Imagine if a movie was made about a decent man getting by in a decaying society, overrun by blacks, Muslims, gays and whatever other boogeymen are conjured up to scare people; he eventually snaps and goes on a killing spree. This film didn't portray him as insane or sick but correct and asked you to empathize with him.
Obviously it would be (rightly) considered crude propaganda and apologia for people like Anders Breivik but what if it was the other way? What if there was a "liberal" version of this film about a man in a decaying society overrun by xenophobic racist conservatives, religious extremists, sensationalized media, spoiled rich teenagers and outright jerks?
God Bless America is that film. As the latest dark comedy by Bobcat Goldthwait, it follows Frank (Joel Murray, brother of Bill Murray) who after long nights of surfing through garbage on television is diagnosed with a brain tumor and has had enough with the world; he teams up with a teenage girl named Roxy (Tara Lynne Barr) and becomes a spree killer of those that "deserve to die."
What's striking is how, as the New Statesman put it, safe and empathetic the movie plays it for a film about a mass killer.
A safer and more partial movie it would be difficult to imagine. In the days before Frank blows a fuse, several things happen that are designed to ingratiate him with the audience. He loses his job after sending flowers to a depressed co-worker. Then he calls his daughter, who lives with his ex-wife, only to find that the child would rather play a computer game than talk to him. Finally he is told he has a brain tumour by a doctor who breaks off mid-diagnosis to make an abusive phone call. Cruel boss, unfeeling daughter, insensitive physician: are you on Frank’s side yet?
As Goldthwait pointed out in an interview, his premise is to get people to feel for objectionable characters:
Similarly, Goldthwait's movies tend to start with an outrageous one-liner premise based on protagonists doing the unthinkable—experimenting with bestiality, exploiting the death of a child, murdering reality-TV stars simply because they're annoying—who, over the course of the film, are humiliated and humbled by the merciless worlds they live in, putting the viewer in the uncomfortable spot of feeling badly for the bad people.
The problem with this approach is it neither shows the clear insanity of the actions of the characters nor does it come off as ironic, it ends up feeling like a justification for them.
Compare this to films like Falling Down or Taxi Driver, where the audience identifies with the characters without being asked to justify them. At one point there's even an "homage" to the gun dealer scene in Taxi Driver which really only serves to remind the audience how much better of a film that was.
Take this scene from Falling Down which manages to both have the audience identify with the character without apologizing for him and be funny at the same time:
The "liberal" version of a social decay
The biggest problem however, is that for all the easy (and literal) targets God Bless America aims at, the Westboro Baptist Church, celebrity worship etc. it seems to miss the broader point: are we actually living in a socially decaying society?
The film would like us to think so but in reality it's anything but. Crime is at an all time low, people are more concerned with serious economic issues, than social issues, and even teenage pregnancy is at all time historic low, not exactly a portrait of a degenerating society.
And for all the problems the film shows, summarized nicely as those that are “scared of foreigners or people with vaginas,” those problems were much worse during the supposed "golden age" of civility.
In many ways it seems like the liberal version of the "golden age" ideology of the far right except instead of social decay from foreigners and gays, it's from Glenn Becks and Fred Phelps(s); while they do some damage, the real problems in America are mostly economic, not social.
What the film misses is what Network (1976) showed us decades ago: that the garbage on TV isn't reality.