Sara Batkie
“We see Americans hating each other, fighting each other,” a notable politician was quoted as saying about the country’s mood at the Republican National Convention. You’d be forgiven for thinking it happened last month in Milwaukee, but it’s actually something Richard Nixon said back in 1968, at least according to Norman Mailer’s Miami and the Siege of Chicago (though maybe the fact that it doesn’t sound completely deranged tipped you off). It’s yet another example of how the past is not even past, to paraphrase another great American writer. Mailer’s book is one of several indispensable real-time chronicles of that tempestuous period, and as the Democrats prepare to descend once again on the Windy City for their convention this week, there’s no better time to revisit another: Haskell Wexler’s 1969 film Medium Cool.
Mailer was down in Miami on assignment for Harper’s Magazine; Wexler’s project was slightly more on-the-fly in comparison. That’s not to say he doesn’t have the credentials: Studs Terkel, the legendary historiographer of the city, is credited as “our man in Chicago,” and Wexler’s keen interest in all corners of a deeply segregated place is consistently on display. Still, Medium Cool might seem at first like an unexpected project for Wexler, initially known for his cinematography on such classics as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and In the Heat of the Night. But he also had an equally prolific career as a committed political documentarian, taking on incendiary subjects such as My Lai and the Weather Underground. As his first (mostly) fictional directorial effort, Medium Cool splits the difference between these two vocations.
The film – which takes its title from Marshall McLuhan’s description of television – is ostensibly the story of a news cameraman named John, played by Robert Forster (who, it must be said, was an underrated hottie in his day). But he’s less of a character than a vessel through which Wexler poses a series of questions about both the creation and consumption of a medium that was in many ways still in its infancy. This is evident from the startling opening scene, which finds John and his soundman arriving at a gruesome roadside accident. We watch as they circle the wreck with their equipment, maneuvering to get the best angles, and only slowly does it dawn on us that they’ve come before the police, the bloodied bodies of the victims still lying in the street. “Better call an ambulance,” John mutters as they walk away.
It’s because of this ability to detach himself from what he’s seeing that John is so good at his job. Empathy isn’t required for subjects you’re merely observing, and that’s true when he’s just watching the news too. “Jesus I love to shoot film,” he says at one point while Martin Luther King, Jr. is heard off screen. Context clues let us know that King is being shown on T.V. because of his recent assassination. The first half of Medium Cool mostly follows along as John goes on various jobs – the Resurrection City camp, Bobby Kennedy’s funeral, and, eerily in retrospect, the National Guard running through a protest exercise. Whether these are events Wexler staged or just happened upon is up to the viewer to decide; what he’s primarily interested in is getting a reaction regardless.
We also see moments in John’s personal life, which drive the film’s second half. After learning that his footage is regularly handed over to the F.B.I. for viewing, he’s fired from his job and set adrift. A chance encounter draws him to Eileen (Verna Bloom), a transplant from West Virginia with a young son, who seems fully removed from the frenetic pace of his world. But there’s no separating the personal from the political in 1968 America, and the two halves converge at the infamous Democratic National Convention, which was roiled by clashes between police and protestors.
These scenes take up roughly the final twenty minutes of Medium Cool, and it’s here that Wexler’s questions about complicity and truthfulness in mass media take on a muscular urgency. While it was clear that the convention would involve some disruption, the intensity and vindictiveness of the violence that the police inflict on the protestors must have been dangerous to film in the moment, and it feels dangerous to watch. As Eileen wanders the streets in a daze looking for her lost son, the line between Bloom’s performance and her genuine fears for her safety blurs so much as to become nonexistent. John, meanwhile, is inside the amphitheater on a freelance assignment, filming the delegate count and Mayor Daley’s remarks. He’s missing all the real action, but Wexler wasn’t.
It all might lead us to wonder: why make a fictional film at all? Wouldn’t a documentary about this unstable time better capture what it was like to live it? But Wexler’s ultimate aim isn’t simply to capture 1968, but recreate it, and possibly rebuild it. Medium Cool often feels most alive when his camera goes where John’s can’t, like the casual discussion amongst a militant Black Power group or the psychedelic Mothers of Invention concert. Maybe he thought a documentary about television, with its talking heads and rigorous reporting, wouldn’t be as truthful, and it wouldn’t allow Wexler to indict himself in the same way the ouroboros ending of his film does. How do you make sense of unbelievable times? Maybe, as John points out and Wexler’s film aptly demonstrates, it’s with a script.
In the decades since 1968, Medium Cool has only become more relevant as the runtime for newscasts has lengthened and the cycle for content has shortened. Many of the radical methods Wexler employs here – handheld shots, breaks in the fourth wall, ironic soundtrack cues, clever cross-cuts (like the one from a black man making a gun with his finger to a white woman at a shooting rage) – would go on to be used in countless features of all kinds. But in his expert hands, they feel new to watch even now, like if a remix existed before the hit song. While this year’s DNC should be somewhat less contentious, Medium Cool stands as a potent reminder that what we see onscreen is always someone else’s construction.
