I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States
— Oath of Office
America prides itself on its sense of honesty, it’s ritualized on our televisions and radios. You have the oath-takers putting one hand on a Bible and the other up in the air: a president being sworn into office, a witness being sworn into court. You have the confessors in the interrogation room, the confessional. It’s patriotic, watching these acts feels somehow connected with our being as if it’s our duty to so, and understand how it works; it’s self-gratifying, we’re upholding the rituals. It’s the American way.
That’s why America never forgave a villain like Richard Nixon; he tainted our rituals. Every family grows up watching a president get sworn in; America was there to swear Nixon into presidential office, and we were there to swear against him in US v Nixon. You break an oath, you confess, you do so so not only you can move on, but everyone else watching and listening in. But where was his confession? Watching him made everything personal; it’s as if we allowed him to betray his position as president. If he confessed, our sins would be absolved. But he never did.
Robert Altman’s Secret Honor brings Nixon back, committing him to the ritual of the confessional. Before—and after— Watergate, film generally avoids to focus on Nixon himself, and the rituals he betrayed. Instead, to make America honest again, Watergate became an important subject in film, particularly focusing on the integrity of the institutions we still have in place: the power of the press (All the President’s Men, Frost v Nixon and The Post). To salvage the image of democracy as a system that still fights corruption, not only gives into it (you know, checks and balances). Instead, Altman attacks the system itself.
Seeking forgiveness is a rather sympathetic view to put the disgraced former president. Based on the one-man play by Donald Freed and Arnold Stone, Secret Honor depicts a fictional Richard Nixon years removed from his pardon (and played by the great Philip Baker Hall) as he rants and raves in his purgatorial drawing room, preparing for a non-existent court hearing with nothing, but a tape recorder, a .357 magnum revolver and a bottle of Chivas Regal scotch. It’s two hours of Nixon fighting himself. Pauline Kael described the film as a split between “confession and self-exoneration.” But by clinging onto confession like a birthright, Altman deconstructs the myth of Nixon, a figure often found too intimidating to approach, and humanizes him as a witness against the systems in place that corrupts even the most seemingly untouchable.
But Altman by no means makes it easy for the viewer. It’s difficult to follow Nixon as he suffers from extreme paranoia, and rambles discontinuously, very much preoccupied by himself. Altman wants the act of following itself to be difficult—the claustrophobic use of space forces us to confront Nixon like a glimpsing into a cell on Death Row—Nixon left to rot for his crimes and we, to observe and hear his confession. The camera’s intense fatalism toward Nixon forces us to feel for him; with all the sweat, and nausea, Altman cooks the man alive, but through the trial by fire is a sweaty truth. We find a new side of Nixon and it’s not what Nixon confesses—Nixon at one point claims Deep Throat was an invention of his own making and the pardon was part of a plan to help cover up a larger scheme at hand. Yeah, right, that’s the madness talking. But rather how Nixon confesses, or his actions—his panic toward a portrait of Henry Kissinger (a former ally he believes betrayed him) and his frantic search for his mother’s Bible to swear on. He’s lost. Nixon wants to see himself as honest again. But he can’t find honesty: he returns to the rituals (to swearing on the Bible), but the system is corrupt. The system taught him honesty is all a performance. It’s a series of rituals that allow him (and everyone who sees him) to believe he’s a honest man even if he privately lives and acts out dishonestly. The system, as he would go on to elaborate, breeds his ignorance—what they don’t know won’t hurt them becomes his argument. But now everyone knows his dishonesty. So he goes back to the act, but it doesn’t work as it once did. He’s simply left with all of his mindless urges, wallowing in his fraudulence and guilt.
Altman does not victimize Nixon. Nixon’s more unsavory characteristics, his antagonism, his narcissism, his bigotry, are still bursting through. But he is a loser now. And no one plays a loser—a man exposed for his weakness—with more vulnerability than Philip Baker Hall. His most frequent collaborator, Paul Thomas Anderson was a fan of this film and Hall’s performance and went on to use the same disarming shame the actor is able to drain out of his body for his later performances for the director. Is there a more pathetic, gut-wrenching scene as Jimmy Gator arguing with his wife at the end of Magnolia? It could be a silent film—I just see him sitting there and know, what a fuck up. Or how Hall could quickly go from cool, collected mentor to a desperate weasel in a flip of a switch in Hard Eight? Each character needs absolution from their sins, but helplessly remains in purgatory. Anderson knew Hall could achieve this because Secret Honor leaves the foundation—he develops on the demons he wrestled with the character of Nixon. He may not look like Nixon, but he does look like the worst version of him.
It’s all in Hall's face—not particularly an ugly face, but a face of distinct features: how his big nose overwhelms the center and his deep-set eyes sit on his pudgy eye-bags—from the top with his expressive forehead wrinkles, alternating between a scowl and high enlightenment with ease, to the bottom with his junkyard dog jowls, he’s got theme park of facial features you’d more often see in cartoon characters (he would be a great live-action Elmer Fudd). But for a one-man film, you need a face as entertaining as Hall’s. His face is a portal to Nixon’s salvation.
Nixon’s confession goes beyond the words, it’s physical—penetrating through his face and body, a body known for its posture and physicality as an auditor, there’s now a weak soul stretched thin. His body, as Hall reaches out above his head, does not reach as far as it once did. He’s weaker: the former Nixon fervor and expletive-filled banter seems more like a health risk now, and his voice sounds damaged from all the whiskey he guzzles down. He’s the Ghost of President’s Past. Regret soaks in his body, fermenting, stinking out of him like a corpse. It’s pitiful. But what brings him closer to us, also pushes him away; Altman tests our will to forgive the nasty old-man. Secret Honor never doubts why no one is there to listen to Nixon, but it’s always asking why you are. It brings a new, colder meaning to social distancing.
The people are revolted by Nixon—no one would touch him with a six-foot stick. His closest friend is his tape recorder, and he talks to the portraits of presidents and former friends and family members on his walls. He proves why as his spiteful rants would upset (or just plain annoy) the best of them. Which leads him to form relationships with inanimate objects like his microphone, one beyond just speaking to it: in a series of separate enactments, Nixon uses the microphone as a phone, a blunt instrument, a hostage, and a gun. Beyond the sheer lunacy of it, it’s strangely intimate and shows a sympathy toward his most staunchest of enemies, literally represented by his new affiliation toward tape recordings, but also through the figurative implications when he uses the microphone in different ways. When he holds the mic hostage by aiming his gun at it, he talks how “yellow” journalist ruined his career. But goes on to use the microphone as his own smoking gun, eventually declaring, “I’m a tramp.” Through the series of seemingly arbitrary signals, he communicates his unspeakable frustration in honesty—it harkens back to the earlier scene where he struggles to understand how the tape recorder works. He recognizes honesty, but it’s a different language. The degradation toward himself suggests he believes he deserved to be caught, but brings attention to the strain of trying to communicate his confession.
“You know what they wrote about me? They said at the end… that I was running around the White House… crazy drunk, talking to the pictures on the walls. Yes, I was. I was lonely. I needed somebody to talk to besides a machine.”
The self-reflectivity of the character continuing to drink and talk to pictures on the wall emphasizes the loneliness of the film and the futility of his rantings. The question of whether the confession can absolve him from the crime remains. But the answer does not matter because Nixon would not allow the punishment to end. He wrestles with himself by explaining how he was made—evidently, he is not the man that would give up and seek salvation. He’s too much of a competitor to accept he’s truly a loser, that’s the football player in him. So as his own worst enemy, he seeks forgiveness for himself by himself, and will probably repeat it over and over again (it is shocking how easy it is to rewatch this film).
It does not matter how much he confesses. Most of his “tip of the iceberg” theory elaborates on how he actually saved the American people and that he made an incredible sacrifice. It sounds and plays like a delusion someone who uses fake news would slander our ears with—it’s an eye-roller. But the circumlocution, through the disjointed anecdotes he shares, help breakdown why his delusions plague him. It’s systemic.
Altman isn’t a stranger to deconstructing. Most of his films deconstruct genre and/or character tropes. It’s a trademark, if you will. In Secret Honor, Altman uses his usual attention to the taking apart, but nothing feels more realized than his deconstruction of Nixon’s white privilege, or his bigotry. Understanding Nixon’s stubbornness becomes the key to understanding his confession as a whole. As a person of color myself, it’s impossible to watch this film and not think of the tapes I listened to to familiarize myself with the “real” Nixon and his casual racism. When he speaks to the tape recordings, other than the ominous “Your Honor,” Nixon directs his responses toward Roberto, his Cuban-American assistant. He’s in charge of editing the tapes, delete everything from…Roberto. In other words, Roberto is perhaps the most important person to Nixon because he is entrusted with saving Nixon from himself: he is responsible for the information Nixon wants to give out, for Nixon’s moral image, and maintaining his integrity,.
Roberto represents Nixon’s humanity: Nixon knows how much he needs him—after telling Roberto to delete one of his crazy rants, he stops for a moment and emphasizes to the microphone, “And…thank you, Roberto.” It’s a flicker of a better, more sound man, a soft moment of clarity Hall does so well. Roberto’s presence represents an ally still on his side, watching over him. Nixon starts with an understanding of Roberto’s presence, even humbly offers his help to a sick wife of Roberto’s friend, as an anonymous favor. But gradually he forgets to appeal to Roberto, further representing his slow descent into his own alienating darkness.
“The press and the liberals, they're yellow! Oh, yes, they hated me...because they were scared too - shitless! Because I was their mess boy! And you know something, Roberto? You are mine! And you watch out, señor...because your turn is coming.”
Nixon demeans Roberto, but in the same breath, his advice hints toward sympathy. It both threatens Roberto’s existence as someone who would stick around and reinforces it. The blur represents the paradox of Nixon’s confession as a whole: the words he uses to seek forgiveness are unforgivable. Nixon is wired the wrong way. White privilege is part of his corruption—no wonder, the Nixon pardon is one of the most damning examples of white privilege in US history. Nixon shows an inkling of an understanding to his inability to accept responsibility, but he cannot get himself to act on it. It’s why he flails around and talks with so much physicality—he’s trying to expel it out of his body because he doesn’t know what to say to get it out. It’s why both the aforementioned anecdote toward Roberto and Nixon’s own final monologue ends with the simple phrase: “Fuck em!” If you can’t convince them to support you, push them aside. His abrasiveness leaves him without witnesses, and without a crowd, he cannot actualize himself and his efforts; the people empower him.
Beyond his bigotry looms the greatest corrupter of his spirit—and the spirit of the entire nation—ambition, or chasing after the American Dream. The closest thing Nixon has to a divine witness for his confession (other than us) is the presence of his deceased mother. As a “gentle Quaker” when she lived, she provided a moral compass during his boyhood. Her sense of goodness is kept alive by the portrait on the wall, her piano he plays on and the Bible he holds photos and little keepsakes in. In the Bible, he also has an old letter stashed away, a young Richard Nixon wrote to his mother and in which, he describes himself as “you’re good dog, Richie.” The letter, a memory of being trampled on and beaten, is his defining experience evidently. Is Nixon his own man or is he a dog? In other words, can Nixon be an individual or is he an obedient follower ultimately destined to be walked all over? The answer comes in an awe-inspiring feat of acting: Philip Baker Hall gets on his knees and begs mother for forgiveness—but in the process regresses to a dog-like state where he starts to bark at his mother. His defeatism returns so his body and consciousness finds refuge in a time of innocence where he followed his mother and obeyed her and everything was alright because she represented a good, upstanding system. She laid a path to righteousness, but he chose a different path, and started following a more corrupt system, American politics. He started obeying the wrong men. It does not matter that he now wants to be his own man, to absolve himself from his transgressions. It’s too late. No one cares anymore. America expects a confession, but refuses to give him a chance to enact on his redemption; the media crucified him so he’s stowed away to work out the possibilities. There are none.
Nixon made his bed and now he lays in it. He remains a “crook” to America. He’s a mask bank robbers use: “I am not a crook” and runs away with thousands of dollars. It’s classic without even knowing the context. But it’s images like these, the ones that reinforce the myth of Nixon and his villainy, that Altman wants to take apart and look at piece by piece—what’s behind the mask of the crook? America conditions nationalism into us, but it’s not the enemy. It is, however, something to watch out for, and question. That’s democracy, isn’t it? To question the system? Secret Honor does not use confession to broach for Nixon’s forgiveness, rather seeing a man corrupted by the system like a terminal sickness, we learn forgiveness isn’t necessarily something asked for, but given. So next time you see a dog, forgive them for me, it just might be Nixon in those puppy-eyes staring back at you.
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