By Hal Brown
It seems like an eternity since I posted this on Daily Kos on June 6, 2018:
Finally two years and about two months later #UNFIT, the documentary about the dangerous psychopathology of Donald Trump, is just about to get wide release on Sept. 1st. I haven’t seen the entire film yet but will when it is released. So far it has received very positive pre-release reviews not only in the progressive media but the general press that covers Entertainment. In a previous diary I expressed concern that the film might be preaching to the choir and not persuade many people who are open to seeing Trump as something less than a god. I wrote:
Movies can have an impact books don’t. The publication of a best seller called “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump” had an impact in that it educated lots of people who needed to understand the psychological underpinning of Trump’s behavior. It didn’t faze Trump the narcissist who didn't even (as far as a know) even tweet about it.
Perhaps a movie making the same case will, especially if it gets good reviews and lots of people see it in the theaters and then it’s picked up by Netflix or Amazon. Trump doesn’t read but movies like this get people talking. Its release should lead to coverage and interviews on television.
(Obviously the pandemic has changed this to some extent. However if the documentary gets enough publicity it could still result in John Gartner and others being interviewed on television and in other media. Hopefully it will be covered beyond the progressive media.)
Hopefully this film will be something of a sequel to Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 11/9.
Maybe it will be nominated for a best documentary Academy Award. In 2002 Moore won it for Bowling for Columbine… One can dream…
I am pleased that the film is getting the publicity I’d hoped for but was pessimistic about. I expect we will see John Gartner interviewed in the media following its release and on numerous TV shows. I am relieved that my pessimism was unfounded.
The reviews have been so good I wondered if any journalists anywhere didn’t like it. I can’t say with certainty that I’ve read very review but I think my Google News alerts probably caught all or most of them. If you want to skip to how I address what that reviewer wrote scroll down the page.
Last week Daily Beast titled their review Top Psychologists Compare Trump to Hitler and Mussolini in New Documentary. It must have been a challenge to decide which menacing photo of Trump to use as an illustration.
Salon featured their review on their main page yesterday. It is by Melanie McFarland, Salon's TV critic.
The movie received very positive reviews by two well known film critics, Owen Gleiberman in the show biz bible, Variety, and Richard Roeper in the Chicago Sun-Times. If you a a cinephile the names Gleiberman and Roeper will be familiar to you.
Despite the positive reviews some of the critics express pessimism about it changing the minds of many voters.
In the positive Yahoo News review ‘#Unfit’ Film Review: Documentary Offers a Scary Diagnosis of Donald Trump, But Will Voters Listen? the author Steve Pond (the awards editor at TheWrap, author of the L.A. Times bestseller The Big Show who is called the industry's most knowledgeable Academy Awards prognosticator) notes the following:
Yes, it’s terrifying to hear everything together in a seamless, hard-hitting package, but is it fresh enough to jar anybody out of their entrenched positions in this divisive political climate? That’s a question that hangs over the bulk of the film, which ties Trump’s psychological profile to his authoritarian tendencies and then to the dangers those tendencies currently pose.
It’s also one of the ironies of “#Unfit” that immediately after Scaramucci points out that attacking Trump’s supporters is guaranteed to get them to rally behind him, the film starts comparing them to the citizens of Italy and Germany who helped Mussolini and Hitler rise to power.
No, those voters aren’t the target audience for this movie – instead, they’re the ones of which one expert explains, “Once you get on board, there is no rational argument that will change your opinion.”
“#Unfit” feels like a rational argument, and a powerful one. But if it’s liable to scare lots of people who already oppose Trump, it doesn’t feel as if it will change anybody’s opinion.
The Hollwood Reporter review basically described the content but ended with this cautionary note:
Naturally, the film can be accused of preaching to the choir (personally, I've lost my voice from so much singing). Despite its powerfully cogent and well-informed arguments, #Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump is sadly unlikely to change the minds of the roughly 35-40% of the population who look at the president's behavior and apparently see nothing to be concerned about. But that's a subject for another documentary.
The preaching to the choir worry is valid. My hope is that a film like this can, to continue with the choir analogy, peel off a significant number of voters from the actual church choir who have been having doubts about Trump.
The documentary has been reviewed in unlikely places because of the subject matter. For example it was reviewed in FintechZoom News, headquartered in United Kingdom, which has a reach of over a million users worldwide. They published a review (here) as did the Pakistan Daily times (here).
I found one review that found fault with the film.
It is by Dan Lybarger writing in what is considered the newspaper of record for the state, the Arkansas Democrat -Gazette. Lybarger is a freelance film critic and writer whose work has appeared in The Kansas City Star, The Pitch, The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Cineaste and other publications.
As one of the first members of Dr. John D. Gartner’s Duty to Warn group and a Kos diarist who often writes about Trump’s psychopathology I thought it was up to me to see if this documentary was getting any less than stellar reviews since nobody is about to suggest I have a pro-Trump bias.
Caption: Sportswriter Rick Reilly details President Donald J. Trump’s singular approach to playing golf in the documentary “#Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump.”
The choice of the photo is not accidental since it illustrates one of the criticisms leveled by the author.
Much of the review describes the content of the movie but below are the excerpts that found fault:
- It's a given that doctors should be wary of diagnosing patients they have never met. I remembered rolling my eyes four years ago when former "Loveline" host Dr. Drew Pinsky suggested Hillary Clinton's Arkansas upbringing might be detrimental to her serving in the Oval Office. (Clinton famously grew up in Illinois.)
- Had "#Unfit" focused on Gartner and his diagnosis of Trump as a malignant narcissist, the film might have been persuasive.
- Gartner's convincing argument that psychology has matured since Goldwater's 1964 campaign is undermined in "#Unfit" by Partland's scattershot narrative and seemingly random choice of "experts."
- It's amusing to hear Rick Reilly describe Trump's stubborn refusal to play golf fairly, but it only tangentially indicates how the man governs. Most of the footage documenting Trump's missteps in office have been on TV and the internet for years. If you are inclined to think the president deserves four more years, this movie won't persuade you otherwise.
- Partland also includes a series of cartoons that seem to be added solely to help pad out the 83-minute running time. Trevor Noah or John Oliver could handle this material and cover more ground in 15 to 20 minutes. A president's health-- physical and mental -- requires far more thought than this film delivers.
Those of us who are informed about the psychopathology of Trump and the articles about it can easily debunk each and every of Lybarger’s criticisms. Here’s why he is wrong:
- Dr. John Gartner is in an entirely different league than Drew Pinsky.
- A film focusing on Trump’s malignant narcissism would have been appropriate for a college course in abnormal psychology but not for general release.
- I can't comment on whether Partland’s narrative was scattershot but I know that the choice of experts was not random, and the suggestion that these weren’t really exerts by putting the word in quotes show the critics ignorance at best and a bias at worse. Every expert in the film is an expert.
- The way Trump cheats at golf is both emblematic and symptomatic of his psychopathology.
- The cartoons referred to were in my opinion making a point and I thi9nk they made it well. Suggesting that late night talk show hosts could or should cover such important material is in the best case naive and the worst, again, show bias.
#UNFIT is being released on 9/1/2020. You can watch it by renting it on CABLE (all major platforms), on SATELLITE (DirecTV and DISH), OR on major streaming platforms. (NOTE: The film CANNOT be ordered before 9/1/2020.)
To STREAM the film, go to the streaming service you prefer (see list).
To watch on CABLE or SATELLITE (see list above), look for ON DEMAND. You should be able to click ON DEMAND from your cable remote OR click the Home button and you'll see ON DEMAND from there.
The rental cost of the film is $5.99. If you watch on CABLE or SATELLITE, you will not incur a charge now; it will be added to your next bill.
How to watch: unfitfilm.com/...
Afterthought: Some history of how John Gartner warned about Trump’s malignant narcissism:
By now everyone reading this knows what malignant narcissism is. I venture to say that if you did a web search for Trump and malignant narcissism prior to the summer of 2016 you would have found any links. Here’s what you find today.
Before John Gartner wrote about it I didn’t know what it was even thought I’d read some of Erich Fromm’s book and papers by Otto Kernberg who also wrote about it.
I credit Gartner with attaching the concept of what the eminent social psychologist Eric Fromm described as a "severe mental sickness" representing "the quintessence of evil". He characterized the condition as "the most severe pathology and the root of the most vicious destructiveness and inhumanity" Wikipedia to Donald Trump.
Gartner pegged Trump as a malignant narcissist in an article he wrote in HuffPost published on June 9, 2016: What is Trump’s Psychological Problem? After explaining what malignant narcissism is he concluded:
Finally, like all malignantly narcissistic leaders, Trump has demonized one community within our own population, who he imagines is involved, en masse, in a conspiracy against America. “I think Islam hates us,” he has said (not radical Islam, all Islam), arguing that “virtually 100%” of mosques are radical. In response, he wants to register all U.S. Muslims, ban all Muslim immigrants, and put surveillance on all mosques. Muslims make up a third of the planet. Do we really want to declare war on all of them? Trump’s paranoid conspiracy world-view and pugnacious nature could ignite the very global clash of civilizations that Bin Laden set out to achieve. As conservative foreign policy expert Max Boot put it: “By setting up war on terror as struggle of West vs. Islam, Trump does what ISIS wants.” Trump may complete Bin Laden’s work
In April, The Economist Magazine put a Trump presidency in it’s top ten list of global risks to the economy and world peace—the first time it has ever included a candidate for any political office on its list. Now that he has wrapped up the Republican nomination, he has arguably graduated to the number one slot. The idea that the American nuclear codes could be in the hands of a grandiose, thin skinned paranoid, with little in the way of conscience or impulse control, is the stuff of dystopian science fiction.
Only this doomsday tale is no paranoid fantasy.
Again, this was is June of 2016!
Then Trump became president. Gartner and malignant narcissism was referenced in this US News article on Jan 27, 2017:
Excerpt:
"Donald Trump is dangerously mentally ill and temperamentally incapable of being president," says Gartner, author of "In Search of Bill Clinton: A Psychological Biography." Trump, Gartner says, has "malignant narcissism," which is different from narcissistic personality disorder and which is incurable.
Gartner acknowledges that he has not personally examined Trump, but says it's obvious from Trump's behavior that he meets the diagnostic criteria for the disorder, which include anti-social behavior, sadism, aggressiveness, paranoia and grandiosity. Trump's personality disorder (which includes hypomania) is also displayed through a lack of impulse control and empathy, and "a feeling that people ... don't recognize their greatness.
"We've seen enough public behavior by Donald Trump now that we can make this diagnosis indisputably," says Gartner.
Then Gartner wrote this in USA Today with a title that couldn't have laid it out in more stark and alarming terms:
