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Posted: **Thu Mar 27, 2014 5:17 pm**

Gregory wrote:Sure, in public he was far more self-aware and usually able to put up a good front in the eyes of most voters before Watergate at least. But considering how secretive, ruthless, paranoid, and vindictive he was known to have been, and some of the things he seemed to sincerely believe both politically and personally, it's not hard for me to imagine that his mind would sometimes become like this at times when he was alone and his career had reached its lowest ebb. It's a fantasy, but a mostly believable one, at least for me.

See, this is my problem with the film- i never found it to be at all believable. It seemed to reduce a very complex character to a simple stereotype. The way he shuffled around, with his rambling mutters occasionally punctuated by a snorting laugh, reminded me more of Gollum than anything else. I could see a lot of political motivation for portraying him this way- making him an object of pity also serves to depower him, reminding us that he is on the way out and can't bother us anymore- but I couldn't see what this film was achieving artistically. The opening blurb (which I don't have onhand to quote) claims that this film is meant to explore and understand Nixon, but by reducing him to a strawman and suggesting that his presidency is the product of mental illness (or at least a troubled mind), I think Altman is evading Nixon as a character rather than understanding him.

I really liked some of the discussion questions, but I hadn't posted in this thread yet because I just don't have a very good answer to them. I'd like to think that this is meant to be something more than character assassination (by putting his worst attributes on center stage), but I haven't been able to see it that way.

Posted: **Thu Mar 27, 2014 6:06 pm**

I find the character of Nixon portrayed here to be very believable. Sure we pity him at times, but we also see him in many other ways and personally, I end up empathizing with Nixon. He appears as a recognizable human here with faults and virtues and all kinds of strange details that don't fit as either. It's hard for me to think that we weren't meant to empathize with this depiction of Nixon after learning so much of his personal history and seeing his mixture of emotions. The success of the film hinges on the portrayal of this character so it's understandable that it didn't work for you, jonz

Posted: **Thu Mar 27, 2014 6:07 pm**

jindianajonz wrote:The opening blurb (which I don't have onhand to quote) claims that this film is meant to explore and understand Nixon, but by reducing him to a strawman and suggesting that his presidency is the product of mental illness (or at least a troubled mind), I think Altman is evading Nixon as a character rather than understanding him.

I'll start out by saying that I can partially agree with what you're saying about Nixon ending up as a bit of a caricature. But I think that the worst things that happened during his presidency -- which were under the umbrellas of foreign policy and surveillance/destruction of domestic political organizations, not what he actually got in trouble for, Watergate, which was trivial in comparison IMO -- possibly did stem from his psychology in some ways. But that's too focused on a single person to be a real-world historical explanation, which is really wasn't meant to be. The choices in the film had more to do with theatre, character psychology, and performance rather than politics. The reasons why Altman, Hall, and the playwrights to some extent embellished and fictionalized the real Nixon because of what Arendt observed eloquently about the "banality of evil." So my answer to the first discussion question is, decidedly not.
I could understand someone who is defensive about a skewering of the actual Nixon probably having a hard time seeing this as good art.

jindianajonz wrote:I'd like to think that this is meant to be something more than character assassination (by putting his worst attributes on center stage), but I haven't been able to see it that way

In order to credibly speculate here that this was largely how Nixon really was when he was not in public or even alone in his thoughts, I'd have to get into a lot of the history of what the actual Nixon is known to have said and done, which is a huge topic and I don't want to stop talking about the film itself. Suffice it to say that he had already assassinated his own character long before Secret Honor came along. That doesn't mean that he had no morals or virtues at all, but those aren't the focus here: it's a look into the kind of psychology that would make someone behave so ruthlessly that he disgraces himself as a public figure. Again. I don't see it as something meant to be even-handed or "accurate."

Posted: **Thu Mar 27, 2014 6:08 pm**

Nixon's much more grounded and well-rounded (if no less ultimately angry and paranoid when it counts) in the Oliver Stone biopic, which presents a broader overview of his early life and experience in politics. But when it comes to explaining how it is that Watergate happened and drawing a line from the personal grievances that haunted Nixon all the way up to the ones that drive Fox News (especially Glenn Beck) and the Tea Party (especially Ted Cruz) today, Secret Honor's take seems pretty accurate. The paranoid style that Nixon embodied is still thriving. And I kind of feel like those of us who can't believe the Nixon of Secret Honor maybe don't have enough Facebook friends or red state relatives who post/email them political glurge.

Here's a link to the whole Richard Hofstader essay, which, even if you just take a quick look at the quotes on the Wikipedia page below couldn't be more relevant:

Richard Hofstader wrote:American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years, we have seen angry minds at work, mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But, behind this, I believe, there is a style of mind that is far from new, and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style, simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.

The paranoid spokesman, sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms — he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization... he does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated — if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration.

The enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman — sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He wills, indeed, he manufactures, the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced. The paranoid’s interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will. Very often, the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing); he has a special technique for seduction.

It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is, on many counts, the projection of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him. The enemy may be the cosmopolitan intellectual, but the paranoid will outdo him in the apparatus of scholarship, even of pedantry. Secret organizations, set up to combat secret organizations, give the same flattery. The Ku Klux Klan imitated Catholicism to the point of donning priestly vestments, developing an elaborate ritual and an equally elaborate hierarchy. The John Birch Society emulates Communist cells and quasi-secret operation through “front” groups, and preaches a ruthless prosecution of the ideological war along lines very similar to those it finds in the Communist enemy. Spokesmen of the various fundamentalist anti-Communist “crusades” openly express their admiration for the dedication and discipline the Communist cause calls forth.

Posted: **Thu Mar 27, 2014 6:47 pm**

Well, put it this way, warren- do you think Glenn Beck really believes that shit? Do you think he could ever become president if he does? Nixon had a hand in the HUAC trials (as mentioned in the movie, which as far as I can tell is actually pretty accurate in most of the biographical detail it gets into) but there's a reason that he profited from it and McCarthy had his career destroyed- Nixon was certainly fully as capable of being a showman (watch the Checkers speech sometime) but the man was smart, and knew what he was doing. The Southern Strategy literally changed politics forever, or at least the human forever (at least 100 years), and he won re-election by an unheard of margin while a war he had promised to get out of was getting uglier and uglier. He was unquestionable an example of the paranoid style in politics, and probably the finest example of it in the 20th century- and I think the movie is turning that on him, making him a locus for all the paranoia and madness that the 60s and 70s have come to represent, a conduit through which it all flows. It's like using Mickey Mouse or Superman for this kind of thing- sure it helps to know about them, but they're also stand-ins for America, and for a certain way of thinking about America.

Posted: **Thu Mar 27, 2014 7:03 pm**

matrixschmatrix wrote:Well, put it this way, warren- do you think Glenn Beck really believes that shit? Do you think he could ever become president if he does?

Yes and no, respectively. Ted Cruz is a little bit cannier and probably believes less of his own rhetoric, but still enough of the ideology behind it that the difference almost doesn't matter. I guess I just don't understand how Nixon's intelligence and political instincts are in any way negated by his ensnarement in the paranoid style. I mean, isn't that exactly what's so interesting about him as a historical figure and a dramatic character? That here was a smart guy who also sort of drank his own paranoid Kool-Aid, which of course, ended up undoing whatever gains he achieved via his smartness. I feel a Reductio ad Hitlerum coming on... Must resist, must resist.

Posted: **Thu Mar 27, 2014 7:11 pm**

Smart might not necessarily be the point, but canny is, and I think Nixon was both- I think he was pretty fully in control of his image and messaging up through the time that everything fell apart. Unlike Hitler, who from what I've heard and read really was a completely crazed, rabid little thing well before he gained any power (and magnified it with huge usage of amphetamines.)

I mean, the White House tapes and so forth show that Nixon clearly was a person with strange, strange ways of thinking- a combination of narcissistic obsession with his own legacy, paranoia, and stunning blind spots- and I think that does carry over fairly straightforwardly. I just don't think the movie is all that interested in what Nixon may or may not have been 'really' like, it's interested in playing with him as a character who belonged to the public by that point.

Posted: **Thu Mar 27, 2014 7:20 pm**

matrixschmatrix wrote:I just don't think the movie is all that interested in what Nixon may or may not have been 'really' like, it's interested in playing with him as a character who belonged to the public by that point.

I guess this is still where I'm confused about your take on the film. If the play is interested in playing with him as a character, how is the play's played with character different from the canny yet paranoid to the point of his own undoing politico that most of the rest of us read Secret Honor's and history's Nixon as? What's the point of this subtle distinction both for you and for the film/play?

Posted: **Thu Mar 27, 2014 7:20 pm**

Nixon is obviously a fascinating creature, and the discussion here giving context to a bit of the movie is good to read. At the same time, I don't mean to derail conversation, but I just don't feel like I saw the same movie. Nixon was made out to be not only a caricature, but a bumbling buffoon. The character we see starts out not only knowing that everyone's out to get him, but unable to get a coherent thought out. His character didn't seem to come off with coherent, full thoughts, and jumped around his own personal history, his own personal enemies, and I just couldn't get a hold of the rhyme or reason for it all. I was not and am not too concerned with the reality of the Nixon we see in the film, but he sure didn't come off like a fully-formed character to me. Just a crazed man at the end of his wits.

That's why this movie didn't do it for me, I guess. I understand, perhaps, what Altman was shooting for. But the ramblings of a crazy old fool didn't reveal any sort of soul to the performer, for me, no matter how black that soul may be (though it was eloquently portrayed).

Posted: **Thu Mar 27, 2014 7:27 pm**

matrixschmatrix wrote:I just don't think the movie is all that interested in what Nixon may or may not have been 'really' like, it's interested in playing with him as a character who belonged to the public by that point.

This is certainly an interesting way of looking at it, and if I ever watch the movie again, I want to try it with this idea in mind. But why would Altman preface the movie by saying it is an "effort to illuminate the character of President Nixon."?

And just so nobody has to go pulling out their discs, the full text of the opening is:

This work is a fictional meditation
concerning the character of and events
in the history of Richard M. Nixon, who
is impersonated in this film.
The dramatist's imagination has created
some fictional events in an effort
to illuminate the character of
President Nixon.
This film is not a work of history or
a historical recreation. It is a work of
fiction, using as a fictional character
a real person, President Richard M. Nixon--
in an attempt to understand.

Posted: **Thu Mar 27, 2014 7:32 pm**

jindianajonz wrote:This is certainly an interesting way of looking at it, and if I ever watch the movie again, I want to try it with this idea in mind. But why would Altman preface the movie by saying it is an "effort to illuminate the character of President Nixon."?

Right. That to me is the key point. Altman and the writer are stating their intention to use this fictionalized exaggeration to get at some truth about Nixon's character by envisioning him alone undergoing a kind of composite dark night of the soul (many individual components of which, from recent historical evidence, don't seem all that far-fetched.).

Posted: **Thu Mar 27, 2014 7:40 pm**

warren oates wrote:
jindianajonz wrote:Right. That to me is the key point. Altman and the writer are stating their intention to use this fictionalized exaggeration to get at some truth about Nixon's character by envisioning him alone undergoing a kind of composite dark night of the soul (many individual components of which, from recent historical evidence, don't seem all that far-fetched.).

I guess my hangups are coming from the idea that a "fictionalized exaggeration" can reveal truth about a character. Glenn Beck certainly offers a "fictionalized exaggeration" of Barack Obama, but I don't see how making a movie based on his views would give any insight into the actual Obama- if anything, it would only tell us more about Glenn Beck.

Posted: **Thu Mar 27, 2014 7:45 pm**

warren oates wrote:I guess this is still where I'm confused about your take on the film. If the play is interested in playing with him as a character, how is the play's played with character different from the canny yet paranoid to the point of his own undoing politico that most of the rest of us read Secret Honor's and history's Nixon as? What's the point of this subtle distinction both for you and for the film/play?

Well, to pull from the same quote jindiana used-

using as a fictional character
a real person, President Richard M. Nixon--
in an attempt to understand.

The Nixon in the film is fictional. He's not a real person, he's a deliberate extrapolation of the public persona of a real person into something wilder and stranger. It illuminates the character of 'Nixon', the myth, the man who is Watergate and Vietnam and the 70s, and America. One of the things I love about the movie is the way it harvests the real world and real people in creating it to create something wildly different- it reminds me of the way that Alan Moore uses other people's characters in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, heightening them until they're something totally other while simultaneously making you feel that in some ways, that is what they were really like all along.

To me, the character of Richard Nixon is a metonym for the character of America, and in illuminating that character, we have illuminated something that fascinates us enough to vote for it, over and over and over. It's not actually important that this is the real Richard Nixon, because nobody sees or votes for a real person, they vote for and talk about and feel angry or allied to an image.

Posted: **Thu Mar 27, 2014 8:13 pm**

matrixschmatrix wrote:To me, the character of Richard Nixon is a metonym for the character of America, and in illuminating that character, we have illuminated something that fascinates us enough to vote for it, over and over and over. It's not actually important that this is the realRichard Nixon[/i], because nobody sees or votes for a real person, they vote for and talk about and feel angry or allied to an image.

It's not that I disagree with this reading of the cultural history per se, just that I don't see what it has to do with the film and certainly not with the filmmakers' intentions. And you lost me with that Alan Moore analogy. A comic book based on a crossover of unrelated fictional characters is like one imagined night in the life of a real historical figure?

jindianajonz wrote:
warren oates wrote:Right. That to me is the key point. Altman and the writer are stating their intention to use this fictionalized exaggeration to get at some truth about Nixon's character by envisioning him alone undergoing a kind of composite dark night of the soul (many individual components of which, from recent historical evidence, don't seem all that far-fetched.).
I guess my hangups are coming from the idea that a "fictionalized exaggeration" can reveal truth about a character. Glenn Beck certainly offers a "fictionalized exaggeration" of Barack Obama, but I don't see how making a movie based on his views would give any insight into the actual Obama- if anything, it would only tell us more about Glenn Beck.

Sure, but that's the problem with your example. Beck's view of Obama is colored by the same paranoid style that obsessed Nixon and did him in. Secret Honor doesn't so much partake of that style itself as indulge it at a distance so as to illuminate the way it works.

If it's never possible to get to larger thematic or dramatic truths through "fictionalized exaggerations," if only what Werner Herzog calls "the accountant's truth" is fair game for storytelling (at least when real historical figures are involved), then by that reasoning every Roman à clef in the history of storytelling in all media would then become suspect. And it's only one step further to question the value of fiction in general. Of course, the sort of "tell all the truth, but tell it slant"* job of fiction is to do exactly what you're saying Secret Honor either shouldn't be able to do or doesn't do successfully in your view.

*yeah, I know I'm quoting a poet

Posted: **Thu Mar 27, 2014 8:31 pm**

warren oates wrote:
matrixschmatrix wrote:To me, the character of Richard Nixon is a metonym for the character of America, and in illuminating that character, we have illuminated something that fascinates us enough to vote for it, over and over and over. It's not actually important that this is the realRichard Nixon[/i], because nobody sees or votes for a real person, they vote for and talk about and feel angry or allied to an image.
It's not that I disagree with this reading of the cultural history per se, just that I don't see what it has to do with the film and certainly not with the filmmakers' intentions. And you lost me with that Alan Moore analogy. A comic book based on a crossover of unrelated fictional characters is like one imagined night in the life of a real historical figure?

Have you read the book? The way Moore uses the characters isn't simply to lump them in together- that would just be dull fanfiction- but to try and find some salient, core fact about what that character is and heighten it until he's created something almost totally different. His version of Jekyll and Hyde has a Hyde who is a Hulk-like beast, but who is the character's preferred aspect, and the more honest and honorable of the duality. His Mycroft Holmes is a totally heartless, calculating government agent, more or less indistinguishable from Moriarty when holding the same position. His Invisible Man is a sociopathic rapist and murderer. Those are all elements of the characters visible in the original works, but Moore brings them out and makes them central, so that the characters feel both totally different and more themselves than they ever were. That's what I'm saying the film does with Nixon- it's not the 'real' Nixon, but it's the secret Nixon, the hyperreal Nixon.

I suppose you could do a work like that with Beck's vision of Obama, but there isn't the interesting interplay between image and real figure that there is with Nixon there- Beck's Obama is a total fantasy, whereas Nixon seemed to be the image that grew up around him.

Posted: **Thu Mar 27, 2014 8:35 pm**

I'm enjoying reading this exchange between matrix and warren, but I just wanted to quickly return to a point raised earlier.

Superswede11 wrote:Altman's direction here is somewhat confusing to me. For the most part he doesn't do anything beyond passively watching Nixon, which works due to Hall's compulsively watchable performance. The times when Altman uses close ups or slow zooms of television screens, however, are distracting and don't add much. Any time spent away from directly looking at Nixon takes away from the intimacy we feel, ever so slightly.

I listened to the first 30 minutes or so of Altman's commentary and he explains the reasons behind the monitors. He said that he included them as a last minute addition primarily for the practical purpose of having something to cut away to. Also, I think he says at one point that the monitors "give distance" from Nixon. Of course, they also fit nicely for thematic reasons, as warren has already pointed out.

Another interesting bit I learned from the commentary was that Altman made this film as a class project while he was teaching at the University of Michigan, with students doing all the technical jobs and observing the entire production.

Posted: **Thu Mar 27, 2014 9:32 pm**

matrixschmatrix wrote:...so that the characters feel both totally different and more themselves than they ever were. That's what I'm saying the film does with Nixon- it's not the 'real' Nixon, but it's the secret Nixon, the hyperreal Nixon.

I don't think Secret Honor's Nixon is the hyperreal Vegas Nixon, whatever that would mean. I don't even think he's the Team America: World Police Nixon (had he been lucky enough to have appeared in the film).

This is all starting to remind me a little of Ron Rosenbaum's excellent Explaining Hitler, which is really a work of meta-historical theodicy and epistemology, couched as a readable volume of cultural analysis. Every chapter features a particularly vested interest whose ultimate view of all the other possible contributing causes of Hilter's rise and monstrous reign usually boils down to: "You can't explain Hitler that way, because then this part of the history gets downplayed." It's not a new idea, but one of the best explications yet of how Hitler is the ultimate Rorschach test.

What I'm hearing from you feels like a similar kind of either/or proposition: If the historical Nixon was, on some occasions, as crazed and paranoid as his character is throughout the whole of Secret Honor, then he: 1) couldn't have been that smart; 2) never would have been able to run for president; 3) must be a hyperreal confabulation (whatever that means and whomever it's presumed to serve).

matrixschmatrix wrote:I suppose you could do a work like that with Beck's vision of Obama, but there isn't the interesting interplay between image and real figure that there is with Nixon there- Beck's Obama is a total fantasy, whereas Nixon seemed to be the image that grew up around him.

Now I'm confused again. "Seemed to be" not "seemed to become"? Not even "turned out to be?"

A couple questions: 1) So there was only one single image -- monolithic and unchanging -- of Nixon from his entry onto the political scene right up to our present moment? And what was that image? (you can guess I don't think so) 2) How are the aspects of Nixon's evolving image that Secret Honor portrays fundamentally untrue to what we do know about him from the historical record? If they aren't, then what's the point of all the distinctions you're trying to make? Or to put it another way: So Secret Honor's a deliberate exaggeration of some very well documented aspects of Nixon's personality and his formerly private, latterly pubic and finally historical and cultural image, an exaggeration that rings of truth even if it never tells the whole truth of Nixon's life and his character (which even Oliver Stone's epic biopic doesn't claim to do)... So what? How does that make your reading of the film all that different from precisely what the writer and director say they intended? And how is that at all like Alan Moore's going to the dark side of the Ring of Gyges myth to out the Invisible Man as the public perv you suggest he always was implicitly/privately?

Posted: **Thu Mar 27, 2014 9:56 pm**

matrixschmatrix wrote:The Nixon in the film is fictional. He's not a real person, he's a deliberate extrapolation of the public persona of a real person into something wilder and stranger.

When you put it that way, I wonder how much this film influenced Roeg when he made Insignificance a year later...

Posted: **Thu Mar 27, 2014 10:08 pm**

I'm not really sure of what the writer or director say they intended the film to be, and I'm not really all that concerned. I think the Nixon we see is closely congruent to what the real Nixon appears to have been- it matches closely on biographical detail, and there are elements of his character that fit how Nixon presented himself- while simultaneously being something of a caricature, a cartoonish drunken madman who presumably could never have kept his shit together long enough to attain real power. Maybe that is what the real Nixon was secretly like, I don't know. I'm not all that worried about it.

What I'm saying is that, to my viewing, the movie takes the imagery and biography of Nixon to make a figure who represents something greater and more interesting, a Richard III and Hamlet for our time. Likewise, Alan Moore took the imagery and character details of famous fictional characters and made them something greater and more interesting.

I think Roeg's movie isn't a bad parallel, though I think its overall goals are very different.

Posted: **Thu Mar 27, 2014 10:53 pm**

matrixschmatrix wrote:I'm not really sure of what the writer or director say they intended the film to be, and I'm not really all that concerned.

Like their opening title card proclaims, the film for them is a fictional meditation, a deliberate fictional exaggeration that's nonetheless intended to illuminate the character and psychology of the historical President Nixon, not to become something wilder, stranger or more symbolic. (This isn't Angels In America, Young Mr. Lincoln or even Altman's own Buffalo Bill and the Indians.). Not sure why their clearly stated intentions wouldn't interest or concern you if you want to make claims about how the film is working.

matrixschmatrix wrote:What I'm saying is that, to my viewing, the movie takes the imagery and biography of Nixon to make a figure who represents something greater and more interesting, a Richard III and Hamlet for our time.

An intriguing analogy you've continued to make. But not one that I feel like I understand any better. How does the play/film do this exactly? Doesn't our proximity in time to the real events and everything the writer, director and audience (including later audiences like us who have access to even more of the released historical record) already know about the facts make it impossible to achieve or even attempt such a Shakespearean abstraction of the character? Secret Honor's Nixon might view his predicament with a kind of narcissist's sense of tragic grandeur, but where's the evidence that the filmmakers agree with him?

To me it still feels more like the the Nixon of Secret Honor is a pretty close sketch of him at his worst based on what was known at the time. One that, even with its intentionally heightened tone and darkly comic embellishments, actually feels even more true to his psychology today then it might have in 1984, when the play premiered. If you were to keep the dark exaggerated tone of the production script but replace the dialogue, collage-like, with excerpts from all those White House tapes released in the interim, you'd have a more historically precise work that wasn't all that different thematically or dramatically. Which is very much like what those drunken late night taping scenes in the Stone film feel like.

Posted: **Fri Mar 28, 2014 3:20 am**

Gregory wrote:
jindianajonz wrote:The opening blurb (which I don't have onhand to quote) claims that this film is meant to explore and understand Nixon, but by reducing him to a strawman and suggesting that his presidency is the product of mental illness (or at least a troubled mind), I think Altman is evading Nixon as a character rather than understanding him.
I'll start out by saying that I can partially agree with what you're saying about Nixon ending up as a bit of a caricature. But I think that the worst things that happened during his presidency -- which were under the umbrellas of foreign policy and surveillance/destruction of domestic political organizations, not what he actually got in trouble for, Watergate, which was trivial in comparison IMO -- possibly did stem from his psychology in some ways. But that's too focused on a single person to be a real-world historical explanation, which is really wasn't meant to be. The choices in the film had more to do with theatre, character psychology, and performance rather than politics.

I like this, and it sort of ties in with how I view the film. It would be reductive and simplistic to ascribe What's Wrong With America to the psychology of one man, but that could nevertheless provide a compelling dramatic premise, as it does here. In Secret Honor, I see Nixon as a metonym for America, and you could generalize a lot of the flaws that the character embodies to the government and body politic of America at the time (and, why not, later as well). From that perspective, it doesn't really matter one way or another if the film is an accurate reflection of Nixon's actual positions and personality. Exploring arrogance, vanity, paranoia and intemperance is hard if your protagonist is an entire nation, or its military-industrial complex, but concentrate all those qualities in one ranting bloke and hand the role over to a great actor and you've got yourself a play / film.

Posted: **Fri Mar 28, 2014 3:25 am**

Thanks, zedz, that's more or less what I've been trying to get at.

Posted: **Wed Mar 29, 2017 9:29 pm**

I have to add to the general amazement at how FAST this 90 minute film moves. It literally flies by, which is an incredible achievement, considering it's a one-man show.

Altman's direction here might be some of my favorite of his work. The camera blocking and staging within the relatively limited set is so incredibly well thought out, it's responsible for at least half of the flawless sense of pacing the film possesses that makes it seem to fly by.

Just an incredible little gem.

Also, the extras on filmstruck are quite impressive, but also bring the film down just a little bit. I get that people of the generation that made this film will never be able to let go of their hate of Nixon. I will never be able to let go of my hate of Bush or Trump, so I truly understand.

But I think by taking Nixon this far into cuckoo territory, the film diminishes itself (and him) a bit, because while it inherently does seem to capture his charisma (and he was a very persuasive charismatic politician in every single clip criterion includes), it also strips him of agency.

Nixon clearly got his hand caught in the cookie jar repeatedly, and he was better than almost anyone at smarming and charming his way out of it (until he wasn't). But I don't think he was ever so off the rails as he gets here. It's great as a work of art about Nixon, but as a work of art in many ways it actually reveals more about the filmmakers than it reveals about Nixon.

Posted: **Sun Apr 16, 2017 5:01 am**

I'm a big Altman fan and have seen probably 20 of his films but somehow not this one yet. How would those who have describe it in comparison to the rest of his work?

It seems like the kind of one-man-play/general theater-like aspect may set it apart, but I feel like even when Altman seemingly does something "totally different" or whatever it still bears a lot of similarity to other works of his. Even in the wintry Western tropes (though thoroughly subverted tropes) of McCabe, for example, one can kind of see how he'd make a film like 3 Women. Even his most "talky," least visual films exhibit a certain atmosphere, one which is present in virtually all Altman. E.g. Short Cuts isn't very conventional, but it ostensibly takes place in the banal everyday world and is about simply normal people in a more realist manner... and yet there's still hints and glimpses of the corner-of-your-eye surrealism, dreamlike haze, and shockingly improbable occurrences that's much more obviously present in 3 Women and Images. Or, perhaps another good example would be the way a certain suicide scene is shot in The Long Goodbye. Altman always found some sort of surreal in the "real."

Posted: **Sun Apr 16, 2017 7:51 am**

oh yeah wrote:I'm a big Altman fan and have seen probably 20 of his films but somehow not this one yet. How would those who have describe it in comparison to the rest of his work?

Well, there's a lot less overlapping dialogue.

I found it ... okay. It's about as good as a one-man show as a movie can be, in terms of performance, direction, etc. The script itself I found rather lacking, it's more a fever dream of an imagined Nixon than anything that seems an accurate portrayal. Unfortunately, it's rather difficult to separate the craft of its making from the script, as the script is rather dependent upon our knowledge of Nixon.

Stylistically, it's quite distinct from Altman's norm, largely because Altman's style is so devoted to the dynamics of groups, an option unavailable here.

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257 Secret Honor

Re: Secret Honor (Robert Altman, 1984)

Re: Secret Honor (Robert Altman, 1984)

Re: Secret Honor (Robert Altman, 1984)

Re: Secret Honor (Robert Altman, 1984)

Re: Secret Honor (Robert Altman, 1984)

Re: Secret Honor (Robert Altman, 1984)

Re: Secret Honor (Robert Altman, 1984)

Re: Secret Honor (Robert Altman, 1984)

Re: Secret Honor (Robert Altman, 1984)

Re: Secret Honor (Robert Altman, 1984)

Re: Secret Honor (Robert Altman, 1984)

Re: Secret Honor (Robert Altman, 1984)

Re: Secret Honor (Robert Altman, 1984)

Re: Secret Honor (Robert Altman, 1984)

Re: Secret Honor (Robert Altman, 1984)

Re: Secret Honor (Robert Altman, 1984)

Re: Secret Honor (Robert Altman, 1984)

Re: Secret Honor (Robert Altman, 1984)

Re: Secret Honor (Robert Altman, 1984)

Re: Secret Honor (Robert Altman, 1984)

Re: Secret Honor (Robert Altman, 1984)

Re: Secret Honor (Robert Altman, 1984)

Re: 257 Secret Honor

Re: 257 Secret Honor

Re: 257 Secret Honor