I honestly have some sympathy for the comedians performing at the Riyadh comedy festival, who have been getting dragged for taking enormous amounts of blood money from a medieval regime that discriminates against women and religious and sexual minorities and whose leadership ordered the execution of a journalist in cold blood in a Turkish consulate a few years back. Being a comedian is hard! It’s a hard life, with lots of travel, and no certainty about the next paycheck. You get your money where you can take it.
And, honestly, I don’t really have a moral problem with this on a macro level. Trade with bad actors happens all the time—just look at our reliance on China—and I think cultural boycotts are somewhere between pointless and counterproductive. If oil-flush oligarchs want to throw around some cash to get people to pretend their ridiculous barbarism isn’t a form of horrendous primitivism, who am I to judge? We all need to make the mortgage; if someone from The Kingdom wants to give me a million bucks to judge a film festival, well, I’d probably have to at least discuss it with my financial advisers.
What I do find kind of annoying is when comedians like Bill Burr play dumb about what they’re doing. “My whole fucking idea of Saudi Arabia is what I’ve seen on the news. I literally think I’m gonna fuckin’ land, ya know, and everybody’s going to be screaming ‘Death to America’ and they’re going to have like fucking machetes and want to chop my head off,” Burr said on his podcast. But Bill, man, surely you knew you’d be going to a Potemkin village where things are lightly westernized and some of the restrictions are loosened. I don’t expect the royals—whom Burr says “loved the show,” by the way; good job singing for your supper, man—to come at you with the bone saw because they want you to return to the United States and tell all the rubes in America that, hey, it’s pretty cool over there. Mission accomplished.
What I find very annoying is when guys like Dave Chappelle pretend that getting yelled at for making jokes about trans people or making jokes about Charlie Kirk means that “it’s easier to talk [in Riyadh] than it is in the United States.” To be clear, I think most of the jihads against Chappelle have been dumb—his routines have been funny and genuinely edgy in a way that I appreciate, even when I disagree with him—but they aren’t, you know, actual jihads. No one’s dismembering him in a closet because he pissed off the professional scolds at GLAAD. I’m glad the audience of rich Saudis enjoyed your material, Dave, but I am curious if they would’ve liked to hear from Mohammad al-Ghamadi, who was sentenced to death for tweeting.
(Don’t worry, al-Ghamadi’s sentence was reduced to thirty years after whining whiners in the west pointed out this was “insane barbarism.” I imagine he still has more difficulty talking than Chappelle, however.)
Anyway, I’m not going to run through the whole litany of literal government repression up to and including murder engaged in by the Saudi Royals, whose country is rated “not free” by Freedom House; none of the useful idiots at the Riyadh Comedy Festival will be likely to care, and I’m sure they’ll just throw out a “well whatabout the FCC in America” as if these are even remotely similar circumstances.1 I just wish they could feel a tiny modicum of shame for censoring themselves at the behest of people who oppose everything these supposed truth-tellers have claimed to believe in.
The Smashing Machine has a bunch of great performances but didn’t quite gel for me. However, it does have one of my favorite sequences of the year, in no small part because it’s set to one of my favorite songs of all time. From my review:
There’s a scene late in the film set to Bruce Springsteen’s “Jungleland”—diegetic at first as background music in their shared home, then soaringly nondiegetic as things come to a head and Roy Bittan’s thunderous organ sends us out—that is either the best scene of the year or the most self-parodic, a lover’s quarrel that turns heated then ugly then potentially deadly. I’m biased here (“Jungleland” is, maybe, my favorite song), but there’s something perfectly overwhelming about that track’s booming wall of sound scoring the moment that Dawn and Mark’s life comes tumbling down.
You can read the whole thing here.
On the bonus episode of Across the Movie Aisle this week, we discussed Paul Thomas Anderson’s American Century.
Paul Thomas Anderson's American Century
On this week’s special bonus episode, we look at the work of Paul Thomas Anderson as a filmmaker whose work spans much of the 20th century, particularly 20th-century America on the West Coast.
Hey, do me a favor and watch this short documentary about a funny moment in internet history when a group of trolls hijacked MTV’s Total Request Live for one day. It’s only seventeen minutes, and if you’re between the ages of 31 and 45 or so, I think you’ll love it.
It’s fun, right? Okay, now listen to my interview with the film’s director, Yourgo Artsitas, about why he made it and what he thinks it says about the internet and us.
Speaking of things that are fun, Bulwark Movie Club is fun! Jonathan Cohn was filling in for Sarah this week, and he had lots of thoughts about All the President’s Men. JVL had thoughts about word processors and typewriters. And I had thoughts about William Goldman. Check it out:
“All the President’s Men” vs. Trump’s Daily Insanity
The Bulwark Movie Club watches All the President’s Men, the film that turned Watergate into America’s founding journalistic myth. JVL, Jonathan Cohn, and Sonny Bunch discuss why the movie still works, what it says about the power of institutions, and how Nixon’s scandal compares to Trump’s “Watergate every day” politics.
Assigned Viewing: A Few Good Men
Hey, so, we’re talking A Few Good Men on the movie club this week; felt like a good week to talk about rights and responsibilities of the military in the face of potentially illegal orders.
That said: It’s only available for purchase for $15. It’s not available for free on a streaming service, nor is it available for rental. I myself bought it on 4K for $17 or something like that (it’s available from various retailers; Amazon had it in my hands less than 24 hours later). Maybe you can borrow it from your local library. But it’s deeply annoying that this movie—a big hit with a bunch of movie stars—isn’t easily rentable online. The internet is great, but the inability of the distributors and the streaming services to, at the very least, have a sort of permanent digital Blockbuster offering rentals of everything ever made available online is so frustrating.
They aren’t, but this is another good reason FCC chair Brendan Carr should keep his big mouth shut when it comes to television networks broadcasting criticism of Donald Trump. America should zealously defend its position as the last real bastion of free speech in the world.
Great take on the comedians. Fine, take the money if you must, but then don’t come back and gaslight us about how the Saudis really aren’t so bad after all like Bill Maher after his dinner with dear leader. Only worse.
Pete Davidson’s dad died on 9/11 and Pete agreed to perform for the people who helped murder him. It’s all fucking gross.