Joe Biden’s performance as a senile US president in The Rape of Ukraine convinces to the point that one cannot tell fiction from fact. His commitment to the role borders on the obsessive; apparently, scans of the actor’s brain at work produced data wholly consistent with a man suffering advanced senility. Beneath the senility, Biden hews tenaciously to the core character arc of a street gangster somehow elevated by historical happenstance to Most Powerful Man on Earth. His business interests in Ukraine, that tragic country, embroil both him and the rest of the world in a sequence of events that gathers threatening momentum like a runaway juggernaut.
Representing Germany, Olaf Scholz is equally convincing as a man of low character bereft of ideas, too compromised to control a government of low-IQ zealots driving an ideological agenda whose only feasible outcome is Germany’s shabby denouement. He acquiesces again and again to every demand made of him by his true master, the United States, no matter its price to the nation that is his charge.
In France, Emanuel Macron persuades volubly as an unpopular French president inspired upwards on the winds of his own rhetoric into intoxicating delusions of grandeur. These hover him aloft at a quivering zero-point between the conflicting needs and agendas of the French people, the EU, NATO, the US and, of course, his magnificently inflamed ego, from which position he accomplishes precisely nothing but obedience to US demands. All this clothed in a high-priced style that fails to mask his mediocrity. He is the only actor I know of who could pull off such a delicate cinematic feat without over egging his performance. Chapeau!
The formerly impressive United Kingdom stars in an important cameo that might be summed up as a poorly attended parade of unwanted prime ministers, each tasked with bellowing louder and yet more stridently than the US for “more war!”. I hope you can forgive me in forgetting their names, but all actors cast in their roles were as convincingly uninteresting as they were paradoxically pivotal. A job well done, all in all.
And who can forget the EU! Perhaps my favourite scene is The Rape of Ukraine’s most pointedly dramatic. Ursula von der Leyen, played brilliantly by none other than von der Leyen herself, stands astride two gutted washing machines, dominating them completely. Behind her, blue and yellow flames rage, morphing at times to suggest the Ukrainian flag, at others that of the EU. Pinched between the forefinger and thumb of each hand, von der Leyen holds aloft two glinting microchips that she wields ferociously, using them as razorblades to rip to tatters a red square of fabric, meant, I assume, to represent the Russian economy. Her golden mane remains implacably opposed to the winds of history howling around her no matter how wildly her movements and the winds rage. No matter indeed; the fabric will not tear! Around her, as if emerging from the yellow and blue inferno, grows the booming, menacing laughter of Vladimir Putin, evil Judo Master, Master Geo-Chess-Politician. He haunts the movie’s every scene.
The overall tragedy, recounted by the film’s many principal and supporting actors, is of a once beautiful country – Ukraine – devastated in the clash between Western powers in the right corner, refusing – angrily, destructively, sociopathically – to accept a more equitable balance of geopolitical power, and in the left the non-western world waking up to the tantalising, nay irresistible attraction of shaking off its economic subservience to that now fading Western power, and it is truly a horror to behold. One is of course always a passive spectator at the movies, but this incredibly moving account of a faraway land turns one’s passivity into bitter impotence as the needless savagery builds on itself in ever escalating waves, each more nauseating than the last. It is truly Greek in its inevitability, but at a scale perhaps even the Greeks could not have imagined.
The actor Volodymyr Zelenskyy brilliantly portrays the actor Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a Ukrainian TV celebrity painfully incapable of balancing the external and internal forces that propelled him to Ukraine’s presidency in 2019. Watching on from the warm glow of the movie theatre, we don’t know whether to laugh or cry as his fate turns ever crueler. Real actors from The West flock to his banner in moral support of his gritty performance to defend his beloved country from the Pure Evil of Grand Judo Master Vladimir Putin, Dictator of The Soviet Union, formerly President of the Russian Federation. But their support proves too little as events unfold. Intoxicating hopes burn to ash again and again as Russia’s military-industrial onslaught grinds relentlessly on consuming everything in its path. The bitterness is almost too much to bear.
With The West mercilessly egging Zelenskyy on from a safe distance, with the deadly and fascistic Banderites openly threatening his and his family’s lives, he cracks. Hard drugs help him cope, but of course with decreasing effectiveness. Not remotely up to the historical challenge, he resorts to type to rely on crass propaganda and low-brow messaging to conceal from his people this increasingly plain and bitter truth; he heads a country being torn apart at the behest of a Western world coldly interested only in its own power, and in the familial wealth of its angrily demented president. As support from The West wanes, as Ukraine’s ability to resist the monster it faces is exposed as too little, so the Old Mother Hubbard aspect of this tale comes to the fore. The West’s cupboard is shown to be bare, emptied too much for too long by the hungry ambitions and grandiose ventures of previous productions.
Though allegedly based on a true story, it is hard to type The Rape of Ukraine. Is it farce? Is it a theatre of the absurd? Tragi-horror? Thriller, war flick, political intrigue, mobster movie? It is all and none of these at once, a unique experience in story telling more entertaining in an easily bored post-modern era than everything that preceded it and prepared the way. It is a veritable Hall of Mirrors for modernity in which image and reality fuse to one. So horrific and terrible is it to behold that I am loathe to recommend it to your attention, but feel I must; it is just that compelling.
The only question is whether humanity can survive much more entertainment of such electrifying quality.
(The Rape of Ukraine is brought to you by Neocon Magical Thinking, Produced by Robert Kagan and Directed by Victoria Nuland.)
