Ego, Truth, and Patricide in QUIZ SHOW
I recently experienced a crisis of despair. Without going into tedious details, I once again tried to gain approval from the Gatekeepers of Culture™, and once again I was rejected. This exhausting and painful pattern has repeated itself for years, and my soul is crushed a little more every time it happens. I like to joke that as a married man, I try to get published in order to experience the rejection I used to get from dating. I love my job as a high school English teacher, but I yearn to be celebrated also as a brilliant author.
To distract myself from the misery of my vivisected ego, I watched one of my favorite movies: Quiz Show, a superb 1994 film starring John Turturro, Ralph Fiennes, and Rob Morrow. (It also features Hank Azaria, Mira Sorvino, Christopher McDonald — best known as Shooter McGavin in Happy Gilmore — and Martin Scorcese.) I’ve watched this movie dozens of times, but it was a perfect coincidence this time around, because I realized something new and profound.
Quiz Show is based on the 1950s program Twenty-One and a scandal that erupted when some contestants confessed to cheating. The film centers on three characters, all based on real people: Herbert Stempel, an awkward nerdy type; Richard Goodwin, the plucky Congressional lawyer eager to hold television broadcasters accountable; and Charles Van Doren, a professor of literature at Columbia University who comes from a prestigious literary family. After Stempel wins some money on a rigged quiz show, he is forced to “take a dive” against Van Doren, who goes on to reign — fraudulently — as champion for several months. Goodwin uncovers the truth and convenes a Congressional hearing, at which both Stempel and Van Doren confess the dishonesty of which they were a part.
I’ve seen this movie dozens of times. Turturro and Fiennes take turns stealing scenes in masterful displays of clumsy authenticity. Sorvino is superb as Goodwin’s wife; perhaps the biggest problem with the film is that she gets so little screen time. The writing is crisp and efficient, a master class on effective storytelling. I never get tired of the repartée between Goodwin and the network brass, the Yiddish slanguage used by Stempel and his wife Toby, or the Van Doren family’s Shakespeare guessing games.
This time, however, was different. This time I felt a painful connection to the film that I never saw coming — a connection that has deepened my love affair with this remarkable motion picture.
“Was it just the money?”: Men and their Motivations
As with every good drama, character motivations are central to Quiz Show. Herb Stempel makes his desires clear in one of the first scenes. Arriving home from another winning appearance on Twenty-One, he is greeted by a streetful of neighbors cheering for him. “They love me,” he tells Toby, “for the same reason they used to hate me — because I’m the guy who knows everything.” We quickly learn, however, that the prize money is also a way for him to achieve financial independence from his in-laws.
Herb takes the dive reluctantly, and with great muttered frustration. His humiliation is broadcast nationwide when the producer demands that he flub a question about his favorite movie, 1955’s Marty. He goes along with this plan in order to remain viable as a television personality. Alas, this too is destined to fail. Stempel is soon told that the network rejected his name — and two others — from a list of 45 possible guests for a show about public affairs. “That big uncircumcised putz is on the cover of Time magazine,” he says, “and I can’t even make the top 42 for a panel show.”
This line has always resonated with me, as an aspiring writer who has never managed to get a book published. Watching interviews with mediocre authors on TV does not help my seething inflammation. At times my life feels like an ongoing demonstration of Flaubert’s maxim: “Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.”
Not that I consider myself a bad writer; I just don’t write things that The Gatekeepers of Culture™ consider profit-worthy. Fortunately I don’t have to earn a living from writing, and my career as an educator has provided me with a deep satisfaction that most working people would love to experience. Still, my yearning for widespread creative acclaim is passionate and unrequited.
I can relate, therefore, also to Goodwin, who describes himself as “a racehorse whose gate won’t open”. When his wife reminds him that he turned down a job on Wall Street, he says: “Money isn’t everything.” Once he starts pursuing the quiz show scandal, he becomes the noble crusader for justice, insisting: “We’re gonna put television on trial.” When he meets the Van Doren family, however, he becomes desperate to avoid besmirching Charlie’s good name, regardless of how guilty he may be. Goodwin is relentlessly hardworking and honorable, a depiction that may not have been fully warranted by reality. (His wife in real life, the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, apologized to one of her late husband’s associates, who did lots of work on the investigation but was not mentioned in the movie.)
Goodwin’s motives are the most simplistic of all the leads, yet he is not a flat character. He thrills to get the upper hand when battling with executives, insisting to Scorcese’s character: “Don’t worry, I’m just getting started.” No human is unburdened by ego, and whether we choose money or fame as a prime directive, we all need to feel appreciated and recognized for our excellence.
Men in particular, I think, have a special need for public acclaim. Surely women want it too, but the male ego lusts with a particular intensity for public recognition. Quiz Show is a film about men fighting for money, yes, but also respect and glory. It focuses on the desires and achievements of the men involved, despite the intellectual aspirations — every bit as worthy of cinematic depiction, I’m sure — of Goodwin’s wife Sandra and Charlie’s mother Dorothy Van Doren.
“Your name is mine”: Van Doren, pére and fils
Nowhere is the masculine preoccupation with ego more painfully rendered in Quiz Show than in the dynamic between Charlie and his father Mark. If Richard Goodwin is the film’s heroic champion — and Herbert Stempel the gangly foil — then Charles Van Doren is the self-sabotaging wunderkind. His tragedy is compounded (violently) by all of his privilege and good fortune. He was handed much of it, certainly, but he worked hard for his degrees and his career in education. It is Charlie’s status and role-modeling that causes Goodwin to hesitate; he doesn’t want to “ruin a man’s life”, as he puts it.
But Charles Van Doren digs his own grave. He knows that his actions are dishonest, even musing in the first meeting: “I’m trying to imagine what Kant would make of all this.” (The assistant producer Al Freedman replies: “I don’t think he’d have a problem with it.”) But when he’s on live television, considering a clandestine deception, he cannot help himself. It’s a question he answered correctly on the application quiz, after all. He decides Freedman is right when he says: “Just because we know you know, you still know.”
As with Stempel, money is an inducement but not the whole story. We watch Charlie’s classroom audience balloon from a few tired students to a packed throng of fans, spilling into the hallways and buzzing with excitement. He feigns a shoe-tying incident at one point, to better align his arrival for maximum public exposure. And these are not just excited young people — many of them are attractive women, including Calista Flockhart (Ally McBeal herself) gushing to the professor about John Keats.
And it’s not just his personal life. One newsreel depicts Van Doren unloading a huge mailbag of letters and cards, which he describes to Goodwin as proof that “kids are excited about books and learning — general knowledge”. He’s doing a lot of good, he’s sure. And as he quotes to his father from Merchant of Venice (Act IV Scene 1): “To do a great right, do a little wrong.” Charlie is not just trying to overcome an obvious atrocity with self-deception. I believe he is genuinely conflicted about his actions. This doesn’t make his choices proper or admirable, only complicated.
Charlie’s dilemma parallels the film’s examination of truth itself, especially in the adolescent age of television. The quiz show scandals were a big deal in 1950s America, because they revealed how little truth we were getting from “the box with colors”. It’s hard to remember, in our age of social media and pocket-sized supercomputers, how television back in the day was an illuminati eye in reverse. It was, in the words of Videodrome’s Professor O’Blivion, “the retina of the mind’s eye”. America saw things on TV it had never seen before, and this black mirror did not reflect a pretty picture through a glass darkly. As Stempel says: “That box is the biggest thing since Gutenberg invented the printing press.” Both he and Van Doren are willing to do whatever it takes — lie, cheat, and steal — to be on it. Was the white suburban TV audience naive, in need of a shocking wake-up call? Sure. But that doesn’t diminish the significance of the producers’ dishonesty.
By the end of the film, Charlie realizes he must come clean. Stempel has accidentally spilled the beans to his wife, inadvertently calling her a “sap” who was defrauded by his performance on Twenty-One. Charlie takes a more intentional approach when he finally confesses to his father. The scene where they wrestle for truth in the empty lecture hall is one of the most powerful images of the film; it forces us to question the very legitimacy of education itself. Who is worthy to shape young minds, and why? Every educator who has ever stood before a class understands the painful truth of Goodwin’s exchange with Scorcese’s pharmeceutical executive: “This is not about what I know; it’s about what you know.” “You don’t know what I know.”
Teaching is, at its core, a kind of shell game, where the educator knows the limits of their own knowledge yet somehow retains a superior position over the students, if only just slightly. When Marge suggests offering piano lessons to earn extra money in Episode 12 of Season 14 of The Simpsons, Lisa reminds her: “You don’t play the piano.” Marge replies: “I just need to stay one lesson ahead of the kid.” My students don’t need to know that I’m not familiar with the blancmange mentioned in the text, provided I can reach Google (and hide my screen) fast enough.
But education is not what struck me on my most recent viewing of Quiz Show. I’ve dug through those themes plenty of times. What smacked me in the face this time was Charlie’s earlier conversation with his father, a moment of selective exclusion.
At the height of his popularity, Charlie flees the city to spend the night at his parents’ country house. His father greets him in the kitchen. They share a slice of chocolate cake while discussing the TV show, the writing of books, and life. Charlie almost tells his father everything, but swerves at the last minute and changes the subject.
Here’s what I realized: Charlie cannot confess to his dad here, because he is getting from his father exactly what he so desperately wants from everybody else: respect and admiration for his performance on Twenty-One. Sure, Mark Van Doren has long congratulated his son for his academic (and literary) achievements. But has Charlie ever stood out in any way? It is this yearning for special recognition beyond merely competent teaching work — the same yearning I have — that keeps him on the path of dishonesty.
It’s a level of recognition that Charles Van Doren would never have gotten as a college professor. As Goodwin says: “The man is on the cover of Time magazine!” Without skipping a beat, Sandra shoots back: “Well he’s not going to be on the cover of Time magazine as Mark Van Doren’s son.” Ironically for my context, Quiz Show’s Van Doren published a novel before becoming an educator (there’s no evidence of such a novel in real life), but he decided he didn’t want to be another of “the world’s mediocre novelists”. Fittingly, it’s about a patricide.
How could Charlie make this dreadful choice, hurting his father so much, given all the privilege and prestige with which he grew up? One explanation, of course, is that he believes he deserves it. One need not look further than a recent First Family to see the corrupting effects of wealth and fame. But I think there’s more. Perhaps Charlie saw his father’s unremarkable level of public attention and could not accept the same fate for himself. Or maybe television — which would not have been a factor in the elder Van Doren’s self-image as a young man — corrupts Charlie.
Whatever the reason, Charlie is corrupted, and his father’s judgment is not painful only because they are close, but because Mark Van Doren is the adjudicator of truth here. A professor of literature, he knows that Keats’ beautiful urn is not the only way to consider life. Still, the knight is as the knight does. The elder Van Doren sees right through the web of self-deception and tells Charlie what he already knows: The time for truth has come.
And it couldn’t come quickly enough. After reading his statement — much of which is taken verbatim from the actual Congressional record — Charlie tells reporters he feels “relieved”. Just as with Goodwin’s uncle, Charlie has been running from himself, and knows that he cannot be satisfied while “getting away with it”.
Even after confessing, however, he’s not done. He’ll never be free from this blemish, no matter what he does. As the real Van Doren told Congress: “the truth is the only thing with which a man can live”. And the truth is that he committed this fraud willingly. It cost him his position at Columbia (although, despite the film’s end note, the real Van Doren did find other teaching positions) and he knows that his father will never look at him the same way again.
Education in My Blood, Dishonesty on the Books
Watching Quiz Show during my weekend of despair helped me reorient my perspective. Cancer killed my father when I was 16, so I never had many adult conversations with him. Nevertheless, I believe he would be proud of the man I am today. (My mother assures me of this on a regular basis, and of course I’m grateful for her pride as well.) I have never borne false witness in the life of my mind, occasional lighthearted classroom deceptions notwithstanding. I may be unknown in the official World of Letters, and the Gatekeepers of Culture™ may have no use for me. But I’m a damn good writer and a superb educator. My students speak highly of me, and I work hard to live with integrity.
My father was a mechanical engineer, but I did not absorb his scientific acumen. I inherited my mother’s schoolteaching genes, and I share a passion for philosophical literature with my father’s father. During science fairs in middle school, I dissected our Apple //e computer and helped my father create a computer control for a model train. (He did most of the work.) These were enjoyable moments of bonding, but it soon became clear that my brain just isn’t wired for scientific thinking. (I later fell in love with chaos and quantum theories, which I would have loved to discuss with him.)
One day in my youth, I saw an ad on TV for a Time-Life series of books about computers. I asked my parents for these books, and they gladly signed me up. When I did not dive into the slender silver volumes, however, my father realized that it was not an understanding of computers that appealed to me, but the calculator wristwatch that accompanied the order. He mentioned it only once, but there was ice in his words and shame in my heart. This episode bears just a slight resemblance to the Van Doren affair, but I have never forgotten the disappointment and sadness in my father’s voice.
I still have those books. I’ve moved them from Florida to Wisconsin, from apartment to apartment to small house to big house. They’re hopelessly out of date now, and I doubt I’ll ever read them. They are an albatross, I suppose, an attractive reminder to put knowledge ahead of gadgetry.
I am James Snodgrass
Watching Quiz Show — and considering the true stories on which it’s based — was a perfect reminder of what matters most in my life. Although I haven’t achieved the global fame I seek as an author, my life is very good. I have a right to be frustrated when the Gatekeepers of Culture™ slam doors in my face, but I will never sell my soul to gain access.
I do not believe that fame is only available to those who make deals with the devil. But flexible integrity is an easy path to celebrity. It’s not hard to summon examples of people who have debased and humiliated themselves for their fifteen minutes of fame. For every honest, hardworking Angie Thomas — producing work of beautiful authenticity and real value — there are a hundred Bhad Bhabies, polluting the world with insipid garbage. As hard as it is to remember in moments of egoistic crisis, I know that fame requires luck and personal connection, along with talent and hard work.
Perhaps, with regard to national interviews or piles of fan mail, I’m destined to be unlucky. And I need to be okay with that. It will give me more time to improve my writing, in the rare instance when another human decides to read it. (Perhaps I’ll be like Emily Dickinson; derided in her own time but adored after her passing.)
I tried to decide, this time around, which character I’m most like in Quiz Show. I’m not the ambitious go-getter Dick Goodwin. I’m Jewish and awkward like Herb Stempel, but not nearly so bitter or foolhardy. I’m a egomaniac like Charles Van Doren, but not so pompous — or knowledgeable about Belgian royalty. I’m a sarcastic scholar of literature like Mark Van Doren, but I have no son and my poetry is mediocre at best. I’m not a money-hungry executive like the Geritol salesman or the producers of Twenty-One.
In the cinematic universe of Quiz Show, I’m James Snodgrass, the contestant who helps Goodwin prove his case. Although fictional, this minor character is partly based on the actions of a real individual. In his 1988 book Remembering America: A Voice from the Sixties (upon which Quiz Show is largely based), Goodwin writes:
A young, impoverished, poorly briefed Greenwich Village poet realized, in the middle of his appearance [on The $64,000 Question], that he was being asked the identical questions put to him during an earlier private session with a producer. On air, watched by millions of people, he felt compelled to answer, but immediately afterward he accused the production team of fraud and angrily refused to return for his next appearance. He wanted no part of their phony quiz show. The producers were stunned. And they had a right to be. For in my entire investigation, I found no other individual who refused to participate. A man of principle, or a fool, he alone sailed against the wind. I don’t even remember his name, but I owe him a debt of gratitude, living proof that at least one man could cling to moral principle amid the wonderland of fantasy and greed.
In the movie, Snodgrass shows a similar kind of moral fortitude — one which conveniently helps the Hollywood intrigue of the plot. As a contestant on Twenty-One, he sends himself upcoming answers via registered mail. (Amusingly, the producer Dan Enright later asks: “Why would he do that?”, displaying a total lack of familiarity with motives beyond money and fame.) When Goodwin comes knocking on his door, Snodgrass is ready. Something he’s written long ago proves useful to the one person determined enough to search for it. He has one line, spoken as he hands over the envelope: “This is good.”
That’s me. I get to chuckle smugly and eat an apple during my four seconds of screen time. That’s it. No cover of Time magazine, no huge bags of fan mail.
Oh well — at least I’m not Stempel or Van Doren.
