#WTW: Medium Cool

(#WhatThomWatched, take two)

Medium Cool 

(Haskell Wexler, 1969; Criterion spine 658)

Understand up front — the ending of Medium Cool is its least interesting, underwritten, most amateurish moment (the narrative ending, not the famous final trick shot featuring the director). But by then the callous cameraman played by Robert Forster has lost your sympathy anyway. Everything leading up to that ending is fascinating, including alternating gorgeous and squalid images of late-sixties Chicago (and, for a while, Washington D.C.); endless visual puns and games (when Forster’s sound man tells him that “For every man in D.C. there are four-and-a-half women!” Wexler smash-cuts rapidly to four random walking women, and then to a pair of legs); and rooms full of details, most often photographs and pictures crammed onto walls, seen in slow 360° pans, and once as Forster chases his naked girlfriend from room to room with the camera running along behind them.

There are many many times in Medium Cool when the camera is addressed or otherwise acts as a stand-in for us as viewers (and we viewers as a stand-in for turbulently charged 1968 America): representing a news photographer’s POV, becoming a gym punching bag, and so on; when a group of militant blacks are haranguing Forster-as-camera-as-us-as-Society, a young man’s finger-gun is matched with grim housewives shooting real guns at a suburban range (these images grabbed me during my viewing and only later did I realize that Criterion chose the exact same scenes to lead off their own booklet essay). But what stood out the most was a tiny moment, easy to miss, when Forster has come to the news director’s office at his television station to demand “film and lab” to shoot the upcoming Democratic National Convention; as the man bemoans the demands placed on him (for what is presumably increasingly unusable footage covering unpalatable politics in a dividing country), he glares directly into Wexler’s camera for a head-on closeup to growl: “They got film and lab!” — they, the filmmakers of the movie we’re watching, the counterculture empowered. In 1968, the angry and the crazed get the cameras, the “film and lab” funding, and access to shoot from inside the riot — from the center of America’s storm — even as the cameraman extends his own arm over the top of the camera into the frame to flip off the police.

Reminds me of:
I also own David Holzman’s Diary, Jim McBride’s shaggy-dog “documentary” from 1967, which I am guessing influenced Wexler, but I was surprised at the polish and slickness of Medium Cool in comparison; I’d always linked the two in my mind and was expecting more of Diary’s film-school-experiment, avant-garde feel (for example, McBride’s pretentious filmmaker subject, the imaginary Holzman played by writer L. M. Kit Carson, puts a time-lapse camera on a night of typical American mid-sixties network television). Instead, Medium Cool has what seem to be meticulously designed and staged sets and carefully controlled camera movements which invite visual connections between innumerable elements and references — Forster’s character’s apartment alone is loaded: in one shot he’s compared (or more likely compares himself in his own mind) to Jean-Paul Belmondo, star of Breathless and other iconic Godard films, while half of the famous “Execution of a Viet Cong Guerilla” can be seen (taken just that same year by the AP’s Eddie Adams); among them counterculture hero Tiny Tim preens in a literal spotlight:

But also — the guilt!
I’ve never actually read any of the Marshall McLuhan media analysis which underlies the ideas played with here and in many other works that I love: it’s specifically his 1964 book Understanding Media and its assertion that television is a “cool medium” (and the corresponding labeling of film as a “hot” medium) that gives this film its title and presumably its thematic thesis. As a long-standing Woody Allen fan, who chuckles every time Allen brings out McLuhan to end an argument in Annie Hall, I should be ashamed. (“I think my insights into Marshall McLuhan have a great deal of validity!” “Oh, do ya? Well, that’s funny, because I happen to have Mr. McLuhan right here.” And then McLuhan himself: “I heard what you were saying. You know nothing of my work!”)

Pitch:
The weakness of the narrative plot does not take anything away from Verna Bloom’s heartbreaking country-mouse widow transplant from the South, wandering into the heart of a (real) riot in search of her (imaginary) lost son, the only bright yellow dress in a solid sea of actual tanks, actual soldiers, actual tangles of fencing, actual protesters, actual blood. 

It is the actual document of that moment in America, disguised as fiction, and it is more than cool: it is chilling.

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