Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/1100404
e article adds that "the crew also installed two rows of specially constructed card catalogs–more than 5 feet high and roughly 25 feet long but with only eight draw- ers that actually opened...," all to get the atmosphere right. 17 V. THE CAPITOL AS A HOUSE OF ILL REPUTE While that glorious Dome provides a cinematic short- hand for power and principle, as well as a hearty paean to democracy and representative government, when Hollywood looks inside the Capitol to depict its den- izens themselves, it inevitably finds fecklessness and prevarication. e dominant theme of movies featuring the U.S. Congress is that our congressional politics is a thoroughly corrupting process, an enterprise for villains. These are popular dramas, aer all, filtered through a popular sensibility and duly mirrored by a pliant Hol- lywood. is viewpoint has been oen heightened by the distance—physical and psychic—between L.A. and D.C., two singular outposts with vastly different mind- sets and mores. is overall surly view allows, even encourages, filmmakers and script writers, as audience surrogates, to feel superior to their political characters and to usually endow them with either whopping inept- ness or abundant cynicism. In reviewing products of commercial entertain- ment, any reasonable observer must realize that Holly- wood films are rarely realistic portrayals of our national politics. In his comprehensive study of U.S. political films, Reel Politics, professor Terry Christensen states that such movies "seldom point out fundamental defects in the system, and they rarely suggest that social prob- lems can be solved by collective or communal action. They simplify the complex problems of a complex society and solve them quickly and easily so we can have a happy ending." 18 e American popular movie hero is, above all, a worthy individual who acts alone, who goes against the grain, who challenges the corrupt organization—one guy versus e System. He must vanquish—not just disarm—his opponent, and he sees any compromise as unmanly. Yet, of course, compromise is the very life- blood of politics. Ergo: compromising politicians as a class are nothing but evil double-dealers, base betrayers of principle. us has show biz ever viewed—and con- demned—political biz. Further, popular art forms like the movies typically presuppose a pointed conflict that can be tidily resolved. is means that whole untidy—or unobserved—spheres of basic legislative activity, such as committee hearings and meetings, report writing, inter-agency actions, bu- reaucratic relationships, constituent services, the nit- ty-gritty of campaigns, inter alia, have been effectively absent from films. e whole legislative "process" itself, with its arcane language and fits-and-starts, is most dif- ficult to dramatize. Likewise, its committees, where vet- eran Hill watchers say the real business of Congress is conducted, have figured little in congressional cinema. 19 It has been noted that real committee work—"slow, complicated, and undramatic—makes unpromising material for fiction films." 20 One rare use of committees in Hollywood films is the sexy investigative hearing, like the built-in pugnaciousness of the 1950s House Com- mittee on Un-American Activities, or HUAC, which has been featured in films such as Big Jim McLain (1952), e Front (1976), Guilty by Suspicion (1991), and Trumbo (2015). Another is the testy Senate confirmation bat- tle, which appears periodically in films like Advise and Consent. Both these committees' subjects make the cut because they have built-in potential for human conflict. It really could not be otherwise. In reviewing Amer- ican motion picture history, writer/critic James Monaco reminds us that "the homogeneous factory system of the studios...most subtly reflected (or inspired) the sur- rounding political culture. Because Hollywood movies were mass-produced, they tended to reflect the sur- rounding culture—or, more accurately, the established myths of the culture—more precisely than did the work of strongly individual authors." 21 One long-standing premise of that culture deems much of our national politics as basically deceitful and politicians as barely redeemable. Such a dismissive outlook on politics, and espe- cially the Congress, is hardly new. A number of observ- ers have remarked that "Congress-bashing is almost as old as the Federal Government itself," 22 while historian James Sterling Young found that, even when our republic was new, Americans had "a culturally ingrained predis- position to view political power and politics as essen- tially evil." 23 More recently, political observers still note the Con- gress' performance ratings are oen very low. eir argument turns on the fact that "the legislative process is easy to dislike—it oen generates political posturing and grandstanding, it necessarily involves compromise, and it oen leaves broken promises in its trail. Also, THE CAPITOL DOME 12