Rapping socialist senators and anti-corporate cyborgs

A friend of mine convinced me (it wasn’t hard) to sit down and watch Warren Beatty’s rap and politics fever dream, Bulworth, again the other night. The last time I saw the film I was in the middle of high school, and I remember being struck by both its vulgarity and its wit. But I also remember having the distinct impression that it offered something of a balanced criticism of the inadequacies of both sides of the political spectrum, leaning slightly left but delivering scathing attacks towards Republicans and Democrats.

Young and stupid doesn’t even begin to cover it.

The movie is so doggedly leftist that it might scare MoveOn. While it offers critiques of the Democratic party, they’re primarily railing against the party’s refusal to move far left enough. J. Billington Bulworth (Beatty), the Democratic Senator who takes up rapping and ornery behavior after putting a hit out on his own life, advocates socializing healthcare, claiming that socialism is a word his party should embrace. The villain is the head of an evil insurance company.

That I missed all this boggles my mind (which I’ll admit is easily boggled). Apparently, my understanding of policy was so weak at the tender age of fifteen that I completely missed the ultra-leftist bent to all of the protagonist’s proposals and focused entirely on the fact that the movie often criticized Republicans and Democrats in the same breath.

Bulworth is well made, with some nicely compressed photography that stresses deep shadows and vivid, hallucinogenic colors, but by the time it’s over, I felt like I’d somehow found my way into a Daily Kos meeting.

And just when I thought the barrage of liberal hooey was over, I made the mistake of turning on Robocop, which tore at me with a nasty second left hook to my already bruised political intake system. Crazyman Paul Verhoeven’s corporate dystopia posits a future in which privatization has overwhelmed ordinary citizens, creating a corporate oligarchy. Once again, power dispersal and market forces are seen as an evil that must be regulated.

I’ve seen this movie several times, but never bothered to think too much about its social implications. What worries me here is not that I missed it, but the implication about the larger public. If I, who, despite my limited, easily-boggled mental capacities, am relatively well informed about policy and quite well versed in interpreting film, managed to completely look over these blatantly obvious political points, how likely is it that anyone else is seeing these things? Hollywood is spending hundreds of millions on socialist tracts and no one seems to be paying any attention.

Still, I’d definitely be in support of some Robocop-style criminal justice. Anyone who’s seen the movie knows there’s one fictional rapist who won’t be harming anyone soon.