A new theater was opening in the south suburbs, one of these premium joints with dinner and drink service, and the owners had the good taste to host the public premiere with a screening of Jaws. In attendance for signing and Q&A was a stormy Richard Dreyfuss, who upon emerging from his holding area to greet the line of fans threw his cap to the ground, glared with furious indignation and shouted a few unintelligible remarks. The fans clapped appreciatively. To see the Orca on the big screen was a thrill, although I felt the busily dining audience was paying rather too little attention to the movie. Afterwards was Q&A as promised and the irascible Hooper took the stage. We sated customers could not have expected the tongue lashing we were about to receive. Dreyfuss had schlepped first class all the way from Tinseltown with an axe to grind and we were to learn from this vituperative ham that we, the American people who'd come to see him fight a shark, were failing to teach our children the value of our civil liberties and the fundamentals of democracy. Apparently our great republic is crumbling because civics has vanished from American schools and our feckless indifference made it so. This went on for some time. Finally the mic was passed to a member of the indicted audience, hand raised. "Do you have any funny stories about working with that shark?"
He obediently responded with a few anecdotes and left. Feathers had been ruffled. I don't know how they run the public schools in Los Angeles County, but I sure as shit had to pass the Illinois and US Constitution tests in seventh and twelfth grade, and the Northwest Suburban Council of the BSA awarded my brothers and me three citizenship merit badges apiece, so the next left coast crusader to make a pit stop in a flyover state should please be aware that the Midwest ain't the San Fernando Valley.
Lucky for us Hollywood has over the years provided the occasional civics lesson, and when not overly condescending we are happy to embrace the message. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is probably the first to come to mind, but the Jimmy Stewart role that actually moves me is in John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, one of several essential Ford films to which I was introduced in a college course on ethics. (The professor happily distributed VHS copies of all films discussed, as if dissemination of valued art should be free.) Stewart is the archetypal pilgrim, come to bring order to the Old West not with a Winchester but with a stack of law books and some crazy talk about the pursuit of happiness; when Jimmy recites from the Declaration of Independence to his gathered pupils I just go all weepy. Maybe it's 12 Angry Men or Atticus Finch that gets your patriotic druthers in a dither.
For as much as he is now a movie star, George Clooney is a television man through and through. So it follows that, to him, integrity in civic duty is a TV newsman named Edward R. Murrow. Hard to disagree.
Clooney's first two films as a director are in love with the roaring heyday of live network broadcast, bringing the spontaneity and recklessness of the 30s newsroom onto the soundstage while at the same time nursing a jaded contempt for its advertisement-driven banality; Chuck Barris and Murrows share a touch of self-loathing, if little else. But whereas Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is all enthusiasm and no discretion the sober follow-up, Good Night, and Good Luck, is as concise and disciplined as if Clooney were not an actor- but an editor-turned-director. (My favorite kind of -turned-director.) The discipline befits the material of course, and I especially admire the restraint exercised in allowing extended sequences of archival footage to do the talking, rather than pointlessly re-staging. All the elements are tasty in this coarse-grained montage, from the journalists' handsome and boozy social scene to the jazz recording studio interludes and period commercials. The creamy black and white set design makes me want to get around to Mad Men in a hurry.
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As much as the knee-jerk conservative in me hates being lectured by lightweights, I found the Dreyfus story quite funny and all your sarcasm and spite well-earned.
ReplyDeleteThat said, I think the conservative movement in the US has a definite tendency to use indoctrination of "our values" in schools. Not that the left doesn't do the same thing at college, but it's an odd balance.
10 years ago with the brunt of that influence weighing on me, I probably would have sought to discover the Founders' intent, the key to our democracy. Now I'd much rather abandon the silliness of Manifest Destiny and the City on a Hill to attack the pragmatics of "Here is the gov't apparatus we have, how can we affect positive change (or maintain hard-earned stasis) through the implementation of policy?" This is the aspect I find lacking in American discourse. No one seems to have a real idea of how to affect actual, honest-to-goodness policies and we vote for politicians like Sarah Palin (who promises that ever-alluring 'folksiness') or Barack Obama (whose vague promise of 'change' becomes more unwieldy with each passing day). In my opinion, we don't need ideologies or history, we need policy instruments.
This is not a question of the Founders. They were Federalists almost to the point of dalliant anarchy. That anarchy is what I think should be the soul of the American polity.