CINEMA: Stanley Peskin
THE arresting title sequence in Robert Redford’s Quiz Show identifies television with Kurt Weill’s acerbic song Mac the Knife from The Threepenny Opera. Although the song is given a romantic interpretation by Bobby Darin (who was a matinee idol in 1959, the year of Quiz Show), it loses none of its bite. As Bertolt Brecht’s lyrics describe a shark whose pearly white teeth make scarlet billows spread, so the rapacity of television as a form of show business is established.
In an equally arresting sequence, a close inspection of a Chrysler 333 draws attention to a society governed by money and power. The Chrysler, an image of the “forward look”, represents the “standard that sets the standard” and it enjoys all the pigskin and calfskin trappings of success. We are in Great Gatsbyland where motorcars are symbols of prosperity and sexual potency. The quiz show in question, Twenty-One, promotes Geritol, a high-potency tonic. Consumers drive one product, drink another.
In their recreation of an actual event described in Remembering America by Richard Goodwin, Redford and screenplay writer Paul Attanasio make it plain that a consumer society is a cosmetic society. The contestants in Twenty-One are mere commodities and, in the course of the film, brand Jewish is replaced with brand Gentile and the ratings soar.
The Jew is Herbie Stempel (John Turturro), a poor ex-GI who is given an opportunity to become a national hero. If on the one hand, he has a “face for radio”, he also qualifies as the “American Dream thing” who has “an Everyman quality”. The film explores the tie-up between myth and commercial manipulation and the myths themselves are remade in cattily inappropriate television images.
The Faustian hero is blonde and blue-eyed Charlie van Doren (Ralph Fiennes) who teaches English literature at Columbia for $86 a week. Young, clean-cut and from a good family, he is not an “annoying Jewish guy with a missing tooth”. Television transforms Charlie into a god to be venerated and he is awarded the supreme accolade: not only is his picture on the cover of Time magazine, but he becomes famous, “like Elvis Presley”.
Charlie more than once refers to Keats’ famous claim that “truth is beauty” as a guiding ideal, but in a society where everybody’s making money and $100 000 is at stake, he cannot resist the sweet smell of success.
Surrounded by the glitterbugs of show business, he becomes for a while too corrupt and cynical to care about the truth. When he answers questions about Paul Revere or about the American Civil War, there is a neat irony. The ideals associated with the “pursuit of happiness” have been abandoned.
Charlie’s literary background is treated with barbed but affectionate irony. At a birthday party given for his father, Mark van Doren (magnificently played by Paul Scofield), there is a fair amount of name-dropping and birthday greetings take the form of a pastiche of Macbeth. More important, however, Van Doren’s liberal humanist values force Charlie to confront himself, to recognise that he is still the greedy little boy who loves chocolate cake and milk.
For this reason, it is difficult to know what to make of the high-flown rhetoric of the speech he delivers to the sub-committee at congressional level: “I lied to the American people” and “I have flown too high on borrowed wings”. Is he genuinely remorseful or is he merely a indulgent, failed Faustian figure?
Whichever he is, it remains Redford’s contention that television is a public trust, and in his film he puts television on trial. Redford, who played Waspy investigative reporter Bob Woodward in Alan Pakula’s All the President’s Men, has an alter ego in Richard Goodwin (Rob Morrow). Goodwin, who got a first in the law school at Harvard, is the investigator who eventually uncovers the scam and who is seen as the conscience of America.
If there is some naivety in the treatment of Goodwin and his wife, this cannot detract from a film which is charismatically acted by everyone concerned and which has an extraordinarily witty and intelligent script.