Broken Taboos of Filming National Leaders
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

You might think that North Korea’s nuclear lunacy would act like a cold shower on Europe’s flirtation with anti-Americanism. You are wrong. The hold that defeatism still has on the European imagination is hard to overestimate.
Two reactions, in themselves trivial, sum up the prevailing attitude here. The BBC asked Ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, whether Korea’s inclusion by President Bush in “the axis of evil” had provoked Kim Jong Il. Mr. Bolton replied, rather testily, that not all the world’s ills could be laid at the door of America.
Second, a columnist at the London Times, Alice Miles, said that her response to Mr. Bush’s statement on the nuclear test was to swear at him, because America had squandered its moral authority. She admitted that she was dismayed by her own reaction. People like her still want America to protect them against the world’s monsters. The thought that the rest of us might otherwise be at some tyrant’s mercy is too frightening to contemplate.
This inner struggle between the flight into denial and the reality principle is symbolized by two utterly contrasting movies that I have seen in the last week, neither of which is likely to be big box office in America. New York Sun readers may have already read about the first,”Death of a President,” which on Monday was screened by the state-owned (but not state-controlled) British TV corporation, Channel Four. This film, which depicts the assassination of President Bush with sickening verisimilitude, won notoriety even before it was shown — plus a prize at the Toronto film festival.
What makes this ultimate exercise in Bush-hating anti-Americanism so insidious is that it is cunningly made to look like a documentary, using real footage of the president and vice-president spliced together with fictional material. The “assassination” is seen through the eyes of the presidential entourage, the police, the FBI, and the Secret Service. President Bush is shown at his most cheerful, charming, and courageous. His imagined death comes across as traumatic, if not exactly tragic.
Once the spectator’s guard is lowered, however, the film’s real agenda emerges, and its credibility collapses under the weight of its propaganda. We are asked to believe that an Arab-American would be convicted of the murder on a trumped-up charge. We are asked further to believe that “President” Cheney would turn America into a police state, abolishing liberty and the rule of law. Finally, we are asked to believe that Mr. Bush’s assassin would turn out to be an unhinged Gulf War veteran who had lost a son in Iraq. The denouement does not spare the heavy-handed irony.
Well, as the Duke of Wellington said, “If you believe that, you’ll believe anything.” But the inherent improbability of the plot is beside the point. This is a sophisticated attempt to undermine the war on terror by a virtual onslaught of the commander in chief. The production values are high, so are the stakes — on both sides.
The very idea of depicting the assassination of a living head of state is, of course, deeply distasteful — a taboo, even. But the British find it hard to see the American head of state in the same light as the queen. As it happens, right now she too is the subject of a movie, “The Queen,” a surprisingly warm portrayal by Helen Mirren. No Briton — or American, for that matter — would feel anything but disgust at a film showing the assassination of the Queen; even the murder of her uncle, Lord Mountbatten, by Irish terrorists in 1979, evoked horror at the time.
It is also the height of irresponsibility to incite those who may already dream of killing the president to believe that they might actually do so. Indeed, it is a form of treachery. Throughout history, those who give aid and comfort to enemies in wartime have been punished as traitors. Men have been executed for less than what Gabriel Ridge, the director of “Death of a President,” has done. Even historical drama about regicide has always been suspect. Shakespeare’s “Richard II” was subversive enough to be used by the Earl of Essex as a signal to his co-conspirators to mount their attempted coup against Elizabeth I, who was well aware of the play’s significance, “I am Richard II, know ye not that?” she is said to have exclaimed.
Mr. Ridge and his backers rely on the fact that free societies do not prosecute artists for their work, however provocative. We leave silencing free speech to our enemies. But the taboo that this film has broken exists for very good reasons.
This brings me to my other movie. “The Lives of Others” (“Das Leben der Anderen”) is written and directed by a young German, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, and is already the most successful German film debut of recent years.
This is highly significant, because Mr. Donnersmarck represents a sharp reaction against “Ostalgie,” the nostalgia for communist East Germany that has dominated German culture ever since the Berlin Wall came down. Gone is the sentimentality of “Goodbye Lenin.” This is a subtle, sinister, and harrowing evocation of a parallel universe in which the secret police (Stasi) spy on everyone — even on the pampered darlings of the regime. The plot revolves around a grimly efficient Stasi officer whose task is to monitor the lives of two such privileged favorites, a playwright and his leading lady.The squalid reality of the regime gradually unfolds until the spy begins to have doubts about the communist system he serves. He deludes himself that he can protect his charges, but the attempt ends in catastrophe.
As it happens, the actor who plays — brilliantly — the Stasi man, Ulrich Mühe, had a similar experience, when he read his Stasi file and discovered that his own wife had been spying on him. For revealing this ordeal, he was denounced by many German intellectuals. The same nostalgic apologists for communism hate this film.
Mr. Donnersmarck has broken the silence that still surrounds this web of deceit by making a movie that does not disguise the reality of totalitarianism. Just how stultifying that silence may become in Germany was recently illustrated by Günter Grass, who took 60 years to come clean about his role in the Waffen-SS.
“Death of a President” is a pathological symptom of the delusion that the war on terror is turning America into a police state. “The Lives of Others” is a reality check that reminds us what a real police state is like. One of these films is a fantasy about the future, spreading alarm and despondency in the midst of a battle for survival. The other is a meditation on the recent past, showing us exactly why the free world had to stand firm in the Cold War. The war will be won only when we in the West can agree about what we stand for and what we are up against.
The mass masochism of the liberal elites is potentially suicidal. When the self-appointed guardians of civilization no longer distinguish between legitimate criticism of elected leaders and morbid fantasies about their assassination, then it becomes impossible to build and maintain a united front against the enemies of the open society. Indeed, the internal enemies are more dangerous than the external ones. The downfall of the West is beyond the power of ogres like Kim Jong Il, but it may yet be brought about by those among us who, despite John Bolton, do indeed blame all the evils of the world on America.