Jon Stewart’s Irresistible:
An Election in Flyover Country

3,199 words

The 2020 film Irresistible, written and directed by the well-known former Daily Show host Jon Stewart, is a much-underrated political comedy in which a small-town mayoral campaign becomes a partisan battleground. At first I thought it might cover the same ground as The Candidate. (As I remember from when I watched it around 1979, a young greenhorn campaigns for a Senate seat, has to tone down his far-Left politics for optics purposes, and is furious because he wins after compromising himself.) Instead, it went in some surprising directions.

The new prospect

Irresistible | Steve Carell Has Found the Right Candidate

Irresistible opens with a montage of presidents on the campaign trail. Then, getting down to business, it shows a dairy pasture — cows in the forefront, hay bales and a windbreak in the background — with the caption “RURAL AMERICA.” It seems about like showing a flock of giraffes munching on acacia leaves, captioned with “East Africa” to further tip off the viewer about which exotic locale the action is in.

Then Jack Hastings appears, a simple farmer of — as the next caption tells us — HEARTLAND, USA. Soon he’s driving in his pickup past a defunct military base. In town — specifically, the fictional Deerlaken, Wisconsin — many storefronts are boarded up. As it later develops, the base’s closure devastated the local economy and reduced Deerlaken’s population from 15,000 to 5,000. (It’s hardly different from the fates of countless Rust Belt mill towns after some overpaid CEO moved a local factory to China so he could buy another yacht.) He walks into a city council meeting in which they’ve decided to require identification for recipients of social services. He presents a stirring argument to the effect that taking illegal aliens off the welfare rolls would be a dereliction of their duty to look out for the downtrodden.

In a posh Washington office, the high-powered political consultant Gary Zimmer reviews the speech. (He’s ambiguously Jewish, as well as a few others. Gary resembles a younger version of the former Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben Bernanke.) He is quite impressed with Jack Hastings and convenes a small meeting. He predicts that he is someone who can go places. “Gentlemen, this square-jawed paragon of Americana is our goddamn key back into the Forbidden City.” He’s a Marine Corps veteran — a Colonel at that — as well as a farmer, a widower, and “a man who makes Joe the Plumber look like Dukakis in Mom jeans and a fucking Easter bonnet. In the reddest of counties in the great, now swing state of Wisconsin.” Gary plans to recruit Jack as a Democrat and launch his political career by having him run for Mayor, an office which will hopefully be a stepping stone to national prominence.

At another meeting, this one in the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) headquarters, Gary likewise discusses his new find. He argues, “There are two million rural votes in these states alone. If we lost them 2.7 to one instead of three to one, we’d win, but we didn’t even try.” A participant who looks slightly like Jen Psaki counters, “Their base turned out. Ours didn’t. If we find a candidate to activate our base, if our African-Americans and Latino communities show up, we win.” Gary argues that they should make an effort to court rural voters, but she doesn’t see the point of even trying to appeal to her own people. “Well, if it’s all the same to you, I’ll stick with pandering to our special interest groups, thank you very much.” She holds hands with other participants who briefly chant the slogan, “¡Sí se puede!” (D’awwww!) Then a black lady comes out in favor of Gary’s idea, acting as the voice of reason and backing the surprisingly enlightened Jews who’ve decided to suddenly take an interest in Flyover Country.

To provide some context, this film came out in the midst of the Democratic Party’s 2016 post-election funk. The Clinton campaign deployed their big bombshell few days before the vote, which was obviously timed to have the most impact and give little opportunity for damage control: Trump said “pussy!” Despite unleashing their Wunderwaffe, the eminently unlikable Cupcake still lost. Surely the result must’ve caused some soul-searching, and it’s hard not to notice that they alienated Middle America. The Democrats were once the working man’s party, but they lost something vital when they switched their focus to bioleninism. Unfortunately, their final answer involved stuffing the ballot boxes and other monkey business to get their feebleminded, girl-sniffing marionette Bidet in office, but all that’s another story.

Wisconsin: Hic sunt dracones

The characters then plan their cheap; even the process of choosing their rental vehicle is a precious scene. Soon Gary is headed off to deepest, darkest Flyover Country. Aboard what appears to be a chartered jet, he reads Deerlaken’s newspaper, views the Wisconsin entry on Wikipedia (ick!), catches up on a sportsball game, and enjoys his fine repast of insalata caprese with a side of French bread. What a multitasker!

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Driving in a Ford Explorer and listening to National Public Radio (ick!), he ventures through the alien terrain, bound for Deerlaken. All he’d have to do is grab a pith helmet, compass, and machete, and he’d be much like Richard Francis Burton setting forth in 1857 to find the source of the Nile. He finally reaches the town and stops at an inn to get some food and seek information for his quest. Come to think of it, that seems like how every Dungeons & Dragons adventure starts!

He encounters the natives at the Deerlaken Hofbrau, who are fortunately quite friendly and give him the sobriquet of “DC Gary.” He orders a Bud and a burger. Those aren’t on the menu — which he didn’t ask for — but someone in the kitchen is kind enough to fetch it from across the street. As things develop later, it turns out that Gary doesn’t like Budweiser or hamburgers, but he’s trying to go incognito among the rubes. (Budweiser as the mass-market suds of das Volk didn’t age so well, of course.) Disguising his bourgeois identity didn’t go as planned. One of the natives has to explain to him that the bottle has a twist-off cap. After removing the cap with difficulty, Gary sniffs the opening to sample the bouquet like a wine snob.

The next day, he discovers that everyone in town knows he’s DC Gary; news travels fast. This is one of many surprises. Despite the friendly reception, he struggles at times to hold back his disdain. Then he goes off to find his prospective candidate. He also has a not-so-cute meetup with Jack’s daughter Diana, who is performing — shall we say — a rather invasive veterinary procedure on a heifer. Mr. Hastings is quite reluctant to run for Mayor at first, but agrees on the condition that Gary will be his campaign manager. It looks like he’s going to have to rough it for a lot longer out in the wilds of Flyover Country!

Soon the campaign is assembled, mostly locals with no experience. Jack is likewise a complete newb. They film a speech in which he announces his candidacy. The results are so bad that a competent high school drama club could’ve done much better. When Gary tries to choreograph the cows, it’s one of the film’s finest moments of surrealism.

The race is on

Their rival, the incumbent Mayor Braun, gets a billboard and rents an office. Given local shoestring budgets, this means his campaign is receiving outside funding from the Republican Party — and that the mayoral race has become a proxy war. Gary unveils an article he wrote for the Daily Kos (ick!) to solicit funding: “Hero Veteran Takes On Small Town’s Small Minds.” What a way to insult the electorate! Before long, it’ll be a gaffe a minute.

I’ll add that proxy wars such as this are hardly uncommon in Flyover Country. A North Dakota native related to me that in one of their Senatorial races, 90% of the funding came from out of state. Big money is a corrupting influence on representative government, which is one of the points the film makes.

The Republican Party then sends in a campaign manager. This is Faith Brewster, a bleach blonde whose wholesome, fresh-faced looks are reminiscent of Ann Coulter, Kayleigh McEnany, and Lauren Southern. Despite appearances, she has an abrasive side. She has nearly as much thinly-disguised disdain for the town as Gary. (Still, I wish the film had gone further and criticized the GOP’s perennial bad habit of making empty promises.) The two apparently have some personal history. At a fish fry, he needles her for the Republican campaign slogan. “‘Deerlaken: Always’  — so apparently Deerlaken Über Alles was copyrighted?” Precious, isn’t it?

A technological challenge for the team is that they’re still on dial-up. (Maybe someone saved an AOL trial disk?) There’s only one WiFi hotspot in town, which also makes for a funny plot point.

Money, money, money makes the world go around

They go to a campaign shindig in New York hosted by a hedge fund manager. It’s quite a posh event, filled with lively liberal babble. There’s a table with hors d’ouevres for various diets: halal, paleo, and kosher. Is it just me, or does it seem that only the latter will need refilling soon? (Interesting approach there — subtle, but a bit daring.) Gary gives a brief introduction. If one runs it through the liberal ideological decoder ring and reads between the lines, he boldly proposes that it’s pragmatic to try to win the support of ordinary white people in Flyover Country. Colonel Jack Hastings steps up and gives a rather unique speech. After a slow start, he basically says that campaign financing is dysfunctional and that it’s odd he has to ask them for money to fund his mayoral campaign when it’s the town that really needs the money. Incredibly, this approach is a resounding success!

With the resulting cash infusion, they finally get their technological upgrade. The inner sanctum of their headquarters now looks more or less like a Deep State war room where they’re about to pull off one of those “color revolutions.” (Word has it that the CIA does indeed have some pretty sophisticated software to test reactions to electoral strategies, crunching the data until the numbers bleed and yield the best possible angle to get the rubes to vote the way they want. Surely manipulating public opinion to swing elections is perfectly okie dokie, so long as they pinky-swear they’re only meddling in the politics of other sovereign nations, right?) Their system figures out the demographic characteristics of the citizens, thanks to highly advanced data mining techniques. This leads to an interesting conversation with the analytics chief on how it works:

Tina: People tell computers the truth, right? Their desires, their prejudices. Every search, every transaction. It’s an unguarded private moment. So there’s no, uh, margin of error, you know? The digital footprint is your true self.

Diana: But surely, people are more complicated than their online transactions.

Tina: Well, says the woman with three cats and an intense search history of the herpes virus.

That’s certainly a nice reminder of how Big Tech usually handles our data and complies with domestic spying. The All-Seeing Eye of Sauron backfires soon enough, though: The software finds a cluster of single women “deeply interested in reproductive rights.” Tina draws certain conclusions about their views on birth control, when in fact they’re nuns at a convent. Ouch! It’s one more event that makes the mayoral race an optics disaster-o-thon.

Two elderly men in wheelchairs arrive in a van. These are the Bayou Billionaires, a pair of tremendously wealthy Republican Party donors. The Democrats top this by bringing in an elderly supporter of theirs, a “billionaire rocket man.” After suffering “a series of micro-strokes,” he seems barely alive and is walking with the assistance of a robotic exoskeleton. In a singsong synthesized voice, he begins speaking, although increasingly unintelligibly. They figure out that the visitor is asking about Israel. Gary answers for Jack, saying he strongly believes sovereign nations are entitled to self-defense. This warm platitude wins the desired financial backing. This one is a bit open to interpretation, but perhaps the Republican supporters are modeled after the Koch brothers. The cyborg could be a loose representation of George Soros, who could pass for the Crypt Keeper’s little brother.

Wrapping up

The election comes around. Then there’s an absolutely delicious plot twist. It’s brilliant! You’ll just have to see it for yourself. They dropped a couple of brief hints about it earlier.

As the film ends, writer and director Jon Stewart briefly interviews Trevor Potter, the former Chairman of the Federal Election Commission. In part, he says:

The problem we have is that none of the pieces of the system are working today. You have regulators like the Federal Election Commission that don’t have a quorum, can’t meet, and when they do, they disagree on what the law is. You have Congress deadlocked so it can’t rewrite the laws. You have the Supreme Court that thinks that almost nothing is corrupt and that citizens won’t think the sale of access, what the court calls ingratiation in return for giving money to candidates, is a problem.

That’s quite right. Big money ultimately became the game-breaker for representative government. That’s the reason why the United States’ ruling class is a dildocracy that turned the two-party system into kabuki theater starring the Republicrats, but that’s another matter entirely.

Why didn’t the film become a hit?

For the political cynic, there’s much to love about Irresistible. Since about half of the American public doesn’t bother to vote, perhaps there are more cynics than one might expect. Although the film doesn’t present everything that’s wrong with electoral sausage-making, I’d call it a good start. Despite its potential, the film’s total revenue seems to have been less than half a million dollars. It’s unclear what the cost of production was, but unless it was shot on a very tight budget by contemporary Hollywood standards, it had a negative return on investment. What happened?

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There are some fairly obvious reasons. For one thing, the choice of title wasn’t the greatest. The single word “irresistible” gives no hint of what it’s about. Someone might assume it’s a rom-com or something. The symbolism only becomes clear at the end of the film, when the title appears on screen and highlights “resist.”

Also, the overuse of profanity got it an “R” rating. That much is realistic, since there’s no shortage of potty-mouthed political figures. Still, that surely deterred some potential viewers who might otherwise have enjoyed it. For Mormons who (unlike me) take their religion seriously, “R” rated movies are a no-no. Lots of Catholics and Evangelicals feel that way also, since that usually means a film will be too ultraviolent or morally offensive for their tastes. The profanity could’ve been cleaned up without sacrificing the message; creative paraphrase can work wonders.

There were other factors outside of the filmmakers’ control. The plandemic emerged while they were putting the final touches on it. Since the Fauci Flu prevented a full-scale release in American theaters, that obviously threw a wrench into the works. If that weren’t enough, the streaming video release came out just before the Long Hot Summer of Floyd. It was doing reasonably well at first, but it’s likely that months of coordinated vibrancy further dampened the film’s prospects. Although the timing was about as unfavorable as it gets, it nevertheless serves as a memory of what the country looked like just before the annus horribilis of 2020 and the Bidet junta’s “New Normal.”

The final word

Wisconsin (s)election for real

This political farce is something else. The cynicism is on full display. This especially comes out in the “Where are my fucking Hispanics?” scene, which ends in a parodied apology ritual. Another interesting feature is cameo appearances of some real-life media figures: Candy Crowley of the Clinton News Network, Charlotte Deleste and Eric Franke of WISC-TV (Channel 3 in Madison), and MSNPC‘s husband-wife team of Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski. The latter is also notable for being the daughter of Trilateral Commission founder Zbigniew Brzezinski, as well as her remarkably candid bon mot while discussing The Donald on a live broadcast: “. . .he could have undermined the messaging so much that he could control exactly what people think, and that is our job.”

From the beginning, Irresistible proved itself to be a devastating satire. Even so, it’s lighthearted enough that it’s plausibly an affectionate parody. It’s a fine line to walk, which it kept up for the rest of the story. At several points I couldn’t decide whether to laugh, mourn for my country, or throw heavy objects. An early scene, set inside one of the corridors of power where strategies are devised that will shape the political landscape, was quite a doozy. A roomful of DNC apparatchiks, having no particular affection for real Americans, were privately debating on whether it’s worth the effort to appeal to us. Now, that is all kinds of special!

I should add that the movie has the potential to touch some nerves on the other side as well. This is evident in Roxana Hadadi’s negative review, with the long-winded title “Unintentionally But Quite Tellingly, the Greatest Flaw of Jon Stewart’s Toothless Political Commentary ‘Irresistible’ is How Thoroughly It Centers Whiteness.” Mainly, the cast is too white, in her opinion. It’s quite odd; why does she have a problem with this? Who does she think lives in rural Wisconsin? (Martians, perhaps?) Where would Ms. Hadadi prefer white people in Wisconsin to be? Would she have a problem with a movie set in Tehran featuring lots of Iranians? Say what one will about the “whiteness” of Irresistible, at least it’s better than a movie set in medieval Scotland in which a third of the cast is black.

The filmmakers had their reasons. There’s an obvious thematic element in the small town with its white and delightsome population, which is contrasted with the urban, ultra-cosmopolitan Democratic National Committee. It also dovetails with the film’s equally obvious class consciousness. On one side is the economically displaced Rust Belt; more or less the new peasants. On the other side is the bourgeois bubble of the Washington insiders, second-handers who derive their posh opulence from proximity to federal power. It’s almost as if these were two different countries. (If this were any more so, it would be The Hunger Games.) It’s refreshing to see a movie that, for once, doesn’t insult the people who grow our food.

Irresistible relentlessly satirizes how the Republicrats manipulate politics in Flyover Country, bamboozle us with carefully-scripted campaigns, court our vote while considering us rubes, and then take us for granted until the next election cycle. (Considering what happened in 2020 and since, going back to benign neglect would be wonderful!) Again, the plot resolution was spectacular. The only way to improve the ending would for there to have been a very brief final scene set in a secret basement of some trendy Washington pizzeria, beginning with “You have failed me for the very last time . . .” But that might be a bit too grim for a comedy.

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