70 THENEWYORKER,AUGUST17, 2020
THE CURRENTCINEMA
PLAYING POLITICS
“Boys State” and “Red Penguins.”
BYANTHONYLANE
ILLUSTRATION BY AJ DUNGO
I
s American democracy in good health,
will it remain so in the years ahead,
or does it suffer from a painful and per-
manent case of electile dysfunction? If
such questions nag at you, I recommend
“Boys State,” a new documentary that
casts a cool eye on the nation’s youth.
We meet a braying batch of them, mostly
aged sixteen and seventeen, who are
drawn together by a common passion
for politics—not the blaze of activism,
that is, but the hard grind of governance.
How and why they developed this pe-
culiar habit, rather than lying in bed
and staring at the ceiling, as John Len-
non advised, is a mystery that the film
does not address. The point is that these
are the sort of kids who, should their
dreams come true, will be running the
show in the future. I used to think that
anyone who exhibits an abnormal fas-
cination with politics as a teen-ager
ought, on principle, to be banned from
public office as an adult; these days,
however, you can’t start early enough.
The inhabitants of “Boys State” look as
if they used their own toilet training as
a filibuster. All of them come from Texas.
The movie, directed by Amanda Mc-
Baine and her husband, Jesse Moss, be-
gins with an explanation: “Since 1935 the
American Legion has sponsored a pro-
gram for teenagers to learn about de-
mocracy and civil discourse through a
week-long engagement in self-gover-
nance. There are separate programs for
boys and girls.” And that’s the first prob-
lem. How can you prepare, in a single-sex
bubble, for the grownup business of leg-
islation? Currently, of the hundred and
fifty members of the Texas House of
Representatives, thirty-five are women;
one way to redress the balance, surely,
would be to have their potential succes-
sors mix it up a little. It may be, of course,
that the Legion did contemplate tossing
hundreds of boys and girls together for
a week, shuddered at the prospect, and
decided to cleave them in twain. Let
them self-govern, preferably after dark.
This movie concentrates exclusively
on the guys. (Will McBaine and Moss
take a deep breath, return to the fray,
and make “Girls State”? Let’s hope so.)
And what choice specimens it finds.
Behold Eddy, an Italian-American lad
who, when he’s quizzed about his po-
litical assets, nominates his own abs.
“He thinks he is God on Earth,” some-
one says, and what’s ominous is just how
far Eddy, like so many handsome striv-
ers, is propelled by that belief.
At the other extreme, we have Ste-
ven, whose mother was an immigrant
from Mexico. Before him, nobody in his
family had made it past the first year of
high school. Already, he seems older and
steadier—less outspoken, yet more elo-
quent—than his coevals in the film, his
only equal being René, one of the few
Black contenders in the frame. As smart
and as slender as a whip, René has so ju-
dicious a manner, and such command as
an orator, that he might as well skip these
childish political games and head straight
for the real thing. He even has a pair of
little spectacles, like half-moons, over
which he examines a crowded chamber
with a mildly inquiring disdain. Why
wait four decades, until René has put on
fifty pounds, moved to Georgetown, used
up a couple of marriages, and somehow
mislaid his hair, his sense of humor, and
his aura of charismatic hope? Give the
guy a Senate committee to chair, now.
The boys are mustered in Austin,
within sight of the capitol. At the out-
set, they are randomly split into two
competing camps, Federalists and Na-
tionalists—each six hundred strong, and
each with a number of administrative
posts to be contested and filled. Atop
the pile are the two gubernatorial can-
didates, one of whom is duly elected
governor as the week concludes. I won’t
spoil the fun, or the genuine tremor of
suspense, by revealing the outcome, but
it’s noticeable that all the major play-
ers in these battles are kids whose for-
tunes we have followed from the start.
How so? Did McBaine and Moss get
lucky? Did they track innumerable boys,
perhaps, and pluck out the successful
ones from a writhing mass of footage?
(No fewer than eight cinematographers
are listed in the end credits.) The only
other possibility is that the filmmakers
pulled a Putin and rigged the whole
deal in advance.
“Boys State” will leave you alternately
cheered and alarmed at the shape of
things to come. True, the landscape of
the movie is richly littered with jerks,
who fill or foul the air with their per-
sonal policy statements; one warns of
Teen-agers learn leadership in Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss’s documentary.
