Coming out with Something: Martin Scorsese's Dead End

A couple site visits have not panned out, so I’m going to subject you to a close analysis of a scene from William Wyler’s Dead End (Goldwyn, 1937). In an earlier column, I contended there were things you could learn by watching bad movies and tv. The gambit here is that you can learn something from paying attention to a good movie, too. Most of what you learn is that for a movie to be good a tremendous amount of skill across a range of crafts has to converge over and over again. Beyond that obviousness, here’s some thesis to tide you over: however good you might think Dead End is, it’s better.

The background: Dead End was a Broadway hit, with a huge set designed by Norman Bel Geddes, and it was snapped up by Samuel Goldwyn. (Paul Monticone has traced this process, and gathered some fantastic archival images here.) Goldwyn was a prestige independent releasing through United Artists. The talent was all top tier: Humphrey Bogart, Joel McCrae, Sylvia Sidney, Claire Trevor; director William Wyler, screenwriter Lillian Hellman, designer Richard Day to reconstitute the gargantuan set, Alfred Newman to do the score, and, crucially for our purposes, cinematographer Gregg Toland.

The historical hinge: Imagine a deep-focus world where everything in-studio is wire sharp, from your face to infinity. You’ve seen it in Orson Welles’s Kane (1941, Gregg Toland), and maybe William Wyler’s Best Years of Our Lives (1945, Toland again). There are superb uses in John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939, Bert Glennon) and Welles’s Magnificent Ambersons (1942, Stanley Cortez). In Welles’s versions it stayed mixed up with the shorter lenses that were all but necessary to the effect at the time, and so deep focus and fisheye distortion merged. It was always a technique prone to trickery—faked via matte shots or double exposures—and in the 70s it tended to show up in split diopter shots that gave you a sharp foreground and a sharp distance and if you looked hard enough some smudgy column in the middle to hide the split. In the 1940s, new filmstocks, coated lenses, and, yes, optical effects drove the quest for “pan focus” across the industry.

Almost 40 years ago, in Chapter 27 (ulp) of the monumental Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production, 1920–1960, David Bordwell recontextualized the technique—and the technician—to take deep focus poster boy Toland down a peg. Some other cinematographers bristled at Toland’s publicity hounding, and Bordwell wanted to demonstrate both that the push to deep focus was broader than just Toland and that because Toland’s preferred framing of deep space was crowded, it ran into problems. To keep the sightlines open to the deeper planes, Toland’s shots ended up static. This reached its maximum in Kane, the source of much of the pushback.

That doesn’t make a Toland shot less striking, though. In Eisenstein’s lost Bezhin Meadow (1937, Vladimir Nilsen and Eduard Tissé) or Anthony Mann’s Border Incident (1949, John Alton) or John Huston’s Red Badge of Courage (1951, Harold Rosson), looming foreground figures often have the effect of holding the rest of the shot in place. The dynamized stasis comes from inside the frame.

Still from Eisenstein’s Bezhin Meadow (1937, Nilsen and Tissé)

Still from Mann’s Border Incident (1949, Alton)

Still from Huston’s The Red Badge of Courage (1951, Rosson)

As for the self-mythologization (“How I Broke the Rules on Citizen Kane” in Popular Photography; or some pages in Life), some of that comes from Toland’s position at an independent production company: he needed to be a little more insistent, a little more of a self-promoter. Every movie was an advertisement for his next gig outside Goldwyn. In this way, he was a forerunner of the modern free-lance craftsperson. “The Toland ‘look’ became famous but also came under considerable criticism within the industry,” (588). (Bordwell is more accommodating about William Cameron Menzies, whom he puts at the center of the professional swirl where expressionism, production design, and VFX meet.)

But Bordwell was also trying to mobilize a way of thinking about depth that would disarticulate staging from focus. Initially, this might seem silly: what is the point of staging action in pronounced depth if the deep stuff (or the foreground stuff) isn’t in focus? And that’s where this scene comes into play. It takes some setting up.

A bit of plot: A key thread in Dead End is the unraveling of Baby Face Martin’s attempts to get back to his roots. On the lam and with a “fixed face” (Humphrey Bogart’s face) he has returned to the old neighborhood to see his mother and get back together with his girl, Francey. The meeting with mom goes disastrously. Marjorie Main repeats, in a strange, ghastly, muted wail, “Just leave us alone….Just stay away and leave us alone and…die.” It is a horrifying thing to hear, so exhausted, so certain of its condemnation. Martin is shook. He needs a drink.

A little while later, Francey (Claire Trevor) makes her way from Brooklyn to East 53rd St. in Manhattan. It’s been eleven years, and she and Marty still have feelings for each other, but she also has a theatrical cough and won’t let him kiss her. Syphilis, of course, and in a stunning shot she pleads with him to really look at her. She steps from the shadow into harsh light and…he sees. But just as the Production Code won’t let her say that she has syphilis, it won’t let anything actuallyvisible mar her face. The lighting has to do all the work.

Francey (Claire Trevor) in shadow

France steps into the harsh light, her sickness “revealed”

Bogart responds by stepping back in horror and scanning downward, finally “recognizing” her dress as a streetwalker’s costume. The camera then pushes in on him, refusing to let him keep his distance. The next time we cut back to him we are even closer and the brickwork on the wall behind is thrown out of focus. He just looms there, eventually lashing out at her. “Why didn’t you starve?” “Why didn’t you?” she snaps back.

Martin (Humphrey Bogart) “sees” the ravages of Francey’s illness…

He steps back and scans downward,

but the camera pushes in. As he accuses Francey, the sharp brick background fades and his head seems to float.

Like Main, Trevor is terrific here—so good she received a supporting actress nomination even though she is only in this one scene. They part ways and Bogart, still unnerved, hustles around the corner to get another drink. That’s where our scene takes place.

The scene: In the first shot Bogart walks by his henchman, Hunk (Allen Jenkins). We pan with him and wait, pushing in on the picture window until Bogart reappears to sit down. The owner, Pascagli (George Humbert), recognizes him and realizes that the last time Bogart was there he objected to the player piano until Hunk kicked it to shut it off. Pascagli theatrically unplugs the thing and the tone momentarily lightens. He then repeats their earlier order to them.

Martin (Bogart) strides quickly past Hunk (Jenkins) and the camera follows his action. Bogart then disappears screen left,,

and reenters, taking a seat at the table in the window.

After Pascagli (Humbert) and Hunk exchange glances, the restaurateur unplugs the player piano,

and reminds the gangsters of their order.

Even though the camera is now inside the restaurant, the space has been coherent. There’s a two-top table that provides a nice, stable axis. There’s a clean 3-shot of Martin, Hunk, and Pascagli—a triangle echoed in the three breadsticks on the table, breadsticks that echo the sprays of dried spaghetti standing tall in carafes in the window. We expect we’ll have medium close-ups of the gangsters shot from the street side of the table. Initially we do. We cut to an over-the-shoulder single of Hunk as Pascagli says he never forgets and order—or a face. Hunk is worried that the restaurateur might realize who Martin is. He looks right down the barrel for an instant before turning his attention.

Hunk listens to the order, distracted, until Pascagli says he never forgets a face.

Hunk, roused, turns across the lens,

to see if Pascagli remembers Martin from days gone by.

The next shot we would expect to be the reverse single of Martin, even if he is wedged between the table and the window sill. But that isn’t what we get at all. Instead, we do an almost Ozu-flip (a “donden”) to a new two-shot of the gangsters in the window, only now we’re looking out toward the street, and Martin adjusts so he’s sitting flush against the table. Hunk, who was just on the right side of the frame is on the left. It breaks the rules, a bit; and it jostles the viewer, a bit. But this is a movie that has been so smart about what it shows us and when that we play along to see where this is going.

The “donden”—an Ozu-style jump across the axis to a new two-shot.

Hunk has been laying out what is bothering Martin: “Twice in one day,” Martin repeats. This is the architectonic of this movie, and also of Freudian trauma, but we’ll hold off on that for a moment. Already Bogart has been rejected by his mother and pushed away his old flame. His foil Dave, played by Joel McCrae, eventually pivots from his upper crust girlfriend who was horrified at the local squalor back to the girl he grew up with, the one who’s been on strike and got walloped by the cops. Doubly wanted vs. doubly rejected. “Twice in one day.” It stings.

Still no close-up of Martin. Instead, we get an over-the-(other)-shoulder shot of Hunk, who tells Martin he should always look forward, not back; his mother had bought a sign that said as much and hung it over the bed. It’s a compressed line. Martin has not only been looking back, but he has been looking back for his mother. Hunk is oblivious that he’s just rubbing it in here. He’s also oblivious to the joke of putting that sign over the bed. The PCA didn’t recognize the implicit primal scene either.

Hunk leans in to explain that Bogart should always look forward.

Back in the two-shot Hunk proposes leaving for St. Louis and another girl, one “as respectable as a whistle…in the right way.” “I bet you there’s WELCOME on the doormat for you there,” he says, offering up another sign, another corrupted domestic ideal that belies her whistle-cleanliness. “Forget about the dames,” Martin says.

The “normal” two-shot.

Finally we get what we think will be the reverse on Martin. But the shot’s wrong. Instead of the complementary over-the-shoulder, it’s just the two-shot shifted left about 40º. Another classical Hollywood rule violation. What gives? Is there a plausible practical explanation, that the unwanted and unheard piano is up against the wall behind Hunk so the camera can’t move any farther left? That, of course, is silly. You can just move the piano or even the wall, the way you jumped the camera in from the street. But also, this is a set not a location. Toland could easily have planned the shots in advance, shifted things around, made it work “right” if he’d wanted to. “But twice in one day,” Martin says, for the second time.

L: A placement for the reverse shot on Martin; R: What we would expect to see

The “awkward” two-shot.

We cut back to the “normal” two-shot and Martin realizes how bad things are. “Forget it,” he says, and Bogart turns away from everything—from the room, from the salt shaker he has been gripping, from the unseen and unheard piano—to look out the window.

The “normal” two-shot again. Bogart turns away from the double rejections and Hunk’s advice.

Back to the awkward two-shot and Bogart’s hand is suddenly at is mouth—he’s thinking, continuity be damned (a). The camera is already on the move, dollying slowly right and panning back left so that the “awkward” two-shot is now a tight two-shot on the same axis as the “normal” one. Martin is lost in thought, staring out the window (b).

(a) The “awkward” two-shot, with Martin’s hand at his mouth.

(b) after the dolly-and-pan, a tight two-shot on the same axis as the “normal” one

Everything outside is out of focus—in 1937 you weren’t going to be able to get deep focus through a window. But as Bordwell notes, there is still plenty of staging in depth out there. Martin is formulating a plan to kidnap a rich kid from the swanky new apartment building down the block. And when he formulates it, Bordwell says, lo and behold someone will push a pram out the door across the street (c). “The woman is too far away to be in focus, and her child is not the target of the scheme, but the fact that she occupies frame center and is the only moving figure in the shot gives her a symbolic salience.” Out of focus, but on point. “Here is the sort of staging in extreme depth, with a significant element in foreground close-up and a thematically important element in a distant plane, that will become familiar in Citizen Kane.”

Yet Bordwell is right and wrong here. What Martin sees when he is looking out the window is a family walking by, left to right, from that new building on the river through the slum, what looks to be a teenage girl in a sailor dress and an adult pair who seem to be her parents (b above). What he sees, in other words, is a precise model of the familial situation he is going to shatter. Earlier the Dead End Kids who have taken his place in the neighborhood gang beat the daylights out of the kid; Martin’s just going to finish the job.

When Bogart turns his attention from the street to explain the plan to Hunk, that’s when the pram appears (c). The carriage isn’t the prompt, it’s the symbol, as Bordwell notes. This is Baby Face Martin, even if he has a new face entirely, and even if that face is as unbabyish as Bogart’s. What Martin’s been up to has been chasing the good old days—his mother, his girl—and getting rejected. He is compensating now, consciously and not—he knows that the money is “something,” but he doesn’t know why he wants to take the boy “farther away.” The set is lining up as Martin’s unconscious as well. Twenty minutes earlier in the movie he went into that building, chasing his mother. He came out of it an orphan. But in his compensatory fantasy, he now comes out of the building as a baby in a carriage, pushed along by someone who cares.

(c) Martin turns to Hunk and the pram appears across the street.

As soon as Martin explains his plan, Hunk leans back, pulling out of the shot entirely, and the camera—Toland’s camera—adjusts slightly right (d). And there it is: the single of Bogart that we haven’t had this whole scene. A flash of his profile before we cut to the over-the-shoulder of Hunk trying to talk him out of it (11). “I come home for something. I didn’t get it. But I’m comin’ out with something. Even if it’s only dough” (12). Back and forth between the nearly frontal shot of Hunk and the profile of Martin, a lopsided exchange that has been justified by that audacious camera move.

(d) The missing reverse of Martin

That move is audacious for at least two reasons. First, it doesn’t quite fit, not just based on the rules of the system, but the edits are jumpy; there’s a dead frame tucked in there somewhere; clearly they—Toland and Wyler—wanted this, wanted it enough to stick with it even if there was a cleaner, smoother, more traditional way to show us how Martin settled on the plot. Second, in my Classical Hollywood history class screening of the film, it jumped out to just about everyone. I called it the “Scorsese shot” and got nods. What makes it a Scorsese shot? I asked. We batted it around and one student offered that it was a way of disclosing Martin’s internal dynamics through apparently unsubjective, external camerawork. I want to follow up on that, because it seems right, but also, isn’t that what classical Hollywood cinema always did? Not quite.

Maybe we see that camera move as getting us access to the confidential conversation, but it feels more like the awkward two-shot was just the camera hanging back, waiting until it could swing toward Bogart’s ear, focalizing the scene through Martin, letting us experience his force of character. Now the odd camera position makes sense: had it been in the expected spot behind Hunk the whole time, it could not have simply slid around to get them both in profile. Had we seen the single of Martin before, we wouldn’t know that this instance was different, that this single was about him, that the whole scene was. (In Hollywood Math and Aftermath I chalked this tendency up to Scorsese’s penchant for a peculiar kind of ostension; I think that goes for Toland, too.)

Hunk leaves to do some reconnaissance, and we jump back outside the restaurant. The camera pans with him as he emerges onto the street and nearly bumps into Dave. They pause and Dave looks into Pascagli’s at Martin, who feels his gaze. Martin looks up in a medium shot, we get the expected reverse of Dave, and Hunk heads up the street as the light in the pool hall comes on. This precise, stagey timing in the exchange of glances sets up the next scene with Dave and his impending girlfriend, Drina (Sylvia Sidney).

Hunk leaves and nearly runs into Dave (Joel McCrae)

Dave stops and looks in the restaurant at Martin.

But pause a moment on that shot of Dave. He is positioned between Martin and the building across the street. “I’m comin’ out with something,” Martin had said; the “something” is the rich boy or the money, ostensibly, but what “came out” of that building was the pram. And now Dave is blocking it. Martin isn’t going to be coming out with anything at all, not the boy, not the money, not with the uncorrupted baby that he wishes he could be again. And certainly not with a mother or a girlfriend. Dave is pure superego popping in between Martin and his desire, thwarting Martin’s attempt to vanquish his properly doubled trauma through mimetic violence. The scene has been staged in depth to drive the plot and manifest its unconscious. Dave’s appearance in just this spot forecloses both, needs to be read as both.

Significant glances: Bordwell’s analysis of deep focus, and of Toland as its very public spokesperson, was set up as a corrective to the ontological, Bazinian reading of the technique. For Bordwell it was never about freedom or realism, it was about branding and over-insistence, and as such it was quickly toned down and assimilated to the cinematographer’s bag of tricks, or, if it remained showy, amounted to a gimmick. “Toland’s densely organized compositions do not, as Bazin argued, make our perception existentially free.” They force our attention to move from place to place.

Yet even Bordwell can’t get away from the notion that in this gimmicky technique, or around it, and in this branded career, or around it, there is something that demands reading. Between foreground and background there is a rhetoric (a tropology). “The Union forever!” young Charles Foster Kane says in the depths while his mother is selling him off to the bank. In Dead End Toland makes use of an astonishing number of setups, a wild proliferation of possibilities. These are occasioned by Richard Day’s gargantuan set, and authorized by his own self-assertions in technique, as Stanley Cavell might have put it. Pronounced deep focus is part of his unparalleled repertoire. There will be more, and more florid, deep focus yet to come for Toland and others. Yet Bordwell is right that its moment passes.

But there will also be more, much more, obliquely motivated camera movement in the decades to come. Here, the movement is built on top of a chain of seemingly inexplicable choices, but the payoff is a glimpse of a radical—for classical Hollywood—gravitational subjectivity. A person emerges whole not just because of a coherence between components such as costume and lighting and framing, as Francey did around the corner, but through an agonistic relationship with a seducible camera. For a character to be psychologically replete in this new cinema, the total system of enframing must be thrown into motion. Martin, in search of his originary fantasy, of that first time with Francey on the roof, where they could be together and be open to the stars, finds only nostalgia’s failure in the realities of sickness and sex work. The camera demanded his reaction then, forced him into a proximity he wanted to escape. Things started to look very weird.

Now, the camera is showily on the move again, but it is drawn to him, testing out the limits of his charisma. Throughout Dead End Bogart pushes us to entertain the idea that Martin is getting a bad rap. We find ourselves siding with the manchild who thinks he only wants to love and be loved—and make some money along the way. And when we side with Martin, something may come along to shake us out of it: Marjorie Main’s malediction; Claire Trevor’s demand; Joel McCrae’s solidity.

I’m not saying that Toland invented modern cinematic subjectivity the way that Cavell contends that Shakespeare and Montaigne invented modern subjectivity as such. (Modern here is sliding all over the place, of course.) But without Toland’s relentless experimentation, his untrammeled multiplication of setups and techniques, the independent showiness that put some of his colleagues off, there is no way this little tracking pan exists, exists to do this form of work in the story. And without Dead End’s balky social-realist-Freudianism, there likely isn’t enough tension between the staging and the shooting—the Bordwell split, reunited—to force Toland’s shot to come to meaning this intensely. Subject and system, here coalescing.

Finally I am not saying that (Baby Face) Martin Scorsese actually got the shot from this movie, even if when he saw it he heard the movie call his name throughout.

Marking beginnings like this is a dangerous game, and not just because it invites Freudian disappointment. Practically, it’s tricky: perhaps Toland tried it out before; perhaps he lifted it from someone else; perhaps it was being invented in parallel across the industry or all around the globe. It will take some archival work to sharpen the claim, and even then it will never be guaranteed. But this shot was so immediately legible to the students in my class, these emerging practitioners shaped by the industry’s tutelary chain, that it feels foundational, feels like a primal scene of invention. For them, this shot is enough.

For me, the shot not only feels foundational, it feels like a rejoinder, an answer to a persistent rejection of reading in the subfield of “media industries studies.” This shot says: The occasion—in the story, yes, but also in the arc of performance, star, and setting—drives the need, the need drives the innovation, the innovation comes to meaning by offering a superior solution to the problems of the moment. And the meaning lies in a lopsided exchange between the uncountably various demands of the system and the fugitive conviction that one has read the scene. Has read the scene enough.

 Enough of that? Enough of that.

Force Projection: Hollywood Pays It Forward

(on Barbie and Sound of Freedom)

2023 in review: To paraphrase something Paramount President Stanley Jaffe said back in the late 1960s, every half-assed analyst is going to tell you a story about where the movies are at. I’m going to take a different road and tell you a story about how the movies feel.

(Where the movies are at: The US box office will finish at about $9 billion this year; if it were to get back to 2019 levels it would need to be $13.6 billion with inflation. Worldwide the situation is worse: the box office may not hit $25 billion this year; it was over $40 billion in 2019. The totals will be lower next year as a result of the strikes.)

I wasn’t going to write about Barbiemany others have, at length, and very well—but then I realized I needed to write about going to see Barbie, not simply because it was the biggest movie of the year but because seeing and having seen Barbie is about a particular feeling. For the foreseeable future the crucial problem that confronts Hollywood moviemaking is understanding what kinds of feelings make theatrical audiences pull the trigger.

That marks a change. In what now seems like a bygone era, moviegoing wasn’t about feeling, it was about the kinds of things the stories were about and the ways those stories were told. But by 2023 the MCU—the boldest and most successful serial storytelling experiment in Hollywood history—had fatally lost the balance between continuity and obligation. Narrative expansion became homework, and no matter how different the MCU movies and shows might feel they can’t overcome that narrative burden.

(Industry conventional wisdom about homework holds that part of why Tom Cruise’s Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part I underperformed was calling it “Part I.” As a consequence Part II has been pushed back and renamed. By that same logic the bait-and-switch of Dune—where you didn’t know it was Part I until it ended—seems to be preferable. Denis Villeneuve is now out here telling us that Part II is “much better” than Part I; sorry, suckers.)

I went to a morning screening of Barbie opening weekend at an AMC Classic multiplex near Camp Lejeune. The seats are still general admission; it used to be a Carmike’s; the matinee ticket was under $9; when Nicole Kidman explained that heartbreak feels good in a place like this no one joined in. The theater wasn’t empty, and the largest contingent were about a dozen pink-shirted moms and their daughters. The moms gave off military-wives vibes with a mix of sleeve tats and soft-tactical shoulder slings. They looked, as Jason Bourne says, like they could handle themselves. They all seemed to have a great time.

The coastal plain of North Carolina is in the midst of a slowburn struggle for cultural dominance over the landscape. The beaches are fully under the sway of the vacation home industry, with cheek-by-jowl triple-deckers up on stilts. The island roads all say they flood during high water, and that now means they flood all the time. This is a landscape of looming uninsurability, and despite the proliferation of hyperkitsch beach toy shops no ironic inflatable alligator is going to ward off the rising waters and the eventual collapse in real estate values.

All day and much of the night, the skies are filled with helicopters and tiltrotors from Marine Corps Air Station New River. State Highways leading to the islands are pocked by turnoffs for training “LZ”’s. For the Marines at New River and Camp Lejeune the swampiness and sea level rise are more a feature than a bug, although the military is far more worried about climate resilience than the amen-chorus who claim to support them. The amount of money the Department of Defense will pour into hardening port infrastructures along the South Atlantic coast to maintain the US’s force projection capacity is truly boggling.

Big chains haven’t found a way to efficiently monetize this convergence so coastal commerce is still small-proprietor: nutritional supplement purveyors and fitness centers calculated to meet your precise level of intensity; places to refuel that seem to have names like “Violence Coffee.”

I am trying to convey a very specific intercalation of landscape, technology, capital, and culture here because as odd as it may seem it functions; the culture that emerges from all those details serves the purpose not because of its precise configuration, but also not despite it. The big idea here is that the grander system of US hegemony makes use of its diverse affective forms to calibrate our investment and our denial, our guilts and our self-justifications. You don’t have to believe all the time. Sometimes you know what you’re doing is morally bankrupt, sometimes you forget it, sometimes you recognize that you are far more implicated than you thought, and sometimes you think, I’m just going to the movies with my friends and their daughters and that can’t be evil.

The multilayered marketing and distribution competence that project Barbie across the surface of the earth works alongside the multilayered logistical competence that projects the US, its power and its stupidities and its unrelenting demands, across the surface of the earth. These gargantuan institutions cling to the planet like giant sheets of contact paper. And like contact paper, when you try to lay one sheet down on another there will inevitably be imperfections, mismatches, bubbles. In those bubbles are an infinitude of individuals—agents—improvising their way even as they are sandwiched between capital-S Systems.

§§

There is a specific politics to Greta Gerwig’s work. It depends on a strong claim that our ordinary politics is terribly mistaken, a diversion of our attention from the real disconnections we face. Only by clearing out the explicit politics can we reestablish the true grounds of political engagement, and those grounds are feminist.

I think of this as a little like Erving Goffman’s deep gambit in prioritizing the study of micro-social interactions. Not that either of them believes politics aren’t essential, but both seem convinced that we can’t do both politics and society at the same time right now. There will be stunning collisions—Goffman’s essay “Footing” gets at Nixon’s go-to misogynist shivving. But most of the time their work will be misunderstood as de-politicized; I might call it pre-politicized instead.

Late in Barbie, Barbie spends a couple minutes in a void speaking with her “creator,” Ruth Handler. Overall the scene felt off to me, but the montage of memories in it was doing a particular sort of work that I have not seen people highlight. Here is a contrast: at the end of Damien Chazelle’s Babylon, our hero Manny Torres (Diego Calva) begs off from family responsibilities to duck into the movies. He then undergoes a transportive experience at a screening of Singin’ in the Rain. This was the “magic of cinema” montage that lots of folks found pretentious.

However good faith it was, however honestly Chazelle came by it, the structure of the experience—the idea of moviegoing in it—required leaving behind the family ties Manny had built in order to find his way back to that flickering moment of transcendence from early in the film—that preposterous and inevitable sunset butterfly—that he lost in the muck of Hollywood depravity.

But when Barbie takes Ruth’s hands she is diverted from the Corporate, from Art, and from Politics toward experiences of connection as such. It is a transcendence accomplished by, as philosopher Stanley Cavell would say, descending through the ordinary. These are the actual things that make life worth it, not the stand-ins that let you leave the compromises of a life behind. Gerwig’s aesthetic is constitutionally defensive, for all sorts of reasons, but it is absolutely rigorous in those commitments. People who liked Barbie liked that it connected them to their connections and their compromises; the word of mouth was superb.

§§

When such descents into feeling are yoked to hegemonic impulses, the results are weepy devastation. The remarkable opening titles for Steven Conrad’s Patriot (Amazon) are affectively adjacent to Gerwig’s montage, only they bring back explicitly political politics because for Conrad, well, it’s about guys being dudes. The configuration of brotherly affection and abusive innocence sets up our hero to be subsumed by the US intelligence community’s deadly apologetics.

Patriot is one of the few real justifications of peak tv. But if you don’t keep gender front and center, similar feelings can get ugly very quickly. A toxically masculine gumbo of sentiment and hegemony gets whipped into a fantasy of righteous vengeance that cloaks violence under violence, spectacularizing bad faith, leaving viewers yearning for permission to forget all the horrors we are doing and that are done to us—you know, crowdfunded fascism.

I am talking about Sound of Freedom, the QAnon–adjacent, child trafficking yuckfest from Angel Studios. Part of the reason I didn’t write about it when it came out is because I don’t want those people to get even a dime of my money or yours. If you skipped it, it begins streaming on Amazon just after Christmas. You can also steal it.

Sound of Freedom is the fictionalized story of the autofictionalizing Tim Ballard. When it opens, Ballard has been working at ICE tracking down pedophiles—hundreds—but has been unable to save the exploited children who are “outside the U.S.” His frustration has built up, but so has the trauma of the job. Like the low-paid content moderators Sarah T. Roberts wrote about in Behind the Screen, Ballard spends hours combing through horrific images; he then needs to render that photo and video evidence in bloodless prose for the legal system. Breaking down, he goes to his boss with a plan to take their efforts beyond the U.S. borders. “This job tears you to pieces and this is my one chance to put those pieces back together.” “We can’t go after Honduran kids in Colombia,” his boss tells him before agreeing to fund the extra-mural operation out of “discretionary.”

The movie is clear that the system of trafficking is robust, flexible, global. In his quest for one little girl Ballard is told she might be in Colombia or “in Moscow, Bangkok, LA.” Eventually his boss gets cold feet and pulls authorization. Ballard pushes ahead and busts up a big trafficking ring, but even then he must make a solo journey deep into the Colombian jungle to rescue the girl from a drug kingpin’s compound. It’s rote, even old-fashioned, this Missing in Action–style regeneration through violence, but it isn’t slapdash.

Ballard built his real-world, freestyle global anti-trafficking organization on this paranoid argument. The trafficked children might be anywhere and so anti-trafficking efforts must be everywhere. Are there kids in your Wayfair boxes? Can you order them via Ebay or Etsy? That may have been too far for Ballard, but for the movie’s star Jim Caviezel and his devoted fans, it’s a different story.  

More than 30 years ago Fredric Jameson insisted that beginning in the 1970s Hollywood’s response to the overwhelming complexity of the late capitalist economy took the form of conspiracy thinking. While there are lots of reasons why people have ended up driving freight trains at hospital ships and snarling traffic near Hoover Dam, the opacity of modern logistics keeps turning up among them. Barbie has fun with some rapid prototyping when Ken’s Barbieland coup succeeds; Hollywood was more than happy to award Nomadland best picture for its vision of the human side of the logistics cycle; and in the depths of the pandemic, Christopher Nolan rolled out his most capacious vision of global logistics in Tenet.

Sound of Freedom is about combatting the logistics of illicit human migration with countervailing force. Ballard’s schemes emerge at the intersection of LDS missionary zeal and the leftover logic of the Global War on Terror. In 2007, President Bush told the American Legion “Our strategy is this: we will fight them over there so we don’t have to face them in the United States of America.” A strategy of quagmire; open ended, failing. Part of the reason Sound of Freedom seems like a “dad” movie is that it is plugged into that same logic, a logic dating all the way back to NSC–68, the Paul Nitze–authored memo that, as John Lewis Gaddis has contended, turned containment into global paranoia. We will hunt the children over there so we don’t have to face the evidence here.

It took five years for Sound of Freedom to be released as it bounced from Fox to Disney and then was dropped before getting picked up by Angel Studios. In that time, journalists at Vice and American Crime Journal had uncovered just how mendacious and sleazy Ballard and his former organization, Operation Underground Railroad, are. (Ballard resigned from OUR in disgrace for treating it as a subsidized sexual harassment agency and may soon be facing charges.) This month, Miles Klee at Rolling Stone explained how Angel Studios’ own righteous posturing serves to cover some epic self-dealing. (That self-dealing would seem less nefarious if they rationalized their corporate structure and simply called it “vertical integration.”)

However ethically, financially, and legally questionable the institutions that came together to make Sound of Freedom the surprise hit of the summer might be, they excused their grift by turning the movie’s fantasy of projective revenge into an enlistment in a cultural crusade. To their audiences they said, You may not want to see this but you need to see this. And if things worked—and things definitely worked—their audiences would tell other people the same.

One of the more annoying things about movies from the perspective of classical economics is that they cost the same whether they are good or bad, and you don’t know whether you have over- or underpaid until the movie is done. There are ways of trying to convince people to give you more money when the movies are good—you can sell merch or build theme-park experiences or make sequels, but all of that is, as they say, ancillary. Angel Studios hit on a tremendously efficient way of capturing that “consumer surplus”: when the movie was over they just asked you to give them more money. They said it was to pay for tickets for other people to see the movie, and some of it was used to defray those costs. But the vast majority of it wasn’t. It was just more than $30 million in profit, as Klee has revealed. Paying it forward was a way to put your money where your word of mouth was.

Caviezel made the pitch over the closing credits. There is more dense-pack weirdness in his closing solicitation than in the whole rest of the movie. “I think we can make Sound of Freedom the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of 21st century slavery.” We have to stop child sex trafficking, we are told. The way to do that is (thankfully) not for us to go grabbing kids away from the adults who are near them—although there has been plenty of that. Nor, surprisingly, are we supposed to donate to groups that work to stop child sex trafficking or work to provide support and care to victims. This is not a Will Rogers Institute–style appeal.

The way to stop child sex trafficking is to get people to go back to the movies: to get them into the theater. Cinephilia trumps pedophilia. Caviezel is explicit: “When you come to a theater you experience movies differently. There is no pause button, there are no distractions. We all have an experience as we watch the film together as a community. It makes it possible for strong messages like this one to take root.” Caviezel’s pitch for the intensity of the cinematic experience verges on the ontological, so much so that when it comes time for you to get out your phone, take a picture of the QR code on the screen, and fork over some money, he apologizes. “Now, I know it’s weird, because we’re in a theater.”

God’s children are not for sale, but the spectacle of their dramatic rescue certainly is. And you should buy it. The move is to pay it forward to an anonymous moviegoer, who will be asked to do the same. The money goes round and round in the studio’s operations and only very incidentally does it spill over into more direct action. It was a grift before it was a grift.

If people who liked Barbie liked that it connected them to their connections and their compromises, people who liked Sound of Freedom liked that it promised a release from those compromises in the form a global connection, a pay it forward community so total that all the righteous and the innocent might be saved and that all the evil might be justly punished. Barbie attends to the slippage between the self and the system; Sound of Freedom dreams of a perfect harmony between self and system, a dream that is always deferred, always in the future, just one more pay-it-forward ticket away.

§§

If you have not seen it, I am asking you to take the two minutes now to watch the “Paying It Forward” sketch from I Think You Should Leave (Netflix; S3E3, starting 9:34). This season dropped on May 30, in every way the contemporary of Sound of Freedom (July 4) and Barbie (July 21).

The sketch veers in ways that are characteristically Robinsonian: there are the woman’s immediate participation in the scam, the fact that she knows in her bones that the order begins “55 burgers,” the impossible softening of the big guy in the SUV (wrestler Damien Sandow/Aron Stevens, lol), and the solution that is the opposite of a solution when Robinson runs away rather than face any consequences.

It also includes the characteristic Robinsonian surplus. A good I Think You Should Leave sketch is like an automatic drawing done while looking at a diorama of human wreckage. In this case, when Robinson bolts from the car, he is enacting the clichéd moment from an LA police pursuit when the driver has precisely this revelation. “Oh! I can just run!” he thinks, only to find himself pinned in a helicopter’s blazing Nightsun spotlight before getting bodyslammed into a cyclone fence. What shows up in Sound of Freedom as the sadboy’s beatific cleverness is, in I Think You Should Leave, Tim’s desperate screaming to hold the idiot plan together. “Pay It Forward” is how Sound of Freedom feels when you manage to laugh at it.

They shot the “Pay It Forward” sketch at a Nexx Burger location in Downey. I made the pilgrimage for the same reason that I clomped around Altadena’s Mountain View Cemetery searching out locations from “Coffin Flop.” (As an LA location, Mountain View is famous; Nexx Burger isn’t.) I like to go to these places not simply to see how they were shot, but to imagine the radical mismatch between the workaday place and the extremity of the result. It really opens up the possibilities.

Like the Piedmont’s Kinetic Nutrition or Semper Fit, Nexx Burger is a family operation with a couple outlets. Unlike coastal Carolina, the LA basin is not a place where global brands have trouble taking root, but it is a place where everyone can dream of bootstrapping their local business into a planetary franchise. From food truck to Downey to Dubai. That hustle may not pay off and may, at some point, turn sour—they did take Bitcoin for a while.

But for now, the thing about Nexx Burger is that every phase of it is better than it has to be. The graphic design is better. The wooden chairs are more comfortable and don’t make a howling sound when you slide them on the floor. They have beer on tap, and they had the Dodger game playing on a big tv.

Sure, they were happy to be featured in Tim Robinson’s sketch, the same way they were happy to get Snoop’s endorsement. They just might get famous. But in the meantime, they do things well. Sitting there, you might wish that other people had a chance to visit the place. As moviegoing becomes more rare, good moviegoing feels more and more like this. The need for the future rises. You begin to sense a system of possibilities, a taxonomy of promises, a montage of connections to be made. The implications come later.

This is the first of two parts. (Sorry, suckers.) In the second I will turn even more explicitly to Hollywood’s—and my—ties to the US military’s technologies of mediated force projection. If you would like advance warning of future installments, sign up here. If you’re an editor (or know an editor) and have reached this far, perhaps some version of City of Industry would be right for your publication. Reach out. Also, since I am now copyediting this myself, let me know if you see any raging typos. Thx.

The Good Shit, 2024

I never do these year-end wrapups of the best movies, music, tv, tweets, for all sorts of reasons, some of which have to do with just not being the sort of person who rates things and some of which have to do with the occupational hazard that the best things I see in a given year are probably things I’m teaching. So if I said that the most amazing constellation of cinematography & soundtrack I saw in 2023 was in Battles without Honor and Humanity from 50 years ago, well, sure, but that isn’t the discourse, is it?

 

But then I saw The New Yorker’s lugubrious (yeah) 2023 tv wrapup and John Waters’s 2023 movie wrapup and it reminded me that the other other reasons I don’t do these things are 1. I am absolutely uninterested in measuring up to some sort of critical responsibility. (Are you snubbing The Bear? I could not care.) 2. I cannot possibly have seen enough stuff to render a real verdict. There are ~600 scripted series and probably that many unscripted ones in the U.S. and more than a thousand movies and did I mention that Battles without Honor and Humanity is part of like a 10–film series on its own?

 

But in the interest of pushing back on the tyranny of the dutiful roundup to which even Waters is susceptible, I will try to compile my own list of the good shit, the stuff that came across my radar that may not be getting attention, or not be getting attention for the right reasons. I guarantee my list will have more comedy on it. And also probably horror. And avant-garde stuff? For this to work, I need your help. Let me know if you see something good and underrated and either new or newly accessible. And a year from now I’ll try to gather those together, and I will thank you publicly.

 

Either that or I will have gone underground in an effort to defend the remnants of democracy in the U.S. At this point it’s 50-50 at best.

Infinitely Disappointed: On Michael Lewis

The recent one-two punch delivered to Michael Lewis’s reputation by his inexcusable remarks about Michael Oher—“What we’re watching is a change of behavior,” he told The Guardian. “This is what happens to football players who get hit in the head: they run into problems with violence and aggression.”—and his apparently insufficiently critical appraisal of epically self-involved crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried has caused some modest shockwaves in the world of those who take longform journalism seriously. As David Roth put it, “I don’t want to have to go back and reconsider this guy’s whole shit.”

It looks like there are two complaints here—I’m going to argue they are intertwined to the point of being the same. The nasty implication that Oher has CTE or got manipulated into suing seems to take Lewis’s “nuanced” efforts to peel back the wretched racism that permeates college football exploitation and show that even his own analysis was caught up in the system. Watching a journalist turn on a lionized subject, especially when that turn is shot through with racist tropes about black male violence, is gross. As for SBF, the public pleading on behalf of his good-hearted youthful indiscretion even after his criminality was revealed seems like a failure of craft. For those who loved Lewis’s prior works, or many of them, it’s not simply the missed opportunity, it’s the squander. You had it, bro. You totally fucking had it. What is the point of access journalism if you’re going to whiff it like that?

At the top I should say that whiffing happens. I don’t think Lewis’s The New New Thing is all that, and it offers a sort of foretaste of the SBF mess. But it isn’t just Lewis. I tried to make the case at some length for Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color, and it still freaks me out. There is probably no filmmaker I rooted harder for than Julia Reichert, relentless documenter of my hometown’s long path through deindustrialization. The local socialist who made a difference because she was a local socialist. But even she was not immune—for American Factory she and Steven Bognar had better access than anyone would ever dream of: presence in board meetings where they discuss in direct terms the anti-union efforts; people who present themselves as rounded characters going through changes on screen, actual villains discussing their schemes, and a story that offered crystal clear connections between Dayton and global capitalism. Yet American Factory ends by veering away from its logical conclusions about worker power to maunder about automation. I attribute that whiff to the Obamas’ involvement, but I realize that might be special pleading on my part.

So: Lewis turns on Oher and defends his “conservators” the Tuohys while he can’t bring himself to turn on SBF. The joint reading seems pretty simple: Michael Lewis has an easier time empathizing with well-heeled white folks than younger Black men who came into money playing ball. I think that conjuncture is there, but that isn’t enough. Because the thing we are trying to explain is not what is up with Michael Lewis the guy with looming implicit racial bias but what is up with Michael Lewis the guy who has also been our go-to explainer for the interactions of finance capitalism and professional life.

I have not yet read Going Infinite. (I will!) I have obviously read Lewis’s statement about Oher. But I did write about Michael Lewis in Hollywood Math and Aftermath. On the one hand, I still like those pages and still think they can be useful—I’ll explain why below. On the other hand, those pages suffer from exactly the problem that all my own writing suffers from: an assumption that people will just read it and take all sorts of things from it, whatever they need, it’s got plenty of riffs to go around. But that is not how anyone reads academic work anymore, really. And it isn’t clear that anyone would or could ever find these pages if, say, they were to ask themselves the question that follows Roth’s question—“Did he secretly suck the entire time?”—which is “Was I a chump?”

Here's the long passage where I try to work through Lewis’s approach. At this point in the chapter, I’m doing this to get to a political reading of Brad Pitt’s stardom and then to the (to me) stunning revelation that Columbia called its motion picture financial modeling project “The Moneyball Initiative.” But I stand by the reading of Lewis on its own. The swirl of race and finance was always there, and it always depended on remaining a reading. If the two got too close, Lewis would back off:

In the work of Michael Lewis—in both the sports books Moneyball and The Blind Side, and in his histories of high finance such as Liar’s Poker, The Big Short, Flash Boys, and his account of Long-Term Capital Management—the interplay of arbitrage and exploitation looks like the oscillation between an idea and a person. The arbitrageurs are forever attempting to isolate themselves from the consequences of their actions by reducing what they do to “strategy,” but because the central phenomenon of their strategy is the trade, the equation of one thing with another, when their trades become a traffic in people, the brutal legacies of actual human traffic rise up through the rhetoric. This helps explain some of the difficult reckonings with race in Lewis, and some of his interest in situations of self-exploitation, where the idea, and not the power relation, can take center stage.

So when John Meriwether pioneers bond arbitrage at Salomon Brothers, Lewis describes him as setting up “a sort of underground railroad that ran from the finest graduate finance and math programs directly onto the Salomon trading floor.” These intellectuals replace mere traders like Lewis, who now “belonged to a new semi-informed breed who could ‘pass’ as experts on the new financial complexity without possessing true understanding.” Lewis, not happy “passing,” remains jealous of his hyperwealthy former colleagues until they are wiped out. The 1998 disaster spawned by Meriwether’s Long-Term Capital Management came the closest to breaking the contemporary financial system before the 2008 crash. In addition to everything else it did, it liberated Lewis from his aspirations to untold wealth. “I demanded no further reparations. I was once again satisfied to be paid by the word.” Underground railroads, new breeds, folks who are passing and demanding reparations—the racial configuration remains, just barely, subtextual.

Once the traders are no longer trading themselves, though, exploitation comes roaring back. In Moneyball, the complex salary system imposed by the league underpays high-value rookies. Initially this allows the A’s to compete by drafting well. Lewis immediately, and without hesitation, links the moment of free agency to the rights of individuals under capitalism: “Not until . . . he had been in the big leagues for six years, would Barry Zito, like any other citizen of the republic, be allowed to auction his services to the highest bidder. At which point, of course, the Oakland A’s would no longer be able to afford Barry Zito. That’s why it was important to find Barry Zito here, in the draft room, and obtain him for the period of his career when he could be paid the baseball equivalent of slave’s wages.”

It is no accident that the slave’s wages are paid to a white man and that the utopian possibility is being able to auction yourself (sorry, your services) to the highest bidder. But at the core of Lewis’s two-track analysis of sports and finance is this dance around exploitation. A few pages later, I am writing more about Moneyball the movie and the happy ending that was grafted onto it late in production. The movie is of course not the book, but the movie is deeply Lewisian.

The movie’s happy ending will not be the A’s winning the World Series—they did not. Nor will it be Brad Pitt’s Billy Beane becoming the highest paid general manager in baseball—he rejected the Red Sox’ offer. The happy ending, for Beane, will be winning enough games that he can keep his job and stay in Oakland near his daughter. At the same time, the movie’s happy ending will decidedly not be the players discovering that they are undervalued and successfully demanding their rightful compensation. Baseball players, and subsequently professional athletes in most other major sports, have since used “statistics the way we read them” to do just that. But no one in Moneyball has any interest in wising up the players lest the arbitrage possibility disappear, leaving the A’s back in the cellar. (They would be there in 2015.) Stripped of Pitt’s stardom, and this relationship looks like exploitation, and in Moneyball, we are supposed to root for it.

The relationship between Beane and pitcher Chad Bradford has all the makings of a bad conscience. “You knew I was worth $3 million and you thought you could get away with paying me $237,000,” Bradford might say. Instead, he thanks Beane for the opportunity to play and says he’ll pray for him and his family. In order to allay—or at least defer—the eruption of a demand for something like justice, the movie turns to its real, chiasmic project: convincing the numberjockey to understand the human costs of his reduction of people to numbers and convincing the subjects of that reduction to willingly enlist themselves in the project.

When Lewis lashed out at Michael Oher’s competence and humanity, and when (if) he whiffed in his portrait of SBF, those are the two sides of the chiasmic exchange, disentangled. Lewis finds himself unable to back off and return to a world of reading, of analyzing at some distance. Instead of Moneyball’s happy ending, we get the double bummer of Lewis playing defense for both halves of his project, a liberal project that, when pushed to the wall, turns vicious and po’ faced. As liberalism will.

Lewis held these two tracks in suspension longer than maybe anyone else could—that is a mark of his skill as a writer and his knack for choosing projects. If he has been our go-to explainer for the interactions of finance capitalism and professional life, what we are seeing right now is what happens when the professional life at stake is not that of literary character Michael Lewis the junior trader but Michael Lewis the writer. What matters about that is less what it tells us about Lewis than what it tells us about how much work, how much art, capitalism demands to keep us on the hook.

After 50 Years, a Watergate Mystery Solved?

Yes, I clickbaited the headline. It’s my first blog post here; I had to try something.

 

I got interested in Watergate Discourse as part of a long gestating and now likely abandoned project on the history of tape recording. I still have ideas about voice, transcription, and indexing that might contribute to telling the media history of the era differently. But here I just want to drop a part of that project where I found something out.

 

Even after 50 years, the Watergate scandal is caught between things that we absolutely know and a surprising number of things we don’t. Nixon and his gang really were going to do just about everything to hold on to power—everything short of order an attack on the Capitol and the assassination of the Vice President. There was a lot of very coup-y plotting, there was endless ratfucking and conspiring and racist and antisemitic ranting and abusing of power and and and. We know this. But there is a LOT that we don’t know. Douglas Brinkley, reviewing Gerald Graff’s solid new history, enumerates some gaps: “Nixon studies have matured in the past 50 years thanks to superb books by Rick PerlsteinJohn A. FarrellIrwin F. GellmanMargaret MacMillan and others. But neither they nor Graff’s Watergate answers some longstanding big questions. Who officially ordered the break-in? What was the aim? Were such central players as Howard Hunt and James McCord cooperating with the C.I.A. even as they orchestrated the break-in?” (My answers are: Mitchell authorized in his floppy way, Magruder pushed it; to see how much more O’Brien knew about the ITT scandal; and no.)

 

None of those questions, though, were The Big Questions of the era, the ones that gripped the popular imagination. Those were: 1. What did Nixon know and when did he know it? And 2. What was the deal with the 18½ minute gap in the tapes? Let’s start with 2.

 

Given that there were literally thousands of hours of other recordings available, and given that Nixon never had a conversation once when he could have it three times in the same day, what could possibly have been so special to warrant the intentional erasure of a tiny portion of the archive? Rose Mary Woods, Nixon’s secretary, took the blame, unconvincingly. The most compelling account I’ve read of the erasure (Haldeman’s) argues that Nixon himself probably did it during his listening-back session, and then, realizing just how damn long it takes to erase specific things, he abandoned the strategy. There’s still not a good explanation for why he didn’t have the tapes burned or piled into a car and driven by a giant magnet. We can suppose all sorts of reasons, but, frankly, Mr. Master Strategist was erratic as hell and never possessed the judgment that would allow him to calibrate the damage done at different scales. This is what we learn, overwhelmingly, from the tapes: Nixon was always all over the place, unable to focus on the big picture even as he sold the world on his self-conception as a guy who always had his eye on that big picture. He is the characterological embodiment of the collapse of the Keynesian consensus, the superplanner undone by a third-rate burglary.

 

In any case, we’re not getting that missing material back. There are moments where people get techno-optimistic about the project but it’s just not going to work. It wasn’t erased once, but ground away over and over, as you’ll see.

 

So I don’t have the missing minutes. I don’t have a new explanation for their erasure. What I have is an account of what Nixon and his Chief of Staff H.R. “Bob” Haldeman were talking about based on the parts that weren’t erased. No one, so far as I can tell, has bothered to read that conversation in context even though Nixon took immediate action as a result. Because this is a blog post and not true crime podcast trying to fill a dozen hours, I will just spill: Based on Haldeman’s discussion of the movie The Hot Rock, I believe that they had been discussing the fact that the break-in that got everybody arrested was not the first attempt to bug the Democratic National Committee HQ at the Watergate. Haldeman had just found that out; I think Nixon had known. Which is my answer to Big Question 1: Nixon knew about the break-in and he knew in advance, which many reasonable people already believed, but which now has, I think, more support.

 

What follows is a very modestly revised extract from a draft chapter. Some of it is a little redundant given this intro. The Hot Rock is available on blu-ray but not to stream legally at the moment.

 

The most famous tape recording in American history is an erasure: the 18½ minute gap in a discussion between Richard Nixon and H.R. “Bob” Haldeman on January 20, 1972.[1] When Nixon later found out about the gap, he recalled, he almost “blew [his] stack.”[2] How had it happened? And what was erased? In the throes of the investigation, the “how” took center stage. Nixon’s loyal secretary, Rose Mary Woods, took the fall, claiming she had accidentally erased the tape while transcribing it, having pushed the wrong button, held her foot down on the pedal, and reached, improbably, to answer the phone. The “Rose Mary Stretch” was so physically challenging that it became an immediate object of ridicule (Figure 1). Haldeman’s successor Al Haig initially blamed a mysterious “sinister force,” then he found a more sexist way to blame Woods (“I've known women who think they've talked for five minutes and then have talked for an hour”[3]). Others blamed Nixon for erasing the tape, either intentionally or accidentally. Haldeman called his former boss “the least dexterous man I’ve ever known.”[4] Robert Altman, in Secret Honor (1984), turned technological ineptitude toward existential ends, with a rambling Nixon repeatedly interrupting his marathon nighttime taping session to tell his valet, Manolo, to go back and erase everything from a certain point. The technology registered the absence of the history it was supposed to capture.



Tales of accidental erasure are harder to believe when one has read the report of the Advisory Panel on White House Tapes from 1974, which concluded that the passage was erased five or more separate times. They “[drew] no inferences about such questions as whether the erasure and buzz were made accidentally or intentionally,” but did note that the characteristic “events” within the buzz implied the “keyboard operations of a normally-operating machine.”[5] (Figures 2 & 3) The more intentional the gap, the more enticing the prospect of recovering whatever was erased. The most recent efforts by the National Archives and Records Administration have been unable to find the voices behind the buzz.[6]

A Nixon transcription tapedeck, via NARA



So what is missing? The logical explanation is that what is missing is a discussion of the Watergate break-in. Nixon had only just returned to Washington from a bachelor weekend in the Bahamas and Key Biscayne, cavorting in the surf with Bebe Rebozo and Bob Abplanalp. Haldeman’s diary indicates that “the P is not aware of all this” on the 18th, and that “I told the P about it on the plane last night” (meaning the 19th; they spoke for nearly an hour) “The more he thought about it, it obviously bothered him more, because he raised it in considerable detail today.”[7]



But the clearest indication that that particular discussion had turned to Watergate comes later in the tape, when Haldeman asks Nixon whether he has seen the movie The Hot Rock (Peter Yates, Fox, 1972).  While much of the recording is unintelligible for the usual reasons that the Nixon tapes are unintelligible—inadequate equipment, improperly installed, with a voice-activated feature that is forever ga-whoozhing itself into action and obscuring key words and phrases—Haldeman’s point is clear. It’s a “pretty funny movie,” he explains. “I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but it’s kinda like this [affair?]. They screw everything up. It’s a comedy of errors.” The crucial word is “this”—a reference not to the immediately preceding discussion, which was about delegate allocations at the Democratic National Convention, but to the botched robbery. And since there is no surviving discussion of the break-in in the lunchtime conversation between the two, we can reasonably conclude that Haldeman is referring to something in the gap.



The break-in was quickly turning into a comedy of errors. Not only were the burglars caught, not only had they carried unnecessarily incriminating evidence with them, but they were amateurs. Haldeman would have read the Post’s article, “Experts heap scorn on bungled ‘bug’ caper,” from the 19th. The professional ridicule was thick; pros “faulted the job at almost every point.” The article let them crack wise, at length: “This is fantastic,” said one wiretapper. “That kind of (bugging) equipment went out with high-button shoes. These guys have got to be circus bums.” “Can you imagine hiring guys from Miami? You’d get local, top talent to do the job right.” “Other experts said taping the doors so they wouldn’t look taped—and then retaping one of them after the tape had been removed by a security guard—could only happen in a Keystone Kops comedy.”[8] That same day, Press Secretary Ron Ziegler had called it “a third rate burglary.” The phrase was appropriate, and it stuck.



Beyond its “comic opera” appearance, what the break-in shared with The Hot Rock was this sense of compulsive return. While the retaping of the doors might have been enough to cue Haldeman’s analogy, the fact that the burglars were rebreaking in to the DNC headquarters brings “this” much closer to The Hot Rock. (They went back in to fix a malfunctioning tap, to install new equipment, and to take more pictures.) In the film, the burglars not only “screw everything up,” they keep going back to their “client” for more money and another shot at the theft. The bankroller is Dr. Amusa (Moses Gunn), and he gets right at the problem: “I’ve heard of the habitual criminal, of course. But I never dreamed I’d become involved with the habitual crime.” The habitual criminal is played by Robert Redford, just out of prison and looking for a new job. His partner asks him how his stint behind bars was, and Redford, with an irony Haldeman would have appreciated, replies, “Not bad. I learned plumbing.”



Haldeman’s tone seems to be that of someone returning to a previous topic, someone who has either happened upon a coincidence or who has planned to include a joke in a discussion, but has missed the chance, and now is going back to make sure it has been told. He also knew that the president would be interested. Nixon was an inveterate movie-watcher, usually screening three films a week, whether in the White House Family Theater, at Camp David, or, as on his visit to the Bahamas, at Abplanalp’s residence (they watched Paul Bogart’s The Skin Game (1971)).



The morning of the 20th, the Post had already made the jump “inside the White House,” by connecting the burglars to E. Howard Hunt, the ex-CIA agent who had been working with President’s Special Counsel Charles Colson. Eventually, it would become clear that the break-in was part of the campaign of surveillance and disinformation that Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy christened GEMSTONE. (Haldeman knew about the plan, but likely did not know its HotRock-y, CIA-style codename.) There was every reason for the President to worry, and every reason for Haldeman to try to distract him.



Nixon and Haldeman almost immediately changed the subject, moving on to a discussion of the national mayors’ conference. But the movie recommendation must have stuck in Nixon’s mind because that Saturday (the 24th) he screened The Hot Rock at Camp David with his wife, his daughter Julie, and her husband David Eisenhower.[9] The film had opened in New York in January and arrived with no publicity in DC in March. The Post’s review was decent, as were the New York notices, but nothing like those for The Godfather, which was dominating screens that spring. Still, The Hot Rock hung around, and it appears to have been re-released onto suburban screens in June (Haldeman could have seen it in Chevy Chase). So there were easily accessible prints when Nixon made the sudden decision to view the film.



Between the 20th and the 24th—between the conversation-to-be-erased and the crime-to-be-screened, Nixon and Haldeman would have the “smoking gun” discussion, in which the president suggests using the CIA to convince the FBI to back off its investigation of the burglary. The guiding framework for the conspiracy is comedic repetition. As Nixon spitballs:

 

When you get in these people when you…get these people in, say: “Look, the problem is that this will open the whole, the whole Bay of Pigs thing, and the President just feels that” ah, without going into the details… don’t, don’t lie to them to the extent to say there is no involvement, but just say this is sort of a comedy of errors, bizarre, without getting into it, “the President believes that it is going to open the whole Bay of Pigs thing up again.”[10]

 

By the end of that day, Haldeman’s characterization of the break-in as a “comedy of errors” had become the genre of the cover-up.  By the end of that week, surveillance and repetition had been bound together across a host of registers—lexical, generic, and here, historical. Backstopping and complicating that merger of eavesdropping and iteration was the technology of tape. When that implicit material analogue became explicit, the Presidency shattered.

 

[1] The gap is part of tape 342, and is available at the end of 342b, http://nixontapes.org/chron3.html. Philip Mellinger conducted the most recent intensive investigation of the gap, and his higher resolution digital file can be found here, http://nixontapes.org/mellinger.html. Mellinger’s article, speculating that an unnamed “White House lawyer” is responsible for the central twelve minutes of the gap, appears here, http://www.forensicmag.com/articles/2011/02/cracking-watergates-infamous-18-1/2-minute-gap#.UmcaQxZzPBY

[2] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/nov/10/richard-nixon-transcripts-fury-tape

[3] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/watergate/articles/120773-1.htm

[4] Haldeman in Haynes Johnson et al., “Haldeman accuses Nixon,” Washington Post, 2/16/78, 1–3, 2. Judge John J. Sirica, believed that Nixon had intentionally erased the tape. To Set the Record Straight, New York: W.W. Norton, 1979, 198.

[5] Advisory Panel on White House Tapes, “The EOB Tape of June 20, 1972,” May 31, 1974, Summary.

[6] See the Mellinger-related materials.

[7] Haldeman diaries, 472–3.

[8] [6/19/72, A7 Ronald Kessler]

[9] Mark Feeney, Nixon at the Movies, appendix; President’s Daily Diary for attendance. In order to watch the film at Camp David, it would have had to be transported there. On the night of the 23rd, the day of the “smoking gun” conversation, Nixon watched Hang ’Em High. (The two films were probably brought together.) To have the films ready for screening on Friday and Saturday, he probably had to request them no later than Wednesday. [I am checking on this process]

[10] http://whitehousetapes.net/transcript/nixon/smoking-gun