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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
God, his head is big.
Honestly, even though it's a function of studio lighting and camera angles, this is one prodigious squash. Bill O'Reilly is halfway through his nightly "Talking Points Memo" and the only thing that truly penetrates is that this guy's face is the size of the grill on a '64 Camaro. "That's it for The Memo," he says, and thank God for it, I say. For a minute, I thought I was watching a documentary special about Easter Island.
When I was at the Herald, O'Reilly was a local anchor in Boston, and he contributed occasionally to the newspaper's editorial section, his columns often amusing sermons from a mount of O'Reilly's own construction. For example, in 1989, Barney Frank stupidly stumbled into a scandal involving a male prostitute named Steve Gobie. O'Reilly unleashed the hounds, calling for Frank's resignation and proposing Honest Bill O'Reilly as a replacement. Public enthusiasm for this selfless gesture was less than vast and, when Frank sensibly declined the invitation to disappear himself, O'Reilly grumbled his way offstage.
Now, in newspapers, or even in elective politics, incipient megalomania is not necessarily an advantage. In television, however, it can be an absolute boon. Over the past two years -- and with his $25 million deal -- O'Reilly has come to dominate the raucous little universe of cable political chat. (I hope dearly that, somewhere, an underpaid News Corporation sportswriter is sporting a button that reads, "Bill O'Reilly Got My Raise.") This has drawn to him some criticism. Michael Kinsley masterfully deconstructed the way O'Reilly scuffed up his Levittown upbringing, and James Wolcott had wonderful fun demolishing the "faux populism" of the whole Fox approach.
Unfortunately, both of these pieces missed the larger point. The chat shows are little more than a form of professional wrestling aimed at the parents of the kids who watch actual professional wrestling. O'Reilly isn't a successful TV performer because people actually take him to be the smartest yobbo in Kelsey's Bar. He's a successful TV performer because he's really good on television. He has created a character, the same way that David Duchovny or Jane Kaczmarek or The Rock have, and he plays it very, very well.
And he does it within a corporate culture most conducive to the creation of precisely that character. O'Reilly has become more adept than Murdoch at creating an elite to which he does not belong. Some of the details of the character he's created are silly -- Kinsley had a hilarious time with O'Reilly's claim that his fellow guests at a Washington dinner party defenestrated themselves rather than speak to him -- but the details are completely consistent, both to the character itself, and to the context within which he performs. Ducks do not give birth to racehorses and, just as it's impossible to imagine one of the three broadcast networks producing "The Sopranos," it's impossible to imagine, say, NBC producing a character like Bill O'Reilly.
For example, compare him to his most immediate competitor, Chris Matthews on MSNBC. Once, Matthews was a shrewd political strategist and a decent enough writer. But on television, he has to work much too hard to stay in character. Matthews regularly went zooming into orbit over Al Gore, whose syntax Matthews found ostentatiously proper and whose vocabulary Matthews found ostentatiously extensive, and in whom generally Matthews detected a lack of Regular Guyhood. This is the kind of high proletarian dudgeon that O'Reilly can summon without breaking a sweat. Matthews, a former intellectual whiz-kid in the employ of Jimmy Carter, perhaps the least Regular Guy ever to sit in the White House, looked as though he were pushing a truck up a hill.
