It’s easy to mistake The Sweet East for a progressive indictment of modern America, with its gun-wielding conspiracy theorists and predatory authority figures – but they belie a blasé politics that undermines the film’s credibility as social satire.
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The Sweet East begins outside the US Capitol, where a group of bored high school students are listening to a history lecture. One of them is the film’s protagonist, a disaffected teenager named Lillian, who has joined her classmates on a field trip to Washington, DC. Their buttocks march single file across the screen as their teacher explains to them that they are in fact facing the building’s rear.
Given that only two years have elapsed since the Capitol was sieged by demands to change the presidential election results, the choice of setting feels like an intentional reminder of recent history. When The Sweet East premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the film’s cautionary tenor didn’t go unnoticed – the programmers who introduced one screening touted it as a portrait of America “shattered into pieces.” Reviewers also eagerly greeted the directorial and screenwriting debuts of cinematographer Sean Price Williams and film critic Nick Pinkerton. Williams, who has shot many of contemporary independent film’s canonical titles, helms the director’s wheel with the same frenzied dynamism that made his cinematography distinctive. The film’s political themes aren’t hard to miss, but they are underscored by a strident irony that neutralizes any claim the film has to genuine insight, which makes reports of its ostensibly radical content rather unconvincing.
The synopsis for The Sweet East advertises the film as a modern-day picaresque, a literary genre with a pedigreed lineage as a vehicle for social satire: Gulliver’s Travels, Candide, and Tristam Shandy are among its prominent titles to be counted. Cinema has also reckoned with the picaresque in its own memorable ways: Forrest Gump (1994) and O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) are popular examples. True to its description, the film whisks Lillian across the East Coast, subjecting her to the unwanted advances of punks, academics, artists, and terrorists. Her journey recalls the digressive narratives of Martin Scorsese’s After Hours (1984), in which a man’s thwarted attempts to get home become a nocturnal odyssey through New York City, as well as the Williams-lensed Good Time (2017) and Funny Pages (2022).
It’s easy to mistake The Sweet East for a progressive indictment of modern America, with its gun-wielding conspiracy theorists and predatory authority figures – but they belie a blasé politics that undermines the film’s credibility as social satire. The only individualized characters are foolish and solicitous: the punks are idealistic, the artists are pretentious, and the academic is a white supremacist pedant. Only Lillian is spared this fate, and she tolerates the other characters with passivity and indifference. This juxtaposition turns the other characters into de facto antagonists and makes Lillian’s disengagement appear noble by contrast, with each successive encounter only confirming her righteousness.
The sin apparently uniting the people Lillian meets is their sincerity, as conviction of any sort is viewed with suspicion and disdain. Indeed, among the differences between The Sweet East and Funny Pages is that the earnestness that animated the latter is absent. Nowhere is the film’s ironic detachment more apparent than in a scene where Lillian and her captor, Mohammed, hike through a forest and stand to marvel at their natural surroundings, revealing a ragged, computer-generated landscape. It’s a silly visual gag, like an image from a Tim and Eric sketch, that highlights the artifice of filmmaking, but it does so by foreclosing any possibility of sentiment. Such comedic devices, the ones epitomized by the likes of Tim and Eric and repeated endlessly in the last decade by independent filmmakers, were first employed by a group of French intellectuals in the fifties and sixties called the Letterist International and later the Situationist International. Called détournement, this technique was achieved by appropriating the symbols of capitalism and subverting them. A group of radical left-wing thinkers, they sought criticize what they perceived to be the encroachment of consumerism into everyday life. In the context of Williams’s film, however, it’s a directorial choice that becomes emblematic of an attitude that is critical of everything and yet stands for nothing.
Another example can be found in a scene where a wild-eyed vigilante fires a gun inside a restaurant and demands to know where “the children” are kept – alluding to the conspiracy theory that 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was operating a child trafficking ring out of a Chevy Chase pizza parlor. Lillian then escapes down a secret tunnel littered with children’s toys, implying that the vigilante’s accusation might be right. The notion is too absurd to take seriously – but then what in The Sweet East is? The film conflates a swathe of issues, like liberal campaigns to end sexual assault with conservative moral panics over grooming; or liberal anger at racial injustice with conservative resentment of cultural elitism. That these positions become indistinguishable when viewed from a distance defines the film’s jaded outlook: it encourages us to laugh at the college professor’s racism, not because it is incongruous but because it is fitting.
Such cynicism makes it unsurprising that various minor roles are filled by fixtures of the so-called “dirtbag left,” a term for a cohort of podcasts (Red Scare, Cum Town, Chapo Trap House) whose comedic content traffics in political provocation and shock humor. Podcaster Adam Friedland and colleague Leia Jospe, among others, are involved in Williams’s film. Their participation suggests a renunciation of the bleeding-heart respectability of bourgeois liberalism, a tactic that in recent years has transformed these sites of nominally left-wing populism into vectors for right-wing rhetoric. Whatever its merits are, the “dirtbag left” has become a case study for how transgressive politics has potential to curdle into reactionary ideology as opportunism has laid it vulnerable to moral compromise. Rumors circulating online that The Sweet East was at least partially financed by Peter Thiel, the PayPal founder and venture capitalist who funded an “anti-woke film festival,” doesn’t help the film’s case. (The Thiel Foundation’s former executive director, Jimmy Kaltreider, is billed as an executive producer.)
American politics certainly faces many troubling and endemic issues, but in withholding from a clear target, the film locates its dysfunction in something akin to spiritual decline. For instance, almost all the characters for whom the film reserves its broadest caricatures are portrayed as working class, and yet little acknowledgment is made of the system that helped shape their politics. Thus, The Sweet East plays into the ideology of the very establishment that it supposedly critiques: that individual personal idiosyncrasies, rather than systemic issues, are responsible for what’s wrong with society. When this becomes the basis for your satire, you inevitably punch down instead of up.
Works Cited
Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. “picaresque novel.” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 25 Jan. 2022, https://www.britannica.com/art/picaresque-novel. Accessed 30 November 2023.
Bernstein, Joseph. “‘Look At What We’re Doing with Your Money, You Dick’: How Peter Thiel Backed an ‘Anti-Woke’ Film Festival.” BuzzFeed News, 3 Mar. 2022.
Debord, Guy, and Gil Wolman. “A User’s Guide to Détournement.” Situationist International Anthology. Edited and translated by Ken Knabb. Revised and expanded edition, Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006, pp. 14-21.
Tolentino, Jia. “What Will Become of the Dirtbag Left?” The New Yorker, 18 Nov. 2016.
