This movie, Vengeance, was difficult to watch. I don’t think I will ever watch it again. First of all, I don’t like B.J. Novak’s face. But mostly, it was difficult to watch because it’s a bit too on-the-nose, too close in space-time to everything that is we are going through as a society. There is that great scene in Spaceballs where Rick Moranis is watching Spaceballs: The Movie, they’re showing him everything that has just happened to him—THIS IS NOW, NOW.
“No, no, go past this part. In fact, never play this for me again.”
The conceit of Vengeance is very of-the-moment, a middlebrow take at reckoning with the Vibe Shift, to the point that it’s pretty annoying.
The plot: a soulless young New York journalist learns of the mysterious death of a girl he used to hook up with (but did not care about) in her hometown in rural Texas. Smelling opportunity in this story, he goes there to do a This American Life-style podcast called “Dead White Girl.”
Rural Texas is, unsurprisingly, a revelation for a New York media guy. The people he meets! They’re alive, they’re smart, they’re human, they are not stupid, they even quote Chekhov.
Everyone is saying the girl he used to date died of an opiate overdose. But that doesn’t seem like what really happened.
The rest of the movie twists and turns and tries to skewer the issues of our time in an Aaron-Sorkiny-talky-way: The Opioid Epidemic, The Role of Social Media In Political Polarization, the Red vs. Blue Divide, “Conspiracy Theories” vs. “Facts”, Godless Brunch-havers vs. Traditional Values, etc.
B.J. Novak’s weedy Elevator Pitch that drives the movie: What if, like, Red State people who believe conspiracy theories aren’t gullible idiots…what if the conspiracy is sort of real, mannnnnn?
It’s actually a great conceit. The cloistered big city liberals think they know everything but in fact are wrong about everything. It’s just executed in an obnoxious way.
Much of the movie is B.J. Novak pacing around oil derricks talking on the phone with his New York producer: “What’s the story here?” “Where is this story going?”
“Great stuff you’re getting down there, keep going at it, pound the pavement, very profound, very human.”
And from the producer: “But what if YOU are the story? You know, this is really about you, your journey, your personal emptiness, etc.”
This is actually a highly accurate depiction of how the New York Journalist-brain works. The constant vampiric search for a “real story” out there, in the great beyond.
Yes, the movie is making fun of New York media world, so it’s ironic and reflexive and self-critical. But it’s still disturbing. And leaves you kind of angry. Because this is how things actually work.
As a freelance journalist and a salaried magazine editor, how many times have I had this exact same conversation, pacing around smoking and talking on the phone: “So what’s the story here? Where is this story going? Who do you still need to get access to? Can you get them to talk? Get them to talk. Also you gotta riff a little bit, include the personal angle.”
Both sitting at the desk in New York trying to guide the writer “out in the field” and myself as the writer, lost, out on assignment.
It’s nauseating to see it all reflected back at you.
The goal of journalism is to cannibalize the lives of real people and turn them into narrative content with a light-touch but clear overarching message. The ingredients are always pretty much the same whether its for a podcast or written narrative feature: you need a good guy or unsung person trying to do the right thing, you need to sit down with bad guys and malevolent heartless forces, you need well-informed subject matter experts, you need “local color” people to set the ambiance, you need police or some kind of officialdom to comment, you need the journalist actually “being there” reflecting on what they’re seeing in real time.
And the journalists, they’re like vampires walking among us. Actual parasites on humanity’s pain.
I have almost come to believe that the role of the journalist is genuinely that of a soul-stealer.
How would I know? Because I’ve done it. I’ve done this moral twist, innumerable times.
I mean you literally steal peoples stories (generally speaking, told to the journalist in generosity, not for clear self-gain) and then you paint a likeness of them to suit your own narrative purposes and with that content get paid and fuel your career to get editorial opportunities to go back and do it again. And again.
Sure, sometimes a subject of journalism has their own agenda, their own reasons for talking to a journalist, “getting their story out,” etc, and it can occasionally be a functional symbiotic relationship.
Take my old buddy James’s excellent narrative piece about the New Right for Vanity Fair. This is a great example of the symbiotic journalist-subject relationship actually functioning as it probably should, as a win-win.
Vanity Fair wants to get out of their bubble and show what’s going on on the lower frequencies. The New Right get to get their ideas and personal brands reckoned with seriously in a major sexy prestige publication like Vanity Fair that they felt previously barred from or turned into caricature by. Everyone wins: Vanity Fair scores a great piece, James has done a great piece of reportage, and the New Right is by and large satisfied with fair treatment and fresh exposure.
But it is not that clear-cut and simple. Usually someone is kind of pissed off.