![]() is a more straightforward, restrained film than Stone’s previous films about American presidents, never delving into the conspiracy theory territory that is both JFK and Nixon’s bread and butter. “ Four bodies,” Nixon says, paved the path to his presidency. When JFK is killed, he sulks about not being invited to the funeral, then resentfully says, “If I’d been president, they never would have killed me.” Kennedy’s ghost never stops haunting Nixon- nor do the ghosts of his two brothers (whose young deaths from TB allowed his parents to send him to law school) and eventually, Bobby Kennedy’s, too. Anthony Hopkins’ Nixon is consumed by self-pity, so desperate for everyone in the world to love and respect him that he ensures the opposite. It’s a sprawling epic that plunges its hands deep into Nixon’s psyche. The latter is a film that defies easy categorization: Nixon is Citizen Kane and it’s Scarface, it’s Shakespearean tragedy and a vampire movie. is the third of Oliver Stone’s films about the American presidency, after 1991’s JFK, a conspiracy theory movie about investigating Kennedy’s assassination, and 1995’s Nixon. W., Vice, and The Report are some of the few major films about the Bush administration that Hollywood has produced, and despite their different approaches to history, each speaks to an important truth: to the personal moral character of George Bush to the moral character of Republican Party in the decades before Donald Trump and to why, exactly, America chooses to forget. As activist, cultural critic, and NBA Hall of Famer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar writes, “Unless they’re making a documentary, filmmakers are history’s interpreters, not its chroniclers.”įew films have tried to interpret the Bush era, but the ones that have are worth examining in detail. ![]() At its best, art can show us truths a bare analysis of the facts can never quite reach. I don’t think fiction has a responsibility to be historically accurate, but it nevertheless informs the shape of history in the public consciousness. But the crimes of the Bush administration have left hardly a dent there. So much of the story we tell ourselves about history comes through pop culture, for better or worse. The biggest sitcom of Bush’s first term was set in New York but never acknowledged 9/11. The biggest sitcom of the 1970s was set in the Korean War, acting as an allegory for the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War cast a much longer shadow on American pop culture than the Iraq War did: basically every American film of the 1970s was about Vietnam, directly or indirectly, and plenty more have drawn inspiration from the war since. Part of it is how much the war has vanished from pop culture. Nobody has tried to rehabilitate Richard Nixon. It’s been nearly fifty years since Watergate, and everyone still remembers that. The British Labour Party has returned to pining futilely for the glory days of warmongering Blairism, with Keir Starmar sacking MPs who voted against a bill to make British soldiers immune to prosecution.īut why has everyone forgotten the Iraq War, and all the crimes of the Bush administration? The mists of time don’t account for it. Former Bush staffers hoovered up liberals’ money to produce ineffective anti-Trump ad campaigns. Colin Powell lied to the United Nations about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction, and he was a star attraction at this year’s Democratic National Convention. You’ve got Politico reporting on Joe Biden’s historic decision to appoint the first Latino Secretary of Homeland Security, as if the Department of Homeland Security wasn’t created five minutes ago with the express purpose of doing the most horrible shit in the world. So has “enhanced interrogation.” Even stuff that is still happening-the Guantanamo Bay detention camp (still open and operating), the PATRIOT Act (still getting renewed with Democratic support), the Afghanistan War (still, somehow)-are treated both like a vague memory and an inalterable normal. Despite being one of the most significant events of this very strange century, the Iraq War has been thoroughly flushed down the memory hole. It’s not just Bush who’s gotten this strange rehabilitation. But what if I told you that Bush launched a war of aggression on false pretenses? Or that he legalized torture? Or that he created a massive state surveillance operation that illegally spies on a billion people? Or that he oversaw the collapse of the world economy? What if George Bush was not just, as Ellen would have it, a guy with different political beliefs, but an actual war criminal? And he paints watercolors!ĭear reader, I am about to let you know something that may shock you. ![]() Sometimes he’ll say something vague about Donald Trump being a bad guy. His friendship with Michelle Obama is iconic. He goes to football games with Ellen and it makes people believe in America. ![]()
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