Good Night and Good Luck

Good Night and Good Luck: An Appreciation

Henry James once famously wrote, "It's a complex fate, being an American."

And perhaps part of that complexity is the paradox that we remain so susceptible to fits of paranoia and hysteria and demagoguery during which the very liberty, tolerance and free expression we consider our hallmark yield to repression, conformity, and terror.

George Clooney's new film Good Night and Good Luck captures the Republic's most notorious Jacobinic episode, the McCarthy Era. A period that began in the late 1940's with House Un-American Affairs Commmittee, Alger Hiss, the Hollywood 10, it reached its climax with the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954. Though even after the junior Wisconsin Senator's reign of terror ended with his censure and death three years later in '57, Joe McCarthy would cast his pall of fear, intimidation, censorship throughout the Cold War; and he would bequeath to American history the ignominious era bearing his name.

Hollywood has sought to dramatize McCarthyism with more and less success over the past few decades. Guilty By Suspicion, One of the Hollywood Ten, and The Front come to mind. But these films suffer their industry's characteristic foible: solipsism, among others. That the blacklists, the naming of names, the loyalty oaths were only symptomatic of terror that permeated nearly every American industry and institution never really emerges in these renditions. Maybe we can't blame the fillmmakers entirely though.

Perhaps the peculiar hyprocrisy of American repression doesn't readily lend itself to dramatization. Perhaps the terrors that periodically grip America elude dramatic form because they're so obscured in denial. After all, we don't declare them, still less acknowledge them when they occur. We don't impose martial law. We don't void the Constitution. The President doesn't dissolve Congress or co-opt the Judiciary. No, instead we investigate, swear oaths, legislate Patriot Acts. Then, quietly, we defrock the dissident; lambaste, stigmatize and banish him; wreck his marriage, alienate his family, deprive him of livelihood and cow him slowly into a docile compliant submission. All the while the demagougues responsible continue to espouse the civil liberties they trammel and profess to act in their name. The schizophrenia is enough to defy narrative.

Still, Good Night and Good Luck somehow rises to the challenge. And it is much of Clooney's accomplishment that he does so paradoxicaly through a story so narrow in scope it borders on claustrophobic. He takes a single, largely unknown footnote to the McCarthy era-- broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow's confrontation with Senator McCarthy and the Senator's response-- and succeds in dramatizing the climate of an era. Through the fate of Murrow, his show; its producers; his colleagues, from CBS's minor employee to its senior executive; indeed of the network itself, Clooney encapsulates the era. Good Night and Good Luck conveys the epidemic fear; the cancerous terror; the cowed silence; the self-serving complicity; the lethal desperation; the suspicion so insidious that it penetrated our most personal relationships, poisoning familes and infecting marriages; and finally, the evil flawed men do when they see persecution and say nothing.

Clooney's technique demonstrates some virtuoso flourishes as well. Not only does Clooney's choice to use actual news footage of McCarthy speak for him-- rather than employ an actor to portray the role as he does with Murrow and evey other character-- not only does this simulate documentary's immediacy and reproduce its realism, the effect actually enhances McCarthy's menace. We watch Murrow, Friendly, and the show's contributors reviewing 16mm footage of McCarthy in a screening room where the Senator's visages assumes the enormity and threat to rival Big Brother.

Of course, the movie has its foibles too. Like any Americam fiction it celebrates our myths, a myth Hollywood, in particular, seems to favor. Good Night and Good Luck enacts the myth of the noble individual's power to fight oppression and prevail if only he will demonstrate the courage and bear the sacrifice. A myth if there ever was one but when, as here, it avoids sentimentality, certainly one well worth appreciating.

This is MSS signing off for the Vanguard, Good Night and Good Luck