Bob Roberts

What better way to celebrate the utter disintegration of American Democracy than with humor? Specifically: one about a right-wing folk-singer running for office. Tim Robbins’ Bob Roberts is great; it’s not great filmmaking (pretty run of the mill stuff as far as that goes) and it’s not the most original idea (borrowing heavily from Spinal Tap in more ways than one) but it has real teeth that cut even deeper three decades later. While the overall narrative falls flat at times and pushes the strain of believability that the “verite” mockumentary style is attempting to establish, the individual scenes themselves do a great job of taking potshots at everything Neo-Liberal America has to offer, from the corporate-controlled SNL to the abysmal role American news media has played in the shaping of this country. You’re forced to laugh to avoid the crying.

Nothing in Bob Roberts should feel like a surprise at this point in history- not the cold, calculating evil coming out of the Republican Party, nor the utter critique of the Boomer generation’s failure at fixing all the problems they believed they could change. Tim Robbins is perfect as a squeaky-clean, plastic-smiling scumbag who subverts everything Woody Guthrie ever fought for in the name of the Free Market, and the satirical music videos he peppers the film with could easily be used by Republicans today unironically without a hitch. Like Network, Bob Roberts can be added to the mounting pile of evidence that proves real life has gone beyond our own satire- or, like Robbins himself said after the election of Donald Trump, that “Bob Roberts came true.”