Death of a President (2007)
Lions Gate DVD (region 1)
d. Gabriel Range; pr. Simon Finch, Ed Guiney, Robein Gutch, Garbriel Range; ph. Graham Smith; m. Richard Harvey; ed. Brand Thumim; scr. Simon Finch, Gabriel Range; cast. Hend Ayoub, Beck Ann Baker, Brian Boland, James Urbaniak, Michael Reilly Burke (90 mins)
Death of a President is a speculative political thriller set in the immediate future. It postulates through the use of archive footage and documentary realism America’s reaction to an outrageous act of political terrorism – the assassination of War on Terror President George Bush by a sniper at an anti-war rally. Significantly, the near future here depicts an America polarized by Republican foreign and domestic policies as background for the fictional investigation that follows the assassination. As hypothetical political contingency, Death of a President addresses the dominant imperative in terrorist cinema since 9-11: terrorism as crisis management – the confusion and attempt to restore order and national self-determination here echoing that of air traffic ground control during the events of 9-11 as depicted in the first post 9-11 terrorist film United 93, which also sought to use docudrama techniques as a means of authentification.
Death of a President begins with Muslim outrage and grief following the immediate events of 9-11, balanced with the view throughout the Middle East that America had lived too safe and secure for too long and it was about time they got a taste of the terror that the Middle East lives with on a daily basis. It continues in the structure of a documentary, combining archival footage with fictional interviews to create an absolutely convincing depiction of Presidential security measures post 9-11, waning confidence in the Bush government, Republican reaction to the North Korean nuclear crisis and the rhetoric surrounding the necessity of the use of force – the us of “force” in the War on Terror being the ethical filter through which the terrorist film subgenre operated after 9-11 as witnessed in the rush of films in 2007.
Fahrenheit 9-11 used the documentary form for a mixture of opinion and dissent, its director Michael Moore admitting he sees a blurred line between objectivity and subjectivity in both journalism and documentary feature film. Death of a President also blurs the line between objectivity and documentary in what is essentially a fictionalized “mockumentary”, assembled with an attention to the political context of post 9-11 America reminiscent of the genuine documentary work of Alex Gibney in Taxi to the Dark Side, also released in 2007: the year that American cinema used the taboo terrorist subgenre to contextualize the issues during the War on Terror as fought in the Bush years, with Bush himself at the time of the film’s release increasingly referred to as a lame duck President reminiscent of Jimmy Carter after the Iran hostage crisis.
The blending of fact and fiction and the incorporation of archival footage interwoven with fiction brings the techniques Oliver Stone brought to JFK to the terrorist film: indeed the investigation of the presidential assassin here alludes to the search for Lee Harvey Oswald following the shooting of President Kennedy and the packaging of the “assassin” – also themes found in the 2007 release of Shooter. What Death of a President adds to these films is the international repercussions of a Bush assassination, hence the interviews include those of a woman who, upon hearing of the assassination, prayed it was not by a muslim. Indeed, this woman felt that 9-11 was a betrayal of Islam. However, she is also aware of the sudden disappearance of terror suspects, sent to CIA interrogation centres outside the reach of the US Constitution – an ethical dilemma explored in Rendition and Taxi to the Dark Side.
Indeed, in an evocation of a new term to enter the cinema of terrorism in this film, “racial profiling”, Islamic names investigated first lead to the arrest of a Middle Eastern man, simply because he was seen there by one of the many security cameras that dot the American urban landscape: the innocent terror suspect being subject to torture being dramatized in Rendition and Civic Duty and the subject of the documentary Taxi to the Dark Side. Being an American with Middle Eastern ties is a difficult predicament, a subject acknowledged in the pre 9-11 The Seige. Nevertheless, the prime suspect’s Syrian nationality puts Syria under greater US scrutiny, to the point where they must enter into political statements.
Interestingly, Death of a President evokes the heavily religious overtones to the War on Terror, the view that Bush was a President on God’s side: ironically a justification claimed by Islamic terrorists, which this film acknowledges in a clever match cut. The imperative to prove a terrorist connection impels interrogation procedure, an ethical dilemma the film contrasts to the tragedy faced by us troops in Iraq, knowing they are not wanted and in constant danger of roadside bombing. The humanity of the American soldier is tellingly portrayed here in one former gulf veteran’s view that it is not worth dying for an immoral cause. Implications of Gulf War veteran resentment of Bush and his War on Terror cause as a factor in peace movement protest and domestic terrorism is also evoked here – ideas of patriotism beloved of the American Right in an era defined by the Patriot Act.
However, Death of a President contextualizes Bush’s hypothetical assassination in relation to the anti-war protest movement that felt the Bush administration’s war policies were violating human rights – indeed a subtext throughout the 2007 releases and the impetus behind the revision of the terrorist genre from escapism to socio-political criticism respective to the compromise to civil liberties in the wake of the Patriot Act. Indeed the ruthless amorality of the CIA Terror Warrior justified by the Patriot Act would saturate Body of Lies in 2008. But in Death of a President, there is a new term to contend with for the first time in the cinema of terrorism – “enemy combatant”. Hence, a terrorist suspect (who is innocent) is detained without being read his rights and is told to co-operate or be declared an enemy combatant and therefore lose all entitlement to civil rights; or even habeus corpus – as examined in the analysis of the Guantanamo Bay treatment of such enemy combatants in Taxi to the Dark Side.
Other Presidential assassination plots in the films of 2007 were Vantage Point and Shooter and it seems that terror directed at the President is fast becoming a set-piece of post 9-11 terrorist cinema, whereas pre 9-11 the prime example was Airforce One. Of these, Death of a President is a relevant portrait of the Bush years, and indeed how Bush may be remembered, in the lead-up to the Oliver Stone biopic on George W. Bush, W. It was acclaimed in the popular press as being devoid of an agenda in its reflection on the Bush Presidency. In that, much of Death of a President treats the Bush era with a distinctly retrospective distance, hence the framing mock documentary footage surrounding the tense excitement of the speculative plot. Fear of terrorism, human rights compromise and cultural sensitivity in post 9-11 inform Death of a President most of all the 2007 terrorist film releases: and its subtle suggestion of Bush’s legacy of patriotism is one of humanist irony.
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