Last night I saw Frost/Nixon and I loved it for one reason (and this reason sounds annoying, but I promise that it's actually not): because it is a perfect demonstration of what Baudrillard wrote about Watergate, namely, that the real subject of the coverup was the system of government itself, that the break-in at the Watergate hotel is a minor crime compared to, say, the megastructure of the oil lobby (or, if you're asking me, the invasion of Cambodia)—but that, by its punishment, it became a way for all kinds of people (including and especially the journalists of the Washington Post) to claim and to believe that American government had gotten a sorely deserved moral reboot. When in fact nothing of the sort had happened. When in fact a little boil was lanced from a cancerous body and everybody celebrated as if a cure had been discovered. It's not hard to see how the cancer has kept right on in subsequent administrations.

The way I see this in the movie is in its quiet insistence that Frost's victory was a Pyrrhic one, or that anyway, what they had going was basically a duel between two men in a forest. It was a great duel, no doubt. But in some ways it had no larger meaning than to declare a winner between two small-time losers. They were reduced to their fates by television—early in the dialogue Nixon talks about how Watergate reduced all his accomplishments to the point where they ceased to exist; the left-wing author gunning for him closes the movie with the very same wording about television, about how this television interview had the effect of reducing both men to a single moment. (Even the post-credit info sequence declares that Frost basically never did anything important again.) But the real dual coverup written into the film (based on Peter Morgan's play) is the nature of Frost and Nixon. The film shows them in their fullness even in their moment of reduction. Some of the most incredible acting ever recorded on film happens on Frank Langella's face without any words at all in the long moments when Nixon is about to confess. The film may argue against television, but it argues for film.