“Miss Sloane,” movie directed by John Madden, 2016
This film is one of those cheesy Washington D.C. exposés
featuring the red lips and reddish hair of Jessica Chastain as Sloane. She’s a hard-charging, unsleeping lobbyist
for a right-wing firm on Avenue K, Cole Kravitz. She is trying to pitch an Indonesian palm oil
bill to Congress by sending a key Congressional voter on a junket to that fair
country. As she claims, she is always
one step ahead of her opponents. And she
is!
What the film exposes – and what we know already – is
that Congress people don’t vote their ‘conscience.’ Of course, whether they have a conscience is
another matter. They vote the political expedient, especially if it comes to
continuing their tenure and not offending those with deep pockets. The ‘pockets’ in this case belong to the
thinly-disguised NRA, which wants to get women on board with guns. Sloane suddenly drops her role in the
deforestation palm oil play at Cole Kravitz and switches to a ‘boutique’ (read
small, liberal and powerless) firm fighting for a gun regulation bill. This puts her against her former bosses at
Cole Kravitz, who are backing the lucrative NRA contract to kill the gun
control bill.
The delight of this film is Sloane’s quick insults and
plain descriptions of reality in D.C. My
favorite come-back was “Don’t be so cynical…” which Sloane interprets as a
defense of naiveté. You almost can’t be
too cynical when it comes to D.C. In one
TV interview she calls the Constitution the equivalent of consulting a
horoscope. Sloane herself lives on
uppers, hires a male prostitute for sex, manipulates everyone, lies, consorts
with tech hackers and will stop at nothing to ‘win’ – which is why she took on
the difficult gun control cause. The
main arsenal in her weapon is the tears of women who were victims themselves or
lost family or friends to rampant gun violence. Suicide (of mostly men) is the leading result of gun deaths, but next are the murders of women by their husbands, boyfriends or partners - far more than mass shootings or crime deaths.
2nd
Amendement
What the film does not get straight is the actual meaning
of the 2nd Amendment, and how it has been changed by the Supreme
Court and the NRA. What the Supreme
Court did to the 2nd Amendment ranks right up there with Citizen’s
United or overruling the Voting Rights Act.
Essentially only the last part of a 3 part Amendment has become law. No mention of a ‘well-regulated militia’
anymore, no mention of ‘the security of a free state’ anymore. No mention of the background of slave patrols
or fighting native Americans. No mention
of it substituting for a standing army. As
she might have put it, the ‘founders’ didn’t mean what the 2008 Supreme Court
decision “D.C. v. Heller” meant. Sloane misses all this in a TV debate with one
of the sleeze-meisters at Cole Kravitz, instead relying on tears and a personal
story of violence to win women over to the gun control fight.
 |
| Italian femicide poster |
But Sloane has a sneaky plan. At one point an unpredictable act of violence
puts the gun control campaign on the defensive and Sloane misses the chance to
float a very reasonable conspiracy theory about collusion between savior and
shooter – something a scheming lobbyist wouldn’t hesitate to do. She herself becomes the colorful target of a
Congressional investigation and it is here that she turns the tables, though
she still pays. Falling on her own sword is essential to winning. It is barely mentioned,
but after her skillful plotting, the gun control bill passes – another bit of
high fiction.
A Hollywood probe of D.C. which of course does not go
deep enough, exposing a senator and a powerful ‘outside interest.’ But as Sloane says, “it’s the system,” a
bourgeois system of lobbyists, money and false ‘representatives,’ which Hollywood is
an essential part of. Yet it is becoming
harder and harder to hide its reality with bromides about ‘democracy,’ the 'balance of powers,' “the
two-party system” and the Constitution. Actually the faction fight between two wings of the ruling class is reflected in this film.
Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box,
upper left, to investigate our 14 year archive:
“The Hidden History of Guns and
the Second Amendment” (Hartmann) “Loaded” (Dunbar-Ortiz),"Cult of the Constitution," "Trapped and Detective Series in General" or for other
movie/film reviews the word ‘film’ or
‘movie.’
The Cultural Marxist
June 5, 2021
No comments:
Post a Comment