Shattered

Shattered Glass is a drastically different movie when viewed from the perspective of a struggling Florida college student rather than a peripheral onlooker into the Washington journalism/pundit/think tank complex. Just as All the President’s Men shifts from being a needly, taut political thriller to quietly self-righteous tale of journalistic heroism once you start to dig into that whole Watergate business, Shattered Glass becomes a different movie when the world it presents is somewhat familiar.

In some sense, the movie seems eerily accurate: the unglamorous offices staffed by bright young writers; the bland desks heaped with papers; the perfunctory business dress; the talky house parties where overeducated urbanites snark and bark over political magazine minutiae; the surprising youth of influential voices; the heady, semi-academic style of pretty much everything. As I’ve commented to people before, it seems to be the one town where being passionate about interesting ideas can actually be socially beneficial. Or, as a rather well-placed staffer once put it to me, “It’s like Disneyland for nerds”—a formulation I much prefer to Hollywood for ugly people.

On the other hand, the film is curiously lacking in the obvious: discussion of politics and policy. Aside from a few mentions of ethanol subsidies (which you can and should read Tim Carney’s thoughts on here), no one seems interested in the substantive meat of the District. As Chuck Lane said in an interview about the film:

[The filmmakers] don't give you any sense that of the fact that at the New Republic [we] were always talking about politics. Politics and public policy were such a big part of what we do. And I think that is not very salient in the movie. And in fairness, the point would be that Steve wrote frothy stuff. Steve wrote about Monicondoms. He wrote about the wacky and the bizarre. It was just sort of tangentially related to politics. And so in a movie that's focused on him, you may get the impression that the New Republic, for some reason, was kind of running frothy stuff and that's it.

I was also somewhat suspicious of the film’s depiction of the editing process. Now, I don’t know anyone at TNR and have absolutely no way of truly knowing how conversations between authors and senior editors actually go, but the film seemed to portray them as condescending and childish—when the girl strangely based on Jon Chiat tries writing something “frothy,” she’s talked to with the same smarmy empathy you might expect from a high school guidance counselor. And Glass’s comments on one of his coworkers stories were about stuff that would barely phase most quality high school scribes, much less the savvy wordsmiths at The New Republic. It’s certainly not like any editing process I’ve been privy to.

So it’s not quite The Great D.C. Movie of Prophesy, but it’s close enough to make you blink. And in the post-Domenech era, it’s a little scary to see a young pundit self-destruct like that—even from the safe remove of big screen retelling.