Un Coeur Simple: Vice and the Riddle of Ideology

I don’t remember the precise wording, but “Vice,” directed by Adam McKay, begins with a disclaimer to the effect that making the film was very difficult because Dick Cheney is one of the more private or reticent public figures in US history. Well, actually, I remember the line that comes after that caveat: “But we did our fucking best.”

It is one of many gimmicks that McKay—who also directed The Big Short—throws at the audience to reassure them that he is not taking their attention span for granted. McKay famously cut his teeth on a very broad—but exquisitely bumptious—form of comedy, mostly starring Will Ferrell, the once and no doubt future George W. Bush impressionist. So “doing our fucking best” is not merely, for McKay and his production team, a matter of accuracy and insight: the film should also be judged by its ability to make Cheney into a character that people—ordinary people—want to watch.

“Want to watch” in both the sense that they want to be entertained by the character of Cheney and in the more active sense of wanting to scrutinize. The film succeeds in both senses.

In the former sense—the passive entertainment sense—Christian Bale’s performance is phenomenal and McKay has surrounded him with both well-known faces (Steve Carell, Amy Adams, Tyler Perry[1]) and character actors (Don McManus, Justin Kirk, Eddie Marsan) who give exceptionally assured performances that seem far less like impressions than like intelligently original interpretations. McKay may have been watching the “American Crime Story” series (especially the first season about O.J. Simpson), as it similarly manages to create a sense of déjà vu without feeling like it is straining after an over-exact verisimilitude. The viewer is invited to judge the film both as a re-enactment and as an autonomous drama: it has a kind of hyper-reality.

The film also throws the viewer repeatedly at the question of what made Dick Cheney tick. “Vice” lures the viewer[2] into a number of answers, as if trying out different possibilities. At first, it seems that Cheney is a kind of Macbeth, shunted into prominence by the ambitions of his wife.[3] For much of the first half, Amy Adams’s Lynne Cheney vigorously fulfills this role, and one of the most interesting scenes is a moment when, after his first heart attack forces him off the campaign trail during his first run for Congress in 1978, Lynne takes over his stump speaking schedule. In contrast to Dick’s low-energy business-Republican platitudes, Lynne’s approach is a brazen and direct cannonade of culture wars rhetoric that takes Dick’s aides by surprise. Lynne seems to be inventing on the spot a form of populism that would take decades to flower fully.

But Lynne fades from the picture by the end of the second act; her position as Chair of the NEH is made to seem like a kind of sinecure that merely adds to the luster of the Cheneys as a power couple rather than as a culture wars beachhead.

Lynne serves as a second kind of spur to Dick’s development in the film, though. Earlier, she shames him for being a drunk and a ne’er-do-well; they are engaged and she holds her continued assent to marriage over his head to force him to straighten out. This is a more conventional family drama: it is about love and self-respect rather than ambition.[4] Dick reforms because he wants to keep Lynne, and without question he loves her throughout the film. On numerous occasions, in fact, the film seems to announce that Dick’s only redeeming quality is that he is a devoted family man. It explicitly makes the case that he gave up Presidential ambitions because he wanted to protect his lesbian daughter Mary from the excoriating spotlight of a primary campaign. And at times the film suggests that Dick was at the point of cashing in with his political and financial success, eager to live a quiet happy life with his family rather than a public life of the pursuit of power.

But the film also shows Dick betraying Mary when his other daughter—Liz Cheney—needs to shore up her conservative credentials in an ugly Congressional primary in Wyoming. At this moment, McKay and Bale portray him as a cold-blooded opportunist; he simply acts.

If the film offers Dick as Macbeth and Dick as the devoted family man, it also silhouettes him against the larger story of the conservative movement as simply an extraordinarily shrewd operator, someone who used the GOP’s fortunes to advance himself, someone who hitched himself to the right people and rode their coattails to enormous success. One early scene introduces Donald Rumsfeld as a charismatically profane Congressman addressing a group of Congressional interns—including Dick. Recognizing a man on the make, Dick wangles a position on Rumsfeld’s staff, only incidentally inquiring what political party he represents. Rumsfeld and Cheney’s fortunes are made together because they are untainted by Watergate, and their experience in the brief Ford administration sets them up for future usefulness and future advances in the Reagan and Bush père regimes.

Underneath this opportunism, though, is a sense of entitlement, of arrogance and presumption. There is a poignant moment when Dick gets his first office in the White House: he calls Lynne with a sort of astonished humility in his voice, and they end up talking about how to make macaroni and cheese out of a box. (Dick talks Lynne through how to make it less watery.) But the nearer Dick gets to Rumsfeld and particularly to David Addington, the more he seems to radiate that aura of entitlement.

Addington is the key, though, to the film’s final hypothesis about Cheney. Addington turns Dick Cheney into a man of ideas, or at least of one idea. The film credits Addington—who was Cheney’s legal counsel and then Chief of Staff while he was Vice President and generally served as his consigliere—with acquainting Cheney with new ideas about the executive branch’s powers that would crystallize as the unitary executive theory. Addington acts as a kind of intellectual quartermaster for Cheney, finding both Antonin Scalia and later John Yoo to serve as jurisprudential provender for Cheney’s appetite for power.

In this framing, Cheney was/is not driven indiscriminately or opportunistically by a lust for power. Rather, he is driven by an idea: when he hears about the unitary executive theory, it instantly accords with some kind of deeply held belief or vision about how America should be run or ruled. Cheney pursued power, in other words, because he wanted to implement a particular kind of government, one with a paramount, unchallengeable executive branch focalized in one human being. Addington helped him understand what this vision must entail and found him the right legal minds to justify it, but the film—at various moments—makes clear that a unitary executive is what Cheney desperately believes in, it is what he feels he must do. It is his ideology in the strong sense.

As you can probably surmise, this multiplicity of theories about Cheney’s motivations carry over to how the film depicts the Bush administration’s actions both in pursuing the Global War on Terror and in selling and then prosecuting the invasion of Iraq. The viewer gets essentially the same menu of options for why the Bush administration acted in the way that it did. It was ambition; it was a retributive desire to protect the “family”/nation; it was opportunism and venality; it was arrogance; it was ideology run amok.

The film does not take the shortcut of answering “all of the above” so much as it seems to commit to each possibility in sequence, cycling through each a number of times in a way that felt both indecisive and also somehow correct. “All of the above” does not really feel like a good answer, even if one takes the somewhat more sophisticated step of distributing these motivations to discrete factions, so that some (the neoconservatives) were purely ideological while others (Halliburton et al.) were purely venal.

Indecision feels correct because ultimately both ideology and venality seem insufficient, at least as motivations for Cheney. The film makes quite clear that the Cheneys were wholly comfortable—materially, any way—before Dick considered Bush’s offer of joining him on the 2000 Presidential ticket. On the other hand, Cheney’s passion for the unitary executive theory seems undermotivated—why would he believe in it so strenuously as a principle, not just as a tool for gaining power?

Cheney, more so than Rumsfeld or McNamara or even, I think, Kissinger, is an enigma, but he doesn’t seem like a very complex man. That is the problem the film clearly put in its sights, and while it couldn’t hold itself steady enough to deliver any answers, it did, I suppose, its effing best.