Film The Nice Touch of Evil
posted by on October 27 at 11:18 AM
Tom Hoopes wonders if Oliver Stone’s movie W. backfired :
The movie W., despite the worst intentions of its makers, succeeds in making George W. Bush more likeable. Reviewers keep remarking on the strange phenomenon. They hated Bush going in — and kind of liked the guy when they came out.
The likability of Bush in W. should not be read as a miscalculation. Stone was correct to portray Bush not as a mean/sick son-of-a-bitch but as an average guy, as a man who is not exceptional in anyway, whose life story contains not one original moment. His likability, or his plainness, is yet another example of what the great Hannah Arendt identified as “the banality of evil.” Bush is just another guy, another Eichmann.
But let’s think about Ebola for a moment. What makes this disease so stupid? It kills too quickly and too horribly. HIV is by far the smarter virus. It’s one that takes its time in the undoing of its subject. Ebola will never match the global scale of HIV. This is how we must understand evil. It is not the loud and frenzied madman we should fear but the affable one, the Mr. Joe Six-Pack. Evil is much more likely to be a couch potato (Oblomov) than an Übermensch (Monsieur Rigaud).
Charles! Oblomov reference! you're my fav
I'm not sure why everyone expects this movie to be a smear campaign against W, since Oliver Stone is a friend of the Bushes...
@lily: Dunno about that. See his own take on the work here and here. He pretty well spells out what he was doing.
I went to see W. on Sunday. I was no fan of the man that morning and if 50% of the "based on a true story" of this film is true, I still don't like him.
He's a frat boy boor, who is shitty at relationships, and is dumb as a post. There is no logic to his thinking, and should never have gotten to the position he is in today.
I didn't like him before, and I like him even less. With all the wealth and privilege he could have benefited from, he squandered it because logic and thinking are hard.
I beg to differ. W does not become more likable in the least through this movie.
Nor do I think is he a very good example of the banality of evil, given his strutting arrogance, wealth and family pedigree. Palin--now THERE'S banality!
Good post. Bravo.
Oblomov evil? Couldn't be bothered.
Charles, Mr. Joe-Sixpack is not the personification of evil, he's a victim of it. This creature was originally developed to reference hard hart type guys who didn't like vietnam era protestors who trashed the USA flag. It's a reference to the urban white ethnics typically Polish or Slovakian, kinda like Archie Bunker.
Charles why would you pick this archetype as the personification of evil? You should pick an upper crusty type guy, waspy and very unaware, like GWB. GWB is not culturally like Joe Six Pack. Pls. get your American white archetypes straight.
Fortunately, Sen. Obama is 100% at odds with your view and yhas said he wants Mr. Jos Sixpack on the Obama team.
Show some unity, OK?
Unity etc. --
Right on, Chaz. Did I just write that?
A pleasant metaphor with ebola and HIV.
All the sharper when one knows that SIV, the closest cousin to HIV, is totally benign for the simians. Bush would've made a fine baseball commissioner.
"Ebola will never match the global scale of HIV"
i wouldn't be too sure about that one. A wee mutation here and there and you will be pooping blood til you croak.
Point of order: Since there weren't any TVs in mid-19th century Russia, it's wildly inaccurate to reference the Oblomov character as a "couch potato."
charles darling, your lips drip truth like my ass would drip honey, were i, you know, a bee.
Kelly O and Ari Spool give Charles Mudede can of Rize, Charles Mudede drink Rize, freak out, Hulk out, CHARLES MUDEDE BECOME HULK!
HULK WILL SMASH CAPITALISM!
And no, I don't feel like letting it go.
'Strewth, mate.
Another banal yet enormously successful example: Human Papilloma Virus (warts). No serious pain, just annoyance, and 80% of humanity has it.
Fast and horrible viruses/bacteriae only work when transmission vectors are very fast... selection pressure allows for the quick killer. When transmission vectors are slow and infrequent, they favor the slow- or no-killer.
Cholera, traditionally a very slow killer originating in the Ganges delta, evolved into the fast killer (48 hours!) in mid 1800's London due to both pooping in and drinking from the Thames.
Bush's banal mask has allowed stealth killers to position themselves all through gov't and corporate america, and put in place all sorts of problematic laws, executive orders, and patterns. And Obama (please, please) will inherit those. What will he do?
But then again, Clinton destroyed welfare better then Reagan could have, and also allowed a serious "anti-terrorism"-erosion to civil liberties after the Oklahoma City bombing.
Who is really worse? Does that category even matter?
Many emergent killer viruses are much hotter when they first start infecting a new population. They either evolve to be less mortal or they die out, because they kill all the potential hosts too quickly. Smallpox was one of the worst killers ever before humans evolved any resistance or defenses to it. Ditto syphilis (great pox). Both were hemorrhagic fevers when they first emerged in the human population.
The movie certainly wasn't the Bush bashing I had expected, but here was something very therapeutic about the story's focus on the personal rather than public failures of the president. It took my mind off the clusterfuck of disasters that is our government by showing our lame duck president as a simple human being, albeit with complicated daddy issues and manipulative handlers like Karl Rove (made even scarier in the movie as the only character that didn't seem to age). Plus Thandie Newton as Codoleeza Rice made me crack up laughing everytime I saw her "perpetually smelling an awful fart" face!
I went into the movie thinking W was a smug, self-centered prick and left with the impression that he was a nice guy with good intentions. Totally caught me by surprise.
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