The year 2019 was reflected in its cinema like few before it. Fittingly, the decade closes with movies that obsessively gazed upon the passage of time and the social realities which are setting parts of the world aflame. It is hard for the art of an era to escape its dominant forces. Since 2016, history has moved in a strange blur, the age of Donald Trump taking on a surrealist hue. From Jordan Peele’s Us to Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, visions of class war and upheaval were expressed through dreamscapes both satirical and haunted. With another decade passing, this was also a year focused on the power of nostalgia and history’s darker edges. Martin Scorsese’s grandiose Netflix saga, The Irishman, followed a de-aged Robert De Niro through the shadowy underworld of American history. Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was pure nostalgia in its reverie, working ever so hard to revive an idea of 1969 Los Angeles. Now the question is if the 2020’s will bring hope or more gazing at what has passed, with fear of what is to come. [Read more…]
Errol Morris On Sitting Down With Alt-Right Nationalist Steve Bannon In American Dharma
Errol Morris, one of the great documentary filmmakers, has sat down with men from the halls of power for years. In his new film, American Dharma, Morris faces Steve Bannon, one of the darker lingering figures of our very recent collective history. If some of the world’s major publications were a bit more astute they would have long ago tagged Bannon as the person of the year, if not the decade. An argument can be made that Bannon is the most dangerous man in the world. Known primarily as the odd right-wing firebrand who helped Donald Trump win the 2016 election, and before that as the head of the infamous website Breitbart News, Bannon’s shadow casts over every major gain by an emerging, new proto-fascism. In Brazil he consulted the campaign of Jair Bolsonaro, in Europe he rubs shoulders with Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Italy’s Matteo Salvini, power players united in their paranoid policies aimed at immigrants and leftists. What sets Bannon apart from the stereotypical Trump aficionado, if not Trump himself, is that he is an actual ideologue, a reactionary internationalist designed for a postmodern world. [Read more…]
Darkest Chambers: Wormwood And The Underground Of American History
As the year reaches its twilight, it is becoming clear that 2017 was the year of iconoclasm. The wave of scandals and shocking revelations (shocking to those unaware of the habits of the elite) has cracked the great marble edifices of many a celebrity or political persona. For a population as addicted to social media and the religion of fads as ours, it is very telling that it has taken sex to shock the public consciousness into the realization that fame is a mask, popularity a vulgar makeup. But the current, lurid headlines still distract from a truth everyone knows but would prefer to whisper: There are darker ceremonies taking place in the deepest, darkest chambers of the American halls of power.