Brief Thoughts on "Don't Look Up," "Vice," and "Casablanca."

 

Not much to say about the new Netflix film "Don't Look Up" since I haven't seen it and might never see it. I'm just reacting to the way that many leftists on my social media and internet sites I frequent are trashing it for how it didn't, instead, choose to be an uplifting film about the people coming together and showing their glorious and beautiful human spirit and overthrowing the oligarchs who are standing in the way of what obviously needs to be done.

Uh, "thwap to ever-optimistic leftist activists: You guys have been living in fucking fantasy-land for so many decades that it's hard to take you seriously. You have achieved SHIT. You have achieved NOTHING. We are closer to global heating catastrophe than ever before. Your record on Israel-Palestine, on Peace, on Inequality, on Police Racism & Violence, is terrible. It's your blinkered, unjustified optimism that keeps you going (Gawd bless you) but maybe you should shut-up here and sit this one out."

Also, some of these precious darlings object to the way that the mass of people are meant to look stupid. Because the people united can never be defeated. It's always our evil overlords who work full-time to divide us who are to blame. You know, to make those of us who think not being shot like animals in the street by racist cops for the colour of our skin should be a human right, to hate the slobbering racist troglodytes who celebrate that and who protest when a window gets broken or a fire gets started in anger over racist state violence. Those damned elites!

Also, ... while I'm sure that a film with this cast of Hollywood A-listers will no doubt be filled with smug, shit-lib hypocrisy and arrogance, ... I'm also pretty sure it's a satire. Or should we also toss Jonathan Swift and Joseph Heller and Terry Gilliam and South Park into the gutter for failing to recognize the eternal beauty of human nature?

Next: I watched about half of "Vice" (about bush II's sleazy VP Dick Cheney) on Netflix early in the pandemic. (The lockdown was why I got Netflix in the first place.) I stopped watching it because the filmmakers seemed to be repeating the term "Unitary Executive" without ever (in my opinion) explaining what it was, why Cheney and Rumsfeld wanted it for and what - therefore - made it so dangerous.

But here's some stuff that I found interesting: Cheney's girlfriend (and later wife) Lynne, apparently wrote his entrance exams to Yale (since he was incapable). Somehow or other his behaviour gets them kicked out. (Either his drinking, or they're living together. I honestly don't remember. But they both had to leave.) He gets work as a telephone lineman but his drinking continues to escalate. Lynne gets him out of jail for drunkeness and sits him down and tells him straight out that her father was an abusive drunk and she is NOT going to live her mother's life. Dick Cheney has to either shape-up or ship-out. 

That took a lot of guts and determination. For a young woman with such a childhood, to stand up to a man and read him the riot act like that. And Dick Cheney doesn't hit her in a drunken rage. He agrees to sober up. And does so. And together, with Lynne's help as the brains of the operation, he gets a career in Washington. Working for like-minded scumbags.

Lynne Cheney's long-suffering mother drowns in suspicious circumstances. She's convinced her father murdered her. At the funeral Dick Cheney tells his (drunken) father-in-law to never try to come near his wife or their two daughters ever again.

I can't remember which scenes came first, but at one point Dick Cheney suffers a heart attack right before an election campaign and Lynne is forced to make speeches on his behalf. (Some of his advisors didn't think Cheney's crowd of voters would listen to a woman but she is clearly good at it and they love her.) I've often said that I never thought Dick Cheney was very smart. His leadership of Haliburton was a disaster and he had to go back into politics and employ raw power and naked corruption to toss public dollars at Haliburton to get it back in the black. From this biopic it really appears that Dick Cheney was Lynne Cheney's creation.

The last scene that I want to mention is the hospital scene after Mary Cheney's car accident. Lynne Cheney thinks Mary has had a fight with her close female friend. But Mary blurts out that she's a lesbian and that they'd broken up and that's what made her so upset that she ended up in a fender-bender. Lynne Cheney's face registers disgust but Dick Cheney immediately says that she's their daughter and that they love her unconditionally. From her Wikipedia page it says that Mary Cheney is a close confidant to her father, so there's some cause to believe this scene happened in life as it did in the movie. Which is touching until you think about all the blood on Dick Cheney's hands. All the millions upon millions of lives he's harmed. It's kind of similar to how the racist father of the USA's racist, mass-incarceration policies of the 1990's, Joe Biden, no doubt loves his wastrel son Hunter, who would probably be serving a life-sentence if he was Black or poor by now.  It's entirely possible for these political psychopaths to be doting parents. loving spouses and true supporters of their inner circles, but that doesn't change the monstrous nature of their policies.

Lynne Cheney's courage and willpower, to not only NOT live her mother's life, but to be a female public speaker and writer, is cancelled-out by the sickening policies of oligarchy, delusion and hatred that she embraces. Dick Cheney's love for his family is totally cancelled-out by his boorish stupidity and indifference to the lives of anyone outside his own chosen circle.

Finally, and like a lot of other people apparently, I've taken to watching movie reaction videos on YouTube. There's two different female YouTubers that I watch. And recently they've each watched "Casablanca." It's a treat to see these millenials become so invested in the story and the characters and to both respond with such shock to the relatively mild (compared to the present day) violence, such as when [SPOILER ALERT!!! ;) ] Rick shoots Major Strasser.

But at the end of her video, one of the YouTubers refers to Strasser's death and says "Bad stuff was happening." IOW: The Nazis were bad. They were villains. That's what happens when people fight back. And both of these YouTubers are from the United States. And so much of the bad stuff happening now is because of the USA. In Iraq. In Libya. In Syria. In Palestine. In the Sudan. In the Ukraine. In Iran. In Venezuela. In Central America. In South America. In US prisons. In Yemen. 

No. The US oligarchy is NOT as 100% racist as the Nazis were. Their system is quite racist but I'd say a large minority of the US capitalist elite could easily tolerate a non-white person for almost an entire day. And, no, the US system of domination has not created literal factories of murder such as the gas chambers. They just use starvation sanctions, brutal mercenaries of all sorts, their own military, and other methods of slaughter to destroy or end the lives of tens of millions of people. If you want to question that then you've already identified yourself as an imbecile.

Then there's the stirring scene where the Czech anti-Nazi patriot Victor Lazlow leads the crowd at Rick's nightclub to sing "La Marseillaise" in response to the Nazi soldiers singing "Die Wacht am Rhein." The whole crowd of French refugees and unhappy Vichy collaborators and residents remember their love of country, homeland. They stand up to their conquerers. They do so in French-controlled Morocco. I wonder how the Moroccans felt about their French occupiers?  I once worked with a man from a former French colony in Central Africa. He was about my age (fifties). He recalled that when he was a child his father asked him and his brother if they dreamed in their native language or French. He told his father that he dreamed in French. His father got visibly depressed. [FWIW: "Die Wacht am Rhein" is a song, based on a poem, about German Rhinelanders resisting French attempts to conquer them.]

I don't want to claim that that's not a stirring scene or that "Casablanca" isn't a great film. Or that those two young ladies are contemptible ignoramuses. I actually watch them because of the few reaction video YouTubers that I've seen, their responses are consistently eloquent and their editing professional. It's a guilty pleasure and I don't want to get too involved with it.