When social discourse turned into blood sport
Best of Enemies
(out of 4) Directed by Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon. Starts Saturday at TIFF Bell Lightbox. 87 minutes. 14A
The idea may not seem so radical, in this day and age of reality TV excess and Internet outrage: giving a national broadcast forum to two highly opinionated intellectuals to argue about politics.
But in the summer of 1968, when three big networks dominated the airwaves with respected male authority figures voicing the status quo, the debates between conservative essayist William F. Buckley Jr. and liberal novelist Gore Vidal were almost tantamount to treason.
Best of Enemies insightfully looks back to these incendiary times, when last-place ABC-TV boldly sought to trim costs for its coverage of the Republican and Democratic presidential conventions by having Buckley and Vidal debate the burning issues of the day, for a fee of $10,000 (U.S.) apiece.
It was a match made in hell, the place that Vidal said he hoped Buckley would immediately be consigned to after the smirking rightist predeceased the scowling lefty (Buckley died in 2008; Vidal in 2012).
The two men genuinely loathed each other and “exchanged minimal amenities” (Buckley’s words) prior to confrontations that began like a show of preening roosters but degenerated into raging cockfights.
Vidal said he refused to read Buckley’s “passionate and irrelevant” National Review journal of conservative thought, while Buckley dismissed Vidal’s bestselling sex satire Myra Breckinridge as “giving gratification only to sadist homosexuals and chal- lenge only to taxonomists of perversion.”
Their mutual antipathy threatened to get out of control during the Democratic convention in Chicago, already disrupted by student street riots, when Vidal called Buckley a “crypto-fascist” and a furious Buckley threatened to punch out the lights of the “queer” Vidal.
Such insults would get you in trouble on TV today, but in ’68 they were beyond shocking, as various commentators (Dick Cavett among them) tell filmmakers Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon. The times may have been a-changin’, as Bob Dylan sang, but social mores were still in the dark ages: ABC News anchor Howard K. Smith reported that female Republicans were instructed to dress “so as to appear vivid but not garish” on colour TV. The Buckley/Vidal debates changed the medium and also the men: they gained high ratings but also lasting rancour, each thinking the other was the lesser man. The irony was they were so much alike in many ways, pioneers of a new world of social discourse as blood sport.