Many Americans feel as though they are living through a singularly tumultuous moment. But great art teaches us that there is nothing new under the sun. “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read,” said writer James Baldwin in a 1963 interview in Life magazine.
In terms of national turmoil, many observers likened 2020 to 1968. While any such comparison is imprecise, the parallels are striking: In 1968, the nation was not only preparing for a presidential election but also contending with the still-raging Vietnam War, the killings of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, and a deadly, if, until recently, little-remembered, influenza pandemic.
Few films better reflect the fractures and fissures of 1968, or have more to say to us during our present moment, than Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool. The film was released by Paramount Pictures in 1969, but it was shot in the preceding summer — one for the ages when it comes to upheaval. The Chicago-based production overlapped with the 1968 Democratic National Convention, which was the site not only of the nomination of presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey, who fell to Richard Nixon in the general election a few months later, but also of violent skirmishes between anti-war protesters, the police, and the Illinois National Guard. The film’s dazzling conclusion deposits its lead characters, played by Robert Forster and Verna Bloom, into the convention inside and the chaotic free-for-all outside.
Already a much-honored cinematographer whose credits included Elia Kazan’s America, America (1963) and Mike Nichols’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), Wexler was initially hired by Paramount to direct, as his first fictional feature, an adaptation of Jack Couffer’s novel The Concrete Wilderness. “It was supposed to be a picture about a young boy who found animals in the city,” Wexler, who died in 2015, recalled in a 2013 interview. “When I got back to my hometown of Chicago to make The Concrete Wilderness, I saw that there was electricity in the air. There were things going on, mostly based on the Vietnam War, the black movement, the poverty of Appalachia.”
But, in making what evolved into Medium Cool, Wexler worked from a script of his own creation, which he proceeded to photograph and direct in an offhand, documentarylike style that gives the final film a lasting patina of believability. At the center of the story is John Cassellis (Forster), an ambitious, gifted, largely unprincipled news cameraman at a Chicago television station. John is a self-serving, in-it-for-himself figure with a striking degree of ruthlessness. In the opening scene, he and a sound man scurry to the site of a car wreck, but instead of helping the victims, they merely document the graphic scene. During its opening stretches, the film suggests something like Billy Wilder’s acidic journalism movie Ace in the Hole remade for the counterculture era.
As played by Forster, whose calm and collected persona would later be used to great advantage in his Oscar-nominated performance in Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown (1997), John seems to believe in very little. But he is thoroughly persuaded that, in his callous pursuit of sensationalism, he is acting on behalf of a viewing public that can only be roused by ever-more violent images on their TV sets. “Who wants to see somebody sitting?” John says at a party. “Who wants to see somebody lying down? Who wants to see somebody talking peace unless they’re talking loud?”
But Wexler does not exempt himself from the film’s critique of the exploitative nature of the media. In a sense, he affirms John’s view of the base desires of the public by depositing his cast into a series of charged real-life environments, none of which have lost their power as examples of cinema verite. Early in the film, John excitedly photographs anti-protest training exercises that are being undertaken by the National Guard. These were real exercises filmed at Camp Ripley in Minnesota. The maneuvers, while staged, ominously presage the finale at the Democratic National Convention.
After losing his job at the station and striking up a friendship with a fresh transplant from West Virginia, Eileen (Bloom), John starts to rethink the callousness with which he has approached the news. While watching a television program on the recently assassinated Martin Luther King Jr., John at first comments on the broadcast in strictly professional terms. “Jesus, I love to shoot film,” he says, focusing on the medium, rather than the message, to invoke the words of Marshall McLuhan, whose insight that television is a “cool” medium gave rise to the film’s still-catchy title. Tempered by Eileen’s more emotional, plain-spoken reaction to King’s powerful utterances, however, John then deconstructs our often-scripted reaction to tragedies: “Memorial meetings. Memorial marches. Moments of silence. A widow cries, and then she says brave words.”
During the bravura conclusion, amid the real-life confrontations outside the DNC, Wexler creates a mosaic of mayhem by blending authentic documentary footage with synthetic elements. Dropped into the melee is Eileen, who, wearing a yellow dress apparently selected to allow audiences to better pick her out, weaves through the unruly throng as she looks for her missing little boy. Switching between shots of marching, chanting crowds and lines of blue-shirted police and heavily armed National Guard members, Wexler builds to a series of violent crescendos, none more startling than when a movie crew member apparently says to an off-camera Wexler, referring to the dispersal of tear gas: “Look out, Haskell — it’s real!” But it wasn’t: The line was recorded after the fact, an example of Wexler marshaling both his experience as a documentarian and his command of artifice as a cinematographer on fictional films.
Proudly, almost comically left-wing in his own politics — his other films include a documentary on the Weather Underground — Wexler captures the undeniable excitement of mass protest. “The whole world is watching!” the antiwar protesters recite in droning yet contagious unison. But, to his eternal credit, Wexler is also alert to the unsustainable, inevitable pandemonium that happens when people take to the streets. Just as Forster comes to realize that social disarray and violence are not photographic opportunities but terrifying realities, so do we. What is Wexler’s point in Medium Cool? Maybe it’s that, whether we intellectually identify with law enforcement or the agitators, each of us, in our hearts, identifies with that lost woman in the yellow dress — a civilian caught in the chaos of history. After living through the last 18 months, who among us can’t relate to that?
Peter Tonguette writes for many publications, including the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and the American Conservative.
