The Death of the President.
“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”
-George Orwell.
George Orwell once wrote…that, "It's not a matter of whether the war is not real or if it is. Victory is not possible. The war is not meant to be won. It is meant to be continuous. A hierarchical society is only possible…on the basis of poverty and ignorance. This new version is the past...and no different past can ever have existed. In principle, the war effort is always planned...to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects. And its object is not the victory over either Eurasia or East Asia...... but to keep the very structure of society intact. "
-George Orwell, Michael Moore (Fahrenheit 9/11).
Gabriel Range's film, Death of a President which won the International Critics Prize at the Toronto 2006 Film Festival is a pseudo-documentary about the assassination of the 43rd President of the United States of America, George Walker Bush (Dubya). The White House did not even comment on the movie and oppositional party member Senator Hillary Clinton thought that Range’s film was, “despicable” and “absolutely outrageous” but Marx-Trek must say the film was compelling, ultra-realistic...to realistic…, and a very cleaver critique of the American psyche, paranoia, ultra-nationalism, despotism, and the complete disconnect between the state and America’s citizenry.
It was something of comedy to see such an accurate glimpse into a possible future out come. The film was set in 2008 where President Dubya is successfully assassinated and the following fake interviews from a jolly god-filled presidential speech writer who just seemed be one step away from seeing beyond our realm who reminds me of the ever so clueless mother in the Adam Sandler movie, Water Boy, a self-righteous lying scumbag police chief who refers to peaceful demonstrations with the crack of his baton, and finally a entire population held hostage and ignored by the state. A spectacle so gripping it cannot be ignored, no matter how fake it is.
The sad reality of this pseudo-documentary is that the US government did not have to wait until the assassination of a president to implement measures that track, spy, and kidnap human-beings. Nor did the US government have to wait for some terror attack such as 9/11 to occur before introducing Big Brother. No, the US government did not have to wait for such dramatic events because legally or “illegally” most of these outrageous practices are already in place. During the feature all I could think about is how such spectacles can either be down played or turned up in high gear so that Empire can achieve its objective. The film played on the all too familiar gut wrenching reality or possible reality, it does not really matter how fake or real, where I was left with a satisfied thought. President Bush does not need to be assassinated to achieve some political goal nor does he need to be killed so that people around him understand that he truly is a war-monger and demon for capitalism not a drunkard born-again saint. This film pretty much lets Bush and Co. know that there is an immense amount of hatred for them all and that plenty of people around world will actually get satisfaction from watching President Bush go down from a semi-automatic carbine sniper rifle from 300 yards away. For satisfied customers the bonus is that they can watch his assassination over, over, and over again.
Knowing that Death of a President is a fake documentary and that the people in the film are in no way connected or based on reality I still feel that the film itself could pass-off as reality. Point being, reality passes us all by with little or no thought and the horrors of reality themselves go unnoticed. Actually, it is not that the far off third world tragedies go unnoticed it is more accurate to say that our own horrors and alienation from our everyday lives keep us all in a constant state of disconnect. So the film itself is as much a real documentary as it is fake. In the early 1900’s it was anarchists, from the 50’s to the 70’s it was communists, the 80’s drugs, and the 2000’s terrorists of all sorts lurking around every corner ready to take your freedom. No matter what decade the threat remains, a faceless problem, a ghost, a spectre! Its not that the US is at war with terrorism or Iraq, they are at war with us all.
