If you need a distraction ahead of Tuesday’s potentially cataclysmic US election, imagine a world in which all Britons and Americans knew about each other came from popular TV drama imports.
US viewers would envisage a place in the iron grip of a monarch with presidential powers over law and war (Victoria and, from tomorrow, The Crown), who rules with the help of the aristocracy (Downton Abbey) and cerebral super-detectives (Sherlock).
Brits would imagine over there to be overrun with doctors (ER, House), cops (NYPD Blue), lawyers (The Good Wife, LA Law) and flatmates (Friends) who have a standup’s knack for one-liners. Such savvy chat even comes from the chemistry teachers turned drug barons (Breaking Bad) and the pathologists (Dexter) who are secret serial killers.
The TV overview of Britain that Americans are given is nostalgically positive, while the image of Americans transmitted in the UK perhaps exaggerates the sense of humour of the average citizen.
But in documentaries made about the other country, a very different picture emerges. American factual TV largely ignores Britain (and most other countries), except for reports on Princess Diana and her sons or profiles of showbiz hit-Brits such as Adele.
Failing to return the compliment, British docs about the US tend to represent America as what the novelist Saul Bellow called in 1990 (adopting a phrase from Wyndham Lewis) “the moronic inferno”. Such films – representing an attitude that ranges from “Only in America!” to, at its most extreme, “Even in America!” – show a nation of morbidly obese racist evangelical Christians, waving a weapon in one hand and voting for Ronald Reagan or George W Bush – or now Donald Trump – with the other.
On the eve of what will bring either the Trump presidency, or four years of resentment from his thwarted fans, comes another trio of examples of this. Two of them compete in the 9pm slot tonight – The Conspiracy Files: The Trump Dossier (BBC2) and The Gun Shop (Channel 4) – while the third-party candidate is American High School (iPlayer).
Although one aim of documentary is to explain a foreign culture to outsiders, The Gun Shop presents an aspect of America that, however good the film, will remain inexplicable to most outsiders. Shot at Freedom Firearms, a weapon-and-ammunition store in Battle Creek, Michigan, it works for a Channel 4 audience as weirdo TV. In the most eye-popping scene, a mother films proudly as her nine-year-old son has his first gun lesson at the shop’s firing range.
But far more than most offerings on the topic, this film sometimes twists its pointing finger to scratch its chin. Customers’ backstories show them to be not merely gung-ho, but traumatised. The mum of the son with the gun was the victim of an armed car jacking, while other first-time gun buyers are shown to have been motivated by a random mass shooting nearby or the killing of an African-American driver by police.
That man was shot after telling police he had a gun, so tooling up could be seen as a poor insurer of personal safety. But a logic has taken hold that is sharply expressed by a Freedom Firearms client: “If everyone’s going to carry a weapon, I don’t want to be the one without one.” This logic may ensure more deaths, but the father of one shooting victim acknowledges that there is no possibility of the US becoming “anti-gun.” Those who think an armed population is a bad idea will have to settle for “anti-carnage.”
A similar check to idealism from realism can be found in American High School, a six-part series filmed in South Carolina at Orangeburg-Wilkinson, an academy with a majority African American and “high poverty index” student body.
The conceit of a charismatic headteacher trying to reform a failing school is familiar here from series such as Educating Yorkshire, but Dr Stephen Peters, the new principal at O-W, is sitting a bigger test than most. In a key scene, he is dealing with the use of a weapon in a corridor when news comes that two cars filled with gang-members are heading towards campus to avenge the honour of the suspended student.
Liberalism and sentimentality tend to encourage educational documentaries towards the most hopeful case studies and American High School has one of those (the story of a star student raised by a single father), but it doesn’t flinch from the painful fates likely to claim many of her classmates.
In both The Gun Shop and American High School, the impending election is a constant subtext – through the issues of racial and social division – but it is most directly addressed in The Conspiracy Files: The Trump Dossier, which has been re-edited up to the last minute to reflect the latest twists in Trump’s problems with females and Hillary Clinton’s with emails.
The thrust of John O’Kane’s film is that Trump has shaped his campaign around unproven or disproven conspiracy theories: Republican rival Ted Cruz’s dad may have helped to kill JFK, Barack Obama faked his US birth certificate, the Clintons had White House aide Vince Foster murdered.
Carefully presenting evidence from forensic experts and “citizen investigators” on both sides of such matters as alleged typographical discrepancies on Obama’s paperwork or disparities in Foster’s supposed suicide note, the film will inevitably be seen by anyone who disagrees with its conclusions as part of the conspiracy (BBC-Establishment-pro-Clinton.) But – more profitably – it explores the creation of an American political climate in which there is no such thing as facts, and even the democratic process is constantly questioned.
An odd omission in an otherwise exhaustive film was the absence of Clinton’s claim, as First Lady, that her husband was the victim of a “vast rightwing conspiracy” to bring him down. This is significant because Hillary’s belief that Washington was not to be trusted seems likely to have played a part in her unwise decision to secrete and delete emails while serving as Secretary of State.
What The Conspiracy Files didn’t state – but may lead many viewers to conclude – is that, if Clinton does win, she will become the third Democratic President in succession (after her husband and Obama) whose occupancy of the office has been relentlessly contested by conspiracy theorists and other “citizen investigators”. And, as a Trump presidency would be viewed with horror in half of the US and much of the world, there should be no shortage of material for more “Even in America!” documentaries.
