Raspberry Picking: Hillary’s America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party (2016)

Greetings and welcome back to Raspberry Picking, where we look back at Golden Raspberry Award winners and decide whether they really deserve to be called the worst movies ever. Today we’re looking at the magnum opus of Professional Oppressed Persecuted Truth-Teller Dinesh D’Souza, a documentary (maybe?) from everyone’s favorite election year. It’s time for Hillary’s America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party, nominee for five Razzies, winner of four, and, if a loving God exists, the final film of D’Souza’s directorial career.*

I do not have words for how much I didn’t want to do this.

I know, I know: I brought it on myself. 2016 was years ago by now, and I knew it was coming. Such is my self-destructive dedication to the Raspberry Picking project. But come on, I can still be mad at the Razzies for doing this to me.

As we’ve mentioned before, the Golden Raspberry Awards, like the Oscars, have particular types of films for which they reserve the bulk of their ire.  Because the Razzies, like the Oscars, are lazy as hell, these are the movies that are easiest for respectable movie-watching citizens to hate. Gross-out comedies. Pretentious, overlong faux–epics. Sexploitation. But in the American Hillary Clinton Versus Donald Trump Election Year of Our Lord Twenty Sixteen, the Razzie voters decided that none of this fruit was hanging low enough, and they went after a different target: right-wing agitprop.

Unlike today’s left-wing agitprop, which is insufferable but often well-made, today’s right-wing agitprop is also usually wretched filmmaking. Lots of wretched filmmaking has flown under the radar of the Razzies because it simply didn’t have enough buzz, but in 2016, they decided to leap on the national politics bandwagon with everybody else. Their target was the third film by Reagan-staffer-turned-author-turned-motivational-speaker-turned-college-president-turned-filmmaker-turned-convict-turned-filmmaker-again Dinesh D’Souza, Hillary’s America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party.

D’Souza is…well, he’s many things. He’s from Mumbai, educated at Dartmouth, and got his start writing esoteric tomes on applications of Catholic philosophy before he became a domestic policy advisor to Ronald Reagan. In the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, he was a respected conservative commentator, and not just on his own side; he had a reputation for meticulous research and trying to reach audiences somewhat to his left. By the mid-’90s, he discovered that there was money to be made in infamy, and he began his tragic transition into a professional pot-stirrer. In the 2010s he has had two major accomplishments: getting embroiled in scandal and legal trouble, and releasing three of the highest-grossing documentary films in history.  Through it all, he has bragged that he ignores his critics, because they are too blinded by their pro-establishment agendas to recognize that he speaks Truth.

So my initial reaction was that this wasn’t sporting. Hillary’s America wasn’t a serious movie. D’Souza and Schooley weren’t making a film; they were making a 100-minute fundraising ad for the Republican National Committee. If you liked the idea of a 100-minute fundraising ad for the RNC – and given the profit the thing made, an alarming number of people liked that idea – you would like Hillary’s America, and if you did not, you would not. The movie succeeded wildly at being what it set out to be, and if my word isn’t proof enough for you, look at its box office numbers. There would simply be no point in evaluating its merits as a film.

Yet that’s exactly what we’re going to do here. Despite how much I did not want to watch it, and I really did not want to watch it, I am the ideal audience for Hillary’s America. As a filmgoer who feels nothing but extreme contempt for both the Democratic and Republican Parties, I have no stake in this fecal festival. Even if the film turned out to be the most morally reprehensible excuse for a documentary since Triumph of the Will, it might still have something to offer us artistically. For the Razzies, being full of it and not recognizing artistry would be totally in character.  So we shall grant Dinesh D’Souza and his motley crew of desperate-for-work actors a new hearing?

THE STORY

I’ll give Hillary’s America this: it swings for the fences right away. The film opens with its single most insane sequence. A big-band swing piece called “Crappy Days,” a D’Souza-penned parody of FDR’s campaign song “Happy Days are Here Again,” plays over the opening credits**, which are accompanied by an animated montage of the Democratic Party’s soon-to-be-exposed Secret History, and my dear friends it is nothing if not watchably bonkers.

We then cut to D’Souza getting his mugshots taken.

The first twenty minutes or so of the film are D’Souza re-creating (with many artistic liberties) his own trial for campaign finance fraud, sentencing, and eight-month sentence in a halfway house. “If you make a film criticizing the most powerful man in the world, expect the empire to strike back,” he snivels. Because this movie might be called Hillary’s America, but the real subject and star is Dinesh D’Souza and the real message of the movie is that Dinesh D’Souza got done wrong by those nasty Democrats who control everything.

Through his eight months in overnight lockup, D’Souza makes acquaintance with a bunch of Real Criminals, including Roc (Corey Cotten), the most earnest gangster in the world. Roc earnestly explains to D’Souza how he successfully hoodwinked so many people: make a plan, pitch the con, take money from the dupes, and then deny the con ever existed for as long as it takes. D’Souza has heard this before, he muses; why, this is exactly what he’s heard about the Democratic Party! Are the Democrats trying to…steal America? He asks Roc, and Roc tells him he’s got it all wrong, because the Democrats are the “party for us, the party for minorities…poor people” whereas the Republicans are the party of “slavery, racists…just a bunch of rich fat cats.” In my former life as a prison teacher, I met a lot of guests of the state of New York, and I don’t recall a single one of them having a nice thing to say about anyone in the US government, but hey, Dinesh’s buddies might have been different.

Anyway, Roc doesn’t quell D’Souza’s suspicions, so once D’Souza gets out of the slammer, he decides to do his own investigating. He dons a suit and tie and wanders downtown to…the Democrat Headquarters, I think? Once the smiling volunteers welcome him in, he heads Secretly down to the Secret Basement, which is so Secret that anyone can just waltz past the AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY sign behind a curtain and through an unlocked door and access the entire Secret History in unlocked archive boxes and file cabinets.

Most of the remainder of the film is historical reenactments of all the Secret Stuff that D’Souza learns in the Secret Basement. Secrets like…notoriously racist presidents Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson were Democrats! The Democrats in the era of Lincoln supported slavery! Early twentieth-century Democrats passed Jim Crow laws, promoted segregation, and formed the Ku Klux Klan! Many Progressive Era policies and judgments were rooted in anti-black and anti-immigrant racism! Secrets that are So Very, Very Secret, you can also learn them by browsing Wikipedia for half an hour. 

If you are still waiting to learn the Secret History of the Democratic Party, I have some very disappointing news for you. Hillary’s America was sold to me as a conspiracy theory documentary, and I feel cheated. This is a conspiracy theory in the same way that “actually the Romans killed Jesus” is a conspiracy theory, and y’all set me up to expect “Jesus is hanging out in a nightclub in Ibiza with JFK and Jimmy Hoffa.”

Oh, there’s also the “Hillary” part of the movie, where Hillary Clinton is apparently using Secret Training she got from Rules for Radicals author Saul Alinsky to further the Democrats’ long con and keep poor and black Americans enslaved for eternity. Or something. The movie has some very fervent and urgent claim to make about Hillary Clinton and the Democrats’ Big Plan, but if you’re sure what it was, you did better than I.

THE BAD

Now, we strive to be fair here, and we must remember when we judge his film that D’Souza was an untrained filmmaker operating under three significant handicaps. The first is that he’s morally bankrupt and dishonest; the second, that he’s a vacuum of charisma with the screen presence of a towel rack; and the third, that he has as much business being behind a movie camera as I have competing in an Iron Man triathlon. But none of those actually excuse how poorly made this $5-million thing is.

Tommy Wiseau high on shrooms could frame a shot better than these jokers. The better shots in the film merely fail at centering something in the frame; in the worst, D’Souza (it’s usually D’Souza) seems to be drifting slowly out of the material world.

And that’s just when he and his co-perpetrator Bruce Schooley are behind the camera. Lord above, I cannot imagine a worse messenger for these causes or any others than Dinesh D’Souza. He’s aggressively, obnoxiously dweeby, literally walking around with his nose in the air. The tone of his narration runs the gamut from “self-satisfied” to “extremely self-satisfied.” He’s one of those people who thinks tidbits from history are being “hidden from him” if they aren’t printed on his dinner napkin when he walks into a restaurant.

Beyond D’Souza, we have a large cast of desperate actors and others pulled in to re-create a 21st-century Republican shill’s notions of American history, and thank God, here we have sumptuous helpings of the glorious B-movie nonsense I live for. Every single person on camera, down to the French horn players in the orchestra, looks like he or she is being held hostage. Only Gidget Taylor, who plays journalist Ida B. Wells, displays anything resembling acting talent. Everyone else chokes out horribly stilted D’Souza-penned lines with bad soap opera inflections and looks perpetually confused and displeased, like they’re still waiting for someone to give them direction.

Any dialogue not cribbed directly from the historical record will make you wish you were watching a bad soap opera. An overseer (James Smith) on Andrew Jackson’s plantation rushes to the boss and cries “Mistah Jackson!  Sir, sir!  Betty here was getting a little uppity about her work!” while Betty (Shawna Linzy) wails “Oh no!  Please, Massa!” Please remember that before he decided his true calling was making Z-grade agitprop for angry lemmings, D’Souza was a respected writer whose first book had criticized the Rev. Jerry Falwell for being unforgiving and uncharitable towards his ideological opponents.

How hard we mortals fall.  In the background of Hillary’s America lurks a genuine Greek tragedy.

THE GOOD

This section will be short, because very little in Hillary’s America rises even to the high watermark of “not that bad.” But here’s where I differ from, I suspect, most of the film’s naysayers: I wish it had been good. I wish D’Souza were not a hack. I wish he had forced his critics, most of whom are hostile to his worldview, to confront and mount a real defense against his message. Had he done so, he’d have made the American political landscape better, instead of worse, which is what he did.

Some of the history in the film, while not “secret” by any stretch of the imagination, is interesting and not as widely known as it should be. The Democratic Party does, in fact, have a sordid history; some of that history still informs their policymaking. Most of the people chastising the movie for its “lies” know less about American history than D’Souza does. And honest Democrats and progressives should, in fact, grapple with the darker elements of their movements’ histories, as should everyone concerned with ideas, their origins, and their potential consequences. A real, in-depth documentary of this history would be welcome. It’s just a darn shame that the person trying to fill that hole is Dinesh D’Souza, who might once have been capable of tackling the subject with nuance and respect and intellectual integrity, but who certainly is no longer.

So…let’s see, what’s good? The animation in the opening credits sequence is occasionally stylish and striking. The closing credits song by the Larry Gatlin and the Gatlin Brothers, “Stand Up and Say So,” is pretty decent if you like contemporary country. Gidget Taylor, as previously mentioned, brings an appealing fiery spirit to Ida B. Wells and someone should offer her some real jobs.

So after all that, what’s our verdict on the movie? It’s tempting to compare Hillary’s America to the smarmy documentaries of late-career Michael Moore: in both cases, they exist to tell one group of people what they want to hear and make another group of people, most of whom won’t see the movie, really mad. But whatever else you want to say about Moore’s films, they are certainly still documentaries. Hillary’s America is the prissy younger sibling of Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS. It makes occasional gestures towards being a legitimate intellectual and historical project (shame especially on Jonah Goldberg, a commentator I like and admire, for offering it even a thin veneer of respectability by granting D’Souza an interview), but in its heart, it’s a shameful kind of pornography: the kind that won’t admit it’s pornography.

And as a special note to the Razzies and the chattering class: please just ignore stuff like this. Nobody who listens to what you say was going to see the movie anyway. If you want to see fewer movies like Hillary’s America – and Christ knows I do – be less easy marks next time.

Quality of Movie: 1 / 5. Badly written, badly acted, and hilariously badly filmed.

Quality of Experience: 1½ / 5. It exudes the syrupy ultra-sincerity that I live for in a bad movie, but getting over what a loathsome, simpering little weasel Dinesh D’Souza is would be an impossible ask.

You can read Tim’s review of Hillary’s America here!

 

*A loving God does not exist.  D’Souza made more movies.

**This song was weirdly difficult to find information on: Google and IMDb were no help in locating the title, the lyrics, or anything else about it, and I of course forgot to write any down while I was watching the film. My deepest gratitude goes out to Brennan Klein, who watched the first five minutes of the movie to spare me from having to do it again.

Mandy Albert teaches high school English and watches movies – mostly bad, occasionally good – in the psychedelic swamplands of South Florida.  She is especially fond of 1970s horror and high-sincerity, low-talent vanity projects.  You can listen to her and her husband talk about Star Trek: Enterprise on their podcast At Least There’s a Dog!  You can also follow Mandy on Letterboxd.