Now It's Dark (film review)

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Now It's Dark

by John Hawkins

The Dark Money Game, the new two-part documentary from Alex Gibney, confirms the worst: America has all-but succumbed to the terminal cancer of corruption. It is difficult to say how much time is left, but that end is a certainty. Things fall apart: It's scientific, goes the Talking Heads song. Gibney's film is inspired by Jane Mayer's book, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. Mayer is a longtime staff writer at New Yorker, and has been nominated for Pulitzers a number of times for her reporting on the dark side of American politics. She appears in the film, providing journalistic testimony that strengthens Gibney's analysis.

Mayer's book opens with a famous quote from the American jurist Louis Brandeis: "We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." Mayer's book title and this quote proves to be prescient, prophetic even, and dismayingly ironic, as the film moves from the corporatization of American politics, as demonstrated by the passage of Citizens United in 2010, to the stinky corruption destroying the Supreme Court today.

The Dark Money Game is largely a character-driven narrative. Insiders and proselytizers; operatives wearing bugs to capture private conversations with power brokers are shown working largely behind the scenes in the dark and away from public scrutiny to create what Hillary Clinton, herself no slouch when it comes to corruption, once describes as "a vast right wing conspiracy." Boy, did she get that right. And the Left is no slouch either.

In Part One of The Dark Money Game, "Ohio Confidential," we're introduced to the House Bill 6 First Energy bribery scandal in the state of Ohio, the largest ever such corruption conspiracy. The essential players are executives at First Energy, former Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder, former state Rep. Jay Edwards and the late lobbyist Neil Clark, a wannabe mafiosi, who committed suicide as a result of the breaking scandal. According to local media outlet WKYC, FirstEnergy admitted to funneling $60 million into a dark money (or 501(c)(4)) group called Generation Now to ensure the passing of House Bill 6, which included a $1.3 Billion dollar bailout for two failing nuclear power plants. Staggering corruption.

Gibney chooses an interesting device to open the narrative: He has the ghost of Neil Clark provide the voice-over to tell the viewer in a confiding wiseguy tone that he's about to come clean. "Macchiavelli was a p*ssy," Clark tells us, "His writings provide a roadmap on how to play the game of politics with tools of deception, cruelty and crime"I knew how to keep their secrets." We hear noir nightclub jazz while the camera car rolls along an embankment toward a body laying in the grass: Neil Clark. The voice continues as we look down at the body:

Now, I no longer feel the need to keep people's secrets. Relieved from this career long burden, it's time for me to share. And share I will. A Sicilian never forgets. I'm Neil Clark. I'm a lobbyist.

Hyperbole and fantasy even after the end. As if the question was: Who doesn't wanna be Don Corleone or Tony Soprano?

I spent nearly 40 years working in politics in Ohio. I learned of bribes, crimes, personal scandals at the top leadership of Ohio's government, some of the state's most beloved public servants. More importantly, I knew how to keep their secrets. That was until the FBI chose to end my career." And that begins the toxic spill of details of government malfeasance and criminality in Ohio.

Gibney shows us how reformers were openly laughed at in public hearings. He then draws the narrative to the creation of the dark money systemic cancer known as Citizens United, a law which gives corporations personhood and allows for untold and anonymous money to be raised through super PACs for political campaigns. Money could now be spent to influence a failing democracy.

In Part Two of The Dark Money Game, "Wealth of the Wicked," Gibney follows the metastasis of money, showing its growing control and the "corruption to the core" of The American Way . We learn of the workings of a little-known but highly influential group called The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, a conservative and libertarian group of neo-originalists, whose mission is to reverse what it sees as the saturating influence of left wing ideology in academia, governance and public policy. A major victory for this group was the reversal of the Roe vs.Wade Supreme Court decision which legalized abortion.

Along with ideologues in the right wing Heritage Foundation, who are behind the desire to make America great again by getting rid of diversity laws and multiculturalist protections and economic opportunity, Federalist Society members work to restore an America that would have been just fine as propertied British colonists -- if mad King George hadn't insisted on all that evil taxation without representation.

Gibney largely draws from the tone that Jane Mayer establishes in her book, Dark Money. Foi example, Giney, like Mayer, feeds us morsels of the mad, greedy thinking at work in the machinations of the corrupt-minded at work:

The Kochs' investment soon paid off. Once in office, Griffith became an outspoken skeptic of mainstream climate science, drawing national ridicule for lecturing scientific experts, as they testified in Congress, that they needed to consider the possibility that Mesopotamia and the Vikings owed their success to global warming and that melting ice caps on Mars showed that humans were not its cause on Earth. (p. 261).

Personally, I believe if Adam had brained Cain, after the Abel Incident, we would have far fewer problems today and cathedrals might have started thousands of years earlier.

In Part Two, Gibney demonstrates how this group has stacked the Supreme Court with jurists who are members of the Society. He provides many instances of their material corruption and the literal back door to their hungry hearts. He shows how the justices have essentially provided President Trump with a seeming 'gratuity' in the form of giving presidents immunity from prosecution. The American Civil Liberties Union wrote, "The Supreme Court's decision to grant presidents immunity from prosecution for criminal acts committed while in office not only gives Donald Trump a free pass for his past crimes, but sets a dangerous precedent for all future presidents."

In conjunction with the current dismantling of government in America and the total ascendancy of crony capitalism, Gibney (and Mayer) paint a bleak and terrifying future for Americans and the world.

Watching The Dark Money Game, I was reminded of a film I saw many years ago on American public television's investigative journalism series Frontline. In that documentary, Black Money, Frontline investigated BAE Systems, a British multinational aerospace, military and information security company, with contracts to the Pentagon. In that program, toward the end is an interview with Saudi Prince Bandar, who was at the center of the bribery scandal. He said of the reputation of Saudi corruption,

What I'm trying to tell you is, So what? We did not invent corruption. This [has] happened since Adam and Eve. I mean, Adam and Eve were in heaven, and they had hanky panky and they had to go down to earth. So, I mean, this is human nature, but we are not as bad as you think.

Of course, the 'hanky panky' he refers to was corruption at the hands of Satan. In an interesting, and ironic sidebar, the Bandars were close friends of the Bushes, and Prince Bandar's wife "indirectly and inadvertently" provided money to two 9/11 hijackers. Money doesn't talk -- it swears, Bob Dylan sings.

I also keep this knowledge in mind as I watch how President Trump kurtsies to Saudi royals as they gaze into that glass globe together and the president accepts "fabulous wealth" symbols from Arab nations, and allows the grotesque holocaust to continue in Gaza.

(From left, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt, King Salman of Saudi Arabia, Melania Trump and President Trump during the opening of an anti-extremist center in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.Credit...Saudi Press Agency')

Gibney has been described by Esquire magazine as "becoming the most important documentarian of our time." He won an Oscar for Taxi to the Dark Side (2007), a film which exposed the excesses of torture and interrogtion in Afghanistan, after being nominated for his 2005 portrait of corruption with Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. He has also directed Zero Days (2016), and last year's The Bibi Files (2024), among many others.

The Dark Money Game is streaming on HBO.

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