What matters
I turned it on just as they got to the scene when Richard, Geoffrey and John were locked in the dungeon and Henry was coming down to execute them. Richard tells his brothers not to cower but to take it like men. And Geoffrey says, "You fool! As if it matters how a man falls down." And Richard says... "When the fall is all that's left... ...it matters a great deal." As I often do after finishing a movie I loved, I have spent the past few days burning spare compute (as they say) turning Network over in my head and situating it within the other works that I love. Network's influence is vast. But my personal canon implicates one writer in particular, above the rest: Aaron Sorkin. Sorkin's love of Chayefsky is broad and obvious. You do not need to listen to him speak to hear it; the series premiere of the ill-fated and ill-conceived Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip opens in direct homage and reference to the film. At first glance, it's easy to be disingenuous about this adoration — especially given our current cultural moment, which has largely lampooned Sorkin's politics, and not just Sorkin's politics but his ideas about politics. It is easy to say that Sorkin made a career out of aping Chayefsky's bombastic, operatic dialogue style without ever really pushing to sell something of depth the way Chayefsky did. I think that's an unfair reading of Sorkin, regardless of how you feel about his politics. Starting with Sports Night and moving all the way up to The Newsroom , 1 I'm not counting his film work, largely because — with the exception of The American President — they're all adaptation and cash-grab jobs. Which I don't mean as criticism, but to highlight the fact that they aren't part of his central oeuvre. And Sorkin's run on the West Wing is just the first four seasons. Sorkin, like Paddy, treats the office as a place of worship — and members of the institutions he portrays are virtuous to the extent that they devote their entire selves to them. The widely accepted reading of The West Wing, as such, is that of a liberal Fantasia, not because it depicts the Bartlet administration as being liberal, but because it depicts a world in which the best possible thing you can do is to try very hard to do the right thing — and the liberals, or really the centrist-leaning Democrats, are the ones who do that. Now might be a good time to mention that I love the West Wing. It holds a special place in my heart — not because it prompted me to begin a life of civic duty, nor to become a man defined by his institution, but because it was the first television show I watched that made me say: whoa, shows can be like that. I care nothing about it's nostalgia, nor agree with its retrograde politics — but the show is good, dammit, and the back half of Season 2 is up there with any other show in my personal canon. Watch any episode in Sorkin's run of the West Wing and strip away whatever pretense and prejudice you have about his politics, and it is still some of the greatest TV writing, with performances to match. Moreover, the West Wing is, to a large extent, an auteurist text, with Sorkin having famously written much of it himself (on copious amounts of cocaine.) No one in government takes responsibility for anything any more. We foster, we obfuscate, we rationalize. "Everybody does it," that's what we say. So we come to occupy a moral safe house where everyone's to blame, so no one's guilty. I'm to blame. I was wrong. So what does this all have to do with Chayefsky? Clearly the two men's worldviews are oppositional. Network is a story about the inevitability of institutions to get corrupted and corrupt in turn. The West Wing is a paean to not just an institution but the individuals who comprise it. Again and again, in the West Wing, we are told the most virtuous possible thing to do is to devote yourself to an institution, and the show's camera follows that precept accordingly: it's not that we know little about Josh and Toby and CJ's personal lives because they happen off-screen, it's that we are told, every episode, that the White House is their personal life, and that in the noblest possible American quest one must subsume yourself into the greater cause — precisely the thing Chayefsky warns about, because he contends that the greater cause will devour your soul. But back to that liberal Fantasia for a second. Discussions of the West Wing online often imply that the Bartlet administration was faultless and perfect (to the scorn of its critics and the glee of its fandom) — that nothing goes wrong, and that every situation is not just salvaged but transcended by its protagonists. This is an immature reading! While the show does take necessary textual pains to pretend that everything lies in the hands of the cast's agency, a recurring theme throughout Sorkin's run is that, despite these lovely, brilliant, devoted, earnest, and dignified people in the Oval Office, the Bartlet administration kind of sucks. In the universe of the show, Bartlet passes no major domestic legislation, commits multiple war crimes against foreign officials, lies to the public about a serious medical condition during his campaign and first term, and appoints one Supreme Court justice. And that's sort of it. LBJ, he is not. His tally sheet looks more like Carter's than FDR's; he wins a second term, but more off the back of his opponent's cartoonish incompetence than his own track record. Why does he not do more? This is the through-line of much of the show, the administration's conflict between what is right and what is expedient — on one hand, you have the oft-repeated let Bartlet be Bartlet : to not capitulate, to not accept half measures, to not do what is convenient or legible but to act with confidence and moral imperity. And then, on the other hand, it doesn't work: which is not an indictment of the characters so much as an indictment of the worldview that celebrates them as heroes. Decisions are made by those who show up. To call this a Straussian reading is probably an understatement. I do not at all think Sorkin intended to slyly deliver this message; I think he probably wasn't thinking that hard about some of the long-term through-lines implied by his storytelling. 2 As is made abundantly clear by every single public statement he's made in the past two decades — including, perhaps most famously and recently, his call for the Democratic Party to run Mitt Romney against Trump in the 2024 election. A moment of true bipartisan unity, in that every single person from every part of the political spectrum correctly derided him for the take, and the New York Times for airing it as an op-ed column. But I still love the West Wing, even at its most obnoxious. And I still, despite myself, love Sorkin — though his best works, like The Social Network with Fincher, are produced with an equally strong, opposing voice in concert. Why is that? Two reasons: He is a very good writer of dialogue and oratory. He celebrates honor and dignity and loyalty, but he does not make great pains to pretend that those things are antidotes to what ails us — which is perhaps the more important message, because if they were antidotes they'd be easier to administer.
DevOps
Programming
Culture
Writing
Movies
Sports
iOS
Entertainment
Ci Cd
Career
Rust
AI
Security
Business
Journalism
Web Development
HTML
Database
Python
JSON