Satire now serves the high and mighty, contra Altman’s call for skepticism of the powerful in his 1992 classic, The Player.
Robert Altman once recommended C-SPAN for its real-time broadcast of public institutions and unfiltered behavior. It could match the unillusioned perspective of Altman’s own films, including the now 30-year-old classic The Player — an insider’s exposé of Hollywood’s moral and aesthetic rot. Livestream coverage of last weekend’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner suggested the D.C. version of The Player that we need but that contemporary Hollywood is unlikely to dare.
The anniversary of The Player and the outrageous duplicity of our media class at the WHCD together force the realization that we don’t have trustworthy media makers anymore.
Where’s Altman when we need him? Gone just like the last honest humanist filmmakers to observe the American experience — Jonathan Demme, even the crude Sidney Lumet. Power-worshipping prevaricators rule the field, as the soirée of Beltway grovelers and butt-kissers revealed.
In The Player, Altman used a murder-mystery plot (Tim Robbins as a bright-eyed, crafty studio executive who kills a pesky screenwriter and hides the deed amid industry skullduggery) to report on the vanity and treachery he had witnessed throughout his career. Keyed to indie-era Hollywood, just before Tarantino’s onslaught, The Player retaliated against the venality that was hidden by an era of formulaic Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Bruce Willis, and Julia Roberts hits and the media celebration (Vanity Fair, Premiere magazine, Entertainment Weekly) that made such degeneracy sacrosanct.
The Player’s casual cynicism — spoofing moral decay through a double high-concept, feel-good ending — gives its perverse fairy tale a gut punch. In the tradition of L.A.-based detective noir, Altman applied the skepticism once accorded to muckraking journalists and political satirists.
Now the mainstream media operate without satire in full service of the powerful elite so that The Player’s sardonic motto — “Movies! Now more than ever!” — is exceeded by the WHCD theme of “Celebrating the First Amendment.” That has to be a joke, you’d think. But in the absence of trustworthy media, the you-are-there quality of livestream, C-SPAN, fly-on-the-wall coverage is the closest we can get to Altman’s insider view (which he would expand to the Olympian observation in his magnum opus Short Cuts, from 1993).
While movies such as The Player and Short Cuts anticipated the common malaise of the millennium, those great, inquiring visions demand viewers with the ability to discern and interpret what they see and not just be passive onlookers. One of The Player’s most piercing jokes refers to an all-star benefit dinner that makes a junior studio exec feel humiliated “in front of hundreds of my closest friends.” She has internalized the delusion, fostered by the media, that plebes can share celebrity status. That’s why uncritical media coverage of the WHCD is at fault. Footage of the swarm of Beltway swells — cutting from Alejandro Mayorkas to Fat Joe, then Jennifer Griffin, or isolated Caitlyn Jenner looking around, just like lonely Jay Carney — veers into The Player territory but without Altman’s moral intelligence to inform the unguided tour.
Only the descriptive caricatures of Tom Wolfe’s “Masque of the Red Death” chapter in The Bonfire of the Vanities could do justice to the White House Correspondents’ Association’s shameless narcissism. (Altman’s dressing Cher in shocking red against the black-and-white gala theme was surely inspired by Wolfe.) One feels Player-level horror in realizing that, after Biden’s attack on free speech with his Homeland Security Disinformation Governance Board, these elites celebrate themselves for going along with it. This is the formerly ink-stained-wretch version of the Met Gala: Jen Psaki, hair pinned up rather than in her daily Bozo-red hanging do, and without her usual RBF scowl. She went glam for the press-room minions she intimidates on a daily basis, as if congratulating their fealty with not-quite chic. Nora O’Donnell wearing sparkling silver lamé followed Psaki’s mode, recalling the female Democrats who wore suffragette white at the 2017 State of the Union address.
Post-Altman media have left us stranded with the mainstream untrustworthy slant. The WHCD was largely sponsored and overseen by CBS News, with Steven Portnoy grinning throughout the proceedings (like back in the days when the Rhodes brothers coordinated the Obama White House and CBS News). So we are lost, as Thomas Jefferson warned when noting that he preferred having newspapers without a government to a government without newspapers. The Player is Altman’s most somber comedy, which becomes especially meaningful when it uncannily resembles the atmosphere of the WHCD — the grim pretense that a cutthroat industry and a despotic administration are normal. “Relax everybody; no one is being held accountable.”
As oblivious as Hollywood, D.C.’s players dine out on privilege, while the January 6 political prisoners languish without due process. This irony is too much for a complicit media to handle; it’s why Georgetown, one of last year’s best films, went unacknowledged by mainstream media, although it is the closest that contemporary Hollywood has come to bringing The Player’s skepticism to D.C. We desperately need Altman’s humane, hilarious cynicism — now more than ever.
