Hollywood doesn’t do politics — at least not politics as it is
practiced in the real world. That muddled and muddy system of
alternating compromise and confrontation, posturing and
horse-trading, simply wouldn’t show up on the silver screen — and,
even if it did, presumably nobody would care to watch it. So
instead the movies invent their own political reality: an imaginary
world in which larger-than-life figures engage in vast
conspiracies, monumental betrayals, outrageous scandals, and
unbelievable conversions. These last are often based on the even
more unbelievable dream of a world without politics, in which our
public men — I suspect the thing wouldn’t work even as well as it
does, which is not well at all, if you substituted women — act
only from principle and with regard to nothing but the common weal.
Such impossible goodness thus becomes the excuse for the impossible
badness that precedes it in the well-worn character arc of the
movie politician, which is repeated yet again in Jay Roach’s
supposed satire, The Campaign.
Mr. Roach’s Game Change, the TV movie about John
McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008, showed
the extent to which his imagination is limited to media
commonplaces about the political world that is otherwise beyond his
ken. In Game Change it was the already well-established
media trope of Mrs. Palin’s supposed stupidity, which Game
Change helped to establish even more firmly. In The
Campaign it is the supposed wickedness of the Koch brothers,
as well as the iniquity, devoutly affirmed by every lefty, of the
Citizens United decision of the Supreme Court which has
supposedly conferred on billionaires in general and the Kochs in
particular enormous and illegitimate powers to influence elections.
The name of the brothers here, as played by John Lithgow and Dan
Aykroyd, is transformed from Koch (pronounced Coke) to Motch, and
their evil plan is to “insource” Chinese workers — or at least
Chinese working conditions and wages — to the bucolic North
Carolina congressional district represented by their creature, Cam
Brady (Will Ferrell).
Yeah, that sounds like something the Koch brothers must be
working on. Their trouble in the movie, however, is that Cam, a
Democrat, has what used to be called, back in Bill Clinton’s day, a
“zipper problem,” so the Motches transfer their allegiance to a
hand-picked Republican, the strange man-child Marty Huggins (Zach
Galifianakis), who seems intended to be a sort of redneck version
of Corky St. Clair, Christopher Guest’s provincial thespian in
Waiting
for Guffman, who doesn’t know he’s gay. That’s good for a
few laughs, as is Cam’s manic philandering and blatant hypocrisies.
He’s even more stupid than Julianne Moore’s (or Tina Fey’s) Sarah
Palin, but Marty is rendered almost as idiotic himself by the
exigencies of campaigning. The movie thus becomes yet another
variation on the “Dumb and Dumber” cross-talk act wrapped up at
last by yet another bogus conversion scenario in which it is the
Motch brothers who are left with the pie in their face.
The film begins with an epigraph from Ross Perot: “There are
rules in war; there are rules in mud-wrestling. There are no rules
in politics.” But this is not true. The media just love the idea
that it might be, but they very well know that it isn’t, since they
themselves are in the business of enforcing the rules with their
constant monitoring of politicians for potential scandal. Almost
any of the things Cam Brady does, for instance, from getting caught
drunk-driving to punching a baby to screwing his opponent’s wife
and putting out a sex tape of the encounter would be under media
rules more than enough to be an automatic disqualification for
electoral office in the real world. It is only in the movies’
political fantasy world that Cam goes on and on committing ever
more impolitic outrages against the media’s code of behavior. He is
said in the beginning to have done what the real-life Democratic
Congressman Anthony Weiner did, but he doesn’t suffer Mr. Weiner’s
political fate for it, nor yet that of Eliot Spitzer whose
fate-worse-than-death has been to join the pack of media hyenas
himself.
And yet the media insist that the movie is true to life!
A.O. Scott of the New York Times writes that
there may be comfort in the thought that the American people
would never elect clowns like these to any office. But then a
glance at some of the clowns we do elect, perhaps especially to our
national legislature, might lead you in the opposite direction.
Really, the movie could not possibly go far enough unless the
screenwriters (Chris Henchy and Shawn Harwell) had abandoned all
invention and transcribed the script directly from C-SPAN. And so
The Campaign wobbles between the vaguely topical and the
completely preposterous.
Mr. Scott is usually a thoughtful critic, but here he is clearly
on auto-pilot. Lip service to the media view of political “clowns”
— perhaps on the assumption that if there are no real life Cam
Bradys in Congress it is only because they haven’t been discovered
yet — is de rigueur. Variety’s critic writes
that “Roach proceeds to illustrate just how flagrant things can
get, and yet the humor works because everything connects back to
the real world.” Of course, it’s not “the real world” but the media
world — the world in which all congressmen are corrupt morons and
billionaires routinely conspire to bring Chinese wage levels and
environmental standards to the U.S. — for which people are more
and more frequently prone to mistake it. That they should continue
to make that mistake is as much in the movies’ interest as it is in
the media’s.
