Robert De Niro: “Vote For Trump and You’ll Get The Nightmare”
Bill Maher had Robert De Niro on as a guest Friday night. Man, he does not like Señor Trumpanzee! Maher is so tired though; not even a good interviewer anymore. He was talking to De Niro as if he was a pundit and quoting that ridiculous and worthless New York Times/Siena poll at him and asking him to explain it. Maybe he should invite someone like Nate Silver, Harry Enten, Aaron Blake, Nate Cohn or Philip Bump on for a question like that. De Niro is better at expressing feelings that are in sync with the national zeitgeist: “He is a total monster... such a mean, nasty, hateful person” and he’s good at explaining the sick mentality of MAGAts. He added, “I can’t see any good in him, nothing, nothing at all, nothing redeemable in him... He’s a sociopathic, psychopathic, malignant narcissist.” [sustained audience applause] “I never wanted to know him; he’s an idiot. He was a clown in New York… a classic bully... He’s got to be stopped.”
Trump tried to ban TikTok and failed. But now that Biden wants to Trump is against it, albeit for the wrong reasons. Señor T, in a message to the morons who pay attention to his narcissistic babbling: “If you get rid of TikTok, Facebook and Zuckerschmuck will double their business. I don't want Facebook, who cheated in last election, doing better. They are a true enemy of the people.” So… there you go; nothing about the constitution or about the law or about anything but himself and his own pet grievances. On Friday, we looked at why Democrats are wrong to go along with the Republicans on passing legislation to force ByteDance to either sell the app— worth billions of dollars— or lose access to the American market.
We tend to laugh at monsters, right? Marjorie Traitor Greene, Lauren Boebert, George Santos… all national laughingstocks. Señor Trumpanzee? Yes, but many people are still too scared of the dangers posed to get too comfortable about laughing. Yesterday, Valerie Trapp tried explaining why film audiences laugh at history’s monsters. “What is the correct distance,” she asked, “from which to film a dictator? You could give him a close-up, revealing his psychic wounds, in a biopic or drama. You could turn on a spotlight, make him sing and dance onstage. Perhaps it’s best not to put him on-screen at all, and to focus instead on those who suffered at his hands. Pablo Larraín, the director of the Oscar-nominated black comedy El Conde, wrestled with this question carefully. He feared that using a dramatic lens to depict Augusto Pinochet, whose 17-year-long military dictatorship in Chile made torture and forced disappearance state policy, could risk generating ‘some sort of empathy’ in viewers, as he noted in an interview with the Spanish-language newspaper El Diario. ‘It would be completely immoral and dangerous to do something like that,’ he told The Hollywood Reporter. Instead, the director shot the film in black and white and invoked satire to ‘produce a distance necessary.’ Oh, and he made Pinochet into a vampire.” I lobe vampire films. I’ll go see that. I love the way The Clash dealt with Pinochet in “Washington Bullets” on Sandinista (1980).
I hope you enjoyed the interlude; I couldn’t resist. “Latin America,” wrote Trapp, “has had dictators to spare, yet El Conde is the rare film that gives one the satirical treatment. It’s part of a longer legacy of movies that have sought to shrink history’s villains, through humor, down to a more manageable size. Hitler spoofs began as early as the 1940s, with Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, and continued in films such as The Producers, Look Who’s Back, and Jojo Rabbit. Mel Brooks, the writer and director of The Producers, explained his approach to The Atlantic in 2018. “The way you bring down Hitler… you don’t get on a soapbox with him,” he reasoned. “If you can reduce him to something laughable, you win.” Some movies, such as The Death of Stalin and The Interview, parodied other world leaders— in the latter, the actor James Franco even rocks out to a pop song with a fictionalized Kim Jong Un.
In El Conde, Pinochet’s monstrosity keeps him at arm’s length, and the film doesn’t ask viewers to relate to his violent motives. As we laugh uncomfortably, watching him blend blood smoothies and fly over the stocky skyscrapers of Santiago, the Chilean autocrat— who ruled by fear and violence— is deflated by the pinprick of silliness. Larraín’s choice to make Pinochet a vampire is an especially lucid way of defanging him. Because the Pinochet of the film has been around for hundreds of years, the true details about the dictator are not the focus; instead, the character becomes a stand-in for the concept of greed.”
More than Pinochet alone, Larraín seems to suggest, viewers should fear avarice, because it’s what drives autocratic rulers to pop up across the globe, even if they go by different names.
…[In] Larraín’s hands, it’s clear that the film’s real target is not just Pinochet but also something he represents— a longer tradition of exploitation and misused power. By the movie’s end, viewers aren’t allowed to comfortably relegate the dictator’s power-grabbing wrongs to history. In the final frames, the cinematography shifts from black and white to psychedelic color, as it’s revealed that an aging Pinochet has found a way to begin anew with his crimes. This visual choice underscores how political profiteering can respawn, existing in the present as much as the past— a point that feels especially timely given the corruption accusations made last year against the current Chilean president.
Yet no matter when or how despots arise, El Conde and other spoofs can help audiences see them with perspective. By using a good dose of zaniness, the best satire lets us look through a fish-eye lens, revealing dictators to be shrunken figures, warped and distorted by the vampiric thirst for more.
We’ll have to wait a bit before anyone makes a film about Trump that paints him as a figure of derision. ’Til the, there’s always Saturday Night Live, Colbert’s show and Seth Meyers’ show for starters. And YG & Nipsey Hustler did a fine song in 2016, “FDT (Fuck Donald Trump),” which I think all DWT readers will enjoy. It was described by the L.A. Times as “the most prophetic, wrathful and unifying protest song of 2016” and even 4 years later it managed to top the charts when Trump was defeated.