The smartest person in the room
On "Broadcast News" and the weight of ambition
There’s a scene in the movie “Broadcast News” that always stops me in my tracks.
Brilliant network news producer Jane Craig (Holly Hunter) knows her best friend and co-worker, veteran reporter Aaron Altman (Albert Brooks), is the most qualified person to anchor a special report on a breaking news story. But a smarmy executive at the network overrules her, assigning deeply inexperienced, "mediocre white man failing upward" Tom Grunick (William Hurt) instead.
Jane urges the empty suit to reconsider, but he objects.
“It must be nice to always believe you know better, to always think you’re the smartest person in the room,” he sneers at her.
“No, it’s awful,” Jane says.
The way Hunter delivers the line, wincing a little, like a gut punch, gets me every time. It's as if she's saying: Isn't it obvious that it's unbearably bad?
That exchange popped into my head again a few nights ago, while going down an anxiety spiral about what I should be doing right now. Because I know exactly what it's like to be one of the smartest people in the rooms I've been in — and it is, in fact, awful.
I list the following personal facts, not as a means of boasting about how accomplished and exceptional I am, but to illustrate the opposite. My career and life trajectory is not uncommon, and these achievements are in large part because I don't know of any other way to live.
I graduated third in my class at a large suburban public high school in a mid-sized American city. I write it this way to underscore the ordinariness: Every year, there are scores of people like teenage me, at hundreds of high schools like mine, dotting every major metro area in this country. 14 years later, I now mentor a high school senior of a similar background.
I did quite well at and graduated from a prestigious university, so infamous for its rigor that there are tall tales and gallows humor slogans about it.
Two months before I graduated (almost exactly 10 years ago), I got a job at a national publication in a notoriously precarious industry, and survived 10 years and two more jobs.
The older I get, the more I recognize my fraught relationship to ambition. Not to be reductive (and certainly not to blame my parents — I want to be clear about that, in part because they are likely reading this), but much of it stems from being the only child of immigrants. Fear, risk aversion, and a scarcity mentality: this is what I know. Sure, some of these traits have served me well, and I grant that I'm writing about a Champagne problem. But ambition is a double-edged sword.
I had a vague sense that this period of forced unemployment might finally force me to reckon with my ambition, and give me a chance to slow down. Thanks to a sizable severance package (unionize your workplace) and 10 years of judiciously saving for this exact scenario (see "only child of immigrants" above), for the rare time in my life, I have the financial cushion to try to untether myself from ambition, at least temporarily. Could I just focus on teaching and working on my book (more on that soon, I hope), and that's it? (I acknowledge these are ambitious acts too — clearly, I have a hard time untethering myself.) But I keep shoving aside my brain's signals to rest and take a beat, instead launching myself into finding the next opportunity and trying to give myself an insurance policy.
How do I disembark from the train of ambition I've been on my entire life, even for just a stop or two? It was only in the last couple years — not just getting Job #3, but, tellingly, once I felt like I had proven I had earned it — that I took my foot off the gas a bit. But now, I'm back to feeling like I have to prove myself. The fear, the risk aversion, the scarcity mentality: it has all come roaring back. It never really left.
Periodically, I've written about how pop culture portrays ambitious women. In pondering this week's newsletter, I revisited this piece I wrote in 2020, which similarly opens with that "Broadcast News" scene. It then delves into more examples of ambitious women on screen that have been especially hard to stomach in the Trumpian age: "Election,” "Parks & Recreation," "Veep," "Scandal," etc. (Curiously, I ended it quite optimistically. I didn't know what was coming in 2024.)
Many of these shows and movies bitingly depict the bind of being an ambitious woman. But it's hard to think of any cultural depictions of ambition that actually show the "figuring it out" part (and yes, many of them are exclusively about white women). Sometimes, they're about a woman caught between professional ambition and a man (can she have it all??!). Or they're about a woman deciding to let go and embarking on a soapy self-help, "Eat Pray Love" journey, and after a vacation, she's cured! (And also, she finds a man — seriously, in too many of them, conventional romance plays an outsized role.)
Figuring it out takes time, and it's often uninteresting — and therefore, not very cinematic. On screen, if a protagonist is going through some transitional period, cue the montage set to a song! But in real life, you can't skip ahead to the part where everything's already resolved. I'm trying to remind myself that the answers will reveal themselves eventually, and that the "figuring it out" part isn't just a phase: it's life itself.
The other thing that fiction doesn't often acknowledge is how ambition is tied up with capitalism (would love to see a protagonist navigating this country’s mockery of a health care system). My fear, risk aversion, scarcity mentality: they're all based in reality. This is what capitalism requires. Each week, I like writing this newsletter because it can be whatever I want it to be. It doesn't need to have, say, a news peg or an SEO headline, or any of the things that a decade of working in digital media under late-stage capitalism has ingrained in me. Still, I wonder if I'm selling myself enough, or whether I've promoted this newsletter enough and on the right platforms, when I could just…not. Old habits die hard.
I love "Broadcast News" for so many reasons, most of which have to do with my line of work. Every time I revisit it, I notice that for a movie made in 1987, it doesn't feel as dated as you'd expect. A lot is still remarkably relevant: news as a product to be sold, as infotainment, as style over substance.
But even if the movie weren't about the news business, or if I weren't a journalist, there are few characters I’ve related to more instinctively and deeply than Jane, especially in that unforgettable scene. I've never seen the weight of ambition so succinctly distilled.
Thanks for reading. What are your favorite depictions of ambitious women on screen or on the page? Are there ones that actually acknowledge the realities of trying to untether oneself from ambition — without devolving into woo-woo self-help territory? Or anything else you want to say about any of this: reply, comment, drop me a line… and looks like you could use a cupcake.
I’ll need to watch Broadcast News. Thanks for mentioning it. Love the way you examined ambition through your own life and film. I’ve also had a reckoning with my own sense of ambition lately, so this piece resonates.