The Horror, The Horror

National Review Online, May 17 2001

You don't need to have seen Scream to know that horror movies have conventions that must be followed. For example, from almost the first few minutes it is generally possible to guess who will survive, and who is going to die. Typically, a nice, likable character will be one of the first to perish. Such a death sets a suitably downbeat tone, and previews the implacability of the torment to come. So it was on last night's season finale of West Wing. It was a weirdly lurid episode, which made little or no sense until one understood it for what it was, a tribute to the cinema of fear. The story begins, therefore, with a good person in a coffin. President Bartlet's big-hearted secretary, loyal Mrs. Landingham, is dead. In fact, the scriptwriters were in such a hurry to get moving with the plot that they had killed the poor dear off in the previous episode. Bartlet, meanwhile is wrestling with an emerging crisis in Haiti. Haiti? That's no coincidence, RKO's land of voodoo can always be relied upon to add menace to any tragedy.

Next, of course, there has to be rain, wind, and lightning. Last night's West Wing was no exception. As the show progressed we learn that Washington is to be hit by a strange unseasonable storm, the worst, Bartlet is assured, for more than a century. Naturally, when such a storm is raging, one of the characters has to run through the tempest looking crazed. Shakespeare famously used such an opportunity to tear out Gloucester's eyes in King Lear. Bartlet merely turned down the offer of a raincoat, and went for a stroll in the deluge.

Add in some terrible childhood trauma to the mix. Flashbacks give us the young Bartlet as a pupil in one of those 1950s prep schools where everyone wears a tweed jacket and sensitive students feel guilty about their privilege. Unfortunately for the future President, Bartlet Senior is the headmaster and he is not played by Robin Williams (but by MSNBC pundit and West Wing writer Lawrence O'Donnell). In the space of a few minutes we watch this ogre hit his son, sneer at Catholicism, support censorship, and underpay his female staff. Well, what else can you expect from a WASP in prime time?

Not, probably, shouting at God in Latin in the National Cathedral, which is what we find President Bartlet doing at the end of Mrs. Landingham's funeral. What a display! He hurls abuse at the deity for allowing bad things to happen, particularly to a man such as himself, who has, he whines, been a good president (there then followed a laundry list of achievements that sounded suspiciously like those once claimed by Bill Clinton). It was Martin Sheen's most spectacular hissy fit since that Saigon hotel room in Apocalypse Now and about as convincing, a piece of ripe ham to add to the West Wing's usual baloney, and an ominous warning that this show was about to turn very dark indeed. For incantations in Latin are never good news. The last time one was tried in a Washington drama was for The Exorcist, and that succeeded in riling up the Devil.

Bartlet gets off lightly. The only apparition he raises is that of the late Mrs. Landingham. She returns to the Oval Office, the first dead left-wing lady to show up there since the days when Mrs. Roosevelt would drop in to chat with Hillary. Mrs. L., of course, is on a mission. In the horror genre, the dead always are. Bartlet, you see, is in crisis. Tantalizingly, at least for viewers on the Right, there is a chance that scandal (but only of the noblest sort: he concealed his Multiple Sclerosis) might cause the president to drop any bid for reelection. Mrs. Landingham will have none of it. She reminds him of the poor, the sick, and the dispossessed (of whom there seem to be a quite a lot, despite all those presidential successes that Bartlet had so recently been recently been discussing with God). The implication is clear: These are problems that need the intervention of big government and a liberal president. There is work to be done, but no one called "W." could do it. Bartlet is the man for the job.

The show ends with a reinvigorated Bartlet at a press conference. The journalists all want to know. Will he run again? Officially, we won't be told until the series returns, but take it from me, this is no cliffhanger. Bartlet will be back. That's the rule. Just ask Freddy Krueger.

In horror, there's always room for a sequel.