Quiz Show (1994)

PG-13 for a bit of language that almost hits an R-rating.  There is definitely one f-bomb in this.  There's also a lot of era-accurate anti-semitism, coupled with some some characterization that is less than flattering about Jewish people.  While the movie wasn't really all that offensive, the language did catch me off-guard more than once in the film.  This is one of those movies that talks a lot as opposed to showing anything that may be questionable.

DIRECTOR: Robert Redford

I keep thinking that I'm giving myself a vacation from writing the blog...and then I watch another movie.  I'll be honest...I'm not sure that I've seen this one before or not.  Like, part of me is fairly convinced that I've seen it.  But I can't say that I remember any part of this movie outside of simply being part of the cultural zeitgeist.  Quiz Show, like a lot of movies from the '80s and '90s, might be the byproduct of a fading understanding of modern classics.  In my head, of course I have to watch Quiz Show.  People have made Quiz Show references.  But I am also painfully aware that, as people are consuming less and less non-FOMO media, this may be one of the last blogs about Quiz Show shy of novelty blogs who watch things ironically.

I want to dive directly into the moral ether here.  I desperately want to explore how I am a fundamentally different person than I was in 1994.  Admittedly, I was 11 at the time, which is the same age my son was.  He watched this with me until his bedtime.  But I also want to explore how I'm a different person than I was in 2016.  There was a time that I would have held Quiz Show as the quintessential film about the role of integrity and truth.  I'm pretty sure that, if I have seen Quiz Show before, it probably would have been in my early 20s.  Either in college or after college.  There was a period where I had watched so many movies in a contained period of time that I was sure to lose memory of if I've seen the movie or not.  But the thing that I like to think that I hold fast and true to is the notion of representing truth.  Ultimately, what Robert Redford made here was a movie about the importance of truth, even when nobody is really looking.  One of the central themes of the film is the notion that Dick Goodwin's investigation of Twenty-One comes out of the belief that the American people are being lied to and that is wrong.  

I should point out that I mostly liked the movie.  I might kvetch about Redford's take on 1958 is a bit too nostalgic and White.  But if we're looking at a movie that takes apart nuance, that's where Redford shines.  Okay, just be aware, that as I gripe and moan, it's part of the investigation of the nuance of the film.  Back to my central idea!  Dick Goodwin is looking into Twenty-One because they tout to be one of the most honest and challenging quiz shows on television.  When there are rumblings that things may not be completely above board, Goodwin becomes this one-man taskforce investigating how corrupt television is.  In the process, he realizes that he might be destroying a lot of people's lives, which is not his intent.  Redford goes even a step further, adding a lot of moral grey area for the contestants.  Van Doren, considering that he's the most charming and genuinely intelligent men you could possibly meet, comes across a little bit like a puppy / puppet in this grand design over at NBC.  He wants to make the most entertaining television possible.  He wants to advance the social cause for the advancement of education, championing his own vocation as professor while being a compelling and marketable contestant on this show.  He keeps hearing that this is how television is made.  He initially has hang-ups, but also had the issue of being a fish out of water.  After all, the guys who are telling him that it is okay to get the questions ahead of time do this all the time. He's the rookie who doesn't seem to know any better.  When he's wrapped up in a federal investigtion, he has come so far that he has almost no option but to lie.

Bravo, Redford.  It's what makes the movie interesting.  The bad guy is a guy who means well.  The foil to Van Doren, Stempel, is correct in his commitment to the truth, but is also wholly unlikable.  I don't love that Herbie Stempel, played by John Turturro, is often marred by Jewish stereotypes.  I would say that it might be something that is unconsequential to the story, but Stempel's entire argument --and rightly so --is that Jewish contestants tend to get dethroned by more likable and more traditionally handsome White males.  Sure, it makes the movie more complex knowing that Stempel is right and that he's the voice of truth in this movie.  But he's also incredibly unlikable, often harming the people around him for the sake of getting ahead.  He's not there as this bastion of truth, fighting for the underdog. Herbie Stempel is only bringing this to light because of his addiction to the limelight and that brings up all kind of questionable reads on the film as a whole.

But this is about me, right?  I made that my central point.  Quiz Show has the ironic position of being a movie that is commenting on 1958 Tinseltown from the position of 1994 when really, I view this movie commenting on the naivete of the '90s in the shadow of Trump's America.  Yeah, I'm going to go there again.  I've mentioned many times on this blog, simply due to the sheer glut of entries, that I'm a Star Trek fan.  Often, Star Trek roots its argument as one of integrity above all things.  After all, lying is not befitting of a Starfleet officer.  And I can get behind it.  As much as my faith has directed me to make moral choices, I can't deny that optimistic, ethically-challenging space operas have had almost more of an impact.  I do believe in truth.  (I also believe in justice and a better tomorrow.  I'm going to put "The American Way" on hold for this time period.) Quiz Show, at its core, is about the danger of the white lie.  The voiceover by Dan Enright as a dejected Charles Van Doren walks away talks about how everything is a lie.  No one was hurt.  People wanted to see a winner get all the questions right and that's what NBC provided for them.  It makes this whole idea kind of murky because we're meant to find Dan Enright a bit of a slimeball.  

Dan Enright, as the movie progresses, gets grosser and grosser.  He tells dangerous lies for the sake of protecting the show and avoiding the corporate bigwigs at NBC and Geritol from feeling any blowback that might come from negative press.  It doesn't take a lot to get me to rally against millionaires and billionaires on this blog.  If anything, I'm itching for the opportunity to take them down. I, too, hate NBC in this.  We're supposed to.  So when Dan ends the film with those words, excusing the comfortable lie, we're meant to hold him to task.  The problem is...Dan Enright's kind of right.

I think that Redford, as much as he made a movie using this line as the foundation for the story, might also agree with that.  After all, he intentionally muddied the waters.  Dick Goodwin doesn't get what he's shooting for, the studio heads.  Instead, the people he's trying to protect, like Charles Van Doren, come across as the real victims.  Redford presents something that is meant to be debated and not come to terms with.  And here's why I think that Dan Enright might be correct.

Illusion is art.  Sure, the game Twenty-One might be a cash grab.  But, as I'll be talking about in my next blog about Sawdust and Tinsel, there is value in both high art and low art.  For those unaware of George Melies, please watch Hugo.  It's a gorgeous movie about a fascinating man.  Yeah, it's historical fiction, but the history part is still mostly intact.  Melies, like many magicians, presented illusions as reality.  It's the reason that we find magic to be something so beautiful.  We know, in the back of our minds, that the laws of physics --when it comes to magic trick --are not being broken.  But those people who allow their minds to believe in the impossible, even if for a moment, appreciate magic all that much more than the broken skeptic.  The reason that Twenty-One presented all of the showmanship of locking up the questions in a bank vault is the magic trick.  That is an extra step that is unnecessary to a quiz game.  We don't tend to do that anymore.  Game shows, as fun as they may be, aren't required viewing as much as they used to be.  It doesn't change the fact that we have replaced the bank vault for moving lights and lavish sets.  There's a line in The Incredibles that my son and I quote all the time.  Bob ask the little kid what he's waiting for and the kid replies, "I don't know.  Something amazing, I guess?"  What Twenty-One provided was the notion that people were capable of amazing, impossible things.

Now, does this mean that all truth is dead?  No.  I think the problem I have is that there is truth that matters and truth that doesn't matter.  Sure, the commandment is "Thou shall not bear false witness," implying that lying, from any perspective, is morally awful.  (Note: In my intro level ethics class, I fought that some lying was not only morally neutral, but a good.  I was debated for a long time by a professor who did not convince me, but I also acknowledge that this man spent his entire career doing this and I wasn't going to have ground to stand on as a layman.)  It's just that I like the notion of the magician being coy about truth while I hate the President demolishing the White House after saying he wasn't going to touch it.  I hate that the same man sent a legal resident to a foreign country and called him a human trafficker / gang member because it made his job easier.  I hate that he sent the military into cities because they're war-ravaged hellholes when, in truth, he just wanted to flex dominance.  That's lying.  When an artist tells you to "trust me," there's joy in knowing that, ultimately, knowing the emotional truth of something is far more interesting than the reality of what happened.  When I look at conflicting moments in the Bible, I don't think that the Bible's lying to me.  I think people are telling a story where the reality may miss the details, but the core of it is the truth of the moment.  

Yeah, the NBC people deceived its audience.  Some people might be mad about it.  But I also know that there are millions of wrestling fans who are told by non-fans that wrestling is fake, but they still choose to believe.  I know that The Blair Witch Project scared me pretty good when I was in high school because the producers told me it was real.  I cherish that illusion because, for a second, I had to question the world around me.  Yeah, was I glad when I found out the reality of the situation?  Sure.  I'm going to deep dive anything.  Do I hate AI?  Sure.  I hate it because that lie hurts people.  But an artist, even as low art as something like a game show, tells its audience that they are making the impossible possible?  I don't hate that.  It's not a moral good, but it is the choice of an artist and I think that might be something else.

Also, everyone watch F for Fake.  That's a better version of this story.