A left-leaning film made by a left-leaning filmmaker for a left-leaning audience, which doesn't really tell us anything we didn't already know
Displaced workers, along with others who fear for their livelihood, are fertile ground in which to sow anti-immigrant sentiment, since angry and frustrated people often seek some target on which to blame their problems. The right-wing has organised and manipulated such anger and resentment, turned it away from corporations, and directed it against the government, decrying high taxes and the inability of the state to solve problems such as soc__ial deterioration, homelessness, crime, and violence. In addition to the target of failed liberal policies, immigrants make a convenient and tangible target for people's anger. Racial prejudice is often an encoded part of the message.
- Robert Wald Sussman; The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea (2014)
Are there some people that are white nationalists that are attracted to some of the philosophies of the alt-right? Maybe. Are there some people that are anti-Semitic that are attracted? Maybe. Maybe some people are attracted to the alt-right that are homophobes. But that's just like, there are certain elements of the progressive left and the hard left that attract certain elements.
- Steve Bannon; "How Donald Trump's New Campaign Chief Created an Online Haven for White Nationalists" (Sarah Posner); Mother Jones (August 22, 2016)
I'm not a white nationalist, I'm a nationalist. I'm an economic nationalist. The globalists gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia. The issue now is about Americans looking to not get fucked over. If we deliver, we'll get 60 percent of the white vote, and 40 percent of the black and Hispanic vote and we'll govern for 50 years.
- Steve Bannon; "Ringside With Steve Bannon at Trump Tower as the President-Elect's Strategist Plots "An Entirely New Political Movement"" (Michael Wolff); The Hollywood Reporter (November 18, 2016)
In Poland and the other Visegrád states, democracy is alive and kicking, while in the west of the continent it is seriously ill. Just like in the US, its media report from a one-sided left and liberal perspective. The supposed populists, who simply express the opinion of the man on the street, are being subjected to all kinds of attacks.
- Olivier Bault; "The arrogance of Western democracies"; Gazeta Polska Codziennie (November 30, 2016)
You're the opposition party. Not the Democratic Party. You're the opposition party. The media's the opposition party.
- Steve Bannon; "Trump Strategist Stephen Bannon Says Media Should "Keep Its Mouth Shut"" (Michael M. Grynbaum); The New York Times (January 26, 2017)
Taking as its subject Steve Bannon, the so-called "Kingmaker" behind Donald Trump's unexpected 2016 election victory, Alison Klayman's documentary The Brink attempts to portray and engage with the controversial alt-right figure without necessarily crossing the line into hagiography or giving a platform to his hateful and divisive rhetoric. Dubbed "The Great Manipulator" by TIME, Bannon's official position in the Trump administration was Chief White House Strategist, an extraordinary rise to power for the former naval officer better known as Vice President of Goldman Sachs and chief executive of Breitbart News than for anything in his capacity as a politician. Seeing himself as spearheading a global alt-right populist movement, called The Movement (and they say the right has no imagination), the film follows Bannon as he travels around Europe preaching nationalism, decrying immigration and Islam, claiming to represent the concerns of the average working man, and attempting to unite the various European nationalist-populist groups, before returning to the US for the November 2018 midterm elections. A heroic truth-teller to some, a personification of a hateful, discriminatory, racist ideology to others, in Bannon's worldview, the only good American is a white Christian heterosexual American. And whilst The Brink is perfectly adequate as a documentary, it's limited by its identity as a left-leaning film made by a left-leaning filmmaker for a left-leaning audience. Very few people on the right will see it, and those that do will find nothing therein to stimulate any kind of reassessment of their ideology and/or political affiliations. On the contrary, they'll most likely find it validating. In short, The Brink encapsulates perhaps the most fundamental problem in contemporary political discourse in the US; everyone is preaching to the already converted and no one is listening to what the other side is saying.
Before looking at the film, a little background is necessary. On August 11, 2017, the white supremacist-organised Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia descended into violence when James Alex Fields Jr. drove a car into a group of counter-protestors, killing Heather Heyer and wounding eight others. Every major politician across both political parties in the US condemned the violence, placing blame solely on the rally – every major politician except one; the President. At an infamous press conference, Trump chose to spread the blame across both those at the rally and the counter-protestors, arguing that there were "very fine people on both sides." According to The New York Times, the decision to take this approach was Bannon's, and the following day, the NAACP issued a statement calling for Bannon's termination, citing him as "a well-known white supremacist" and "symbol of white nationalism". Less than a week later, Bannon was fired (although he has since claimed he had actually handed in a two-week resignation notice on August 4).
Bannon's first engagement in his post-White House career was championing Roy Moore in his victory over incumbent Senator Luther Strange in the Republican U.S. Senate primary in Alabama, despite Trump endorsing Strange. However, after nine women accused Moore of sexual assault and child molestation, he lost the December Senate election to Democrat Doug Jones. As the election was initially considered a sure-fire Republican victory, the incident seriously damaged Bannon's reputation as a political strategist. Worse was to follow. In January 2018, Michael Wolff's book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House was published, featuring numerous statements from Bannon criticising the Trump family, including calling Ivanka "as dumb as a brick", saying that the June 2016 meeting between Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, and Russian agents was "treasonous", and speculating that Special Counsel Robert Mueller would make Trump Jr. "crack like an egg". He also intimated that Kushner was involved in money laundering. Trump reacted as he reacts to most adverse situations – he threw a tantrum, Tweeting that Bannon "cried when he got fired", and claiming in an official statement that Bannon "lost his mind" when he lost his White House job, also downplaying Bannon's role in the 2016 election, stating he was "a staffer who worked for me after I had already won the nomination" and "he had very little to do with our historic victory". Bannon, for his part, refused to fire back, saying he still had "unwavering" support for Trump and that the "treasonous" comment was intended to refer only to Manafort.
Bannon subsequently went to Europe, where he spent the next seven months attempting to establish "a united populist agenda", aka The Movement. In the years previously, right-wing nationalist parties, almost all subscribing to either a hard or soft Euroscepticism, had already made significant inroads in places such as Austria (in the 2017 legislative election, the national conservative/social conservative/anti-immigration Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs formed a coalition goverment with the conservative/Christian-democratic Österreichische Volkspartei), Belgium (the far-right/national and social conservative Vlaams Belang currently lead the opposition), Denmark (the national and social conservative/anti-Islam Dansk Folkeparti has been the country's second largest party since 2015), Finland (until this year, there was a coalition between the national conservative/economic liberalist Sininen tulevaisuus, the liberal conservative Kansallinen Kokoomus, and the agrarian/liberal conservative Suomen Keskusta), France (the national and social conservative/economic nationalist/anti-immigration/protectionist Rassemblement national (formerly the Front national) is the largest right-wing political party on the continent and currently leads the opposition), Germany (in the 2017 federal election, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland became the first right-wing populist party in the country's history to win seats in the Bundestag, coming third on a platform of national and social conservatism, anti-immigration, anti-Islam, anti-feminism, and economic liberalism), Greece (in the 2015 legislative election, the national and social conservative Anexartitoi Ellines formed a coalition with the economic nationalist/democratic socialist Synaspismós Rizospastikís Aristerás), Hungary (the 2010 parliamentary election saw a landslide victory for the national and social conservative/anti-immigration/Christian democratic Fidesz, who retained their supermajority in 2014 and again in 2018), Netherlands (the national liberalist/anti-immigration/anti-Islam Partij voor de Vrijheid have led the opposition since 2017), Poland (the national and social conservative/Christian-democratic/economic nationalist Prawo i Sprawiedliwość have been in power since 2015), Switzerland (in the 2015 federal election, the national and social conservative/economic liberalist/anti-immigration/isolationist Swiss People's Party received 29.4% of the vote, the highest ever recorded for a single party in Swiss history), and the United Kingdom (in 2016, the nationalist/anti-Islam UK Independence Party successfully campaigned for the UK to leave the EU, and in the years since, the Conservative Party has seen numerous defections to UKIP. The recently elected Conservative Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, was also a major supporter of Brexit, and has close ties with former UKIP leader, and current Brexit Party leader, Nigel Farage).
Bannon returned to the US for the 2018 midterm elections in November, hoping that the Republicans would retain control of the House and the Senate. Although they held the Senate, they lost 41 seats in the House, losing control to the Democrats in an election which saw a sizable number of firsts for women and minorities, including the first gay governor (Jared Polis of Colorado), the first bisexual senator (Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona), and the first Muslim women (Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan) and Native American women (Sharice Davids of Kansas and Deb Haaland of New Mexico) elected to the House.
So much for background. Whereas Errol Morris's American Dharma, which made the rounds on the festival circuit in 2018 but has yet to be picked up for distribution in North America, is essentially an extended interview with Bannon, focusing on how he got to where he is, The Brink is more concerned with what Bannon did after he was fired. The film begins in August 2017, a few weeks after he was let go as Chief Strategist, with Bannon, perhaps doing damage limitation, talking about how much he hated working at the White House. The film then traces his involvement with Moore, the reaction to Fire and Fury, the break with Trump, his time in Europe, and his campaigning during the 2018 midterms. Klayman focuses on his European activities, where his aim is nothing less than to unify and centralise the various right-wing populist groups under an overarching banner of national and social conservatism, anti-Islam, anti-immigration, counter-globalism, and Euroscepticism (although the film never addresses the inherent contradictions of a global movement built on counter-globalism or a centralised movement made up of groups whose main aims are nationalist). Ultimately, Bannon was hoping for a landslide right-wing victory in the 2019 European Parliamentary elections (although it's not covered in the film, he was partially successful – right-wing groups did make substantial gains compared to previous elections, although not quite to the degree he had hoped). Klayman accompanied Bannon for the duration of his European travels, embedding herself in his inner circle, where she was granted extraordinary access (partly because she didn't have a crew; it was just her and a camera). Upon his return to the US, she remained with him until just after the midterms.
As you would probably expect, Bannon is at pains throughout the film to stress that neither he nor Trump are racists, nor is he a white nationalist, although he does acknowledge that he's an "economic nationalist". In this vein, at a fundraiser early in the film, Bannon tells a group of Republicans that Trump doesn't care about skin colour, religion, or sexuality, he "cares only that you're a citizen of the United States of America". Seeing the film two days after Trump told three non-Caucasian American-born senators and one non-Caucasian naturalised American senator to "go back where you came from", the audience at the screening I attended had a good laugh at the unintended irony of Bannon's claim. And really, it's not hard to see why accusations of racism and white supremacy follow him around, as he spends his time in Europe meeting such controversial far-right figures as Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro, Belgium's Filip Dewinter, Sweden's Kent Ekeroth, the UK's Nigel Farage, France's Marine Le Pen, Italy's Giorgia Meloni, Hungary's Viktor Orbán, and the Netherlands' Geert Wilders, as well as conservative billionaires like Erik Prince and Guo Wengui. Somewhat amusingly, although we literally see him warmly meeting these people, when his connection to them is later questioned, he unashamedly uses the one-size-fits-all "we were just at the same dinner" defence.
Klayman shoots the film in a cinéma vérité fly-on-the-wall style, letting events play out without really commenting on them (although she does question Bannon directly a couple of times). And this non-intrusive style makes sense, allowing some of Bannon's more outrageous comments to speak for themselves, without the need for qualificatory commentary. For example, he tells Farage, "we're on the right side of history", referring to The Movement as "a global revolt"; at a rally in Hungary, he states that The Movement will be built on "old school Christian democracy rooted in the European tradition" (so plenty of room for Muslims); he asserts that "divine providence is about human action" (no, he doesn't seem aware of the oxymoron); he repeatedly claims that "hate is energising" and "hate is a motivator", seemingly proud of how politically divided society has become in the last few years; and in perhaps his most interesting, if perplexing, claim, he refers to China, Iran, and Turkey as the "new Axis".
His tendency to say abhorrent, but fascinating things is introduced in the opening scene. Telling Klayman about his visit to Auschwitz, he says that he found Auschwitz II-Birkenau more haunting than the more infamous Auschwitz I, and couldn't understand why until it was explained to him that whilst Auschwitz I was a converted army barracks, Birkenau was built from scratch specifically as a death camp. Imagining the designers working on the plans, he speculates that they must have "totally detached themselves from the moral horror of it". This, he goes on to say, is a reminder that "humans can do this - humans that are not devils, but humans that are just humans". Which is a pretty chilling thing for someone with the ear of the American President to say. Another scene sees him visiting Edgware Road, the so-called "Arab street" in London. Traditionally (going back at least 40 years), the Road has been the home of various Middle East businesses, which Bannon somehow manages to interpret as evidence of a "recent" turn to Islam in the city (parroting the opinion of that most odious of sub-humans Katie Hopkins, who was thoroughly embarrassed when she tried to make a racist point on Twitter concerning the Road, leading to a spike in people visiting the shops and restaurants).
Bannon's opinions on the mainstream media are also interesting, and on this particular point, I don't actually disagree with him. He believes that because trust in the media is at such a low ebb, the more obsessed they become with people like him, with right-wing policy in general, with criticising Trump, the better it is, as it simply drives their base further into their camp and gives them a free platform. This was seen especially clearly in the 2016 election when all the celebrity endorsements of Hilary Clinton and all the condemnations of Trump seemed only to galvanise his base, with the media inadvertently doing much of the ground-work for the very people they were speaking out against. Bannon himself seems to thrive on the outrage he can elicit from the left-wing media, relying on their emotionalism to trip them up. We do see him challenged a couple of times, but only a couple; Paul Lewis of The Guardian has a contentious, although always polite, interview about whether or not some of his statements can be seen as incitements to racism, whilst Susanna Reid of Good Morning Britain doesn't let him away with anything in relation to the Unite the Right rally (throughout the interview, Piers Morgan sits silently, happily dreaming about what hat to give Trump the next time they meet). There's also a great moment in Toronto when he is debating populism with David Frum, and he references the brilliance of Trump's Electoral College win in 2016, promtping the audience to burst out laughing, briefly throwing him off his game.
In terms of aesthetics, as mentioned, Klayman shoots the film in the style of cinéma vérité and rarely comments on events directly. Her editing style, however, offers its own rejoinders to Bannon's claims. For example, she intercuts news reports on Cesar Sayoc (the Trump fan who sent pipe bombs to George Soros and various Democrats) and the Tree of Life synagogue shooting with Bannon arguing that he's not bigoted or racist, and simply wants to represent the ordinary working-class people (who, he claims at one point, almost universally support Trump). Later, she intercuts scenes of fascist rallies in Europe and migrants being attacked in Germany with Bannon's five-star hotel meetings with right-wing politicians, showing the practical trickle-down consequences of their ideology. In another scene, when he insists that he would never take any non-American money because he's too much of a patriot, Klayman immediately cuts to him meeting Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui, with whom he subsequently has a behind-closed-doors meeting. Perhaps most powerfully, however, after the disastrous 2018 midterms, over scenes of Bannon raging at his underlings and trying to figure out what could possibly have gone wrong, Klayman plays an audio montage of newly-elected Democrat women speaking about their policies and plans and condemning the kind of hatred upon which Bannon thrives.
For all that, however, I felt the film had some significant flaws. Klayman can certainly be commended insofar as she never crosses the line from depiction to endorsement. Her fly-on-the-wall approach, although it cedes the floor to Bannon, never affords him the opportunity of an uninterrupted formal platform, with the verité style working to expose the flaws, contradictions, falsehoods, and hatred in his ideology even as he espouses that same ideology. The problem is that Klayman assumes her audience is in complete and total agreement with her before she's even said anything – that Bannon is a dangerous purveyor of racial-based hatred and prejudice. Because of this, the documentary remains all surface; she doesn't offer a deep dive into his psychology because why would she when the audience already thinks the same way as her? So, there's a real lack of probing and interrogation. For example, his European tour could be interpreted as nothing more than a no longer relevant man fighting to avoid obscurity, and there are several times when this reading is crying out for attention. Klayman, however, never touches on it.
In this sense, it's hard to know what anyone will glean from the film. The very few on the right who see it, will read it as yet more evidence of a left-leaning elitist media determined to crush the right and run Trump out of office; those on the left will simply have their opinions about Bannon reaffirmed; and those in the middle will be unlikely to see it at all – an arthouse documentary about a political figure isn't exactly multiplex friendly. This is especially pronounced just after Bannon meets with members of the Rassemblement national in Paris. Barely bothering to hide their white supremacist tendencies, after the meeting is over, Klayman asks "What did I just watch?" However, as Bannon is her only interviewee, he is allowed to downplay the meeting without really being called out, leaving the left to shake its head at his lies ("is he seriously trying to deny he just had a meeting with a bunch of neo-Nazis"), and the right to shake its head at the left over-reacting ("it was just a dinner guys, calm down").
With this in mind, it's kind of hard to pinpoint exactly what Klayman accomplishes with the film – it doesn't tell us anything about Bannon that you can't find online, and although it does give us access to his workaday world, it doesn't actually reveal much about his thought processes or private ideology. In the same sense, it isn't going to change anyone's way of thinking about him. So what was the point? Why give such a hateful and dangerous individual so much attention when you don't have anything in mind other than having your audience nod along with you? At best, the film seems to be suggesting that Bannon is a good example of the banality of evil – he's not an evil genius or a political mastermind, he's just a man who believes in hate. So, clearly, Klayman is trying to demystify him, painting him as kind of a slick used car salesman, successfully selling cars which he knows are defective. But really, did he need demystifying? How many people honestly thought he was anything special, or somehow more nefarious than we could ever have imagined? Additionally, at the end of over a year of spending every day with him, is the only thing that Klayman came away with that he is demonstrably human? That seems somewhat anticlimactic to say the least.
The film also makes some baffling decisions. For example, after the Roy Moore debacle, a subtitle tells us that Bannon was fired from Breitbart, kicked off his own radio show, and cut off by his billionaire donors Robert Mercer and Rebekah Mercer. However, if Klayman ever asked him about any of this, it doesn't make the final cut. Indeed, we learn next to nothing of his time at Breitbart, what kind of material he wrote, what he stood for, why he was so controversial, or why so many people argue that Andrew Breitbart himself would have hated what Bannon did to the site. On the other hand, we do get a scene where he is shown looking at old college photos and remarking on how handsome he used to be. Explosive stuff indeed.
The Brink is a perfectly watchable film, but so too is it perfectly forgettable, which, given the subject and the extraordinary access, is hugely disappointing, and must go down as a missed opportunity. Indeed, as the film ended, the only thought I really had in my head was "Bannon would have loved that". Which is not exactly a good thing.