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The problem with Brett Morgen’s Chicago 10 is that it so completely buys into its own bullshit. It’s an animated documentary that undermines its own purpose. The animation here has an unexpected effect: it emphasizes how unafraid Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and the rest of the Chicago Eight (except, perhaps, Bobby Seale who knew people who had died) were of actual consequences. They’re having fun. The trial is a gas. A couple of years in a cushy jail is a small price to pay for decades of counter-culture fame. When they come into the courtroom dressed as judges, are forced to remove their robes and are wearing police uniforms underneath, you feel like “no wonder this movie is animated. The trial was actually a cartoon.”
Unlike a Nelson Mandela for instance, these weren’t men who had to fear that because of their actions someone might come in the middle of the night and make their family disappear.No, Hoffman and Rubin are pop culture stars, enjoying their moment and their notoriety. Neither Hoffman nor Rubin ever miss a chance for another press conference, media appearance or crowd to speak to. When Rubin is talking about how scared and excited he is now that he’s been charged with inciting a riot across state lines he sounds like a young actor who just got cast in the latest Speilberg movie. He even refers to the entire incident as “the Academy Awards of protests”, as though no one involved was actually hurt or injured. “Revolution” is like a country fair for the counter-culture, not a means to achieve a different practical reality. Indeed, both Rubin and Hoffman are as absolutely intoxicated with their fame as any pop star. Eager to be lionized as the heads of a cult of personality they rarely seem to do much except spout homilies and utter drivel. When they talk about a New World Order they seem to think they’re talking about freedom but what they’re actually talking about is celebrity. This shallow irony is apparent to the audience even if the director remains oblivious.
This celebrity-addiction is apparently infectious. No one is immune. Justice Julius Hoffman’s ridiculous and appalling rulings seem geared to play up his role as the bad guy in this comic melodrama. When he makes the hideous step of actually having Bobby Seale bound and gagged in the courtroom it is a move that seems calculated to guarantee his fifteen minutes of fame: “What’s the worst possible thing I could do? I won’t just have somebody bound and gagged, I’ll bind and gag the BLACK GUY.” For dramatic effect, this actual event is actually placed later on in the film, out of its actual chronological sequence, so that it has an even greater impact. Morgen has to save it because with the MTV aesthetic of the rest of the film, the movie is in constant danger of stimulation saturation. That might make it unique in the history of documentaries but it’s not necessarily desirable. By the time we get to the end he has to top everything that’s gone before and when what’s gone before is dream like animation of weed smoking, sex, the trial itself, a soundtrack bursting with Funkadelic, Rage Against the Machine and the Beastie Boys and documentary footage of cops busting up real (not famous) people, it’s not going to be easy.
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Not that Chicago 10 is without its merits. At times it’s very good, even powerful. In the actual footage from 1968 Democratic convention is often harrowing. We don’t generally expect to see storm troopers on the streets of the United States. It reminds you of just how far things got. Towards the end, a middle-aged woman is forced into the back of a paddy wagon while singing “We Shall Overcome”. It’s one of the really heart-wrenching moments of the movie. The scene when Bobby Seale is forcibly gagged is ugly enough to emphasize how much fun the rest of the cartoon has been…and make you wonder if that is a good thing. But neither Rubin nor Hoffman nor any other of the Chicago eight (or the two lawyers which rounded it out to 10) ever get their heads busted open. We never see them in the fetal position underneath a barrage of nightsticks. And yet, they get all the screen time, all of the ink, and their names in the history books. That would be fine if they seemed like great men or even brave ones. But they don’t. They feel like spoiled American brats. This is underscored when a young Black woman is asked if she feels sorry for the rioters at the convention getting beat up by the cops. She doesn’t and she’s just glad that people see that it is white people causing all the ruckus.
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That brings the movie to another seemingly unanticipated revelation: to the men of Chicago Ten revolution had become an abstract idea. Their only goal really does feel like it’s just to raise a ruckus. By having made a lot of noise they feel like they’ve achieved something. That their actions led to Nixon in the White House and the Viet Nam war going on for another seven years seems immaterial to them. The fact that they made headlines and have a cool media nickname is much more important in their childish minds and somehow makes them relevant. That they were actually marginalized and not reaching the vast majority of the American public, the very people they claimed to be fighting for, seemed to escape them completely.
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Four decades on and the Sixties, if anything, become more deeply immersed inside the hazy glow of its own self-generated mythos. You would think that forty years would give Morgen some perspective…but you’d be wrong. I am reminded of Danny Sugerman’s trite and child-like biography of Jim Morrison, No One Here Gets Out Alive. Any kind of real insight into the subject matter is forfeited because of the chronicler’s painfully obvious hero-worship. It’s too bad. Morgen is undoubtedly a film maker of verve and passion. He wants to believe. I wanted to believe for him watching his movie. But forty years later the “movement” that Hoffman, Rubin and company championed has failed so completely it’s almost painful. Not only did the Viet Nam war keep going on – for years – not only did thousands of more people die, not only did the civil rights era drown in a sea of cocaine, excess and big business during the Seventies but forty years later America is as imperialist as ever, committed to the use of force to expand its economic power and movies like this are made at the behest of the corporate power structure. Compare Chicago 10 to the astonishing and devastating spiritual resonance of Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir and the former film feels trite, clumsy, disingenuous. Between the thumping soundtrack, the ebullient animation, and the quick-cutting documentary footage, one wonders what Morgen is trying to hide. What’s scary is he might not be hiding at all. Maybe he doesn’t think these events are profound or meaningful, he thinks they’re hip. Or, worse, maybe he thinks profound and hip are the same thing. Who knows? That might just be the real American tragedy of the 21st century.
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