On October 19, 2007, President George Walker Bush was assassinated on his way out of a conference in downtown Chicago.
Death of a President, opening nationwide on Friday, is an investigative documentary into the events leading up to the shooting of the President and the aftermath’s steamroller effect on the country and the world.
There has been a critical backlash against the film from White House staffers, political figures such as Hilary Clinton and media corporations that have sworn not to show the movie. The film’s director Gabriel Range has even received a handful of death threats. How, they wonder, can Range, or any director for that matter, conjure up such an atrocity on film? As the disclaimer at the end of the credits emphasizes, “This film is fictional. It is set in the future.”
Compiling archival footage of protesters and news feeds with digitally rendered dramatizations, the film is impressive in its technicality. Supposed White House speech writers, secret service agents and forensics specialists all appear in news-style footage with the President and are featured in interviews explaining their thoughts and accounts. In one such interview the speech writer for the President explains that Bush had told her he did not mind protesters’ different opinions, but that he wished that they would demonstrate peacefully. Although fictional, these primary source testimonies, one degree away from the President himself, infuse reality into the words being spoken.
Herein lies the difficulty with the film: its presentation style is intrinsically truth-oriented. Documentary films use archival footage and interviews to construct some understanding of actual events. When this genre is mixed with future fiction, our imaginations begin to stretch out, filling in the unspoken with questions of, “What if?”
What if George Bush were assassinated? As the film progresses, Range explores the implications of racial scapegoating and the way the snowballing frenzy of collective consciousness blinds the individuals involved. Such a mass takes on its own character, dismissing reason to become reactionary. Anger and fear are powerful tools in opportunistic hands. Range portrays the management of fear by the U.S. government in light of post-9/11 anxiety, pinning the assassination on an Al-Qaeda accomplice despite conflicting evidence.
Amid the accounts of plausible events, it was often difficult to discern what was real footage and what was a construction of digital mastery. The audience is not meant to see the difference. Ambiguity is key. The message, however, is clear: just as the citizens in this future United States are left in the dark about the portrayed events, the audience is left without a way to distinguish between truth and fiction. Range speaks to a larger disconnect between governments and the governed, leaving us a bit discouraged, if not altogether disillusioned.
Amidst this disheartening message, there are moments in the film that pump up the action-genre excitement. The pound of bongo drums is set off by the united voices of youth in dissent. Faces and heads are masked by black hoods and red scarves, with mohawks, dreads and nose rings to accent the mix. They break the line to the motorcade, and one man connects with Bush’s car, slapping his hand down on the hood of the limo. The break is described by secret service agents in interviews, calling the action an unprecedented breach of security. There is urgency in their presence, weighed against the sheer panic of the law enforcement that is not prepared for the 12,000 bodies gathered.
Before seeing the film, I wondered if it would play out like a call for an assassination. Even if it did not promote such an event, I was sure that this idea would be at least glorified. In the end the film does not carry a moral tone, nor does it align itself with one side or the other in partisan politics. It allows its audience to ask the questions that dwell in the nether regions of taboo, and it offers some unsettling responses, though never spelling out a single answer.
