Pols335 essay: The political integrity of a celluloid fantasy.

There were three movies in this module- All the President’s Men, Good Night/Good Luck, and Shattered Glass. There were no question sets for Shattered Glass, which was good because I didn’t actually watch it. I sat through maybe the first half-hour and then had to walk away. Hayden Christensen is just a crummy actor. The prequels sucked and they made me dislike his face and his voice, and Glass made a mistake by casting as its lead someone I don’t like. Also yes I know George Lucas sucks as a director, so Hayden was working with a handicap even before the amputations. But plenty of actors managed to make it through Lucas productions without sucking so hard, so ultimately Shattered Glass was unwatchable. So I faked that one some.

Module: All the President’s Men, Good Night, and Good Luck, Shattered Glass

• What cinematic techniques do the directors of these three films use to reflect the reality of the journalists and their world?  Which techniques do you find most successful and which are less successful?

The stories told by Shattered Glass, All The President’s Men, and Good Night, And Good Luck are all adaptations of real-world events, with real-world lessons to be taught by their directors. Each film seeks to inform its audience (in its narrative way) as to what notable events have happened in their world. A connection is forged between the audience and the screen through the application of a variety of cinematic tools. Shattered Glass and All The President’s Men are filmed in a straightforward style and use similar languages to different degrees of success, while Good Night, And Good Luck reaches for a felt sense of reality that reaches through the abstract of its black and white production. The extent to which each film can convince its audience of a shared universe determines its ability to present a message relative (and relevant) to that audience.

Good Night, And Good Luck is the stylistic anomaly, having as it does an actual style. Presented in black and white, there is an obvious difference between the world inhabited by Ed Murrow and the one I occupy. The filmmakers overcome this obstacle by appealing to the audience’s other filmgoing senses. The scenes are not played for drama with peaking music behind every reveal; the story is told by people talking. That conversation has a natural sound to it. There is a chemistry to either the performers or the dialog that gives an authenticity to the humanity of these black and white caricatures. In-scene drama is conveyed by the camera and use of lighting. The angles at which Murrow and Friendly are framed in the recording booth encourage a real feeling of claustrophobia. These cancerous mobs smoke so much you can almost smell it, and the film is actually helped by the quirk that most people tend to think of those years as having somehow actually happened in black and white. The film doesn’t look like the real world at all, but there are enough other sense-oriented cues that it feels real. Where Good Night falls short is in the scope of its production. It’s a very small world that Ed Murrow occupies, and it contains very few players- the television footage is the film’s outside world. By keeping the in-camera universe so narrowly defined, an uncanny valley develops between the two worlds and you recognize that you’re watching genuine portrayals through a specifically-constructed lens. One is left to wonder what meaningful nuance might have been left behind on the valley floor.

All The President’s Men and Shattered Glass both use the more traditional method of drawing audiences into a shared world by making the one on screen as identifiable as possible with the audience’s experience. Similar methods are used by each film. Scenes are shot in familiar locations – offices, living rooms – dressed with personality. Some desks are neat, some are messy; Carl Bernstein’s apartment is coldly lit and cluttered with shelves of books, the living room of his source is lit warmly and decorated for comfort. Shattered Glass’s ‘New Republic’ lives in the same detestable Nü-age open office layout that’s so popular with the kids these days. These are places that we know, so we feel comfortable stepping into them. The camera is kept largely at eye level- the audience is in meetings and talking to sources alongside the actors. These are people on the screen, not dramatic figures. Those people are made real by their mannerisms, the mistakes they make, the personalities they bring into their performances.

All The President’s Men has a similar setup to that in Good Night, And Good Luck. News footage of actual events is used to ground the “reality” of the performances. While this works for Good Night, it falls somewhat flat for President’s Men. In the latter, the television is used as a narrative device as well. The screen playing out Nixon’s inauguration in the foreground while Bob Woodward types in the background is an interlude, not narrative. This dual use of televisions diminishes the import of the story’s television-only villains, reducing them to interludes between sequences with the dreamy blond guy. This real world feels just a little less dangerous than it should.

Shattered Glass on the other hand suffers for its characterizations. Hayden Christensen has the misfortune to be forever tainted by Anakin fatigue, and a hard reality for the film is that I as a member of its audience have been burned before. I hear that petulant voice and have a difficult time buying the man as a Leading Man. As a writer with far too much imagination on his hands, Christensen’s Glass is both the film’s main character and its villain. That kind of role, in which the audience is asked to feel something on behalf of a compromised star, calls for more complexity than I see in his range. Orson Welles, Robert Redford, Hayden Christensen, one of these things is not like the other. I believe in the world Stephen Glass lives in, but I don’t care to share it with him.

When taking upon an honest portrayal of journalism, filmmakers take upon themselves some of that journalistic mantle of integrity. The story of the pursuit of truth is best served truthfully, in some way. If the audience doesn’t have a felt connection to the world on the screen and the people within, then the film is a mere morality play. Between the three films highlighted here, the viewer is effectively challenged to consider the sources of their information- not just the message, but the messenger as well. The opportunity for information to be manipulated exists in the reporter as much as does their source. The real-world events of McCarthyism, Watergate, and journalistic elitism are known best by the headlines of their culmination. These films draw the audience into a shared reality and demonstrate how the manipulation of information in the audience’s world resulted in the headlines they remember.