This was the morning after Zanna and I had watched the documentary Totally Under Control, about the appalling, and not surprising, disastrous Trump-led mismanagement of Covid in the United States. Because of my sickness, we'd watched it in bed, which seemed appropriate, but for a movie about a tragedy, it was surprisingly funny. You've got to give it to The Great Buffoon - for someone responsible for so much death and disaster, he sure knows how to make us laugh. The stupidity, the arrogance, the ignorance of the stupidity of the arrogance: if we strip out the irreparable damage he's done to the world, these last four years really have been a hoot.
One scene shows the now-famous footage from May of a nurse standing next to him saying PPE supply has been sporadic, which we now know to be a massive understatement, to which he replies: "Sporadic for you, but not sporadic for a lot of people. Because I've heard the opposite. I have heard that they are loaded up with [PPE] now." The breathtaking gall of it, the nonsense, the belief in alternative facts, is something to which we are all now accustomed — but still the only valid response is to laugh, and then to visit the website fivethirtyeight.com, as you did every day in October 2016, to reassure yourself, via high-quality statistical modelling, there's no way he can win the election.
After the scene with the nurse, the film cuts to an interview with the US' leading mask manufacturer, who voted for Trump in 2016. When asked what he thought when he saw Trump's reply to the nurse, he says: "I turned to my wife and said, 'That's complete bulls***. He has no idea what he's talking about.'"
America is sick and getting sicker. This is both metaphor and not. With an abundance of clear and overwhelming evidence of Trump's life-threatening dishonesty staring the country in the face, you have to wonder how much longer it will put up with his bulls*** before getting itself to the metaphorical doctor. Hopefully just a few more weeks.
SHE SAW
Another week, another depressing documentary leaves me hopeless and despondent. Totally Under Control is a two-hour blow-by-blow account of how the Trump administration bungled America's Covid-19 response leading to the deaths of more than 200,000 people. Sounds like it should be ruinous for Trump and lose him the election but the venn diagram of MAGA supporters and people who will watch this film are two distinct circles that never touch, let alone intersect.
It's not a beautiful documentary in a visual sense - there's no argument to watch it on the big screen - but the entire thing was made during a global pandemic and prolific documentary maker Alex Gibney, along with co-directors Suzanne Hillinger and Ophelia Harutyunyan, makes a point of showing the interview set-up with camera poking through a carefully sealed hole in a giant sterile barrier. This is film-making that is necessarily information first, aesthetic second. The subjects in front of the lens include a whistleblower, a director of one of the US' only producers of vital N95 masks - himself a former Trump supporter - a young volunteer in Jared Kushner's dismally ineffective Covid-19 Task Force (also just quietly Robert F. Kennedy's grandson), public health experts, infectious disease experts and front-line workers.
If you've been following the pandemic in the US, you'll be familiar with a lot of what this film covers. And so you may, like me, be numb to it. The documentary's key revelations about the disastrous mismanagement of Covid-19 in the US will make no difference to the dangerous political polarisation unfolding in America. As The Social Dilemma made so abundantly clear, facts no longer matter. There is no such thing as the truth. There is your truth and there is my truth.
By the time this review goes to print, Trump will likely have denounced Totally Under Control as "fake news media from the radical left" and launched personal attacks against Gibney, Hillinger and Harutyunyan in one of his manic Twitter barrages. I checked to see if it'd happened already but he was preoccupied with listing states and how they're going to hell: "New York has gone to hell. Vote Trump"; "California is going to hell. Vote Trump", etc.
There was a time when I would've considered a documentary like this important work, and of course it is, but right now what purpose will it serve other than to send those of us who already know Trump botched Covid into an outrage spiral? At least it exists for posterity purposes I suppose - maybe one day there will be a society civil enough to find it useful as a cautionary tale.
Totally Under Control is available on Apple iTunes now.
