Vague Noun Modifiers: Aaron Sorkin and The Trial of the Chicago 7

[I incorrectly published a piece at one point when it was not yet meant for publication. Variations may be minor to nonexistent, but I nonetheless put this piece out there erroneously before it was ready. My apologies.]

What started in my head as a more limited critique of The Trial of the Chicago 7 has snowballed into a larger study of the work of film and television auteur Aaron Sorkin, a virtuoso creative force easily likened to contemporary Joss Whedon, although given what we’ve recently learned about Whedon, that’s an unkind comparison. The Trial of the Chicago 7 is not a great movie — partly because Sorkin is a better writer than he is a director, and the film comes across as one of many standardized, assembly-line products of 2020 — but it is symptomatic of Sorkin’s approach to the world.

What hurts to watch about The Trial of the Chicago 7 is that it’s a movie about The Left that seems to not really care about The Left, then or now. As a conceit, the film is as much an excuse for an old-fashioned courtroom drama (where Sorkin got his start with A Few Good Men) as it is for saying anything specific about its subjects or the different-yet-intertwined ideologies that link them. Structuring the emotional core of the film as a personal conflict between Tom Hayden and Abbie Hoffman (the latter played by a show-stealing Sacha Baron Cohen) fails to yield meaningful fruit.

Because the conflict is largely reduced to personality, discussions over political strategy are flattened into a simple dichotomy between the terms cultural and political revolution. This conflict is headed off when Hoffman admits to reading the Port Huron Statement, which might be meaningful if anyone in the audience knew (or cared to find out later) what the fuck the Port Huron Statement was. Hoffman actually admires Hayden (except for that “he implies possessive pronouns and he uses vague noun modifiers”), so Hayden reluctantly (and rightly) agrees to let the less straitlaced but no less brilliant Hoffman take the stand instead of him, which is where Hoffman delivers a powerful testimony that includes the line “I’ve never been on trial for my thoughts before”.

Despite being on trial for their thoughts, The Trial of the Chicago 7 is not interested in those thoughts. As far as Sorkin is concerned, Hoffman, Hayden, Bobby Seale, et al are relics of a past from which society has moved on. For all the centrality of the Vietnam War and protests against it, nothing in The Trial of the Chicago 7 points to larger, ongoing critiques of the Forever Wars the U.S. is currently engaged in. That there is a modern Left — one distinct from Clintonite neoliberalism and which draws directly from the Students for a Democratic Society, the Yippies, and and the Black Panther Party — is something that does not seem to occur to Aaron Sorkin, a writer whose work is as politically naïve as it is emotionally biting.

For example, when the film centers itself on Bobby Seale and the obvious racism Seale experiences at the trial, there’s an uncomfortable air of historical distance. Like many cinematic depictions of historical racism, The Trial of the Chicago 7 is guilty of allowing an implicitly white audience to feel better about not living in that past, of not being racist like Judge Hoffman, an individualized representation of what are, in fact, institutional forces. Despite the fact that the treatment of Bobby Seale evokes, among other things, the ongoing crisis of police killings of unarmed Black men, Sorkin does nothing to make that point in any meaningful way. As with the relationship between the Vietnam War and current U.S. military involvement in the Middle East, the line that needs to be drawn between the treatment of Bobby Seale and modern racism is nonexistent.

The heart of the problem with The Trial of the Chicago 7 is that Sorkin, as he usually does, makes the film all about personalities. This makes for good writing, and Sorkin’s script is terrific in a lot of ways, but it makes for an empty political gesture. Sorkin, too, is guilty of an overuse of vague noun modifiers. Indeed, Sorkin’s neoliberal bona fides show clearly as he reduces the historical Left to a series of personalities to be inhabited by all-star actors, including the always brilliant Cohen as Hoffman, Eddie “Oscar Bait” Redmayne as Tom Hayden, and stalwart character actor John Carroll Lynch as Dave Dellinger. As these strong personalities collide, they create drama, naturally, but in doing so Sorkin negates the politics.

Sorkin’s script is guilty of precisely what Tom Hayden suggests of Abbie Hoffman, that is, causing people to think not of the politics but of the personalities:

For the next 50 years, when people think of progressive politics, they’re gonna think of you. They’re gonna think about you and your idiot followers passing out daisies to soldiers and trying to levitate the Pentagon. They’re not gonna think of equality or justice, they’re not gonna think of education or poverty or progress. They’re gonna think of a bunch of stoned, lost, disrespectful, foul-mouthed, lawless losers. And so we’ll lose elections.

But Sorkin doesn’t really think that, or to put it without reading Sorkin’s mind, his script doesn’t care about that. It’s just another strike in an interpersonal conflict.

Looking back through Sorkin’s career, his films repeatedly evoke character and individuated social structures over any kind of larger sociocultural implications. In this way, The Trial of the Chicago 7 is an odd choice for a writer (now writer-director) who seems to skew the real world in favor of abstract interpersonal drama, even when that drama plays out on a global scale (as in The West Wing) or has massive implications (as in The Social Network).

The best distillation of Sorkin’s approach to the world is Moneyball. Like much of Sorkin’s screenplay work, Moneyball is a clash of personalities anchored by a visionary (Mark Zuckerberg, Billy Beane, Abbie Hoffman, Josiah Bartlet, Lucille Ball) who alone can see the forest for the trees. In another way, though, Moneyball is a film whose reduction of individuals to numerical data is comparable to Sorkin’s writing style; Sorkin’s screenplays are physics lessons, studies in the interaction of objects in space.

While Sorkin thus understands interpersonal relationships, he seems to have an unwillingness to extend those relationships to broader sociocultural concerns. This is not, strictly speaking, a criticism; he’s entitled to his approach, which has produced some truly excellent films and series. But this is a criticism of The Trial of the Chicago 7, which deserved a more politically and sociologically nuanced approach than Sorkin gave it.

Even in a much more overtly political script, Charlie Wilson’s War (a barely watchable film best described as “an even shitter pre-cog imitation of Argo“), the writing at best flattens down the broader geopolitical implications of the subject matter and at worst trivializes those implications as quips traded between actors treating human beings as chessmen, an actual piece of imagery used in Charlie Wilson’s War).

The Trial of the Chicago 7 is a mirror image of Sorkin’s breakout work, A Few Good Men, a film directed by Rob Reiner and scripted by Sorkin based on his own play. Both films are courtroom dramas that hinge on the roles of the individual within larger structures. Are the two marines guilty of murder after being ordered to haze a fellow marine? Are the eight men on trial guilty of violence committed by a large group of people?

In each case, to reiterate a point, the individuals on trial are essentially molecules moving and colliding; the debate over their guilt is a debate over the role of small pieces of a larger whole. The men on trial in both instances are scapegoats for larger structures, and both films are acutely aware of the role that power plays in the actions of human beings caught up in structures of said power, but both films are also more interested in abstracting those systems. Neither films particularly have strong opinions about the real world, or indeed anything; Aaron Sorkin is among the least opinionated screenwriters in cinema history, an idealistically and unrealistically neutral and detached observer whose neutrality often comes with unintended rhetorical consequences.

That’s precisely why seeing Sorkin write and direct a film about a group of highly opinionated activists is so frustrating. I’d almost prefer a right-wing film that damns those unpatriotic commie bastards to hell than a wishy-washy film that blunts their socio-political accomplishments into common courtroom theater. We see this strategy at work in A Few Good Men, too, where everything that happens is a series of individuated interactions with no larger implications. A few good men, or indeed a few bad apples, are to blame, and while the film is a gut-wrenching meditation on the nature of life in an iron-clad chain of command, it has little to nothing to say about the military industrial complex. Again, Sorkin is not legally obligated to make the political points I, in his shoes, would make, but I’m free to point out that his work overall is a frustrating exercise in reducing the dangerously political to the safely personal.

I think perhaps Sorkin’s oeuvre is best summed up by the teary finale to Charlie Wilson’s War. Tom Hanks’ Charlie Wilson, after spending the film successfully lobbying for military aide to Afghanistan in their war against the Soviet Union, breaks down upon the realization of the sheer apathy of his colleagues. In this context, the parable told to him by Gust Avrakotos (Philip Seymour Hoffman) takes on a particularly gut-wrenching meaning. Over time, a “zen master”, upon every event of note, replies to the moralization of that event with “we’ll see” as chains of cause and effect reshape the way prior events come to be moralized.

And while on one hand this is a commentary on the way that events have unknown and unintended consequences — something certainly true of the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan — it’s also a meditation on disinterest and reductionism. Sorkin is the zen master meeting every event with a stone face and a lack of care for the fact that the past, present, and future are all both lived experiences and larger structures that live and breathe.