The Sunday Times (London)
March 3, 1996, Sunday
A case of tape that?
Stephen Amidon
If ever a man’s life was a matter of public record it was Richard M Nixon’s, so what is there left for Hollywood to tell us? Some people may be too famous for fiction, says STEPHEN AMIDON.
In the two decades following Richard Nixon’s spectacular public downfall, the only way Hollywood would touch him was if he was made of rubber. In what became one of moviedom’s most fatuous running gags, films from the pulpy Best Seller to Kathryn Bigelow’s sublime Point Break showed bank robbers using Nixon masks to disguise themselves as they went about their business. In the latter, Patrick Swayze even paused, upon fleeing the scene of a crime, to parrot Nixon’s famous ”I am not a crook” speech. Audiences could be forgiven for thinking that the most important political scandal in American history was little more than fodder for celluloid puns.
This month sees the first real effort to remedy this shortcoming. Oliver Stone’s new film, Nixon, is Hollywood’s maiden attempt to peer directly into the soul of that most enigmatic, most dramatic of American presidents. So why has it taken so long for Tricky Dicky to reach the big screen? In an era when producers cry out for topical material, you would have thought that Nixon’s remarkable career, with more ups and downs than a Californian seismograph, would have been a wellspring for writers and directors.
In fact, the opposite has been the case. Richard M Nixon is a prime example of a relatively new phenomenon: characters who are too famous to film. There simply might not be any need for a Nixon biopic. It can be argued that we have already seen the movie, that Nixon’s remarkable story has already been watched by more people than ET and Cats combined. From the moment he squared off with a little-known State Department official named Alger Hiss through to his famous Checkers speech; from his sweaty, ill-fated television debate with JFK to his stunning visit to the People’s Republic of China, Nixon’s peculiar drama was enacted in the public domain for everyone to see. With the help of neither director nor script, Nixon transformed himself into a fully fledged character in his own five-act drama, complete with funerary epilogue on the ancestral patch of Orange County soil.
This renown has presented any artist wishing to plumb the depths of the Nixonian soul with a real dilemma. What use is art when it comes to a life like this, a life already so visible, so shadowless? How can writers or film-makers dramatise a career whose every moment has already been played out in the most public of theatres?
Richard Nixon was famously immune from legal prosecution does the same protection also stem to artistic proceedings? Before Stone, those rare artists who took on the Nixonian legend chose unorthodox media or oblique angles. Robert Coover’s sprawling early 1970s novel The Public Burning, which dealt with Nixon’s involvement in the prosecution of the alleged spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, cast him as a mustachio-twirling Dick Dastardly with all the subtlety of a vaudevillian baddie. (Though critically acclaimed, the book is currently out of print.) John Adams’s 1987 opera, Nixon in China, is an intriguing though ultimately quixotic representation of the president’s historic visit to Peking in 1972. And Robert Altman’s one-man film, Secret Honor (1984), provides one of the more astonishing screen performances in recent movie history as Philip Baker Hall depicts a drunken Nixon ranting against his enemies on the eve of his resignation. It is a remarkable piece of theatre, though the result is to make Nixon appear freakish, even demented, an image hard to square with his resilient, sober, hard-working career.
What is interesting about the above-mentioned works is that they are one offs. However brilliant, they all cast Nixon as a two-dimensional icon, whether he be Coover’s Machiavellian schemer, Adams’s self-consciously historic baritone or Altman’s clown prince. Interestingly, the only important film to tackle the Nixon saga before Stone’s epic, Alan J Pakula’s All the President’s Men (1976), hardly even features the president’s name, much less attempts to depict him. It is as if the reality of Nixon were so daunting that artists were forced to explore the margins of his career and personality instead of taking the bull by the horns.
Until Stone’s film, that is. It is hardly surprising that Stone, with his patented paranoia and first-through-the-door bravado, should be the self-appointed artistic biographer of Nixon. It takes a sensibility supremely lacking in self-consciousness to tackle such a monstrously large and diffuse subject. Hardly surprising, then, that the film is a biographical mess, singularly failing to use poetry’s broad licence to shed any meaningful insights into the 37th president’s story. With a wealth of documentation, news footage and those infamous tapes already lodged in the public consciousness, Stone starts out seriously hamstrung by fact.
For most of the film he can do little more than dress people up and let them walk the walk and talk the talk. As if to make up for this, he then indulges in wild speculation about Nixon’s involvement with some Kennedy-killing Texas oil men, as well as in weepy melodrama about his spartan California childhood. The overall effect is not unlike being read passages from a history text by someone on day-leave from a clinic for paranoiacs. From a historical vantage, the film casts nothing but darkness on Nixon’s soul. When the lights come up, all that money and celluloid have left us no closer to understanding Tricky Dicky than we already were. Indeed, as with Stone’s JFK, those who were ignorant of Nixon’s life will come away a lot further away from understanding it.
The film’s failure as biography is not only illustrative of Stone’s shortcomings, but also points up the difficulty facing the artist who wishes to tackle a public figure in our age of blanket candour and mass communication his job might already have been done for him. How does one represent that which has already been rigorously represented? How does one analyse that which has been subjected to so very much analysis? Can art reach places that media scrutiny cannot? Do any such places even exist in characters such as Nixon?
Writers, poets and balladeers used to have it easy when it came to depicting the famous. Homer was able to write about those rowdy Greeks for an audience who had never seen a post-battle news conference, while few of the punters packing the Globe had any idea what Prince Hal really looked like. Even in a work as recent as Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Horses (1950), a barely concealed gloss of Huey Long, the Louisiana party boss, most readers had only the vaguest notion of what the Kingfish looked and sounded like.
Nowadays, however, the creator does not have this zone of public ignorance in which to manoeuvre. When Shakespeare wrote his Great British histories, he was able to improvise within a few very broad parameters, giving his own interpretation of the pressures and crises involved in being an English king. But if Shakespeare’s crookback Dick was a product of one man’s imagination, Stone’s hunched-shouldered one must be a creature of everyone who ever watched a news bulletin or read The Washington Post. This is why the speculations about Nixon’s bourbon-guzzling or his meetings with pernicious JR types are so preposterous the Nixon we know wasn’t fuelled by childhood ghosts or influenced by shady Texan operatives. His mendacity, triumph and pain were there for everyone to see beneath television’s arc lights and unblinking camera. We know why we hate Nixon, just as we know why we might so grudgingly admire him. We’ve heard the tapes; we’ve seen the footage. There is no need for art to work on him. There is no imaginary vacuum that needs to be filled.
This applies to many public figures. Imagine being given the task of dramatising the OJ Simpson affair. With the exception of the murders themselves, there is really little a screenwriter can bring to this comprehensively public personality that is not already there on those Court TV tapes and his subsequent efforts at mass ingratiation. (Will Simpson’s trial be the first news event to be syndicated as a rerun?) Reams of known fact spiced with a pinch of wild speculation seem to be all that’s left for the artist who tackles the public figure. An actor preparing to play RichardIII would be ill advised to spend much time trying to find paintings or contemporary accounts to model his work on. Shakespeare didn’t care. But for Stone’s film, Anthony Hopkins spent hours watching tapes of Nixon to learn those familiar mannerisms, from the counterfeit grin to that peculiar hunch of the shoulders. The measure of his artistry becomes how well he can re-enact the familiar rather than how much that is new he can show us.
Another example of this restriction of creativity n dealing with public theses can be seen in Primary Colors, currently the bestselling novel in America. Written by an anonymous author with great access to the Clinton camp, it portrays a randy Southern governor and his steely blonde wife as they fight their way through the 1992 primary campaign for the Democratic nomination. Though it is brilliantly written, the book’s wild popularity stems mostly from the fact that it confirms the images and innuendo that are already part of the public discourse about Clinton, rather than suggesting an alternative Slick Willy to the one we know. (Try to imagine a comparable contemporary novel about JFK!) As our public figures become increasingly capable of playing out every aspect of their lives in the public eye, the need to search out clandestine motives, closeted lovers or sulking demons becomes less urgent. Madonna might get to play Evita, but what intelligent actress would want to play her?
Does this mean that the biopic and the roman a clef are doomed to become mere handmaidens to the public record, cheesy made-for-TV re-enactments of the visible? Not necessarily. There is still a vital role for the artist in laying bare the inner workings of public figures. For, in this era of blanket coverage, the danger is that the fully faceted image will be mistaken for the real thing. Just because we have all the pieces needed to make up an icon, it doesn’t mean that the statue will have a heart. The artist must remedy this, must avoid simply parroting the public record (as Stone does), in order to reach those places the camera and mike cannot.
Perhaps Adams and Altman and Coover were right after all the only way to get at these transparent gods is obliquely. The days when Shakespeare or Penn Warren could use a complete public career as a means for illuminating public tyranny may be over, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other tricks left in the artist’s bag. After all, John Ford’s Young Mr Lincoln, which depicted Honest Abe’s career as an anonymous Illinois lawyer, told us everything we needed to know about the man without re-creating the Gettysburg Address or the assassination at Ford’s Theatre. Perhaps if Stone or another film-maker were to choose a single, lesser-known event from Nixon’s life his persecution of Hiss, for instance then we might be able to understand something about that one part of the man’s anatomy the mass media cannot depict the soul. Until such time, we will merely be left with costlier and costlier rubber masks.
