Frost/Nixon and the Virtues of a Limited Perspective

“You know the first and greatest sin of the deception of television is that it simplifies; it diminishes great, complex ideas, trenches of time; whole careers become reduced to a single snapshot.” –Frost/Nixon

It’s a common truism that the new medium of television lost Richard Nixon the 1960 election against the more camera-savvy John F. Kennedy. However, any semi-thoughtful viewer of the movie Frost/Nixon might wonder whether this quote about the reductive power of the visual image is intended to apply to the film itself. After all, the movie takes a single series of televised interviews as its subject matter—interviews that were themselves a condensation of six years of Nixon’s presidency—and present them as a coherent narrative. Isn’t this the same sin of simplification that the line from Frost/Nixon refers to?

Yet, in contrast, after watching the seven episodes of HBO’s mammoth and awards-studded John Adams miniseries, I find myself longing for a little simplification to help me make sense of things. David has already written about John Adams and the question of fidelity to the “facts” of history, so I won’t belabor that point. Suffice it to say that, after eight and a half hours, I’ve been reminded of some historical facts I’d forgotten, but I feel no closer to understanding the character or motivation of the second president of the United States. Perhaps the miniseries is trying to portray Adams as a complex character, but to me, he just comes across as inconsistent. (I confess I’m hardly an unbiased viewer—my husband claims I hold 18th-century grudges, and I’ve always had a big one against Adams for the Alien and Sedition Acts. U.S. history class in high school was, for me, a challenge to find my favorite president. Every time a president committed what I considered an unforgivable sin, he was immediately and irrevocably removed from candidacy. The trail of rejected and disgraced presidents strewn in my wake was a sight to behold.) Granted, all of us human beings are fairly inconsistent, but I don’t feel that merely holding up a mirror to our inconsistencies deals with complexity in a meaningful way. Give me a narrative, or give me death.

Writer Peter Morgan, who, in addition to Frost/Nixon, has given us The Queen and The Last King of Scotland (and, unfortunately, The Other Boleyn Girl, which at least keeps me from thinking Morgan is perfect), manages to create political narratives that are intriguing and complex. Part of his skill lies in choosing an interesting angle from which to tell the story: instead of getting a head-on portrait of figures like Richard Nixon or Idi Amin (shudder), we see glimpses of them through the eyes of an outsider, a British talk show host or a Scottish physician. There are no pretensions to presenting an exhaustive account of these political celebrities.

Second, Morgan usually focuses his screenplay around a central conflict or tension: whether Queen Elizabeth should publicly mourn Princess Diana, whether David Frost can get ex-President Nixon to let down his guard about Watergate. These conflicts obviously don’t tell the whole story about ER II or Tricky Dick, but they don’t claim to. The story being told is about something else, like the effect of the media on American politics, or a sea-change in British identity. The Queen or the president is simply a way of getting at that other story.

Because Morgan’s narratives acknowledge—and even call attention to—their limited perspectives, they strike me as less reductive than the “biopic” approach. They also remind the viewer to exercise humility when taking the measure of another human life. Frost/Nixon doesn’t seek to pardon Nixon’s presidential crimes, nor does it render him entirely sympathetic—but it also doesn’t claim to present the entire story of Nixon the man. The limited narrative, I might venture to say, judges certain of Nixon’s actions, but it does not attempt to render judgment on the man himself.

John Adams, on the other hand, seems to be trying to render its subject more “human” by giving us the inside scoop on his family life. Sadly, Adams’s actions as a father seem to be about as misguided as those rotten Alien and Sedition Acts. Because the miniseries gives the impression of being comprehensive, it doesn’t leave us the option of reminding ourselves that there still is an “untold story,” that there’s more to this man’s life than anyone except God could possibly know. (It’s particularly hard to remember that there’s an untold story when the miniseries insists on TMI moments like Adams’s daughter’s un-anesthetized mastectomy.)

Lest I come across as a thoroughgoing postmodernist, I do believe that there is a God’s-eye view on the story of each human life—I just believe that view belongs to God alone. I’m thankful for forms of storytelling that remind me of my own partial knowledge, my own quickness to judge. I’m not likely to ever hold a positive view of either Nixon’s or Adams’s presidency, but at least I can acknowledge that there’s more to their stories than I know.