Trying to watch MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell's "Absolute Proof," a two-hour "docu-movie" designed to convince its viewers of what they already believe — that Donald Trump's defeat in the 2020 election was the result of a vast and incoherent conspiracy, or an overlapping set of conspiracies — reminded me of an experience I had once at the Cannes Film Festival. (That isn't a sentence I expected to find myself writing.)
At the premiere of Jean-Luc Godard's "Film Socialisme" some years ago, I found myself sitting next to a prominent British film critic I knew slightly. There's no saving seats for your friends at a Cannes premiere; everybody piles into the ginormous theater in a wild scrum, and you sit wherever you can. If you catch sight of someone you recognize, so much the better. Well, this was late at night and after the lights went down and Godard's hypnotic, non-narrative and deliberately baffling film began, my British acquaintance promptly went to sleep. As far as I could tell, he slept through nearly the entire movie — which is admittedly rough going — so I was especially impressed that he published a review of it the next day. Which was thoughtful and funny!
I didn't fall asleep during "Absolute Proof," I promise. But I'm not going to claim I watched all of it with keenly focused attention. It is simultaneously so bizarre, so boring and so amateurish — without form or depth or any variation in tone, and seemingly endless — that it becomes impossible for a viewer to follow the supposed arguments that Lindell and his interlocutors are making for more than a minute or two at a stretch.
Evidence would suggest that the decision to package "Absolute Proof" as something vaguely resembling a movie, at least in terms of running time, came after the fact. Lindell repeatedly refers to it as a "show" and sometimes as "today's show," and performs both his stream-of-consciousness monologues and rambling interviews from behind a news-anchor type desk bearing the mysterious logo of the "WVW Broadcast Network." (That appears to be a one-man Christian media outfit run by Brannon Howse, who is credited on Lindell's website as co-creator of "Absolute Proof," and should perhaps be considered its director.)
Arguably, "Absolute Proof" has more than a little in common with "Film Socialisme," political orientation aside: It resists all structural and narrative conventions, makes no effort to tell a clear story, contradicts itself and leaps from subject to subject, and could fairly be described as a meditation on what has gone awry in our society. There are jagged mid-interview edits, unexplained fadeouts, occasional surges of faintly troubling soundtrack music and interpolated video essays composed of stock footage: the blinking lights on a broadband modem, the U.S. Capitol at night (dramatic foreshadowing?), someone using an iPad, a stylized spinning globe.
I watched the film on Lindell's website — it hasn't been "censored," but no longer appears on major platforms like Facebook or YouTube, and even on the low-end right-wing cable channel OANN is shown only with a legal preamble essentially warning viewers that none of it is true — and was unable to prevent myself from toggling away sporadically to read email or look up what European soccer games were streaming later or search on Autotrader for cars I'm never going to buy. (I might like to imagine myself as the sort of person who would buy an ultimate Republican-dad car, like a Lincoln SUV, both out of some double-switchback ironic impulse and because I genuinely liked it. But I know I'm not.)
I think cars were on my mind because Lindell has the classic demeanor of a showroom salesman. I don't mean to be insulting. I'm not talking about the odious and slimy salesman who keeps interjecting your first name into his sentences and maneuvers you into buying something you don't want on egregious terms. Lindell is more like the guy who gradually wears you down with relentless Midwestern good cheer and a series of non-sequitur anecdotes until you sign up for the useless $500 service contract just to make it stop.
When Lindell calls out the mainstream media for refusing to pay attention to his grab bag of miscellaneous non-evidence about voter fraud — which is sometimes about small numbers of people in Nevada who allegedly voted when they shouldn't have, and sometimes about a communist coup involving the Chinese government, the FBI and (of course) Dominion Voting Systems — he doesn't get middle-school-girl pissy like Donald Trump or artificially hot under the collar like Ted Cruz. He mostly seems sad and disappointed, but still able to imagine an America where decent people do the right thing.
After chuckling about the fact that suddenly all the journalists who ignored him and treated him like a buffoon want to talk to him — "your CNN, your New York Times, your Worshington Post" — Lindell poses a rhetorical question to our entire profession: "Why dontcha become a real journalist and go, 'Wow,' and take this story and run with it?"
He's fond of the disappointed question, which now that I think of it resembles a sales tactic. ("Andrew, why wouldn't you go ahead and buy that Lincoln and do a good thing for your family? Is it really gonna be about the interest rate?") That's exactly the tone he strikes in a direct address to the former attorney general, lamenting his public announcement that there had been no significant election fraud: "Bill Barr, if you're watching — why would you say something like that?" A few minutes later, he makes a similar inquiry of Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, again based on what we must consider the faulty assumption that she is riveted to the screen by this crackpot video hosted by a pillow salesman.
Let's pause here to acknowledge that, out in the real world, Mike Lindell tried to convince Trump to stage an actual, literal coup-d'état in the last days of his presidency, and was apparently 86'd from the White House by chief of staff Mark Meadows and presidential counsel Pat Cipollone, neither of whom is likely to go down in history as a hero of democracy. So, yes, I understand that Mr. MyPillow should be considered, in a certain light, as extremely dangerous.
I'm not arguing that he isn't. If anything, the fact that Lindell comes off on camera as a likable bumbler rather than a sanctimonious dickhead, that he is incapable of following a sentence from beginning to end in comprehensible fashion, and that it's impossible to tell how many of these fractured fairy tales of electoral misconduct he actually believes undoubtedly makes him more dangerous, rather than less. There's been a lot of speculation that maybe Republicans can achieve full-on American fascism by nominating a smarter, smoother and more competent version of Trump, but maybe that's looking at the problem the wrong way around. A dumber, nicer Trump could be a far more effective instrument. Mike Lindell would genuinely feel sorry about some of the things he'd have to do as America's dictator, and he'd want to make clear to us that, for gosh sakes, he didn't hate anyone.
There's no point in trying to detail or debunk the various conspiracy theories floated in "Absolute Proof," which are assembled and delivered in such scattershot fashion that it's clear the audience is already supposed to know the words and sing along. If you're looking for evidence that Lindell isn't quite as big a dope as he appears, and may have his eyes on a prize bigger than his bedding empire, that arrives in the ingenious premise that Trump's electoral defeat — although of course illegitimate — was a blessing in disguise.
So many people showed up to vote for Trump, Lindell tells us, that they "broke the algorithm" — maybe the one inside the Dominion voting machines, maybe the ones in servers in Germany or Italy or Communist Party HQ in Beijing — that was supposed to ensure an easy Biden victory on election night. That led to all the supposed shenanigans by Democrats and their RINO allies (although, again, Lindell isn't given to calling people names) that flipped states Trump had actually won to Biden, which in turn — and at last! — caused true patriotic Americans to sit up and pay attention. As Lindell puts it, "This is the most attack on our country, I'm telling you, ever."
This is of course opposite-world thinking on a world-historical scale, in which the political faction that tried its damndest to overturn a clear election result imagines itself the victim of a fanciful web of interlocking conspiracies to destroy democracy. All of this was providential, however, because it led to — well, to what? To the widespread red-pilling of far-right America, to an unwatchable and probably accidental movie that Jean-Luc Godard might pronounce a work of genius, and perhaps to Mike Lindell's next and greatest sales pitch.
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