Minor spoilers ahead forVice.
Viceis an inherently controversial movie. The film has been incredibly divisive among critics, coming in at a65% rating on Rotten Tomatoesdespite being pegged as an awards heavy, and it’s even more unpopular with audiences as evidenced by the dismal C+CinemaScore(anything less than a B+ on CinemaScore and you’re in trouble). To be fair, the film has some uneven moments, but as I said in my review, I see it as a companion piece of sorts withAdam McKay’s previous film,The Big Short, where he seeks to blend entertainment with education for his audience.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the mid-credits scene of the film. Using the focus group that had been featured previously in the message testing for the Iraq War and changing the name of the Estate Tax to the “Death Tax”, we come back to this group and a fight breaks out between a conservative member and a liberal member over the merits ofVice. McKay then turns the camera to a young woman who’s clearly supposed to signal as a young millennial, and she says, “I can’t wait to see the newFast & Furiousmovie. It’s going to be so lit.”
Some people have taken umbrage with this moment citing it as not only dismissive, but also hypocritical. It targets a specific demographic as somehow less socially aware, and then tries to blame entertainment likeFast & Furiouseven though McKay’s filmography includes broad comedies likeAnchorman: The Legend of Ron BurgundyandTalladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby. If his critique is that young people have ignored politics in favor of mass entertainment, isn’t he equally to blame?
But my read on the scene isn’t that McKay is saying, “If not for those darnFast & Furiousmovies, people would have paid attention!” Rather, McKay is taking issue with two things: engagement and age, and the statistics bear him out on this. If you look at the 2016 Presidential Election, voter turnout was about the same with 2012—about 58% off the electorate. But when you break it down by age range, young people consistently lag behind other age groups. Although in 2016 young voters ages 18 to 29 (the age group for the young woman in the scene) rose by 1.1%, that only brings the total to46.1% for young voters, well behind the next age group of 30-44 (58.7%) and far behind citizens 65 and older (70.9%).
Furthermore, McKay knows that if you want to reach people, you have to be entertaining. That’s not an indictment of entertainment likeFast & Furious, but an acknowledgement that movies like that are what people want to see. In 2010, we got the excellent documentaryInside Job, which breaks down how the financial collapse happened and the consequences of it. The film made$7.8 million worldwide. In 2015, we gotThe Big Short, which also tackled the financial collapse, but did so in a more mainstream, entertaining fashion. It made$133 million worldwide. By any metric, far more people went to seeThe Big ShortthanInside Job, even though they’re both great movies.
If he wanted to, I’m sure Adam McKay could have directed a dry documentary about the Bush era with Dick Cheney as the focal point. I’m sure he could have attempted to dive into Cheney’s psyche and tried to explore what makes him tick as though that would have any effect on the Republican Party’s slide into authoritarianism. Instead, he made a film for the young woman at the end ofVice. The final scene isn’t a criticism of her as much as it’s a recognition that Americans want to be entertained above all else. The final scene ofViceisn’t here to dismiss entertainment, but to acknowledge that the only way to reach people with serious subjects about recent American history is to package it with a million spoonfuls of sugar. That may be damning, but if you think we’re not amusing ourselves to death (to borrow the title ofNeil Postman’s scathing 1985 book), check out the former reality TV star in the White House.
