Guthrie had agreed to do the interview as a desperate final appeal. Someone, she kept saying to Kotb—someone must know something. She’s right. You can’t just make a person disappear. Another camera, an eye tuned to the subtle strangeness of an otherwise ordinary day—someone or something, somewhere, must have caught a glimmer of the truth. Among the public facets of Nancy’s disappearance is a frank, resentful, widespread incredulity at the failure of the technological apparatus that surrounds us so ungraciously, whether we like it or not. Many of us assume that we are, at this late date in the history of the world, almost totally surveilled. Our bodies pass from one camera’s jurisdiction to another, turning the city street or suburban road into a constant cinema of overlapping angles. What’s all this footage for, if not a scenario like this one? How can an elderly woman just be gone?
That question, no less baffling today than it was back in February, haunted Savannah Guthrie’s interview. She spoke in her usual strong, musical way, but there was also something mystified and hesitant in her tone. She relayed the story of her family’s tragedy almost tentatively, as if testing her own perceptions against the recollection of the audience at home. Was this really happening at all?
The surrealism of the interview—and of the circumstance that was its context—was heightened by the fact that both Guthrie and Kotb are exemplary exponents, even under so much pressure, of the “Today” show’s ethos and sensibility. Both women occasionally smiled through their tears, telegraphing poise and control more than an overflowing inner joy. As Kotb asked questions about Nancy, whom she sometimes affectionately called Guthrie’s “mommy” or “mama,” she seemed to brace herself, and Guthrie, too, for the inevitably devastating answer. They were narrating an awful and unresolved series of events, but also still doing the “Today” show—reassuring the audience by way of their softly displayed, endlessly professional command over the medium of television.
In the interview, describing the early moments of her mother’s absence, Guthrie explained the array of terrifying thoughts that occurred to her and to her siblings. Her brother, a retired fighter pilot, “saw very clearly, right away, what this was.” A kidnapping, he said, for ransom. “He knew.” Guthrie’s instant instinct was self-blame.
“It sounds so—like, how dumb could I be? But I didn’t want to believe. . . . I just said, ‘Do you think . . . because of me?’ ” Here, something cracked in Guthrie’s held-together performance. “ ‘Yeah, maybe,’ ” her brother responded. Guthrie gasped quickly for breath as she recounted the conversation. The warm studio lights and blurred background and pinkish couch now played in haunting counterpoint to the spectacle of a daughter relaying—and still pondering—the arrival of the darkest fear: having somehow, possibly, caused harm to her mother. Of course, this was deeply unfair. The blame, almost certainly, at least partially, belongs to the unconscionable entity caught on camera, gussied up like an ICE agent or a soldier on loan from a private military contractor. But simply naming the great fear and sharing it with the millions of watchers in living rooms and hotels and airport lobbies was a trial almost too painful to contemplate.
How did she feel watching the person on the Nest camera? “It’s just totally terrifying. And I can’t imagine that that is who she saw standing over her bed.”
Whenever the interview cut back to the “Today”-show set, members of the program’s cast—Craig Melvin, Carson Daly, Al Roker—emitted an audible groan of terror and sorrow for their friend. They, too, were participating in a professional exercise, however unprecedented. But, unlike Kotb and Guthrie, out there alone on the tightrope between total journalistic disclosure and the sensitivities of morning TV, they couldn’t really keep it together. Melvin—always the empath—looked ready to head home and cry. Daly, the former teen-pop monarch of “Total Request Live,” seemed to age decades before the camera’s eye.
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