The Comey Rule

Jul 26

The Comey Rule, created by Billy Ray, 2020. Showtime.
The Newsroom, created by Aaron Sorkin, 2012. HBO.
The Looming Tower, created by Dan Futterman, Alex Gibney, Lawrence Wright, 2018. Hulu
Vice, directed by Adam McKay, 2018. Hulu
The Big Short, directed by Adam McKay, 2015. Kanopy.
The Laundromat, directed by Steven Soderbergh, 2019. Netflix.
Watchmen, created by Damon Lindelof, 2019. HBO
Chinatown, directed by Roman Polanski, 1974. Netflix.

It was only a couple months after the riot at the United States Capitol that it was announced someone was going to make a TV show about the riot at the United States Capitol. It was inevitable that some intrepid content creator would be inspired by the camo-and-antler chic costuming and the chance to work with all of our best middle-aged, white character actors. Showtime was the quickest to lay claim to a limited series from the creators of The Comey Rule, The Comey Rule being the show that no one wanted that recreated the tedious and unproductive power struggle between FBI Director James Comey (played by Jeff Daniels) and Presidential nominee, then actual President Donald Trump (played for some reason by Brendan Gleeson), in case you missed it.

Other recently announced projects include a ripped-from-the-headlines story about the reporters who broke the Harvey Weinstein scandal and another about the mass shooting at a New Zealand mosque. On HBOMax I can watch The Newsroom, also with Jeff Daniels and co-starring his chin, which recreated past events like the Osama bin Laden assassination or the Arab Spring and explained them like children's books read with the usual tone of paternal pandering. For three glorious seasons it answered the question, “What if the television news was more like Soviet-era Central European propaganda broadcasts but with better lighting?”

I can also watch a very entertaining documentary series with actor recreations and jaunty illustrations about the ongoing opioid crisis and the egregious profit the Sackler family created from human misery. On Hulu there's The Looming Tower, another limited series with Jeff Daniels in it, explaining how September 11th happened. (It's because good Muslims and good law enforcement lost the battle against bad Muslims and bad law enforcement.) With the blending between the real and the fictional, with the news becoming entertainment and entertainment becoming the news, I'm wondering: how do we know something really happened unless it is recreated and simplified dramatically by a diverse ensemble cast, headed by Jeff Daniels, and captured on blue tinted film?

I've been trying to figure out how we got to this place of edutainment, where hearing or reading about some newsworthy event is no longer enough, now we have to regurgitate it and redigest it in many different media forms. I thought maybe we could blame Jon Stewart's era of The Daily Show, when a bunch of people realized having a comedian read you the headline news alongside some jokes was basically as informational as reading the paper. Or maybe it was simply the fact that we elected a reality television star as our president, and the colliding of worlds hasn't stopped since.

In some ways this can be understood as a way for compensating for the disappointment that is news programming. All of the cable television news channels spend approximately ten times longer telling you how you should feel about the news events than explaining what is actually happening. CNN's follow-up coverage of the insurrection and the QAnon movement, both of which sprung from slow moving developments mostly within “flyover” regions of the country that mostly go ignored by mass media and prestige journalism and so only found real coverage after the damage was already done, primarily consists of an Irishman sticking a microphone in front of some random middle-aged white person sitting outside a protest or a rally of some kind, talking to them until they say something “wacky” about the election being stolen or vaccines containing microchips, and then broadcasting that clip on national television as the Irishman sadly shakes his head and explains how misguided they are.

Our world is increasingly strange and complex, it is fast moving beyond our traditional models of observation and reportage, and we are regularly surprised by horrors like mass murder, revolutionary uprisings, terrorist attacks, and financial crash and boom cycles. “How did this happen?” we wonder, shocked. “There was no advance warning.” Then it turns out there was, like a memo indicating that Osama bin Laden was determined to attack the United States within its own borders, it's just that it wasn't as exciting as creating a reaction video to the three second snippet of the new season of Succession, so it might as well not have happened.

This, at least, is what Adam McKay suggested in Vice, his angry and messy cinematic investigation into the secretive world of the inexplicably still alive war criminal and former Vice President Dick Cheney. He indicts the audience directly, accusing us all of being too entertained by insipid reality television programming and terrible pop music to notice our nation was committing atrocities on multiple fronts in the Middle East. So what if the solution, then, was to make the careful and thorough investigation and presentation of complex and important matters as entertaining as Real Housewives? Would that create an informed and thoughtful populace?

McKay first attempted this with The Big Short, his funny, smart, and extremely influential hit film about how the housing market crashed the global economy in 2008. When the market crashed, it surprised basically everyone, including people whose job it is not to be surprised by this kind of thing. And perhaps the most popular and effective autopsy of this crash wasn't a work of reportage in the New Yorker, it wasn't a sober segment on 60 Minutes, it was a Hollywood film with big names and very bad haircuts. It was based on the book by Michael Lewis, a smart Vanity Fair financial journalist whose books about things like Wall Street, baseball, and “the Third World,” keep dads on business trips informed about the goings on in the world; but a successful book can't match the reach of one successful film these days. The problem of moving a story from book to film, though, remains: how does one cram ten hours of information into a zippy, two-hour fictionalized account? By building on the fact-joke-fact-joke template built by Jon Stewart and all of the Daily Show spin-offs like HBO's Last Week Tonight, Netflix's Patriot Act, and others, but also incorporating the style of address of the least excruciating and most viral TedTalks.

The Big Short reinvented all of the workarounds and digressions that have bogged down the traditional informational script. Before McKay, a film required that a character show up who demands an explanation of what is going on, usually with a line with something like, “Explain this to me like I am a child,” followed by a long monologue where a character pukes information at the audience about what a dividend is (Margin Call), the hierarchy of the Catholic church (Spotlight), or how a chemical compound affects the human body (Erin Brokovich, Dark Waters). It's awkward, it's tedious, it's predictable. In Margin Call, a lifeless Zachary Quinto explains to Jeremy Irons the origins of the financial crash. In The Big Short, Margot Robbie delivers a better written but similarly educational spiel through the fourth wall while half-naked in a bubble bath.

So no wonder The Big Short has been ripped off so many times, in our new era of edutainment, and McKay has recreated this setup in Vice — a film that is better than the reviews it received upon its initial release would suggest. What many film critics saw as its weakness is actually its strength — it is an angry, messy film, made all the more messy by its unrestrained contempt for both subject and audience. It's vigorous and alive in the way a lot of filmmaking simply is not these days. But he's also taken that format to podcasting in his series Death at the Wing, where he uses stories about basketball to explain the long aftermath of Reagan's economic and drug policies, and in the many documentaries he produces on subjects like QAnon or how the controversy around the removal of Elián González possibly cost Al Gore the 2000 election.

The Comey Rule, created by Billy Ray, 2020. — *The Comey Rule*, created by Billy Ray, 2020.

Many filmmakers have tried to borrow (steal) McKay's style, none so egregiously as Steven Soderbergh in his explainer film about the Panama Papers, The Laundromat. Soderbergh makes the “explain this to me as if I were a child” thing literal. While McKay respects his audience enough to expect them to keep up once certain terms are defined, Soderbergh has educational interludes to explain things like... what interest on a loan is, what the bartering system is, and so on. He thinks so little of us, the viewer, that he fully expects us not to notice he has put Meryl Streep in a bad wig and brownface to pass her off as a Panamanian secretary for the purposes of some shock reveal. And meanwhile the really complicated and real world consequences of financial misdealings are slid over in a glib and insulting style, where a lower-class Panamanian woman's death is played for laughs and complicated financial maneuvers are left unexplained (probably because Soderbergh himself does not understand them — at some point someone is going to realize Soderbergh is an adequate but mediocre filmmaker, all of his intelligence and “style” ripped off from better and more original people).

There was a need for Hollywood and media to position themselves as the anti-Trump once he took office. He was an enemy of the truth, a spinner of yarns, a demagogue and propagandist, and Hollywood was going to save us from all of that through education, fact checking, and counter-narratives. Culture will save us! Meryl Streep got up at an awards show and made a silly speech about how intelligent, sophisticated, inclusive, compassionate the creatives of the world are. (I mean, tell that to all of the Muslim actors they forced to play terrorists and Latin actors they forced to play gang members and drug dealers in prestige television series, but whatever.) Hollywood could be a refuge for the truth and could tell stories that would build empathy and honesty. Instead they mostly collaborated on superhero movies with the Department of Defense and to most people, not just the deplorable ones, it looked like rich kids on the left fighting with rich kids on the right with no one good to root for.

Now that shows like Watchmen are lauded not only for their storytelling and that very fine Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross score but also for their ability to educate the masses on hidden dark spots in American history like the Tulsa Massacre of 1921, it's probably a good time to question the aftereffects of embedding historical fact in longform entertainment for pedagogical purposes. These programs distort truth for the sake of a good story, with maybe a little “inspired by true events” caveat at the beginning, probably without much thought to what the audience might do with this information.

Now that California is running out of water and on fire just all of the time now, I have heard twice at parties people speak with authority about the origins of this issue now plaguing the state: the California water wars between the growing city of Los Angeles and the agricultural community of Owens Valley and beyond in the 19th century. Except the version of the story they were telling didn't come from any history book; they were relaying a distortion and misplacement in time of these water wars from the Roman Polanski film Chinatown.

Chinatown created a false story about the shady origins of Los Angeles's water supply that happens to resemble in many different details the true shady origins of Los Angeles's water supply. The filmmakers and writers changed the year, the individuals involved, and who profited, but otherwise, the story follows the version of events where an urban center was allowed to thrive at the expense of farmers and ranchers.

These people I heard retell the fictional version rather than the historical version were not experts, they're not rewriting the historical record to fit with the narrative constructed by a Polanski film, it is only that when one must recall to mind the story of an historical moment, something casual, something that does not directly affect your life in any way, the memory of a really great film with extremely good outfits might burn more brightly in your brainpan than something from a Wikipedia page or a couple pages in a history of California article you read while on a train eight years ago. You might not even notice, ever, that one has overwritten the other, until some smartass like me humiliates you in front of your friends by pointing out you don't know what you are talking about.

Of course the point of Chinatown was not to educate the public about the corruption surrounding the decisions made around the distribution of resources. I think Polanksi just wanted to look at Jack Nicholson in a really fine suit, which is okay — I do, too. The pleasures of Chinatown are many, it's not just the way it has miseducated many a naive viewer who comes across it on a list of Netflix offerings late at night as they remember “oh right, this is supposed to be pretty good.”

It's hard to tell, though, what the pleasures of The Comey Rule might be. Does anyone ever want Jeff Daniels in things? Or is he just what you get when your script isn't good enough for William Hurt and you don't have the guts to hire a real weirdo like John Carroll Lynch. Perhaps the pleasure is in watching Brendan Gleeson turn his brainy and warm bear form into dumb, mouth-agape coldness to play Donald Trump. It's a good performance, but by now we are awash in Trumps, everyone has an impression of Trump, it's not just the comedians either, all of your friends have pulled out their own Trump performance, practiced in front of a bathroom mirror. After a beer or two, they say a couple nonsensical superlatives and leave their mouths hanging open and laugh at their own joke. So while yeah, it's a pretty good Trump, there should be fewer Trumps; we do not need any more Trumps.

This is television for people who have already decided what they believe about Hillary's emails but want to learn what happened to reinforce that belief but are too lazy to read a Wikipedia article. It's not well shot, it's not well written, it tries on a few McKay-like flourishes, but that doesn't come close to adding the necessary lightness I would require to be entertained by this many hours of an FBI investigation that goes absolutely nowhere and accomplishes nothing other than, according to The Comey Rule, make Comey's daughters sad. And despite its very sincere intentions in educating me about our very important institutions and procedures and its misguided attempts to rehabilitate the image of a man who is, at the end of the day, just a very fancy cop, I felt distinctly dumber after it was over.

I pray, let this be the end of the edutainment, of the creative output of these lifeless forms who have only ever conversed with other Harvard graduates, who look at the hellscape that is the political reality of this country and instead of questioning why, despite knowing nothing about 99% of the people who populate this great land, they have been put in a position to speak to and for them, to decide that the real problem is simply one of education.

If only the people knew! If only the people knew Trump was a sexual predator, a liar and a cheat, or an out-of-shape beast with declining cognitive function! Surely then they will rise up! (I mean, they did know, and they did rise up, they just ran off in an unexpected direction.) But you know what, when they put Jeff Daniels in a big shaggy mustache and some camo with a Three Percenter badge on it, and film him storming into the Capitol building alongside, and I'm just spitballing here, some sort of Jesse from Breaking Bad kind of figure, I'll probably watch it. It's likely there will be nothing else on.