Mediated Media

Rating: 9/10 (21 December 2005)

The visual media of television and film can be a tool or it can be a toy, a means of discourse or merely an object of entertainment. At either extremes, The Media (sic) can be either a degrading escapism that unfocuses the audience away from reality, or harsh propaganda designed to center the masses towards one specific ideology.
How do we treat media? How do we know where to draw the line between entertainment and discourse, objectivity and subjectivity, documentary and mise-en-scene? These are the types of questions that come immediately to mind when regarding a film of this type, one that shows the effect media can have on life, politics, and truth, both personally and publicly, while attempting to create an effect itself.
The set is McCarthy-era US, the characters a group of reporters, the drama the desire to defeat the fear of McCarthyism while keeping a safe distance away from Communism to be able to do it without losing their lives. Around the desire of the characters to defeat the clouds that hang over their heads is the almost defeatism stoic resolve they feel as they press ahead with full knowledge that they could lose their jobs and maybe even their way of life in the process. All to present one message: the television is a tool, not just a flickering image.
What is compelling especially of this film is its comparison to two other noteworthy films about journalism, Citizen Kane and All the President's Men. Citizen Kane, being famous for its use of deep-focus, presents a character who is decidedly subjective, while deep-focus itself is a method of objectivity. This film, Good Night, and Good Luck., presents characters who are altruistic in their belief in objectivity and standards, and yet most of it is shot with a very small depth of focus, often times leaving most or all planes of action slightly fuzzy or completely indelible. All the President's Men presents an idealistic image of heroic journalism with open, clean spaces and long, white rooms for the newspaper men to move through. This film presents characters entrapped by their surroundings, already pre-imprisoned before they've even had the chance to fight back. Shadows cover the frame, and the edges of the shots are all dark.
As a method of presentation, Clooney chooses to show the antagonist, McCarthy, through found media, acquired documentary images of actual things that he had done and said. This has a profound two-fold effect: on one hand, it's verite style creates an objective McCarthy, the real man, a knowledge that he actually existed and said such things. On the other hand, it means we never really see the diagetic McCarthy, the one that fits into the story. As a way of presenting a villain, it means that it's impactful to have true media, but on the other hand it removes said media from the audience twice, once as a mediated image between actual event and audience sitting on their couch, and once as said image being re-imposed through yet another screen, creating two layers of pixellation to affect our imagining of this character. The characters in the film struggle with presentation, thus reminding us post-structurally that we are being presented something by Clooney, meaning the discourse has been removed from us enough that we have to call into question the character of McCarthy as he was presented, not as he was.
Now this is not some banal nor malevolent attempt by Clooney to create tension between the audience and the discourse, it's meant almost entirely of an expression of the issues with subjective media and the effects on human rights and their potential for abuses. The problem with mediating media is that it can't help but call attention to the director's own bias, whether or not that is the point, even if the audience didn't initially question the producers of the original medium.
Such semiotic reading comes to a point where it becomes an almost infinite loop. For example: I am now writing a review about a film about an event in television about an era that ended fifty years ago. How far removed, then, are you, the audience, from the actual event? What are you to think of this film by itself from my own discourse, much less McCarthy or the era he moved within? I'm sure you, as my potential audience, are merely wondering whether or not this film is any good, or if it's worth the time to see? So I end rather bluntly and uneloquently: Yes, it's quite good, and you should see it if you get the chance.
--PolarisDiB