the dying dream of liberalism post Cold War

Bulworth is a 1998 political comedy by Warren Beatty and when I say by Warren Beatty I mean it's directed written and acted by him all at once, this thing is firmly rooted in the last years of Bill Clinton and set in California and it takes aim at a lot of topics most movies wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole.

I'm mostly looking at this through the Chapo Trap House lens because as much as I think Warren Beatty meant this to be a fun light romp—and it is weirdly prescient about how even in the 90s austerity was already making life worse for people—it's also this satire of the Clinton-style cool politician taken to its absolute limit, so far that the state has to assassinate him just to keep things running like they're supposed to. I know that's what Beatty was going for but after hearing this other take that's way less literal I can't unsee it now.

Early in the movie the main guy hires a hitman to kill himself after a mental breakdown and suddenly, just like Office Space, he's free from all the usual rules because he knows he's gonna die so who cares, and this is where the whole thing stops being literal because the first assassination attempt worked, the rest of the movie is just a liberal politician's brain dying and in his last moments he's wishing he'd been more like the heroes on his wall—RFK, MLK, Harvey Milk—which, y'know, funny how all those guys ended up huh. The rest of the film is him pissing off donors, wrecking the usual order of things, firing up the Black voters he spent his whole career ignoring, and also trying to hook up with Halle Berry (which, fair).

And he's doing all this while rapping in the most painfully 90s way imaginable. Like Forrest Gump but for politics, I think this movie works way better as this bleak joke about post-Cold War America and how nobody's actually doing well even though we "won," the whole thing keeps coming back to this line—"gotta be a spirit, can't be no ghost"—like it's warning you not to be another bought-off hack looking for redemption at the last second. It's even more hopeless than Dr. Strangelove because in Strangelove there's at least something at stake, it's about the Cold War and not blowing up the world, but Bulworth is just this echo of “hey we won so why does everything suck?” and the answer is because you can't afford to live and every social program gets cut a little more each year and the best we get is Bill Clinton trying to rap.

—Maxwell Houdini