Sartre's second century

Contemporary Perspectives 175
evidence we had of Sartre's artistic commitment to an exposure of this
deplorable political scandal. According to Michel Contat's "Notice" in the
Pleiade volume, however, it was Miller's earlier drama, Death of a
Salesman (1949), that made the greater impact upon Sartre. 4 In Miller's
classic piece, the eponymous salesman, Willy Loman, having been made
redundant late in life, kills himself in order both to salvage some selfrespect
and to provide some future security (by way of life insurance) for
his wife and sons. At first glance, then, there is solid evidence for a
powerful Milleresque influence upon Sartre, even if the context, the
dynamics and the motivation of the fictional Loman's suicide are rather
different from those of the historical character Abraham Feller, Sartre's
doomed hero in La Part dufeu.
Reflecting upon these fragments of dialogue and sketches for possible
scenes, it seemed to me that George Clooney's 2005 picture, Good Night,
and Good Luck, fortuitously provides some interesting points of comparison
with Sartre's rediscovered and unfinished play. Most obviously, of
course, both are set amidst the hysterical anti-communism of the early-
1950s, and both focus upon (initially reticent) antagonists of McCarthy,
each of whose encounters with him would prove literally life-changing.
Clooney's hero, the eminent broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow, was
to be canonised as the patron saint of American patriotism when he
exposed McCarthy's mendacity in his current affairs programme, See It
Now, in March 1954, thereby precipitating the Junior Senator's downfall.
By contrast, Sartre's hero, the equally real-life Abraham Feller—legal
counsel and chief policy adviser to the Secretary General of the United
Nations, Trygve Lie, and McCarthy's brother-in-law—was driven to
suicide.
Clooney's excellent film is surely one of the best in its genre since
Oliver Stone's JFK (1992), or even Alan J. Pakula's All the President's
Men (1976). I will not dwell here on the numerous merits of Good Night,
and Good Luck, but I want to consider two key aspects of its success by
way of a contrastive prelude to my consideration of Sartre's failure with
La Part dufeu. The first such element is the medium itself. By shooting a
movie, Clooney can take full advantage of all the facilities he needs in
order to recreate the location and the ambience of a national TV studio at
the beginning of the medium's heyday. This recreation is ingeniously
enhanced by Clooney's decision to shoot the whole thing in black and
white. This technique both provides a sympathetic context for the clips of
authentic archive footage, and subtly introduces a distancing effect that
4 See ibid., 1573-79.