There was something of a carnival atmosphere outside the premiere screening of Alister Barry’s new doco, The Hollow Men. Labour was there in force, handing out flyers with its local candidate smiling and shaking hands. There was a real sense of occasion; everyone was pleased to be there. It’s a sign of how political this town is, perhaps, or a sign of how political this time is.
This is the second media spin-off of Hager’s book. We went to the stage play last year, dragging non-local Malcolm along for the ride. I think Malc enjoyed it, but it must have been hard going to keep up. Surprisingly, I think the film is even more incomprehensible than the play to an uninitiated audience – it relies on a lot of prior knowledge about how things work in this country.
Barry has a track record of assembling compelling documentaries on New Zealand’s recent sociopolitical history out of TVNZ archive material, and this was another worthy entry. An adaptation of the book by Nicky Hager, Barry took leaked emails and followed Hager’s timeline, showing with clips of key players and key incidents how a novice MP was manouvred into leadership of the opposition and nearly made his way to being New Zealand’s Prime Minister. There was lots of voiceover, much of it read aloud from leaked emails by actors. The vast majority of the footage was from the TVNZ vaults, showing MPs at work and at play and, most interestingly, including “cutting room floor” material from outside the edges of the scripted public appearances.
As an account of cynical political message manipulation, this is first-class, tracking the behind-the-scenes decisions to run certain issues through to how they played out in the media and the public eye. Hager pointed out during questions afterwards, as he did at Drinking Liberally the other week, that this was a portrayal of politics-as-she-is-done, and not specific to one party. However, he said that the cynical tricks on display were designed to misrepresent or distract from the party’s true policies – and the National party had a large gap between how it portrayed itself and what it really stood for. Much larger than other parties. So although the tactics are general, National does deserve particular condemnation for its behaviour.
And the signs at the end are clear – the media dance is continuing in earnest, just as cynically as before. John Key is a much better poster boy for National than Brash, and equally managed and compromised. The film all but demands that you be cautious of Key and the people behind him – if you weren’t already.
It was a good doco, sometimes painful to watch, and of particular interest to me so i could see lots of material that I had only read about (I was in Scotland while this whole affair was going down). I recommend a watch if you’re a New Zealander.