Daniel and Jack sit down across from each other in brown leather armchairs and ruthlessly interrogate each other about their many crimes. We also continue our election year series on movies about (or at least mentioning) US Presidents by talking over the deeply mid 2008 Ron Howard movie Frost/Nixon, an almost entirely fictional account of some TV interviews in which a chat show host helped a mass murdering crook present himself to the world as a thoughtful and moral person, to enormous acclaim. Thankfully the media learned their lesson and don't launder horrific people anymore just because they're powerful. * Originally exclusive for Patreon subscribers. Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay independent. Patrons get exclusive access to at least one full extra episode a month. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper/posts Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618&fan_landing=true IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's (Locked) Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ Jack's Bluesky: @timescarcass.bsky.social Daniel's Bluesky: @danielharper.bsky.social IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1
Be prepared for difficult application process and stressful work environment.
Challenges?
Many.
Rewards?
Numerous.
Failure?
Possible.
Your employer?
The American people.
The few chosen have been the presidents.
It is now clear that Richard Nixon and close aides conspired to sabotage peace talks to get him elected in 1968.
They massively, directly and covertly interfered in a major diplomatic negotiation that was the most sensitive, not only going on at the time, but probably one of the most important negotiations in American diplomatic history.
In 1968, Richard Nixon is the Republican nominee for president.
Hubert Humphrey is the Democratic vice president and eventual nominee.
And Nixon realizes that Johnson, President Johnson's efforts to bring North Vietnam to the peace table and to begin an end to the Vietnam conflict Nixon realizes that these efforts are going to be bad for his bid for the presidency.
And so he makes a secret overture to South Vietnam to discourage them from going to the peace talks and instead to wait until he has secured the presidency.
And it's another I Don't Speak German bonus episode.
And it's the latest installment in our ongoing, because the election is still ongoing, at least at the time of recording.
And it seems like it will just be ongoing forever.
Our ongoing series of movies about, sort of, about the American presidency.
And Daniel is here also.
I hope if he's not, then we're in trouble.
Daniel, are you there?
I am here.
I am here.
Okay, and that's good.
So we're recording this on the night, well, night from my point of view, of the Vance Waltz debate, aren't we, on CBS? Oh, is that happening?
I guess that's happening tonight, yeah.
So we won't know anything about that.
I was going to ask you, are you pumped?
But clearly you're just oblivious.
I will.
Well, I was just way too invested in Frost-Dixon to be following, you know, like real-world politics or anything like that, so...
Yeah, no, I always just catch it the day after.
So it's like, oh, it's in the news.
Oh, let's watch the debate or watch bits of the debate or whatever.
So I never watch these things in real time.
At least not in a while.
Not in a while.
I mean, it will be exciting.
It will honestly be exciting to see.
I mean, I think Wall's...
I don't know.
It's just hard not to like the guy.
And so he's just going to smear Vance into a tiny little pustule of nothing.
Well, one hopes.
Because Waltz is honestly, he seems to me to be as good as American politicians can possibly be.
Yeah.
And Vance is pretty close to...
I mean, Trump obviously changes the calculus on this.
But Vance seems like, you know, in the absence of Trump, you would say Vance looks to be about as bad as they can be.
So it really is a meeting of antipodes, this one.
It's going to be interesting how the thing I'm mainly interested in really is to see how they both handle each other because they're very, very different.
And yeah, I mean, anyway, we will maybe talk about that on another show, but it is going to be interesting just on a technical level to see how those two personalities interact with each other.
Yeah, no, hey, we could do another bonus episode.
We could just watch the debate and discuss it in a couple of days.
That's fine with me.
Yeah, yeah, let's just completely degenerate into, you know, lowest common denominator political podcasting, which is just another way of saying every fucking political podcast.
Yeah, I bet we could get Nate Silver on.
Let's get Nate Silver.
Oh, I expect so.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, welcome to Jack and Daniel's new venture.
We just watch stuff and talk about it.
The podcast.
Yeah, that's how it goes.
And that's really what these bonus episodes are, people, which is why you pay for them.
So yeah, speaking of an amazing political meeting of different personalities, you know, and conversations crackling with political controversy and the cut and thrust of interrogation and stuff like that, what we're going to be talking about in this bonus episode, as I say, it's another in our series of chats about movies about the American presidency, or connected very tangent, or movies with a president in, I suppose we have to call this since we did Independence Day.
And it is the movie Frost-Nixon.
Frost slash Nixon.
Which, honestly, that would...
I mean, Frost slash Nixon?
That would have been a better film.
Like, at some point, just Frost lunges forward, pulls a box cutter out of his jacket, and just slashes Nixon right across the face.
If we could have gone full inglorious bastards with it, I think that would have been better.
Daniel, what do you think?
Like, full Dexter mode.
He just goes, like, full serial killer mode.
Yeah, no, I could see that.
It's a slasher movie, where it's like David Frost working his way through Nixon's AIDS until he gets to the big guy.
Yeah, or just a series of movies about David Frost, the slasher-stroke-political-avenger.
You've got Frost-Nixon as the original one, and then in subsequent movies, David Frost, with his box cutter, goes after other political figures who are guilty of some malfeasance, you know?
And every time directed by Ron Howard, because he's the only person who has the real subtlety in order to handle these kinds of concepts.
Anyway, yeah, so...
Ron Howard.
You know, one of the things I was going to do in this episode is I was going to start with a thing about, like...
I'm probably going to be quite...
I mean, spoilers, everybody.
I don't like this movie.
I think this movie is shit.
So I was going to start with a thing like, I think this movie is terrible, and I think it's badly directed, and I think Ron Howard is basically the epitome of everything that's wrong with Hollywood filmmaking.
But, even so, no disrespect to the man's memory, to the people that loved him, etc., Because I got it into my head somehow that Ron Howard was dead.
And I have no idea how I got that idea.
It was just in there, in my brain, Ron Howard's dead.
And I just thought, I'd better check that, actually.
Like, five minutes before we started recording.
And he's not.
No, no.
He's still alive.
He's certainly not dead.
He is 70 years old, so he's not even, like, that aggressively old.
Yeah.
No, no, he's not even president age.
Yeah, he can't be president until you're 70 now.
That's how it goes.
Yeah, no, I hear you.
That's right, yeah.
Okay, so yeah, Frost Nixon.
It's not very old, is it?
It's 2008 or something?
2008, yeah.
So, I mean, which is still like 16 years ago.
So, yeah.
To me, that's a recent film.
Yeah.
Directed by Ron Howard, and it's based on a stage play, which is quite a hit stage play, by somebody whose name I can't remember.
And it stars Michael Sheen as David Frost, because Michael Sheen at this point was basically playing every real British historical personality who was in a film.
He was Tony Blair in The Queen, and Michael Sheen basically made his career in the early aughts as the guy that played everybody who was in British politics or British media when there was a fictionalised version of them in a film.
And I think he's still doing it, actually, so...
Still, whatever works.
And also starring, and I'm still stuck on how you say this, Frank Langella or Langella as the, well, they're both eponymous, as the eponymous Richard Nixon of Frost slash Nixon.
And a lot of other people who, Sam Rockwell is in this, and who else is in this?
Oliver Platt.
Oliver Platt, I'd say, yeah.
And then Toby Jones.
Toby Jones, who turns up for a couple of scenes where he doesn't really need to be in them just because they wanted Toby Jones in lots of prosthetics and loud 70s suits doing an accent.
He's the best thing in the film.
Also, Matthew McFadden as John Burt, which is hilarious to me.
But yeah, so it's basically a dramatization of, well, it's a fictionalization of the process whereby Richard Nixon ended up being interviewed for television by David Frost, who was a television personality in the 1970s.
And of course, this is Nixon post-presidency, post-Watergate, post-resignation, all this stuff.
And the film is...
Well, it's pretty much a complete fiction.
Oh, Kevin Bacon as well.
Kevin Bacon is the loyal...
I always like Kevin Bacon.
Before we started actually recording this, Jack and I were talking about actors we liked as children and movies that we liked as children.
And Kevin Bacon is just one of those...
I've just liked him since I was 10 years old.
He can do no wrong, as far as I'm concerned.
And I think he's pretty good here, yeah.
Yeah, he does a good job here.
But it does hammer home the A Few Good Men vibes that I got.
Oh yeah, oh yeah.
I kept thinking that Kevin Bacon was in Nixon.
I'm like, didn't he play?
Wasn't he one of the...
No, no, no, that was James Woods.
Kevin Bacon was in JFK. And so I was just like, another...
He just shows up to every Nixon movie now.
You know, it's like, you know, if it's got Nixon in the title...
No, that's not true, because Kevin Bacon wasn't in that one.
No, although he would have been a good Bob Haldeman, actually, thinking about it.
I mean, for all the bullshit that James Woods is into these days, I think he was really good in Nixon as Haldeman.
But yeah, Kevin Bacon, especially now, a few years down the line, another 15 or 20 years later, he would have fed into that a little bit better.
But I think he would make a good Haldeman now.
Yeah.
Anyway, when he wants to make a Nixon movie, that's our casting recommendation for all the vendors.
Keep Kevin Bacon in there.
Well, I kind of want to make a Nixon movie because Richard Nixon is a real fascination of mine.
I'm one of those people who's really endlessly fascinated by Richard Nixon.
And I'm fascinated by depictions of him as well, representations of Richard Nixon, of which there are many.
I remember being very young and watching a television drama about Watergate Where I believe it was Martin Sheen who played John Dean.
He's the viewpoint character.
And I may be hallucinating this, but I think this is real.
Nixon was played by Rip Torn.
Oh god, that's brilliant casting as well, isn't it?
Yeah, that works, doesn't it?
There have been so many.
Dan Hedaya has played Nixon.
Did you see that one?
I have seen that, yes.
I saw it many years ago.
It was very adorable.
But yeah, I'm fascinated by Richard Nixon.
I'm fascinated by depictions of Richard Nixon.
And depictions of Richard Nixon are usually very, very inaccurate, including the Oliver Stone movie, Nixon, which is on...
Most of the time, my favourite movie of all time is Kubrick's The Shining.
Occasionally, my favourite movie of all time is Oliver Stone's Nixon.
Yeah, and you and I have discussed Oliver Sons Nixon in several different places, or else we would definitely have done it in this podcast, because we've kind of beaten it to death a little bit.
But maybe we'll do it just for fun.
We'll have an even more bonus bonus section.
These are the ones that are just our self-indulgence.
We just want to sit and talk about Nixon for another four hours.
We'll see how it goes, but I don't know.
This started originally...
I did find that miniseries you were mentioning.
Martin Sheen did play John Dean.
This is a miniseries called Blind Ambition, and Rip Torn did play the president Nixon, and I now want to seek this out.
I am fascinated at what a 1979 Rip Torn would do with Nixon.
So anyway, yes, I'm just agreeing with you.
Yeah, I must revisit that now that I've been reassured that it is real and not just a figment of my fevered imagination.
Yeah.
So yeah, no, I don't think we'll really forget Oliver Stone's Nixon.
It is a wonderful, bizarre, insane, bad, fantastic movie.
It's got very little to do with the historical Richard Nixon.
Right, right.
Yeah.
Yeah, no.
In very much the same way that this film has very little to do with the historical Richard Nixon, or indeed the historical David Frost, or indeed the historical Frost-Nixon interviews.
But, Daniel, what do you think of this film?
Did you enjoy it just as cinema or what?
I mean, I probably don't think I'm as harsh on it as you are.
I'm a little bit less in deep on the Nixon lore.
An obsession, although, again, of course, I love the Oliver Stone movie.
And A Secret Honor, another great Nixon movie.
That one was directed by, I think that one was directed by Robert Altman in the 70s.
I mean, that one stars Philip Baker Hall.
I mean, it's basically, it's literally like a one-man show.
And I saw that, you know, 25 years ago or something.
Yeah, it's a funny thing.
I've only recently discovered that this existed because I was talking about Nixon on Blue Sky and somebody said, what do you think of Secret Honor?
And I said, what's that?
So this is now, you know, very near the top of my list of things that I need to seek out.
Nowhere near as high up as the Rip Torn miniseries, obviously.
That sounds absolutely insane.
Yeah.
Frost-Dixon, I mean, I knew this movie.
I never saw it before.
We just said, hey, let's do Frost-Dixon.
It'll be a movie about the American presidency.
And I sort of knew it as one of those kind of also-ran Oscar contenders from that year.
And that was kind of a tough era.
There were a lot of really great films being made around that time.
And Frost-Dixon was like, it's sort of the middle.
It's on every top critic's list of top ten films.
And it's always number 8 and 9. It's well-made.
It's well-acted.
And that's kind of how I respond to it.
I watch it and I'm like, you know, I have my issues with the acting.
One particular actor, I think, is just...
I don't really want to say miscast, but I find I enjoyed it while I was watching it, and I did watch it three times for this because we delayed this three times, and I kept watching it right before we were going to record because what I realized was this film, it's in and out of me.
It goes through me like water.
I watched the film.
I end the film.
I'm like, oh, that was a perfectly pleasant way to spend two hours.
It's very lower middle brow.
It kind of does its thing.
It has a couple of really good performances.
And then you just never think of it again.
And so I literally watched the first half of it last night and then finished the second half after I got home today.
And I was like, okay, we're going to record.
And I was like, hold on, what happened in the first half again?
I don't know, that's kind of the Ron Howard effect to a certain degree.
He just can present this to you in this completely effortless kind of thing.
It's the cinema equivalent of baby food.
It just goes in and out the other end, and it's done.
But it gives you a vague sense of having consumed something of impetus.
But yeah.
So I don't feel very strongly negatively or positively toward it.
I mean, it is just like the very standard, like, okay, that was a movie.
And I like some of the performances.
I don't like some of the other performances.
It's very pedestrianly directed.
There's nothing going on here.
This is something that I think when we talked about Oppenheimer, I sort of get into a little bit.
It's like, what is this movie about?
What are we supposed to leave this movie thinking about?
What is the message here?
I think the, I mean, my answer to that is like the very, you know, it's kind of what's in the tagline, right?
It's, you know, Playboy television star, you know, tests his mettle against, you know, one of the worst people on the planet and like proves himself to have some substance.
And it's just like a Hollywood director in a Hollywood system telling itself that it's actually important to get vague admissions of guilt from the powerful and treating that as more important than any other measure of political competence.
Well, that is certainly not something that is going to be produced and applauded in elite circles.
So that's kind of my take on it.
And we can get into some of the other stuff later, but Yeah, so I assume you are much more negative towards this.
Is that just in general, or is that because of the subject matter?
Because it does take enormous liberties with the subject matter.
Well, it's kind of both.
It's kind of both and neither, or yes and no, in response to your question.
Obviously, since Oliver Stone's Nixon is one of my favorite movies, sometimes on a good day, my favorite movie of all time, I I don't have an inherent objection to dramas or depictions of Richard Nixon and his presidency and Watergate and all that stuff, that entire era, which are incredibly historically inaccurate.
I'm fine with that.
I mean, I could talk about the historical howlers and...
Omissions and so on in that film.
But it's still a movie that I love, so clearly I don't have a kind of inherent debilitating objection to that.
So I think it's fair to say that my problems with Frost-Nixon are not ultimately about the frustrating and annoying, and in many ways, egregious misrepresentation of history.
I think, really, it's...
This is one...
Because I re-watched Oliver Stone's Nixon after I watched this.
Not necessarily for us to talk about, just because I wanted to.
Right.
That's gotta be it.
That's just a giant whole shift.
Yeah.
Get rid of this.
Is like, you know, is like, you know, what is his name?
Frost.
Frost gives, gives the shoes to Richard Dixon and then Richard Dixon sits off bemusedly into the sea and roll credits.
And then like the beginning of Oliver Stone's and Dixon.
I can just imagine that.
That juxtaposition must be pretty insane.
It's like, we are doing Citizen Kane, but with Richard Nixon as Charles Foster Kane.
That is what the movie Nixon is, from Oliver Stone.
Absolutely.
And it certainly does...
Watching those two movies in quick succession, ostensibly these two movies on the same subject matter, or very closely connected subject matter, It does show you that, for instance, Oliver Stone, whatever one wants to say about him, and I have many, many unkind things to say about Mr. Stone, particularly these days, particularly when he writes and produces and directs essentially pro-Vladimir Putin propaganda movies filled with lies about Ukraine.
Whatever you want to say about him, he is an artist with a very particular and a very powerful cinematic vision, you know?
And that is a different sort of thing to watching a Ron Howard film, to be frank.
No, no, yeah.
Oliver Stone, whatever you say about Oliver Stone, and I agree with everything you just said about Oliver Stone, he has a point of view, and he is not afraid to put that point of view across.
Like, he has something he's trying to say with his movie about Richard Nixon.
That is not just, you know, that is not putting you through the paces.
Like, that's a legitimately brilliant movie.
Even if you hate every bit of it, it's legitimately, it's doing something interesting.
Whereas this is, you know, it's just, you know, it's, it's like a, it's, it's like the, it's like a, I don't want to say McDonald's cheeseburger.
I want to say like one step above.
It's kind of like, like a, like a Ruby Tuesday or like, like at one of the higher end, like sit down restaurant chains, you know, like a Chili's or something.
It's like their cheeseburger.
It's like, it's very pedestrian.
It's manufactured, it's produced as well as it can be given the constraints that go into making it.
And then, you know, it'll fulfill your diet, and then the moment it's gone, there's just nothing else to it there.
But yeah, it's very, like, manufactured.
It's very, like, it's built out of, like, very familiar parts.
And, you know, well, we have to have the girl, so that we have a female interest, so that we have women in the movie, so that we have...
And, you know, she's going to serve as sort of an audience surrogate, and she's going to kind of introduce us to...
To Frost.
But, you know, like, why are we doing a meet-cute on an airplane?
Why are we doing, you know, like, you know, what is this, you know, what are we doing here?
What is this movie about?
Like, and that's kind of, again, I kind of come down to, you're like, what the hell is this movie doing?
Yeah.
And that leads me back to where I was going, because, as I say, you know, clearly, the historical inaccuracy, although it bugs me, that's not the fundamental problem.
The fundamental problem is that And it's not even really the...
Like, with Oliver Stone's Nixon, you know, the style is extreme and intense and operatic and crazed and all that stuff, and I love that stuff.
But I like movies that are calm.
I like a lot of movies that are couched in something like that, just sort of calm, almost pedestrian, professional Hollywood standard way.
The slightly higher toned cheeseburger that you were just talking about.
There's lots of movies like that that are still good movies.
So clearly it's not that that I have a problem with.
And this leads me to your question.
What is this movie about?
That's a really good...
You watched it, and then you said to yourself, what is this movie about?
I think that what Frost-Nixon is about is ultimately, isn't the media great?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Aren't journalists wonderful?
Isn't TV news wonderful?
That's what it seems like to me.
It seems like an enormous sort of media self-congratulatory circle jerk.
Right.
Because...
I mean, we can talk about how it represents Nixon as having far more interiority and tragic dimensions than he actually had, I think.
I mean, Oliver Stone's movie is far more guilty of that than this, but this movie still does the same thing.
And when you do that, you are essentially buying into the bullshit, passive-aggressive, self-exculpatory bullshitting, myth-making that Richard Nixon did about himself.
you're still doing it yeah but it's it's not that that's the ultimate problem it's not even the fact that this movie is filled with lies and and really quite egregious misrepresentations of history like this movie represents making the interviews as essentially a gladiatorial battle between david frost and richard nixon and by extension the establishment misrepresentations of history like this movie represents making the interviews as essentially a gladiatorial battle between david frost and richard nixon and by extension the establishment or power or whatever on one side and on the other hand this scrappy little band of historians and researchers and journalists
and so on it represents it as this great big battle the historical truth is the exact opposite of that it was a big cooperation everybody knew what everybody was doing everybody was making money out of it richard nixon didn't just get paid to do them he got royalties they pre-arrange like stuff that's presented in the film as david frost springing stuff on nixon starting it with why didn't you burn the tapes They pre-arrange that.
They pre-arrange the whole thing about asking him about Watergate, the whole thing about, oh, he's about to spill the beans because he's got a conscience.
We need to stop the interview.
Are you sure you want to do this, sir?
None of that happened.
All of that was prearranged between them.
It's all part of Nixon's very carefully planned self-rehabilitation program.
They were all in on it.
The whole thing's total fucking bullshit.
But it's even more than that.
It's that, for me, the answer to the question, what is this film about?
It is the media puffing itself up and saying, look at us.
Look, look.
We are the guardians of truth.
We are the investigators.
We get to the truth.
We get these great significant moments, you know.
And that's pretty obnoxious, to be honest.
Right?
Yeah.
Yeah, no, definitely.
And it's not even like...
To me, it's also like, even if events...
I don't...
I really didn't know the background of the Frost-Nixon interviews before watching this, and I deliberately did not read a lot of the history just because I figured, like, you're going to have all that, and I'd rather...
You know, this is what I'd learn, but I... I, you know, it does not surprise me that this was a much more copacetic process in terms of getting these interviews made than the film implies it is.
Not least because, like, Rost and Nixon are kind of still friends at the end, you know?
They're like, but he gave him a gift.
Like, the last thing he does in the movie is give him a gift of some shoes.
And, like, we can talk about, like, what that's supposed to mean, you know?
It's like, you know...
Is that supposed to be a big fuck you to Richard Nixon because the man with these effeminate, laceless shoes actually bested you in Mortal Kombat?
It's so weird.
In the film, I'm making this sound more interesting than it is because the film really does nothing with this concept.
It has this extended thing where this very fictionalized thing where Nixon calls Frost three nights before the final interview is supposed to take place.
You know, it's like, you and me are the same people, and we clawed up from the muck and all this sort of thing.
And Frost is just sort of sitting there, like, half-smile on his face, kind of going, like...
We're not so different, you and I. Yeah, we're not so different, you and I. And I don't know how the film wants me to take that, because, like, on one level, yeah, I can see, like, yeah, okay, you know, David Frost is in some ways being portrayed as being, like, this kind of, like, he's only doing this because it's going to get him ratings, because it's going to get him money, because it's going to get him acclaimed, because it's going to get him back in the...
In the limelight and be a big star again.
But we're just told that.
We don't see...
I mean, I guess this is where I'm just going to say, I think Michael Sheen is very bad in this movie.
And I don't think that Sheen is bad in the sense of he's a bad actor.
I haven't seen it.
I went and looked.
I don't think I've seen much else that he's been in.
And so I can't comment on that.
To me, he's playing Austin Powers in this.
This is a two-steps-toned-down Austin Powers.
And I understand that it was that era, and it's London in the 60s and 70s, etc.
To an extent, they're playing on the true stereotypes, but there's just no there there to the performance.
We talked about Fargo.
We talked about William H. Macy and how flat his affect is, and everything he does there.
If Michael Sheen was giving us that performance, where there's just a flatness, whereas everything he's doing is this artifice or something like that.
That's the decision you can make about what you're saying about David Frost.
The film doesn't seem to have an opinion about what's going on.
It doesn't seem to have an opinion about whether David Frost is or is not like Nixon.
And it doesn't seem to be...
It wants us to have...
And I think it's a good speech.
I think Langella is very good there.
I think Langella is actually very good in the movie.
I think he's among my favorite Nixons.
I'll just say it that way.
I mean, Anthony Hopkins is always going to be number one for me, but he's up there.
I think he does a really great job embodying Nixon in the sense that I forget that I'm watching Frank Langella, an actor I really admire, and I just start seeing him as Nixon at a certain point.
And I feel the same way about Anthony Hopkins, is that I just forget this is Anthony Hopkins, and I just start seeing him as the character.
And that's difficult to do, especially when you're playing someone as repulsive as Richard Nixon.
But yeah, no, that's...
I don't know, that's where I land.
When I say, what is this movie about?
I think it's about two hours long.
Let's see, you know?
But yeah, no, respond, if you will, to anything I just said there.
I know I kind of threw a bit at you, but...
No, I pretty much agree with everything you just said.
I think Langella is great for the most part.
I think occasionally the performance tips into...
Occasionally it's a little bit too grotesque, but I'm the guy that likes whatever the hell Anthony Hopkins is doing in Nixon's.
I can't complain.
I mean, you have to get across the Nixon-ness of Nixon.
And Nixon is one of those people nobody's ever quite looked like that.
Nobody's ever quite sounded like that.
He is one of those people who just seems like a total original for all his loathsomeness.
I think Langello, generally speaking, does a good job.
He, of course, is playing the character on the page and not the real man.
And the character on the page is this guy who's driven by inner demons and stuff like that.
And I've come to believe that the actual historical Richard Nixon did not have anything like that level of interiority.
I just see him as a grubby, nasty, sadistic, paranoid, self-seeking little shyster.
Who had no conscience and no morality about anything and was just always out for himself at all times, with the possible exception of a grandiose idea of his abilities as an international statesman or something like that, which is all based in narcissism.
Which is all based on being best buddies with Kissinger, who, whatever you say about him, actually was that guy.
Kissinger died.
Yeah, Kissinger died.
Kissinger did eventually die.
He did eventually die.
I had that moment of like, hold on, did he?
Is he still among us?
It's the zombie walk, you know, I can't remember anymore.
Did it actually happen, or am I just thinking of one of the many times that I fantasize about it happening?
Yeah, right, right.
Yeah, no, Kissinger's dead now.
Kissinger, Jesus.
That's an entire subject by itself.
I mean, in 20 years, are we going to have a movie that's like this Trump?
And it's like, you know, the vainglorious, like the history of how Trump was driven by his demons from having a, you know, a landowner father and wanting to succeed and like getting across is in this world of real estate and becoming like not the, you know, we're going to have this like this deeply interior like message of like the real Trump.
And like, it's like, no, that's not, that's just not who Donald Trump is.
No, I wouldn't put it past Hollywood or the American media to do that.
I don't think it'll work anything like as well as the fascinating crop of stuff we've had like that about Nixon.
Firstly, because however much I think Nixon might have lacked real complicated interiority, he still had loads more complicated human interiority than Donald Trump has.
Donald Trump is basically a reflex machine.
And also, Richard Nixon did spend his entire post-presidency life very carefully, very strategically rehabilitating himself, rewriting history, essentially, in his memoirs where he rewrites history and lies and misrepresents things and so on systematically.
A lot of what we see now of Nixon is, you know, in the same way that, what is it Dan Olsen says when he talks about Triumph of the Will?
When you watch that movie, you are watching Nazi propaganda.
When you buy the idea of Triumph of the Will as this great work of cinema, even though you might loathe the ideological message, if you buy the idea that it is a great and original piece of cinema, that idea itself is Nazi propaganda.
We are still recycling that propaganda that that regime told about itself.
With our constant re-representation of Nixon, we're still doing that similar sort of thing because we're still repeating his rewriting of himself, his public face that was all fake.
And this movie takes part in that.
To re-other things you were saying, I agree with you about Michael Sheen.
Michael Sheen is not an actor that I'm fond of.
I think of him fundamentally as a sort of sitcom actor who got above his station somehow, really.
And a lot of what he's doing in that movie seems to be television comedy acting.
I will kind of give him a pass to an extent, because of course he's playing David Frost.
You won't be as familiar with David Frost as I am.
I grew up, because I was a very sad nerdy kid, watching David Frost's politics show on the BBC on Sundays.
Where he would interview politicians and talk about events of the week and stuff like that.
David Frost, he was a bit toned down by then, but certainly back in the 70s and 80s, he was quite a flamboyant television personality.
And one of the things Sheen is trying to do, of course, is he's trying to do a kind of an impression.
I think he's kind of hamstrung.
By that.
But yeah, I agree with you.
It's not a great...
But he is dealing with a problem like you identified.
The film isn't really clear on what it's trying to say.
Is it trying to say that there is a kind of similarity between the two men?
I think the Frost...
Thread in the film is saying there's this fellow who's actually quite shallow, who comes to maturity to an extent, who comes to care about and understand things and be a bit more serious through this experience of battling Richard Nixon, which of course is a total fictional construction.
And yet, there's a weird thing at the start.
The idea just seems to pop into Frost's head when he's watching Nixon leave the White House for the last time and go to the helicopter.
And he supposedly catches this as Nixon is waving to the crowd and turning to go into the helicopter.
Frost is watching the news report and he sees just this moment or suggestion of a look on Nixon's face and that fascinates him.
And then we never hear about that again.
That never comes back.
At no point in the film does anybody say, why are we doing this, David?
And David says, I just saw a look in his eyes when he got on that plane and I had to know.
No, it never comes back at all.
So it seems to clash with the idea that he's doing it just because he wants the ratings or just because he wants the money.
So, yeah, it's not clear on its own dramatic arcs.
Yeah, no, and I mean, you know, you could argue.
I mean, it's trying to sell us on this idea that, like, you know, that David, like, after he has this monumental phone call from Richard Nixon, He suddenly crams the final three days and he's going through all his notes and he's just scribbling everything down and making phone calls and going like, hey, you actually should go to that trip to the National Archives and get those transcripts because I think there's actually something there.
And it's like, yeah, dude, I was trying to tell you that like six months ago.
Like, come on.
You hired me because I'm an expert here.
What are you talking about?
I also, I have a deep love of both Oliver Platt and Sam Rockwell, and I think they're both good here.
They're playing Sam Rockwell and Oliver Platt, but I'm fine with that, you know?
Yeah, no, I agree.
That's fine.
I mean, the bits where it's Matthew McFadden, Oliver Platt and Sam Rockwell doing researching and laughing about the research stuff in the hotel room.
That's that's that's fun.
That's great fun.
Yeah.
But yeah, the that stuff about the research, that's that's complete bullshit.
That's the Sam Rockwell character.
character is the real guy is apparently an inveterate self-promoter and self-aggrandizer who really talked this stuff up.
But yeah, no.
No.
No, he's just a dedicated seeker of the truth about Richard Nixon, and he just wants everybody to know just how terrible Richard Nixon is.
And yet, when it comes down to it, he just can't not shake the man's hand.
That's just how powerful a presence Richard Nixon is.
He offers you his hand, you're just gonna take it.
Or is it just meant to be because he was the president?
Is that it?
Oh, God.
I mean, we ostensibly do these to talk about what does this film have to say about the American presidency, right?
And I think that that's sort of the, you know, I guess Ron Howard, I believe Ron Howard has like met Barack Obama.
He's probably met Bill Clinton.
Oh, that doesn't surprise me in the slightest.
I don't know that for sure, but I believe he's like, you know, he's like of that, you know, he's of that class where he gets to do that sort of thing.
And it does strike me as, like, if you sort of take it as that, as, like, you know, we are people who are moving in this arena, and, like, this is the impact that the presidency has on just, like, because he's the former, you know, you call the former president, you call him Mr. President, you know?
And during the entire, you know, during the entire film, Frost will always refer to Nixon, you know, in person as Mr. President.
It's never, hey, fuck that, I mean, You know, you can't imagine saying that in that world.
And I think that that's like the portrait I get of the presidency is like this place where it's just this place of respect, this place of like this kind of ultimate, you know, well, he was the president.
He was the, you know, the It takes a particular kind of person to reach that height.
Richard Nixon, having reached that height, still was not able to get respect from his compatriots and from the Ivy League elites, etc.
That's sort of the image I get of the presidency, in terms of what this film is trying to say about the presidency, to the degree that it's saying anything at all.
It's all implicit, but that's my read on it.
What do you think about that?
Yeah, I think that's right.
The phone call is kind of the key moment in the film.
And of course, the phone call didn't happen.
But I will kind of give them a pass on that one, because although that phone call didn't happen, Richard Nixon did do stuff like that.
There are recorded instances, I think, during the presidency of Richard Nixon calling people up, journalists even, that he knew from the White House press corps, and just rambling drunkenly into the phone at them for hours on end, and they're not remembering it the next day.
That is apparently a thing that Richard Nixon used to actually do.
Yeah, I know.
It almost certainly did not happen in this case, but it is very plausible that it might have happened.
And so, yeah, I'm with you.
I'm kind of like, yeah, and it's a good scene.
Langella does, you know, he knocks it out of the park.
He does what he has to do with this, you know?
It feels like it's from a different movie, but, you know?
Yeah.
And a lot of the sentiments that he expresses in that phone call are, they are like things that we know Richard Nixon did say and think.
I mean, he did have a deep inferiority complex and loads of resentments about people that he thought didn't.
I mean, this is one of the things people don't understand about Richard Nixon, is that Richard Nixon was a conspiracy theorist.
As indeed was Bob Haldeman.
This is part of why they got on so well, and this is part of why Watergate happened.
This is part of how the plumbers happened.
You know, his attitude was, well, everybody tapes and bugs everybody, and everybody does dirty tricks, and everybody frames everybody, and everybody does this stuff, and they're all out to get me, so I have to do it before they do it to me.
And this is how you end up with the still extraordinary internal malfeasance of the Nixon White House.
And yeah, a lot of that stuff that he says in the fictional phone call, it's not a bad representation of the sort of self-pitying, paranoid attitude and feeling of social inferiority and resentment and stuff that he definitely had.
And I don't think the film is...
I think the film is presenting that critically.
I think we're meant to find it kind of sinister and frightening and pathetic and so on.
And I think we're meant to see Frost's reaction as a counterpoint to it.
That the film is saying, well, Frost hears this and he is motivated by it partly because it does strike a chord because people do look at him with a certain amount of contempt because they think he's just this or just that or just the other.
And he wants to prove those people wrong.
He wants to prove that he can do more, do better than that.
But I think there's also a sense in which the film is saying, well, you can take feelings like that, justified or unjustified, and you can do constructive things with them instead of destructive things with them.
I think, you know, I'm trying to give the film its due.
I think that's what it's trying to say there.
And I think with the presidency, I think with Nixon as a whole, I mean, the shoes, you mentioned the shoes earlier.
What are the shoes about?
And it is an underbaked...
I mean, firstly, the idea of the shoes is effeminate.
I think the reaction that Nixon and Kevin Bacon, his aide, have to the shoes, it's like it shows that they're of the older generation and they're reactionaries and so on, as opposed to Frost, who's this younger man, maybe forward-thinking and so on.
And then the idea that towards the end, you know, when Frost gives Nixon a pair of the same shoes as a gift, and Nixon accepts them in that awkward way, but he doesn't seem to know what to do with them or how to react.
I think it's supposed to be tragic.
I think it's supposed to be low-key tragic.
It's supposed to be saying, this man, he can't connect with the modern world.
He can't connect with the outside world.
He can't connect with people outside this narrow worldview that he has.
He can't connect with the future.
And there's this feeling of tragedy that he's never been connected with anybody, that somebody tries to connect with him on a human level, and he doesn't know what to do with it, and stuff like that.
And there's another scene where he's leaving the house where they do the interviews, and he goes over and he pets a woman's dog or something.
Is this what you call a dachshund?
Yeah, look at that.
And then he's like, and I'd sit on the head.
I have a Chiweenie, I have a half Dox and half Chihuahua in my house.
So I do have a certain love of dogs like that.
That dog is adorable and has no idea what the fuck is going on.
With Frank Langella just patting it on the head.
What are you doing?
What are you doing, Nixon?
This is almost as awkward as J.D. Vance going to a donut shop, you know?
That's it, isn't it?
In the same way that we joke about J.D. Vance being an alien or a robot or whatever, I think the film is trying to present Nixon in something like the same way, like the way he pats the dog.
It's like he's never quite seen a dog before.
He's like, oh, what's this thing?
What do you do with it?
You pat it on the head, I suppose.
I think if the film is, and I'm reaching like hell to try to make this make sense, but I feel like if the film is saying anything, it's saying there's something about that level of power.
Yeah.
Where you only end up there if you are, in some sense, alien to the rest of us.
If you are some kind of much bigger personality or stranger personality or something.
And the rest of us kind of have to just watch you and try the best we can to make sense of you.
And of course, that ties in with what I feel the film is saying about the media self-congratulation and the myth-making about investigative journalism and all that sort of thing.
Because it's like, Well, we have these strange, weird, huge, alien creatures that rule us, and by the definition of the office, only people like that can get there.
And we need these pioneering, determined people of conscience and determination to get to the truth and so on, in order to have any hope of understanding what the hell's going on with them.
I mean, we're in the midst of a presidential election season now, and the whole thing is like, particularly primary season, it's like, well, do they look presidential?
Does he look like a president?
And that's totally this thing that there's some internal thing.
These are men of gold.
These are men, and maybe hypothetically, hopefully soon, a woman of gold who are just...
Stand taller than us mere mortals, who are better than us, and that they are suited to hold this office because of this metal that's in them.
And that Nixon must have had that in order to ascend to the presidency.
He must have had that pureness, that something in him that allowed him to be the president.
and yet he's when you look at him he's so venal and so vain and so paranoid and such you know and just such a small petty little man that somehow like he must like and I feel like that's where that's where these filmmakers are sort of like getting into this thing of like trying to find And it's like, no, no, really, these are human beings who scrabble their way to this office, who made this happen for themselves.
But they're just people.
They're just you and me.
They're not a different type of person.
And I think it's hard to know how far back this idea about the presidency went.
Because I don't think that this was...
It seems to be this artifact of this post-war world or this 20th century superpower concept of the president must be...
In order to bequeath this power upon this single individual, they must obviously be a person of this rarefied quality.
And therefore, it's arguing in reverse.
Of course, Donald Trump just puts all that to bed.
Yeah.
And I think that's a lot of the rejection of Donald Trump.
It's not because he's vain and because he's fetal and because he's an awful person and because he's a racist and because he's a sexist and because he grumps women and all that sort of thing.
It's just like he's a buffoon.
He puts the lie to the whole thing that the presidency is this imperial regency or something.
It's this...
It's, you know, the fact that he may well be elected a second time, I mean, it just, that's the rejection of Trump from, you know, like, the never-Trump Republicans.
It's like, he's just, he's too rude.
He's, you know, he's the fart in the punch bowl, you know?
Like, you know, that's And Nixon was that as well.
It's just that I think we believed in, as you say, the propaganda of Nixon himself and of the media.
The media, like Woodward and Bernstein and the Washington Post and all this, they have to make Nixon into this towering figure in order to show how nice it was, how great they were to have taken him down, right?
And then ultimately, Watergate is...
Yeah.
Watergate is on the top 100 list of crimes that, you know, that Richard Nixon committed.
And it's not, like, not anywhere near, like, every president has committed, like, 10 worse atrocities than, like, I spied on my political opponents.
Like, that's just, you know.
I don't know.
I'm not saying everybody does it.
I'm saying that they all commit horrible crimes in the process of either becoming president or being president.
It's just in the nature of the office.
You're right.
The mythologizing is the really distasteful part here.
But yet the film, again, is so flavorless that it just kind of washes over you.
It's just part of that.
Frosty Nixon is not a shining example of that.
It just partakes of that.
It just uses that as part of it.
It's the water it swims in.
And so we're interpreting the presidency through this movie, but really we're interpreting the presidency through movies of this type.
And they sort of all do this.
Yeah, I agree with most of what you said.
I think maybe...
I mean, the office of the presidency has changed a lot, historically, really, up until the 20th century.
It's definitely until the second half of the 20th century.
The presidency was not the incredibly powerful imperial position that it is now, and has been for about, I don't know, getting on for 100 years.
It was...
Obviously, it was a very powerful position, but a presidency for most of the 19th century.
Lincoln is a bit of an exception, obviously, because of the circumstances that he found himself in.
And then 19th century presidents after Lincoln are faced with the vast aftermath of the same situation.
So you have a president like Grant, who's trying to deal with...
The aftermath of the Civil War, Reconstruction and stuff like that.
But leading up to that, and then when things had settled down a bit in the late 19th century and early 20th century, the president is kind of like...
He's the guy who's in charge of staffing all these agencies and ministries and posts and stuff like that.
He's not the...
With the rise in the early to mid-20th century of the American global empire, obviously as a result of the two world wars, it becomes an immensely more powerful position.
And so it develops this extra feeling of mystique about it.
I think that's part of where it comes from.
And it's really a reiteration of a very old...
It's the great man theory of history.
I mean, I think what we see in Frost-Nixon is the idea, like you were talking about, the man of gold, but also the idea that...
Maybe these people are exceptional and huge and world-shaking in their flaws and faults.
Maybe they're there because of that.
Maybe they're not in that powerful position because of their exceptional positive qualities.
They might be there because of their exceptional negative qualities.
But we are still talking about some sort of race of creatures apart.
Or, I suppose, if I'm being as sympathetic to the film as I can be, we at least feel like that, which is why, you know, you can know how egregious a war criminal the guy was, but when he walks up to you, he was still the president, so you can't not call him Mr. President and you can't put your hand out because we still, we just have that feeling about these people.
I suppose that's...
That's my positive attempt.
Yeah, no, no.
I mean, I think we have, like, correctly interpreted what the film, you know, whether it's what it's doing or whether it's, like, what it's intended to do or what it just has done.
You know, it's just, it's all on the screen.
You know, we're allowed to, you know, I don't know what Ron Howard was thinking when he directed that scene, but, I mean, honestly, given Oliver Platt and Sam Rockwell's, like, role in this film, I kind of think it's like a laugh line, you know, because it's like, you know, Oh, withering, withering is kind of the line that Platt gives to Rockwell after that.
And it's like, okay, that's, it's a funny moment.
Like, it's a funny moment, you know, but also it's like, yeah, you have like no principles at all.
Like, you know, or, you know, it's like, yeah, no, it's, it's just, yeah, yeah, no.
I mean, I cannot tell you.
I cannot tell you, like, if Barack Obama, if I were in the room with Barack Obama and he held out his hand, for all the things that Barack Obama has done, I don't know that I could bring myself to not shake his hand, you know?
And whether that says something about the presidency or whether that says Donald Trump, it would be a lot easier to...
I mean, God, you'd probably even do it with Donald Trump.
There's just that politeness thing.
It's just like, well, this person has this kind of, you know...
It's a news story.
Actually, no, man, that would be great.
We could live off this podcast if that happened.
The Fox News would be all over it.
The comedy podcaster refused to shake Trump's hand.
Yeah, let's set that up.
There's a career in that.
Let's do it.
Absolutely, yeah.
Okay, well, I don't really have much more to say.
I think we've done it.
That's a podcast.
I think we've covered it, yeah.
That's the power of investigative, truth-seeking podcasting for you.
Yes, absolutely, absolutely.
Yeah, I don't have anything else.
I mean, there's not really anything else that's, you know, any other performers that I really want to highlight.
I mean, it's just, you know, it just kind of is what it is.
I mean, you know, I don't know.
You've gotten to the end of this.
You kind of know how you feel about it.
I wouldn't say don't watch this movie.
I wouldn't say watch this movie.
I'd say, like, you know, if this...
If this conversation has made you feel one way or the other about the film, then you're probably taking the wrong thing from it.
It's a very middling thing, and I will probably never watch it again.
If your tolerance for Oscar-bait, Hollywood-processed cheese-type stuff is high, and you're curious...
Yeah, sure.
Go and watch it.
There are worse ways to spend a couple of hours, I suppose.
It's like two hours and one minute long with credits, and so you can get through this, and it's a pretty painless process of getting through it.
And you do genuinely have a pretty good Frank Langella-Nixon performance as well.
No, no, absolutely, absolutely.
Okay, well, we got an hour out of it anyway.
Maybe a bit less than that in the edit.
So yeah, I mean, join us for another bonus episode when we manage to get one out, listeners.
But in the meantime, thank you for paying to listen to this one.
And I hope you enjoy the catastrophes that are undoubted, the 14 huge news stories that have undoubtedly happened while we've been recording this.
Yes, yes, absolutely.
All right, good night.
There you go.
Nixon was, one, timing the end of the war to his reelection.
He realized that if he left Vietnam in 69, 70, or 71, it would collapse in 71 and 72, and that he would not win a second term as president.
And so one of the reasons he kept the war going was to postpone that collapse.
At the same time, and this was something he certainly had to keep secret from everybody in the United States because most people did not consider Richard Nixon's reelection to be worth the sacrifice of American soldiers' lives or the sacrifice of anyone else's lives.
