Frost/Nixon

Ron Howard's and Peter Morgan's Frost/Nixon, an adaptation of Morgan's play of the same name (complete with the original leads), can be interpreted as a kind of sequel--or prequel?--to Morgan's The Queen.  Like The Queen, Frost/Nixon examines the interface between politics, celebrity, and television, dwelling in particular on how the television medium lends itself to creating a seductive (or repulsive) image of reality for the audience.  As the title (with its bizarre overtones of that other famous theatrical abbreviation, Marat/Sade) suggests, however, Frost/Nixon pays as much attention to the business of making television as it does to the travails of those trapped in the camera's eye.  Moreover, unlike The Queen, which casts the monarch as an unwilling participant in a televisiual age, Frost/Nixon casts Nixon as a reasonably canny practitioner of the televised self-image, even though Nixon also remains aware, as he dryly comments to Frost, that his personality and physicality leave him at a disadvantage.  Instead of the monarch vs. the media, then, we have two media manipulators going at it--with the apparently superficial "performer," Frost, coming out on top.  Near the end of the climactic final interview, Nixon briefly looks down a camera lens as though it were a gun barrel.

The film splices together real news footage from the Watergate scandal, a mockumentary featuring the major behind-the-scenes players, and the main narrative leading up to and including the interviews.  Howard and Morgan thus confront the audience with three layers of cinematic/televisual history: the "reality," itself mediated through television, that takes on further authority from both famous journalists like Walter Cronkite and the appearance of the older television images (we're seeing something that is obviously "history"); the mocked-up documentary, in which actors playing real people establish that the Nixon interviews were an event; and the linear narrative about the making of the interviews themselves, which makes it clear that this is all about creating a good show.  (That, and money--Frost spends lots of time desperately raising funds, while Nixon wants as much cash as he can get.)   Frost, represented as having no interest in politics whatsoever, immediately thinks of global audience shares when he happens to catch Nixon exiting the White House; Nixon, though, is performing for the cameras as much as Frost is.  (In what may be Howard's clunkiest decision, Nixon seems to catch Frost's eye through the television screen, setting up the identification between the two that runs throughout the film and climaxes with Nixon's drunken, late-night telephone monologue.)  In a sense, by opening with fragmentary scenes from Nixon's televised resignation speech, Frost/Nixon begins where The Queen ends, with Nixon embracing the medium that the Queen longs to eschew.   Where The Queen showcases an implied historical transition, with the queen (under duress) abandoning older forms of monarchical "portraiture" for the televised image, Frost/Nixon suggests that this transition has already happened for all of its participants.  Nixon's regret is that he isn't suited for the cameras, not that he needs to live in front of them. 

In one of the final mockumentary scenes, James Reston (Sam Rockwell) notes that the real triumph of the interviews was not anything that Nixon said, but a close-up of Nixon's beleaguered face.  Perhaps one of the greatest ironies of this film is that this great triumph arguably cannot be seen in the actual interview, in which Nixon remains in control of himself.  Frost/Nixon effectively gives the audience what it want and did not actually get: a sentimentalized moment of despair and regret.   Given the overall narrative trajectory, which uses Frost's interest in getting a confession as a device for creating suspense, it's not surprising that the fictionalized film winds up rewriting the televised reality...since, after all, the film has been calling the nature of that reality into question from the beginning.