Aaron Sorkin Used To Understand That Corporations Were A Necessary Evil. Looking at Some of His TV, I Don't Know If He Does Any More

 

One of the many, many reasons I thinks Sports Night was a masterpiece is that of all of Aaron Sorkin's body of work for television it's the most realistic about its purpose. This is particularly when you compare it to his last work for television to date The Newsroom, which takes place in an alternate universe not just compared to reality but even Sorkin's previous work.

No one who works at Sports Night, the show or the network its on has any illusions that they are in anything but a job and that it is dependent on ratings and sponsorship. None of them are wild about it to be sure but they all accept it as a reality as the people who work as Studio 60 or Newsnight just don't. If Will MacAvoy talked to Dan Fielding about what he thought their mission as journalists were,  Dan's reaction would have been: "What have you been smoking and I can have some?" Dana Whitaker (Felicity Huffman) would have told MacKenzie MacHale (rightly) that she was amazed that anyone let her back to produce a program if she didn't care about ratings. And if Isaac Jaffe (Robert Guillame) had heard the way Charlie Skinner was talking to Leona Lansing about how he was running his department he would have been the first person to say Leona should just fire his ass and start over.  Everyone in Sports Night may have done the walk-and-talk that Sorkin was famous for and they have had visions of an ideal program but all of them knew that the corporations ran the show and that they're jobs were incumbent on ratings and any boss who said otherwise was going to get fired sooner rather than later.

The biggest difference between Sorkin's early work on television and his last two shows is that in both cases he views that people who work in television are following a calling, not mere corporate shills. This was one of the reasons that Studio 60 was just a critical and ratings disasters and it's a major reason The Newsroom has always disappointed me. Sorkin has lost the idea he clearly had a grasp on in Sports Night: those who work in TV are doing a job reliant on corporations. The people who work on the title shows in both of his later works believe just as sincerely that they are purveyors of a noble profession where money is irrelevant.

The West Wing as you might expect doesn't really weigh in one way or the other on either argument. In large part it's because this is a show set in the world of politics and corporations just aren't as important to the day-to-day work of running America. It's also due to the fact that Bartlet is part of a Democratic administration and Bartlet's position was that of a liberal Democrat.  In it Sorkin was essentially following the words of Theodore White when he described how the two parties viewed the world: "The Republicans are for virtue; the Democrats are for Santa Claus." And in Bartlet's America, government was the solution to all problems. Which brings me to the point of this essay.

Because Hollywood even in 2000 was essentially a big donor to the Democrats Sorkin talked about it a few times during the four seasons he was the showrunner. Most of the time he was neutral on it and almost every time it had more to do with the senior staff then the President. Bartlet seemed to consider Hollywood like every other part of the Democratic base: a necessary evil.  He understood that he couldn't isolate them but he didn't have much of an opinion one way or the other on their product. That discussion was left more than anything to Toby Ziegler and it's through three different story lines that dealt with him in Season 1 – and another was related to it in Season 3 – that the viewer might have gotten a hint as to what Sorkin might actually think about the profession he was a part of.

In the fifth episode of the series the staff is concerned about making a trip to Hollywood for a fundraiser. The President is giving a talk about sex and violence in the movies and TV the day before he's scheduled to attend a fundraiser involving a producer named Larry Posner. Toby thinks this is hypocritical because Posner's films have gratuitous sex and violence.  Bartlet points out the problem Toby has with Posner's films isn't that they have sex and violence; it's that they suck. "But people go to them because they have gratuitous sex and violence," Bartlet says. "If we could just get people to stop going to crappy movies, Posner would stop making them."

"With all due respect," Toby says. "How's that going with the war on drugs?"

This is the first sign of Toby's true snobbery towards Hollywood which is not uncommon about the far left. However a few episodes later Toby is taking notes for the State of the Union. He is meeting with three Democratic congressmen -  I want to make that clear - and they are talking to him about cutting federal funding for the arts.

Toby, who couldn't denounce Hollywood fast enough, immediately argues that this is a necessity. He says the budget the U.S. spends on arts is equivalent to that of Sweden and that it costs the taxpayer 39 cents a year.  He takes great pride in mocking these Congressmen for not knowing that Oscar Hammerstein wrote the lyrics to Oklahoma and not knowing the difference between Arthur Miller and Arthur Murray. Toby, it's worth reminding you, is from New York one of the few places in the country where this might be common knowledge. The following episode he goes out of his way to defend PBS, another bastion of liberal politics as well as a certain kind of elitism.

In both cases, I should mention, Sorkin (through Toby) doesn't hesitate to argue that the government should be spending money on arts and entertainment as a public service as it does providing other major public services – you know like Social Security, welfare and food stamps. There's a clear distinction between provide these high arts as opposed to the lowly product that Hollywood turns out. Again both times Toby is defending it to Democrats.

The giveaway., I think, comes two seasons later  when someone is discussing defunding the National Endowment for the Arts.  He meets with a sour faced woman who complains what the current chair Oakenwood has done. Frankly the descriptions she makes honestly make you wonder why the Republicans didn't save this for a campaign issue. I'll just list a few:

"Hold The Lettuce, two bacon cheeseburgers constructed from Rottweiler dung"

Slut, a one word poem by a female performance artist who sings named and covered in hot chocolate

A piece which involves the artist destroying all of his belongings outside a Starbucks in Haight Ashbury. (Sam's reaction: "I've done that a couple of times. I didn't know there was funding."

Toby makes it clear he has to be dragged to galleries to see Picasso and Rembrandt but he still makes the kinds of arguments that really do speak of progressives extremism, which means they're either offensive or flimsy.  He compares her to a Nazi and their banning degenerate art. He tells her that it's not the job of people to get rid of things taxpayers don't approve of. "Most people don't like tanks." (Sorkin's character could have answered: I imagine the people who were the victims of the Nazis were happy to see them when they showed up.) He argues that it is just important to argue that art is reflective of culture. "The Age of De Medici was also the age of Da Vinci. The age of Elizabeth was also the age of Shakespeare."  This time she answers: "Ain't none of these guys Da Vinci or Shakespeare." Toby just throws back: 'Says you." (She could also have argued that these leaders were essentially tyrants.)

Eventually in order to get the budget back Toby has to agree to fire Oakenwood, something he does reluctantly. But in hindsight by having Toby take such a full throated defense of art and culture  when it is funded by the government – and in the same breath abusing Hollywood for being guiding by such mere factors as box office –  are as close as Sorkin has ever come in any of his works to raise up the idea of art while putting a middle finger to the business that gave him the right to make it.

The fact that in every case of government funding arts and culture Sorkin through Toby is essentially calling it a necessity as vital as any other government service, may seem like he is defending his profession as an artist. But what it leaves out is the fact that in the case of Broadway and PBS (and to an extent many of the playwrights who worked in some of the eras he discussed) they were as much entertainers as they were artists. This is telling for someone who has just a gift as language and it plays in with the themes of Sorkin's later work, particularly in the case of Studio 60. Performing before a live audience and reported news are not mere jobs but callings, symbolic of such minor things as dollars and cents. Sorkin, speaking through Toby, doesn't seem to think that there's a link between artists getting paid to make their often questionable art by the government and those who work in Hollywood making movies with gratuitous sex and violence. Yet both are drawing  a paycheck for their service, the same way Sorkin and the cast of all of his shows are. So why is one a noble profession and the other just a product of commerce?

And more to the point if you truly believed the government's job is to support all of its citizens the way so many progressives earnestly do with basic economic needs then isn't it your mission to spend as much money in the budget doing it? Isn't there a double standard in paying taxpayer dollars for arts and culture that could go just as easily to the unfed and unsheltered?  Hollywood may not produce the same high standards of art that people like Toby consider (though its worth noting that we should question whether he believes so much in what art as that the government has a moral obligation to fund it) but the fact that we consider shows like The West Wing  and films such as The Social Network and Moneyball works of art even though they never received a dime from the government should be an answer to this question.

Perhaps Sorkin, like so many people in Hollywood, can't escape the idea that being a mere entertainer is beneath him. I'd argue that entertainment is as valuable to the world as art and can serve the same function. Toby might consider Oklahoma and Death of A Salesman and Hollywood films 'mere entertainment' but as someone who's seen all of them, the only one it matters to may be the creator. To the viewing audience I'd argue we don't debate one is entertainment or art the same way everyone in either industry seems determined to: our only metric is if we liked it.  Hollywood has provided an escape from the world we live during hard times, as it did so often during the Depression and World War II for audiences who needed to get away from the horrors of the world for a few hours. The creator might care more about what the audience thinks about the product but most of us – including critics like myself – only do so after the fact. Overall we just want to escape the world and not sweat the details.

Speaking strictly for myself I think it is the job of films, TV, plays, music, really anything creative to provide an escape hatch from the world of the everyday. Whether it is art or entertainment is subjective but that doesn't make one inferior to the other, nor does it mean they can't be both. Entertainment, like everything else, is a job not a noble calling absent from commerce. Sorkin used to know that in his early days. Looking at his later work and this part of The West Wing, I wonder if he still realizes that.