The rapper K’naan has a song that begins: “Until the lion learns to speak/the tales of hunting will be weak”
It implies an empathic view of history. And a simple one, too. The perspective of the hunted would, of course, be far different than the perspective of the hunter. But what if the lion could speak? What tale would he tell of a herd of gazelles? Surely, it would diverge from the story he’d file of the man with the rifle. History, it seems, is malleable, and it can cast players to serve in a multiplicity of roles.
J. Edgar Hoover is easily villified. Some of the roles he played during his lifetime were malicious. Others were mundane. Some could even be described as admirable. So what does that make him? Was he a villain? A hero? An anti-villain? With their new biopic, J. Edgar, Clint Eastwood and Leonardo DiCaprio have submitted an answer. Rather, a pathway to an answer.
(image via Bauer Griffin)
J. Edgar is a prestige film. To be perfectly frank, that’s true of any project Clint Eastwood takes on. The Oscar whispers commence almost as soon as the dude begins prepping a new flick. This one is pretty thick with Academy bona fides. There’s Eastwood. There’s Leo. There’s Eastwood’s go-to cinematographer Tom Stern and his go-to editors Joel Cox and Gary Roach. Also, Dame Judi Dench and Naomi Watts. This film doesn’t need to be good in order to pique the interest of the people in charge of award nominations. It just needs a tweet listing the names of its key players.
Of the key players, the cast of thespians presents evidence supporting a sporting parallel for DiCaprio. Apart from the Dame and Naomi Watts, Leo shares the screen with Armie Hammer, the actor who played the twins in The Social Network. Hammer steals quite a few scenes. Maybe even the whole movie. How could Leo the Oscar-less allow that to happen?
Well, if you recall some of DiCaprio’s most notable performances (This Boy’s Life, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?, Titanic, Catch Me If You Can, The Aviator, The Departed, Blood Diamond, Inception) what they all have in common is that Leo usually plays alongside some powerhouse performers–as if he were Magic Johnson.
Throughout Magic’s basketball career, his greatest successes were linked to the success of his teammates. Like #32, Leo has rarely carried the load alone. (Neither is he really built for it.) Like #32, Leo seems to work more joyously and more successfully when he is positioned so he can help good and great peers achieve gooder and greater things. In the case of J. Edgar, Hammer is Big Game James Worthy. Will this film be the actor’s Game 7 of the ’88 NBA Finals? If it is, you could make the case that he couldn’t have done it without a big assist from DiCaprio.
(image via Poptower)
J. Edgar presents Hoover to us in five parts: the meticulous builder of systems, the young crusader against Communism, the comic book crime-fighter, the collector of dirty secrets, and the old man who simply won’t relinquish the absurd amount of power he worked so hard to accumulate. These roles, of course, only represent Hoover’s professional life.
The personal Hoover Eastwood and DiCaprio give us is a man who may or may not have been a closeted cross-dresser, but who certainly sustained a deep, lasting intimacy with a man — the character played by Duncan. This Hoover has few interests outside of his work, and he draws his professional aspirations from the bond he shares with his mother. Their mother/son relationship hinges on a big worldview made simple by all that one can accomplish pursuing a career (and a life) in Washington, DC.
When we meet Hoover, he has emerged from organizing the entire Library of Congress to devise the method by which suspected Bolsheviks will be rooted out and booted from U.S. soil. The twin ambitions suggest a simple man who could be called a progenitor of information systems — a public servant in the order of Robert McNamara. And the stage is set for this Hoover to strike a heroic pose.
As the film takes us deeper into Hoover’s life, we see the degree to which his career was built on posturing. When his law enforcement credibility is challenged, this Hoover responds by donning a cape and seizing every photo opp to present himself to the world as the pulp hero he seems so desperate to be. Here, the Eastwood/DiCaprio incarnation of Hoover takes a turn from heroism toward anti-villainy. Many heroes have tripped over their own vanity. Few have held the power to hold the country hostage while struggling to assert their bravery and piety. Hoover, we see, was one of the few.
In the end, the Eastwood/DiCaprio Hoover arrives at the destination he is most often reduced to: the powerful man who derived his power from all the secrets he knew. These secrets are, in some measure, the products of the system he began building much earlier in his life, and he remains driven to collect them based on the sense of righteousness he cultivated during the Red Scare. At best, this Hoover was a sad man whose view of the world never evolved past his own youth. At worst, this Hoover was a coward, a predator and a bad, bad man. (Not, to be clear, bad meaning good.)
The chronology of J. Edgar suggests a man who aspired to be a hero and eventually landed in a place where he could be cast as a villain. Even as tidy as it is, it still leaves room for subjectivity. The film allows us to make of Hoover whatever we want to. That seems to be the privilege of history: We can tell the story that most suits us. Thinking back to the K’Naan song, if the lion has a good lobbyist, does he even need to speak?
If we take a less cynical view of J. Edgar — and, indeed, of history — we can see a different lesson: Power is not compatible with history. The initial aim of history is to record what happened. The point at which it seeks understanding of why events transpired is the point at which it collides with power. Power has no obvious need to understand why something happened. As power seeks to sustain itself, contemplation generally goes against its best interests.
Instead, power needs enemies, and it needs resources to squash those enemies. For most of the 20th century, the specter of communism created a threat would-be American heroes could use to define themselves. J. Edgar Hoover came of age at a moment when that threat could be heard exploding on your neighbor’s porch. Supposing that threat was precisely what Hoover imagined at the moment he first imagined it, shouldn’t the threat diminish as Hoover accumulated and wielded power? Shouldn’t that be the ultimate goal of a man in Hoover’s position of leadership?
Ah, but there’s the rub. Leadership and power are not synonyms. In too many instances, power is devoid of leadership. Hoover, it becomes clear, was always interested in the institutions charged with keeping order. Put another way, Hoover was always interested in control*. Leadership never seemed to appeal to him. Nevermind his vanity, Hoover couldn’t possibly be heroic. The idea of Hoover as a villain is too simplistic. Which leaves us with only one way to understand J. Edgar Hoover: as the anti-villain. Somewhere in his heart, there was virtue. Over time, his actions betrayed it completely and brutally.
At least, that’s how the gazelle sees it.
(* Yes, conspiracy theorists, the word “control” is contained within the acronym “COINTELPRO.”)
