Watching the rise of people like Jair Bolsonaro, Rodrigo Duterte and Donald Trump, it is hard to miss the ways their paths to power are following a familiar pattern: conservative adherents of older mythologised pasts who rise to power built on decades of systemic breakdown and economic decline.
A major criticism I have of news coverage of Donald Trump is treat him as an outlier, a singular evil who has turned the US into a fascist state, rather than the logical endpoint of decades of policy decisions and systemic inequalities.
While the context is unique, watching The Kingmaker felt like an echo.
When the film begins, I was wondering what the film's approach would be - the first scene shows Marcos in a limo, stopping on a street and handing out money to children. For about the first quarter of the movie, Marcos is our guide, with an uninterrupted to-camera address about her life, her marriage, and her despair at the current state of her homeland.
I studied a bit on the Marcos regime at university, but that was a decade, so I was not prepared to be as skeptical as her words initially made me feel.
As the film progresses - and her lies become more blatant - the film breaks away from Marco's POV, intercutting her words with montages and information of what was really going on under the period of martial law.
The film transitions from Marcos' voice, to those of the people she impacted, from villagers displaced by her desire to create an island reserve for her favourite African animals, to victims and opponents of the government, to current government officials, like Andres D. Bautista, who was head of the Presidential Commission on Good Government, who went from roles in government to living with family in the US after the rise of Duterte.
Marcos emerges as a shrewd manipulator, who simultaneously creates and believes her own view of reality. She can justify everything, and the film pays special attention to the ways in which historical revisionism has led to a rehabilitation of the Marcos. A particularly chilling sequence involves school children talking about how much better life was under martial law.
As the film heads toward the finish line, we follow Marcos' son Bongbong as he campaigns to become Vice President of the Philippines. The film also re-positions Duterte as an extension of this revisionism, but an active participant in the Marcos' plans to return to power.
I was amazed at the access that the filmmakers had to everyone. I was particularly surprised at Bongbong's appearance. Through his to-camera address and campaign appearances he comes across as a privileged rube, lacking his mothers' skills or sense of strategy. While Imelda sees him as the successor to the dynasty, the film highlights the ways in which he is only able to work as his mother's pawn. Once again, the parallels to other would-be despots are hard to miss.
The most unsettling aspect of the film is how, despite extended periods in her company, Marcos never reveals anything. At the start of the film, I wandered if the filmmakers had been taken in, and it would be a one-sided portrait, or a character study stripped of its broader context.
Instead, the movie offers a feature-length exercise in contrapuntal narration, juggling Marcos' own romanticized mythology with her cynical manipulation. Based on the characterization she gets here, I would not be surprised if Marcos would be happy with it.
The film may intend to offer a critique, but the final image that emerges from this film is of a formidable power player who is still terrifyingly relevant.
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