Review: American Dharma Only Reaffirms What We Know About Steve Bannon

The film feels rather like listening to the arsonist calmly explain why he set the fire as we continue to watch it rage.

American Dharma
Photo: Utopia

The original fascist movements of the early 20th century brimmed with hatred: for the comfortable bourgeois society from which many of its adherents stemmed, for the message of working-class brotherhood propagated by the rising socialist parties, and, not least, for the increasing influence of women and ethnic minorities in the public sphere. Fascists forwarded physical strength, emotional imperviousness, glorious self-sacrifice, authoritarian decisiveness, and a mythical, almost occult conceptualization of the nation as counter-values to the “soft” attitudes they saw in other modern movements.

So, when, early on in Errol Morris’s American Dharma, Donald Trump’s former campaign manager and advisor Steve Bannon claims that “modernity is based around emotionalism,” which keeps a nation’s folk from realizing their “dharma,” you should know who you’re dealing with. American liberals tend to focus on Bannon’s evident racism as evidence of his fascism, but however little he cares about the rights of immigrants and minorities, this former World of Warcraft wage-slave driver doesn’t see racism as central to his ideology. It’s the icky softness of the left, the womanly “emotionalism” that Bannon most needs to root out from himself—and from the diseased national body he projects onto his view of America. For him, ethnic others are collateral damage, racism a means rather than the message. As he claims to Morris later in the film, thoroughly overlooking the point of the filmmaker-interviewer’s question on racism, the alt-right movement isn’t about the other, it’s about the self.

Many have balked at Morris’s decision to dedicate his documentaries to interviews with notorious perpetrators of evil, first with his chilling, endlessly fascinating The Fog of War, about former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, then with the frustratingly shallow The Unknown Known, about another former secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld. The primary issue with American Dharma, though, isn’t that Morris talks to Bannon per se, but that as soon as Bannon begins decrying the enervating effects of modernity on what should be the hard body politic, we know exactly who he is. Later remarks praising Trump for being a “leader” rather than a politician, or evoking the mythical notion of a “Judeo-Christian West” that must be defended—whose dharma has been perverted by globalization and the multinationals that Bannon and his friends are actually in bed with—reveal nothing beyond the anticipated.

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Abandoning his patented Interrotron device that allows interviewees to address both camera and filmmaker directly, Morris conducts his interviews across a table from Bannon in a Quonset hut, an arch-shaped military building that Morris dressed in imitation of a scene from Henry King’s 1949 war film Twelve O’Clock High. In advance of their talks, the filmmaker evidently had Bannon submit a list of his favorite films, and throughout American Dharma, Morris splices scenes from them into footage from the interviews, both searching them for insight into his subject’s character and attempting, in places, to confront Bannon with the way his self-delusions have led him to all-too-convenient interpretations.

For example, Morris sees Falstaff’s cold dismissal by Henry V at the end of Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight as a betrayal. Bannon, on the other hand, sees it as the student’s necessary transcendence of his guardian and instructor, coming, on camera, to a realization that his interpretation matches his own fantasy of his relationship to Trump. Bannon also expresses unqualified admiration for John Wayne’s character in The Searches—the man whose fervent racism blinds him to the humanity of his own family. As Morris would have it, Bannon’s inability to see the truth of his own condition makes him something of a tragic figure; Greek tragedy, by the way, is also something the articulate but wacked-out fascist misinterprets, describing the ancient genre as “hopeful” to his interviewer at one point.

Besides clips from old films, American Dharma also draws on news footage, headlines, and original slow-motion footage of Bannon’s hefty form wandering around deserted airways and dilapidated Rust Belt towns. Morris takes familiar news footage of Trump impersonating the disabled, using misogynist language, encouraging violence, and the like, and composites it in-frame with clickbait headlines and social media comments from internet trolls, imitating the flood of distressing information we’re submerged in as subjects of Trump’s America. This aesthetic strategy—previously effective in Morris’s Standard Operating Procedure as a means of exploring the truth value of digital photography—is here more redundant than revelatory. It’s almost precisely what we see every time we unlock our phones, and in more or less the same multi-window format in which it appears to us there.

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A crucial point to consider regarding Morris’s choices here is whether laying the audio of Bannon’s obvious prevarications, pointed silences, and cynical misreadings of American society behind this quasi-allegorical representation of our screens actually illuminates anything. One may worry that the film has the potential to do the opposite, as Morris, though more combative an interviewer here than in his other films, does too little to challenge certain lies—like Bannon’s continued implication that Trump’s coalition primarily consists of the disaffected working class. (As the fascists did a century ago, Trump’s movement greatly exaggerates its share of working-class votes.) Bannon isn’t as dull an interview as Rumsfeld, but neither is he as sharp as McNamara, and the film never makes a compelling case that he’s the one we should be listening to as the world burns around us. American Dharma feels rather like listening to the arsonist calmly explain why he set the fire as we continue to watch it rage.

Score: 
 Director: Errol Morris  Distributor: Utopia  Running Time: 96 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2018  Buy: Video

Pat Brown

Pat Brown teaches Film Studies and American Studies in Germany. His writing on film and media has appeared in various scholarly journals and critical anthologies.

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