politics

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (2025)

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“His flock has not only begun to shrink, but to calcify,” Bishop Langstron (Jeffrey Wright) warns young Reverend Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor) about his reassignment to serve under Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin) at Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude in upstate New York. Jud has just faced a committee of three upper-level members of the church for punching a fellow priest in the face, and he recounts the story of his turn to Christ, one of redemption not achieved but ongoing. Jud was a boxer in his youth before he found salvation, and for large parts of the film, the driving conflict is between Jud’s willingness to sacrifice, his sincere desire to bring others closer to Christ, and his testament to Christ’s love, versus Wicks’s egotistical self-martyrdom, his drive to consolidate his power at the expense of eroding his flock’s faith, and his heretical performance of his own prejudices as if they were God’s words. If Glass Onion could be (rightly) criticized for being a little too on-the-nose with its depiction of an Elon Musk-like richer-than-sin weenie loser villain, Wake Up Dead Man instead goes for a less specific target with the same ostentation by taking on all of the sins of modern right wing nationalism that cloak their evil under a banner of faith, and those who put darkness for light. Like me, director Rian Johnson had a profoundly religious upbringing, and although we both have left the churches in which we were raised, this film demonstrates a deep and abiding admiration for and fondness of true believers who practice God’s love, and I both respect and was moved by the approach. Johnson may have, intentionally or unintentionally, created one of the best pieces of Christian propaganda since Chronicles of Narnia or “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” and he did it showing the apotheosis of contemporary American Christian Nationalism tending to a church that was literally without Christ. 

When I was young, one of the oft-repeated sermons that I witnessed (through countless Thursday chapel sessions at the fundamentalist Christian school that I attended, Sunday School sermons, Children’s Church ministries, and Wednesday Youth Pastor recitations) was one about the Christ-shaped hole in everyone’s being. Sometimes the hole was in your soul, and sometimes it was in your heart; if it was in your latter, they would occasionally use a piece of wood cut into a heart, with a lower-case-t-shaped void in the middle, into which a conveniently sized cross could slot as a visual representation. (Presumably, the more ambiguous nature of the soul prevented it from being carved out of scrap wood for these performances). I get the feeling that Johnson likely sat through some of these same services, and he transposes that metaphor in this film to a literal void in the shape of a crucifix on the walls of Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude. We learn the reason for this in a story related by Martha Delacroix (Glenn Close), who witnessed the destruction of the temple as a child; the monsignor’s grandfather Prentice was a widower with a daughter, Grace, when he became the shepherd of the town’s flock, and the daughter was a girl of “loose morals” who ended up a pregnant teen. Prentice promised her his fortune if she remained under his roof and didn’t embarrass him by going into the town, and she honored her end of the bargain until his dying day, watching as Prentice poisoned her own son against her and groomed him into becoming the next in a line of men who disguise their hatred behind their vestments. She found his bank accounts empty, and destroyed much of the church, supposedly out of rage, before dying while pounding on the outside of his “Lazarus tomb,” which can only be opened from the outside by construction equipment but which can be opened from within with only a light push. Ever since, Grace has been characterized as “The Harlot Whore,” and has become a key figure in Monsignor Jefferson’s fiery sermons.

It’s to this lost flock, not only shrinking but calcifying, that Jud arrives. That sounds like a coldly analytical way to describe it, but it’s with that same clinicality that Jud diagnoses the rot at the heart of Perpetual Fortitude, metaphorically calling it a cancer that must be cut out. This raises suspicions, of course, when Jefferson Wicks dies, seemingly impossibly. He entered a small cubby near the pulpit with no apparent exit, in full view of all witnesses, and collapsed before a knife was found in his back. Those in attendance that day other than Jud were a select few extremely devoted followers, who form our cast of suspects and witnesses. Martha was there, as was her husband Samson (Thomas Haden Church), the church groundskeeper who has found the strength to maintain his own sobriety because of his respect for the Monsignor’s own dubious overcoming of his addictions. Town doctor Nat Sharp (Jeremy Renner), whose wife recently left him for someone she met on a Phish message board and took the kids with him, is present, as is concert cellist Simone Vivane (Cailee Spaeny), who is currently funneling all of her savings into Perpetual Fortitude in the hopes that the Monsignor will be able to cure her of her painful, disabling neuropathy. The town has also become home to Lee Ross (Andrew Scott), a former pulp sci-fi novelist of some (niche) renown whose pivot into libertarianism has made him an outcast in the elite literary circles he envies and left him with only a small but devoted fandom of survivalists who, in his words, “all look like John Goodman in The Big Lebowski.” Ross hopes to make his way back into polite society by publishing a book of Wicks’s sermons and his own accompanying essays and commentary, and as such is one of the Monsignor’s sycophants. Rounding out the group is Vera Draven (Kerry Washington), who is carrying on the family tradition of acting as the Wicks family’s lawyer, following in her father’s footsteps, as well as Cy (Daryl McCormack), the son her father forced her to adopt when she was still a student and the boy was already old enough to be in school. Cy has returned to Perpetual Fortitude, tail between his legs, after a failed attempt at breaking into politics. 

Most of the film’s political satire revolves around Cy. I mentioned before that the satire in this one is less about mocking a specific individual than about painting a broader picture, but Cy seems like a deliberate invocation of Christian Walker, at least if I’m reading Cy as being as closeted (which I am). When Cy complains to Jud that he failed to make his political ambitions come true, it was in spite of the fact that he hit every single right-wing talking point, listing them one by one in a screed that lasts for over a minute of the film’s runtime. He describes his playbook as, to paraphrase, “making people think about something that they hate and then make them afraid it will take away something that they love,” which is an encapsulation of the go-to method of reactionary appeals to perceived attacks on normalcy. Wicks is clearly not a technically adept person, a member of an older generation, but Cy’s incessant need to constantly curate his existence for his online following means that Wicks’s ideas work their way out to Cy’s followers, a genealogy of intolerance. It works thematically while also justifying why there’s footage of a very important meeting that reveals every participant’s motivation. 

We’ve gotten pretty far into this without ever mentioning Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), the gentleman detective who is ostensibly the star of this series. He enters the film fairly late as well, but it’s a damned good entrance, as he finds himself inside Perpetual Fortitude and face to face with Jud, who has provided the narration to this point, and finds it difficult to find something nice to say about the church and can only bring himself to compliment the architecture. Blanc has been brought in by the local sheriff (Mila Kunis), and he’s fascinated by the opportunity to solve what is, despite the lack of a door, a locked-room mystery. It turns out that the church reading group has all read multiple examples of the genre, including The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and The Hollow Man, which means that any one of them could have drawn inspiration from them. It was here that I first suspected that we were being led to the inevitable conclusion that Jud had committed the crime and was merely an unreliable narrator, as is the case in Roger Ackroyd (um, spoiler alert for a book that turns one hundred next year, I suppose); after all, his name sounds like someone trying to say the word “duplicity” after too many drinks. As it turns out, the presence of Roger Ackroyd is a clue, but not the one that I thought. 

Blanc, despite a slightly smaller presence here, is nonetheless excellent when he’s on screen. As with the previous two installments in this series, there’s much to laugh at and be puzzled by here, and the audience for my screening had a delightful time. You will too. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Manda Bala (Send a Bullet, 2007)

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In its most shameless hours, there isn’t much difference between Vice News journalism and the Mondo exploitation movies of the 1960s & 70s. Vice has well earned its reputation for bravely tackling subjects more traditional news media won’t touch, but that bravery often translates to a kind of in-your-face bravado that can cross over into shock-value exploitation. There’s a thin line between reporting on real-world violence and profiting from horrific images of that violence, and that line gets especially blurry when you package those images with youth-culture music & aesthetic signifiers. Of course, that pseudo-documentary/pseudo-exploitation hybrid journalism bothered me a lot more in the 2010s, when Vice News hit peak popularity and I’d be casually confronted with its graphic violence via friends’ TV & laptop screens while just going about my day. It all came back to me watching the 2007 documentary Manda Bala, though, which plays like a Citizen Kane-sized cornerstone in establishing the cinematic language of aggro hipster journalism in the Vice News era.

Self-billed as “a film that cannot be shown in Brazil”, Manda Bala is a high-style documentary about brazen crime & corruption in that country, the unlikely center of which is the world’s largest frog farm. At its core, it’s a film about extreme wealth disparity in mid-2000s São Paulo, transitioning between interview subjects via scale-busting helicopter shots of the sprawling city’s skyscrapers & slums. It documents crimes on the furthest ends of those economic extremes: flagrant political corruption that steals massive amounts of money from impoverished communities and those communities’ frequent kidnappings of the ultra-wealthy’s family members for quick ransom payouts. The frog farm is just one of many money-laundering schemes on the political corruption end, but it’s one that offers the film a point of visual interest as the overpopulated frog nests are rife woth amphibian cannibalism. Besides the unapologetically corrupt owner of that farm, other interviewees include former kidnapping victims, currently active kidnappers, anti-kidnapping detectives, bulletproof car salesmen, and a plastic surgeon who specializes in reconstructing kidnapping victims’ severed ears with their own rib cartilage. Hostage videos, surgery footage, and ballistics tests constantly escalate the violence of the film’s imagery while it alternates between shockingly candid interviews with the people who suffer that violence every day. Sometimes, the film’s eagerness to entertain feels callously flippant given the severity of its subject (especially in its upbeat Tropicália music cues), but its retro, shot-on-film aesthetic is gorgeous and its on-the-street reporting pulls no punches when detailing the violence on either side of the poverty line.

My used DVD copy of Manda Bala boasts that the film won the Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, among a second prize for Best Cinematography. Given the state of the infotainment documentary in the mid-2000s, I believe that prize was deserved. The tonal mix of hipster cool cred & violent bloodshed in Manda Bala may have made me a bit queasy, but there’s no question that it’s better crafted than the nonstop onslaught of rote, cheapo digi-docs about George Bush, Wal-Mart, climate change, and the meat industry that cluttered up Blockbuster Video shelves throughout that decade. As much as the film relishes the quirky frog-farm imagery and Mondo hyperviolence of its subject, it does consistently hit the right political targets — explaining that the kidnapping epidemic is a direct symptom of the poverty caused by corruption, then going on to explain how that corruption is just a modern extension of historical Portuguese colonization. The film likely has just as legitimate of a claim as being a precursor to recent high-style arthouse documentaries like The Act of Killing & Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat as it does being a precursor to Vice News web broadcasts, but something about the confrontational, Mondo-style imagery read pure Vice to me. Maybe I’m too squeamish to differentiate true, hard-hitting journalism from shock-value exploitation; or maybe it’s okay to do a little of the latter if it draws attention to the former.

-Brandon Ledet

Leila and the Wolves (1984)

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Leila and the Wolves is a 1984 docu-drama that took over half a decade to make, premiering at the Mannheim-Heidelberg International Film Festival in West Germany and then going underground for decades at a time. It got a re-release in the U.K. twenty-four years later at an event called “Women’s Cinema from Tangiers to Tehran” in 2008, then disappeared again for some time after that before popping up in various European festivals before getting proper stateside screenings this year with limited releases in the U.S. and Canada. Ten years prior to its first release, the film’s Lebanese director Heiny Srour (Leila has no credited writer, as many of the stories of which it is comprised were real experiences Srour collected) was the first Arab woman to have a film considered at Cannes, with her 1974 documentary The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived. Leila tackles a similar subject matter, focusing on the forgotten/erased role of women in the liberation movements of Lebanon and Palestine in the twentieth century. 

The film isn’t invested in recounting the broader history prior to the 1920 British occupation, and some familiarity with the region is helpful. Prior to its dissolution in 1922, the Ottoman Empire controlled portions of the Middle East that are now occupied, in whole or in part, by Iraq, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. Beginning in 1915, the government of the U.K., represented by Britain’s senior ambassador to Egypt, Henry McMahon, and Hussein bin Ali of the Kingdom of Hejaz (the western coast of the Arabian Peninsula which is now partitioned into parts of Saudi Arabia and Jordan) exchanged a series of letters. Called the McMahon–Hussein correspondence, this exchange committed Britain to recognition of an independent Arab state in the Middle East in exchange for assistance in fighting the Ottomans as part of the Middle Eastern theatre of WWI. This prompted the Arab Revolt (1916-1918), which ultimately led to the end of Ottoman control of the area; in combination with the Turkish War of Independence (1919-1923), the Ottoman Empire was, as they say, history. 

Britain, as it is wont to do, reneged on this promise, and secretly signed the Sykes–Picot Agreement with the French Third Republic, which set forth the terms under which Britain and France would partition the remains of the Ottoman Empire. This led to the League of Nations’ Mandate for Palestine, which placed Palestine (and an area called Transjordan which now comprises parts of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq) under British rule, meaning that the Palestinians had essentially assisted in their liberation from one foreign power only to be stabbed in the back by their supposed allies, who became their new occupiers in 1920. “Mandatory Palestine” existed as a geopolitical extension of British rule for just shy of three decades, until 1948. If you’ve paid attention to the news at all during the time that you’ve been alive, then you know the rest. 

In Leila and the Wolves, Nabila Zeitouni is Leila, a modern Lebanese woman currently residing in London. Her friend, a man played by Rafik Ali Ahmad, is planning a showcase of photographs depicting various acts of resistance against Western occupying forces. Leila protests that all of the photographs depict only what the men of the region did to resist occupation, asking where the evidence of women’s contribution to the efforts are. Her friend laughs her off, saying that women “weren’t involved with politics at the time.” Following this, Leila goes on an extended out of body experience/astral journey through and into the photographs and the events depicted therein. After encountering a group of women in black burqas and niqab in a semicircle on a beach, watching men splash about in the surf without a care in the world, Leila moves through time, with mostly newly shot recreations but also incorporating archive footage where available. 

In a photo of men resisting British soldiers (in their ridiculous little imperial uniform shorts) and driving them down an alley, we pan out to see the women in the adjacent homes standing on their balconies, ready to pour boiling water down on the retreating occupiers. In a time of greater lockdown and restriction, the resistance takes advantage of the fact that women planning a wedding will be regarded as being beneath suspicion to use them as information couriers to organize activity (humorously, in this sequence, Ali Ahmad plays a quisling translator for the Brits, consciously intertwining this role with that of the dismissive curator). Later still, women are more actively engaged in the fighting, including participation in the exchange of gunfire. We also travel through Leila’s subconscious as well, as there are a few overt fantasy sequences. The first sees Leila as she might be if she accepts the narrative of female pacificity and political disengagement, a glimpse into an imagined future in which she sits in a room surrounded by her daughters and their daughters’ daughters. The questions that she asks of them are banal and concerned only about familial relations. Which daughter are you? Married? Kids yet? Only one? Are you my granddaughter? Are you married yet? Towards the film’s end, Leila finds herself in another fantasy sequence amidst the wreckage of ancient buildings, dancing with nearly a dozen skeletons in black garb. 

Across the spectrum of reviews I read, I don’t think I ever saw any of them connect the film to what stands out to me the most about it, which is its punk sensibility. Leila is clearly anti-establishment in its views, as there’s never a question about the film’s certitude of the morality of resisting foreign occupation, and it instead focuses on the necessity of remembering all the fallen. During my viewing, I was struck by the way that there was a disjointedness to the narrative; this is not entirely to its detriment, as this made the experience somewhat trancelike and thus all the more immersive, but it’s not what one would call seamless. In this way, it brought to mind one of Brandon’s favorites, Born in Flames, which can also be characterized by its piecemeal construction, but which, to quote him, is a “work of radical politics that transcends its jumbled narrative.” Because our discussion of it on the podcast was so fresh in my mind, I also kept thinking of how he described the punk ethos of Times Square as well; I think that it’s the DIY effect of the film’s use of recreations, although this one is also technically impressive in all that it accomplishes in ways that most punk films are not. Regardless, it’s an important and informative document of its past and our present, connected across time and as relevant as ever. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Chocolate Babies (1996)

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Would it be too redundant to call a movie “the ACT UP version of Born in Flames“? Born in Flames was already a pro-queer, pro-safe-sex, pro-sex-worker activism piece made in New York City when ACT UP was at its most loudly active — so radical in its politics that it climaxes with a celebratory act of terrorism blowing up the World Trade Center. Still, the political themes of Lizzie Borden’s D.I.Y. No Wave provocation was more focused on feminist issues than the AIDS crisis in particular, as it was made early in the still-worsening epidemic. Over a decade later, another microbudget NYC indie picked up where Born in Flames left off, redirecting its exact brand of political fury at the smiling politicians who left AIDS-suffering citizens to die in droves without lifting a systemic finger to help. Stephen Winter’s 1996 rabblerouser Chocolate Babies may have been made well after ACT UP’s loudest, headline-earning protests, but it’s directly informed by those political actions, exaggerated for shock value & be-gay-do-crimes inspo. It opens with a closeted Councilman being confronted on the front steps of his NYC apartment by a group of protestors, who cut themselves with a switchblade and smear HIV+ blood on the shocked man’s face, who then likens the act to “murder” in the press. Nothing is said of the mass murder he is committing by downplaying & exacerbating the AIDS crisis among his local constituents, of course, which is exactly why that kind of violent public confrontation was necessary to save lives.

The taboo of exposing the public to HIV+ blood becomes a core shock-value tactic for Chocolate Babies, which climaxes with a living-room surgery in a cramped apartment wherein a group of friends dislodge a bullet from their star protestor’s shoulder with bloody tweezers. It’s an excruciatingly long, drawn-out scene shot as if it were a live birth, complete with moaning screams of pain. Between all that bloody violence & shouting, you might miss that the movie is structurally a low-budget romcom. Like Born in Flames, Chocolate Babies is a collection of standalone vignettes musing on a core political theme, loosely stitched together by a propulsive, repetitive soundtrack (in this case, abrasive tribal drums). The story that holds that scatterbrained edit together is an unlikely love triangle between an HIV+ political activist (Max, Claude E. Sloan), the closeted homophobe politician he most often targets (Councilman Melvin Freeman, Bryan Webster), and that politician’s naively idealistic staff member (Sam, Jon Kit Lee). The youngest of the three is caught between two worlds, acting as a subversive employee of the exact government official his friends are protesting, while accidentally falling in love with the men in charge on both sides of that divide. The drag queens, rooftop hedonists, and political dissidents who escalate that conflict to a bloody climax are all lovely people and his closest friends. It’s all very wholesome & sweet, even if it’s politically furious.

The dramatic themes of Chocolate Babies can be sincerely heavy, touching on the loneliness, addiction, and familial bigotry that weigh down its queer community. However, the overall tone of the film is flippantly joyous, with characters complaining that their political actions aren’t accomplishing enough in quips like “I have better things to do with my time. I could be sucking dick!” They self-describe as “raging, atheist, meat-eating, HIV+, colored terrorists,” or “Black faggots with a political agenda” for short. Their politics are shouted in the horrified faces of politicians & businessmen who’d rather peacefully ignore the AIDS epidemic on NYC streets, but they’re just as often delivered as open-mic standup in out-of-context interstitials. The movie ultimately ends on a calming note, with crashing waves and familial love eroding the nonstop barrage of belligerent shouting that preceded. The moment is earned, given the film’s tender love-triangle conflict and sincere internal wrestling with loving someone who’s already given up on surviving their illness. The majority of the runtime is loud, celebratory, and energizing, though, mostly working as a political catalyst for the audience to get in their representatives’ faces instead of just getting high to manage the pain of living.

Chocolate Babies has been available to stream for free on director Stephen Winter’s Vimeo page for years now, seemingly ripped directly from a 1990s VHS tape. Recently, however, the local repertory series Gap Tooth Cinema screened the film at The Broadside in a much nicer, cleaner digital scan that suggests a better future for the film’s home presentation. It belongs to a company of low-budget, queer communal provocations that have finally gotten their full due in cinephile circles over the past decade — titles like Tongues Untied, Fresh Kill, Buddies, Paris is Burning, The Watermelon Woman and, of course, Born in Flames. The only thing it’s missing is a spiffy new Blu-ray release with a crisp, collectible slipcover to cement that status.

-Brandon Ledet

Feels Good Man (2020)

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The first few weeks of Donald Trump’s second presidential term have surprisingly been defined more by the daily stunts & shenanigans of unelected government official Elon Musk than they have been by the actions of the president himself. Sure, Trump is signing a relentless barrage of hateful, unconstitutional Executive Orders that are threatening to crumble decades of social & economic progress in a matter of days. That was fully expected, though, especially if you paid any attention to the “Project 2025” agenda advertised during his election campaign. Musk’s overt, oligarchic influence on these Executive Branch actions have been just as nefarious but much more bizarre, especially as an extension of the failed meme humor of his current reign as the Villain King of Twitter. It’s not enough that Trump & Musk are wielding institutional power to reshape America with a straight-up Nazi agenda; they’re also irony-washing that Nazi ideology through several layers of internet meme humor, so that their above-board, bought-and-paid-for coup is read as a humorous prank meant to “trigger the libs,” not to welcome in a new, shameless era of American fascism. Between Musk’s “DOGE” branding, his juvenile obsession with the numbers 69 & 420, and the bar now being so low that his executing a Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration now qualifies as a “dog whistle,” it’s clear that we’re living through America’s first 4chan presidency. Evil has never been so inane.

If you catch yourself wondering how, exactly, we got here over the last few years, I’ve seen no better explainer than the 2020 documentary Feels Good Man. A 90-minute history lesson on the memeification of a cartoon stoner frog may sound trivial in the context of America’s Nazi takeover, but Feels Good Man somehow does a better job explaining & contextualizing that far-right political shift than any other film I’ve seen – predating and overriding all of those QAnon docs that auto-populated on every streaming service in the years following the January 6 coup attempt of 2021. The stoner frog in question is, of course, Pepe the Frog, the breakout character from alt-comics artist Matt Furie’s cult series Boys Club. A soft-spoken San Francisco stoner who’s been drawing goofy frog doodles his entire life, Furie confides that Pepe is the Boys Club character he most personally identifies with . . . which is a brave thing to admit given the character’s eventual perversion and radicalization in the Hell pits of 4chan once it escaped the pages of his comic book. A single frame of Boys Club in which Pepe explains to his burnout roommates that he urinates with his pants completely lowered to his ankles because it “feels good man” was a funny enough image that it started getting shared on the internet outside the context of its source material and, as the movie argues, somehow snowballed into Donald Trump becoming the 45th President of the United States.

I have a general affection for Anthropology of the Internet documentaries that immortalize disposable online ephemera for cinematic prosperity, especially when they capture the sinister atmosphere of the Internet’s dankest dungeons (see also: the Russian dashcam compilation The Road Movie, the evil-clown sightings doc Wrinkles the Clown, and Jane Schoenbrun’s Slenderman doc A Self-Induced Hallucination). Even so, Feels Good Man does a better job than most at explaining how its own subject’s online virality led to real-world consequences outside niche meme forums. It chronicles Pepe the Frog’s transformation in the hellfires of 4chan from loveable frog to “the new swastika”, explaining how users who identified with Pepe as much as its creator had to force the frog to “go dark” to protect him from “normies” (i.e., women) who might identify with him as well. Because 4chan is an attention-economy culture that mostly traffics in “ironic” racism, this effort manifested as Pepe becoming a mouthpiece for Nazi rhetoric and an online dog whistle for alt-right C.H.U.D.s. Making Pepe as bigoted as possible became a kind of online game, and it gave real-world Right Wing ghouls a way to signal to the keyboard Nazis at home that the Trump-led establishment shared their values without abandoning their more buttoned-up, traditional voter base. That co-opting seems a little quaint now that Elon Musk is Sieg Heiling on an official government stage, but it was a major stepping stone that led us here.

The half of Feels Good Man that explains how 4chan memes created a new Nazi America is populated with all the expected demons of 2010s alt-right ascension. Pepe’s Nazi radicalization was directly inspired by Steve Bannon’s political strategy to “flood the zone with shit,” which has become the go-to playbook for the Trump-led Republican Party. During the infamous street interview when Richard Spencer is punched in the face by a protester, he’s explaining his Pepe the Frog lapel pin to a reporter at the moment the fist connects with his jaw (which the movie graciously repeats in several loops for our viewing pleasure). Pepe is even transformed into a direct stand-in for Trump himself, outfitted with a new smug facial expression and a Trumpian wig. Most critically, former Infowars blowhard Alex Jones is sued for copyright infringement by Matt Furie after using Pepe’s image on a fundraising campaign poster, marking Furie’s too-little-too-late attempt to reclaim his intellectual property from the worst people alive. The half of the film that’s about Furie’s astonishment & unpreparedness for the Internet’s hateful perversion of Pepe is adorably naive and populated with fellow alt-comics artists who are sad to see their friend suffer in this exponentially shitty shithole of a world: Lisa Hanawalt, Johnny Ryan, Aiyana Udesen, etc. Their attempt to reclaim Pepe and save his reputation was heavily outgunned, though, since the opposition included literal White House occupants.

It’s easy to roll your eyes at the twee preciousness of Furie’s pleas for good vibes and kindness as opposition against the hateful scum who’ve stolen & desecrated his art, but I appreciate the sentiment. I could not have sat through an exhaustive recounting of how 4chan “elected a meme as a president” and ushered in a Fourth Reich for the LOLs without a little kindness & levity. Being reminded that there are still sweet, reasonable people in the world who are oblivious to the deep well of evil on the other side of their computer screens was a calming counterbalance to the infuriating co-opting of meme culture to enact real-world fascism detailed elsewhere in the film. Five years later, it’s clear which side of that divide is winning the Culture War, but it’s also clear that they cannot create anything substantial themselves worthy of sharing & celebrating; they can only pervert, corrupt, and drain the humor & life out of previously existing art & language (which explains their more recent fondness for generative A.I.). As evidenced by the interstitial animations that imagine what it might be like if Boys Club had been adapted into a psychedelic Adult Swim sitcom instead of a Nazi dog whistle, Pepe deserved so much better than the hell-world we live in. He’s a cool frog.

-Brandon Ledet

Soundtrack to a Coup d’État (2024)

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It’s likely cliché to describe any movie’s editing style as being similar to jazz, but in the case of Soundtrack to a Coup d’État the descriptor is literal.  The anxious sounds & stylish block text of vintage jazz albums overlay news-report propaganda clips for 150 relentless minutes in this essay-style documentary film, which covers the CIA’s efforts to rebrand the Cold War as a “Cool War” by deploying popular jazz musicians to distract from its conspiratorial overthrow of the Congolese government.  While political figures of the era as formidable & dissonant as Nikita Khrushchev, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Malcolm X weigh in on the UN machinations that led to the CIA’s conspiracy to assassinate Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba, the soundtrack to that coup is provided by formidable & dissonant jazz greats of the era: Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, Nina Simone, Charles Mingus, and, most improbably, Louis Armstrong.  That soundtrack is not a formalistic choice made by director Johan Grimonprez so much as it is the core of his subject.  He details how those musicians were manipulated into working as semi-official “jazz ambassadors” for Black American culture in African nations that recently joined the UN, and how those ambassadors of Cool were used to distract from and cover for the planned execution of a newly sovereign foreign leader. 

There’s a sharp specificity to this doc’s subject, walking the audience through how African nations newly inducted into the United Nations were seen as a threat to be squashed by paranoid US leadership.  Their power within the UN as a young, organized voting block was especially threatening to the US government’s interests, since it relied on those nations remaining colonized so they could be mined for uranium supplies in the ongoing nuclear Cold War against the Communist Bloc.  Each subversive maneuver to ensure Belgium’s continued rule over the Congo is thoroughly documented in the onscreen text that interrupts the archival clips, often with page numbers & footnotes to encourage further research on your own time.  What Khrushchev describes as the “cacophony” of jazz guides the everything-goes, free-association editing style of that archival footage, so that the film ends up snapshotting the greater context of late-50s & early-60s global culture outside its duty to detail the step-by-step progress of its titular coup.  By the time Khrushchev is making jokes about visiting Disney World in a press conference attended by Marilyn Monroe, it plays like an alternate version of Joe Dante’s The Movie Orgy made for lefty academics: an impressive feat of politically fueled editing-room mania that captures & compresses the moral & political rot of an entire era.

Soundtrack to a Coup d’État‘s focus on the CIA’s appropriation & manipulation of Black American artists recalls a few other recent documentaries about the politics of Black artistic life in the US, namely Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project, and I Am Not Your Negro.  It distinguishes itself from that cluster of radical docs by slightly shifting focus away from Civil Rights clashes of the 1960s to a different form of racist US state violence, but it’s still racist US state violence all the same.  Grimonprez uses a key Malcolm X clip to link the two struggles, in which the activist encourages his audience to get angrier about the US’s violence abroad instead of just the Civil Rights struggle at home, emphasizing that foreign governments are dropping American bombs on Americans’ behalf.  All efforts to de-colonize are worth supporting, but it’s especially egregious to ignore the ones suppressed by bombs bearing your country’s name.  That line of thought has obvious current relevance in the continued bombing of Gaza by the Israeli military—backed by US weapons supplies—resonating just as loudly as the continued cultural racism of the US and the continued, aggressive unpredictability of jazz.  It’s a documentary about a very specific political moment in time, but the global fight for post-colonial freedom smashes through that temporal window.

-Brandon Ledet

Rumours (2024)

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Before things go to hell for the characters of director Guy Maddin’s Rumours, one of them suggests that they get down to the business at hand, citing that the G7 Summit “isn’t a summer camp.” You wouldn’t know that from the way that the so-called leaders of the so-called free world behave. For the most part, they behave like a group of high schoolers assigned to work together on a project and treat the summit with exactly as much gravitas as—or perhaps even less than—an after-school club. These two hooked up last year and one of them wants to get to work on their group statement while the other is still unrequited; one guy is content to sit back and let others put in all the work; another person thinks that they’re doing inspired, powerful work when in fact his contributions are meaningless flim-flam; and there’s the one little weirdo who wants everyone to like him and has cured meats in his pocket. You had one of those at your high school, too, right? 

This year, Germany is hosting the conference, under the leadership of Chancellor Hilda Ortmann (Cate Blanchett). After a few photo ops, the seven adjourn to a gazebo to work on their joint statement about the never-expounded-upon “current crisis,” but not before they stop off to take a look at—and get a photo with—an archaeological discovery on the grounds of the castle at which the conference is taking place. It’s a “bog body,” mummified remains over two thousand years old. Owing to the unique composition of the soil, the flesh remains intact while the body’s bones have completely liquefied. It’s noted that the corpse has had its genitalia chopped off and hung around its neck, and this is specifically mentioned to be a punishment that ancient peoples of the area practiced in rebellion against weak, inept, or otherwise failed leaders. We learn that U.K. P.M. Cardosa Dewindt (Nikki Amuka-Bird) slept with the supposedly charismatic Prime Minister of Canada Maxime LaPlace (Roy Dupuis) at a previous summit, although this time around, she simply wants to focus on the “work,” such as it is. Representing the U.S. is President Edison Wolcott (Charles Dance), a doddering, elderly man whose sleepiness, apathy, and exhaustion are attributes clearly mocking current White House occupying chickenshit Joe Biden. French President Sylvain Broulez (Denis Ménochet) is a vain, self-important man whose greatest desire is to be appreciated as a deep thinker by the others, while Italy’s P.M. Antonio “Tony” Lamorte (Rolando Ravello), for whom this is the first summit, finds easy acceptance among the others through his genuineness, although he comes across as naive as a result. Japanese Prime Minister Tatsuro Iwasaki (Takhiro Hira) is … also there. 

Maxime has an emotional outburst just as the gazebo dinner is finished, and the rest of the group pair off to brainstorm ideas for their statement while he stalks about the woods nearby, calming himself. President Wolcott tells P.M. Lamorte that it’s not worth working on, that no one takes these statements very seriously and that it’s fine to slack off a little, leading him to regaling the newcomer with exactly the kind of “good ol’ days” talks that geriatric politicians love to spout. Broulez and Iwasaki passionately discuss a potentially powerful opening statement, but we later learn their collaboration produced nothing but meaningless buzzwords amid wishy-washy ideology. Ortmann and Dewindt likewise make little progress, as each time one of them makes a statement that expresses any strong ideas, the other cautions for the need to walk this back so as to appear nonpartisan. Things take a turn for the worse when the regrouped seven realize that they are completely alone, and that no staff has appeared for some time. The nearby catering set-up is long vacant and the castle in which all their aides and staff should be is empty, quiet, and locked. From here, things get surreal and bizarre, as the seven try to find out what is happening and make their way back to so-called civilization despite their isolation. More bog bodies start popping up, potential pagan rites are performed and witnessed, there’s a giant brain in the woods, and an A.I. chatbot designed to entrap potential child predators may have gained sentience and decided to destroy mankind. 

If Rumours is only two things, it’s both funny … and toothless. One Gets The Point very early on, and that drum is beaten over and over again. Perhaps this obviousness is the point. After things have gotten very strange and dangerous, one of the characters comments on the potential of viewing each of the world leaders in attendance as a microcosm of their represented nation and that the events playing out before him is an allegory. Of course, this comes at a time when France is being hauled around in the woods in a wheelbarrow, revealing that the film’s Canadian director may have little respect for the boot-shaped nation. That observation doesn’t hold up, however, and this might have been a stronger film if it had gone fully allegorical and used the summit as an opportunity to play out personified international relations, but that’s not what Maddin is aiming to do. What was advertised as a satire is more of a farce. It’s funny that, upon viewing a photo of the hatchback sized brain that Maxime discovered in the woods, three of the male delegates comment that it must be a woman’s giant brain because “it’s smaller than a man’s giant brain would be,” despite this being a completely novel event. We’re meant to laugh at the inherent sexism of the patriarchy, and we do, but it has no bite to it. Characters behave like they’ve reunited for, as noted above, a summer camp getaway, with special attention being paid to everyone being sad that this is likely Maxime’s last summer at camp with them; he’s facing legal trouble for an utterly (and realistically) banal monetary scandal. Tonally, it’s like he’s being punished by his parents and not being allowed to come back next year, and the rest of the leaders treat his serious legal trouble (which is legitimately unethical) with the frivolous dismissal of the kind of low-level mischief that might cause a kid to be grounded from going to camp. 

The comedy works, but ironically, its aim is as broad and meaningless as we are meant to find the film’s characters’ lukewarm politics to be. Again, that may be the point, but that justification doesn’t move the barometer for how much I like the piece in a positive direction. When the humor works best is when it plays a little dirtier. Maxime gets a text message, supposedly from a girl named Victoria, and Dewindt tells him that he may be chatting with an A.I. chatbot that was created in order to ensnare pedophiles by messaging potential sex criminals, citing that people in their positions of power are statistically more likely to be sex pests. Hilda suggests that they play into the scenario, as if they “trip the alarm,” so to speak, the authorities will trace the phone, and they can use this to be rescued. However, on the off chance that they may be speaking with a real child in need of help, they must also play down the creep factor to avoid psychologically harming Victoria. This observation about the frequency with which power overlaps with sexual abuse is one of the only times that the film is really cutting, taking aim not just at the facile nature of empire and its pageantry but at the seductive and corrupting nature of invisibility and immunity. That this leads into a good running gag in which the group must brainstorm messages that are creepy and gross (but not too creepy and gross) seems almost indicative of the fact that if the film leaned harder into the satire and less into the farce, the jokes would land with more punch. 

This isn’t really the kind of film that you can spoil, but this film does end in an apocalypse. There’s a big stew of what might be happening: the bog bodies rise from the earth as (compulsively masturbating) reanimated undead, with the implication that there might be something primal and supernatural at work; “Victoria” may have gained sentience and masterminded a cleansing of the earth in order to start anew; the big brain in the woods and its psychic effect on those around it may be related to the latter or could be another concurrent apocalyptic scenario. It doesn’t really matter if these are connected or not, as the group makes its way back to the castle and, covering themselves in the reflective silver emergency blankets that they find in their G7 gift bags, prepare to give their joint statement. Maxime, using scissors and tape, rejects a statement that “Victoria” has created and covers it with excerpts from the various things that different characters have managed to scribble down over the course of the movie. There’s Biden’s Wolcott’s sleep-talking nonsense about “need[ing] a slip to go to the sleep tank,” dutifully transcribed by Lamorte. There’s sections from another character’s ramblings that begin with a metaphor of marriage for international relations before devolving into a revealing glimpse at an attempt to negotiate for non-sexual physical intimacy with a disengaged partner. Throughout the film, characters express reverence for previous G7 Summits and the “powerful” declarations thereof, citing passages that are perhaps pleasing to the ear but ultimately hollow. As the film ends, they stand on a balcony to make their address to an empty lawn, their blankets reflect an orange sky and distant pillars of smoke, making the mirrored surface look more like translucent plastic that contains nothing of substance. The statement is delivered with gusto but signifies nothing, their drama observed only by the undead, one of whom seems to be mocking them by masturbating over their self-congratulatory nonsense. 

The film is a decent success as a comedy, although it lacks the unusually-expressed but nonetheless palpable sentiment that makes something like My Winnipeg work. I’d call it a cynical meanness, but it’s not nearly cynical or mean enough. As a result, it’s not a success as a satire. You’ll laugh, but it’s unlikely to stick with you. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Parallax View (1974)

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It’s a well-known fact around these parts that I love a conspiracy thriller. I couldn’t have been more excited that my local arthouse theater programmed a month-long series of 1970s American thrillers, and I bought a ticket for almost every one of them. The first of these is a cornerstone of the genre, and one that was a sorely lacking blind spot in my checklist of canonical films of said phenotype. The Parallax View, a 1974 release from director Alan J. Pakula just two years before his second-best picture nomination for All the President’s Men (his first was for To Kill a Mockingbird), stars Warren Beatty. Beatty plays Joe Frady, a reporter in the Pacific Northwest, three years after he was present at the base of the Seattle Space Needle when a high-profile politician was assassinated in the restaurant above. He wasn’t in the room when it happened, but his ex-girlfriend Lee Carter (Paula Prentiss) was, and she’s convinced that six of the other eyewitnesses who have died in the intervening time were the victims of foul play; Frady waves off her concerns as anxiety born of self-medicating, until she, too, turns up dead. Now convinced, Frady starts to pull at the frayed threads presented to him and discovers a conspiracy that permeates the fabric of the country’s leadership, one whose reach is far wider than he could have imagined. 

In the book upon which The Parallax View is based, the inciting assassination was that of JFK, making it a part of the subgenre of conspiracy media that specifically appeals to the Dale Gribble set. Here, the assassination that precedes the opening credits is that of a generic independent politician with an eye on the presidency, as the film was released too late to attach itself to the Kennedy assassination without making itself a period piece. That didn’t stop this one from becoming as locked into a certain time as a period piece would be in the intervening half century, however, while also remaining unfortunately (if not unsurprisingly) relevant to the current greased-by-blood American political machine. Sure, there’s a lot of culture shock upon seeing Frady purchase a plane ticket with cash after he’s already boarded the plane. On the other hand, the film seems almost prescient in its depiction of the abject terror of living in a society shaped by shadowy forces that can arrange car accidents for reporters, poison newspaper editors in a way that mimics a heart attack, and knock a passenger plane carrying a progressive candidate out of the sky. It’s not that hard to make a connection between the fictional conspiracy at play here and, for instance, the sudden death of a whistleblower who raised safety concerns about airplane manufacturing just six weeks ago. That’s not really prescience, really, any more than The Simpsons “predicted” any of the things it’s been credited with foreseeing in recent years; it’s just an indictment of the fact that we’ve made much less progress in the past sixty years than we would like to think. It’s all just the pageantry of empire. 

The Parallax View falls short of being a masterpiece. It has some really wonderful set pieces, and the picaresque nature of the narrative keeps things moving even when the story starts to feel a little slow. First, Frady goes to a tiny Oregon community where the political aide to the dead senator was last seen and where one of the witnesses was drowned while fishing when a dam was opened. This sequence is great, as you can feel the immense tension as the dam opens again while he’s investigating the area. This is preceded by an impressive fist fight between Frady and a local oaf, then followed by an exciting car chase that I would bet money was an inspiration to the future creators of The Dukes of Hazzard. Even after he manages not to drown, Frady’s editor Bill Rintels (Hume Cronyn) still isn’t convinced that there’s a conspiracy afoot, until Frady miraculously survives the assassination of in-hiding political insider Austin Tucker (William “Mr. Feeney” Daniels), at which point Rintels relents. In his investigation, Frady discovers that an organization known as The Parallax Corporation is using mail-in personality tests to find sociopaths and recruit them to become assassins. From here, we get to the film’s most famous sequence (and it, in and of itself, is a masterpiece): a five minute montage to which Frady (undercover after submitting a false test) is subjected to as a kind of orientation/brainwashing. You can see it here, and although it functions beautifully in isolation, it’s obviously much more effective in the film itself. 

In a lot of ways, this is the platonic ideal of a 1970s political thriller, disillusioned after a decade that saw the death of a beloved president, the murder of the leader of the Civil Rights Movement, the unmasking of another president’s illegal surveillance of the public. While the book was solely focused on the assassination of JFK, this one explicitly talks about the demoralization of an entire nation as there’s the murder of another public figure “every other week, it seems.” It’s also unrelentingly grim, as everyone turns out to be corruptible and already under Parallax’s sway despite initially seeming to be trustworthy, or genuinely good and invested in getting the truth out but very easy to kill and cover up, or less safe than they thought they were despite taking every precaution. No one is unreachable, no one is untouchable, no one is safe, and no number of civilian collaterals is considered too much, whether it be eighteen eyewitnesses, a plane full of people who were unlucky enough to be on the same flight as a senator, or an entire marching band that has the misfortune of having been selected to perform at a congressman’s campaign announcement. It’s bleak, but worth seeking out. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Shampoo (1975)

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At this point, you can’t fault Quentin Tarantino for hiding or obscuring his influences.  Maybe around the time he first made a splash with Reservoir Dogs on the 1990s film festival circuit, he could’ve been accused of lifting images & ideas from the Hong Kong action cinema that directly preceded him without citing his sources, but by now we’re all used to his schtick.  Tarantino is more of a genre film DJ than a traditional director, remixing & recontextualizing pre-existing media in an act of creation through curation.   Still, there is something a little deflating about catching up with those sources of inspiration after seeing them regurgitated in one of Tarantino’s post-modern mashups.  I understood as a teenager that Kill Bill, vol. 1 visually referenced a long history of vintage Japanese cinema & manga, but it wasn’t until recently watching Lady Snowblood for the first time that it really became clear how much more potent & vivid those source texts can be compared to their photocopied American version.  I loved Jackie Brown when I first saw it in high school as well, but at this point in my life I’m way more likely to return to Pam Grier classics like Coffy & Foxy Brown than I am to their adoring echoes in Tarantino’s homage.  This exact phenomenon hit me again while watching the 1975 Hal Ashby comedy Shampoo for the first time last month, which in retrospect made Tarantino’s most recent film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood feel a little hollow in its redundancy.  There was already a perfectly executed post-mortem on the old-world Los Angeles of the 1960s, made just a few years after the fact, while the corpse was still fresh.  Only, Ashby’s film ties that world’s death and the sinister hedonism of the hippie-dippy takeover that followed to the presidential election of Richard Nixon in 1968, while Tarantino ties it to the Manson Family violence of 1969.  There are no murders in Ashby’s day-in-the-life story about a fuckboy hairdresser who sleeps his way across Beverly Hills, but you can still distinctly smell the stench of death bubbling up from the canyons below.

Warren Beatty is a producer & co-writer of this bad-vibes hangout comedy, in which he satirizes his own real-life reputation as a handsome playboy & sex addict.  He plays an extremely popular, promiscuous hairdresser who compulsively sleeps with all of his clients.  He’s proud of his actual, professional salon work and insistent that he is not a gigolo, since he sleeps with the women purely for the pleasure of the act, and they return for more because he’s genuinely talented with hair.  The hairdressing is 100% part of the foreplay, though, as he practically dry-humps his clients’ heads while blowing them dry, then thrusts his instruments into his waistband like a cowboy’s phallic pistol.  Haircuts are unavoidably intimate acts in all circumstances, but there’s something especially shameless about his technique.  Usually, he gets away with this slutty, unprofessional behavior because the men outside the salon assume he is gay, a stereotype he gladly exploits for cover.  Only, Beatty’s promiscuity gets the best of him when the insular small-town community of Beverly Hills offers no new conquests he hasn’t serviced, and he finds that he’s already screwed over a potential investor in his dream to open his own salon by screwing the man’s wife, mistress, and teenage daughter (a baby-faced Carrie Fisher) on separate occasions – all seedy, all within 24 hours.  Meanwhile, satisfying his monogamous girlfriend at home while satisfying every other woman in the county proves to be trickier by the minute.  The sitcom juggling of these conflicting, overlapping relationships can be funny in a Three’s Company kind of way, but a lot of the film feels like a bitter autopsy on the recently concluded Free Love era, dissecting it more as a covert extension of classic male entitlement than as some progressive far-out experiment.  It’s a damning self-indictment that set public relations for the himbo community back for decades, so there’s something bravely vulnerable about Beatty’s involvement in the project in particular (assuming that Hal Ashby was not quietly known around town as an insatiable fuck machine).

Shampoo has somehow maintained a lasting reputation as a zany screwball comedy, which is mostly only paid off in the two party sequences at its climax.  In its clearest culture clash between the old-world Los Angeles of the 1960s and the upcoming druggy sleaze of the 1970s, both of the opposing sides in the hippies vs Nixon voters divide cross into enemy territory during simultaneous parties.  An absurdly Conservative, buttoned-up Jack Warden plays the central figure in this sequence: the businessman investor who’s been triple-cucked by Beatty’s assumed-queer hairdresser.  There’s a lot of awkward tension wound up by Warden’s Nixon-election-night party, where he’s unknowingly invited a small cadre of counterculture types, including his mistress (Julie Christie) & Beatty’s girlfriend (Goldie Hawn, looking like a boardwalk caricature of Goldie Hawn), who both get into Real Housewives-style glaring matches with Warden’s wife (Lee Grant).  Where the movie really gets funny, though, is when Warden leaves his Nixon-voter safe space and follows his younger, druggier associates to a hippie party in the Hills, chaotically drunk.  Warden explores the hippie party like he’s walking through an alien planet, poking at the locals like extraterrestrial specimens before experimenting with the idea of joining them.  It’s a short-lived cultural exchange, but it is a memorably funny one, especially since it releases a lot of the social tension of the election-night party that precedes it.  That tension immediately returns in full force when Warden catches a direct glimpse of Beatty’s passionate heterosexuality, though, and an ambient threat of violent retribution hangs over the rest of the picture.  It’s the same low-key hangout turned sourly sinister vibe shift that Tarantino echoed in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and although neither film explicitly marks the end of the Old Hollywood era with the brutal murder of Sharon Tate, it’s a feeling & a memory that hangs over both pictures like a dark cloud (something rarely seen in sunny LA).

If Warren Beatty’s slutty hairdresser has any direct corollary in Tarantino’s film, it’s clearly Brad Pitt’s Cliff Booth: a has-been movie star whose handsome face only covered up his rotten personality for so long before the good times came to an abrupt stop.  If we’re tracking the way that influence reached Tarantino’s pen, it starts with a real-life friend of Warren Beatty’s, Jay Sebring.  A famously talented hairstylist, Sebring was also a close friend & former lover of Sharon Tate’s and one of the five Manson Family victims murdered in Tate’s home.  Tarantino cast Emile Hirsch in a small role as Sebring in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, but there’s a lengthier, indirect representation of him through Pitt’s part as the co-lead.  Cliff Booth partially plays as an homage to Beatty’s hairstylist protagonist in Shampoo, who was in turn partially written in homage to the real-life Sebring.  Everything in Taratino’s films works this way.  It’s all fragments of reflections of ephemera from decades past, rearranged in loving homage to the media he genuinely, passionately appreciates as a consumer.  His work can be incredibly rewarding & entertaining, but there’s something limiting about that practice when compared to the original movies that inspire it.  Somehow, Beatty was able to convey the same darkness & brutality that concluded the Free Love 1960s in his homage to Sebring (mixed with winking reference to his own reputation) without ever evoking the death-cult violence that ended his friend’s life.  It can be fun to pick apart the academic collage of art & history in Tarantino’s work, but there’s something much more direct & powerful about the original works they reference.  Maybe Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was partially made as a corrective to Shampoo‘s discordant reputation as a goofy sitcom, intended to accentuate the more tragic undercurrents of its real-world context that are muffled under the humor of its hippies vs Nixonites culture clash.  If so, it’s a shame that Taratino has reportedly abandoned his planned project that dramatizes the art of film criticism, since that what he’s mainly good at.

-Brandon Ledet

Civil War (2024)

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The first noises you hear in Alex Garland’s Civil War are surround-sound blasts of static bouncing around the room in unpredictable, disorienting patterns.  That discordance continues in the film’s crate-digging soundtrack, which includes songs from bands like Suicide & Silver Apples that disorient their audiences with off-rhythm oscillation for a near-psychedelic effect.  Likewise, a sunny, up-beat party track from De La Soul violently clashes against a scene of brutal militarism in a way that’s chillingly wrong to the ear and to the heart.  Civil War is cinema of discordance, a blockbuster art film that purports to take an apolitical view of inflammatory politics.  That discordance is evident in its main subject: the psychology behind war journalism & battlefield photography.  Even though the work itself is often noble, journalists’ personal impulses to participate in violence as up-close spectators can be disturbingly inhuman, and Garland’s main interest appears to be in the volatile disharmony between those two truths.  It’s a movie about professional neutrals who act against every survival instinct in their bodies that tell them to fight or flee, and that instinct that says what you’re observing is dangerous & wrong carries over to the filmmaking craft as well – something that only becomes more disturbing when you find yourself enjoying it.

Kirsten Dunst stars as a respected photojournalist who reluctantly passes her torch to a young upstart played by Cailee Spaeny, mirroring the actors’ real-life professional dynamic as Sofia Coppola muses.  Along with two similarly, generationally divided newspaper men (Wagner Moura & Stephen McKinley Henderson), they travel down the East Coast of a near-future America that’s devolved into chaos & bloodshed, hoping to document the final days of an illegitimate president who refuses to leave office (Nick Offerman) before he is executed by the combined military of defecting states.  Like in Garland’s screenplay for 28 Days Later, their journey is an episodic collection of interactions with survivors who’ve shed the final semblances of civility in the wreckage of a dying society (including a show-stopping performance from Jesse Plemons as a small-time, sociopathic tyrant), except instead of a zombie virus everyone’s just fighting to survive extremist politics.  The journalists look down on people who’ve consciously decided to stay out of the war—including their own parents—but in the almighty name of objectivity they attempt the same political avoidance, just from a much closer, more thrilling proximity.  They sometimes pontificate about the importance of allowing readers to decide on the issues for themselves based on the raw data they provide from the front-lines, but Garland makes it clear that their attraction to the profession can be something much more selfish than that.  Moments after watching & documenting real people bleed to death through a camera lens, they shout, “What a rush!” and compliment the artistic quality of each other’s pictures.  They’re essentially adrenaline addicts who’ve found a way to philosophically justify getting their fix.

There may be something amoral about picking at the ethics & psychology of front-line war journalism in this way, especially at a time when we’re relying on the bravery of on-the-ground documentation from Gaza to counteract & contradict official government narratives that downplay an ongoing genocide.  Civil War never makes any clear, overt statements about journalism as a discipline, though; it just dwells on how unnatural it is for journalists to be able to compartmentalize in real time during battle, even finding a perverse thrill in the excitement.  They are active participants in war without ever admitting it to themselves, and most of the emotional, character-based drama of the film is tied to the ability to maintain that emotional distance as the consequences of the war get increasingly personal.  As the lead, Dunst in particular struggles to stay protected in her compartmentalized headspace where nothing matters except getting “the money shot” of actual combatants being brutally killed just a few feet away from her camera.  It shuts off like a light switch when she sees her inhuman behavior reflected in the younger version of herself, played by Spaeny.  It also shuts off when reviewing her own artistically framed pictures of a dying colleague, which she deletes out of respect (and maybe out of self-disgust).  However, as soon as she finds herself in competition to capture a front-page photo before other nearby journalists beat her to the punch, it flips back on, and the movie doesn’t seem to have anything concrete to say about that switch except to note how deeply strange it is as a professional talent.  Nor does it really need to.

Like a lot of recent audience-dividers, it seems the major sticking point for most Civil War detractors is that Garland’s main thematic interests don’t match the themes of the movie they made up in their heads before arriving to the theater.  Any claims from either audience or filmmaker that the movie is apolitical ring false, given that Nick Offerman plays a 3rd-term president who declares “Some are calling it the greatest victory of all time” in press conferences about his obvious, disastrous failures.  If the allusions to Trump and the January 6 insurrection were any more blatant, the movie would be derided as an on-the-nose caricature.  The divide between artist & audience is just one of personal interests.  If you’re looking to Civil War for speculative fiction about where the current populist politics of our country may soon lead us, the movie is not interested enough in near-future worldbuilding to draw you a roadmap.  It’s much more interested in the psychology of the unbiased, objective spectators of this extremist political discord than in the politics of those actually, actively participating in it, which it takes more as a given.  Maybe that’s purely a statement about the nature of war journalism, or maybe it’s something that can be extrapolated as commentary on the consumption of horrific news footage as a subgenre of smartphone content, or as self-deprecating commentary on making fictional films about politics instead of directly participating in it.  Maybe even Garland himself doesn’t know exactly what he wants to say about the act of reducing the horrors of real-world violence into sensationalist words & images, but it’s at least clear that he feels something alienating & cold in that spectatorship, and that feeling is effectively conveyed through his choices behind the camera.

-Brandon Ledet