Best of Enemies

Best of Enemies is a  2015 documentary constructed from pre-existing TV and film footage and directed by Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon.  The movie focuses on ten debates between Gore Vidal and the conservative icon, William F. Buckley -- the debates were a feature of ABC news coverage of the Republican and Democratic political conventions in 1968.  ABC was the perennial Nielsen ratings loser to NBC and CBS -- as a contemporary quip had it:  "If the Vietnam war were on ABC, it would be cancelled in 13 weeks."  NBC and CBS covered the conventions gavel-to-gavel; ABC experimented with a ninety-minute format in prime-time, each night's coverage culminating in a much-ballyhooed debate between Vidal and Buckley.  (ABC's production values were conspicuously limited -- the first night's debate took place in a garishly colored, Pop art set; mercifully, that set collapsed the next day, dropping all the studio lights down on top of the set and forcing the remaining 9 encounters, moderated by Howard K. Smith, to take place in front of a fringe of discretely closed curtains.) 

The documentary features some pundits as "talking heads" and claims for the debates a significance that I think is dubious -- the pundits assert that these debates were the beginning of our current Cable News culture of instantaneous, feigned outrage and lurid confrontational commentary.  (I'm not sure of this -- I recall vividly Joe Pyne's show and other barbarous stuff on late-night TV that seems to me to be more directly ancestral to shows like Bill O'Reilly's The Factor and Hannity.)  Everything in the movie leads up to William F. Buckley's celebrated melt-down, a moment that led to years of litigation between the two men.  Buckley cultivated an aura of suave noblesse oblige and had a particularly ornate rhetorical style -- he interlards his sentences, constructed like edifices by Milton or Gibbons, with curious vocabulary items, words that, I think, he often misuses or distorts in order to embed them, like gems, in his discourse.  On his TV show Firing Line, where he was lord and master, Buckley was wont to sigh at the ignorance of his debating adversaries, roll his eyes or cause them to bulge in pseudo-astonishment at logical defects in his enemy's syllogisms -- often, he would grimace and cause his tongue to dart all around his thin, little mouth, almost seeming to hiss as if his buccal orifice were nest of vipers.  Too cool and nonchalant to be ruffled by his debating partners, Buckley inhabited a bubble of stoic calm -- he might be amused at a debating opponent's errors, but he was too sagacious and perspicuous to ever get angry.  In the ninth convention debate,Vidal punctured Buckley's bubble, calling him a "crypto-Nazi" and eliciting a bizarre reaction from the conservative ideologue -- Buckley's eyes hardened to glinting chips of obsidian and, for some reason, his lower jaw began to saw laterally, sideways, and, through these facial contortions, he managed to call Vidal "queer" and said that he if were to "sock (him) in the goddamn mouth, (he would) stay plastered."  As invective, those words didn't make much sense -- "plastered" applies to being drunk and "sock" is too effete a term for what Buckley's eyes and mannerisms implied that he was about to do.  This startling moment, Buckley's complete on-air melt-down, haunted the Conservative for the rest of his life and he seems to have been as puzzled as anyone else who saw this happen as to what exactly had occurred.  Buckley sued Vidal and, apparently, sought to have all  tapes and records of his infamous melt-down expunged from history.  It didn't work --- a grainy black and white record of the confrontation somehow survived and it is all the more eloquent for being of such dismal quality.  The two men continued to be mortal enemies.  Buckley died first.  Accordingly, Vidal had the pleasure of writing an obituary about his old sparring partner  -- he ended the essay by imagining Buckley burning in hell "and fanning the flames of injustice and old hatreds." 

The film is interesting and has good archival footage of the Miami and Chicago political conventions.  Buckley underestimated Vidal, a man that he had obviously loathed for many years preceding the debates.  While Buckley tried to devise elaborately eloquent arguments about the political situation, Vidal went straight for the throat, hurling a series of carefully scripted ad hominem attacks at Buckley -- Vidal had done his homework, vetting Buckley's writings for extremist remarks to jam down the Conservative writer's throat; furthermore, Vidal had crafted numerous Oscar Wilde style insults and epithets that he memorized and deployed at various times in the debate.  Buckley correctly characterizes Vidal's style as "feline" but didn't really have any adequate defense. In the course of the ten debates, Buckley seems to become more and more panicked by the fact that Vidal was seemingly besting him -- even though Vidal wasn't playing by the rules and, generally, ignored the political events that the two men were supposed to be discussing.  The sense that he was being made a fool, I think, erupted ultimately in Buckley's bizarre and alarming outburst.  At this juncture in history, I don't know what young people would make of this documentary -- I saw the whole thing transpire "live"  on TV when I was 14 and it made an impact on me, although I never quite understood what had happened.  A youthful audience today would probably just see two campy middle-aged queens insulting one another in pompously affected East Coast accents.  And the film does suggest an equivalence between the two men -- both were from aristocratic families, had run for public office and lost, both considered themselves cultural critics, and both may have been sexually ambiguous.  Vidal is elaborately Gay, in some images sporting a huge pompadour; Buckley is less queer but he still seems extremely effete.  The aging allies of both men appear as commentators.  Buckley's younger brother, still missing the point, calls Vidal "whore Vidal" and says, loyally, that if his brother had "socked" Vidal  as he promised he would have killed  him -- "he could have broken him in two over his knee,"  William F's brother says, then, flashes his family's immensely appealing and photogenic grin.