“We spend most of our time stumbling in the dark.” While watching Tom McCarthy’s Spotlight (2015), that sentence struck me. What an accurate way to define journalism: stumbling in the dark. We always hope for a Hollywood ending, when the truth is unveiled and the culprits exposed. But, at heart, reporting means struggling. The best investigations
movies I watched taught not only the necessity of truth, but also its cost. Sometimes, its failure.
At 40 years of distance, Alan Pakula’s All the President’s Men (1976) and Spotlight portray the same confrontation of reporters with systemic secrets whose implications far exceed what they suspected. Both are true stories. All the President’s Men follows two young journalists at The Washington Post, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, eager to win their spurs. After five men linked to the CIA break into the Watergate building, headquarters of the Democrat Party, they start investigating. This minor news soon escalates as they discover a major conspiracy from Nixon’s re-election campaign.
Likewise, Spotlight revolves around the Boston Globe four-member investigative team. The alleged complicity of Cardinal Law in not revealing sexual assaults on children committed by a priest, Father Geoghan, 25 years earlier, urges the reporters to investigate. From this first case, they soon discover two, then 13, then dozens of pedophile priests, revealing an omerta imposed by the Church for decades. The main obstacle faced by the journalists in both films is indeed silence. Victims stay quiet out of shame or fear of reprisals, while the witnesses look away.
“If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse one,” condemns Mitchell Garabedian, the only Boston lawyer willing to fight for the victims. “Everyone knew;” the lawyers who settled cases quietly for a fee, the police, even some journalists. Several shots emphasise the Church’s omnipresence across Boston: how do you take on the most powerful institution rooted in every layer of society? The same silence meets Woodward and Bernstein, who face slammed doors everywhere they turn. Against a stalemate, their tenacity eventually leads reporters to the truth. Nothing comes easily, not when such powerful people are at stake. So they show up at doors unwanted, until they receive an answer. They spend days, months, researching files. They gain the trust of a woman in the Re-Election Committee, who goes from “I can’t talk to you” to revealing the initials of the Watergate masterminds. And as they “strip” pieces of the puzzle — a name, an amount of money, a hint — the big picture emerges, far deeper than expected.
Because of its disruptive nature, journalism is a story of small acts of cowardice or courage. It’s as simple as an editor trusting his reporters and printing an article, knowing the White House will come down on him: “Let’s stand by the boys.” It’s Robby, one of Spotlight’s reporters, raised in a private Catholic school, resisting the peer pressure of his friends to “walk away.” It’s victims and witnesses speaking up, knowing they might lose jobs, friends, even their lives. It’s also a collective story that debunks the myth of the lone reporter.
But this very stubbornness puts reporters in danger. Obsession pervades both films, as the reporters literally put their lives on hold. David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007) portrays Chronicle Journalist Robert Graysmith’s consuming chase after the Zodiac, a serial killer who terrorised San Francisco in the 1960s-1970s. He spends more than 15 years on the case, losing his wife and his job in the process. Paul Avery, the journalist covering the case, becomes an alcoholic facing unanswered questions and the Zodiac’s threats. The ending speaks to failure: although all the clues point in
the same direction, the long-awaited meeting with the alleged Zodiac does not give Graysmith the certainty he had hoped for. The publication of his book, while evidence remains inconclusive, raises a question: Is Graysmith still pursuing the truth? Or trying to find meaning in a mission which, somewhere along the line, lost the very
anchor of journalism that is reality?
Photo by Camilo Rueda López on Unsplash
