The horror of Vice

Vice is a horror film. Dick Cheney is the monster spreading a right-wing virus throughout the land.

In a typically brilliant performance, actor Christian Bale portrays the former vice president as a youthful ne’er- do-well who becomes motivated to succeed to please his hard-driving, power-hungry conservative wife.

Lynne Cheney comes off as the puppeteering Hillary of the right, subtler and more generationally and philosophically content to stay in the political background.

The movie places Dick Cheney intimately and vitally at the root in the 1970s of the right-wing movement that has grown to widely infest modern America.

The film’s scariest moment comes at the very end. It occurs in a simple line of summary text. It’s that the unitary theory of presidential power still exists though no president has tried to use it to its arguable full strength … since, well, Cheney.

The movie’s premise is that Cheney, acting as effectively the real president for the pliable stooge George W. Bush, applied the unitary theory after 9/11 to order spying on American citizens, torture of foreign terrorist suspects and a war in Iraq for the sake of a war on somebody.

In the film, a young and up-andcoming Cheney talks conspiratorially with an agreeable young right-wing lawyer named Antonin Scalia about someday testing the limits of this unitary theory.

This is the theory: The Constitution, by expressly vesting executive power in the president, essentially gives the president unchecked authority to run everything in the executive branch of the government, meaning everything except making laws, appropriating money and ruling on court cases. By the theory’s most extreme version, the president cannot do anything illegal in his executive capacity because everything he does is made legal by his doing it.

I found the aforementioned summary text frightful, not retrospectively, but prospectively. I was hoping to goodness that Donald Trump stayed cooped up in the White House watching television and never laid eyes on this movie and its reference in the epilogue to a theory still lying there for a president to test.

If Cheney was Michael Corleone, then Trump looms as Fredo, the weak and woeful blunderer allowed to head a once-great family after it has deteriorated to his level of incompetence.

A reader reports going to a showing of the movie on Christmas Day and seeing Gov. Asa Hutchinson in attendance, and of asking the governor afterward what he thought of the show.

“Entertaining, but exaggerated,” the governor is quoted as saying.

Hutchinson later gave me a further review: “Interesting, but a real downer. Christian Bale did an amazing job. All the character actors were really good. But it was such a humanly destructive and negative movie that it took any fun out of it.”

I can understand that the film’s assault on the descent of America into right-wing desolation wasn’t a bowl of Christmas cherries for one who himself was a beneficiary of that descent.

But I wasn’t crazy about the movie either.

Its underlying narrative is that Cheney arrived in Washington as a green wannabe in the 1970s, fell in with the savvy but mean-spirited Donald Rumsfeld, and became a formative agent of the modern rightwing movement that gave rise to tax cuts and Fox News and energy deregulation and focus groups manipulatively rebranding estate taxes on the rich as death taxes on the grieving.

Cheney comes off as a young Forrest Gump and an old Hannibal Lecter.

From watching Richard Nixon’s use of power and fatal decline, Cheney presumably became a brilliant zealot who foresaw in Bush a useful dolt through whom he could essentially function as president.

Never does the story develop the character of Cheney. The narrative never plausibly moves him from the drunken-driving Wyoming kid stretching power lines for a living to the blindly ambitious ground-floor mastermind of America’s modern right-wing decline.

All we get is that his young wife wanted him to be better than her own drunken, abusive father, and to carry her to prominence.

The best part of the narrative is, of course, the subtlety and nuance that will attend any life story. For all his hardness, Cheney is portrayed as instinctively accepting and loving of his lesbian daughter until, as it happens, he accedes to his other daughter’s need to demagogue against gay rights as a congressional candidate in Wyoming.

Go see the movie if you’re on the left and want to work yourself into a lather of anger and distress over the manipulative evil of this man and the destructive politics spreading around and from him.

Go see it if you’re on the right and want to behold the liberal media engaging in yet more fake news.

That is to say that Vice really doesn’t amount to anything new, until and unless Trump sees it and gets the idea that he has constitutional powers befitting his megalomaniacal delusion of personal wonder.