Totally Under Control (2020)
dir. Alex Gibney, Ophelia Harutyunyan, and Suzanne Hillinger
Rated: TV-14
image: ©2020 Neon
I’m imagining the year 2060, when I’ll be 80 years old. In my mind’s eye, I see someone who’s my age now. Like me, this fictional person is a history buff – and a cinephile, too, of course – and she watches old movies and reads books about (mostly pop-culture) history. (What will this time period’s version of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls be called, anyway? Stan’s World: When Marvel Ate the Entertainment Industry?)
This person, who was born in 2020, reads part of the Wikipedia entry for “COVID-19 pandemic in the United States” and becomes fascinated. After watching a few YouTube videos of archival news footage about the pandemic, she stumbles across the trailer for Alex Gibney, Ophelia Harutyunyan, and Suzanne Hillinger’s documentary Totally Under Control. She watches the whole movie with an unbelieving half-grin on her face.
It’s a disturbing watch, but for her it’s a little like when I watched Triumph of the Will. It all happened so long ago, it’s hard to imagine actually living through it. This invented person – like the actual people who might one day watch Totally Under Control four decades from now – will never know the rage, frustration, and sense of hopelessness that watching Gibney, et al.’s film engenders in someone living through this moment.
The documentary is a contemporaneous chronicling of the disastrous American response – specifically the Trump administration’s disastrous response – to an infectious disease that has (so far, it should be stressed) killed over 220,000 Americans. Gibney, Harutyunyan, and Hillinger collaborated is secret, according to the film’s trailer, for five months, talking to medical and scientific experts about the richest country in the world’s failure to stop the spread of the virus. Filming began in early summer, after we had all resigned ourselves to the fact that this wouldn’t be a quarantine-for-two-weeks-and-go-back-to-normal situation. According to text in the last frames of Totally Under Control, editing on the movie wrapped just days before Donald Trump announced that he had contracted COVID-19 himself.
This was preventable.
Even if the outbreak of the pandemic was inevitable, a competent governmental response based on adhering to scientific evidence and best practices could have stopped the virus dead in its tracks and saved thousands – possibly hundreds of thousands – of lives. We won’t know the staggering final number of casualties for another year or two.
Adhering to strict COVID protocols, the filmmakers interviewed dozens of doctors and scientists, some with first-person knowledge of the Trump administration’s blundering, self-serving non-response to the situation. The film makes clear that Trump was so focused on the economy, which he saw as the silver bullet in his reëlection effort, that he hoped COVID would just go away. For Trump to win, the country had to stay open, allowing capitalism to pursue its insatiable thirst for profits.
As a contrast to the American response to COVID-19, Totally Under Control also focuses on the effort in South Korea to flatten the curve. Because that country made hard science their guide in decision making, they (and almost every other developed nation) were able to hold their national death toll to just a fraction of American casualties. South Korea implemented what one interviewee calls “the trifecta of pandemic response”: test, trace, and isolate. Because those things are both expensive and cause people to stop spending money, America has done the bare minimum of all three.
Of course, not every problem can be laid at the feet of the Trump administration – although, as the ones minding the store, every problem is their responsibility, no matter how much Trump refuses to take it. The filmmakers document an early misstep by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in developing a testing protocol for the virus. The first iteration of the test had three components, named N1, N2, and N3. The first two worked as designed, but when the CDC distributed the tests to public health centers around the country, the N3 component fouled up the process, causing a crippling lack of access to testing while everyone scrambled to find a solution.
So, while Trump didn’t cause the testing snafu, or the red tape of getting new tests approved by the Food and Drug Administration – although, the film argues, his administration could have done more to help cut through that red tape – his approach to governing only made things worse. From slow walking testing to keeping sick cruise ship passengers on their vessel off the coast of California so as not to add to the official American infected count, Trump did what he’s always done. He made it painfully obvious that all he cares about is how the deadly pandemic reflects on him and his own self-interest.
Totally Under Control’s most damning indictment is that we really shouldn’t have expected anything better from a group of people who start with a conclusion and try to make the facts fit it, instead of the other way around. Pandering to his base, Trump appointed Robert Redfield, a man who called for abstinence as a solution to the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, as the director of the CDC.
As an offering to his true god, unregulated free-market capitalism, Trump appointed Alex Azar as his Secretary of Health and Human Services. Azar was a lobbyist and pharmaceutical executive who oversaw a tripling in the price of insulin when he was the CEO of drug maker Eli Lilly.
Even Trump’s stated number one goal as president, building the wall, was touted as a solution to the pandemic. The corollary to the wall, his barbaric, draconian policies on migration and immigration would stop the spread of the disease, too, according to Trump. As is typical with most of Trump’s other policies, though, the evidence says otherwise. His flippant politicizing of the pandemic – making the act of not wearing a mask a political statement, for instance – is grotesque, if not exactly shocking.
Totally Under Control lays out these arguments with sobering facts and a chilling style. Gibney and his co-directors have made a vital and damning piece of reportage that will act as a roadmap after this is all over.
And to any possible 40-year-olds who might stumble across this review on whatever the internet has morphed into by the year 2060:
Yes, this really happened.
Yes, we were really this stupid.
I hope you never experience anything that will let you know how enraging it was to live through it.
Why it got 4 stars:
- Totally Under Control is possibly the best documentary of the year. I’ll be honest, the movie contained almost nothing I didn’t already know. But, the filmmakers presented it in a riveting way, and in the back of my mind, I was aware that there are plenty of people who might be exposed to this information that don’t have the first clue about it. That’s reason enough for the film to exist.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- The documentary barely touches on how we had a warning sign of what we’re going through now: the 1918 flu pandemic. A whole other documentary could be made about how that outbreak was similarly politicized, a subject I have only scratched the surface of myself.
- Do you even remember the 2009 H1N1 outbreak? I do, but just barely. And that is, I believe, the difference between a competently handled public health emergency and what’s happening now.
- I realized as I was editing and proofreading the review that I’ve written it so it sounds somewhat vague as to whether or not Trump won a second term. If you’re reading this on the day it was published, we still don’t know. Here’s hoping we avert the catastrophe of another four years of this truly deadly administration.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- Totally Under Control is available for rental or purchase on most online outlets, or for free if you have a Hulu subscription, which is how I saw it. For the love of the god I don’t believe in, watch it.