Appalling Film: "The Death of a President"

By Brigitte L. Nacos

One would think that nobody in his or her right mind would have the idea to produce a film about the assassination of a sitting president, never mind produce such a movie. Yet, British director
Gabriel Range did. His “Death of a President” is about the assassination of George W. Bush after the President delivers a speech in Chicago on October 19, 2007. One would also think that nobody would want to see such a movie, never mind pay scalpers as it happened according to rumors at the Toronto Film Festival where the film had its world premier on Sunday. And today, the movie is shown on television in the United Kingdom. I read in one of the stories about the film’s debut that the topic raises the question of insensitivity. Just insensitive? I find it utterly despicable to show the murder of a sitting president for what the director calls a “fictionalized retrospective documentary…in which we’re using the lens of the future to look at the present.”

It doesn’t ring true, when Range claims he didn’t mean his work to be a political attack on President Bush. What else could he have had in mind with an assassination toward the end of the President’s second term as dramatic device to take a critical look at the United States’ reactions to 9/11 under George W. Bush’s leadership? Isn’t here the notion that it is not all that surprising when a president, whose policies are so unpopular in many parts of the world and increasingly at home, is killed in the end? Could such a movie encourage some nut to do in reality what is shown on the screen? After all, we live in a country that experienced too many real presidential assassinations and assassination attempts.

If the British production company finds a distributor in the U.S., one can only hope that the film does not find an audience here.

I did not see and will never see “Death of a President,” but I watched the awful mix of fact and fiction in ABC’s “The Path to 9/11.” While the fictitious nature of the production was repeatedly flashed onto the screen, the material was otherwise presented as factual from the moment it began by referring to the 9/11 Commission’s Report. Real life characters were identified by their real names and depicted either as heroes or caricatures. With Rush Limbaugh promoting the TV-production in which one of his friends was involved as a writer, it was hardly surprising that nothing was spared to blame the Clinton administration for not nailing bin Laden and his crew before 9/11.

And yet, staging the assassination of President Bush to dramatize his post-9/11 policies is even more appalling than ABC’s pre-9/11 docudrama.