All the President's Men: They Don't Make Them Like That Anymore

Since this month is pretty light on things leaving HBO Max, my viewing has been a little more scattershot of late. Instead of worrying about what's about to leave, I've checked out movies on other services, or just about anything that caught my eye. Last weekend it was Everything Everywhere All At Once (which was pretty ace) and this weekend I'm rewatching All the President's Men.

The only other time I watched it was back in 2005, on one of the first weekends I was at journalism school. They wanted to show us an idealized version of one of American journalism's greatest hits, presumably to inspire us to reach the same kinds of heights as Woodward and Bernstein. I don't know if it necessarily worked at that goal, but it did inculcate a love in me for movies about journalism.

For one thing, I like the procedural aspect of it. You've got Woodward and Bernstein chasing down leads bit by bit, sometimes doorstepping a contact, other times working the phones. You see them taking calls at all hours of the day, grabbing food in between meetings, and getting yelled at by their editor for not having enough to go on. So from that perspective, it really does do what my J-school was hoping to communicate, which is the detail work and the tenacity needed to land an investigation.

The other journalism movie I can think of that showed the legwork to the same degree is Spotlight, which I think I'm due for a rewatch as well. That said, I also have a big soft spot for the Post, which is less about the procedural, nitty gritty of journalism and more a high-minded discussion of what the press is for. Probably have to rewatch that one as well.

Now, the main thing that those two more recent movies are missing is the weird naturalism of 70s movies that pervades All the President's Men. Part of it is technological, like when Woodward and Bernstein are driving in a car at night, and they drive through a deep enough shadow that the screen goes completely black, though you still hear their voices. Even into the 80s and 90s, filmmaking technology couldn't cope with dim lighting the way it can now, although clearly the director of this film probably wanted that shot to look natural, to the point of sacrificing the visuals. I don't think a modern film would get away with that.

Then there's the sound production. You have a lot of background hum, whether from whatever's happening in the shot or just the noise the microphones picked up back in the 70s. My favorite moment, though, is when Bernstein's talking to a source outside and a jet flies past, making the two characters have to shout. I can only assume that's on purpose, possibly even to evoke what happened when the real Carl Bernstein was having that actual conversation, but once again, you can't imagine a heavily curated and managed film in 2022 having that same feeling of artful sloppiness.

This is a thing that's always fascinated me about movies from the 70s. You start to see it in the late 60s, not only when New Hollywood directors were coming up but even in something like Bullitt, where shots were deliberately staged differently than they might have been just a decade earlier. The framing of shots and the way sound is recorded are deliberately done poorly (like lens flares), to make things seem more natural. There's also an odd quality to the way lines are delivered, which you wouldn't hear in movies now, again probably to sound more like how people were thought to speak.

It's gone by the 80s, where shots are framed in more traditional ways, although the first Superman film with Christopher Reeves, from 1978, is also shot in that more straightforward style, so it might be a question of what fits the content, too. I have to say, though, as odd as the framing and sound mixing are in movies from that era, I never quite get tired of it, even if the special effects aren't as good as now.

The other striking thing about watching All the President's Men in 2022 is how little has changed, and how much. We've just spent the summer watching hearings about a president's criminal misdeeds (the January 6 insurrection), and read about an entirely different set of misdeeds (the improper handling of classified material at Mar-A-Lago), so that's how little has changed - dishonest president doing dishonest things.

What's different, of course, is the willingness of said dishonest president's own party to condemn him. All the President's Men makes a point of having various Republican characters denounce what the Committee to Re-Elect the President was doing with regard to the Watergate break-in. I can't imagine future movies made about the current era being able to find quite as many Republicans willing to criticize Donald Trump, witnesses like Cassidy Hutchinson notwithstanding. Especially when you consider that a lot of these supposed Republican critics of Trump are on record as saying they'd vote for him again.

I don't want to say that the events depicted in All the President's Men seem quaint in comparison to thousands of yahoos storming the Capitol, because going by the portrayal onscreen in that movie, the burglars hired by Nixon's people were just as incompetent as Trump's coterie. And one has to remember, the first time Trump was impeached was for doing stuff to undermine his rival, just like Nixon was doing. Still, it's not quite the same as whipping up a mob to kill your own vice-president and disrupt the electoral process.

Though if that security guard Frank Wills hadn't discovered the break-in, who knows what Nixon might have unleashed later on in his second term?

Separating Art from the Artist (Part N of X)

I don't really have guilty pleasures. If I like something, I like it, and I don't really feel embarrassed to like it, because I don't read books or watch movies to impress other people. That means my reading sometimes extends to genres or series that aren't high on the lists of the top SFF books of the year, for example, much of urban fantasy. I got into the genre through Daniel Abraham's Black Sun's Daughter series (which he wrote as MLN Hanover), and from there I moved to Patricia Briggs's Mercy Thompson books.

The books are silly, and perhaps a bit repetitive, but they're a fun, breezy read and a good way to get stuck into some female-written SFF, without also being bound to the Ann Leckies or Arkady Martines of the moment (much as I've enjoyed their books). Every once in a while, though, I stumble on some comment that Briggs puts in her protagonist's mouth. It's become a ritual over the ten years that I've been reading the Mercy Thompson books to note some passing comment and wonder what Briggs's politics are. Sometimes it's spurred by the comment that Mercy has a concealed carry license, or it might be anything else.

In the most recent book, it was when one of the werewolf characters talked about how high gas prices were. So I checked Briggs's Wikipedia page, as I always do, and found that there's no mention either way of outre political beliefs. This time, though, I persisted and found some reactions in the previous book where readers were disappointed that another character had voted for Donald Trump. I also found the interview below:

There are a couple of things to talk about here. First is the standard, and kinda disappointing, refrain that she hates both parties equally, which I've found is usually code for "I vote republican". It's tempered, though, by the very correct point that both the Democrats and the Republicans are completely beholden to dark-money - I may agree more with the Democrats' goals, but I'm just as uneasy with how much of the party is beholden to corporate interests and PACs as I am with the Republicans.

Briggs also makes the accurate point that the character in question, Mercy's husband Adam, is a white man from the South who was born in the 1950s, so what political affiliation do they expect him to have? The other source I found, criticizing Adam's voting, mentioned that he voted for Trump grudgingly, which is also an interesting characterization: in real life, plenty of conservatives have voiced displeasure with Trump but have continued to vote for him because they still can't bring themselves to vote for Democrats. Briggs doesn't mention that, but she could very well have been thinking about it.

The other important thing to keep in mind is that for all the conservative viewpoints espoused, there are also some pretty liberal ones. One good example is that werewolf who complains about high gas prices: he's gay, which she's used as a subplot in several novels to show how traditional werewolf society is still patriarchal and homophobic, but also an opportunity for the pack to evolve, by growing to accept him and his fairly elevated place in their hierarchy. The character's mate has also, over the course of the series, become a key ally to the werewolves, despite their long-ingrained homophobia. So there's some social consciousness to the series.

The final thing to unpack, for myself and those other readers, is our own reactions. Honestly, there's nothing that says complaining about high gas prices has to mean you're suddenly a member of the Proud Boys or whatever. It's true that in our rather febrile political climate, the ones most likely to complain about pain at the pump, or at the grocery store, seem to be more right-leaning (at least on social media), but high prices and inflation affect us all, and I've seen plenty of left-leaning friends express dismay at the price of gas. I'm not generally the kind of person who stops reading an author because I disagree with one or two things they or their characters say, and it's important to keep that in mind when reading these stories that might reference current events.

So the upshot is that I'm planning on continuing with the Mercy Thompson books, until I decide that the quality's gone downhill or Patricia Briggs starts having her characters give long explanations about how great Trump is. But given the tenor of the video I've shared here, I think the latter is a remote possibility.

There are definitely some Republican or Trumpist issues that we shouldn't abide in decent society, but let's also keep some perspective: characters can complain about gas prices, believe in concealed-carry or vote for Trump, but we don't have to immediately disqualify the author for those things.

Queen Elizabeth II

Just a quick set of thoughts on the passing today of the Queen of England, and the outpouring of solemnity and scorn that I've seen on social media, on both sides of the Atlantic.

Last year, I wrote a similar post after the death of Prince Philip, which I used to talk about Elizabeth's legacy and what she meant to me and basically everyone else in the West. What I wrote then is still broadly how I feel, though I should add that quite a lot of comments have talked about how her death seems like losing your grandmother. These comments have revolved around a picture taken recently (maybe in the past couple of weeks?) of her standing in a living room in her palace, looking like a kind old lady, and I can't deny, there's a grandma vibe there.

Really, how could it be otherwise? For people of my generation, Queen Elizabeth was this presence who had been there for all our parents' lives, just like a grandparent. The fact that she kept out of the spotlight helped too: she didn't make pronouncements that pissed people off, she didn't throw her weight around. I don't think I ever even heard her voice until I was in my 30s.

As far as the mourners and the detractors, as always I fall somewhere in between. I can't relate to the more fulsome expressions of grief, especially here in the US. Nor can I relate to those who are celebrating, though I can understand why some people are calling out the colonialism that the Queen represented. The British like to pretend that they "stumbled into an empire", and that they were on the whole good colonial masters; they also like to pretend that they let go of the empire with equally good grace and little bloodshed.

What I do think is too bad is how Elizabeth's death is overshadowing the various crises engulfing the UK at the moment, from runaway inflation to widespread industrial action to an energy crisis that will ruin thousands of families this winter. These crises are all pretty much self-inflicted, when seen against the backdrop of Brexit; the only thing that isn't the fault of the ruling Conservatives is the war in Ukraine, but that's just shown up how unprepared and chaotic the country was.

The new prime minister, Liz Truss, has announced an energy price cap of £2,500 per year, but if you think about it, that's already a ridiculous amount of money to pay for keeping the lights on and heating a home. Beyond that, Britain is poised to renege on its own treaty by eliminating the Northern Ireland protocol, thereby also jeopardizing peace in the region, all because the Tories can't be bothered to maintain the agreement they made or to find a long term solution that works.

In my more cynical moments today, I couldn't help thinking that Elizabeth saw her moment to shuffle off, given the chaos facing the country in the near future. Certainly the political and social climate won't do any favors to her heirs, and in decades to come we'll probably look back on the Elizabethan era with a fondness that probably won't be entirely warranted.

Still, it's the close of an incredible era, with way too many cultural moments to count. It'll be interesting to see how King Charles III navigates the next few years, and how he'll diverge from his mother's way of doing things.

Quick Thoughts on Judas and the Black Messiah

Just finished watching Judas and the Black Messiah on HBO Max, and I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to check it out earlier. As with so many movies and books in my various queues, there was always something more urgent to watch, but the spur for me to watch it now was the fact that it's set to disappear from HBO Max at the end of September.

The first thing to say is that the movie is stuffed with magnetic performances. Daniel Kaluuya is the most obvious one, playing Chairman Fred Hampton, but LaKeith Stanfield does a great job as Bill O'Neal and so does Jesse Plemons as FBI agent Roy Mitchell. Kaluuya and Stanfield have rightly been recognized for their performances, but I was struck by Plemons in this, how he's clearly evil but also, to an extent, conflicted by what he's meant to be doing. 

What I liked about his performance was contrasting it with his roles in Friday Night Lights and Breaking Bad, which are clear opposites to one another, while in this film he's somewhere between the boy in Friday Night Lights and the sociopath in Breaking Bad - he has things he cares about, and isn't even completely unsympathetic to what he's asking of Bill O'Neal, but he's quick to harden his heart and do what his superiors order (with Martin Sheen playing a gross and sinister J. Edgar Hoover, making a nice change from Jed Bartlet).

Of course, it's perverse to write about Judas and the Black Messiah and only single out the white dude for praise, so let's be clear that Daniel Kaluuya is amazing. His speeches suck you in from the first scene, and the speech he gives when he gets out of jail was especially electrifying. Beyond that, I loved his relationships with Deborah, Bill, even the other gangs that he enlists into the Rainbow Coalition.

As far as the history, it's an era that I know so little about, even though the Black Panthers were founded just across the Bay in Oakland. That said, it's not surprising that a group that couched the racial liberation struggle in Marxist/Maoist terms would be hard for American culture to understand. But it was fascinating to see the organizing that they did, in addition to their more proactive methods of countering police brutality. It makes me want to find out more about them, because a cursory search on their Wikipedia page just now shows that there was a lot to the original organization, good and bad.

One thing that the movie elided but that I thought would have been interesting to raise was that Rainbow Coalition that Fred Hampton put together. He's depicted pulling together other Black gangs in Chicago, as well as Puerto Ricans and the Young Patriots, which look like a white supremacist movement, mostly because they're all shown to be southern whites and they're standing in front of a Confederate flag. It turns out that they were a far-left movement that also advocated class struggle, but aimed at poor whites from the South.

Knowing that, it makes more sense that Fred Hampton would have been able to bring them into his movement, but it would have been nice to see it spelled out better. The fact that there was a revolutionary group aimed at poor whites is a pretty eye-opening idea, since the portrayal of them on film usually seems to lean on the racism.

Of course, part of my problem is that my understanding of the 60s is mediated almost exclusively through Star Trek, Spiderman, music (Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel especially) and repeated viewings of Forrest Gump when I was in school. The latter, in particular, does a nice job of transmitting the atmosphere of the 60s, but doesn't go very deep, and none of those sources can encompass the wide sweep of everything that was happening then. So we end up with cartoonish portrayals of the Black Panthers or other movements of the era, without understanding what they were actually about.

That's why I liked this movie so much: it goes into a topic that I feel I ought to know more about, anchoring it around a fascinating personality in the form of Fred Hampton. And by showing us what was happening in the 60s, it lets us draw a comparison with how race relations are going now, showing how despite certain markers of progress, there are still the same power structures in place that led to Hampton's assassination.

As I mentioned, Judas and the Black Messiah is streaming on HBO Max through the end of September. I'd have liked to watch it earlier, but I'm glad I caught it now.