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.”
