“The vice presidency is mostly a, uh,
it’s a symbolic job.”
Over the last few years, director Adam McKay
has been quietly and powerfully transforming what
popular visual storytelling looks like.
With his academy-award winning films The Big Short and Vice,
and now the Amazon series he’s executive producing
‘The Giant Beast that is the Global Economy’.
“Whether you like it or not, we’re all connected,
by money.”
McKay has shown himself to be the master
of creating fun entertainment out of the kind of complex,
confusing topics that Hollywood would traditionally dismiss
as far too boring and difficult to touch.
Who else could turn the subprime mortgage crisis
and unitary executive theory into the stuff
of mainstream entertainment?
Scorsese makes a film about finance,
and we get lines like this:
“I know you're not following what I'm saying anyway, right?
That's okay.
That doesn't matter.
The real question is this, ‘Was all this legal?
Absolutely f—ing not.’"
McKay makes a film about the same subject,
also featuring Margot Robbie, but instead of cutting
the boring financial details in favor of this,
McKay finds ways to make the topic itself
come alive for us.
“Here’s world famous chef, Anthony Bourdain,
to explain.”
“Being the crafty and morally onerous chef that I am,
whatever crappy levels of the bard that I don’t sell,
I throw into a seafood stew.”
He’s like that really amazing teacher
with a knack for getting through
to his students in their own language.
“So now he’s going to short the bonds.
Which means to bet against.”
McKay first made a name for himself
as the director of Will Ferrell comedies
like ‘Anchorman’,
“I’m in a glass cage of emotion.”
He also co-founded Funny or Die,
and this is him and his daughter
in the viral comedy, ‘The Landlord’:
“I want my money!”
McKay’s roots as a funny guy
are crucial to what he’s doing,
as he imaginatively sketches out scenarios
to find humor in dry material.
But another big element of McKay’s recent work
has been around for a while in cinema,
in one form or another, though its generally been ignored
by Hollywood and most audiences.
And that is the Essay Film.
Vice is referred to most often as a biopic,
but it’s really an Essay Film –
driven by editing to put forward an argument,
“The vice presidency is also defined by
the President.
And if were to come to a, uh, different understanding.”
cutting in real-world footage, and full of experimental,
stylistic flourishes like going early
to fake end credits or dreaming up
a faux-Shakespearean exchange between the Cheneys.
It’s primarily concerned not with story or reportage—
but with ideas and thought.
Whatever you think of Vice or The Big Short,
it’s hard not to admire McKay’s sheer creativity
with the visual and dramatic forms.
“And Congress had no choice
but to break up the big banks,
and regulate the mortgages and derivatives industries.”
[shattering]
“Just kidding.”
By making an essay out of the raw material
of a fictional biopic, he’s experimenting
with what a popcorn movie or show is allowed to be.
He’s challenging audiences to understand
and intelligently engage with world events.
And you might say he’s a trailblazer
for helping this traditionally more academic form,
the essay film, into the kind of thing
you want to watch with your friends
on a Saturday night.
“Is there a correlation between richness
and dickness?”
So let’s go into what we mean
by ‘essay film’ and why McKay’s use of the form
makes him one of the most innovative
and interesting directors working today.
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[speaking French]
Alright, let’s talk about the Essay Film.
You might notice that you’re watching one right now.
Yup, we ourselves at the Take make video essays.
The definition of an essay film, film essay
or video essay is fluid,
but typically the form is defined by things like:
editing taking on a primary role.
In the Essay Film, the author’s voice
resides at least as much in the editing as in the script
or production.
Blurring the distinction between documentary and fiction.
And it also might feel personal.
Oftentimes the author takes on a kind of persona
that’s involved in the essay.
[speaking French]
Creating a direct, conversational relationship
between the author and viewer.
[speaking French]
Because of the way that I'm talking to you right now,
you’re aware of a sort of dialogue between us,
you’re aware of yourself – whereas in a standard fiction narrative
you get immersed and basically forget
your presence there.
A fiction film generally doesn’t want you to think
about the fact that there’s someone there
editing together and creating this story,
but the essay film is self-reflexive.
It’s making us notice the cuts, the construction,
[speaking French]
and by extension hopefully making us notice,
in a Brechtian sense, the artifices and structures
of our world.
And that’s the point.
To inspire the person taking in the essay to think.
“So what should you trust?
Your government, a shiny medal,
a computer code, or none of the above.”
Citation, or drawing on lots of other sources,
like images, films, or books.
If you’re writing an essay for English class,
and you don’t cite some evidence to back up your points,
you’re probably going to get marked down.
Citations in a film essay serve this purpose, too,
and they also create a feeling of conversing
with other works.
In Hans Richter’s 1940 Essay, “The Film Essay”,
he wrote that :
“ In its effort to make visible
the invisible world of imaginations,
thoughts and ideas, the essayistic film
can tap into an incomparably larger
reservoir of expressive means than the pure documentary film.”
And quote:
“With this abundance of means even ‘dry’ thoughts
and ‘difficult’ ideas assume a color
and entertaining quality.”
So what Richter describes here is essentially
the heart of what McKay does so well.
He makes the driest of topics entertaining,
and he makes invisible ideas visible.
“Jamie and Charlie found markets
we’ll sell options very cheaply on things
they think will never happen.
So when they were wrong, they were wrong small.
But when they were right, they were right big.”
[singing]
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when the essay film
was born as the definition is so fluid,
but it becomes a more defined genre
in the post-World War II period, in the 50s and 60s.
The idea of the “essay” itself comes from the French write, Montaigne.
[speaking French]
He took the word from the French for “to try.”
So before our common understanding
of the essay as a piece of non-fiction writing
guided by a thesis, Montaigne’s idea of the essay
was about testing out ideas, attempting.
[speaking French]
And film essayists,
like Godard,
are very consciously following in the searching,
experimental, playful footsteps of Montaigne’s essays.
And we can see this heritage also in what McKay is doing.
He tries things out in Vice.
It strikes him that there’s a Shakespearean,
Macbeth subtext to the Cheney’s.
“All these Shakespearean themes
come into play very naturally.”
They’re driven by bottomless ambition,
and Lynn is a veritable Lady Macbeth in the way
she whips her husband into shape.
“Either you stand up straight, and you get your back straight
and you have the courage to become someone,
or I’m gone.”
So McKay decides to play out these themes
in a fake, Shakespeare inspired scene
between the couple in bed.
The results are funny, and obviously not what
really happened, but that’s the whole point.
McKay is testing out different versions
of what could have been, from the plausible
to the totally outlandish, in order to circle around
the deeper, unknowable truth of what was really
driving this man under the surface.
This spirit of trying, testing is what really
gives Vice its creative power.
It’s not afraid to experiment, to go off the rails.
So just as Montaigne was thinking through his writing,
McKay is thinking through cinema –
he’s making connections, and encouraging us
to make new connections, too.
He’s telling us not to tune out or tell ourselves,
‘Uh, who can be bothered to really understand
all this complex jargon.’
“Mortgage-backed securities, sub-prime loans, tranches
Does it make you feel bored?
Or Stupid?
Well, it’s supposed to.”
Because that’s exactly what people in
positions of power want us to do.
“Wall Street loves to use confusing terms
so that you think only they can do
what they can do.
Or even better, for you just to leave them
the f** alone.”
[music playing]
Another major thing that defines the video essay
in most people’s minds today, is that it’s making an argument.
Michael Moore is an example of someone
who’s mastered the argument-driven essay.
Whether or not you agree with him,
the reason Moore has made such an impression,
ever since ‘Bowling for Columbine’,
is that this is a guy with a true talent
for stringing together footage and voiceover
in order to make his case.
“He’s also one of the great people
of stringing together an argument.”
There’s a split among academics
over whether an essay film should be more question,
that searching, playful, personal rumination,
or answer, the evidence-based
structured argument.
Still, just as a lot of people would say that a written essay
needs to make a cohesive point,
to many folks the glue that holds
contemporary video essay together is some kind of thesis.
So what, then, is Vice’s argument?
We’d say it’s this:
That much of what’s wrong with the world as we know it,
can be traced back to the culprit of Dick Cheney’s
incompetent heart.
This motif of Cheney’s failing heart ties the film together:
the plot is punctuated periodically by the character’s comically
casual announcements of his various heart attacks.
The whole movie is narrated by the dead soldier who gave
his heart to Cheney.
Going back to this idea of making invisible thoughts visible,
McKay gets at this point that Dick Cheney
had too little feeling for his fellow man
symbolically, via a number of
imagined shots of Cheney’s literal heart,
planting a mental question:
Would our world be what it is today,
if this heart had not been so weak,
so inadequate, so greedy and uncaring?
“Like a puppet show, but much more enjoyable.”
What if Dick Cheney had had a heart
that worked?
. Out of this argument
about Cheney’s heart,
McKay is making a broader one.
“This was the guy who had his hand at the wheel
and quietly changed our lives more than anyone.”
He’s asserting, through editing and
visual allusions to recent events,
that many of Cheney’s decisions and actions led directly
to the issues we're grappling with now.
For example, seizing on the threat
of a national emergency to expand presidential power.
The ever-increasing power of corporations and politics,
and the branding of ideas to obscure their complexity
or true meaning.
“Make sure you work in the phrase
we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,
that focus group through the roof.”
“I kept being astounded by how much this guy
really changed the course of America.”
Whether you agree with McKay’s arguments
in Vice is your business.
But McKay’s ability to bring these essayistic techniques
in a traditional Hollywood format
is exciting for the film medium.
The essay film has historically
been a pretty obscure, high-brow form or,
in recent years, it’s become
a fast-growing field on YouTube
through channels like The Take.
So we have to give McKay
his due for bringing the essay film
into new territory.
By merging the essay with the biopic
and showing what it means to think through cinema,
he opens up new, creative tools for storytellers,
and new intellectual tools for us, as we try to become more,
informed and engaged citizens of our world.
“I believe, we can make this work.”
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