Truth

Will Smith as Dr. Bennet Omalu pointing to the N.F.L. representative and through gritted teeth, imploring him to, "Tell the truth!" about CTE is one of the more powerful scenes from this year's films.  Will Smith didn't get nominated (that's a whole separate post), but his performance in Concussion was outstanding and it is one of three recent and important films that deal with the theme of finding and disclosing truth---truth that is being held back by powerful forces that have a self interest in telling a different narrative.  Concussion, Spotlight, and 13 Hours each evokes anger and dismay from the viewers by showing how vested bureaucracies will sometimes stop at nothing and will bury peoples' lives and careers to retain power.  Each demonstrates why investigative journalists and filmmakers have a vital role to play in an open society and why the current tide against "offensive" speech is so misguided.

We need to know the truth so we can deal with it.

The N.F.L. clearly has an interest in controlling the narrative around the long term effects of head trauma.  It has long been known that football players suffer debilitating injuries that leave them limping and sore for the rest of their lives.  Dick Butkus and Wilbur Marshall, for instance, had to sue to collect disability payments from their playing day injuries.  But it has been only recently that the Alzheimer's like symptoms of former players have become widely known.  Like tobacco use, it turns out that the effects of playing only show up years later.  The N.F.L. has downplayed CTE for years, and attempted to throw a blanket over Omalu's work.  It became harder to do so as more player suicides began to hit the headlines and more reports of symptoms of the effects of head trauma from ex-players like Jim McMahon and Antwan Randall El have made it difficult for the N.F.L. to sweep under the rug.  But they tried and went to great lengths to silence and discredit Omalu.   The reality is that only by dealing with the truth--understanding fully the evidence and the data--will the N.F.L. be able to save itself and the game of football.  We do not fully understand the extent of the risk (CTE currently can only be determined by examining the brain of someone deceased) but more research will help determine rule changes and technologies in equipment that may reduces the risk of  long term problems.

The film Spotlight centers around the Boston Globe investigative reporting team that did a spectacular job of uncovering the pathology of child sex abuse in the Boston Archdiocese.  The Catholic Church was a powerful institution in Irish Catholic Boston with adherents at the highest level of business, government, and courts.  Because these forces closed ranks, the Archdiocese was able to cover up the continued transferring of pedophile priests that ruined the lives of hundreds and hundreds of vulnerable children.  Because they preyed kids from lower economic classes with dysfunctional families, their actions were even more despicable.   The institution that is supposed to be an advocate for the disempowered instead victimized them.  That team at the Boston Globe courageously took on the Archdiocese and exposed the Church despite the implicit threats to their careers and helped put an end to outrageous practice of circulating offending priests from parish to parish.

In 13 Hours, the filmmaker largely left politics out of the film and let the facts speak for themselves. You will recall that Susan Rice went on the talk show circuit immediately after the Benghazi attack to propagate the fiction that the attack on our embassy was the result of a protest against an anti-Muslim video.  This film dispels that myth and shows that the State Department left that embassy woefully undefended and then did not respond to pleas for help when there were military assets available. Only the bravery and fighting ability of a handful of CIA contractors kept the death toll from being even worse.  The Clinton State Department spun a tale that was simply not true to protect Clinton and the re-election chances of her boss.   By sticking very close to the facts, Michael Bay fully discredits the fairy tale of Clinton and Rice without every mentioning them.

Film is a reflection of the times.  It is not fortuitous that these three films were released within months of one another.  We need to know the facts.  We need courageous journalists and filmmakers that are willing to risk their careers (and even their lives) to expose the truth. Louis Brandeis once famously said that "Sunlight is the best disinfectant."  We need to know the likelihood of head injuries in football so we have fewer good men like Junior Seaus, Dave Duersons and Mike Websters meet tragic endings.  We need to know how institutions like the Catholic Church screen and monitor priests so that we don't have systemic abuse of kids.  The country needs a full accounting of all of the facts leading up to the deaths in Benghazi to ensure that it doesn't happen again and because Mrs. Clinton is asking us to promote her to commander in chief.  In each of these cases, the existing power structure -- the N.F.L., the Catholic Church and the State Department attempted to whitewash the facts and tell a different tale.  Taken together, these films show that no institution is above challenge and we need always to view their narratives with an amount of skepticism.

Mrs. Clinton somewhat infamously proclaimed, "What difference, at this point, does it make?"

When there is harm, it makes all the difference.