Vice – A film that contributes to the problem it appears to be addressing.

The Reluctant Son and I were negotiating to see a film last night.  The women in the family had decided to have a girl’s night out.  The reluctant son didn’t want to go out and isn’t a big fan of films – he would rather watch something like sports where the outcome is not predictable.  But the sports menu looked dull.  So we ordered in and explored the top twenty films of 2018 that neither of us had seen.  We agreed that we were interested in seeing Vice together – the film about Dick Cheney and his political machinations as George W.’s Vice President.

 

As the final credits were rolling, we noticed that there were two production teams – one headed by Brad Pitt and the other including Will Ferrell.  And it was the reluctant son who articulated our shared experience.  We had expected a serious film about a serious subject.  We had been surprised that it was presented with a kind of heavy handed criticism, typical of such Brad Pitt films as War Machine, interrupted by the kind of irreverent jocularity that Will Ferrell’s movies include.

As the credits were rolling, we were returned to a focus group that had been used in the middle of the film to encourage “rebranding” such things as inheritance taxes as the death tax.  It had the feel of being an outtake that would have been at home in one of those Will Ferrell movies, but, in the sly, self-conscious way of the film, it turned into a campy fight between the focus group members about the qualities of the film itself.  A liberal and a conservative started fighting about whether the film they were acting in had value – with the conservative suggesting that it was just liberal propaganda.  Meanwhile, two women, watching the verbal spat devolve into fisticuffs, shared their disinterest in the argument – and focused instead on the latest gossip about their favorite pop star.

While this might have been intended as witty commentary on the state of the populace today, the Reluctant Son noted that the movie is a symptom of the problem that it claims to be addressing – the problem that politics is no longer relevant in most people’s lives unless it is a form of entertainment.  This could be conceptualized as: We have a President who is functioning as a reality TV star, not as a real person.  And this movie, a movie that both paints Cheney as a war criminal and a killer of thousands of innocent people, including our soldiers, and a movie that also points out that Cheney was integral to the change in legislation that opened the door to Fox and MSNBC becoming propaganda machines by lifting the FCC requirement that news cover issues in a balanced way, plays its own part in entertainifying these horrible assertions.  Rather than working to help us understand how this state of affairs came to be, it turns into a kind of cartoon.

 

Instead of taking an artistic position regarding how it is that Cheney became the person that wreaked the kind of havoc that it and we deplore, the film makes fun of the kind of drama that Shakespeare wrote – briefly writing and acting dialogue between Lynn and Dick Cheney as he is weighing whether to reenter the fray and become the Vice President that is fraught with meaning.  It takes the position that it cannot do this though, it cannot speculate about what motivated Cheney because he was so private and kept his inner world so hidden.  It pretends that it is a documentary, when, in fact, it is a dramatic reading of history – just as many Shakespearean plays were a dramatic reader of history.  And the Bard frequently knew nothing about the actual psychology of the characters he was writing about – his best writing is often pure speculation.  This movie leaves the central figure unexplored and instead simply demonizes him.  It does not help us understand him – and therefore it does not help us understand how we are complicit in electing demons.  It leaves us innocent – in a weird version of American Exceptionalism – because it concludes, essentially, “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?”  Or, on an even closer reading, "How can we be responsible for men who have no heart?"

This film pretends to be a documentary to its decrement.  The Reluctant Son, who saw the four hour documentary Bush’s War as part of his college education, acknowledges that Vice hits the high points of Cheney’s subterfuge and abuse of power, but by turning itself into entertainment instead of art, it turns the most interesting aspects of this insidious character into pure demonology.

One of the central motifs through the film is that Cheney relaxes by fly fishing.  Early on, we see a trout trolling for food.  As the movie builds towards articulating the darkest deeds that Cheney orchestrated, we see, instead of a trout, a dark creature – essentially the Creature from the Black Lagoon – with legs and arms – slipping between the rocks of a trout stream as Cheney is fishing.  The implication is clear.  Cheney is a monster. 

The problem is that this movie does not help us understand why he is a monster.  His final words indicate that he has served us.  He has kept us safe.  The film portrays him as having kept his wife Lynn safe from a life like her mother’s – a life with an alcoholic, abusive husband who ultimately murdered her.  Cheney protected his wife by cleaning up his own alcoholic abusive life – he was headed towards being that abusive, murderous husband, but became a savior rather than a perpetrator when she read him the riot act.  He straightened himself up when she confronted him.

But he didn't really.  The message of the film is also that the murderous, abusive man sought power not to be able to protect her or us, but to afford him an outlet to attack people who could not defend themselves.  He did this from a distance and with the power of his very idiosyncratic reading of the constitution to protect him (and the power to cover his tracks – he learned from Nixon to destroy the evidence – in his case, the emails rather than the tapes).  And in doing all of this, he began a process of undermining our ethical functioning (including recruiting psychologists to do his dirty work).  His assertion that executive functioning, as conceived in the constitution, is unquestionable set us on the path that we are now confronted with.  He created the position that we do not have a President, but an Emperor – a King – a Despot.

It is useful to know, I suppose, where our current constitutional crisis comes from.  But by camping that up, this film ends up concluding that government – like education, parenting, and science in this post factual world – doesn’t actually matter because it is just entertainment.  When we turn it off, we turn the next thing on and life goes on. 

Can art return to helping us realize that life matters?  I think some art still does that – the Overstory, for instance, leads us to deeply feel the urgency to do something about the environment.  We want to go out and hug a tree after reading it.  But this movie suggests we should simply give up and join the Reluctant Son in watching the next game on TV.  Fortunately he has not.  He is studying political science and does believe that good government matters.  I hope he finds enough compatriots to right our badly listing ship of state - something this movie purports to be doing while actually keeping us locked into a kind of hopeless inaction and sense of powerlessness.   

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