Who could have guessed that the 1991 Senate Judiciary Committee’s Clarence Thomas–Anita Hill hearings would set the tone for American political and television culture for years to come?
Those hearings became an embarrassing nationally televised spectacle, foreshadowing the O. J. Simpson trial, the Bill Clinton–Monica Lewinsky disgrace, and other degradations that exposed American social habits. The public has ever since regarded race, sex, and political power in tabloid terms.
The new HBO movie Confirmation can’t avoid those terms, since they have become the lingua franca of our political discourse. It begins promisingly, going back to the partisan rejection of President Reagan’s 1987 nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court, setting a pattern of shameless Democrat vs. Republican gamesmanship that still exists today. This leads to the fight against President George Herbert Walker Bush’s nomination of Thomas in 1991, typified by a clip from a TV interview of New York activist Flo Kennedy inciting her audience: “Kill him [Thomas] politically and kill Bush in the meantime.”
That repugnant vitriol, expressed through Flo Kennedy’s feminist indignation, is an undercurrent of Confirmation, which was scripted by Susannah Grant (who wrote Erin Brockovich) and directed by Rick Famuyiwa (hyped for last year’s Sundance hip-hop comedy Dope). Combining the agendas of feminist and black filmmakers does not guarantee objectivity. Beneath the main players in Confirmation, there’s a conspicuous subplot about the secondary echelon of female Beltway operatives, featuring Senator Biden’s assistant Carolyn Hart (Zoe Lister-Jones) and a Senate investigator, Ricki Seidman (Grace Gummer), whose simmering outrage over the outcome of the Thomas hearings announces the film’s true purpose as a referendum on gender equality. Yes, it’s stealthily PC (avoiding the heroics of Erin Brockovich and lacking the panache of a Costa-Gavras political thriller), but it’s still PC.
It’s also — essentially — television. A third subplot features clips of a roster of TV newscasters: Carole Simpson, Brit Hume, Tim Russert, Ted Koppel, Peter Jennings, Barbara Walters, Andrea Mitchell, Bob Schieffer, Dan Rather, David Brinkley, Tom Brokaw, and others — all seen in younger days — whose function is to regulate the film’s historical replay. (They never inquire who leaked Hill’s personal information.) These talking heads (including comic lawn jockey Chris Rock) aren’t just a Greek chorus; they’re like footnotes, implying accuracy and authority. Brokaw’s many appearances confer judgment on which of the hearings’ testimonies are “compelling” or have “credibility.”
Current political discourse loses true credibility through exactly this kind of prevarication; the acted-out and media-footnoted representation of history distorts the issues at hand. Grant and Famuyiwa give sentimental preference to Hill. Her statements, “I don’t want it to appear that I had a political agenda” and “I had to tell the truth. I could not keep silent,” do not pass for motivation. Grant and Famuyiwa, with their dependence on famous names and talking heads, prove incapable of achieving character depth, atmosphere, or intellectual nuance. Instead, this turning-point cultural event falls into the maw of TV sensationalism.
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Actress Kerry Washington, of television’s sleazy drama series Scandal, here mixes scandal with Scandal. She portrays law-school graduate Anita Hill. caught, like Dorothy, in the headlights of Oz as she steps naïvely before the predatory media and D.C. hacks. Ms. Washington’s participation in this retrospective political drama is loaded with cultural irony and political folly — as much as the Hill–Thomas hearings themselves, which “inspired” the highly rated Scandal. In that series, Washington plays a black crisis-management operative who conducts an adulterous affair with the white president of the United States (Tony Goldwyn). It is a warped fantasia on themes that originated with the Hill–Thomas hearings, stirring them up to fit a perverse sense of license that, at the peak of the Obama era (the series began in 2012) somehow celebrates the power position of a black woman in government.
Washington’s character, Olivia Pope (partly based on G. H. W. Bush’s black female press assistant, Judy Smith), is what hip-hop culture calls a “jump-off” and “a side-chick.” Olivia’s style is the opposite of Anita Hill’s demure deportment, and yet Washington, unfortunately, plays both with a wide-eyed stare that looks scared when she means to look serious.
Washington’s last name could as well be “Hollywood,” considering how her career combines D.C. and Malibu culture-war attitudes on race, gender, and political partisanship. Her black-actress “authenticity” status is conferred by the Hollywood establishment, and yet it never translates into believability (except for her role in Rodrigo Garcia’s profoundly moving pro-life film Mother and Child). The scene where Anita Hill prepares her bit-player parents for the coming catastrophe shows no experiential rapport; it’s as if the fake-noble, cornpone parents of 13 kids were unfamiliar with issues of sex, race, and politics.
America’s black professional class is alien to the mainstream media, which still cannot fathom black people beyond ghetto or celebrity stereotypes.
A similar inauthenticity occurs in the equal-time blandness of Clarence and Virginia Thomas’s interracial marriage (Wendell Pierce and Alison Wright). Confirmation hardly improves on its characters’ Nineties media iconography, except that these actors are relatively glamorous. The hearings’ key moment passes with little impact, although Thomas’s stoic, extraordinary proclamation is still strong enough to shrivel this TV-movie’s approach: “This is a circus. It’s a national disgrace. And from my standpoint as a black American, as far as I’m concerned, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas. And it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. — U.S. Senate, rather than hung from a tree.”
Thomas’s “high-tech lynching” is a major American turn of phrase, a great, prophetic concept that speaks more boldly to modern American race and media experience than anything James Baldwin or even Frederick Douglass could ever imagine. Confirmation indicts itself when an early scene attempts to pre-empt Thomas’s rhetorical masterstroke by having Hill whimper, “When someone comes forward, the victim tends to become the villain.” The same moral shell game occurs when Senator Ted Kennedy (Treat Williams) warns the committee to separate race from sex — even though, in this case, neither is ignorable.
#related#Confirmation doesn’t clarify the hearings sufficiently, because of tabloid-media oversimplification. (Jeffrey Wright, who plays Hill’s counsel, Charles Ogletree, might have been better cast as John Doggett, the black Texas businessman and Thomas defender — a Dickensian personality who lit up the hearings, but who is glimpsed only briefly in Confirmation.) America’s black professional class is alien to the mainstream media, which still cannot fathom black people beyond ghetto or celebrity stereotypes.
Grant and Famuyiwa cannot portray the D.C. culture that relegates blacks to EEOC appointments, nor can they even overcome the Hollywood culture that fails to imagine that the ways in which black male and female colleagues relate is similar to the ways in which white men and women relate. Both Thomas and Hill remain pawns in D.C. and Hollywood games of high-tech sleazing; that’s the only way their experiences are acknowledged.