I’ve wanted to write about something along these lines for over a year now - after seeing Vice at the start of 2019. This is a very loose Films With Great Backstories: another lockdown special, if you will, because not by accident did I spend many, many hours in these past few weeks thinking about mis-direction and how much we can ever trust our leaders.
I earn a living working in marketing, writing copy for arts and music venues. This often means writing copy for events that haven’t happened yet, or may be a total one-off and never happen again. You have to build hype and a spin on something that doesn’t exist yet - and then guess ahead further, to how it might make someone in attendance feel. Usually this means combining images with a press release and a playlist, as well as an understanding of the context the artist comes from. The components to build a story are all at hand. I turn it into a story I know our audience will want to hear.
Which is perhaps why I have collected this odd group of media together - a few films, two TV series, a handful of documentaries, a few books. In my mind, they each do an incredible job of shining a light on facts, conversations and moments in history that are deliberately obscured. They help interpret issues that resist interpretation. And by doing this, they perform an infinitely more difficult trick than the one I am faced with on a daily basis: they fill in the gaps of information that has been kept hidden, or break down unnecessarily complicated systems to allow non-experts to understand.
What I applaud each of these projects for is stepping out into the headwind of stories that are (almost) impossible to tell. These films and media take concealed facts and bring them together into a compelling narrative. I’ve read comments from so many people saying the majority of the narratives below are too complicated or they couldn’t keep up. I think we all know that that’s exactly what some people in power want us to think. That’s why they do this in the manner they do. But it’s never something that’s addressed, so it’s easy to forget we live with that assumption.
For good or for bad, I’ve come to realise I am one of those people who needs a narrative and human stories to better understand elements of society. Maybe that’s what we all do. What worries me is we’ll be left waiting until someone funds an expose on Dominic Cummings and Boris Johnson and what is currently going on behind the scenes. By then the statute of limitations on publicly holding both of them accountable may have passed.
So for the past few days, I’ve been leaning into the confusion. I thought back over this collection of media, and how I’d compare the tactics employed with what I’m seeing in the news right now. I asked myself if I thought Dominic Cummins et al would be above similar tactics. I believe we’re being sold something quick-to-outrage because the reality beneath it is much worse.
To note: This is nothing like an exhaustive list - consider it a mini season of discontent. I would love to hear your recommendations too.
There are a few spoilers dotted around.. not sure if they warrant a warning…
The Wolf of Wall Street, 2013
You’re likely familiar with Martin Scorsese’s deliciously dastardly The Wolf of Wall Street. Oh for the power of hind sight. This film gives us a great explainer of penny stocks and Jordan Belfort’s pump and dump scheme. It manages to entwine incredible performances from Leonardo DiCaprio, Matthew McConaughey and Jonah Hill with a searing take-down of Wall Street culture in the late 1980s and capitalism. You’re rooting for Belfort as much as you kinda wanna learn he did die on that yacht in a Mediterranean storm. And, thanks to some masterful explainers, you understand enough of the incredibly complicated mechanisms of stockbroking to know he’s a bad guy.
But did you know the making of the film is almost as unbelievable as the story? This is a brilliant article in to the almost-too-strange-for-fiction tale of how The Wolf of Wall Street was made. It gets pretty complex but keep reading - it’s kind of Fyre Festival-terrifying. And yes, it does require asking, ‘who will play Leonardo DiCaprio in THIS?’
Vice, 2018
If The Wolf of Wall Street could make investment fraud understandable for laypeople, it paved the way for The Big Short (2015) and Vice, both directed by Adam McKay.
In one of The Big Short’s opening scenes, Anthony Bourdain is recruited to explain collateralised debt obligations. A genius move.
Vice didn’t do that. And that’s something I love about this divisive film: how unwatchable it is.
Do you know how difficult it is to remain engaged with Vice? The Wolf of Wall Street has Leonardo Dicaprio carrying our attention. Vice has Dick Cheney, played by Christian Bale. Following the former U.S. Vice President from the 1960s up to the George W Bush era of 9/11 and its aftermath. Writing for the Guardian, Peter Bradshaw described Bale’s performance as “bland magnificence”.
I realised halfway through the bizarre two hour feature (probably when the film credits role up for the fake ending…) that I am not used to being emotionally invested in a someone that purposefully gives so little entertainment for the screen. IRL, Dick Cheney relied on this tactic too. As Variety explains…
“Cheney was the ultimate stealth power player — the mild-mannered functionary of burn-it-all-down conservatism. Christian Bale nails the Dick Cheney persona — dry, pointed, deceptively dull, invisibly passive-aggressive, a blank with a hint of a growl — and does it with a playful bravura that could hardly be more perfect.”
Deceptively dull is definitely it. Vice argues that Cheney was a man accustomed to being sidelined, used to working in the shadows. Slightly out-of-shot is where he did his worst.
Widely considered the most powerful vice president ever, Cheney was a political insider who placed loyalists in government, set up Guantanamo Bay detention camp, authorised shooting down planes on 9/11 and made controversial use of intelligence to justify an invasion into Iraq.
“McKay’s wacky structural alienation-effects and meta gags are more pertinent here, and the dialogue is far more smoothly managed: there is a nice fantasy scene in which Cheney and his formidable wife Lynne (played by Amy Adams) switch into Shakespearean dialogue, as a comment on the laconic, tongue-tied nature of real life.”
That scene pretty much made my skin crawl, but it’s in there for good reason. We’re told by Vice’s narrator (Jesse Plemons) that we, the audience, cannot ever really know what happened when Dick Cheney was talking to Lynne about taking the running mate offer made by George W Bush. We are told that we can never know if they spoke in Shakespearean dialogue or not.
Even if you didn’t like the film or CBA to watch it, maybe give this Vice review by the LA Times a read:
“Whatever its merits as film art, “Vice” deserves a special public service Oscar for Best Depiction of a Wayward Constitutional Theory in Film award. Whatever its flaws, the movie shines a light on the most tendentious yet consequential constitutional theory of our time. In the hands of our current president, this theory is a loaded weapon pointed at the very essence of our three-branch governing system.”
I don’t know whether this film is good or bad. Many of the reviews criticise McKay for not being able to decide if his film was a drama or a comedy - I mean, I still don’t know what to make of the intense musical number that didn’t even make it to the final cut. Perhaps McKay doesn’t know because all of this is so close to home. Reading beyond ten reviews of Vice made my eyes hurt. But Dick Cheney got away with a whole lot, in plain sight, because he was not a very interesting man to give your undivided attention to, and he knew it.
Do we resort to bizarre tropes and methods as the world becomes increasingly absurd?
The Good Wife, 2009-2016
It would certainly appear so with The Good Wife and The Good Fight. Both legal and political drama series, The Good Wife follows the life of Alicia Florrick after it emerges her husband, the Cook County State's Attorney, has had an affair. Florrick returns to work as a junior litigator at the law firm Stern, Lockhart & Gardner. The initial premise was based on writers Michelle and Robert King looking to create a series that focused on the wife of a high-profile politician following a public sex scandal - citing President Bill Clinton and North Carolina Senator John Edwards as inspiration.
The Good Fight is a spin off, also created by the Kings. It follows Diane Lockhart, the named partner at Florrick’s firm, and begins the day President Donald Trump is voted into office.
I love both of these series, namely for handling topics I have barely seen covered with such depth in other media - and for how much these series embrace the absurdity of modern life.
The Good Wife was especially brilliant at dramatising NSA wire-tapping and the murky world of post-9/11 law, when Florrick’s firm takes on the case of an American citizen who claims to have been imprisoned and tortured by the U.S. military in Afghanistan.
(I have looked for clips of this online but can’t find any! I recommend just watching the whole thing…)
I can’t think of another programme to show the farce of redaction, or in fact many aspects of US law and US military law, so effectively and creatively. What I would give to see them dramatise Cummings’ escapades…
This is the closest thing I could find for some analysis… a brilliant guided tour by the Financial Times’ David Allen Green, arguing that Cummings statement helps to “explain, or explain away” his behaviour.
The Good Fight, 2017-
If The Good Wife began to embrace more unusual, creative methods of story telling in its later series, The Good Fight took that ball and ran. No longer restrained to broadcast TV (The Good Fight airs on CBS’s All Access streaming service), absurdist, bombastic, bizarre-o comedy and drama is The Good Fight’s MO, and in the first few series, this was used to brilliant effect.
“Some of [The Good Fight’s] deepest appeal has always been its ability to be uncannily, remarkably attuned to what it feels like to be alive right now.”
When The Good Fight aired for the first time in 2017, it felt alarmingly prescient. Few other shows were dramatising how strange reality has become for many people in America under President Trump. From the first episode, The Good Fight pulled this off.
“The Good Fight — which debuted on CBS All Access in February 2017, shortly after Trump took office, and recently kicked off its fourth season — is the only show I’ve seen that has effectively captured what many Americans have felt throughout the past few years: that the world and the news cycle have become so unhinged that satire is frequently moot, and living through it has been a relentlessly exhausting exercise.”
I have to admit, I’ve struggled with the later seasons of The Good Fight, because of the increasing absurdity (Lockhart’s conversation with a bruise the shape of Donald Trump on her husband Kurt’s back kinda cinched it for me). The balance between gently meta-silly and distractingly-bizarre tipped. Perhaps unfortunately for the legacy of the show, it sounds like the Kings aren’t letting up.
This doesn’t relate specifically to my hypothesis of bringing the unknowable to light, but it does relate to the idea that we don’t know what strange effects the current US administration and UK government are having on our interpretation of reality. In many ways, the current usage of Non Disclosure Agreements is absurd at best. A segment of an episode satirising censorship in China was censored by CBS itself. No wonder Diane is microdosing psilocybin.
What else isn’t helping? Well…
The Great Hack, 2019
If you want to understand why a man like Dominic Cummings is so dangerous, watch The Great Hack first, Here - this is the trailer. Welcome to Cummings’ wheelhouse.
This Netflix documentary looks to unpack how a data company named Cambridge Analytica works, and its impact on modern democracy (most specifically the UK’s Brexit campaign and the 2016 US elections), as uncovered by journalist Carole Cadwalladr.
Before I watched this documentary, I knew big data could be kinda bad, I knew Cambridge Analytica was some kind of bad shit and I knew Facebook was bad. But what Cambridge Analytica achieved is incredibly complex, and vital for anyone that votes or uses social media.
If you find the idea of ‘post truth’ or ‘fake news’ difficult to engage with, I found this a very useful way to understand it, and how dangerous these tactics can be when weaponised. Cambridge Analytics claimed it had 5,000 data points on each American voter. If you don’t think that’s scary, and if you don’t think you could have your opinion changed by someone knowing a lot about you, then watch this documentary.
“It’s impossible to know what is what, because nothing is what it seems” Cadwalladr explains in the trailer- yap.
Here is a fascinating article also written by Cadwalladr which hones in on why we should specifically fear the work of Dominic Cummings. Published in September 2019, her article gives us a very useful examination of what Cummings was up to before coronavirus.
“This is the man who – according to evidence published by the Electoral Commission – played a central role in a scheme that resulted in Vote Leave being judged to have broken the law. A scheme that constitutes the greatest electoral fraud perpetrated in Britain for more than a century – one that Cummings has refused to come before parliament to answer questions about.”
If that tickles your fancy, why not find out what Cummings has been up to with big data and the new NHSX Contact Tracing App. You know that part in all Oceans 11 films where Danny Ocean calls up all his old criminal pals? … You couldn’t make this stuff up.
And if you would rather look at a diagram to explain the Cambridge Analytics scandal, here you go.
HyperNormalisation, 2016
As much as I feel the way I feel, I am not someone who easily puts across opinions on Twitter etc. I have a terrible recall for names, books, even systems. But that doesn’t mean my viewpoint doesn’t count. Often, in times like these, it’s easy to give up trying to make sense of it all, and to assume that things are too hard to understand. And that’s purposeful.
If that sounds familiar to you, I recommend watching a few of Adam Curtis’s documentaries. HyperNormalisation helped me realise it’s not my fault if watching the news leaves me completely confused or feel like I can’t get a proper hold of the facts. It’s not me, it’s them, and they’re doing it on purpose.
Across three hours, Curtis argues that governments, financiers, and technological utopians have given up on the complex "real world" and built a simpler "fake world" run by corporations and kept stable by politicians.
“As this fake world grew, all of us went along with it because the simplicity was reassuring.”
Brandon Harris’ review in The New Yorker at the time sums it up well…
“Curtis stuffs what could have been an entire miniseries of historical rumination into just under three hours, and one feels the corners that have been cut and the gaps that have been just barely sutured. But what suturing: Curtis is one of the most dynamic of contemporary editors, displaying gifts of intellectual montage that create art out of detritus.”
Of course, Curtis isn’t without his critics (although I am convinced the majority of them also envy Curtis’ knack for building ridiculously persuasive arguments, as well as ridiculing him for precisely the same skill).
“For as long as he has been making films, Curtis has been interested in obfuscation and doublespeak. He examines the ways in which power brokers (and the people behind the power brokers) manipulate reality, or present a rosy façade as a way to conceal nefarious activity. Yet there’s the feeling while watching HyperNormalisation that Curtis is secretly getting high on his own supply. He uses smoke and mirrors to attack the smoke and mirrors. He offers the impression that he is reporting from the other side of the looking glass, a privileged position where the eccentric shifts of global power can be viewed with chilling clarity. Yet the way he presents his arguments suggests that he trades on the ignorance of his audience. He knows that as long as he frames himself in a position of authority, he can say anything he likes and we’ll swallow it whole.”
Jenkins has possibly missed the point here: Curtis’ work, especially HyperNormalisation, feels to me like it is designed to mimic the feelings of disorientation experienced in contemporary reality.
Other honourable mentions…
If I write enough of these blogs, I’d love for ‘Illustrating the Unknown’ to become a common theme. In the mean time, I thought I’d mention a few others that might appeal…
All The Presidents Men, 1976
I will hold back on featuring All The Presidents Men properly here, as I want to do a separate post on that… but it’s definitely in the spirit of what I’ve covered. You often hear people saying this film is boring or that very little happens. That’s entirely the point of this political thriller focused on the investigative journalism that uncovered the Watergate scandal. The systems that allowed Watergate to happen are so complicated I still don’t understand it - that’s the point, that’s why they were able to do what they did.
Imagine - a scandal so boring and convoluted, no one can be bothered to find out about it.
That’s not to say I understand it fully. After watching it once with the volume tuned up to 80, I went back and watched with Wikipedia page searches in real time on my laptop. I still couldn’t keep up. This is dense shit and very difficult to understand without a working knowledge of US government officials in the early 1970s.
“It is a work barren of ideas, of imagination, and of a sense of either the tragic or the comic aspects of the subject, and one that would be essentially boring if it were not for the historical importance of the events dealt with. The reportorial techniques employed by Bernstein and Woodward differ hardly at all from those that might be used by a pair of reporters examining the misdeeds of small-town grafters, and while this is not in itself a failing—small fish and large ones are caught by the same means—the lack of a sense of history diminishes the magnitude of the story. But this account will be indispensable to those who for one reason or another have not kept up with the running accounts of events and to those who will someday place it in its proper historical setting.
”
It did make the New Yorker’s Book of the Month Club, so maybe they knew they were on to something…
Catch and Kill, 2019
A lot of the governments or people in power mentioned above (real and fictitious) relied on gaslighting tactics for years. If you want a current-day example of how gaslighting can happen to entire groups of people, read Ronan Farrow’s Catch and Kill.
Here is the excerpt that completely shocked me and got me hooked on it.
These stories are about people who had the tools at hand and did not tell the truth. They veered away from it. Some of the most skilled storytellers in the US collected every element of the story that they could, purposefully for not telling it - hence where the title comes from. I won’t say any more as it is really worth reading with those elements of suspense in place.
Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, 2009
Pulitzer-prize-winner Chris Hedges’ book on illusion and fantasy in contemporary American culture was published in 2009, a year before Instagram launched and in the same year Barack Obama started his first presidential term. Which is to say, a whole lot has happened since. But when I leafed back through the book this week, many parts remain pertinent.
“The culture of illusion thrives by robbing us of the intellectual and linguistic tools to separate illusion from truth.”
Dick Cheney, fake news and the impact of reality TV are all in there, even if 2009 feels like a world away.
Amusing Ourselves to Death, 1985
Even further back in time is Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, which Hodges quotes in Empire of Illusion, and Postman’s famous and oft-debated analysis of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley.
“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions”. In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.””
In 2017, when Trump was elected as president, Neil’s son Andrew Postman wrote a follow-up article for the Guardian. This argument feels apt for now:
“How engaged can any populace be when the most we’re asked to do is to like or not like a particular post, or “sign” an online petition? How seriously should anyone take us, or should we take ourselves, when the “optics” of an address or campaign speech – raucousness, maybe actual violence, childishly attention-craving gestures or facial expressions – rather than the content of the speech determines how much “airtime” it gets, and how often people watch, share and favourite it?”
I have to say, I’ve had limited patience with anyone I’ve seen quoting Orwell, Huxley or any kind of doomsday predictions as a way of saying “we knew this would happen all along!” (of course some writer, somewhere, would land on right now as a prediction, and what a hollow victory to finally see dystopic fiction match with reality), but I sat with both Neil and Andrew Postman’s arguments for some time, and it has helped join the dots.
What does it all mean?
Memes that take the piss out of a 60-mile round trip to have an eye test divert the attention away way from what Cummings was actually doing on all those tos-and-fros between London and Durham.
Anytime there are memes and running jokes like this surrounding the Prime Minister or his advisors, we should also be looking to the sidelines.
These people aren’t stupid. They don’t even think we’re stupid per se. They just know how easy it is to bury stories that aren’t easily told.
Finally then, one other quote from Andrew Postman, because I too looked for solutions this week. Alongside a list of films and media it was satisfying to gather because they resonate particularly well. What about how to get out of this mess?
I would urge anyone to read Andrew Postman’s article in full, as he goes on to give practical advice too, but this felt like a pertinent place to end this, at least for now:
“I wish I could tell you that, for all his prescience, my father also supplied a solution. He did not. He saw his job as identifying a serious, under-addressed problem, then asking a set of important questions about the problem. He knew it would be hard to find an easy answer to the damages wrought by “technopoly”. It was a systemic problem, one baked as much into our individual psyches as into our culture. But we need more than just hope for a way out. We need a strategy, or at least some tactics... We must teach our children, from a very young age, to be skeptics, to listen carefully, to assume everyone is lying about everything. (Well, maybe not everyone.) Check sources. Consider what wasn’t said. Ask questions. Understand that every storyteller has a bias – and so does every platform.”