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Volume 22. Number 1 (1997) reprinted by permission Oklahoma City University Law Review SUBTERRANEAN GOVERNMENT, UNDERGROUND FILM ANTHONY CHASE* † Professor Chase juxtaposes in this essay modern political developments with efforts on the part of film makers to capture the essence of those developments on screen and provide an appropriate visual metaphor. The question is how to visualize the nature of power relations in a society where power itself tends to become less visible all the time. After sketching the construction of subterranean government in the United States, and its historical background, Professor Chase then examines director Alan Pakula's "conspiracy trilogy" (Parallax View, All The President's Men, Pelican Brief), which comes closest to providing a cinematic equivalent to the nineteenth century novel's preoccupation with rendering concrete images of social reality. at least become a common assumption of ongoing legal studies, if not popular legal consciousness as a whole. Whether it will depends largely on the same kind of historical and political factors which not only shaped the reception of legal realism and its systematic exposure of the unwritten constitution but, necessarily, ground the success or failure of any theoretical innovation in philosophy or natural science.2 The social context within which the discovery of the unwritten constitution took place should by now be familiar. The liberal capitalist road to modernization (represented by Britain, France, and the United States) had increasingly come into conflict with the authoritarian capitalist model (Germany and Japan), as sociologist Barrington Moore describes in his classic study of the social origins of dictatorship and democracy.3 When President Franklin Roosevelt assumed office in 1933, he confronted a situation where, according to world-systems theorist Immanuel Wallerstein, the liberal capitalist approach was challenged sharply from the right by Germany and, equally disconcerting to those whose task it was to manage the state apparatus, from the left by the Soviet Union. Both the New Deal program engineered by Roosevelt and the Nazi program led by Hitler were carried out within the confines of a capitalist political economy. But the rise of the Nazis in Germany (and, to be sure, emperor-system fascism in Japan) facilitated, as Wallerstein observes, Roosevelt's development of "the New Deal as an alternative type of political solution," one that was liberal rather than authoritarian in Moore's terminology, "centrist" rather than "rightist" in Wallerstein's.4 Once the international right wing, the Axis powers, had been defeated (and the Red Army was in Berlin), the U.S. shifted from a left of center strategy (aimed at defeating authoritarian forms of capitalist rule) to a right of center strategy, becoming as Wallerstein puts it, the leader of a 'free world' alliance against the world left . . . ."5 This volte-face in U.S. policy, identified as a postwar response to communist expansion by some historians, but as already taking place early in the war by critics like Gabriel Kolko, provides an essential historical boundary along side of which to locate legal realism's rise and relative decline. Thus, diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union by the Roosevelt administration and equally unprecedented unemployment figures claimed center stage at the same time that Karl Llewellyn, at the political margin represented by professional culture, published his realist manifesto on the Constitution. "I am not arguing," he declared, "that the United States ought to have the sort of constitution loosely designated as 'unwritten.' I am arguing that they have such a constitution, and that nobody can stop their having such a constitution, and that whether anyone likes that fact or not, the fact has been there for decades, and must be dealt with by any theory that purports to do a theory's work."6 What troubled Llewellyn, of course, and other realists at that moment was the Supreme Court's obstruction of the New Deal; specifically, roadblocks in the path of liberal capitalism's reconstruction, under new and transparently dangerous circumstances, thrown up by a judiciary clinging to the conservative apologetics of substantive economic due process. If the Court ruled that laissez faire had been written into the constitution, the realists, echoing Holmes' famous Lochner7 dissent, replied that the constitution to which the Court should turn was, in fact, essentially unwritten and therefore no economic philosophy could be designated as permanent, unalterable, or fixed. The constitution, following Llewellyn's paradigm, was a kind of artifact, a reflection of social and historical circumstances, put to use for particular purposes by a specific society at a given point in time. And if ever there was a context which cried out for a new constitutional verdict, it was the suddenly worldwide economic depression. The cumulative weight of social and political events--from the instability in government precipitated by spectacular economic dislocation to the alarming cartelization of world markets, from the reelection of Roosevelt in 1936 to his bold, courtpacking maneuver--effectively produced capitulation by the Supreme Court. Michael Ariens has recently described how, initially, it was taken for granted that politics, not some autonomous unfolding of constitutional principle, had caused the judiciary to change its tune. A theoretical reformulation of constitutional doctrine starkly revealed by the notorious "switch in time that saved the nine" was uniformly regarded as an adjustment by the Court, in the nick of time as far as most observers were concerned, to social and economic facts which were simultaneously new and inescapable.8 The focus of Ariens' essay is on the way in which the theoretical understanding of what happened during the constitutional crisis of 1937 was subsequently revised to fit new social needs. The breakthrough of realism was thus remanded, using a lawyer's term, for further review in light of cold war exigencies. Just as the left of center strategy described by Wallerstein was, in the postwar period, converted to one right of center, and just as the United States abroad pursued what in Japan was actually called "the reverse course,"9 by the 1950s American legal culture was also being reoriented by key figures, such as Felix Frankfurter, who knew precisely what they were doing. "What is most important," concludes Ariens regarding Frankfurter's turnabout, is that "his revised history of the constitutional crisis of 1937 became the accepted history in legal academia. This new version allowed legal academics to conclude that the decisions of Justice Roberts in the spring of 1937 were the product of legal reflection, not political pressure."10 Given this background, it becomes easier to understand why the second critical discovery of modern jurisprudence, sottogoverno, has managed to make so little headway when it comes to redrawing the map or diagram of legal reality. Just as historical events conspired to bring forward and then rudely cast aside the progressive legal realism of the 1930s, the late twentieth century critique of subterranean government has been pressed forward under the most difficult social conditions, against all odds. Before proceeding to this second dramatic innovation within modern jurisprudence, however, we must be sure to understand what legal realism did and did not represent. Certainly it challenged those legal notions which placed law in a privileged position above, or at least outside, the realm of politics. Just as Llewellyn had relied upon Bryce, Beard, and Bentley, the last of whom "saw and said in 1908 all that should have been necessary to force constitutional law theory into total reconstruction,"11 another writer whose work appeared in the U.S. in 1908, upon whom Llewellyn apparently did not rely but certainly could have, made transparent the extent to which legal theory had been seeking a new paradigm for decades. Italian political philosopher Antonio Labriola observed that "legislating has become an epidemic; and reason enthroned in legal ideology has been dethroned by parliaments . . . . New legislation has more than once been revised, and the strangest oscillation may be observed in it . . . ."12 During the momentous transition from a precapitalist to mercantilist, then competitive capitalist political economy in the United States,13 the legal system and its rules had been turned inside out. By the end of the nineteenth century, it was evident that the notion of law as immutable, "reason enthroned," was no longer acceptable even to those in power. Why, then, should it be passively accepted by those seeking admission to the circle of citizenship, and thus access to power itself? Although the realists, as a result of their challenge to conventional legal ideology--"a government of laws and not of men," in the popular reference--were sometimes accused of moral relativism or of harboring antidemocratic sensibilities, the charge was groundless. The crucial point to make was that constitutional democracy had not been secured in the first place merely through deployment of the myth of legal certainty, the idea that legal rules could somehow be made impervious to manipulation by power. The real constitution--the real guarantee of democracy--was something that could not be protected by language standing alone, no matter how sacred, even if memorized by every elementary school student and recited, hand on heart, by each newly sworn citizen. Even when men and women rule through law, it remains men and women who rule. Legendary civil rights attorney and Dean of Howard Law School, Charles Hamilton Houston, was fond of observing that no African-American need be reminded of the difference between law in the books and law in action. But those without such direct personal experience of the disparity between the system's claims and performance could fall victim to the myth of legal certainty, the ideology that realism sought to derail. If not legal certainty, stare decisis, original intent, or the elaborate rigamarole of law review footnotes and turgescent casebooks--on which little reliance should ultimately be placed, according to the realist critique--then what are the irreducible components of political freedom, or the minimum structures of constitutional democracy? The three essential elements are popular sovereignty (including an inevitably hard won universal suffrage), civil rights and liberties, and public government. The historic struggle to establish the power of parliaments and legislatures against kings and dictators, and to secure such basic liberties against state power as the right to speak or organize trade unions, has proved essential to the construction of modern democracy. But the guarantee of public, rather than secret government remains on a par with the first two components of a free society and may have become the most precarious of the three pillars supporting constitutional rule in the U.S. Classic authoritarian techniques of rule, such as striking out against civil liberties and the elimination of parliamentary opposition, have proved tempting, yet often elusive, to contemporary political leaders uncomfortable with democratic institutions. Of course, the desire to provide some sort of legal justification, however strained, for official conduct remains. After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, President John Kennedy turned to Richard Nixon, a bitter adversary, for advice as to what course of action to follow next. "I would find a proper legal cover and I would go in," Nixon recommended. "There are several justifications that could be used," he continued, "like protecting American citizens living in Cuba and defending our base at Guantanamo. The most important thing at this point is that we do whatever is necessary to get Castro and Communism out."14 Thus a perceived need to provide some semblance of "legal cover" for governmental action, however illegal the action may be, remained strong, as did willingness to employ the standard justification of anti-communism. President Ronald Reagan and his secret government used a commitment to saving Nicaragua from communism and support for the Contra army, whom Reagan dubbed the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers, as justification for trading American arms for hostages held by Iran (contrary to stated U.S. policy) and for bank rolling and equipping Contra "freedom fighters" (contrary to U.S. law).15 The deployment of retroactive as well as "mental" Presidential Findings during Iran-Contra--ultimately no more credible than outright, illegal destruction of documents, which also occurred--carried the effort to fabricate legal cover stories to a pathetic, perhaps tragicomic extreme.16 But to whatever lengths contemporary politicians seem willing to go in an effort to evade democratic accountability, abolition of the legislature itself (at least in the U.S.) appears beyond their grasp. Admittedly, Eisenhower and Kennedy transformed the national security bureaucracy into a new and competing branch of government. Lyndon Johnson created his own Gulf of Tonkin incident and prosecuted a savage and unpopular "police action" in Vietnam without a Congressional declaration of war. Richard Nixon had his enemies list, bugging devices, and successfully conspired to run against the opposition candidate of his choice. Reagan's "can do" NSC staffer, Lt. Colonel Oliver North (later, of course, a Republican Senate candidate) bragged of his willingness to lie to Congress if he felt the end justified the means. But actually dissolving the legislature seems a political gambit about which American authoritarians can only fantasize. In the 1930s, President Franklin Roosevelt unsuccessfully sought to pack the U.S. Supreme Court and in Gabriel Over The White House,17 a Hollywood film made during Roosevelt's first year in office, the President in fact suspends a deadlocked U.S. Congress for the duration of the Great Depression. But by the end of the twentieth century, if not by the 1930s, employment within domestic politics of such extreme alternatives as outright redesign or elimination of a branch of government (or rescinding of the franchise) had apparently been declared off limits by the ground rules of the liberal capitalist state. It is for this very reason, this historical shift in "the rules of the game," that the third component of constitutional democracy has become absolutely crucial to the maintenance of a free society. Public government is critical if secrecy is to be prevented from providing the cloak behind which those who seek democracy's subversion can achieve their main aims without actually having to risk construction of a police state or straightforward abolition of the legislature. Nixon may have engineered the Saturday Night Massacre, George Bush may have stolen the Presidency in 1988 through "flagrant misrepresentations" of his part in Iran-Contra,18 but Nixon could not abolish the courts and Bush could not avoid an eventual confrontation with the record (and the electorate) in 1992, unless he chose (like Lyndon Johnson) not to run again. Where contemporary authoritarians have done their greatest damage to the democratic state is in secret, not in public where they realize they could actually lose.19 What brought down Nixon's regime was the bungled burglary of the Watergate complex. What Reagan and his co-conspirators did not count on was Nicaragua shooting down the Hasenfus plane. Even Rodney King's assailants ended up being convicted of felonies for one reason: someone had a video camera, ready and able to make public the secret brutality of the Los Angeles Police Department. Without the videotape, the beating simply did not happen. Secrecy is a final refuge within modern constitutional democracy for the totalitarian impulse. Under the rubrics of sottogoverno, or subterranean government, and "cryptogovernment," Italian law professor Norberto Bobbio organizes his critique of a whole spectrum of totalitarian political techniques. They range from influence by hidden centers of financial leverage through management of that part of the economy which "belongs to the sphere of invisible power, beyond the compass . . . of democratic and jurisdictional control" as well as "actions carried out by paramilitary political forces which operate behind the scenes in collaboration with the secret services . . . ."20 In spite of thousands of pages in law reviews and legal textbooks devoted to American constitutional law and its practice, as well as tens of thousands of law school classroom hours devoted to separation of powers analysis and the endless parsing of Supreme Court cases, only during the last several decades has this public/secret dichotomy--what Bobbio describes in a European context as the new "opaqueness of power,"21 --been thrust onto the stage of national politics in a way that compels its introduction within the canons of political theory. Only now can we acknowledge the discovery of subterranean government as one of the key breakthroughs of twentieth century jurisprudence, potentially poised to force a dramatic paradigm shift in legal knowledge. II. Cinema During the avant-garde sixties, "underground film" meant movies unlikely to be shown in regular theaters, even at midnight on a Friday or Saturday. "Underground" thus meant unorthodox, lacking commercial appeal, somehow on the periphery. Luis Bunuel's Un Chien Andalou fit the bill, but so did Tod Browning's Freaks, (banned for thirty years outside the U.S.),22 as well as the daringly formalist cinema of artists like Andy Warhol.23 "Underground filmmakers had always operated on the fringes of the American culture," reports motion picture historian Douglas Gomery, "but in the 1950s and 1960s they worked with more intensity than ever before."24 Lines separating underground from experimental or independent filmmaking have not always been clearly drawn. "Independence" may refer to a relation between financial backers of an individual film and the Hollywood studio system (or, today, the corporate giants which absorbed the major studios); or, for that matter, between a filmmaker and those same investors. It can imply a degree of autonomy in a film's distribution and exhibition or the distance between a film's content and the reigning conventions of a particular film culture. "The independent producer of an iconoclastic film," argues Michael Parenti, "who might not be able to get studio financing, has to rely on personal funds and sympathetic individual investors. Sufficient backing may take years to procure, as was the case with John Sayles's Matewan, the story of class warfare in the West Virginia coal mines."25 Of course, independent filmmaker John Sayles's Matewan,26 as well as Martin Ritt's The Molly Maguires27 (which was made for Paramount, a Gulf & Western Corporation), represent genuinely, or rather literally, underground film; moving pictures actually photographed beneath the earth's surface, employing a narrative derived from and designed to comment upon the social relations of the mining industry and its history within the labor movement. This particular sort of underground film appears in many different national film traditions and reveals the extent to which film artists across cultures have found mining an inherently dramatic social context within which to situate stories about moral and political issues. From John Ford's How Green Was My Valley28 and the British classic, The Stars Look Down,29 to Argentina's Time For Revenge,30 films organized around the mine itself, as well the lives of those who toil underground, and which focus on the conflicts generated by this often dangerous category of employment, have left their mark on film history. The master discourse in this particular area of cultural expression, however, almost certainly was inscribed a century ago by the French novelist, Emile Zola, in his famous Germinal. Zola's avant-garde naturalism, a "stylistic exaltation of the material universe,"31 proved an incomparable means of conveying the actual experience of being inside a mine. The opening pages of Germinal, where Zola initially situates his reader within the alternative universe of Le Voreux, the world of the mine, of its workers and owners, of the system of industrial capitalism itself, are unforgettable. "While Etienne lingered, by the fire warming his poor raw hands," writes Zola, "Le Voreux began to emerge as from a dream."32 It is this dream, with all of its strangeness and violence and mystery, that French film director Claude Berri manages to capture from the very first frames of his motion picture adaptation of Germinal.33 Reviewing Berri's film, Jill Forbes suggests that for "late twentieth century audiences, the mining environment of 'Germinal'--like the lost Countryside of the Pagnol films--is highly exotic. It is not just that the pits have closed (earlier in France than in Britain), but the culture of solidarity they generated has all but disappeared too . . . ."34 Zola acknowledged that the central drama of Germinal was the struggle between capital and labor and F.W.J. Hemmings, like Forbes in her observation on the contemporary fate of proletarian solidarity, remarks in his introduction to Zola's most famous work that the "struggle between capital and labour has lost its priority over the years, to be replaced by others more urgent . . .35 We might paraphrase Forbes and Hemmings by suggesting that the character of social conflict within a world organized along capitalist lines has, indeed, been transformed during the past century and the very nature of societies governed by capital, especially in terms of new networks of flexible accumulation,36 has been reconstituted almost from the ground up. Certainly, during the period when Zola wrote, it was still possible to construct convincing archetypal representations--images of the "capitalist system"--which were instantly recognizable and carried with them a profound capacity to express the essence of the social regime for which they provided a basic metaphor. The mines and furnaces, pits and smoking chimneys of capitalist industry provided, perhaps, an illustration without parallel. But the task of coherently representing the modern world system of domination in literature and film has been rendered infinitely more complex, precisely as a result of the social restructuring alluded to above. Immanuel Wallerstein even suggests that "urbanization of the world and the increase in both education and communications" have made it much more difficult for ideology and security managers, the politicians and public relations men employed by any society, to come up with new justifications for persistent and dramatic disparities in wealth and power. And the old apologies, a century after they were initially skewered by novelists like Balzac, Hugo, and Zola, seem to work no more. "Such political awareness," concludes Wallerstein, "is reinforced by the delegitimization of any irrational sources of authority."37 Though this may represent a somewhat optimistic view of social consciousness, the fact remains that the modern capitalist state, as was argued in the first half of this essay, has been compelled to resort more and more to secrecy, to the deployment of invisible power, in order to preserve its paramount position. Advances in popular sovereignty, political suffrage, and legislative representativeness, accompanied by a deepening of demands for human rights and civil liberty, have all put considerable pressure on the state to accomplish traditional managerial (and repressive) tasks under infinitely more democratic and thus constraining conditions. The now commonplace globalization of poverty and war, by themselves, would cause Zola's Etienne Lantier to find the "social problem" unrecognizable today. Thus the current predicament of the progressive writer or filmmaker: how to render the unrecognizable visible, to capture an image of a system whose control tower seems not to be located anywhere, to render in fiction or film a system almost without transparent reference points, frequently organized out of the way, from below, by an invisible state. A link was forged between the world of Zola and our own, between the capitalism of late nineteenth century France and that which has apparently emerged victorious at the end of this century, in a lecture delivered by the great University of Wisconsin social historian, Harvey Goldberg, at the time of the Watergate crisis. Discussing Zola's crucial, certainly famous, involvement in efforts to uncover the truth in the notorious Dreyfus affair, Goldberg observed: Because you see, the Dreyfus affair is a kind of trial run for Watergate, a kind of trial run for those 15 or 20 years of CIA covert operations, a trial run if you please for a whole schema of political assassination of foreign revolutionaries or uncomfortable political leaders at home. The point is that with the Dreyfus affair you are into a very continuous exercise in raison d'etat, in public lying, into what we now call coverup. You are into a kind of conspiracy to protect the establishment from too much open and critical thinking, from too much public discussion, from too much intervention by the popular classes into the political process.38All the techniques of the clandestine state, the technology of state secrecy which we attempted to map in the earlier political analysis grounding our critique of cinema, the foundation for an inquiry into the form and content of the underground film--all of that Goldberg sees as already implicit in the tentative machinations employed by the French government in its effort to disguise the savage injustice perpetrated by its conviction and imprisonment on Devil's Island of the army officer, Alfred Dreyfus. But how can contemporary motion picture directors find just the right image, a calculated visual means of conveying the experience of conspiracy and coverup, designed to reveal the technical apparatus of government secrecy on which modern rulers have come to depend? What would an underground film tracking the emerging system of subterranean government actually look like? What we are seeking here is, in short, the cinematic expression of what Fredric Jameson identifies under the heading "Totality as Conspiracy" in his Geopolitical Aesthetic. "Archetypal journeys back beyond the surface appearance of things," he suggests, "are also here dimly reawakened, from antiquity and Dante all the way to Goffman's storefront/backroom" and even to Marx's request that we follow the captains of industry "into the hidden abode of production, on whose threshold there hangs the notice 'No admittance except on business.'"39 Jameson proposes the thriller genre as the perfect medium to perform tasks assigned to a contemporary version of underground film, arguing that the "promise of a deeper inside view is the hermeneutic content of the conspiracy thriller in general," and in fact nominates Sydney Pollack's Three Days of the Condor40 as a prime candidate. The "representational confirmation" in Condor, asserts Jameson, "that telephone cables and lines and their interchanges follow us everywhere, doubling the streets and buildings of the visible social world with a secondary secret underground world, is a vivid, if paranoid, cognitive map . . . ."41 If we keep in mind that Condor's Sydney Pollack also directed The Firm,42 the first film based upon one of John Grisham's hugely successful "legal novels,"43 then we may advance the proposition that it is precisely the legal "conspiracy thriller" which delivers the most compelling current version of underground cinema. If Pollack directed the first "Grisham film," the second was made by Alan Pakula and the book he brought to the screen was virtually written for him to direct: The Pelican Brief.44 Even a cursory review of Pakula's "conspiracy trilogy" (The Parallax View,45 All The President's Men,46 The Pelican Brief) will demonstrate why a focus upon the spatial or architectural properties of his movies may qualify Alan Pakula as the contemporary underground filmmaker, par excellence. The Parallax View (at least until the appearance of Oliver Stone's controversial JFK), has been generally regarded as the most interesting of the Kennedy assassination spinoff films. Warren Beatty plays the role of Joe Frady, a newspaper reporter, who reluctantly comes to believe in the existence of a professional organization of assassins called the Parallax Corporation. This company is available to handle the kind of assignments which the modern corporate state occasionally requires and yet cannot publicly employ legitimate governmental entities to handle. The investigative journalist manages to infiltrate the organization in search of his headline but realizes, too late, that he is in over his head and, in the end, is made a "patsy" for the film's violent conclusion. Formally, Pakula utilizes a "multiplicity of landscapes," following in the footsteps of Hitchcock's Saboteur47 and North By Northwest48 in order to geographically situate the conspiracy thriller within the quotidian discourse of the travel brochure and "the meanings of the space of daily life as such."49 Other formal devices, however, cause Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner to fault Parallax as political cinema: "The members of the corporation are depicted as faceless businessmen, the dark lighting and extreme long shots of the concluding tribunal scene make the commission of inquiry into impersonal functionaries of corporate society . . . . Architectural space and scene construction operate to make Frady seem overwhelmed . . . ."50 That, one could rather easily reply, is the whole idea. Surely, between the Rolling Stones' "Shout it out, who killed the Kennedys . . . well, after all, it was you and me," and JFK's rather concrete evocation of identifiable suspects, there is plenty of room for a film like Pakula's which asserts, however abstractly and metaphorically, that it is the system itself which constitutes (and thus alone can accurately represent) the system, with conspiracy seen (or, where successful from the system's point of view, the Parallax view, not seen) as the totalizing moment of contemporary history. Jameson describes All The President's Men as "that muted new version of The Parallax View which is Pakula's Watergate film . . . ."51 The formal bridge between the two films (which Jameson, with his extreme focus upon spatialization in cinema, oddly seems to omit) is an architectural one: the "wings and causeways of the sports arena in which the second senator has just been shot,"52 and from whose inadequately lit, concrete and steel suspended ramps Joe Frady emerges only to be himself eliminated, open directly into the "cavernous parking garages" where Bob Woodward will surreptitiously meet an invaluable (still unnamed) source from deep inside the NixonHaldeman conspiracy. Like Jameson in his identification of a "light-dark axis"53 around which All The President's Men is organized, Ryan and Kellner observe a symbolic opposition between the film's shadowy underground parking garage and the fluorescent lighting of the Washington Post newsroom.54 One of the most satisfying moments in Pakula's Watergate film, in the view of Jameson, occurs just after Bob Woodward meets with his underground (and unidentified) source for one of the last times. "Woodward breathlessly turns to confront his pursuers," says Jameson, "only to find the lights of the empty streets of a sleeping Washington staring him in the face."55 Whether or not one prefers, like Jameson, to describe this climax in terms of the "empty Mallarmean category of an encounter with the absolute Other,"56 it effectively consummates the film's formal project of locating purely cinematic means for portraying the invisibility of government by conspiracy, what Norberto Bobbio described earlier as the opaqueness of power. We may also utilize this scene as a bridge into our final architectural site, so to speak, the visual structure around which The Pelican Brief, the final panel of Pakula's conspiracy triptych, is built. Woodward's source, the character played so sardonically by Hal Holbrook, has just finished running through a list of a dozen crimes committed by the Republicans trying to get Richard Nixon reelected and Woodward, momentarily stunned, asks "do the FBI and Justice know this?" Pakula cuts from a closeup of Redford to one of Holbrook, smoking a cigarette, and before he can answer Woodward's question, as if on cue, there is suddenly the sound of a car nearby with the ignition switch turning, roar of the engine, then tires squealing as the car bursts into gear and out of the underground parking facility at high speed. There is a shot of Redford's head spinning to see what the hell's up, same of Holbrook, then the car itself; back to Redford for two shots (repeat of the prior shot of him, then he looks back at Holbrook), and a terrific, almost abstract art shot of a bare concrete wall and single line of light fixture (cf., Mondrian and Rothko): Holbrook has disappeared. The sequence Jameson describes, out on the wet streets after Woodward laboriously climbs to the main level, follows this scene immediately but does not come close either in terms of sheer terror or ultimate meaning. Back in the garage, underground itself, is where it is at. The reader, perhaps, does not need to be told what comes next. Besides turning it into a film, the single most important contribution Pakula made to Grisham's novel, The Pelican Brief, was the addition of a harrowing sequence, near the end, in the bank's parking garage. Reporter Frady was killed running along the garage-like arena ramp, just when he thought he had reached safety. Reporter Woodward could have been killed, along with his Nixon administration source, right there in the underground parking facility, perhaps even by the men in the car parked invisibly just a few feet away from where journalist and confidential source exchanged state secrets. Reporter Gray Grantham and Darby Shaw, law student extraordinaire, could have died right there in bank parking, moments after heroically tracking down and getting their hands on precisely the political dynamite they were after, if Darby had not picked up the cue, either from earlier in this film when her Constitutional Law professor was murdered, or from the previous Pakula film about Watergate which dealt, in a sense, with the same conspiracy. It is what turned Woodward's head too: the sound of a car key in the ignition. The vicious dog in Pelican, barking at such an inopportune moment for Mattiece's hired killers, is just extra, perhaps the evil twin of the President's own dog: biting the hand that feeds you.57 Woodward said, after all, that he too was a Republican. |
