The classic example of this theme was, of course, Peepli [Live], in which vanloads of predatory reporters arrive at a small village on the scent of the TRP-boosting “story” that a poor farmer has promised to kill himself. It was a portrayal of media both as an intrusive force in its own right and as a mirror in which a middle-class society built on “traditional values” could see its darker, more primal face.
But the template for the “ugly media” movie is Billy Wilder’s 1951 classic Ace in the Hole. Watching it again recently, I found it hard to believe it was six decades old – the story, about a personal tragedy being turned into a media carnival, is so ahead of its time that the film looks fresher and more relevant with each passing year.To some extent, that’s true of most of Wilder’s work. His best movies are driven by acerbic screenplays that poke holes into just about any aspect of modern life – or social institution – you can think of. But even by his standards, Ace in the Hole is unusually savage and bleak. There is no light at the end of the tunnel, no happy ending, no bending to Hollywood norms about a lead character finding redemption.
In a recent film, Michael Douglas reprised the role of Gordon Gekko, the cold-blooded Wall Street trader whom he first played in 1987. But few actors could portray single-minded, obsessive characters as well as Douglas’s father Kirk. In Ace in the Hole, the senior Douglas is Chuck Tatum, a down-on-his-luck reporter stranded in a small town, working for an uninspiring local paper called the Albuquerque Sun-Bulletin (its high-mindedness as well as general lack of imagination summed up by the depressingly earnest motto “Tell The Truth”). When a local tourist guide named Leo gets trapped inside an old mountain cave, Chuck realises he has a story that could help him get back to the top of his profession (read: back to the big newspapers in New York), and he milks it for all that it’s worth.
“I don’t make the news, I only report it,” Chuck says defensively at one point, but we see him manipulating events for his own benefit – even to the extent of coercing the rescue-operation chief to use an unnecessarily time-consuming method to save Leo. Some scenes are spine-chilling: during his first conversation with the trapped man, when Chuck discovers that the cave was an ancient Indian burial ground, his eyes gleam and become animated; you realise he’s less concerned with Leo’s plight than with the tantalizing headline of the next day’s paper.
Typically, Wilder fills the screenplay not just with brilliant lines that draw attention to themselves but sly asides as well (“We’re the press, we never pay!” grumbles a young photographer when asked to shell out 50 cents for admission). But watching Ace in the Hole, I was repeatedly reminded of Wilder’s great visual sense – something that is occasionally forgotten because he is seen primarily as a man of words. Consider the breathtaking overhead tracking shot that reveals dozens of cars and trailers recently arrived in what was once a deserted outpost. Or the scene where Chuck draws Leo’s manipulative wife towards him for a clinch by roughly grabbing her head (with the camera positioned behind her so that his giant fist nearly fills the screen) – it’s one of the most subversive variants I’ve seen on the classic Hollywood kiss.
But the most most striking images – and perhaps the abiding one – is a long shot of carnival debris being swept along by the wind, as Leo’s father wanders desolately about; the shot is almost a symbol for the grime that accumulates over the course of the movie. At the end, there's no one left to clean it up.
P.S. In a way, I think Ace in the Hole makes for an interesting companion piece to Sunset Boulevard, which Wilder made the year before – the visual and thematic similarities between the two movies should have any fan of the Auteur theory smacking his chops. For instance, both films begin with a man incapacitated by not having a working vehicle (or in danger of being deprived of his vehicle) – a situation that leads him to an isolated setting where he will feel trapped and creatively stymied. Without giving away specifics, both films, at key moments, have very artistically executed close-ups of a dead man seen from underneath, so that his face is almost looking down at the camera.
And of course, both stories, in different ways, are about the creation of the celebrity cult. For me, one of the most disturbing moments in Sunset Boulevard is the brief shot of the gossip columnist Hedda Hopper (playing herself) in the final scene, where Norma Desmond (former silent-screen star, now a delusional old woman) descends the staircase, imagining she is about to make a grand comeback. Hopper is shown teary-eyed as she watches the faded star, but one can hardly forget the role that her own pen played in creating, sustaining and then destroying the image of Norma Desmond.
[Two earlier posts on Wilder films: Stalag 17 and Some Like it Hot]
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