J. Edgar: Not Epic Enough

In Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar, the legendary FBI director describes Richard Nixon—the mirror image of Hoover's own internal repression and manifest unscrupulousness—as “immense.” It would be an apt term for Hoover himself. Long ago, before revelations about his corrupt use of covert information to blackmail and frighten virtually everyone in Washington, and before speculation about his personal life marred his reputation, Hoover occupied an immense place in the nation’s imagination as a crime fighter extraordinaire. He significantly shaped a Cold War-era sensibility about the vulnerability of the nation to internal threats. And he was, along with Nixon and Kissinger, a prominent player in the debauchery of democracy at that time, an American Caligula whose special fondness for using covertly obtained information about sexual indiscretions to blackmail the powerful reflected a vast insecurity about his own sexuality.

In seeking to encompass this immensity on the screen, J. Edgar endeavors to tell at least four separate stories. They are these: 1) how Hoover was moved by the violence of the “Red Scare” in the early 1920s to found a new crime-fighting division within the Department of Justice, using “scientific” methods such as fingerprinting; 2) the growth of the FBI into a national icon, and of the myths of the “G-man” and of Hoover’s own personal involvement in such celebrated Bureau success stories as solving the mystery of the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, and the shooting of John Dillinger; in both cases Hoover's involvement was exaggerated or wholly fabricated in the service of his keen talent for public relations and hunger for adulation; 3) the long-time, occluded relationship Hoover maintained with aide Clyde Tolson, widely—but not unanimously—assumed to be homosexual in nature; and 4) the use Hoover repeatedly made of personal, especially sexual, information for purposes of blackmail or intimidation, most notoriously in the case of Martin Luther King when the Bureau forged a letter to King encouraging him to commit suicide.

In telling these stories reasonably well, and with the technical panache for which Clint Eastwood is admired, the film tells none of them exceptionally well and succeeds mainly in revealing the timid, emotionally clotted figure behind the fabricated G-man image. The result is curiously deflating, and emotionally distancing. And there are some distinctly odd aspects to this movie. Most notably, there is the matter of cosmetics as the characters age—what one reviewer called “ghastly slatherings of old age make-up”—and some really freakish attempts to approximate the appearance of certain real life characters. Hoover himself is done reasonably well as a corpulent senior, but Clyde Tolson—handsome and dashing as a young man—looks positively entombed as an old one. Robert Kennedy appears to be weirdly and witlessly grinning throughout a conversation with Hoover in which the latter is blackmailing RFK’s brother, and the Nixon that appears in J Edgar has to be the most comically absurd attempt at verisimilitude ever put on celluloid. If there is some stylistic comment being made here—i.e., that all politicians wear masks that are grotesque covers for their distorted real selves; or that Tolson entombed himself through a life of slavish devotion to Hoover, etc.,—it is lost in the plain strangeness of these devices.

Leonardo DiCaprio is quite good in his role, especially as the younger J. Edgar. And the relationship with his imperious mother is very well rendered. But even here there is something all too predictable and diminishing. Of course, Mother is a domineering bitch sculpting her son in the service of her own narcissistic needs, instructing him early on like a wind-up toy that he is to gain back the family “glory” and compensate for the (of course) alcoholic failure of a father, all the while smothering her son sexually and ruthlessly condemning the homosexuality of which she must have been aware early on (“I’d rather have a dead son than a daffodil,” she tells him.) Judy Dench plays this thankless stereotype about as well as it can be played—I can imagine an Academy Award nomination—and the film does convey the sense of a loveless maternal magnificence to which Hoover might have been captive.

The movie also deftly leaves open to interpretation the precise nature of the relationship between Hoover and Tolson. That they were gay lovers has been disputed by some who knew both men well, and who plausibly argue that Hoover—exquisitely, one might say, expertly sensitive to the damage that personal indiscretions could do to reputation—served in a time when a revelation of homosexuality spelled the end of a career. But the most sensational of whispers, that Hoover participated in crossdressing rituals (a rumor that has been roundly disputed and never corroborated), is hinted at obliquely in the film when, after his mother’s death, he dons her pearls and dress.

Whatever the truth about Hoover’s sexual life—I think it is possible to believe that the relationship with Tolson was an idealized gentleman’s affection that substituted for a physical intimacy of which Hoover may have been incapable—what’s clear is that there was a relationship between his own tortured sexual ambivalence and the paranoid use he made of sexual blackmail. There is the real fascination of the Hoover story, insufficiently captured in this film: the occult relationship between profound emotional dis-jointedness, closeted sexual instincts, and political corruption, especially in the case of one who exerted such a vast influence over politics for close to five decades.

All the more fascinating is the fact that late in his life, and at a peak of Hoover’s power, he had a rival in political psychopathy in the figure of Richard Nixon. It is quite interesting and insightful, I think, that the Hoover  of this movie recognizes that in Nixon he may have met his Machiavellian match. And equally penetrating that it is Nixon, alone among the politicians Hoover faces off with, who crudely identifies the FBI director for what he is (“that cocksucker,” Nixon calls him) and who is determined to wrest from Hoover after his death the “personal” files that gave Hoover his sway over everyone in Washington. (We may assume, also, that in Nixon, Hoover was confronted with a figure not likely to provide the kind of blackmail-worthy sexual indiscretions that filled that file.) The movie depicts the files being shredded by Hoover’s ever loyal secretary Helen Gandy, but in fact much of the contents are available for public reading in the National Archives. In a November 9 article in the Washington Post, Kenneth Ackerman, author of “Young J. Edgar: Hoover and the Red Scare, 1919-1920,” writes that the files “paint a stark portrait of power run amok.”

Nixon outlasted Hoover. But there is cunning to history, and even after his death the figure of Hoover exerted an influence over events. Nixon was determined to appoint a non-entity as a successor to the directorship of the bureau—and did so in the person of J. Patrick Grey—the better to tame the bureau and politicize it in the service of the vast crimes that were the Watergate scandal. But Mark Felt, a long-serving FBI agent and associate director had long coveted the job, and it was partly out of revenge for being passed-over that he betrayed Nixon, serving as the Washington Post’s famous “Deep Throat” source, helping to bring the President down.

It should take the breath away to realize that during a period of peak domestic discord, the two most powerful positions in government were held at the same time by men afflicted with extraordinary paranoia and severe disorganizations of personality. The wreckage that this nexus inflicted on American democracy is for historians, and some other filmmaker, still to consider.