a screening we shared with premium subscribers to Salon at the Loew's Orpheum on the upper east side of Manhattan. Thanks to Fonda Berosini of Warner Brothers Online for her efforts in making the arrangements for us, and to Kerry Lauerman of Salon for his hospitality at the event.
Our incredibly warm and gracious readers who attended the screening braved the difficult traffic conditions created by the security alert that had been announced late in the afternoon. Many have written messages this morning expressing gratitude. All I can say is that the feeling is mutual.
I had the great good fortune of watching the film seated next to Seth Lipsky, editor of the New York Sun. Seth is one of my journalistic heroes. As founding editor of the English-language weekly version of the Forward, he showed how the American Jewish community and the issues of concern to it could and should be covered. As founding editor of the Sun, for the past three years he has led the daily newspaper that sets the example of enterprising journalism and outstanding cultural coverage for the New York Times, in the event that the Times ever seeks to mend its ways. Seth has kindly emailed us James Bowman's excellent review of the film from this morning's Sun, "Clooney's misguided search for 'the truth'" (subscription required). Bowman writes:
Why I should have expected anything other than an exercise in media triumphalism from “Good Night, and Good Luck,” I don’t know, but I did. Silly me. If I had seen the advertising tagline before I saw the movie, I’d have known: “In A Nation Terrorized By Its Own Government, One Man Dared To Tell The Truth.”The Power Line readers at the screening expressed their agreement with Bowman's evaluation of the film by hooting their derision as the credits rolled. The film, shot in black and white, takes a black-and-white view of the subject matter. It replays straight, without context, for example, Joseph Welch's legendary takedown of McCarthy at the Army-McCarthy hearings.And it’s not only in the tagline. The film’s hero, Edward R. Murrow (David Strathairn), a once-famous CBS newsman, explains his broadcast attack on Senator Joseph McCarthy in March 1954 by saying he’s “going to go after him because the terror is right here in this room.”
Yeah, right. The real Murrow made his name reporting to Americans on the Blitz in London. It’s a little hard to believe that he didn’t have a better idea than this of what “terror” meant.
But the film’s director, George Clooney, and his co-writer, Grant Heslov, have completely bought into the official Hollywood version of the McCarthy era. It’s hardly surprising, but it’s quite false. Not by the wildest caprice of imagination was “a nation terrorized” by McCarthy. A few screenwriters, actors, and directors with a strong sense of their own entitlement to keep on writing, acting, and directing were denied that opportunity. Some diplomats, military men, and other government officials also lost their jobs. Some were not hired.
Most of those who were seriously affected had been and in some cases still were communists or communist sympathizers — which in those days meant agents or would-be agents of Josef Stalin or his heirs, foreign dictators whose massive military might was geared for war against America, whose proxies were or had recently been killing American soldiers in Korea and who were responsible for what at the time were the greatest mass murders in history.
In that context, to talk of the junior senator from Wisconsin as “terrorizing” anybody is a form of hysteria. There are plenty of reasons to regret McCarthy’s career, but to regard him as a terrorist amounts to a willful refusal to understand “The Truth” that the film and the media culture it represents here characteristically claim as their own property.
Murrow and his producer at the network, Fred Friendly (Mr. Clooney), are presented as a sort of Woodward and Bernstein avant la lettre. Because they are so perfect — always right, as Mc-Carthy is always wrong — Mr. Clooney must have seen the need to qualify his admiration in some way,lest his film become mere hagiography. This he does, or rather tries to do, by stressing its period feel.
Not only is it in black and white, so that it will blend in easily with the kinescopes of the period that he uses with some frequency (and exclusively to represent McCarthy), but he portrays people as being of their times in ways calculated to make them stand out to us. They are constantly smoking and drinking, for example, and their attitudes toward women in the workplace — here represented mainly by Patricia Clarkson as producer Shirley Wershba — are gratifyingly Neanderthal.
Scene: a Manhattan bar in the small hours. Murrow and Friendly and the whole CBS staff are knocking them back after Murrow’s famous broadcast attack on McCarthy, waiting to see what the papers will say about it. The air is thick with smoke and male camaraderie. “Shirley, hon,” Murrow says to the only woman present, “will you just go across the street and get the early editions ?”
In another scene we see Murrow interviewing Liberace and asking him if there is any immediate prospect of his marrying and settling down. It is perhaps not quite clear whether we are meant to laugh at Murrow’s naïveté or at the hypocrisies of the time, which made it necessary to keep up the pretense that everybody in the public eye was heterosexual.
There is also the strange subplot about the discovery of the secret marriage — because CBS had a policy prohibiting its employees from marrying each other — of Shirley and her husband Joe (Robert Downey Jr.). What, I wonder, is the point of this? That CBS had issued such a puritanical edict on account of McCarthy?
All these things are not really humanizing details. Even when we see an actual commercial for Kent cigarettes that stresses that the manufacturer has chosen Murrow’s show for its advertising because the people who watch it are more intelligent than the average, it is not really a fault of Murrow’s so much as a way of being patronizing toward his period.
But the movie itself is evidence that we have no right to patronize. For the questions that anyone without Hollywood’s and the media’s vested interests in self-mythologizing would want to have answered are these: Were there, in fact, any communists in Hollywood, the press, or the government, and were they a real danger to the republic?
These questions the movie never thinks it worth its while to ask,let alone answer, save in one brief scene where Shirley and Joe are in bed and one of them asks: “What if we’re wrong? Can we be sure that we’re not going to look back and see that we were protecting the wrong side?”
Happily for them, they decide that they can be sure.
One line of Murrow’s attack on Mc-Carthy stands out for a Truth that is more, one hopes, than mere advertising hype. It is that “mature Americans can engage in the clash of ideas without being contaminated.”
That may have been true in the 1950s. But a movie like this one, which feels it necessary to protect us from any genuine controversy, suggests that it is so no longer.
The same footage climaxed Emile de Antonio's equally propagandistic documentary "Point of Order" 40 years ago. It's stretching the point only a bit to say that viewers unfamiliar with the subject will leave knowing a little less than when they arrived.
PAUL adds: Many years ago, PBS aired some of Murrow's work. As I recall, it consisted mostly of interviews with celebrities and politicians. The one I remember best is his piece with Senator John Kennedy, in which Jackie made a cameo. Murrow struck me as basically a hack, and certainly a sexist. It sounds like the movie at least captured the sexism.
JOHN adds: I enjoyed the film for its excellent jazz music, its lovely black and white aesthetic, and its portrayal of 50s vices. (At one point I wondered whether the audience was supposed to be aware of a certain parallel between Murrow's smoking himself to death and McCarthy's drinking himself to death.) And to its credit, the film does briefly acknowedge the existence of actual Communists in the federal government, specifically Alger Hiss. On the whole, though, the movie's perspective was too cartoonish to be very informative, or to generate much sense of conflict.
One of the things I can't figure out is how the McCarthy story is supposed to have anything to do with today's issues. George Clooney clearly thinks that it does, and there are a couple of portentous moments in the film that indicate that we are supposed to draw some kind of a parallel. But what is it? The closest potential parallel would be if there were a "witch hunt" for suspected Islamic terror supporters going on. For better or worse, however, there isn't. Maybe the parallel is supposed to relate to the abuse of Congressional committees. But who has been unfairly hauled in front of a committee in recent years? The closest "witch hunt" analogies I can think of are Ronnie Earle's persecution of Tom DeLay and other Republicans, and the special prosecutor's hauling of Karl Rove, Scooter Libby and many others before a grand jury to investigate the Plame pseudo-story.
But somehow I doubt those are the parallels Clooney had in mind.
