The Meaning of Recognition (6 page)

One last possible flaw could have been fatal if left unattended. When the insurrection of April 1943 is being planned, one of the younger characters, correctly told that the rebels will have no
chance, says that at least they will die with honour. No doubt pared back under the rigours of production, Ronald Harwood’s script is nevertheless a work of moral subtlety at the high level
we have come to expect from him on these subjects. Though crippled in the theatre by the extent of what it could not show but only say, his play about Furtwängler touched on every point that
mattered, and his script for
Operation Daybreak
, the film about Heydrich’s assassination, is one of the most considerable works in the genre. (If only the film had been as good as
the script: but Timothy Bottoms as a Czech commando gives you an idea of what
The Pianist
might have been like if it had been made under the Hollywood conditions that the self-exiled
Polanski is supposedly longing to return to. Think Brad Pitt with a prosthetic nose.) Harwood must have known that on this point about death with honour he was courting glibness. But the visible
action – and no doubt he was heavily engaged there too – protects the truth. Except as a gesture, the revolt fails terribly, giving us cause to remember that although the few combatants
did indeed die with honour, the many non-combatants who died previously did not do so with dishonour. The dishonour all belonged to their persecutors.

On this point, as so often when the Holocaust is in question, one of the main opponents of sanity is our own fantasy. In the wishful thinking that saps our thinking, we can’t help
wondering why all those obedient victims didn’t gang up at a given signal and fight back with their bare hands, as we would have. In our minds we have mighty powers, like Steven Seagal: our
hands are deadly weapons. But the hands of the murderers weren’t bare: they were holding rifles and machine pistols, and those really were deadly weapons. It is a tribute to the film, and a
service to historical truth, that the revolt in the Warsaw ghetto is kept in perspective. In Sobibor, the breakout was led by Russian soldiers who knew what they were doing. In the ghetto, the
insurgents were mainly untrained civilians. They took a heartening number of their tormentors with them, but that was it. The issue was already decided before the flame-throwers were brought in,
and the tanks soon had nothing left to shoot at. Hannah Arendt took account of the uprising in Sobibor but thought she was being realistic when she said that the place to resist was in the ghetto.
If only she had been right. It was too late even in the ghetto. It had been too late even before the Nazis came to power. It was too late when Hitler, still a long way from the Reichstag, preached
extermination and got away with it, because the police of the Weimar Republic were dissuaded from acting against him. From then on, the Jews of Germany and of all the countries that Hitler later
invaded had no chance of stopping what would happen to them, and the majority of the German people that voted against him had no chance of stopping it either. It was Chinatown.

Postscript

Before deciding to direct it himself, Stephen Spielberg offered
Schindler’s List
to Polanski. In press accounts, Polanski is usually reported to have turned the
job down because he believed that the lasting turbulence of his childhood memories would have affected his ability to work. Perhaps so, but another explanation might be that he didn’t want to
tell a story about the saved, when the real story was about the drowned. He might have been able to modify the script towards an even more intense realism of detail, while subtracting some of the
uplift that marks almost every Spielberg project no matter how dedicated to a sense of tragedy. (I say ‘almost’ because Spielberg showed, with
Band of Brothers
, that he could
seize the opportunity offered by a television series to steer clear of the hokum that marred its big-screen progenitor,
Saving Private Ryan
.) As a director, Polanski had always been able
to impose his bleak vision on producers who wanted something more cheerful. For the closing scene of
Chinatown
, even the writer, Robert Towne, wanted virtue to win out – a conclusion
that would have suited the studio. Polanski made sure that malevolence carried the day. But he would have been hard-pressed to do the same with
Schindler’s List
, which is essentially
a neo-Talmudic tale about a group of people being saved by a benevolent intervention: true to the facts, but misleadingly consoling about their context. (It should be said in haste that they were
Jewish intellectuals who first and most firmly pointed out that this new Talmud of divine interventions and miraculous escapes was a blasphemy against historical experience, and not just against
the scriptural tradition.) The story of
The Pianist
was about just one man being saved by a sheer fluke while everyone else was murdered. Here was a narrative much more congruent with
Polanski’s view, and he was able to bring all his unsentimental skill to making the most of it on screen.

In America, fans of
The West Wing
are called Wingnuts. There are about twenty million of them. British Wingnuts are fewer but even more dedicated, because in order to
view the programme when it goes to air, they first have to find it. Channel 4, perhaps to ward off accusations of abject subservience to American cultural imperialism, moves the programme
unpredictably around the schedules in order to keep the viewing figures as low as possible. The irony here is that the White House of
The West Wing
’s fictional President, Jed
Bartlet, and the White House of the actual President, George W. Bush, have little in common beyond their colour scheme and architecture. A different language is spoken in each. In
The West
Wing
version of the West Wing the frantically energetic inhabitants speak modern American English in its highest state of colloquial eloquence. Crafted in the Bush administration’s West
Wing, a holding area for somnambulists, any speech by the President sets a standard so low that Donald Rumsfeld is elevated to the oratorical status of Edmund Burke. When the Founding Fathers were
addressing the question of a national language, German and Hebrew were both considered. After they finally realized that the language in which they were discussing the matter was probably the best
candidate, English won by default. Bush and the rest of the boys make you wonder how it happened. How long does it take them to wish each other good morning? Condoleezza Rice, whose gift for
languages includes her own, must feel like an epidemiologist dealing with a mass outbreak of lock-jaw.

From that angle, the actual West Wing is a wildly improbable fiction. The fictional West Wing is realistic, but only in the sense of reminding you that realism is the most refined form of
manufactured drama. Just how refined, in this case, is best studied by viewing the episodes one after the other. To ease the frustration of waiting for Channel 4 to peel back the camouflage on the
latest instalment, the trainee Wingnut can purchase the whole of the first season on video or, even better, on DVD: twenty-two chapters of the story in a single glorious wodge. The second season
will shortly be forthcoming: I haven’t seen the DVDs yet, but I have been granted access to a set of time-coded tapes. So even as the third season intermittently unfolds on broadcast
television, I have been able to wallow in the forty-four chapters of the first two seasons with full benefit of replay. Sometimes I watch half a dozen episodes in an evening that stretches on into
the night, like Bayreuth with snappier music. Things that struck me as merely wonderful a couple of years ago are now revealed as miraculous. On a one-time basis, a typical episode is so absorbing,
and flies by at such a speed, that the viewer has no time to ask how it was put together. You don’t wonder how they did it. When you start seeing how they did it, you
really
wonder
how they did it.

To start with, there is the dialogue. Aaron Sorkin conceived the series and supervises every line of every episode, even when he does not compose its basic story. He has absorbed the whole
tradition of high-speed, counterpointed dialogue since it first emerged in 1930s screwball comedy and later on spread into drama in both the cinema and television. Before
The West Wing
, it
was not unknown for straight drama to be accelerated by comic timing: Sipowicz in
NYPD Blue
would never have talked that way if his writers had not grown up watching
Sergeant
Bilko
. But Sorkin has pushed the heritage to such a culmination that there is no possible further development except decadence. Even as it stands, the complexity of the exposition verges on
the incomprehensible, especially if you don’t know much about the American political system. (Since there aren’t all that many Americans who know about it either, in its homeland the
show is widely recommended by schoolteachers as a painless civics lesson.) Sometimes you have to wait for half an episode to find out that the two different sets of initials bandied about in the
first scene stand for a bill and a committee that will meet each other in the last. But usually a quick reference to the Second Amendment will be expanded later on by an argument about the
desirability of banning private guns, and the argument will be illustrated by somebody getting shot.

The otherwise all-inclusive talk has only one conspicuous absence: obscenity. In the film
Wag the Dog
, David Mamet’s enjoyable dialogue had the advantage that the characters were
allowed to swear.
The West Wing
makes you wonder whether that is much of an advantage at all. Unlike
The Sopranos
, which as an HBO cable product enables anybody in the cast to say
anything at all – try to imagine a sentence from Tony that doesn’t include a four-letter word –
The West Wing
is financed and first broadcast by the NBC network and
therefore rules out any swear word you can think of except ‘arse’, which scarcely sounds like a swear word at all when spelled and pronounced in the American way, as a perissodactyl
mammal of the horse family. (Here I attempt to echo the relentless pedantry of President Bartlet, an affliction from which President Bush is notably free.) When characters refer to each other or
themselves as being pissed, it doesn’t even mean they are drunk. It is merely the American way of saying they are pissed off with each other, which they frequently are, even if they are
pursuing the same objective. Usefully deprived of profanity as an easy shock effect, the vigour of the dialogue still depends on conflict, and thus further depends on an American cultural feature
strange to us.

*

In the British version of the English language, we will go out of our way to avoid verbal confrontation even with enemies. The American version thrives on verbal confrontation
even between friends. The people of
The West Wing
all adore each other, and you can tell by the way they find quarrel in a straw. The quarrel, however, is rarely a screaming match. When
fighting for advantage, they up the speed, not the volume. Toby Ziegler, the Chief of Communications who is most often caught between administration policies and his personal beliefs – this
is a Democrat administration, but one of the show’s binding themes concerns the distorting pressure of political realities on liberal principles – is allowed only the occasional
pop-eyed crescendo. When Josh Lyman, his deputy, raised his voice in the President’s private office, it was because of post-traumatic stress disorder. Somebody had shot him during what looked
like an armed attack on the President at the end of the first season. It also looked like the potential mass write-out that once climaxed a season of
Dynasty
so that the actors would
moderate their demands in the next salary round. (Joan Collins was placed at the bottom of the pile of bodies, for purposes of encouragement to her agent.) In fact, however,
The West Wing
near-massacre was an attempt by white supremacists to nail the President’s black personal assistant Charlie, who had enraged them by forming a miscegenetic alliance with the President’s
daughter. Enraged in his turn, Toby spent a whole episode looking for a gimmick to offset the drawbacks of the Second Amendment by finding a way around the First. He was on a personal quest to
subvert the Constitution, and had to be reminded that the document had been framed against exactly that impulse. Toby did quite a lot of yelling before his colleagues calmed him down to his usual
brooding mutter, but he never ceased to be articulate either way. Nobody ever does. Even the token Republicans can pack a page into a paragraph. There has never been dialogue like it, but little of
it can be quoted in the form of one-liners, because there are very few of them. The wit in
The West Wing
is a lot funnier than anything in
Cheers
,
Friends
,
Frasier
or for that matter
The Importance of Being Earnest
, but most of it comes up in the interchange between serious characters. Which brings us to another trump in the
show’s unbeatable hand: the acting.

With a few exceptions, the standard of acting is uniformly stratospheric, but even her colleagues agree on ranking Allison Janney as beyond praise. In the role of C. J. Cregg, the White House
press secretary, she is currently the most admired thespian in America. Before she was handed the script of
The West Wing
pilot, fans of Janney had to search her out in some pretty
off-trail movies, and when the movies were mainstream she was rarely in them for more than a few minutes. In
American Beauty
you could see her, briefly, being downtrodden. In
Drop Dead
Gorgeous
you could see her, briefly, being trailer-trash vulgar. You had to add up quite a lot of bit parts before you realized that she could do everything. Sorkin himself noticed her when
she fell downstairs in
Primary Colors
, having been scared into epilepsy by the wanton attentions of a presidential candidate more like Bill Clinton than Jed Bartlet. As C.J. she can give
it everything she’s got, and there seems to be no limit. C.J. is a six-foot clothes horse who happens to be divinely bright and funny. Surrounded by men who specialize in the sarcastic riff,
she can hold her own and often shoot them down over her shoulder while racing away from them with her elegant version of the show’s typical gait, that of an Olympic walker on the point of
being disqualified for breaking into a run. But she is more likely than they are to have the vapours in her office when something has gone wrong.