Politics as experienced through online discourse and the hand-wringing punditry of the news cycle can feel like an existential slog, like staring at a raging fire from inside a glass box. The cynic will tell you things have always been this way, and that the 2016 election merely awakened a privileged, sheltered demographic to an ugly reality. Yet the upheavals of the past half decade have proven indisputably destabilizing. With the cartoonishly reprehensible Donald J. Trump in the White House, features of the country’s rooted corruption, sexism, and racism have become disturbingly transparent, giving the impression of a reality more chaotic than ever.
One related outcome: the emphasis on self-assuring distinctions of good and bad, performed and repeated ad nauseam to impose order on an otherwise irrational political reality.
In the face of day-to-days that involves Klu Klux Klan rallies and openly-admitted sexual predators in positions of power, our expressions of outrage, increasingly rote and redundant, have to come seem primarily in the service of our own comfort and satisfaction. Baffled, we continuously apprehend these realities through mockery, disgust, and rhetorical takedowns that function like sugar-high equivalents of closure.
American popular culture’s corresponding output leaves much to be desired, perhaps because it feeds less on the cause for disaffection than the disaffected imagination. Parody has long functioned as an expression of animosity, but today’s comedies seem lackluster because the content has surpassed the form. Recall the smutty sensationalism of House of Cards, the Kevin Spacey-starring Netflix series that envisioned an alternate reality of of scheming, murderous, adulterous Hill staffers and their democratically elected bosses. It’s amazing how quickly this once-scandalous show lost its bite when the presidency’s real-life absurdity began making Frank Underwood’s machinations look relatively grounded. The same goes for the routine political sketches on Saturday Night Live, which depicts the President as a Dr. Evil sort, destined for failure. This certain failure appears as a fantasy, a prayer tempering the unpredictability of a bitter reality that does not actually ensure his downfall. The President is already viewed as a caricature, which places political parody at the peak of fashion while ensuring such parody is automatically redundant. In mocking and jeering we merely contribute to the same feedback loop of approved images and ideas. In much of recent American cinema, we gleefully satirize the comical villains and opportunist idiots of the liberal imagination. Take for instance Armando Iannuci’s The Death of Stalin and Adam McKay’s Vice, which we view as rough analogs to the bumbling incompetence, backwards thinking, and overall power-mongering treachery of the current administration. Dunking on the bad guys feels good, but to what extent is this a superficial substitute for political engagement, a self-congratulatory distraction?
Continuing this recent output of easily-digestible invectives against the corrupt powers-that-be is Taika Waititi’s “anti-hate satire,” Jojo Rabbit. The story of a 10-year-old fledgling Nazi who discovers his mother has been hiding a Jewish girl in their home, Jojo envisions fascist groupthink from the perspective of a sensitive kid in search of validation. His imaginary friend, a wacky, blue-eyed Hitler played by Waititi himself, is his confidante and BFF—so you can imagine the scope of the kid’s allegiance. As a product of a child’s imagination, Hitler is a big goof, like a mustachioed Peewee Herman prancing alongside Jojo as he struggles to earn respect from his Nazi classmates and superiors. While occasional stark reminders of the regime’s brutality punctuate the otherwise whimsical mood, the film hardly strays from its bright, colorful character, its commitment to sentimentality and quirky relatability. Is the intended provocation the mere fact of Hitler’s resurrection as a kid’s friendly ghost?
Most confusing is Waititi’s decision to portray Nazi psychology through an ironic, liberal purview, which disowns the chilling self-righteousness of the program with ingrained apprehension and balking. Our various Nazi characters as a result are portrayed as complicit, but begrudgingly so. These are good Nazis stuck in the wrong time and place, evinced particularly by Sam Rockwell’s Captain Klenzendorf, the gay, alcoholic head of Nazi youth services who turns a blind eye to the Jewish girl and confronts the Americans in the final showdown donning eye shadow and dressed in a pink-accented, bedazzled uniform. For all its attempts at a half-assed historical alienation à la Bertolt Brecht, Jojo Rabbit intends to be relatable to the average American, and uses the political talking points of a good Democrat whose greatest nemesis is an uncle who voted Republican. Jojo’s mother, a Marlene Deitrich-inspired member of the German resistance played by Scarlett Johansson, insists he’ll grow out of Nazism, and when a dinner table discussion turns heated, she insists they stop talking politics.
Another film released this year about a fatherless, brainwashed youth comes to mind: Jean-Luc and Pierre Dardenne’s Young Ahmed, about a Muslim teen who succumbs to radicalization. Ahmed is stubbornly devoted and for the most part unsympathetic in his unbending misogyny, a worldview fostered by a crooked imam whom the boy sees, like Jojo does Hitler, as a father-figure. In both films, the appearance of a romantic female interest throws these boys into disarray. But whereas Ahmed challenges audiences to grapple with the corruption of an innocent, Jojo Rabbit never takes seriously the consequences of a kid buying into an ideology of hate.
Hitler and Nazi Germany are easy targets for Waititi, but hardly do these universally accepted evils need a sentimental treatment. There are good people on both sides, the film seems to say in its presumably heart-warming conclusion that shows Jew and reformed Nazi celebrating the end of the war with a dance. Similarly reductive humanist impulses appear in Jay Roach’s Bombshell, the story of the female Fox News employees who challenged the misogynist status quo and brought about the downfall of sexual predator Roger Ailes. It was inevitable, the Hollywood dramatization of #MeToo, a movement that presided over the takedown of wealthy and powerful ogres like Ailes and Harvey Weinstein. Curiously, though these stories mark significant feminist achievements in American history, the emerging David and Goliath narratives have proven startlingly resistant to nuance—as if complex storytelling will undermine the motivation to believe women.
Roach was a natural choice for Bombshell; the Austin Powers director in the past decade has shifted to innocuous political dramas with films like the Sarah Palin origin story Game Change and the Hollywood blacklist drama, Trumbo. If the Hollywood dramatization of #MeToo was inevitable then so, too, in a sense, was Bombshell, with its treatment of everyday politics and feminist agendas as two discrete issues. Indeed, the luxury of separating your politics from your womanhood is one delusion of white feminism that the film touches upon but leaves entirely unexplored; which is disappointing to say the least in a film about the women who work at Fox News. Kate McKinnon plays a (closeted) lesbian and secret Hillary Clinton voter who also happens to work at Fox News. When she decides to take Margot Robbie’s ambitious evangelical, Kayla, under her wing, she runs through a bullet point list of Fox stereotypes: always appear angry, blame everything on the immigrants, et cetera. Meanwhile, Kayla nods approvingly, unaware her coworker is speaking condescendingly. Despite their disparate beliefs, these beautiful blonde women coexist happily. Nicole Kidman’s Gretchen Carlson encounters a hater at a grocery store—if only that stranger knew about her pioneering feminist efforts, the film seems to suggest. Carlson, appalled at the rude woman, insists in so many words that not all Republicans are bad people, while the rest of the film emphasizes Carlson’s sympathy to liberal causes like gun control. Any question of these women’s complicity in the lies and fear-mongering perpetuated by the conservative news channel is muted, or buffered with humor as if to safeguard their legitimate claims against Ailes.
Bombshell is manufactured, feel-good feminism for the politically ambivalent, empty calories that serve to lionize its women protagonists rather than dignify them with more challenging portraits. That Bombshell centers exclusively around white women is not necessarily a problem, as the experiences of individuals bullied, harassed, and abused by those more powerful than them by virtue of biological differences are important and relevant to us all. Yet these women are only portrayed in terms of their bravery and heroism, subsuming their unflattering views as a necessary toll of their ambition and willingness to do whatever it takes to succeed in the industry.
I cannot help but view the fundamental lack of curiosity in these films as Hollywood capitalizing on a new socially-encouraged outrage that spins feminist and anti-fascist stories into popularly-appeasing, feel-good yarns. Political cinema that prompts critical reflection is a rarity in Hollywood thanks to these self-validating impulses; yet two films from 2019 offer mild antidotes. Todd Haynes’ Dark Waters and Scott Z. Burns’ The Report draw satisfaction from the process of detailed, determined accountability-seeking. These thoroughly unromantic movies summon, through prolonged stretches of time and endless piles of paperwork, the frustration and spiritual drainage of the long road of resistance. Both end on a lackluster note, indicating that the fight, as it were, continues, and that the wrongdoings the film seeks to redress, continue to go on unaccounted for. Perhaps this resistance to closure mostly unimpeded by palliative triumphs is a mood we must embrace; confronting the purgatory of our current moment more fully might even encourage us to reinvent and reconsider the ways we resist.