Dark Secrets in the Parking Garage

• Share

(2 of 2)

It is only when Woodward descends into the darkness of a parking garage to consult with Deep Throat that the movie briefly becomes a real noirish melodrama. The filmmakers made Deep Throat a smoker, which some say he was not, to give him a Robert Mitchum air, which was surely not something we would now impute to Felt. But Hal Holbrook gives a gnomic, cranky performance as Deep Throat. (Shouldn't there be an Oscar for best performance by an actor you can barely see?) And director Alan Pakula added menacing off-camera sound effects to Holbrook's scenes--a mysterious bump, the sudden squeal of tires as a car departs. Finally, chillingly, Holbrook tells the reporter that his investigative zeal is now placing his life in danger.

He's not really a person; he's a plot device. But that's the way we want--need--these stories to be told, with frissons of black glamour and some risk factors. The emergence of distressingly ordinary W. Mark Felt returns the narrative to the quotidian. Which may not be such a bad thing. Various journalistic Pooh-Bahs are taking the occasion to remind us that journalism at its socially useful best must often rely on anonymous sources to do its job. Without them, it would be nothing but dubious celebrity interviews and reports on sewer-bond hearings. We also need reminding, at a moment when public confidence in journalism is, according to the polls, at an all-time low, that it can be an honorable craft. Deep Throat be damned; he was, it seems, more mentor than prime informant on the story. It was the hardworking boys--fueled by ambition (yes, that, speaking of low human motives), passion and fast food--who put the puzzle together. Do you think, just possibly, we could use a few more of their ilk right now in Washington?