There is a time and place to cite SA’s constitution. When someone undermines your human dignity, say; or when you experience discrimination on the basis of race, gender, or sexual orientation; or when your freedom of expression is unfairly stifled.
I realise now that my right to bring a cup of takeaway coffee onto the Ster Kinekor premises at Rosebank Mall was not a constitutional hill on which I should have declared myself willing to die. One always sees clearly in retrospect. So this is a public apology to the Ster Kinekor employees whose otherwise pleasant day was stained by my caffeine rights grandstanding.
Happily, the slightly absurd episode with which my movie-going experience commenced was appropriate preparation for the film that followed. Adam McKay’s Vice, about former US vice-president and general bad-guy Dick Cheney, is centrally concerned with the uses and abuses of constitutional interpretation.
Through his idiosyncratic and cynical reading of the US constitution, Cheney managed (abetted by such scurrilous legal eagles as Antonin Scalia and David Addington) to turn the vision of the founding fathers on its head. As he trampled on the Geneva Convention and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, he also systematically undermined the right to privacy of US citizens, the separation of powers and various forms of oversight in the US government.
McKay employs similar techniques to those used in his 2015 film The Big Short, in which he interrupted the plot to find quirky ways of explaining complicated financial instruments — specifically the subprime mortgage scam — in layman’s terms. In Vice, it’s the dubious “unitary executive theory” (which effectively grants the US president free and absolute reign) that requires no explanation. McKay has fun with various other meta-narrative devices along the way.
While George W Bush faced most of the world’s derision and critique, Cheney was the one running the show — from the moment the twin towers collapsed and throughout the “war on terror” that decimated Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, right up until he left office as simultaneously the most powerful and the least popular vice-president in US history.
Vice achieves something remarkable, turning the caricature of the Machiavellian schemer into a complex portrait of a man who realised, early on in his career, that the only meaningful principle in politics is the relentless pursuit of power — and who applied this principle throughout his four decades in Washington, DC.
The result is a fascinating insight into the operation of the Republican Party during this period. Cheney was there at the downfall of “Tricky Dicky” Richard Nixon; he served as chief of staff to Gerald Ford; he paid his dues as a congressman under Ronald Reagan; he was secretary of defence to George HW Bush. When Bill Clinton was elected, Cheney secured his power in the private sector as CEO of oil company Halliburton.
In 1991, Cheney drove operation Desert Storm in Iraq; 10 years later, he created the conditions for a “perfect storm” of corporate greed and right wing warmongering to maximise profit from Iraqi oil fields. The result, the film implies, was ISIS.
Vice connects other dots in convincing fashion. We see the growth of Fox News into a rabid propagandistic tool that allowed Republican politicians to act with the appearance of a comparatively “soft touch” (as Cheney tells his friend and former mentor Donald Rumsfeld, the crass and shady operator who had returned from the political wilderness to pick fights for the second Bush administration). We also see how the climate created by Fox would spiral out of control and facilitate the election of Donald Trump.
The financial crisis of 2008, the likely electoral fraud in 2000 that got George W into power, the cultivation of fossil fuel dependency in the 1980s, the US bombing of Cambodia in the 1970s — all of these are woven into a disturbing tapestry.
Much has been made of Christian Bale’s transformation into the puffy bald likeness of Cheney; the film’s only Oscar win was for make-up. McKay and his excellent cast deserved better. Indeed, what makes Vice such gripping viewing is the excoriation of external appearances, laying bare the moral decrepitude of an American body politic in which the constitution is of little consequence.
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