It didn't. George W. Bush still beat John Kerry. Relatively easily, in fact, despite some optimistic exit polling early in the day, which still feels like a tease all these years later.
I'm sure that wasn't the first time a polemic had been released in an election year with the hope of influencing the outcome, but it is something I tend to associate with Moore. He's tried it twice during the Trump era, once to prevent the era from starting (Michael Moore in Trumpland, from 2016) and once to effect change on the midterm elections (Fahrenheit 11/9 in 2018). I guess the latter could have helped, as there were a lot of Democratic wins in 2018. He appears to have been willing to let Barack Obama fend for himself, which turns out to have been a perfectly good decision.
Maybe he's run out of gas, as there is no Michael Moore movie trying to take down King Donald in 2020.
However, that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of other filmmakers who have taken his place.
In fact, this past weekend alone I watched four movies released during this "most important election of our lives" election season, each of which could reasonably be construed as trying to prevent the second term of the Donald Trump presidency. I hadn't started our three-day weekend with the intention of watching all of them -- in fact, I watched October horror movies the first two nights, Thursday and Friday. But once I got started, I kept going, and I thought I'd recap them for you now.
Watched: Saturday late afternoon
Released: August 28th
The first, and ultimately the best, is the heartfelt documentary that tries to restore the innocent roots of the internet's most awful right-wing meme, Pepe the Frog. No, Pepe was not originally envisioned as a sadistic, politically incorrect dog whistle to any person out there inclined toward racism, violence or one in the name of the other. His creator, Matt Furie, drew him as a happy-go-lucky stoner living with three other animals, playing video games and peeing with their pants dropped all the way to the floor. The latter action contained the fateful origins of the character's meme-ability, as he explained his pants-dropping freedom by quipping "Feels good, man." That line made its way into the first not-very-sinister, then the extremely sinister parts of the internet, where incels initially adopted Pepe as a sad frog that they thought resembled them, and then as a mad frog that wanted to burn the world.
The progression -- regression, really -- from innocent comic book character to embodiment of the alt-right is told with a highly engrossing narrative competence by Jones et al. It's moving and angering and by the end, you just feel bad for this character with the gentle soul who was transmogrified into the personification of evil, not to mention the gentle soul of its creator. The movie also really details the life cycle of a meme on a place like 4-chan, where these anonymous users were first adopting him as a kindred spirit, then ultimately shoving him in the face of the various "libtards" they wanted to own as they worked to elevate Donald Trump to the White House. One nice thing about it is that it does not overtly campaign for the end of the political fortunes of Trump, but that message is a clear subtext in the story of a benign cartoonist and his attempt to wrest back control of his intellectual property.
Watched: Saturday evening
Released: October 23rd
If you had to intuit that the director and stars of Feels Good Man want to see Trump go down in flames, no such intuition is necessary here. Oh, Sacha Baron Cohen doesn't say that either -- he doesn't need to. His relentless, merciless attempts to ensnare members of Trump's inner circle -- and his success at catching one big fish, Rudy Giuliani -- really speak for themselves.
I did end up reviewing Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, as I told you on Sunday I would. If you want to check that out, you can find it here. So I won't go on at length about it because my review captures most of what I'd like to say, even though I probably could have written a review twice the length. (In short, I really liked it.)
However, I do think it's worth noting that Borat, in a way, shares a spirit with Moore the most. Like Moore, he relies on confrontational, cringey humor. Although Moore might not like to hear his work reduced to this, both also rely on pranks to either embarrass their subject or to try to make them understand the error of their ways. This time around, Borat has to disguise himself to better pull off his schemes -- Moore never bothered with any of that. And both have produced, at their best, riveting results in unveiling the malevolent prejudices of right-wing jerks.
Watched: Sunday morning
Released: August 28th
What was it about August 28th that made it such a good day to release anti-Trump films? Feels Good Man also came out that day. Oh, I know -- it was the day after the end of the Republican National Convention. Or, maybe it was just a Friday in late August, when they figured there would not be a huge amount of competition from high-profile theatrical releases. (Ha, joke's on you -- there was zero competition.)
This is the first (though not the last) of the movies I watched to rely heavily on the talking head format. The talking heads in this case are mostly psychologists breaking down their diagnoses of Trump, which mostly come down to that he's a malignant narcissist. This I knew, but what I didn't know was that there was a rule of thumb growing out of Barry Goldwater's run for the presidency in 1964 not to diagnose a patient from afar. Goldwater was apparently done a disservice when all sort of psychologists were quick to declare him unfit, a judgment that many of them later consider to have been rash. Nowadays, though, the theory has shifted with someone like Trump due to the sheer quantity of information about him they have access to. Some even declare that this gives them a better chance to diagnose him than if he were sitting on their couch, feeding them what he thought they wanted to hear.
The lion's share of interviews with people we know are with George Conway and Anthony Scaramucci, one-time Trump voters or actual Trump employees who came to Jesus about this man and the threat he poses the country. I thought this was very well put together and fairly enlightening, even though I did probably know most of it. The pillars of malignant narcissism really rang true with me, especially as one of them involved sadism.
Watched: Sunday night
Released: October 13th
The final film was the one I thought had the potential to make the most impact, as it involves an inevitably rushed attempt to analyze the mistakes made during the pandemic under Trump's watch. I say "inevitably rushed" because the final chapter in the story has, of course, not been written. The reason to make the movie now, rather than waiting until a vaccine was out there and the whole breadth of the disruption and loss of life could be measured, is to influence the outcome of the election. And while I support that as a mission, I think in this case it made the film a bit less effective.
For more than two hours -- Gibney has never been accused of brevity -- I watched as the film took us back through the critical junctures and big news headlines of the pandemic, following an on-screen timeline across the bottom of the screen, and interviewing key figures along the way, mostly virologists. Although I obviously did not delve into every single one of those moments at the time they happened, I did live them, so some of this felt like regurgitating things to me that I already knew. Gibney is always a thorough filmmaker, but I felt this movie got a bit bogged down, and was at times quite dull. A 90-minute film would have worked better, especially since the "ending" hasn't been written yet.
Still, it was useful to have all this stuff in one place, and I thought the movie was worth making. I have to acknowledge that burnout was also a factor for me in this viewing, as I was coming to the end of a weekend in which I'd watched seven movies total going back to Thursday night.
So if I liked all of these films, some of them very much, and some not as much for a reason that could help explain that reaction, why do I only say that Michael Moore's spirit is "alive," not "alive and well"?
Because ultimately, I'm not sure if any of these films is going to mean anything.
I don't mean that I think Trump is going to win. I think he's going to lose. But I don't feel like any of these films will have played a meaningful role in bringing about that loss.
We like to imagine this set of undecided voters out there, selecting from the available movies and television programs and articles and books to help eject them from that camp one way or another. But I'm just not sure this is really true. Especially in the case of the later releasing films, I'm just not sure there are people sitting out there, marking their calendars for October 13th, waiting for a single film to eviscerate Trump on his failed handling of the virus. They've got so many other outlets more immediately providing them that information.
What's more, I think these films are mostly preaching to the choir. Liberals like me gobble them up and dream ourselves away into a fantasy that these are big, influential conversation pieces. When in fact, particularly in 2020, they are just small drops in a very big bucket of election-related noise. In fact, by having four such movies (and certainly more that I didn't watch this past weekend), the filmmakers are essentially cannibalizing each other as viewers make choices among an ever-growing pool of entertainment options. And who could blame them if they'd prefer escapism in 2020, rather than yet more election discussion?
The good news is, I'm pretty sure the end result will have made it seem like these movies had an influence, even if they probably did not.
Before leaving I'd like to mention that I considered watching a fifth movie this weekend, just to be balanced. If there's a true corollary to Moore in our cinematic landscape, it's not on the left side of the aisle, but the right. Even more doggedly than Moore perhaps, conservative filmmaker Dinesh D'Souza times new films to the elections, trying to do for conservative candidates what Moore tries to do for liberal ones.
Just for the sake of being fair and balanced, and to see what it was all about, I did watch, back at the time, his 2012 movie 2016: Obama's America, whose title alone probably suggested he did not expect it to help Mitt Romney beat Barack Obama. I thought it was bad, but not awful -- I disagreed with his politics, but the worse part about it was just that he's not a very good filmmaker.
Since then he's made a conservative screed every two years, only two of those having been timed to presidential elections: Hillary's America in 2016 and Trump Card this year. I thought it would be "fair" of me to give D'Souza another viewing, even though I disagree with his politics as well as his filmmaking.
I had the movie up on iTunes to rent and everything, but I just couldn't bring myself to do it. I saw his smug face on the poster and thought "If I contribute even one $4.99 rental to this guy, it will boost his worldview and his sense of his own importance just that little bit more." Just as every vote counts in a presidential election, every rental counts in determining the success of a film. And I don't want either Trump or Trump Card to be considered a success.
Hey, who ever said I had to be fair? Donald Trump has run roughshod over the very notion of fairness, in every day of his life, in everything he does. I can't wait until we send him packing.
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