Democracy is the free respect of some clear rules

Rating: 10/10 (20 October 2008)

A brilliant American film for the 21st century. One more film on McCarthy, you might say. Yes indeed. But this one is different. Different because it is in black and white and it is a real smoking factory : politically correctness is forbidden. Different because it is not about the cinema but essentially about television, CBS. The real fourth power of the media : the power of journalism reinforced by the power of images. This television produces news programs that become the 21st century gospels. This power is absolutely enormous. And yet it is not CBS that brings McCarthy down, nor Murrow. It is McCarthy himself who brings himself down when he decides to react to Murrow on television and rebut him. In other words he falls in the trap laid in front of him and is unable to cope with this medium : he appears like what he is, a bigot, and he attacks someone who is beyond doubt in the wide public, a gospel writer as I have already said. Then McCarthy is doomed. This film hence shows something most people ignore on the old continent as well as on the new continent. The USA, like any human society, contains both good and evil because good cannot exist without evil and vice versa. But the USA, like any human society founded on the belief that individuals have rights and are fundamentally free as individuals and as citizens, will contain evil by its own efforts because good is necessarily stronger, even if at times it takes a few years to get around an obstacle and get into a dominant position. It is true some damage may have been caused during the period when evil had the upper hand, but good will push that evil down and aside sooner or later. Unluckily in such a society evil will find its way back up one day and will have to be pushed down again. But that is democracy and to believe that good, provided we all agree on what good is, can triumph once and for all is just as narrow-minded as the belief that communism had triumphed in 1917 once and for all. History has proved how wrong such a view was. The only criticism I may do is that the film believes television can be an education tool, and thus it does not understand that the medium itself goes against this idea. He says that television is entertaining and isolating people and it is in a way extremely wrong. Television is entertaining for sure but it is not isolating people, it is by mediatic essence homogenizing people, building vast all and everyone including consensuses, the famous global village of McLuhan. Yet the film is conscious of this shortcoming when it says that television can be an education tool if the watchers, the audience wants it to be such a tool. The place and role of television in society and the very medium it is goes against that eventual desire. Television can be used to educate people but it is not its "natural" mediatic essence. It is true it played a great role in the McCarthy case but it is the press that played that role in the Watergate case, and it is the press that has played that role ever since and it had even before the Watergate. Television is then essentially the relay of such mediatic investigation, when it is already out and has come out most of the time in the press. We may regret television not to be what we would like it to be, but a medium is a medium and its essence cannot be negated. It is like history. If you negate the essence of history, the natural course of history, history will sooner or later come back with a vengeance and make you pay for that vanity of yours. Think of the Soviets who tried to force history into their vision of the future. In 1989 history came back and leveled all these cogitations and pretensions. Think of the Chinese and how Mao's egalitarian communism was dismantled and how that decision liberated the energies of millions of people, and think how this liberation of human power is still not complete, and yet their experience shows that strict regulations are necessary to protect both the market economy and the people of the country against the unavoidable greed and cheating instinct of some individuals in that society.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines