In the aftermath of the Charlottesville violence, the press is so willing to latch onto anything in entertainment as relevant to the world as they see it. Even if it makes Texans the villains in the midst of a disaster of epic proportions.
On August 25, the B movie, Bushwick, was released and desperate critics noticed it. What would have been merely ignored by film reviewers in a previous time, or dismissed as violent and shallow, instead received glowing reviews from such sources as The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Vulture. The plot focused around a fantasy where Texas secedes from the United States, and starts a second civil war.
“Some films have all the luck,” said New Yorker reviewer Anthony Lane. His reference was to the timing, but really, the timing couldn’t have been worse. Like the Charlie Hebdo cartoon, like the Politico cartoon, comparing Texans to white supremacists while the state is suffering from historic flooding due to Hurricane Harvey is in extremely poor taste. First of all, obviously they are attacking innocent victims, and second of all, they are justifying their own uncharitable articles. Way to kick people when they are down, liberal media.
Vulture’s reviewer, David Edelstein, went for the jugular his summarization of the plot. He stated that, “The real threat, [the film] says, is from within, from white men in states like Texas and the Carolinas who vie multiculturalism as the enemy--and laughably underestimate the number of illegal weapons in blue-state urban areas.” Meanwhile, the ‘real threat’ is in danger of drowning, in real life.
The trailer, which vaguely shows some of the main characters shooting at what appear to be the police or members of a S.W.A.T. team, briefly mentioned that the plot is about the state of Texas seceding from the United States and invading other states. So the men in black are actually invaders. But none of this is made explicitly clear in the trailer.
Lane explained, though, that viewers aren’t “even sure who the good guys are, or whom we should be rooting for.” Armed thugs “are not the enemy” in this film; instead, those who impose martial law are viewed as violent. The force behind the plot is that armed white men apparently “don’t anticipate much resistance” from the “ethnic diversity.”
Benjamin Lindsay of Vanity Fair claimed that Bushwick will awaken the public to the “armed and dangerous fringes of our country,” such as Texas and South Carolina. The film apparently was inspired by Gov. Rick Perry’s comment, that Texas would secede after Obama’s election, according to the directors. Way to try and justify this, by citing fake news! Rick Perry never said anything about seceding from Texas if Obama was elected!
It’s interesting to note that while the networks developed this narrative after Charlottesville, the directors of Bushwick had the idea that this was reality 8 years ago.
The plot is clearly stuck in the fantasy world of racism and terrorism that the left is willing to paint for the sake of making all conservatives look bad. However, Lindsay emphasized that “it rests too close to reality for comfort.”
However, Vulture has but one criticism of the film: it doesn’t portray the minorities as the heroic main characters. Instead, “black characters have fat stashes of weaponry and itchy trigger fingers and are almost as much as a threat to the protagonists as the white supremacists.”
