WashPost Film Critic Mourns Camelot Myth Led to Reality-TV President

December 10th, 2016 1:14 PM

Washington Post movie critic Ann Hornaday was clearly signaling the arrival of a Trump commentary in a Thursday piece headlined "Jackie, art and accuracy in a post-fact world." She's a fan of the film, but she was willing to admit that maybe all the mythmaking and celebrity-building around the Kennedys made President Trump possible.

Even so, she's consoled by the "halcyon legend" that Jackie Kennedy could summon a writer from Life magazine and just dictate to him (like a dictator) how the Kennedy legend should be established. That's a consoling and "quaint" concept, that liberal journalists could submit themselves as "news" butlers and maids to their leaders?

As unsettling as Jackie often is, it’s also a consoling portrait of a time that, especially in this political season, in some ways seems worthy of halcyon legend after all. A week after her husband’s murder, angered by historians and writers who are already challenging his accomplishments, Mrs. Kennedy summons a writer from Life magazine to the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port to advance her own version of the official narrative. Based on real-life journalist Theodore White, Billy Crudup’s unnamed author dutifully records Mrs. Kennedy’s dictation, ceding her full editorial control, including revealing erasures (“I don’t smoke,” she insists icily) and the Camelot comparison. As contentious as their conversation is at times, it now seems quaint that there was once as trusted and far-reaching a journalistic institution as Life for Mrs. Kennedy to use to connect with her public. Even the political transition to Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration, while certainly fraught, proceeds apace with admirable decorum and gravitas.

This is where you put that quizzical look on your face, that the same people who boiled over at the idea that the ee-vil Fox News Channel would serve as a soft-serve station for Bush/Cheney or Trump/Pence are consoled by the idea of the Kennedys creating a myth with an obsequious liberal media? Then she speculated about how the Kennedys led to the Trumps:

But planted within that fond look back are also the seeds of what was to come, seeds that the Kennedys themselves helped sow, wittingly or not, and that have now come into florid bloom. As figures who occupied the liminal space between politics and pop culture, they arguably presaged a time, 50 years later, when a reality-TV star could not just credibly run for president, but win.

Mrs. Kennedy’s invention and adroit deployment of the Camelot myth — which took firm hold despite some skeptical howls — looks relatively benign when juxtaposed with the fake news and outright falsehoods promulgated by the incoming administration, from President-elect Donald Trump’s unfounded claim that 3 million people voted illegally in November to a virulent hoax involving the Washington pizzeria Comet Ping Pong that resulted in an armed gunman entering the restaurant this past weekend.

Alarmists might suggest that our willingness to indulge artistic liberties on the big screen has inured us to the far more consequential distortions that now plague a “post-fact” culture. But there’s a crucial difference between creative license and lying.

We’ve now entered a mass-media space in which the most crucial frames have disappeared. The facts that filmmakers use as fodder for leaps of interpretive imagination are now being routinely warped (or, more commonly, disregarded) in service to the dark arts of demagoguery, with grave life-and-death stakes. When Washington Post reporters interviewed purveyors of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory this week, one of them lightheartedly compared it to the same kind of hobbyism practiced by assassination buffs who take JFK as gospel; another called his amateur Pizzagate investigation “a work of art.”

Does anyone else find it odd that the Post critics find "grave life-and-death stakes" in a confused man at a pizza parlor firing one shot that hurt no one, but never find that in an abortion clinic? And never conceive that their woolly-headedness about Islamic terrorism has "grave life-and-death stakes"?

Then Hornaday returned to the consoling idea of the halcyon days of liberal dominance in defining "consensus history," including Life magazine Kennedy mythology:

Of course, to really appreciate a work of art, one needs critical thinking skills — a value embodied in “Jackie” by the title character but one that has been cast aside over years of politicians and pundits fulminating against “historically inaccurate” films while willfully ignoring the growing importance of media literacy, especially in public schools. As Jackie reminds us, there might have been a time when Americans relied on consensus history, agreed-upon facts and shared notions of objective reality to acquit our participatory duties as informed citizens.

For a real-life look at Kennedy mythmaking in cahoots with Teddy White for Life, see the Daily Beast: "White was a respected journalist and the author of the best selling chronicle of the 1960 campaign, The Making of the President, 1960, that portrayed candidate Kennedy in an especially favorable light and his opponent (Richard Nixon) in a decidedly negative light."

If you're looking for media literacy to cast a skeptical eye on liberal "consensus history/facts/objective reality," then stick with NewsBusters.