Medium Cool (1969) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

****/****
Image A
Sound B-
Extras B+

starring
Robert Forster, Verna Bloom, Peter Bonerz, Marianna Hill

written
and directed by Haskell Wexler


Mediumcool1click any image to
enlarge

by Walter Chaw
No one has ever been cooler in a movie than
Robert Forster is in Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool.
The title comes from Marshall McLuhan's assignation in his Understanding Media
of
television as a "cool" medium, i.e., one that requires a more
active participation to benefit from meaning–in opposition to
something like
film, which he identifies as a "hot" medium. It could just as
soon refer to Forster's John Cassellis, however, the avatar for a
new generation of
existential detachment. The multifoliate rose of this contraption
reveals its
first complication in being a film about Cassellis, a television cameraman active at the very end of a decade of immense internal
tumult in the
United States, where television gradually emerged as primary
witness–if not
also prosecution, defense, jury, and judge–of the death of the
counterculture.
It's telling, too, that one of the best studies of American '60s cinema
is
by Ethan Mordden and titled Medium Cool–acknowledgment,
along with
Wexler's film, that the movies can provide "hot"
context for their "cool" counterpart.

RUNNING TIME
111 minutes
MPAA
Not Rated
ASPECT
RATIO(S)

1.85:1 (1080p/MPEG-4)
LANGUAGES
English 1.0 LPCM
SUBTITLES
English

REGION
A
DISC
TYPE

BD-50
STUDIO
Criterion

The final nails to our collective
cultural innocence, such as it was, take place immediately before and immediately after Medium
Cool
's 1969 release, from the major networks ramping up
Vietnam War coverage
around 1965 through to Nixon's televised resignation in August
of 1974, with 1969's moon landing operating as fulcrum somewhere in
the Prime Time in between. Culturally, the U.S. came to grips with
existentialism via cathode-ray Sartre–we were beginning to be
indoctrinated, en
masse
, into a different reality through a parasitic medium.
Harlan Ellison
referred to it as the "glass teat" in a series of articles for the LOS
ANGELES FREE PRESS from 1968-1970: mother and whore, the nourishment
suspect
but taken just the same.

By the time the Zapruder film aired on
broadcast television in 1975, it followed years of speculation about
its content and what was to that point "hidden" from public
view. By not showing it on TV, in other words, an entire conspiracy
cult grew–television had become, since 1963, the year of Kennedy's
assassination (when it gained 93% immersion in American households),
the means
through which both sides attempted to sculpt the truth, and the
incubator
simultaneously of insurrection and, ironically, skepticism. If not the
Zapruder film, the inciting televisual event could arguably be the
assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald, captured in all its glory for the
fixed,
rapt fascination of a nation gradually undergoing a perceptual
metamorphosis.
The systematic assassination of all of youth's leaders–Medgar Evers in
1963, Malcolm X in 1965, George Lincoln Rockwell of the American Nazi
Party in 1967, then the one-two covered by Medium Cool (Martin
Luther
King, Jr. in April of 1968 and Bobby Kennedy in June of that same
year)–became the fabric of
suppertime viewing and post-supper, porch-swing speculation, delivered
through
the agency of Walter Cronkite arm-in-arm with contemporary
entertainments like the dark "The Outer Limits" and the O. Henry-like
"The Twilight Zone"
(where first we learned of American casualties in Vietnam–way back on
September 27, 1963). Indeed, while one show warned that your
cathode-ray mother
had been hijacked, Rod Serling and Cronkite occupied complementary
space on CBS
for those early years of the medium (cool): twin, eloquent chroniclers of
the ideological apocalypse.

The lovechild of Godard and Antonioni, Medium Cool is hopelessly hip and equally meaty. It shares a birthday with the likes of Midnight Cowboy,
The Wild Bunch,
and Easy Rider, and like those films,
it's at least in part a
restructuring/critique of western genre conventions, revivifying a
dying form
through evisceration and satire. The easiest corollary to draw to it,
the
American western is also effective shorthand for where the Empire once
saw
itself vs. how the Empire then saw itself. Still, Medium
Cool
may share a deeper kinship with Antonioni's Blowup, Powell's Peeping
Tom
, or Kubrick's 2001 as science-fiction moored by J.G. Ballard's definition of the genre as
explorations of identity, space, and time, dedicated to examining the
fusion between man and machine. If Medium Cool
were to have a
sequel it would be–it was–directed by David
Cronenberg and called Videodrome.
Early on, soundman Gus (Peter Bonerz), the sidekick to Forster's John
Cassellis,
describes himself as an extension of his boom microphone. John
himself admits to his lover that he hardly knows anything beyond what
he saw in someone else's images, or through the remove of his own
camera. At the end, a car crash claims Eileen (Verna
Bloom), the female protagonist of the piece, a dislocated
woman lost with her young son Harold (Harold Blankenship) in Chicago's
urban diaspora, but we receive this news through disconnected images and a broadcast we fail to locate within
its
medium. It's Ballard's Crash
in the association of John and Eileen's burgeoning relationship with vehicular mayhem–more,
it's
Cronenberg's adaptation of Ballard's book in its coldness, its
insectile
detachment, and its implication of eternity in its utter refusal to
offer
resolution. The film doesn't exactly end, because it's not so much a
narrative
as it is a mile-marker and a warning.

Mediumcool2

Indeed, the film has the barest outline of a plot. John and Gus photograph a car accident and its
victims before calling the police. They attempt to interview a
black cabbie (Sid McCoy, just awesome) who has drawn interest and
suspicion for
returning the ten grand he found in the back of his ride, and they
visit the Democratic
National Convention, where everyone is tear-gassed. Along the way, John
takes something from little Harold
by accident and misadventure, only to meet his mother and develop an
interest in
her but too late, too late. It's headlong, a confusion at times (Eileen
appears
in an early sequence like a phantom from a previous edit), at once
completely
reliant on a 1969 knowledge of current events–like the otherwise non
sequitur set in an industrial hotel kitchen that's minutes away from
being the site of RFK's assassination–and creating a sci-fi
scenario not unlike Invasion of the
Body Snatchers
that suggests television is changing people,
some
forever not for better. An outraged cocktail-party guest excoriates a real-life TV cameraman for feeding the public
appetite for
soundbites and venality; later, John's lover Ruth (Marianna Hill)
fumbles right
there on the edge of sexual hysteria in the buff while recounting
moments from Mondo
Cane
's segments on nature mutated in the wake
of
America's nuclear testing in the Bikini Atolls. Cassandras in a world where television has made passive observers of the rest of us, they are, accordingly, helpless to change the futures they see. "Medium
cool" in this way is not merely a category, but also a warning. I like, too,
the
declaration in a room decorated by a portrait of MLK, hands open in
supplication, that what John and Gus aim to do is encapsulate 300
years
of black experience into fifteen minutes of platitudes. Imagine what
the equation
looks like in the Internet age of instant experts, rabid punditry, and passive/savage Arendt-ian consumers.

The thrill that Medium
Cool
provides now, some forty-four years on, is that it's
clearly too late for us already: there's likely not a person alive not
fundamentally altered–who hasn't had their opinions shaped, attitudes
constructed,
destinies narrated–by television's "massage," and the film, intended
as historical record, has found itself immortal instead as prophecy. Via scholar Paul Cronin, Bloom recounts within the Criterion Collection Blu-ray's special features that her career took a hit after Medium Cool because
casting
directors had a difficult time separating her performance from reality;
this movie about representational junction successfully confused the
line–irrevocably, really–between representation and reality. In
truth, that's a
difference without a distinction. The picture's key moment, when
someone calls
out "look out, Haskell, it's real" during the Chicago riots (a
moment engineered, as it happens, but no less real for the
engineering), in this way
takes on the full weight of profundity. It's analogous to Kevin
McCarthy's
fourth-wall-breaking warning of "they're already here" in the Don
Siegel Invasion of the Body Snatchers, in other
words, these pronouncements combining to describe television's victory
over reality. In the end, there isn't any difference. When the momentary survivors of a zombie apocalypse are
looking for answers, such as they were, in 1968's Night
of the Living Dead
, they
turn, of course, to television. We didn't
know then that the battle between man and his machines had begun, and who knows when it was over? It didn't end with a bang, or even
a whimper.

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THE
BLU-RAY DISC

Sourced from a new, Wexler-approved 4k digital restoration, Medium
Cool
has, safe to say, never looked better than it does on Criterion's Blu-ray edition. The painstakingly-dustbusted 1.85:1, 1080p transfer brings the end of Flower
Power roaring back to
life, the revitalized palette–so rich in yellows (see: the famous dress that helped Bloom stand out from the crowd in the finale) and reds–giving lie to the notion that the era's film stock had no vibrancy, or that age would have rendered any it did have irretrievable. The chaos of Wexler's
handheld ethic is carried off without a hint of judder; the sequence
where
John chases Harold through a parking lot remains a miracle of
the pre-Steadicam era, and this presentation honours that with an image free of anything that might betray it as a 21st-century
reinterpretation, as there's no obvious revisionism in the grainy image. Of course, any reiteration or transformation of Medium
Cool
should be met with ironic scholarship (ditto the
endless upgrades to Blade Runner), but that's for
someone
smarter than me to parse. Less impressive is the 1.0 LPCM soundtrack: although there's nothing in the way of artifacts (hissing,
scratching, jumping, echo),
it's mixed so low that I had to turn my receiver to "max" just to
create a pleasing sound field. Those hoping to get those Frank Zappa & The Mothers of Invention songs painted
on the back of their brainpans will need far more powerful amps than I had
at my
disposal… What a shame.

But the disc's supplements are mostly revelatory, starting with a brilliant overview by Thomas Beard in the insert booklet and continuing on through a
pair of commentaries, excerpts from Paul Cronin's 2001 and 2007 documentaries Look
Out
Haskell
, It's Real! (about the making of Medium Cool) and Sooner or Later (about the legacy of child actor Blankenship), respectively, and new pieces in which Wexler takes centre stage. The first commentary, featuring Wexler, actress Hill, and editorial consultant Paul Golding, was recorded for
Paramount's 2001 DVD and is lively and
informative, if finally trivial. The highlights of this one are the
anecdotal contributions of a charming Hill, as well as the reminiscences from Wexler and Golding about working with real television reporters, working with real Black
Panthers (ad libbing their lines ("Do you realize how many guns 10,000 dollars
would have bought, man?")), and of course shooting at the infamous Chicago Democratic Convention.

In the interest of
full disclosure, I met Paul Cronin a decade ago in Denver and we've kept in touch. Nevertheless, I have the sincerest admiration for (and occasional jealousy of) Paul, who contributes an authoritative analysis of the picture in the second yakker, pulling it all
together from
production to performance (Bonerz was key in helping the cast learn to
improvise! I'll never watch "The Bob Newhart Show" the same way
again) to reception to aftermath. As befitting a man who's put so much
work
into examining this film, he comes off as an expert without appearing
pedantic–a
neat trick, and an enviable skill. I want to thank him for his repeated spotting of Godard references: that picture of Belmondo in John's
flat; that glimpse of Contempt on a
television in the background. Add to the list
of sci-fi films that Medium Cool reminds me of the deconstructionist
horror of Alphaville.

The two excerpts from Cronin's
documentaries, one running 54 minutes and still called "Look Out Haskell, It's Real!" (1080i), the other titled "Harold Blankenship" (1080p) and running 16, offer vast insight
into the first
sparks of creation (the picture was based on a book it ultimately had nothing to
do
with), in addition to touching on the illiterate Blankenship's first
experience with a shower and various
sequences–including
RFK being rushed into the abovementioned hotel kitchen–that were shot and deleted or planned but never shot. What I wouldn't give to see some of this elided material. A present-day interview with Wexler (15 mins., 1080p) finds the legendary (and
legendarily cantankerous) filmmaker in an expansive
mood; alas, by this point his recollections, ever-dimming, are
largely
redundant. A
longer
stint with Wexler, "Medium Cool Revisited" (34
mins., 1080p), is set at the NATO
summit in Chicago 2012 as Wexler resurrects his hippie roots by
interacting
with today's counterculture. Brother, it don't hold a candle–it's like that Woodstock sequel they tried a while ago. Who knew
that in
2013 we'd look back with this much regret that the new day dawning
never broke
over the horizon?

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6 Comments

  1. Brett

    Tiny slip: Moon landing was July 20, 1969 — not ’68.
    xox

  2. Brett

    Tiny slip: Moon landing was July 20, 1969 — not ’68.
    xox

  3. Brett

    Tiny slip: Moon landing was July 20, 1969 — not ’68.
    xox

  4. Bill C

    Thanks, Brett, that was all me. A cut and paste glitch.

  5. Bill C

    Thanks, Brett, that was all me. A cut and paste glitch.

  6. Bill C

    Thanks, Brett, that was all me. A cut and paste glitch.

Comments are closed