Critics have dubbed Robert Red-ford's recent film Quiz Show as a modern morality tale and testimonial to America's loss of innocence. Thus far reviews have ignored the film's underlying witness to the changing loyalties in the nation's soul. In 1959, television had yet to become the primary medium by which the public acquired knowledge and truth. Redford's rendition of the "Twenty-One" game show scandal documents television's victory in craftily achieving this status of power.
In the final and most telling scene, congressional investigator Richard Goodwin watches helplessly as NBC and Geritol associates dodge justice while "Twenty-One" star Charles Van Doren confesses and suffers the blame alone. As one senator offers shaming words, the senate chamber reverberates with chastising applause, falling upon Van Doren like so many cracks of the whip. Hence the disgrace of 50 million duped viewers is heaped upon the hero-turned-criminal. For them the result is a reattained state of justification, as well as a swift restoration of trust in the medium of television (if ever there were any doubts).
For Van Doren it means losing his Columbia instructorship and accruing humiliation for doing what many of the viewers might have done. Although we no longer throw real stones, the results are still the same: Justice rolls off the back of the NBC executives and television gets off unscathed.
The film makes much of corruption in big business and apathy in Congress, but why spend two hours restating these assumptions? Perhaps corruption and apathy also lie elsewhere. Indeed, if television can successfully win over the allegiance of the American public in the face of an unforgivable exercise of power and technique, society may very well be nearing apotheosis.
At its close the film suggests something that augments the theme of responsibility. Off-camera the voices of NBC and Geritol executives justify the means by the ends: "We're not exactly hardened
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