REFORM! First Draft

Complete first draft for In Review Online.

It can often be difficult to evaluate the work of a director who is branching out from their niche. With Jon Bois, he has worked himself into several such pigeonholes, due to his relatively recent rapid rise to prominence (within a more cinephilic context) and the demands of market expectations. Bois, of course, has always been a video creator interested first and foremost in sports, even discounting his longstanding tenure with SB Nation and Secret Base. He has also never shied away from the importance of his collaborators, praising the contributions of Alex Rubenstein to their Dorktown videos, which include The History of the Seattle Mariners series that arguably brought Bois to his current level of recognition as a pioneer in Internet documentary aesthetics. So, the prospect of a Jon Bois video made without any other voices (literally and figuratively) for the first time in years, and on a subject entirely apart from sports, might almost seem like a test of how far viewers are willing to go along with his interests. Reform! comes, not coincidentally, alongside the launch of the Secret Base Patreon and the continuation of the long-dormant Pretty Good series, Bois's first great video endeavor. It divided its focus equally between sports and non-sports topics, and was put on hiatus because of lack of interest and/or trepidation from sponsors more focused on sports; the hope is that the Patreon will allow a general branching out for Secret Base employees, most of all Bois. While it plays out similarly to the Pretty Good series, especially possessing the greater sense of narrative-building that the new videos have shown, Reform! is a different proposition altogether. In three videos totaling about two-and-a-half hours, Bois relates the history of the Reform Party movement, the most successful third party in American politics of the last century, which formed and imploded within eight years. While this is his first video focused entirely on politics, it is by no means a sudden awakening. He has laced his stances throughout his videos for years, often to galvanizing effect: the scene in the Randall Cunningham video where he enumerates the reasons why someone would be pro-union before abruptly saying that anti-union people are assholes; the references to the lack of accountability for white-collar criminals responsible for the Great Recession and the Atlanta Falcons-New England Patriots Super Bowl as a reflection of the 2016 election in The History of the Atlanta Falcons; his direction of the Fighting in the Age of Loneliness series penned by Chapo Trap House co-host Felix Biederman, which construed mixed martial-arts and UFC as a reflection of our entire era; there are even mentions in Falcons and 20020 of the Native American practice of a precursor to football as a non-violent substitute for war. Reform!, then, comes not as an entirely new direction but instead a long-awaited, brilliant elaboration on themes that remained dormant until now. For one, as much as Rubenstein, Seth Rosenthal, Kofie Yeboah, and other collaborators have improved Secret Base projects as writers and narrators, it is somewhat freeing to remember that Bois is the only voice here; the unity provided by his sole perspective creates a much different and more even experience from the Dorktown videos. There is also an urgency that pulses through Reform!; not to downplay the importance of sports to the public and individual people, but Bois constantly reorients the series around the issues that mattered then and continue to matter now, the Reform Party's pervasive interest in curbing the national debt notwithstanding. This, interestingly, creates a tension with the knowledge that all the stories contained within revolve around three elections whose outcomes are presumably known to virtually every viewer. While many individual games which Bois and Rubenstein elaborated upon so fully in the Dorktown videos were unlikely to be known to the average viewer, the ultimate "important" outcome is already known here: Clinton will win in 1992 and 1996, Bush will win in 2000, with the rest of the proceedings "merely" fascinating detail. Considering the consternation and strife that runs rampant throughout Reform!, it creates, if not a sense of waste, then a feeling of doom and gloom, of the nation heading in a direction that the main figures (and Bois himself) do not necessarily want. At its heart, Reform! is interested, like all of Bois's greatest projects, in people that embody a certain dream or fantasy that clashes with ordinary ideas of success. The Reform Party proves to be one of the starkest examples of this: its largest wins on a national level were achieved by billionaire Ross Perot, who was broadly disinterested in the practice of politics, and through his and many others' incompetence its broad relevance disappeared as soon as Pat Buchanan took control. But within this context, Bois rightly sees even the minimal true gains as monumental salvos upon the status quo at a time where, per Francis Fukuyama, "the end of history" had been achieved. He sees them as the embodiment of a promise, full of all the faults inherent in a profoundly human enterprise that quickly was co-opted and transformed into something more monstrous. In Reform!, Bois has also assembled perhaps his greatest cast of inexplicable people from names and personalities on down. Especially within this context, it's a delight that Bois, for perhaps the first time in his videos, treats a main character with nothing but contempt; the description of Pat Buchanan as a "big bag of shit" is only the start of a beautiful and entirely justified amount of invective. Elsewhere, he finds a great deal of insight in the inexplicable actions by people capable of being decent: the many blunders by Ross Perot, Jesse Ventura (the closest thing Reform! has to a hero) supporting Donald Trump for the nomination, Lenora Fulani supporting Buchanan, John Hagelin's persistent belief in meditation's ability to bring about world peace. He allows himself more skepticism in these and other moments than he generally does in his sports videos, given the potential existential importance of their actions, but he does so from a place of empathy. Reform! has great fun in crafting sequences that make full use of this cast, the central political chart, and the sets of bars tracking the polling of the candidates in the major elections. The "clown car" montage that blazes through every single Reform Party candidate seeking the nomination in 2000 is one of his most breathlessly hilarious, shifting with breakneck speed between "harmless lunatics and malevolent scumbags." But two sequences, conveyed with starkly different means, stand out for their profound sadness. The first closes part 2, with Bois, in the absence of any footage, utilizing crude models constructed in Google Earth—previously seen most prominently in the farcical "Mr. Jello" scene in Mariners—to illustrate the ousting of Reform Party chairman Jack Gargan, founding father of the entire movement. His stubborn refusal to yield the floor even as he is being shouted down by the vast majority of the room and punches are thrown, sending blocky human figures to the ground, makes the scene all the more horrible in the sudden finality of each action. By placing the viewer literally in his perspective, the degree to which his dreams have been curdled by the politics he sought to dismantle in the first place is visceral. The second centers upon a much less consequential figure, the pricelessly named successor chairman Gerry Moan, who has been characterized as a stickler for rules in an attempt to maintain the decorum of the party even as Buchanan runs roughshod. When a motion is made at the party convention to oust party secretary Jim Mangia, his former longtime ally, for clearly homophobic reasons, Bois presents the sequence simply, using the footage from C-SPAN as Moan struggles to maintain his composure. Bois interweaves his narration with Moan's choked-out words, moving away briefly to show a picture of the two together even amidst the strife earlier on in the convention, before showing Moan leaving the stage, refusing to preside over his friend's dismissal with a sad kind of dignity. Reform!, despite the magnitude of its issues and ramifications, up to and including the Buchanan iteration's profound influence upon both the 2000 and 2016 elections, is maybe the most human of Bois's work so far. Just as the History of series use the structure of a team's history to tell the fascinating stories of individuals, so does Reform! observe a different kind of a pageantry within a framework to convey just what makes all these people tick, seeing none of them as saints but only some of them as demons, which makes the ultimate disappointment all the more potent. However, Reform! concludes with a paean not unlike the endings of Adam Curtis's documentaries of considerably more far-reaching pessimism: a sudden ray of light that emphasizes dreams and possibilities. It is a hope for a better future provided by the seed of idealism that the Reform Party symbolized, placed in contrast to the atrocities and disasters of the past twenty-four years—signaled by Bois simply as his camera glides over the years, up to and including 2023—that have often been indirectly encouraged or directly caused by both political parties. When faced so much devastation in this area, and so much oddity and failed potential in the Reform Party, that Bois still retains this much ultimate optimism speaks to his conviction, the heretofore unexpressed boldness of his vision.