10 Political Satires

“Duck Soup” (1933) Behind the peppy musical numbers, underneath its chipper exterior, the Marx brothers’ high watermark remains a work of white-hot political aggression. Born entertainers, the Marxes maintain a good-natured demeanor in the film, pulling off some of the most elaborate physical comedy in their illustrious oeuvre (students of comedy should have their eyelids clipped open, “A Clockwork Orange”-style, and watch Harpo and Groucho’s celebrated mirror scene until it’s permanently imprinted upon them) and deploying fearlessly randy puns at a breakneck speed that feels like it’s actually trying to break your neck. (Groucho fantasizes about marriage to his beloved with “I can see you right now in the kitchen bending over a hot stove, but I can’t see the stove,” which is both a fat joke and supremely raunchy sex joke.) But Groucho’s quick-talking despot Rufus T. Firefly — and no writer’s dreamed up a sillier name since — was a sniper shot aimed right between the eyes of the politicians who obfuscate, distract, and cloud the truth in their shameless power-grabs. “If you think this country’s bad off now, just wait’ll I get through with it!” could be the most accurate summation of political strategy ever committed to celluloid, blurring the line between a promise and a warning. Hail Freedonia! “Thank You For Smoking” (2005) Before the star-making successes of “Juno” and “Up in the Air” and star-unmaking catastrophes of “Labor Day” and “Men, Women & Children,” Jason Reitman made an auspicious debut with this meditation on smokescreens both literal and moral. There’s no room for questions of right and wrong in the anything-goes dervish of rationalization and straight-up lies that is professional lobbying. There’s no truth, only victory. As quick-talking tobacco rep Nick Naylor, Aaron Eckhart conducts some pretty objectively evil business. To wit: falsifying studies, knowingly misrepresenting information, and offering a dying man a suitcase full of cash that might as well be spattered with blood, in exchange for his agreement not to implicate the deleterious effects of tobacco on his condition. But Reitman affords Eckhart ample opportunity to make his case for Naylor’s soul, and ultimately offers him a lifeboat out of his relativist hell. For a film in which tobacco, alcohol, and firearms lobbyists collectively refer to themselves as the “Merchants of Death,” it’s not nearly as cynical as it might sound. The innocence of children provides this film with a soft gooey center, though it never undermines Reitman’s disparaging perspective on lobbying and the soul-suckers who do it. The language can be cartoonishly over-the-top, but Reitman’s depiction of carnivorous amorality isn’t too far removed from reality. “Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” (1964) The finest, most perfectly calibrated work of American political satire on film is full to bursting — tumescent, one might even say — with dick jokes. Dicks are everywhere in Kubrick’s comedic masterwork, compelling rational men to make irrational decisions and empowering irrational men to make the jump to full-on insanity. A symbolic dick gave the film its most iconic image, of Slim Pickens ecstatically riding his massive atomic phallus into the great beyond. And one dick in particular threatens to bring about the end of days when it stops functioning and its owner, Sterling Hayden’s mad general Jack D. Ripper, figures the only possible explanation is a Commie plot. Kubrick, aided by the multi-role genius of Peter Sellers, expertly skewers the lunacy of American crisis-politics, but as order and propriety break down in the War Room (where, as we all know, fighting has been expressly forbidden), he gets at deeper critiques of the fragility of manhood. It’s almost as if men will do absolutely anything to feel powerful, and if that means repopulating the Earth in a coal-shaft bunker during a nuclear winter, them’s the breaks. Like a male-rights activist’s dream sprung to horrifying life, ‘Strangelove’ scandalized audiences upon its release in ’64, but the volcanic eruption of thoughtpieces the film would’ve generated if made today would be enough to bring about a different sort of apocalypse.