Robert Aldrich’s Twilight’s Last Gleaming gradually
reveals itself to be seeped in imperial America’s driving contradictions: it amply
showcases the immense resources of both the military and the Presidency, their multi-faceted
responsiveness in the face of an emergency situation, but also reveals the confused
or absent moral and strategic purpose beneath, in this case harking back to a
secret document that demonstrates the effort in Vietnam was always known to be
hopeless, that indeed the hopelessness was largely the point, in demonstrating to
its enemies the country’s capacity to shed its humanity. In extreme contrast to
a present-day governing infrastructure that sublimates itself to Presidential
willpower, Aldrich’s film indicates the supremacy of what would now be called the
Deep State, the President accepting he may be collateral damage for the sake of
greater interests; this may have been idealistic even at the time, but even the
positing of it makes the movie a sobering monument to how far things have
fallen (it’s rather amusing that the President, played by Charles Durning, is a
particular accident of history, having won his party’s nomination only because
of an old-fashioned deadlocked convention). The film is meatily cast, inevitably
of its time in that the levers of power are entirely held by older men (mostly but
not exclusively white): Burt Lancaster persuasively weary and unkempt, preeminent
as a disillusioned former General and Vietnam POW who leads the hijacking of a
nuclear silo, the character’s back story illustrating another aspect of institutional
ruthlessness. Aldrich makes good periodic use of split screens in navigating
the multi-faceted narrative, and if the film often falls short of realism (the
final moments, played as stately and distanced, would surely in practice be marked
with chaotic urgency; more generally, the film feels oddly under-populated,
even tinny at times), it’s dramatically effective, and a lastingly fascinating reference
point.
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