The idea of a bubbly British comedy producer interviewing a disgraced vestige of the Eisenhower Administration has a gothic humor within that would make for a good Auberon Waugh novel.Unfortunately it was the idea for a series of "high-toned" news broadcasts served with all the seriousness of a fifth-grade civics lesson. I refer to the Frost-Nixon talks and in this form, as Q&A, the idea reached only that level of satire that might be found in the eyes of the beholder.
To later create a high-minded stage play out of this inherently inane concept required of playwright and audience a level of seriousness bordering on derangement. But so it was done and the theatre was thus able to reach out and build audience from the herds of otherwise unreachable, uncultured news buffs.
Apparently, even after nationwide theatrical "performances" of the Frost interviews, there remained so many news junkies who could never ever be persuaded to enter a theatre that it was deemed necessary to make a film of the play of the TV broadcasts. (Baudrillard fans, are you listening?) In this way, NPR's great unwashed will eventually get a crack at it on HBO or DVD.
The film of the play of the TV show premiered in London a few weeks ago. The D.C. Examiner is giving the movie front-page play. For here, in the nation's capital, culture is a rare commodity with politics rushing into that vacuum. (There would be no opera, believe me, without subsidies and the huge foreign audience that resides here. As for theatre, if I am not mistaken there is less here than in Baltimore.)
You get the idea sometimes that Ivy Leaguers are appreciated in the ranks of the political class because for four years they are guaranteed to have had some little culture pounded into the crevasses left by their impoverished home lives. They can, by graduation time, find Europe on a map. They have a vague idea of some Constitution or other. They can spell Kabul, though with a little help from Word. And they can appreciate the "importance" of Nixon and the Frost interviews.
Of course, looking in at this from the outside, it seems nutty. Are these the baroque manifestations of any hobby taken too far? Or are we immersed in a culture of political psychosis?
I think the latter. One test will be if the course that shows Ivy League undergraduates how to find Europe on a map is eventually displaced by a new course studying all the fascinating "cultural" artifacts connected with the Frost-Nixon chat.
Read a good book tonight.Do your part for mental health.
