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US television‘This is about power’: the truth behind Impeachment: American Crime Story A new series relives the affair between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky and here, those involved remember and reflect on a national scandalDavid Smith in Washington@ More
Documentary filmsThe Big Scary ‘S’ Word: why are people so terrified of socialism?In a new documentary, film-maker Yael Bridge looks back and forward to see why some people have been so repelled by socialism and how things might change in the future David Smith in Washington@ More
“This isn’t Dallas, it’s Nashville! SING!” The desperate speaker is rhinestone-suited old-time country singer Haven Hamilton, played by Henry Gibson, in this rereleased state-of-America ensemble classic from 1975, written by Joan Tewkesbury and directed by Robert Altman. The toupee-wearing star has just been shot in the arm by a lone gunman in the crowd at a political rally featuring wholesomely patriotic country music, and the crowd is on the verge of panic. Only soothing tunes will calm them, and eventually a sprightly number called It Don’t Worry Me finally gets them singing along, forgetting all about the murder attempt they’ve all just witnessed. (Like Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, from a year later, this is a movie that is attempting to deal with the trauma of the Kennedy assassination as much as, or more, than the Vietnam war.)It’s an appropriately sensational and bizarre set piece to close this unique film and, watching it again for the first time since its last revival 17 years ago, what strikes me is its complex attitude to country music itself. Nashville is of course the home of country, the home of the Grand Ole Opry; the music is not really ironised in this film, not mocked, even when the singers are at their most narcissistic and self-serving and when the songs are at their cheesiest – especially Hamilton’s toe-curling For the Sake of the Children, a mawkish song from a man to his mistress, piously saying he has to return to his marriage. The music, playing almost continuously, is the glue that holds the movie together. It may sound schmaltzy, but the city-slickers deriding it sound worse.This is Gerald Ford’s America, on the verge of the bicentennial in 1976 … an event everyone hopes will heal the agonies of Watergate. An independent presidential candidate is coming to Nashville, hoping to promote his new ideas: taxing churches, abolishing the electoral college, removing lawyers from government. But for some Kennedy lovers present, the final dismissal of Nixon just brings back unhappy memories of how Nixon actually won against Kennedy in Tennessee in 1960, and the Kennedy motif is an unhappy omen.So too is a public fainting fit suffered by the local country star Barbara Jean (Ronee Blakley), who has perhaps intuited the hysteria and anxiety in the air. Allen Garfield is great as her boorish husband-slash-manager Barnett. Geraldine Chaplin is insufferably patronising British journalist Opal, who has a fling with handsome singer Tom (Keith Carradine), who is also having an affair with Linnea (a superb Lily Tomlin), with whom Wade (Robert DoQui) is poignantly in love. Linnea is an unsatisfied married woman with hearing-impaired children whose sleazy husband Delbert (Ned Beatty) is working with visiting TV producer John Triplette (Michael Murphy) to set up a lucrative media-political deal. All these – and many more – characters’ lives crisscross, their dialogue overlapping in the middle-distance sound design while the candidate’s megaphone-van trundles around the city, blaring its choric political commentary, an ambient effect rather like the tannoy announcements in M*A*S*H.The film’s most brutal moment is the treatment of Sueleen Gay, the waitress and tone-deaf wannabe country star played by Gwen Welles, who is tricked by the unspeakable Delbert and Triplette into appearing on stage, purely because they want her to do a striptease for the braying good ol’ boys present. Poor Sueleen thinks they wanted to hear her sing. It’s an ugly moment of abuse and, perhaps tellingly, the band switch from wholesome country to traditional burlesque music for this humiliation.Altman’s control of this sprawling material is wonderful – though Tewkesbury’s screenwriting achievement should not be forgotten. This is the heart of the troubled mid-70s American zeitgeist: angry, sentimental, violent, comic, afraid. More
The actor Matthew McConaughey appears to be seriously considering entering politics, according to a report on Sunday which said the Dallas Buyer’s Club star has been “quietly making calls to influential people in Texas political circles” as he mulls a run for governor.McConaughey, 51, was born in Uvalde, Texas, and lives in Austin, the state capital, with his wife and children. Last year he published an autobiography of sorts and in March he told a Texas podcast running for governor was “a true consideration”.“I’m looking into now again, what is my leadership role?” he said. “Because I do think I have some things to teach and share, and what is my role? What’s my category in my next chapter of life that I’m going into?”Brendan Steinhauser, an Austin-based Republican strategist, told Politico, which reported the McConaughey calls, he was “a little more surprised that people aren’t taking him more seriously, honestly.“Celebrity in this country counts for a lot … it’s not like some C-list actor no one likes. He has an appeal.”McConaughey’s other recent screen credits include The Wolf of Wall Street, for Martin Scorsese; The Gentlemen, directed by Guy Ritchie; and Free State of Jones, about a civil war deserter who led an uprising against the slave-owning Confederacy.He also has an impressive three entries – The Paperboy, The Wedding Planner and Serenity – in Hear Me Out, a Guardian series in which writers make a case for why widely loathed movies deserve to be re-examined.In the US, entertainment often bleeds into politics. Ronald Reagan was an actor before campaigning for rightwing causes, becoming governor of California and beating an incumbent, Jimmy Carter, for the White House. The bodybuilder and actor Arnold Schwarzenegger became governor of California, the wrestler Jesse Ventura governor of Minnesota.And, of course, when Donald Trump ran for the White House in 2016, he owed his fame more to a reality TV hit, The Apprentice, than to his bankruptcy-flecked career in real estate.McConaughey is not alone in pondering a switch from Hollywood to a governor’s mansion. The reality TV star Caitlyn Jenner is in the early – if faltering – stages of a run in California, as Republicans seek to recall Gavin Newsom.The Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, will seek a third term next year. He remains a formidable figure, despite controversy over his handling of a winter storm earlier this year which crippled the power grid, left 125 Texans dead and made state Republicans a national laughing stock.Reagan, Schwarzenegger, Trump and Jenner ran as Republicans. Ventura was the candidate of the Reform Party, his victory a major shock.McConaughey’s views are mostly a mystery. Karl Rove, a senior adviser to the last governor of Texas to become president, George W Bush, told Politico he found a McConaughey run “improbable, but not out of the question” and said “the question is: Would he run as a Republican? A Democrat? Independent? And where is he on the political scale?“He says he has a funny phrase about being a hardcore centrist, but what party would he run under?”Democratic hopes of turning Texas blue – or at least purple, away from its baked-in ruby red Republicanism – have continually come up short.In 2018, Beto O’Rourke, a congressman, made national headlines but failed to eject Ted Cruz from the US Senate. In 2020 the state’s other Republican senator, John Cornyn, also survived a much-hyped challenge.Earlier this month a long slate of Democratic candidates in a race for an open US House seat effectively cancelled each other out, two Republicans making the runoff.O’Rourke failed to parlay his fame into a successful presidential run and has yet to say if he will seek to challenge Abbott. Julián Castro, a former mayor of San Antonio, US housing secretary and candidate for the Democratic nomination, could also run.McConaughey’s star status is proving a considerable lure for progressives but many fear a run as an independent. Most observers reason that would only succeed in splitting the vote and ushering Abbott back into power.A leading Democratic strategist, Paul Begala, told Politico: “Texas doesn’t need a third party, Matthew! We need a second party.” More
The professional wrestler turned star actor Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson said on Monday that he would run for US president if he felt he had enough support from Americans.Johnson, 48, one of the highest-paid and most popular actors in the United States, has been flirting with a possible White House bid for several years.“I do have that goal to unite our country and I also feel that if this is what the people want, then I will do that,” Johnson said when asked about his presidential ambitions in an interview broadcast on the Today show on Monday.The ex-wrestler did not say which party he would represent or when he might launch any bid for the White House.His remarks follow an online public opinion poll released last week that found some 46% of Americans would consider voting for Johnson.Johnson, whose work includes the rebooted Jumanji movie franchise and the TV show Young Rock, joins a long list of American celebrities who have run for political office.They include Terminator star Arnold Schwarzenegger who became governor of California, former wrestler Jesse Ventura who became governor of Minnesota and former actor Ronald Reagan who become president as did former “Apprentice” star Donald Trump.More currently actor Matthew McConaughey and former Olympic champion and reality TV star Caitlyn Jenner are reported to be weighing potential runs for governor in Texas and California respectively. More
Matthew McConaughey has announced he is “seriously considering” a run for Texas governor, a year before the state election.The actor revealed his intention on a recent episode of Crime Stoppers of Houston’s The Balanced Voice podcast on Wednesday. He told the host, Rania Mankarious, that running for governor was a “true consideration”.“I’m looking into now again, what is my leadership role?” he said. “Because I do think I have some things to teach and share, and what is my role? What’s my category in my next chapter of life that I’m going into?”If McConaughey launches a gubernatorial campaign, he will face Greg Abbott, a Republican who is up for re-election.This isn’t the first time the 51-year-old Oscar winner has hinted at the idea. When asked in November 2020 by the conservative talk radio host Hugh Hewitt whether he would consider a bid, he responded, “It would be up to the people more than it would me.” He called politics a “broken business” and said it would only garner more interest when it “redefines its purpose”.McConaughey’s political affiliation is unknown, and many online are speculating whether he would run as a Republican or Democrat. While there is no clear indication of which side he falls on, his past comments on hot-button issues such as gun violence, masks and defunding the police can offer some clarity.In October, McConaughey was invited on the Joe Rogan Experience, the popular podcast, where he discussed topics including being a Christian in Hollywood and defunding the police. He said some Hollywood liberals went too far left.Discussing his religion, he said: “Some people in our industry, not all of them, there’s some that go to the left so far … that go to the illiberal left side so far, that is so condescending and patronizing to 50% of the world that need the empathy that the liberals have … To illegitimize them because they say they are a believer is just so arrogant, and in some ways hypocritical, to me.”When asked about defunding the police, McConaughey gave a careful response on how he would attempt to improve relations between police and the community. “It’s almost like it should have been renamed because ‘defund’ does not sound anything like there’s been money reallocated to different areas of handling some police exercise,” he said.“The community and the police need to get back together, and the community needs to say, ‘Here’s what’s unfair. Here’s how I feel it’s unfair as a Black man or a person of color or whatever the situation. Here’s my problem with my relationship with you as cops,” he continued.McConaughey said his life practice was to meet in the middle and compromise, which is clear on his other political stances. “The two sides got to talk,” he said on the press tour for the film White Boy Rick. “Hey, where can we reach across the aisle here? Find a compromise for the betterment of all of us?”The actor spoke out on the “epidemic” of gun violence in 2018, taking a different stance from his more progressive colleagues. He showed concern that the March for Our Lives, organized after the Parkland high school shooting, would be “hijacked” by some anti-gun movement, saying that the march was for “rightful, just and responsible gun ownership – but against assault rifles, against unlimited magazines and for following up on the regulations”.Early in the pandemic, McConaughey filmed pro-mask PSAs and interviewed Dr Anthony Fauci on Instagram. In an interview with Jesse Will for Men’s Journal, he lamented how politicized mask-wearing had been by both sides of the spectrum. “It became apparent that there was no plan. Our leaders were scrambling,” he said.In the same interview, he touched on the possible message of a hypothetical campaign – not the “Make America all right, all right, all right again” many of his fans joked about, but a more serious “meet me in the middle – I dare you”. The message follows the same philosophy as his bestselling autobiography, Greenlights: “When facing any crisis, I’ve found that a good plan is to first recognize the problem, then stabilize the situation, organize the response, then respond.”Regardless of his political affiliation, McConaughey’s love for the Lone Star state is evident in his many philanthropic projects through his foundation, the Just Keep Livin’ Organization. When his home state was hit with a severe winter storm in February, McConaughey hosted a virtual benefit through his foundation to provide Texans with the “bare necessities”. More
With movie theaters closed all over the world due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Hollywood studios had little reason for celebration over the past year. In business for over a century, Universal Pictures (founded in 1912), Paramount (1912), Warner Bros. (1923), Walt Disney (1923) and Columbia Pictures (1924) now have an extra reason to be concerned. In 2020, China took over Hollywood’s crown as the world’s biggest movie market, with a revenue of $3.2 billion, 84% of which came from domestic sales.
Foreign-Language Entertainment Is Having Its Soft-Power Moment
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Is this new status enough for China? Probably not. New blockbusters will soon rebalance these numbers, but soft power — the ability to seduce people from all over the world through culture — takes time to build up. Soft power also brings lasting income to its country of origin in terms of products and services, like tourism for example. When in 1934, Walt Disney began work on “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” other film studio chiefs derided the project as “Disney’s Folly,” since adults, not children, were considered to be primary consumers. These executives forgot that children watch films over and over again and want all the related merchandise. “Snow White” went on to become the first film in history to gross $100 million, selling 400 million tickets from 1937 to 1948.
Welcome to Chinawood
These are just numbers. Disney’s greatest achievement was making his creations into lucrative vehicles of US culture for decades to come. That is what China wants to achieve. It has been taking similar steps ever since farmer-turned-entrepreneur Xu Wenrong began building Hengdian World Studios in the 1990s. Known as Chinawood, it became the largest outdoor film studio in the world and one of China’s biggest domestic tourist attractions, offering historic film sets, a resort hotel and live performances. Marketing itself “China’s tourism and performing arts capital,” Chinawood attracts thousands of TV shows and film productions every year.
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Also, since fewer than 40 foreign films are allowed to take a bite of this massive market due to a strict quota system, Chinawood also houses foreign productions like “The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor,” a Hollywood-Chinawood co-production (these escape quota restrictions), starring the likes of Brendan Fraser and Jet Li, grossed over $400 million worldwide in the first 21 weeks of its release.
Is this enough to make Chinawood a new soft power? The answer is, probably not. Because Chinawood productions face a similar challenge as all the other blockbusters shot in the country, these films often lack creativity, self-criticism, audacity and freedom. Take the recent historical war drama, Guan Hu’s “The Eight Hundred,” for example. The film — at $470 million, 2020’s top-grossing production — pushed China to the number one spot in global box office revenues. However, most of this profit comes from China itself and not international markets. While European and US theaters still struggle to open because of COVID-19, even without the pandemic, it’s hard to say that such productions could help the Chinese film industry overseas.
“The Eight Hundred” was abruptly pulled from a scheduled premiere at the Shanghai Film Festival in 2019 without an explanation. A version shorter by 11 minutes later opened in theaters, with much fewer scenes involving Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang forces. Besides likely censorship, what may explain the little impact the film had internationally, as the film critic Tony Rayns suggests, is that while avoiding the “rabid China-is-top-dog quality of the Wolf Warrior movies,” its “spirit is resolutely neo-nationalist,” with “all the bombast and jingoism of the current moment.”
Hollywood became an effective soft powerhouse not only because of million-dollar budgets and top-quality products, but also thanks to creative freedom. For instance, Oliver Stone’s “Born on the Fourth of July” (1989) and Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” (1979), both masterpieces, were expressly critical of US military intervention in Vietnam. The films are also on the patriotic side, with American values overemphasized. However, by criticizing America’s own culture and politics, the films are far from being hard-power propaganda.
Hard Power Interference
The Communist Party of China (CPP), on the other hand, interferes directly in cultural productions. According to a report by James Tager, PEN America’s deputy director of Free Expression Research and Policy, since 2011, the CCP’s Central Committee issued a statement declaring the “urgency for China to strengthen its cultural soft power and global cultural influence.” As Louisa Lim and Julia Bergin write in The Guardian, the party is trying to “reshape the global information environment with massive infusions of money” with the aim being to “influence public opinion overseas in order to nudge foreign governments into making policies favorable toward China’s Communist Party.”
The official People’s Daily once declared, “we cannot be soft on soft power,” calling for culture must be exported in order to strengthen China’s international stance. Chinawood is part of this effort, which includes $10 billion spent annually on public diplomacy, in contrast with $2 billion allocated by the US Department of State in 2018. Soft power works well when China opens hundreds of Confucius Institutes to spread its language and culture around the world. What doesn’t work is when the same party severely punishes Chinese ethnical minorities, like the Muslim Uighurs facing persecution in Xinjiang.
China already has an important cultural soft power: its art, poetry, painting, sculpture and pottery, from the early imperial dynasties to the 20th century, coveted by museums and collectors around the world. It succeeds because the state hard power doesn’t interfere significantly with it. But when it comes to contemporary culture — films, games, TV shows and apps like Tik Tok — Chinese hard power seems to impose harmful control. That’s not how soft power works. It needs freedom and self-criticism to produce genuine and seductive art.
George Orwell once said that “Journalism is printing what someone does not want printed; everything else is public relations.” The phrase also pertains to the arts and the entertainment industry. When President Xi Jinping says that “the stories of China should be well told, voices of China well spread and characteristics of China well explained,” by “well” he probably means “positive.” That is definitely not how one wins soft power for the long term.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
Stormy Daniels has said she could not remember key details of the sexual liaison she claims to have had with Donald Trump, until seeing a film about Roger Ailes’ sexual harassment of women at Fox News prompted her to remember.“I went to see that movie Bombshell,” she said, “and suddenly it just came back.”Daniels, an adult film star and director whose birth name is Stephanie Clifford, was speaking to Michael Cohen on the former Trump lawyer’s podcast, Mea Culpa, made by Audio Up Media and distributed by PodcastOne and LiveXLive. Excerpts were shared with the Guardian.Daniels also described Trump “doing his best yet horrifyingly disturbing impression of Burt Reynolds”, on a bed, clad only in his underwear.Daniels claims to have had sex with Trump in Nevada in 2006. He denies it, but a $130,000 hush money payment to Daniels reimbursed by Trump contributed to Cohen’s downfall in 2018.Trump’s longtime fixer was jailed for tax fraud, lying to Congress and violations of campaign finance law. He cooperated with investigators and published a book, Disloyal, while completing a three-year sentence.The payment to Daniels, and Cohen’s role in a payment to another woman, Playboy model Karen McDougal, during the 2016 election, are at the centre of ongoing investigations. Stripped of the protections of office, Trump is vulnerable to prosecution.Daniels’ appearance on Cohen’s podcast marks a rapprochement between the two. After Cohen orchestrated Trump’s attempts to keep Daniels quiet, Daniels had harsh words for Cohen in her own book, Full Disclosure.Daniels called Cohen a “dim bulb” and “a complete fucking moron”. She also detailed what she claims was a threat to her safety and that of her daughter, allegedly from Trump. In 2018, she said: “It never occurred to any of these men that I would someday have a voice.”Cohen is now a vocal critic of his old boss. Daniels remains a thorn in Trump’s side. “Both of our stories will be forever linked with Donald Trump, but also with one another,” Cohen said, apologising for inflicting “needless pain” and adding: “Thanks for giving me a second chance.”The details of Daniels’ alleged liaison with Trump at a charity golf event in Lake Tahoe in 2006 are well known, not least thanks to her book, which the Guardian first reported.“I couldn’t remember,” she told Cohen, “how I got from standing in that bathroom doorway to underneath him on the bed, like I couldn’t remember how my dress came off or how my shoes got off, because I know I took my shoes off because I clearly remember putting them back on and they were buckled, like they’re really gold strappy heels that were not easy to, you know, come off.“And I just, there’s like 60 seconds where I just had no recollection of it and it’s not in the book, and nobody really wanted to ask about it. They just wanted to know the details of what his appendage, or lack of appendage, looked like. And I was like, it really bothered me for, like, years, like, I definitely wasn’t drinking so I’m like why don’t I remember this.“And I’ll never forget this moment. I went to see that movie Bombshell, and suddenly it just came back.”Bombshell was directed by Jay Roach, starred Nicole Kidman, Charlize Theron and Margot Robbie and was released in 2019. It told the story of the downfall of Roger Ailes, chief executive of Fox News and a key Trump ally, over sexual harassment.Trump denies accusations of sexual harassment and assault by multiple women. Shortly before the 2016 election, Fox News killed a story about Trump and Daniels. Ailes resigned in July that year and died the following May.Daniels’ own case against Trump for defamation is heading for the supreme court. She told Cohen: “I’ve already lost everything, so I’m taking it all the way.”Of Lake Tahoe in 2006, Daniels also told Cohen she now remembered thinking, ‘Oh fuck, how do I get myself in this situation. And I remember even thinking I could definitely fight his fat ass, I can definitely outrun him. There’s a bodyguard at the door. But I wasn’t threatened, I was not physically threatened.“And then so I tried to sidestep … I was like, trying to remember really quickly, where did I leave my purse, like I gotta get out of here. And I went to sidestep and he stood up off the bed and was like ‘This is your chance.’ And I was like, ‘What?’ and he was like, ‘You need to show me how bad you want it or do you just want to go back to the trailer park.’”Daniels has said Trump told her he would get her a slot on The Apprentice, the reality TV show for which he was then most famous. At the time of the alleged encounter, Trump’s third wife, Melania Trump, had recently given birth to their son, Barron.Daniels told Cohen she went to the bathroom, then “was genuinely like startled to see him waiting” when she came out.“I just froze,” she said, “and I didn’t know what to say. He had stripped down to his underwear and was perched on the bed doing his best yet horrifyingly disturbing impression of Burt Reynolds.”She “didn’t say anything for years”, she said, “because I didn’t remember.” Now the star of a ghost-hunting reality TV show, Spooky Babes, she added: “I’ve been face to face with evil in the most intimate way. Demons don’t scare me any more.”Daniels has described what she says happened next. Speaking to CBS 60 Minutes in 2018, she said: “And I was like, ‘Ugh, here we go.’ And I just felt like maybe it was sort of … I had it coming for making a bad decision for going to someone’s room alone.”The interviewer, Anderson Cooper, said: “And you had sex with him.”“Yes,” Daniels said. More
