David Caute

What the President saw

A staff writer for the Boston Globe, Mark Feeley is also a lecturer in American Studies at Brandeis University. I mention this because evidence has been accumulating these past 20-odd years that American Studies departments, like Cultural Studies, Film Studies and, of course, Media Studies are busily engaged in subverting that central but antiquated notion dear to traditional history departments — ‘because’. Causality is oldhat, it’s risible, and it’s out. The new history is virtual history, or ‘alternate’ history, the kind that did not happen but might have happened, just as novels and movies and genre paintings depict realities which somehow failed to occur. In some cases like Oliver Stone’s Nixon and JFK movies, the excitement for the spectator is searching for vestiges of real history and real ‘becauses’ behind the virtual activity on the screen. Stone makes films in the indicative, but Mark Feeley, who is rather scrupulous and old-fashioned about the truth, resorts to conditionals and even subjunctives as he transports us into the virtual history of a very real and plausible Richard Nixon ‘at’ (or not ‘at’) a number of wonderfully described movies.

For example, wishing to devote a whole chapter to Alexander Mackendrick’s film Sweet Smell of Success (1957), but also intent on keeping us in touch with the life and times of Richard Nixon —Congressman, then Senator, then Vice-President, then hiatus, then President, then not-President scuttling from impeachment post-Watergate —Feeley solves the problem with generous helpings of virtual history and the conditional. ‘It is the movie Richard Nixon might have made had Richard Nixon been a movie director: the movie that aims to show what journalism is really like.’ And: ‘Sweet Smell of Success bears such a nakedly Nixonian title, unleashing the poetry of his id without the prose of the superego.’ And: ‘This is one movie about journalism Nixon might have enthusiastically endorsed.’

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