No political faction’s stranglehold on storytelling is absolute or unchallengeable.
No political faction’s stranglehold on storytelling is absolute or unchallengeable.
T here’s something fitting about the times. While many of us live under a form of house arrest, the Internet is delivering to us the purest vintage right-wing anti-government storytelling available, if you know where to look.
Various on-demand services now have Clint Eastwood’s little masterpiece from last year, Richard Jewell. The title refers to the security guard who foiled the 1996 Centennial Park bombing, then turned into the lead suspect of the FBI’s investigation, and was ultimately proven a wronged man. The script is more complex than some of the initial reviews gave it credit for being, but the message comes through loud and clear. In Richard Jewell, the media and the government are corrupted by their own strongly held, barely justified narratives of good guys and bad guys. And the people in these institutions are perfectly willing to destroy a few good guys to get ahead in their careers, especially if those good guys are strange in any way.
The destructiveness of media and government is a function of their laziness. Over time it is revealed that a cursory examination of the distance between a phone booth and the bombing would have shown that it was physically impossible for Richard Jewell to have committed the crime by himself. And if he didn’t commit it by himself, then the criminological “profile” of a lone wolf and wannabe-hero that was used to make him a suspect no longer applied to him. But for the FBI, one bad theory is just the entry point for embracing another.
And that is more than true on Netflix, which bought the little-noticed Paramount miniseries Waco. This series portrays the horrible standoff between the Branch Davidian cult and the federal government, which ended with the Davidian “Mount Carmel” compound undergoing a gas assault led by tanks. It culminated in a fire that killed the 75 remaining inhabitants, 25 of them children.
While the series does show some skepticism of David Koresh, particularly concerning his practice of assuming the marital rights to the women from all the married men in the compound, overall it takes a maximally anti-government side in all the disputes about what happened in 1993 (spoilers to follow). From the initial raid by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms to the aggressive tactics used by the FBI, the nature of the Davidian cult itself, and the moral responsibility for the deaths in the awful final assault on the compound, my thought at the end was, this could have been written by Timothy McVeigh, the right-wing militia man whose reaction to the events at Waco led him to bomb the federal building in Oklahoma City. But here it is, with well-cast stars and streaming on the most popular streaming service.
The initial ATF raid is portrayed as a needless publicity stunt — Koresh could have been arrested on a morning jog. The grounds for the initial warrant are shown to be suspect; the Davidians had fewer weapons per capita at their compound than the population of the state they were in. Throughout the ordeal, it is pointed out that it is absurd to use tanks on American citizens, that the government misunderstood the religion that the Davidians practiced, and that this led them to miscalculate in a way that cost more human lives. The Davidian cult is portrayed as a millennial religion that believes it will be persecuted, but not a suicidal one along the lines of Jonestown. It’s stated that the gas used to flush out the Davidians from their standoff had been banned by chemical-weapons treaties as weapons of war. And the gas is shown asphyxiating and killing the Davidian children before the fires reached them. The final scenes are partly narrated by a local right-wing talk-radio host, who, taking on the role of the voice of God, essentially accuses the FBI of at-best deliberate negligence with the lives of the Davidian children, or at worst, a positive intention to kill the Davidians and destroy all the evidence of federal wrongdoing.
Still, this doesn’t exhaust all the potentially right-wing content on streaming services. There’s always the Norwegian series Occupied on Netflix, which portrays a future in which a Green Party government abolishes petroleum production in Norway, only to be swiftly subjected to a silk-glove invasion from Russia (more spoilers to come). It turns this with was done with the connivance of greedy European Union officials, who fold at the first confrontation with real power. Much of the Green Party’s establishment is shown as easily corrupted, and the main protagonist has to become a nationalist savior for his people, even organizing his counterassault by becoming a “gamer.” Not everything runs in a right-populist nationalist direction on Occupied, but much more than you’d think possible.
If anything, this little burble of content suggests that no political faction’s stranglehold on storytelling is absolute or unchallengeable. And sometimes what was once the paranoid fantasy version of history turns out to be the truth recorded in history.