See it now: queer history and archival fantasy. Issue 9 (21st October 2019) - Rohy, Valerie
ABSTRACT: Good Night, and Good Luck, George Clooney's account of journalist Edward R. Murrow's public struggle with Senator Joseph McCarthy, includes archival footage of McCarthy, HUAC hearings, and other 1950s televised ephemera; it is in this archival footage that the film's most obvious queerness can be found, in the figures of Roy Cohn and Liberace. This paper examines the formal and thematic effects of the film's archival footage in view of the sexual and political issues in the whole of the film. The overt thesis of Good Night, and Good Luck is that in 2005, as in the 1950s, freedom of political dissent is under threat and must be defended. Where politics are concerned, the film suggests that very little has changed since the 1950s, yet where sexuality is concerned, both straight and gay viewers may congratulate themselves on our progress. That liberal self-congratulation belies the film's sexual sleight of hand: only by localising gay male sexuality in the caricatured figures in archival footage can the film entertain, and even celebrate, an extraordinary intimacy among straight men – Murrow and producer Fred Friendly. Thus the archival footage is not the space of reality but of the film's governing and pervasive fantasies.