[D66] Steve Bannon’s Documentaries

[A.O.]

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/12/steve-bannon-films-movies-documentaries-trump-hollywood-214495

What I Learned Binge-Watching Steve Bannon’s Documentaries

     By Adam Wren, www.politico.com
     View Original
     December 2nd, 2016

Before he directed Breitbart News, before he directed Donald Trump’s 
insurgent campaign to a surprising victory in November, and before he 
directed the president-elect’s nascent administration as a senior 
adviser and consigliere, Steve Bannon directed a different kind of 
creative enterprise altogether. Documentary films.

Bannon—the bomb-throwing anti-establishment provocateur turned Trump 
whisperer—enjoyed a long and extensive dalliance with Hollywood, 
producing 18 films, from the 1992 Sean Penn drama “Indian Runner” to the 
1999 Anthony Hopkins Shakespeare adaptation, “Titus.” He handled 
distribution for the independent film company Wellspring Media. Along 
the way, he also racked up nine directorial credits of his own, 
compiling a body of work replete with red-meat conservative 
documentaries. His oeuvre, a set of 9 films released from 2006 to 2016, 
included projects capturing the rise of the Tea Party, such as 2010’s 
“Battle for America,” and 2012’s takedown of the Occupy movement, 
“Occupy Unmasked.”

If you’ve never heard of these, you’re not alone: Only four appeared to 
have ever enjoyed even limited releases in theaters; most went straight 
to video, and circulated on Amazon and local libraries to a small and 
presumably deeply conservative audience. One, 2012’s “District of 
Corruption,” which is a 70-minute commercial for the work of Judicial 
Watch, the conservative non-partisan watchdog group that hounded Hillary 
Clinton over her emails, “scored the second highest per-screen average 
at the box office on its opening weekend,” averaging $7,374 per theater, 
according to a press release from Judicial Watch. Perhaps Bannon’s 
best-known film, the 2011 “The Undefeated,” which follows the rise of 
Sarah Palin, had a budget of $1 million, according to IMDb.com, and 
played in at least 10 theaters. Only one of his films—the Reagan love 
letter “In the Face of Evil,” Bannon’s 2004 directorial debut—has been 
rated by Rotten Tomatoes critics, who gave it a gut-punching 11 percent. 
This relative obscurity is, apparently, fine with the director, who 
clearly aimed them at a highly motivated audience. “I don’t do things 
for packs,” Bannon once said of his films. “I’m an independent filmmaker.”

Since Trump named Bannon his “chief strategist,” a job that gives him 
the president’s ear in what’s likely to be a smash mouth, mercurial 
White House, reporters have been riffling through his past to pin down 
his politics. Sure, in interviews, he’s laid out a worldview that 
touches on everything from “enlightened capitalism” to the decline of 
Christianity. And his welcoming of the white-nationalist “alt-right” on 
Breitbart has made him the target of protests, unusual for an adviser in 
an administration that hasn’t even taken office yet. But the 
documentaries offer a different, and rarely opened, window into how he 
sees the struggle America is facing. From start to finish, Bannon 
productions are intense, often short (they average 82 minutes), and 
vehicles for an extremely Darwinian, highly alarmed view of just what 
threatens the nation—and who might save us.

Over several days in November, I set out to watch every Bannon-directed 
documentary, and two others he produced. They were not all easy to find: 
I scoured the Apple Store and Amazon, where I rented the docs on-demand 
or purchased new and used copies from people with usernames like 
“da_grandma” and “RetroResale.” The earliest documentary, a 2004 
collaboration with Clinton Cash author Peter Schweizer on the glory of 
the Reagan days, was available at my local library. The experience was 
an agitprop fever dream, nine films spanning 13 hours and 11 minutes 
made with a “kinetic” editing style that aims to “almost overwhelm an 
audience,” as Bannon himself told Variety in a 2011 interview. If you 
imagined a Breitbart version of ESPN’s “30 for 30,” only far less subtly 
done, you’d be in the ballpark. They flicker with stock footage of a 
pride of lions noshing on a bloody zebra’s flesh, blooming flowers, 
rearing grizzly bears; there are towering mushroom clouds and seething 
Hitler speeches that flash on the screen while we hear a monologue from 
talking heads like Newt Gingrich and Phil Robertson of “Duck Dynasty” fame.

If I learned one thing during this all-out assault on the senses, it was 
that the arc of the moral universe may be long, but it bends toward the 
guillotine. Western Civilization as we know it is under attack by forces 
that are demonic or foreign—the difference between those is blurry—and 
people in far-distant power centers are looking to screw you. What’s 
worse, Christianity and freedom are on the wane. In his documentaries, 
the president-elect’s man is a kind of political John the Baptist, 
explaining to you how bad and corrupt and Godless our country really is, 
and preparing the way for potential saviors to take the country back. 
The Big Banks, the Establishment, Hollywood, the Left, the Right—to all 
of them, Bannon insists, “the forgotten man” is a potential mark in a 
long con that threatens to topple the “Judeo-Christian West,” as he put 
it in a colloquy with the Vatican in 2014, according to a recording 
unearthed by Buzzfeed. Even Justin Beiber, Miley Cyrus and Kimye are in 
on the plot. More on that later.

In Bannon’s dark an apocalyptic world, where the heroes are few and the 
stakes are high, we’ve only a cadre of mavericks and truth tellers to 
protect us. They include Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich and Lou Dobbs and 
Michele Bachmann. An important one is Robertson, the God-fearin,’ 
gun-totin’ patriarch of the clan; he’s the star of Bannon’s most recent 
film, “Torchbearer.” It saw a limited release at 31 theaters nationwide, 
mostly in flyover country, and was screened at this year’s Republican 
National Convention, as well as at Cannes, where Robertson himself 
appeared, surrounded by armed guards, to promote the film.

Throughout all of the films, a Trumpian through line emerges. As you 
watch them, the seemingly disconnected strands of Trumpism—anti-illegal 
immigration, economic angst, frustration with “the Party of Davos”—form 
a cacophony that Bannon somehow marshals into a symphony. Start with a 
strong foundation of Reagan worship (Bannon’s first documentary, 2004’s 
“In The Face of Evil,” which seems to argue a great-man view of history, 
in Trump-like fashion, that Reagan alone could steer us through the Cold 
War). Sprinkle on a polemic about the woes of the “illegal immigration 
invasion” (2005’s “Cochise County, USA,” which frames illegal 
immigration as a “national tragedy,” and 2006’s “Border War,” which 
paints a bleak picture of the same topic in locales ranging from 
Nogales, Arizona, to Washington, D.C). Add a little economic anxiety and 
anti-elitism (2010’s “Generation Zero,” which tracks the origins of the 
2008 financial crisis back to Woodstock and the “narcissism of the 
hippies”). Mix it with a glowing appraisal of the Tea Party (2010’s 
“Battle for America,” which covers the rise of the Tea Party movement, 
2010’s “Fire From the Heartland,” which follows the once-meteoric ascent 
of conservative women like Michele Bachmann and Congresswoman Cynthia 
Lummis, and “The Undefeated,” the 2011 work that examines Sarah Palin’s 
career). Layer on a lament about crony capitalism, Clintonian scandals, 
professional protesters and Obama fatigue (2012’s trio of films 
“District of Corruption” and “Occupy Unmasked” and “The Hope & The 
Change”). Top it with Clash of Civilization and culture wars (2016’s 
“Torchbearer,” which focuses on Robertson). And then you realize it: 
Long before Trump announced his 2016 campaign, Bannon was staking out 
the political terrain that would later become the familiar geography of 
his boss’s presidential bid.

In roughly reverse chronological order, starting with the Robertson doc, 
I went down the Bannon rabbit hole. Soon, I would realize that the 
average Bannon film had all the filmic subtlety of an R. Kelly slow jam 
(beneath a voiceover about Sarah Palin’s many political enemies, we see 
a man choking another man over a table); all the historicity of a Dan 
Brown novel (The bank bailouts happened because hippies gathered at 
Woodstock?) and, in some cases, the shelf life of arugula. The same day 
I started watching the Robertson film, released to select theaters on 
October 7—as scooped by Breitbart!—news broke that “Duck Dynasty” had 
been cancelled.

Not long after I polished off that first documentary—images of a 
camouflaged Robertson pointing a rifle at me, an actual scene in the 
film, still haunting me—the toll of the bruising task I was about to 
undertake dawned on me. Only 11 hours and 37 more minutes to go, I told 
myself.

***

The first thing I learned is that in Bannon’s filmic world, there are no 
shades of gray, only black and white, sinners and saints, demons and 
angels. Here, an abridged list of “enemies” from the Phil Robertson 
flick: The atheist lawyer Clarence Darrow, he of Scopes’ trial fame; 
hippies, Hitler and Hollywood, apparently Bannon’s own Axis of Evil; the 
French; journalists who criticize Phil Robertson; the Nazi doctor Josef 
Mengele and Planned Parenthood.

Amid that cavalry of offenders enters a lone cowboy, Phil Robertson, 
Duck Commander-in-Chief. Over the course of the documentary, Robertson 
worries aloud about the potential fall of our godless Republic, a fall 
he apparently thinks began with the Scopes Monkey Trial. As Robertson 
diagnoses it, society’s ills aren’t so much illegal immigration or 
nuclear war or genocide or even ISIS, but Godlessness. The tagline of 
the film may as well be Make America God-Fearing Again. “From the 
guillotine to the gas chamber to the gulag,” Robertson tells the camera, 
“the story is always the same. When you take God out of the story of 
your civilization, you open the door to tyranny.”

Much of our bleak current affairs stems from hippie culture, Robertson 
concludes, when we turned inward and became our own gods. (This would 
become a motif of Bannon’s filmography, I would soon learn.) “What 
started out as free love and flowers in your hair ended up with the 
Manson Murders,” Robertson says. Wow, I thought, that escalated quickly. 
“Murder is mainstream, we slaughter our own children,” Robertson told 
Breitbart ahead of the film released earlier this year. “We priss around 
and parade our perversion; it’s being done in front of our very eyes. 
Depravity, literally. And I never thought I’d see it in my lifetime. But 
it has literally become mainstream.”

So goes the camouflaged philosopher's lament about the fall of Western 
Civilization. Along the way, he highlights various 
crossings-of-the-cultural Rubicons that have lead us here: The teaching 
of evolution in classrooms, of course; the inventions of the guillotine 
(the French “totally despised Christianity”) and the atomic bomb; the 
rise of the “Cult of Reason” and “the worship of science.” We see b-roll 
of what we’re lead to believe are baby parts being harvested by Planned 
Parenthood victory.

Near the end of the film, we see images of Justin Bieber, Kanye West and 
Kim Kardashian-West and Miley Cyrus riding lustily on her wrecking ball, 
which the viewer is left to assume, isn’t headed toward her ex-boyfriend 
Liam Hemsworth, but everything that makes America great. “You are your 
own God,” Robertson says, the images passing in quick succession on the 
screen, summarizing the spirit of our current secular age. “We go about 
our lives accumulating as much as we can. Seeking whatever amusements we 
can to distract from our emptiness, hooking up with whomever we can. We 
are no longer image bearers. We are crutch-driven animals following our 
instincts.”

At times, it’s hard to tell where Robertson ends and Bannon begins. For 
starters, they share a disdain of youth culture. As Bannon told his 
Vatican audience, “if you look at younger people, especially millennials 
under 30, the overwhelming drive of popular culture is to absolutely 
secularize this rising iteration.” But that’s merely a symptom of a 
larger problem that’s gripped the globe. “I believe the world, and 
particularly the Judeo-Christian west, is in a crisis,” Bannon told the 
Vatican conference in 2014 (later, he would add that “secularism has 
sapped the strength of the Judeo-Christian West to defend its ideals”). 
To return to Pax Americana, according to Bannon, we must repent of our 
Godless ways.

The film ends with Robertson conducting an impromptu baptism of 
seemingly random people—first there is “Becky,” followed by a “dude” 
with red hair whom Robertson simply calls “Red on the head,”— in what we 
assume is a Louisiana river, after he delivers a short homily on the 
“Gospel of God’s grace—what a message, what a hope.” A gospel song plays.

This baptism could be the beginning of a metaphorical national revival, 
if we wanted it to be, as Robertson and Bannon suggest we should. The 
invitation is there for the taking. It’s like Robertson says, in one of 
his many syrupy non-sequiturs, walking down the steps of the Jefferson 
Memorial, as the documentary rolls interminably on.

“If you have life and liberty, and you’re happy, happy, happy, what else 
is there?”

He lifts his hands up, forms a shruggie emoticon.

***

I journeyed deeper still into Bannon’s filmography, and what was a 
whirlwind 2012 for Bannon. In March of that year, Andrew Breitbart died 
of heart failure, and Bannon took over Breitbart, while also releasing 
three documentaries (he would have another three-documentary year in 
2010!) : “District of Corruption,” the infomercial for the work of 
Judicial Watch, the conservative watchdog organization that released the 
steady drip drip drip of Clinton emails during the campaign and “changed 
history” by getting their man elected, according to president Tom Fitton 
in a post-election Breitbart editorial; “Occupy Unmasked,” an exposé on 
what Bannon sees as the professional protesters behind the Occupy 
movement; and “The Hope & The Change,” which follows 40 “hard-working 
Democrats and Independents who voted for President Barack Obama in 2008, 
and are now having second thoughts”—and which Fox News’ Sean Hannity, a 
regular Trump booster, gushed was “the most powerful documentary I’ve 
ever seen in my life.”

The first three films blur together in a haze of archival news clips. 
But beyond stock footage, they all blend a disdain for the 
establishment, which clings to power through “rigged” political and 
economic systems and is driven by “a form of capitalism that is taken 
away from the underlying spiritual and moral foundations of Christianity 
and, really, Judeo-Christian belief.”

“District of Corruption,” the first documentary of this period written 
and directed by Bannon, is a companion film to the New York Times 
best-selling book, “The Corruption Chronicles, Obama’s Big Secrecy, Big 
Corruption, and Big Government.” At its core, it’s an expose of D.C. 
over the last 20 years, and covers well-trodden conservative media 
territory. We learn about the “Chicago Gangster” Obama administration. 
About Bill Clinton’s Marc Rich pardon. We discover that Clinton “ran the 
office like a criminal mob operation.” The film frets over the influence 
of A.C.O.R.N and Saul Alinsky on American politics. Even George W. Bush 
is skewered by the film for his role in signing TARP. Wall Street’s 
“bailout central.” Here, if you close your eyes, you can almost hear 
Trump doing the voiceover: A rigged system! I remembered a Bannon line 
from his 2014 Vatican Skype session. “For Christians, and particularly 
for those who believe in the underpinnings of the Judeo-Christian West, 
I don’t believe that we should have a [financial] bailout,” Bannon said.

“Occupy Unmasked,” also released in 2012, represented a new moment in 
Bannon’s career. By then, he had cemented his relationship with Andrew 
Breitbart (who also appeared in the 2011 Palin film, “The Undefeated.”) 
Here, though, Breitbart appears as a prominent talking head explaining 
the chicanery and fraud of the Occupy movement. Occupy, the film argued, 
was really defined by “raping, pillaging, pooping.” The 
documentary—“really kind of an arthouse film,” the auteur, Bannon, once 
mused in a 2012 interview he did with the investigative journalist Lee 
Stranahan—predicted that “Occupy will give way to race wars.” It decried 
professional protestors who were allegedly paid $60 a day to join the 
movement. I thought of Trump’s post-election tweet: “Just had a very 
open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, 
incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!” Bannon clearly 
doesn’t like professional protestors. “Andrew, what are you talking 
about? It’s a bunch of dirty hippies,” Bannon told Breitbart, according 
to the Stranahan interview, when the late activist broached the idea of 
covering the movement. Still, he made the film.

Hipsters and protesters aside, no one in this triad of films came off 
worse than Obama. “The Hope & The Change” opens on hopeful images of the 
early days of his presidency. We meet voters from across the country, 
assembled by the Democratic pollster Pat Caddell, who were optimistic 
about the Obama era, but soon, they grew disappointed. “There’s no way 
that anybody who watches this film can vote for Barack Obama,” mused 
Sean Hannity during his Aug. 24 show on Fox News. “It’s impossible. You 
bring us back and walk us through the whole election cycle.”

It’s in this film that we see the message of Bannon and Trump’s populism 
take shape.

“I feel like it’s a complete hustle, and we’re the but of a joke,” one 
disillusioned Obama voter said of the bailouts.

“The middle class has not gotten bailed out in this entire process,” 
says another.

“We’re not the big banks,” says another. “We’re not the car dealerships. 
We’re just small, average people, and in Obama’s eyes, we don’t count.” 
A rigged system, one might say.

For nearly six hours, I had subjected myself to suspenseful music played 
over non-suspenseful C-SPAN footage. Harried, swooping panning shots of 
the Jefferson Memorial at night. Crash dummies rocked in a collision to 
demonstrate the moral hazard of the bailouts. Conspiracy theories about 
Bill Clinton and Tyson’s chicken. An indistinguishable parade of white 
talking heads against a white background. Hundred dollar bills spread 
out across the screen—a visual metaphor for political bribes, if you 
didn’t catch it. Generic act titles such as “Filegate” and “Coda: 
Children of the Revolution.”

“My films are very tightly structured into acts,” Bannon said in the 
2012 interview with Stranahan. “The whole film is highly structured 
before I run the camera on what I call the subject matter experts.” But 
they drone on, often in sound bites that would otherwise strike you as 
terrible dialogue in a film: “The most transparent administration ever,” 
one of those subject matter experts says, “ended up being not very 
transparent at all.” At least three of Bannon’s documentaries use 
virtually the same clip of CNBC’S Rick Santelli 2009 rant from the floor 
of the Chicago Board of Trade, the one that gave rise to the Tea Party. 
“This is America! How many of you want to pay for your neighbor’s 
mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills? Raise 
their hand?” The floor boos. “President Obama, are you listening?”

I still was.

***

Four documentaries into the experiment, I have to admit I wanted out. I 
brainstormed excuses to email my editor, begging off the assignment. But 
I was too far down the rabbit hole to stop.

Next on my list was “The Undefeated,” the 1-hour and 57-minute paean to 
Sarah Palin. Bannon’s longest work, surpassing even his debut Reagan 
documentary by seven minutes, it traces the rise of Palin from mayor of 
Wasilla, Alaska, to national political phenomenon.

Bannon’s films often began with a verse of scripture appearing as white 
text over a black screen. In “Generation Zero,” it’s a quote from 
Ecclesiastes; in “The Undefeated,” it’s a passage from the Gospel of 
Matthew: “Every good tree bringeth forth good fruit. But a corrupt tree 
bringeth forth evil fruit … by their fruits ye shall know them.” Palin, 
we’re left to posit, is a good tree. One-minute and 29 seconds into the 
documentary, we see images of cats licking themselves, apropos of 
nothing. Not 20 seconds later, a shadowy figure readies a handgun in 
front of a television screen blasting black and white static. A few cuts 
later a man handles a knife. Later, when we hear about how the left is 
attacking Palin, we see a door open in a bomber plane, and, is that a 
bevy of bombs falling out of the sky? Yes. Minutes later there is 
footage of a shark attack. It was, in a word, disorienting.

If there was a unifying theme, though, it was this: In Palin, Bannon 
found his first vessel: a politician who could bind together the diverse 
strands of his political philosophy—a missionary missile aimed straight 
at secularization and crony capitalism. “Whether she becomes a candidate 
or not for the presidency, I think these big broad themes of her life 
and her political life are going to play out on the national level over 
the next couple of years,” Bannon said in a September 2011 interview 
with The Palin Update, an independent radio show hosted by the Palinista 
Kevin Scholla.

So enraptured by Palin was Bannon that he lingered on her early days as 
mayor and governor for more than 60 minutes before reaching the apogee 
of her political career, when she was selected as Senator John McCain’s 
running mate in 2008. You learn more about the inner workings of 
Alaska’s budget process than you ever wanted to know. This movie was one 
of the few to be reviewed in the mainstream press, and not too kindly: 
“Its tone is an excruciating combination of bombast and whining,” wrote 
Kyle Smith, the New York Post’s film critic, “it’s so outlandishly 
partisan that it makes Richard Nixon look like Abraham Lincoln and its 
febrile rush of images—not excluding earthquakes, car wrecks, volcanic 
eruption and attacking Rottweilers—reminded me of the brainwash movie 
Alex is forced to sit through in ‘A Clockwork Orange.’ Except no one 
came along to refresh my pupils with eyedrops.”

“The Undefeated,” however, does feel like Bannon’s most personal film. 
As the screen fades to black, we see a name flash on the screen: “Doris 
Herr Bannon: 1922-1992.” The film ends with a quote from Thomas Paine’s 
The Crisis: “If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my 
child may have peace.” He had dedicated this film to his mother. Did The 
Mama-Grizzly Mater Familias remind him of her? Like 2010’s “Fire from 
the Heartland,” a meditation on the journeys of conservative Tea Party 
political women such as Michele Bachmann and Jenny Beth Martin, it seems 
to posit that it’s novel that women are getting involved in politics. 
Can you believe it? Here are all these women—and conservatives at 
that!—who have things to say about the direction of the U.S. government. 
There oughtta be a documentary made!

If Palin was Bannon’s preferred candidate to lead his anti-establishment 
revolution and return the U.S. to its Judeo-Christian roots, it was 
Reagan who provided the Platonic ideal of a revolutionary. Bannon’s 
seminal and most conventional documentary is his paean to the Gipper: 
“In the Face of Evil: Reagan’s War in Word and Deed.” It was everything 
you would expect a fawning Reagan documentary to be, rich in pro-Reagan 
interviews and archival historical footage, like the president’s “Tear 
Down this Wall” speech. This one also got reviewed. “A brilliant effort 
… extremely well done,” trumpeted Rush Limbaugh. In its review, The 
Washington Post’s Desson Thomson was more circumspect, calling it “the 
sort of film that will make its target audience, presumably religious, 
right-wing Christians, heartened and possibly misty-eyed. But it’s 
likely to provoke hooting and hollering in less reverent circles. Being 
single-minded in purpose, ‘In the Face of Evil’ takes a wide berth 
around issues and events inconvenient to its narrative propulsion.”

Reagan is the plainspoken archetypal “great man,” who saw the world as 
it really was—called a spade a spade, the Republican establishment be 
damned!—and put it across in a style that only a few leaders have 
effectively mimicked (Palin, and now Trump, chief among them— “an 
outsider, a radical, with extreme views” as text in the Reagan trailer 
blares.)

“Trump is Steve’s Reagan,” Julia Jones, Bannon’s co-writer on the 
project, told The New York Times.

“In the Face of Evil” was also transformational for Bannon’s career arc, 
leading him to his first brush with Andrew Breitbart. “We screened the 
film at a festival in Beverly Hills,” Bannon recounted in an interview 
with Bloomberg, “and out of the crowd comes this, like, bear [Breitbart] 
who’s squeezing me like my head’s going to blow up and saying how we’ve 
gotta take back the culture.”

***

Bleary-eyed and now experiencing a low-level anxiety about nothing in 
particular and everything in general, I finished my trip through all 
things Bannon on a chilly Tuesday evening the week of Thanksgiving. Days 
before the rest of the nation prepared to watch television marathons of 
a more entertaining variety, sedated in a tryptophan-induced stupor, I 
found myself in a far less pleasant stupor of my own.

Was everything I thought I knew wrong? Maybe Sarah Palin’s political 
career wasn’t finished. Maybe the hippy culture did lead to the 
financial crash of 2008. Maybe Western civilization was on the verge of 
collapse. And here I am, wiling away the apocalypse watching indie 
political documentaries when I should be spending time with my loved ones.

But one thing I was sure of was that the Bannon that emerges in his 
documentaries is occasionally a contradiction from the Bannon we’ve come 
to know in recent months. For as much gnashing of teeth as there’s been 
about Bannon’s white nationalist ties, his documentaries largely steer 
clear of racial themes, though most of his subjects and talking heads 
are white Christians. There was Shelby Steele, the Hoover Institution 
fellow who calls himself a “black conservative.” In “Generation Zero,” 
Steele wonders how “white guilt” contributed to the financial crisis. 
“Since the 60s, white Americans have been in a place where they 
constantly have to prove that they are not racist,” he says. “It is that 
phenomenon of white guilt that presses people in the government to say 
things like ‘Everybody has a right to a house.’ Unfortunately, 
capitalism doesn’t work like that.”

At the end of my experience, I couldn’t help but wonder: Does Bannon 
actually believe these things, or does he merely see a business market 
in untapped, conservative moviegoing audiences? For instance, both “The 
Hope and the Change” and “District of Corruption” poke fun in 
mini-montages of Obama’s infrastructure spending and “shovel ready” 
projects. And yet, in a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter’s 
Michael Wolff, Bannon boasted, “I’m the guy pushing a trillion-dollar 
infrastructure plan. With negative interest rates throughout the world, 
it’s the greatest opportunity to rebuild everything. Shipyards, iron 
works, get them all jacked up. We’re just going to throw it up against 
the wall and see if it sticks. It will be as exciting as the 1930s, 
greater than the Reagan revolution—conservatives, plus populists, in an 
economic nationalist movement.” Is the Bannon whose documentaries worry 
about the corruptive influence of Hollywood on Obama and American 
culture still the same one who receives Seinfeld royalties, to which he 
acquired partial rights from the sale of Castle Rock that he helped 
broker in 1993? “People have very strong political beliefs, but at the 
end of the day, I haven’t met a bigger set of capitalists than I have 
met in this town,” he told Variety, speaking of Hollywood, ahead of “The 
Undefeated” release. “It is one of the most Darwinian of environments 
that I have ever seen.”

With Bannon’s documentary career behind him, at least for now, it 
doesn’t matter as much whether he precisely believes the content of his 
documentaries. What matters is that he certainly knows how to package a 
story to a specific audience. It’s easy to see Bannon becoming the 
keeper of Trump’s message, the necromancer of his narrative. You can see 
him being tasked with making a running documentary of Trump’s first 
years in office that plays at the RNC in a 2020 re-election campaign. 
After all, Andrew Breitbart once called Bannon the Tea Party’s Leni 
Riefenstahl, the Nazi propagandist. “People have said I’m like Leni 
Riefenstahl,” Bannon once said. “I’ve studied documentarians extensively 
to come up with my own in-house style. I’m a student of Michael Moore’s 
films, of Eisenstein, Riefenstahl. Leave the politics aside, you have to 
learn from those past masters on how they were trying to communicate 
their ideas.”

In Trump, Bannon has perhaps finally found the subject of his magnum 
opus, his greatest muse since Palin. Because Trump has given Bannon, now 
headquartered at 1600 Penn, his shot at a wider audience, “the packs” he 
once shrugged off: It’s all of us. This time, you won’t have to troll 
the dark corners of Amazon to find his work. And this show’s running 
time, already far longer than the paltry 13 hours it took me to churn 
through his filmography, could be measured not in hours and minutes, but 
years.