Looking past old and new taboos
The breezy Radical Wolfe is the documentary that’s the most fun this year, even though its subtext is quite serious. A short, 71-minute overview of the career of writer Tom Wolfe, it feels like a principled reminder of what journalism used to be, offering Wolfe’s originality, professionalism, and integrity.
Director Richard Dewey bases his approach on Michael Lewis’s 2015 Vanity Fair article “How Tom Wolfe Became . . . Tom Wolfe,” imitating what Wolfe ingeniously made seem like an easygoing style. (The Talking Heads track “I Zimbra,” faux-primitive art-rock, is always exciting to hear, but it makes for a misleading launch in the doc.) Dewey works best letting the excitement of Wolfe’s career rise speak for itself — his daring reportage should shame this era’s media mongrels.
Wolfe’s personalized style and onomatopoeic headlines belonged to the rule-breaking cultural upheaval of the 1960s yet also challenged it perfectly. Wolfe’s post-Yale, journeyman-journalist background — a kind of starting over at the bottom — differs from the Ivy League fast-tracking that turns today’s journos into snarky elitist partisans. Plus, Wolfe was “the most skillful writer in America,” Christopher Buckley observes. “He can do more things with words than anybody else.” What seemed casual and slangy actually displayed a shrewd, inspired vocabulary.
Lewis recalls when “newspapers did not have a distinctive voice [or reporters who] sounded unlike anybody else.” Gail Sheehy recounts, “There was no sense of style, everything had to be in the first paragraph: Who, What, Where, When, Why.” Well, that’s certainly over now. And not because Wolfe broke the rules. Instead, he brought reportorial integrity — curiosity — to whatever subject was at hand. That’s what’s missing from most so-called journalism.
“The truth is always revolutionary,” Wolfe said on William F. Buckley’s Firing Line. His vivid, inquisitive storytelling sharply contrasts with the rank advocacy that contaminates today’s Fake News. Wolfe’s heightened realism was born of necessity when writer’s block stalled his assignment to cover teenage race-car culture in California, and his apologetic memorandum (“typing at top speed for eight or nine hours”) turned into a classic Esquire essay: “Sex, power, motion, first thing you notice is the color . . . ” Editor Byron Dobell struck out the memo’s salutation, thus publishing “The Kandy-Kolored, Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.”
Dewey captures the mythic heroic-reporter’s brio that Lance Morrow was going for when recounting the classic newspaper movies in his nostalgic memoir The Noise of Typewriters. Wolfe, a Southerner from Richmond, Va., working in the North, found success at age 35 and sought all-American cultural truths. Lewis puts this in Millennial terms: “Drawing the attention of Blue America to Red America. He’s saying, ‘This is not just who we are, this is American, and I’m gonna show you what’s great about it.’” That describes the 1965 bootlegging-to-NASCAR story “The Last American Hero Is Junior Johnson. Yes!” as well as Wolfe’s most controversial piece, “Radical Chic” (1970), which simultaneously skewered Leonard Bernstein’s upper-class-white New York liberalism and the modish Black Panther revolutionaries.
An honest exposé such as “Radical Chic” is impossible in today’s craven journalism, when no reporter shows the honesty or courage to investigate Antifa or Black Lives Matter. Former Panther turned academic Jamal Joseph argues via cliché, “Consciousness was being raised around injustices that was happening in our society.” But Niall Ferguson notes, “Wolfe was unafraid to confront the great taboo of race.” Confrontation, with the instincts of an intrepid reporter and an outrageous stylist, became the hallmark of Wolfe’s The Right Stuff (about the Apollo space mission) and his first novel The Bonfire of the Vanities. Both culminated from “The New Journalism,” a term Wolfe coined for the genre he spearheaded, joined by Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, and Gay Talese, then later envied by a Mailer–John Updike–John Irving triumvirate. “Literary spats are fun,” Wolfe joked. “It makes you realize you’re alive in the morning,” he added, showing a cheeky attitude that some have called his “vendetta against intellectual Left.”
Radical Wolfe is enlivened by Dewey’s good selection of clips from the Right Stuff and Bonfire movies. Brian De Palma apologizes for Bonfire’s box-office flop (“I violated the text of the book”), yet Dewey’s selections are apposite, finding De Palma and Philip Kaufman true to the spirit of Wolfe’s social perception and artistic bravado.
Dewey stops there. Brief mention of Wolfe’s “fundamental prescience” covers his final books, written despite the failure of contemporary journalism to account for the world’s current condition — resisting tribalism, feminism, and socialism being the new taboo. Had Dewey’s appreciation gone further, he might have included Michael Bay’s terrific Pain and Gain, in which Wolfe’s last novel, the Miami-set Back to Blood, gets the vivacious film adaptation it deserves.