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Errol Morris On Sitting Down With Alt-Right Nationalist Steve Bannon In American Dharma
Errol Morris, one of the great documentary filmmakers, has sat down with men from the halls of power for years. In his new film, American Dharma, Morris faces Steve Bannon, one of the darker lingering figures of our very recent collective history. If some of the world’s major publications were a bit more astute they would have long ago tagged Bannon as the person of the year, if not the decade. An argument can be made that Bannon is the most dangerous man in the world. Known primarily as the odd right-wing firebrand who helped Donald Trump win the 2016 election, and before that as the head of the infamous website Breitbart News, Bannon’s shadow casts over every major gain by an emerging, new proto-fascism. In Brazil he consulted the campaign of Jair Bolsonaro, in Europe he rubs shoulders with Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Italy’s Matteo Salvini, power players united in their paranoid policies aimed at immigrants and leftists. What sets Bannon apart from the stereotypical Trump aficionado, if not Trump himself, is that he is an actual ideologue, a reactionary internationalist designed for a postmodern world.
In American Dharma, the portrait Morris builds of Bannon via his words is of a strange, hybrid radical produced out of classic Americana. The subject sits inside a mock air force hanger, dressed in a green combat-style jacket, scruffy but with a rather ominous demeanor. There is a rapidity in how he tells his story. Bannon…
