Published on Portside (https://portside.org/)
“Vice” Turns the
Life of Dick Cheney Into Entertainment — and Stays True to His Terrible Evil
Jon
Schwarz
December
22, 2018
The
Intercept
“Vice” is an outstanding
new movie about Dick Cheney’s rise to power. Trying to make the former vice
president’s life genuinely funny and entertaining must be the final boss level
in filmmaking, but writer and director Adam McKay pulls it off.
Moreover, he may
literally be the only person in America who could. McKay co-founded the Upright
Citizens Brigade in Chicago. He then became one of the
most original and prolific writers ever to pass through “Saturday
Night Live”; he even invited Noam Chomsky to deliver one episode’s cold
open (Chomsky couldn’t make it, so Lewis Lapham did it instead.) After
leaving the show, McKay directed comedies, including “Anchorman” and “Talladega
Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.” Most recently, in “The Big Short” in 2015,
he got audiences to both laugh at and understand credit default
swaps, for which he justifiably won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay.
Another writer
might have a narrator explain that Cheney could make “the most wild and extreme
ideas sound measured and professional.” But no one else would illustrate this
with an imagined 1974 Oval Office scene in which Cheney — played by Christian
Bale in an uncanny incarnation — blandly asks President Gerald Ford, “What if,
on a unilateral basis, we all put miniature wigs on our penises, and we walk
out to the White House lawn, and we jerk each other off?” Ford, persuaded by
Cheney’s drab, bureaucratic mien, declares, “I say we do it!”
Most impressively,
“Vice” serves as a response to two aphorisms that together explain why it’s so
damnably hard to beat the powerful and make the world work for regular people.
In the novel “The
Book of Laughter and Forgetting,” the Czech novelist Milan Kundera
famously put these words in the mouth of one of his characters: “The
struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
And on “Last Week Tonight,” John Oliver famously said, “If you want
to do something evil, put it inside something boring.”
Every society’s
memory is continuously being rewritten on the fly by the people at the top so
that it better serves their needs. You might think you remember that George W.
Bush lied us into a huge, disastrous war, the consequences of which everyone on
Earth will suffer for the rest of our lives. But on television in 2018, the
former president was transformed into Michelle Obama’s rascally “partner
in crime.” This is what Kundera meant, playing out right in front of us.
But it’s even
better for apex elites if there’s nothing much to be rewritten in the first
place. The Bush administration put most of its evil inside Cheney, who was so
dreary that even at the time only obsessives could manage to pay attention to
what he was doing. This is what John Oliver had in mind.
For audience
members who are normal people, McKay uses everything in his capacious bag of
tricks to pull Cheney’s villainy back into history — and does it
so zestfully that no one will have any problem remembering it after they
leave the theater. And for the small number of aging oddballs who recall Cheney’s
saga, the bill of indictment is rendered, by any reasonable standard, with
scrupulous historical care.
Cheney did cross
paths with Roger Ailes in the Nixon White House, when Ailes first began
thinking of what eventually became Fox News. Cheney sincerely worried from
the 1970s onward that Congress was encroaching on the “prerogatives and the
powers of the president of the United States.”
He is a true believer in the
strong version of the unitary executive theory, which holds that the
Constitution gives the president powers close to that of an elected king.
Cheney’s lawyer David Addington did bizarrely maintain that vice
presidents aren’t part of the executive branch. As the film’s narrator says,
Cheney saw the 9/11 attacks as an “opportunity” for the Bush administration to
do what needed to be done. Cheney was the driving force behind the period’s
torture and expansion of extraordinary rendition — i.e., kidnapping individuals
off the street or battlefield. (The movie even depicts how the U.S. would put
its prisoners into diapers for the flight to various black sites around the
world.) When Democratic Sen. Pat Leahy of Vermont argued with Cheney on the
floor of the Senate in 2004 about Halliburton, Cheney’s former company, Cheney
did tell Leahy to “go **** yourself.” We see Cheney holding the 2003 Joe
Wilson op-ed, on which Cheney scribbled notes asking whether
Wilson’s wife Valerie Plame had sent him “on a junket.”
In its deepest
cut, the movie makes a nod to the most damning facts about Cheney and the
invasion of Iraq: As Cheney and Bush discuss the 1991 Gulf War during a 2000
meeting, Cheney states that “wartime presidents are always popular.” In
reality, Mickey Herskowitz, a reporter and Bush family friend who for a time
worked on ghostwriting a Bush campaign book in 1999, later said that Bush was
fascinated by the political capital available to leaders who win wars — and at
the time already had Iraq in mind. Why? It was Dick Cheney, as Russ
Baker explained after interviewing Herskowitz:
According to
Herskowitz, George W. Bush’s beliefs on Iraq were based in part on a notion
dating back to the Reagan White House — ascribed in part to now-vice president
Dick Cheney, Chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee under Reagan.
“Start a small war. Pick a country where there is justification you can jump
on, go ahead and invade.”
The one place
where the film clearly ranges far afield from verifiable fact is in service of
making Cheney look better. In the 1970s, Cheney’s mother-in-law Edna did, as
depicted, somehow drown in a pond despite her lifelong fear of water. Cheney’s
wife Lynne also did write in a memoir that “for years I wondered if
she had somehow been the victim of foul play.” But in her book, Lynne Cheney
concludes that the most likely explanation is that blood pressure medication
made her mother dizzy and caused her to stumble into the water. The film,
however, makes it appear likely that Cheney’s father-in-law murdered Edna —
which gives the movie version of Cheney an opportunity to stand up to him in
protection of Lynne and their young children. (Cheney is also accurately shown
wholeheartedly supporting his gay daughter Mary at a time when this was by no
means the norm among GOP politicians.)
And while it seems
churlish to complain about a movie that packs in so much, there are a few top
Cheney highlights that didn’t make the cut. For instance, while a congressman
from Wyoming in the 1980s, Cheney was a critical defender of the Reagan
administration during the Iran-Contra affair — something which demonstrated
that he believed in the supremacy of the executive branch even when he wasn’t
in it.
A few years later,
when Cheney was secretary of defense during the build-up to the Gulf War, he
traveled to Saudi Arabia to show then-King Fahd military satellite photos that
purportedly revealed Iraqi troops massing on the Saudi border. Whatever Fahd
saw, it persuaded him to allow the U.S. to station troops in his country. But
as commercial satellite photos made clear, there were no Iraqi
troops where the U.S. claimed they were. The movie also doesn’t mention
that, according to Cheney himself, he asked his Defense Department
underlings to study how many tactical nuclear weapons they’d need to
destroy a division of Iraq’s Republican Guards. The answer turned out to be 17.
Finally, the movie
does show Cheney’s 2011 heart transplant in graphic detail. But we don’t learn
the metaphorically perfect fact that for more than a year before the donor
heart became available, Cheney had an external pump pushing blood through his
body at a steady rate. That is, he literally had no heartbeat. As
the New York Times said at the time, such patients “are urged to wear
bracelets or other identifications to alert emergency room doctors as to why
they have no pulse.”
So go see “Vice”
soon, and take people both old enough to remember this history and young enough
that they don’t. Everything we understand about where we are depends on what we
believe about how we got here.
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Source URL: https://portside.org/2018-12-25/vice-turns-life-dick-cheney-entertainment-and-stays-true-his-terrible-evil
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has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
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