Gaslit (Miniseries Review)
Jun. 14th, 2022 04:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakGaslit
50 years since Watergate this month inevitably means a lot of new media. The miniseries Gaslit tackles the saga by focusing on some of the minor and major supporting cast, both those who didn‘t get any of the fictional (or other) spotlight before, like Frank Mills, the security guard at the Watergate who originally caught the burglars, or FBI Agent Mallaness who was part of the investigation, or John Dean’s wife Mo, and the ones those who are well known, like John Dean or John Mitchell. Above all, Martha Mitchell, superbly played by Julia Roberts, the first person to go public with accusing Nixon a year before anyone else did. Martha is part of the reason for the title, though I think it also works on another level, an unfortunately very timely one, given the current January 6th hearings.
The miniseries does have its flaws - it‘s not always evenly paced, for starters; the last but one episode, „The Year of the Rat“, spends way too much screen time on Gordon Liddy going from nuts to even more crazy at a point where everyone watching really has long sinced grasped just how crazy he is, and how disturbingly that nuttery is today far more mainstreamed in right wing parties. But overall, it‘s really well done, and manages to unite the black comedy narrative with the human cost narrative. The first time this hits you is in episode 2, when after the first episode basically did Nixon‘s Eleven (Dean‘s date Mo summarizes the general impression when saying re: the party Dean takes her to „everyone here is evil, I‘m having so much fun“), we see the aftermath of the bungled break-in and wiretapping mainly from Martha‘s pov, when she, who‘s been swanning around as a fast mouthed Republican society queen so far, wakes up in a California hotel to find herself essentially taken hostage by her husband‘s bodyguard so she won‘t talk to any reporters, and it gets increasingly more disturbing from there. (This was one of the things Martha later wasn‘t believed about until Watergate criminal McCord confirmed it in 1975.) Martha‘s horror and helplessness are played absolutely straight. Which doesn‘t mean the black comedy tone elsewhere ever goes away. In a way, it reminded me of Then Death of Stalin, which similarly goes for black comedy among dog-eats-dog powerstruggling politbureau and yet manages to get across the human horror at the same time.
Mid-series, the two FBI agents conducting their investigation (not knowing their boss has already been drafted by Team Nixon) conclude that they‘re not dealing with a couple of evil masterminds but with a bunch of morons. (They‘re not wrong; one of the officials they‘re visiting has a photograph of himself and Liddy on the wall even while denying ever having heard of him.) I was entertained but briefly wondered whether this wasn‘t providing the impression that their fall was inevitable and the situation hadn‘t really been dangerous for democracy. Spoiler: it doesn‘t. (One of the ways the show manages this is via John Dean, who pointedly isn‘t presented as the misguided Knight among the evil robbers but, while having the occasional glimmer of human decency early on (as when he‘s nice to the Mitchells‘ eleven years old daughter Marty who has fled from her parents‘ latest argument) but mostly is depicted as being as greedy for power and despite being clear on the fact everyone is breaking laws left, right and center as willing to continue as the rest. Dean‘s initial decision to testify against Nixon is presented as being all about saving his own neck, not due to a genuine sense of guilt, but unlike his fellow Nixonians, otoh he does come to realize his own guilt, and the long term damage everyone, including him, has done to the country, in the last two episodes. The show also isn‘t shy in contrasting John Dean‘s fate (just a few months in prison, intact, flourishing marriage, mostly admired for testifying) with Martha‘s (a destroyed life, vilified and belittled by many on both ends of the political spectrum), or for that matter that of one of the genuine good guys in the story, Frank Mills the (black) security guard, who first gets only a paltry two and a half dollars raise for his efforts and then gets fired for „attracting undue attention“. („Because, John, you‘re good looking“ Mo says when he wonders why he escaped with a slap on the wrist. She could have added “white” and “male”.) (And played by Dan Stevens, who as in Legion and I’m Your Man proves he was wasted on Downton Abbey. Gaslit’s version of John Dean demands great comic timing, the ability to come across as a not unredeemable asshole and a tricky mixture of shallowness and genuine emotion.)
The John (Dean)/Mo love affair and marriage gets paralleled and contrasted with the John (Mitchell)/Martha marriage, and not just in the sense that one is beginning and the other is ending on this show. In both cases, the women are presented as smarter, more genuine and tougher then the men; in both cases, the relationship as presented in the narrative (I wouldn’t presume to say anything about the real marriages, not knowing anything about them) is one where at different times we see verbal acid flow. Mo (an outstanding performance by Betty Gilpin; episode 6 belongs to her - well, to her and to Frank Mills’ cat Tuffy) at a critical point tells John she hated him at first, and the part of him she couldn’t stand then isn’t gone once she fell in love with him. The Mitchells are very much a 1970s trope Edward Albee would immediately have recognized, alcohol fired insults, sloppy kisses and all. The key difference isn’t the ability to be a team; the series shows that Martha very much enjoyed being a political wife in the past, and was a campaign asset. No, the difference is that John Dean is able to listen to Mo at the cost of his own ego and follows her advice, that in their case, loyalty is a two way road, while John Mitchell betrays Martha in increasingly unforgivable ways and thus damns himself on a personal level as well as through the corruption of the law.
Gaslit has of course a lot of nods to the most famous take on Watergate, All the Presidents’ Men, while pointedly avoiding making Woodward, Bernstein, their editor Ben Bradlee or Washington Post owner Katherine Graham characters. (The Washington Post itself perversely never gets shown when someone is reading a newspaper; they always read the New York Times. Is this the revenge for The Post (the movie)? You see the back of Bob Woodward’s 1970s cord jacket and blond hair at various points, and Mark Felt, who after his death was revealed to have been Deep Throat, lurks repeatedly in the FBI scenes. But the reporter Winnie who is actually a character in this series is a female writer who starts out as one of Martha’s press contacts and ends up as one of the very few friends she keeps; googling tells me she’s an amalgan of two female journalists, one of them Helen Thomas. There’s also a black female journalist, Janelle, in the Frank Mills subplot, but both of them work as chroniclers more than investigators. Since we’re mostly in the pov of the perpetrators of the crime, with the exception of the two FBI agents involved in the initial investigation, and because Gaslit while doing homage wants to be and succeeds in being its own thing, that’s not surprising. Then there are the brief hat tips and cameos, like one Hillary Rodham briefly showing up in a scene involving the young lawyers of the Watergate prosecution team, which are fun if you catch them, but you don’t have to to enjoy the story. And the more throat constricting types of foreshowing, like Gordon Liddy ending up with a Ronald Reagan poster in his cell with the headline “Make America Great Again!” (No idea whether Reagan used that slogan as well, but it was obviously meant as a pointer in two directions, or rather one, the continuous development of the Right in the US.)
Lastly, the music: mostly the 1970s stuff you’d expect. Despite the last but one episode spending way too much time on Liddy’s crazy, I have to say using Siegfried’s Tod from Wagner’s Götterdämmerung for Liddy’s breakdown cracked me up. (Just in case you’ve been missing out on the fact Liddy really means it with the Hitler worship in all the other episodes, they also let him sing the Horst Wessel song (in very bad German, it’s obvious the actor doesn’t speak it) when refusing to testify at court. Which is the kind of thing that’s so over the top it must be true.
All in all: a clever series with virtues outweighing the flaws. Not least because the cat gets a happy ending.
50 years since Watergate this month inevitably means a lot of new media. The miniseries Gaslit tackles the saga by focusing on some of the minor and major supporting cast, both those who didn‘t get any of the fictional (or other) spotlight before, like Frank Mills, the security guard at the Watergate who originally caught the burglars, or FBI Agent Mallaness who was part of the investigation, or John Dean’s wife Mo, and the ones those who are well known, like John Dean or John Mitchell. Above all, Martha Mitchell, superbly played by Julia Roberts, the first person to go public with accusing Nixon a year before anyone else did. Martha is part of the reason for the title, though I think it also works on another level, an unfortunately very timely one, given the current January 6th hearings.
The miniseries does have its flaws - it‘s not always evenly paced, for starters; the last but one episode, „The Year of the Rat“, spends way too much screen time on Gordon Liddy going from nuts to even more crazy at a point where everyone watching really has long sinced grasped just how crazy he is, and how disturbingly that nuttery is today far more mainstreamed in right wing parties. But overall, it‘s really well done, and manages to unite the black comedy narrative with the human cost narrative. The first time this hits you is in episode 2, when after the first episode basically did Nixon‘s Eleven (Dean‘s date Mo summarizes the general impression when saying re: the party Dean takes her to „everyone here is evil, I‘m having so much fun“), we see the aftermath of the bungled break-in and wiretapping mainly from Martha‘s pov, when she, who‘s been swanning around as a fast mouthed Republican society queen so far, wakes up in a California hotel to find herself essentially taken hostage by her husband‘s bodyguard so she won‘t talk to any reporters, and it gets increasingly more disturbing from there. (This was one of the things Martha later wasn‘t believed about until Watergate criminal McCord confirmed it in 1975.) Martha‘s horror and helplessness are played absolutely straight. Which doesn‘t mean the black comedy tone elsewhere ever goes away. In a way, it reminded me of Then Death of Stalin, which similarly goes for black comedy among dog-eats-dog powerstruggling politbureau and yet manages to get across the human horror at the same time.
Mid-series, the two FBI agents conducting their investigation (not knowing their boss has already been drafted by Team Nixon) conclude that they‘re not dealing with a couple of evil masterminds but with a bunch of morons. (They‘re not wrong; one of the officials they‘re visiting has a photograph of himself and Liddy on the wall even while denying ever having heard of him.) I was entertained but briefly wondered whether this wasn‘t providing the impression that their fall was inevitable and the situation hadn‘t really been dangerous for democracy. Spoiler: it doesn‘t. (One of the ways the show manages this is via John Dean, who pointedly isn‘t presented as the misguided Knight among the evil robbers but, while having the occasional glimmer of human decency early on (as when he‘s nice to the Mitchells‘ eleven years old daughter Marty who has fled from her parents‘ latest argument) but mostly is depicted as being as greedy for power and despite being clear on the fact everyone is breaking laws left, right and center as willing to continue as the rest. Dean‘s initial decision to testify against Nixon is presented as being all about saving his own neck, not due to a genuine sense of guilt, but unlike his fellow Nixonians, otoh he does come to realize his own guilt, and the long term damage everyone, including him, has done to the country, in the last two episodes. The show also isn‘t shy in contrasting John Dean‘s fate (just a few months in prison, intact, flourishing marriage, mostly admired for testifying) with Martha‘s (a destroyed life, vilified and belittled by many on both ends of the political spectrum), or for that matter that of one of the genuine good guys in the story, Frank Mills the (black) security guard, who first gets only a paltry two and a half dollars raise for his efforts and then gets fired for „attracting undue attention“. („Because, John, you‘re good looking“ Mo says when he wonders why he escaped with a slap on the wrist. She could have added “white” and “male”.) (And played by Dan Stevens, who as in Legion and I’m Your Man proves he was wasted on Downton Abbey. Gaslit’s version of John Dean demands great comic timing, the ability to come across as a not unredeemable asshole and a tricky mixture of shallowness and genuine emotion.)
The John (Dean)/Mo love affair and marriage gets paralleled and contrasted with the John (Mitchell)/Martha marriage, and not just in the sense that one is beginning and the other is ending on this show. In both cases, the women are presented as smarter, more genuine and tougher then the men; in both cases, the relationship as presented in the narrative (I wouldn’t presume to say anything about the real marriages, not knowing anything about them) is one where at different times we see verbal acid flow. Mo (an outstanding performance by Betty Gilpin; episode 6 belongs to her - well, to her and to Frank Mills’ cat Tuffy) at a critical point tells John she hated him at first, and the part of him she couldn’t stand then isn’t gone once she fell in love with him. The Mitchells are very much a 1970s trope Edward Albee would immediately have recognized, alcohol fired insults, sloppy kisses and all. The key difference isn’t the ability to be a team; the series shows that Martha very much enjoyed being a political wife in the past, and was a campaign asset. No, the difference is that John Dean is able to listen to Mo at the cost of his own ego and follows her advice, that in their case, loyalty is a two way road, while John Mitchell betrays Martha in increasingly unforgivable ways and thus damns himself on a personal level as well as through the corruption of the law.
Gaslit has of course a lot of nods to the most famous take on Watergate, All the Presidents’ Men, while pointedly avoiding making Woodward, Bernstein, their editor Ben Bradlee or Washington Post owner Katherine Graham characters. (The Washington Post itself perversely never gets shown when someone is reading a newspaper; they always read the New York Times. Is this the revenge for The Post (the movie)? You see the back of Bob Woodward’s 1970s cord jacket and blond hair at various points, and Mark Felt, who after his death was revealed to have been Deep Throat, lurks repeatedly in the FBI scenes. But the reporter Winnie who is actually a character in this series is a female writer who starts out as one of Martha’s press contacts and ends up as one of the very few friends she keeps; googling tells me she’s an amalgan of two female journalists, one of them Helen Thomas. There’s also a black female journalist, Janelle, in the Frank Mills subplot, but both of them work as chroniclers more than investigators. Since we’re mostly in the pov of the perpetrators of the crime, with the exception of the two FBI agents involved in the initial investigation, and because Gaslit while doing homage wants to be and succeeds in being its own thing, that’s not surprising. Then there are the brief hat tips and cameos, like one Hillary Rodham briefly showing up in a scene involving the young lawyers of the Watergate prosecution team, which are fun if you catch them, but you don’t have to to enjoy the story. And the more throat constricting types of foreshowing, like Gordon Liddy ending up with a Ronald Reagan poster in his cell with the headline “Make America Great Again!” (No idea whether Reagan used that slogan as well, but it was obviously meant as a pointer in two directions, or rather one, the continuous development of the Right in the US.)
Lastly, the music: mostly the 1970s stuff you’d expect. Despite the last but one episode spending way too much time on Liddy’s crazy, I have to say using Siegfried’s Tod from Wagner’s Götterdämmerung for Liddy’s breakdown cracked me up. (Just in case you’ve been missing out on the fact Liddy really means it with the Hitler worship in all the other episodes, they also let him sing the Horst Wessel song (in very bad German, it’s obvious the actor doesn’t speak it) when refusing to testify at court. Which is the kind of thing that’s so over the top it must be true.
All in all: a clever series with virtues outweighing the flaws. Not least because the cat gets a happy ending.
no subject
Date: 2022-06-14 07:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-06-15 01:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-06-15 12:26 am (UTC)He did. It was his big campaign slogan.
I’ve never been a huge fan of Julia Roberts, but this series sounds like it’s worth a look.
no subject
Date: 2022-06-15 01:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-06-15 01:07 pm (UTC)This sounds very much like Dean's own take on Dean then, per his book Blind Ambition, about which I wrote:
(N.B. I am taking my characterization here mainly from Dean’s own book Blind Ambition, which despite being an as-told-to is an impressively self-excoriating portrait of the author as a shallow young douchebag on the make, over-awed by the trappings of power and willing to kiss a lot of ass to get them. It’s one of those books that asks How Could I Have Been So Stupid?, but answers the question with Because I Was A Venal Little Asshole Trying To Ingratiate Myself With My Bosses, And While I Was Uncomfortable With Some Stuff I Was Able To Over-Ride My Qualms As Long As I Wasn’t Directly Liable.
In All The President’s Men, Bernstein describes his initial impression of Dean as “a WASP Sammy Glick who hadn’t even been very imaginative about the way he climbed to the top”, and at this point a) he’s not wrong and b) I’m not entirely sure Dean would disagree.)
Dean‘s initial decision to testify against Nixon is presented as being all about saving his own neck, not due to a genuine sense of guilt
I'd be slightly more generous and rate it as roughly 1/3 self-preservation, 1/3 vindictive fury at realizing Nixon was planning on making him the scapegoat, and about 1/3 some semblance of conscience (exact proportions of each open to dispute).
But yeah, the last element was definitely not the primary driver, at least to begin with.
This is what I actually find fascinating about Dean: the available evidence suggests that he started out as kind of a shitty person, who ended up doing the right thing for multiple not-very-noble reasons as well as a dash of conscience, stuck by it under fairly extreme stress, and seems to have ended up developing a sort of moral core that he did not start out with.
no subject
Date: 2022-06-15 01:12 pm (UTC)ETA: Again, Dan Stevens is great in the role. I think my favourite "quiet" moment - as in, it's just facial reaction on his part - is when Dean, already in prison and post initial testimony, listens to the tapes (including to his own voice), because that's the transition phase from mostly Looking Out For No.1 to becoming genuine.
no subject
Date: 2022-06-15 03:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-06-15 03:10 pm (UTC)