WHAT KIND OF MOVIE ARE WE IN?
BEING THE 4TH PART OF "THIS IS ALL COMPLETELY NORMAL"
IT’S IMPORTANT TO KNOW WHAT KIND OF MOVIE YOU’RE IN
My wife is a professor of filmmaking. One of her favorite exercises is to have her students place different musical cues on top of the same neutral video clip: say a shot of swings on a windy playground, or people walking down a street at night, or strangers in a pub. The music makes all the difference. Sad music makes the playground scene poignant, all about the kids that aren’t playing on the swings. Likewise, triumphant or happy or mysterious music changes our feelings about what might be about to happen to the people in the clips. I mention this because it’s a fun exercise - you should try it - and also because if you’re a character in a movie it’s a very good idea to know what kind of movie you’re in. Having this information could mean the difference between getting the girl or solving the mystery or getting eaten - or not eaten - by something-unknown-to-science while on your way home from the store. Knowing what kind of movie you’re in helps you know if you should be ready to run, and how fast, and roughly what kind of thing might be chasing you. A good clue to the kind of movie you’re in, as inferred above, can be found by listening very carefully to the background music. You may have noticed this last few years that the background music of our times has been getting creepier and creepier.
We are in a monster movie.
Like Donald himself, monster movies have a predictable structure. In the first act, the monster appears and runs amok while everyone panics and dies, because the monster is unlike anything they’ve ever seen before and they can’t figure out what it wants or how to fight it. In the second act, our hero - often by surviving in dangerous proximity to the monster - comes to understand the monster’s behavior and discovers a weakness. In the third act, knowledge of this weakness is exploited and the monster is defeated.
For ten years now, we’ve been trapped in the first act - panicking and running in circles - with no idea how to respond to the scary monster that is Donald Trump.
That said, recognizing that we’re in a monster movie is helpful, because there are familiar tropes in the genre that can be usefully applied to the monster movie in which we are now trapped. For instance, in the beginning of a monster movie most characters don’t believe the monster actually exists. They don’t accept the monster is real until the bodies start piling up and they finally see the creature - and the destruction it’s causing - for themselves. The moment when the monster is finally recognized and revealed is the moment when the tables finally turn, when our heroes begin to effectively fight back against this suddenly clear and present danger. This moment of recognition represents a fundamental and necessary turning point in any monster story, because you can’t organize to fight a monster that you don’t believe exists, or that you don’t believe is actually a threat. There is great hope in the fact that we, as a nation, are finally arriving at our very own “you’re gonna need a bigger boat” moment in our ongoing, real-life, monster-fighting adventures.
Another common trope in early examples of the genre involved rescuing White Womanhood from a threat, often posed by unfamiliar and (of course) darker-skinned outsiders. Think “King Kong” and “Creature from the Black Lagoon”. There’s a good argument to be made that “Birth of a Nation” is the original horror movie, and that it marks the first breakout, silver screen appearance of this particular trope. It’s also, not coincidentally, the pop culture, blockbuster debut of a lot of the White grievance schtick that is Donald Trump’s bread and butter. Other common monster movie tropes include the rule that “the Black guy dies first“, and that you should not - under any circumstances - go down into the dark basement when you hear a noise, or for any other reason, especially if you’re a non-white character. You should never assume that the monster is dead or go to check when you find signs that it’s been injured. You should not - of course - invite the monster into your house for soup, unless you’re Gene Hackman, in which case go for it. (And you should watch the Gene Hackman link and the “dies” link above, really. You need a laugh. Laughter is our friend.)
But the biggest and most central trope of all is that the monster is, by definition, big and scary and overwhelmingly powerful and that it is not possible to resist the monster openly.
Lots of Trump’s followers have proclaimed him to be a genius. Far too many of the rest of us have also been prepared to believe that Donald Trump is a genius, if clearly an evil one. Literally thousands of pages have been written over the last ten years, carefully explaining to us that Donald Trump’s relentless chaos, disorganization and meaningless destruction is in fact part of some grand, brilliant, longterm plan that the rest of us aren’t clever enough to understand. This is false. And yes, there are people around Trump who have all kinds of evil plans and who believe they can manage or control Trump in order to make their horrendous plans a reality. Happily, these people are in the process of finding out that Trump and his chaos are not so easily wrangled.
By accepting the premise that Donald Trump is an overwhelmingly powerful monster, that he is clever, and that his actions are the result of a rational thought process that we may or may not be able to understand and reverse-engineer and reason with we have fundamentally failed to comprehend the nature of the monster we’re dealing with, and we have greatly reduced our ability to defend ourselves and our world.
ON UNSUSPENDING DISBELIEF
Once you know that the shark in Jaws is actually just a barely functional mechanical doll - a doll that needed to be repeatedly hauled up and resuscitated after short-circuiting and sinking to the bottom of the ocean - it becomes a lot less scary. If you then turn off John Williams’ amazing two-note score it stops being scary at all, and we can all go back in the water. As a kid, when you recognized that the original Godzilla was just a guy in a rubber suit stomping on a bunch of toy houses then the frightening spell was broken and you were free to relax and appreciate the gonzo splendor of the kaiju apocalypse. Like Dorothy, we need to remind ourselves that the Great and Terrible Wizard of Oz was, in the end, just an insignificant little man behind a curtain. By seeing clearly what is actually in front of us - and not just accepting the stories we’ve been told - we reclaim our power over our own lives. By shaking off our habits of fear and obedience, we free ourselves from captivity to a grotesque fraud who would burn down our world, and who would expect us to applaud and to thank him when it’s gone.
To mangle our metaphors, Donald Trump is just a malfunctioning, insignificant little man in a rubber shark suit, and his enablers are all just a bunch of unprincipled and degenerate oompa loompas, bowing and scraping before their awkward, glitching orange god…
Donald Trump’s supposed mystique is built, in large part, on a foundation of things that he is - emphatically - not. This makes him incredibly vulnerable and makes his power much more brittle and ultimately much more unstable than it has so far appeared to be. To be clear, Donald Trump is, in actual fact, a misogynistic bigot and an asshole. None of that is an act, and to many of his supporters it’s clearly a big part of the appeal. What is not appealing - to anyone at all, anywhere in the entire world - is what is becoming more and more obvious every day: Donald Trump is unraveling. And Donald’s unraveling isn’t just becoming obvious to his critics. If that were the case then it wouldn’t really matter because we don’t like him anyway. What does matter, a lot, is that Donald Trump’s unraveling is becoming painfully obvious to a growing number of his fans, and to people who try very hard not to pay any attention at all to politics, and even to people who live thousands of miles away and who - under normal circumstances - might not even be able to tell you the name of the president of the United States.
Donald Trump is unraveling spectacularly before our eyes, in real time - flaming out like some huge, infernal Roman candle - on the biggest and most public stage in the history of the world. As a consequence, what is becoming increasingly obvious to an ever-increasing audience includes, but is not limited to, the following:
Donald Trump is not a Very Stable Genius. He is not playing four-dimensional chess, or regular chess. He is not playing checkers. Donald Trump is not, in fact, playing any kind of strategic board game at all, he’s just dumping over every board he can reach because he likes the sound the pieces make when they hit the floor. Donald Trump is not thoughtful. He is not clever. He is not motivated by the well-being of his supporters, or of anyone else in the whole world other than himself. He is not sane.
Donald Trump is so head-wreckingly uncomplicated that it’s taken us years to slow down enough to be able to recognize his brutal simplicity. He’s so astonishingly petty and ignorant and cognitively impaired that it’s hard to believe it’s not an act. But it’s not. With Donald Trump, what you see is what you get, and what we’ve been getting lately is a nasty old man who is increasingly disoriented, delusional, demented, distracted, disinhibited and depraved. He forgets what he’s talking about. He constantly insults and demeans women and people of color. He makes frequent violent threats, and then he breaks all kinds of laws in the process of making those threats a blood-covered reality. He repeats himself. He wanders from subject to subject in ways that make no sense. He is preeningly, unjustifiably, childishly vain, blathering on about his “beautiful” body and his “perfect” brain, desperate for us to disregard the evidence of our own eyes and ears. He mixes up words and countries or makes up new ones. He lies all day long: stupid, obvious, easily disproven lies, sometimes dozens of them a day. He destroys things - alliances and national treasures and lifesaving bureaucracies - for no reason at all. Then he repeats himself and does it all again.
It is time to take away grandpa’s keys.
Or, to be less polite about it — and yes, all that stuff above was polite, I’m from Philadelphia - we could put it like this:
At his very best, Donald Trump has always been your garden-variety creepy uncle. Donald has not been at his best for a very long time now. Lately, Donald Trump is more like your garden-variety creepy uncle coming off a months-long bender of codeine and crystal meth and sleeping in people’s hedges. And now he’s dancing strangely and staggering around your lawn, covered in badly applied clown makeup, shouting rude things at the neighbors and hurling little vodka bottles at the squirrels.
Donald Trump is an embarrassment. He is a joke. He is an American laughing stock before the world, a source of shame and dishonor in the eyes of our enemies and of our oldest friends.
Donald Trump is an idiot and a fool and a maniac. He is an angry moron. He is an unapologetic predator and a murderous tyrant. He is an enraged and heavily armed toddler screaming to get what he wants, and then screaming even louder for the next thing.
Donald Trump is a slime mold. He is an icky, orange, slowly spreading menace. He is a primitive organism that thrives on rot. Everything he touches he makes unclean. You can’t reason with a slime mold. Slime molds are impervious to logic and to moral persuasion. They must be contained and corralled and cleaned up. Most importantly, the unsanitary conditions that permitted them to grow in the first place must be remediated. Festering darkness must be exposed to light. Left-behind places of fear and despair need to be embraced with hope and material support and connection. The obscenely rich are a plague. Insane inequality destroys democracy and undermines the decency of a society. It is violent and grotesque, and Donald Trump is its insatiable avatar, its mindless essence made flesh.
And maybe Donald hasn’t always been like this. Maybe at some point in the past, before his brain rotted, Donald Trump was capable of expressing his malice in a more calculated and coherent way. But even if that were the case it wouldn’t really matter. The Donald Trump we’re dealing with now is so senile, so profoundly cognitively impaired and so depraved that pretty much every single thing that comes out of his mouth is either delusional or predatory or wildly inappropriate or just plain weird. And going forward it’s only going to get worse. Much worse.
Some version of the above is what we should be repeating all-day, every day between now and the midterms. And we should keep repeating it until the glorious day when we’re finally forever rid of Donald Trump. We should be doing this not because it’s petty or mean or because it’s a winning strategy, though it might be some or all of these things. We should be saying this all-day and every day because it is obviously, absurdly, catastrophically true, and because calling things by their proper names is the necessary foundation of the path back to sanity. We should be speaking this truth out loud every day because by failing to do so we would dishonor ourselves, and we would make ourselves complicit in an obscenity. We should be speaking this truth every day out of respect for our ancestors who worked so hard to achieve all the progress that Trump is trying to destroy, and out of respect for our children who will inherit whatever’s left of this world when we are gone.
And we don’t need to screech or shout or have a hysterical meltdown while we’re doing this. We don’t have to hiss and point and make weird faces like the creepy pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Don’t panic. Don’t freak out. Let it rip, but let it be fun. Because being on the right side of history when it really matters is a great thing. Because pulling down a biblical tyrant is the Lord’s work. Because we’re lucky to be the ones to be here now to save the world when it really needs saving. Because laughter dispels fear and shrinks fascists, and because you and I and everyone around us could all really use a good laugh.