The Bishop on spin
The Bishop has always had a bit of a soft spot for Al Gore. A two-time presidential hopeful, he is often derided by his critics as charm-free—and perhaps he is—but for those intellectually sufficient to follow what he says, his arguments take on a certain unprepossessing charm of their own. An Inconvenient Truth, then—Gore’s documentary-cum-PowerPoint presentation on global warming—could be seen as a wrestling match between who Gore is and what he says. The result is something of a draw.
There is no point in pretending, even for a second, that this is a documentary, or any other sort of film. Whether or not Gore chooses to run in 2008 (your pontificating pontiff suspects that he is tired, and won’t), this is campaign commercial, an advertisement for the issue and the man himself. There is nothing cinematic about An Inconvenient Truth, nothing that could make the experience of seeing it in-theatre different from watching it on TV; or even—but for a few charts and a moment of communion between Gore and a cherry picker—hearing it, perhaps in the car on the way to work, on CD.
As political piece, as with all forms of advertising, the only way to judge An Inconvenient Truth’s efficacy is in hindsight, via public opinion—and the reports have been, for the most part, and perhaps surprisingly, superb. (The website Rotten Tomatoes, which compiles the opinions of various mainstream and Internet critics in a yeh-or-nay (‘fresh’ or ‘rotten’) fashion, gives it a remarkable 92%.) The Bishop imagines left-wing liberals will (or, rather, have) adore(d) it, while for liberal centrists, the environment may, while the film is still warm, now take its place among more personally relevant Democratic issues: health care, education, employment and such. Pure centrists, or non-conservative sceptics (such as your ecologically-uncertain evangelical himself*), may be inclined to give the topic a second look. But for conservatives of all shapes and sizes, sitting up straight and paying attention will be a little like being cornered by one’s parents for a talk on the birds and the bees—only aged twenty-five, instead of the usual twelve.
Watching An Inconvenient Truth, the Bishop was reminded of a comment by Australian comedian John Safran: ‘You’re too stupid to be an atheist’. Unequipped with first-hand knowledge of the facts, and unable to make much of them even if we were, most of us can only take—or not take—what Gore tells us about the future of hurricanes, polar ice caps and the like on faith. And while, as philosophy, the scientific method can fall back on its rigorous standards (and certainly in opposition to non-naturalistic worldviews), we have only individual scientists' word that they have followed those standards—and that they have been successful in doing so. But this is matter of meta-heuristics, not one of politics, and in Gore’s favour he has the demeanour of one who is, as much as anyone can be, incapable of falsehood.
Indeed it seems, on face value, that Gore would make as good a presidential candidate as anyone likely to run for that office. He is a Southern Democrat, which means he can expect to give his party one red state.** He is religious. He is, in presentation, modest and self-effacing (though the Bishop can clearly see the necessary haughter of a man who believes he knows best. Many times throughout An Inconvenient Truth, he makes reference to this or that eminent ‘friend’, and the Bishop cannot be sure whether this is because he ever-so-slightly smarmy, or in order to assure us that he actually has friends). At almost six-foot-two and square-built, he has perhaps the ideal physiology of a president, and can add to his masculinity resume both high school football and voluntary service in Vietnam. He has immense experience in Washington, but grew up on a farm. And his intellect has never been in doubt. Why, then, has he struggled?
The Bishop suspects it might be that Gore—with all the self-awareness of a high-school hall monitor—has no conception of how to entertain. He knows what entertainment is—he’s seen as much of it as Tipper will allow—and yet, as any parrot owner knows, even a bird can be taught to speak without knowing how to talk. And faced with conclusive evidence that he is neither engaging nor funny, he stoops to compensate; but hearing Gore joke about his absent sense of humour, one can do no more than swallow hard and try to laugh, in much the same way one would if a terminal bowel cancer patient made a quip about feeling a little shit.
What Gore needs is Nick Naylor (Arron Eckhart), the tobacco lobbyist and spin doctor of Thank You For Smoking. Intelligently cast, Ekhart is just self-effacing enough—and surrounded by just enough other hustlers (he often approaches his contemporaries with the expression of a doe caught in headlights)—to come across as sympathetic as he is smooth.
Katie Holmes, by contrast, is ridiculously miscast; as a journalist who goes down to get the low-down on her subjects, Holmes brings neither the savvy nor the sex appeal to liberate anyone from their most guarded secrets—let alone the wily Nick. Even her physical details are wrong—twice it is noted that her stand-out bodily characteristic is ‘great tits’. (What the hell, the Bishop wonders, was the costume designer thinking, putting her in nothing but those loose, oversize shirts?) And it is disappointing that in a film which does such a snappy job of spelling out the secrets of spin, we get no insight—besides her insides—on how this bravura reporter plies her (rough) trade.
This film is one of scenes rather than story—like his father, Jason Reitman is too light—and prone to schmaltz—to fully sustain this high concept. But there are here and there laughs—and commentary—of a semi-original kind. One scene stands out. Nick is sent by one of his various bosses to pay off Lorne Lutch (Sam Elliot, useful), the ‘original’ Marlboro Man. Now dying of lung cancer, it is intended that such ‘generosity’ will see Lorne take his vengeance, and vehemence, out of the public eye. Clearly aware that Nick is full of tricks, he first refutes the offer, but when Nick, circumlocutorially, explains the consequences of not keeping the cash, Lorne—as though he had been punched drunk by Nick’s sure-fisted verbiage—changes his tune. How many such dextrous rhetorical inversions as this are Reitman’s, and how many come from the novel by Christopher Buckley, is a matter for those who have read it; but whichever one of them it is, he has perhaps a future in spin doctoring himself.
*For instance: Gore notes that the one constant global-warming relationship over the past forty years has been between atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and heat. While this is almost certainly incontrovertible, the climate is a frankly fickle (scientifically: chaotic) thing, and there is no reason not to speculate that, upon reaching what could be called a critical mass, carbon dioxide levels might have a different effect.
**Though failed to take his home state during his 2000 run.
There is no point in pretending, even for a second, that this is a documentary, or any other sort of film. Whether or not Gore chooses to run in 2008 (your pontificating pontiff suspects that he is tired, and won’t), this is campaign commercial, an advertisement for the issue and the man himself. There is nothing cinematic about An Inconvenient Truth, nothing that could make the experience of seeing it in-theatre different from watching it on TV; or even—but for a few charts and a moment of communion between Gore and a cherry picker—hearing it, perhaps in the car on the way to work, on CD.
As political piece, as with all forms of advertising, the only way to judge An Inconvenient Truth’s efficacy is in hindsight, via public opinion—and the reports have been, for the most part, and perhaps surprisingly, superb. (The website Rotten Tomatoes, which compiles the opinions of various mainstream and Internet critics in a yeh-or-nay (‘fresh’ or ‘rotten’) fashion, gives it a remarkable 92%.) The Bishop imagines left-wing liberals will (or, rather, have) adore(d) it, while for liberal centrists, the environment may, while the film is still warm, now take its place among more personally relevant Democratic issues: health care, education, employment and such. Pure centrists, or non-conservative sceptics (such as your ecologically-uncertain evangelical himself*), may be inclined to give the topic a second look. But for conservatives of all shapes and sizes, sitting up straight and paying attention will be a little like being cornered by one’s parents for a talk on the birds and the bees—only aged twenty-five, instead of the usual twelve.
Watching An Inconvenient Truth, the Bishop was reminded of a comment by Australian comedian John Safran: ‘You’re too stupid to be an atheist’. Unequipped with first-hand knowledge of the facts, and unable to make much of them even if we were, most of us can only take—or not take—what Gore tells us about the future of hurricanes, polar ice caps and the like on faith. And while, as philosophy, the scientific method can fall back on its rigorous standards (and certainly in opposition to non-naturalistic worldviews), we have only individual scientists' word that they have followed those standards—and that they have been successful in doing so. But this is matter of meta-heuristics, not one of politics, and in Gore’s favour he has the demeanour of one who is, as much as anyone can be, incapable of falsehood.
Indeed it seems, on face value, that Gore would make as good a presidential candidate as anyone likely to run for that office. He is a Southern Democrat, which means he can expect to give his party one red state.** He is religious. He is, in presentation, modest and self-effacing (though the Bishop can clearly see the necessary haughter of a man who believes he knows best. Many times throughout An Inconvenient Truth, he makes reference to this or that eminent ‘friend’, and the Bishop cannot be sure whether this is because he ever-so-slightly smarmy, or in order to assure us that he actually has friends). At almost six-foot-two and square-built, he has perhaps the ideal physiology of a president, and can add to his masculinity resume both high school football and voluntary service in Vietnam. He has immense experience in Washington, but grew up on a farm. And his intellect has never been in doubt. Why, then, has he struggled?
The Bishop suspects it might be that Gore—with all the self-awareness of a high-school hall monitor—has no conception of how to entertain. He knows what entertainment is—he’s seen as much of it as Tipper will allow—and yet, as any parrot owner knows, even a bird can be taught to speak without knowing how to talk. And faced with conclusive evidence that he is neither engaging nor funny, he stoops to compensate; but hearing Gore joke about his absent sense of humour, one can do no more than swallow hard and try to laugh, in much the same way one would if a terminal bowel cancer patient made a quip about feeling a little shit.
What Gore needs is Nick Naylor (Arron Eckhart), the tobacco lobbyist and spin doctor of Thank You For Smoking. Intelligently cast, Ekhart is just self-effacing enough—and surrounded by just enough other hustlers (he often approaches his contemporaries with the expression of a doe caught in headlights)—to come across as sympathetic as he is smooth.
Katie Holmes, by contrast, is ridiculously miscast; as a journalist who goes down to get the low-down on her subjects, Holmes brings neither the savvy nor the sex appeal to liberate anyone from their most guarded secrets—let alone the wily Nick. Even her physical details are wrong—twice it is noted that her stand-out bodily characteristic is ‘great tits’. (What the hell, the Bishop wonders, was the costume designer thinking, putting her in nothing but those loose, oversize shirts?) And it is disappointing that in a film which does such a snappy job of spelling out the secrets of spin, we get no insight—besides her insides—on how this bravura reporter plies her (rough) trade.
This film is one of scenes rather than story—like his father, Jason Reitman is too light—and prone to schmaltz—to fully sustain this high concept. But there are here and there laughs—and commentary—of a semi-original kind. One scene stands out. Nick is sent by one of his various bosses to pay off Lorne Lutch (Sam Elliot, useful), the ‘original’ Marlboro Man. Now dying of lung cancer, it is intended that such ‘generosity’ will see Lorne take his vengeance, and vehemence, out of the public eye. Clearly aware that Nick is full of tricks, he first refutes the offer, but when Nick, circumlocutorially, explains the consequences of not keeping the cash, Lorne—as though he had been punched drunk by Nick’s sure-fisted verbiage—changes his tune. How many such dextrous rhetorical inversions as this are Reitman’s, and how many come from the novel by Christopher Buckley, is a matter for those who have read it; but whichever one of them it is, he has perhaps a future in spin doctoring himself.
*For instance: Gore notes that the one constant global-warming relationship over the past forty years has been between atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and heat. While this is almost certainly incontrovertible, the climate is a frankly fickle (scientifically: chaotic) thing, and there is no reason not to speculate that, upon reaching what could be called a critical mass, carbon dioxide levels might have a different effect.
**Though failed to take his home state during his 2000 run.
posted by Salisbury at 5:39 pm
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