Seven Red

Several years ago, George Clooney made a very boring movie called Good Night and Good Luck. I’m not particularly interested in rehashing the movie, much less praising it, as I think it was nostalgic and reactionary in many ways. But I do want to comment on its boring quality, which I think was the best thing about it, and tie that to some current events: specifically, Obama’s recent visit to the House Republican Retreat.

So, Good Night and Good Luck was interesting precisely because it was so boring. At times, the film slows down so much that you don’t think it will ever move again: slow, measured dialogue, long pauses between lines, a plot that develops through a series of interruptions. We saw it in the theater in Giant State University Town, and there were literally people around us sleeping halfway through the film. Now, you would think that the major conflict at the heart of the film – Edward R. Murrow’s showdown with Joe McCarthy – would be sufficient to sustain some interest. I don’t know if it is that interesting or not, but I do think Clooney’s handling of the filmic elements push the film beyond this conflict in interesting ways.

Good Night and Good Luck presents itself as a critique of modern journalistic practice, and, specifically, sensationalism in journalism. The nostalgic (and reactionary) point is that journalism had some glorious heyday (represented here by Edward R. Murrow) during which careful assessment of social and political conditions was its stock in trade; for Clooney, this care has devolved into a chase for the latest adrenaline pumping report or nasty political fight. I don’t want to disagree with part of the premise. It’s clear that contemporary journalism, and especially of the teevee variety, is a monumental farce. If we were to read it nostalgically, we would see the Murrow moment, together with some fantasy concocted about Woodward and Bernstein and Watergate in general, as the contemporary ideology of professional journalism, an ideology that’s completely metastasized. Ideology in the Althusserian sense of an imagined form of real relations, and gone straight haywire in some supposed quest for the exposé, combined with some laughable contrivance of conflict with power. (I’ll note, briefly, that the lefties constantly claiming to be “Speaking Truth to Power” are merely another pathetic species of this arrangement – the ease with which the Tea Imbeciles grab hold of the mantra is clear enough). The false image of this relation of power is perhaps best exemplified in the painful stupidity of a Tim Russert (if we may speak negatively of the dead) – the ultimate insider playing at some working class Buffalo persona while pretending to throw “hard questions” at politicians. (This little bit of Sunday morning nonsense has become even more false and, incredibly,  even more stupid in the person of David Gregory, though at least Gregory forgoes the asinine and transparent costume of the white male “blue collar guy” and presents himself perfectly openly for what he is: an utterly cynical bourgeois apologist.)

But to return to Clooney’s nostalgic point, we should see that it is itself partly false, to the extent that contemporary journalistic practice is not at all a departure from the ideal constructed around Murrow (which is to say, the same ideal Clooney celebrates in the film) but rather an intensification of that ideal. It’s the fight with Tailguinner Joe (or Nixon, or whoever) as fight (and all that implies) held up as the desideratum always and everywhere. Indeed, today’s chief emulator of Murrow (Keith Olbermann) shows us precisely how the version of conflict has spread malignantly throughout the social body. His “special comments” – almost always vitriolic hyperbole that sends certain factions of the left into some weird vocabulary-driven ecstasy – are the pure intensification of the classic Murrow speech, and they are (not surprisingly) the most YouTubed and chattered about segments of the show, the parts that leave the left blogosphere panting for more. As intense experience goes, we are not far from the rather sad and babbling mania of a Glenn Beck. Of course, I wouldn’t suggest any equivalency between the two commentators outside the affective; the problem is that this might be the only equivalency that matters. Needless to say, Olbermann ends his special comments with an indignant version of Murrow’s “Good night and good luck.” The sign off ends up being only the most obvious outward sign that the fight as fight is what circulates as the Murrow ideal; Olbermann in fact grasps the very ideal that Clooney promotes at the thematic level, thereby demonstrating all the more thoroughly how wrong Clooney is.

If Clooney misunderstands this relationship at the semantic and thematic level, however, he understands it perfectly at the filmic level. The film is boring precisely because it seeks to de-intensify the viewing experience, a quality that is evident in everything from its slow shots and dialogue to its use of black and white. If you want serious television journalism, the film makes us feel, you have to get used to that feeling, its slowness, its pace and patience. You have to desire this level of boredom, at least visually (it’s still rather easy for the long, researched New York Times story to bore the hell out of anyone, but teevee?). Or rather, you have to develop different attention mechanisms, which is not exactly easy when the particular forms of attention played on by sensationalism are exactly what we need to develop under conditions of information overload (oddly, Al Gore gets this right in The Assault on Reason, though he immediately assigns the whole problem to the sphere of biology). The strange tension in the film thus develops between the ramped up semantic content, presumably centered around just the kind of intense adversarial relations that drive sensationalism today, and the extreme slowness of the filmic elements. For my money, though, the film’s slowness is so rhetorically foreign to our now everyday experience of the visual that it ends up lingering. What we learn, in spite of ourselves, is that we fucking hate the film for it, and would never watch it again. Which is, of course, the clearest exposition of the real problem plaguing contemporary journalism, Murrow’s sign-off notwithstanding.

To return this discussion to the present day, and Obama’s recent successes in several (sensationally) aggressive appearances, then, I’d suggest that a similar sort of tension marks the two Obama’s we’ve grown familiar with, if the pundits are to be believed. Call them the Campaign Obama and the Presiding Obama. If you’ve been paying attention to any of this the last few months, you’ll know that the Presiding Obama is a Big Disappointment relative to the Campaign Obama, largely because he doesn’t “fight back” or even, really, “fight at all.” Now, I hesitate the get into any of this, since it’s pretty easy to drift into what’s coming to be called “Obama apologist” mode, whereby any action at all by Mr. Obama is justifiable for some reason, or is otherwise part of some grander strategy (whether for good or evil, the story switches depending on teller), and etc. We’ve heard it all before. For my part, I think plenty of what the Presiding Obama is doing policy-wise sucks. I also think it’s just a hard goddamn job. So I’ll deny Obama apologetics here and say I’m just floating an analogy. In any case, ever since the State of the Union, the recent energetic townhalls, and the now-legendary Enter the Dragon act Obama did on the House Republicans’ dumbassery in Baltimore, all you hear from the Democratic and liberal sites is that Obama’s got his groove back, and he’s takin’ it to ‘em, and This Is What We Wanted to See All Along.  (And really, House Republicans, when you walk through the garden, you better watch your step…I mean, Baltimore?). But. If I might map the Campaign Obama and the Presiding Obama onto my rough sketch of Good Night and Good Luck, I’d say that the Presiding Obama – the one who doesn’t fight, but goes about the prosaic and tedious business of governing – may be the more interesting. The 2010 campaign is revving up, with the Massachusetts fiasco serving as the wake-up call, I guess, so we could expect to see Campaign Obama return with all the speechifying and electricity. But the Boring-Ass Obama? That’s the guy I want to have a beer with. If we can bracket policy for just a second – always a fraught operation – what’s remarkable about the Presiding Obama is the attempt to circulate a different style or pace. And maybe what we need politically, what precedes policy, is the right metabolism for that kind of slowness, a desire for that level of boredom.

Apologetics and grand strategies aside, I do seem to remember that that’s sorta what the guy was  telling us all along.

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