Subsections below:
The forbidding complexity (and readiness for satire) of Nixon as a topic
The historical relevance, or current interest, of Nixon’s time
A little side note on historical “revisionism”
How this film enters the biopic pantheon
A quickie director’s dossier
The problem with doing some blog entries on movies is that, while a given movie seems a good choice to watch (with the initial idea to write on it), sometimes I find I’ve bitten off more than I can chew. There’s a lot to discuss about the movie, for the level of audience I think I’m writing for (whether rightly or wrongly). Plus there may be aspects of a director’s or actor’s career, public image, and so on that I don’t know as well as do others, so—try as I might to do a fair job—I might write too shallowly or skimpily for these other people who know the topics better.
I’ve wanted to do a review of Oliver Stone’s Nixon for some time, not simply because it’s election season, though one of this film’s still-relevant points is that we should be careful when a candidate for the highest office in the U.S. is trying to peddle a plan to solve huge, intractable problems (like the Vietnam War, or enormous national debt) and yet we don’t know what his secret plan is or whether he even has one.
The forbidding complexity (and readiness for satire) of Nixon as a topic
This movie poses a number of problems, and one of my major warnings is that—especially considering that, I think, most people in the country today were not alive, or of adult age, when Nixon was in office, so they wouldn’t remember him when he was “current”—you should read some reliable information on Nixon’s career, and really absorb it well, before you see this film. Nixon’s career was chock-full of so many notable episodes, connections to major historical matters, “accident-scene career messes to rubberneck at,” and so on, that this movie, even at over three hours long, is stuffed with a lot of material that you can’t begin to assess as to how well it’s portrayed unless you know this historical figure and his times. And amazingly, Nixon is now part of history, not just because he died in 1994, but because a lot of the incendiary issues to which he was tied one way or another are many years in the past, and so much other stuff has come to occupy the public’s, and politicians’, front-burner attention since his time.
Another thing about Nixon is that, as a personality, as someone who was famously “ethically challenged” in his political life, he is ripe for portrayal simply as a character study—and this film itself seems at times to portray a Shakespearean figure that it almost seems impossible to believe was a real person or someone whom Americans would willingly have voted into office. And Nixon as “a character that almost represents a standard for what baby boomers and others would never want to be” has been treated in culture numerous times.
One colorful example is the novel The Public Burning, by Robert Coover. Published in 1977, this is a relatively late example of the type of James Joyce–influenced “mega-novels” that came out mostly in the 1960s and ’70s, as florid in pyrotechnic style and self-consciously literary conceits and premises as they are earnest about representing the amazing and not altogether encouraging aspects of tumultuous, ethically compromised American life: William Gaddis’s early example The Recognitions (1955) and his later JR (1975), Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961) and Something Happened (1974), Thomas Pynchon’s V. (1963) and Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) and Giles Goat-Boy (1966), and numerous others. Coover’s The Public Burning, perhaps the most notable of his numerous novels, can (I suppose) be classified by today’s term of “magical realism,” and alternates satirical depiction of government goings-on with a flashily rhetorical depiction of a sort of broader American cultural fandango that provides some of the background of the book’s story. Its main intent seems to be to show what a bizarre, yet politically adept, personality Nixon was (matched only by the freakish elements within swaths of American culture), and it focuses (with fictionalization of real events, of course) on his doings in the early 1950s, when Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed for spying for the Soviet Union .
The aim and achievement of The Public Burning are reflected in a nicely turned preface (to a reprinted edition) by philosopher, novelist, and critic William H. Gass, written in about 1997, as it happened in the wake of Nixon’s death and of Oliver Stone’s film on Nixon. One comment shows the paradox in writing on Nixon as a character:
Huge hunks of the book are narrated by Dick Nixon, Eisenhower’s VP at the time, though thinking and conversing with more pith and eloquence than the real one managed, since we now have read the tapes [via transcript] and are acquainted with his style. The book’s Tricky Dick is nevertheless blessed with sufficient hypocrisy, self-delusion, and opportunism to suggest his connection to the historical vice-president, but not to cement it. Coover’s Richard Nixon is a rich and beautifully rendered fictional character. The real Richard Nixon is a caricature. This is one of the profound ironies of Coover’s achievement. […] The allegedly real Nixon does not speak in sentences, but in sputters and jabs. His cliches are mostly scatalogical. He talks like a mob boss. Concerning Ted Kennedy, Nixon orders his henchmen: “Plant one. Plant two guys on him. This will be very useful. Just might get lucky and catch that son-of-a-bitch and grill him for ’76.” [p. xii; boldface added]
I was only about 11 or 12 when the Watergate scandal seemed to fill the TV news so thoroughly that my young, wondering mind took the reports’ focus as indicating strong justification in their daring to cover their object so extensively: they must have reflected some serious, worth-digging-into political “cancer” that had to be dug out. In 1973 or so, I was still politically naïve enough that I was surprised/disappointed by a grade-level peer speaking what was probably her parents’ view, that Nixon was an “asshole.” My mother has been almost through her entire life a true-blue Republican, and in 1973 I tended to conform with her view to the extent I was somewhat dismayed by the peer’s opinion; but by the late 1970s, I did become solidly enough a Democrat, on my own steam. By the time I was 15, in 1977, I was enough versed in (and more or less apt to conform my opinion with) how Nixon was widely regarded scornfully—helped not least (and certainly not only) by Mad magazine, which at its own historical peak in the late 1960s and early ’70s had a field day with him.
The historical relevance, or current interest, of Nixon’s time
It astonishes me today that now I seem among the baby boomers who are most apt to carry (as if like a solid historical lesson) the skeptical, if not deeply scornful, view of Nixon that has held sway among so many, because, as I said earlier, today so many American citizens have been born at times so they couldn’t even have been alive or politically aware when Nixon was in office. It’s as if I am one of the old World War II vets who are the only remaining witnesses to that war’s time. But not only that: I myself am not among the confirmed Nixon haters who were old enough to be subject to being drafted into the military when he was in office (and in more value-neutral terms, I am not nearly as well versed in Nixon minutiae as are others older than myself), and yet I’ve seen enough history flow since the 1970s to be astonished that so much of what Nixon was in the middle of seems, now, “ancient history” and out of many young adults’ awareness or concern. And in a way that’s pretty regrettable.
Who knows much about, or remembers, détente? Who still gets worked up over Henry Kissinger? Who remembers Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev?
Nixon himself once said that in the early twentieth century, one of the great European leaders had said that his historical scene at the time featured small events and big personalities in its leaders; but Nixon said (meaning in about 1970, perhaps), the historical scene featured big events. But Nixon didn’t complete the figure of speech: he could have added, “And small characters”—such as, a George Carlin or the like would have pounced on, Nixon himself. But indeed big events shook the ground in the early 1970s, and whoever was in charge had to do something responsible, if not heroic, about them. And it was Nixon as President who, however successfully, tried to rise to the fiery occasion.
Think of his “ending” the Vietnam War itself: today it might be forgotten that there was a peace treaty of early 1973, for which Kissinger and North Vietnam representative Le Duc Tho won the Nobel Peace Prize (Tho declined the prize), though the war was more thoroughly ended when the North Vietnamese overran and took over South Vietnam in 1975. How did Nixon get us to the peace treaty? He ordered the so-called Christmas carpet-bombing of Hanoi in late 1972, in order to get the North Vietnamese to capitulate, though of course the bombing caused deep shock and outrage among his critics for its brutal and extensive nature.
There’s been a lot of history since that time, and today our minds are commandeered (understandably) by the 2008-and-after financial crisis, the attenuated wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, more than a decade of worry about al-Qaeda, and the current imbroglio posed by Iran. What are we left with as a notable focus of interest from the Nixon era? As it seems (for those who care), Nixon himself. The character. And we could ask, What would we do if another Nixon came running for president in our time of dire need? Haven’t we learned to beware of geeks bearing grifts? (Not that Mitt Romney carries quite the ethical baggage of Nixon.)
Stone might have seemed an ideal director to take on Nixon, given his own way of treating current-historical or not-so-long-ago history: JFK, Wall Street, etc. His film actually goes to a certain length to be even-handed (with exceptions) about Nixon’s complex life, a historically dense and troubling time, and a complex scandal (Watergate) that brought Nixon down. But as I said, if you don’t know much about Nixon or his time, I strongly suggest not watching this film until you do, because you can be confused by it and unable to assess some of what it does. Even for me, I’d forgotten some of the stuff it deals with, but other stuff readily came back to memory, because the film actually touches on a number of episodes in Nixon’s career that have long been famous and seem to have been tailor-made for memory by how they reflect—like striking, bizarre personal errors in a close associate—on him as a personality as well as figured in his “resume” (e.g., the Checkers speech in the early 1950s, where among other things he makes mawkish reference to his wife Pat’s “Republican cloth coat”).
What we have today is a film—a large important facet of which is actor Anthony Hopkins’ brave and mainly successful depiction of him—that could lead young people to say, Sure, those were tough, tumultuous times, but how did this weird, sick character get to be President of the U.S.?
How did this crook—I’m afraid this epithetic still fits him well enough, since the Watergate crisis seems to have shown so extensively and vividly that he was like a mafioso in the Oval Office—how did this crook get to be the statesman who set up the famed “opening to China” of 1972?
He was both someone whom people felt should be stopped from ascending to power (his “character flaws that could lead to no good” seemed apparent to some from the earliest phase of his career) and a personage that, as his life unfolded, seemed destined to join the ranks of famous American characters like Davy Crockett, General Custer, and many others. Not that he would be a benign member of the annals of American folklore, but that he still was a character that somehow would be destined to attract attention in American history for many decades to come, whether or not his political implications, as they impacted real individuals, would end up cold in the graves of these individuals after a while.
A little side note on historical “revisionism”
Today’s average middle-class voters, having been treated to eight years of the second Bush Administration, and otherwise having cause to be forgetful of 1970s politics, may miss out on some important distinctions between what was a conservative (“odious” or otherwise) in the 1970s, and what amounts to the same today. Without getting into a discussion that could get enormously detailed on the merits and could raise a lot of emotions on both sides of the liberal/conservative divide, I want to point out that the Nixon/Kissinger conservatism was almost a world different from what characterized the second Bush Administration’s conservatism, particularly in international affairs. This is not a small matter. One thing I am thinking about is a remark in the recent biography on novelist Joseph Heller by Tracy Daugherty, Just One Catch.
Daugherty’s book is pretty good, I found in giving it a quick, eager reading a few months ago. But one point it makes is strongly off-base. Incidentally, since I mentioned the Joyce-influenced novelists above, I could add here that Heller represented, among other things in his intellectually rich work, a certain strain of critics who were especially disgusted with Nixon, as a person and (not quite the same) as a kind of politics, with Nixon’s pettifogging, innuendo, scaremongering, etc., etc. Catch-22, as some of its fans may well know, is not simply about World War II, which it depicts ostensibly, but more subtly about the self-interest, alienation-between-peers, ambition, and insincerity of careerist men, especially among the more privileged. It also treated certain quirky political issues of the late 1940s and 1950s, perhaps as reflecting a distillation of the worst tendencies that lay more broadly behind careerist society: one of these was the Alger Hiss affair, involving supposed microfilm hidden in a pumpkin. Catch-22’s pillorying of this is insinuations about papers hidden in a tomato, when the Chaplain is interrogated toward the end of the book. Of course, the Alger Hiss case was championed by—and in effect became an important early-career anchor for—Richard Nixon.
Heller’s later novel Good as Gold, while obviously not as good as Catch-22 (and generally pursuing a less ambitious set of agenda items), of course makes a conspicuous point of castigating Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s most important associate in the White House, especially regarding geopolitics. Heller’s fictional use of Kissinger is as a sort of “negative career-aim reference point,” so to speak, for the ambitious Bruce Gold; when faced with the possibility of becoming the country’s first Jewish Secretary of State (not counting Kissinger), Gold savors all his negative feelings, press clippings, and so on about Kissinger as if as a touchstone for not what any good Jew should be if he or she rose to Kissinger’s level of stature.
The strongly off-base point of Daugherty’s biography is to characterize Kissinger as an early emergence of “neo-conservatism” that would come to full flower in the second Bush Administration, in Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld especially. I think this is wrong as to both history and actual “pure” philosophy of the men involved. Though Cheney and Rumsfeld were active in the Ford Administration, in broad terms their ways of operating as would occur in 2001-08 were only nascent in about 1975, and Ford’s Administration, while utilizing Kissinger in an important way as Secretary of State, certainly did not include the kind of geopolitics that George W. Bush would later sanction. Kissinger’s philosophy of Realpolitik and his factual circumstances including the Soviet Union and nuclear-arms control were a quite different matter from the 2001-08 “war on terrorism” business.
One thing very much to the point here is that a keystone of how awful the second Bush Administration was for me is, in its manic rewriting of national strategy, methods, and so on regarding geopolitics, it even scrapped the nuclear ABM (anti-ballistic missile) treaty, a 1972 treaty that through the 1970s and early 1980s represented a landmark and exemplary way to pursue arms control when the Soviet Union was still an American rival. To my eyes as a lowly citizen, I saw no reason it should be junked in the name of a new American disposition toward combatting “global terrorism” in the past decade, not simply because the U.S. and Russia still hold by far the most nuclear weapons on the planet. In any event, to round out a discussion that could also get hairy, neo-conservatism as represented in George W. Bush’s manic redoing of American geopolitics, especially symbolized in discarding the 1972 ABM treaty, was about as far from Henry Kissinger’s way of doing things as you can imagine, whether or not you like or respect Kissinger for his 1970s work.
In fact, if Joseph Heller was still alive (he’d be almost 90), I’m sure he would have had very little good to say about the second Bush Administration, but I seriously doubt he would have summed it up as more of the 1970s Nixon/Kissinger geopolitical fare. He was more precise and historical rooted than that.
How this film enters the biopic pantheon
I first saw Nixon when it was out in late 1995, and then when I viewed it recently, it seemed it had been so long that I first saw it that I was almost as if seeing it for the first time. In addition to the storyline being out of order—partly to suit a “framing” device where the film starts with the Watergate break-in and seems in large part to be Nixon’s life as recollected by him when he is at the precipice of losing all (the standing) he had worked his life for—it also has so many characters and incidents that it could get confusing even for someone like me who remembers a fair amount of stuff about the man. For those who know a lot about his life already, picking through the movie won’t be so bad.
In fact, in some ways the film seems a little superficial, in terms of representing incidents fairly much as they are long known to have happened, like the Checkers speech, aspects of the 1960 Kennedy–Nixon debate, his 1962 California-governor’s-race concession speech, and so on. For a film of manageable length to cover such a dense life would be a challenge at best; in the abstract, it would be regrettable if memorable episodes passed by like barely-glimpsed stops on a bus tour, with the movie seeming to err on the side of inclusiveness rather than on the side of depth of study of certain episodes. With such quickie recounting, it risks being glib and slighting, rather as Nixon’s shallower detractors have been in alluding offhandedly to the old episodes; a biopic should not merely unroll old incidents as if to repeat all the old, shallowly recounted “cartoon panels” of such a person’s life. Yet that is part of the paradox of a movie on Nixon’s life: if you go just deep enough to squeeze in an episode into three minutes of film time, the at-times comical Nixon looks like a world-class cartoon character, while to leave some of these episodes out entirely (in order to avoid shallowness of depiction) would be to skimp on revealing details of a life.
In fact, to the extent I am well-versed in Nixon at all, in these more jaded and disjointed-national-history times, I found the familiar glints of Nixon’s life to come across in a strangely humorous way from this movie—and this wasn’t merely a matter of Stone’s tone or emphasis, but a matter of the inevitability of how Nixon’s life come across—like on the borderline between parody and historical accounting. When Nixon died in 1994, probably numerous creative types, not least in Hollywood, felt as if to say, “He’s gone. Now let’s do it—a warts-and-all movie about him, lest people forget.” Of course, the question some would raise, and which even the film’s makers might have been wary of, is whether such a film would be a hatchet job, or a fair enough biography: and of course, Nixon’s nature, if reflected well enough on screen, would make it unclear what the answer was.
While Nixon certainly worked hard to get where he did, he also seemed like a horrible beach ball that kept popping out of the waters, there in our face again, “destined for greatness—one way or another” as Tony Randall says in the movie The King of Comedy (see my June 1 and June 8 reviews)—and as was probably inevitable, the historical national character he seemed cut out to be was both an eccentric and a “crook” of a politician—who yet also had political brilliance. I’ve felt for some time that history further down the road will probably treat him more kindly than the baby boomer generation generally has tended to. But for now, when viewers see this movie—and sift out the “questionable theories” that Oliver Stone seems apt to leaven his historical films with—they can marvel at Anthony Hopkins’ impressive performance and ask, How did a troll of a man like Nixon get to the level of power in the U.S. he did?
If we also consider that our current presidential race is about as similar to 1968 (Humphrey versus Nixon) as to 1980 (Carter versus Reagan), and we see how in 1968 Nixon appealed to the “Silent Majority,” with soaring rhetoric, as if he was just the ticket in turbulent, quagmire-affected times, we can ask today: granted that the national problems we face are different, can we still hand over the White House keys to another “Nixon” who promises a “secret plan” to cure what ails us?
I will look in Part 2 at some details of the film, without having seen it all a second time (due to practical constraints). So my Part 2 will be scattershot and sketchy.
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A quickie director’s dossier
If one were to consider all the noted directors exemplifying Hollywood
Stone wrote the screenplay for Midnight Express (~1978) and Scarface (1983), the latter a favorite for those who like really violent gangster films. He directed Salvador (1986), which poked its nose into what at the time was the hot-button topic of Central America , which was a festering political issue in the 1980s with the Sandinistas, etc. His first major film—as a critical success and a winner with audiences—was Platoon (1986), which seems to be considered among the most worthwhile films on the Vietnam War along with the controversial (for some) but beloved (by others) Apocalypse Now (1979); Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987); and (from what I can gather; I haven’t seen it) Hamburger Hill (1987). Other films may be added to this list (e.g., Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter [1978], also controversial, is sometimes included). Platoon has been especially esteemed because Stone, unlike the directors of the other, early-made Vietnam films, had actually served in Vietnam
After Platoon, Stone had joined the ranks of “major directors whose new films were always watched for their promise”: Wall Street (1987) followed, with its famous character, the Wall Street titan Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas; Born on the Fourth of July (1989), with Tom Cruise in a noted performance; the quite-violent Natural Born Killers (1994); JFK (~1991), very controversial for its conspiracy theory as to why JFK was assassinated; and The Doors (1991), on the rock group. More recent efforts have included the respectable-enough World Trade Center
Some of Stone’s trademarks are familiar enough: a flashy visual style, including quick edits, multiple short shots of a scene or person, sometimes with different apparent film stocks; insertion of historic footage within more historically-oriented films; a general sense of excitement created by all this; attention to hot topics of turbulent times or events in decades starting in the 1960s; and, notoriously, theories, either major components of a film (as in JFK) or more minor (as in Nixon), as to why something happened that either are implausible or highly controversial at best.
In this latter regard, Stone may disappoint some because he is in a position, as a film director of interesting work, to present the truth (or as close as Hollywood films dare come to it), particularly when he chooses topics that get a lot of people’s blood boiling anyway; and yet he spoils the proceedings a bit by including theories that seem like crank ideas, or like snide insinuations inserted just to express contempt for the “evil” side of what or who he is depicting.
