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George Clooney's Good Night And Good Luck

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“Good Night, and Good Luck is George Clooney’s warning to today’s post-9/11 YouTube culture that civil liberties and rights can slip away with mass hysteria”
- (Caulfield, 2007).

George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck (2005) is a huge alert and warning to todays post terrorist attack (of the Twin Towers in 2001) society, in which civil liberties and human rights of each and any person can slip away as an effect of mass hysteria. The core of Clooney’s approach is the idea that sometimes journalists need to go beyond simple and exact reporting and offer some more in-depth interpretations on current affairs. He stresses the tensions caused by post-war paranoia and threats made against a country through his portrayal of the acting and characterisations, …show more content…

George Clooney has shown the fear and paranoia that surrounds McCarthyism and all that Senator Joe McCarthy stood for, during his time of (so-called) power. The acting and characterisations in the film steer the point of fear and paranoia to show the actual feelings and emotions of people during this period of time. The uninviting, distant and desperate expressions of the characters when reporting on See It Now convey this very idea. The pronounced and dramatic acting from the characters in the film is abundant with extended eye contact and strong delivery of the lines, which are combined on the news show to describe and clarify the fear of McCarthy and his impact on society. The reason of fear of McCarthy was that he was accusing people of being communist, having communist connections and being communist sympathisers. This was not a good look to have and was frowned upon if these accusations became true. The film successfully demonstrates the overwhelming fear of the employees of the CBS television broadcasting company being accused as communist sympathisers. Whilst the film was produced in 2005, it is shown in black and white as a way of relating it back to the period of McCarthyism; making it seem as though it was actually of that …show more content…

Mass hysteria is defined as an imagined or assumed threat that causes physical symptoms among a large number of people. It’s a fear that grips a large group of people because of a potential danger to the well being of their society. This is a short-term event that may or may not have one specific cause and sometimes, there is no real explanation for why it happens; it just does (Study.com, 2015). In particular, the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers created an enormous amount of hysteria in the United States and around the world. Shortly after the incident, the whole world had come to know about the terrible tragedy; it had spread across to every nation. This occurrence led to a crazed population with fear and paranoia running rampant through their minds. America, as well as other countries, fell into such a state of paranoia and fear of more terrorist attacks that their trust started to shatter. They began to crack down in airports with security searches, looking for in particular, people with Middle Eastern features, for the possibility that they were terrorists. As a result of the Twin Towers incident, countries all around the world became frightful of what could possibly happen to them, leading them into what its called as mass

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