Famous playwright and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin has always been great at explaining motivation. In his TV series The West Wing, President Josiah Bartlett and his staff believed that moving the ball forward politically would mean a more just, economically sound, and tolerant society. The president, some speculated, also was driven to try to impress his father. The baseball players in the Sorkin-penned screenplay for Moneyball wanted to win games. In The Social Network, Mark Zuckerberg became king of Facebook due to personal insecurity and a desire for social prestige.
The Trial of the Chicago 7, Sorkin’s preachy and all-over-the-place new film (screening in certain theaters and arriving on Netflix today), largely fails because it avoids a direct accounting for the motivation of its characters. For to do so would be to uncover some very uncomfortable truths about the American left, radicalism, and the 1960s—truths that Sorkin, who both wrote and directed the film, would rather not face. The most obvious is that many of the activists from that tumultuous and overly exposed era were Marxists and radicals out to destroy the United States. After all, we are talking about people who bombed federal buildings and brandished the flag of the communist Viet Cong, whom Americans were fighting at the time. David Horowitz’s magnificent memoir Radical Son exposes the violent criminality of the protest movement, particularly that of the Black Panthers.
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