Last night Errol Morris (who lives in and shoots his films in the Boston area) showed his new film American Dharma at the Harvard Film Archive and spoke about it afterward. In the tradition of his previous films Mr. Death, The Fog of War, and The Unknown Known, it’s a feature-length interview with an absolutely terrible piece of shit. This time it’s Steve Bannon.
Morris has had a hell of a time with this film. It’s gotten a more negative reception than any of his past work. It still doesn’t have a distributor. Nobody wants to release it. It’s gotten a scathing critical response. People are mad at him for giving Bannon a platform, and they criticize him for treating Bannon with kid gloves. Well, I saw the film for myself. I’m a big fan of Morris’s work, but this film is… pretty bad!
Morris’s previous films in this vein all worked because each managed to get to the absolute core of its subject and expose the inherent contradiction or emptiness in their worldview. He was able to surgically dissect the subject and display their guts to the camera, without the subject even realizing it. You hear that the subject actually liked the documentary, and then you watch it and you think “how the hell do they not see that they look like a fucking maniac?” Because Morris gets the subject to open up so deeply that the subject looks at the film and sees a mirror, but the audience looks at it and sees right through them. Morris did not pull this off in American Dharma for a number of reasons.
First off, Morris inserts himself into this film in a way he never really had before. In his previous films, you’d occasionally hear his voice asking a question or prompting, but in this one you hear entire conversations between Morris and Bannon. Unlike his previous films, it’s often less the subject explaining themselves and more of an argument between political rivals. And when they argue, Morris just isn’t that good at it! He sometimes makes a good point (e.g. that all Bannon’s ‘economic populism’ is really in service of the wealthy), but then he lets Bannon give a typical dissembling response and drops it, moving on to the next subject.
Morris clearly does not understand Bannon at all. He comes off as totally out of touch with the political moment. At one point Morris tells Bannon “at times you remind me of Lucifer in Paradise Lost, that quote, ‘Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven’.” Bannon agrees and seems very happy with the comparison. During the director Q&A after the film, Morris talked about how outrageous it was that Bannon compared himself to the devil. He was like “typically when you interview someone, they don’t invite comparisons like that, they don’t want you to call them evil.” I was thinking “you fucking old out of touch liberal, have you never seen a Joker meme?”
Morris seemed to think that it was sufficient that he elicited a full description of Bannon’s shitty ideology and put it all on screen. He thought that the inherent contradictions and nihilism spoke for themselves. But anyone who’s been paying any attention already knows that it’s nihilistic and contradictory. That’s what fascism is. He never got Bannon to reveal anything private about himself. The guy was always totally comfortable, in his element. He’s a practiced bullshitter, and he spent the entire film bullshitting. I felt like Bannon was more in control of this film than Morris. And that’s a fucking depressing thought.
