‘Are We the Baddies?’

“Are we the baddies?”

The line comes from the British comedy show That Mitchell and Webb Look, wherein the two leads play a pair of Nazi soldiers who come to realize that the skulls adorning their uniforms portend a less-than-positive intent. In a moment of self-discovery, they come to the conclusion that yes indeed, they are the baddies, and flee.

I keep thinking about this sketch while taking in the latest batch of American films.

It’s tricky to watch Hollywood movies right now, partly because every narrative reminds me, in one way or another, of the recent U.S. election. Every story about brave and stalwart American heroes falls differently now, be they politicians, government agents, cops or Barbie.

Barbie is a particularly strange film to watch at this point in 2024.

Only last year, the film was touted as a game-changer for female audiences and female-driven films. But rewatching it today gives it a distinctly different flavour.

All the rah-rah girl power of the plot, wherein the Barbies and their real-life counterparts triumph over Ken and his army of bros, feels very sad, given what has transpired in the real world. We’re now living in a patriarchal nightmare on steroids. It’s more than Ken-nough, it’s a Ken-apocalypse.

Even older films don’t hit in quite the same fashion.

I had the curious experience of watching Frank Capra’s 1939 political satire Mr. Smith Goes to Washington the night before the U.S. presidential election.

The film follows an earnest young senator by the name of Jefferson Smith (played by an extremely callow Jimmy Stewart), who is recruited to Congress under the mentorship of a longtime family friend and established senator named Joseph Paine (played by Claude Rains).

Smith, the leader of the Boy Rangers, an organization that largely resembles the Boy Scouts, is recruited because he is thought to be easily manipulated due to his lack of political experience.

Full of gee-golly-whiz-isms, Smith’s rube manners immediately make him something of an easy mark for the Washington press corps, who plaster him on the front page in a series of goofy poses.

This is only the beginning of Smith’s humiliation. Things get darker when his former mentor throws him under the bus, branding him a liar and accusing him of stealing money from literal children.

A broken man, Smith vows to leave Washington, despairing that all his illusions about democracy have been just that. His idealism has been shattered into a million pieces.

The scene of a disgraced Smith wretchedly weeping outside of the Lincoln Memorial might be a little on the nose for contemporary audiences, but it hits hard in this current moment.

I marvelled at the strangeness of the parallels in the plot with current events. There’s even an evil media baron who attempts to control the press, going so far as to pay thugs to rough up Boy Rangers who are distributing their own independent newspaper.

But I realized I’d entirely forgotten that Smith is not the actual hero of the film.

Clarissa Saunders (Jean Arthur), aide to a former senator and an old Washington hand, intimately familiar with the tricks and snares of D.C., is initially unimpressed with Smith but comes to appreciate his essential good nature.

When he loses faith, it is Saunders who encourages him to stay and fight, not only to clear his name, but to take a stand for the soul of the nation itself.

This fearless, tough-talking woman then feeds him strategy and support from the press gallery. In the process of fighting the good fight, the pair fall madly in love.

The pinnacle of the story arises when Smith takes to the Senate floor in an epic go-for-broke filibuster.

His courage and steadfast commitment to American ideals finally breaks the corrupt senior congressman, who attempts to shoot himself before finally admitting to his role in the plot to defame Smith.

In Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, at least, truth, justice and the American way prevail. The end.

What happens when the baddies are running the show?

America has long been a nation that believes its own hype, drinking the jingoistic Kool-Aid in the form of stories, books and of course movies. They’re probably not alone in this; we simply hear about it more often, due to the juggernaut that is U.S. media.

If you watched only films about the Second World War from American film studios, you might think that the United States won the war almost single-handedly, taking down the Nazi threat in good old-fashioned can-do style.

But what happens when not only all the stories you’ve been told turn out to be not true, but the folks who are supposed to be upright and stalwart turn out to be not so good?

In other words, what happens when the baddies are running the show?

A more recent film brought this into even clearer focus. The Order is the 2024 fictional retelling of a white supremacist movement and its leader Bob Mathews. Based on The Silent Brotherhood, a 1989 non-fiction book by Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt, the film stars Jude Law and Nicholas Hoult as two righteous cops leading the manhunt for Mathews and his band of white-power brothers.

The true story is harrowing enough. Mathews and his ilk have hatched a plan to overthrow the government, instigate a race war and murder thousands of people.

Director Justin Kurzel keeps things tight and efficient in terms of the storytelling, but it’s difficult to watch the action as the fearless FBI agents set out to uncover the truth behind a string of robberies in the Pacific Northwest. In the process, they discover an insurgency in the planning.

Even as I was rooting for the feds to take down the white supremacists, there was a part of me that wondered about the future of that very organization, and whether its mandate will be the same under the incoming administration.

With the news that the current head of the FBI upped and quit, clearing the way for the incoming Donald Trump administration to install a new leadership, things took on an even darker aspect.

Certainly, the feds are not lily white. But what happens when the FBI is made up of the same people who they were once charged with stopping?

Who watches the watchers, in other words?

And is all this watching where things first went wildly off the rails?

When reality TV becomes real life

Several pundits have made the point that the ethos of reality TV and Fox News is at the root of the crumbling democracy in the United States.

Films are also not without influence. Movies dedicated to old white dudes proving their relevance and penile power through revenge and acts of violence, all seeming to star Mel Gibson, continue to tumble off the assembly line.

Even the incoming president likes to portray himself as a Rambo-esque Uberman complete with a rippling six-pack and a machine gun. The dark fantasy of this, as ridiculous as it may seem, has been cheerfully embraced by Trump supporters.

The idea that films are the manifestation of the culture in which they’re created is not a new idea. It wasn’t new in 2017, when the first Trump administration was wreaking havoc on our collective psyches, or even decades earlier, when the Nazis established their own film studio system under the control of Joseph Goebbels.

How films speak the unspoken was the subject of director Rüdiger Suchsland’s 2017 documentary Hitler’s Hollywood. Suchsland made use of philosopher Siegfried Kracauer’s thesis that “films contain the collective unconscious of the period in which they were created.”

In the case of Nazi Germany, this is easy to see in hindsight. But today we’re very much in a period when history is still in the process of being made.

So, this is where things get interesting. It’s doubtful that Trump will establish a film studio along the lines of Goebbels’ propaganda machine, and whether the media world will take a knee remains to be seen.

But fear, if not outright capitulation, is in the air, as Variety magazine noted: “At the corporate level, some executives, such as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, congratulated Trump on his comeback, while Warner Bros. Discovery chief David Zaslav predicted that the new administration would be more willing to rubber-stamp future mergers.

“Yet there are concerns about how Trump, who has made no secret of his antipathy toward the media or his desire to exact revenge, may respond if Hollywood is too critical…. If studios and streamers aren’t worried about enraging a thin-skinned commander in chief, they may be concerned about alienating the majority of voters who handed him a decisive victory.”

But the era of overtly political films — at least narrative ones — may well be on the wane.

Documentaries may still do their thing, thank the Lord.

I’m curious about what kind of films are coming down the pike now that the paradigm of American goodness and exceptionalism, at least in the political sphere, has been put to rest.

I guess we’re about to find out.

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