Continental Drift: Alexander Payne's "The Descendants"

Alexander Payne’s The Descendants is a comedy about evolution, its local story informed by the great Darwinian narrative of organisms and environments being shaped by time. Under time’s ponderous and yawning weight that slouches restlessly forward, the Earth and its tenants undergo change so gradual that extinction isn't sighted until the dwindling and final whimpers. In The Descendants, this applies to a man, a marriage, a nuclear family, a tribe, a state, a geographical locale, and a world. But the depression of things falling apart has a jester on its back. The world is equal turns comic and tragic as we try to make sense out of this huge, careless, chaotic, changing thing, making it tolerable by lying to ourselves and each other. A map shows Hawaii, a cluster of islands separate but grouped together. Matt King (George Clooney), whose family roots extend to King Kamehameha, narrates that his home state’s geography resembles his more pressing familial affairs: these islands are all “part of the same whole, but drifting slowly apart.” The analogy underlies the whole of Payne’s exquisitely tempered new film, which is a meditative answer of forgiveness to the guilt that tightly laced through his previous work, Sideways. Whereas the drunken, despicable, yet loveable men of Sideways were addicted to duplicity as a means of keeping the brutal present realities at bay (there’s a motif of rest being interrupted by a knock at the door or ringing phone, always with inconvenient news), The Descendents' Darwinian longview perspective reconciles present-day pressures of jealousy, hatred, and sadness to an acceptance of the flow of time.

The malaise of Matt’s life materializes after an accident involving his wife, Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie), whose living will mandates that she be taken off life support. They had been growing distant, as he devoted himself to economic frugality and his work as a lawyer, while Elizabeth maintained the home base raising their two daughters, Alexandra (Shailene Woodley) and Scottie (Amara Miller). Elizabeth’s death imminent, Matt is faced with the strenuous work of setting things right at home. But he also must satisfy the desires of his cousins. For 150 years, the Kings have maintained control of lush Hawaiian wilderness, and Matt is pressured to sell the land to real estate developers, a move ensuring exorbitant riches for the already well-off (though spoiled and irresponsible) King clan. Matt’s in the tricky position of needing to please everybody: his bloodline, his grieving in-laws, the people of Hawaii, etc, and only he can make the decision to sell or maintain the ancestral land. “Paradise can go fuck itself,” he says of the outside world’s ideas about Hawaii, the vacation getaway where people are still capable of injury, misery, conquest, and being forgotten in time. During Matt’s opening words of crestfallen paradise, we see impoverished and indigenous faces of Hawaii, a Polynesian locale restructured as a getaway, a bastion of forgetfulness for tourists and residents alike. Like Miles (Paul Giamatti) and his cherished 1961 bottle of wine in Sideways, Matt is getting older, having peaked as it were, with nowhere to go but down to oblivion.

The immediacy of Matt’s tragedy isn’t accelerated by the prospect of Elizabeth’s death as much as it is by her infidelity. Daughter Alexandra (Shailene Woodley), a sassy and rebellious 17-year-old, breaks the news about Elizabeth’s lover, a real estate salesman named Brian Speer (Matt Lillard). This was no frivolous affair, as Elizabeth was falling deeply in love, preparing to leave Matt. Family friends, in addition to Alexandra, have kept this “unique and dramatic situation” (as a complicit buddy dubs the situation) secret from Matt, a man too preoccupied to see the eventual termination of a marriage he knew was troubled, but which he assumed to still have time.

Matt's unresolvable problem with a terminal spouse echoes a situation Alexander Payne has dramatized before. In About Schmidt, the recently retired Warren Schmidt (Jack Nicholson) discovers the 25-year-old love-letters of his deceased wife, who unexpectedly died of an aneurysm. All of Schmidt's emotions amount to nothing. The cuckold, as say Harold Bloom describes Othello (who isn’t a cuckold, but believes he may be), is faced with how he’s running out of time: the “luxury” of a lull into the future is cast off, as his time, or presumed sex life to spawn and make a home, becomes somebody else’s. And for the worse, the cuckold oftentimes rebukes his lover or spouse, even – as with Othello and poor Desdemona – killing them. But Matt King and Warren Schmidt are out of luck. Matt King rants at Elizabeth’s inert body, a scene that’s both heart-breaking, like Marlon Brando’s monologue to his wife’s corpse in Last Tango in Paris, and oddly hilarious, given that just moments earlier Matt held his composure, chiding his daughter for her harsh words to the body. Unlike Othello or Brando in Last Tango, Matt can’t afford to throw himself into a reckless abandon, submitting to his passions and grief. Precisely because he can’t afford to look ridiculous, he looks ridiculous. He is impotent to satisfying himself.

If Matt could take at least the slightest modicum of consolation in knowing that Brian Speer, with that toothy douchebag Realtor smile, is kind of an absurd replacement (I think an audience is supposed to be a little amused that a woman is cheating on George Clooney with Matt Lillard, who has slightly swollen up since his heyday 10 years ago), he is more brutally hurt by the major coincidence of the affair. Matt wants to know who Brian Speer is, if not to get some sort of revenge or satisfaction by punching Speer in the face, then by at least doing what Elizabeth would have probably wanted and informing him that she is going to die. He discovers that the Speer family, including beautiful wife Julie (Judy Greer) and two sons, are renting a house on some King land, and asks the boozy Cousin Hughie (Beau Bridges) about them.

The news is unbearable. Brian Speer’s company is the buyer of the King’s untouched wilderness, and Speer himself will overlook the development of hotels and vacation-oriented properties on the same fertile frontier Matt’s family has enjoyed for over a century. The Darwinian turmoil of infidelity’s implications – of being bested by a superior male – is hilariously inflated by the metaphor’s invasion of reality. As Matt absorbs the news, Payne frames Clooney with an old black and white photograph of a Hawaiian woman of Native descent accompanied by a white man, while the bar’s sound is decorated by some local performers, whose Hula music has been overtaken by a distinctly European yodel. Speer’s name denotes a sort of indigenous tribal conflict, in addition to a phallus, and it seems that Matt King’s crown as ruler of the land has been usurped along with his illusion of stable husbandry. To put it a little coarsely, Brian Speer might as well be fucking Elizabeth in Matt’s bed, on top of Matt’s corpse, with Matt’s children, if not all of Hawaii, watching. He is conquered. Infidelity is equated with Post-Colonial peril in The Descendants.

As a man, Brian Speer is hardly extraordinary or noble, just as he disappoints Matt by not quite being the insufferable douchebag demanded by jealous love. Speer cowers when Matt confronts him, knowing that his own marriage would be imperiled by his affair seeping out. Matt struggles to keep his rage balanced, his questions leading to as to whether or not the two did sleep together in Matt’s house, on his bed. He tells Brian the grim news about Elizabeth, but the lover's reaction is stilted shock more than heartache. Matt’s retaliation amounts to merely an inappropriate kiss on Julie’s lips. The sore notion is that relationships are tantamount to the ownership of property.

Who owns the future, having control of time and the leisure to do what one desires in their limited space? It’s a recurrent Payne theme. In Citizen Ruth, different political factions literally fight it out for control of the future in the form of an unborn fetus. Election’s fledging schoolteacher Jim McCallister (Matthew Broderick) struggles to make a baby at home, fails at consummating an affair elsewhere, and can’t shape the future of school politics in accordance to his wishes; whether as teacher or tour-guide (his occupation at the film’s conclusion), he doesn’t move history forward, but he narrates it as a sterile and aging onlooker, an idea Payne and co-screenwriter Jim Taylor illustrate as McCallister sneaks out of bed to sip beer and watch pornos in his basement (note that he does nothing beyond watching), while the amoral and unethical Tracy Flick (Reese Whitherspoon), whose name becomes confused with the procreative act when written on cupcakes (“FLICK” = FUCK, in case you didn’t figure it out), rises through the elite ranks of the world, presumably screwing her way to world domination. In Sideways, Jack (Thomas Haden Church) and Miles are both running out of time as they chug through middle age like so many bottles of wine: Jack is getting married to a beautiful Armenian woman, but he's plagued by his “plight” to sow as many wild oats as possible before saying “I do,” while Miles’ alcoholism and depression are motivated by his dwelling on the past. Near the end of the film, the discovery of his ex-wife's pregnancy by a more well-adjusted, wealthy, and handsome suitor, overwhelms him with some powerful emotion (Grief? Fear? Anger? Dread?) Jealousy in a comedy has rarely been so existential.

Payne’s body of work comprises a human comedy about a thinking individual’s dread of insignificance and mortality, with no children, friends, or documents to hand off a wished-for memory. The theme is most clearly voiced by Schmidt, who admits, “So much has happened in my life that whole chunks of my life just seem gone and erased,” a line narrated just as a large bug splats on his windshield. He visits a Nebraska history museum and reflects on the Native Americans, “Those people got a raw deal.” As for the pioneers, they are commemorated with a placard saying, “The Cowards Never Started. The Weak Died on Their Way. Only the Strong Arrived. They Were the Pioneers.” Schmidt understands, like Miles and Matt King, that he’s not a pioneer. “We’re all pretty small in the big scheme of things,” he narrates at the film’s conclusion, writing to Ndugo, the African child he sponsors through a starvation relief organization. “And I suppose all you can hope for is to make some kind of difference. But what kind of difference have I made? What in the world is better because of me?...I am weak. And I am a failure. There’s just no getting around it. Relatively soon, I will die. Maybe in 20 years. Maybe tomorrow. It doesn’t matter. Once I am dead, and everyone who knew me dies too, it will be as though I never even existed. What difference has my life made to anyone? None that I can think of. None at all.” Like Phineas’ funeral in A Separate Peace, taught by Miles to his English class in Sideways, there is a deep sense of encountering one’s own funeral and being so depressed, because of that “raw deal,” that one can’t even cry. You will be forgotten, an idea reinforced in The Descendants by the presence of Elizabeth’s Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother.

Even the fates of the winners, implies aren’t permanent. The King family is much more fortunate than Mr. McCallister, Miles and Jack, and the numbed, "wood-man" struggling to awake, Warren Schmidt. Even in the “Paradise” of Hawaii, no one is “immune to life.” In the parley of Jared Diamond’s guns, germs, and steel (and more especially, maybe in Diamond’s idea of collapsing civilizations), Conquered and Conqueror eventually double each other, as the blood of King’s white ancestors overtook the Polynesian genes of the 19^th century Hawaiian king. Pictures of Hawaii’s poor and forgotten indigenous descendants are played over The Descendants’ bitter introduction, where Matt King fumes, “Paradise can go fuck itself.” Yesterday’s King is tomorrow’s Pauper, or Mr. McCallister, Miles, and Warren Schmidt.

Lying becomes a placating antidote. Duplicity is the means by which Payne's characters maintain a semblance control, bending the rules by altering a narrative, sometimes on a whim. But duplicity and bad faith are perilous for an inward individual struggling with the differences between fiction and non-fiction. In Sideways, Miles' lying is as deplorable as it is necessary for survival. His dishonesty reminds him of his inadequacy. At one point he steals from his own mother, but his gaze at old family photographs, along with every nuance of Paul Giamatti’s magnificent performance, conveys a knowing guilt. This fuels his drive for drinking, enabling him to temporarily forget. He is like the pinot grapes he loves so much, delicate and requiring a very specific kind of care, and lacking that, he is miserable – and lies some more. It’s only when he’s with Maya (Virginia Madsen), whose name implies a living earth, that he can bring himself to be truthful – even inadvertently betraying Jack and fumbling up his blooming love affair.

Jack has no guilt, though Miles’ mother notes that his lack of fame “is a sin,” meaning that his failures, like Miles’, have a moral element to them. Jack is pure force without reflection, versus Miles who is all reflection. Jack says to Miles, “You understand movies, literature, wine. But you don’t understand my plight.” Jack is, we learn, an actor, and he slips into alternate roles which aid his adventures in casual sex. We can imagine him aesthetically forming a myriad of new identities with each affair: he will be a part of his new Armenian father-in-law’s business after the wedding with Christine; or he will set up a nice wine country home with Stephanie (Sandra Oh); or…we can only speculate what his fantasy scenario would be like with the portly barbecue restaurant waitress. Losing his wedding rings (which have words written in the ancient Sanskrit language), though, forces him to confront the possibility of his nothingness: “If I lose Christine, I am nothing!” he cries to Miles, having left his wallet – containing the rings – at the waitress’ house, where a large and angry husband caught him with his pants off. Losing that marker of civilization and language (the Sanskrit) leaves a man to his oblivion.

This average, mid-American blue-collar couple of fat waitress and burly trucker is a (most amusing) symbol for all of Sideways’ absurd proceedings. They are discovered by Miles when he sneaks into the house to retrieve his companion’s wallet, making love and talking dirty. The man is turned on by his wife’s duplicity and infidelity; it is a fetish. The idea is then humorously politicized when Payne’s camera, doubling for Miles’ perspective, pans away from the copulating couple and across a television set showing George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, two liars who playfully massaged a nation to blissful delusion. The TV image recalls an earlier image of Hitler and his cronies earlier in the film, perpetrators of the Big Lie: lying is our opium, our poison, our stability and destruction. It’s the fuel of an apathetic gas-guzzling civilization.

For Payne, we lie to each other and ourselves to blot out that irritating truth of our nothingness. But Payne is not a nihilist. We endure and adapt. We evolve. The surprise letter to Warren Schmidt at the end of About Schmidt, implies – even if it is untrue – that Schmidt has made a difference for little Ndugo, which means a lot to him, especially after having surrendered himself to the “necessary lie,” demonstrated in his wedding speech praising his daughter’s scary new family. Miles privately drinks his beloved 1961 bottle of wine at a fast food restaurant, an act which feels both sad and actively defiant to the truth of his nothingness. Even if he is a liar, triumphing over his impulses by telling the ultimate lie at Jack’s wedding and wishing his ex-wife well with her pregnancy, his opus of fiction, the unpublished novel, was apparently based on many hurtful biographical experiences. His outcome is unknown, but we know that he still goes on looking for Maya, knocking at her door.

Matt King follows a similar pattern. He could easily tell his belittling father-in-law (Robert Forster) the truth about Elizabeth’s infidelity and how she was far from being a model wife, but he holds his tongue. It’s better to let the illusion be maintained. Julie Speer, in a moment that begins moving and becomes uproarious, comes to Elizabeth’s hospital bed to forgive her for sleeping with Brian, but it’s obvious that her words contradict the truth inside. “Unique and dramatic situations” are hushed and eased by lies. The truth doesn’t necessarily set one free (Brian Speer would be better off lying to Matt about the erotic proceedings in the King house), which is why some Payne characters require booze, porn, and large doses of humor. Alexandra’s stoner boyfriend Sid (Nick Krause) comes off as an annoying and insensitive dumbbell, but his careless idiocy may have much to do with his own parent’s tragic death. He actively engages with doofy energy, buffering sorrow.

Time and evolution are merciless, and history is God’s murderous memoir of screeching, pissing, moaning, and derision as people clamor and struggle to hold on to something they can count on as being their own. The Descendants is richer than other “dramadies” because it is intimate but strangely epic, cosmological. It captures the sense of an ancient living earth, a magisterial chain of existence out of which its characters reconstruct dramas. Alexander Payne’s eye details the struggles with his uncanny blend of detachment and sympathy in a manner parallel to one of his main forebears, Stanley Kubrick, the great film artist of civilization and its discontents, from the dawn of man to beyond the infinite. In Sideways, Maya noted how her love for wine grew out of a kind of imaginative speculation, wondering about the grapes, their existence fashioned by the workers and surrounding environment, the hands, the sun, the precipitation, the wind, eventually making something “so fucking good.”

The Descendants contemplates, and beautifully accepts, the present’s link with an ancestry of forgotten voices and faces, whose imprint is there hidden in the grass and waves. The land doesn’t belong to Matt King; rather, he, like everyone else, belongs to it. Payne has a remarkable image of the jealous Matt sticking his head up over a mound of earth, spying his adversary in the game of natural selection, Brian Speer. The funny composition pointedly shows Matt’s insignificance, which is the actual insignificance of all passionate people. But he endures. He still has tears for Elizabeth, the short-fuse of anger quelled by the great scheme of evolution. Appropriately for this film decorated by Hawaiian music, a form of the hula – ‘auana – apparently refers to “wandering” or “drifting.” And the final moments of The Descendants show the King family, a father with two daughters, watching the heart-tugging, anthropomorphic documentary March of the Penguins, Morgan Freeman’s narrator mentioning “continental drift,” the great masses of land moving together and apart over millions of years. The conclusion resonates marvelously, as we may remember that the way Matt's children follow him on his journey is itself a march of Follow the Leader, hatchlings behind the Papa Bird. In Payne’s impeccable hands, The Descendants is a perfect microcosm for a universe that tries to make the best of an unreliable world of ceaseless movement, the centers unable to hold but always still drifting.

"That's Entertainment!": Washington, Hollywood, and "The Ides of March"

George Clooney’s The Ides of March is about Hollywood, just as much – if not more – as it is about insider politics. Clooney is cognizant of his public reputation as an activist Movie Star and filmmaker, and so understands that his film will be perceived as smug politicking from the Entertainment Industrial Complex, as many saw previous offerings like Good Night and Good Luck and Syriana. Those two films were released in 2005, and whatever their respective flaws, they were passionate, uncompromising, and yet heavily distributed warnings about the political climate of the 2K decade. But instead of being silenced, the Joseph McCarthys of the last ten years have grown in popularity, the divisiveness between Red and Blue states dug in deeper with irreconcilable differences. The waste of late capitalism as dramatized in Syriana similarly has become more of a problem, doomed to disastrously explode rather than be placated or solved.

The Ides of March joins The Adjustment Bureau and Moneyball as a reflection of Obama Era disenchantment, where the idealism of the new hip boss is, if an improvement on the old boss, not sufficient to make manifest “Hope.” It’s the Audacity of ‘Eh.’ Gridlock and effective narrative construction, at which the Right is master, makes progress milquetoast. Media and Politics are bridged worlds, one and the same, selling stories and myths but still more interested in maintaining an audience than demonstrable change. The Ides of March is an acknowledgment of the futility in both elections and Hollywood narratives. As a political movie, it offers nothing new, and is initially a little underwhelming. An ideal left-wing candidate, Governor Mike Morris (Clooney), is running in a fictional Democratic primary against an old-school tax-and-spend liberal, and in his tactical bid for power we see the machinery and wheels running beneath the ideas, and how campaign consultants, such as young Stephen Myers (Ryan Gosling), are consumed with compromised principles in the beast of political discourse, which has less to do with solutions than with winning. There are issues of loyalty, as Myers is torn between his mentor, Paul Zara (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who is running the Morris campaign, and the rival campaign manager, Tom Duffy (Paul Giamatti), who works to lure Myers to his side. There is the duplicitous hunger of the media, embodied by a New York Times reporter, Ida Horowicz (Marisa Tomei), who is chummy with Myers, but is really only motivated by getting a big scoop. Both political candidates are working for the endorsement of a sleazy senator (Jeffrey Wright), whose delegates are easily traded for a promised cabinet post. And finally, there is the contrivance of the alluring young woman, Molly Stearns (Evan Rachel Wood), a campaign intern who seduces – or is seduced by – more than one main character.

This sexual contrivance was of particular annoyance at first viewing. The seduction happens in intense close-ups between Molly and Stephen during an after-work drink, with the young woman looking like a hollow design for conflict, and the young man as a flawed douchebag more interested in careerism than affection. And then it moves into another dimension all too quickly, as a late night cell-phone mix-up discloses that Molly is having a liason with the heretofore perfect Gov. Morris. It becomes more drastic when, in the same scene, Molly implies that she’s pregnant and is going to have an abortion. Stephen is hurled into confusion. He put the man Morris on par with Morris’ ideology. But now, Stephen realizes that Morris is the caricature of deviance with which conservatives see liberals: a horny philanderer who screws his buddy’s daughter, and then kills an unborn baby.

Stephen steals campaign money for the abortion, but he’s distracted from Molly’s problems when Zara fires him for not telling him about a secret meeting with Duffy. “In politics, loyalty is the only currency that matters,” Zara says. Stephen plans a late game-change, where he’ll give Duffy information of the affair and abortion for a job, but again, trust is valued over skill. Stumbling back to his hotel, he finds that Molly’s committed suicide. He grabs her phone – which links her to Morris – and uses his information to preserve his job. The Constitution is not his religion. Self-Interest is.

That’s The Ides of March. Pardon the spoilers, but there you go. It’s an unusual narrative for a prestige film (perhaps showing its theatrical roots, adapted from the play Farragut North), and I’m not sure if it’s exactly what audiences or critics are expecting, as the film ends with what is the beginning of the story they were probably wanting to see. Whereas most stories are about the fulfillment of cathartic release and solution, The Ides of March is about the frustration of cover-ups, the gap in politics – and entertainment – between truth and manipulated narrative. There is no closure, just as our political world documented in 24-hour cable news cycles has no ending, just regurgitation. Molly, the hot intern, is just as quickly replaced by another sexually attractive 20-year-old who riles the men around her with latent lust as she brings them coffee. Indeed, we are right to be upset with Clooney for having Molly be nothing more than a contrivance. Politics are structured atop a heap of tools, with no end save for the perpetuation of a present that always promises hope for tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.

The woman as impelling agent of desire is a hallmark of Hollywood movies: the femme fatale, the romantic love interest, whatever it is, as long as it has legs, breasts, a comely smile, and is under the age of 30. A naïve and superficial viewing of The Ides of March would instantly – and so has – trigger a dismayed reaction of “pure contrivance.” But thinking about Molly’s function as a character reveals Clooney and co-writer Grant Heslov's intentions. Stephen is distracted from sex with Molly by a Town Hall meeting on TV starring Morris who is, humorously enough, talking about gay marriage. Stephen's desire is not plugged into Molly, but politics, and more than that, the electronic delivery of the message – which is exactly what a film director deals with. For Molly, the scene where she confesses her pregnancy is deliberately calling attention to her contrivance status. She is malleable, going from Stephen’s lover, to Morris’, and then to pregnant, all in the space of a minute. That she is portrayed as a victim doesn’t necessarily make her one, another odd attribute of Molly’s place as a character and Clooney's direction. Everyone is framing a narrative, altering history, and constructing a message with a lie, something we see the morning after as he casts her as "the cleaning lady" to whomever he is talking to on phone, while she claims that he seduced her, even though an examination of earlier scenes indicates that she was the seducer, putting her number in his phone, proposing the after-work drink, and saying things like, "I've been trying to fuck you for a long time." The sick joke finds climax at her funeral. Her father eulogizes her, referring to how she “touched” so many people. Indeed, Molly did touch quite a few people. Her function has little to do with her talent, and everything to do with her comely smile in a close-up.

We too are sutured into the pathos, or pretend like we are, which is in accordance to the nature of politics. Clooney, no slouch in working with formally demanding directors like Steven Soderbergh, means to ask us if we’re falling for it. Do we believe the speeches? Does Clooney’s electronic message control us, like Stephen’s cell-phone blackmail manages to control Morris? At the beginning of the picture, Morris announces at a debate, “My religion and what I believe is called the Constitution.” He’s told that his form of rhetoric works for “student council president,” but not President of the United States – but he still won’t back off. We listen to him, and we’re as “goosebumpy” as Stephen, who admits, “I have drunk the Kool-Aid, and it’s delicious.” Morris earns more respect when he shakes his head after someone passes him a laptop. This man of the "real world" says, “Give me a hard copy. I hate those fucking things.” Later on he shows how down-to-earth he is when he responds to Myers’ belief that noble missions can’t end in a disaster (e.g. plane crash). "Roberto Clemente," Morris points out, Clemente being the baseball player who died on his way to bring earthquake relief to South America.

But at the end of the picture, Morris is in shadow, surrounded by the silver metallics of a cafeteria kitchen, blending into the grey world of tools for consumption around him. This dark moment works on us because Clooney’s perpetually nice-guy image is also now tainted in our moviegoer heads. Even when – and sometimes especially when – Clooney played criminals in the past, he’s always been sympathetic or likable. This is his darkest character, just as he is, conceptually, a nation's brightest hope.

So is Mike Morris just “singing Kumbaya,” as Zara cynically implies? Even as a sexually dominating horn-dog willing to cover up an intern’s death, there is no reason we should doubt that he would, like a Clinton or Obama, be more of a centrist than a fighting liberal. This is a pertinent question Clooney and Heslov are asking: is the ideal candidate worth it if their personal lives are morally questionable? Is the figurehead different from the man of flesh and blood? Morris himself states, “Society has to be better than individuals.” This dream candidate is all too human. But FDR, probably the greatest president of the 20^th century, also had some questionable virtue; while George W. Bush, who may have been a very good man (such as portrayed by Oliver Stone in W.), was maybe the worst president of the last 100 years. The dark and sticky stuff of sex and abortion, which all politics seems to collapse toward, is personal. So it’s strange, as Myers tells Morris, that “you can bankrupt a nation, you can start unnecessary wars, but you don’t fuck the intern.” This is the irrational truth of political discourse. Public violations are far more acceptable than private ones. The political life is a willing sacrifice of its stated ideals, dignity and integrity, which it nevertheless continues to talk about. As he chides Myers, Duffy offers a desperate warning that seems to squeal from the vestige of his humanity: “Get out.” Duffy is mapping out a new world for the Democratic Party, where they must be “meaner, tougher, and more disciplined” – descending to the Machiavellian level of the Republicans. The dark message of Clooney’s “liberal message movie” is that if Democrats hope to win, they have to get rid of that annoying “humanity” thing.

Politicians are like artists who give their lives for the creation of imaginary narratives and images. The public feeds on it, but the artisans struggle for respite. In Julius Caesar, when Caesar is assassinated on the “ides of March” from which Clooney’s picture gets its title, he does not have a first-person reaction of confronting his mortality, but refers to himself in the third-person. “Caesar” the politician is an independent creation. Shakespeare was himself a very ironic artist, whose medium is so often the message, the theme of performance being central to his plays. Clooney marries this perennial truth of political drama to meta-movie observations. The Ides of March, with its credit titles in a distinct font recalling a rich 1970s-movie inheritance, begins with Myers reading from Morris’ scripted speech, the lights and sound being prepped in the auditorium where a subsequent debate will transpire. The buzz of a moderator’s desk is loudly generated, calling attention to the showmanship and technology used in staging the “message.” The Ides of March will end in a similar environment, with Myers sitting in a Hollywood production-style director’s or actor’s chair, putting in an ear-piece for sound, and looking directly at the camera – not a camera in the studio, but at us, at Clooney’s camera, the film surrounding and encompassing the fiction.

As Steven Ross documents in his recent book, Hollywood Left and Right, American movies have a rich history of political involvement. But though activist figures like Clooney, Warren Beatty, Barbara Streisand, and Matt Damon (those “elitists”) generate the most attention and so people see Hollywood as a liberal establishment, Ross shows how the Right really controls the narrative, in figures like Louis B. Mayer, incidents like the Blacklist, the political involvement of figures like Charlton Heston, and elections of Ronald Reagan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Sonny Bono. More than a cult of personality, it’s the style of an “American Narrative” that most explicitly proves the dominance of triumphalist, conservative values in Hollywood (and remember, “political correctness,” though used with more annoying sincerity by the Left, is used just as often in the service of the Right). The complicated sense of collective guilt, nuance, and empathy are not as successful as simplicity, good and evil, might makes right, an eye for an eye, and American righteousness. A Marxist Dialectic where the viewer actively is in dialogue with the picture, usually ends up annoying typical moviegoers who "just want to be entertained" and feel good (look at Meek’s Cutoff, The Tree of Life, Terri, and Drive – the four best films I’ve seen this year, all of which upsetting many mainstream -- and indie -- American moviegoers).

Do the Right Thing and Thelma and Louise did not necessarily mean progress for blacks and women in film and culture; and Brokeback Mountain didn’t open up the floodgates for acceptance of gays. As South Park pointed out in their satire of Clooney’s Oscar acceptance speech from 2006, derided as a large cloud of “Smug,” Hollywoodland is distinct from middle class America, and Clooney is here admitting to that. But he’s also showing how people simply refuse to understand celebrity, either Political or Televisual: the "Smug" is part of the performance, and we refuse to see through the fourth wall. We embrace the Lie, as we always have. If there is to be any sort of revolution or change, the public too must be snapped out of their entrancement and hypnosis of images. This may be the key theme of Clooney’s body of work. Beyond Good Night and Good Luck, about newsman Edward R. Murrow (an excellent David Straithern) going against Joseph McCarthy, Clooney’s first film was the undervalued Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, where Chuck Barris (Sam Rockwell) leads a double life as Gong Show entertainer and CIA assassin. Entertainment and policy’s underbelly are performed by the same characters. In both cases, the audience sits rapt, passive, and docile. Clooney must make a liberal movie where liberals are made to look their worst, and so exorcising himself of the “Smug Elitism,” which he knows does indeed exist in his profession. Clooney has persistently worked against his movie star status, disappointing his viewers in Solaris, Up in the Air, Michael Clayton, and The American, staying away from pat endings and clear distinctions of good and evil, demanding that they engage with the picture. Will a pissed-off audience result in change? People demanding their money back? A dialectical exchange of ideas? Clooney himself may be too jaded. But his refusal be absorbed by the tropes of his world (see what's happened to Johnny Depp, who can't turn down big paydays) indicates that those ideals of dignity and integrity still run, if not in him personally (can they, for celebrities in either Washington or Hollywood?), then at least in his work.