No doubt to pounce on the publication of Bill Clinton's My Life, Bravo decided to dredge up Primary Colors and run it on the day of the book's publication two weeks ago.
It is a measure of our times that you had to wonder, for a moment, if this was media synergy or just cynicism; Joe Klein's fictional take on Clinton's 1992 campaign, translated handily into film by Mike Nichols from Elaine May's script, could be taken by Clintonites as a withering censure or as a backhanded badge of honor. Clinton, after all, managed to cast his perjurious sex scandal as a triumphal test of character; he is said to have encouraged Billy Bob Thornton to take the role of the amoral campaign operative.
For the record, Bravo is owned by NBC Universal, a joint operation of the GE-owned network and Vivendi Universal, which owns the movie; Bertelsmann AG owns Alfred A. Knopf, publisher of the Clinton memoirs. Unless Vivendi and Bertelsmann have a Franco-German cross-pollination policy, it's likely Bravo only seized a sensible moment to show Primary Colors.
Only it wasn't quite the Primary Colors seen in theaters or on DVDs. With the asynchronous air of a bad Godzilla flick, characters gummed soundless words while their disembodied voices discerned "spit" on shoes and lamented each other's "freakin'" mistakes. Jack Stanton, John Travolta's Clinton imitation, "did" his baby-sitter. This was almost-cable, of course, with commercial interruptions, but somehow the movie won through.
It is a surprisingly affecting movie, too. Travolta plays Stanton a little too broadly at times—but then, so did Clinton. The light air of the flick's clever comedic bits never quite resolves into a pall as events turn grim. Kathy Bates has several masterful moments, including her bitter, tearful soliloquy as old friend-fixer Libby Holden, telling Stanton and Emma Thompson's Susan/Hilary that she will bite back if they use the dirt she's excavated for them, and her later good-bye speech to Henry Burton (Adrian Lester) about being the moon in the Stantons' reflected light.
The only discontinuity caused by the sanitary dubbing arises as Stanton eulogizes Libby in a small country church. He reads her last note to him, in which she tells him she's "so freakin' disappointed" in him, and the congregants' gasps and nervous giggles ring off-key. "Freakin'" just doesn't cut it. But its analog would not have pleased advertisers, either.
At least it wasn't on the real NBC, where that venerable, ancient word might have earned GE a whopping fine, for the Senate that very day had voted to increase, from $32,500 to $275,000, the top fine for broadcast indecency. The House had approved a hike, too, earlier in the year, the blowback from Janet Jackson's Super Bowl stunt and the frustrations it focused about radio shock jocks and such televised slips as Bono's inadvertent use of that freakin' word.
Alanis Morissette, perhaps, would have called it irony; Frank Rich of The New York Times likened to "an outrageous coincidence in a bedroom farce" the fact that the same day also saw Vice President Dick Cheney freakin' on the Senate floor. After a class photo, Vermont Democrat Patrick Leahy approached the veep, who snubbed him, apparently miffed at Democrats' incessant pounding on the no-bid contracts awarded Cheney's former employer, Halliburton, in Iraq. Leahy, a Catholic, countered that he didn't appreciate Republicans hounding Catholic Democrats over their abortion stances. Cheney's pithy rejoinder, perhaps emblematic of the administration's intellectual depth, enjoined Leahy to freak himself.
No doubt this was not the first time that word had been heard on Capitol Hill, even in that unpleasant configuration. What was astonishing was the speed with which Cheney found a Fox News set, not to disown or to apologize for his coarseness—although he never admitted it, either—but rather to exult in it. He allowed that he "felt better" for saying it and revealed he'd heard from others that it needed to be said.
Probably some viewers who consider themselves "religious conservatives" nodded with approval without noting even a hint of inconsistency. It is more likely that Cheney spotted a chance to heave some red meat to conservatives who freak and spit regularly, calculating it would cost the administration nothing among the more pious conservatives it pleases by penalizing on-air obscenities. Or by castigating John Kerry for using that word in a Rolling Stone interview, albeit in an entirely different context—about how the administration "freaked up" in Iraq.
In Primary Colors, Libby and Henry meet with a character played with oily efficiency by Tony Shalhoub, who observes, in disclosing incriminating information about Jack Stanton's rival, "Now he'll go down. This is America. You can bank on it." Well, not so fast. Bill Clinton eventually disproved that point. At least he pushed back the barriers of what would take down a politician. The public proved itself willing to tolerate wide ranges of inconsistency, chief among them the gap between Jack Stanton, sinner and saint.
And so it is possible for Cheney to exploit a similar gap. What's troubling about this episode, however, is that helps crystallize contradiction as policy. Already we've bought the Iraq-Al Qaeda link that didn't exist, and we accept that freedom is best preserved by curtailing it. And it's perfectly fine to hurl obscenities at our foes, who stand in the way of a pure and moral future.
Much more, and we're really freaked.
Chuck Twardy has written about art and architecture for several daily newspapers and for magazines such as Metropolis.