Janice Sutherland, “Murdoch (Part 2)” (2013)
As I suspected, the second half of this series turns out to be a damp squib: it’s basically a rundown of media mogul Rupert Murdoch and his News Corporation’s activities from the late 1980s to the present day. Interviews with notable politicians, acting celebrities and media personalities from across Australia, Britain and the United States are spliced together with news reels and welded into a chronological narrative by a voice-over narrator. The film’s visual style is rough-hewn and slap-dash with bright colours, bright lights and a big-band music soundtrack at particular points of the film all lending a racy touch suggestive of mid-20th century film noir crime suspense movies and TV shows replete with corrupt police officers, shady small-time politicians, thuggish gangsters and femme fatale girlfriends and call-girls with hearts of gold: the kind of world in which our man RM might have grown up in and where he first caught the scent of his future empire.
Hmm, there isn’t much analysis of what drove and continues to drive RM to absurd and surreal heights of achievement apart from people saying banalities like his work is his hobby and that he likes to back winners (in politics, not horse-racing) and that News Corporation’s culture is a reflection of his personality and what he values. Perhaps the most illuminating part of the documentary is its blow-by-blow portrayal of how over the years politicians in Australia and Britain have cozied up to RM, how he appears to pick and choose winners in general elections and how his print and TV news media outlets unashamedly barrack for those Australian and British politicians he chooses to bless. The corruptive radiation of media and politics in bed together sends out rays of harmful radioactive particles from the TV screen, DU-style, never more so than in the brief section where up-and-coming British PM hopeful David Cameron and his wife hang around RM, his son James and RM’s protégée at News International Rebekah Brookes like bad smells just before the British general elections in 2009. This might well say something about the fragility of political culture in both Australia and the United Kingdom, that it has become so dependent on the whims of one man who imagines himself as a king-maker cleaning out the filth in the political establishments of both countries.
The film notes that RM does not have a dynastic succession plan in place. RM’s children have so far not shown that they have their father’s ability, steel and personality for the kind of rapacious business he revels in. In any case, RM is surely one of a kind who came to be where he is because of particular circumstances and particular chances he took that will never be replicated. It may just be that News Corporation is now far beyond the capabilities of ordinary humans to control because it is too much the child of one man: it is his work of art, his unique creation. Also the world in which RM began his empire has changed too much because of him, and now is changing in ways that can’t sustain News Corporation, post-RM, forever because the creative forces that propelled him and his baby to the top have now become destructive.