The Brink is documentarian Alison Klayman’s up-close-and-personal portrait of Steve Bannon, the outsized personality who founded Breitbart as a “platform for the alt right” and who encouraged Donald Trump’s race-baiting right into the White House.
But even Trump is not shameless enough to keep Bannon around – as The Brink opens, Bannon has just been fired from the Trump Administration in the wake of the wake of the Charlottesville disgrace (“very fine people on both sides“). Bannon is now embarking on a campaign of uniting the European populist Right around a common racist/ white supremicist/anti-immigration message.
Bannon, of course, is a genius at political messaging, and his major outcome was the once unthinkable re-emergence of public white supremicism – voicing those who lived under the dark, damp underside of rocks and logs with the other creepy-crawlies, and making them feel like they can walk the earth erect like other vertebrates.
Bannon is a major ham, and all too happy to let the world watch him in action. Bannon, of all people, is savvy enough to understand that Klayman is hostile to his beliefs and career,yet he granted her intimate access. His ego must not have allowed him to resist a movie about himself – or he learned from Trump that no publicity is bad publicity.
For her part, Alison Klayman (Ai Wei-wei: Never Sorry) is clever enough to let Bannon himself reveal his flaws. As he thinks he is showing us his skills, he is also showing himself to be an attention-craving blowhard. The horror isn’t that Bannon is some invincible evil mastermind but it’s in the masses (only glimpsed) that are so consumed by the fear and hatred that he peddles.
In the riveting opening sequence, Bannon describes how German technocrats designed the Birkenau death camp to be masterfully efficient. The banality of evil is not an original thought, but Bannon’s insights are more than a little scary (and his appreciation of Nazi efficiency is uncomfortable).
I found The Brink to be irresistible and watched with fascination. To those who have had their fill of the propagandists of the Right in Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes and Get Me Roger Stone (with Paul Manafort as bonus, I say that The Brink still offers insights – and more satisfaction. Bannon wants his political skill to be validated, but The Brink reveals how pathetically he craves relevance.