Radical Surfaces

Abstract Oliver Stone’s Nixon ends in a sentimental, nostalgic flare. The drunk, pill-popping paranoid seems almost to recognize his failings when it comes time for him to resign. He looks at Kennedy’s image and says mournfully, “When they look at you, they see what they want to be. When they look at me, they see what they are.” At the end of Robert Altman’s film Secret Honor, Richard Nixon screams a mad, defiant “Fuck ’em” at all his presumed and imagined enemies, all the voters who elected him, con demned him, and elected him again. “Fuck ’em;’ he screams—his image echoed on the television monitors in his office that multiply and recreate him. “Fuck ’em;’ he yells, fist upraised, his television image responding, throwing out more images. “Fuck ’em.”