Spotlight

Spotlight Date: 27-June-10
Spoiler Rating: High

Quiz Show (1994)

Robert Redford's Quiz Show is a fine example of how an event from history can illuminate issues that define both an era and the pervasive character of a nation. The event it explores was the discovery in the 1950s that a popular television show was rigged and its heroes egregious frauds. The scandal speaks volumes about economic, racial, and intellectual class distinctions and the gulf between players and pawns. Set these against the backdrop of the boob tube and you have a truly all-American film.

The screenplay is framed around three men, all superbly portrayed. The most prominent, Charles Van Doren, hails from an elite New England family which boasts writers and scholars. He has a Master's degree in astrophysics and a doctorate in literature. Though not drop-dead gorgeous like Ralph Fiennes, who plays him in the movie, the real Van Doren had the clean-cut, athletic looks suitable for a prime-time hero. The producers of the trivia program Twenty-One (David Paymer, Hank Azaria) view him as a gold mine, a means of drawing audiences and gratifying their corporate sponsor. As if by fate, Van Doren pops up at the exact moment when they are looking to dump the show's current champion, a very nerdy, very Jewish Brooklynite named Herb Stempel (John Turturro). Stempel, the second main character, is forced from the limelight and forgotten in the great white Protestant's wake. He sets his heart on revenge.

Why would Van Doren, who was teaching at Columbia University at the time, want to be on a quiz show? The first line spoken to him says it all. "Excuse me, are you the son?" a woman asks at a party, and it is clear that he is bent by the weight of comparison and expectation. (His father is played by Paul Scofield, the very image of a great man and a believable burden despite his apparent kindness.) And how would the show's producers be able to drop Stempel and promote Van Doren at will? Because both of these men, like other contestants before them, are given the trivia questions and answers beforehand, so that the talent they display on the set is mere acting. Their performances earn them money and fame, which each regards as the cure for his own insufficiency.

Around the time of Van Doren's rise to national adulation as an eligible bachelor and spokesman for education, a lawyer working for the United States Congress starts to sniff around Twenty-One. This fellow, Richard Goodwin (Rob Morrow), has a foot in both worlds, for he is Jewish like Stempel and an Ivy League hotshot like Van Doren. He definitely prefers the latter's company, and not just because Stempel is unhinged. The movie's immersion into the late '50s helps explain Goodwin's hard-to-shake faith that Van Doren must be a decent man. Using the word "innocence" to describe past ages sounds condescending, but I do hold that 60 years ago people believed, and maybe had reason to believe, that members of the well educated, well favored class would adhere to the standards of gentlemen. The '50s were a time, too, when people might have expected honesty from the real-life celebrities they followed on TV with whom they had made a connection. This was, after all, before television broadcast the admission of an American president to behaving like a criminal.

During his investigation Goodwin strives, unsuccessfully and perhaps excessively, to keep Van Doren's name clean, and in fact his goal is never to smear the show's contestants. "I thought we were going to get television," he laments upon his unsatisfying victory, "The truth is, television is going to get us." He refers to corporate greed, the force behind so much corruption in the last century and present day. At the congressional hearing he brings about, the show's producers take the blame and Van Doren suffers humiliation, yet the real powers — the heads of NBC and its sponsor, Geritol — emerge entirely (and predictably) unscathed. This is the final impression of Quiz Show following the personal ordeals that precede it: how television has long consumed the United States and made its citizens easy targets for unfettered exploitation.

Copyright © 2010 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.