What is there to be said about Steve Bannon that hasn’t been scratched into a bathroom stall under a sewer in hell with a demon’s fingernails? The former Trump guru and campaign strategist has been conspicuously absent from the public sphere as of late. Some of this might be the result of the ongoing Mueller investigation into the campaign Bannon helped create. However, some of it may also be due to the fact that he has a documentary about him coming to theaters soon. For The Brink, filmmaker Alison Klayman was purportedly given full access to Bannon, and the film follows him through the 2018 midterm elections as he runs around being Steve Bannon.
Klayman seems to have gotten Bannon’s blessing to film everything he was doing as a result of her previous award-winning 2012 documentary on Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei. Maybe Bannon was hoping for the same level of complicated lionizing portrayed in that film, but from the early reviews, it seems that Steve Bannon forgot that he isn’t a particularly impressive person fighting against an oppressive regime. He is an egomaniac fighting to overthrow social norms by utilizing white supremacist and white nationalist groups.
Variety calls the documentary a “fly-on-the-wall, rise-and-fall-and-rise-of-a-white-nationalist documentary,” pointing to sequences where Bannon, not unlike his orange-headed friend Trump, sets up what he clearly thinks are cinematic moments that will ingratiate himself to the audience, only to end up accentuating how much of a creep he really is. The example given is him telling a story of going to visit Auschwitz and Birkenau, which were concentration camps and are now museums to the Holocaust. Through the telling of his experience there, the viewer, according to Variety, gets the distinct impression that Bannon doesn’t really have sympathy for the Jewish people murdered by the Nazis so much as he is amazed by the Nazis.
The trailer has a lot of footage of Bannon meeting with European anti-Semitic “nationalists,” and even being called out for his work with them by everyone, including the documentary filmmaker herself. I don’t think the word “enjoy” applies here, but watch the trailer below the fold.
