Best of Enemies (Morgan Neville/Robert Gordon, 2015)

I usually find little I feel like watching on in-flight entertainment, so on yesterday’s trip back to the UK I was happy to discover ‘Best of Enemies’, a recent documentary about Gore Vidal and William Buckley’s famous televised debate during the 1968 Democratic Convention, among the available choices. The debate might seem an unsustainably slight subject for a 90-minute documentary, but the film offers a consistently entertaining wealth of detail about the two antagonists and the debate’s political and cultural context, perhaps even shooting off in too many directions and leaving certain tantalising questions unanswered. Did Buckley come to regret the homophobic insult he notoriously wielded against Vidal after being called a ‘crypto-Nazi’, or simply that he lost his cool? What was the truth of Vidal’s accusation that Buckley had distorted his military record? Marshalling a chorus of talking heads sympathetic to both sides, the film makes grandiose claims for the pivotal biographical and cultural importance of the debate, which isn’t always entirely convincing: is it accurate, for instance, to implicitly tie Buckley’s regrets about his behaviour to interview footage of a rueful older Buckley longing for death? What gives the film most substance though is the assertion that the debate, in setting up a spectacular confrontation between two irreconcilable culture warriors, anticipated a contemporary media culture in which reportage or more constructive argument have given way to showy slanging-matches between well-entrenched viewpoints and the vituperative bon mots of polished pundits. The assertion is interesting and, up to a point, convincing, but it fascinates most in also highlighting the differences between Vidal and Buckley and today’s media personalities. I’m saying this as a big fan of Vidal’s writing, but it seems remarkable today that two such preening monuments of East Coast sophistication and mannered articulacy could have commanded such widespread public interest – Buckley in particular being a caricaturist’s dream of ostentatious verbiage and odd behavioural tics. If the film doesn’t quite justify the assertion broached by one commentator that Buckley was a master at demolishing his opponents’ arguments, with much of what he’s shown saying here seeming simply ad hominem or mean-minded, watching the film did make me kind of wish he could be our right-wing hate figure du jour.