Lost in the Movies: election series

Showing posts with label election series. Show all posts

Election Overlook

In lieu of an October Overlook, this is a survey of the twenty-five posts I fired off in response to election season. Get out the door and vote if you haven't already, but if you have, kick back and check out my election series. Feel free to jump in and comment; these issues will still be with us after today, and I'll respond to anyone who's just catching up with my blog now.

1. Countdown to the Election
"For the moment, politics will be our focus: the good, the bad, the ugly, and yes, on occasion, the idealistic too."

2. W.
"By the end of the movie, we still don't quite understand what's going on in that head, why things came to this point - but the man at the center doesn't really seem to understand either, and we're brothers in confusion."

3. Primary & 4 Days in November
"Ironically, it was the cameramen who captured Kennedy at the dawn of his presidential career who would have been most suitable to record its poignant sunset - along with the intimations of a dark, uncertain night to come."

4. The Candidate
"At any rate, it's difficult to imagine Obama pinning David Axelrod in a corner at an election-night victory party and pleading, almost plaintively (as McKay does in the film): 'What do we do now?'"

5. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
"Jefferson Smith, for all his initial naivete and incompetence, couches his idealism in American history, in the Constitution, America as an ideal, a set of principles, not a geographic land blessed by God out of some arbitrary favoritism. Though admittedly, he has been known to pal around with terrorists."

6. Can Mr. Smith Get to Washington Anymore?
"Smith, though 30, looks about 5-10 years younger. He's short, slightly awkward, and speaks with a high-pitched lisp. As he drives around in his little car...the candidate admits that even his parents and brother won't donate money to his quixotic campaign."

7. The Contender
"And, given the [Palin pregnancy], it was conservative Republicans who shrugged at a youngster's fornication, slapping a 'Shit Happens' bumper sticker next to the Jesus fish on their SUV."

8. The Weather Underground
"They declare a desire to 'bring the war home' but while Asian hamlets are being napalmed, they hold orgies in order to 'smash monogamy' and destroy any last semblance of bourgeois conservatism."

9. Mr. Conservative: Goldwater on Goldwater
"McCain could definitely use Goldwater's clarity of purpose and conviction. Say what you will about Barry, he lost by sticking to his convictions rather than abandoning them."

10. Fahrenheit 9/11
"The film stokes paranoia in more subtle ways than mere verbal insinuation. Its electric editing, pervasive musical score, and lingering slo-mo close-ups build a feeling of dread."

11. So Goes the Nation
"[John Kerry's] verbal contusions offered ample ammo for a glib Republican catch-phrase: audiences eagerly chant 'flip-flop, flip-flop' and even dress as man-size sandals to prove their point."

12. When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts
"In other words, despite his fierce anger and defiant attitude, there's an underlying longing for community and understanding that characterizes this film, and indeed all of [Spike] Lee's work."

13. Sicko
"[Michael Moore's] usual impulse is to storm the citadels of power with his camera and poke it into the faces of those who have devastated average lives...but he holds back. And cathartic as it would be to see him make the insurance company sweat, it would be easy and, in a sense, miss the point."

14. Maxed Out
"Maxed Out saw the storm on the horizon. Watching it today, about a year and a half after it was released, in the wake of the meltdown of the debt-based U.S. and world economy, is an eerie experience."

15. A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash
"One by one, alternative energy sources are considered and brusquely dismissed by the talking heads, especially by one young fellow who seems to delight in throwing cold water on every prospect for hope and a way out of our overreliance on oil."

16. An Inconvenient Truth
"Gone were the turtle suits of Seattle and Davos, replaced by a well-groomed (if slightly stocky) man in a dark suit, travelling around the world, one hand on his laptop like a post-Information Age, nonviolent, Tennessee-accented James Bond."

17. The Devil Came on Horseback
"As hundreds of thousands were killed and millions displaced, it dawned on the world that systematic genocide was taking place in Darfur. And Steadle was there to observe."

18. Inside North Korea
"On the North Korean side of the divide, two guards face one another, ready to shoot the other if he tries to jump over, while another guard stands further back, evenly between them, facing the other way in case someone tries to escape from that direction."

19. Iran: The Next Iraq?
"We see boy soldiers (some as young as 13, though they look even younger) primed for war and a Tehran fountain commissioned with red-colored water - it's supposed to flow with the 'blood of martyrs.'"

20. Frontline: The War Briefing
"Its title frames the issue as something the next president must focus on, and indeed after years of flirting with Iranian strikes, and dealing with the distracting mess in Iraq, we're back to square one: Afghanistan, the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and Pakistan."

21. Frontline: The Al Qaeda Files
"The image of bin Laden, with the long beard and robes, hidden deep in a cave somewhere on the outskirts of civilization, may frighten many Americans, but it seems supremely calculated to do so: it's an image bin Laden has created himself, not one he was born into."

22. Taxi to the Dark Side
"From a simple, almost thoughtless action, the jotting down of some comments, the typing of a memo from behind a comfortable Washington desk, thousands of people can suffer - and the depth of their experience has no correspondence at its root."

23. No End in Sight
"For Iraq, a war of choice in which we had all the time in the world to think ahead, postwar planning did not begin in earnest until two months before the invasion began. This boggles the mind, but it's only the beginning."

24. Iraq in Fragments
"Now that I better comprehend the big picture, Iraq in Fragments seems more vital, more important, than ever. It is important as an experiment with the documentary form, it is important as a document of Iraq, and it is important as a work of art in its own regard."

25. The Choice
"Both John McCain and Barack Obama have been lifelong tight-rope walkers. Now, at the hour of utmost need, McCain has fallen from his perch and Obama remains, teetering on razor's edge."

The Choice

It is, among other things, a tale of two cities. Or at least, that's how it starts. Not Chicago, not Phoenix, not Hanoi, nor even Washington. "Frontline: The Choice 2008" begins with the party conventions in the late summer of 2004. The Democrats gathered in Boston, one of the birthplaces of America, to reinvent their party and, they hoped, the nation. They would fail, but in that failure, they may have planted the seeds of their eventual success. How much of Obama's famous convention speech was hype, created after the fact by a media looking for The Next Big Thing? All I know is that I missed it, but upon arriving at my family's house to catch some convention coverage, my mother turned to me and said, "I just heard the future president speak." Obama evocatively, and shrewdly, stepped outside the partisan framework of recent elections to declare, "there is not a liberal America, or a conservative America, there is the United States of America!"

Meanwhile, the Republican gathering in New York City - wounded city, site of 9/11, but also big, bellicose, haughty - contained the seeds of division. Republicans lit into their opponent, cast the other side as unpatriotic and weak, and cultivated a sense of Red America rising up to crush Blue America (ironically, this was in the heart of Blue America itself). But though the party seemed united and boisterous in its quest to re-elect President Bush, there were seeds of division in the GOP as well. These were best represented by John McCain, a figure immensely popular with the public, but doubted and disliked by other Republicans. McCain strode onstage to deliver a martial, impassioned defense of his president focused on national security, but one can see in the tepid, strained faces of the audience that there's a disconnect. Nonetheless, McCain is present for a reason. Despite his dislike of Bush, despite his differences with the Republican Party, he has decided he wants to become the party's nominee for president the next time around. This is the first step in that direction.

Mid-decade, filmmaker James Longley took his small camera to Iraq, where he shot, directed, and sound-recorded, and later composed music for and co-edited, a truly fascinating movie. Insinuating himself into various Iraqi populations, he formulated a graceful, poetic film which feels as different from other Iraq docs as a verse feels from a newspaper article. Iraq in Fragments presents the documentary as art film, in an unusual but captivating approach. Much of the film has the feel of narrative fiction, but by sidestepping continuity - the cutting is impressionistic, the sound design musical, the photography close-quartered and graceful - the movie avoids most of the compromises inherent in documentary form. This is a good movie with which to draw my election series to a close, because it's a reminder of the humanistic and individualistic elements underpinning politics and world affairs...the soul in the body politic.

Iraq in Fragments exists in three fragments of its own. The first fragment follows a little Sunni boy in Baghdad - he has difficulty in school and works for a machinist who is alternatively tough-loving and physically rough. The second fragment does not focus on one individual but rather the collective passion of the Shiites in Iraq's South as they coalesce around Moqtada al-Sadr to discover their post-Saddam identity.The third and final fragment travels to the north, visiting with Kurdish peasants who bake bricks, herd goats, and rush to polling places when they get the chance to vote, hoping to stake a claim on their own land. Each fragment is poetic in texture, ranging from the distracted sadness of the little boy to the fierce, frenetic violence of the militias to the cozy pastoral lives of the Kurds. Form scrupulously echoes content and the free flow of impressions and experiences and images and sounds is liberating and indeed startling after experiencing so many informationally-focused documentaries.

No End in Sight is one of the best Iraq documentaries because it is isn't powered by justifiable rage but rather sheer disbelief and frustration. Its director, Charles Ferguson, ostensibly pro-war in 2003, does not focus too extensively on the reasons for going to war or even on the subterfuge involved in the preparations. This it leaves to other documentaries (whatever the motives, this plays as effectively as Michael Moore introducing the uninsured in Sicko and then announcing that the movie would not be about them). Instead, No End in Sight chronicles the unbelievably incompetent and damaging way that the arrogant Bush administration, and especially the Department of Defense, conducted the postwar reconstruction. Or lack thereof. Complete lack thereof. In World War II, the plans for postwar Japan and Germany were drawn up two years in advance. For Iraq, a war of choice in which we had all the time in the world to think ahead, postwar planning did not begin in earnest until two months before the invasion began. This boggles the mind, but it's only the beginning.

On December 5, 2002, an Afghan taxi driver picked up several passengers in the small city of Khost. The driver's name was Dilawar and he was a slight man (though 5'9," he supposedly weighed only 122 lbs). He was young, only 22 years old, and had a family in Yakubi, a small village, where he agreed to take the three men. Passing an American base which had earlier been rocketed, Dilawar's car was stopped by Afghan guerrillas guarding the base. Finding an electric stabilizer in the trunk of his car - which Dilawar claimed not to know about - he was turned over to the Americans and held in Bagram Collection Point, where he was interrogated as a suspected terrorist. On December 10, 2002, he was declared dead. He was the second prisoner to die at Bagram within a few weeks.

With the bogeyman spectre of Osama bin Laden lingering over the Western world's head, the threat posed by terrorism and Al Qaeda specifically - and Osama bin Laden even more specifically - sometimes seems almost metaphysical. John McCain likes to call it "an existential threat," which may be true in its own way, but also implies something unfathomable, almost abstract in its evil. What "Frontline" does, in this series of episodes aired between 1999 and 2005, is lift the curtain a bit and show us what lies behind the organization of Al Qaeda, the events of 9/11, and the terrorist attacks since then. It's a riveting, fascinating, and sometimes disturbing look at a culture often alien to Americans, and also sometimes weirdly familiar.

Ah yes, the "forgotten war." It's become less forgotten in 2008, as the candidates turn their attention from Iraq to Afghanistan, where a resurgent Taliban, an unstable Pakistan, and a weak Afghan government are reminding us of forgotten promises. This, the most recent episode of "Frontline," focuses on conditions in Afghanistan and Pakistan now, following soldiers in the line of duty, examining the tribal areas of Waziristan nominally under Pakistani control, and asking what we can do about it. Its title frames the issue as something the next president must focus on, and indeed after years of flirting with Iranian strikes, and dealing with the distracting mess in Iraq, we're back to square one: Afghanistan, the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and Pakistan.

Like "Inside North Korea," "Iran: The Next Iraq?" is a rather sensationalist TV program. It opens with a breathless analysis of Iran's nuclear capacity which bears a disquieting resemblance to the pre-Iraq buildup, and it closes with a look at different U.S. options including a pincer-like invasion from positions in Afghanistan and Iraq, which it acknowledges is unlikely. The bulk of the program details the history of Iran, which I would suspect comes from a previous program on Iran which ran on the History Channel. This is the most interesting and informative section, particularly when we come to the Iran-Iraq War of the 80s, in which the U.S. government supported Saddam Hussein as a proxy to keep Ayatollah Khomeini in check. We see boy soldiers (some as young as 13, though they look even younger) primed for war and a Tehran fountain commissioned with red-colored water - it's supposed to flow with the "blood of martyrs." All this is fascinating but tells us little about the complexities of the situation.

Update, November 2017: While I was rightly critical of this documentary's tone at the time, and remain wary of the DPRK government today, this nearly decade-old review now strikes me as far too credulous about all of the film's claims - and frequently too glib in its characterization of an entire nation. It remains as a marker of where I was in 2008 but I would advise readers to look elsewhere if they want a more well-rounded picture of this society and its relationship to the U.S.

Though an interesting idea, "Inside North Korea" is a rather slapdash production, the kind of thing you'll watch and be fascinated by on the History or Discovery Channel late at night, but which is too sensationalistic to really stand on its own. Of course, it's admittedly hard not to be sensationalistic when dealing with North Korea. A Stalinist prison camp shut off from the outside world, ruled by the whims of a madman, North Korea is so impoverished that satellite pictures taken at nighttime show it as an island of darkness while surrounding countries shine with the bright lights of civilization. And yet they have nukes, which is a cheery though (and why this doc is included in this series).

Above all, The Devil Came on Horseback is a portrait of impotence. Its subtitle could be "And There Was Nothing I Could Do About It," or more damningly "And Then We Didn't Do Anything." It documents the crusade of former Marine Brian Steadle who took a job as an observer in the Sudan in 2003. The brutal Islamic regime in Khartuom was winding down a civil war with Christians and animists in the south but something was beginning to happen in the western region of Darfur, where a rebel movement had sprung up to challenge the government. Arab mercenaries were riding into villages on horseback and slaughtering civilians - burning huts, raping women, killing children. These mercenaries, known as the janjaweed, often waited until government planes had finished bombing the villages, and according to their own testimony, Khartuom shared information and even directed them where to go. As hundreds of thousands were killed and millions displaced, it dawned on the world that systematic genocide was taking place in Darfur. And Steadle was there to observe.

In An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore and director Davis Guggenheim assemble a battery of evidence to prove global warming's impact and plead for action to arrest its malign effects. They do so with humor, grace, and a surprising amount of style. Writing about the film after its Cannes premiere in May 2006, Salon critic Andrew O'Hehir wrote, "It's difficult to imagine that 'An Inconvenient Truth' will change many Americans' views on global warming. Gore's track record as an environmental advocate is well known, and the film is not likely to play widely or well among the Fox News demographic. It may rally those of us who already agree with him to push the issue closer to the top of the national debate, and certainly that's a worthy goal." From the standpoint of 2 1/2 years later, we can already see that O'Hehir was overly conservative at best, and possibly just plain wrong. This has been one of the most influential films of the decade.

T. Boone Pickens, everyone's favorite takeover artist/swiftboater-turned-bipartisan energy guru (I thought he was just a harmless old geezer until I looked him up), likes to say that the energy crisis and the necessary solutions are issues of "national security, the economy, and the environment." There's a seed of optimism in this, the idea that by embracing clean and renewable energy we can kill three birds with one stone. A Crude Awakening, in sounding a dire warning about energy depletion and the coming blowback, largely ignores the national security and environmental aspects of the problem and foregoes a narrow focus on the economy to demonstrate instead how oil depletion would wreak havoc on our entire society, on every level. It's also anything but optimistic; in fact it's almost humorously dour when it comes time to answer the question, what next?

"And you know, I run into some very smart people in our Congress and I ask the question...so what's the long-term plan here, what happens when the bills come due? What [do] the grand thinkers have in mind here? And all I ever get is this sort of blank half-smile." -Liz Warren

While preparing this blog's election series, I noted that most of the documentaries out there dealt with foreign affairs. The few which stepped outside the bounds of national security and international relations tackled trendy issues like global warming, the energy crisis, and universal health care. But this year, the economy crept up on the election and suddenly, without warning, took it hostage. I didn't see any docs that dealt with the economy as a whole, but ran across Maxed Out on Netflix and though the emphasis seemed to be on credit cards rather than the national debt (though it promised to address that too), I figured it was a decent compromise. It turned out to be more than that - it is indeed the most prescient film I've watched so far. Unlike many other documentaries which race after current issues to record them before they've slipped into history, Maxed Out saw the storm on the horizon. Watching it today, about a year and a half after it was released, in the wake of the meltdown of the debt-based U.S. and world economy, is an eerie experience.

(The above image is of a woman delivered by the hospital, via taxi, to a community rehab center after she could no longer pay for her stay. They essentially dumped her on the sidewalk where, addled and still clothed in her hospital gown, she wandered the streets until someone found her and brought her inside. She is one of many - others arrived still in pain or with IVs in their arms.)

Sicko is not an electric, polemical masterpiece like Fahrenheit 9/11; it feels longer than that film, is not as formally original, and drags in spots. However, it is a far more mature work, more subtle, more focused, and ultimately just as devastating. As "entertainment," I prefer Fahrenheit, but I have more respect for Moore's work in Sicko; flaws and all, he nails the HMOs to the wall and asks basic moral questions that can't be evaded. It helps that the subject he's dealing with is a no-brainer: why on earth does the richest, most powerful country in the world have such a shitty health care system? Why should the incentive of health care providers be to avoid treating people? Why, years after these problems became apparent, are we still unable to impose a solution? It may seem that these are "easy" questions, that there's no bravery in asking them. But the fact remains that we are currently stuck with an inhumane, indeed inhuman, situation and however obvious it may seem that it's wrong, the fact of its existence requires an outraged critique.

Mournful, occasionally playful, angry, and as direct as its maker's trademark personality, Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke assembles footage of the disaster and interviews with its victims into an elegy for New Orleans, a testimonial of Hurricane Katrina, and an indictment of the government that looked the other way. Katrina was not only a disaster of epic proportions, it was a turning point in American history. It finally unmasked President Bush and his administration as clueless, incompetent, and careless, and forever sank the estimation of his presidency. It revamped the media, empowering them going into the following year's election; it effectively turned conservatives against the president; it sank Bush into a popular miasma from which he never emerged. But if these were the indirect fruits of the disaster, they provided no consolation for the miserable, the dispossessed, and the increasingly hopeless Katrina left in its wake. The movie ends on a hesitantly hopeful note, as the city's citizens vow to move on, but it's been three years, the roots and results of the problem have not been addressed (and are not being addressed in the current campaign) and it seems increasingly likely that the glum scenario of a dispirited, dissipated metropolis will continue for the near future.

As we pivot from Fahrenheit 9/11 to the election Michael Moore hoped to influence, let us note that his film did not have the desired effect. As we all know, Mr. Currently 20% Approval Rating joined the company of Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, and Dwight Eisenhower (and, hey, Richard Nixon) to win re-election. For some reason, I expected So Goes the Nation, a 2006 documentary about the 2004 election, to detail allegations of voter fraud and/or suppression in Ohio. Actually, though it appears to spring from a liberal perspective, So Goes the Nation places blame for John Kerry's loss on the Democratic Party, and its inability to get its message across. The entertaining doc cuts between a recap of the campaign and a daily countdown to Election Day in Ohio. I still don't know anything about irregularities in Ohio (the state which the whole election pivoted on), but So Goes the Nation makes a convincing case that if the Democrats want to win in the future, they had better take responsibility for their campaigns. They seem to have gotten the message.

Fahrenheit 9/11 achieves a more total immersion than any other documentary I've seen. Which is to say, it erases the distance between the audience and the material, the emotional remove that remains when we watch the news on TV. Fahrenheit 9/11 plays as a narrative film, a story unwinding before our eyes in the way all Hollywood stories unwind, complete with the appropriate formal tricks (cutting footage to echo the mise-en scene of a screen drama) and subtle manipulations (streamlining facts to fit a conventional narrative). In erasing this distancing effect, in adopting the tools of narrative fiction rather than exploratory documentary, Moore crafts a powerful work, as personal as any auteurist art film, as immersive as any escapist entertainment. He also disables our ability to think and critically analyze what we are seeing, fashions a work of sublime propaganda, and crafts an intensely manipulative, misleading, and demagogic pseudo-doc.

"One...two...three..." A little girl plucks the petals of a daisy. When she reaches the end, a freeze frame and a zoom in on her little face as a somber voice counts down. Cue the mushroom cloud. This notorious attack ad only ran once, but it got its message across. In 1964, word on the street was that Republican candidate Barry Goldwater was a warmonger. And if not that, then a bigot who opposed the Civil Rights Act. Or, at bare minimum, a radical outside of the American mainstream who declared proudly, "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice!" Today Goldwater tends to get a break from everyone: intellectual conservatives admire him as the founder of their movement, while liberals long for a man of the Right who considered abortion a personal matter and persecution of gays unseemly. Meanwhile, the Republican Party and the conservative movement is crumbling before our eyes. It's easy to hold up Goldwaterism as a noble principle from which the party has fallen, but as this movie reminds us, it's not that simple.

"You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows."
-Bob Dylan, "Subterranean Homesick Blues"

"We're against everything that's 'good and decent' in honky America. We will burn and loot and destroy. We are the incubation of your mother's nightmare."
-"J.J.", member of the Weather Underground, as relayed in The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage

"Dig it! First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into the victim's stomach. Wild!"
-Bernardine Dohrn, member of Weather Underground, wife of Bill Ayers, on the Charles Manson murders

"They knew they were crazy...Terry [Robbins] and Billy [Ayers] had this Butch Cassidy and Sundance attitude-they were blessed, they were hexed, they would die young, they would live forever, and at their most triumphant moment they would look over their shoulders, as Butch and Sundance looked back at their implacable pursuers, and say more in admiration than in dread, 'Who are those guys?' I believe they thought they looked cute, and that everybody would know it was basically a joke. The next minute, they were lost in it and couldn't get out."
-Carl Oglesby

"You don't need a proctologist to know who the assholes are."
-Popular saying amongst Students for a Democratic Society

Ah, the Weathermen. Who'da thunk we'd still be talking about them in a 2008 presidential election? But thanks to Bill Ayers, once a member of the defunct left-wing terrorist group, now a Chicago education reformer who has crossed paths with Barack Obama, the only domestic terrorist group to take its name from a Top 5 hit on the Billboard charts has become a household name again. The Weather Underground, an excellent 2002 documentary, is a decent starting point for anyone curious about the group; though somewhat sympathetic to the radicals (you won't find that Manson quote anywhere in the film) the upshot is that it solicits interviews from many of the Weather big shots. This offers a look into the group and its history which veers from funny to scary to pathetic, but is never less than fascinating.

The Contender is only 8 years old, but it's already a period piece. First and foremost it's about sexual politics and the politicization of private lives - not especially pertinent issues right now - but it's also about the way gender becomes politicized (or vice-versa) when judging leadership qualities. That is a pertinent issue, but in light of Hillary and Palin and the fascinatingly convoluted way culture wars have been playing out, the film's take on these matters seems somewhat simplistic. And when the film touches on other issues, it consistently favors those that are no longer a large part of the national discussion, and ignores those that are. If this all sounds critical, I should back off a bit. It's not the movie's fault that it hearkens back to the past (actually, I think a movie's "dated" qualities make it all the more interesting), and as a political thriller it's quite entertaining and engrossing. However, if its politics seemed somewhat obtuse in 2000, they now seem positively ridiculous.

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