“BUILDINGS” ROMAN: Garage Freaks & Film Geeks
I was walking back to my dorm one night when I saw two silhouettes standing on the roof of a campus parking garage. The shadowy outlines of the figures and the greenish hue of the streetlights immediately brought one thing to mind: All The President’s Men (1976).
It was, admittedly, a bit of an odd first thought. It’s not like the movie was my first exposure to parking garages. I’d consider myself quite well-versed in the nature of parking garages; I walked through one every weekend of my middle school years, visiting my brother in the hospital. Maybe that’s why the setting of the garage in the film resonated with me; my personal experience with them was already tinged with the liminality and dread of being twelve years old in a precarious personal situation. It wasn’t too much of a leap to apply those same feelings to being thirty years old in a precarious national situation.
Parking garages aren’t places you linger. They are, by their function, transitory. You only stay in a parking garage for as long as it takes you to walk between your car and the exit. There’s nothing else to do, nothing to look at. Just pillars of concrete, sans-serif signage, and big arrows practically begging you to leave. You can’t stay there forever. There has to be someplace you go to once you leave, something that comes next. That’s why Woodward meets with Deep Throat in the garage: he needs to get the investigation un-stuck. He needs to get out of the garage.
The two of them are shrouded in darkness, with rich, deep shadows hiding the face of Woodward’s informant. Even with this sense of anonymity and disguise, they cannot escape the fact that they are not meant to be in the garage like they are. Woodward flinches at a car driving past, possibly the single most likely thing one might experience in a parking garage. He is strikingly vulnerable without a car to sit in, a vehicle to be driving—he is not “coming from” or “going to” anywhere. He is a man, standing still, trying to figure out what comes next.
It’s not revolutionary to say that Watergate has been mythologized as a kind of national coming-of-age tale, the loss of innocence of an entire country. Nixon’s cover-up set off a fireworks display of political cynicism that has only gotten bigger and more dangerous over time. Presidents and political figures openly admit to the kinds of things that once made Nixon resign. Journalism is full of pay-walled articles and clickbait headlines. The political environment feels impossibly bleak. As much as Watergate resonates, it can’t help but seem nostalgically simple.
Pakula’s filmmaking carries a similar emotional resonance. His “Paranoia Trilogy”—All The President’s Men, The Parallax View (1974), and Klute (1971)—all share an obsession with surveillance that seems like a fledgling incarnation of the current cultural atmosphere. In an era of social media apps selling our data, generative AI training on our conversations and art, and the ever-present threat of our own digital footprints, I only wish it were as easy to outmaneuver surveillance as it seems for Woodstein: blast some Vivaldi and communicate through a typewriter where the government can’t hear you. Instead, I have to navigate through Instagram settings to turn off targeted ads, turn off location sharing and biometric data, and keep all my social media accounts anonymous or set to private—usually both. Encryption, VPNs, ad blockers—none of it helps when Instructure gets hacked and our Canvas data gets held for ransom.
Everyone I know is confused and lost—how did we get to this point? How are things going to end up? Nobody knows. For the moment, we’re all stuck in this big parking garage we call America, trying to figure things out. Like Woodward and Deep Throat, trying to answer that first question. Like those two people I saw as I walked back to my dorm, looking up at the stars, trying to answer the latter. Our perpetual coming-of-age, both national and personal. And the real question, the one we ask ourselves every day: how do we keep going?
You can’t keep going in the parking garage. If you try, you’ll just wander up and down the ramps forever, going mad, clutching your parking validation like it’ll save you. You have to get out. You have to do something. Whoever’s watching you, you have to watch them right back. And as Bradlee says, you have to get your ass back in gear.
