Oklahoma City

The central insight of Barak Goodman’s new documentary, OKLAHOMA CITY, presented by American Experience and airing on February 7th, is that the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building by homegrown radical Timothy McVeigh was not a singular event, but a signpost on the road of radical right extremism that the United States has been traveling down for decades. 

Goodman opens his film with the devastation caused by the truck bomb and the initial media frenzy around possible suspects. He pays particular attention to the drama surrounding locating the children who had been in the Murrah building’s day care center, forcing us to concentrate on the worst damage that the bomb did, giving the audience a refresher on the destruction and the death toll of the worst incident of domestic terrorism in the United States. An invaluable voice that Goodman returns to over and over in this documentary is McVeigh’s own. The source of the audio is never explained to us, but they are clearly the words of the bomber explaining his mission: The war between the patriots and the government had already started, his bomb was just a counterattack.

With that introduction, Goodman takes us back to the real subject of the documentary, the intellectual and actual history of violent, gun-based, white supremacist separatism in the United States, the movement that spawned McVeigh and . . . well, Steve Bannon, current Senior Strategist to Donald Trump. Goodman’s documentary is an able and oblique commentary on the current state of the alt-right, without actually using that term. It’s sly and effective because he simply presents the words of the Aryan Nations and Richard Butler, a vile racist who was regarded as crazy in the 1980s, but whose words find an easy home in today’s alt-right media centers. When Butler says that the only way to save America is to assert white Christian sovereignty, it is impossible not to recognize the spiritual connection between the militia members who are desperate to attack the American state and the people who currently run it. 

Goodman takes us through a comprehensive tour of extreme domestic terrorism, including the standoffs that killed Bob Matthews, founder of The Order, the botched raids at Ruby Ridge, and eventually, the key confrontation animating white extremists in the early 1990’s: the Branch Davidian confrontation outside Waco, TX. 

The Branch Davidians were an offshoot of the 7th Day Adventists who had been around for 50 years before a charismatic leader named David Koresh hypnotized them with prophecies of the end of the world and withdrew them within the walls of that compound. When the ATF got word of illegal weapons moving in and out of the Davidian compound, they moved in, too hard, too fast. They were fired upon almost immediately and retreated in disorder. The ensuing standoff became a pilgrimage site for folks like Timothy McVeigh, a veteran whose story we learn in bits and pieces throughout the documentary, as his personal wanderings and musings intersect with the larger story of the white supremacist movement. By 1993, McVeigh was struggling to make it outside the service. He made his living selling The Turner Diaries and other racist paraphernalia at gun shows across the country. Ironically, the Davidians were not white supremacists, but they became a cause célèbre because they preached one of the same messages: the government is coming for us and our guns. The Waco standoff lasted for 51 days. 

The standoff ended when the FBI went in to tear down the walls of the compound, even as Koresh and others had been spreading fuel around the compound. Listening stations spread around the compound picked up the sound of this plan, but it wasn’t processed by the FBI before the entire compound was in flames. The hard right immediately turned the incident into propaganda, using by now familiar methods: espousing invented theories that take it for granted that the government was trying to cover up evidence of the true events of the massacre, which they consider to be a crime against the people (9/11 didn’t invent truthers, they’ve been with us for a long time). The Brady Bill was signed almost immediately afterward, convincing McVeigh and many others that there was an undeclared war on Christians with guns. By the end of 1993 there was a huge underground preaching armed resistance to the federal government. 

Goodman finishes his documentary with the story of McVeigh’s careless bomb making and his uneasy confederates as well as the manhunt, including the largest investigation in history, that swiftly caught up with McVeigh, who has since been executed. The documentary is workmanlike and doesn’t use any uncommon or unconventional methods to tell the story, but Goodman’s work is alive with an urgent sense of the connection between history and the current moment. In the end, Goodman argues, Timothy McVeigh was not the real perpetrator in Oklahoma City: it lays at the feet of the movement that spawned him. A movement that now has an avatar or two in the White House to go with the 500 militant white supremacist groups currently active in the United States. Goodman attempts at consolation, coming from one of the first responders in OKC, ring much more feebly than his clarion warnings. “I hope that love is stronger than any terrorist attack,” remains a noble sentiment, though, and one that we will need to cling to in the days ahead. 

The AFI in Silver Spring is hosting special screenings of OKLAHOMA CITY on February 4th and 5th. Airing on your local PBS affiliate on February 7th. 

DENIAL

Denial opens with an infuriating exchange between Deborah Lipstadt, an academic who is on a speaking tour to support her book, Denying the Holocaust, and one of the most prominent Holocaust deniers, David Irving. Irving crashes Lipstadt’s event and we are outraged along with Lipstadt by both Irving’s grandstanding and his horrific addiction to falsehood. Irving is not content with stunt ambushes in his attempt to force Lipstadt into a debate. His last ditch effort to accomplish that is to sue Lipstadt in London for libel for the things she says about him in her book. David Hare, the screenwriter, and director Mick Jackson make sure that we understand the convoluted rules of this unfamiliar process. They place us firmly with Lipstadt’s fish out of water inexperience, who is then subjected to a barrage of exposition on finer points of British libel law without being too grating about it (the first time). It helps that quite a lot of arcane legalistic exposition is delivered by accomplished actors. Andrew Scott (who you love to hate as Moriarty) plays Anthony Julius, Deborah Lipstadt’s superstar solicitor, with the same acerbic, dry wit he brings to that other role. Tom Wilkinson handles the role of Richard Rampton, the barrister who will actually argue the case in the courtroom itself, with rumpled assurance. Rampton is quiet and understated, but, in court, Wilkinson excels at conveying contempt barely veiled by the cut and thrust of the proceedings. Denial’s feisty heart is Rachel Weisz’s Deborah Lipstadt, full to the brim with warm verve and a strong sense of injustice, squirming under conflicting imperatives who feels robbed of her voice. Weisz is a fine foil to the steely rigor of her lawyers and the sad conviviality of her opponent, David Irving, played by Timothy Spall. Spall is affable as Irving, who is unfailingly polite in person, but vicious and unrestrained in his appalling speeches where his wit often plays to laughter. He can’t see his racism or theirs beyond the laughter. Spall masters Irving’s confusion about why everyone else don’t see the humor as well. 

There is the germ of a great movie here, given the talented cast and the weighty subject matter. The filmmakers want too badly for the audience to be crystal clear on the rules and the stakes which betrays them into many repetitions of ground already well covered. For every bravura sequence like Lipstadt’s introduction to her legal team, a fizzing verbal sequence that flies through miles worth of exposition with style and dexterity, legalese whipping from lawyer to lawyer, before the bombshell of their legal strategy lands on Deborah. The film undermines itself with one or two or three too many discussions of that strategy, of the stakes, and the state of Lipstadt’s feelings about who is or is not in control of her voice at any given moment. It is a testament to Mick Jackson (The Bodyguard, LA Story, among others) that for the most part the the film doesn’t drown the audience in an effort to ensure they understand water is wet, but he can’t quite save us from a good soaking thanks to Hare’s script. It helps that, despite the repetition, the film otherwise moves briskly as Weisz, Wilkinson, and Scott provide levity and humanity while balancing the voluminous amount of technical detail in a grueling trial. 

Most of the action in Denial takes place up close in small rooms between a few characters, and cinematographer, Haris Zambarloukous, operates well, if within convention. However, the film finds a completely different pace when we are taken to Auschwitz. This may be solely because the keepers of the Auschwitz Memorial only allowed documentary footage to be shot on the site. Plenty of critics and artists don’t think it’s even possible to grapple sufficiently with what happened at Auschwitz and eschew trying to do so directly. Denial is not a film with enough visual ambition to make an attempt like Alain Resnais’ haunting Night and Fog, but they still seem to recognize to treat Auschwitz differently. Exterior shots of the site show the ruins of the camp blanketed under a heavy fog that cannot help but evoke the clouds of ash that once emanated from and hung over this place. These are not establishing shots to get through before pushing on with plot business, Zambarloukous lingers over these exteriors and on other objects that the Nazis did not see fit to destroy such as the tragically voluminous piles of every day objects left behind by the dead, the discarded remnants of hundreds of thousands of people murdered in this place. The film flirts dangerously with heavy sentimentality as Deborah prays over the haunted ground at Auschwitz as well, but fortunately the film must move on and we are spared from that.

Denial explores the tension between the urge to deliver the blow that will vanquish an evil tormentor and the meticulous work that makes such a blow possible fairly well. Lipstadt is an avatar of the quickened heartbeat a rational, informed person experiences when an outrageous liar abandons logic to say something vile and unsubstantiated. Her legal team are the brusque representatives of the slog of law and logic. Lipstadt is impatient to deliver that one killing blow. Denial provides us with that blow, but not without teaching Deborah, and us, perhaps once too often, of the importance of earning that blow while denying Irving and all such outrageous bigots a victory out of emotional impatience for their comeuppance. Deborah Lipstadt’s work is affirmed in a judgment that leaves no doubt that David Irving deliberately falsified history to advance his racist political agenda. David Irving continued to deny the Holocaust and behave as though the verdict never happened. Lipstadt and Julius are aghast at Irving’s rejection of reality on television. The case was never really about Irving, though, thanks to his invincible sense of self, it was about to re-affirming the primacy of facts to establish truth for everyone watching. So when Irving demonstrates that he will never learn this lesson, Lipstadt gives Julius the best possible advice in the face of an insufferable braggart, who resolves to know nothing but what he feels. “Let’s just turn him off,” she says and they, and hopefully the rest of the world, banish him back to the darkness that he arose from.