Trial of the Chicago 7 and Aaron Sorkin’s Internal American Opera (Patreon)

Aaron Sorkin is idiosyncratic.

I know that word doesn’t describe anything specific, but instead a collection of works that add up to something singular. But that’s why it’s necessary. For Aaron Sorkin embodies so many damn words, often all at once. Proud. Idealistic. Verbose. Intelligent. Self-important. Defensive. Blowhard. All of which are apt, but somehow don’t quite cover it, either. And so mere words give way to complex phrases and observations, like the fact his work is often sprinkled with casual sexism and racism, while often purporting an enlightened view of those very same subjects. This in turn reflects how his work is filled with a kind of inescapable myopia. For no matter what Sorkin sets his gaze on, it comes out in Sorkinese. And this almost always can help unearth the weird specificity of his writing, from the way he fetishizes of the concept of dignity and decorum, to the way he demonizes the internet, to the way he paints a picture of a Sapiosexual world where people speak in obscure facts that they share with each other by starting it with saying, “did you know?” … It’s a lot, really.

It is also impossible to talk about him in the rote terms of good or bad.

I say this because the ways in which Aaron Sorkin is “a good writer” are fairly obvious. People love to talk about his talent for dialogue, as if it’s just about coming up with witty lines (and he is good at that), but there’s a constructive element to it, too. Because he understands the shape, purpose, and lyrical flow of a scene. He understands conversations are about positive and negative exchanges of power and how crafting “therefore / buts” aptly lead us into the next part of the story. And when linking it all together, Sorkin knows how to construct a singular arc of a story that has been unfurled with purpose and passion. And as a result, even his most mediocre of work is easily watchable in a way that only good dramatists can muster.

In short, Sorkin always makes pointed work.

Which means the difference of quality is simply a matter of what he’s pointing at and whether or not said pointing has any quality of insight… which is… well let’s get into that.

It starts with a simple framing problem. Because Aaron Sorkin is an optimist to the point that it is his best and worst quality. He believes in the power of education. He believes that institutions can make a difference and help people. He believes in grand ideals like truth, justice, and the American way (all that classical Superman stuff). And he believes in these things earnestly. In one way, we need that kind of optimism, for a world without it is a world without hope. But Sorkin also can't help but serve up that optimism with these big, hammy gestures that take the form of grand crescendos. All of his work, no matter how seemingly grounded, is effectively a kind of opera. It’s important people doing important things with important importance! All with giant songs in the heart and crucial parts to play! And as some smart playwright said, all the world’s a stage. Many think this operatic grandiosity is the inherent problem with his work, but I’d argue 1) it’s sometimes fun and 2) it’s more complicated than that.

Starting with the fact that this very grandiosity is the reason why The West Wing effectively works. For starters, it’s actually a setting/stage that’s readily built for all that. Moreover, the show is codified as a fantasy world where people always end up doing the right thing and we see the world functioning with rose colored glasses, even when things grow dire. And for whatever it’s worth, the show was reflective of an early Sorkin who seemed to be more grounded and responsible with his viewer’s time. Moreover, the show’s more balanced tone was perhaps best embodied by the light touch of director Thomas Schlamme, who understood how to dance between the walk and talk with the regularity and gravitas of that show like few others. But noting Schlamme’s influence brings us square into the bigger discussion around Sorkin. Because for much of his career, he’s been partly defined by the directors who have interpreted his work.

For example, there’s a whole audience that recoils at Sorkin’s bombast and I can’t help but feel like it’s one of those things where their criticism stems from an obsession over naturalness, or don’t like when a film’s messaging is “too on the nose” (we see these criticisms of Spielberg). Which I think is the reason that many people regard Sorkin’s best work as The Social Network, which is the film where Fincher “un-opera-ed” his voice to the nth degree (or at least translated it to a sparse and haunting playground of Ivy League academia). Some people need this kind of subdued grounding to enjoy Sorkin’s work, but truthfully, I’ve not really cared for the difference. All I’ve really cared about is whether either tactic approached something that rings true. Because all the optimism in the world isn’t worth anything if you aren’t genuinely reflecting the state of the very issues you are saying you give a shit about. Which unveils a simpler problem with Sorkin’s viewpoint…

He may be a good talker, but he’s not a good listener.

You can see this in the very DNA of just about everything he’s ever done. Sorkin comes into every world / subject he portrays with this high-powered nature of assumption and then paints in broad strokes. Granted, you don’t sense this as much in his film work (which tends to require a more focused and tighter treatment of its story), but in his expansive television work? Oh dear. Look no further than Studio 60 On the Sunset Strip, which painted comedians as these self-serious gallivanters who march toward the noble truth! It could not have felt more off-base. And nothing highlighted the pretension of these characters quite like the fact supposedly-genius sketches weren’t achingly unfunny (please check out Emily VanDerWerff’s recent revisiting of the show for there’s so many amazing observations, like the fact that Sorkin doesn’t know the difference between clever and funny). But more tellingly, bear witness to the fact that Sorkin’s show soon devolved into a screed against whatever random thing was annoying him that week (like bloggers, dammit!).

In essence, Sorkin became “the old man” rather quickly. And whatever ugly dynamics existed in his soul soon got more pronounced. Witness The Newsroom, which positioned itself as the bastion of level-headed journalism, but could not be more out of touch with his portrayal of even the most recent history. And it soon devolved into soapboxing with unsettling speeches about “due process” for rapists, along with forcibly concocting situations where men give patronizing “buck up” speeches to women for their mistakes which were equally-forced-by-the-writing. Man, I can’t think of another show that loves when a young woman doesn’t know something, like what LOL means! But meanwhile the old guy with the bowtie is hip to it, dammit, and knows The Rock has a brother in the armed forces! The motives of all this are so thinly veiled and obvious, but the show’s nadir was likely this infamous moment on a plane, with it’s tone deaf, hair point turn in which the journalist shares… well… a certain bit of news. The point of this criticism is not just that he’s an old man, but how much his work only reflects “Sorkin-vision.”

And the problem with Sorkin-vision is how much he confuses it with actual reality.

I actually think about this overall dynamic a lot. For one, I grew up constantly thinking about how other people see the world, whether to best understand them or give them what I thought they needed (note: this comes with its own terrible problems, specifically if you contort yourself to be what you think they want). But on the flip side, it’s downright strange to me how many people just can’t believe the experience of the world is genuinely different for others. Not in that obvious, concrete way where some people have money or face tangible hardship. But that the way where the very rules and day-to-day operation with society are so utterly different. For example, Sorkin can reference core examples of racism in his work and yet expressed literal disbelief that there would be racism in the screenwriting industry! (Yikes). It is the very essence of myopia. And it not only makes it so you can’t understand the world outside your own orbit, it makes you assume that others will always behave the way that you do. I mean, when asked what would happen with Trump being willing to cede power, that ultimately he would do the right thing  This isn’t the act of idealism. This is denial of the most basic ugliness in front of him. For Sorkin just can’t imagine a world that doesn’t fit in his myopic, internal version. He can’t imagine a world where people don’t behave like he does.

Some argue this is just dangerous centrism, but it’s really dangerous ego-centrism (it can be both, really). Which would be one thing if he was telling stories that are about unpacking that flawed self-hood, but he’s never really unpacking anything about himself. Instead, his narratives launch into other people’s stories with reckless abandon. We theoretically should want someone with the chameleon instinct to tell these stories, or better yet, someone close to that experience. But instead it’s all about “how Aaron Sorkin would do all this!” And it seeps into everything he writes. I mean, I like Steve Jobs a lot, but ultimately it only paints Jobs as complicated in the exact way that Sorkin’s also complicated (just too brash, always eventually correct, etc). Even then, I’d argue that when his work is directly pointed at character introspection, it feels at least more human. But the more directly political the work?

Well, then it all becomes fodder for Aaron Sorkin’s “Internal American Opera.”

Which brings us to The Trial of the Chicago 7.

The real-life trial is one of those historical events where people go “Wow, that’s so crazy! Someone should make a movie out of that!” What with its endless courtroom gags, relative social importance, and surreal judicial malfeasance (like with the literal gagging of a defendant). But such insane anecdotes do not a story make. Not just because the difference between fiction and non-fiction is fiction has to make sense, but because shaping an actual narrative around this particular trial is quite tricky.

On one level, that makes Sorkin perfect for this story, because he finds and frames a narrative quite elegantly. Which means he doesn’t get distracted from the story he is telling to constantly shoehorn in historical ephemera (like the fact this movie could have had Norman Mailer, Arlo Guthrie, and Jesse Jackson pop up). Instead, he finds the characters that frame the range of politicization (whether with the defendants or the prosecution) and frames arching conflicts between them all. This is most effective when it's between the off-the-wall comedic absurdism of Abbie Hoffman and the straight-laced, nose-to-the-grindstone work of Tom Hayden. Likewise, Sorkin takes the massive swarm of courtroom proceedings and knows exactly what to skip, effectively zeroing in on the sequences that make for a compelling story. And within all this, there are all these quippy, insightful lines like, “I think we were leading 10,000 undercover cops in protest” and “It’s almost astonishing the seven us weren’t able to end a war” and “So our role in history is we made it easier to convict our friends?” which all dot their scenes with aplomb.

And I’ll even be honest, I was utterly preparing to wince at the denial-ridden centrism of the film, whether it was how it portrayed the leftist movement or some desperate attempt to put “good cops” within the narrative, but it’s actually… not horrifying? I mean, it’s not great, but it at least frames different approaches to leftist movement as an actual dialogue between Hayman and Hoffman, nor does it actually think Hoffman’s theatrics are a “pointless fuck you.” It also seems to understand the way any protest turns violent at the point the police just decide it’s time to get violent. I can consider this understanding a nice surprise, or maybe this is the thing about the actual historical event of the Chicago riots: its injustice is undeniable. Despite that, these positive qualities of the film are not the be all end all. Because on another level…

Sorkin turns out to be the opposite of the person for this story.

Let’s start with the least important factor: direction. We’ve only seen two efforts from Sorkin so far, but admittedly he has that writer's skill of knowing exactly how to get in and out of every scene. He also always knows where the conflict is. These things are important. But so much of direction is a matter of fine-tuned control of tonal moments. And it’s not that he just doesn’t know how to make the opera feel grounded, he lets it loose. Similarly, he doesn’t have that eye for when an outfit looks like a costume instead of a wardrobe. More surprisingly, he doesn’t have that ear for when an actor's line is coming off too strong or when he has to reign in an actor’s dialect (an actor friend once argued that sometimes the most important thing a director can say is “don’t do that voice”).

To be honest, I get it. Being fussy on the page is one thing because it’s usually a limited argument that plays on hypotheticals. But being fussy on set is about making the right, fast-paced choices over necessary aesthetic details and kind of requires you to have this in-person social nuisance quality. They’re quite different. But if you don’t lock those aesthetic things down, they result in making your production seem like a TV movie (an outdated insult if there ever was one) or make it so the tangible details of bad wigs or accents become the entire talking around a film.

Even with that, the truth is that the directing doesn’t “sink” the film. But it doesn’t highlight how much comes down to the nature of specific choices. Because with everything we leave in frame, or every thing we add to a story, we are making a very conscious choice. And so we must ask… Why? Why is the movie choosing to focus on X? Also, for this real-life story, what is in the story that didn’t actually happen? What is the reason for that? Is it for narrative economy? Thematic underlying? I ask because when you start looking at the specificity of the choices of The Trial of Chicago 7, that’s when Sorkin’s idiosyncratic weirdness starts spilling out.

Let’s start with gender dynamics. Granted, we understand this is a story “about” mostly white men, which, okay, fine — but that just means you have to pay extra close attention to the way it inserts women. No, it’s not just about the depiction of bra burning (which didn’t actually happen). It’s the way the film makes room for the usual Sorkin offenses. Like the moment where the white defense attorney patronizingly tells the dismissed female juror to “Keep reading James Baldwin.” Or when the other defense attorney singles out the stenographer women in the court and asks them, “are you any good? Keep up.” More prevalent are the scenes with the defense’s office manager Bernadine, which seemingly focuses on her rebellious take no-shit attitude, but of course finds the moments to paint her naivety. Like when her insistence that “most people are smart,” is met with the made-to-be-wise counter that “if you believe that, you’re going to get your heart broken every day of your life.” All of these interactions feel dripping with this combination of control and patriarchal judgement and this icky line of patronizing / challenging / encouragement.

But the inserts that feel the weirdest mostly involve Jerry Rubin’s plot. That’s because Daphne O'Connor (Caitlin FitzGerald), you know, the undercover agent he had a “taking it slow” relationship with? She didn’t actually exist. She’s inserted as a kind of light-hearted femme fatale betrayal, who in usual Sorkin fashion, delivers a stoic glance that implies she feels bad about the man she ended up hurting in some way. Couple this with the fact that Jerry Rubin’s arrest is showing him heroically defending a woman from being sexually assaulted… Yeah, this woman also didn’t exist. And it doesn’t take a mathematician to put two and two together here. They are not merely inserted for ease of narrative. This is not like the economical choice behind Emily Watson’s character in Chernobyl, who served as a composite for many brave scientists involved in the clean-up. These two female characters are inserted purely to create a certain heteronormative framing around Jerry’s character, one that simultaneously demonizes women’s treachery and yet teaches them a lesson, while also lionizing women’s sexuality purity and defending it with honor. In other words, it’s typical patriarchal bullshit. And these psychosexual axes to grind are inserted because they are of seeming importance to Sorkin, I guess?

At the same time, we have the film’s exploration of racial dynamics within the narrative of Bobby Seale. Make no mistake, the actor (the great Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) imbues every moment of Seale’s screen time with weight and nuance. And even Sorkin seems to understand the “big stuff” about this particular narrative. Like that Seale’s very inclusion in the trial is a politically motivated, racist fabrication. And Sorkin, through Seale, correctly paints the white character’s insurrection as a relative game (“your life, it’s a fuck you to your father, right?”). But dramatization is about so much more than “being correct” about issues of racial injustice.

It’s about giving depth to humanity. A director like Spike Lee will show the range in the humanity of a character like Seale and knows the importance of such humanization. But to Sorkin, it starts and ends with their relative points. Despite Seale’s pleas for autonomy, he still exists as a prop to point at in those certain moments. It’s just like the moment where The Maid character shows up for literally one second to highlight the pain of Tom Hayden’s reflexive standing up in court. It’s that she’s “wrong” for pointing out that wrongness, it’s that her character literally only exists to make the white character feel bad. She, like Seale, exists to serve up points to white characters and this can’t help but make Black people pawns in the morality of white guilt (and this is honestly something a lot of narratives are beyond, but Sorkin’s still stuck in the 90s). So even when the narrative offers up some whiff of an awareness of these important cultural differences, Sorkin is absolutely not saving these narratives in the way he thinks he is.

The fact that Sorkin stumbles in arenas of reflecting truth in race and gender is, at this point, regretfully unsurprising. The more difficult question is whether or not he succeeds in how he comes at the end of his own choice narrative. I’m talking of course about the way the film paints the “gentlemanly” bow on the end of the Abbie Hoffman / Tom Hayden divide. But it turns out, the key to their agreement is mere academic respect! The sudden turn of wow, you read the “Port Huron statement” and the other saying “you’re a talented guy!” taps so squarely into Sorkin’s particular hierarchy of needs, it’s kind of hilarious. Moreover, the idea that their respective climaxes hinge on an argument about possessive pronouns / vague noun modifiers?! Particularly as a cause of concern from Hoffman’s point of view?!?!?!? I just… I mean… Look, if this actually happened, I will, I dunno, write an essay about The Phantom Menace or something. And the point is not that Hoffman doesn’t know that stuff, he’s not pedantic enough about it to argue about it (where Sorkin clearly is).

The audacity of the ending presses on and at their sentencing, the characters read from the list of names of American soldiers who died in Vietnam and the triumphant music swells! Even the prosecutor Schulz shows respect and stands for the names being read! It all happens as the judge shouts: “Order! Order!” We watch this over-the-top scene play out and perhaps think it’s all too good to be true, right? They’re probably just over playing it a bit?

But again, it didn’t actually happen.

They did try reading names earlier in the trial, but their list included names of the Vietnamese as well (Sorkin’s omission of this part says a lot about how he plays to a certain brand of patriotism). The reason to make this choice is obvious in its manipulation. But it’s certainly more of a choice when, instead, during the verdict this happened: “In a final gesture of contempt towards those on trial, Judge Hoffman ordered that the barbers of the Cook County Jail cut the long hair of the defendants and defense lawyers that he found so offensive.” No, it was not the towering, telling moment, but just another spiteful bit of evidence of the cultural divide that highlighted the comic absurdity of it all.

Yet, Sorkin can’t help but paint the ending as the noble, triumphant win. Just as he can’t help but paint prosecutor Richard Schultz as a level-headed American experiencing a crisis of conscience. Joseph Gordon Levitt is so smooth and natural at this performance that it works within the narrative seamlessly, but again, it comes down to the issue of “why.” Because the real life Schultz was not the composed professional, but considered the government’s pitbull, who made their lives a living hell. Sorkin narratives are constantly filled with these kind of moments where conservatives turning face, but I get stuck on that obvious question: what good is there to dramatizing a crisis of conscience that was never there? Is it not the same fantasy of Donald Trump magically growing a conscience on election night? What real good does this fantasy serve? Is it merely about wishing away the clear ills of the world?

In all my questioning of the choices in The Trial of The Chicago 7, it’s not “oh no it’s different and that’s bad!” It’s “does it get at the real heart of the thing?”

Some may believe it does. Maybe they, like Sorkin, only want to see the glorified version of history that falls more in line with American History textbooks. But always we have to ask, at what cost? Because there’s a moment I keep thinking about in the film where the ending notecards let us know where each character ended up. In American Graffiti, these title cards were gut punches of a complicated reality. But here, as it tells us about how Rubin got hit by a car and that Abbie Hoffman committed suicide (seemingly in part because he was disillusioned with the 80’s culturally adopting unbridled capitalism), Sorkin decides to keep playing that triumphant music swell going. I honestly couldn’t believe it. It is so outright discordant. And imbues the viewer with a feeling of irony so deep as to be unshakable.

It may seem small, but this reflects the utter crux of “missing the mark.”

For while Sorkin writes these movies about America, they constantly feel like they miss the most important target in each given story. I love The Social Network as a film, but I can’t help but think how it influenced how we saw Mark Zuckerberg as a bitter genius, rich-people-hating/envious asshole who just doesn’t realize he’s an asshole when, by all accounts, he was a devil-may-care, socially unaware techno-libertarian dolt who has steered the world at large into fascism. So what good is Sorkin’s brand of “here’s how it SHOULD have been” when we desperately need to dive into the essence of what really was? Or hell, can we even acknowledge that Sorkin’s getting lazier with his tricks, often even using the same dialogue and jokes again and again. It’s like he always gets trapped in his own literal echo chamber, so it always comes back to that idiosyncratic viewpoint. So what made him “the best one” to tell this particular story?

I ask because the real life trial of the “Chicago Eight” was a farce.

It was cooked up nonsense. It was a dangerous act of political tyranny, perpetrated by cruel, vacant, deluded men who weren’t just petty, but believed in the horror of their convictions. It was part of the same hateful Trumpian mindset that has plagued the country for centuries now. And the chaos that ensued was not a neat narrative, nor a story that benefits from being made into one. It is a farce, and it needs to be understood as farce. Something more in line with cynical Iannucci’s In the Loop, or something that taps into the real life up-is-down absurdism of Dr. Strangelove and Duck Soup. But instead of the film going down that path, this history of this moment was told by an idiosyncratic artist named Aaron Sorkin, who is so utterly inept at farce because he genuinely cannot comprehend it.

He can’t even imagine the true horrors of farce. He can’t imagine characters without shame. He can’t imagine an arc-less trial. He can’t imagine that some people have a different brand of myopia that is just hateful and cruel. He can’t believe the evils in the American story are as evil as they actually are. He can’t imagine the Sisyphean nightmare of how our democracy constantly crawls along the edge of a knife. Just as he can’t write a single role for someone who doesn't fit into his deeply internal version of The American Opera. He seemingly can’t stand that the story was as it was. It can only be how he thinks it should be. And where The West Wing worked because it separated reality from fiction and let us believe an idealized America alongside him, these non-fiction portrayals feature a streak of disingenuous choices that don’t bring us closer to their crucial essence, but instead take the form of myopic denial. And as everything in our reality cascades and crashes into fascism, we are desperately fighting for the real, unblinking, tragic history of America.

Because we’ve had enough trouble with Sorkin’s one.

<3HULK