<nettime> The stupidity of the Americans

[Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi@gmail.com>]

[ Machine translated film review from
https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Die-Dummheit-der-Amerikaner-4323913.html?seite=all 
]


The stupidity of the Americans

March 02, 2019
Rüdiger Suchsland


From Cheney to Trump: Adam McKay's "Vice" shows that the majority of 
the US is a land of morally corrupt self-righteous idiots

The films, which are once shot about Donald Trump, can be taken from a 
famous sentence of the Nazi Propaganda Minister: "Gentlemen, in a 
hundred years you will be showing a beautiful color film about the 
terrible days that we are going through Play the role now, so that 
viewers do not yell and whistle in a hundred years when they appear on 
the screen, "Dr. Joseph Goebbels on April 17, 1945.

The interesting thing about this sentence is that here one knows what 
will come, as he knows what is. It directs all its actions only on the 
effect, on the appearance and suitability for the aesthetic effect. And 
indeed: aesthetically, the Nazis have won the Second World War across 
the board. To this day, they determine the iconography of evil on the 
canvas.

Will that be like the powerful of America? One can see in the poor 
performance of "Vice" at this year's Academy Awards an indication of the 
virtues and disadvantages of this film: "Vice" is not good for the 
well-tempered politically correct symbolic action such as "Green Book". 
Adam McKay's feature film about the republican "Dark Knight" Richard 
Cheney was the film of this year's Academy Awards, which fiercely 
focused on the immorality and abyss of American politics.

He does not show harmonious coexistence and racial reconciliation. He 
shows a portrait of white political America. An America that is corrupt 
controlled by the big corporations, especially the arms and energy 
companies that dominate the politicians like puppets.

Director Adam McKay serves the myths of power: 9/11 - what a moment! The 
film shows what we can not know: the crisis center in the White House 
bunker, insecurity, chaos, a piercing alarm and all eyes on the boss's 
boss. Its round, pink-doughy face looks down expressionless. Only the 
corners of the mouth move, the lower jaws grind. Cheney thinks.

He is determined and only we interpret retrospectively a "dark" to it. 
He is a haven of peace. Work on the myth, because so much rest and cold 
blood you have to have first. If it was war, one wished that one had 
such a man on his side. He just gives his orders - a man where he 
belongs by nature - in the center of power - and stands behind him, a 
bit tender, a bit reassuring, a little bit controlling, Cheney's wife 
Lynn, immensely mesmerizing, brilliantly abysmal of great Amy Adams is 
played.

Because Amy Adams, not Christian Bale is the star of this movie. Bale, 
like many of his colleagues, once again confuses acting performance with 
external similarity approximation to the object; He eats dozens of fat 
cubes, can daily several sausage pelts of make-up and prostheses over 
the head, until he looks like a meat incarnate volleyball, and of facial 
expressions anyway nothing is recognizable. Adams needs a wig.

It starts with a surprise: a young man driving in 1963 in Kansas drunk 
car, is stopped by a police officer, for the second time. And here Lynn 
turns up. They are already married, but now she folds him together, 
makes him small, takes him apart, breaks it down into its individual 
parts and then rebuilds it as a new human being: What women power is 
also called, as an inseparable mixture of sex and violence this movie.

She makes him her avatar

Because Lynn Cheney is tough, stiff, all-American, a class leader with 
all one and ambitious. And because, as a woman in her sixties, you can 
not fulfill this political ambition in spite of all yours, she puts 
everything on her husband. She makes him - and that is the daring thesis 
of this film - her avatar.

First he fails, then she makes sure that does not happen again. The 
result is a power couple of two powerful people who correspond to each 
other, whose story the movie tells as a farce, and modern version of 
Shakespeare's "Macbeth", but one turned into comedic. Richard Cheney, 
whom we know, is Lynn's creature.

Thus, from the late sixties onwards, he happens to become a Republican, 
becoming a perfect second man behind Donald Rumsfeld, who appears as a 
happy cynic, adviser to new president Richard Nixon, precisely because 
he is not distracted from conviction and ideology.

"Rummie"

Next to Lynn, "Rummie" (played with energy by Steve Carell) is the 
second man to make Cheney what he is: Dick and Don are a decade-long 
couple Machiavelli and Shakespeare could not have invented better. "What 
do we believe in?" Young Cheney asks his mentor once in a key scene of 
the movie. What the later Minister of Defense can hardly keep from 
laughing and disappears into his office. The point of the scene seems to 
have escaped the makers: Apparently, Cheney believes that one should 
believe in something.

Cheney is quiet and effective, he does his job, and so it goes up: to 
its own, still windowless office, to presidential adviser and White 
House Chief of Staff under Gerald Ford. Then Secretary of Defense under 
George Bush, and then his son George W. Vice President. In between jobs 
in the economy, reliable lobbying for arms and energy companies.

"Theory of the unified power"

However, the film underlines an interesting point, probably because it 
appears to him as "too intellectual". Because Cheney is always 
interested in the "theory of the unified power", ie the pooling of as 
many possibilities of influence in one hand. The film shows in furious 
alienation effects: With knights, pharaoh masks and a hunting cat. 
Rumsfeld suddenly seems to have a gangster knife in his fist.

Adam McKay is not anyone. As a writer, director and producer, he worked 
for many years on "Saturday Night Live". Obviously McKay could not 
decide in the montage whether he wanted to make a comedy or a drama, a 
tragedy or a satire. The tone and atmosphere of his film now oscillate 
between a typical Michael Moore rage inability to take the political 
opponents seriously, political instruction and comfortable often silly 
clothes.

The audience is always right

McKay is best still there, where the director makes no secret of his 
contempt for the vast majority of Americans. For that the American 
critics, above all the politically correct upper middle-class liberals 
hated him.

Because the audience is always right: if Trump chooses, it was a 
democratic decision, not the result of low instincts and manipulative 
enemy propaganda that falsified the election. The fact that the United 
States is simply a country of morally corrupt self-righteous idiots in 
its majority is something you can not even think about.

"Vice" is a movie about the stupidity of Americans. It's about Cheney, 
but even more about those who made him possible, who allowed him to 
become who he became. Dick Cheney is bad, ok. A heartless monster, so what?

"You finally chose me," Cheney accuses the audience in the end. Rightly so.

The entertainmentification of politics, not just the American, has 
prepared the ground for all this.

Political comedy brings nothing

By putting his humor in the void, "Vice" proves a fundamental, far 
beyond himself weakness of this kind of political comedy. Political 
comedy is just as popular as ever. But she brings nothing.

While comedy and talk shows are better informed than sobriety-based 
news, they are depopulating the electorate, reinforcing the impression 
that politics is really just a big entertainment show.

The shift to the right is global. Corruption is worse than ever. 
Transforming democracies into authoritarian regimes - governments that 
are majority-empowered by governments are quite subtle in concrete practice.

What have the political comedies changed? Done against it? Nothing. You 
promoted the process.

"Vice" fails where it tries to capture the human Cheney. The only scenes 
that attempt to portray a humane Cheney appear as alibi moments: the 
man's obvious love for his family, the surprising tolerance of his 
lesbian daughter Mary, in whose favor Cheney even waives a presidential 
nomination.

What are his goals? Cheney is not an idiot. He has motives. Maybe only 
private. Maybe money and power. But here he remains caricature, here the 
film remains extremely naive, because his makers can obviously not 
imagine that such a person also has convictions. Instead, everything 
seems somehow absurd, and the film exposes at best a - alleged - gloomy, 
macabre comedy of a system.

The director does not want to humanize Cheney, but he barely gets around 
it. So we do not realize that, he dehumanizes America.

There are people who are immediately more personable than Richard 
Cheney. McKay shows Cheney as a gray bureaucrat, a chameleon of power, 
and a demonic puppeteer behind the scenes. A flattering portrait, 
because overall this is indeed a disturbing monument, but just a monument.

We are witnessing a man who orchestrated the Iraq war, signed death 
sentences legitimizing torture, exposing agents to punish displaced 
relatives, creating billion-dollar deals with the oil industry, killing 
hundreds of thousands - not counting disinformation, false news, and 
undermining democracy. Maybe comedy is the wrong form for something like 
that?

This idolization is consequently a trivialization. You might ask after 
this movie: Is not Richard Cheney worse than Trump? And after the answer 
"Yes" then conclude: Trump is not so bad.

Or does this film have almost a liberal nostalgia for those times when 
right-wing politicians were perhaps right-wing but rationalized when 
they had a certain taste, were not vulgar, and a few values they 
believed in?

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