Medium Cool explores such issues as the conflicts between power and truth, responsibility and exploitation in the TV-news medium. (The title refers to McLuhan’s categorization of television as a “cool” medium, that is, one that is “high in participation . . . by the audience” — a notion that might puzzle the parents of children hypnotized in front of the tube.) It can serve on one level as a rallying cry against the monopoly of media by the establishment.
But in the end, Medium Cool falls into the same navel-gazing trap that ensnared Blowup. What most people remember about the film is the line “Look out, Haskell, it’s real!” overheard as Wexler films a National Guardsman discharging a tear-gas canister in his direction. (Ironically, the line was added to the film during editing, compounding the murky interrelation of fiction and reality.) People also remember the concluding sequence, an inversion of its opening, and the infamous final shot that holds a mirror, or rather a camera, up to the artifice.
As the credits roll, the demonstrators chant on the soundtrack, “The whole world is watching!” But watching what?
Rashomon to judgment
Medium Cool left documentarians with a mixed legacy: is the camera a tool for liberation or a mirror of the filmmaker’s subjectivity? But some of what Wexler left behind proved to be of great practical value for at least one filmmaker. Cinema verité filmmaker that he was, Wexler shot reels of footage of the chaotic events in Chicago, an archival boon 40 years later to Brett Morgen when he made Chicago 10 (2008), his documentary about the 1968 demonstrations and the equally dramatic show trial of the activist leaders that followed.
Morgen also got his hands on hours of audio tape covertly recorded of the trial, which he dramatized with capture-motion animation. He wanted to make the story vivid for a new generation of viewers, but in doing so he ignored its context, causes, and consequences. As a result, Morgen made a documentary film about a historical political trial that is neither political nor historical.
Which is just what he intended to do. “The movie is more of a parable or fable for all times,” he says. “There’s a war going on, there’s opposition to the war, and there’s a government trying to silence the opposition. It’s an age-old story. Truth is not singular — we have different ways of seeing things. I was approaching this as mythology.” And objective truth and reality? “I just don’t understand that,” he says. “I’m trying to smash that sort of belief. That’s not where we’re going now.”
That might be a dangerous direction in which to go at a time when we’re invading countries for, as Michael Moore proclaimed at the 2002 Oscars, “fictitious reasons.” Truth then would belong to whoever gets the last edit, and history would become a director’s cut.
Brian De Palma would be up for making that cut. In Redacted (2007), he transfers the Rashomon effect to the Iraq War and the accompanying labyrinth of surveillance cameras, digital recorders, embedded journalists, and terrorist Web sites. At the heart of the film lies an atrocity — a rape and murder committed by US troops. But this reality comes framed by numerous filmed points of view — a mirrored box of narratives, with the official version “redacted” to remove incriminating elements and serve the purposes of power rather than truth.
Like nearly every other film about Iraq, Redacted was widely despised — more so than others perhaps because it blatantly blurred the line between “documentary” and “fiction.” But the high concept of finding the truth amid a maze of disconnected viewpoints evidently appeals to the public. How else to explain the success of Vantage
Point (2008), in which an apparent assassination of the president gets rewound repeatedly from the perspective of various participants to reveal not so much a solution to the puzzle as increasingly preposterous scenarios? Vantage Point opened at the number-one spot at the box office in February, earning $24 million in its first weekend.
More modest in production and grosses, George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead (2008), his fourth installment in the zombie epic he began in 1968 with Night of the Living Dead, goes deeper in its analysis of truth, reality, and the media. What the student filmmaker who is Dead’s protagonist confronts is not the real-life tragedy of Redacted, or The Blair Witch Project’s (1999) figment of idle post-adolescent imaginations, or Cloverfield’s (2008) 40-story special-effect standing in for post-9/11 trauma, or even the lumbering intestine-chomping zombies that have been Romero’s resilient metaphor for four decades. It is the Internet. Romero’s hero suspects the official media of covering up the true nature and extent of the living-dead disaster, so he films his own version, heedless of the risks, in order to set the world straight — and to attract 18,000 hits a minute to his Web site.