Nixon’s monstrosity and his talent, at this point, were one: It was somehow not human to be this good at politics, this hard to get rid of. Scandals and losses hurt him but could not make him disappear. The antigovernment paranoia of early-to-mid-1970s American film is often described as a response to Watergate, but given the lag time—it takes months or years to make a movie—it is probably better to read movies like The Candidate (1972), Executive Action (1973), and The Parallax View (1974) as responses to the mere fact of Nixon’s election. Even more likely, they have little to do with him at all. They are responses to the murder of Kennedy, the machinations of the CIA at home and abroad, to Vietnam, to the growing power and secrecy of the corporate conglomerate.
When Nixon returned to politics in the late sixties, writers who sought to give him a second chance had to do so by assigning him a kind of ugly gravitas. “There was something in his carefully shaven face—the dark jowls already showing the first overtones of thin gloomy blue at this early hour,” writes Norman Mailer in 1968. “He had taken punishment, that was on his face now, he knew the detailed schedule of pain in a real loss, there was an attentiveness in his eyes which gave offer of some knowledge of the abyss, even the kind of gentleness which ex-drunkards attain after years in AA.”8 Even someone who does not know how Norman Mailer spent the early part of the 1960s can detect in these one-after-the-other clauses the deferred desperation of a man projecting.
That same year, a reporter for the Harvard Crimson who interviewed Nixon imagined the face in which Mailer saw a new, grizzled wisdom as a terrifying artifact of mass production, a face with nothing human left in it at all:
As he wrote, historical circumstances were already working to literalize this writer’s fantasy of “millions of synthetic Nixon-images.” On January 19, 1969—the day before the article was published—thousands of protestors staged a counterinaugural parade in Washington. One of them wore a Nixon mask, the nose of which he pretended to pick for twenty blocks. His commitment to the bit landed him in a New York Times report on the protest, the article being, it was later observed, “the first time a presidential mask was mentioned in newspapers.”10 Soon mass-produced, Nixon masks became Halloween favorites, outselling even masks of incumbent presidents during that holiday for decades afterward.11Robbers wear Nixon masks in the 1991 movie Point Break and, occasionally, in real life. The scene where an upsettingly young-looking Christina Ricci dons one to make out with an equally fresh-faced Elijah Wood, in Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm (1997), remains, in a film full of potent images of ravaged Gen X innocence, the creepiest, and the funniest. Citing these and other examples in his superb study Nixon’s Shadow, David Greenberg remarks, “The Nixon mask is powerful because it’s redundant—the mask of a man who seemed to be wearing a mask already.”12 It suggests the idea of a face that is simply stock faces, all the way down.