"Cinema and the 2004 United States Presidential Election"
Domingo de Santa Clara

The last thing I feel like writing about at the moment is, of course, the election. The ending of the whole saga was, like a poorly scripted sit-com, depressingly predictable with a promise of more of the same, week after morbid week. I wish I could simply turn off the T.V. and they would all go away but of course, I can’t.

One of the only positive aspects of this “most important election in our lifetimes” is that the stakes were/are so high that a whole slew of artists have gotten politicized. It seems that it takes a grotesquely insane president to make filmmakers tear their attention away from the latest issue of Res magazine, if only for a couple of seconds.From the Christian fundamentalist blast of films like George Bush: Faith in the White House, which was bulk-mailed to churches across the country, to the mega-success of Fahrenheit 911, which grossed more than any documentary in history and is probably the first film in American history to be seriously considered to affect a Presidential race, more political movies are being produced and viewed than in any time in recent memory.

However, I do not think it is accurate to say that these movies come from “all parts of the political spectrum” as the mainstream news networks have commented, but rather from the liberal left, who are finally angry enough at the appalling war reporting of their venerated New York Times to start looking elsewhere for their news and analysis. Most of the current documentaries’ viewpoints are decidedly anti-Bush, and basically pro-Kerry, albeit reluctantly. But they do not go much deeper than that.

Basically, movies like Uncovered by Robert Greenwald are doing what journalism is supposed to be doing, i.e. investigating claims made by government officials. It’s just that journalism in the U.S. is currently in a pathetic state of spineless kowtowing, which as far as I’m concerned accounts for a good deal of the popularity of these documentaries. In other words, if CNN was doing what a news program ought to, we wouldn’t need movies like Bush’s Brain.

My main criticism with all of the films, from Michael Moore on down, is their steadfast refusal to place the United States in the context of the rest of the world. There is no attempt to understand why angry Middle Easterners might want to saw off Americans’ heads, a sentiment I myself share on an almost daily basis. There is absolutely no mention of Palestine (or any other country besides this one, for that matter), an issue which is intractably intertwined with the whole image of the United States in the rest of the world and particularly among Arabs. In fact, Arabs are barely portrayed at all in any of these movies, except as passive victims at best, or wealthy accomplices of the Bush family at worst.

For these and other reasons, I think that the ideas in the films, even the best of them, remain as impoverished as the rest of political discourse in America. Hell, the president doesn’t even believe in Global Warming! How can we expect quality documentaries?

It is always heartening to see vibrant political debate, and the atmosphere in America is more politically charged than I have witnessed it in my lifetime. But it must be remembered that the debate is still taking place within the heavily patriotic and xenophobic United States, where there is an utter absence of reliable media to begin with. So while I’m glad these films are being made and being viewed by so many people, I still think we have a long way to go, and much more profound cinema will need to be crafted, if we are to really understand and change our place in the world and the future.

And now, the films:

Besides the world-famous Fahrenheit 911 by Michael Moore, there are several other anti-Bush films:

Robert Greenwald (www.outfoxed.org) has directed three very popular documentaries, Outfoxed, which is about Fox News, Uncovered, which details the deception used by the White House leading up to the Iraq war, and Unprecedented, about the 2000 Presidential election.

Bush’s Brain (www.bushsbrain.com) directed by Micheal Paradies Shoob and Joseph Mealey details the way in which Karl Rove pulls the strings behind George Bush.

Orwell Rolls Over in his Grave (www.orwellrollsinhisgrave.com) directed by Robert Kane Pappas, is an even further scrutiny of the U.S. media.

There are also several pro-Bush films that have come out recently attempting to counter the aforementioned liberal docs:

George W. Bush: Faith in the White House (www.bushvideo.com) is an entertaining piece of shit directed by David Balsinger, former producer of the influential and groundbreaking 1970’s T.V. series The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams. He later directed paranoid religious schlockumentaries like In Search of Noah’s Ark. His latest release, fired off to churches around the U.S. and labeled as “non-political”, specifically deals with how fervently Evangelical Christian the president is. It has a brilliant quote on the DVD sleeve: “Nobody spends more time on his knees than George Bush.” I kind of figured that, actually.

Stolen Honor (www.stolenhonor.com) directed by Carlton Sherwood is about John Kerry’s anti-Vietnam war activism. The film accuses him of betraying American soldiers by admitting that he participated in war-crimes, as opposed to bragging about them as he was to do 30 years later while running for president.

As I mentioned above, one of the only positive aspects of Bush being re-elected is that it may force people in the U.S. to remain politically involved. Take, for example, Eminem. Clearly this man, like most rock stars, cares not a whit for anything other than his own career. Now he has made what is arguably the best political movie of the year, a grim, angry film of a song he wrote called MOSH. The video, brilliantly animated by Guerrilla News Network (www.guerrillanews.com), features a young man deployed to Iraq to fight, leaving behind a wife and family who promptly get evicted from their home. The couple, spurred on by repeated images of Eminem jumping around and waving his arms, don black hoodies and join an army of kids, including masses of pissed-off looking war vets, who battle police and ominously march on a building resembling the White House. The end of the piece has them all voting, naturally, but the majority of the film is strongly anti-authoritarian and basically kicks ass.

The message is simple and straightforward, the same sort of thing Mike Moore is trying to say: don’t send our boys over to Iraq, we have plenty of problems back here. The crucial difference is in Eminem’s militant tone, which hopefully will strike a chord in another part of the population.

The other important distinction is that because Eminem is the biggest rapper in America, one hopes that his new video will be seen by the most important players in the anti-war movement: the U.S. soldiers in Iraq.