Image copyright Amazon Studios
“There we were - demented children mincing about in clothes that no one ever wore, speaking as no man ever spoke, swearing love in wigs and rhymed couplets, killing each other with wooden swords, hollow protestations of faith hurled after empty promises of vengeance - and every gesture, every pose, vanishing into the thin, unpopulated air. We pledged our identities, secure in the conventions of our trade that someone would be watching. And then, gradually, no one was.”
- Player, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Tom Stoppard
The state apparatus flexes its judicial muscles, appalled not by that which is appalling, but the baldness with which the appalling is meted out. In the engulfing bombast of the impeachment hearings, premised upon a transatlantic telephone call constituting (as well as in its content questioning) nefarious election interference and dubious foreign interest, those for whom such practice has long been a more discreet pleasure have seized the opportunity to appear historically aghast. In this entirely internecine squabble, the performatively energized political class have rarely seemed so misaligned to their electorate. Are they aware that no one is watching?
Two films released in the US in 2019 concerned themselves with the bipartisan mendacity of American deep state machinery: Amazon’s The Report (Scott Z Burns), and the IFC Films-distributed, British-produced The Day Shall Come (Chris Morris).
By far the most fêted of these releases was The Report, Scott Z Burns’ dramatization of the composition and publication of the 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture techniques. Reconstructions of the particular methods used, screaming suddenly forth from the film’s primary raw material of strip-lit congressional office, are abrasive and obscene. They are filmed in a schematic way that attempts neither to distract from nor describe their horror (as sleep deprivation was a near-ubiquitous technique, they even supply their own soundtrack). Burns is similarly unflinching in depicting the neofascist attitudes and Orwellian doublespeak among CIA leadership that enables the program to run unfettered and unquestioned for eight years (the report’s remit spans the period immediately succeeding 9/11 to early 2009), as well as the agency’s drilled recourse to sabotage and suppression when bitten.
Butterflying upstream their bureaucratic gum is the report’s beleaguered author, Daniel Jones (Adam Driver), whose grandstanding tirades toward a mostly seated Dianne Feinstein (Annette Bening) occupy a great portion of the film’s last hour. An easy read might be to situate this within Hollywood’s wider weakness for loud, virtuous men and silent, supportive women, but that would be to mischaracterize the power dynamics – Jones is largely venting, with Feinstein, the report’s commissioner, tolerating – as well as to underestimate the overwhelming appetite within American liberal culture for quiet, steely statecraft. Bening’s sublime embodiment of drawing-room poise in representing Feinstein constitutes an archetype du jour in that regard – the Hillary Clinton democrats so voraciously advertised in 2016: qualified, savvy, with above all else an equanimity
and understanding of how to get things done (qualities of a political class whose valorizing of technocratic pragmatism has in turn served to discredit ideology as bumpkin and naïve).
Feinstein, of course, does have an ideology, but one that seems less a product of personal ethics than a liberally-minded constitutional exegesis – someone whose broad fidelity to a fictional, ideated ‘America’ is seen as the purest of motives (as well a strategic, bipartisan boon). She fights tirelessly for the publication of Jones’ report, yet supports the Obama administration’s drone program, and believes Edward Snowden a traitor. It is clear it is she, rather than the gallantly flustered Jones, who marks the ideological center of Burns’ film. Burns elsewhere nods to the civilian collateral of the drone program, and his exposure of the Obama regime’s coldly self-serving attempts to quash the report will give pause to some who uncritically lament for those two halcyon terms, but his film takes a curious and pernicious stand against whistleblowers. Approaching a nadir in the seemingly Sisyphean effort to attain publication approval, Jones speaks with a contact at the New York Times, who assures him that an uncensored version of the report would be made public the next day if only he were to pass along a copy. Summoning a vague sort of gumption that Burns declines to specifically illuminate, Jones refuses, says the report “will come out the right way,” and returns to his office on the swelling strings of a score signaling virtue. For all its scenes depicting the tooth-and-nail sabotage that so nearly killed the report altogether, the film here seems to express a fundamental faith in the state – in its own self-ordained system of inter-branch checks-and-balances, over and above any other avenue to direct accountability.
Assessing The Report as a piece of critical or dissident cinema therefore seems not so much a question of its renunciation of torture or CIA tactics but of where and how the film situates this episode in the wider context of American history. Perhaps most instructive in this regard are its closing scenes. Rather than attempt to understand what in American political culture has engendered these atrocities, Burns’ film ends on aisle-crossing speeches from Feinstein (“never again”) and John McCain (“our enemies do this, we don’t”) and a quote from George Washington that largely serves to cast those eight years as an aberration outside of traditional and typical American values. Burns is wise enough to the radical potential of his story (he recounts how the film’s first producer, HBO, dropped it without explanation, and he ended up producing it in half the time on half the budget) but his wider editorializing ultimately serves to undermine that potential. To position the abhorrent as aberrant is to recognize it while at the same time disempowering it of its power to indict, and in framing it in such a way Burns effectively runs a sanitizing exercise for the state, using a popular medium to sublimate atrocity into the cultural status quo; into comforting myths of American exceptionalism.
Chris Morris is a British comedian whose slim filmography to date (two features and a short) suggests a curled lip disdain for the playbook act-break tone shifts of conventional narrative structure. His films, much like his most recent television work (occasional stints directing the Armando Iannucci-helmed Veep), propel themselves with an exiguity of maneuvering and simply run, one scene to the next, with a disorienting and muscular verve hewn from a forensic attention to detail and an idiosyncratic preoccupation with the mobilizing energies of silliness and stupidity. As well his films rarely offer the viewer a comfortable tone, and in The Day Shall Come as well as 2010’s Four Lions, there is an incredibly present sadness, often missing or mishandled in comparable films, as fate (always synonymous with the will or attitudes of the social-political milieu) forever precedes characters Morris assiduously imbues with vulnerability and humanity.
The Day Shall Come is billed as a film based on “a hundred true stories” – a rhetorical posturing given Morris avers to have studied in the region of four-hundred real FBI sting operations in researching the script. Moses Al Shabazz (Marchánt Davis) leads an ideologically radical but pointedly non-violent urban commune, whose ambit seems somewhere at the intersection of a church and a farm. He is many things at once: perspicacious yet given to hallucination, politically attuned yet cartoonishly superstitious, always spoiling for the pulpit but bidden to those around him (his family and two-strong retinue of grumbling but loyal followers). He is above all else a sign of life in a destitute area of Miami gutted and abandoned by the city (Morris’ depiction of the neighborhood, with its pastel cinder-block low-rises, is the most credible and textured space in the film, which otherwise seems to want in location and affect for an orchestrating visual idea). All that seems to be coming to Moses’ neighborhood is the cold and displacing wave of gentrification, here perceptible on the horizon in the construction cranes the smiting of which he prays for daily. Two of them score the sky to the east, thin, gold and reaper-like, looming above him like skeletal twin towers.
“Pitch me the next 9/11” – Michael Braun, playing prosecutor Richard Signal, enjoins FBI Miami’s counter-terrorism chief Andy Mudd (Dennis O’Hare) early in the film. It is the sort of brass-tax pomp and naked career solipsism that has long defined Morris’ socio-cultural czars (cf. his presenter persona in The Day Today, Brass Eye, etc), and an injunction that neatly encapsulates the operative concerns of this small group of agents, whose intensifying need for an attention-grabbing bust folds in as the film’s secondary perspective. Special Agent Kendra Glack (Anna Kendrick) is the primary lens in this group, and it is she who identifies Moses as a potential mark. The film proceeds as a bait-and-lure of increasing absurdity, as the FBI attempt to paint Moses as a credible threat via a series of increasingly labyrinthine entrapments. Desperate for money to backpay his rent, Moses initially takes a cash-and-weapons deal from an agent posing as a sort of al-Qaeda Santa (offering money and munitions to like-minded radicals), intending to pocket the cash and make a picket fence of the truckload of AKs his beliefs won’t permit him to fire. But even on this, he reneges – and an attempt to turn in himself and the undercover agent at FBI HQ presents the team with a catch-22 that momentarily nixes the op. Eventually, through increasing desperation on both sides, energies are renewed, and Moses and his crew wind up taking on a lucratively propositioned gig smuggling uranium (they in fact only fill the canisters with urine and beans) to a group of white supremacists (undercover police on a separate sting op).
All comes to a head with Moses and his family ambushed in a drive-thru donut shack, a fake bazooka planted in his hands, and the combined domestic militaries of the FBI and Miami PD encircling the parking lot, weapons drawn. Rushed by the SWAT team, a hallucinating, off-medication Moses presses the launch button on the fake bazooka (told by a conscience-stricken
Kendra that it’s a fake, he confers with God to imbue the useless metal tube with enough non-lethal force to permit his escape). Nothing, of course, happens, except that the paperwork can now be filed to criminalize five lives in the service of political and personal gain. Unlike The Report, which in its final moments goes out of its way to wrap cotton wool around a real disaster, The Day Shall Come shows how the state can sow disaster out of cotton wool: Moses and his followers are sent to prison, their sentences ranging 35 to 15 years, each meted out on plea bargains, without trial.
There is little doubt that of the two films considered here The Day Shall Come is the least sugared pill, its moral core Anna Kendrick’s hand-wringing cipher Kendra, whose furtive conscience pays lip service to a particularly anodyne schema of ethics that balks at any sort of direct action. Kendra is an obvious counterpoint to Bening’s Dianne Feinstein, who in The Report is positioned as a political centrist for whom a crisis of conscience has spurred action. Kendra is the inverse – a state stooge whose quotidian actions are unconscionable but who espouses a wooly moral discomfort that is easily absorbed by the larger machine. She ends the film promoted on the backing of Moses’ four-decade incarceration while patting herself on the back for thwarting Mudd’s ploy to simply assassinate him under the new and neatly expedient cloak of police misconduct (“a shooting that’s just another shooting”) – a line in the sand so particle-thin it might serve as a proxy for the country’s illusory two-party dialectic, and a device with which Morris, more trenchantly than anything else in these two films, illuminates the profound absence of ethical reality in the transparent posturing and calculated careerism of the contemporary political class.
Though a compelling cinematic experience (for its two lead performances, its analytical intensity, and its dexterous organizing of an intricacy of events and information naturally resistant to dramatization), when confronted with The Report’s final salvo of myth-mending bromides, it is harder to see it as a piece of dissenting cinema than as a film intending to color the horrors of American statecraft as fundamentally unAmerican. One might find this easier to excuse as a subtle act of trojanism – a confected parcel within which to smuggle more disruptive ideas – if the hyperreality of American good weren’t laced throughout the narrative (in addition to its anti-Snowden bent, Driver’s Jones at one point seems most acutely exercised not by the inhumanity of the torture but its judicial inutility – its illegality scuppering an opportunity to prosecute certain architects of 9/11). The Day Shall Come omits any such sedative, its lucid portrayal of a trussed-up shadow economy in which bespoke convictions are shopped around inter-state prosecution loopholes shown to be one greased by the collusion of federal, legal and police authorities. What is more, the existence of such a system is revealed to be predicated not on conspiracy, edict or circumstance but a wider bipartisan milieu that permits and commissions its operation, one in which institutional racism, faceless gentrification and confederate flag-flying neo-Nazi groups with east coast financiers stitch in as natural crests on the quilt. For all this, The Day Shall Come’s miserly stateside distribution ensured it barely registered with American audiences, while The Report, giving its final word to the father of the country, was granted a well-billed Prime drop Thanksgiving Day, targeting the couchbound post-turkey crowd.
Dissent may by definition only survive at the fringes, but as streaming begins to succeed theatrical distribution, those fringes become ever more delicately concealed. While curatorial algorithms may purport to find an audience for every film, the numbers in those audiences for whom a film may present a new idea is surely precisely what those same algorithms diminish. Like Stoppard’s suddenly postlapsarian Player, ‘who is watching’ occurs to us as a question of now existential concern. Chris Morris has spent the vast portion of his career in a position to dissect prevailing attitudes with so broad a reach he has often elicited national controversy from audiences entirely unfamiliar with his worldview. That those audiences may now be so extensively pre-screened as to never encounter his work seems inimical to the concept of a dissenting pop culture, which – in the convention of its trade – requires not simply that someone will be watching, but that not everyone watching will already agree.
Thom Carter is a Boston-based filmmaker and writer.
