The Beast
By Mehnaz Choudry
[1] Many critics including Robert Toplin would argue that Oliver Stone's films interrogated issues of Hollywood's responsibility to represent "History" responsibly. I would like to highlight a scene from Nixon that will help answer the question, is Oliver Stone's Nixon a "lost opportunity?" (Toplin 44). Many critics saw the film as a "lost opportunity" historically since Stone must fill in gaps of intimate conversations, suggest motives for certain actions, and use real footage alongside "reel" ones -- but I consider the film a lost opportunity for other reasons. It is not possible to get to the "true" Richard Nixon, but for Stone Nixon doesn't appear to be a real person but simply an embodiment of an American masculine ideology. Stone describes him as "embody[ing] everything that's right and wrong about America in general and American politicians in particular," which he connects to the notion of a "Beast" infiltrating government (Hamburg xvii ). He adds, "Nixon is about the illusion of power" and a "giant of a tragic figure in the classical Greek or Shakespearean tradition." The director seems so intent in creating a "a giant...tragic figure" that at times he defeats his purpose of casting Nixon in a more humane, complex, and compelling light that would challenge Nixon's detractors who have typecast him only as "Tricky Dick."
[2] It is largely for audience satisfaction that Stone wishes to depict Nixon in such an "epic" scope. His ideologies and the theses that his film puts forward must also be presented in an epic scope, such as the notion of the "Beast" controlling the machinations of government or the suggestion of dark demons of repression and guilt that haunted the President. John Dean says that the film is not an "anti-Nixon polemic," an assertion that is only partially right. The film does not mean to become an "anti-Nixon polemic," but in the end it does not succeed in creating a complex portrait of the president. It is surprising that Stone discusses his character by saying "we empathized with him and made him better than he was" (Bingham 273), because in a pivotal scene in the film Stone does not succeed in showing the real "systems, ambitions and ideologies" that motivate him, nor does it "connect the inner man to his external reactions and decisions" (Bingham 259).
[3] The scene is based on a real event that took place on May 9, 1970, when Nixon decided on an impromptu visit to the Lincoln Memorial. President Nixon walks up the steps of the Memorial with his valet, Manolo. The steps are covered with sleeping bags and some scattered "campfires." As Nixon approaches the monument, the spectator can hear the opening lines of the Battle Hymn of the Republic: "He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword -- His truth is marching on." In the real incident Nixon did not just arrive at the monument with only his valet but was also accompanied by Secret Service men. Although this may seem inconsequential, the film suggests that Nixon's actions are irrational and the sign of a scattered mind. Nixon is so far-gone that he doesn't even think about his safety amid throngs of protestors.
[4] The scene also lays the groundwork for the "epic" Nixon. The Battle Hymn is both a song about god as well as a metaphor about President Lincoln and the Union troops battling the South, and Stone wants to emphasize Nixon's visit as part of the man's "obsession" with Lincoln, which was hinted at earlier in the film when we repeatedly see Nixon sitting in the Lincoln bedroom in the White House. The film does not emphasize any of the ways Nixon became "obsessed" with Lincoln and almost suggests that it is a travesty that Nixon believed he was facing issues similar to the great president. The words "He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword" do not resonate with spectators as the image of God punishing the South for the moral wrongs of slavery, but instead suggest Nixon's "terrible swift sword" descending on innocent Vietnamese who were killed in heavy air attacks.
[5] As Nixon looks at the statue, behind him the night sky is suddenly filled with daylight and the silhouette of a fiery explosion. During the scene, we hear more of the song: "I have seen Him in the watch fires of a hundred circling camps, They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps," followed by "I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps -- His day is marching on." The last line is punctuated by gunfire, and we see the president in an overhead shot from behind the shoulder of the statue of Lincoln. With the shot of the sky filled with fire, Stone implies that Nixon has forced American soldiers in Vietnam to "build Him an altar in the evening dews and damps," and Stone continues to force blame on him for the "crime" of the Vietnam War. In a swift montage, the camera cuts from Nixon to a black and white shot of a young civil war soldier and two more photographs of Civil War battle camps, accompanied by the lyrics, "I have read a fiery gospel writ, In burnished rows of steel," followed by color images of young soldiers in Vietnam, during which we hear, "As ye deal with My contemnors, So with you My grace shall deal." Next the camera shows Nixon turning around to face a murmuring crowd as we hear the final words of that stanza: "Let the Hero born of woman, Crush the serpent with His heel, Since God is marching on." Nixon finds himself faced by a group of young protestors in hippie clothes and unkempt hair.
[6] Is Stone suggesting that these protestors are "contemnors" or "serpents?" In a way, he is. If The Battle Hymn is a metaphor for Lincoln leading the Union to victory, here Stone suggests that Nixon's obsession with Lincoln implies Nixon believes that he is himself like Lincoln, but that he sees his own people as "serpents" that wish to subvert him. Nixon evokes the fact that his family went Republican after Lincoln freed the slaves as a metaphor for his own desires to topple communist aggression by freeing the Vietnamese. Clearly the protestors and Stone believe that both achievements are not the same.
[7] The Lincoln myth, which highlights a poor young man struggling until he becomes a small-town lawyer and fighting against the odds until he becomes president of the United States, is conflated with the events of Nixon's life. The complexities of the Lincoln myth, its connections with the notion of the "ideal male" as a virile adventurer and an untrammeled man of action is juxtaposed with earlier scenes in the film that focus on Nixon's childhood in Yorba Linda. We see a stern father who works hard but cannot support his family, a mother whose religious fanaticism appears alienating to her sons, and the desolate landscape of their California home and the lonely farmer's stand where the family works. All of these scenes subvert several facets of American capitalist ideology: Stone undercuts the Rosebud syndrome and the picture of the happy poor who are removed from the corrupting influence of money, showing Nixon as resentful of all facets of the elitist Eastern establishment such as Harvard and the Kennedy wealth. Stone also critiques the notion of honest toil as a morally admirable path to achieving the American dream. The barren landscape of Yorba Linda that Stone shows us earlier is juxtaposed with the image of Lincoln in his log cabin, but here the myth of the American West or the Virgin Land will not provide for the family's survival. The most important way in which Stone evokes the Lincoln myth and the beast conversation, however, is to emphasize that America is and cannot be the land in which all problems can be solved within the boundaries of the existing system. To show us Lincoln's image during the beast sequence further emphasizes that Nixon is a failed patriarch -- he did not bring America together after much bloodshed, and, as he morbidly jokes after Kennedy's assassination, "I bet if I was President they wouldn't have killed me." For Stone, Nixon's achievements are not up to par with the mythic Lincoln or the mythic Kennedy.
[8] A significant portion of the sequence focuses on the conversation Nixon has with a 19-year-old college student about the war. She confronts him with the statement, "what's the point of being president, you are powerless," and adds, "you can't stop it can you, even if you wanted to, it's not you, it's the system that won't let you stop it." He tells her that he can "control the system" and "tame it to make it do some good," and even agrees with her when she charges that Nixon sounds like he is talking about a wild animal. Sandwiched between two sharply edited montage sequences Stone articulates his vision of the Beast. Stone argues that the beast "grinds the individual down to meaninglessness" and "drives itself from 1.the power of money and markets; 2.state power, government power; 3. corporate power, which is probably greater even than state power; 4. the political process or election through money, which is therefore in tow to 'the system'; and, 5. the media, which mostly protects the status quo and their ownerships and interests like Doberman pinschers" (Kreisler, Part VI). All these beasts become a metaphor for a military industrial complex that is responsible for Kennedy's assassination and the escalation of the Vietnam War.
[9] Stone's beast argument contains another subversive message -- on one hand his comparison of Nixon to Lincoln and Kennedy sets up the first as a failed patriarch who further normalizes an oppressive standard of masculinity. It also points out a serious crack in the façade of the overly-masculine persona: the drive for violence that leads to catastrophes such as the Vietnam War. Upon returning to the United States from Vietnam, Stone was shocked by a divided nation and the belief that his government had lied to him and allowed the deaths of thousands of young men. Historian Stephen Ambrose accused Stone of making Nixon appear tougher than he really was and engaging in non-existent behaviors such as drinking and cursing heavily. However, Stone's purpose is deeper than just presenting the president in a bad light. Stone connects Nixon's physical inferiority to his experience on the Whittier College football team where the young Nixon acted as a "tackling dummy" because of a lack of athletic talent (Toplin 250).
[10] Stone also connects this inferiority complex to Nixon's "hard-nosed football analogies of a coach like George Allen of the Washington Redskins" or the fact that the President loved the movie Patton, starring George C. Scott who played General Patton (Toplin 250). Nixon would watch Patton numerous times before his invasion of Cambodia, and I believe that Stone connects Nixon's aggressive attempts at a masculine persona as resulting in the continuation of the Vietnam War. For Stone, the "mythology of manhood, and...the test of manhood signified...quite explicitly, the space in which sons confirm their authority with their fathers" (Boose 67). This mythology, as Lynda Boose asserts in her work Gendering War, is often achieved (especially in the American male psyche) by participating in war and results in what she calls techno-muscular war films such as Rambo and Excalibur. For Stone's Nixon, the Vietnam War becomes a way in which the president is able to enter the mythology of manhood that figures such as Lincoln and Patton signify; and, on a personal level, it is this same mythology that carried Stone to war. I would argue that Stone sees Nixon's techno-masculinity as another aspect of the "Beast" that corrupts the American landscape. Another critic rightly points out that Nixon encouraged the image of himself as a "fighter" against "enemies" of his administration (Bingham 260).
[11] I am not interested in the logic or truth of Stone's beast thesis. I am interested in the mythic scopes of the Beast argument and its use as a metaphor. When Nixon admits that he is trying to end the war, the girl charges that he can't stop it because it is out of his control. Images of his brother Arthur and Harold's suffering cut across the screen in black and white. Much like the suffering and death of his brothers from tuberculosis, the suffering and death of the young soldiers in Vietnam are not in Nixon's control. The beast has become a metaphor for "both the American body politic and Nixon's overwrought psyche -- with no real exploration of the horrible political landscape that produced politicians such as Richard Nixon" (Sharett). There is no real probing into Nixon's character that goes beyond a layman's understanding of psychoanalytical theory, but even with the stab at making him an epic figure, Stone doesn't succeed in creating a truly tragic hero. But why even attempt to paint Nixon in such a light? Stone's major argument becomes that in "undressing Nixon, we can undress and expose the 'truth' of America's supposedly innocent past" (Sharett). Although I don't believe that psychohistory should replace history, in a year where such jingoistic films about America's supposedly idyllic past such as The Alamo and Miracle have emerged, Stone's vision is a refreshing one. The whitewashing of President Kennedy as a benign figure of moral solidarity and the denigration of the government and several conspirators as malevolent is a lie that Stone finds necessary to tell the public in order to convince them of the truth of the "beast" controlling politics
[12] The most interesting manifestation of the Beast appears in a much-criticized and talked about deleted sequence that can be found on the 2003 edition of the DVD and video of Nixon. This scene is central to the two Beast sequences that appear in the film but was cut in an attempt to bring the film to an appropriate length. We see Nixon arrive at CIA headquarters, while the camera closes in on a tight shot of the CIA seal, gesturing to the secrecy that threatens the American landscape. Nixon meets with the director of the CIA, Richard Helms (Sam Waterston), and requests that he turn over papers that he signed to "chair a special operations group," referring to the secret plot to assassinate Castro. Helms adds, "It's not an operation, as much as an organic phenomenon." While Helms delicately fingers the petals of several lilies, he continues, "it grew, changed shape, it developed appetites, it's not unusual in such cases that things are not committed to paper." As Helms lists several "secret operations," such as Guatemala, Iran, and Cuba, Stone inserts several shots of leaders who were assassinated and violent abuses led by the C.I.A. and sanctioned by the Unites States. Helms asks Nixon whether his position at the CIA is safe, and Nixon tells him, "the president" will make sure his position is protected and that Helms will be funded. As Nixon speaks, a shot of a yellow rose blooms over his face. Helms attempts to divert the conversation from Kennedy's assassination by commenting "flowers are a continual reminder of our mortality," to which Nixon responds, that he doesn't like flowers because they "remind him of death." The emphasis on flowers and the greenery in Helms' office points to Stone's belief that "the Beast" is a natural, organic, phenomenon that cannot be proved by signatures on a paper or traditional evidence. Instead, it can be seen in the power-hungry desires of men such as Helms and the politicians who make the mistake of supporting them.
[13] Helms leans in to smell an arrangement of exotic, tropical flowers, and between the hot-house colors, we see that his eyes have changed from those of a human beings', to those of a lizard -- completely black and glassy. A shot of Helms' monstrous eyes also appears in the Beast sequence when Nixon is at the Lincoln Memorial connecting further the monstrous events of Vietnam (with which that sequence is largely concerned) to different organic tentacles of the Beast. Without the context of this scene, Helms' eyes during the Lincoln Memorial beast sequence could refer to the darkness enveloping the vision of American leadership but also the public that refuses to acknowledge what is going on. When we see Helms' eyes, Nixon comments, "There's worse things than death, there's such a thing as evil," suggesting he recognizes that Helms and those like him are secret monsters or beasts. In this beast sequence, I believe that Stone sees Helms as representative of not just the Beast but also a satanic figure. The Beast of Revelations 13 in the Bible is brought to power by the "dragon...with a serpent tongue," or the devil (who is also represented as a snake in the Old Testament). The contacts that Waterston wears to darken his eyes make them appear to be reptile-like aligning Helms' reptile eyes with the reptile eyes of Satan.
[14] Stone continues the Beast as biblical monster when Helms quotes the W. B. Yeats poem, "The Second Coming":
Turning and turning in the widening gyreDuring the last line, Helms looks accusingly at Nixon. As Nixon looks back, first embarrassed and then defiant, Helms concludes by saying, "this country stands at such a juncture." During Helm's recitation of the poem, the camera spins slowly around Nixon as flowers bloom over his face, and the camera captures tight shots of the center of other flowers. Stone points to the nature of the biblical beast that is animal-like with seven heads and ten horns and receives his power from "the dragon" or the devil. The shot of Helms' eyes among the flowers makes him appear to be a waiting snake in the Garden of Eden. Stone also points to his organic notion of the Beast, with the shots of the flowers that connect to the shots of spreading tuberculosis cells in the Lincoln Memorial beast sequence. Nixon's comment that flowers remind him of death connects the images of flowers and destructive tuberculosis cells because of the swift way both are shown blooming and growing, much like the power of the Beast that blooms and grows quicker than Nixon can control it. Helms quotes the Yeats poem to accuse Nixon that the President is the newest manifestation of the Beast, and the American public's tacit support of him and his war-mongering policies have brought him into power.
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
and everywhere, the ceremony of innocence is lost
The best lack all conviction;
while the worst, are full of passionate intensity
What rough Beast, its hour come round at last,
slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.
