The title of this documentary is Deflating the Elephant. It takes the fight to the Republican "elephant" by exposing how conservatives tend to frame the debate around an issue with vague and misleading language.
Your host is George Lakoff, author of Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate and professor of cognitive linguistics at the University of California-Berkeley. Lakoff's central idea is that many political issues today have been "framed" in terms friendly to the Republican party. He seeks to explain this framing and offer suggestions about how to combat it. Your narrator is Oscar-winning actor Sean Penn, although he doesn't narrate so much as occasionally comment. Also appearing is writer/director Aldo Vidali, who interviews Lakoff for the first few minutes but then disappears. Lakoff spends the rest of the film talking directly to the camera.
I had three big problems with this film: one, it is almost completely devoid of "production," making it ill-suited to the DVD medium; two, it is dull, lifeless, and hopelessly esoteric; and three, the film is ideologically barren. It is completely partisan, lobbing fierce yet over-generalized accusations at conservatives while conforming its message to the conventional wisdom of the Left.
As to the first problem, I admit that I don't like to hold small-scale documentaries to very high standards of DVD production. After all, I feel that content is more important than form in this genre. But this film falls far below even my standards. Of all the advantages the film medium offers in making an impact on the viewer or getting a message across, this film uses none of them. The opening credits look suspiciously like PowerPoint slides. Each segment of commentary by host George Lakoff is introduced with a heading, such as "On Religious Politics," and they include — I'm not making this up — subheadings that list the specific aspects of religious politics that Lakoff will mention in his discussion. This would be helpful if I were sitting in Lakoff's class taking notes, but I'm not.
Even worse than these mistakes, though, is the way Lakoff is presented. He is sitting at a desk in what appears to be a makeshift "classroom" set. It must be a classroom, I say to myself, because there are two maps on the wall: one of the U.S. and one of the world. Each state and country is given its own pastel color. I can't imagine why the filmmakers thought the maps were necessary (or why they apparently stole them from an elementary school), because they contribute further to the unfortunate feeling that we're stuck in a lecture.
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Article comments
1 - Dr Dreadful
I saw Lakoff's book in Borders a while ago and he does have a point that modern political debate - and not just in the US - is generally framed in conservative terms (low public spending = good, strong unions = bad, etc).
It sounds rather as if the publishers thought it might be a good idea to make a DVD out of the book but were too cheap to actually spend any money on a professional production.
2 - Aaron Whitehead
I've since browsed past some of Lakoff's books. I wonder if the bad production doesn't do him justice.
I agree that a lot of his basic ideas ring true. I guess he's just not the best spokesman for his own work. And the people who made this DVD should have realized that at some point.