RM Movie Club #2: Quiz Show

[Simple Torture]

I've only seen it once, but I'm excited to watch it again and try to focus on things that I didn't notice the first time. There's one scene I'm especially interested in and that I hope to write extensively about. We'll see.

[lennytheweedwhacker]

I've only seen it once, but I'm excited to watch it again and try to focus on things that I didn't notice the first time. There's one scene I'm especially interested in and that I hope to write extensively about. We'll see.

i saw it 6 or 7 years ago, but remember very little details about it

[tragabigzanda]

Whenever there's active promotion on the part of somebody else, whenever I see somebody all dolled up for a fancy photograph and someone's handing out flyers or whenever there's active promotion for something like that, as an imposition on my day, I hate all those people and I want them to fail. I have a visceral reaction to advertising and promotion. There's just something about salesmanship that grates on me on a very base level and I react very negatively towards it. I want those people to suffer and I want their enterprises to fail.

[lennytheweedwhacker]

john turturro is the greatest actor of our generation

[@SkitchP]

To one of Trags points, I suppose one of the things I actually really enjoy about the movie is how low the stakes are. I'm not entirely sure why. The outcome does feel entirely inconsequential.

[tragabigzanda]

Whenever there's active promotion on the part of somebody else, whenever I see somebody all dolled up for a fancy photograph and someone's handing out flyers or whenever there's active promotion for something like that, as an imposition on my day, I hate all those people and I want them to fail. I have a visceral reaction to advertising and promotion. There's just something about salesmanship that grates on me on a very base level and I react very negatively towards it. I want those people to suffer and I want their enterprises to fail.

[Simple Torture]

I'm going to need some time tonight to sit down and type my thoughts up, but here are my notes!

[@SkitchP]

I have no idea what any of that means, but you're a good man Simple Torture.

[The Argonaut]

The only thing I can make out is " John Turturro- what else can you say?"
That's a definite truth.

[Jorge]

visual styke
----
repetitive/clong
taxis edb bymy
puph chgg TV show
turist en sh.
----
stein shut
mhit m rm hit
----
newrm/musggn
--> ovrduws
mudy's
imgood !
dov
much

[Simple Torture]

visual styke
----
repetitive/clong
taxis edb bymy
puph chgg TV show
turist en sh.
----
stein shut
mhit m rm hit
----
newrm/musggn
--> ovrduws
mudy's
imgood !
dov
much

I'm sure we have a Rammstein lyrics thread somewhere, so I'm not sure why you posted that here.

[Simple Torture]

Okay, so I've got a lot to talk about, so I'm only going to cover a few things in each post, make a few over the next few days. I agree with a number of things trag said, so I want to get to that eventually (the movie's stakes, and especially the role TV plays in it as a character or an unstoppable cultural force), but before I get to that I want to look at its style for a minute. A number of people have accused this film of having little or no distinctive style, and I'm here to defend it...at least a little bit. I think the problem is that in the first 30 minutes or so the film does have some signature shot compositions and a way it wants us to view its world, but it sort of falls away as the movie goes on--and it also gets replaced by a really annoying, over-used "style" that just drove me mad. It has to do with the idea of mirroring and symmetry, which cuts at one of the film's biggest themes--class.

One of the film's earliest shots had me thinking about this: the line of taxis outside of the TV studio. The effect here is almost like when you're in a dressing room that has mirrors on both walls, and when you look at one you can see your reflection shrinking off into infinity (it kinds sucks that this shot has credits over it, I think):



We really get going with the mirroring when we get into the studios at NBC. As the band plays and Jack comes out to start the show, we're placed directly in the center of the set, and from this perspective we can see that the two halves mirror each other. This actually becomes more pronounced when the quizzing actually starts, since the women who close the doors to the boxes are twins:





Why the mirroring at this stage in the film? Well, I believe it's done with the viewer of the TV show in mind (not us, the viewers of the film) since it's supposed to suggest fairness and no one getting any advantage over their opponent--hey, we're so fair that the two women locking the boxes are genetically identical! It becomes pretty clear to us, the film's viewers, of course, that the show isn't fair, and that the symmetry is just a put-on. The film does a couple of other interesting things with this visual theme when Van Doren starts to comes on board, including this shot, right after he's agreed to be on the show:



Of course, he thinks at this point that he's agreed to do an above-board show that'll treat him and his opponent fairly and let the best man win; what he doesn't know is that the plan to fix it is already in, represented by the fact that the symmetrical staircase in the NBC lobby is unevenly cut down the middle with one man in a grey suit and one in a navy one (they even appear to be on different stairs here). The slight unbalance to the image relates to the unbalance that Van Doren is not aware of just yet.

The other good shot that works with this same theme is right after Van Doren wins for the first time: it's him going down the stairs while everyone else is in the elevator. I wish I knew how to make a gif, because a still doesn't really get across what I want to highlight here: unlike the rest of the film that--as people have said--is pretty static, the camera here spins to create a dizzying, unbalancing effect, just at the moment when Van Doren realizes that things aren't as balanced as he thought, and that he's now implicated in this crooked scheme:



But after this point in the film, I feel like this sort of visual language pretty much drops away. But that's not to say that the whole idea of mirroring is completely abandoned: we're constantly reminded of the differences between Van Doren and Stempel, how they're almost reverse images of each other. One's Jewish, one's a Gentile. One lives in a rowhouse in Queens, the other a townhouse in the village (and, whenever he wants, at his family estate in Connecticut). Lots of these differences have to do with class and the social ladder: Stempel has to borrow his wife's father's ill-fitting clothes to be on TV, he makes bad investments to squander the cash he "wins," and he's easily relegated to being a "nobody" once his run on the show is over. Van Doren, on the other hand, comes from the "Van Doren Van Dorens," is constantly seen at fancy-schmancy parties, and has a job that comes with a title ("professor"). My favorite contrast is what they do with their families: when Van Doren relaxes with his clan, he and his father have a witticism-off by quoting lines from Shakespeare (a scene trag mentioned). What do Stempel and his kid do when they're hanging together? They watch professional wrestling on TV--nothing says podunk and "we ain't classy" like pro wrestling (which was mostly performed at fairgrounds and carnivals before the explosion of TV in the '50s). I guess my big problem with the way the film deals with class is that it doesn't do anything with it--it simply uses Van Doren's privilege and Stempel's humble surroundings to contrast them with very little of a thematic statement. Unless--and I'll get into this more in another post--we're meant to feel the two collapsing into each other with one of the film's final lines: "Television is gonna get us." More on that later.

[Simple Torture]

Oh, and I meant to add: there's a specific sort of shot that drives me bonkers in this film, and it's the montage shot. All the people turning on the TV...newspaper headlines and newsreel footage whizzing by...Goodwin knocking on doors and crossing out names on his pad...over and over again. That shit just felt unnecessary and overdone after a while.

[tragabigzanda]

Whenever there's active promotion on the part of somebody else, whenever I see somebody all dolled up for a fancy photograph and someone's handing out flyers or whenever there's active promotion for something like that, as an imposition on my day, I hate all those people and I want them to fail. I have a visceral reaction to advertising and promotion. There's just something about salesmanship that grates on me on a very base level and I react very negatively towards it. I want those people to suffer and I want their enterprises to fail.

[Simple Torture]

Here's an article on the film's direction that I mostly agreed with: http://www.avclub.com/article/what-iqui ... nd-i-94199

[Rangi Guy]

I quite liked Quiz Show - although I felt it overstayed it's welcome some by the end - and wished they'd trimmed a bit of the fat off this.

Despite seeing this as the point where I guess a sesnse of trust had been broken by this scandal - as other's have pointed out - the stakes really didn't seem all that high, especially when all is said and done - there really were no losers, except maybe the contestants.

One thing that got a little grating as the film went on was Dick's accent which seemed a bit too thick.

IT did make me wonder what I would have done in that situation if it was presented.

[Simple Torture]

One thing that got a little grating as the film went on was Dick's accent which seemed a bit too thick.

Right in the middle of my notes it says, "Holy fuck, that accent."

[LoathedVermin72]

I'm watching this right now. I immediately disagree about the visuals being unimportant or flat; quite the opposite, I think. If anything, it feels visually restless. Lots of quick editing and movement. And, of course, Michael Ballhaus is a very good DP. The lighting in this movie is quite beautiful, and there is a great sense of space and depth in a lot of the shots. The framing can be clumsy, but I appreciate what Redford is doing.

I was not surprised to see Scorsese do a cameo; his influence is all over this.

[Simple Torture]

A few more thoughts, based off my notes and what some others have said in this thread, especially having to do with the film's central conflict/the stakes/trimming the narrative.

The scene of Van Doren vs. Stempel on the quiz show is one of my favorite in the entire film; in fact, it's so good that I think it actually hurts the movie a bit that it occurs early on and not later. It's super engaging to watch not just one but two characters having to make a difficult ethical decision in the span of like 60 seconds. It's a nice added bonus that neither can hear the other and they don't know what their opponent is up to; it's a small but telling representation about how true ethical decisions are made in isolation, that you can ask other people for input and their suggestions, but when you make a decision like the one these men have to make, you're really on your own.

When I say that it's an "ethical" decision, I mean that in like the big-E, big-P "Philosophical Ethics" kind of way: the decisions that these men make have an impact on every aspect of their lives, and they both understand, on some level, that the decision they make is going to determine the kind of person they are, no matter what face they give to the world. When Van Doren is considering taking the bait of the rigged game show, he has this exchange with Hank Azaria's character:

Van Doren: "I'm just trying to imagine what Kant would make of this."

Freedman: "I don't think he'd have a problem with it."

This is one of my favorite lines from the movie, not just because Freedman has no idea who Kant is (although the delivery is subtly hilarious, because he obviously thinks he's a figure that he should pretend to know, but he doesn't realize how much of his statement influences Van Doren's decision), but because of the way it moulds what happens to Van Doren afterwards. The center of Kant's treatise on ethics is a concept known as the categorical imperative, which basically states that in matters of ethics, if you hold a specific action or virtue to the highest of standards--if it's at the core of what makes someone good or ethical--then it cannot be contextually dependent; i.e., you can't say, "Well, you have to be this way sometimes, but sometimes it's okay to deviate." So if you hold "Killing people is wrong" as sacrosanct, then you can never kill anyone--even in self defense, even in defense of another, even in the service of the state. If you hold being honest as an ethical necessity, then you must be honest in all circumstances--even if you're a sympathizer hiding Jews from the Nazis and a Nazi comes to your house and asks, "Are there any Jews here?" In that scenario, a Kantian who holds honesty as a virtue would have to say, "Yup!"

What does this have to do with Van Doren and Stempel? I'll deal with Stempel first: it's pretty clear that his decision is driven totally by self-interest, and that he doesn't take anything like this into account. He wants to stay on the show because it seems like the best things for him--why would he want to go back to being a nobody from Queens? His crisis is more about trying to figure out what's best for him: if takes the dive, he believes Enright will take care of him, and he believes that if he doesn't take the dive, Enright will ruin him. Right and wrong doesn't enter into the picture here; it's all about him, him, him. I think we can assume, however, that Van Doren considers himself a Kantian, based on his response to Freedman. So making the decision that he does--to be involved in Freedman and Enright's deception, even if he didn't agree to it beforehand, even if in the moment it struck him as "wrong," even if he only had a few seconds to decide, based on the game show's clock--in the Kantian sense, this involves a complete flipping of a virtue he's expressed before in the film; that is, he decides, even in that split second, that being honest is no longer a categorical imperative, that he can go on living without it. He decides, basically, that he's above it, and honesty no longer matters--in Kantian terms, it's not that he expects everyone else will be telling the truth and he will be lying (he probably couldn't live with himself if he thought this), but that lying is simply the natural order of things, and that the world can keep on spinning without honesty and no one's life would be any worse. It's not too hard to see how his view can be shifted: everyone around him at the network--Enright, Freedman, even the head of NBC--lie all the time, and they're successful and happy. It's not until things begin to crash down around him that his perspective begins to shift back. Some may see this as an anti-Kantian film--i.e., that it's meant to demonstrate the shortcomings of a philosophy like this--but I think it's an enormously pro-Kantian piece of art. Consider: in Kantian terms, you can be a completely ethical person and lie all the freaking time, as long as lying is what you hold as a virtue and that you lie to absolutely everybody. From the point of answering the question on the show to when he confesses to his father, Van Doren is technically "ethical" in Kantian terms, because he's living his entire life as a lie (the fact that he's unmarried/not in a relationship helps this, since he doesn't have a confidant to confide in). The congressmen who at first applaud Van Doren for his honesty, they're anti-Kantians, because they're glad that he's shifted his perspective and taken responsibility. It's that guy who first speaks up and says, "No, you should've known," who seems like the film's moral center: if Van Doren is truly the man who believes that deceit is wrong, that it's right to be honest, then he didn't "make one mistake" (as so many awful people like to say when they're caught in a lie), because every day that he lived with that lie, and every time he shook someone's hand in congratulations, every time he took an endorsement or returned the smile of a pretty girl who recognized him from the TV--those were all mistakes, and he had lived millions and millions of them when he was lying. I don't think the text wants us to have a shred of sympathy for him, and--even though I don't think I'm a Kantian--I'm completely okay with that.

So, that's that.

I think where the film stumbles a little in its central themes is with the character of Goodwin. I think he's elevated a bit too much to the status of "third protagonist," when he could have spent most of the film as an outside force threatening the stability of Van Doren's worldview and he would've been just as effective. Did we need to know about his wife, his intra-office squabbles, his background as a Harvard man? They add flavor to the text, but I really think this is a film about Van Doren and Stempel, and Goodwin detracts from them a bit. His part in the story also seems to raise its stakes to a point that many have expressed displeasure in, and I tend to agree with that up to a point. I think the simmering conflict between Van Doren and his father--one representing the ascendence of TV as the cultural medium with the most cache, and the other of course representing the decline of the written word, especially poetry, as the most respected mode of expression--works just fine on its own in scenes like the one at the birthday party. What I like about it is it doesn't moralize and it doesn't try to say that one is right and one is wrong, that one is better and more pure and that the other is worse and more commercial, tainted. Goodwin's character and his arc does introduce a viewpoint like this, though, in a slightly altered manner: the fact that NBC's top executives and sponsors get to slide through the hearings with no black marks on their records allows him to muse, "I thought we were gonna get television. The truth is: television is gonna get us." It's a bridge too far for me, a little too neatly-tied-up. Yeah, we get it: TV has the ability to make lies seem like truth and to force feed us storylines and narratives that its higher-ups decide are important...but I feel like this could have been subtly handled in the main Van Doren/Stempel story while keeping the film's focus on their ethical dilemmas, which is what interests me most.

I really did like this movie, btw.

[tragabigzanda]

Whenever there's active promotion on the part of somebody else, whenever I see somebody all dolled up for a fancy photograph and someone's handing out flyers or whenever there's active promotion for something like that, as an imposition on my day, I hate all those people and I want them to fail. I have a visceral reaction to advertising and promotion. There's just something about salesmanship that grates on me on a very base level and I react very negatively towards it. I want those people to suffer and I want their enterprises to fail.