On that dreadful Brexit movie
We saw that Brexit movie on HBO last night. God was it dreadful.
Set aside the fetish for elite movers and shakers behind the scenes, the conspiratorial mindset of master manipulators of public opinion. (It’s kind of a weird moment where everyone across the spectrum seems to have their own versions of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.)
What was most grating about the film was how utterly familiar and clichéd was the lead character Dominic Cummings, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, who was the mastermind behind the Leave campaign.
In Benedict/Cummings, we get—inadvertently, I’m quite convinced: self-importance; failed attempts at oracularity that wind up being platitudinous; incomprehensible scribbling on the white board, meant to signal that we’re in the presence of the political version of John Nash, that resolve on the insertion of a “back” in between “take” and “control”; historical grandiosity that can never quite decide whether Brexit is the most important event since the fall of the Berlin Wall or Alexander the Great’s decision to launch the Persian campaign.
Watching all of this, getting increasingly bored and irritated, I suddenly remembered where I had seen it all before: in the television ramblings of Pat Cadell.
Caddell, for those of you who don’t know or remember, was the pollster impresario behind Jimmy Carter’s 1976 campaign. He never was really able to repeat that victory again, though he certainly gave it a go with Gary Hart in 1984, Joe Biden in 1988, and Jerry Brown in 1992. But, boy, did he hold on for decades, trying to position himself on TV or elsewhere as the man who held all the keys to the castle.
All the same elements that we see in HBO’s portrayal of Cummings were there in Cadell: the impulse to self-dramatization, the combination of crackpottery and kitsch, and the sheer luck or happenstance of having won one campaign, propelling him, in the mind of his admirers and detractors, to the level of genius.
And at the same time, despite the grandiloquent homages to history and community and destiny, the HBO film gives you no real sense at all of what this guy actually thinks or is about. Just some vague sense of him—as was also true of Cadell—lurching from one cause to the next campaign to the next candidate, always in search of something, something. You do, however, get a much clearer—and, ironically, more poignant—sense of what the maestro behind the Remain campaign thinks and feels. Which may or may not have been deliberate.
I guess it’s just an irresistible conceit of the genre, the man behind the scenes of the political campaign, always reinvent to the wheel.
Speaking of which, the film’s obsession with online data tracking, micro-targeted ads and such: there was a whole spate of this kind of discussion back in the 1980s, just when more localized and computerized forms of marketing and market research were getting going, and how that all was going to completely and utterly transform our politics. In fact, my sister Jessica gave me a book for either my high school or college graduation that was all about this topic. I remember poring over page after page, chapter after chapter, of discussions about how zip codes were destiny, and how all political choices would be determined by this newfound granular knowledge of our consumer choices. The fetish for technology and microscopic knowledge as the grand explainer of politics never ends.
Anyway, if you haven’t seen the film, you can give it a pass.