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A system glorifies its winners. The mass media and the rest of
corporate America are enthralled with professionals scaling career
ladders to new heights. Meanwhile, the people hanging onto bottom rungs
are scarcely blips on screens.
Far from the media spotlights are countless lives beset with
financial scarcity, often in tandem with chronic illness, monotony,
adversity and despair. The same institutions and attitudes that lavish
outsized respect on high achievers (the wealthier the better) are apt to
convey ongoing disrespect for low achievers.
The flip side of adulation for winners is often contempt for people
with cumulative misfortune, who routinely slog through murky
quasi-netherworlds and do their best to keep from going under. According
to mass-media calculations, they just don’t rate. In a society
overdosing on unmitigated capitalism, it’s not just a matter of scant
disposable income. As a practical matter, the country treats many people
as disposable.
When personal dreams of success or even equilibrium sink below
horizons, the same media outlets that laud the successful have little
use for those defined by the system as abject failures. For mainstream
media, the plentiful underachievers are customarily the rough equivalent
of flotsam and jetsam.
The downwardly un-mobile may pump gas, wash dishes, trim hedges or
do any number of other low-pay no-benefit jobs. They might rent a tiny
run-down apartment, sleep in charity shelters or bed down on urban
cement; they may wait in emergency rooms or clinics, merely shaking
their heads at the immediate question that prompts most Americans to
show medical-insurance cards.
In human terms, they may be the salt of the earth, but the
corporate-driven system commonly treats them like dirt. And for many of
those who’ve been on a downward spiral for a long time, there’s not the
slightest whiff of a happy ending. Media disdain for such lives is most
vehemently expressed by ignoring them; in the routine calculus of the
newsroom, nonpersons get non-coverage.
If you see the new movie “The Assassination of Richard Nixon,” you
might feel compelled to think again about such matters -- and maybe in a
new way. Inspired by a real person named Samuel Byck who went through a
personal meltdown 30 years ago, this stunning film makes more difficult
our usual psychological evasions about people whose failures include
inability to pull themselves out of tailspins.
You may never see a more powerful performance on a screen than the
one in this movie by Sean Penn. (Full disclosure: He’s a friend.) I
agree with Newsday reviewer Jan Stuart, who wrote that the film is “a
triumph for its star and the writers, who make us cringe with empathy
for a man who taps into the latent loser in all of us.”
It isn’t just that we would rather not contemplate the dire
circumstances of others. We also would prefer not to look too closely at
the thin ice that is underfoot for us all. Even the most secure have no
guarantees of health, stability or longevity.
While reviews across the country are almost unanimous with praise
for Sean Penn’s superb acting in “The Assassination of Richard Nixon,”
their reactions to the overall film have ranged from acclaim to
indifference. The discomfort of some reviewers seems to be intertwined
with wariness about the movie’s great empathy for someone who can’t win.
The marriage that the film’s main character desperately wants to
glue back together has cracked up beyond repair. The political economy
that he hopes will welcome and reward his honest work has no use for
him. All the outward signposts tell us that he’s headed toward the
system’s destination for what it treats as expendable -- the equivalent
of corporate road kill. And his mental deterioration leads him to engage
in terrible violence.
Director Niels Mueller, who co-wrote “The Assassination of Richard
Nixon” with Kevin Kennedy, has brought to the screen a work of
creativity that finds politics in humanity. Given its acute
sensibilities, the film is remarkable enough to represent a bit of a
cinematic miracle.
Maybe fuller realization of vulnerabilities that are inherent in
the human condition -- and exacerbated by predatory social orders -- can
bring more genuine humility and deeper compassion.
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Norman Solomon’s next book, “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits
Keep Spinning Us to Death,” will be published in early summer by Wiley.
