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I'm going to be really open about my lack of respect for
journalism. As a "profession" with no rules or formal
version of reprimand, I only point to myself and shimes as
low bars for measurement. When the Filmsnobs receive a letter
from the OFCS, the correspondence always starts out, "Dear
Journalist". Did I have to take special courses in college?
Did I have to make a certain score on a test? Did I have to
take an oath? No, all I needed was a URL and a penchant for
boob jokes to be considered in this hallowed regard. But say
shimes or I write something unethical or improper. I know
that's not much of a stretch, but would we be punished by
a board or a court? Of course not. Journalism is about the
only "profession" where this type of procedural
punishment is not a consequence. I guess we could be fired
but we run the site so perhaps we can't be considered "paid
professionals." Using that tact, I have even greater
reserve about the quality of work that is done within the
regal halls of newspapers and television stations by people
actaully getting paid with real money. Since Watergate and
All the President's Men, there is now the concept of
the celebrity journalist. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein
(or Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman by a more logical conclusion)
stumbled into the notion that the central point of a story
did not necessarily need to be the subject but the author.
Since then, an outside perspective offers that the profession
has made a dramatic shift from objectivity to self-posturing
and grandstanding in the hope that any minute detail could
unearth a secret 18-minute tape. Bernstein even commented
that the post-Deep Throat era of journalism has created "reporters
at a small town newspaper examining the judging results of
the county fair's cattle competition in hopes of revealing
scandal." It is this type of environment that could create
Stephen Glass, a reporter who worked for The New Republic
in the mid-nineties who was fired after it was revealed that
he fabricated over half of the high-profile articles he wrote.
Shattered Glass, the film that chronicles his downfall,
has little interest in revealing Glass as a microcosm to the
society or profession that bred and pampered him. Without
looking at the larger picture, Glass fails to develop
as a character study in a misguided shot at creating mystery.
In the end, the film wants to dissect an amoral case in the
hopes of finding morality. It's a 90-minute presentation convincing
us that we really should care about the minor consequences
of a lying reporter.
Shattered Glass opens with the titular character (Hayden
Christensen) speaking to the high school class of a former
teacher. By this point, he is 24-years old and writes for
The New Republic. The film takes a good five minutes
to establish that this is an IMPORTANT MAGAZINE that JOHN
MCLAUGHLIN quotes on his show and is "the official in-flight
magazine for Air Force One." Great. Sure. Everytime I
hear about the uber-snob rag, the editors are always apologizing
for publishing a story that was either (a) grossly incorrect,
(b) smug, (c) condescending, or (d) all of the above. But
this is not the internal logic of the film so I'll move on.
Everyone on the staff- fellow writers, editors, owners - are
all taken aback by Glass's charm and quick sense of humor.
He's always spinning amazing stories about pot-smoking and
hookers at a young Republican conference or high-tech corporations
making settlements with teenage hackers. The vivid detail
of the yarns makes fellow reporters story ideas about ethanol
subsidies and instability in Jordan seem...well, boring. The
outrageousness of these tales should act as a warning, particularly
in the way that Glass never seems to have his notes in his
office or the way that he always loses the phone numbers to
his contacts. Some doubt is raised with the editor-in-chief
Michael Kelly (Hank Azaria), but he too dismisses this behavior
as the quirkiness of a great writer. The high-tech arbitration
piece hits the newsstand (appropriately entitled "Hack
Heaven") and a few distinguished and studious reporters
at Forbes Digital (Steve Zahn and Rosario Dawson) find
it odd that the names and situations of the story seem so
anonymous for such a large-reaching piece. How does the movie
make these two reporters distinguished and studious? By showing
them unraveling the story through a Yahoo! search, that's
how. Anyway, this investigation receives an amazing amount
of attention from the film, detailing the events like an archeological
dig. While all of this is happening, Kelly is bumped from
the editor-in-chief position and replaced by Chuck Lane (Peter
Sarsgaard) who immediately begins to question Glass' methods
and inspirations. As he is questioned, it is revealed that
half of his stories were completely fabricated and the rest
had partial fibs. As Glass begins to plunge into despair and
his situation disillusions coworkers, Shattered Glass treats
the situation like a four-year-old discovering that Santa
Claus doesn't exist.
And perhaps I'm being cynical and should play along with
the idea that there is a profession out there that should
be treated with kid gloves and whose sins are washed away
with the purest of soaps. But Shattered Glass does
very little to establish its own case. Glass appears like
an ether fog and immediately wows. While nothing is explicit
in the script, Christensen does an amazing job with suggesting
a sense of need and pity through line delivery and facial
expressions. This is a guy who wants attention; he needs it
like a drug. The type of havoc this guy creates for an entire
publication and its staff seems to beg for an explanation.
The script suggests that no understanding makes this so much
more damning. But there are just so many gaps. A lot of people
are charming, but this is not enough to make them hotshot
writers by the age of 24. The secrets exist in the stories
he fabricates. Director/co-writer Billy Ray takes great measure
to re-create the stories as Glass tells them and then goes
back to factually deconstruct through Lane's eyes. But there
is no psychological deconstruction. How does someone imagine
all of this and then go to great lengths to make it as real
as possible? What is that process? The film suggests an itching
to create a narrative structure to unravel these stories but
fails to because Glass is convinced that it should
function as an expose of a dark moment in ethics rather than
as a study about why people would do this and how. The audience
wants to see Glass enter those stories again and explain the
existence of every lie, the motivation of every nuance and
the anticipation of each desired result. But once the truth
lifts the veil, things turn uglier as the film simply exists
to elicit sorrow for Glass as he grieves and to watch the
other characters react to the downfall. Perhaps the saddest
victim is Chloe Sevigny, who was set up as the new indie princess
after 1999's Boys Don't Cry but has since fallen into
a rather shady cast of characters (re: Harmony Korine). Here
she plays Caitlin Avey - a fellow journalist - who can display
no emotion other than doe-eyed disappointment. This is the
woman who redefined the orgasm just a few years ago now reduced
to a silent gasp in the face of less-than-perfect colleagues.
Sad indeed.
Perhaps most insulting to the audience is the portrayal of
Kelly as a man of integrity held as prisoner to his loyalty
and stubbornness. Let's just get a few things out of the way.
I know Kelly was killed earlier this year when a car he was
a passenger crashed in Iraq. It's sad. He had a wife and kids.
But when I think of Michael Kelly, I think of a hard-core
conservative who could barely hide his bias as he pretended
to perpetrate a noble truth. In more bolder terms, I think
he was a real prick. I started following his career in October
of 1998 after he spoke at Evangel University in Springfield.
Myself and Matty Patt of Springfield thought we were attending
a lecture about the firsthand account of a journalist during
the first Gulf War. What we got was an hour of anti-Clinton
morality rhetoric with plenty of emphatic points about the
weakness of the the Department of Defense. He said Clinton
wasn't doing enough in Kosovo despite the President's call
for NATO intervention in the face of Republican disdain. To
prove his point, Kelly played an audio tape of a young girl
in Bosnia being gunned down by a sniper. Exploitative? Sick?
Self-exposing? Yes. Kelly proved to me then and there he was
a journalist not interested in truth or understanding but
as a vehicle for his own philosophy and opinions. But instead
of letting it hang out and writing for The Washington Times
or The Weekly Standard, Kelly attempted to paint
himself as the crusading objectivist. He did this even after
he personally attacked members of Clinton's staff including
conference calling Sid Blumenthal and cussing him out in the
ear shot of two dozen or so people. He openly vilified John
McCain, Al Gore, or anyone who could have posed a threat to
George W. Bush in 2000 yet hid his agenda under the pretenses
of "liberal" media outlets like The Atlantic
Monthly. If the filmmakers of Shattered Glass wanted
to tell a story about the dark underbelly of journalism, they
should have talked about Kelly and all the other journalists
who became mid-level superstars in the 1990's. Surely a film
about Matt Drudge, David Brock, or Kelly would be more interesting
than one about a guy who faked a few stories for an overrated
magazine. This truly represents that cynical image painted
by Bernstein: Guys who want to BE THE STORY. Stephen Glass
wanted to be the story, but he just didn't turn out to be
that interesting.
Putting my feelings about journalism aside, I got a weird
fuzzy feeling watching Shattered Glass. The film is
set in the spring of 1998, when the biggest threat to democracy
was not haywire voting machines or preemptive strikes or the
USA PATRIOT Act but an intern blowing the President. People
talked about dot com's and tech stocks with free abandon.
A place like Digital Forbes could employ fifty or so
journalists and no one seemed to balk at the idea of raising
more capital to keep them high in fresh bagels. At this point
in history, we can look back to something as recent as 1998
and think: Were we absolutely insane? Could that have only
been five years ago when we thought that Internet start-up
companies could buy ad time on the Super Bowl? My mind spun
with the the contrasts to current time and date, but the film
seems to breeze past the subjects with hardly a passing interest.
This fantasyland bred the world where Glass could survive
and thrive. This needed examining within the context of this
story and it got me thinking that we need this type of examination
of the 1990's in general. A lot could be learned about our
country's current state of denial or about the tenuous nature
of business cycles. Based on the complex layers Glass created
and conveyed in his fiction, he might be perfect to be the
screenwriter. But he should take some lessons of his film
biography and make sure that some understanding is incorporated
into the process first.
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