The Meaning of Recognition (7 page)

C.J.’s panic attacks are the sole concession to a sexual stereotype in a show that scarcely recognizes either the traditional differences between the sexes or, indeed, sex itself. By what
amounts to an evolutionary change, sex is sublimated into displays of verbal bravura. This has the effect of doubling the oomph when there is a temporary relapse into what might just conceivably be
a standard mating ritual. The scene when C.J. instructs Danny Concannon to kiss her is recognized among Wingnuts with an historic memory as the hottest thing since Bacall first blew smoke at
Bogart. Danny is the accredited White House correspondent of the
Washington Post
and he shouldn’t really be fooling with a professional enemy, but he can’t resist her. It is
very easy to believe. C.J. ranges between little emotional moments like that and grandstand virtuoso press conferences in which she parries the thrusts of her massed assailants with glittering
wisecracks.

Janney is going to end up with a decade’s worth of Emmys stuffed in her garage. Yet without this role she would have had the same kind of film career as, say, Paula Prentiss, who was the
best thing in a dozen movies that nobody remembered. Janney could never have been a bankable film star. Almost exactly twice as tall as Al Pacino and with a face radiating an uncomfortable degree
of nous, she just didn’t look right. With due allowance for gender and altitude, the same rule applies to most of her male colleagues. Playing Toby Ziegler, Richard Schiff can fully deploy an
uncanny knack for ensemble acting that was perfected through hard years of near neglect, including a stretch so far off Broadway that the adjective off-off hardly covers it. Like Janney he has
never been billed above a movie’s title or anywhere near it. But one of the strengths of the modern cinema in the US is the depth and strength of character acting that backs up the star
system. The character actors get less to say than the stars but what they get is better.
The West Wing
was Schiff’s chance to say better things at length. The DVD set of the first
season carries, among its additional features, a set of interviews with the actors. Janney says something we might have guessed: that most of C.J.’s more technical dialogue has to be
explained to her before she delivers it to us. Schiff says something we might not have guessed, but should take notice of: if he had stayed in movies he would never have had a chance to work like
this, because movies can’t do it – only an extended television series can. The same applies to Bradley Whitford, who plays Josh Lyman. Whitford is an attractive actor but not a leading
man for the big screen, which is well staffed with males who set the female audience dreaming just by the way they look. In
The West Wing
he can set them dreaming just by the way he
sounds.

Whether he set his secretary dreaming was an open question for at least thirty episodes. Finally the shine in Donna’s eyes became unmistakable. Donna, played by Janel Moloney, has a double
function: everything has to be explained to her, which makes her useful for purposes of exposition, but she also has a gift for asking the awkward question that stops the hot-shots in their tracks.
In Hollywood terms Moloney is
joli laide
at most and would probably have remained a cute oddity on the feature list until time rubbed her out. Here she is where she belongs, slowly melting
Josh’s heart and infallibly melting ours. The never-on but never-off relationship of Josh and Donna is either safe sex carried to absurdity or a love duet from the first act of
La
Bohème
, depending on your viewpoint. Judged by appearances, the currently ongoing dance between Sam Seaborn (Rob Lowe) and the in-house Republican Ainsley Hayes (Emily Proctor) is more
conventional, because they are both lookers: nothing
laide
about the
joli
in either case. Lowe, indeed, was in leading-man contention for the movies, but the movies would never
have given him such an extended opportunity to play it smart, and he is smart enough to know it. By now he must be blessing the unscheduled video appearance that made him available for
television.

This being
The West Wing
, Sam and Ainsley have not actually touched each other yet, but when they debate the finer points of educational funding you can tell that the pheremones are
flooding the air. The time seems long ago (as far back as the first few episodes, in fact) when the gorgeous Sam did anything so crass as to exploit the attractive power of his chiselled dialogue
by actually getting a woman into bed, and even then she had to be a law student. She was also a call girl, but she had come to the right place. In real life, Sam would have been hounded out of his
job. In
The West Wing
, his colleagues ribbed him out of countenance but finally ganged up with him to help protect his civil rights along with hers. All this was done as a sub-plot amid a
tangle of other plots, some of which are still working themselves out now. Sorkin is an expert at finding out what an actor can do and projecting it far into the future, sometimes shaping a whole
story line to accommodate the expansion. The younger actors accommodate best to this flexibility. The older ones are given a more predictable framework. I sometimes feel guilty at not being as
thrilled by Leo McGarry, the Chief of Staff, as I am by C.J., Toby, Josh and Sam. John Spencer has had a long career of sterling work at the edge of the limelight but he still tends to show the
emotion as well as having it. He has a lot of emotion to show: his wife left him, he was under investigation for his history of drink and drugs, and he had to take the rap for Bartlet’s
indecision in a period when the President was uncharacteristically thinking more about the opinion polls than his ideals. But Spencer shows the emotion by gritting his teeth even when the dialogue
is telling the story, so the words come out crushed. The same often applies to Bartlet himself. Here I risk heresy, because by now it is established wisdom that the adulation Martin Sheen has
aroused by his playing of this role would give him a real shot for office if he ever ran.

Of course it wouldn’t. Martin Sheen is a radical with opinions designed to get him arrested, not elected. But as an actor in the show he copes nobly with a challenge even more
uncomfortable than handcuffs: his role is the only one in the script that courts banality. Bartlet is the President as the irreproachable man of principle, and thus furthers a tradition that goes
back at least as far as Henry Fonda in
Fail-Safe.
(Gore Vidal, in his script for
The Best Man,
tried to subvert the tradition by making Fonda walk away from the job because a man
of principle would never do what it took to get it, but the
lèse-majesté
worked only once, and the film remains an oddity.) Having stuck himself with an impeccably guiltless
hero, Sorkin dreamed up Bartlet’s case of MS, so that the perfect gentle knight would have something to conceal. Wherever Wingnuts gather, there is debate about the wisdom of this
initiative. My own opinion is that Sorkin could have made Bartlet as devious as LBJ and still held the story together. Making him as crooked as Nixon would have been out of the question, and to
model him on Clinton would have involved one of the interns in several scenes where her dialogue went fatally silent. But sometimes when Bartlet is in the full spate of his integrity you
can’t help longing for a flaw – any flaw, except inarticulacy. Blessed with a total number of lines per episode exceeding his part in
Apocalypse Now
by an order of magnitude,
Sheen, while often overdoing it with the scornful focus of his eyeballs, generously helps his minions sustain the exalted level of the symposium. But if they all just sat there, the symposium would
look as if it had been devised by Plato. All those words would pile up in a heap if the people weren’t moving: which brings us to the direction.

The direction is mainly the work of Thomas Schlamme, who can be best praised by saying that he is Sorkin’s other half. The basic propulsion of the show’s coruscating visual impact is
the walk-and-talk, a device that the TV critics first started to notice in
ER
, whose techno-babbling medicos hurtled through the hospital at such a speed that the viewer feared there might
be further injuries to people already injured. Made possible by the Steadycam, the walk-and-talk allows a television show to compensate for the visual scope it concedes to a feature film, which can
afford big exteriors. Like a police procedural or a hospital soap opera,
The West Wing
is necessarily confined to interiors. The walk-and-talk turns the interiors into a speedway. Schlamme
is a master of the technique. Even the overhead lights are calculated for impetus. As the heads of the hurrying characters interrupt the lighting, a strobe effect needles the viewer’s
subconscious, adding to the adrenalin rush. It could be said that Schlamme has pushed a gimmick to absurdity: you sometimes wonder when the walking talkers, rounding the same partition for a second
time, will reach out for a bottle of water or a towel. But some of the show’s best scenes have been ordinary two-hand exchanges, and among the very best was Bartlet’s solo after his
den-mother secretary Mrs Landingham was written out in a car crash. Alone in the cathedral, Sheen cursed God in rousing terms (‘Have I displeased you, you feckless thug?’) before
winding up his imprecations with a passage of untranslated Latin, which the actor’s expressiveness made far more intelligible than President Bush’s untranslated English. Which brings us
back to where we began: the quality of the language.

The answer to the question of whether there will be a movie of
The West Wing
is that there already was. Sorkin wrote
The American President
, and the amount of his best writing
that had to be left out of it gave him the idea for a television series. Annette Bening is a superb handler of dialogue, but when you compare what she got to say in the movie with what Allison
Janney gets to say now you can see that a revolution is taking place. The standard three-act format of the feature film is starting to look restrictive.
Band of Brothers
had already proved
that a military series could do what
Saving Private Ryan
couldn’t: the movie brilliantly evoked a battle, but the series could explain a war. Politics needs more explaining than
anything, and there was already reason to believe that
Washington Behind Closed Doors
had left the movies behind. After
The West Wing
, political movies are close to nowhere. Why
make
Thirteen Days
as a film? Minus the exterior action, it would have done better as a series. The writing would have had room to flourish.

We are left with the consideration that America has got the writers, whereas nobody else has. Television impresarios like Sorkin and Steven Bochco might have taken the initiative away from the
Hollywood film studios, but this cultural civil war is all taking place in Los Angeles. The implications for the rest of us are daunting, if not dire. When it comes to actually speaking English,
America is now incontestably the centre of the English-speaking world. Britain, in particular, did itself suicidal damage when its broadcasting system was allowed to promote yob-speak as some kind
of regional accent. Already there is a generation of British actors who couldn’t pronounce
The West Wing
dialogue if they tried. The Australians would have a better chance: we might
murder the vowels, but at least we put the consonants in. American military imperialism is a phantom. There are severe limitations to what it can do with weapons: it can’t shoot John Pilger
for example, although many of the regimes that he considers less lethal would not hesitate. But American cultural imperialism is a fact. Working by assent, it was hard enough to resist when it was
exporting junk: American junk was always better than anybody else’s. Exporting quality, it looks and sounds unstoppable. Our best hope of fighting back is to make literacy fashionable. The
enemy is doing its best to help us. When I was young, American movies like
Rebel Without a Cause
were full of alienated teenagers with flick knives. The youngsters in
The West
Wing
flaunt their grades and hone their rhetoric. For the example to be effective however, our yoof would have to see the show, for which Channel 4 hasn’t run out of hiding places yet.
The pre-breakfast slot on any Friday with an odd-numbered date is still open.

TLS
, 4 April 2003

Postscript

After two more seasons, further conclusions. In the long run,
The West Wing
will probably be seen as a product of the Clinton era. President Bartlet is not a George W.
Bush who can talk – as unlikely a notion as a platypus that can fly – but a Bill Clinton whose sexual requirements are fully satisfied by marriage to Stockard Channing. Aaron Sorkin
could have made Bartlet promiscuous as well as clever and there would have been no great injury to his mental distinction, but the network would not have worn it. The important point is that
Bartlet’s intelligence, though plainly an idealized exaggeration, is not impossibly out of scale with Clinton’s. As Sidney Blumenthal’s bulky but civilized book
The Clinton
Years
reveals, Clinton’s real-life West Wing was alive with social concern and productive argument, and the man who energized the troops was Clinton himself. On the whole, the troops
were up to it. There was no C. J. Cregg, alas, and a Josh–Donna combo might have been hard to find, but there was an enviably creative buzz. There might have been even more of that if so much
time had not been consumed by the Whitewater investigation, which went on longer the more it became obvious that there was nothing to discover. On that theme, the malevolent Republican vigilantes
in the show add up to a study in simple realism. Sorkin is careful to offset them with the adorable presence of Ainsley Hayes, the Republican angel, but on the whole the sworn enemies of Bartlet
are a lot like the sworn enemies of the Clintons in real life: untiring promoters of manufactured scandals. That Clinton presented them with a real scandal remains one of the sad moments in recent
political history, although it should never be forgotten that Clinton’s private life, and Monica Lewinsky’s, would have remained private if it had not been for Linda Tripp, who was
activated (‘empowered’) by Kenneth Starr, the Special Prosecutor working on the Swiftian assumption that the President must be guilty of something or there would never have been a
committee to investigate him.