The Other, Darker Side of "W"

Watching Oliver Stone's W. spurred me to revisit the director's 1991 film JFK. I wanted to remind myself what an important film Stone could make when he was taking risks, or at least was presenting a provocative interpretation of events that we thought we understood.

JFK remains a deeply disturbing film that encourages us to think big and dig beneath the familiar surface. Stone stormed the formidable barricades around an assassination story that has become encrusted in orthodoxy over the years. He raised the question harbored by many Americans: Should we ignore the multiplicity of powerful interests with deep antagonism toward John Kennedy? He made us think about how little we really understand transformative events officially characterized as simply the work of disturbed loners.

His nearly twenty-year-old blockbuster led to a public clamor for answers, and an overwhelming congressional vote to release long-hidden government files on the assassination. This in turn spurred on a fresh cadre of researchers, and fostered healthy debate. In many respects, then, JFK was a brave and important motion picture.

But W. is Stone at his most tepid and superficial -- a filmmaker pedaling backwards. It offers little more than a modestly entertaining and unambitious portrayal of George W. Bush and his family -- with moments of excessive "balance" that have surprised reviewers. We can shake our head at this woefully flawed prodigal son making his way to the top -- and at the painfully apparent consequences of this unfortunate success story, most notably the invasion of Iraq. The principal appeal of Stone's W. is a chance to laugh - or curse - at many of the old anecdotes. But in the process, it offers almost none of the insight or revelation that we have come to expect from a Stone production.

Sad to say, when one gets past the pleasure of I-told-you-so, Stone's W. reflects a lethal lack of curiosity about the 43rd president -- and the general lack of deeper understanding of what lies behind the success of the Bush dynasty. Stone also perpetuates the notion that the rise of a mediocre man means that the story of that rise is somehow itself insignificant. That assumption is wrong -- dangerously so. It is the costly mediocrity of George W. Bush, and indeed of his father before him, taken in tandem with the fateful changes they wrought, that ought to compel a closer, far more serious look, well beyond the smirks and the laughs, the familiar platitudes and the inability to swallow a pretzel.

"People don't know a lot about him," Stone told the New York Times' Richard Berke. "That presidency was veiled and hidden from the public view..." Yet Stone's W. shows no desire to probe what George W. Bush's disastrous rise really meant -- only a rush to put it behind us and move on.

That's the crucial question, and the answers go deeper than most of us suspect. I have spent the last four years interviewing hundreds of sources and examining some thousands of documents in an effort to understand how this most improbable of leaders was elected -- and re-elected -- the leader of the most powerful nation in the world. What I found as I wrote my forthcoming book, Family of Secrets (Bloomsbury), was that the very improbability of Bush's success hides an even more improbable and unknown story -- a story full of the kind of drama and geopolitical intrigue that made JFK such a riveting film.

Many of the signature episodes of W's life -- with their orthodox interpretation accepted by Stone -- were in fact carefully constructed falsehoods, or exaggerated and then spun to great effect. These range from the alleged "mano a mano" incident in which he purportedly challenged his father to a fistfight, to his religious conversion that won him the evangelical vote. The film scratches at a crucial topic -- the continuity of figures from the administration of Bush senior to that of Bush junior -- but does little to establish what this meant. In fact, the story of W. reminds us anew that political leaders are not lone rangers on the historical stage. They are shaped, constrained and pushed constantly by powerful forces, the role of which we rarely consider or discuss.

The strength of JFK was its vivid (and highly cinematic) rendering of the military-industrial complex, the more extreme manifestations of the intelligence apparatus, and the intermingling of the state with so-called lawless elements. I found some of these same forces at work in the Bush phenomenon. There even are links between the Kennedy and Bush destinies (and those of the Bushes and Richard Nixon, himself another former Oliver Stone subject) that I could not have thought possible when I began my inquiries.

Because understanding the true nature of power is too important to be done on the fly, it is crucial that we not let Stone's film be the final word on this remarkable chapter in American history. Nor should we dismiss W. himself as an aberration from which we will easily recover once he is gone.

Here are just a few of the subjects the Stone movie might have addressed, or at least raised questions about: What was the truth about the "Rathergate" affair concerning the mysteries of Bush's military service record gaps, which led to the professional demise of one of America's most celebrated newsmen and resulted in a pall of silence falling over journalism in general? Did the man who ordered thousands of Americans to deadly service in a trumped-up conflict in Iraq actually complete his own military service, or didn't he?

What was W's real relationship with his father -- without whose own lightly-examined political rise he would never have become president? What of the rumors that the Bush family has a deep and ongoing relationship with the intelligence establishment, predating 1976, when the elder Bush became CIA director as a purported "intelligence virgin?" What's the real story behind the incompetence in government that made Hurricane Katrina much more of a disaster than it needed to be? Why, really, did Bush and his administration go into Iraq, and why is there still no consensus on the true purpose of this disastrous gambit? Who wanted him to do it, and why?

The truth about W., his family, and the forces behind them is far darker than even the most jaded among us probably has imagined.

Maybe the old Oliver Stone can come back to shoot a sequel.

Investigative journalist Russ Baker is the author of Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, The Powerful Forces That Put It in the White House, and What Their Influence Means For America, to be published January 6, 2009. Now available for pre-order at Amazon.com.

Comments

[zenx98]

Rathergate was one of Rove's best con jobs. The false documentation was floated like bait to an eager news organization in order to discredit the man and his network.

[CatfishJohn]

...having not seen the movie yet, i was hoping stone would explotre the core sociopathy of the character as it manifested itself ont he world stage.. e.g. - the dark, grim irony of a man who as a teen revelled in putting explosives in captured small animals ( birds, frogs)mouths and according to reports of him best firnds at the time gleefully watching their body parts rain down on him later in lifew creating so much unecessary similar human carnage for al the world to see in iraq..i understand the movie is more anecdotal and superficial than that...i look forward to reading your book sir regarding the political forces behind this 8 year debacle and would advise all to look back in retrospect to the book wirtten by eric alterman and mark green, " the book on bush", presciently warning us then of his impending impact on our nation. their book was widely panned as " too harsh", "too condemning- give this "likable guy" president a chance"...­we did- twice- the resutls speak for themselves­...

[hiprogloho]

The reason why this filmic portrait is so dull and listless is that Stone may share a background of some of the foreign national folks who coaxed W. as their oil war puppet. All is not what it seems when power corrupts. There are those in the public eye who are solely blamed and then there are those who pull the strings behind the scenes who write the history books to condemn a fall guy and hide the complete truth. If one man or family was as powerful as complicit media spin would have us believe, then two Kennedy brothers who tried to save America from the aftereffects of covert fascism would still be above ground.

[likeicare]

Figuring out the Bush 43 regime is like peeling back the layers of an onion -- you find something new the deeper you go.

A lot of the "mystery" about Bush's reign of terror has to do with Dick Cheney, and the lessons he learned in Nixon's Watergate WH: the obsessive need for secrecy and disavowment of subordinates' activities, etc.

The clue can be found, oddly enuf, in the Texas Constitution of 1878, whereby power rested in the Lt. Gov's office, not the Gov's -- a nifty little way to operate a shadow govenment, outside of direct public scrutiny, while giving the appearance of legitimate governance, which rarely if ever, did anything to remedy the plight of the state's most miserable citizenry. Sound familiar?

[proreality]

The most telling line of your story is the last, it is the very thing I said as I left the theater. There is going to have to be a "W 2".

[nunzia]

Absolutely EXCELLENT review of that failed attempt.
Thank you so much.
You hit on every single failing.
I was terribly disappointed.
As I left the theater I thought, we'll just have to wait for the next one.

[CactusTom]

While the movies was certainly an artistic mess, especially many of the cardboard charters surrounding the Bush charter, it did cover most of the bases. But there are two factors that make a movie about W. nearly impossible. First, it is crazy to try and over think the driving forces behind the man. Truly when it comes to George W. Bush there is no there there. He is nothing more than the forces (Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc.) bumping him along.

Bush is precisely the reason that the founding fathers tried to shade America toward a limited Republic rather than a broad democracy. Through Bush Joe six pack was king of the world for 8 years. In other word, the broader the democracy the shallower the outcome. These things are hard to get across in a two hour movie.

As far as why did we invaded Iraq? That one is easy. The Neocon plan was always to return Iraq to the status of an American client state. The movie made this point quite clear when Cheney was asked about an exit strategy. There is no exit strategy he said. There was no exit strategy because the Neocons intended that we never leave Iraq as a means to make sure Iraq always remained a client state.

[DDK]

I, too, felt the film was lacking. I had hoped perhaps to learn something new about GWB, but, alas, I was more curious than the filmmaker. There were no surprises, nothing much to recommend the film beyond the performance of Josh Brolin.

[mulegino]

I haven't seen "W", but although I agree that JFK was a very good-in the sense that it included well documented historical facts that have been ignored by officialdom and the establishment press to this day.
However, from an aesthetic viewpoint, the casting of Kevin Costner as Jim Garrison destroyed the movie. One could get a mop, prop the mop up in a pail, get a recording and a speaker, and find a more convincing performance than that quintessential wooden actor could.

[dve2z]

this film is not a documentary. Its purpose was to create a buildup and then culminate in "empty Oval office" scene and then slide into "empty stadium" hollowness. And that was very powerful and devastating.

any attempt to show the real Bush (who in my opinion is a really morally flawed individual) would push the film towards caricature. Bush is so overwhelmingly bad, any future film will only be able to expose only one slice of him without appearing genre-crossing (from reality to a spoof).

[oldfart1]

Right on. Stone did a very good job on an artistically intractable subject: how could a man so utterly unsuited to the task become POTUS?

And if you think that was a puzzle, what about John McCain, who's even worse?

The real strength of this movie comes out when you realize that Stone's answer for Bush applies to McCain as well. They were both trying to show they were as good as their fathers - when they weren't even close.

[JShankel]

Yeah, let me get this straight:

Closeted New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw fairly singlehandedly brought down a sitting president, promoted the war in Vietnam, escalated the Cold War and subjugated our nation under the boot of shadow fascism.

But George W. Bush is just a well-meaning pretzel enthusiast with daddy issues who got a wee bit in over his head in Iraq.

Still, great performances in W. and well worth seeing just for Brolin. But yeah, falls well below the 'Team America' gravitas threshold.

http://movies-of-the-week.blogspot.com/2008/10/w.html

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