A couple of months ago, I had a movie experience that truly shook me up. It was early December, and I was in the middle of my end-of-the-year marathon, catching up with the big prestigious awards-season films I’d missed. One of them was “I’m Still Here,” Walter Salles’ acclaimed true-life drama, set in Brazil in 1970, about a family whose exuberant and loving existence falls off a cliff when the father, Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello), is taken in for police questioning by the country’s military dictatorship. His wife, Eunice (Fernanda Torres), is told that it’s a routine interrogation, and that he’ll be back within a matter of hours. But that doesn’t happen. The hours stretch into days, then weeks, and then months. He is never heard from again.
I’ve been watching movies about political oppression, and scenarios like this one, for most of my life. But in all that time, I can honestly say that I’ve rarely experienced such a bone-chilling reaction as the one I had watching “I’m Still Here.” The movie itself, especially the first hour, is powerful. But that’s not what it was; I’ve seen plenty of powerful political films. What felt new to me — and intensely disquieting — was taking in a saga of repression like this one and wondering if it now had the potential to happen in America. I felt as if it was a question I’d never had to ask myself before.
It’s not as if there hasn’t been staggering oppression within the confines of the United States. When you watch a movie drama about racism, from “To Kill a Mockingbird” to “Malcolm X” to “Fruitvale Station,” you’re seeing the scalding reality of systemized injustice. But I’m talking about something different: the specter of dictatorship. In 249 years, that has never defined America. And as we all struggle to wrap our heads around the question of what the second Trump term will mean, how far it will go, how much the rule of law is threatened, and how much freedom will be lost — the question of whether, in fact, it can happen here — it’s clear to me now more than ever that the movies have been teaching us about all this for decades.
If you’re a film buff, a cinephile, or whatever you want to call it, you’ve gorged on every kind of movie: old and new, Hollywood and independent, American and international, comedy and romance and Western and musical and noir, dramas of war and action and revenge. But political dramas that explore the power of fascism occupy a special place. Movies like Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Conformist” laid bare the connection between personal pathology and political oppression. Documentary spectacles like “The Battle of Chile” revealed the hidden hands of overly controlling governments. And there have, of course, been a thousand dramas that told the story of Nazi Germany from the inside. All of these films have been slices of ominous experience. All of them have been warnings.
In the ’70s, American cinema got very political — but the conspiracy and corruption that the New Hollywood films were so often about, spinning off Watergate and Vietnam, told a story not of fascism (as much as certain countercultural voices may have called it that), not of creeping autocracy, but of an American political establishment that had grown top-heavy with power. Of course, the other half of that story was that the system was able to correct itself. We didn’t get rid of corruption. But America, and the films that dramatized one of its darkest periods, demonstrated how resilient our flawed democracy truly was.
The end of democracy is what we saw in films set in Europe, or in countries such as Argentina (like “The Official Story,” the “I’m Still Here” of the ’80s), or Mao’s China. On some level, I will confess, I always absorbed those films feeling like I was watching what happens to “them.” The people who live in the places where totalitarianism can take root. I think one of the greatest movies of our time is Philip Kaufman’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” because it’s a drama of such passionate ordinary people caught up in a political nightmare. I’ve always watched that film with a double-edged sensation: that the characters are just like me…but because they’re dealing with the Communist crackdown of 1968 in Czechoslovakia, they’re also not like me. Because that’s where it happens. Over there.
When I saw “I’m Still Here,” I thought: How certain am I that that’s still true? How scary is it to think that there, for the first time, might become here?
