by Brendan Foley
“I will leave a mark so big that it will be felt for years to come, and history will remember my name. There’s no turning back. I must stand fast in my resolve. The world has no use for another scared man. Right now, the world needs a fucking hero.”
The only thing keeping Jody Hill’s Observe and Report from being the most prescient satire of Donald Trump’s America possible is that Ronnie Barnhardt (Seth Rogen)’s final victim isn’t a black man.
In every other respect, Hill’s 2009 film is a blistering encapsulation/prediction of the increasingly public toxin of resentment-fueled rage that has come to dominate American discourse. That pestilence is evident in everything from Gamergate to the idiots screaming about Ghostbusters to the more public, at times lethal, discourse surrounding ongoing racial strife and rape culture. There are people (usually white, often male) who are choking with anger over a country and world that seems to be leaving them behind, and they flock to Trump and his Cheeto-dust skin like a messianic figure.
As Trump has continued to get headlines every day for being a dumpster fire of a human being, pundits and analysts continue to express disbelief and bafflement over his popularity with a certain segment of voters. But there’s nothing baffling about it. What we are seeing is the frothing spill-over of an anger that has been steadily brewing since Obama took office (if not beforehand), and one need only look at Observe & Report’s ugly soul to understand what drives that anger.
For those of you who haven’t seen it (and based on the box office receipts and limited cult clout, that’s a lot of you) Observe & Report features Rogen as mall security guard Ronnie Barnhardt. Rogen’s familiar form is perverted wildly, his friendly bulk stuffed into a uniform and crew cut that gives him a cruel, threatening dimension. Ronnie’s twin passions in life are guns and the make-up counter girl Brandi (Anna Faris) but his life seems stuck in an endless rotation of bland mediocrity. His existence of steady nothing is interrupted when a flasher begins terrorizing the mall, inviting the attention of both the media and the real police. For Ronnie, this is his chance to step up and truly be as important as he has always fancied himself. Brandi starts paying attention to him, he gets to carry himself like an actual cop in the wake of investigative detective Harrison (Ray Liotta), and things go so well that he goes off the meds he’s been taking to handle his bi-polar disorder. Things… escalate.
It’s important to note that as dark and twisted as Observe & Report goes, it is a comedy. Hill’s reach for gags sometimes come as a detriment to the film’s overall tone (the funniest scene in the movie [Rogen exchanging an endless series of “Fuck Yous” with Aziz Ansari] feels like it has been imported from an entirely different film) but there are big laughs mined throughout. Faris deserves all the credit in the world for playing Brandi as a truly reprehensible nightmare of a human being, while Michael Pena steals every scene that isn’t nailed down with his own bizarre choices. And Ray Liotta appears to not know that he is in a comedy, which makes his every scene ten times funnier.
That Observe & Report is a comedy (and a comedy clearly cut from the riff-heavy cloth of the Judd Apatow mold) puts it in interesting company. Ever since Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy hit, there’s been a long strain of movies that take great delight in the degradation and humiliation of upper middle class and/or wealthy white men. From The Hangover series to the Horrible Bosses movies, to Hall Pass and most every Adam McKay film (a satirical bent that went from subtextual to overt with his work on The Big Short, aka How White Men Fucked Up the World), these are comedies which derive their laughs from placing well-off white dudes in situations where they are embarrassed, emasculated, stripped of all power and agency, terrorized, or simply flat-out maimed for the audience’s amusement.
(Compare that to the comedies of the 90s which tended to center around men as tornadoes of chaos that bent the world to their wacky will [like Ace Ventura, Austin Powers, Wayne’s World, etc.]
Observe & Report feels, for much of its running time, like a blunter and grungier version of those films, with Ronnie as the clueless and entitled dope who is oblivious to the harm he causes or the prejudices he harbors (he’s racist without realizing he’s racist, frequently insisting on the guilt of people of color with no cause beyond, “You just look at his face and you can tell!”).
Ronnie’s mental state deteriorates to a point where violent consequences are unavoidable. Now, movies have conditioned us to accept that there are two, and only two, possible outcomes to a situation like this: Either they go with the Hollywood version (Ronnie realizes the error of his ways, makes a gesture of redemption, and the movie ends with the status quo reasserted but the heroes in a healthier place for having gone on this journey) or the dark indie movie version (Ronnie spirals further downward until the movie ends on a note of ambiguous melancholy, probably with a riff on the Lady and the Tiger ‘choose your own ending’ conclusion [btw I saw The Lobster recently and was not amused]).
Instead, Hill cribs from the Taxi Driver playbook. He gives you the ‘happy’ ending, but in his hands the happy ending is rendered ash in your mouth. At the film’s conclusion, Ronnie’s violent mania has lost him everything, right up until the flasher reappears. Ronnie point blank fucking shoots the guy right in the middle of the mall and is hailed as a hero for his action, receiving waves of applause even as he walks off caked in blood spray. The movie ends with Ronnie back in charge of security and with a new girlfriend, closing on a final shot of his smirking face firing round after round at a gun range.
When Observe & Report came out to middling-to-negative reviews and low box office (and with most critical conversation centered not on the film but in an entirely misread sex scene) there was talk about whether or not Ronnie’s triumph was meant to be viewed as a dream sequence, the same way that people wonder if the final moments of Taxi Driver are meant to be Travis Bickle’s dying fantasy.
But denying the in-movie reality of these conclusions deprive the respective films of their actual points. In Observe & Report’s case, Hill is exposing the hypocrisy of privilege that allows for these outbursts of rage. Privilege is the ability to crash a car at 80 MPH and saunter away whistling Dixie, while behind you the next ten cars slam into the wreckage and explode. That’s the privilege that straight white men have enjoyed for, well, for forever, essentially.
Over time, and especially in these last few years, that privilege has been attacked by all comers, with brave voices rising up in furious opposition to a status quo that positions heteronormative white dudes at the top of every food chain. This is a good thing, a great thing, but it is leaving a percentage of people (not exclusively but majorly white and male) feeling disenfranchised and left behind. They look at an America where women hold positions of power (and bust ghosts), where gay couples live openly, where trans people can use whatever bathroom they fucking well please, and it is not the America they know, not the America they were promised in their youth when they inhaled a hundred thousand narratives where white man’s might makes right.
Ronnie Barnhardt is that anger made manifest. He’s a bully and a creep and a racist, and he goes through his day with no understanding that he is any of those things. Ronnie Barnhardt assumes that a can-do attitude and a goal-oriented (psychotically goal-oriented, we should specify) mindset are enough to merit a position of power. He is baffled, sincerely baffled, when this is not the case and the things he desires are not simply handed to him.
Like I said, lots of comedies deal with this dejection and emasculation (Ed Helms has built a career on it) but Observe & Report digs into the anger in a way that almost no other film has or could. It settles in and lets you watch Ronnie’s rage fester and grow and fester and grow until he lashes out and takes back his power with the pull of a trigger.
Ronnie Barnhardt triumphs in Observe & Report.
Please let’s work together to make sure he doesn’t win in November.