Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

In other words, history repeats

itself. This is because history is driven by human nature, and human nature has never changed and
never will. We can, however, learn from our mistakes, which is why the enduring aspect of texts
serves a didactic purpose in the prevention of these repeating errors. Through his film “good night,
and good luck”, George Clooney aims to teach his 2000s Bush-governed audience to not make the
same mistakes as 1950s McCarthyistic America. He comments on enduring ideas like people and
their escapist relationship with entertainment, the dilemma of journalism and the Machiavellian
tactics used by politicians to gain power, so that the truth about 9/11, or at least an opening for the
truth, is grafted into the minds of civilians who ironically contribute to the biggest changes in
government through indifference and ignorance. There is no question that “good night, and good
luck” will certainly endure through the ages, because the tale it tells of Joseph McCarthy and his
subjects was revived during the Bush administration and now the Trump administration, and quite
frankly during every administration to ever come because we simply just don’t learn.

How are politicians able to plunge millions of people into a state of hypnosis so that they can
comfortably rise to power? Politicians are demagogues, or leaders who gain popularity by exploiting
emotions and prejudice to arouse the common people, whip up their passions, shut down reasoned
discourse. In his film, Clooney uses archival footage of McCarthy using patriotic and emotive
language to invoke the ‘us and them’ paradigm, “I do ask you, and every American who loves this
country, to join with me”. Since McCarthy’s footage is in black and white, Clooney makes the
aesthetic choice to produce the film in chiaroscuro. This in turn conveys how McCarthy preyed on
people’s sense of right and wrong, turning political opposites into moral opposites and creating a false
binary that cannot be challenged. McCarthy uses the craft of emotional provocation to heighten
America’s Red Scare, a corrupt and vile tactic that helped him pave the way to political opportunity.
This time travel back into the 1950s is essential for Clooney’s audience to understand the hidden
corruption and deceit marring the 2000s bush administration, where bush created and exacerbated an
invisible threat to the point of mass hysteria and mass ignorance of his true agendas in oil-rich middle
eastern countries.

Just as McCarthy uses the fear of communism to rise in the senate, bush uses the fear of Islamic
terrorism to justify the deaths of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians so that he could satiate his oil
addiction and thirst for political superiority through this resource. And just as Bush uses the fear of
Islam, Trump uses the fear of refugees to make the top 0.01 percent of America wealthier while the
remaining 99.9 percent are left to stagnate. To Trump, the Mexican race is a whole national threat,
and the rest of America believes this stupidity because he has so cleverly created and exploited this
fear of Mexicans, or “animals”, committing job theft and other major atrocities. Bush called Saddam
Hussein’s followers “bullies” and McCarthy called communist sympathisers “unamerican”. All
politicians have to do is play on our emotions through language like this. As such, “good night, and
good luck” will certainly endure through the ages because it reveals how politicians will always be
demagogues who capitalise on emotional manipulation and false, non-existent threats to justify
corruption.

We all have a voice. We have opinions, things that we value, things that we criticise and things about
the world that deeply bother us. Most of us do nothing with that voice and just watch the world burn
in a frenzy of lies and misinformation, probably because we don’t believe that our voices will make a
difference. Journalists believe otherwise. By retelling journalist Edward Murrow’s experiences during
the McCarthy era, Clooney draws attention to the unchanging dilemma of crusading journalism in a
climate that suppresses critical thinking. Claustrophobic settings, repeated periods of silence and
smoke-filled rooms are all symbols in the film that build tension and highlight the pressure and
zeitgeist of confinement felt by the CBS journalists. The darkness enveloping Murrow’s presence also
conveys the personal risk he and all journalists undertake to expose the demagoguery of politicians in
power, such as loss of employment and sponsors.

When “good night, and good luck” was produced, the narrative being force fed to the world was that
Saddam Hussein was a tyrannic dictator hiding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and that the 9/11
attacks he orchestrated were a trailer of what’s to come. Naturally, this terrified western civilisation.
As president, Bush had the strongest and loudest voice, which he used to make dramatic declarations
like “the United States of America will not relent until this war against terror is won.” The smaller
voices of truth activists however, reached out to the public through broadcasting corporations like the
Colorado Public Television and PBS, which hosted subversive documentaries such as the ‘9/11
Explosive evidence: experts speak out”. This became one of the most watched programs similar to
Murrow’s “see it now” that also had a large viewing base. However, like CBS, PBS’s airing of such
films had been controversial and damaging to the grand narrative of America.

Politicians have always despised the press but through his film Clooney asks his audience to
commemorate the journalists who have always risked their lives for justice. 1143 journalists have
been killed worldwide since 1992, with 190 of these journalists killed in Iraq. For instance, earlier this
year, a 39-year-old correspondent for a local Iraqi TV station and his camera man were killed near a
police station by a group of armed men. “good night, and good luck” demonstrates how journalists
back then and journalists now are the heroes we need in this world of censorship because the rest of
us are too frightened to speak up. The film will therefore certainly endure through the ages as it
highlights the unchanging negative attitude towards reportage and journalism.

Now let’s talk about people, the commoners, us. The corruption that happens in this world is our fault.
People have the ability to make choices and they make all the wrong ones. One of these wrong
choices is the rejection of truth because the truth makes us unhappy, paired with an addiction towards
entertainment because saturating our brains with rubbish makes us feel productive. In ‘good night,
and good luck’ Clooney demonstrates how it is mere civilians who fuel the fear-mongering tactics
used by politicians, by choosing entertainment over education.

The intertextual reference to Shakespeare, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves”
reveals how mere civilians, with their viewing preferences, unconsciously benefit and further the
corruption of government which depends on our “limited scrutiny”, as Harold Pinter describes in his
Nobel Prize lecture. Clooney brings urgency to the matter of television becoming a means of
escapism rather than education through audience surrogacy, stimulating reflection upon our own
values and the information we choose to ignore. I participated in this internet poll, the question being
“should networks offer more primetime escapism?” As you can see, most people like to stay in the
dark when it comes to current affairs, just as they did in 1950.

There is an entire list of entertainment affected by the 9/11 attacks on Wikipedia, with coverage of the
attacks and their aftermath being the longest uninterrupted news event in the history of US television,
a continuous 93-hours. You can imagine the frustration felt by people at the time, finding no way to
escape the endlessly traumatic updates on the event. But this shouldn’t give us an excuse to forever
turn a blind eye towards issues that make us upset, and Clooney comments on the dangers of such
oblivion and how the escapist role of television these days is the reason why political corruption can
easily unfold. Largely owing to Clooney’s audience surrogacy technique, “good night, and good luck”
will certainly endure through the ages as viewers now and in the future will have their own ignorance
directly questioned, and viewers, as we can see through the networks popular in 1950 and in the
2000s, will always be ignorant.

The unfortunate reality of things is that “good night, and good luck”, although it sheds light upon
enduring issues like the indolence of people, the role of journalism and the universal laws of corrupt
politics, the world will never learn. At least not enough to prevent history from repeating itself. It’s
truly pathetic that this cycle will forever continue, but at this point it shouldn’t surprise us. The human
condition is unchanging, we are not evolving as a species.

And as Franz Kafka said, “there is an infinite amount of hope in the universe… but not for us.”