American Dharma (2019)
dir. Errol Morris
Rated: R
image: ©2019 Utopia
Much of the negative criticism for documentary filmmaker Errol Morris’s American Dharma is aimed at Morris not challenging his subject enough on his beliefs. Steve Bannon, the right-wing luminary and short-lived White House Chief Strategist to Donald Trump – just a few of Bannon’s many roles on the world stage – is allowed to present himself as a towering figure of great foresight and heroism, the critics claim. What these critics have forgotten (or possibly don’t know), is that direct confrontation isn’t Morris’s preferred mode of operation. He’s said as much in a recent interview about American Dharma:
“I don’t really believe in adversarial interviews. I don’t think you learn very much. You create a theater, a gladiatorial theater, which may be satisfying to an audience, but if the goal is to learn something that you don’t know, that’s not the way to go about doing it. In fact, it’s the way to destroy the possibility of ever hearing anything interesting or new. I guess I don’t believe in them.”
What Morris does believe in is letting his subjects talk. He lets them reveal themselves through their own words, then he uses the powerful tools of cinema – dialectical montage, visual metaphors, soundtrack – to comment upon what the subject reveals about himself. Sometimes Morris gets self-reflection that reveals regret over mistakes made and lives ruined, as in his 2003 Oscar-winning documentary The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara. Sometimes he gets a frustrating (yet still fascinating) refusal for any sort of self-reflection at all, as in The Unknown Known, a documentary focusing on Donald Rumsfeld.
In American Dharma, the portrait we get of Stephen K. Bannon is one of a true-believer in his cause. By the film’s end, there is no doubt that Bannon is convinced a political revolution is coming to America, and it will be a violent one. Morris, for his part, transforms Bannon’s words – and beliefs – into a terrifying, apocalyptic (if at times heavy-handed) vision.
Morris ends American Dharma by burning down the airplane hangar in which the interview with Bannon took place. It’s a literal manifestation of Bannon’s efforts to do the same to the American political establishment – and what he thought he was achieving with the election of Donald John Trump to the presidency (and might still, only time will tell). The metaphor is a potent one, even if Morris holds on it a bit too long.
Morris also exposes in Bannon an inclination to blur the lines between fantasy and reality, which serve to further his own delusions of grandeur. Bannon goes on at length about the World War II action film Twelve O’Clock High, casting himself in the role of Gregory Peck’s Brigadier General Frank Savage, a man with the courage and strength to fulfill his destiny – his dharma, according to Bannon – which will allow the men he is leading to do the same. As someone who believes in the power of film (and storytelling in general) to reveal great truths about the human condition, even I thought Bannon’s perspective was more than a little nutty.
The director films Bannon, who seemingly participates with no sense of irony, reenacting brief bits from the 1949 war picture. Bannon walking down a runway, Bannon turning a mug with what looks like (I haven’t actually seen Twelve O’Clock High) the visage of Robin Hood on it. The very set where the two men speak – that airplane hangar – is modeled to look like the one from the Gregory Peck film, complete with rows of folding chairs where the airmen sat as Peck’s character pumped them up for battle.
And Bannon isn’t above a little creative revisionism in order to serve his own purposes. The two men speak about one of Shakespeare’s most famous inventions, Sir John Falstaff, and how Bannon (naturally) sees himself in the character. For the uninitiated, Falstaff acts as a mischievous mentor to young Prince Hal, who is destined to ascend to the throne as King Henry V. Once on the throne, King Henry turns his back on Falstaff in an act of betrayal, devastating the buffoonish knight. Morris and Bannon review clips from Orson Welles’s 1965 film Chimes at Midnight, which dramatizes the scene of treachery.
Bannon – who was publicly rebuked and dismissed from Donald Trump’s inner circle just seven months after the Sun King’s inauguration – sees in Falstaff not a character who was betrayed, but one who silently accepts his fate. He dutifully played his role and is happy to have advanced his goals. American Dharma forces me to wonder how Bannon would have described Falstaff if someone had asked him about the character before Trump metaphorically beheaded Bannon for all to see.
The most stunning moment of the documentary comes by way of a statement from Errol Morris, not Steve Bannon. Morris is relating a story about his son being upset because Morris voted for Hillary Clinton instead of Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primary. Bannon, too, is incredulous. “How could you vote for Hillary Clinton,” Bannon asks, stunned. Morris responds, “I did it out of fear.” Morris leaves in a pregnant pause as the two men just look at each other.
It’s a chilling moment, easily the defining moment of the documentary.
It goes unspoken, but I’m assuming Morris’s calculation was the same that so many of us on the left made. Clinton might not have been perfect, but she represented the best shot at beating the racism, misogyny, and cruelty of Trump; qualities that his followers seemed so ready to embrace. In the aftermath of that admission from Morris, Bannon sits with a smirk on his face. His ultimate strategy of throwing the opposition off balance by any means necessary worked.
Bannon claims again and again in the film that the answer to victory in the 2016 presidential election was promising the average voter an economic lifeline. In reality, any means necessary, of course, in most cases meant fear. Fear of the other; fear of dirty immigrants swarming inside the United States to rape, kill, and spread disease; fear of a Muslim hoard wiping out the white race.
Bannon is a true-believer in all these things. He is on record numerous times – this is one of the few things I actually wish Morris had brought up in his interview with Bannon – advocating for a book titled The Camp of the Saints. It’s a 1973 French reactionary novel imagining the destruction of Western civilization by hoards of third world immigrants who are depicted as literally eating shit.
In American Dharma, Morris continues his project of interviewing controversial political figures, not with an aim of pinning them down or exposing them, although he does push back (mostly through the use of ironic editing counterpoints) when it’s warranted. The critics who have taken Morris to task for not being more confrontational with Bannon miss the point of what Morris is doing. He lets these figures speak their own truth, so that the audience can most effectively get inside their head.
Bannon’s beliefs in an impending cataclysmic war between Western (read: white) and Islamic civilization terrify and sadden me. All the more because people in my own life (my father, for instance) subscribe to these hateful, fear-driven views. American Dharma got me inside Stephen K. Bannon’s head, and it was an unsettling place to be.
Why it got 4 stars:
- Know your enemy. It’s really as simple as that. Despite Morris not pushing Bannon on some of his beliefs – a charge that’s not totally baseless – the director gave me a deeper understanding of who Bannon is. That should always be the main goal of a documentary like this one.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- Bannon makes Andrew Breitbart, the founder of the website Bannon headed for several years, seem like a philosophical lion of the Republican party. I call bullshit. He was a fame-seeking, publicity-obsessed provocateur. That’s made obvious when you watch the video of Breitbart screaming incoherently at a group of Occupy Wall Street protesters, a clip that is featured in American Dharma.
- Bannon plays up his “hero of the common man” persona by talking a lot about spreading the wealth, but, just like his one-time boss, he is part of the economic elite. He was an investment banker at Goldman Sachs. He seems to have no conception that the policies Trump supports all serve the purpose of continuing to redistribute wealth from the “common man” he loves so much upward to the richest people in the country.
- Whatever you believe about Bannon’s political views, he has a mastery over the zeitgeist. He got us all to laugh at Trump, fatally underestimating him in the process. I remember going to a screening of the first debate between Trump and Clinton and looking around as everyone in the theater laughed wildly at every little eccentricity Trump displayed. I had serious misgivings about the trivial nature with which so many viewers of that debate treated it. We have become distracted by meaningless, frivolous issues. Forget sound bite culture, we’re all mesmerized by meme culture now, which is even more reliant on simple (usually false) representations of complex ideas. And Bannon used our obsession with triviality to his great advantage.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- Quiet (bordering on somber) crowd for this one. There were only 10 or 15 of us in the giant auditorium of The Texas Theater.