50 years of Watergate | Richard Nixon, movie character

On June 17, 1972, five Republican Party burglars were arrested for breaking and entering Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate Building in Washington. The case will lead to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. Since then, Nixon has become a movie character. Overview.

Andre Duchesne
The Press

During a conference held in 1981, the director of Star Wars, George Lucas, is asked if Emperor Palpatine was in fact a Jedi. “No, he was a politician,” replies Lucas. His name was Richard M. Nixon. »

The director continues, “He overthrew the Senate, eventually took over, became an Imperial type, and he was truly evil. But he pretended to be such a nice guy. »

Contrary to the saga, Richard Nixon never had a majority in the Senate during his years in the White House. As for the rest… the manipulative, paranoid, lying and unsympathetic side of the 37^e President of the United States has largely fueled the cinematographic works in which he appears… or not.

Since All the President’s Men in 1976 and up to the TV series Gaslit this spring, Nixon was the subject, direct or indirect, of about fifteen films, fictions and documentaries, according to a review by The Press. Overall, his dark side emerges. But have we seen the full fabric of man?

“His personality traits made him easy to caricature. He has become the archetypal crooked politician. It’s not false, but he was no more dishonest than others, “says Karine Prémont, associate professor at the University of Sherbrooke and deputy director of the Observatory on the United States of the Raoul Chair. -Dandurand (UQAM).

She recalls as an example that in the presidential election of 1960, the Democrat John F. Kennedy also won (against Nixon) by cheating, with the help of his father. Lyndon B. Johnson also bought votes. “Nixon, however, had a more elastic sense of ethics than Kennedy or Johnson. Once in the presidency, they better understood the importance of walking straight. It was not his case, ”she adds.

American filmmaker who directed the documentary Our NixonPenny Lane points out that if the Watergate recordings (some 3700 hours!) betrayed the personality of Nixon, there is no unit of comparison.

“Never before and never after have we had access to so many private conversations,” she says. One wonders what other presidential conversations would have revealed. »

Other presidents made recordings in the Oval Office, but they were never heard from.

Also in fiction

Some filmmakers made Nixon a twisted fictional character. It is even found in superhero movies X-Men – Days of Future Pastfilmed in Quebec, and watch men.

“His character has been used in non-historical films”, notes Baptiste Creps, teacher-researcher at the Gustave Eiffel University, in Paris, and specialist in Hollywood cinema. “He then becomes an iconographic figure, almost phantasmagorical. We do not find quite the same thing for other presidents. »

And when Nixon is portrayed in his real role, it can sometimes be very negative, continues Mr. Creps. ” In The Butlerby Lee Daniels, the comedian John Cusack gives the impression of having modeled himself on a rat to embody it”, he says.

Filmmaker Philippe Falardeau also notes that several films have presented Nixon as a “slightly wacky, caricatural character”, a personification “sometimes funny, but rarely deep or interesting”.

His preference goes to two biographical films opposite to each other. In the first, All the President’s MenNixon is practically absent, whereas he is omnipresent in the second, Frost/Nixon.

“If we have two films to watch on Nixon, these are these”, says Mr. Falardeau, who signed a political fiction, Guibord is going to war. “What they have in common, and it pays tribute to their qualities, is that we know what happened, we know how it ended, but we are still at the end of our headquarters. »

Mr. Falardeau believes that filmmaker Ron Howard, in his film Frost/Nixon, do not judge the character. “He judges what he has done historically,” says the filmmaker. It does not pass moral judgment on Nixon, but is interested in how the latter believed strongly in what he did for the right reasons. »

Baptiste Creps finds for his part that the Nixon by Oliver Stone makes “a very ambivalent, even humanizing portrait of this Nixon haunted by the very heavy figure of Kennedy, by which he is traumatized”. “It’s very surprising when you know Stone’s career,” he said. We would have expected a portrait of this director perceived as very leftist and opponent of the Republican Party for many years. »

Still a long time

Passionate about American history, John Parisella, associate professor at the Center for International Studies and Research at the University of Montreal, recalls that Nixon’s presidency had been marked by successes: the détente with the USSR, the trip to communist China, the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, subjects that were rarely or not retained in the cinema (there was an opera Nixon in China).

But he knows why the “echoes of Watergate still resonate”. “We will always refer to this use of the powers of the State and the Constitution to hide criminal interventions”, says the researcher.

“I don’t know if there’s anything left to say about Watergate,” said Penny Lane. It seems to me that this event was very well covered. But the character of Nixon will continue to interest for a long time. It carries the most tragic dramatic arc. And that is irresistible material. »