Documentary tackles narcissism, entitlement with a laugh

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This article was published 15/11/2019 (2515 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Inspired by the similarly titled New York Times bestseller by Aaron James, Canadian documentarian John Walker looks at the rampant narcissism, obnoxious entitlement and toxic discourse that seem to have recently overtaken public life. (A note: Since the film uses the word “asshole” a few hundred times, so, necessarily, does this review.)

Loosely mixing on-the-street encounters, pop-culture excerpts and interviews with experts in asshole-ology, this timely treatise is breezily entertaining and sometimes unexpectedly scholarly. If you want to watch serious academics carefully defining their asshole-related terms, making extremely fine asshole-related distinctions and advancing general theories of assholery, this is the doc for you.

James, an author and philosophy professor at UC-Irvine who is extensively interviewed, sees assholes as worse than jerks but not quite full-blown criminal sociopaths. He defines an asshole as someone who consistently ignores the standards of communal, co-operative behaviour. An asshole believes that he — and it’s usually, but not always, a he — is above the rules. Immunized by a vast sense of his own specialness, he doesn’t register the objections, the feelings or even the basic rights of other people.

James’s analysis supplies a bit of a through-line for the film.

Overall, though, Walker (whose previous works include Arctic Defenders and Quebec: My Country Mon Pays) is pretty loosey-goosey. He films some brief encounters with random regular people who are eager to offer up examples of smug assholes, drunk assholes, rude assholes, reckless assholes, Facebook assholes and asshole ex-boyfriends. We love to hate assholes, it seems, and categorizing them is supremely satisfying.

Other snippets include statements from what seem to be young pick-up artists and social media influencers, who are clearly demonstrating assholery rather than examining it. This angle could have been pushed more.

Other interviewees, who offer a more sober and cerebral analysis, include Italian novelist Edoardo Albinati, British comedian and actor John Cleese (“I guess in a way, my mother was an asshole”), and activist and feminist Lorella Zanardo, along with economists, journalists and legal theorists.

There’s a scathing critique of asshole capitalism — which James argues led to the 2008 recession, partly through the “asshole factories,” as one interview subject calls them, of hedge fund firms — and an alarming look at the rise of asshole politics.

The entire film could be read as an elaborate subtweet of U.S. President Donald Trump, managing to implicate the American president without once saying his name out loud. (Two commentators walk past Trump Tower at a key moment.)

Walker focuses instead on a proto-Trump figure, Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, who transitioned from trashy television to politics, his murky finances and sexual scandals actually propelling his populist success.

Points about the connection between assholeness and misogyny and the amplification of assholery through social media are raised but could be more comprehensively followed up.

There are plenty of smart and interesting people talking, but the film’s overall argument is scattered rather than systematically developed.

The film is also tonally all over the place. It can be jaunty and funny — there’s some talk about the quintessentially Canadian subcategory of the hockey asshole — but much of the material is difficult and dire. The made-in-Manitoba portion, for example, deals with harassment, bullying and intimidation in the RCMP and its crushing effects on hundreds of female officers. (Asshole leaders make for asshole organizations, suggests former Mountie and Gimli-area resident Sherry Lee Benson-Podolchuk.)

This is one of those docs, though, where urgent, important subject matter compensates for some technical shortcomings. And, wow, bonus stars for sheer topicality.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca