800 Words: A Post-Wedding Brunch Fight About Barbara Jordan Part 2

….never mind that Roosevelt barely lifted a finger for black civil rights so as to appease his Dixiecrat constituency; never mind that Roosevelt turned a blind eye to the heinous war crimes of the Soviet Union’s troops, never mind that Roosevelt aided military dictators sympathetic to American interests from Duvalier to Trujillo to Chiang Kai-Shek to even Franco, never mind that Roosevelt was perfectly prepared to collaborate with Mao in order to subdue Japan, never mind that Roosevelt approved the firebombing of civilian areas in Dresden and Tokyo that killed half-a-million people, never mind that Roosevelt refused to find a place to grant immigration asylum to millions of Jews who couldn’t get out of Europe, never mind that all Roosevelt’s New Deal programs and fireside chats could not put eight million Americans back to work.

And yet Roosevelt remains one of history’s most beneficent leaders. If modern world history has a single Great Man (in both influence and morality), it must be Franklin Roosevelt. In spite of all these awful compromises, and occasionally because of them, he is still perhaps the greatest of all presidents in American history. Being such a towering historical figure, his mistakes are correspondingly grander than those of lesser leaders. But insofar as we live in a world greater than that which existed in Roosevelt’s era, it is the world of this particular Great Man’s creation.

When John Maynard Keynes, the great economist, was asked if there had ever been anything like the Great Depression, he replied, “It was called the Dark Ages and it lasted 400 years.” We currently live in the worst recession since the Great Depression, but this recession is a mere pebble in the pool compared to the Great Depression’s tidal waves. Like Barack Obama after him, Roosevelt used the bully pulpit to advocate for necessary reforms, but he never, never, NEVER advocated for a single policy before he felt the public was ready to find it acceptable. If Roosevelt was able to advocate for more than Barack Obama currently does, it was because the American public – and the world – was correspondingly more desperate. Roosevelt realized that like military surgeons, a world leader must play triage with matters of life-or-death in order to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number of people.  Along the way to saving as many lives as possible, many people – perhaps just as many if not more – will be left to die.

We probably live in a climate closer to the damaged spirit of the 1930’s and 40s than the world has ever since come, but the level of danger is far, far lower than it then was. Merely in America, Roosevelt faced challenges from demagogues left and right (literally), any one of which could have wrested the reins of power from a less able leader than FDR. Consider just one of them:

Father Charles Coughlin preached to tens of millions every Sunday on the radio waves to broadcast that the New Deal was not nearly extreme enough in its social programs, and that the United States needed a government friendly to Hitler and Mussolini to stop the Communist/Jewish influence pervading American society. In 1935 he began to organize support for a candidacy for Huey Long that would unite the poor of the South (of all races) with Catholics. When Long was assassinated, he attempted to form a coalition with Dr. Francis Townsend (the pioneer of social security) to unite senior citizens, nativists, and Catholics against Roosevelt. When that coalition didn’t materialize, he promoted an organization on-air called the Christian Front, an org devoted primarily to anti-semitism and the violent overthrow of the United States government.

Many feel that Franklin Roosevelt did much more to sell his revolutionary policies than Barack Obama has. Perhaps they’re right, but if they are, it is because the desperation of his era enabled Roosevelt to have much more leeway in his time to advocate for positions than Obama does in ours. For their time, Roosevelt’s policies were far more revolutionary than Obama’s are in our own day. The New Deal was a revolution, Obamacare is merely a restoration. Modern liberalism and modern prosperity did not exist until Roosevelt created it, Obama is merely trying to create its resurgence.. And because our era, for all its problems, is so much less desperate, Obama has far less leeway to ram his programs through than Roosevelt did without a major backlash in the voting booth.

Furthermore, no matter how forcefully Roosevelt sold the New Deal, there were millions of people who felt that The New Deal did not go nearly far enough. Many millions were quite bitter that Roosevelt did not nationalize the banks. Many of them talked of abandoning the Democratic party for a Socialist government. Father Coughlin spoke for many millions of those people when he said that America should make an alliance with Hitler and adapt policies similar to those of National Socialism. But it would only be a few years later that Roosevelt’s own Vice-President, Henry Wallace, broke with the Roosevelt administration and said that the United States should have a strong and completely friendly alliance with the Soviet Union. Many in America agreed with Wallace, and felt that a Socialist government was not nearly enough. We often forget that the Communist party in America was taken extremely seriously in the 1930’s. At their height, the American Communist Party numbered 200,000 members, and millions more attended their meetings. At a time when 8 million Americans were unemployed, the Soviet Union was the one country in the world that could guarantee full employment and their staggering record of human rights abuses was barely known to outsiders. Even those who believed in Roosevelt’s vision greatly feared that Roosevelt did not speak out forcefully enough against those who wished him ill. Roosevelt never took on Coughlin’s criticisms publicly, nor did he Huey Long, or Henry Wallace. And yet it’s Roosevelt’s vision of the future that created our world, not theirs’.

The extent of Roosevelt’s greatness is still underestimated. For all his faults, the modern prosperity of North America, Europe, and East Asia is his creation. And he created the foundation for that prosperity at a time when the whole world could have easily fallen prey to Stalin or Hitler’s designs, even America. Compared to how forcefully Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Franco, even Churchill, DeGaulle and Ben-Gurion pursued their agendas, Roosevelt was as unautocratic as could be. One might even argue that he was only as much an autocrat as was necessary for America to resist the autocratic temptation. Compared to what could have been, Roosevelt was a model of restraint. Roosevelt may have been more forceful in his advocacy than Obama, but only because the public demanded it. Never, never, NEVER in Roosevelt’s career did he stray an inch past the threshold which the plurality of Americans were ready to accept.

Like Obama, Franklin Roosevelt was an utterly undistinguished politician a mere four years before his election. For seven years, he was Assistant Secretary of the Navy. He was chosen by Democrats as Vice-Presidential candidate in 1924 because his cousin was the most popular President of recent history (who was also a Republican). He was chosen to give Al Smith’s nomination speech in 1928 because he was by then a Polio case whom many rivals thought would be dead by 1932. Roosevelt was attractive to an American public deperate for new air. He was unknown and charismatic, but luck brought him to the forefront of history. Had there been no Roosevelt, there might have been others who enacted similar reforms. As strange as it seems today to suggest that the irreplaceable giant of the 20^th century was replaceable, it’s still possible that another Roosevelt could have arisen. Perhaps it would have been Roosevelt’s Secretary of State Cordell Hull who designed the United Nations, or Ohio governor James M. Cox who chose Roosevelt as his running mate in 1924 and had a long record of progressive reform, or former Secretary of War Newton Baker whom Woodrow Wilson handpicked as his preferred successor, or Wendell Willkie who campaigned as the Republican nominee in 1940 on a platform of National Unity in the face of international crisis, or President of First Union Trust and Savings Bank Melvin Alvah Traylor who spoke out against the greed of Wall Street, or Truman’s Vice President Alban Barkley who managed for decades to be a Liberal Democratic senator from Kentucky. Did Roosevelt truly have the potential to be a greater man than these other figures? Did History choose Roosevelt to be the Great Man of the 20^th century for any other reason than a whim?

Roosevelt’s speeches were certainly important to his presidency, but in no way were they the heart of his presidency’s success. At the heart of the Roosevelt presidency’s success were reforms like the Glass-Steagal Act which created a buffer between commercial and savings banks and made balance sheets from transactions a matter of public record; or creating the Federal Deposit Insurance Commission which could insure bank deposits, or taking America off the Gold Standard; or the Securities Act which required acts of interstate commerce (virtually every act…) to be registered with the government, or the Wagner Act which guaranteed unions the right to collective bargaining, or the Social Security Act which guaranteed people retirement pensions. At its heart was also the social programs that provided relief to citizens like the Public Works Administration which built the majority of the infrastructure which America uses to this day; or the Federal Housing Administration which regulated the standards by which homes were built; or the Resettlement Administration, or the Civilian Conservation Corps, or the Rural Electrification Administration, or the Tennessee Valley Authority, all of which did their part to bring modern amenities into impoverished rural areas. 

At the heart of the Roosevelt Presidency was a country so desperately sick of Republican governance that they elected 70 Democratic Senators (and 1 Progressive) in 1935 to 23 Republicans and 322 Democratic congressmen to the Republicans’ 103. Roosevelt’s speeches certainly helped, but what mattered far more was that the country was ready to follow him. And Roosevelt did not need to force the country to adapt his reforms by one iota. Had he tried, his Presidency would have turned out very differently.

Is Obama as significant a world leader as Roosevelt? Thankfully, no. We should be extraordinarily grateful that we don’t yet need a leader as great as Roosevelt. But we may yet. If Obama is not a world leader of Rooseveltian greatness, it’s probable that at very least the greatest president since Roosevelt. Even the very best presidents before Obama – certainly Truman, Eisenhower too, perhaps Kennedy or Clinton or Johnson or even George H. W. Bush, merely had to act as stewards. No president before Obama had to re-establish Roosevelt’s reforms; the best among them merely had to know enough to keep them in place. Only Truman and George W. Bush had to negotiate the problems of a world whose conflicts were as fraught with outcomes just as uncertain as in the Obama era, and Obama, like Truman, has been light-years more successful than Bush.

But had the Barack Obama we know not existed, could there have been others who could have risen to meet the challenges of our time with similar aplomb? Could Hilary Clinton have done it? Or Al Gore? Or Bill Bradley? Or Gary Hart? Or George Mitchell? Or Bob Graham? Or Wesley Clark? Or Joe Biden? Or Chris Dodd? Or Bill Richardson? Or Tim Kaine? Or Jim Webb? Or Harold Ford? Or Andrew Cuomo? Or Elizabeth Warren? Or Deval Patrick? Or even Jon Huntsman? Or Colin Powell? Or Christine Todd Whitman? Or hell, even John Edwards, John Kerry or John McCain? Looking at their current records, virtually all of these people seem unlikely to have leadership capability on par with President Obama. But what if history had happened differently? Would we look at them differently? Would we look at Barack Obama differently?

(A speech to impeach Nixon. Try telling me this woman did not have the charisma to move the world.)

To me, history has one obvious example of a person who had Barack Obama’s charisma, drive, intelligence, practical know-how, moral fortitude, and then some. It should seem unbelievable to us that a black woman from Texas whose lesbianism was an open secret could have been short-listed as a Vice-Presidential candidate in 1976, but that’s precisely what happened to Barbara Jordan. It’s possible that all which prevented her from being offered the post was the fact that she’d been diagnosed with MS in 1973, a year after being elected from congress.

(1976 Democratic Convention Keynote Address, Part 1. Listed by a poll of American historians as the 5^th greatest speech in modern American history, right behind MLK, JFK, and FDR)

One of Lyndon Johnson’s final political acts before his death was to secure Barbara Jordan’s nomination for the Democratic Party in Texas’s 5^th district congressional seat. Even after 20 years of suffering from MS, Bill Clinton still wanted to nominate her to the Supreme Court and only refrained from doing so because she’d also developed leukemia. Barbara Jordan is perhaps the greatest ‘What if’ in modern American electoral history. Had Jordan been healthy, would the election of a Black president have happened 25 years earlier? Would the election of a woman president have happened an untold number of decades before it will? Would the election of a gay president have been possible the full century it now seems that the American public will seem ready for it? It seems absolutely impossible on its face. Yet why were the last three Democratic presidents before Obama all eager to put her as far into the public eye as possible? She was a southern Democrat, black and a moderate on fiscal and immigration issues. As ridiculous as it seems to us today, it is nevertheless possible that Barbara Jordan could have been elected President by carrying the South. Is it any more ridiculous than the fact that a black man named Barack Hussein Obama whose father was a Muslim polygamist could be elected President of the United States seven years after 9/11?

(Same convention, same slot, even the same place – Madison Square Garden, but 16 years later. Now an elder statesman with a body wracked by illness.)

Obviously, Barbara Jordan never became president. But make no mistake, she most definitely could have, and it would have sent precisely the same inspirational message across the world which Obama’s election did. But the very qualities which could have propelled her to the presidency would also have required a delicate balancing act against a Republican party who could have blandished her to a gullible public as a black racist hellbent on revenge against white people, as a woman weak-willed against our enemies abroad, and as a lesbian intent on pushing through a militant agenda against traditional family values. Barbara Jordan could also have been the greatest president since Roosvelt, but it would have required precisely the same delicate dance which Roosevelt used to perform so brilliantly, and which Obama performs today nearly as well. She’d have been accused by the left of selling out Democratic causes, and by tens of millions of Americans from across the spectrum as being weak in opposition to the arguments her opponents made.

In case anybody didn’t see tonight’s debate and doubts that Obama can’t fight when he needs or wants to…

Today, Barack Obama stands accused of precisely the same weaknesses which of which Franklin Roosevelt was once accused. Roosevelt’s name (along with Lyndon Johnson’s) is now used as a blunt instrument with which Obama is constantly hit over the head for not advocating his policies forcefully enough. Apparently, what’s needed is yet another assemblage of Sorkinian rhetoric, and this time the world will be convinced of the moral rightness of his vision in precisely the way they were not by his last gaggle of transcendent oratory.

What matters is results, not salesmanship. If there is no record of good policy, there is no speech worth giving. Ultimately, Obama’s record must speak for itself, just as Roosevelt’s did. Over time, we will see that the Affordable Care act will enable us to reduce the national debt. We will see that the Dodd-Frank bill will begin the dirty work of forcing banks manage their risks. The stimulus package, the largest in history, will start remaking America’s energy sources and improve the quality of our public schools, and unemployment is finally beneath 8%. Al-Qaeda is virtually obliterated, the Iraq War is over, half-a-dozen Middle Eastern dictators have been deposed, the region has not erupted into explosive war, nor does it show obvious signs yet of doing so. Not a single one of these accomplishments is as much as I or President Obama or any other liberal would like to see, but it is the absolute most that could have been gotten in the circumstances, and creates the bedrock upon which future reforms are possible.

In addition to results, there is one other quality which matters – something without which results are not possible. Organization is what matters. As one friend recently put it to me most convincingly, the most important work a candidate does is not what he does on the pulpit, but what he does when he shakes hands. It’s what his volunteers do when they knock on doors and call people. Obama, an organizer from his earliest adulthood, understands the importance of organization as perhaps no presidential candidate ever has. 

If last night’s debate, already called the most brutal in modern American history, proved anything, it is that Obama is perfectly capable of advocating his positions with as much force as he requires. I firmly believe that of all Obama’s accomplishments, his very greatest…the very heart of his administration, is his very reluctance to stoop to the level of those in the American government who would do their country ill. Even if Washington is still partisan, Obama has clung to the post-partisan mantle from the beginning to the end of his first term. No matter how hard Republicans hit, no matter how much liberal Democrats clamor for him to strike back with full force, Obama keeps the force of his office in check. He does this because he realizes something which no modern American president before him seemed to realize – it is the bully pulpit which has destroyed the US government’s ability to function. For forty-five years, Democrats and Republicans have fought a veritable arms-race for to see whom can stoop the lowest in partisan rancor. The race was long-since already won, the Republicans won it with the Gingrich Revolution in 1994 and since then have resorted to increasingly authoritarian behavior with every passing year. The Democrats could not possibly keep up. The only hope for their vision to recapture American imaginations is to find a way to drain the country of the partisan poison. If the poison is not drained, then the hatred will only increase. If the hatred increases much more than it already has, democratic means will no longer seem like a viable option to keep the other side from achieving power. We’ve already seen undemocratic means dictate a presidential election when the Supreme Court voted on partisan lines to stop the Bush v. Gore recount in Florida. How much more partisan can things get before we begin seeing still more authoritarian means of resolving conflicts? If Obama is a great man who bestrides history, he has become one not by thumping his chest after the manner of an historical mover, but by holding the power of his office, and of his person, in unbreakable reserve.

It is only by one side forswearing the arms-race that this track can be avoided. It may not be avoided anyway, but it is the best hope we have. We can only hope that there are enough rational people to see that one side is unprincipled and will do anything to be elected, while the other has lain down there arms. If we do, then rationality will push the most unprincipled demagogues in America to the fringes where they belong. If the American public is not rational enough to realize this, then the 236-year-old American experiment is once again on the verge of failing. 

800 Words: A Fight About Barbara Jordan Part 1

This morning, as is my penchant, I single-handedly attempted the demolition of three friends’ self-esteem at a post-wedding brunch. As is the extent of my self-delusion, I think I succeeded. The reason these friends have lost their right to self-esteem? Their evil, malevolent, disgusting love for Aaron Sorkin.

To the half-dozen readers of this blog, my belief in the eternal evil of Aaron Sorkin is well-documented. I firmly believe that insofar as a single television writer is capable of corrupting American discourse, Aaron Sorkin has established that over and above what any other writer could ever have done. To this day, he is the only verifiable evidence conservatives have to demonstrate that liberalism and fascism go hand in hand. For his genius, I shall always revere him. For what he does with his genius, I declare open, attritional, total, and eternal war against that vile messenger of Satan.

Of course, this is (mostly) hyperbole. No artist, perhaps no single historical  actor, can move the forces of history to the extent which I claimed above. But it says something about my friends’ view of the world that they took what I said even 1% seriously. History is an inexorable state of flux. Surely people can affect history, but only History can put people in the proper position to affect it.

For over a hundred years, the modern study of History was dominated by the ‘Great Man Theory’, which posits that only people at the top can truly affect change. According to this theory, men like Augustus Caesar, Mohammed, or Martin Luther created history, and in no way were they created by history – and the same goes for great aesthetic creators like Beethoven, Shakespeare, and Michelangelo, or great scientific minds like Newton, Darwin, and Pauling. And yet by writing history as though all that matters is the lives and ideas of such people, all historians managed to prove was that there were many external factors involved in the creation of Great Men. The experiences which formed these great men mattered as much as their inborn talent, and there are many, many potentially great men (and many more potentially great women) who did not accumulate the necessary experiences to achieve their world-changing potential.

 There was a long while when this theory was regarded as the summit of informed opinion. It was endorsed by thinkers as diverse as Gibbon, Carlyle, Emerson, Hegel, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Spengler, Keynes, Barzun, Arthur Schlesinger, Harold Bloom, Egon Friedell, and many lesser-known thinkers. According to these thinkers, we lesser people are all the creation of greater beings whose thoughts create the world as we currently understand it. It should go without saying that, at least to an uncomfortable extent, they are right.

But they’re not completely right. Ironically, the most famous critic of the Great Man Theory was himself one of history’s great men who used his greatest work to rail against it. Tolstoy devoted the last 100 pages of War and Peace to a veritable polemic against the Great Man Theory – claiming that such theories were nothing more than a medieval vestige of the need of the hyper-religious for a god to explain their destinies. Ever the follower of the 18^th century encyclopedists, Tolstoy had a fanatical opposition to any religious belief which smacked of submission to authority. Like Rousseau, his hero, and virtually all the other encyclopedists, Tolstoy primary belief was in the natural laws of nature. Since, according to Tolstoy and Rousseau, it is systems of rule which keep mankind from fulfilling his ultimate potential, it follows that no man is greater than any other. In the correct circumstances, any uneducated peasant can contribute as much to the growth of society as the best educated nobleman (like Tolstoy).

As so often happens in philosophy, both schools of thought are absolutely right, and absolutely wrong. In recent decades we have seen the virtual collapse of the Great Man theory in university teaching. In an era when the study of critical theory is so prized, how can such an old-fashioned notion of biographical ‘Great Man’ history survive in an age of Marxist history, deconstructive history, sociological history, feminist history, - all of which share a similar intention of overthrowing the top-down, Great Man theory and all of its forgetfulness of those who suffered underneath the great men.

I don’t think many historians of a generation ago would have predicted that the Great Man theory would come back with such force into today’s discourse. But even if the Great Man theory isn’t true (and it isn’t…), it’s apparent that people need the theory of ‘Great Men’ in order to make sense of today’s world. Without it, history is a dry series of micro-speculations that is far too speculative to make an over-arching narrative. Therefore, the study of history becomes an ass-backwards proposition. The paradox of history is that to properly ascertain how history happened, we need scientific reconstruction, not a narrative recreation. But if events are reconstructed with all the precision of science, history becomes a nearly useless exercise. There are far too many historical events to exhaustively analyze them all with the precision of science and data entry. If such a project were attempted, there would be no point to history. Very little could be learned from it because it would only be a dry series of speculations that has very little bearing on people’s understanding of the world. What matters in history is not the detail but the sweep. It is the narrative of history that matters, and a proper understanding history’s narrative will always involve an artfully approximate guesswork, not any precise science.

Even if we’re mindful not to, we all assign superhuman qualities to the ‘titans’ of history, qualities that have very little to do with who these people really were, what they did, and how the world made their accomplishments possible. We can’t help it. History is too large to be understood. Therefore, there is an overwhelming temptation among thinking people to ascribe all the history which we experience in our own time as paling in comparison to the accomplishments of past heroes and villains.

The example given this morning was, of course, Barack Obama, and how his refusal to use the bully pulpit for great achievements makes him pale in comparison to an historical figure like Franklin Roosevelt – who allegedly never stopped using his position as the leader of the free world to advocate for good. Never mind that Roosevelt placed 200,000 Japanese-Americans into internment camps rather than using the bully pulpit to stand up for their rights, never mind that Roosevelt refused to bomb the railroad tracks to German death camps rather than confront those who would accuse him of being controlled by a Jewish cabal; never mind that Roosevelt would never have ordered America to enter World War II without the bombing of Pearl Harbor, never mind that Roosevelt gave into to conservative clamoring to balance the budget and thus prolonged the Great Depression by four years; never mind that he thought he could make Stalin relinquish control of Eastern Europe and what would eventually become the Soviet Bloc… 

800 Words: The Aaron Sorkin Problem - Part 4

Seventy years ago, Aaron Sorkin would have been screenwriter to the giants - a writer who can write eloquent dialogue beyond our wildest imaginings, capable of fusing humor and sadness together as firmly as a diamond; capable in the right mood of Shakespearean eloquence and Chekhovian pathos. Seventy years ago he would have been a  creenwriter of choice to Hitchcock, Welles, Ford, Hawks, Capra, Lubitsch, Wilder, Cukor, Huston, Minelli, Ray, Sirk, and would have made better movies for them all (Oh dear, I sound like an Aaron Sorkin screenplay).

The studio system was far from perfect, it was a factory which churned out product for a focused grouped audience on schedule. Whether good or bad, the product must come out on time. No envelopes were pushed except by mistake, and studio heads did everything they could to drive difficult talent out from the industry. But Golden Age Hollywood also nurtured talent from cradle to grave - if you exhibited talent, there was always steady employment. In 1935, a young writer with Sorkin’s talent would be personally supervised by Irving Thalberg and David O. Selznick, and producers like them would consider it a mission for him to create the best possible product for their pictures. The studio system did not produce most of the greatest movies ever made, but they cared about their product in ways most studios today can never be bothered with, and as a result produced a stunning amount of damn good movies. Some greater movies may have been made later, but so did a lot of far worse ones.

How many contemporary writers of Sorkin’s talent find those types of opportunities? Today’s screenwriters, like everybody else in Hollywood, are free agents; forced to claw their way to the top because there is no mechanism in place to ensure that talent will ever get the opportunity it deserves. And when a talented person is lucky enough to be promoted up the food chain, there are scant people to navigate him on the journey to utilize his talent.

In so many cases, Aaron Sorkin teleplays can be viewed as recreations of the studio system - or any other functional workplace. His shows derive their interest from watching benevolent places where authority figures can always tell us what is right, and derive their danger from less benevolent people standing in their way. Would that Aaron Sorkin worked in the studio system..., a screenwriter and script doctor of genius who could write on order for whatever situation Hawks and Hitchcock demanded.

Aaron Sorkin writes romances about people who do bold, innovative, extraordinary things. Yet the manner in which he writes about them is as artistically timid, conservative, manipulative, and formulaic as words can possibly be. Through television, artists like David Chase, Matthew Weiner, and Larry David may have created the American literature of our age and expanded the capacity of human thought in ways we still can’t imagine. Aaron Sorkin uses his gift to recreate a formula best used seventy years in the past. He is an extraordinary artisan, perhaps the most extraordinary wordsmith on television, ever, or on any screen. Yet like any competent artisan, he is in dire need of a great artist’s guidance.

One can’t help noticing a steady trend in every one of his shows as the reviews get worse and worse. The trend is not the reviews, the trend is the shows, and they’re absolutely steady. Aaron Sorkin has applied precisely the same formula to every show he’s ever done - whether the workplace is a TV show or a political office or an administrative building or some melange of all three, there are absolutely consistent archetypes at work - the brilliant but arrogant young men, their benevolent father figures, the women made ditzy by emotional damage, and...of course...the snivelling moral midgets who remind the other characters that the real world exists. Sorkin’s shows have been almost completely consistent in their brilliance to idiocy ratios - it’s the public that’s finally tiring of it.   

Is The Newsroom really as bad as everybody says? No, it’s not. The first three episodes have some genuinely good moments, but few people can watch it without noticing that the good stands next to moments fully as cringe-inducingly horrible as anything on TV (Studio 60 for example...). No one will ever accolade this show with the plaudits of The West Wing or The Social Network, but it takes an effort to not notice that it’s at least better than terrible....though perhaps not too much.

The entire Sorkin approach is grounded in screwball comedy - the fast paced repartee, the unconsumated sexual tensions, the elegant social mores, this is all the Golden Age Hollywood which anyone can watch in Bringing Up Baby, Some Like It Hot, The Lady Eve, His Girl Friday, and The Philadelphia Story. Even The West Wing has its roots in the old Hollywood talkies in which great writers who could never get a novel published tried to fit a script the length of a novel into ninety minutes. But whereas Preston Sturges fit Huck Finn into ninety minutes, Aaron Sorkin could fit Moby Dick. Sorkin isn’t writing screwball comedy, he’s writing eightball comedy (speaking of cringe-inducing...). But the pleasures of verbal sparring seem superficial to most people, it seemed superficial to many people at the time. Many famous classics with this approach used a sermonizing tone to assuage their guilt that perhaps this pleasure of watching people talk fast was too substanceless and morally lax. The result was Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, 12 Angry Men, On The Waterfront and the entire career of Stanley Kramer. Art, and particularly movies, do not exist to create sermons. Sermons are meant to simplify the world and create the idea of a particular action for the listener to enact. But unlike sermons, art is not a hammer with which to bang society into whatever shape we see fit. Art is about contemplation and making our perception of world more complex, or at least it is in my world. Everyone has reasons to act the way they do, and a worldview which frames characters either as beacons of moral strength or as moral midgets sending us to Sodom and Gemorrah is simplistic at best, and fascist at worst. But if all this is true for the speed of the sounds emanating from Golden-Age Hollywood, how much truer is it for the light speed of an Aaron Sorkin show?

If the talent of Aaron Sorkin can be divided into something similarly simplistic, it would be ‘fair’ to say that the better angels of his talent reside within his sheer verbal enthusiasm. Like Hepburn and Tracy, Bogie and Becall, Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, Sorkin’s characters exist solely for the sake of verbal sparring.  The entire Aaron Sorkin experience is grounded in the idea that it might be fun to watch His Girl Friday on cocaine; and when the high comes down, it might be nice to put on Mr. Smith Goes to Washington again to put your conscience at ease. Within Sorkin’s personality is a Mozart of dialogue, yet that same brain houses a Jonathan Edwards worth of fire and brimstone.  

...more as this story develops....

800 Words: Secret Handshake

(Another rerun from the VoW days. Not at all representative of the best things I've written, but it just seems appropos for everything that's happened during the last 24 hours)

(Evan sits down to begin work on the Concert for Washington, the first half of which will be premiered at the Atlas Intersections Festival in March. He stares intently at the screen...wondering to himself how such a magnificent statement of everything in the world should begin, and without warning a moment of inspiration finally descends upon him and he feverishly types upon the screen...)

Christopher Dodd has no neck.

(Evan stares blankly at this sentence for five minutes before inspiration deigns to descend upon him again and he revises the sentence extensively so that it now reads...)

Christopher Dodd has a second forehead where his neck should be.

(Evan stares at this still more. He then realizes that the sentence still misses a certain je ne sais quoi, and as inspiration descends upon him yet again, he humbly goes about revising the sentence into a more definitive form....)

Christopher Dodd seems to be slowly growing a fetus inside his neck. Seriously, what were all those women thinking? This is a man with a series of bad toupees and an upside down Mount Rushmore where his neck should be. If I were Carrie Fischer I'd have been actively wondering what it was in me that made me want to date somebody who looks so much like Jabba the Hut.

(Evan sits on his bed, with a feeling of intense satisfaction at what he just typed. Enter West Wing President Josiah Bartlett and The American President President Andrew Shepperd)

Bartlett: Another would-be-'genius' trying to depict Washington....What did we do to deserve this country?

Shepperd: They all think they can do it. But there's no harm in letting the kid try.

Bartlett: When the kid's twenty-eight and sitting on his ass on a Friday night in his parents house, there's plenty of harm.

Evan: I'd say it's an honor to meet you too Mr. President, but I have a feeling you're here to annoy me.

Bartlett: Maybe he IS a genius!

Shepperd: Aw c'mon, cut the kid some slack. Weirder kids than him ended up on our staffs.

Bartlett: Are you asking me to do that as President Bartlett or as A. J. McInerney?

Evan: Did I take your Vicodin?

Bartlett: Not until Sundays, then the sky's the limit with your back.

Shepperd: Hush up Jed, we gotta talk to him.

Bartlett: Yes sir Mr. President...

Shepperd: How many times do I have....never mind. I read your treatment Evan, it's not bad.

Bartlett: FOR ME TO POOP ON!.....Sorry Mr. President, keep going....

Shepperd: Really, it's not a bad idea you've got here. Voices of Washington, Washington from the perspective of the people who live here.

Bartlett: Why are you encouraging the kid? Somewhere in his life the poor boy has to make a living.

Shepperd: If he's as good as his idea, he just might.

Bartlett: The kid was watching a Star Trek episode he's seen a dozen times earlier tonight.

Evan: Hey, at least I don't have to dial the Butterball hotline on Thanksgiving....

Bartlett: They're good people at Butterball.

Evan: They didn't know that you solved the Middle East peace process with the help of a teleplay.

Bartlett: You take that back!

Evan: Or what? You'll put a hit out on me with your contacts in the Qumari Mujahideen?

(Evan and President Bartlett put each other in headlocks)

Shepperd: (Dives between them) Break it up! Break it up! (pause) Alright everybody, let's not say things we can't take back. Jed, Evan's right that you couldn't make peace in the Middle East without the help of a script, and Evan President Bartlett's right that you're a nerd beyond redemption.

Bartlett: And you didn't even need anybody's script to mediate that solution?

Evan: Y'know I feel like I'm losing control of this dialogue.

Shepperd: Don't worry, you'll get it back in a minute.

Bartlett: Look, all I'm saying is that I think this is a good kid who has to know by now that luck isn't on his side. That's all. Obviously he's bright and obviously the learning difficulties have left some battle scars. But kids like him have to sink or swim like everybody else. So why are we stopping at his house rather than a kid who more resembles an Aaron Sorkin character?

Shepperd: Because you know as well as I do that we're just figures out of liberal pornography and that both The West Wing and The American President are pieces that never dug into the realities of either politics or Washington.

Bartlett: And you never enjoyed living in a fairy-tale?

Shepperd: I enjoyed it plenty. So did he, but we never lived in a Washington college dorm with all those kids who watched The West Wing and decided that the show is what Washington is actually like.

Bartlett: Alright, so the kid has an idea to do things that we didn't do. But what credentials does he have to do something like this?

Evan: Credentials?

Bartlett: A guy with an education is still worth something in this country...ever consider going back to school?

Evan: No.

Bartlett: Why not? You're a smart kid.

Evan: You ever see my high-school transcript?

Bartlett: High school? Jesus kid, get over it already. And even if you'd never get into Dartmouth or Yale. Some people are destined for middle management and what's wrong with that?

Evan: Y'know you seem a lot nicer on television.

Bartlett: That was before I realized that my son is an inveterate wife beater.

Evan: OK, now I'm really losing control of this dialogue.

Shepperd: Just give it a minute...

Bartlett: What's wrong with saying that? Elites have problems too.

Evan: Yeah, but you all have a built-in network to shield yourselves from the worst of it.

Bartlett: And you think you don't?

Evan: I think my ride could have been smoother...

Bartlett: No arguments there. But what have you got against Aaron Sorkin characters? Whatever his shows are about, we're the kinds of people who have the lives you wish you had. We're always smart, good looking, benevolent, and we get everything we want. Don't blame us for being the types of people you want to be.

Evan: ...Why would anybody resent that?....

Shepperd: I don't blame you for resenting us. People don't just watch us to see how they want their lives to be, they also watch us to flatter themselves into thinking that they're somehow like us. We were Sex and the City for politicos.

Bartlett: Alright, so you think you can do better kid? Go ahead. But why should I believe that your piece will be anything but an Aaron Sorkin portrayal of Washington with worse writing?

Evan: Because you're not who I'm interested in. This isn't Washington from Barack Obama's point of view, it's Washington from the point of view of the guy who does Barack Obama's secret servicemen's dry cleaning. I don't want the kind of self-consciously lofty stuff that Aaron Sorkin does. This has to be about the people who aren't glamorous enough to make an appearance on The West Wing.

Bartlett: Like you?

Evan: Damn straight people like me. Most of us will never get a professorship at Dartmouth or win a Nobel Prize, but why are our stories any less worth telling than yours?

Bartlett: I'm not necessarily saying it's any less worth telling, just that yours'll be harder to get people interested.

Evan: They always are. Because most of us have to get through our lives the best we can in spite of the knowledge that very few people are interested in what we think. And while people like you are busy moving in circles that most of us can only watch on television, the rest of us deserve to have our voices heard too.

Bartlett: Am I the only one who thinks this sounds eerily like somebody who'd vote for Nixon?

Shepperd: Don't listen to him Evan. So what's your plan for this?

Evan: Best I can tell the plan is to plug away. Write as much as I can as soon as I can. I know I'm not Dylan or Sondheim but I can write song lyrics, and I can certainly compose music. I know what I want to write about. So now it's just a matter of getting it down, and that has always been the big problem...

Bartlett: Well God's speed to you sir and we wish you the best. Now Mr. President let's get going, I still want to use that coupon at Quizno's.

Shepperd: Don't worry Evan, he'll come around. Keep at it.

Evan: Thanks. Tell him not to get the roast beef dip, the bread gets soggy.

800 Words: The Aaron Sorkin Problem - Part 3

(ew ew ew ew ew ew ew ew ew ew ew ew ew ew ew)

And four years later, we got Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip - Aaron Sorkin’s drama/comedy/romance/dramedy/tragicomedy about what goes on backstage at Saturday Night Live. Or so we were led to believe. In fact, it was nothing more than a roman-a-clef in which Sorkin his puts contempt for NBC (which he renames NBS...get it?) on full display, virtually names names, and declares from episode 2 that his intention with this show is to revolutionize everything about how television is created, produced and distributed. Once again, credit must be given: Studio 60 was not a bad show, it was just a total, utter disaster. It was a misfire of genius -- a complete, ignominious failure of the most brilliant variety. It was like going to a ballet produced by Diaghilev, composed by Stravinsky, choreographed by Nijinsky with sets by Picasso and the resulting production being dancing chickens. Who knew a car wreck could be this entertaining?


(This is eerily prescient....and not in the way it’s supposed to be....)

The show began with Aaron Sorkin devoting the first scene to blasting television, blasting NBC, blasting his sponsors and blasting anybody dumb enough to still be watching. After the opening, Sorkin proceeded to write in a bunch of fake newscasts during which anchors somehow saw a parallel to the movie Network, and were therefore moved to compare the action of the first scene to the writing of Paddy Chayefsky. Such modesty.


(Aaron Sorkin’s Mad as Hell)

The only work of Chayefsky’s which is still particularly well known is Network - the famous mid-70’s satire of network news. But for Sorkin to compare his opening scene to Network is almost beyond belief. Network was about how blowhards can dominate the airwaves to stoke fears. Howard Roarke wasn’t a whistle-blower, he was an unhinged demagogue -- Glenn Beck’s saner grandfather. But Aaron Sorkin seems to think that Howard Beale is a hero -- the grandfather of Bill Maher or Keith Olbermann (whether they’re heroes are for another day). Once again, Sorkin tells us that all it takes to change the world is one theatrical speech. And once we hear the clarion call of reason, the entire world will move back to the direction of virtue and right.

Studio 60 is as much a fairy tale as The West Wing or The American President. But in this one the Grimms Brothers get a co-writing credit. We’re no longer watching a heroic collective doing battle against an enemy that goes mostly unseen. We see the forces of good battling the forces of evil in full, ugly view. There are two types of characters on this show: flawed characters whose flaws are never visible to us, and scummy douchebags whose loathsomeness melts your skin. The NBS chairman, Jack Rudolph - played by Stephen Weber, is Sorkin’s (and everybody else’s) worst nightmare of a studio executive. He’s our worst nightmare because he’s competent and smart enough to think on the level of his talent. He understands that the guys at Studio 60 are trying to revolutionize everything about the relationship between television and its corporate sponsors, he just wants them to fail.


(Oy.)

Studio 60 proclaimed itself in its second episode as the ‘very model’ of a modern television show, yet it never missed a chance to preach about the impossibility of producing good television. It’s a show about what’s supposed to be the funniest TV show on television, yet its characters mope about the set as though the Bartlet Administration put on a production of Hamlet during a nuclear war. It displays sketch after sketch supposed to demonstrate that it’s possible to enlighten audiences at the same time as making them laugh, yet the sketch comedy was unfunny to a point well beyond pathetic. It preached about the importance of keeping good morals in television, yet was there a single show in television history that used a bully pulpit to settle scores so blatantly?


(Only Studio 60 would treat not only Sting but his f(*&ing Lute with reverence)

Was there ever a more anticipated television comeback than Sorkin’s? And was there ever a show so eagerly awaited that went away so quietly? It was a disaster of epic, epically entertaining proportions; a show so risible as to be almost every bit as watchable as a great show. Not a failure, a flop. Once again, credit must be given. To make a flop takes real talent, the only other requirement is a complete lack of self-awareness. Most bad movies go unremembered, but every film geek remembers North, Howard the Duck, Heaven’s Gate. When talented artists make terrible products, they’re often just as viewable as the good stuff.


(This is how Washington works.....)

Which is why the self-awareness of Charlie Wilson’s War came as such a welcome surprise. For the first time in Sorkin’s career, we see an acknowledgement that glamor is not what changes the world. To be sure, Charlie Wilson’s War is every bit the romance and fairy tale of every other Sorkin script, but this is a very different sort of fairy tale. This movie is a joyride in which we watch the two least distinguished people in Washington begin a chain reaction that brings down the Soviet empire. For West Wing fans who’ve never seen the movie, imagine a West Wing episode in which the heroes are Bingo Bob Russell and Oliver Babbish, and it happens to be the best episode they’ve ever made.

Perhaps it took fifteen years of writing about politics, but Sorkin finally seemed to realize that change is never affected by the most charismatic people in the room. In a world capital where everything can be stopped or moved (usually stopped) by bureaucrats, the pettiest bureaucrat is the most powerful person in the country. And so the key to bringing down the Soviet Union lies within a professionally mediocre congressman and a rogue CIA agent who couldn’t care less about his orders. There is neither a happy ending for the characters nor a sense that what they did was of benefit to anyone. The movie ends on an admirably ambiguous note in which Charlie and Gust are left to wonder if they did not in fact create a greater monster than the one they brought down. If anybody wants a political movie that gives a true sense of how Washington works, I would point them to this one before any other. It is usually the least distinguished looking people who hold the most power, and even the most successful policy makers can never be sure that they did more good than harm.


(We’ll see...)

I have no idea as to who’s responsible for the unqualified success of Charlie Wilson’s War. Did Sorkin simply follow George Crile’s book (which I’ve been meaning to read since college) event for event? Did he get lots of guidance from the great (and still under-rated) Mike Nichols? Or has he just learned that much in the intervening years about human nature?

It’s still difficult to say. The Social Network was not his triumph alone. As all great movies are, it’s a lucky meeting chemistry between great writing, great directing, great acting, sympathetic producers and a great production team. My own sense of what made it work is because it was a perfect mismatch of two great but limited talents. In so many ways, David Fincher is a director who works like Aaron Sorkin’s shadow self. If Sorkin can’t stop gushing about the wonders of the world, Fincher can’t stop harping on its horrors. His movies are brilliant monuments to pessimism and misanthropy which take as much delight in indecency as Sorkin does in its reciprocal. Se7en plays like a game show in which we have to guess what incredibly brilliant manner the serial killer will plan his next victim. Fight Club is a movie possessing an entire philosophy that seems to advocate nothing less than a violent, totalitarian overthrow of bourgeois values. The ability to meld Sorkin and Fincher would seem no more plausible than melding the writings of Karl Marx and Ayn Rand. But in The Social Network, these antithetical approaches combine to form a view of human nature that is as close to perfectly balanced as movies become. With a more optimistic director, The Social Network would have merely been the story of a guy who lost a girl and built a website. With a more pessimistic screenwriter, The Social Network would have become the story of an idiot savant who will take us into the dark ages. Instead, the movie becomes about possibilities. Mark Zuckerberg may or may not be human in the way that we are. But by watching his interactions, we are forced to ask if he has made us become more like him. And if we have, is that an improvement or a step backwards?


(Cain and Abel?)

These are questions that seem far beyond either the writer of Studio 60 or of Charlie Wilson’s War. This movie touches on questions so universal that they can only be asked by a great artist who always puts substance ahead of surface. If the brilliant language ever ceases, we will know that Sorkin is ready to plumb depths on his own.

The West Wing won an Emmy in every season of the four for which Sorkin was its head writer. The Sopranos lost out every year until Sorkin left. But which was the show that went deeper into dramatic possibilities? Into the American experience? Into the nature of human beings? One was a network television show about the biggest possible subjects in the most public setting. The other show was a premium cable show about a minuscule American subculture that operates in shadows. One show gives us characters who speak in gold-plated Oxonian English. The other gives us characters who speak in street-wise malapropisms. One show speaks to our longings for the success we wish we had. The other speaks to our fears of what it may take in our country to achieve success. One show has flawless characters who view the problems of the world at arm’s length. The other show has flawed characters who though they seek redemption, are the problems of the world. The West Wing is the world as we imagine. The Sopranos is the world as it is.


(The Pine Barrens)

We will not know if Sorkin is ready to get his hands dirty for a while yet. His next project is “Moneyball.” A movie about the 00’s Oakland A’s which he co-wrote with Steve Zallian (screenwriter for “Schindler’s List”). This is another project that is not entirely his. So if it becomes a real statement on human beings, it won’t entirely be his doing.

Nobody should doubt that this movie will be entertaining. But will it be true to baseball in the 21st century. Moneyball is a book about how a small-market baseball club in a run-down city made a desperate scramble to assemble a competitive team. It’s a great story, but it’s terrible for baseball. The “Moneyball” example has never been replicated. But every large-market baseball team can point to the ‘Moneyball’ example of the Oakland A’s to justify not sharing their revenue with other teams. If ever there were an example of how Aaron Sorkin’s life-affirming idealism is based on a lie, this will be it.

And after that comes Sorkin’s new HBO show about an idealistic liberal cable news network: More As This Story Develops. There’s little to say about this except to relate that when my friend (whom we’ll call Der Fersko for now) first told me about it, he came up with a much more fitting title: You Knew What You Were Getting.

800 Words: The Aaron Sorkin Problem: Part 2 - The West Wing

(The West Wing characters in embryo.)

Sorkin literally created the premise of The West Wing on the spot at a lunch meeting when he couldn’t come up with anything better. He seemed to take the entire Andrew Sheppard White House and merely give it a TV series. Jed Bartlett is Andrew Sheppard, only now a true genius rather than merely brilliant. Leo McGarry is A.J. MacInerny, only this Chief of Staff is arguably a more accomplished politician than the president himself. We clearly see earlier incarnations of Toby, Josh and CJ, only they’re now played by actors of a higher paygrade than the TV version like David Paymer, Michael J. Fox (what the hell is he doing in a roll that small?) and Anna Deavere Smith.

The result should not have been nearly as good as it was. I have friends, very knowledgeable friends whose opinions I greatly respect, who say that The West Wing is one of the two or three greatest TV shows ever made. That people with good judgement can believe that makes me incredulous. But even I have to admit that The West Wing is a miraculous step forward for a writer who until then showed no talent for anything but style.


(Actual arguments. Not propaganda.)

Let’s give credit where it’s due. The West Wing tried to be an extremely substantial show that gave air to real problems and genuinely exposed its audience to every side of every issue they tackled. The well-propagated argument that this show was liberal propaganda is utter crap. The West Wing was as even-handed a piece of political fiction as America has yet to see. The problem is not that The West Wing was left-wing propaganda. The problem is that it was left-wing pornography. Sorkin took admirable pains to portray every side of American politics exactly as it is. Left-wing corruption invades government just as right-wing corruption does, and conservatives are as capable of acting with integrity as liberals. It’s not Sorkin’s fault that more of today’s Republicans are corrupt than today’s Democrats. The only problem is that in spite of the painfully realistic portrayal of contemporary Washington, the Democrats still always win.

The problem was never in his analysis - with a rolodex of consultants that included Lawrence O’Donnell, Dee Dee Meyers, Marlon Fitzwater and David Axelrod - that would have been nearly impossible. The problem was that in spite of such painstaking realism, he still insisted on instating moments that never happen in politics: happy endings, the triumph of virtue, people listening to reason. How many episodes of The West Wing build up jaw-dropping momentum only to be killed in the final ten minutes by a wholly implausible, saccharine, false ending?


(ew.)

There are moments in The West Wing so powerful that you wonder if you’re watching something Shakespearean. Of course, the Sorkin verbiage is there throughout - Sorkin has never written a scene in which characters sound like anything but Aaron Sorkin. But Sorkin finally learned how to tone things down. For all the fast-paced action, there are scenes of The West Wing which are so quiet as to make you gasp - it’s a trait which Sorkin rarely again exhibited.

Let’s just take the most famous example of the entire series, when Bartlet asks for the doors of the National Cathedral to be sealed and speaks to God as an equal.


(Shakespearean?)

Let’s forget that it only takes the Secret Service five seconds to evacuate and seal a Cathedral after a funeral, let’s forget that the idea of a President concealing his MS from the media for three years is absurd, let’s forget that Martin Sheen pronounces the Latin word ‘cruciatus’ differently the two times he says it, let’s forget that he refers to Josh Lyman as his ‘son’ when he can’t stop yelling at him for two seasons, let’s forget that Sorkin killed Mrs. Landingham off without telling the actress until the day she got the script. Let’s just focus on the fact that we’re watching a larger-than-life figure with the charisma of King Lear, addressing God in a howl that would horrify Job. When Josiah Bartlett curses God, God fears the coming wrath.

There are moments throughout Sorkin’s seasons of The West Wing which carry all the mythical weight of Wagner. And just as in Wagner, they’re almost enough to make you forget that everything which builds up to them is completely ridiculous. There is no president in modern American history who would feel compunctions about targeted assassination. Yet when we see Bartlet’s reluctance, we feel the weight of a moral horror.



Jed Bartlet is a giant, not a human. When we see his doddering New England eccentric persona, we quickly realize that this is just the Clark Kent-cover put on by Superman. But who would know after watching The West Wing at its best that this is the only type of character which Aaron Sorkin is capable of writing?

...Well....that’s not quite true. Yes, Bartlet, Leo, CJ, Sam, Josh, Charlie and Donna are all subtle variations on the same template - characters too good, too elegant, too intelligent, too authoritative, too likeable for our world - the federal government equivalent of Ozzie and Harriet. But then, there’s Toby Ziegler...


(Toby)

Toby is the only character in The West Wing who seems to realize that he’s living in an implausible universe. He’s the only character who does not seem to feel entitled to success -- he is neither well-dressed, nor good looking nor possessed of a friendly disposition. He is The West Wing’s one concession to reality. He is the only character who seems to talk in a distinctive language of his own that sounds different from every other character. He is an angry man with real individuality who seems to have wandered over from the set of The Wire. He is the only member of Bartlet’s staff willing to routinely challenge him, and the only member of the staff who thinks that the administration may not always be doing the right thing. The rest of the characters seem to walk around him with a mixture of condescension and fear. And it’s no wonder why; everybody else on The West Wing is fantasy, Toby is reality. His existence proves that Aaron Sorkin can write real characters, he just doesn’t want to.


(More Toby)

Like every other organization in the world, the White House is run by Toby Zieglers, not Sam Seabornes. The West Wing could have been a show about how Washington really works. It could have been a cast of dozens of flawed people who between them portray how government works (and doesn’t) for a network television audience. Instead, we got a fairy tale - a decent comedy/drama that often seemed as though it just happened to take place in the White House. The problem was never that The West Wing was a bad show. The problem was that it should have been one of the two or three greatest shows ever made - and fell so short of that goal that you can only bemoan what might have been.



(At least there are no scenes like this in The West Wing....)

Unfortunately, Sorkin’s whole metier is to take extremely important subjects and charm us by trivializing them. Wouldn’t it be funny to see the President of the United States high on painkillers or dialing the Butterball hotline so he can demonstrate how to carve a turkey? Well, yes, it is funny. But aren’t there better things that we can see the most powerful man in the world doing?


(oh...wait....)

But let’s give the man some credit, The West Wing looked to be on the cusp of breaking this mold for two years. For the first two years, it looked as though The West Wing might have transcended the usual canned TV fare to become a true epic. And after 9/11 we had every reason to expect that this show would rise up to the challenges of the new era - imagine Jed Bartlet as a wartime president who loses a daughter in a bombing. So it’s all the more a shame that Sorkin chose that moment to realize that he was a coke addict.

Let’s face it, a pace like the one at which Aaron Sorkin wrote could not have been set without some kind of stimulant. The second season of Sports Night and the first of The West Wing aired simultaneously, with Sorkin writing or rewriting every word we heard on television. How could he find time to sleep - let alone come down from a binge? I have no idea what Sorkin was like during this period, but I picture him staying in the same room 24-hours-a-day with 4 padded walls, no pictures, a small table, a laptop, Toby’s rubber ball and Tony Montana’s mountain of cocaine in which he hourly buries his face. I can’t imagine how anybody would write fifty scripts a year otherwise.

And let’s also face that all the elements of cocaine addiction found their way into his scripts: the fast-forward talking, the inability to stay in a single place, and the utter paranoia of Sorkin’s virtuous characters against an outside world that would dare dismantle their utopia. The only part of addiction which never made its way into his scripts is the actual experience of it. Where is an Aaron Sorkin story about a drug mule or a rehab doctor or a violent addict? Surely Sorkin knows something about all of them, and a writer who has injected so much of his personal life into his scripts could easily find ways to make these characters compelling. Aaron Sorkin shouldn’t have been writing Studio 60, he should have been writing Breaking Bad.


(Season 3 decline on display)

People say that The West Wing declined after Sorkin left, but the truth is that The West Wing was already declining by season 3. I have no way of knowing this, but I do wonder if the zen-like stasis in which people usually exit rehab numbed Sorkin to the realities of 9/11. The West Wing began as a kind of idealized vision of what we’d hoped the Clinton administration would be. But by year three, it became stuck in the 90’s when the 00’s demanded attention. The years after 9/11 handed Sorkin a golden opportunity for a grand epic which could have taken in every issue of the Bush years. Instead, we got bit sketches about re-election, targeted assassination, debate camp, kidnapping and terrorist plots that were always stopped. Many of these were supposedly conceived in response to post-9/11 events, but everything on The West Wing was weak stuff compared to what we saw on the nightly news. Over The West Wing’s seven seasons, the Bartlet White House never encountered a true life-or-death crisis. Sorkin, and his successors, spent the entire series writing about how the Clinton administration should have handled their problems when they could have extracted so much better material if they’d moved on to how the Bush administration should handle theirs.


(President Walter Sobchak)

And finally, Sorkin’s natural urge to curbstomp the head the feeds him got in the way. Universal wanted the show to make more money, and so they impeded on his creative control. Sorkin responded by writing a Presidammerung in which the President’s youngest daughter is abducted by terrorists and the President temporarily invokes the 25th amendment to cede control of the White House to the arch-conservative Speaker of the House, John Goodman. "See if you can resolve this, schmucks" it seems to say. It was the latest in a string of f--- yous to the people who bankroll him. Sorkin may well have been right to walk away from The West Wing. But rather than get into bed with people whom he knew he wouldn’t get along with, he could have spent those years writing Sports Night at HBO, and producing a show that was exactly the way he wanted it. Some people are attracted to the impossible like bugs to light. But if you’re going to attempt the impossible, why stop halfway? Why wasn’t The West Wing a modern Iliad? Sorkin’s gift should have settled for no less.


(One of the worst examples of self-congratulation in TV history...until Studio 60)

800 Words: The Aaron Sorkin Problem: Part 1

I’m surfing channels on Saturday morning, agonizing about how to write my Washington Post review. On Starz is The Social Network in HD, the single greatest American movie released since movies became an obsession for my 14-year-old self.



The Social Network is not just a movie that expands the possibilities of what movies are capable, it’s a movie that portrays a question which we all ask in every era of human endeavor. Is there potential for human nature itself to change? We are 11 years into the 21st century, and as we have in every generation since the existence of thought, we wonder if intellect has grown to the point that it may master human nature. Will secrets be a thing of the past? Will privacy? Will self-reliance? Will ephemerality? Will delayed gratification? And will they be missed? Can we be happy without any of them? Can we input all our personal information into networks without them being used to conquer us? Will our grandchildren read about the ambiguities of memory and privacy as something they can identify with, or as quaint historical artifacts?

If, like me, you suspect that the answer is still no, then you view humanity’s online migration with as much alarm as excitement. It would be nice to believe that science and technology were capable of demystifying human beings. Perhaps we are no less a hydrochemical machine than a computer is an electrical one, so machines we may be but we are still human. And being human means we must allow for the thought that our increased public presence on facebook, our increased reliance on google searches, our decreased capacity for expansiveness on twitter will lead to as many setbacks for humanity as it will benefits.


(“The Future, Mr. Gitts.” Noah Cross in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown)

The Social Network is, inevitably, a portrayal of what is supposed to be new kind of human being -- more machine-like, incorruptible and less prone to error. In this way, Mark Zuckerberg is clearly not quite human. And yet, because he has a black hole in place of a motivation, he’s a very old sort of human. Like Charles Foster Kane or Noah Cross, like Bazarov from Fathers and Sons or Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, like Edmund or Lady Macbeth, he is a person who aims to change everything about the world in which he lives. Why must the world be changed? Is there any better reason to change it than the simple fact that he thinks he can?

And because Mark Zuckerberg believes that the world can be changed, he does change it, and yet he doesn’t. The glorious new era which the internet and facebook promise to lead human beings will come crashing down with the same destruction as every other rapid metamorphosis has in human history. Yes, the internet can bring us many great new things, but for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The promise of Zuckerberg’s better world never materializes, and in place of a glorious new world comes rampant, massive destruction. I’m not sure that I have ever seen a work of art document the beginnings of this type of attempt to change the world better than The Social Network.

What makes this movie fantastic is the rapid-fire dialogue, as machine-like in its efficiency and order as the issue upon which the movie touches. But what makes the movie extraordinary is the messy ambiguity that remains unsaid. True to the orderliness of everything about the screenplay, the dialogue would have us believe that Mark Zuckerberg was motivated to create facebook by the loss of a woman. But everything in David Fincher’s direction and Jesse Eisenberg’s acting shows that he is motivated by something far more primal; a basic (in)human compulsion to create this website that he can neither explain nor control nor understand. We neither do nor are meant to understand Mark Zuckerberg’s motivations, neither do nor are the filmmakers, and neither I would venture does Mark Zuckerberg. Does Mark Zuckerberg have a motivation? Does he need one?


(The World of Mark Zuckerberg’s head)

This is the paradox of The Social Network’s filmmaking. To create the question of whether Zuckerberg created - and embodied - a new form of human being, the movie needed a writer so skilled that it could tackle a question no smaller than “what makes human beings do what they do?”. But in order for the question to be asked, the question could never be asked.

If Aaron Sorkin had blatantly inserted that question into the screenplay, it would kill the whole movie. But I’m fairly sure that question never occurred to Sorkin to ask. In the world of Aaron Sorkin, there’s nothing that cannot be explained in five seconds. Every scene has a conflict that must be developed. Every character has a motivation that can be summed up in one word. Every screenplay has a beginning, a middle and an end. He does not write screenplays, he writes schematics.


(Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka. Mark Zuckerberg’s great-grandmother?)

And those schematics happen to be the most elegant prose written in English today. Is there anyone working in literature, poetry, the essay or theater today who can write as elegantly as Sorkin? Surely Sorkin’s work isn’t possible without David Mamet’s fast-talk puzzle-plays, but even Oleanna and Speed the Plow are clumsy turtles compared to any episode of Sports Night. Christopher Hitchens writes a mean essay, but he takes paragraphs to articulate a point of view that Sorkin can get through in thirty seconds of West Wing dialogue and still have time to articulate two other points of view. Roth and DFW can pack explosions into a sentence, and they both certainly run a better marathon, but neither can pack the hydrogen bomb explosions you see in a Sorkin teleplay chosen at random. If you want to find a competitor to Sorkin, you have to go back to the Golden Age of the Hollywood Studio -- the classical elegance of the world of Hawks, Capra, Lubitsch, Sturges, Cukor, Hitchcock and Wilder in which everyone was articulate and charming, and every character seemed to exist to seduce us and each other body and mind. But listen to the dialogue of An American President or Charlie Wilson’s War and try telling me that its speed doesn’t make Mr. Smith Goes to Washington sound like a paraplegic.


(“There’s Nobody Who handles Handel like you handle Handel.” Preston Sturges’s Unfaithfully Yours)

This is a phenomenon unlike anything in classic Hollywood. There are few lines which you recall an hour later, much less years. There are zingers aplenty, but none that can be appreciated without five minutes of context. The whole aesthetic of a Sorkin script is a sensory overload - we encounter an orgy of sinfully seductive words at top speed, one delight piling onto the next with animal excess. Sorkin seems a Shakespeare of dialogue, combining effects at a speed which we are permanently behind. In the case of Shakespeare, it adds up to bliss. With the exception of The Social Network, Sorkin’s scripts add up to exhaustion.


Why is Sorkin just a virtuoso and not the cosmic genius his gift should allow him to be? Because there is nothing there but the words themselves. The characters in Aaron Sorkin scripts are virtually interchangeable, mere vessels for witty banter who never live off the page as characters fully developed. Has Sorkin ever created an inarticulate character? An uncharismatic one? An atypical one? This isn’t Shakespeare. This is Shaw.

A writer can do a lot worse than George Bernard Shaw. But Aaron Sorkin is a screenwriter who blogs for the Huffington Post. George Bernard Shaw was the most productive writer of the twentieth century - with a mind that operated at top speed for the whole of a seventy-five year career. His plays are just one aspect of an achievement that takes in dozens of short stories, 5 novels, 60 plays, journalism, political polemics, music criticism, literary criticism and philosophy. In his spare time, he wrote a quarter of a million letters.


(Pygmalion)

But today Shaw is known, if at all, for his plays. And his plays display a fearsome intellect and a still more ferocious wit. But Shaw is another writer whose work is completely hidebound by the fact that all his characters sound exactly like George Bernard Shaw. The action of his plays is less dialogue than it is debate. His plays are neither about characters nor plot, they are about ideas. The best of them: plays like Don Juan in Hell (itself an excerpt of Man and Superman) and Pygmalion (the basis of My Fair Lady) are vessels for brilliant characters to show brilliant plumage in brilliantly mounted organizational campaigns - as though they were for the military or advertising. There is never a dialing down of wattage - if Pygmalion works, it’s because Eliza Doolittle turns out to be just as brilliant as Henry Higgins and a complete intellectual match for the man who made her. Not that we should be surprised - her father, Alfred Doolittle, is an equally brilliant man who just happens to be snubbed because of his Cockney accent. Even Freddy, the upper-class twit, manages to be idiotic in a strangely articulate way. I know, I know. My Fair Lady is amazing. But My Fair Lady is a love lettter to Edwardian culture. Without the songs, it would simply be social commentary to a generations of Americans that elect manglers of the English language to their Presidency. Try to think of how much would be lost with the absence of the songs. Would Henry Higgins misanthropy seem nearly as charming without “I’m an Ordinary Man”, or would Eliza Doolittle seem nearly as sparkling without “I Could Have Danced All Night?”

But as a social critic, Shaw was second to none. His plays were brilliant exposes of hypocrisy, pomposity and pedantry, and did so with more clever lines per minute than were heard this side of Seinfeld. As a social critic, Shaw dwarves Sorkin. But as a purveyor of stage language, as an organizer of theatrical effects, as a coordinator of plotlines, Sorkin beats Shaw, no contest. Shaw sustains dramatic tension over a few hours at most, makes his points, ties it up. Sorkin wraps up each episode in a tidy bow and still keeps the tension going with linear arcs from episode to episode, season to season, show to show, movie to movie.


(“The Scene” part 1)

For the well-made play, there are few better exercises than the Courtroom Drama. The plot, the conflict, the tension, the development and the resolution are built into the screenplay. It has a beginning, middle and an end. In the words of Roger Ebert, “...A Few Good Men is one of those movies that tells you what it’s going to do, does it, and then tells you what it did.” And because the script is completely air-tight in its construction, it may contain huge ideas within it. The movie (based on Sorkin’s own play) is about nothing less than what it takes to defend the United States. We watch Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson debate issues of the most paramount importance to our lives, and then we realize, this is exactly what a Hollywood Movie should always be.


(“The Scene” part 2)

Or should it? The complaint is hardly new that Hollywood makes movies about what it takes in our crazy world to remain on the side of righteousness and virtue, and always takes the side of the most virtuous, most righteous people. There are never any compromises to the necessity of vice in a movie by Stanley Kramer or Tim Robbins or Michael Moore. Try picturing a version of Twelve Angry Men in which a legitimate argument is made that maybe the defendant killed his father. Try picturing a version of Cradle Will Rock that realizes that its subject would have made for a better musical were it not meant as Communist agitprop. Try picturing a version of Fahrenheit 9/11 in which Moore allows for the possibility that there just might have been unevil thoughts behind the decision to go to war with Iraq (albeit wrong ones). One doesn’t have to be a conservative to see the problem with this. It’s perfectly alright for artists to take political stands in their work, but it should never be at their work’s expense. What’s the point of a work of art when the same point can be made in a political debate?


(I don’t care how much people love 12 Angry Men. This is one of the worst scenes in any movie I’ve ever seen.)

It’s precisely this problem that ruins The American President. We’re presented our pornographic dream of a White House; full of brilliant, attractive, virtuous, liberal politicians who never have anything but the best interests of the American people at heart. It’s a given that everything they believe is correct, and all they have to do is follow their gut instincts in order to produce the best outcome for the America. All it takes is one magical speech and the President can reaffirm the trust of the American people. All Republicans are snivelling moral midgets who are completely upfront about their desire to corrupt the discourse of the country. There is no sense that Republicans believe what they believe because of ideology, only pure and unadulterated corruption. Even if this were true in real life, it makes for utterly terrible drama.

And yet we almost buy it. Why? Because we want to so desperately. A world with President Andrew Sheppard is something we desperately want to believe is possible. We want to believe that our leaders can be geniuses who dress like a Brooks Brothers commercial and banter like Bogie and Becall. But Andrew Sheppard doesn’t exist, and if he did, he’d be a demagogue. What else can you call a President who can dispel all suspicions and rally the country with a single speech? It is a movie that exposes the rot of Hollywood’s dream of America for exactly what it is. It is an elegant, glamorous, Hollywood movie that harkens back to all the great traditions of the Golden Age. It is also one of the purest pieces of agitprop in cinema history. And the worst part is that it worked. Thanks in part to Aaron Sorkin, a generation of American liberals were raised with the idea that a teeming mass of their countrymen are waiting for a great leader who can inspire our country to better things. They thought they found that leader in Barack Obama, and when he proved to be merely the best president in half a century rather than a wet dream, they hollered betrayal.


(Has American democracy ever been advocated less democratically? American liberalism uber alles.)

And then came Sports Night. Family Guy called it “a comedy too good to be funny.” But that misunderstands the whole point of Sports Night. Sports Night is not a comedy, it’s a romance. If it operates on a higher quality than The American President or A Few Good Men, it’s because it’s about something more than simple-minded pieties. It’s about the romance of sports, the romance of TV, the romance of working on deadline, the romance of interoffice politics and the politics of interoffice romance. The only problem is that there’s little but romance in the show. Characters uniformly love what they do, they do it well, and they all live a happy-go-lucky existence. Even their dark moments seem to exist only to make us admire them more. The action is so jam-packed that there isn’t a single boring or banal moment. In fact, there isn’t even a moment that’s about banality. For all you hear about it, there is barely a single moment of the show in which you see characters actually compiling stat databases or going through the process of color-checks. A Matt Weiner or David Simon would find ways of making the boring stuff about their job interesting, Aaron Sorkin’s solution is to avoid it altogether.


(The West Wing in embryo)

The Sorkin trademarks of The West Wing were already there: the walk-and-talk conversations, the reverence for Ken Burns-type history, the treacly endings, the knight in shining armor guys trying to heal and woo emotionally battered women, and the manichean paranoia that gives characters the sense that everybody not in the club is trying to destroy what they do.


(nerd in shining armor tries to save dame in distress)

There are lots of fascinating elements to Sorkin’s scripts, but the least commented upon is their utter paranoia. Over and over again, we see Sorkin characters defending themselves against people who want to destroy everything which they work for. If you’re in the club, you’re a figure of absolute good. And since you’re beyond reproach, anybody who questions what you do is an evil interloper.

And there lies the problem with Sorkin’s romanticism. He finds romance so romantic that he will inevitably play the Romantic to the bitter end. How many hours of Sports Night were devoted to executives trying to meddle with the show? How could anyone mistaken this for anything but a meta-commentary about Sports Night?

Any creative artist who has ever been in a situation in which the choice presented is to compromise or fold knows how this ends. The clashes between production and talent have inspired artists far greater than Sorkin. But in the end, the guy with the money always gets his way.


(...except for in Aaron Sorkin scripts)

If the above clip is a meta-commentary, then consider why Isaac Jaffe asked if the network would guarantee that everybody gets to keep their jobs if they made the compromises. Is it possible this was Aaron Sorkin’s ultimate concern, is it possible that we’re meant to think this was Sorkin’s ultimate concern? Well, Sorkin had a chance to save most of Sports Night’s jobs. After ABC cancelled, he got offers to continue it from HBO, Showtime and USA. Yet he turned them all down so he could focus on The West Wing. What amazes about this decision is not that this may have been craven and self-motivated. It is that Sorkin lacked the foresight to realize that a writer as obsessed with control as Sorkin would have far more of it in the earlier days of premium cable. HBO specialized in difficult writers with too much vision for network television. But Sorkin made it clear that he had to succeed on network TV, because surely nothing cable produces can compare with the prestige of network television.....

(note from 2025: god, to say Aaron Sorkin wrote the most elegant prose in English of any writer of our time? What on earth?...)