Re: <nettime> The stupidity of the Americans

Thanks for this.A better machine, the German DeepL translator. The review is worth it.

On Sun, Mar 3, 2019 at 7:19 PM Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi@gmail.com> wrote:

[ 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 US is in its majority a country of morally corrupt self-righteous idiots

Revulsion and admiration lie as close together as the red and white stripes on the American flag, and if this is in some respects a real-life monster movie, it's one that takes a lively and at times surprisingly sympathetic interest in its chosen demon.
A.O.Scott, New York Times, in the review of Vice.

The films once made about Donald Trump can be based on a famous sentence by the NS Minister of Propaganda: "Gentlemen, in a hundred years' time we will be showing a beautiful colour film about the terrible days we are going through. Don't you want to play a part in this movie? Hold on now, so that in a hundred years the audience won't yell and whistle when you appear on the screen," said Dr. Joseph Goebbels on April 17, 1945.

The interesting thing about this sentence is that someone here knows what will come, just as he knows what is. He orientates his entire action only towards the effect, the appearance and the suitability for the aesthetic effect. And indeed: aesthetically, the Nazis won the Second World War all along the line. To this day they determine the iconography of evil on the canvas.

Is this going to be like the Mighty Americans? One can see an indication of the virtues and disadvantages of this film in the poor performance of "Vice" at this year's Oscars: "Vice" is not suitable for a 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 Oscars, which focused most sharply on the immorality and abysses of US 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, above all by arms and energy corporations that dominate politicians like puppets.

Vice - The second man

Director Adam McKay uses the myths of power: 9/11 - what a moment! The film shows what we can't know: The crisis center in the White House bunker, uncertainty, chaos, a piercing alarm tone and all looks at the representative of the boss. Its round, pink-pasty face looks expressionlessly downwards. Only the corners of the mouth move, the lower jaw grind. Cheney's thinking.

He is determined and only we interpret in retrospect a "dark" about it. He's a haven of peace. Work on the myth, because so much peace and cold blood you have to have first. If it were war, you wish you had a man like that on your side. He gives his orders very briefly - a man where he belongs by his nature: In the center of power - and behind him stands, a little tender, a little calming, a little controlling, Cheney's wife Lynn, who is played incredibly fascinating, great deep by the great Amy Adams.

Because Amy Adams, not Christian Bale, is the star of this movie. Bale, like many of his colleagues, once again confuses acting with outward similarity to the object; he eats dozens of kilos of fat, has several sausage skins of make-up and prostheses put over his head every day until he looks like a volleyball made flesh, and mimic is no longer recognizable anyway. One wig is enough for Adams.

It begins with a surprise: A young man drives a drunken car in Kansas in 1963, is stopped by a policeman, for the second time. And this is where Lynn shows up. They are already married, but now she folds him up, makes him small, takes him apart, disassembles him into his individual parts and then rebuilds him as a new human being: What women's power also means, as an inseparable mixture of sex and violence, this film shows.

She makes him her avatar.
Because Lynn Cheney is hard, stiff, all-american, a class leader with lots of one's and ambitious. And because as a woman in the sixties one cannot fulfil this political ambition despite all the ones, she puts everything on her husband. She makes him - and this is the daring thesis of this film - her avatar.

First he fails, then she makes sure it doesn't happen again. The result is a power pair of two power men who correspond to each other and whose story the film tells as a farce, and a modern variant of Shakespeare's "Macbeth", albeit one shot in a comedic style. The Richard Cheney we know is Lynn's creature.

Thus, from the late sixties onwards, he becomes a Republican by chance, precisely because he is not distracted by conviction and ideology from the essential, the perfect second man behind Donald Rumsfeld, who appears to be a cheerful cynic, the advisor to the new President Richard Nixon.

"Rummie"
Next to Lynn, "Rummie" (played full of energy by Steve Carell) is the second man who made Cheney who he is: Dick and Don are a decade-long couple that Machiavelli and Shakespeare couldn't have invented better. "What do we believe in?" the young Cheney asks his mentor once in a key scene of the film. The later Minister of Defense can hardly hold his own with laughter and disappears into his office. The punch line of the scene seems to have escaped the makers: Cheney obviously believes that one should believe in something.

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

"Theory of Unified Power"
However, the film consistently underscores a highly interesting point, probably because it appears to him to be "too intellectual". Because Cheney is always interested in the "theory of unified power", i.e. the bundling of as many influence possibilities as possible in one hand. The film shows this in furious alienation effects: With knights, pharaoh masks and a hunting cat. Rumsfeld suddenly seems to have a gangster jumping knife in his fist.

Adam McKay isn't just anybody. As author, director and producer he worked for "Saturday Night Live" for many years. McKay obviously could not decide in the montage whether he wanted to shoot a comedy or a drama, a tragedy or a satire. The tone and atmosphere of his film now oscillate between Michael Moore's typical raging inability to take his political opponent seriously, political instruction and comfortable, often silly clothes.

The audience is always right
McKay is at his best when the director makes no secret of his contempt for the vast majority of Americans. The American critics, especially the politically correct upper middle-class liberals, hated him for this.

Because the public is always right: If they vote for Trump, it was a democratic decision and not the result of lower instincts and manipulative enemy propaganda that falsified the elections. The fact that the USA is perhaps simply in its majority a country of morally corrupt, self-righteous idiots, one should not even think.

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

"You finally chose me," Cheney accuses the audience in a direct speech at the end. You're right.

The entertainmentification of politics, not just American politics, has paved the way for all this.

Political comedy is useless
In that his humor runs into emptiness, "Vice" proves a fundamental weakness of this kind of political comedy that goes far beyond himself. Political comedy is just as popular as never before. But she's no good.

Comedy programmes and talk shows provide better information than sobriety-believing news, but they depoliticise the electorate by reinforcing the impression that politics is actually just a big entertainment show.

The shift to the right is global. Corruption is worse than ever. The transformation of democracies into authoritarian regimes - through governments that are mostly empowered by election - takes place very subtly in concrete practice.

What did the political comedies change about it? Done that? Nothing. Nothing. You promoted the case.

"Vice fails where it tries to grab the human Cheney. The only scenes that try to show a humane Cheney appear as alibi moments: the man's obvious love for his family, the surprising tolerance towards his lesbian daughter Mary, in whose favor Cheney even renounces a presidential candidacy.

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

The director doesn't want to humanize Cheney, but he can't get around it. He's dehumanizing America so we don't notice.

There are people who are more sympathetic than Richard Cheney. McKay shows Cheney as a grey bureaucrat, as a chameleon of power, and at the same time as a demonic puppeteer behind the scenes. A flattering portrait, because altogether this is a disturbing monument, but just a monument.

We see a man who staged the Iraq war, who signed death sentences, who legitimises torture, who exposes agents to punish unpopular relatives, who arranged billions of deals with the oil industry, who killed hundreds of thousands in return - not counting disinformation, false reports and the erosion of democracy. Maybe comedy is the wrong form for something like this, isn't it?

This idolatry is consequently a trivialization. You could ask about this film: Isn't Richard Cheney worse than Trump? And after the answer "yes" we conclude: Trump is not that bad.

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

I'm like bed bugs. You have to burn the mattress to get rid of me.
Donald Rumsfeld in Vice.