My latest column for Caiman Cuadernos de Cine:
Two signs of hope in an era often defined by hopelessness:
(1) After a half century of prevarication, media has finally gotten around to calling Donald Trump a gangster, thanks to the 34 accusations of “racketeering” in his Georgia indictment, thus forever altering his media profile.
(2) An experimental, intellectual essay film (and comedy), Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, has become a world-wide hit, thanks in part to its audience not perceiving it as such. Thus a belated form of truth-telling in politics occurs around the same time as an effective form of subterfuge in cinema.
A century ago, audiences had far less difficulty calling Al Capone a gangster and perceiving F. W. Murnau’s Der letzte Mann as some sort of experimental and intellectual essay film, largely because they hadn’t received as much conditioning from publicists as we’ve had, to hate and mistrust films addressing our intellects.
A federal law in the U.S. known as the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act and a highly successful line of dolls for little girls have helped to set the stage for these surprising recent developments. Furthermore, Capone arguably had some edge over Trump due to his taste for culture (e.g., opera) whereas Trump’s interest in money and power seems motivated exclusively by a desire to make his own audience meaner, uglier, and dumber than it already is.
What distinguishes the criminal indictment of Trump in Georgia from his three preceding indictments is its finally forcing media to call the man a gangster via its repeated use of the term “racketeering”. This replicates the basic ground level of acknowledgement and understanding held by Americans in the 1920s who had the lucidity and honesty to call Al Capone a crook, meanwhile implicitly or explicitly dubbing him the king of Chicago. But why has it taken our media this long to call a former President a crook? It seems that more Americans today believe in him as their public servant than 20s Americans thought the same about the mobsters in their midst. In other words, the 20s crowd was ahead of us in bearing witness to its own living conditions.
Some of Barbie’s detractors argue that the virtual enslavement of Chinese workers by Mattel in manufacturing Barbie dolls automatically invalidates any of this company’s ancillary cultural activity. I would reply that Gerwig’s film delivers a detailed ideological and metaphysical critique of Barbie dolls at the same time that it advertises them, giving it a contradictory status that we should address. But by the same token, America’s crimes don’t automatically invalidate American movies.