Is it just me or did the revelation of W. Mark Felt as Deep Throat feel like a letdown? After waiting over thirty years to find out the identity of the source that helped bring down the Nixon administration, to see this doddering old man waving feebly from his doorway was a big disappointment.
Where was the tease of a lead-in? "Now that Deep Throat had decided to step forward, who could it be? TUNE IN TOMORROW!"
There should have been a mighty pronouncement that ended with gasps of shock and portentous musical punctuation of DUNH-DUNH-DUNH!
Where was the oomph? Where was the huzzah? Where was the big "Ta-DA!"?
You would have had that if Martha Mitchell had been unmasked as Deep Throat. Or her husband John. But Mark Felt? Even in his prime he doesn't look like he had the dramatic punch for the role; he doesn't seem worthy to carry Hal Holbrook's trenchcoat.
Maybe I've been spoiled by the political intrigues as well as the great casting to be found in shows like 'The West Wing', '24', 'Alias', and 'The X-Files'. And that's just Tooborld! Think of all those suspenseful movies full of governmental cloak-and-dagger.
But as the Number Two man in the FBI at that time, Felt's name was on everybody's list of suspects, and Haldemann even discusses the possibility on the Tapes; he actually states right out that he knows Felt is the guy.
(Wherever he ended up for his Big Hiatus, I wonder if HR is crowing ot his fellow souls that he was right.)
So does this mean that Hollywood will come calling now for a chance to tell the Mark Felt story? And who would play the man? Obviously they can't ruin the story with stupid casting for a younger demographic, say by hiring Keanu Reeves to play Felt. And that might also mean this is a made-for-TV movie - just fine by me!
A preliminary off-the-top-of-my-head type of suggestion would John O'Hurley, the guy who played Mr. Pederman on 'Seinfeld'. That's just based on the superficial look of both men.
Here's another tangent more in keeping with Toobworld - did Watergate happen in the dimension of 'The West Wing'? How far back in their presidential timeline do you have to go before they are re-aligned with that of the main TV Land?
Counting backwards, here are the Presidents of 'The West Wing':
Josiah Bartlet (interregnum: Glenallen Walken)
Owen Lassiter
D. Wire Newman
By my reasoning, that puts the fictional timeline back to about the Carter years. So it could be that Nixon's administration is common to both worlds.
But maybe Watergate never happened in the 'West Wing' universe. Or - if it turned out that this was the "evil mirror universe", - maybe the conspirators of "CREEP" never got caught. And with that kind of seismic change to History, a new dimension was born and W. Mark Felt remained a small footnote to the chapter on the Nixon Years.
However, if it did happen, how would they reconcile the fact that we know now about it during the Bush administration? Do the staffers in Bartlet's administration continue pondering whom it might be, or did the revelation take place in an earlier presidency?
Ah well. late night ramblings. But at least I'm at work so I'm getting paid for them! Woo-hoo!
BCnU!
Tele-Toby
I, too, thought Felt was something of a letdown. I was wondering if it had something to do with the fact that I wasn't even alive during Watergate, but perhaps I'm wrong.
ReplyDeleteWith regard to The West Wing's split from the main universe, I always speculated Watergate was actually key to this. This is the theory that I concocted: Nixon resigned in 1974, two years into his second term in office. Instead of just having Vice President Ford serve out the rest of his four-year term, the people call for a "recall" election of sorts, allowing a new presidential election to take place in October 1974, or perhaps a little later given that there only would have been three months to put together a national election. This would explain the two-year offset of WW's elections versus our own. So, instead of having Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II, other people such as Newman, Lassiter, and Bartlet are in the right places at the right times to win their parties' nominations and eventually their presidential races. I think the theory fits, given that Nixon is the last "real" president we have seen on WW (not counting the documentary special episode, of course). However, I don't know about the legality of a national recall election. I just figured that the Constitution could have been quickly amended to allow such a possibility, if it's not in there already (and I don't think it is).
Now, don't ask me about the timeline of 24. It's really screwed up, since apparently six years have passed between Day 1 and Day 4, which would place up sometime in 2006.