One election I didn't expect be constantly thinking about was the 1968 contest between Richard Nixon and Humbert Humphrey.
The election first came into my head when I was watching The War at Home last week for my Audient Authentic series. The documentary retraces the history of Vietnam war protest in Madison, Wisconsin, but does have a brief bit about the Democratic National Convention in neighboring Chicago. I didn't choose it because I was interested in engaging with that infamous convention, which featured riots between police and protestors outside the convention, but rather, because it popped up as a documentary from the 1970s on Kanopy.
As I was watching it, I didn't think ahead to the fact that I was already scheduled to be watching another movie, all about that convention, in just the next few days. It was two days later, in fact, that Aaron Sorkin's The Trial of the Chicago 7 was released to Netflix. I wasn't planning to review it, leaving that assignment to one of my writers, but as it's a major film releasing this autumn from a major director, I did end up watching it on Sunday night. I was a bit disappointed, actually, giving it only three stars out of five --and inevitably contrasting it to the much more interesting Chicago 10, the Brett Morgen documentary from 2007, recreated from actual court transcript of that trial, and using the always engaging cinematic art of rotoscoping.
The trifecta was completed yesterday, when I took my birthday off work and went to the beach, taking advantage of our new ability to stray more than five kilometers from our house, as we steadily easy COVID restrictions. Totally unrelated to either of these two viewings, I was listening to a podcast about the history of Jane Fonda workout video on a favorite Skate podcast of mine, Decoder Ring, hosted by Willa Paskin. The premise of the show is to dig into pop culture phenomena -- such as the rise of the throw pillow, or the "Baby Shark" song -- and figure out how they came to be. In the course of discussing Fonda's workout video, Paskin also included some clips from her days as an activist, in which she was talking about the 1968 Democratic Convention. Unbeknownst to me, Fonda actually married Tom Hayden, one of the Chicago 7, played by Eddie Redmayne in Sorkin's movie. Again unbeknownst to me, the workout video was designed to pay for Fonda's political activism endeavors.
So all three of these came within a week, which I thought was strange enough to write about.
Two of my recent experiences of that convention were only coincidental, of course, but Sorkin has enough of an activist mentality himself that I think it's probably no surprise his movie is coming out just in time for the 2020 election. Then again, as I learned from the review my ReelGood critic wrote about it, the script for this movie was first commissioned back in 2007. So the fact that it's only coming out now was certainly not premeditated from the start, though this particular release date could have eventually been, and likely was, chosen on purpose.
There are similarities between 1968 and 2020, of course, but there are as many differences. While they were then protesting the loss of American lives in Vietnam, we are now protesting the loss of black lives to racism and police brutality and other American lives to COVID. Interestingly, though, they were protesting the failed policies of a Democratic president, while the Republican in the White House is the target of all our current ire.
It's interesting, however, how little we've progressed as a society since then, and maybe we've even gone backwards. In a famous occurrence depicted in Sorkin's film, Judge Julius Hoffman (played here by Frank Langella) bound and gagged Black Panther co-founder Bobby Seale (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) for his attempt to speak on his own behalf when his attorney was waylaid by emerency surgery. That act of horrible racism and ignorance, which was sadly typical for Hoffman, had justice served almost immediately when Seale's trial was declared a mistrial by Hoffman himself. (The film makes it sort of unclear why Hoffman, who was responsible for this gagging, was also responsible for declaring the mistrial -- one of the things I suspect is also explained better in Chicago 10.)
The justice that we can do for Blacks today is to vote Trump out of office in two weeks. Let's hope it happens. Until it does happen, though, I will probably continue to wake up in night sweats.
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