Chicago 7 : a trial to the movie
The Chicago 7 trial and pro-American Hollywood propaganda.
If you haven’t seen the Trial of Chicago 7 yet, then don’t read the following, if you don’t intend to but are curious, go ahead and read …
The credits roll at the end of “The Trial of the Chicago 7”, I am staring perplexed at the screen. There is no doubt that Aaron Sorking made a good dramatization of the events that took place in Chicago in August 1968, where during the national convention of the Democratic Party, the major American political collectives organized a week of protests against the Vietnam war. Subsequently seven members of these collectives were tried for conspiracy. The events take place between the final months of the disputed President Johnson’s tenure, and during the Nixon presidency. The week of protests in August 1968 is considered by many historians to be one of the most critical moments in American history in a period that saw great political, social and cultural turmoil. Many reached Chicago, and on August 28, 10,000 showed their dissent. The week was the scene of violent clashes with the police, large numbers of men in uniform were employed, shouting “law and order” and the brutal violence of the police was defined “Police riot”; a repressive dynamic that could remind many of the Genoese July of 2001.
The script is intense, and as in the best Hollywood traditions it points straight to the “heart”, seasoned with that all-American romanticism. The film was shot mostly in a courtroom, with a budget of 35 million dollars. Despite the effort to enrich it with some footage from historical repertoire, probably in an attempt to ensure its reliability, the film lacks substance. The director does not contextualize the theme enough, the presentation of the main characters is brief and superficial, the week of protest (which began with the killing of seventeen-year-old Dean Johnson at the hands of the police) is timidly represented, almost leading to suspect an intentional censorship.
The facts are excessively fictional and jumbled into the unfolding of the story, a rather incomprehensible stylistic choice, above all because it greatly limits the breath of the film and its potential. The concern to pack stereotyped emotions, in the dull style of the “fleeting moment”, seems more urgent than the telling of the story, which results in a further weighting of the film.
The sense of confusion that is perceived in the unfolding of events is perhaps due to the genesis of the film. In 2006 Spielberg commissioned the script to Sorkin, the film sinks and from there on the production appoints several directors which end up with nothing, until 2019, the start year of filming under Sorkin’s direction.
The film is produced in record time, which could serve as an excuse for the film’s lack of historical punctuality.
Is it perhaps for this “hasty” production that the climate of violence and the riots of that week of protest are superficially narrated?
It seems that the director does not take the responsibility of narrating a historically important moment like that of Chicago.
The scenes of protests in April of the same year exploded following the murder of Martin Luther King and had seen violent clashes with the police, which led to 2150 arrests and eleven victims among the demonstrators.
Sorkin has the luck and the curse of dealing with a symbolic place and a conscious America: it would seem a great opportunity for a director in the hot climate that the world is going through today. Instead Aaron Sorkin chooses to be politically correct, giving a partial and sometimes biased reconstruction of facts.
It therefore seems clear that the director and the production are riding the wave of generalized unrest, which in the last two years has led large crowds to express their dissent in the arteries of large international cities and that even in times of pandemic, despite the extreme reduction of individual freedoms, has seen demonstrators pouring into squares around the world shouting: “Black Lives Matter”.
So is this a smart maneuver to secure the coveted position of the “most watched” on Netflix?
It would seem that the limit of this film is its purely commercial identity, about which we could continue to talk at length; but in this way we would take away the right to make a whole series of considerations, necessary to unmask the total mediocrity of a film acclaimed by many and which will probably earn some Oscar nominations.
What else is wrong with this historical drama? Perhaps the excessive presence of Hollywood clichés? Sorkin tells the characters but not their story, almost creating a grotesque caricature, the director portrays Hoffman and Rubin, played respectively by Sacha Baron Cohen and Jeremy Strong, co-founders of the Youth International Party, as fools, undresses them of the revolutionary charge and of their political identity. While the prosecutor Schulz, played by Joseph Gordon Levitt, is the clear representation of that unbearable paternalistic and nationalist American well-doing.
Is it because the film constructs the farce of the happy ending? It seems that the director has not done his homework and has not studied enough to know the importance of the topic and the events that took place. Furthermore, the Chicago trial also went down in history for being spectacular and full of twists, so it does not seem that the director / screenwriter has made too much effort to take a pre-packaged story.
Still, despite an excellent performance by Frank Langella in the role of the ferocious and biased judge, something just doesn’t fit in the film, and here is the revelation: the whole film is occupied by the presence of white men!
Obviously every director is free to overturn, if he finds it necessary for a historical fact in the name of art, to prefer fiction to historical narration, but he must also take charge of the choices and the message he sends through his films, and the criticisms that will follow.
The women in this film are portrayed as mere frames within a story made and told by men, yet those are the years of the cultural revolution, of the feminist movement. The Women Strike for Peace movement was present in Chicago in that week of riots, and there are six actresses with a not exactly marginal role in the film, and thirteen actresses with a secondary role.
But Sorkin’s woman is passive, lying incapable and mute in the shadow of the political militant, who is painted a bit like a clown but who remains virile.
The women in this film not only play the stereotypical role of the woman bound to the image alone, but the political militants themselves are stripped of their identity strength; in the scene of the attempted rape, the protester, played by Madison Nichols, is a woman in the grip of hysteria (sic!) and unable to react. Also in the case of juror 6, played by Juliette Angelo, the director gives us a silent, fearful character, a “helpless and weak victim” as a woman is described only in gender stereotypes. In the female character of the Black Panthers, Sondra, played by Tiffany Denise Hobbs, Sorkin shows the cliché of the prudent woman because of her fear, and ignobly and subtly lets pass the silenced idea of the fanatic, of the madwoman who extends a gun to her militant partner Bobby Seale, co-founder of BP, which arouses a lot of suspicion in me about Sorkin.
Incidentally, the only female character who is granted intellectual ability is police officer Daphne O’Connor, played by Meghan Rafferdy. The character is that of a bitch, useless to go around with so many big words and here is another gender stereotype popping up. Another cliché is added to the character, that of American do-gooders, because despite the fact that agent Daphne had entered the collective in disguise and betrayed their trust, in the end she’s “one of the good ones” that gives the right advice in moments of tension.
Furthermore, the director describes the Black Panthers as a small group of fashionistas who show up in the courtroom dressed all alike, mocking the visual strength of the image and imagination of BPs and its importance.
This alone could be enough to push to change movies, or to decide to permanently boycott Netflix.
Sorkin’s world is represented under a right wing vision, where in the end the state and its representatives are the good guys, who fight against bad apples inside and outside the system; and as in the best pro-American propaganda works, the epilogue shows us an America united by the same values of justice and nationalism. This action clearly removes the historical memory of the events of the summer of 1968 in Chicago and on the arbitrariness of the conspiracy charge against the 7. This message passes despite the awkward attempt to disguise itself with the idea of being a film of denunciation and on the side of the “righteous”, which however leaves the viewer confused with a film that does not know anything.
I am sure that many of my reflections will be considered excessive if not inappropriate, some could argue that the film is about the trial of the seven members of some of the most important American “revolutionary” collectives, and that these are white men. But it is the representation that we give that counts, it is how we tell the story, and Sorkin seems to live in a black and white world, where there are good and bad, and who counts is man and is white.
Written by Giuseppa Stanislasky
Translation by Dende
Post Scriptum by Radio Punk
Did you like this article? Do you any similar idea? Contact us!