"For every explosive confrontation in Minneapolis, there is a quieter, less tangible threat in the form of Kash Patel's FBI seizing voting records from Fulton county, Georgia a state Donald Trump lost by fewer than 12,000 votes in 2020 or the steady implementation of 900-page manifesto by the influential rightwing thinktank the Heritage Foundation, neither of which lend themselves to blockbuster treatment."
"The latest, Anniversary, which launched this week on Netflix a streamer increasingly uninterested in the subtleties of any situation, let alone this one depicts a US in which an evil rightwing genius in the shape of a beautiful young woman talks the country into ditching democracy via the medium of (I love this detail; the sheer optimism of it) a stirring book of essays."
"Actually, I thoroughly enjoyed the first half of the film, in which Diane Lane plays a centrist mom and political scientist at Georgetown University, trying to keep her family and the discourse together. In essence, it's a domestic drama with some autocracy for dummies around the edges. But what's clever is its presentation of an Orwellian-style assault on democracy via language that sells plurality as hostile to togetherness and unity very credible in today's landscape."
Autocracy can be both dangerous and deceptively mundane, advancing through slow institutional and administrative changes rather than spectacular violence. Examples include the FBI seizure of Fulton County voting records and the gradual adoption of a 900-page Heritage Foundation manifesto aligned with Project 2025. Those procedural moves—voter manipulation and federal electoral interference—erode public faith in democracy more insidiously than headline-grabbing events. Popular films frequently emphasize action and spectacle while neglecting the mechanisms that produce collapse. A film like Anniversary dramatizes how language and cultural narratives can sell unity by portraying plurality as threatening, making slow democratic erosion feel plausible and frightening.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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