movie of the day: Good Night, and Good Luck (2005)

when i was an English student at Bowling Green State University, i was never much for allegory. to me, allegory was too direct in its methods, leaving little to the imagination and revealing itself as the pontification it so often comes across as.

if there were such a thing as a neutral point of view, i would probably have a disdain for Good Night, and Good Luck, as it is an obvious allegory of contemporary media coverage, cast in the historical context of the McCarthy hearings during the mid-50s.

but i don't have a neutral point of view.

the fact of the matter is that with the Bush administration's attempts to cast everything in terms of black and white (if you're not with us, you're with the terrorists, etc.) Good Night, and Good Luck is an important allegory to consider. the McCarthy hearings destroyed people both figuratively and literally (the film covers the suicide of a Murrow associate, Don Hollenbeck, who killed himself after being crucified by a columnist for the Hearst syndicate of newspapers) and the obvious message here is that those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.

the parallels between the McCarthy hearings and the rhetoric of the Bush administration are frighteningly congruous. McCarthy, like his modern day counterparts, would always attempt to bring the argument back on itself, often engaging in ad hominem attacks on his critics because it was obvious that his arguments didn't hold water. McCarthy made a mistake in attacking Murrow, who was respected by the American public for his coverage of World War II.

the one element that we find that Good Night, and Good Luck has not parallelled is Murrow himself. Murrow's politics did not make him confront McCarthy's witch hunts, but instead he was compelled by a need to do what he felt was right. as he explains to Sig Mickelson early in the film, there is no such thing as a neutral view point, that all news is editorializing to some degree. the problem is that today we lack a newsperson of Murrow's character. no one will step up and question this administration and do what is right.

the most amazing element of the film is that director George Clooney made a conscious decision to only use Joe McCarthy's actual televised appearances and hearings instead of casting an actor to play McCarthy. this is, of course, the most effective method of showing the fervor and lunacy of McCarthy's witch hunt, and it seems that it may be just as easy to slip Bush, Cheney, McClellan, Rumsfeld, Rice and all of the other zealots in there without ruining a thing. and that's a frightening thought. Five Stars (out of Five)