Mank: Elusive Truth

I've had an abiding interest in Herman Mankiewicz and Orson Welles since I first saw Citizen Kane and devoured Pauline Kael's Raising Kane in an MA in Media Studies class I was taking at The New School in 1975.  Welles became such a passion that I devoted one of my Ian's Ions and Eons stories ("Ian, George, and George") to Welles (George actually was his first name, and Orson his middle name) and I even talked about his work in this History Channel interview in 2010:

I've had less opportunity to talk about Mankiewicz, but pleased to discover that his son Frank was Robert F. Kennedy's 1968 Presidential campaign press secretary, and his grandson Josh (son of Frank), a local New York City television and now a national NBC reporter.  I was therefore glad to see Mank on Netflix last night.

I thought it was good but not great.  The black-and-white, flashback format was a nice, if somewhat obvious, homage to Citizen Kane.  Herman's writing of the script, with no credit but ample payment from Orson, at first, and then Herman insisting on getting credit, because he realized the impact the movie would have, was also well presented.  But the probing, enduring questions around the creation of this masterpiece were barely touched upon and not extensively explored.  What was Herman's ultimate motivation in writing such a devastating take-down of his friend and patron William Randolph Hearst aka Charles Foster Kane?  Did Herman love Hearst's young wife Marion Davies, platonically but nonetheless deeply enough to motivate the script?

And speaking of Davies, when Herman's brother Joe asks Herman about the "rumor" that "Rosebud" was Hearst's name for Davies' "genitalia," Herman scoffingly denies it.  Was that denial truthful (which it appeared to be in the movie) or just Herman not wanting to admit the truth to his brother?

The problem is that, since presumably almost no one in the audience for Mank knows what really happened, and why, we have no way of judging the accuracy of this docu-drama.   That's ok.  I often tell my students that you can't expect complete truth even in documentaries, let alone docu-dramas.  But because that elusive truth of such keen interest, I found Mank enjoyable -- and certainly lifted by Gary Oldman's brilliant performance in the title role -- but somewhat unsatisfying.

The Loudest Voice 1.2: September 11 and After

The Loudest Voice continued to make history in its second episode, depicting September 11 and its aftermath in way that's never been done before.

That way is the reaction and the role played by Roger Ailes.  As a disclaimer, I should say that I have no idea if what Ailes is depicted as saying is 100% true.  I was on Fox Magazine for a 10-minute interview on October 20, 2001 about propaganda in wartime, but that's the closest I got to Fox News in this crucial period.   Ailes is shown to be shocked by the twin towers attacks - as was every American, especially those of us living and working in New York - and then quickly turning to his seeing how this could be an advantage for Fox News, and then close to calling some of the shots with Dick Cheney and through him Bush and the White House in the subsequent attack on Iraq.

What is undeniable is that this was the period of time in which Fox surpasses CNN to first place in cable news.  MSNBC was so far behind in third place that it's rarely seen or mentioned.  Ailes got Fox to this commanding place by both supporting the US attack on Saddam Hussein and to a degree making it happen.  In that sense, Ailes is like William Randolph Hearst, who at the end of the 19th century leveraged the U. S. into the Spanish-American War over Cuba with his newspaper's reporting.

That war set up America for the 20th century, just as the war in Iraq, based on the fiction that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction - a fiction promoted by Fox News - set up America for the 21st century.  Given the current war of words with Iran, which grew far stronger when we crushed Iraq, we clearly are still experiencing the effects of that war in Iraq today.

If nothing else, The Loudest Voice is a vivid tableau on the media determinism of television news.  But it is much more than that, and I'll be back with a report on what I see next week.

See also:  The Loudest Voice 1.1: Fox Launch