APRIL 4, 2008 - VOL. 1, ISSUE 9

In the city, in the summer, something is always simmering in hazy oranges and yellows. Everything is ready to burst, tensions press against the dam until something sparks and flash-boils unrest into violence. Beleaguered men, oppressed in some way, rise up and lash out in a thematic swelling with the weather. The heat breaks and things ease with the rain. The scene is familiar, and it would be stale if it didn't actually happen so often. The 1960s were marred by anger at violence, and anger manifested with violence. 1968 was especially hot. It was a cup of water heated beyond the boiling point, where the slightest disturbance of the surface will explode it and scald everything nearby. It looks completely benign, calm and tepid even, something so innocuous as a microwave oven setting: Medium Cool. Haskell Wexler's film blend of fiction narrative and documentary footage captures just how hot tempers actually ran.

The 1960s are a contemporary religion to today's student generation. We know the stations of the cross well: political upheaval, Vietnam, Robert F. Kennedy's assassination, Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, the music, the liberation, the action and apathy, and so on. And we know the ideas intimately, championing them and holding them up as examples of how to act now. Student movements and protests of the past are glorified because today we are pathetically flailing to care about the latest war to end all wars. We don't, not in the same way, and without the urgency of being sent to fight. We are all rhetoric, and Medium Cool reminds us how different our anti-war, anti-establishment movements really are, with one backed into a corner left to lash out in a riot in Chicago, and the other today, left to our Wikipedia philosophy, our need to photograph the latest history, our hypocritical premium on individuality in the cult of iPods and web-logs, all dumped in a harmless cordoned-off protest zone.

For two hours, Wexler's film strips us of our hypocrisies. It puts us in a Chicago that is both familiar and distant. The city is bright and warm, but gritty in its photography. I'm struck by watching the L train rumble by, moving through sunlight and shadow. It is difficult to glamorize grimy and ugly elevated tracks, and Wexler doesn't try. We're taken to a slum and watch as a man climbs the utilitarian and unattractive wood staircases attached to a tenement, brought inside to something just as dirty and unpleasant. No doubt influenced by the cinéma vérité movement that was being popularized at the time, aided with the advent of more portable cameras outfitted with long telephoto lenses. Everything seems to be shown to us as-is, and Wexler uses the burgeoning style to make a statement, letting us ponder the beauty of cinema and the reality of television.

The title comes from Marshall McLuhan's "cool medium" description of television. According to McLuhan, it requires active participation of the viewer to interpret and string together the events and images being shown. Film, by contrast, is said to be "hot" because it is generally linear and requires less of the consumer to extract meaning and fill in the blanks. Wexler is obviously using the descriptor as play-on words and as a cunning commentary of how both mediums radically defy these simple classifications.

Medium Cool follows John Cassellis, a television news cameraman from Washington, in Chicago for the Democratic National Convention. He falls for a woman, Eileen, who recently moved to Chicago with her son, now living in a cramped, hot, rundown apartment. She is a widow, having just lost her husband in Vietnam. The film pushes back and forth with John's lust and his responsibilities as a newsman. The last quarter of the movie is its most compelling. John is on the floor of the Convention, and Eileen is looking for her missing son in the middle of the riot in Grant Park and beyond.

Wexler's film is a laboratory for toying with the ideas of the 1960s. Chicago is a crucible for Wexler to experiment with the effects of political turmoil, class segregation, of the Vietnam War, of journalistic ethics and the exhibition of violence. In one scene, we watch John thoroughly enjoying himself at a roller derby as women barrel into each other, throwing their bodies into others, crashing into the outlying railing. The scene plays silently with only "Sweet Georgia Brown" under the violence. We settle in, soothed by the familiar song and enthralled by the derby until suddenly we are jarred back into reality. The song stops, the location sound cuts in, and we hear people cheering as people crash all around us.

It is a moment that parallels the emotion that comes later. The connection is a loose one, as almost everything in Medium Cool seems to be. The plot is there because it needs to provide some significance to what occurs during the riots later on, but it is secondary to Wexler's laboratory or forum for discussion. We move from issue to issue well, tied by the disjointed manner in which television news pieces are stitched together, but the feeling that we are to pay attention more to the comment than the image is palpable.

The separation of meaning and image is more relevant now than ever. The film is a constant interplay of television spectacle and the "reality" of documentary footage. Cinéma vérité, more than other documentary forms, is mistaken for "real life," but it is still a constructed, edited interpretation framed from specific angles that lead us to a point of view. In Medium Cool, Wexler combines footage of the Illinois National Guard in a training exercise with actual footage of the Chicago riots. He puts his actress in the middle of a dangerous upheaval, combining narrative fiction and narrative reality in compelling new ways. As today's student generation forgets the torturous emotion that begat violence and only remembers the grand statement of protest, we are directly confronted with the dichotomy of the image—what we remember—and the meaning behind it.

By allowing the plot to fall in importance forces us to remember the emotion that has boiled over. We are feeling something not simply because a plot arc has directed us to do so, but because we believe that this is real, the blows the Chicago Police deal out are real, the dire circumstances and feeling as if there is nothing left to lose, is real. In some ways it is, in others it isn't, but that is Wexler's point. The events become the main characters, and John is simply an excuse to take the audience to them.

The film is a bit of a hodgepodge of scenes that directly address civil unrest, social segregation, and political problems. Because of it, the film seems a bit heavy-handed in its commentary, moving from one condemnation of society to the next, but that does not diminish the effect of seeing Chicago as a microcosm of American tensions in 1968. Everything is loosely but deftly connected, and this structure seems to fit well with Wexler's melding of perceived fact with perceived fiction. Perhaps I am drawn in to the film more than most because of my relationship to Chicago. Like Eileen, I am a Chicago émigré, sometimes lost in the simmer of a hot city. Grant Park is a innocuous and placid place, and the streets that act as the stage of the riots are familiar. Walking down them in the shadow of real anger has a sobering effect.

Wexler's conversation with the reality of television reminds us how prolific it is today. Documentary is not exactly fact, but not exactly fiction either, and as cameras are placed in everyone's hands, the line is only getting grayer. Medium Cool captures an anger in a singular historic event. We now look cynically on protest and it seems as if half those in attendance are photographers waiting to capture the latest historic event. Everything gets diluted here, and nothing seems special because we care more about the documentation, the spectacle, the image than the reality, the action behind it.