Hacker Cinema
Best of Enemies
2015 · Film · documentary · 87 min
Directed by Morgan Neville, Robert Gordon
A documentary about the legendary series of nationally televised debates in 1968 between two great public intellectuals, the liberal Gore Vidal and the conservative William F. Buckley Jr. Intended as commentary on the issues of their day, these vitriolic and explosive encounters came to define the modern era of public discourse in the media, marking the big bang moment of our contemporary media landscape when spectacle trumped content and argument replaced substance. Best of Enemies delves into the entangled biographies of these two great thinkers, and luxuriates in the language and the theater of their debates, begging the question, "What has television done to the way we discuss politics in our democracy today?"
2 positive1 negativefrom 3 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
3 comments on Hacker News
> Civility and decorum ... taught in our schools today
"Education" means "leading", think "as if hand in hand, in time": it is a matter (in this case) of transmission through /example/ - not of passing information. Then, you can bring awareness to it: and awareness raising passes through showing that one way is higher and the other is low.
You must live that example.
The rarer the example, the greater the evidence of a social crisis. Some noticed, the crisis in higher culture is surely a damage, but it is that in the common culture of pyramidal society (the brother, the teacher etc.) that is mining the texture.
> maybe... we could still have debates like this
Some people are getting warier, as if in the terms legendarily attributed to Mark Twain: "Don’t argue with a fool, or the listener will say there is a pair of you". To debate, you need adequate interlocutors - if Umberto Eco imagined discussing with a six years old (a "new modern possibility"), he wanted the different credentials to be patent.
But actually, the matter has never been that simple. I have recently seen the initial part of the "Gore Vidal vs William Buckley" movie, Best of Enemies (Gordon; Neville, 2015) and I found the first debate immediately embarrassing.
There's a great movie called "Best of Enemies" about their rivalry and the impact of their televised debates. It's on Netflix. It's a 94% on Rotten Tomatoes. Definitely worth watching.
This is related in time and U.S. Political scene: the documentary "Best of Enemies" which centers around ABC's coverage of the U.S. Presidential party conventions hosted by William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal. It also analyzes their histories and it analyzes the rise of identity politics in the U.S. And this identity politics / these debates perhaps showcase the ideological fracturing of the U.S.
> http://www.magpictures.com/bestofenemies/