A POLITICAL SEASON: Occasional 2024 series on politics in movies THE WAR ROOM (1993)
From time to time this 2024 U.S. election year, we’ll write about movies that deal with politics. To the best of our ability, we want to look at how cinema can CONVEY/COMMUNICATE the nature of politics regardless of one’s own political stripes (though we all have them, including this writer).
A great place to start is 1993’s documentary THE WAR ROOM by Chris Hegedus and famed doc moviemaker D.A. Pennebaker (Don’t Look Back, Monterrey Pop, etc). The War Room, more from necessity then design, focuses on James Carville and George Stephanopoulos, the key architects of Democrat Bill Clinton’s 1992 successful campaign for U.S. president.
Even in its limited scope and circumscribed ability to get real access, it’s a fascinating window into the day to day machinations of a political campaign. Although the political world of 30 years ago now seems quaint and antiquated, it still shows how certain core principles-effective communication, simplification of message, immediate response-are critical to a winning campaign.
The War Room came about because producers R.J. Cutler and company wanted to make a documentary on a full political campaign. Hegedus and Pennebaker agreed if they could get the access needed to REALLY make a documentary. Of the three 1992 presidential campaigns-George H.W. Bush, Ross Perot, and Bill Clinton-only Clinton’s campaign agreed to the parameters. And then they further narrowed the scope by only agreeing to allow the documentarians access to Carville, Stephanopoulous, and “the War Room” which was the campaign’s headquarters in Little Rock, Arkansas.
So from the start, one can see what a quixotic quest it was, even in 1991-1992, to really pull back the curtain on an aspect of democratic political life that only works obscured, hidden by the curtain. Campaigns are about controlling message. Documentaries are all about capturing the truth NO MATTER WHERE IT LEADS.
You can see the conflict.
Nevertheless, the doc does touch on some of the very sensitive issues the Clinton campaign negotiated. This includes having to address allegations Gennifer Flowers made that she and Clinton had had a years-long affair. Though Clinton denied it at the time, it later came out in Clinton’s own deposition that he HAD the affair. These moments provide rich irony for anyone who remembers that roughly 6 years later, Clinton would AGAIN bring pain down upon himself, his family, his administration when it came out that he had had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky, a very young intern at the White House.
And though Clinton, his wife Hillary Clinton, Vice Presidential candidate Al Gore and his wife Tipper Gore, are all fairly small characters in the doc (which provides its own rich irony), we do get a sense of just how brutal a political campaign is on individuals. Especially at the highest possible level.
This writer, in fact, came away with a new sense of empathy for Hillary and Chelsea Clinton (Bill and Hillary’s adoloscent daughter at the time). Whatever the private understanding was in that family, having to daily deal with extra-marital allegations and the details of such affairs must not have been fun. It must have taken a toll.
But from there, the doc pivots more to a day to day portrait of how a campaign works to win an election. Stephanopoulos, the communications director, comes across as a focused, laid back, pragmatist willing to g with the best idea. Carville, known as the “Ragin’ Cajun’”, a journeyman campaign advisor with a populist working class streak, steals the show in many ways with his idiosyncratic, charismatic personality. But the two political hacks truly appear to work together in a symbiotic Appollonian-Dionysian dynamic.
But even that characterization belies the fact that Carville kept the campaign very focused. He had three key points that he drilled everyone to focus on:
Change vs. more of the same. 2. The economy, stupid. 3. Don’t forget health care.
The doc is breezy, entertaining, and short (just over 90mns). It touches on the ups and downs of the campaign with focuses on the summer convention, the debates (which Clinton won with his biggest skill/talent set-connecting, communicating, listening), the last few days leading up to the actual election day.
There’s an interesting digression late in the movie where Carville gets obsessed with driving a story about how the Bush campaign appeared to accept/use foreign Brazillian money for campaign materials. This writer is still unsure how that would have been a “political gotcha” but Carville thinks he’s got pay dirt. When nobody else, including the all important evening broadcast news networks, wants to carry the story, Carville seems put out. But he recovers quickly, which may also be the point.
For those political junkies out there, there are also some great scenes between Bush campaign strategist Mary Matalin and Carville. For those who don’t know, they fell in love during the campaign and married in 1993. They are still married today. That relationship is almost the most hopeful thing in any movie about U.S. politics of the last 30 years. A die hard GOP Republican and a die-hard liberal progressive Democrat somehow transcend their own jobs/politics to see the humanity, loveable aspects of their fiercest competitor.
There’s more to the doc of course including some fascinating scenes of how the War Room team negotiates all the different personalities in a campaign. One scene finds a meeting slowing down to a crawl over an argument about what kind of signs should be held by electors at the Democratic convention. In the moment, it feels too obsessed about (colors, horizontal vs vertical orientations, hand written versus printed out) but when the documentarians cut to the results of the final decision, one does realize how important every detail is. How consequential every decision can be.
It’s hard when one tries to be honest with oneself to ascribe numeric value to the decisions of a political campaign. So many other factors-external events, national mood, scandals, oceanic electorate re-alignments, dug-in partisanship-play roles in how elections turn out. One can’t really say that even the BEST run campaigns were the determining factors in a loss or win.
But in our current near 50/50 U.S. political climate, one can see how such campaign decisions might be the difference between winning or losing 40,000-50,000 votes in a key suburb in a key swing state. And for anyone following this year’s 2024 presidential campaign, it may be just these decisions that mean the difference between carrying the electoral college or losing the election.
NOTE: The War Room is available to stream on The Criterion Channel and other outlets as of April 8, 2024.
Craig Hammill is the founder.programmer of Secret Movie Club