|
|
Nixon on Stage and Screen: The 37th President as Depicted in
Films, Television, Plays and Opera,, by Thomas Monsell. McFarland
& Company, 1998, 247 pages.
Nixon in Life and in
Art by Stephen Cox
Politically, Richard Nixon was a typical inhabitant of
that sad desert of Republican Party history that was bounded on one side by the
low, jumbled hills of Wendell Willkie and Thomas E. Dewey and on the other by the
glittery Las Vegas of Ronald Reagan.
| | Stephen
Cox is a professor of literature at the University of California San Diego
and the author of "The Titanic Story." |
|
Like Reagan, he was, at least theoretically, a supporter of free markets and
individual rights. Like Willkie and Dewey (and Huey and Louie too, I guess), he
wasn't particularly interested in either of those things. What interested him was
gaining and keeping office. For that purpose he, in company with virtually all
the other Republican pols of his generation, supported every big-government
scheme that anybody ever thought of, including schemes designed to benefit
precisely those people (professors, welfare workers, "artists") who would never,
ever vote for him. Because their politics was formed largely by reaction to other
people's whims, Nixon and the thousands of public figures whom he typified were
always falling for weird, momentarily popular ideas. Example: when inflation
drifted slightly upward in 1971, Nixon responded with a sudden, despotic
imposition of wage and price controls on the whole economy. He suspected that it
wouldn't work, and it didn't. Well, so what? He was re-elected in 1972.
Nixon's openness to expedients could lead, by chance, to some good things, too.
He rendered one of the greatest services to liberty that any American statesman
has ever rendered when he pledged to end conscription, and did so. In this
instance, he was actually opposing the mindset of the liberal establishment. At
the time, leading Democratic politicians were calling for conscription to be
expanded, in order to make slavery fair for all. Nixon appears to have perceived
that violent opposition to "the military-industrial complex" was chiefly
motivated, not by any sincere conviction that either war in general or the
Vietnam War in particular was "wrong," but by the decided disinclination of
middle-class youths to fight a war. He acted on that perception, and it turned
out to be correct. For all intents and purposes, the end of the draft was the end
of mass agitation in the United States. Unfortunately for Nixon, however,
this turned out to be another one of those cases in which the people who profited
from his actions continued to detest him. His big mistake came early in his
career, when he participated in the popular anti-communism of the time.
Anti-communism is the one thing that the liberal establishment never forgives in
a Republican politician. Nothing that Nixon ever did could free him from the mark
of Cain stamped on his forehead by the anti-anti-communists who for the past
half-century have systematically promoted a confusion between him and the man now
popularly regarded as the worst villain of all time, Sen. Joseph
McCarthy. |
| Odd, vulnerable, shifty
as vulnerable people often are, coarse as men of his generation were taught to
be, admiring of intellect without being an intellectual, admiring of grace and
courage without ceasing to admire phoniness and cunning, Nixon was finally
defeated by the second-ratedness within him, ably assisted by the third-ratedness
within him. |
|
This accounts for 66.6% of Nixon's bad reputation. For the other 33.3% we must
blame his own personality, which was always more interesting than his politics.
Odd, vulnerable, shifty as vulnerable people often are, coarse as men of his
generation were taught to be, admiring of intellect without being an
intellectual, admiring of grace and courage without ceasing to admire phoniness
and cunning, Nixon was finally defeated by the second-ratedness within him, ably
assisted by the third-ratedness of his subordinates and the fourth-ratedness of
his opponents. Nixon was a strangely fascinating American. I put that last word
in its place of emphasis because I cannot picture him as a denizen of any other
clime. Can you? Since Nixon was, in his way, a representative American, it
is interesting to see how other Americans have viewed him. That's what Thomas
Monsell helps us do. He offers a detailed, year-by-year accounting of hundreds of
representations of Nixon supplied by the performing arts during the past
half-century. His research is almost frighteningly extensive, his judgments are
fair, his writing is pungent. "Nixon on Stage and Screen" is both a trustworthy
reference book (I found only one substantive error — an allusion to an
alleged parody of the film "High Noon" that is in fact a parody of the TV series
Gunsmoke [p. 76]) and a juicy story about all the things that can happen to you
when people with typewriters decide to do you in. Because that's what 99% of the
people responsible for the works considered in this volume try to do to Nixon.
They try to do him in. In the process, they reveal a great deal more about
themselves than they reveal about RMN, the human punching bag. Quite a
number of these people are repeat offenders, producing work after work on the
theme of Nixon's wickedness. Gore Vidal (can there be such a man?) is one
example: two plays and a movie, plus a TV miniseries attacking Nixon associate
Alexander Haig. Oliver Stone, on whom even Vidal purportedly looks down (212), is
another one: three films and a "dialogue" published in a magazine. Then there are
the paranoids — e.g., Robert Altman, whose vision of America (projected in
the play and film "Secret Honor") appears to be that of a nation controlled by
100 "wealthy power brokers who . . . meet in California's Bohemian Grove" and who
ensnare aspiring young politicos like RMN by placing ads for people to run for
Congress (134). Yes, I'm sure that's the way things happen in American politics
— and it's all so dramatically compelling, too. Notice should also be
taken of the fetishists of sex theory, who find themselves able to account for
Nixon's bizarre ideas (such as his suspicion that there might possibly be
such people as communist spies) only by reference to such unlikely features of
his psyche as erotic yearnings for the communist spy Ethel Rosenberg. On this
topic, consult one of the cultural indicators that Monsell dutifully unearths,
Robert Coover's terminally disgusting novel "The Public Burning." I parted
company with Coover's work after witnessing his public reading of part of it, but
Monsell assures us that "the novel's epilogue contains a scene in which Nixon is
sodomized by Uncle Sam" (21). This is the kind of thing that is supposed to
reflect badly on "Nixon."
| Despite all the talk
about the use of art to explore Nixon's "tragic" character, any authentic
evocation of tragedy requires a degree of sympathy for the protagonist, a degree
of sympathy that is precisely what does not emerge in the artistic views of Nixon
that have thus far been produced. |
|
Defending the ludicrous account of Nixon delivered by "Secret Honor," Altman
said, "Whether it is true or not doesn't make any difference because in art what
you try to do is explore various views of things. This is just a view" (134).
Here is a refreshingly innocent declaration, especially for someone who, to my
knowledge, has never used his art to explore any idea that dared to wander
outside the well-established confines of the American left. Despite all the talk,
by people cited in this volume, about the use of art to explore Nixon's "tragic"
character, any authentic evocation of tragedy requires a degree of sympathy for
the protagonist, a degree of sympathy that is precisely what does not emerge in
the artistic views of Nixon that have thus far been produced. Perhaps funds were
lacking for a truly tragic treatment. Or perhaps the only "art" that gets funded
in America is art that is immune from sympathy with any but a left-wing worldview
or character formation. Of course, it would be very easy, supposing that
Hollywood is not more sympathetic to communism than it is to Richard Nixon, to
turn the story of his life into a tragic film. First you would establish sympathy
by showing the young RMN heroically battling the commies. Then you would
investigate the fatal flaw that got the mature RMN mixed up in the Watergate
mess. Anyone could write a film like that. Funny, isn't it, that nobody
has? But if you really want to see how far American art has wandered from
accurate or even interesting perspectives on the world, ask yourself this
question: where is the spate of films, plays, and television dramas exploring
President Clinton's flaws and errors? Here, one might imagine, is the kind of
thing that would practically write itself in Hollywood. After all, the town voted
en masse for Clinton. Surely the people who backed him for president must believe
that he qualifies as the kind of character whom Aristotle regarded as fit to
become a tragic hero — a good man, "or one better rather than worse."
And surely those people, if they're smart enough to vote, would never deny that
Clinton has some interesting flaws, perhaps even more interesting flaws than
those of Richard Nixon. But dramas about the tragedy of Clinton appear to be slow
in coming. In fact, there aren't any. Offhand, I can't even think of a novel that
shows Bill Clinton being sodomized by Uncle Sam. Now, why do you suppose that is?
|
| | |
|
