J6: a new kind of “riot” from Adam McKay

Last Thursday, Deadline reported that Adam McKay, the Oscar-nominated director of Vice and The Big Short, will be producing a new historical drama about the Capitol attacks of January 6, 2021.

Written and set to be directed by Billy Ray, the project — titled J6 — will catalog the events of the day that supporters of President Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Ray has said that the film will focus on first-hand accounts from people who were in or around the Capitol as the attack unfolded. “The goal was to do a ground-level view of a momentous day,” he said. “Someone else can tell the story of the chaos at the White House... I wanted to stay in the trenches.”

This makes sense, since Mr. Ray appears to have a predilection for “trenches,” and the people in them: his other works as screenwriter include Captain Phillips (2013), which recounts the real-life hijacking of an American cargo ship by Somali pirates; Richard Jewell (‘16), about the security guard falsely accused of bombing the 1996 Summer Olympics; and The Hunger Games (‘12), in which Millennials literally kill each other in a desperate attempt to attain basic resources on live TV while one-percenters watch for sport.

Here is a writer devoted to fetishizing the arenas of trauma in which everyday folks grapple for a sliver of hope. Fittingly, “J6” sounds like it could be the name of a parking lot at a shopping mall — and this critic feels just as much weariness and disorientation at the thought of Ray’s movie as I do from the thought of looking for my car on a Saturday afternoon at the Palisades Center.

Why must there be a movie about the attack on the Capitol so soon after it happened? Why the urge to capitalize on people’s trauma as soon as possible? James Jones had the grace to wait ten years after the attack on Pearl Harbor to publish From Here to Eternity — a novel, and subsequent film adaptation, that follows the lives of several people over the months leading up to the bombing. Call me crazy, but I feel like national crises demand something greater than big-budget commemoration: wouldn’t it make sense for powerful filmmakers like Billy Ray and Adam McKay to petition lawmakers to do something about the attack first, and then memorialize it once we’re on the other side of danger?

The time gap between historical events and their big screen treatments has been getting smaller and smaller: United 93, directed by Paul Greengrass, was released five years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks; Oliver Stone delivered a sequel to Wall Street (1987) two years after the 2008 financial crisis (his previous film, a biopic of George W. Bush, was released before the forty-third President had even left office); and Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty went into production just months after the murder of Osama bin Laden.

All of these dramas served — and continue to serve — as pat opportunities for Hollywood to reinforce institutional narratives about complex historical events. From the moment D. W. Griffith first bellowed “Action!” through his megaphone on the set of The Birth of a Nation (1915), the movies’ relationship with history has rarely been nuanced, or even accurate. In fact, it’s often been dangerous.

Originally a comedian and writer for Saturday Night Live in the 1990s, Adam McKay came to prominence as a writer-director of inane, crass comedies with fellow SNL-alum Will Ferrell: Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004); Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (‘06); Stepbrothers (‘08); and The Other Guys (‘10). Largely released during the presidency of George Bush the Younger, these films at once satirized and reinforced the worst tropes of American male buffoonery. I’ve felt for some time that the schadenfreude, or joy at others’ humiliation, that fueled audiences’ love of these movies (not to mention the movies of Judd Apatow, Seth MacFarlane, Trey Parker, and Matt Stone) helped prepare Americans to accept and embrace the pseudo-reality TV idiocy of Donald Trump.

This is not to say that McKay was in any way responsible for Trump becoming President — but I do think it’s fair to recognize that neither man would have a career if not for their exploitation of the threshold between free speech and incoherence. There’s something genius about the aggressive irreverence of the McKay-Ferrell movies, just as there’s something effective about the belligerent inarticulateness of Donald Trump. Both parties foster mocking laughter, and yield high ratings.

It’s striking that in the years since Trump’s rise to power, McKay has sobered up and turned towards emphatically “righteous” projects, as if atoning for past sins: The Big Short (2015) is about the U.S. housing bubble that led to the 2008 recession; Vice (‘18) is a biopic of Dick Cheney; and his new film, Don’t Look Up, is a comic metaphor for the climate crisis. J6 will be yet another of these self-congratulatory, hit-me-over-the-head problem pictures — another obvious kowtow to mainstream indignation that offers no insight, nor constructive engagement with the wider implications of a crucial moment in American history.

What McKay and Hollywood at large don’t seem to realize is that a little woke moralizing doesn’t make up for decades of deliberate moral recklessness. You can’t reconstruct a fallen house of cards to make up for the fact that you helped build it.