That First Scene In The Newsroom Is Fucking Stupid
I have on my computer a big ol’ list of article ideas, and I’m running out of softballs. This is the seventh article I’ve written for this blog now, not including the first, and if there’s something I’ve learned it’s that it can be hard to motivate yourself. It’s one thing to write about a movie you’ve seen a trillion times. It’s something entirely different, however, to say, “Hey maybe we should start that big replay of Far Cry 3 so you can write that article about the handling of mental degradation and violence in video games!” (Article coming soon.) Sometimes, it feels like the cards are stacked against you, and you’re going to need to debase yourself a little to get motivated.
All of which is a very long way of saying that this article, about the opening scene of The Newsroom, is petty by design. Ideally, I would have rewatched the pilot rather than relying on Youtube clips so that I could offer you some narrative insights or something else that sounds good like that. (I may have even rewatched the whole show.) Alas, I did not. I am aware of the fact that I am saying Will McAcoy is petty in the most petty way possible. I am aware of the obvious hypocrisy. I am also aware that, according to McAvoy, I am part of the problem. I also use way too many “to be” verbs and the universe is imperfect. I am at peace with all of this.
Despite those “Sorkinisms” videos you might have seen and certain style choices that drive me crazy, I do consider Aaron Sorkin one of the greatest screenwriters of all time. I’ve seen most of Sorkin’s work. (Specifically, I haven’t seen Malice, The American President, Sports Night, or Studio 60, but I have seen all of everything else.) I think The Social Network is one of the best movies of the decade so far, I loved Steve Jobs, I think The West Wing, while flawed, was one of the greatest shows of all time during Sorkin’s tenure. Even at his worst, everything he writes is just so damn watchable due to the sheer inertia of his dialogue and the way he structures his scenes. The more you slow down the Sorkin of your Sorkin script, the worse off you are. Looking at you, Moneyball.
This one's blurry.
Even The Newsroom, what might be the worst entry in Sorkin’s career, has flashes of brilliance. The pilot, which starts with the famous rant, completely shifts gears once the oil spill starts and we watch the team hunt down the story. It shifts back to neutral once we reach the end of the pilot, but there was promise. Sometimes, the show delivered on that promise. Most of the time, however, it was just as shallow as the opening scene. (As far as I’m concerned, Sorkin’s only absolute failure during his career so far was the campus rape episode.)
The scene in question opens with Will sitting at a college panel. The topic of the panel was never really clear to me, but it involves news anchors. Will sits in between a man and a woman, a conservative and a liberal respectively. They appear to be debating about American individualism, but really, they’re just exchanging personal swipes while the audience of millennial college students yuck it up. None of this seems the eensy-weensiest contrived at all.
The editing speeds up. The audio dampens. He starts seeing flashes of Emily Mortimer. This man’s about to explode, and the filmmaking tell us with the subtly of a bull whose family was murdered by the owner of the china shop he’s currently destroying.
An audience member asks Will what party he belongs to, and we learn that Will has never publicly stated his political affiliation. He’s seen as “the Jay Leno of news anchors.” A relic of a time when news men were real news men, and they weren’t compromised in the slightest.
Then Jenny steps up to the mic.
This one is also blurry.
Oh Jenny, with your blonde hair and your big Bambi eyes and your millennial tweety insta-phone. Surely you aren’t going to say something stupid. Surely, you aren’t going to do what we all think you’re going to do and mess up the act of asking what is already a ridiculous question nobody with half a brain would ever actually ask. Surely you are not going to do this. Surely.
“Can you say in one sentence or less— (Audience giggles)… You know what I mean. Can you say why America is the greatest country in the world?” Oh Jenny! You did not just up and ask that question! Jenny, with your memes and your digital vinyl streaming and your Buzzfeed plaid button-up periscope-y internet trigger warnings!
Don’t get me wrong, I find a lot of the behavior of my fellow millennials to be as annoying and unproductive as everyone else. What I’m talking about here is the heavy-handed nature of the set-up to the rant that’s about to happen. Everything about this scene is detached from reality and basic logic. The pundits, the millennials, the debate, this isn’t how it’s supposed to be, and Sorkin and director Greg Mottola, another great filmmaker led astray by The Newsroom, go almost hilariously out of their way to make sure you know that everything happening on-screen is utterly revolting. You can feel the hand of the writer behind everything everyone says and does. Look closely enough and you might even see some strings.
As an audience member, I want to feel my own emotions. I don’t want Sorkin ramming what I should be feeling down my throat. Human beings have the uncanny ability to identify with anything so long as we have something to relate to. You don't need to force it so much.
The liberal answers, “Diversity and opportunity.” The conservative answers, “Freedom and freedom. So let’s keep it that way.” Obviously he says that because he’s a conservative pundit, and that’s the kind of conservative punditry we apparently expect from a conservative pundit. Will tries to deflect, but the moderator won’t have it. He sees Mac some more. She holds a sign. “It’s not.”
He tries more deflection. He answers with the constitution and the declaration of independence. A good answer, or at least a better answer than “Freedom and freedom.” But the moderator wants more. He wants a “human moment” from a Will. I think we’re supposed to be rooting against the moderator at this point, but all I’m doing is rolling my eyes because the moderator seems to think that humanity and the ability to spew sound bites are the same thing. One more prompt from Mac, and he finally explodes. “It’s not the greatest country in the world, professor, that’s my answer!”
The millennials gasp. The professors gasp. Somewhere in a spooky swamp, Scooby-Doo yells, “Ruh-roh!” The moderator finds this idea so shocking he has to ask again. “So you’re saying—“ “Yes.” Will interrupts. The moderator tries to change the subject again, but Will takes control and the rant truly begins.
I couldn't get HBO Go to stream in HD for me. Apologies for the blurriness of the screenshots.
I remember watching the pilot air on HBO. I could barely tolerate anything before this part of the scene, but this is the moment where I truly started to turn against the show. Look at how everyone in this scene is behaving, as if the notion that America isn’t the greatest country in the world never occurred to any them. That in the audience’s twenty or so years, they never questioned political norms or the society they live in. It’s at this point where you have to wonder about Sorkin’s intentions, because it feels like he wants to sit an entire generation on his lap and explain things to us like we’re good little boys and girls.
Will begins the rant by attacking liberals. He goes after the National Endowment of the Arts, not because there’s anything wrong with it, but because it costs political capital and dumb conservative pundits can attack liberals at any moment with this apparent frivolous government spending. Will then connects this to a larger issue: People don’t like liberals because they lose. Apparently that’s the only reason one wouldn’t vote for a liberal candidate, and not anything else. It's some weird reverse ad populum argument that doesn't make any sense. “If liberals are so fucking smart then how come they lose so goddamn always?” Will asks. Speaking as somebody who leans pretty far to the left, I don’t think the ability to campaign is the same thing as the ability to govern or effectively lead. I also think that the context of every election differs, and there isn’t any one blanket reason why one party loses to another. But hey, that’s just me.
Will then turns to the conservative pundit and attacks his jingoism. “And with a straight face, you're gonna sit there and tell students that America is so star-spangled awesome that we're the only ones in the world who have freedom? Canada has freedom. Japan has freedom. The U.K. France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Australia, Belgium has freedom. Two hundred and seven sovereign states in the world, like, a hundred and eighty of them have freedom.” It’s a fair point. It’s a point expressed in a needlessly smug manner, but it’s a fair point nonetheless.
Then he turns back to poor Jenny. “And you, Sorority Girl, just in case you accidentally wander into a voting booth one day, there's some things you should know.” As you are guaranteed to get young people to listen to you by being condescending and sexist, he proceeds to list a bunch of statistics about America and our standing in the world. I don’t know if any of them are accurate. I’ll assume they are, or at the very least, they were. Will then turns back to Jenny and says, “Now none of this is the fault of a twenty year old college student, but you nonetheless are without a doubt a member of the worst, period, generation, period, ever, period.”
I could say that a baby boomer accusing any other generation of being “the worst ever” is almost exceedingly laughable. I could say that god forbid any of us millennials can’t live up to the great heights of tripping balls at Woodstock or electing Bush. My pampered generation doesn't have such shining pillars of the community as Shirley Phelps-Roper or Oliver North. We weren't the generation that literally drank the Kool-Aid, and I won't be able to sit my kids down in my suburban home and say, "Kids, after Sharon Tate and Altamont, we realized our revolution or whatever was bullshit, so we all looked inward, and we realized we were all nothing but a bunch of selfish pricks. And now we're making it your problem, so if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go tell some other kids that our generation invented rock and roll."
I could say all that, and honestly, I don’t see any reason not to. If Will’s goal here is to raise the level of discourse in this country, piffling generational tribalism is definitely the way to start. It feels good being on Will’s level. You fucking assholes.
The rest of the rant is nostalgia. We use to look up to men of intelligence. We aspired to greatness. “We reached for the stars,” to quote one of the more prevalent Sorkinisms. I think Will, and by extension Sorkin’s heart is in the right place. Of course we should all aspire for something better for ourselves in all the arenas of our lives. I’m just not sure what era Will is specifically talking about. He clearly looks up to the journalists of old. Is it unreasonable to assume that he’s talking about the era of Cronkite and Murrow? Because if so, we’re also talking about the era of racial segregation and Vietnam. Or maybe Sorkin is talking about the era he grew up in, where he saw such wonderful human advancements as the creation of indefinite poverty and mass incarceration. The inner cities became war zones and somewhere in a deep dark corner, Karl Rove and Lee Atwater were sharpening their fangs and feasting on virgin blood. So when Will says that “We fought for moral reasons. We passed laws, struck down laws, for moral reasons. We waged wars on poverty, not poor people” I don’t know what the fuck he’s talking about. Reagan?
Again, I agree with the sentiment. I just don’t agree with his premise or the nature in which this scene is presented, and I can’t help but notice that all this seems a little familiar to me. In the beginning of season two of The West Wing, after President Bartlett and Josh Lyman survive an assassination attempt by a group of white supremacists, the senior staff members find themselves on the verge of a complete nervous breakdown. One staff member, Toby Ziegler, basically wants to throw out the bill of rights and the constitution in order to hunt down not just the white supremacists that almost killed the people he loved, but all white supremacists everywhere. Eventually, however, he realizes that he would be trampling on everything he believes in, and as much as it may hurt sometimes, the same laws that enable the most hateful among us also enable the strongest.
There’s a part of me that thinks that during his tenure at The Newsroom, Sorkin somehow became Toby Ziegler, only instead of going to war with white supremacists, he was going to war with the internet and all the ugliness it’s brought to the forefront. It’s hard not to be sympathetic. At the end of the day, Sorkin is an idealist, and at his best he can be as inspiring as the men he seems to revere. I do believe Sorkin’s intentions were good when it came to The Newsroom. That doesn’t excuse treating your viewers like they’re stupid.
