Film review:
American dreams and nightmares
THE ASSASSINATION OF RICHARD NIXON
DIRECTED BY NIELS MUELLER
STARRING SEAN PENN WITH DON CHEADLE, JACK THOMPSON AND NAOMI WATTS
Reviewed by Neil Braganza and Karen Ruddy
Marx and Engels once wrote capitalism produces its own gravediggers. What they meant is capitalism creates the working class, whose poverty and experiences of dehumanization leads them to organize collectively to overthrow the very system that begets their destitution. The Assassination of Richard Nixon offers us the grim lesson that capitalism not only produces its own gravediggers: it also produces its own psychopaths, people who rebel against it not by joining a class struggle to transform society, but by killing themselves and innocent working people.
The Assassination of Richard Nixon (2004) is set against the backdrop of the Watergate scandal and is based on the true story of Samuel Bicke’s (his real surname is Bycke) failed attempt in 1974 to hijack a passenger airplane and crash it into the White House. Most of the film focuses on Bicke’s life the year preceding his assassination attempt, and explores how an ordinary man could be driven to commit mass murder.
AMERICAN NIGHTMARE
Bicke’s story is all too ordinary. He is a white working man who desperately wants to live the American dream: to open his own small business with his best friend, a black mechanic; to fulfill his role as family breadwinner and thereby reunite with his kids and ex-wife; and to drive a Cadillac, the classic symbol of the American dream. Yet, he is turned down for the loan he needs to start his business; his ex-wife has lost interest in him and is instead dating a man who really does own a Cadillac. And, last but not least, he is stuck in a job he hates.
The film portrays the tragic life of a man who knows he has failed to live up to his own standard of manhood, but who must nevertheless sell himself as a successful man. Bicke works at a family-owned office furniture store that only hires married men. To keep his job and win the recognition of his boss, he must pretend he’s married. And, to win back his wife, he must demonstrate to her that he’s a successful salesman. Trapped in this vicious circle, Bicke is forced to live a life of lies and deceit that he finds morally reprehensible.
As a salesman Bicke must exude a confidence and assertiveness he lacks. His workplace, like countless others under capitalism, is structured to produce feelings of insecurity and alienation. Bicke’s boss tries to teach him how to be a successful salesman, but does so by playing on Bicke’s insecurities. Not only must Bicke compete with co-workers for recognition, his boss also intimidates him into lying to and manipulating others. The greater the boss’s efforts, the more Bicke loses confidence, and the poorer a salesman he becomes. Bicke ends up despising his boss, his job and himself. He realizes that to be successful he must degrade himself and his customers by deceiving them, and subordinate himself to his boss and the rules of his workplace. His success could only come at the price of his emasculation.
Bicke’s hatred for his boss and job gets attached to the image of Richard Nixon, who his boss identifies as the “greatest salesman of all.” While the Watergate scandal isn’t explicitly depicted in the film, almost every scene contains a television that is tuned into the inquiry. Audiences and characters are constantly subjected to Nixon’s endless speeches in which he blames the social and economic crisis of the early 1970s on the failure of individuals to believe strongly enough in the American dream. Throughout the film, Nixon’s voice eerily blends with the voice on the self-help tape Bicke’s boss gives him to improve his sales technique. The two messages are identical: anyone can become successful simply by believing in the reality one wishes existed. In other words, the American dream can be yours if you want it badly enough.
Bicke’s inability to piece together a respectable life for himself and his family gives the lie to the American dream, showing it to be the illusion that many working women and people of colour always knew it to be. While it may have been realizable for the white men of an earlier generation, who reaped many of the benefits of what is now commonly referred to as the post-WWII “boom,” after the recession and oil shocks of 1973, that economic security began to disappear. Bicke is part of that group of white American men who in the 1970s saw the American dream-and its promise of prosperity and happiness for anyone who is honest and hard-working-crumble before their very eyes.
The film captures the ambivalence of Bicke’s situation.
On the one hand, as a white man, he enjoys the privileges of post-war capitalism, and still believes deeply in the American dream. He continues to think he can escape insecurity and exploitation without escaping capitalism. For instance, when Bicke applies for a loan, he tries to sell the loans officer a vision of a new way to do business in America. Rather than manipulate his customers, he pledges, he will be upfront with them about how much profit he is making from his sales. But, as the loans officer cynically points out, being honest about how much profit you’re making doesn’t change the fact that you’re making a profit. This scene reveals the absurdity of seeing capitalism as simply a moral problem that could be solved if business owners were only more honest with their workers and customers.
On the other hand, Bicke’s hatred for a society that continuously degrades people and feeds on their insecurity by offering them an unrealizable dream, and his own sense of alienation and disenchantment at work, leads him to identify with the oppressive experiences of women and people of colour. Bicke desperately searches for ways to organize with others to address systemic exploitation and oppression. Yet, his lack of knowledge of the history of struggles against racism and sexism leads him to be patronizing towards those he wishes to convert to his cause. In one scene, he tries to convince the Black Panthers to change their name to the “Zebras” so their movement can better reflect what he sees as the common struggles of whites and blacks. In his personal life, Bicke’s ex-wife and his best friend resent being told that they are being duped by an oppressive system when they have to put up with sexism and racism at work everyday in order to make a living.
Bicke is enraged by the dehumanization he sees around him, and this rage could have served as a basis for his politicization. But in the absence of any mass radical movement that could provide him with a sense of collective struggle and an outlet for his frustration and despair, he ends up turning his anger inward until he can no longer psychically cope with the reality that he will never live the American dream.
In the final month of his life, Bicke is alone and depressed. He decides that the only way to right the wrongs of his situation is to assassinate Nixon. He feels some remorse that his assassination attempt will involve taking the lives of innocent people, but he convinces himself that he will be redeeming all of humankind. On the tape he sends to his favorite composer, Leonard Bernstein, which outlines his plans, Bicke describes himself as a grain of sand lost on a huge beach-a grain that will shed its anonymity by rising up and changing the world. Indeed, by killing Nixon, Bicke believes he could finally realize the dream that it is possible for individuals to transform their situations by virtue of their sheer willpower. He will push this impossible dream to its logical conclusion by becoming the one individual to rise above all others in the name of ending manipulation and corruption.
In the end, Bicke’s assassination attempt fails miserably. After he kills one pilot, shoots a number of passengers, and holds one airline worker hostage, he takes his own life. It would be easy to feel sorry for Bicke, since his plight as a working man is so similar to that of many people under capitalism. It would also be easy to romanticize him as a hero who, despite his failures, wants to destroy one of the key symbols of American capitalism: the White House. But the fact that Bicke understood his actions to be those of the individual hero so celebrated by Nixon’s American dream should give us pause.
Neil Braganza and Karen Ruddy are members of CUPE 3903 at York University. Neil is also a member of the New Socialist Group. This review is the product of a post-film discussion between the authors and Clarice Kuhling and Alex Levant.