TMA 691 Online Response #4: Son of Rambow and Media Effects

One could view Son of Rambow simply as a film about the positive expressive power of film: young Will Proudfoot, already an artist with his biblical sketchbook, finally discovers the medium through which he can truly exorcise his demons.  Along the way, he overcomes a domineering mother, first through disobedience and then by winning her over to his side when she cuts ties with a puritanical sect known as “The Brethren.”  Acceptance of what was once thought to be corruptive is arguably a theme of Son of Rambow, but the inclusion of another character, Didier, makes the film’s presentation of media effects more complex.  Film functions differently for Will than it does for Didier and thus reflects a prediction made by Charters: “If it is established that children are moved by pictures toward dislike for one social value and toward liking for another, and if it is shown that both facts and errors are learned and remembered, it is apparent that motion pictures have fundamental influences which may be exerted in any direction” (6).  Son of Rambow presents two case studies, one in which a character is effected by media, while the other is merely affected.

First Blood effects Will tremendously; visiting Lee Carter’s home for the first time, he views it voyeuristically from a canoe, while Lee records bootleg copies for his brother.  This experience is Will’s first with multimedia—he is not even allowed to watch educational documentaries about fire or the wheel when he is at school—and it proves to be the missing ingredient for the narrative he is constructing to reconcile the loss of his father.  After watching First Blood, Will becomes “the Son of Rambo,” a role of empowerment.  Though he begins to wear a headband and other accouterments from time to time, his adoption of the role is more psychological than outward.  His first declaration, after all, happens in a dream during an exchange with a villainous scarecrow:

“Who are you?”  the Scarecrow asks.

“I am the Son of Rambo.  What have you done with my dad?”  Will becomes muscle-bound and proceeds to rescue his father as the dream unfolds.  

He publicly announces his role for the first time when filming screen tests with Lee, who is more technician than artist.  Manipulated into performing stunts, Will falls out of a tree while being filmed, and when he gets back on his feet he runs in circles, screaming, but in control.  Lee asks, “Wait, what are you doing?”

Will approaches the camera for an extreme close-up, and with as much malice as he can muster he says, “I am the Son of Rambo.” 

“Hang on.  You want to be the Son of Rambo?”  From that moment onward, the boys’ screen tests become less derivative of Rambo and more like Will’s imaginings from his sketches.  Rather than reenact scenes that have already been filmed, the boys do something much more praiseworthy: they become creators. 

   While film inspires Will to work out his problems through creation, it has a different effect on Didier, who seems to be a superficial result of media.  Part Michael Jackson, part Robert Smith, and part Patrick Swayze (albeit self-proclaimed), Didier arrives with much fanfare at Will and Lee’s prep school with a group of other French exchange students.  His power as opinion leader is evident as he quickly gathers an entourage that follows him through the school grounds, adoring his every move.  He and Will cross paths eventually, at which point Didier discloses his greatest wish: “Well, to be star of movie is my dream, my friend.”

Will obliges Didier, partly out of necessity; Lee has been suspended and, therefore, unavailable to film for a time.  As soon as Didier enters the picture, though, the film starts to lose its integrity.  It becomes all Didier, all the time.  The focus of their film shifts from the protagonist, the Son of Rambo, to Didier, also known as Wolf.  Around the school Will begins to enter the spotlight, though not because others know his name; instead he is “that little boy making a film with Didier.”  To the chagrin of Lee, other kids become involved in the film for the same reason as Didier: to be seen.

Didier and crew, reminiscent of a shot from "Beat It" (below).

Jealousy aside, Lee takes issue with Didier and others’ inclusion in the film because they are ruining something that was once more pure.  Though the film was not without its own obvious influences, Didier gives the boys’ Son of Rambow an MTV-like infusion, in effect mainstreaming it.  From a study group standpoint, he gives the boys’ movie the sex appeal it was lacking and completes “the process of apparent convergence of outlooks” (Gerbner 181).  The problem with Didier, though, is he seems to have been created by a study group, as if he were the result of a survey, circa 1985, asking teens what they most like and dislike about the pop stars of that era.  He is “the theoretical elaboration and empirical verification of television’s cultivation of common perspectives” (183).  He meets the coolness criteria for teenage boys, while also being attractive enough for girls; his supposed brooding and dangerous nature appeals to both groups.  However, he is also boring and bored, as he tells his followers.  Didier functions as a critique of the in-crowd, in all of its contradictions.  As an opinion leader, he funnels current trends to his entourage, but he emphasizes style over substance.  His inability to appropriate these styles in an original way makes him a rehash, a retread, which does not go unnoticed by his fellow French exchange students, who are not blinded by his exoticness like the British are (who, by the way, gradually become more like him as the story progresses).  Will, on the other hand, fashions First Blood into something all his own.  Intellectual property reasons notwithstanding, he and Lee create Son of Rambow, different on the surface--its title--and in content than its inspiration, a claim that Didier cannot make. 

TMA 691 Online Response #3: The Maltese Falcon & Wood's Ideal Figures

“Look at me, Sam.  You worry me.  You always think you know what you’re doing, but you’re too slick for your own good.  Some day you’re going to find it out,” Effie Perine tells Sam Spade, early in The Maltese Falcon.  Her prediction does not come true, at least in the case of the Maltese falcon.  Sam is always in control, always as slick as he thinks he is, as he becomes involved with a cast of unsavory characters only to deliver them to the police.  The preservation of justice in The Maltese Falcon gives the impression of a more hopeful conclusion than later film noir; “it’s subversive elements are, in the end, successfully contained,” it seems.  After all, the hero makes it through mostly unscathed (aside from being “slipped a mickey”), the villains are detained, and Archer’s death is avenged.  However, a closer look at Sam’s interactions with the female characters (and their placement on Wood’s ideal figures spectrum) reveals the subversive means by which justice prevails.

From American capitalist ideology, or “the values and assumptions so insistently embodied in and reinforced by the classical Hollywood cinema,” emerged two ideal figures: “The Ideal Male: the virile adventurer, potent, untrammelled man of action,” and “The Ideal Female: wife and mother, perfect companion, endlessly dependable, mainstay of hearth and home.”  Due to their incompatibility, we also see their shadows, “the settled husband/father” and “the erotic woman.”  The Maltese Falcon has three female characters, each of which occupy a different archetypal role.  Early in the film, Sam Spade interacts with each in succession, starting with Iva Archer, just widowed wife of his murdered partner. 

Waiting inside Sam’s office, Iva is playing the part of the grieving widow, black dress and all, except her veil is pulled up from her face.  As soon as Sam closes his door they kiss, more passionately than one would expect from a man and his business partner’s wife.  “Sam, did you kill him?” she asks, believing she was the motive, the prize, for Archer’s death.  “Well, I thought you said if it wasn’t for Miles, you’d…?”  Feeling foolish, she begs, “Be kind to me, Sam.”  Sam points out the ridiculous contradiction in her interrogation and plea by repeating them back to her: “You killed my husband, Sam.  Be kind to me!”  When she asks him to come to her, he humors her: “Soon as I can.”  She pulls the veil over her face, a mourner once again, despite the shadowed letters from the window giving away whom she is really thinking about: SPADE is on the wall in giant font, completely dwarfing the much smaller ARCHER. 

Iva Archer is The Maltese Falcon’s ideal female, albeit a failure of an ideal female.  The only wife in the film, she is hardly a perfect companion, dependable, or the mainstay of home.  Her affair with Sam goes in the face of the civilized values she is supposed to embody.  Not surprisingly, Sam, the ideal man, can hardly stand to be around her.  Their “staggering incompatibility” apparent, Sam never offers her a seat, nor does he give her enough time to sit down before shooing her away. 

The ideal female’s shadow, the erotic woman, is filled stylistically and narratively by Brigid O’Shaughnessy.  Miss O’Shaughnessy has already given Sam two different aliases before revealing her real name to him after letting him enter her hotel room, an act in itself unbecoming of an ideal female.  She is also in a state of undress in her pajamas; what they look like might be more important than what they are, though.  The pajamas, along with the furniture, are vertically striped, in contrast to the oblique shadows coming through the venetian blinds.  The incongruity of lines parallels Brigid’s stories, which change multiple times.  Her voice becomes increasingly desperate, and she pleads with Sam: “You’ve got to trust me, Mr. Spade.”  The camera cuts to an unmoved Sam, sans clashing shadows: “You won’t need much of anybody’s help.  You’re good.  It’s chiefly your eyes, and that throb you got in your voice when you say things like, ‘Be generous, Mr. Spade.’”  Though not immune to all of Brigid’s charms, Sam never loses control in their relationship; she remains a means to an end in solving the case, as if he knows she is a femme fatale whom he must get close to in order to get all the answers.

Effie Perine does not fit as neatly into ideal female or its shadow as the other women.  She cannot be the ideal female because she works and she is unmarried.  Neither is she an erotic woman because her interaction with the protagonist is, on the surface, benign.  In some ways she occupies a motherly role, ever ready to offer helpful advice.  In a scene sandwiched by Sam’s aforementioned visits with Iva and Brigid, Effie walks into Sam’s office, and we see the true nature of their relationship.  Sam slumps in his chair as Effie sits on his desk, the only instance in which Sam allows a woman to be above him.  They talk nonchalantly about an otherwise serious topic: the belief that Sam played a part in Archer’s death. 

“Well, how did you and the widow make out?” she asks, upon entering the room.

“She thinks I shot Miles.”

“So you could marry her?”

“The cops think I killed Thursby…the guy Miles was tailing for that Wonderly dame.  Who do you think I shot?”

“Are you going to marry Iva?”

“Don’t be silly.  I wish I’d never laid eyes on her.”

“Do you suppose she could have killed him?”

“You’re an angel.  A nice, rattle-brained angel.”

Sam is more casual with Effie than any other character, let alone female.  This casualness is punctuated when Effie makes and lights a cigarette for him, an act teeming with symbolism in a film made under the Hays Code.  Sam and Effie have a relationship outside the values seemingly extolled by classic Hollywood cinema.  Theirs is not a relationship of “legalized heterosexual monogamy;” that is what Archer had, and now he is dead.  Nor is theirs like the illicit union of Walter Neff and Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity, a pairing bound to end in disaster (though had Sam been more passionately involved with Brigid, it could have been).  The Maltese Falcon shows an awareness of the “hopeless contradictions and unresolvable tensions” of the ideal male/female pairing.  The ideal, virile male—the only character strong enough to enact justice—cannot be domesticated, lest he meet death or become, in a sense, neutered, like Detectives Polhaus and Dundy, who must abide by the law, a type of ideological values.  Neither can he allow a dangerous woman to control him, thereby bringing on himself predictable ruin.  Sam Spade triumphs by going a route that cannot be categorized (as represented by his relationship with Effie), which is truly subversive.   

TMA 691 Online Response #2: How Green Was My Valley & Wollen

The opening and closing scenes of How Green Was My Valley, while not as visually symmetrical as those of The Searchers, present a similar dichotomy of arrival and departure, except in reverse order.  The film begins with a waist-level shot of Huw Brown, now fifty years old, packing his belongings in a shawl as he prepares to leave his valley and never return.  “I am leaving behind me my fifty years of memory,” he muses.  “Memory.  Strange that the mind will forget so much of what only this moment has passed and yet hold clear and bright the memory of what happened years ago, of men and women long since dead.”  The topic of memory returns in the closing scene after the death of Huw’s father: “Men like my father cannot die.  They are with me still, real in memory as they were in flesh, loving and beloved forever.  How green was my valley then.”  A memory montage follows Huw’s narration.  In order, the entire family sits at the dinner table; a young Huw meets and greets his sister-in-law Bronwyn as she goes to the market; his sister Angharad opens a gate leading out to the meadows to see Huw and Mr. Gruffydd walking towards her; Huw and his father walk together up a hill, spanning left to right on the screen, while in the next shot his older brothers enter right and continue left, signaling an inevitable convergence. 

In contrast to the final shot in The Searchers of Ethan Edwards, “[leaving] the house again to return to the desert, to vagrancy” (573), the Morgan clan returns home.  The horizon, visible in both endings, serves different purposes: In The Searchers it completely envelopes Ethan, who becomes smaller and smaller as he walks away from the camera and into the desert’s vast expanse; in How Green Was My Valley the characters divert attention away from the horizon by coming towards the camera.  

The endings of both films emphasize “the master antinomy in Ford’s films…between wilderness and garden” (573).  Wollen explains differences in antinomic presentation thusly: “As we have seen, in the case of Ford, some antinomies are completely reversed.  Instead, there will be a kind of torsion within the permutation group, within the matrix, a kind of exploration of certain possibilities, in which some antinomies are foregrounded, discarded, or even inverted, whereas others remain stable and constant” (575).  The antinomy of wilderness and garden, contorted by the reversal of arrival and departure in The Searchers and How Green Was My Valley, has the same implication in both films: the wilderness is the garden. 

Wilderness is Garden most certainly means something different to the Morgan family than it does to Ethan Edwards.  After all, they are settlers, or at least established in their village; one could even make the case they are natives, this film's version of the Comanche (the Morgan's occupation of this role depends on the civilized/uncivilized antinomy between mine workers and mine owner, townspeople and clergy transplant Mr. Gruffyd; the obvious torsion here is the Morgan's attachment to their land versus the Comanche's transient relationship to land as hunters/gatherers).  Cwn Rhondda is the only place Huw knows before beginning school; it is his home until he leaves at age fifty.  As an adult he associates his childhood in the valley with purity: “So I can close my eyes on my valley as it is today, and it is gone, and I see it as it was when I was a boy.  Green it was and possessed of the plenty of the earth.”  The earlier the memory, the better, for he associates the infiltration of industry with corruption: “In those days, the black slag, the waste of the coal pits, had only begun to cover the side of our hill, not yet enough to mar the countryside nor blacken the beauty of our village, for the colliery had only begun to poke its skinny black fingers through the green.” 

Oppressive and ever looming, the colliery remains the sole means of subsistence for the majority of the valley’s residents.  Trouble begins when a notice is posted announcing a reduction in wages.  Too many men are willing to work for less, which leads to talk of creating a union.  Crucial to this plan is Mr. Gruffydd, the new preacher.  Like Ethan Edwards, Mr. Gruffydd plays the role of the nomad; he is an outsider from the University of Cardiff, come to “conquer the world with truth,” more plough-share than sabre.  In helping the miners unionize, he hopes for them to stay, not to become nomads in a different sense by going to America. 

His entrance also reveals a forbidden love.  In The Searchers, the barrier between Ethan and the woman he loves, or at least used to love, is his brother; in How Green Was My Valley, the barrier between Mr. Gruffydd and Angharad Morgan is his status as clergyman.  In the wilderness/garden overlap, or torsion, Mr. Gruffydd, like the colliery owner Mr. Evans, brings civilization to the people of the valley.  The difference between the two is their method: Mr. Gruffydd hopes to civilize via the Word, Mr. Evans via industrialization.  Mr. Gruffydd's method proves unsuccessful when rumors of a scandalous relationship between Angharad and him surface.   The accusers call a deacons’ meeting to determine a fit punishment for the female party involved.  No one has accused Gruffydd of wrongdoing, which is proof to him that Christ’s teaching have become corrupted, perverted.  He announces his departure: “This is the last time I will talk in this chapel…I am leaving with regret.”  His regret is not an admission of indiscretions but of a sorrow that his stewardship over the people of Cwn Rhondda did not have its intended effect.  Mr. Evans also has a corrupting influence on the people and the village, although one could argue that his intentions were never as altruistic as those of Mr. Gruffydd.  His unstated contribution to the village--providing employment on a large scale--only serves to dispossess Huw's brothers and accelerate their exodus to America.      

Mr. Gruffydd’s presumed exit is never confirmed; as he is readying himself to leave, the emergency horns at the colliery begin to blare, distracting him from his plans.  Whether he stays or goes is not as important as the fate of Huw and the rest of the Morgan family, though, considering How Green Was My Valley opens with Huw and ends with Huw.  The “My” of the title belongs to Huw, who, though just a boy, is the protagonist in a story full of adults.  The placement of nomad onto a supporting character is just another torsion of John Ford, always mindful of “the theme of the quest for the Promised Land, an American re-enactment of the biblical exodus, the journey through the desert to the land of milk and honey, the New Jerusalem” (574).  For Ethan Edwards, never able to stay put in any one place, the Promised Land is the wilderness.  Conversely, for Huw Morgan and his family the Promised Land is a memory of times lost; it is a garden, a virgin land uncorrupted by industrialization's pollutants.

TMA 691 Online Response #1: Studio 60, Garnham, and some Smythe

The pilot episode of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip begins with the revelation that it is a show about a show.  One of the actors/comedians of the fictional show, also called Studio 60, gives the studio audience an inside view of the set, while the real behind-the-scenes takes place in an office backstage between Jerry, who is in charge of Broadcast Standards and Practices for the National Broadcasting Station, and Studio 60 showrunner, Wes Mendell.  Just minutes before a live airing of Studio 60, Jerry informs Wes that he must cut one of the planned sketches from that night’s episode.  The censoring of sketch 4A, the contents of which are a mystery at this point, sends Wes into a very public tirade.  He interrupts the opening sketch by walking in front of the camera and telling two actors dressed like President Bush and Vice-President Cheney to leave and then invites the television audience to turn the channel, or better yet, “turn off the TV.”  The cameras, however, continue to roll as Wes reveals the source of his frustration: the declining quality of television programming as a result of commercial interests. 

            “This show used to be cutting edge political and social satire, but it’s gotten lobotomized by a candy-ass broadcast network hell-bent on doing nothing that might challenge their audience.”  He continues: “There’s a struggle between art and commerce.  There’s always been a struggle between art and commerce, and now, I’m telling you, art is getting its ass kicked.”  His last condemnation of NBS involves an unflattering comparison: “Pornographers.  It’s not even good pornography.  They’re just this side of snuff films, and friends, that’s what’s next because that’s all that’s left.  And the two things that make them scared gutless of the FCC and every psycho-religious cult that gets positively horny at the very mention of a boycott, this prissy, feckless, off-the-charts, greed-filled whorehouse of a network, this thoroughly unpatriotic, mother”…at which point the cameras cut to the non-diegetic opening credits of Studio 60. 

            Wes’s diatribe reveals the tension between the producers of media, at least in a creative sense, and the distributors.  Studio 60 is one example of NBS’s “free lunch,” which according to Smythe, “must always be subordinated to those of the formal advertisements, because the purpose of mass media is to produce audiences to sell to the advertisers” (38).  Programming takes a backseat to advertising, as evidenced by the reaction among NBS execs dealing with the crisis; their primary concern is which sponsor they have undoubtedly offended.  Perhaps the only NBS employee unfazed by the incident is Jordan McDeere, who has just been named president of the National Broadcasting Station.  Ever opportunistic and blessed with the right connections, she has a contingency plan that will save Studio 60; in fact, she closes a deal that same night to bring back two former Studio 60 employees to run the show—one a writer, the other a director, both of whom became famous after being fired four years earlier. 

            Though they go about it using different methods, both Wes and Jordan both seem interested in upending current imbalances of power.  After all, they both want to run the controversial 4A sketch.  Wes’s “contribution to the general project of overthrowing domination” (Garnham 67) is the more obvious of the two, considering the direct subversiveness of his impromptu television appearance.  He knows what he is doing will bring about his certain dismissal, but in his opinion he is saying what has to be said.  On the other hand, Jordan seems an unusual agent of change as president of NBS; her only apparent superior, Jack Rudolph, tells her so much, implying that the status quo and subsequent retention of sponsors, advertisers, and audience are more important than her constructed story of Matt Albie and Danny Tripp’s return.  She insists the audience will buy her story of bringing back Matt and Danny, two men who “hate [Jack’s] guts,” because NBS is “committed to quality.”  Jack has little reason to doubt Jordan, given her previous accomplishments.  She has made impressive turnarounds everywhere she has been: Atlantic Records, NBC, ABC, etc.  Once Matt and Danny are on board, she gives them permission to do something Wes Mendell could only have dreamed of a week earlier: run sketch 4A, which was actually written by Matt years earlier, titled “Crazy Christians.” 

            When Jordan tells Studio 60’s new showrunners to “open with it next week,” Matt turns to Danny and asks, “What if she’s for real?”  Her sincerity should be called into question, her motives for promoting “Crazy Christians” arguably disingenuous in comparison to Wes’s, whose progressive call to action exposes the reactionary opportunism of Jordan.  While not successful in getting “Crazy Christians” on the air, Wes does successfully make the link between media and political economy, the former subordinate to the latter.  Jordan’s position in a “specific class fraction within the mode of production” (68) gives her power that Wes does not have, such as the ability to show a sketch considered un-airable just a week before, but it also clouds her judgment with regard to media-economy relations.  Like many cultural theorists bent on liberating the masses, Jordan aims to validate the culture, in this case the airing of a biting social satire, rather than attack its economic base.  However, unlike said theorists, her intentions are not liberating but monetary. 

            Studio 60’s pilot ends with the hope that this long-running program, albeit fictional, will regain its relevance from earlier years.  Unfortunately, the fate of the actual Studio 60—its cancellation after one season—dampers much of the positivity one might feel about Jordan McDeere, Matt Albie, and Danny Tripp taking over the fictional show.  The real Studio 60 offers viewers a glimpse of Hollywood’s power structure, including its backroom deals, and while condemnatory of it, the show is still subject to the same powers decried by Wes Mendell.  Studio 60 pushes boundaries in its critique of media’s subservience to money, “but nothing is done about processes of economic development” (70).  Viewed on DVD or a streaming service without commercials, it is easy to imagine the ironic effect of the real commercial break after Wes’s tirade, which must have shown a preview for a program in which “people are having contests to see how much they can be like Donald Trump,” or one in which “people eat worms for money.”  It must have shown an advertisement “courting 12-year-old boys, and not even the smart 12-year-olds.”  That Studio 60 lasted just one season is proof that “no empowerment will mean much unless it is accompanied by a massive shift in control of economic resources” (70).

Online Response #12: Ace in the Hole & Lippman

In order to prolong the story of Leo Minosa, trapped in a Native American dwelling, Chuck Tatum needs Leo’s wife, Lorraine, to play the part of the grieving significant other, a role she has not hitherto inhabited.  “I want you to go to church,” he tells her.  Waving that day’s newspaper, featuring his headline, he says, “Tomorrow this’ll be yesterday’s paper and they’ll wrap a fish in it,” implying public fickleness in regard to human interest stories that lose their steam.  He turns to Herbie, his photographer and traveling companion on this assignment, and gives him a task: “I wanna picture of her with rosary beads.”  The staged nature of the photos, not to mention the story, is constructed to meet certain public expectations, “the picture in their heads,” similar to the story told by M. de Pierrefeu of a photographer’s visit to the war hero Joffre: “The General was in his ‘middle class office, before the worktable without papers, where he sat down to write his signature.  Suddenly it was noticed that there were no maps on the walls.  But since according to popular ideas it is not possible to think of a general without maps, a few were placed in position for the picture, and removed soon afterwards” (13). 

                A veteran reporter, who has met his first real opportunity since landing in Albuquerque, Chuck Tatum knows how to sell a story.  Even before asking Herbie to propagate the image of Lorraine Minosa, soon-to-be-widow, he tutors him on the art of identifying “one good beat.”  One man trapped in a mountain is better than 84, he tells him.  A story about one man offers potential for a human interest story that a story about 84 men does not.  Leo’s dire circumstances only make things better for Tatum, who is not shy about exploiting someone else’s predicament for his own gain: “Bad news sells best because good news is no news” he tells Herbie as they make their way through the mountain for the first time to meet Leo.  Tatum engineers the pseudo-facts and pseudo-environment of the story by dragging it out as long as he can, with unfortunate results, none of which are surprising to the spectator, who becomes an analyst of public opinion simply by viewing Ace in the Hole.

                Lippman states, “The analyst of public opinion must begin then, by recognizing the triangular relationship between the scene of action, the human picture of that scene, and the human response to that picture working itself out upon the scene of action” (16, 17).  Dramatic irony allows the spectator to easily observe this triangular relationship through access to Tatum’s point of view, including his motives.  There is never a question of who is in control—Tatum, at least until the situation escapes his grasp—and because we know who is pulling the strings, we recognize Tatum’s pseudo-environment and his reasons, along with others’, for perpetuating it.  The small town of Escadero is full of opportunistic characters: the unhappy wife, who is making money for the first time in her curios shop at the expense of her entrapped husband, the sheriff, whom Tatum promises, “You play along with me and I’ll get you re-elected, and Herbie, who, in his inexperience and naivete, does just about anything Tatum asks. 

                To a certain extent, the Federber family is also opportunistic.  They stopped in Escadero when the story was just developing; still in Escadero after the story has become national, they want a claim on being the first ones there.  Though obviously a criticism of the sensationalism in news and its implied bending of ethics, Ace in the Hole is also critical of the public, exemplified by the Federber family.  

Unlike Mrs. Minosa and Sheriff Kretzer, they have no monetary or political stake in the story; rather, they are entranced by the picture.  “Emotionally they want to believe it (19),” whether it signifies supernatural manifestations in the Mountain of Seven Vultures, the narrative of the courageous reporter, the determination of the devoted wife, or the indomitable will of the victim, who, thanks to daily reports, is able to update the public on his progress.  Tatum is guilty of prolonging the affair, and he eventually takes the blame for Leo’s death; the public, however, is guilty of creating the spectacle.  The public, after all, arrives in droves to witness the story, which they cannot truly witness because access to Leo is limited to Tatum.  Instead, they literally set up a carnival, thus setting the stage for Tatum’s pronouncement that “the circus is over,” which, sadly, is not an exaggeration.    

                The spectator, possibly guilty of committing the same errors as the Federber family if placed in a similar limited-view position, is given access to “the scene of action, the picture of that scene, and the human response to that picture working itself out upon the scene of action” through a proxy character: Jacob Q. Boot, Tatum’s boss.  Like the spectator, Boot sees everything that is happening but is powerless, unable to effect Tatum’s schemes, which are continually spiraling out of control.  After the story has struck, Tatum finds Boot in his room in Escadero.  

Tatum thinks Boot will be pleased with the increased circulation of the Albuquerque Sun-Bulletin, but instead, Tatum, a representative of “the unseen facts” (31) has other concerns: “You’ve been putting a halo around that sheriff;” “I don’t make deals,” referring to deal of exclusivity reached between Tatum and the sheriff; “I’m not your kind of newspaperman.”  Boot as analyst of public opinion works strictly because of his ethics that fly in the face of his supposed role as newspaperman.  He is not interested in selling papers; this is a man who hangs a crocheted sign inside his office with the words, “Tell the Truth.”  His insider status makes him an expert, the kind Lippman considers necessary to assist the government in making facts intelligible to the public.  That Ace in the Hole allows insider access to the spectator makes it more generous than Lippman: the public, too, can see through the illusion of “facts,” only if allowed to step outside of itself.