Primary Colors: beyond Willy [Bill Clinton]
105.2Abstract (summary)
As her name barely hides, the [Kathy Bates] character is beholden to the presidential hopeful, Governor Jack Stanton (John Travolta), and his wife [Susan Stanton] (Emma Thompson). [Libby Holden] identifies with the moon, a bleak, arid, dark and empty place illuminated only by the light and warmth that the Sun King governor and his spouse cast by their promised glory: "Without them, I'm dark and black and cold and dead and empty and airless for eternity." To suggest that this nourishment is reciprocal, we're twice reminded that a Southern governor wrote "You Are My Sunshine." In the clutch, however, the Stantons disappoint her. They decide to expose the human failings of their chief rival for the nomination, Fred Picker (Larry Hagman), despite Libby's arguments. When their light no longer consoles her, she gives up. Though she decides not to expose Stanton with the dirt she has on him, she can no longer pursue her false ideal. So she kills herself - somewhat restricting her political effectiveness. By the force of her character, it's not Stanton but Libby who is the film's tragic hero, and her tragic flaw is her idealism. She is Everyperson: a benighted soul whose life offers so little solace that she craves an impossibly ideal hero to follow. When the impossible ideal proves indeed impossible, she has nothing left. The earthy cowgirl turns out to be the film's highest dreamer. She crashes.
[Joe Klein] ended the novel with [Henry Burton] uncertain whether or not to remain in Stanton's camp. [Mike Nichols] shows Burton's unyielding detachment while Stanton tries his every charm to regain him. The film goes on to President Stanton's inaugural ball. It follows the president through a series of calibrated handshakes, concluding with the proud, beaming Burton, still in the fold. With this closure the viewer is led to adopt the principled Burton's embrace of the flawed Stanton. Nichols has Burton constructively abandon idealism. Whereas he left his earlier employer, a black congressman, because of that mentor's tendency to compromise, Burton learns the importance of getting the right things done and so stays with Stanton.
Stanton's power as a politician derives from his melding of opposites, his fertile ambivalence. He's an effective governor and an incorrigible lech. The warmth and openness of the latter feeds the former. When he visits the barbecue, he warmly embraces Fat Willie (Tommy Hollis) and his wife, but there is already a nervous edge to Willie's buxom 17-year-old daughter, who later threatens scandal. When Burton confronts Stanton in the public lavatory with Willie's story, Stanton is shown as a divided image, firm in the flesh but blurry in his mirror reflection. Although, as Libby points out, the fact that Stanton faked his blood test proves he thought he might be the father of the girl's baby, Susan stays focused on defusing the issue in the campaign. In that cold ambition she embodies the extreme form of placing platform ahead of personality. When Picker tells the TV interviewer about his first wife leaving him, the Stantons instinctively reach for each other, for assurance. But their devotion as lovers is subordinated to their commitment to their campaign. Before the need to advance their platform, norms of marital and political conduct recede.
In Mr Smith Goes to Washington, American Everyman Jimmy Stewart is astounded to find that his country's capitol is a warren of corruption and cynicism. Only through his sterling character is this true believer able to defy the "machine'" and single-handedly renew American democracy. Flash forward sixty years to the suspiciously familiar story of a charismatic young presidential hopeful with an errant libido. When Mr Travolta goes to Washington, he's an incorrigible sleaze, but a heroic sleaze nonetheless.
LIKE a business deal in Abe Lincoln's day, Primary Colors opens and closes on a handshake. In this film the business is politics. Both shakes unite a black hand and a white hand. Normally this shot would signify interracial brotherhood. But in this story's context, these framing shots are a reminder that we live in a state of holy ambivalence. Every issue is a mix of black and white.
Primary Colors is Mike Nichols' expert and resonant adaptation of Newsweek reporter Joe Klein's best-selling novel, a roman a clef published under "Anonymous." This satire against political dishonesty was written by a man who lied when he was asked if he'd written it. It depicts the presidential nomination campaign of a Southern governor of Clintonic character and proclivities. Familiar events and characters, such as a "Clearwater" business scandal and the hero's - Hillaryous? Roddammit? - wife, are presented slightly inflected, as through a funhouse glass darkly. When the real President Clinton was Tripped up by the Monica Lewinsky and Kathleen Willey allegations, the melodrama of his life threatened to leave this fiction in its dust, obsolete. But to the credit of screenwriter Elaine May and director Nichols, their work commands more lasting interest than a mere peekaboo at the current president's affairs.
The film affirms a human nature that is imperfect - sometimes sadly, sometimes charmingly, but inevitably imperfect. In this vision, it is naive and foolish to expect saintliness in politics or perfection in anyone. Like humanity after the Fall, politics pure and simple has become impure and complicated because life is like that, and people are like that. With this film, a realistic moral fog has finally dawned on Hollywood. As Hendrik Hertzberg argued in The New Yorker (23 March 1998), the film "is a definitive answer to the easy moral certainties of Hollywood films, a pap of ignorance, sentimentality, corniness and patriotic, populist naivete. " In the Klein-May-Nichols vision, wisdom and responsibility inhere in eschewing delusions of perfection to acknowledge the reality of moral and political life. An unrealistic idealism inevitably disappoints. Worse, it breeds cynicism and a self-destructive despair, as imaged in the suicide of the hero's fixer ("the Dustbuster"), Libby Holden (played by Kathy Bates).
As her name barely hides, the Bates character is beholden to the presidential hopeful, Governor Jack Stanton (John Travolta), and his wife Susan (Emma Thompson). Libby Holden identifies with the moon, a bleak, arid, dark and empty place illuminated only by the light and warmth that the Sun King governor and his spouse cast by their promised glory: "Without them, I'm dark and black and cold and dead and empty and airless for eternity." To suggest that this nourishment is reciprocal, we're twice reminded that a Southern governor wrote "You Are My Sunshine." In the clutch, however, the Stantons disappoint her. They decide to expose the human failings of their chief rival for the nomination, Fred Picker (Larry Hagman), despite Libby's arguments. When their light no longer consoles her, she gives up. Though she decides not to expose Stanton with the dirt she has on him, she can no longer pursue her false ideal. So she kills herself - somewhat restricting her political effectiveness. By the force of her character, it's not Stanton but Libby who is the film's tragic hero, and her tragic flaw is her idealism. She is Everyperson: a benighted soul whose life offers so little solace that she craves an impossibly ideal hero to follow. When the impossible ideal proves indeed impossible, she has nothing left. The earthy cowgirl turns out to be the film's highest dreamer. She crashes.
IN contrast, Henry Burton (Adrian Lester), a young black teacher, survives both seduction by the Stantons' image and disillusionment by their reality. He remains in their camp because the compromised Stanton still holds more promise than do any alternative candidates. For all his loose libido and dimpled duplicity, at least Stanton has the more humane platform. So long as the flawed man serves the preferable policy, Burton learns to tolerate the personal shortcomings.
In the film as in the book, Burton is our representative in the action. He narrates the novel. In the film, too, we learn as he learns. As the grandson of a Martin Luther King figure, Burton represents a tradition of idealistic reform in American politics. His youthfulness represents the next generation of political commitment. The film's Burton rings three telling changes on the book. His first girlfriend is changed from a woman of undeclared colour who works for Ralph Nader to a black journalist, March Cunningham (Rebecca Walker). As a writer for the radical Black Advocate, she subsumes the novel's Jesse Jackson figure, Luther Charles. Like the framing handshake shots, this change in the lover emphasizes Henry Burton's movement beyond racial politics.
To emphasize Burton's signification of a political decision, the film omits the personal life the novel gave him: his white mother and stepfather, scenes with his parents, the revelation that Doc Hastings is Burton's natural father, and the complications, loss, and recovery of his later passion, colleague Daisy (Maura Tierney). Instead of the one-night stand with Susan Stanton (a scene that was filmed but cut after a preview), Nichols's Burton comforts her as she weeps over a babysitter's claim that she is carrying Jack's baby. Sans love story, family, and sexual engagement with the Stantons, the film makes Burton embody the choice that must be made between an effective pragmatism and an ineffectual purism. Isn't that what we mean when we say "the public must supersede the personal"?
Klein ended the novel with Burton uncertain whether or not to remain in Stanton's camp. Nichols shows Burton's unyielding detachment while Stanton tries his every charm to regain him. The film goes on to President Stanton's inaugural ball. It follows the president through a series of calibrated handshakes, concluding with the proud, beaming Burton, still in the fold. With this closure the viewer is led to adopt the principled Burton's embrace of the flawed Stanton. Nichols has Burton constructively abandon idealism. Whereas he left his earlier employer, a black congressman, because of that mentor's tendency to compromise, Burton learns the importance of getting the right things done and so stays with Stanton.
To some extent the film can be read as the Hollywood left's support of Bill Clinton in the face of the squalid stories of his private bent (and vice versa) and his suspect assignations and possible perjuries and obstructions of justice. Given the Nichols-May career as leftish intellectual wits, and with Rob Reiner playing a Jewish radio phone-in host ("Schmooze with Jews"), the film could pass for a liberal rebuttal to the anti-Clinton campaign of Ken Starr and Jerry Falwell.
The film celebrates emotional generosity and the vulnerability of the sensitive simply by casting John Travolta as the Tennessee governor who can't govern his zipper. The right-wing version would have cast, say, Larry Hagman as Jack Stanton, his every moral pretence thereby undercut by his aura of venal self-interest; perhaps it would have had Travolta as the two-time loser who's too damn "soft" - i.e., impotent - for a man's hardball politics. That's how we're used to reading those faces. Instead Nichols cast Hagman as former governor Fred Picker, the well-meaning rival whose past indulgences force his withdrawal. Both Travolta and Hagman have firmly established personae, Travolta as a sensitive man capable of resurrecting his career and even his life (Michael, Pulp Fiction), and Hagman ever trailing oily clouds of Dallas. Hagman's Picker seems more calculating than the book's when he launches a blood drive for a stricken candidate and, unlike the book's character, doesn't publicly confess to the cocaine in his past. Both in their performances and in the signification of their continuing personae, Travolta and Hagman provide political antitheses.
Travolta's casting even defends against the Clintonian charge of obstructing justice. Stanton uses a blood sample from his "Uncle" Charlie (J.C. Quinn) to beat a paternity rap. This is an extension of his mythopoetic earlier appropriation of Charlie's life story for sentimental effect. But we're used to forgiving John Travolta characters their delinquencies - from Welcome Back Kotter to the refried Grease. With his boyish smile, soft voice, and melting eyes, the lad dances along Teflon. Here his off-white lies serve heroic causes, like adult literacy and the liberal platform.
BUT accepting Stanton means more than supporting Slick Willy. Nichols always aspires to poetry, not history. The film argues that we have to accept leaders who may well be severely flawed human beings. As generations of dangerous demagogues have taught us, we can't afford stars in our eyes when we choose our heroes. We have to outgrow the politics of personality and focus on their platforms - then hope they will too. If we wait for a saint, our best agendas will remain unserved. Worse, we'll throw our weight behind the imperfection that has the best camouflage, perhaps to even worse effect.
The film acknowledges that politics is a sexual business. It takes energy and charisma - that special "jelly" - to win the campaign for the public heart. That's sexual. Kennedy had it; Nixon didn't; Carter pretended he had it in his heart; Bush couldn't; and Johnson had so much it curled back and shafted him. In the film, New York Governor Ozio regularly toys with the notion of running for the presidency, but the question is: does he "have the cojones" to stick it out? When the news breaks that Cashmere McLeod is in possession of incriminating tapes, we also learn that Henry is sleeping with Daisy and Libby is having an affair with her female assistant. This montage reveals the sexuality of campaigning.
When long-legged librarian Marianne Walsh (Allison Janney) literally falls for Stanton, it's not just sexual politics but political sex when he follows through to firm up their agreement. On the level of marital relations and professional discipline, Governor Stanton is inexcusable when he couches the librarian. But his personal weakness must be weighed against the importance of his espousing her cause, the challenge of adult literacy, and persuading her to bring the teachers' union onside. Whatever the balance in their respective pleasure, the political success of their sex is mutual.
Stanton uses his sexuality the way Burton's previous boss used his "Lulus," the "artificial sweeteners" with which he would buy votes - only to have his initiatives vetoed. People don't vote for what's right, Burton complains, but according to what they will get for their votes. Of course, Burton would prefer a more innocent president - but given his society's system of government, what actually works? So Burton ultimately determines to forgive the personal weakness in order to support the policy.
This pragmatism pervades the film. The grizzled redneck version of James Carville, fixer Richard Jemmons (Billy Bob Thornton), commits an act of jaw-dropping sexual harassment but remains at the heart of the Stantons' campaign - his central virtue is his unerring political instinct. Burton's first girlfriend, March (whose name evokes the civil rights movement of Henry's grandfather), leaves him because she's appalled that he even considers joining Stanton. Political issues are more important than the personal. In this sense, Nichols seems to have caught the pulse of the nation. As the polls surprisingly reveal, President Clinton's popularity seemed to rise with the pile of scandalous allegations. More than the mavens and the nattering nabobs of Republican negativism might like to admit, the general public discriminates wisely between the man's private follies and the president's public responsibilities.
As Nichols reminds us, politics is very much the art of the possible. In earlier days, the young Stanton has instructed Libby that "We don't do this sort of thing ... Our job is to make it clean because if it's clean we win. Because we have the better ideas." But later, the Stantons are faced with the opportunity to knock Picker out of the race by revealing unsavoury details about his past. Libby refuses to hurt the "flawed but decent man." But for the Stantons, now perched at the brink of power, the stakes are too high for the old principle. If they fail to prevent Picker's nomination, their party will suffer from his likely exposure by the Republicans. With the dirt on Picker, and only Picker obstructing the Stantons' path to the presidency, the Stantons don't hesitate. For Susan, the only issue is whether to leak the news to the New York Times or Wall Street Journal. They flunk Libby's test.
THIS film would have us believe that politics is deals and compromises and spying and cover-ups. Its characteristic camera shots are the long shot and the zoom-in. The former contextualizes a small movement as part of a larger design - such as the contrary billows of red (Picker) and blue (Stanton) balloons; the zooms work to reveal the media-driven nature of the political dance - the morphology of Stanton's handshakes, the circling of the paparazzi lens as it moves in on vulnerable celebrity prey. In a reverse strategy, the promised intimacy of the Stantons' Thanksgiving opens on a closeup of the family behind a roast turkey. The camera draws back to reveal a battalion of roast turkeys and a mob of the Stantons' friends. We only meet Governor Stanton's mother when she leads the sunny singalong, not in any family intimacy.
Our most fruitful spying is upon Emma Thompson's Susan. Her performance provides an intriguing exploration of the limbo between the personal and the political. We constantly have to pick her out from the group shots to read her mixed emotions and controlled awareness. When we spy on her, we get the most complex humanity in the film (though Kathy Bates as Libby has the most crucial speeches). Susan is introduced on the phone after the (mutual?) seduction of Stanton and the librarian. That is, we learn of Susan's - thwarted - moral force before we see her. With Burton, we first see her at the airport, scolding Stanton for missing an important meeting.
When Ozio's son apologizes for talking business over the barbecue, she feigns naivete: "How else will I learn?" The rather poignant irony is that she has to feed the man's assumption that as a woman she is outside her husband's political life. Of course, her every scene -including her covering for him anent the ambiguous "fly fishing" -establishes her centrality. Susan Stanton is as pivotal as Hillary. On TV with her husband to face the adultery rumours, she grips his hand warmly when she attests to his sticking power. But when the camera's red light goes off, her hand darts away as if burned. When the campaign team celebrates the exposure of Cashmere McLeod's fake tapes, Susan stays apart from Stanton until the end of the scene, when she returns his embrace. It's as if she needs the others' emotional momentum to re-accept him. At the revelation that Stanton faked his blood-sample for the paternity test, Susan seems to fly out of the frame. This sudden escape prevents any expression of a single emotion and enacts her revulsion. She returns to our sight only after she has recovered her resolve to support him.
Earlier, while the team in the background reacts to Cashmere's TV appearance, Susan stands in the right fore, surmounting her doubt and collecting the conviction to spin around and reaffirm her husband's innocence. The dialogue fades out, as we assume Henry's perspective and embarrassment, Then the camera zooms out to the isolated all-night doughnut shop, where Stanton pursues another indulgence of his appetite and warmly courts another simple citizen. In this scene we shift from picking Susan out of the crowd to tracking down Stanton. Nichols' mise en scene turns us into the analytic spies that Libby personifies within the plot.
What especially invigorates the film is the dynamic of intuition, energy, passion, and pragmatism that characterize backroom politics. It's easy to see how people grow addicted to the game. Advisor Jemmons' muddled parable about the woods, intended to alert Susan to the bimbo factor, seems to leap into his mind from the forest mural Nichols' designer put on the motel wallpaper. Fred Picker seems visibly to gain strength, coherence, even a platform, from the huge crowd applauding him at a rally. To his credit, he draws back from the rabid zeal and settles his audience down as he would the country. Yet his pacifier also alludes to the ambivalence at the heart of charisma: "Sometimes we go a little crazy. Maybe that's a part of our greatness." At Libby's funeral Stanton recalls her gift: "She lent us her courage and her warmth and her madness." Both speeches explain Nichols' acceptance of Stanton's "madness," that lunatic self-indulgence that both undermines him and defines his appeal. In his meld of opposites, his warmth sears as well as saves. "This is the price you have to pay to lead." And accepting a flawed but decent man is the price we may have to pay to implement our platform.
The title refers directly to the colours that candidates show in the exhausting series of primaries that pave the road to the presidency - many of which quickly fade out. Indirectly, it may also refer to the ubiquitous red, white, and blue of American patriotism. These are the primary colours in American culture; Nichols deploys Old Glory more rhetorically than any film since Patton. In Libby Holden's image of the black moon reflecting the bright white light, the primary colours, are the clear distinction she wants to make between absolutes, between black and white, right and wrong. In the film's perspective, however, as the framing handshakes and Burton's progress suggest, the primary colours, are the uniting of these contraries. Reality is not a matter of clearly separable opposites. In politics as in life the essential human palette works through shades of greys.
Stanton's power as a politician derives from his melding of opposites, his fertile ambivalence. He's an effective governor and an incorrigible lech. The warmth and openness of the latter feeds the former. When he visits the barbecue, he warmly embraces Fat Willie (Tommy Hollis) and his wife, but there is already a nervous edge to Willie's buxom 17-year-old daughter, who later threatens scandal. When Burton confronts Stanton in the public lavatory with Willie's story, Stanton is shown as a divided image, firm in the flesh but blurry in his mirror reflection. Although, as Libby points out, the fact that Stanton faked his blood test proves he thought he might be the father of the girl's baby, Susan stays focused on defusing the issue in the campaign. In that cold ambition she embodies the extreme form of placing platform ahead of personality. When Picker tells the TV interviewer about his first wife leaving him, the Stantons instinctively reach for each other, for assurance. But their devotion as lovers is subordinated to their commitment to their campaign. Before the need to advance their platform, norms of marital and political conduct recede.
It's because we live in a shaded morality that, as Stanton sings, the Tennessee pantheon needs both Williams boys, Tennessee as well as Hank. There's a wisdom in the population that - consciously or not -accepts the opposite poles of human nature, the redneck macho blues of Hank and the feminine sexual outlaw, Tennessee. "It's never Just Hank," Stanton says, assured that in the corner of the Puritan American soul there's a soft spot for Tennessee too. Maybe that's why Clinton climbs in the polls as his scandals mount. For all the pundits' moralizing and dire prophecies, the public appreciates the person of juice, the spirit rampant, the transcendent outlaw: "The picture ain't ever complete without ol' Tennessee."
Stanton tells Burton this as they walk away from Picker's withdrawal speech. In the novel Stanton wields his evidence of Picker's past involvement with drugs and homosexuality but then plans to withdraw from the campaign himself, to honour Libby. Not for Nichols such sentimentality. Picker abandons the field before Stanton even considers withdrawing.
AFTER Stanton's last handshake with Burton, the camera draws up and pulls in on Old Glory. The flag in all its compromised but surviving promise summarizes the ambivalence of the whole film - the way "God Bless America" did in The Deer Hunter. But in Primary Colors there's one more lie left. There's always room for another lie. In the closing credits the source novel is still attributed to Anonymous. Of course, we all know that's a lie. Joe Klein has 'fessed up. So we know who stands behind that fiction. But hey, in the games of life, art, and politics, there's always another unidentified source, always another fiction, always another lie. Our trick is to pick the falseness that will promote our preferred truth.
MAURICE YACOWAR is the always truthful Dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Calgary.
Word count: 3562
Copyright Queen's quarterly Summer 1998
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