The Real Reasons For Things

What we see in front of us matters. Even if we can’t always be sure of what it was. The things that have already happened matter. Even if we just want to move on. Haskell Wexler’s MEDIUM COOL is a part of history and an essential film even if the reality it contains has long since overshadowed what the film is. Released by Paramount Pictures in 1969, the time of EASY RIDER and MIDNIGHT COWBOY and THE LOVE BUG, the film came a full year after the real events shown but it survives now both in the reality it presents as well as the still genuine surprise of discovering how a film that opens with a major studio logo attempted to present such imagery with this sort of message at all.

In 1968 Chicago, John Cassellis (Robert Forster) works hard as a hotshot news cameraman and the morality of what he’s pursuing doesn’t interest him so much as simply getting the story not to mention the time he spends pursuing women. After he encounters a young boy possibly trying to break into his car, he meets Eileen (Verna Bloom) a single mother who has just moved to Chicago with her son Harold (Harold Blankenship) from rural West Virginia. While getting to know her, John soon learns that footage he has shot has been given by the network to the FBI and the news of his firing quickly follows. He gets hired again soon enough to film at the Democratic National Convention but as the event approaches, Harold sees the two of them kissing and runs off so as the protests swirling around the convention begin to take place Eileen goes in search of her missing son, unaware of what she’s going to encounter out in the streets.

Realism is the key word here, or maybe just the idea of it. The camera sees what it does because of the person behind it, the person controlling what the image is. But it’s not about realism. It never was. Whatever it is that we’re seeing is always affected by the way it’s photographed, which is what MEDIUM COOL is about, how the film is saying there’s no way an image can’t be somehow manipulated by the person behind the camera. The very first scene underlines this feeling, cameraman Forster and his sound man played by Peter Bonerz filming the body of a girl, either dead or close to it, lying by a car which has crashed into a divider by the highway. It’s their job to just get the shot, of course, not do anything about what’s in front of them with nothing even said about the condition of the person until an offhand comment to call an ambulance as they walk off. The image recalls the car crashes in films from this period by Godard, another filmmaker who played games with what was real or not and it’s certainly where MEDIUM COOL takes a lot of inspiration from. In this case the almost absurd coldness adds to the feeling, complete with a lone person on the overpass above who barely takes any notice of the scene. This is a film with a main character who approaches what he does always thinking about how to capture the image in front of him in the best way possible and the job is nothing more than that. The meaning behind it is something else entirely and the result doesn’t interest him. When a girlfriend suggests they go see a movie he instead takes her to a roller derby, something else that’s really happening yet likely not real at all, but if he’s not responsible for what’s being photographed then he’s not interested. It’s the act of shooting it he cares about, not the intent, not ever seeing what’s really going on and what the result of it all is going to be.

The style of MEDIUM COOL is one where each shot always feels curious, always probing as if constantly trying to understand the image. Each shot is important. Each direction the camera is pointing at matters. With this film more than most others, it’s hard not to look for meaning in every single image, real or not. Even the strict reality of what they’re filming has different levels, including the National Guard preparation drills for the upcoming protests that are anticipated at the convention, something that’s not quite real right at the start. But MEDIUM COOL is likely most known for the genuinely real footage it incorporates, using actual riot footage in Chicago during the convention that was captured for this film, in some ways the very reason the film exists at all with a close-up look at the protestors and police going up against each other.

At times it’s almost impossible to believe that some of this footage was captured at all and it likely dictated how much more important it was going to be than the plot. And this blending of reality, staged or not, continues all the way through like in one early section showing an actual Resurrection City protest in D.C. with Jesse Jackson briefly spotted but other moments are clearly a melding of the two, a glimpse of young voters in front of an RFK campaign office and one scene which comes soon after a display of filmmaking responding to the moment; the film was surely in the works before this event, another reminder of reality informing the fiction of it all. Haskell Wexler was already an established cinematographer in his career at this point having shot WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? (for which he won the Oscar), IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT and THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR in addition to extensive work directing and photographing documentaries which continued long after. Wexler also has the screenplay credit here, although it would be interesting to see what the script actually looked like, and this film brings together those two halves of his career at once, turning each approach into something new and maybe it overwhelms the story but that is likely part of the point as well and it doesn’t flinch from how powerful this becomes, with editing by Verna Fields who would go on to cut JAWS six years later that always zeroes in on the power of each individual moment and how the images need to go together.

At an early cocktail party attended by members of the press they seem aware of the problem facing them with much of the talk being about what their role in it all really is, trying to do their job while being assaulted on all sides around them whether the rioters, police or their own editors. They’re trapped somewhere between the demands of the public and the demands of those in charge, trying to somehow do their job while finding the necessary balance. What the essential argument boils down to, simply put, is it their job to go for the blood or go for the facts. In the world we live in now, 55 years after the film was made, the media has become so corporatized, sanitized and so locked into the story they’re determined to present which has already been decided on that it barely seems like the same business anymore as the individual reporter becomes more and more irrelevant, never allowing people to focus on what’s actually happening at the moment. But in this film the people are still trying to pay attention, even if they’re still arguing about the events in Dallas several years later unaware of what’s still to come, maybe within only the next few days. “Let’s not get into politics,” says a rich woman being interviewed about life in Chicago in a way that makes it clear exactly what her politics are and, just like the press, a black taxi driver who gets media coverage after finding money in his cab is rewarded with suspicion on all sides for his honest actions. Robert Forster’s John Cassellis may be interested in a story like that when it’s in front of him but even when he’s trying to put together the pieces can’t quite see how it all fits into the bigger picture. There’s hostility towards everyone on all sides with the producer at the station putting baseball coverage on the same level as what’s going in in their ‘nervous city’ where there are places the cameramen are afraid to go and maybe they should be.

So many subjects are swirling around in the film whether it’s the media, the convention or the racial conflict hanging in the air. Driving through Washington where the funeral procession for Robert Kennedy is about to pass through, John Cassellis is mostly impressed by how fast the news crews are setting up while his sound man Gus is thinking about his time in a cocktail lounge the night before, musing on the pleasures of four and a half women for every guy in D.C. The film’s view of women and how the men treat them may be a product of when it was made but it all fits in with the main character’s view of the world and the people around him, just as interested in all the newfangled technology in his apartment he can show off as the naked girl next to him in his bed. When John gets bored with one girl, he tosses her over to a colleague who’s expressed interest anyway. The first girl he’s having a fling with early on is a nurse played by Marianna Hill, just as eager to have him jump on her in bed right as she is to call him a bastard while arguing about the way the documentary MONDO CANE may or may not have altered the reality it was filming but he likely doesn’t tell her about things like the girl from the opening scene. Whether the rush of the camera or the rush of the girl in his bed with nudity (possibly responsible for the X rating the film received at the time from the MPAA, although Wexler always insisted in interviews that it was politically motivated but, either way, it officially has an R now) that pushes the boundaries of the time and it’s all a reminder of how far he’ll go. Eileen from the Appalachian country of West Virginia is the other woman who comes into his life and, played by Verna Bloom in a way that always feels completely authentic, she may not be the same sort of intellectual looking to challenge John on the nature of what he does but she is smart and empathic, able to understand enough to know that something has shifted in the world around her. She keeps her poster of Bobby Kennedy hanging on the wall nearby, just as he has his own poster of Belmondo that he pauses in front of, another Godard connection but it also shows the two icons they each have, one from the real world, one from film.

The loose nature of the narrative forces the viewer to fill in certain blanks, including the issue of John losing his job then being hired for another crew covering the Democratic Convention very soon after, but it never seems that important. Although in the film they haven’t met at that early point, Verna Bloom is clearly spotted in her yellow dress with Forster during the cocktail party but this doesn’t really matter either and the director essentially admits to placing this scene out of order in the film on the DVD audio commentary, saying he decided to move the party up from where it originally was and since he wanted to keep what was being said he simply left her in there, more interested in the message than the need for a strict linear plot. Wexler is clearly willing to focus on the images and moments he’s discovered while filming more than an obligatory need to move the story forward, which speaks to what he wants to focus on both as a cameraman and a documentarian with it all continually adding to the immediacy. Cassellis thinks of his job as being more about the story than the subject, let alone what it means, caring about aesthetics not intent. He wants the story, not the human element, just as the black militants talk to the camera, and to us, but not any camera he might be pointing at them, just as the hotel kitchen workers in one scene are just doing their jobs, just a few feet from where history is about to change. Meeting Eileen and Harold gives his life a shot at humanity and the story thread of Harold’s birds being let loose, both in nature and in his own apartment, is a vestige of the project’s beginnings as an adaptation of the novel “The Concrete Wilderness” as if from a world that he’ll never be able to escape himself, stuck with memories of a father who is most likely dead, whether in Vietnam or otherwise, but either way he’s not coming back. One byproduct of the film’s unique production is how genuine every moment feels, whether showing life in Chicago or among the Appalachians, allowing us to connect with that moment in history even more, the people of all types are out there marching with the cops all around them, looking the way cops always do. The media also looks the way they always do even if the technology is different, with an out of focus middle finger coming from one of the marchers held up to them as one of the vans drives away.

Forster’s character is a boxer which indicates how he approaches his work as well, straight ahead and with a sort of tunnel vision, proudly uncomplicated in the way he says he’s “sometimes up, sometimes down.” This outlook adds to the nervous energy of the sequence where he visits the black militants, greeted with demands to do ‘human interest’ stories they want him to do but he only knows how to respond to this with his own hostility. It’s not entirely clear why he gets fired from the station and he doesn’t seem certain either, at the very least he was just causing trouble or so maybe he was just actually starting to think about what he was involved in. When he explains the how it’s all “just politics” and the media has its own script that it follows, a script that provides us with the narrative that we, the public, need. The moment has undeniable punch and though the film never really gets into whether this is an awakening he’s having or is he just caring about it for the first time it still has a power coming from what he now believes. It’s the voice of a man who has finally realized something that has changed his entire world, as if for the first time learning that his own reasons for doing the job had nothing to do with why they really wanted that footage in the first place. Early on Gus the sound man says that he thinks of himself as nothing more than a machine like a typewriter, but the film knows that the power behind having the camera to capture the image means nothing without any thought behind it.

The improv nature of this always feels raw, a representation of the reality of the time even if it’s an intentionally heightened filmic reality which makes the FORREST GUMP version of history seem even worse than it is. It stands to reason that anyone watching the film will be more interested in the convention footage than in the story of the Appalachians but even this makes sense. Beginning with the mesmerizing opening credits filmed from the point of view of a motorcycle that has just picked up an all-important reel of footage from the main character driving through the streets of Chicago as the instrumental “Emotions” by Love plays on the soundtrack feeling like the perfect musical statement of the film with the way it recurs throughout feeling like the spine of the film and it goes perfectly with its need to keep probing, searching, remaining alert. But so much of the music heard makes this feeling pop throughout, with “Oh No” and “Who Needs the Peace Corps” by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention adding immeasurably to the mood of the moment. Even the psychedelia of the nightclub scene has a totally natural quality, never feeling like it’s trying too hard to present the moment as it was and though the counterpoint of “Happy Days Are Here Again” which plays while cutting between the convention and the aftermath of the beatings by the police and the message isn’t in any way subtle but it’s not trying to be. It’s obvious, too obvious, but watching this sequence now is a reminder of how we’re still forced to listen to things like this now as if to distract us from what the truth really is, in a desperate attempt to get us to believe that things are normal, even though we know otherwise.

The most important footage is held for the end, in the style of a showman knowing this is what people want to see, clearly building up to the convention protests out on the streets and a display of the police response to all this, giving us a good look at what they were up to. The look at what the cops were doing to the protestors seen during the final twenty minutes are as valuable as anything. “Look out, Haskell! It’s real!” is the famous line heard as tear gas is released just a few feet away from the camera and, just as famously, was dubbed in afterwards, a breaking of the fourth wall which itself is a break of the reality even as it appears to be spontaneous, but it gets the point across. It seems notable that the film’s main character who loves shooting with has camera so much is not present for the riots since this is what he’d want to photograph instead of the parliamentary nonsense of the actual convention. And we sort of lose just why Verna Bloom’s Eileen is in the middle of all this while searching for her son but that barely matters. She’s America, a forgotten part of America, wandering unaware into the middle of all this, with a yellow dress to help us keep our eye on the innocence she represents among all those people. “Come back!” a protestor shouts as a news van drives off before the beatings start, the media abandoning all responsibility as it of course was going to do, as it was always going to do, just as the film opened with walking away from a girl dying by the side of the road. The birds released by Harold are allowed to be free but never the people. Harold has nowhere to go once he runs off into the night, all he can do is return home. You can’t escape. There’s no way to escape.

“Jesus, I love to shoot film,” John Cassellis says while watching a TV documentary on Martin Luther King, Jr. To him, the simple act of doing it is what is so profound on its own. He’s moved by the imagery, he’s moved by the story being told but he doesn’t seem to register the actual reality of what’s in front of him, not knowing that the power behind having the camera to capture the image means nothing without any thought behind it and MEDIUM COOL mixes the two like no other American film ever has. In this sense the medium really is the message. The famous final shot, and the power of the message being shouted during it, is one that feels very much of the time the film was made with EASY RIDER coming out a month before this was released, but it still resonates. Or at least it should. The reality is still right in front of us. How real is what’s in front of us. How much it really does matter.

For a film in which performances on the surface seem secondary the actors who are there bring a great deal, always a sense of humanity to the inherent coldness of the approach. Robert Forster is phenomenal, very much a star but also completely and totally this guy. It may not be his best performance but it’s likely no one used him as pure movie star as well until Tarantino did years later. Verna Bloom, maybe best remembered now as the wife of Dean Wormer in ANIMAL HOUSE and as June the artist who assists Griffin Dunne at the end of AFTER HOURS, unforgettably projects a sense of humanity and warmth the film doesn’t otherwise have up against the son played by Harold Blankenship, an actual Appalachian boy discovered by the production in Chicago who barely seems aware there’s a camera on him. The sly presence of Peter Bonerz gives a comical feel to all his scenes even if he’s not doing much of anything and it also comes off as totally real while Marianna Hill, an actress who has long interested me with a long stretch of roles like her STAR TREK guest shot in the episode “Dagger of the Mind”, one of the leads in Howard Hawks’ RED LINE 7000 but maybe most famously as Fredo’s wife in THE GODFATHER PART II here plays John’s first girlfriend Ruth. It’s a part that stays on the outskirts of the story even as she gets some of the strongest scenes, the one person ready to challenge the message and her part is a sidebar to the main story and maybe a hostility he doesn’t want to deal with anymore, but she also feels totally genuine with the playful bit of business when she comes up to Forster at the nightclub making it clear that she knows what he’s doing. At times it can be difficult to always tell who are the actors and who aren’t in all this which of course is part of the point (Sid McCoy, the cab driver who finds the money, was an actor as well as the announcer on SOUL TRAIN) but Peter Boyle is of course instantly recognizable now as the gun clinic manager bringing some humor to the moment he gets plus Felton Perry, years before playing an OCP exec in ROBOCOP, is one of the black militants who gets a speech that he turns into one of the most powerful moments of the film, talking about a media that doesn’t want to know, never wants to know, telling us in no uncertain terms what the result is going to be if all this keeps happening.

MEDIUM COOL came out a year after the events it shows and I imagine by then the convention was old news, maybe something people were trying to forget. Or maybe they were off seeing EASY RIDER instead. Now, of course, what the film shows is history. And it’s still surprising that Paramount released it at all. The following year Robert Forster starred in Noel Black’s COVER ME BABE, playing a rising young film director, this time playing a man behind a film camera instead of a news camera. This makes it sound like the two films would make for a good double feature but it’s probably more interesting as a Los Angeles time capsule of the period and with its own style that hasn’t aged as well. Maybe ZABRISKIE POINT would be the better one to pair with MEDIUM COOL. Several decades later by the time news cameras had gone from film to video Robert Altman attempted his own blending of real and fiction during a presidential campaign using a much more satirical approach with the great TANNER ’88 series on HBO. And now life is one big blending of real and fake, always faced with the question of how much the media refuses to admit it, no matter how much the whole world is watching. But now the question becomes what the purpose is of the media when they don’t do their jobs, maybe not even understanding what their job is in the first place. Newspaper subscriptions get canceled (no more Los Angeles Times every morning for me) and no more cable news. It’s a media that has for all intents and purposes abdicated any responsibility in the events of the day more than it ever has, more than we ever thought was possible. It all feels like the goal is to make a world where there’s only one voice in the media, one voice allowed to speak its version of the truth. Of course, there’s a word for that and I don’t know if this message matters anymore. But that’s not up to me. And maybe what the final scene is saying is that you can’t escape. The only hope is that people will be watching. Until then, the world goes on. The watching goes on in an unending search for the truth. Hopefully.