Much has been made and said about the 1960s in terms of the decade’s impact on political, social, and cultural history. I am not one to necessarily subscribe to the reactionary rockist worship of the decade, predominantly espoused by Boomers who can’t get over themselves. However, that decade did spawn groundbreaking documents that fused the worlds of art and politics. The Society Of The Spectacle, The Port Huron Statement, The Medium Is The Massage, and others. Art became political and politics became material in art. Televisions beamed Vietnam into the home with commercial breaks repeating the mantras of consumerism that Godard so thoroughly eviscerated on films that helped stoke the fires of May 1968. Things reached a fever pitch that summer in Chicago. Haskell Wexler took a read of the social temperature, and his meterological precision would be affirmed. He even filmed preparations for RFK’s funeral several months prior. August 1968 would then act out his forecast. What is left in the wake of the DNC riots is Medium Cool.

It is a spectacular fiction of meta-fiction and documentary and a documentary of documents and meta-documents. Like the Situationists, Wexler has a grasp on the convergence of the media and politics into the spectacle. He took the name of the film straight from McLuhan’s staggering analysis of the current media landscape. Most experienced the chaos of those August nights passively watching on television. Robert Forster’s news cameraman, his lady acquaintance and her son experienced it. There. Live.

LOOK OUT HASKELL… IT’S REAL!!!!!

The above is the film fissioned to its spectral essence. Wexler takes the levels of fiction he spun and the realities he captured and massages them into a message, the message. To wit, he makes political art of a stripe more vibrant, alive, visceral, and out there than most would mention given the chance of selecting a document of the age. In fact, his studied praxis allows the film to transcend the 1960s and become something larger and instructive, as well as personal, and intimate. Celluloid bursts at the seams with the ideas, images, colors, voices, music, politics, and energy this work contains.

When the cameraman in the final shot turns his instrument (weapon?) on us, that is Haskell not letting us off the hook. After all, it is real.