The types are hated; openly detested what the other represented: their ideas, their way of seeing the world and its lifestyle. When, in 1968, the US network ABC offered them starring ten debates during the Republican and Democratic conventions for the elections of that year, they said yes in spite of that hatred. The ability to argue and to destroy the other’s arguments on camera was more attractive to keep ruminating in privacy. It was an innovative approach at a time when TV news were the most reliable for the citizens of that country institution, although the real reason can be traced to the lack of budget for the news network to its competitors NBC and CBS. William F. Buckley Jr., considered the first modern intellectual right, director of the conservative National Review and host of Firing Line , and Gore Vidal, the arrogant and provocative liberal writer, author of a long list best sellers and great cultural entertainer of his day, agreed to discuss the hot topics of the political agenda. Best of Enemies, exquisite documentary directed by Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville can be seen on Netflix, plays the days that changed television (political show was seen by 10 million people) and leads to troubling questions about the current forms of the show and journalism, like the construction of mass audiences and the dominant intellectual laziness.
the film takes those explosives dialogues between people of origin as similar (white patrician accent, one wanted to be mayor of New York, the other democrat) and worldview as different (Catholic Buckley believed that communism and diverse sexuality threatened the future of his country, while the progressive Vidal despised sectarian right with his work and sought to eradicate all sexual label) and on that play mounted file fragments and testimonies Nearby the event and its protagonists people. In the sequences of what was the debate, competing in verbal fencing, but aware that they needed each other to give the best show, it is clear that the right care Vidal who despises the struggle for civil rights, while Buckley Jr., proud sponsor of the policy of “law and order”, can say without flinching that “freedom produces inequality.” Vidal believes the world is right when he accuses US genocide in Vietnam because “90% of those killed were civilians,” and Buckley Jr., who later would be one of the great makers of the triumph of Ronald Reagan, perceived Vidal and thought it embodies as a danger to the nation . “How will I be unpatriotic if I am the official biographer of this country?” He replies proudly Gore Vidal, in a moment.
The elegance and erudition both are dazzling and dominate first eight debates, until the hatred explodes in the ninth issue, when a distant Gore Vidal calls “criptonazi” his opponent off balance and get Buckley Jr., who sets aside chivalry, to become a bully who spits “fagot” as he looks into her eyes and threatens to trompear his “fucking face” and let him cast. A legendary scene; a time when the rating was gold dust, while the wisdom and political dialogue were defeated. Buckley Jr. could never forgive and even the trial that struck Vidal, who doubted his heterosexuality in an article Esquire- could free him from that guilt. They were born the same year (1925), but in 2008 Vidal was fortunate to fire of this world. “I think hell be a livelier place,” wrote Gore Vidal, who “was good hating,” as in the film quips journalist Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, a friend of Buckley Jr.
Best of Enemies is an intelligent and entertaining documentary shoots a reflection on the present. Reconstructs a historical debate and the ways of a world that no longer exists, that of an era still dominated the illusion that the word of the other could be assessed and ideological differences, to the scene on TV. A world that confirmed lost every time we hear the rhetoric poverty of the majority of political and laziness of so many journalists and intellectuals who, instead of betting on the sharpness and quality of disclosure issues usually reserved for specialists, prefer to believe that Chicano, cunning and ability to impose its hollow cries are the only attractions valued by the general public
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