In Danny Boyle’s Ink, which opened the Venice Film Festival this year, Rupert Murdoch’s first Sun editor, Larry Lamb, is played by super dishy Jack O’Connell, 36, whereas the 58-year-old Guy Pearce plays Murdoch with stick-insect charm. This is despite the fact that Lamb was one year older than Murdoch when the Australian bought the tabloid for £800,000 in November 1969, then worked with him to turn it into a super, soaraway, sexist success.
The film needs Lamb to be younger, because in it he’s a rebel, up against old fuddy-duddies. This is not the only liberty Ink takes with the truth, but then when has anything to do with the Sun been polluted by honesty or adherence to the facts?
In the film, the Daily Mirror is set up as a pantomime villain and part of the establishment: its long history of incisive investigative reporting utterly ignored. Meanwhile, Claire Foy plays Jules, a female journalist who, according to the press notes, is an amalgamation of several different female reporters who worked for the Sun. If there’s one thing the ladies love, it’s being amalgamated.
Stephanie Rahn, the first Page 3 girl, though, is given her real name and the editors worry about exposing her to public infamy, while no one mentions the word “tits”. She is given agency and a tasteful photoshoot in a field; it’s almost feminismy.
Talking of tits, the film reminded me of Richard Curtis and his comedy The Boat That Rocked, which told a fictionalised version of the pirate station Radio Caroline. Of course, the DJs from the real-life station were caught up in historical sex crimes investigations and one found guilty of indecent assault, another of rape. No one would make that film today and Curtis would never have made the film, had he known. Ink is as if they made The Boat That Rocked but they already knew what happened.
Suggested Reading
The Afghan who went to space
The glamorisation of the press can sometimes be totally understandable. We all love to see the plucky reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, played by Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford in All the President’s Men, going after an unseen Richard Nixon. Jason Robards as Ben Bradlee in that film holds an absolute authority of gruff honesty. No lesser Hollywood god than Tom Hanks would reprise the role in Steven Spielberg’s The Post, although here the focus was bizarrely shifted upstairs to the Washington Post’s proprietor, played by Meryl Streep.
Likewise, Spotlight gave one of the most realistic depictions of journalism as a team sport, with multiple journalists researching the widespread scandal of child abuse in the Catholic Church in Boston and its cover-up. The paradox here is that I can’t remember the names of any of the characters – I think of Mark Ruffalo and Rachel McAdams, Michael Keaton and Liev Schreiber – but they are undoubtedly, quietly heroic in their diligent pursuit of the truth, and piecing together of a complicated case.
But the Fourth Estate can also be scumbags. We know that. They can be charming scumbags as in the case of Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in Howard Hawks’s His Girl Friday – which was remade with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau as The Front Page – or horrific PsOS like Kirk Douglas’s superambitious reporter in Ace in the Hole.
Once more heading upstairs, the press mogul gets perhaps his greatest portrait in Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane. But here there is a real ambivalence to Charles Foster Kane. We see the dying man, then the media version of him and then the pieces of a man told by those who knew him best: his associates, best friend, ex-wife, his banker, his valet and none of them is able to really get to the heart of who he was, perhaps because he was in the end heartless. Welles, both actor and director, shows you that Kane loses his humanity as he gains power. It is a timelapse of corruption which we can’t help but feel involved in because we go with his initial charisma and we see his vulnerability – the child with the sled – before almost anything else.
We can’t help but feel compromised with Lance Oppenheim’s new film Primetime as well, which also premiered at Venice. The film shows the rise of NBC Dateline’s Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson at his most American Psycho) and his show Catch a Predator, in which alleged paedophiles are baited by online activists and of-age actors posing as vulnerable children. Once the “target” enters the house, which has been rigged with cameras, Hansen emerges to reveal the sting and conduct an interview before releasing the humiliated man who will then be tackled and tasered by the police.
On the one hand there is the utter disregard for due process and legal protections – this is essentially lynching by TV – and on the other there is the use of that humiliation and an apparent vigilantism as entertainment. Like Ink, Primetime gets somewhat lost in its own narrative of following a protagonist who is trying to get on the ladder of success. Hansen and his plucky team will do anything necessary to win the ratings battle against Lost and ultimately, who gives a shit about paedos, right?
Now manosphere and far right influencers have taken on similarly extra-judicial livestreamed stings, followed by beatings and humiliation and without the involvement of the police. In Russia, the far right go after homosexuals, using the same techniques.
Pattinson plays Hansen as a relatively despicable human being who is obviously not quite right. Jake Gyllenhaal in Nightcrawler is a clear influence. But he is delivering a show which has found an audience and approval among the higher-ups in the network and within the ranks of law enforcement.
Suggested Reading
Why Netanyahu hates the most powerful film of the year
Going back to Danny Boyle’s film, it isn’t often the case that a tagline is better than the actual film. But with Ink it is: “They Broke the News.” This pithily and wittily sums up what the Sun and other News International properties would do whether it was directly via the obvious bias of the fair and balanced Fox News or indirectly by laying the groundwork for channels such as Newsmax and GB News with even looser journalistic standards and almost no attempt at impartiality.
There are still great journalists out there breaking important stories. But the establishment likes advertisements for itself and Ink provides that. Primetime might be a more concerted and negative character portrait of a figure in the media who dangerously blurs legal and moral lines, but there are still the beats of the Hollywood success story and an application of audience sympathy. Ace in the Hole it is not. Network even less so. Yet we need films of that power more than ever.
