But One Heart–Broadcast News and My 2013

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Broadcast News, released in 1987, is my top film of 2013. 

For me, 2013 was a year of modest professional successes and spectacular personal failures. Sometimes even those failures feel like a twisted kind of success, a sign of progress after the near-total nonexistence of my personal life for the past several years, though I sometimes worry that those failures will relegate me back to a place of having no personal life again, now that I’ve demonstrated my absolute, all-encompassing incompetence in the realm of human connection and interaction. As Aaron Altman says in Broadcast News,

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2013 was also a year in which my personal and professional lives became powerfully intertwined, a time in which it seemed to become clear that almost nothing draws me to someone on a personal level quite like a profound professional respect. In her essay entitled Lines and Deadlines which accompanies the Criterion edition of the film, the critic Carrie Rickey quotes Edgar Degas as saying, “There is love and there is work, yet we have but one heart.” 2013 taught me just how true that is.

Of course, writing about games isn’t nearly as important as covering the news of the world. But I do think it’s important. Games make meaning, and I think it’s important that coverage of games engage with the meanings games make in ways that are substantial and challenging. Sure, there’s plenty of room for fun and entertainment and silliness in games coverage. But there are also ethical standards and responsibilities to consider. I wouldn’t feel good about working for a site that I felt consistently reinforced the notion that games are exclusively for young men, for instance, or that never questioned the glorification of violence in so many games. In Broadcast News, you see the camaraderie among the staff at the Washington, D.C. bureau of a nightly news broadcast. You feel the energy in the room when they’re broadcasting live. And though it’s different, I understand those feelings. I know the laughter that rings through my office, the sense of camaraderie, and the shared passion for the work, the sense that even if we’re talking about games, we can do it well, with standards, and every once in a while, we can say something that matters. 

Broadcast News takes place at a time of great change for the business of broadcast news. Producer Jane Craig (Holly Hunter) and reporter Aaron Altman (a phenomenal Albert Brooks) represent the old guard. New to their team is Tom Grunick (William Hurt), who can’t write well and isn’t very bright, but sure is handsome. Aaron mocks the importance placed on appearances in the industry…

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…but there’s no denying that a charismatic anchor helps bring in the viewers, and that you need to be aware of things like this in the ratings-driven business of network news. Adapt or die. 

Things are always changing. In the world of game coverage, there’s a greater emphasis being placed on video these days. As someone who considers herself a writer first and foremost and who knows that she has no hope of ever winning over the Youtube crowd, this sometimes makes me anxious, and leaves me wondering if I have a future in this industry. But there’s no denying that video is a powerful and increasingly important way to reach people. Adapt or die.

I was going to write a lengthy appreciation of this extraordinary film, this film in which concerns about ethics and systems and structures and concerns about the complexities of how we relate to and connect with each other as people, as friends, as lovers, are so expertly intertwined. This film that understands just how political the personal really is. But I can’t do it. I don’t have the words, right now, to articulate just how good and true I think this film is, or what it means to me.

It has something to do with the feeling I get when watching the film that though the three main characters are sent their separate ways by the movie’s climax, and end up, seven years down the road, married with children (Aaron) or engaged (Tom) or dating a new guy (Jane), that for all the ups and downs of their time in Washington, for all the pain and the upheaval, it must have been a golden time in their lives, a time they will always look back on wistfully. And I think of my life, these years here, this time now. This is that for me.  This may be my life at its most piercing and complex and immediate.