Bob Roberts-A Film Relevant For Today

"The Path to 9/11" may have started quite a few years ago, and aside from the perpetrators themselves, there is ample blame to go around on both sides, on the left, on the right, and when you get right down to it, from various points 'twist and 'tween the extremes.

We might, as well, want to look at ourselves, at the haphazard and even artificial way we choose our leaders, one of the failings of a democracy, to be blunt.

In the 1992 film, "Bob Roberts", Tim Robbins takes a biting look at how the media promotes image over substance in the person of the right wing biker/folk singer turned politican who is the title character.

"Bob Roberts" started as a character skit Robbins performed on a mid nineteen eighties episode of "Saturday Night Live", in which Roberts was an obnoxous anti-smoking advocate (are there any other kind?), whom he then parlayed into this movie, which incidentally in one scene takes a jab at the series, which is presented as a copororate funded hypocritical commercial enterprise.

Surprisingly, he doesn't really portray the left in a flattering light. In the person of "Brickley Paiste" (portrayed by old friend Gore Vidal) , the incumbent liberal Senator whom Roberts has decided to run against for election to the Senate, we see a tired old man full of the usual self-serving liberal sound bites and bleeding heart rhetoric that Roberts despises, a well meaning sort who is rapidly becomming irrelevant in the dawning age of conservative populism.

But it is the charismatic Roberts who is the main focus, and about whom we know little, nor about whom we ever really learn much. To all intents and purposes, he is a media creation, an empty suit with no real substance. The son of nineteen sixties era hippie parents, he rebels, becoming a biker and eventually a conservative oriented folk singer, releasing albums which become wildly popular, such as "The Freewheeling Bob Roberts" and "The Times They Are Changing Back", obviously parodies of old Bob Dylan albums.

At his campaign appearrances, Roberts sings a good many of his songs, and they are quite good. Two that particularly stand out to me are "Complain"-which is a diatribe against liberal welfare "handout" programs to the poor and "lazy"-and "She's A Beautiful Girl" which he performs at a Pennsylvania state beauty contest.

So good in fact are these songs, which Robbins actually sings, and co-wrote with his brother, it is a shame that he refused to release a soundtrack album of the movies songs. He feared they would be seen out of context.

Roberts is running behind Paiste by ten percentage points until Paiste is filmed in the company of a sixteen year old volunteer campaign worker and is accussed of infidelity with the underrage girl. Despite his protestations that the girl was a friend of his granddaughter, and that he was merely accompanying the two of them home, he takes a hit in the polls, and for a while the two candidates are runing neck and neck.

Still, Roberts doesn't get a free ride. A radical underground reporter is on his trail, determined to dig up evidence that Roberts, as a board member of the anti-drug advocacy group "Broken Dove", along with his shady campaign manager, have been involved with the CIA in smuggling drugs in Central America while in the course of a war against leftist guerrillas-a sub-plot which is an obvious reference to the mid-eighties Iran-Contra scandals. There are also vaque suggestions that Roberts, as a Yale graduate, is a member of the ultra secret fraternal cult "Skull And Bones".

Due to all this, Roberts never establishes a firm lead over Paiste, and toward the end Paiste in fact starts to regain the lead. Suddenly, as Roberts is leaving a campaign appearrance at a Live comedy skit show- where an assistant pulls the plug when Roberts begins performing an obvious campaign song which had not been scheduled or approved-he is the victim of an assassiantion attempt apparently by the same underground reporter that had been feverishly and doggedly on his trail, and who, in what might be seen by some as prophetic, was an Arab American.

After this -and on the heels of the release of a new album, "Bob On Bob"- which occurs shortly before the election and leaves Roberts diasgnosed by his personal physician as permanently paralyzed from the waste down, he goes on to win the election.

As for the purported gunman, it is determined that he must have been set up to take the fall for Roberts' assault, as he was sufferring from cerebral palsy which afflicted his right hand to such an extent it made it imposible for him to have done the deed. Yet, some time after swearing that he would one day get Bob Roberts, he is murdered by a group of deranged and angry Roberts fans and supporters.

One of the final scenes portrays newly sworn in Pennsylvania Senator Bob Roberts, wheelchair bound, appearring at a Washington D.D. function, on stage and playing guitar and singing a song which is eerily reminiscent of Jim Morrison.

This might be, coming from ardent conspiracist Tim Robbins, a nod at the long held belief that Morrison faked his own death years before. If this is the case, it is appropriate for this movie, and especially for this one scene in particular, which, if you ever get a chance to watch the film, I encourage you to watch very closely, especially as the camera zooms in for a close-up of Roberts as he sings. It is then that the true character of Bob Roberts is finally revealed.

This is a great movie, whatever you might feel about ultra liberal Robbins and his wife Susan Sarandon, who also appears in the film as a vacuous local news reporter. In fact, this is one example of the many ways in which this movie is a work of genius. There is not just one local tv anchor crew interspersed during parts of the movie, but two from seperate stations, and they are all the same, engaging each one in the banal type of irrelevant banter and pretentous small talk we have all come to expect from local news outlets.

To that extent, the movie is as much a slam at the media as it is of politics and politicians. Done in documentary style, this was a shot across the bow at the then strong and still building conservative populist movement. Against the largely irrelevant and seemingly entitled attitude of the liberal oppossition, whom Robbins seems to recognize was understandably and quickly loosing favor. Against the self-serving pretentousness and hypocrisy not only of politicans, but the corporate media, and the dog and pony show they had turned the political process into. Nobody looks good in this film. Nobody is suppossed to look good in this film.

And that includes you and I, the voting public. Maybe especially so.