Retrospective: Good Night, and Good Luck (Patreon)

"Our battles aren't fought at the end of a parachute. They're won and lost in drab, dreary corridors."

The Sandbaggers

Sweat pours down the technical director's brow. The smoke of his Kent, crushed between his thumb and forefinger, fills the tiny control room. Behind him, a producer shouts out a series of double-digit numbers. The numbers something to the director. He cues a super and counts in the anchor.

He is making history. Not a soul will remember him.

Good Night, and Good Luck dwells in the drab, dreary corridors of CBS Studios in 1953, a space too small and claustrophobic for the triumphalism and bombast of most movies about the press. Edward R. Murrow isn't an immense personality paving the way to the future; he's one component of a team of pencil pushers, fact checkers, and technicians. Nor is he a shining beacon of justice against the iniquities of McCarthyism; Murrow fails to repudiate McCarthy's lies about Alger Hiss, and he doesn't touch William Randolph Hearst with a 20-foot pole. This isn't the story of the press saving democracy; it's a tale of people going to work under a shitty government and shitty bosses.

This is a Cold War thriller about the proxy war of words waged in the media between McCarthy and Murrow. Empires are rising: CBS, ABC, NBC. Murrow and company can't make a truthful broadcast without sponsors and executives breathing down their necks. The military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned against after strengthening has a chokehold on the press. Murrow does not win his most important war: the one against his industry, or against racism, or rampant corporate censorship. He merely got lucky in the history books, taking down the most prominent crackpot in Fifties' American politics.

Murrow and his colleagues are punished for that. Journalists doing their job is the worst thing CBS executives and sponsors could imagine. Good Night, and Good Luck doesn't show the press saving the day: it depicts a few people of integrity fighting for justice, and facing appalling retaliation for it. At the end of the day, Murrow still has to do his tedious little profiles of tedious little celebrities. Like all the best movies about journalism (All the President's Men or His Girl Friday), Good Night, and Good Luck shows the press not as a shibboleth but a tool; an ungainly weapon in a war of words. If we're lucky, that weapon will be used against the right people. If not, Rupert Murdoch can sleep peacefully.