the times | Thursday October 15 2020 1GT 7
times
The cinematographer would set up
the camera in a hotel room or home
or wherever they were shooting, then
withdraw behind it into a sealed tent
so that when the subjects came in
“they were not sharing the same air”,
Hillinger says. The directors remained
at home — Gibney in New Jersey,
Harutyunyan and Hillinger in
Brooklyn — and interviewed subjects
on a screen above the camera.
They begin their coronavirus
story in early 2020 when Trump
was busy assuring America
that it was merely an invention
of his political opponents. “This
is their new hoax,” he toldsupporters. “It will go away, just stay
calm. We have it totally under control.
It’s going to be just fine.”
Gibney says it “feels like ancient
history, but it’s important history”. The
film traces the efforts by public health
experts to warn the president, as well
as catastrophic delays in the effort to
develop a working test for the virus,
the failure of the White House to
speed things up and Trump’s apparent
fear that acknowledging the threat
would damage the buoyant economy
that was to be a central part of his
re-election campaign.
When a public health official
declared in late February that “it’s not
a question of if this will happen butinvolved and Fema starts bidding,” he
exclaimed. “Fema is driving up the
price. What sense does this make?”
One of the most shocking suggestions
in Totally Under Control is that price
gouging was all part of the plan. What
supplies Kennedy’s group found were
flown back to the US, but the job of
distributing the goods was given to
five US companies that could sell it
for any price they liked.
The Trump administration thought
“that private markets would be the
most equitable way to decide on
distribution”, Gibney says. “In the
middle of a pandemic it’s really the
looniest idea.”
They also allege that Trump traded
special assistance for political favours.
They say that when Gavin Newsom,
the governor of California, sought
federal assistance, he was required to
make a public statement thanking the
president. Hillinger says that they
learnt this “from a source that was on
the phone call with Newsom’s team”.
Past presidents have boosted their
reputations by helping disaster-struck
states. I mention the pictures of
Barack Obama almost embracing the
Republican governor Chris Christie
during his visit to hurricane-ravaged
New Jersey in the build-up to the 2012
election. “I think Trump just takes it to
such an exaggerated state,” Gibney
says. “We tried hard to get governors
to talk to us on the record, but they
were all extremely reticent. They were
afraid that Trump would take revenge
on their state.” And Trump often
boasts of how the governors have
praised him. “We have done a
‘phenomenal’ job, according to certain
governors,” he said in a recent tweet.
Filming began in May, following
strict coronavirus safety protocols.
when this will happen and how many
people in this country will have severe
illnesses”, causing the stock market to
plummet, Trump was furious; she was
swiftly sidelined.
Totally Under Control does not break
any news, but it joins the dots and you
see a big picture, albeit one that does
not always make sense. Take Mike
Bowen, one of the last remaining
producers of N95 masks in America.
He says that for years he had tried
to warn the Obama administration
that this could be a problem during
a pandemic. “I voted for Donald
Trump,” he says in the film. “I thought,
‘I know, if I contact enough people in
the administration... one of these
people is going to look at this.’ ”
In January he tried harder: if they
would put in the orders now, there was
still time to activate manufacturing
lines that could make enough masks
for health workers. He was ignored.
He recalls watching Trump in the
Oval Office later that spring, listening
as a nurse says, brightly, that some
of her colleagues had learnt to make
do without enough protective gear.
“I heard the opposite,” Trump says.
“I have heard that they are loaded
up with gowns now.”
Bowen says: “I turned to my wife
and said, ‘That’s complete bullshit. He
has no idea what he’s talking about.’ ”
Later we see him testifying, tearfully,
before Congress, about the hundreds
of calls he gets, the orders he can’t fill.
“I can’t help these people,” he says.
Bowen was ignored, then watched,
with mounting bewilderment, as
masks somehow became a partisan
issue. Meanwhile, in upstate New
York, a doctor named Vladimir
Zelenko, who had started trying the
antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine
on his patients, uploaded a YouTube
video addressing the president. “The
next day his chief of staff, Mark
Meadows, called me,” he says. Shortly
after that he received a call from the
commissioner of the Food and Drug
Administration. Trump began taking
it and public health officials came
under intense pressure to approve it
as a potential miracle drug even when
the evidence was shaky. Trump
dismissed one study as having been
conducted by scientists who
“aren’t big Trump fans”.
“It shows how Trump is
running his government,”
Hillinger says. “He’s going to
take advice from anyone he
wants to.”
They finished the film at the
beginning of this month. Gibney
went to bed, exhausted. “I was
sleeping soundly,” he says. “At 2am I
got a call.” It was a producer, calling
him to say that Trump had been
diagnosed with Covid-19. Trump
catching the virus he had decried as
a hoax “had a certain sardonic poetry
to it”, he says. They debated whether
to call the film back and insert new
scenes, but the events just kept on
coming. “We would still be going
crazy,” he says.
They had begun it in a metropolis
crippled by the virus. Hillinger had
been ill with it. “A friend of mine died
from Covid,” Gibney says. “Another
friend was two weeks on a ventilator
and survived, to the great applause of
the staff at the hospital.”
Their film is all about “the tension
between politics and science”, Gibney
says. “If there is a hope that I have
it’s that we regain that confidence
in listening to the science rather
than the politics.”Don’t say
goodbye,
just have a
French exit
I
f you want to slip quietly away
from this article without letting
me know, go ahead. Don’t say
goodbye. You will be bang in
style, for this autumn the “French
exit” is having its moment.
This is confusing for the French
exit since if there is one thing the
French exit is good at, it’s not drawing
attention to itself. In Us, the novel by
David Nicholls recently adapted as a
BBC series, the main character is
dragged away from a party by his
wilder girlfriend, urged into a French
exit. “It’s when you leave without
saying goodbye,” the girl explains. The
man is shocked by this transgression
of social mores. “To just walk away,
cool and aloof? I wondered if I could.”
Yet increasing numbers of screen
heroines are leading the way. Emily in
Paris, the show the critics love to hate
this season, is full of French exits, and
Michelle Pfeiffer has gone all out by
starring in a film titled French Exit.
Of course, the French exit has never
truly gone away; the interesting thing
is when it morphed from French leave,
a phrase thought to date back to
Napoleonic times, and recorded by
The Oxford English Dictionary as first
appearing in a novel by Tobias
Smollett in 1771.
Suddenly, French leave, which
sounds like one of your great-uncle’s
euphemisms for sex, has become an
“exit”; modern and flashy, running
away from the party like a chic
Cinderella to your waiting Parisian
boyfriend’s moped. Incidentally, in
France, along with many European
countries, this rude departure is called
“leaving in the English style”. Except
“British exit” no longer has the
required fast, no-fuss connotations.
Can the French exit survive the
pandemic? For it to thrive it needs
a distracted host, a large crowd and
no beady eyes tracking and tracing the
exact movements of party personnel.
Much harder to “fade out on the way
to the toilet” in a group of six. The
French exit is literal escapism. The
idea of it right now is utter, glamorous
escapism too.
Helen RumbelowMichelle Pfeiffer in French Exit
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Totally Under Control
will be released in the
UK and Ireland in
select cinemas and on
digital on October 23Alex Gibney,
co-director of Totally
Under Control