Image via Roadside Attractions
The only problem with The Oath is that it came out too early.
Ike Barinholtz writes, directs, and stars in The Oath (alongside Tiffany Haddish), a film that marks what might be the first great satire of the Trump era. While films like Death of Stalin and BlacKkKlansman certainly feel relevant to our current moment, you get the feeling they were in development before Trump and gained a new urgency as the political tides changed. The Oath, by contrast, was clearly, consciously conceived out of the Trump era news cycle and reflects on the meaning, duties, and absurdities of “resistance” to his agenda. The film is so sharp in its critique of 2018 politics and how they impact family dynamics that it might have been better if the film had either dropped just before midterms or on Thanksgiving.
The Oath’s premise is that the President of the United States (a thinly disguised stand-in for the Trump administration) has instituted a “voluntary” loyalty oath that must be signed by Black Friday. As the deadline creeps closer, unrest mounts. Protestors are being detained. Dissidents are disappearing. And the Civilian Protection Unit (clearly a take on our real-life modern-day Gestapo, ICE) is showing up at citizens’ doors.
Smartly, The Oath doesn’t show us the full extent of this lightly fictionalized creeping dystopia. We see the news through Chris’s (Barenholtz) eyes and stay mostly inside his house as he prepares for the most political event in his calendar year, Thanksgiving dinner.
While the world is falling apart outside, Chris tries to pull it together so that he can serve Thanksgiving Dinner to his right-wing brother Pat, Pat’s Fox News anchor look-alike girlfriend, and his conservative baby boomer parents. The Oath is not just a social satire, it is a holiday comedy of manners. The film tackles an issue that has been much discussed over the last two years: how do you get through the holidays with family members who have terrible political views?
It isn’t much of a spoiler to say that Chris has trouble dealing with his family’s politics. But, in his failures, perhaps we can learn some valuable lessons. While we should aspire to be like Chris in that you stand by what you believe in, but, we should try not to be like Chris in pretty much every other way.
Here are some ways to avoid looking like a self-righteous liberal this Thanksgiving, even if, like Chris, you are a bit of a self-righteous liberal. After all, just because you have the right opinions doesn’t mean you always make the right decisions.
Get the Non-Political Stuff Right
One recurring bit in The Oath is that Chris can’t get his brother’s girlfriend’s name right. Her name is Abbie (Meredith Hagner), but Chris can’t stop calling her “Katie.” It doesn’t take a Freudian disciple to venture a guess that Chris gets Abbie’s name wrong because he doesn’t want to accept that this neo-con Barbie could become a part of his family.
If you know that you’ll be spending the holidays with a conservative uncle or right-wing cousin, think about what you can do outside of politics to help you get along. That way when you have the inevitable blow-up about the credibility of Tomi Lahren’s YouTube channel, it won’t come after a backlog of smaller slights.
Don’t Make Assumptions About Your Allies
One strange problem of the Trump era is that as so many people line up against the fascism of the Trump administration, you find that you have plenty of allies that you may not have much in common with, outside of defeating authoritarianism. Just because you agree that what’s going on is fucked up doesn’t mean you have the same vision for what to do about it.
This tension is illustrated beautifully in a scene between Chris and his sister Alice (Carrie Brownstein). While both Chris and Alice are both pot smoking, NPR loving liberals, Alice confesses that she signed the oath. Alice’s guilt is compounded when Chris assumes she hasn’t and rails against anyone who would sign it, pushing away the only family member on his side.
This Thanksgiving, remember that just because someone is on your side doesn’t mean you’re running the same playbook.
Don’t Make Yourself A Victim
One of the best scenes in The Oath features Haddish—who is brilliant as Chris’s wife, Kai—taking Chris to task for his self-righteousness. Chris takes political events personally, but that often means that he identifies so closely with protestors and activists in the streets that he forgets that he isn’t actually in the streets himself.
Kai accuses Chris of acting like “White Nelson Mandela” when all he is doing is sitting at home and tweeting, making the actual lived struggle of oppressed people feel like his own simply because he is commenting about it online.
Let’s just say that after two years of Trump, many of us know that feel.
Log Off
If there is one great lesson from The Oath, it is this: log off. For cinematic reasons, cable news and Twitter are used interchangeably, but really this is a movie about social media. Chris receives push alerts about the news that interrupt his time with his family: his phone even goes off during Thanksgiving Dinner. As Chris is cooking, he bargains with Kai so that he can watch the news for just a few minutes while the turkey is cooking. He has the problem many of us have: he is too invested and way too online.
In the Trump era, many of us have felt a civic duty to stay informed. We know the names of cabinet members, circuit judges, and minor FBI officials that we couldn’t have identified to save our life before Trump came along. We have added obscure journalists to our Twitter feeds where there was once athletes and stand-up comedians. This means we have new, obscure government scandals and misdeeds to get mad about every day, in addition to all of the big terrible things that would have pissed us off anyway.
If all of the political knowledge that comes from being perpetually online gives you the energy to get politically active and organize, that’s great. But, if all this constant deluge of information leads to is angry @-replies and trolls in your mentions, it might be time to do what Chris couldn’t and LOG OFF.