The Staller Center winter/spring film series started with a bang on Jan. 30 with the 7 p.m. screening of “The End of America,” a documentary based on Naomi Wolf’s book of the same title.
Obviously modeled on Al Gore’s environmental documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” “The End of America” centers its discussion of Bush-era politics in a lecture given by Wolf to an appreciative audience.
Using media footage from CNN, Fox, and MSNBC, in addition to videos by private citizens, Wolf and filmmakers Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern explain the “Ten Steps” a country takes on its way to imminent fascist dictatorship.
Wolf, a well-known activist, journalist, and feminist, author of “The Beauty Myth,” detailed these ten steps in her book “The End of America: A Letter to a Young Patriot.” She then went on a tour with this book and part of this tour formed the basis for the documentary.
The documentary itself presents little in the way of new information. Truly, it seems that “The End of America,” which screened at the Staller Center’s Main Stage, was made for those of us who have been living under the proverbial rock for the past eight years.
Highlights of the documentary included one of a kind footage from a protest in Minnesota, where police arrested over 200 people in a park that was near a protest but not a part of it.
Despite such interesting points, as well as some poignant notes on how similar the policy of the last administration are to those of 1930s Nazi Germany, most of “The End of America” focuses on the image of Wolf on the stage, delivering her lecture in a bright red skirt suit and stiletto heels, while playing with her abundant hair. Wolf, like Gore in some ways, is enthusiastic and moralistic at the same time. Yet, unlike Gore in “An Inconvenient Truth,” she delivers no truly stunning images or information.
The Staller Center was more packed than usual for the screening, and an overwhelming number of people stayed for the Q ‘ A with Wolf and Sundberg.
As is wont to happen with most Q ‘ A sessions, most people who were called on did not have an actual “question” to ask, and Wolf and Sundberg did not allow for many questions by making their responses unnecessarily repetitive and detailed. Perhaps the one hopeful element of last Friday’s screening was the pervasive feeling that if such films can be made, and such crowds come to see them, the maybe, just maybe, we haven’t reached the end of America just yet.
