Movies About Television: Medium Cool & The Candidate

The loss of innocence after the quiz show scandals of the Late Fifties, had less to do with the television audience, as Quiz Show (1994) tried to dramatize.  The people running the medium had to face the grim fact that television was nothing but a Machiavellian instrument.  The techniques of manipulation – a sociology of the medium – would soon be revealed by Marshall McLuhan with the publication of Understanding Media (1964). 

McLuhan taught us a way to see the media, but especially television, and its possible effects regardless of content.  This was his revolutionary act.  The book’s contents may not have been original or entirely satisfactory to the establishment critics, but his words unveiled new meanings to the realities of the mid-1960s.  Indeed, McLuhan’s view of media revealed meanings heretofore unmentionable. 

Advertising, politics, marketing were open for all to see and evaluate.  How the public would respond to this knowledge was uncertain.  To a great extent, despite knowing they are being manipulated, the public has come to accept the most absurd practices (spin doctoring, reflexive commercials) as routine and nearly enjoyable.  But the fact remains that the angle of criticism and evaluation of television would be less tied to television’s content (this is the McLuhan mantra), a la A Face in the Crowd (1957), and movies would soon examine the very structure of television.

A central idea in Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media is hot and cool media.
   
    A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in “high definition.”  High
    definition is the state of being well filled with data.

A photograph and radio are high definition, thus hot media.  The cartoon, telephone, and television are cool media.  He also contrasts the two.  The city slicker is hot; the rustic, cool.  Calvin Coolidge, cool; Franklin Roosevelt, hot.  The past mechanical time, hot; the TV age, cool.  The Waltz, hot; the Twist, cool.

So, what is the difference between hot and cool.  A hot medium allows less participation than a cool one.  The participation is not necessarily a product of conscious choice.  The medium defines our level of our involvement.  Hence, McLuhan’s most well known phrase: “The medium is the message.”  Content is subordinate to the form.

One example: listening to a baseball game on radio versus television.  Our imaginations are put to greater use for the game on radio.  While on television, little is left to the imagination as we can observe the entire event.

The catch with the idea of involvement is that, say, when we watch television with what McCluhan calls a “unified sensorium.”  When we move from the cool television medium back to the hot print medium, we take all of our senses which the print medium rejects.  Over time, a life conditioned by television, say, will create an impatience for the more slowly evolving narratives of a book. 

Ultimately, individuals in our society become passive, distant, less responsive to the actual, reality.  We’ve be “cooled.”  And this is the theme of Haskell Wexler’s 1969 film Medium Cool.  In this case, the distant individuals are local news reporters, played by Robert Forster and Peter Bonerz, who are compelled to tell the important stories to the public, while observing journalistic objectivity.  They cannot, should not be touched by the things that they report.

Their profession becomes the analogue for the television culture.  We amass more and more content, learn more about the world, but are becoming less connected with that world.  As a society, we have become calloused to the pain and hardships people are suffering as we learn about their suffering.

The film gained much attention because it filmed several sequences during the 1968 Democratic convention when massive demonstrations ran into an aggressive police presence on the streets and parks in Chicago.  This form of filmmaking, cinema verité, created an emotional immediacy rarely if ever found in American movies up to that time.

Robert Forster’s reporter is first viewed filming a car crash, so involved in the event that he doesn’t give help to the victims.  Soon, he becomes acquainted with a woman (Verna Bloom) and her son.  The relationship creates a shift in his viewpoint toward reporting and the morality of his profession.  This, and accusations by black militants that his reports are exploiting aggression for the dramatic value, causes him to shed his journalistic objectivity. 

Medium Cool associates Forster’s awakening with the birth of a political consciousness, ultimately associating political apathy to the mesmerizing content of television.  We have become numb to the horrors of war and the degradation of poverty because we have accustomed ourselves to the presence of these things.  This would be one interpretation – a liberal political one – of McLuhan’s work.

A significant passage in Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media looks at the reasonS why John Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon in the 1960 election:

    When the person presented looks classifiable, as Nixon did, the TV viewer has   nothing to fill in. He feels uncomfortable with his TV image. He says uneasily, ‘There’s something about the guy that isn’t right.'

These remarks didn’t go unnoticed by the Nixon campaign in 1968, who employed the lesson diligently, according to Joe McGinniss’s seminal work The Selling of the President 1968.  McLuhan’s words were taken to heart by Nixon’s staff, who were distributed significant extracts from Understanding Media.  Political campaigns have never looked back.

The unofficial adaptation of McGinniss’ book came in 1972 with Michael Ritchie’s film, The Candidate, starring Robert Redford.  Perhaps “adaptation” is the wrong word.  The Candidate synthesizes a process that McGinniss meticulously describes.  Further, the film corrects the anti-Nixon wish fulfillment of the Selling’s readers.

Bill McKay (Redford) becomes a candidate for the California Senate.  He wins the Democratic primary easily but is given little chance to topple the incumbent, Crocker Jarmon (Don Porter).  Tellingly, McKay is prompted to run by a campaign consultant, Marvin Lucas (Peter Boyle).  At the start, McKay can say what he wants, give his true feelings on issues.  He will not compromise his principles. 

Even when Lucas brings in his heavy hitting media people, played by Allan Garfield and Michael Lerner, McKay stands up to them.  Primarily, McKay believes he has nothing to lose because he has little or no chance to win.  Thus, on an issue like abortion, McKay stands up unequivocally for women having that choice.  When he doesn’t know much about an issue when questioned, he admits he has to look into it more.  He gains more public acceptance because he’s a fresh voice in a world of political pablum. 

And it’s exactly at this point of public acceptance when the polls indicate that he’s pulling closer to Jarmon week after week that McKay gives up his principles.  He has a chance to win, so why shouldn’t he take it?  This will mean that he has to lean on his political media advisors very heavily.  They will doctor raw footage to make McKay the raw politician into a Kennedy-esque like presence.

Ultimately, the political consultant, Marvin Lucas, becomes more important than the candidate.  Lucas was modeled after a political strategist of the time, but what we now see in his character is the antecedent to James Carvelle and Karl Rove.

The film also successfully dramatizes how the candidate, McKay, loses himself in the process. At times, he mechanically moves forward, just trying to survive the campaign grind.  Soon, he starts babbling and talking nonsense when he should be serious:

         Can't any longer play off black against old - young against poor. This
         country cannot house its houseless - feed its foodless.

It’s as if he’s witnessing his own breakdown.  But he pulls it together, makes peace with his father (Melvyn Douglas), an ex-governor of California, as well as makes a deal with the head of a large labor union. Floyd J. Starkey (Kenneth Tobey) who reciprocates McKay’s antipathy to him.

Finally, after a strong showing during a televised debate, McKay upsets Jarmon and wins the Senate seat.  Television and good looks didn’t completely turn the tide, although his father tells an incredulous Starley that people will vote for Bill “because he’s cute”. 

The strongest statement of where our political process is headed occurs in the final scene.  McKay gets Marvin in room, alone.  He needs to ask him something.  “What do we do now?”

It’s the consequential statement on a political process subsumed be images and manipulation.  No one knows what to think anymore.  We’ve lost our minds to a medium that can’t tolerate directness and truth. 

The Candidate shows how the television medium affects all, not just Nixon.  The pursuit of political success, the aroma of political power, will cause all sides to give up their principles and integrity.  We'd think them fools if they didn't.