Shakespeare, Casablanca, and Screen Responsibility

It is impossible to write about the state of the Image Industry in 2022—film, television, or streamers—without reference to the signal event of summer: the hearings conducted by the House committee investigating the January 6 attack, watched more broadly than anyone ever expected. The select committee, which convened those hearings and presented the evidence through in-person testimony with expertly edited digital audio and video materials, delivered the ratings hit of the summer. It was so popular—such dominant water-cooler chat, as they used to say, back when people went to offices—that even channels that had not planned to carry the proceedings abruptly signed on. And the clips and links were everywhere.

The hearings, still ongoing at this writing, marked a pivotal moment in US politics as well as a signal event in the US television production annals. When has CSPAN ever drawn record numbers before, or been joined by networks spontaneously hopping on board? The “limited series” made renegade Republicans into complicated folk heroes, from the still-right Republican Liz Cheney to the heroic career Republican staffer Cassidy Hutchinson. Perhaps even some Democrats will manage a cameo, if committee chair Bennie Thompson rises to the occasion or if Jamie Raskin returns with the same professorial eloquence he showed in July when he quoted Abraham Lincoln and brought him up to date:

As the committee members assemble their evidence for the American people, they are counting on being heard, and racing in slow Congressional style to get everything done before the series giant killer entitled “The Midterms” provides their finale.

Watching the hearings, I thought back to the momentous televised moments of the past, from the Kennedy assassination of 1963—if only there’d been more television coverage then, there might have been a view of someone(s) on that grassy knoll—to the slow-motion OJ chase in a white Bronco on the 91 freeway in Los Angeles thirty years later, in 1994.

Both were predated by the earlier set of hearings that Senator Joseph McCarthy infamously staged, with the help of Roy Cohn, targeting alleged Communists and homosexuals, ruining lives and careers with wanton glee. The Army–McCarthy hearings of 1954 finally turned the public against McCarthy and brought him down, thanks in no small part to the rhetorical challenge thrown at him by the Army’s chief counsel, Joseph N. Welch—“Have you no sense of decency, sir?”—and Edward R. Murrow’s CBS reports.

Too young to have experienced those hearings in the fifties, I caught up with them through the archival documentary Point of Order (1963), directed by Emile de Antonio and made in collaboration with Dan Talbot, the majordomo of US film exhibition and distribution. The film was widely shown in repertory in the seventies and eighties, by which time de Antonio had moved on to other political subjects. And so, unexpectedly, did mainstream politics: the Watergate hearings were televised starting in May 1973. The hearings and their widely viewed broadcasts continued for fifty-one days. On August 9, 1974, Richard M. Nixon resigned as US president—also via a live TV broadcast.

Nearly two decades later, on October 11, 1991, the Senate Judicial Committee met to vote on the fitness of Clarence Thomas to join the Supreme Court. It is a matter of his eternal disgrace that then–Senator Biden presided over those hearings. Anita Hill was treated so shabbily that one wondered if the senators even remembered they were being watched. For years, I kept on my shelf a set of VHS tapes that I’d recorded. It was infuriating to see how her testimony was ridiculed and dismissed and to learn later that those ready to corroborate her testimony were never called. Instead, the committee chairman displayed a combination of cowardice, uncertainty, and misogyny.¹ It was the day that US women were betrayed and dismissed, and any woman who watched the hearing live on that date will never forget it. With supreme historical irony, in that moment, Joe Biden delivered his administration, and America itself, into the hands of Clarence Thomas and his vengeful wife.

All these past hearings, and more, are reverberating through my brain today. With a changed landscape of multiplying channels and selective reframings, distortions, and denials, it is obviously a different media world. I have frequently complained in these pages about the film/television/streaming industry’s failure to confront its historical moment. Film and television, streamers and platforms, studios and theaters all have the power to equip their audiences with the analytic and imaginative tools necessary to decipher this new world order.

Clearly there were some congresspeople who thought so too. Thankfully, the House committee “brought on a veteran TV executive to help do the job, hiring James Goldston, the former president of ABC News, to produce the hearings as if they were a docudrama or a must-watch mini-series.”² The strategy worked. With their expert deployment of witness testimony, smartphone clips, and other materials, the committee established a new benchmark for its format—a format that was, in fact, more sophisticated than a great deal of campaign materials (at least on the Democratic side of the aisle, which forever lacks even the most basic tenets of messaging that film or advertising pros could provide) and even a lot of films.

In its wake, I have a message for the image industry: stop acting like the police in the infamous school corridors of Uvalde: maximum weaponry, zero courage. The US image industry has all the resources at its disposal—equipment, budgets, talents, reach—but evidently lacks the courage, the will, or the desire to challenge the forces of fascism taking over this country. It has all of the weapons, but none of the nerve.

Surely the calamities of the present day—from active shooters to abortion criminalization to climate degradation—are worthy of the industry’s attention. New genres and characters, new aesthetic strategies and formats, are needed to activate audience emotion, to pierce the glazed distanciation of viewership, to prompt analysis and engagement, to spike emotion into action. But painfully little has materialized. I’ve already discussed Don’t Look Up (Adam McKay, 2021) in this space. It is worthy as far as it goes … but where are the rest? If pressed, I suppose that Patrick Somerville’s Station Eleven (HBO Max, 2021–22), which has been held up as a postapocalyptic saga of life following the global devastation of a fatal flu epidemic, can also be seen as an exposé of the dangers of cults and the cost of following violent false prophets.

Still, I confess to being in need of something far more direct and instructive, something that can spark a franchise of engagement in a world that is fast disappearing. Multiplex entertainment is fine, even traditional, but the times demand more. It is nearly six years since Mr. Trump “won” the election, and the country has fallen deeper into the dark sinkhole that opened then. The image industry has an important role to play in jump-starting its publics and leading a way out of the tunnel before it’s too late. Scribes, get out your keyboards: the time is nigh.

The Elizabethans had Shakespeare (or multiple authors attributed to that name) to bravely confront the corrupt powers that be with the bold brilliance of a provocateur. Corrupt leadership, deranged rulers, wars and dangers, political subterfuge, intrigues in the halls of power … oh, imagine signing that Shakespeare guy to a development deal. What skullduggery he could unearth today and enfold into a screenplay that everyone would rush to see, a series that would keep everyone bingeing and, just maybe, then taking action, organizing new political structures, inventing new platforms to reverse-engineer consumerism into societal participation.

Here’s an idea for all the foundations committed to social change: fund imagination coupled with political will and able to reach a popular audience. Initiate screenplay competitions to jump-start the recalcitrant image industry, new work that can make political action viable and attractive again, movies and series that make it hip to speak out against what is wrong in this country—before it’s too late. If TikTok challenges can get vast numbers of Americans to dunk themselves in water or rub ice cubes and salt on their bodies, then surely a smart film could get folks to emerge from their domestic cocoons and link arms—to save the neighborhood, the country, the planet, their endangered rights, their imperiled lives.

And if it’s considered unreasonable to expect an entertainment industry to have a progressive conscience or mission on its own, to want to rescue a flailing society—it needn’t be. In the column and podcast that he posted recently, “What Casablanca Teaches Us: Heroism in the Face of Fascism,” Robert Reich argued that the movie business used to do better.³ Unsurprisingly claiming Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942) as a long-time favorite film—he’ll get little argument on that one—Reich simply points to its release date to remind his audience that this was no nostalgic piece capitalizing on war for romance. No, this was a film that took a stand in the middle of a war whose outcome was by no means certain. No, this was romance aiding the war, with antifascism triumphing over attraction, duty over love. It is a film that shows what’s at stake.

Noah Isenberg’s book We’ll Always Have Casablanca: The Life, Legend, and Afterlife of Hollywood’s Most Beloved Movie, was written while Obama was still president and was released for the film’s seventy-fifth anniversary in early 2017. Isenberg points not merely to the date of the film’s production, like Reich, but also to the fact that it was filmed in Casablanca soon after US troops took over the city, and that many in the cast were themselves refugees. Of course, the United States was a different country then—and this was a different war. And as FQ’s associate editor, film historian Rebecca Prime, recently reminded me, Hollywood was actually a deeply politicized and engaged community then in a way that is completely different from today.

Before and beyond being claimed as a mood piece for lost love and fervent causes, with even Woody Allen pledging his allegiance to it once upon a time, Casablanca is a morality play with a fierce antifascist message for its audiences: stand up and sing, and then fight.