Escape From All This

Good question.

Though any pronouncement by the 47th President that comes without legislative text, as the invaluable Jane Coaston once noted, should be read in the voice of a college football coach saying, “We’re really going to emphasize smashmouth football,” meaning it’s just hot air emitted from the blowhole of a sweaty, self-impressed man, well, still, when His Imbecility mentions the industry that is the nominal subject of this blog, the staff is compelled to weigh in. And that’s what he did last Sunday evening, or last Monday morning, May 5th, posting at 1:18 AM as generally sane people do via his Ice Cream Social app that other countries seeking to draw filmmakers and movie studios away from America was a threat to national security and that he would “begin the process of instituting a 100% tariff on any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands.”

As it happens, His Imbecility also indirectly weighed in this blog’s other nominal subject (college football) a couple weeks before when he took to his Ice Cream Social app midway through the precipitous soap opera slide of Colorado quarterback Shedeur Sanders from surefire first round selection to fifth round afterthought in the NFL Draft to command that Sanders “should be ‘picked’ IMMEDIATELY by a team that wants to WIN.” (Perhaps the President missed the game where Sanders lost by 18 points to the 2024 Bad Boy Mowers Pinstripe Bowl champions?) What did that have to do with the tariff on coffee coming in from Indonesia? Nothing, but also everything, because T*ump doesn’t see himself as a President but as a King, one who gets a say in all matters and who is, himself, both the law and the truth rather than the law and the truth itself. When he said Sanders should be drafted IMMEDIATELY, he meant it not as an offhand online observation but an Emperor Constantine-like edict and expected whatever team was on the clock at that moment to honor his decree. (They didn’t. Sanders was picked a few rounds later, and by the Cleveland Browns, so, not a team that wants to WIN.)

King Big Brain I’s Hollywood tariff social media decree, however, was not his only one on May 5th. Later that morning he also proclaimed his intention to rebuild and re-open Alcatraz. Because he’s a verifiable idiot, I jokingly assumed the President must have been watching “Escape from Alcatraz,” though as both The New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle wrote, it really did seem as if he might have been watching “Escape From Alcatraz.” In quasi-explaining his quasi-plan later, the President “appeared to (reference) a scene from ‘Escape From Alcatraz,’” wrote Aidin Vaziri for the latter, “in which a raincoat used in a makeshift raft is shown floating in the San Francisco Bay.” And though the Washington Post would also report that some of the President’s Hollywood tariff proclamation seemed to stem from not-ready-for-public-view information being gathered by his so-called Hollywood Special Ambassador Jon Voight, it’s not a stretch to imagine King Big Brain I ignoring, say, the state department’s reports on the escalating Kashmir conflict between India and Pakistan to watch Don Siegel’s 1979 movie and in that moment tying both tariffs and reopening Alcatraz together in his cerebral gelatin. 

The specifics of these tariffs, I’m not even going to get into that, not least because there are no specifics. “The whole thing is a goofball,” Variety quoted Schuyler Moore, a partner at Greenberg Glusker, saying, “I can’t imagine how they’re going to do this in practice.” In a modicum of fairness, it’s possible that Special Ambassador Voight was working toward something workable only for his pudding-brained overlord to take whatever he was working toward and then drive it right off the cliff. As with his Shedeur Sanders proclamation, it’s simply about the King, er, President injecting himself into everything, a way to remind everyone that America is the T*ump show, to paraphrase a 2017 Axios article by Mike Allen and Jonathan Swan, and he its megalomaniacal producer.

Kevin Smith has often told the story of attempting to write the Superman movie that was never made, “Superman Lives,” and producer Jon Peters insisting that it should end with the Man of Steel fighting a giant spider. Why, wondered Smith, to which Peters replied that spiders “are the fiercest killers in the insect kingdom.” Smith went on to remember people from Warner Bros. telling him that Peters was always on about that giant spider, as if he had watched some TV program on insects one time and saw a giant spider, a chunk of garbage snagging on something at the bottom of the occluded waterway of his brain, flapping away there forever. That’s me paraphrasing the inestimable David Roth colorfully noting how T*ump tends to repeat the same bits of weird pseudo-knowledge over and over and doesn’t this whole spider thing sound just like the 47th President? Smith also said that when he went to see the notorious Peters-produced stink bomb “Wild Wild West,” he could not help but note that it concluded with its main characters fighting a giant mechanical spider. In T*ump’s Hollywood, there are going to be a lot of movies ending with variations of giant mechanical spiders. That, as he would say, I can tell you.