Ms. Information , Dumb Money and Simone: Woman of the Century are in cinemas and The Pigeon Tunnel is streaming on Apple TV+
Two films today that are largely about people being driven mad by things they find on the internet, both make copious use of the social media screenshots and video clips to help tell their stories.
They made for an interesting double-feature yesterday, that’s for sure.
In fact both of Ms. Information and Dumb Money will make fascinating viewing when they are dug from a time capsule sometime after the apocalypse, perfect illustrations of the sheer craziness of the times we currently live in.
I found Ms. Information to be surprisingly moving – a sign, I think, of the repressed trauma of the early weeks of the pandemic response. Watching clips of Jacinda Ardern and Ashley Bloomfield making pronouncements from the Beehive Theatrette I was taken right back to the anxiety of those days, the fear of disease and the surprising totality of the response.
Microbiologist Siouxie Wiles may have been the most public face of the pandemic (other than Ardern and Bloomfield), despite never being officially involved and never taking a cent from either the government or the media who relied so much on her appearances.
The film shows, through the prism of this one woman’s experience, how New Zealand’s attitude towards the pandemic shifted over time, away from the kind team of five million to a pack of freedom loving, anti-vaxxing, conspiracy minded, grifting zealots.
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That was only a tiny minority, true, but when that minority feels empowered and has access to modern tools of amplification, they can quickly become tyrannical.
Those screenshot recreations – all true an early caption tells us – show how Wiles’s phone went from being a source of support for her to a vehicle for some awful abuse and bullying.
As the film, expanded from a Loading Doc short film put online in 2020, shows, Wiles doesn’t take kindly to being bullied but it’s clear the toll that it takes on her and her family.
It’s sobering to consider that we may never again be able to recreate the kind of social cohesion we showed in the early days of the pandemic. How are we going to survive the next inevitable crisis?
In Dumb Money the baying internet mob is seen as a force for good but the Redditors that took on the Wall Street hedge funds during the Game Stop campaign of 2021 were driven by similar impulses. The establishment is not on your side and – thanks to pandemic lockdowns – you have plenty of time to ‘do your own research’ online.
The many thousands of retail investors – most using investment democratising apps like Robinhood – who followed YouTuber “Roaring Kitty” on his journey to boost Game Stop’s stock price in order to enrich themselves and stick it to those heavily exposed short-sellers from the big end of town, were not savvy and not smart. They were a mob and Game Stop was a bubble.
As we know, those impulses can easily be turned against different targets.
In this case, the film makes very clear whose side it is on with some representative little guys looking to find a lucky strike that can break the cycle of struggle they are stuck with. And it’s also clear that the odds remain stacked in favour of capital. I want films to encourage us to go the barricades and change the system as much as anyone but I’m not sure that this is quite the story to stir that up.
I really wanted to like Dumb Money so it’s lucky for me that I did. It’s mostly fun.
In 1979 Simone Veil was elected the first President of the European Parliament and I couldn’t help thinking as I was watching the striking biography of the French politician and stateswoman of another female politician who won an election in that year and how different the two women were.
Veil was a Holocaust survivor and believer in the European project – as a safeguard of the post-war peace for a start – and Margaret Thatcher was a provincial English nationalist whose vision never encompassed any of the social improvements that Veil dedicated herself to.
Olivier Dahan’s film (written as well as directed) jumps around time periods regularly as is the fashion these days but the structure works. It starts with Veil’s most famous political achievement – making abortion legal in France for the first time in 1974 – and inexorably leads to her Holocaust experience, the defining period of her life, and the inciting incident for a career in public service.
It can be easy to think, sometimes, that we have made no progress but this film is a reminder that there have been gains, some of them significant.
The full title of the picture, Simone: Woman of the Century, sounds hubristic at first but as the credits roll you can fully believe it.
Errol Morris is one of our most idiosyncratic documentarians. You can always tell when you are watching one of his because his questions are usually searching and his visual flourishes tend to support rather than distract from the subject at hand.
His latest is The Pigeon Tunnel, an extended interview with David Cornwell, better known as the author John le Carré, who died in December 2020 at the age of 89.
As a lifelong fan of le Carré I’ll always take an opportunity to go back into his world but, while Cornwell tells Morris several times that at his age he has no reason to hide anything, it does take some time for the director to get him to reveal something deeper than the usual well-rehearsed anecdotes.
It happens when the subject comes around, once again, to the subject of Cornwell’s father Ronnie, a con man and convict, and the source of all the insecurity that sent young David towards the security services in the first place.
At this point you can see the old man start to crumble a little. There’s real sorrow and anger in those eyes but he soon regains his stiff upper lip and the moment passes.
Still, there are plenty of insights into the kind of character that makes a spy and the psychological need to betray. That word comes up often in a very decent film.
Further reading
I wrote about the Alec Guinness version of George Smiley for RNZ back in 2019. Both Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley’s People are streaming Prime Video in Aotearoa.
And today I wrote a piece for RNZ asking why it is that there so many series that I can’t finish.
