During the pandemic I have become something of a “news junkie,” despite the largely negative impact on my emotional state that politics, plague, and publicity seem to bring.
Though I have often been lulled into sponge-like absorption of television programming, two recent airings have brought me to greater skepticism toward coverage of current events, both national and international.
Alongside Kinky Boots and She Loves Me in the PBS Great Performance series of Broadway musicals has been the 2015 live U.K. broadcast version of Sound of Music starring Kara Tointon as Maria and Julian Ovenden as Captain von Trapp.
In the interest of full disclosure, I admit to being part of a small minority which finds this Rodgers and Hammerstein musical annoyingly syrupy and cloyingly sentimental – best summed up by Christopher Plummer (Captain von Trapp in the famous screen version) as “the sound of mucus.”
I confess to fast-forwarding through the inane Do-Re-Mi and So Long, Farewell even when watching the new production, although the less well-known How Can Love Survive? and No Way to Stop It (neither included in the 1965 film) once again stand out as both clever and refreshingly caustic.
For all of the show’s deficiencies, however, this particular production is appealingly framed by a view of just how the whole thing has been mounted and produced. As a kind of final flourish, a fascinating documentary addendum to the performance shows how the musical was rehearsed over six weeks in a church basement and then taken to an elaborate set for final production preparation.
The resulting production flows like a movie while still retaining the freshness of a live theatre performance. In other words, the viewers see an illusion of a show taking place in a variety of locations, though actually staged live on one complex set. The visual trickery is truly clever. Although the production isn’t currently available on PBS, it may be rebroadcast in future.
In a much different vein is Coup 53, a documentary claiming to reveal how Mohammed Mossadegh, the prime minister of Iran, was overthrown, resulting in the restoration of the Shah as head of state. The role of the American CIA in staging the coup is well known, but writer/director Taghi Amirani names the British agency MI6 as the ringleader.
In the film, available online at coup53.com, Amirani demonstrates how, in the BBC documentary series End of Empire, the episode about the fall of Mossadegh edited out the interview with one of its most important subjects. The interviewee, a British agent named Norman Darbyshire, claimed to be the prime operator in arranging the coup, so his testimony is clearly crucial to the film’s main thesis.
It is fascinating just how Amirani managed over the course of 10 years to discover the original script of the documentary, while his restaging the interview with Ralph Fiennes substituting for Darbyshire is masterly.
The film also claims that Winston Churchill was anxious to get rid of Mossadegh so that Britain could retain its virtual ownership of Iran’s oil industry, which Mossadegh had nationalized. It then goes on to show how the assassination of the chief of police was arranged, and how eventually Churchill used the Red Scare in the States to persuade President Eisenhower to use the CIA to engage in the titular coup, which, the film claims, paved the way for both the current crisis in Iran and a multitude of other dubious political activities by the CIA.
All this is brilliantly narrated and as gripping as any fictional spy story. Indeed, this is the real issue: though it is compellingly convincing, many will claim that it is nothing more than socialist or communist propaganda. It may in reality be factually correct, or it may be just another example of cinematic tricks designed to promote a political agenda.
In these days of internet hacking, of unscrupulous video editing, of photoshopping, of massive media control by a few, and of false propaganda, it becomes ever more difficult to know if one should believe what one is seeing and hearing when watching television or surfing the internet.
It is ever more challenging to know what is true and what is fake news, what is factual and what is false. Yet in these fraught times of pandemic, economic crisis, widespread unemployment, political controversy, social injustice, and climate change, it becomes more imperative that we are able to arrive at some sort of truth.
As we move further into a dystopia far worse than Orwell predicted in 1984, it would seem more and more certain that the one hope of arriving at any certainty lies in remaining faithful to the promise and the eternal verities given to us by Christ. If we could all live by his precepts, if we could all love our neighbours as ourselves, the world would indeed be one in which we could, with assurance, find the right direction.
We have to begin with living out our Christian beliefs and trust that this will result in a viral spread of truth and love.