Why we need more films like Medi­um Cool in our post-truth times

“The whole world is watch­ing,” sing the pro­test­ers at the 1968 Demo­c­ra­t­ic Nation­al Con­ven­tion in Chica­go as the end cred­its roll in Haskell Wexler’s 1969 film Medi­um Cool. The chants were fit­ting back then, just as they were on 21 Jan­u­ary, 2017, when the Women’s March on Wash­ing­ton made the entire world take notice once again. Signs read ​“protest is the new brunch”, encap­su­lat­ing a trend for mass par­tic­i­pa­tion in a mod­ern world. Social media put every­one at the heart of the occa­sion; whether you were at a march or not, any­one could be vocal about a loud, proud polit­i­cal move­ment even if only in 140 characters.

It was an event that thrived on a vari­ety of new plat­forms, a state­ment about pos­i­tive polit­i­cal engage­ment for a new gen­er­a­tion. Medi­um Cool, a slick Amer­i­can dra­ma about a TV news cam­era­man in the late 1960s, encour­ages that kind of par­tic­i­pa­tion through the evo­lu­tion of a spec­ta­tor char­ac­ter who moves out from behind the cam­era to become immersed in the pol­i­tics around him. The ​’60s coun­ter­cul­ture that the film close­ly exam­ines is doc­u­ment­ed through real protest footage, with scenes shot on loca­tion as events unfolded.

The truth seen on screen sur­rounds the audi­ence and returns us to that nasty real­i­ty that the act of watch­ing a film is meant to take us away from. The film ques­tions ideas of both the ethics and pol­i­tics of images with­in Wexler’s nar­ra­tive for his lead char­ac­ter who ​“just loves to shoot film”, and is obsessed with cap­tur­ing the news he finds in front of him. If you thought Jake Gyllenhaal’s blood­thirsty cam­era­man in Dan Gilroy’s Night­crawler was unique, Wexler’s pro­tag­o­nist John Cas­sel­lis (Robert Forster) is essen­tial­ly that character’s kin­dred spirit.

In the 2014 thriller, Lou Bloom chas­es crime scenes across Los Ange­les to cap­ture the blood­i­est footage for TV news sta­tions in the, obey­ing the broad­cast­ing mantra ​“if it bleeds, it leads”. Cas­sel­lis maybe wouldn’t agree entire­ly with Bloom’s tac­tics, but if Medi­um Cool’s open­ing scene is any­thing to go by, he would prob­a­bly under­stand his inten­tions. Video cam­era rest­ing on his shoul­der, sound guy fol­low­ing close­ly behind, Cas­sel­lis snoops around a wrecked car on a Chica­go high­way and its severe­ly injured dri­ver to cap­ture the acci­dent before remark­ing on a leisure­ly walk back to their car, ​“bet­ter call an ambu­lance”. It’s an alarm­ing scene that high­lights just how blind he real­ly is behind the cam­era, with human safe­ty tak­ing the sec­ond spot on his list of priorities.

The cam­era­man grad­u­al­ly grows dis­il­lu­sioned with his craft and the film’s turn­ing point ignites his moral out­rage and his under­stand­ing of the role he has played in an oppres­sive sys­tem. He turns to free­lanc­ing, and the DNC protest pro­vides a clear oppor­tu­ni­ty to cap­ture an expres­sion of resis­tance and reclaim his work. Both the film’s sto­ry and the director’s approach pose inter­est­ing ques­tions – Cas­sel­lis rejects the posi­tion his job puts him in once he realis­es how the footage can be manip­u­lat­ed, but it’s the pow­er of the right footage that makes Medi­um Cool so effec­tive and important.

Wexler’s pro­tag­o­nist and his cin­e­ma audi­ence learn to see what is real in a push towards polit­i­cal engage­ment and social activism that the Women’s March also encour­aged. In reject­ing his posi­tion as a pas­sive spec­ta­tor, Cas­sel­lis under­stands the pow­er of the cam­era that the film­mak­er has cap­i­talised on throughout.

Despite bring­ing us back to the real world, it begins to feel like we are even­tu­al­ly going to be lost in the nar­ra­tive realm of the film. The young Robert Forster is rugged­ly hand­some and Eileen (Ver­na Bloom), the sin­gle moth­er he befriends, is whole­some and relat­able with a sweet yet trou­bled son. Per­fect roman­tic fam­i­ly dra­ma mate­r­i­al it would seem.

Medi­um Cool is also sim­ply beau­ti­ful, the result of hav­ing a famed cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er – Wexler pre­vi­ous­ly shot In the Heat of the Night, The Thomas Crown Affair and Who’s Afraid of Vir­ginia Woolf? – as its direc­tor. The film moves from sun-drenched, gold­en scenes of famil­ial hap­pi­ness as Cas­sel­lis, Eileen and her son spend an after­noon togeth­er watch­ing pigeon rac­ing, to the bold pur­ples and blues of the Chica­go ghet­to where he is chas­ing a story.

As attrac­tive as it is social­ly aware, Medi­um Cool ulti­mate­ly relies on the use of real doc­u­men­tary footage to make a clear state­ment on Cas­sel­lis’ sense of respon­si­bil­i­ty to depict the truth on screen. The roman­tic plot and cin­e­matog­ra­phy is a beau­ti­ful trap, lulling us into a false sense of secu­ri­ty. The audi­ence, believ­ing them­selves to be mere­ly spec­ta­tors to a dra­ma, become part of the polit­i­cal sit­u­a­tion around them. This is as close to real life as it gets, and as such there’s no escap­ing it.