Thoughts on binge-watching Aaron Sorkin's The Newsroom: Don Quixote, Werner Herzog and impossible dreams
I’m the kind of person who waits for TV series to run their course over seasons and then binge-watch them, so don’t ask me why I’m talking about The Newsroom now.
I just got done, and am still basking in that warm, soapboxy glow that you get only from an Aaron Sorkin drama on issues of Great Cultural Importance. (I hear Steven Spielberg’s The Post is a little like this, but we’ll have to wait a while to know that for sure.) One of the key motifs of The Newsroom is that of an idealistic knight-crusader going all out against those that threaten the fabric of democracy (free speech, et cetera) – hence the frequent shout-out to Don Quixote.
And that brought back movie memories. For one, Arthur Hiller’s iffy film version of the Broadway play, Man of La Mancha, with Peter O’Toole as Don Quixote, belting out that swelling inspirational anthem The Impossible Dream in the way only a good film actor can. (He treats it like thoughtful dialogue set to music.) And then, another version of the same song, in another Sorkin-esque drama (though a cheesier one) set in a newsroom – Up Close & Personal, with Michelle Pfeiffer and Robert Redford.
The Newsroom Season one. Image from Facebook.
And then, the toughest watch of all Quixote-based films: Quxiotic/Honor de Cavalleria (Honor of the Knights), in which the Catalan filmmaker, Albert Serra, jettisoned plot in favour of a series of Terrence Malick-esque reveries on nature. He said he wanted to “focus on atmosphere, on details, on things I love better than just showing the plot or trying to give information about the characters.”
I did some Googling and discovered that the first talkie version of the Cervantes novel was (appropriately) in Spanish, Don Quijote de la Mancha (1947), by Rafael Gil. (A name that popped out from the cast was Fernando Rey, known for his Buñuel collaborations and for playing the villain in The French Connection.) I couldn’t find the movie (there seems to be a German-dubbed version, put up in parts), but I did find this spectacular clip (below) that captures the bit about “tilting at windmills.”
Note how a shift in camera angle changes the way we regard the windmills, which are so unthreatening early on. Around the 1:41 mark, we get a low-angle shot, and the vanes transform into scimitars, slicing through us.
So far, this scene from the novel was to me a combination of funny and pitiful – a delusional old man attacking a harmless, motionless thing. But the magic of cinema transforms this thing into the fearsome enemy inside Don Quixote’s head: an imaginary enemy, to be sure, but no less dangerous.
This is what The Newsroom is getting at, but with enemies who are very real. In a way, it’s about the high cost of idealism, the (noble) foolhardiness of this pursuit of an impossible dream.
A different kind of dream – a different kind of windmill-tilting pursuit – is glimpsed in this article by writer Anosh Irani, who talks about Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, the story of a dreamer’s attempt to build an opera house in the middle of a South American jungle.
Irani writes, “While I watched this marvelous film, I thought to myself, ‘This is what it’s like to write a novel.’ You start out as a pathetic dreamer; you take off on an adventure where the odds are stacked against you... You embark on this journey with hope, a song perhaps... A year or so later, the song starts to fade away, in surprising correlation with the money, and you realize that you’re faced with transporting a massive ship over a mountain.”
Herzog did this scene (above) without special effects, which means he actually did what his protagonist did in the movie – he transported a steamship over a hill. Roger Ebert marvels, “And it is here that we arrive at the thing about Fitzcarraldo that transcends all understanding: Werner Herzog determined to literally drag a real steamship up a real hill, using real tackle and hiring the local Indians!”
The difference between Herzog and Irani is that the latter’s profession doesn’t leave him with a choice: there are no special effects, no substitutes in writing, whereas Herzog could have made his life easier. But the ordeal is similar, and it made me wonder why Aaron Sorkin hasn’t attempted something about the writing life yet. If there’s anyone who can make thrilling drama out of staring at a computer screen, it is he.
Troubled productions somehow end up with documentaries about their making. Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse chronicled Francis Ford Coppola’s trials during the production of his Vietnam-war phantasmagoria, Apocalypse Now. Then we had Lost Soul, about the making of The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), and Lost in La Mancha, about Terry Gilliam’s aborted project, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.
Fitzcarraldo got one too, and the title of the documentary is unsurprising: Burden of Dreams.
