Good Night and Good Luck
The essay by T. Hochscherf and C. Laucht published in 2012 on the 2005 film Good Night and Good Luck aims to present the controversial nature of the film by showing the reader two areas where it sparked controversy: the historical representation of the era it is set in, and its allusion to contemporary political issues. The essay gives examples of controversial issues within both areas.
In the first (and longer) part of the essay, the authors examine the way in which the film depicts the McCarthy era of American history. The main point of criticism for most of this section is that the focus of the film is too narrow to realistically present the cardinal issues of the age, and lacks broader contextualisation of the plot; therefore, the film resorts to oversimplification of very complex problems and remains limited in scope, both in perspective and space. All the while, the authors hardly ever seem to consider that any part of this way of representation might have been intentional; indeed, the only point where they come close to such a conclusion is when they concede that a limitation in scope is partly a technical necessity of filmmaking and plot development, and that the film having been shot in a single, closed locale is the source of its suspense.
Up until this point, the essay seems unbiased and well supported by evidence. However, there is a sentence at the end of the fifth paragraph which may strike the reader as out of place and betrays the true view of the authors: “As much as Clooney might be a liberal demagogue, he is a skilful entertainer”. "Demagogue" is a word with strong connotations of disapproval, and shows the bias of the authors. Furthermore, even if one disregards the negativity of that word, the sentence still seems to assume that "a liberal demagogue" and "a skilful entertainer" are, in most other cases, mutually exclusive, and that Clooney being both at the same time is some form of exception. This is wrong, since a demagogue is supposed to be able to play well upon people’s emotions.
In the last section, dealing with historical representation, the authors state that the McCarthy-case is not the sole focus of the film, but that the film also pays tribute to the television of the 1950s. The essay here lists the different purposes of shooting the film in black and white, although it only touches upon the self-declared most important point in the last few lines: according to the authors, the film is a monument to the "golden age" of television, when commercial interests did not rule over all else yet. However, the essay here also states as a negative that a film about television “ironically uses cinematographic aesthetics as a way of stylisation”. It seems hard to understand why a film using cinematography is "ironic"; the essay is concerned with a film, after all, and not a television programme, even if the main focus of said film is a particular television programme.
The second major part of the essay aims to show how parallels between the message of the film about the media and today’s political scene in the US contributed to the controversy around it, even though these parallels are never made explicit in the film. Again, the essay seems to fall back into examining the film in light of its director’s political views and statements, comparing it only to a single other film, Syriana, with which Clooney and his criticism of the Bush administration is also closely associated. Finally, the essay seems to find politically neutral ground by examining the other, this time implicit, parallel of the film to the society of today, namely its criticism of contemporary media.
T. Hochscherf and C. Laucht’s essay on George Clooney’s Good Night and Good Luck seems, at first glance, to be rooted in facts, and while there are valid points of criticism in it and the works it cites are authoritative, the bias of the authors emerges at various points through the essay, and may leave the reader wondering whether with a little research, one may find authoritative sources that support the opposite of the essay’s statements.
Link to the article: http://www.uwosh.edu/filmandhistory/controversial_films/films/goodNightGoodLuck.php
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