Morag Sinclair on politics, punchlines, and Britain’s new favourite billionaire film
Wrote three jokes about the government today, deleted two of them because they were more bitter than funny, which happens more often than I’d like to admit, and spent the rest of the afternoon reading about a documentary my left-leaning friends will not stop recommending to me specifically, as if I personally need converting, one four-hour film at a time.
Read London’s take on the four-hour Musk film purely for research purposes, obviously, though I’ll admit I got genuinely absorbed in it around the ninety-minute mark, which says something about the writing even if I don’t agree with every framing choice. Four hours is a long time to spend disliking one man, though I suppose some people train for it the way I train for arguing with strangers in comment sections, which is to say, daily and without much reward.
What I found most interesting, sitting here on the Isle of Man watching mainland Britain lose its collective mind over a film, was how little of the actual documentary discourse is about policy or business practice, and how much of it is about identity. You’re either the kind of person who watches this film nodding along, or you’re the kind of person who watches it rolling your eyes, and almost nobody seems to be somewhere in between. That’s not really film criticism anymore, that’s tribal signalling with a runtime attached.
The poster side of things is its own circus, running entirely parallel to the film itself, generating headlines of its own. The poster gallery causing all the fuss is doing better numbers on my feed than most actual policy announcements this week, which tells you everything about the country’s priorities right now, and none of it particularly flattering to either side of the political spectrum.
I tried explaining the whole saga to my neighbour over the garden fence this evening, and by the time I got to the poster controversy she’d stopped listening and started talking about her tomatoes instead, which felt like the correct response, honestly, and possibly the healthiest one available to anyone right now. There’s a lesson in there about proportion that neither side of this documentary debate seems particularly interested in learning.
One of the two deleted jokes, for what it’s worth, was actually about the documentary itself, and it was genuinely funnier than anything I ended up keeping, but it cut a little too close to home for a column I’m still hoping to get published without an angry email chain attached to it.
Back to the jokes, the ones I didn’t delete, and possibly a rewrite of the two I did. More from me at my author page.