All the President's Men

Saw All the President's Men, a fairly famous political thriller about the Washington Post breaking the Watergate scandal.  This film was made in 1976, a mere two years after Nixon resigned, so this was the prestige retelling of the scandal of the day.  It seems pessimistic for its time, with Woodward and Bernstein hungrily typing away at their typewriters, talk of being bugged, and frightened aides refusing to go on record.  But by today's standards it all seems sadly quaint.

Back in the 60s we had a vision of the government as super-competent, with a plan and a fallback plan for everything.  It had gotten us through the world wars and landed us on the moon.  As Watergate and Vietnam chipped away at our conception of ourselves, our conception shifted until by now we have a conception of the government as bumbling and corrupt; divided, self-serving, and only incidentally helpful.  We have just finished with a president who was far more corrupt than Nixon.  What's a bugged headquarters in comparison to a stormed capitol?

So this film grimly exposes an enviably clean underbelly, but it poses the press as the champions to uncover this dirt and to save us from it.  The film opens with a typewriter key striking a page so loudly, it made me jump.  The film ends with the two journalists hammering away to the sound of cannon fire on the TV.  It's great stuff - posing the press as the weapon to take down corruption.  (Of course though: Fox News was founded in the 90s to prevent exactly this sort of thing from ever happening again so keep in mind, the press itself is perhaps only another tool.)

The film if pretty good.  There's car park meetings and crafty extractions of confirmation and an arc of Woodward slowly learning to trust his gut.  It's very gripping in its own way.  The parts I found most gripping were the parts that troublingly revealed the roots of our current political climate, but those were also the most worrying.  In retrospect, it feels like a horror film that ends with the monster slowly returning from the dead, and slowly sneaking up behind the heroes.