When I was a kid, Ted Bundy was the first serial killer that I learned about. He wasn’t the worst or even the most memorable, but when people mention serial killers, I imagine him. Now as an adult in Presidon’t’s era, I watch documentaries about him and learned that he campaigned for Nixon, which makes me laugh and say, “Bien sur.” I studied American history so I knew about Nixon’s history of wrongdoing and never revered him, but it takes living through Presidon’t to really flesh out the daily mood. If the person holding office is a criminal, everyone who supports him may not be a criminal, but there certainly is a rather large portion of the Venn diagram that reflects a correlation with criminal supporters. If it looks like a duck…..

All the President’s Men is a classic because it memorializes the Nixonian era. I initially watched it a little over a year ago during a stressful period of my life. I decided to watch it again during a pandemic because my notes and memory of the film were not firm. It seems like a germane movie to watch anytime during Presidon’t’s term since he has a handful of Watergate level controversies every second while simultaneously and helpfully act as the source explaining his malfeasance. Even though I am watching the movie out of obligation, not joy, I imagine that a fraction of the $3.99 that I spent to rent the film will go to Frank Willis, the security guard who reported the crime and appears as himself in the film. He was never steadily employed after that night.

For those of you living under rocks such as myself, even while the book that it was based on was being written, Robert Redford bought the film rights to All the President’s Men. He starred in the film as Bob Woodward, a plucky young reporter who receives an assignment to a story that is more than the average city crime that crosses his beat. As his bosses at the Washington Post realize that the story needs a more seasoned reporter to polish his work, Carl Bernstein, whom Dustin Hoffman plays, partners with him as they discover that the White House is behind the Watergate burglary, which is only the tip of the ice berg when it comes to government malfeasance. The story behind the creation of the book and the film sounds just as interesting since the film definitely influenced the book, and the movie would not exist without the book. It is an art ouroboros!

With a two-hour eighteen-minute runtime, All the President’s Men is not as much fun or comprehensive in telling the Watergate scandal story as I expected. I went into the movie knowing the story and still found it challenging to follow the journalists’ investigation logic, remember the cast of characters and all the bread crumbs that made up the entire story. The details, while painfully recreated, easily wash over you. It is really a movie about journalism, how the sausage gets made, the process of building a story, not the story itself. It is an odd couple, buddy cop without the uniforms or enforcement power movie with Woodward as the workaholic and Bernstein as the schmoozer, the mover and shaker. Like most movies from the seventies, the fictional part is how every waking, living, breathing moment is devoted to getting the story, which maybe it was, I never read the book, but considering that Bernstein and his then girlfriend Nora Ephron made a stab at screenwriting the script, I think that they probably found the time to multitask and let their luxurious seventies locks down. They were not anachronistically rocking Rihanna’s Work.

Movies from the seventies lulled us into a false sense of security that people are smarter and more professional than they actually are. After watching seventies films, you believe in happy endings because someone has their crap together and relentlessly goes forward until the right thing gets done! No bathroom breaks, just smoking, drinking coffee and working! I was surprised that All the President’s Men actually ends with a loss, Nixon’s second inauguration, whereas the book covers the entire scandal. Sure the film has reassuring postscripts to show that everyone got what they deserved, but those scenes are not as minutely depicted on screen as everything that came before. Is it supposed to leave us a little dissatisfied so we feel driven to finish the work and enter the narrative? The decision is simultaneously countercultural in its denial of the well known ending and frustrating. We spent all this time to only get the beginning! Maybe it is time for a series reboot?

All the President’s Men is a visually rigorous film. The foreground and background are usually both in focus as a shorthand touchstone to provide political and cultural context for the protagonists’ progress in their investigation. It is a way of saying what the masses, even in an elite newsroom, considered important at the time while “Woodstein” knew what was really crucial. There is a Mondrian kind of organization to this visual thinking-invisible bars of action for our eyes to consume while our ears try to gain traction and determine the narrative’s trajectory. Even though I have seen other films that Alan Pakula directed, Klute, The Parallax View, Presumed Innocent and The Pelican Brief (still need to see Sophie’s Choice), I have no idea if this style is characteristic of Pakula’s work. Until now, I did not realize that he directed all these films. I should have been paying closer attention to detail. Oh well.

I joked while watching The X-Files that if Mulder and Scully spoke Spanish, the episode would only be five minutes because they would talk to the right people and know exactly what was happening. The women of All the President’s Men know the entire story, but are completely disinterested in going forward and seem more outraged at the interruption of their daily routine than the actual criminality of all the men around them. They are complicit, but rarely condemned. There is a thick fiction of basic decency promulgated as if we should not conflate support of Nixon with support of criminality, which life experience screams as false. Even when pushed into doing the right thing, their priorities are stubbornly the personal over the public good, standing by their criminal men, employers, husbands or beaus. No wonder the fifty-two percent has been able to stay under the radar and are outraged like Nosferatu at the sudden appearance of sunrise exposing their secret predations. They are never called to account and in a pivotal plot twist, filmed like a coy cat being gradually lured in for a pet with treats. It reminded me of every DNC convention with Republicans as salt of the earth people who reluctantly have to break with party to do the right thing. Hell, I was never Republican, but my biography has that trope in there. How long has this trope been going? When was the last time that being Republican actually was not associated with criminals and breaking with the party was necessary to do the right thing?

Whatever. All the President’s Men may be a classic, but it is a dull one. See it once and judge for yourself, but it was challenging not to be distracted into multitasking. Maybe the book is better.