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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

The Sick of It

I was certain that Freddy Gray had mentioned here earlier what is possibly the best television program ever made, Armando Ianucci’s devastating satire of British politics The Thick of It (possibly NSFW for language), but cannot find it this morning. Nonetheless I advise anybody who reads or writes for The American Conservative to see it, and keep […]

I was certain that Freddy Gray had mentioned here earlier what is possibly the best television program ever made, Armando Ianucci’s devastating satire of British politics The Thick of It (possibly NSFW for language), but cannot find it this morning. Nonetheless I advise anybody who reads or writes for The American Conservative to see it, and keep an eye out for the film version, In the Loop, which levels the same keen satirical eye on the concerted effort of U.S. and British politicos to effect the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Somebody once said that American films are essentially children’s fare in disguise. That may be a bit harsh, but can’t be rejected out of hand, even by this lover of American cinema. Revenge fantasies, happy endings, clumsy sexual titillation, cliched humor, overt manipulation, overweening soundtracks cuing cheaply conjured emotion, all wrapped in the gaudy veneer of technical sophistication and run through the multiplex mill at a desperate pace. This represents the bulk of what we’re offered.
I’m not complaining–the ninety percent that is dreck sustains an industry that occasionally produces what is our time’s high art. No one is forcing us into the theatre, though the overbearing promotional (and cross-promotional) campaigns that treat each aspiring blockbuster as cultural seismic events to be missed at the peril of one’s social connectivity are about as close to coercion as one can get without a knock on the door.

If only it were possible to shield oneself from the studios’ ad campaigns. I’m convinced that far fewer people would be of the opinion that, say, the first three or four Batman films were worth a fraction of the ticket price if they had experienced them without the considerable pressure of cultural consensus (manufactured though it may be). I still remember hearing an impressionable sort tell a friend that he’d purchased Batman on VHS (ninety-nine dollars retail) years ago when this was still a novelty (not to disregard the beneficial effects of the early-adopter’s ambitious insecurities financing the development of welcome innovations such as home video). “Yeah, I own it,” he bragged. Oh youth!

This cultural herding works in retrospect and reverse as well, when popular appeal over time comes to influence critical opinion. Sometimes this is deserved–I would cite the first Dirty Harry film, having outlasted charges of fascist leanings. Too bad Clint Eastwood seems intent on burying it under the annual offerings of trite liberal cliche that are his current oeuvre–all while, apparently, collecting a pass from the cultural commissariat for making not one but two ape/man* buddy films.
Sometimes not. Few old enough seem to remember that Apocalypse Now received middling reviews on its release (the production of the film, way over schedule and budget, incommunicado deep in the jungle, was a sort of building legend as it went on–a brilliant if unintentional parody of the film and its source work, Heart of Darkness, that remains far more compelling than its final product), and then only because Francis Ford Coppola was still riding in the wake of The Godfather. I’m not saying that Apocalypse Now isn’t a classic–I’m saying it isn’t any good. Unforgivable humorlessness. Pretentious dialogue. Martin Sheen conveying all the expressiveness of a sheet of drywall. “The horror” indeed. But that’s an argument for another time.

It’s a shame that we can’t experience films without preparation every time. One should step into the theatre with zero expectations; a film should descend upon us like some mysterious, alien and authorless transmission from the ether. Some of my most satisfying film experiences have happened in this fashion, having come across something with no prior knowledge. The element of surprise doesn’t hurt but enhances a film’s chances of gaining purchase in our psyche. Alas, this is rarely possible.

But the “children’s films” charge comes to mind when I compare The Thick of It to what is its nearest American counterpart, The West Wing. Earnest and attractive folk exchanging inauthentic witty banter as they labor for justice, narrating out loud their agonizing over moral implications every step of the way, lest we miss the point. Personal ambition barely in evidence. I just experienced a chill of disgust merely thinking about it. Most American television, in particular social and political commentary, is a sort of cultural masturbation. People watch such as The West Wing to convince themselves of their intelligence and superior morality, of the great expansiveness of their empathy.

Ironically, this is achieved in part by distinction of the initiated viewer from a great bigoted and benighted Other–Republicans, often, in the vast melodrama (those familiar with Stuff White People Like will recognize the conceit of the “whiterpeople”, superior in taste and ethos, which is dependent on an implied bogey I would call “other white people”, OWP, upon whom the whiterfolk are forever offloading their considerable and conspicuous contrition). It’s been said before because it’s true–most of our television and cinema is there to make us feel better about ourselves. Kitsch, in other words.

Not so with The Thick of It.  Shot in what might be the most effective use of the verite style yet, the show conveys the absurdity and chaos of democratic governance in our time. In fact, governance is little in evidence as cabinet ministers and MPs spend their days ducking, dodging and fobbing off on one another scandals that seem to erupt daily, and that are more often acts of political gamesmanship than substantial concerns. The rare encounter between common folk and elite are awkward collisions between alien creatures–and giving the citizenry no more slack than it allows the elite. The Thick of It is about nothing less than the impossibility of true democratic governance, and the continuing erosion of our approximation thereof, admirably placing the blame where it belongs–on human nature itself. The point is not to confirm our prejudices and massage our vanity but to dispel them. To wipe the obscuring fog from the mirror. Real satire, in other words.

*Corrected from “baboon-man buddy films”, per Jesse Walker in comments.

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