That Ain’t Cool

Is it 1968 all over again for the Democrats? This year as then, the Democratic National Convention takes place in Chicago. Once again, an unpopular Democratic incumbent bedeviled by an ill-conceived imperial war dropped out during the primaries. And again, young antiwar protesters have found themselves at the wrong end of police batons, often at the behest of Democratic officials.

As 1968 began, Lyndon B. Johnson squeaked out a win in the New Hampshire primary over the antiwar Eugene McCarthy. Chastened by the poor showing, Johnson announced he would not seek reelection and instead focus on finding a way out of the Vietnam War. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis in April, and American cities exploded with rage. In June, Johnson’s presumptive top-of-the-ticket successor Robert F. Kennedy won California’s primary and was promptly killed as well. When the Democrats convened on Chicago in August, they nominated Johnson’s vice president Hubert Humphrey in a brokered convention while, outside, more than eleven thousand Chicago Police and many thousands of National Guardsmen brutalized Vietnam War protesters in a “police riot.” In November, Republican Richard Nixon, running his campaign on “law and order,” defeated a surging Humphrey with a slim popular vote margin of 43.4 percent to 42.7 percent. (Segregationist George Wallace won 13.5 percent of the vote.)

With tens of thousands expected in Chicago to demonstrate against further U.S. aid to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, this year’s Democrats hope to avoid a similar fate against Donald Trump and his too-online acolyte J.D. Vance. Vance became famous with his memoir Hillbilly Elegy, later adapted for the screen by Ron Howard. Yet the movie to watch to understand this political moment is not that Appalachian tale, but the far stranger, looser, and occasionally breathtaking Medium Cool. Released in 1969 by veteran cinematographer and documentary director Haskell Wexler, the film captures the pulsing feel of 1968 by splicing documentary techniques into a fictional storyline. It follows TV news camera jockey John Cassellis (Robert Forster) as he prepares to work the DNC with his sound man (Peter Bonerz), reports from the hard-luck neighborhoods of Chicago, and falls in love with single mother Eileen (Verna Bloom), who has come to the city with her rascal son from West Virginia.

On the way into town, the newsmen come across an auto accident and shoot some quick footage before calling an ambulance and zooming off. The media, boy! What life-and-death question can they not reduce to spectacle? But reporting human interest pieces in Chicago—and at the Poor People’s Campaign’s March on Washington that spring—cultivates a social consciousness in Cassellis. He follows the story of a black cab driver who found $10,000 in his car and turned it over to the police. Visiting the driver, Cassellis gets an earful from some black Chicagoans unhappy with being overlooked and discounted by traditional white media. They “didn’t want to ‘act,’” Wexler told Roger Ebert upon the film’s release. “They would only agree to be in the scene if they could say what they believed about the way the media treat black people. So we were honest with each other.” These indignant interlocutors address the camera directly, implicating the viewer in the media’s failures to consider them: “You are the exploiters. You’re the ones who distort, and ridicule, and emasculate us. And that ain’t cool.”

The film’s formal innovation has lent it staying power. As the narrative incorporates scenes of cinema verité, it blurs the line between the real and the fictive. At times that adds to the film’s fidelity to the Chicago it depicts. Like the mostly non-actor black Chicagoans in the taxi driver scene, Eileen’s son Harold is played by Harold Blankenship, a local boy the film crew recruited from the streets of uptown who emerges as the film’s most compelling character, full of a melancholy pathos. Elsewhere, the elements of documentary exceed the plotting of the film itself. In an early scene, the newsmen watch the Illinois National Guard train for crowd control, with half of its guardsmen clearly having fun in their assignment playacting as hippy protesters, and the other half practicing corralling them. These guardsmen reappear in the film’s celebrated final act, when Eileen and Cassellis wander through the real-life antiwar protests happening outside the convention, witnessing the cops brandishing their batons. The film crew gets hit with tear gas.

Wexler, a Chicago native and political radical, wrote the film as a comment on the American media’s distortions and failures. Cassellis, a stand-in for the cinematographer Wexler, bemoans to Eileen the media’s “script,” by which they interpret such tragedies as the killing of Dr. King to foreclose any substantive response. He is told off by would-be interviewees; he comes to learn that his station has handed over his footage to the FBI to identify subversives. The film closes with a pan toward Wexler himself, sitting behind a camera, and the viewer’s lens and Wexler’s behold one another as if to reveal the artifice of even this critical statement. To watch Medium Cool today, with the media weakened and armchair media criticism a plentiful currency of public life, is to return to a moment when a centralized media apparatus could be both agenda-setting and in which the revelation of such an agenda could offer a story its dramatic tension. But who now doesn’t have a ready take on the media’s slant, or on what the media is doing to the minds of Americans?

Wexler began his exploration of American urban development in his 1953 documentary short The Living City. “The American City is scarred beyond belief. We are renewing parts of our cities, but the spread of blight, of decay, is more spectacular than our best efforts,” narrates the famed Chicago historian Studs Terkel, who would also consult on Medium Cool. Such blight, for Wexler, involves both the physical spread of substandard housing and debris and the social ills of those in whom the state has disinvested. In one scene, a policeman brings home a troubled boy on the streets to his worried and thankful mother, with a warning: he’s not in any trouble . . . this time. This dynamic is reprised in more depth in Medium Cool. Cassellis follows Harold home to confront him after chasing him through a parking lot, thinking him a thief. A social worker visits Harold while his mom is out and asks after the conditions he’s living in—is there a TV? How many rooms in the house, for how many people? The possible symptoms of poverty threaten to plunge mother and son into further trouble.

Circumstances have trapped the two. Upon arrival in Chicago, Harold’s father left the family. In West Virginia, his mother Eileen was a schoolteacher; here, her credentials will not let her continue that work. And in Chicago, Harold complains, the schools don’t teach anything, instead wheeling in a TV and letting the students watch whatever. Kids fight with rocks and guns, and supervision of both Harold and his whole neighborhood ilk seems lax. A documentary about the making of Medium Cool called Look Out Haskell, It’s Real (named for a shout from the crew to Wexler when the tear gas came) includes footage of a jettisoned arc tracing Eileen’s political evolution. Guided by Peggy Terry, a real-life organizer of Chicago’s poor whites, Eileen watches Jesse Jackson speak and learns to see her struggles as related to the black organizing happening in Chicago at the time. None of this, however, made it into the final cut. Instead, Eileen appears as mostly a caring mother and beleaguered lover, the political resonances between Chicago’s poor white and black populations largely hinted at.

Toward film’s end, Harold witnesses Cassellis force himself on Eileen, and bolts from home. As Cassellis is filming inside the convention, and Eileen searches frantically, Harold gets himself dizzily lost with a friend. He perches on the bandstand in Grant Park and introduces himself as a candidate to an imagined audience, arms a-waving. A lost Appalachian boy from a broken home yearning to speak to the masses, suddenly thrust onto the grand stage—why, here is a cinematic stand-in for J.D. Vance.

Vance’s breakthrough, in Hillbilly Elegy, was to explain the white working class to a reading public that had been stunned by Donald Trump’s presidential victory. To do this, he parsed “a culture that increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it.” Having emerged from his proud, fierce, violent, and maladjusted Appalachian Scots-Irish milieu, as he described it, he acted as a tribune of its troubles, explaining why the behaviors the hillbillies had internalized precluded these white workers from flourishing. This won him accolades in the liberal press, backing from conservative tech power broker Peter Thiel, a Senate seat in 2022, and now his vice-presidential candidacy on the Republican ticket. The Ron Howard film version was made for Netflix and released in November 2020, bookending the Trump presidency. As film critic A.S. Hamrah wrote, “The movie’s failure as a drama overshadowed both the right-wing politics of its source material and the way it caricatures poverty in the U.S. by blaming its victims for their plight”—same as the original text. Yet Vance was able to trade this callous disregard of the people from which he came for a ticket into the halls of power.

Medium Cool instead probes seriously the connections, and ruptures, between what is happening in the forgotten neighborhoods of Chicago, the unrest in the streets, and party politics. The wackiness inside of the brokered Democratic convention, the viewer understands, is intimately related to what is happening outside its walls. But with the media a faulty conduit for channeling that unease, how might the anger of the people puncture the prim rhythms of the party? The workaday organizing happening in Chicago for jobs or income mostly lurks beyond screen’s edge. Instead, the public’s will finds voice through protest: the spilling of feelings of anger, despair, and distaste with political insiders into the streets to become a broadly legible problem. Indeed, Wexler had the protest scenes written into the script, so sure was he of some sort of coming action at the DNC.

In the event, the 1968 demonstrators found their response from the supposedly more dovish party to be nightsticks on their skulls, a response that helped assure their later loss at the ballot box. Now, young people whose votes the Democrats need to win the general election are again demanding that the United States change course on an unpopular foreign war, and protesters are again in Chicago. Will they be heard? The whole world is watching.