Totally Under Control is a comprehensive account of how badly Trump bungled COVID
Film Reviews Movie Review
Alex Gibney is known for being a prolific documentarian, leaning on a team of researchers, interviewers, and editors to help him tell ripped-from-the-headlines stories about the likes of Enron, WikiLeaks, and Russian interference in American elections. But he’s never had a turnaround time quite as rapid as the one for his latest film, Totally Under Control, a movie so up-to-the-minute that it actually ends with President Donald Trump testing positive for COVID-19. Gibney and his co-directors, Suzanne Hillinger and Ophelia Harutyunyan, didn’t waste any time with this project. Clearly, they wanted to get the movie in front of as many eyes as possible before voters go to the polls on November 3.
The doc’s title is a dig at Trump, whose message to the American people at the start of the coronavirus pandemic was that his administration was on top of everything, and that our daily lives should continue unaffected. As everyone knows, that promise didn’t exactly pan out. Investigative reporters, political analysts, and health experts have written extensively over the past six months about what exactly went awry, and why the United States’ response to COVID-19 has been exponentially worse than nearly every other country considered to be a global superpower. Totally Under Control functions as a sort of clearinghouse for those stories, shaping them into a narrative with a clear set of heroes and villains.
In the latter category? Everyone at the White House who had access to a wealth of information about how bad the pandemic could get—and about how other nations were managing it—and then chose not to do as much with it as they could’ve. Gibney and company argue that when Trump himself publicly downplayed the potential threat of the virus early in 2020, he set a tone that defined how many in the government and in the country at large would continue to respond. In the months that followed, as the danger to American lives and livelihoods became impossible to ignore, the Trump team had multiple opportunities to make up for some of its past mistakes. Instead, according to Totally Under Control, they made the situation worse by continually seeing the pandemic as an opportunity to reward their friends, to punish their political enemies, and to secure Trump’s re-election.
As he does with many of his movies, Gibney himself narrates Totally Under Control, which allows him to explain up top that the documentary was made under difficult conditions. Unable to travel around the world to do in-person interviews, the crew relied on what Gibney calls “COVID-cam,” a remote set-up that involved providing subjects with good-quality video and videoconferencing equipment, and a socially distanced crew member to operate it. (The interviews don’t look like they were shot via Zoom, in other words. They look professional.) The filmmakers fill in the gaps with animation and recent news footage, as well as enraging clips from social media of Americans angrily protesting any effort from corporations and local governments to get them to wear masks.
One recurring criticism of Gibney’s work is that some of his films feel rushed and under-thought, as though he felt all he needed to tell a story was a point of view and a few lengthy interviews. But at his best (with documentaries like Client 9, Going Clear, and The Inventor), Gibney and his staff have skillfully woven together multiple storylines and ideas into something informative, entertaining, and easy to understand. Somewhat surprisingly—given how quickly this movie was made—Totally Under Control is one of the better products of the Gibney factory. It’s comprehensive and measured, covering as much of this rapidly escalating catastrophe as possible.
If anything, the biggest knock against Totally Under Control is that with a length of just over two hours, it sometimes feels as exhausting as it does exhaustive. Gibney, Hillinger, and Harutyunyan have so much good material that they occasionally linger longer than they need to on this saga’s many subplots, like the failures of the Centers For Disease Control And Prevention to produce a usable COVID test, or the details of several super-spreader events around the world. It’s over an hour into the film before it gets to the moment in early March when sports started shutting down and Americans began to realize just how disruptive this disease was going to be.
Still, given how much has happened since then, it’s useful to have a slickly assembled package of data points and anecdotes, to serve as a record of just what we’ve been through… and, perhaps, why it all went so miserably. After carefully establishing what was happening around the world in early 2020—versus what was happening in the U.S., where various health agency memos referred to the potential virus response as not a matter of “time-sensitive urgency”—Totally Under Control in its second hour shifts into a document of one outrage after another, detailing how a White House staff filled with short-sighted opportunists and small-government activists was incapable of making the kind of big moves and public appeals required to slow COVID’s spread.
Anyone who’s kept up with the news this year will undoubtedly already know many of the stories and scenarios laid out in Totally Under Control. But Gibney, Hillinger, and Harutyunyan do an impressive job—on a tight deadline, no less—of making the case for why the mismanagement of this pandemic matters. By lining up an impressive roster of doctors, scientists, and pre-Trump-era public servants to describe their first-hand experiences, this documentary ends up pitting the people who work for the betterment of humanity against the people who look out for themselves. Gibney then asks viewers to pick a side.
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…his documentary ends up pitting the people who work for the betterment
of humanity against the people who look out for themselves. Gibney then
asks viewers to pick a side.On the one hand, the former is better for everyone, but on the other, this is America.
Yeah, I don’t need to watch this to know who the people are that look out for themselves (hint-the proudly have a Trump/Pence sign in the yard).
“Yeah, I don’t need to watch this to know who the people are that look out for themselves”Is that what you think the point of the doc is???
There aren’t two sides. Spreading the disease hurts the economy for years to come. Selfish thinking in the moment will only hurt those people later on. So really, it’s all the same side: the science-is-real side.
The myth of American and boot-strap individualism has created a whole population of egotistical, self-interested monsters.
Even that’s too kind. A self-interested person would be pro-mask, both for health reasons and the economy.These are beyond selfish assholes. They’re death cultists.
I will never, for the rest of my life, understand the violent anger of people who are upset about being asked to wear masks. It’s such a nothing inconvenience with clear benefits for the individuals and society. There’s no amount of empathizing or psychologizing that will put me in that mindset. It’s like trying to understand how a dog thinks.
It’s infantile. Self-centered almost to the point of solipsism. I don’t know how else to see it.
“It’s like trying to understand how a dog thinks.”But without the inherent nobility.
And without the evolutionary urge toward self preservation.
A complete lack of science education? I grew up with science, then double majored in sciences, then got a master. To me, this is routine. Some chemistry experiments require wearing a mask, or gloves, or conducting a reaction under a hood. Sometimes you clean up with water, other times you have to use something else. Handling wild animals, or dead animals, or things that could be contaminated…. It’s just what you do. This is normal.
Somewhere along the line, I’m guessing after Vietnam, Americans started getting lazier and too comfortable in their seat at the top of the world. Then we reached a point where any inconvenience to our way of life became an a front to liberty. We’re lazy, selfish a-holes is what I’m saying. Well, half of us.
Exactly – I feel increasingly unable to even understand the “other side of the aisle” these days. For example, regarding abortion, I am fervently pro-choice, but I can academically understand how, if someone had a deeply-felt religious conviction that life begins at conception, how they might come to the conclusion that abortion is murder and therefore must be stopped. I 1000% disagree with that point of view, but I able to connect the dots on how people got to that point of view.
With the “mask resistance” and other favorites of the Trump-era right, I just don’t understand. You look at their rallies and it’s like seeing a wild-eyed other species whose motivations and psychology are just incomprehensible to me.
The logic train goes like this: Scientists and liberals are the enemy, scientists and liberals want us to wear masks, anything we can do (that isn’t to inconvenient) to disagree with or disobey with scientists and liberals is good, therefore not wearing masks is good.
“Die of preventable disease to own the libs!”
I mean, I’m not gonna stand in their way…
Motto of Hermain Cain.
If only it just affected them.
The Pro-Life stance is easily understandable. At face value, protecting children is a virtue. Protecting the defenseless is a virtue, motherhood is virtue. And killing is the gravest sin for just about every major creed on earth. So once your convinced a fetus is a child, all those inherent values merge and it makes sense. That’s understandable (if not narrow-sighted), not wearing a protective mask that could save the lives of your loved ones and fellow Americans because it’s a slight inconvenience is incomprehensible until you realize that MAGAs are just this generation’s brainwashed zealots like the Brown Shirts.
It’s a all rah-rah, tribal/team bullshit.
They have their team apparel (red hats), and think masks are ours. You know, because it’s all a zero sum game we’re playing (one with lots of opportunities to sell branded team merch!).If the left were homogenous enough to support a unified propaganda thread (and hence a true Fox News analog), I’m sure they’d be similarly susceptible to stupid bullshit. Thankfully the coalition is too diverse to go diving off a cliff like a pack of lemmings anytime someone floats an appealing conspiracy narrative.
With the “mask resistance” and other favorites of the Trump-era right, I just don’t understand. You look at their rallies and it’s like seeing a wild-eyed other species whose motivations and psychology are just incomprehensible to me.The myth of American exceptionalism. It’s your missing dots.
LOVE your name. 🙂
Conservative pride.
“you’re not the boss of me!” And the best is when they try to justify it by saying “this rebelliousness helped found this country.” Dumbass, a king treating you like shit 3000 miles away is NOT the same as being told to wear a fucking mask during a pandemic, even the founding fathers knew that (and oh BTW, the people who whine about this most worship the current president like a king, so…). You’re just being a baby.
There are a lot of angry people in this country who are just looking for a reason to start a fight. Especially if it’s with someone who has no choice but to take it, like a low level retail employee given the grim task of reminding customers in red states to wear masks.
Yeah, badly as I need a job, I turned one down enforcing Target’s mask policy at the door, because the store’s located in a heavily pro-Trump town. I wasn’t about to risk my life or health for minimum wage to get a bunch of prideful gun-toting bozos to Wear A Damned Mask, Already.It’s two weeks on, and they’re still trying to find people willing to do it….
If they let me stand out front in the official Trump uniform — camo war cosplay getup and holding an AR-15 type rifle, with the authority to use it — I’d do it in a heartbeat just to shove their idiocy back in their faces. What are they gonna do, start shooting up a Target over a mask?
It’s happened before – and even if it’s not escalated to gun violence, I’m not willing to take a bunch of Trumper’s verbal and physical abuse over basic courtesy and safety….
Wearing a mask is literally the most patriotic thing you can do during a pandemic.
Nobody is really angry about masks. They’re angry, and have chosen masks as a convenient symbol of their anger.There’s generally two groups:- denialists, who don’t think COVID exists, or who think it’s not important. For them, mask-wearing is pointless and a demonstration of mindless obedience. They refuse to wear masks to demonstrate that they don’t believe in COVID – and treat every day they don’t wear a mask yet don’t die of COVID to be yet more proof that they’re right. Most of these people aren’t really that angry about the issue itself – more just stubborn – but many of them are angry about the damage done to the economy by what they see as an ‘overreaction’ (at best, if not outright conspiracy). Masklessness itself isn’t that important to them, but is a badge of identity – “look, I haven’t fallen for that hoax!”- libertarians, who may or may not believe in COVID, but don’t believe the government should tell people what to do about it. They think individuals should decide how best to protect their own families and communities, and that blanket diktats from government – many of them admittedly rather legally and constitutionally dodgy, as they often involve unilateral assumption of powers by executives without direct legislative oversight – are unjust in themselves, and part of a general increase of state power that they find objectionable. Again, masks are mostly just a symbolic thing here: it’s hard to demonstrate to the world that you, say, have too many friends over for non-distanced dinner parties, but it’s really easy show to that you don’t wear a mask. So if you want everyone to know, “look, I’m refusing to obey the unjust commands of these would-be dictators!”, then not wearing a mask is an easy way to do that.I think these two groups started out somewhat distinct, but as the hysteria has mounted they’ve gained increasing overlap, and it’s generally the people who are both denialist (ignorant) AND libertarian (passionate) who are the biggest problem. There’s a lot of grumpy libertarians who might, say, not wear masks around their equally foolhardy friends, but grudgingly do so around strangers or those who are particularly vulnerable, because they’re not total idiots; likewise, there’s a lot of confused denialists who might not see the point of wearing masks, but do so anyway to avoid the hassle. But when you have people who are both ignorant of the dangers AND angry about the politics, then you have a recipe for trouble…
I would add another class – hardcore “low information” Trump supporters.These are the people intentionally distancing themselves from objective reality. There’s a sad, relatable core to the anger they have, as it’s really hard to look at the last few decades of American history and come away with anything near a positive outlook for anyone not in the 9 figure plus income range. They’ve been lied to – by society telling them “just work hard and you’ll be rewarded” amongst many lies. They’ve watched as the local businesses they ran or had friends involved with are steamrollered by Wal-Mart or whichever mega is destroying their town and been told that it’s for their own good. They’ve watched a world growing steadily more interconnected and complex at a nearly exponential rate with the only benefits seeming to land in the laps of the already well to do. The sad part is that they’re not looking for answers, they’re looking for perpetrators. Incremental change is not enough, so they want the person promising that everything will be better when they’re in charge. Details are probably a detriment here – one of the common refrains when reading on con artists is that the best scam is one the victim builds for themselves. Convince them that the end is worth it, and they’ll construct fantastic edifices of assumptions and outright self-delusion to defend the scam from people trying to help them not be victimized. Trump keys into this perfectly – the fewer details, the more his base wants to defend them.This IS a bipartisan issue, there will always be deluded ‘true believers’ on pretty much any side of any issue, but the Trump campaign and to an extent the GOP behind him has weaponized this group more effectively than anyone before.They ARE angry. They are being convinced by the person they adore that the US has been ‘stolen’ from them and Donald Trump is not only the best, but the only, shot they have at restoring the ‘good days’.This is the Know-Nothings with a charismatic leader sharing their beliefs (at least in his public statements) in the Presidency.
The metaphor I keep coming back to is that they’re toddlers. Adult toddlers. Unable to make sound decisions for themselves, rebelling against any kind of authority just because it apparently feels good, throwing tantrums if their will is balked…these are the actions of small children. And unfortunately the rest of us get to pay the price for their immature selfishness.
Angry toddlers.
My 17-year-old works at the local grocery store. A good day is when someone doesn’t spit at him, scream, or otherwise try to assault him for wearing a mask. They had to hire a security guard JUST to deal with people who won’t comply with the mask rule.
Oh my god, I feel so bad for him. I worked at a grocery story when I was 17 and I can’t imagine dealing with that. I had enough anxiety from the people yelling at me about bagging wrong or the price of things I had no control over.
These people are fucking garbage.
on a GOOD normal day people treat grocery workers like garbage, especially the younger ones. I cannot imagine how difficult they must be now when a kid has to ask a grown-up human being to wear a mask to avoid, you know, killing your fellow shoppers or staff at the place, and has to listen to the drivel and drama about how dictatorial and sheeple we’ve all become. I know they do it because I listen to people complain about this everywhere I go, constantly, and those are the ones WEARING masks and complaining. The ones who don’t wear them complain even louder.Let them make their choices but don’t kill my family for your dumbness. Please. I’m begging you.
I nearly put my fist through my TV when I saw some woman saying she can’t breathe in her mask and comparing herself and anti-maskers to George Floyd. Like, congratulations, you took two situations I didn’t think I could be any madder about and somehow mashed them together into something even more enraging, you dumb selfish self-victimizing c*nt.
I wonder how these folks would have handled the full on socialism of WW2 rationing?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationing_in_the_United_States
By bitching and whining through their overstuffed fucking mouths.
I actually think dogs aren’t that hard to figure out. They live for the moment and follow there instincts. Cats though, who knows what the fuck their thinking.
It’s because to a not insignificant portion of the population, “freedom” means “be children.”
What I don’t get are the social media anti-mask obsessives, who seem to be devoting most of their lives banging on and on about masks, posting reams and reams of cut’n’paste “information” hour after hour, day after day …. and not one of them actually seems to know what a mask is for. It’s to stop you spitting on people. That’s it. Seven simple words. Months of daily garbage don’t and won’t counter that. The only possible counter is “I WANT to spit on you”, which is generally frowned upon at the best of times.
This sounds good and important and far too aggravating to sit through.
yeh, i can’t watch right now.
Or I could just watch the news, I already know how much they bungled everything, it’s literally life right now. Seeing it further up close sounds even more depressing.
Watched the documentary. It does some critically important things you won’t get from reading / watching news. Hearing from numerous experts who tried desperately to stop the crisis, tried to alert the media, and were promptly ignored both by media and the masses at large. It provides a lesson in that we the public are also partly to blame, for trusting the media too much and not holding them to account when they fail to give experts a large enough bullhorn who are trying to warn the public of an incoming disaster. We knew PPE was a problem and experts tried to tell us – the media scarcely covered it for more than a week in the news cycle months ago.
think about all the stuff the Moron in Chief has done just this year—fucking up a pandemic response and admitting he lied about its severity to the tune of 200k+ dead and counting; finding out he pays no taxes; pushing for a vaccine not out of concern but to score badly needed points before election day—and he could STILL BE ELECTED. This would have destroyed anyone else’s candidacy, obliterated it into dust, but thanks to our deeply engrained cultist susceptibility, he’s still hanging around with plenty more chances to inflict damage on the democracy and Americans. It boggles the mind.
FUCK and I nearly forgot the whole “blew off the Russian bounty on American soldiers” ANNNNNNNNND calling American soldiers “suckers and losers”. And not condemning white supremacists during a debate when he was offered the chance. And taunting governors who needed ventilators during a pandemic to come kiss his ass in return for said ventilators. Comparing him to a toddler with a handgun is an insult to real toddlers with real handguns.
I mean, a toddler with a handgun could only kill, at best, around a dozen people.
I don’t mean to nitpick, but … well, actually, I do mean to nitpick, and a toddler would need extraordinary levels of coordination, agility, strength, and composure to kill a dozen people with a handgun.
UNLESS his parents, a bunch of old white men who enjoyed that he could get away with anything, kept reloading the gun for him?
Or the adorable tyke got her/his hands on a Glock 17, with a 17-round standard configuration — and if Daddy and Mommy want to go all Dirty Harry, has a special magazine that can hold up to 33 rounds!
Now, isn’t that a comforting thought?
He didn’t just lie about the pandemic. He actively stole PPE from the states initially infected. He actively made it more likely people would die.
wow how could I have forgotten about that? The governor of Md was able to score some tests via his “Korean connection” (his wife) and made sure to guard and hide them in case the ATF or whatever showed up to “seize” them. Unbelievable.
It’s insanity that our government was so incompetent, so cruel that this was allowed to get as bad as it is. We knew as early as January how bad this virus could be when stories were coming out of China, and our government did nothing to prepare us. I heard reports from China about the rising death toll, how bad it was, on This American Life, for Christ’s sake. But it still got out of hand, and we’re the ones suffering in the mire of the Trump administration’s horrible decisions. Sure, he got COVID, which felt good for a moment, but he was still able to afford care that no one else could ever get. We received zero help from the people who work for us, and it’s so goddamn infuriating.Fuck him, fuck the Trump administration, fuck every single Republican, fuck the people who voted for them, and fuck these annoying Kinja ads that take-up half the page and make it impossible to load the article.
Yeah I am so pissed off at how badly we fumbled this. I mean, I thought I had no expectations for Trump, but… what needed to be done was so plainly obvious. After the initial two month quarantine we shoulda had testing on demand everywhere, contact tracing, there should have been a solid relief framework so that nonessential businesses could stay closed and nonessential workers could stay home without any worry over rents or mortgages or being able to get groceries, we completely wasted that time and now we’re so far behind everyone else. I’m not even sure I’ll be able to see my family at Christmas. I honestly think this is THE thing that will be pointed to in history books as the end of the American empire. We were already on a decline, our infrastructure’s been rotting away, we languish behind many other countries in various metrics of quality of life, etc.- but there’s no clearer indication of this than a global crisis breaking out and our handling it objectively worse than literally everyone else. And of course the damage to the economy is so great that foreign investors, in countries that have stabilized, will be able to loot all sorts of properties and businesses.
I was a bit the same. Low bar of expectation. But really, he didn’t need to do anything – just stand out the way while the experts do their thing, and tell the public to comply with the experts. That’s all he needed to do, but his ego and narcissism is so comprehensive he couldn’t even manage that.
So glad I live in NZ.
The Republicans decided they could make hay out of “Don’t let the government tell you to wear a mask!” In the long term this may not have been a good idea but they could either do that or admit that capitalism has its limits.
I live in Australia. Not exactly New Zealand but at least closer than a lot of other places (not just geographically!) in a “I can’t believe it’s not butter!” vs actual butter kind of way …Or at least margarine.
I like how for decades we Australians have seen ourselves as the sophisticated older sibling to little New Zealand, but are increasingly looking wistfully at a competent government that seems to care about its citizens and wondering why we can’t have that.
has anyone done the “trump is the anti-christ predicted by nostradamus” analysis yet?
That’s the hardcore Republican strategy for the past few decades. Erode all public confidence in the federal government so that no one will look to them for help anymore.
This is true, and your username is inspired.
I can hear Elrond saying to his daughter, “if you stay, you will never reach Operating Thetan Level 5!”
The Obama administration actually left a plan for what to do about “novel coronaviruses”. Obama literally did a better job handling this pandemic, and he didn’t even know it was going to happen.
It’d be nice if this administration being directly responsible for several dozen 9/11s would be enough to conclusively lose them the election, but who knows anymore.
“ they wanted to get the movie in front of as many eyes as possible before voters go to the polls on November 3. “So its streaming free on every available platform?
Depends on whether you consider Pirate Bay a platform or not.
And to think if he’d literally shut up, sat down and let the experts handle this (aka pulling a Doug Ford), he’d have a much better chance of reelection.
Trump can’t do that — his ego won’t let him, and if his sense of self-preservation overrode that for once in his life, his followers would call him a “Sellout” so fast our heads would spin!
was this review payed for by CNN and all the late night show hosts??
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