Yesterday's Movies

Before watching the movie:

I don’t know how well-known this movie is. The only reason I’ve heard about it is because The Simpsons referenced it in an episode title that I only knew because it was the only time I ever heard a TV station announce the episode title as part of saying the show was on next, and it only stuck in my head because it was confusing without knowing the reference. I think at some point I got around to looking up what the reference was and got just enough answer to satisfy me and then I forgot about it until I was looking for mockumentaries and realized I’d already heard of this.

What little discussion I’ve seen around the movie recently is about how the satire has evolved into reality. I hope there’s still a little satire that seems like satire.

After watching the movie:

Bob Roberts left his hippie parents as soon as he was able and enlisted himself in military school with hard-scraped cash a forged check out of his mother’s checkbook, got rich quickly through business dealings, became a right-wing folk singer, and is now running for Senator in Pennsylvania, bankrolled by businessman Lukas Hart. On stage, Roberts sings flag-waving songs railing against the lawlessness of the 60s, against welfare, and against the people who complain about having nothing while refusing to work. On his campaign bus, he’s glued to the phone making fast-paced stock trades and coordinating with his campaign manager. Roberts is running against incumbent Democrat Brickley Paiste, a passionate liberal who happens to have been one of the senators who questioned Hart the most rigorously in the Senate hearings about the drug smuggling that was found to have been occurring on planes purchased from Hart’s company by Broken Dove, the anti-drug charity Roberts sponsors. Along the campaign/concert trail, far-left reporter Bugs Raplin vows to expose Roberts as a corrupt fraud, and British documentary filmmaker Terry Manchester has behind the scenes access to almost everything.

The underlying rhetoric and hypocrisy of the Roberts campaign is infuriatingly real and only slightly less unmasked than the state of things today. The quiet part of Reagan-Era neoconservatism is getting increasingly louder and what I hope was meant to be cartoonishly exaggerated is pretty familiar now. But what I appreciate the most about the satire of Roberts is the musical references. Many of Roberts’s songs are direct references to 60s folk songs but with the sentiments run through a Bizarro-world filter. There are songs like “The Times are Changin’ Back” and “This Land is My Land” recast as a white supremacist dog whistle song, one of Bob’s music videos is a direct spoof of a Bob Dylan video, and one of the songs has a break to literally whistle Dixie, which, if the reference to the idiom is intentional, is maybe the cleverest thing in the movie. At the other end, there’s also the completely bald-faced “Don’t Vote” song, explicitly saying, “if you believe these liberal things, don’t vote and we’ll get along fine without you”

I didn’t realize until I was getting ready to write this post that this is technically a Saturday Night Live spinoff, as the character of Bob Roberts was originally in one 80s sketch where he leads a youth group in far-right songs around a book-burning campfire. So of course pivotal events happen around Roberts being a last-minute substitute musical guest on a fictional SNL-like show the Saturday before election day due to network meddling. That’s where the movie seems to cross from satire the Overton Window shift has made less funny into actual prophecy, considering the Candidate Trump-hosted SNL in 2015.

The cast is full of recognizable people. Most of them are cameos, but a lot of names bigger than the roles they’re in suggests to me that there was a lot of enthusiasm among these actors to be part of this warning. Gore Vidal apparently mostly threw out his script and just spoke about his own political values, which is probably why he sounds more leftist than any electable Democrat. In particular, Alan Rickman stands out as being in a role just prominent enough to feel less like a cameo and more like he’s being underutilized. One of my biggest complaints about the execution is that Giancarlo Esposito’s Bugs Raplin comes off as kind of unhinged at the end and he’s meant to be one of the most sympathetic and completely correct characters. The problem is that the system is so broken that the people who see just how broken it is are often a bit broken in turn by that realization, and after what Raplin has been through by the end, he’s certainly got a little license to be unhinged.

This movie made me angry a lot. Bob is a bit of a straw man, but not much exaggerated from actual officeholders and pundits of today. This feels like it hits close to the dark, bitter humor between leftists about the opposition, but it’s not as sharp or funny as that, and I’m not sure if that’s because the political landscape it was made for is 30 years old or just because it wasn’t meant that way. It’s a time capsule, it’s a prophecy, it is to political outrage as a haunted house is to fear, a safe simulation for handling those emotions. I wish I had seen it without the baggage of modern context.