'Death of a President'
I suppose one could compound the vicarious thrill ...
[. . .]
"Death of a President": The assassination of George W. Bush considered as a downward spiral into tragedy
Much controversy has surrounded British director Gabriel Range's TV docudrama [link|http://www.deathofapresident.com/|"Death of a President,"] which purports to report, from some future date, on the assassination of President Bush outside a Chicago hotel in October 2007. Inevitably, most of it is made-up controversy, fomented by possibly well-intentioned people (but also by boobs and morons) who haven't seen the film and who ascribe powers to mass-culture products that they don't actually possess. Nobody's going to kill Bush because it happens in a movie. Any lunatic who may have such aspirations already possesses them, and Range does not depict the assassination or its aftermath as positive events for anyone.
CNN and NPR are refusing to carry ads for the film, and several of the country's biggest theater chains are refusing to show it. That's their right, of course; it's not censorship. It's just chicken-hearted, pants-pissing cowardice (and free publicity for the filmmakers). All that said, of course this is a hot topic: Range ingeniously blends actual news footage with fictional elements and "Zelig"-style digital insertions to depict the killing of the current, real-life (and widely disliked) United States president by -- well, by somebody.
In the film's universe, Bush is shot after giving a standard speech (one of his better ones, actually) defending his aggressive posture to the world before a group of Chicago business leaders. The assassination itself is a blend of familiar elements: a sniper in an office-tower window (\ufffd la JFK), a moment of exposure amid the random crowd outside a hotel (\ufffd la Reagan). The event itself is surrounded by angry protesters (drawn from images of real Chicago protests over the last few years), some of whom have successfully broken through police lines and entered the Secret Service "containment zone." It's chillingly and convincingly rendered: A couple of loud pops, a man falls to the ground amid chaos and screaming, a limo squeals away at high speed toward the nearest hospital.
I can state with some authority that Range's depiction of the antiwar movement is rather thin, and to pretend that a demonstration of 10,000 to 12,000 people for a presidential visit is a large protest is nonsense. (There have been at least two antiwar marches in the United States since 2003 that drew upward of 500,000 people, probably larger than any comparable events of the Vietnam era.) But it isn't entirely misguided to suggest that a tiny, hateful minority exists within the antiwar movement, and it's clearly true that the weight of law enforcement would come down hard on anarchists, radicals and other nonconformists in any future 9/11-level national disaster, as happens here.
But who actually did it? Is the shooting in fact the work of left-wing antiwar agitators, a conspiracy by al-Qaida and various Axis of Evil states (as the newly enshrined Cheney administration is eager to assert), a disgruntled lone nut or somebody else? Range's whodunit is reasonably clever, even if most viewers will guess right away that the Syrian-born software engineer who's immediately arrested is the wrong guy. But the mystery really isn't the point of "Death of a President." Range has a marvelous feel for the clich\ufffds and conventions of TV-news documentary, and the tone of mournful elegy he strikes here is both convincing and -- believe me, I'm shocked to be writing this -- moving.
Range deploys elements of Ronald Reagan's state funeral for his own purposes, even editing Dick Cheney's oratory on that occasion so that it appears to be that of a new president mourning his fallen predecessor. I don't imagine this will make the film's conservative critics any happier, but it forced me to consider certain things about George W. Bush I am generally reluctant to face. Watching this film in late 2006, when Bush is already "dead" in the political sense -- a lame-duck president, likely to lose his congressional majorities -- carries a particular, painful pathos.
I find myself agreeing both with the Bush-hating demonstrators and with Cheney, and if I read the film correctly, Range is inviting us to make that bizarre leap of imagination. Bush has been partly responsible for a historic decimation of the U.S. Constitution and for an unnecessary war that has caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, but he did so because he is/was a man of profound personal conviction, and misunderestimated intelligence, who firmly believed he was doing the right thing for the future of his country. If the assassination of Bush might lead America, as in the film, even closer to becoming a police state, wouldn't that be a fulfillment of his vision, and that of many others among our fellow citizens?
"Death of a President" opens Oct. 27 nationwide.
President-
... or, following a Two-fer (perhaps in Cheney's bunker, with Blondi nearby, panting) - President Hastert ?