The reductive power of the close-up

For a more in-depth look at Frost/Nixon I highly recommend my friend redeyespy's review. I agree with his assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of this film. What got me thinking was a line from James Reston, Jr. (Sam Rockwell). Director Ron Howard uses a documentary-like device throughout the film in which several of the main actors reminisce on their participation in the events dramatized. Reston's post-mortem includes this phrase "the reductive power of the close-up." Meaning the way television can reduce a long and varied career into a single moment. Here a buffoonish British talk show host was able to do what legions of investigative reporters and Congressional committees could not -- force Richard Nixon to betray self-doubt and remorse before millions of viewers. Not because he was the President's intellectual equal, but because he understood the power of television. Remarkable.

This wasn't the first time Nixon had fallen victim to the new monster. It's widely assumed that the first ever televised Presidential debate between Nixon and JFK cost Nixon the 1960 election due to the sickly pallor and presence of sweat on the Vice President's upper lip. Radio listeners thought Nixon had won the debate, but they hadn't seen the close-ups. "Never let them see you sweat." Watergate was before my time, but there have been a few such defining television moments in my lifetime. "There you go again." -- Ronald Reagan debating Carter in '80, George Bush Senior's bewilderment in a supermarket check-out line, Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky on the rope line and "I did not have sex with that woman," Bush Jr. on the deck of the carrier "Mission Accomplished", etc. Is it fair? Probably not. What's for sure is that television is a carnivore that must be fed. What it builds up it eventually tears down. It will be interesting to see how the reductive power of the close-up plays out in the Obama era.