Totally Under Control

“When nature set loose a terrible disease, it took advantage of the very connectivity we had manufactured.”

TOTALLY UNDER CONTROL makes the case that the Trump administration’s constant retconning rationalizations to President Donald Trump’s rudderless edicts is central to the cascade of failures to contain the SARS-CoV-2 (Coronavirus) pandemic.  This includes the dismantling of key roles and teams, including the National Security Council’s Global Health Security Team in May of 2018, and willful ignorance of President Obama’s Pandemic Playbook.  These acts created a perfect storm of events turning a manageable crisis into a tsunami of death.

In a February 25 press briefing, as President Trump returns from India, Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, contradicted the administration’s nonchalance, “We expect we will see community spread in this country.  It’s not so much a question if this will happen any more, but rather more a question of exactly when this will happen and how many people in this country will have severe illness.”

Trump thrashed, markets panicked, and lockdowns began.  Negligence from the administration prevented accurate tests and masks from rapid deployment.  Mike Bowen, President of Prestige Ameritech, broke down in Congressional testimony, “I can’t help all these people.”

Bowen acknowledges his company alone could have supplied 7 million masks a day if they had the proper support when needed.

Instead of learning from their mistakes, the administration persistently doubled down on them.  When wishful thinking didn’t materialize into a decline in cases, the administration concentrated on laying blame rather than constructing solutions.  Most perversely, they drove up the price of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) and hoarded a “federal stockpile” which Senior Adviser and nepotism beneficiary Jared Kushner obtusely insists is reserved for the federal government, not the states.

A volunteer tasked with retroactively justifying no-bid contracts for PPE intimates that they had to sign NDA’s.  Writer/director Alex Gibney rather boldly lands an interview with Dr. Vladimir Zelenko who planted the idea in President Trump’s head that hydroxychloroquine is a viable drug therapy.  A primary care physician, Dr. Zelenko has no experience in epidemiology.  Gibney lets him assert that he’d seen improvement in patients, but it’s purely anecdotal.  The administration rationalizes this unscientific (and potentially deadly) course of treatment solely because a family physician put a video on Twitter—Trump’s shiny object du jour.

The film works in the narrative style of his other documentaries, including ENRON: THE SMARTEST GUYS IN THE ROOM and last year’s CITIZEN K.  It differs, in that respect, from the more taut, structured thesis style of INSIDE JOB and CAPITAL IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY.  It can therefore, at times, feel like information overload.

Gibney doesn’t so much pull these threads together into a recap and conclusion as he ends the chronological information dump on a punchline: The Woodward tapes revealing Trump’s concealment of the severity of the virus, and a footnote that Trump tested positive for COVID-19 days after the completion of the film.  Like a Sorkin/Fincher joint, the credits roll to the tune of “Time Has Come Today” by The Chambers Brothers.

Gibney’s approach might work for some subjects like the fall of Enron, but in our inured, post-traumatic gaze of the disinformation age we run the risk of passively engaging with the unstructured, linear thought-stream.  It becomes background noise, indistinguishable from the daily news cycle—a meta-film, in a sense, involved in, to paraphrase McLuhan, its own “all inclusive nowness.”

I don’t mean to suggest the film is bad, but I’m the choir to whom Gibney’s preaching.  That’s shooting fish in a barrel.  A more concisely and cogently structured film is needed if we’re to rip people away from the warm glow of attractively simple-minded propaganda that politicized this pandemic in the first place.  If we accept the movie not in spite of, but because of its packaging, without carefully considering its contents, does that make us the Donald—not truth seekers but photon receptacles?