Show Notes
In this After Dark special, host Joshua Paisley speaks with Professor Steve Fielding about the 1972 Oscar-winning film The Candidate, released just months before Richard Nixon's landslide victory over George McGovern. Robert Redford plays Bill McKay, a handsome young radical community lawyer picked to run an unwinnable California Senate race against an 18-year Republican incumbent—on the promise that since he can't win, he can say whatever he likes.
Professor Fielding explains how the film reflects the fractious Democratic Party of 1972, moving left with candidates like Eugene McCarthy while Nixon peeled away white working-class Democrats on racial lines. McKay resembles Robert Kennedy and especially John V. Tunney, the real 36-year-old idealist who won California's Senate seat in 1970. The scriptwriter Jeremy Larner had worked for McCarthy, and director Michael Ritchie had worked on Tunney's campaign—they knew what they were depicting.
The conversation explores McKay's journey from principle to product. At the start, asked about busing to integrate schools, he declares "I'm in favour of it." By the end, he says "we need to look into it." His campaign managers cut his hair, change his ties, edit his factory visits into dynamic clips while suppressing footage of angry Black women at a community hospital. The film shows the alienating reality of 1970s campaigning—the distorted shopping mall speech where he can't see or hear his audience, getting punched in a urinal, ticker tape parades—all still closer to real people than today's complete abstraction through screens.
Professor Fielding reveals the real John V. Tunney lasted just one term before being swept out in 1976, predicting McKay would likely do the same—or quit in frustration, wondering "what am I here for?" The film's most depressing insight isn't that villains corrupt candidates, but that the process itself inevitably does. It ends with McKay's famous line after unexpectedly winning: "What do we do now?"—a question he can't answer because he's no longer the person he thought he was.
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