Back Row Thoughts – The Darkest Timeline

Earlier this week, I worked as an election clerk here in Los Angeles. From a very early age, my mother and my grandmother instilled in me the value of voting and the importance of being politically engaged. For my Gram, she was born just a decade after women were finally granted the right, and for Mom, she grew up in the counterculture 60s and 70s, watching wars and rampant corruption pervert the institutions of government, driving her activism. By the time I hit eighth grade and joined the fledgling speech and debate club at my school, the idea of being apathetic to the workings of our democracy was simply not entertainable, my final oratory premised on it being flatly unamerican to not vote.

While my immediate family is largely liberal when it comes to social and economic issues, everyone has voted for candidates from both major parties (and some third parties), because the various priorities and platforms of those running for office was always far more important than whether they put a “D’ or an “R” next to their name on a news font. What mattered was what you stood for, not who you stood with. When we moved to upstate New York in the mid-90s, Mom registered as a Republican, mostly because the demographics of the county were 97% on that side based on the most recent census data, and she didn’t want to risk being shut out of public and social functions in such a homogenous area. She still voted her values and her conscience, eventually changing her party affiliation ahead of the 2004 campaign so she could vote in the Democratic primary (she voted for the late John McCain in the 2000 Republican primary, and like me, she would have voted for him over Al Gore had he gotten the nomination). That change ended up being to her benefit, because when she decided to become more active in civics, including working elections, the county and the village needed Democratic volunteers, as the system at that time divided the voter rolls by party, and when people came to a polling place, they had to sign in at their respective party tables. Being an eager Democrat allowed her to work more than a dozen local, state, and federal elections before dementia took this activity away from her. She took immense pride in it, and even rose to a supervisory level, because regardless of outcomes and ideologies, the fundamental right to vote was sacrosanct and she felt it was her duty to foster it.

In 2005, I joined her for a local election in the off year. Again, they needed Democrats (the county has balanced out significantly since the 90s thanks to the internet exposing the youth of the area to the wider world and other perspectives), and it was an easy way to make $100 when I was out of work, so when she asked if I’d help out, I was more than happy to. It was a long, boring day working outdated machines for races no one cared about (I think we had something like 50 people show up for the entire 13 hours the polls were open), but it was in its own way fascinating, and it felt good to do my part.

I didn’t get the chance to do election work again until the 2022 midterms. When I moved to California, I wanted to see if it was possible, and I even volunteered for the 2016 general. I had to eventually pull out because I ended up picking up a work assignment, but I kept checking to see if there was a need for volunteers, and two years ago, I got to do four days’ worth of work (plus two training sessions) helping people cast their ballots and make their voices heard. I went through another round of training in January in anticipation of working the March primary, but again work took precedence. However, with no such restrictions this fall, November called to me, and I stepped up once more. It’s been a year and a half since Mom died, and I figured this was a simple and effective way to honor her memory. Plus, the more I do it, the more fun and interesting it becomes.

While I have my political leanings, I keep them out of my business when I do this work, because no matter where you stand on the spectrum, your right to vote is just as important as mine. We won’t always agree, but I’ll always strive to protect that. This is why, during the 2016 campaign and the first presidency of Donald Trump, I got so anxious and at times terrified of his constant, categorically false proclamations of voter fraud, which spurned the cult-like members of the GOP to launch their crusade to curtail those very rights. In state after state, based on absolutely nothing (what few documented fraud cases we get almost always involve Republicans trying to vote twice or on behalf of relatives to counter the non-existent fraud they keep hearing about from their leaders), we’ve seen millions of people purged from voter rolls, restrictions put in place to limit the times, locations, and methods that people can vote (particularly if they negatively affect demographics that don’t tend to vote Republican), an endless stream of lawsuits and challenges to the simple act of counting ballots, public measures and propositions either ignored or weighed down by requirements for supermajorities to pass, and extreme partisan gerrymandering that is designed to dilute the votes of anyone the party doesn’t like. All this mania led to an attempted coup on January 6, 2021 when Trump sent a violent mob to the Capitol to try to halt the certification of his loss the previous fall, and the fallout has only gotten worse, with poll workers being publicly defamed and receiving death threats, political operatives recruiting white supremacist militias to intimidate voters, incendiary devices being placed in drop boxes to literally burn ballots, and even crazy people attacking polling sites with machetes.

All of this was spurred on by Trump because he doesn’t believe in democracy. He believes in authoritarianism and greed, nothing more. As such, his defeat this week was a necessary step to fixing the things he tried so very hard to break the first time around. He needed to go to jail after being convicted of 34 felonies, and he needed to be tried for the nearly 60 others for which he had been charged. His candidacy, from the moment he announced it nearly two years ago, was always about keeping himself out of prison, further enriching himself, and exacting vengeance against anyone who dared hold him accountable, as well as anyone who didn’t buy into his stream of bullshit consciousness that’s as free of facts as his diet is of nutrition. Keeping him out of the highest office in the land has nothing to do with politics. It is simply a matter of good vs. evil. Donald Trump is unequivocally, inarguably, irredeemably evil. Political party is immaterial. If he was a Democrat, I’d be just as vehemently opposed to him. He is a racist. He is a rapist. He is a Nazi. He is a criminal.

And yet, somehow, he won. He’s going back to the White House to wreak even more havoc. He’s going to give apartheid billionaire Elon Musk unfettered access to the technological resources of the most powerful nation on Earth so that they can both increase their wealth. He’s going to put antivax nutjob Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – a man who literally has a dead worm in his brain – in charge of public health in an attempt to kill the Affordable Care Act (thereby robbing over 30 million people of their healthcare coverage), ban vaccines, and remove fluoride from our drinking water, after Trump previously sent more than a million Americans to their deaths after he royally fucked up the COVID response. He’ll once again cozy up to dictators like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un, and abandon our allies so long as it makes him money. He’s promising mass deportations with no mechanism for proving whether someone is in the country legally or not, prosecutions of all his political adversaries, even more curbing of civil liberties, more cuts to voting rights, and even the possibility of unofficial martial law by turning the police and military against protesters who exercise their First Amendment rights to call him out as the monster he is.

For people who adore this country and cherish our freedoms, regardless of political leanings, this is a very scary time. I still don’t know how we survived his first term, and after we had the temerity to deny him everything he wanted four years ago, his cruelty and malice will only intensify. And to see his supporters, some of whom are within my own circles of friends and extended family, take active glee in the suffering to come makes me sick to my stomach. I started working elections to help serve my country in my own small way and pay tribute to those who taught me what patriotism really meant, and it’s possible I may have helped oversee the end of it all. When the best I can hope for is that he’ll only be as terrible next time around as he was the last time, or that he’ll follow the Constitution just enough to step aside when he’s term-limited in 2028, things are looking very grim indeed.

So what does this long-winded scream into the void have to do with movies and this blog? Well, while the MAGA faithful will always dismiss the entertainment industry as the so-called “liberal media,” filmmakers did their level best to warn us about what was to come. In cases like Alex Garland’s Civil War, we were given a hypothetical outcome. But in recent weeks, the stories have become all too real, thanks to the actual, real-world consequences of Trump’s actions, and the actions of those like him. For this particular column, I have three movies to go over which help illustrate the point. I watched two of them before the election, and the third just yesterday. I could have reviewed the former set in advance, but a) I was far too busy with AFI Fest and my actual election work, and b) both of them fall under the heading of “no one who needs to see this ever will,” so there was no point in wasting sleep on their account.

So here we are, on the precipice of the very fascist backslide that the great wars were fought to prevent a century ago, and one can only take solace in the fact that there are still people strong and brave enough to tell these stories. Honestly, I don’t know if I can count myself among them, but as the darkness quickly approaches, all I can cling to is the joy that film brings me to prevent myself from spiraling.

***

Zurawski v. Texas

I originally saw this as part of my coverage of this year’s Mill Valley Film Festival, but it did get a national release just before the election. This is one of the most tragic and raw documentaries you’re likely to see this year, and it presents in stark detail the effects of Trump’s intolerable cruelty. One of the self-described crowning achievements of his first term was the appointment of 1/3 of the Supreme Court – a process that Republicans giddily rigged on all three occasions – which dutifully overturned the landmark Roe v. Wade case that enshrined a woman’s right to an abortion 50 years ago. In his ceaseless war against facts and decency, Trump claimed multiple times that every legal scholar wanted this, even though it was almost literally the exact opposite. When Roe fell, several states triggered almost total and draconian bans on the procedure, based on no legal theory, only a desire to control women.

One of the worst instances was in Texas, where abortion is now illegal after six weeks, before most women even know they’re pregnant, with only a vague exception in place for the life of the mother. Amanda Zurawski is one such mother. After trying to conceive with her husband for years, she finally got pregnant, but miscarried at 16 weeks when her water broke far too early. Because there was still a faint fetal heartbeat, doctors were not allowed to terminate the pregnancy, turning her away rather than risk losing their medical licenses and being prosecuted by the state’s aggressively regressive Attorney General, Ken Paxton, who’s been under indictment on federal charges for years and who barely survived an impeachment trial for his corruption. While waiting, Zurawski went into septic shock, and could only be helped when she was at death’s door. Because of the infection to her uterus, it is unlikely that she’ll ever be able to have children of her own.

The film, Zurawski v. Texas, directed by Maisie Crow and Abbie Perrault, chronicles the titular lawsuit filed by Amanda and several other women in the state who suffered under similar circumstances against their home state. Among the plaintiffs are a woman forced to carry a fetus to term despite an underdeveloped brain that could not survive, an OBGYN who suffered an ectopic pregnancy, and others like Amanda who had miscarriages with severe infections. Their request is simple, straightforward, and reasonable. They want acknowledgement that they should have been allowed abortions because their lives were in danger, and they want solid clarification of the law to determine just how close to death they have to be in order for doctors to intervene.

This is a hard movie to watch, because the trauma these women went through is palpable. It cuts you to the quick to watch a funeral for a baby who had no chance to live, its pale blue skin and bulging eyes from its own suffocation serving as a modern-day version of the Emmett Till photos. You want to cry when you watch that baby’s mother vomit on the stand while giving testimony because having to relive the worst day of her life is just that visceral. And you want to throttle anyone and everyone who dismisses their plight, like Senator Lindsey Graham rolling his eyes at Zurawski’s testimony during a Congressional hearing, or the state attorneys callously asking on cross examination only if Ken Paxton personally denied them an abortion as a means to absolve him of any responsibility.

This is the world that women now face with Trump coming back into power. For years he lied through his teeth about women having elective abortions in the ninth month or somehow having them after the birth, which is literally impossible. He’s gone on record as saying that women who have abortions should be punished. Actual, living women have died waiting for the healthcare they desperately need, all so that people like him who see The Handmaid’s Tale as an aspiration can exert that much more control. Part of his closing argument during the campaign was to say that he, an adjudicated rapist, would “protect women, whether the women like it or not,” which just goes to show that the cruelty was always the point.

It breaks your heart to see this, because these are all women who wanted their babies. These aren’t the “whores” that anti-abortion crusaders try to use as strawmen. They wanted to be moms, and when their bodies said no, they looked to their doctors for help, and the doctors could do nothing because the state said no. And just when you think that an ounce of sanity can win out, the rug is once again pulled out from under them. One of the most amazing things about this film is that it came out so quickly, as Zurawski’s case was just resolved back in May. This is a story that needed to be told so badly that it was turned around in less than six months. Of course, the cautionary tragedy is that in a case like this where decency needed to triumph, the women not only got no justice, but the country just collectively slapped them in the face at the ballot box once again.

Most of the time, I can keep my personal politics out of a review, but this is an exception. All these women wanted was help and validation, and instead their government not only failed them, but the powers that be basically told them that they somehow deserved this. I dare any normal person to watch this, to hear these horrors, and then to look them in the eye and feel nothing. If you can do that, you’re what’s wrong with this country, not doctors or women.

Grade: A

The Apprentice

I compare this film, in a way, to The Passion of the Christ. In the insane mind of someone like Trump or those who delude themselves into believing his lies, this might come off as a messianic endorsement. Rest assured that it is not. What I mean is that when I saw Mel Gibson’s film 20 years ago, I was able to do what few others were willing to, and that’s take the mythos of the central figure out of the equation. If you watch that movie as just a story rather than an attempt to evangelize, and treat Jesus as any other character, then you can see the picture for what it really is, a well-made snuff film with some tremendous acting and production values. As an agnostic, it’s much easier for me to set religious figures aside, so I understand if the faithful have a hard time accepting this take on things, but honestly, it helped a lot, especially when it came to the stereotyping of Jews.

I went into The Apprentice the same way. Ultimately, this is a work of drama, so I can separate the real people being depicted from the depiction itself. As much as I loathe and despise Donald Trump and everything he stands for, I can still watch this film for what’s actually being put on the screen. In this case, it’s a masterful modern Frankenstein story, meticulously showing how a man can make a monster, and occasionally hinting that there’s a degree of pity to be had.

Director Ali Abbasi, who has shown with works like Holy Spider how delicately he can handle even the most horrific of subjects, treats the relationship between Trump (Sebastian Stan) and firebrand attorney Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong) as a sort of fucked up version of a father-son dynamic. In the film, Donald resents his own dad, Fred Trump (Martin Donovan), not for his racism, but for being satisfied with his level of success stopping at “millionaire” status. Donald is far more ambitious, but far less capable. With the federal government suing their company for their discriminatory “red-lining” policy (a term used for landlords and real estate owners refusing to rent/sell to black people; as Cohn notes, Trump would literally mark applications from prospective black tenants with a “C” for “Colored” as a personal note to deny them), Trump seeks out the help of the powerful Cohn to get the case thrown out. Through his bombastic style and underhanded practices – including blackmail and bribery – Cohn is able to get the case settled with no admission of wrongdoing on the part of the Trump family.

From there, Cohn molds Trump in his image, imparting his three crucial rules for winning at all costs: always attack, never admit any wrongdoing, and claim victory even when you lose. Cohn also brings Trump into his inner circle, introducing him to all the power players in New York, and teaching him that all relationships are transactional. This helps lead to Trump’s massive successes of the 1980s, including rebuilding the Commodore Hotel, buying the Plaza, building Trump Tower, and wooing his first wife, Ivana, played here by Maria Bakalova.

As his star rises ever higher, Abbasi shows Trump’s humanity reactively ebbing away until he becomes a full-on sociopath. He denigrates his father and even tries to trick him into signing his entire estate over to him instead of splitting it with his siblings. As his brother Freddie (Charlie Carrick) succumbs to alcoholism (one of the only areas where Trump has ever showed the capacity for empathy is when he talks about Freddie’s addiction), he turns his back on the “loser” who couldn’t make it as a pilot and wasn’t smart like him to go into the family business. He rapes Ivana after goading her into getting plastic surgery. He shuns the closeted Cohn after he finds out that Roy has likely contracted AIDS, and only pretends to welcome him back as he’s on his deathbed, doing everything in his power to erase the existence of everyone who helped him, because acknowledging them would mean admitting mistakes and sharing credit.

The performances at the top of the bill are absolutely outstanding. Bakalova is quickly becoming one of the best actresses working today (though between this and Borat, I do hope her entire career doesn’t become defined by right-wing takedowns), and she gives Ivana the grace and dignity that her husband never did. Stan doesn’t mimic Trump’s voice exactly, but his speech patterns, facial ticks, and body language mannerisms are replicated about as precisely as possible. And as for Strong, he plays Cohn as the fiercest pit bull in the ring, until his deterioration wears on him and you can see the regret painfully marked on his face. All three of these performances are worthy of a nomination because of how well they depict the tragedy.

Once you take all this in, then you come back to reality and your jaw drops at the fact that pretty much all of this stuff, while enhanced for dramatic effect, actually happened. Trump really did red-line minorities. He really did rape Ivana. He really did try to bilk his own father out of his assets. He really did steal his slogan from Ronald Reagan (who in turn stole it from Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos – more on that later). He really did build his tower while refusing to pay his workers. He really did give a dying Roy Cohn pewter and zirconium cuff links and claim they were diamonds as one last “fuck you” to the man who made him.

All of this is documented and has been litigated in the public square for decades. Anyone who cares to know the facts already understands all of this. The fascination comes from seeing it all unfold in a way that’s both chaotic and orderly at the same time, and that could have been prevented had there been any concern for competency and the rule of law. There’s a genuine degree of sadness in this catastrophe, because even an ounce of humility could have stopped all this before it started. What’s worse is that we are the ones who will suffer the consequences.

Grade: A

And So it Begins

I took this in yesterday, partly because I just needed to go see a movie to take my mind off our country descending into madness once more, and partly because this is the official International Feature entry from the Philippines, and it was leaving theatres today. I had to see it while I still had the chance. However, I went in completely blind. I had no idea what this film was about until it started. As I sat alone in the auditorium and realized the subject matter, I silently wept once more at the helplessness I and so many must be feeling right now.

Directed by Ramona S. Diaz and partially distributed by PBS (look for them to get the axe in any of Trump’s upcoming budget proposals), And So it Begins shows that we in the United States are not alone in our turmoil, which is its own form of devastation. Like at least one other documentary this year (Democracy Noir, which I also saw for Mill Valley and will detail here if it gets a full release), the film gives the viewer a first-hand look at another democracy backsliding into dictatorship.

The story concerns the doomed presidential campaign of former Vice President Leni Robredo. The widow of a member of the Filipino Congress who died in a plane crash, Leni took up her late husband’s mantle as a way to honor him, as she had never been that politically engaged before his death. When she entered public life, however, she began to understand what it really meant to serve the people, and became so popular that she attained the second-highest office in the island nation back in 2016. The Philippines conduct their elections a bit differently than we do, as the President and Vice President are chosen independently of each other, rather than being on a joint ticket, and Presidents are limited to one six-year term. In a major upset in 2016, Robredo was elected VP from the opposing ticket of the man elected President, Rodrigo Duterte.

Duterte spent his term committing countless crimes against humanity, chief among them the extrajudicial murders of tens of thousands of Filipino citizens accused (largely without proof) of being drug dealers or drug addicts, including his political opponents. He also openly harassed women, including Leni, and mocked her dead husband. Like Trump, he’s a monster through and through. So when his term came up in 2022, Leni looked to build on her momentum and succeed him. Unfortunately, despite a strong grassroots following, it was not meant to be.

So what went wrong? That’s what the film is there to show us, and nauseatingly it’s very similar to what we’ve experienced here at home. Leni’s main opponent was Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos, Jr., the eldest son of the late dictator, who enacted martial law to violently crack down on any political dissent until a people’s revolution forced him and his wife Imelda into exile in Hawaii. From that moment on, the Philippines have enjoyed a young democracy, but “BBM,” as he’s called, was keen to restore his family’s rule. He lost to Leni for the VP job in 2016, but he wasn’t about to let that happen again. An onslaught of disinformation, revisionist history, and incitements to violence became the hallmarks of his campaign, spending millions of dollars and outright lying about bars of gold he’d give to his voters if he won. He dodged every debate, never took an interview with independent media, and slandered everyone who questioned him as a disloyal enemy of the country. Sound familiar?

In the midst of all this, we also follow along with journalist (and eventual Nobel Peace Prize laureate) and co-founder of the independent outlet Rappler, Maria Ressa. Ressa has dedicated herself to combating actual fake news, stressing the importance of the fourth estate as repressive regimes seek to destroy it in favor of self-serving propaganda. She’s been arrested multiple times and convicted in absentia for daring to question the likes of Duterte and Marcos, and has had her life threatened multiple times. Her bravery in continuing to speak truth to power is something we should all aspire to, but in the wake of the realities of modern nationalism and the speed at which authoritarian interests can spread lies, it may become a losing battle. One of the most terrifying scenes I’ve seen in a film all year sees the Rappler offices get raided by police during a meeting, with masked officers insisting they have a search warrant that they won’t let anyone read, confiscating all the computers and phones, threatening the civilian journalists, and arresting the lot for refusing to comply. When it’s all done, it’s revealed that this was all a drill (in retrospect I should have realized something was amiss when the film’s camera crew wasn’t immediately accosted), but it’s a very real possibility for them based on very real incidents that have taken place all over the world.

The shock of the film doesn’t come from the fact that Leni loses, even though she has massive support among young people, the LGBTQ community (which has been routinely targeted in the country), and national pop music icons (sound familiar again?), to the point that an election eve rally welcomes nearly 800,000 attendees. Instead, it comes from just how willing people are to pretend the past never happened. The Marcos dictatorship saw thousands killed and tens of thousands more arrested and tortured for daring to oppose him or speak out against him. Many of the survivors are still alive, and remember with horror what happened to them and their loved ones. And yet, in a rebranding for the ages, Bongbong (along with Duterte’s daughter as his VP), successfully convinced over 30 million people that what they went through didn’t actually happen, and are now making it policy to deny basic facts, essentially erasing the existence and the experience of the victims. That’s the very same tactic that Trump and his ilk have employed since he rode down the escalator in 2015, including entering the phrase “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” (a textbook bit of gaslighting where anyone who recognizes the evidence of their eyes and ears is dehumanized as being crazy) into our collective lexicon, and multiple campaigns to ban any educational program that acknowledges race relations, America’s historical sins, the validity of sexual diversity, or just makes white people “uncomfortable.”

On the whole, this is a very sad, yet competently made documentary. I only dock it a few points because it doesn’t give us anything new, no hope to latch onto. We’ve seen this story far too many times over the last nine years, and we’re about to live through it again for at least four more. If this election has taught me anything, it’s that simply telling the truth is no longer enough. There has to be a tangible call to action with actual plans to beat these people at their own game. My biggest complaint about the Democratic Party in my adult life is that it has naively conducted itself as if we’re all playing on an equal field by the same rules, even though every time they’re not in power, the other side literally and figuratively rewrites the rules to suit themselves. I believe in our better angels, but sometimes you have to fight fire with fire, and the fact that my side is constantly unwilling to do that goes a long way toward our own assured destruction. And So it Begins, while noble, is but another symptom of this illness. Until someone is willing to offer a real solution, we’re just pissing into the wind and waiting for the tanks to roll in.

Grade: B

***

Apologies for the lengthy read, and for getting far more personal and political than I normally do, but the last 48 hours (and really the weeks leading up to them) have devastated me beyond even what I thought possible. There have been times in my life where things have gotten so dark that I couldn’t see the light at the end. It happened when I was 10 and was mercilessly bullied to the point that I attempted suicide. It happened in my 20s and early 30s when I hated my job so much but couldn’t extricate myself from it. It happened five years ago when I nearly went bankrupt because I couldn’t find work to save my life. It happened when my mother was diagnosed with dementia. It happened in 2016 when Trump was elected the first time. And it’s happening now, when America has shown just how much they hate women that they’d rather put a rapist in charge than let someone with two X chromosomes lead us forward. If you feel the way I do, know that it’s not just you. I pray that gives some small comfort. I’m sure I’ll be cheerful again in this space in due time, but for now, as all of these films demonstrate, the warnings were all there. I can only hope that the worst doesn’t come to pass.

Join the conversation in the comments below! Did you see any of these films before the election? Do you think anyone could have been swayed by them? What will you do to carry on four the next four years? Let me know! And remember, you can follow me on Twitter (fuck “X”) and subscribe to my YouTube channel for even more content, and check out the entire BTRP Media Network at btrpmedia.com!