Daniel Krone's Film Blog: 2020

(This is an article I wrote during the first Trump campaign for a contest. It may not reflect my current views on the matter. It is here to be preserved. I did not win the contest.)

The Trump Card

Daniel Louis Krone

If Hilary Clinton played the woman card in the Presidential Election of 2016 then it would be safe to say Donald John Trump, now the 45th President of the United States, played the Trump card. If you’ve ever played cards you know it is the card of which if you hold in your hand wins against all other cards. And that goes to the very deepest core of why I think Donald Trump won the 2016 election to become Commander and Chief. These deconstructions are going to start pouring out from experts and so-called experts across all sides and boundaries. I’m sure their is some remote aboriginal tribe that has an opinion on the 2016 Presidential election and there is probably a meme to go with it.

I feel almost everyone during this election was prone to drastic hyperbole and the passing along of deceptively toxic rhetoric, misleading information, and unfounded ideas. A headline from the BBC recently read “Facebook’s Fake News Crisis Deepens”. The great meme wars and internet talking head debates have started. Twitter is more used for news now than real genuine investigative journalism. That is a deeply troubling dynamic. Facts are currently weighed equally with opinions in the realms of news more often than in days past. Sensationalism is currently running amok and it is deeply distracting to reality. The ease of which it is to take quotes and videos out of context and repurpose them has reached critical levels. The 4-minute warning has sounded but not for the atomic bomb but for the every growing cultural schizophrenia of the information age. The world wide web has truly become a spiderweb of deep insanity and the level of cognitive dissonance was resoundingly loud this election cycle on both sides of the isle. The head of Breitbart News (Steve Bannon), a notoriously racist and right wing news organization, has become Trump’s chief media strategist and was recently given a place on the National Security Council. This is more proof that the corrosive web of what’s the truth and what’s misinformation on the internet will only become a more normalized trap and the levels of deep insanity will become far more common. The world wide web is indeed a web and people’s minds are being cocooned to later be feasted upon by the spiders like Steve Bannon and men like Alex Jones. The most frightening part of this dynamic is that those being feasted upon do not seem to care. They are blissful and at peace with their resounding ignorance.

I do believe most Americans fall somewhere in the middle of the whole right-left dichotomy. It would just depend on how the issues are broken down and that it seems is the crux of the failure of our media and by extension our politicians who have been met with low approval ratings after low approval ratings after low approval ratings pretending to be more concerned with the common man and then selling him out for corporate interests year after year. With words like liberal and conservative being tossed around currently as buzzwords and punchlines as apposed to a clear understanding of the points of view of the other and a discussion as to what legitimately will make things better. The divide between real world understanding is partially because of the internet’s deep divide of information. If you find an article with an expert laying out the foundation of evolution within a few clicks I can find a counter argument from a so-called expert laying out so-called information for the exact opposite of it. I can do this almost consistently with almost any argument. Even the simplest of understandings now fall subject to counter arguments being weighed and viewed in the same light and with something as deeply complicated as modern politics it’s almost impossible to find clear and concise information that shows a story honestly and in a responsible light.

Modern news has become a cesspool of roundtable discussions who offer opinions that are viewed with the same weight as facts to the point where a great deal of people cannot even tell the difference between the two as if what is fact and what is opinion is in some sort of debate. Kellyanne Conway’s comments regarding Press Secretary Sean Spicer and “Alternative Facts” are as clear as crystal and like the dinosaurs it seems the concept of objective facts are dying out.

“The internet is an orgy of thoughts screaming to be heard. The internet is a great hope for ideology, the great debate inside us all, an arena where even the most petty arguments are given equal footing to some of the deepest questions mankind can ask of itself. The internet should be applauded for its openness and shunned for the exact opposite that it is equally guilty of. The internet is a wealth of ideology and debate but it is also a den of wolves for factual knowledge. Misinformation creeps around every corner of the internet. It is sharpening its fangs waiting for the most gullible of people to listen and then it pounces with its misleading ideology and misspoken facts. It is a kaleidoscope of colors and ideas we were never meant to even see. It is a gangbang of information. It is an information overload.” - This is an excerpt from a story I’ve been writing about a supercomputer who starts to glitch because it has been programed by giving facts equal footing with conspiracy theories and I fear currently that that is happening now but not in the mind of a giant computer’s AI but in the minds of regular people. Living in information bubbles and echo chambers stoking the dangerous fire of cognitive dissonance that appears to be eroding rational thought by the billions.

To the core of what brainwashing actually is Trump is now the President because of your average citizens misunderstandings of the deepest core of brand marketing. Trump a word synonymous with winning at all costs, a name he says is his most valuable asset, a name we are all used to seeing in gold letters, and a name like most reality T.V. isn’t even real. We’ve not elected a man to lead us. We’ve elected a corporate logo, a symbol, void of any real purpose or true ideology designed to sell products off of that name and not their own merits. Trump is simply a mascot for American capitalism. He has no real political experience minus rubbing elbows and has riled people up for a game whose rules him and they don’t seem to understand and whose consequences are completely misunderstood.

According to a meme in a 1988 People Magazine interview Donald Trump said, “If I were to run, I’d run as a Republican. They’re the dumbest group of voters in the country. They believe anything on Fox News. I could lie and they’d still eat it up. I bet my numbers would be terrific”. Well that’s not true at all. Trump never said that. It seems close enough to something he might say based on what we know about him and his speeches but it’s simply something that never happened. It might as well be a meme suggesting that the Loch Ness Monster has just been appointed head of the CIA. But if it were that it would be more transparently ludicrous. Memes have replaced the good old fashioned political cartoon which can always be easily seen as bias upon first sight but because modern internet memes are so easy to create and so quick to spread and reuse, because most of them are based upon simple templates, you don’t even need a basic understanding of art, graphic design, or politics to make one. The slippery slope of information has devolved into misinformation and slid into madness. Memes spread like diseases and few people tend to check on their validity. What does “Take My Money” Philip J. Fry, Pepe the Frog, or Condescending Wonka have to say about the crisis in Syria? Does Philosoraptor or The Most Interesting Man in the World have an opinion on the electoral collage? Why are there musical remixes of Alt-Right leader Richard Spencer getting punched in the face during an interview? Is anything of this helping? Or is it all just for show? Didn’t we just elect a reality T.V. star to the most powerful office on the planet earth?

Media nowadays is like the flavors in an ice-cream shop. Their used to be three vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry and whatever biases these flavors had seemed more transparent. But now with the advent of the new media boom the flavors are vast and like most psychological studies have shown people will stand mystified and unsatisfied trying to find that perfect flavor that suits their mood and in this case pre-established biases. It’s not real information. It is comfort food information. In terms of the media people tend to align with razor specific bias media that matches up with their ideology that blocks out the light of the full picture of objectivity like an eclipse. Some of that light escapes just enough to illuminate a story in order to draw the wrong conclusion about it.

The concept of echo chambers is one of the clearest examples of this cognitive dissonance. Take for example the meme heavy Facebook page of Occupy Democrats and now try to take into account that another Facebook Page called Occupy Democrats Logic whose slogan is “Doing their best to distort the truth, one bold lie after another”. This page was specifically created to rebut the other. By what method is it rebutting do you ask? Memes. Two apposing sites designed specifically to rebut specific topics in order for people to avoid the details of an actual discussion is what seems to be happening more and more. The entire bases of Reddit seems to be on threads that devolve into the absurd stream of consciousness. This is a microcosm what the internet is doing to our information and on a different level our consciousness. That whole fear of the MTV quick fix of information culture is now being exhausted by this device with seemingly limitless access to information and misinformation.

Most voters are single issue voters but still spread misinformation based on their implicit biases of these issues rather than looking at the bigger pictures overall. Abortion for example as a hot button issue is far more complex and nuanced than just a woman’s right to choose what she does with her own body or baby killing. There are deeper social implications with each law passed on this issue that stretches from the individuals it directly effects to the whole of society but the pros and cons of a full understanding cannot be weighed honestly on one side or the other but rather both. This goes with almost every issue. But humans raised on red bull, twitter, and simple soundbites do not seem to have the patience or time to understand deeply complex and nuanced issues and seem to be fine clinging onto their memes and slogans repeated ad nauseum like a tribal mantra. Each side of any particular issue not budging much creating circular arguments of the same points and counterpoints being repeated until both sides are too exhausted to continue a debate while committing fallacy after fallacy and not even bothering to notice. And this is much of why and how Trump won. “Make America Great” is a simple easily digestible slogan and Trump, like the great salesman he is, simply pushed it until it got him where he needed to be. All pop songs nowadays need a hook and a repeatable chorus. Trump’s chorus of American exceptionalism and making it great again was simple enough. Who honestly cares about the minutia of how and why he’ll be able to make it great or even if he is honestly qualified to do so. Trump’s win also has to do with his celebrity status as a wealthy man. Did his supporters honestly know the tedious details of his business practices or where they believing the hype and bathing in the nostalgia of remembering him from such shows as “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous”.

A more personal story about this phenomena of celebrity worship that has somehow walked its way to the furthest reaches of power is from the point of view of a 4 year old boy. As I started this essay I was over at a house with a little boy playing with his Ninja Turtles. I was looking up articles on Trump and trying to figure out exactly what I’d say about him for this contest. As I scrolled past a picture of him the boy said “Hey that’s Donald Trump” with resounding enthusiasm. I was alarmed at how quickly he picked up on him. He recognized him it seemed quicker than he could make the distinction between Donatello, Raphael, Michelangelo, or Leonardo. So I decided to do something rather dangerous for my own psyche. I looked up a picture, the most common type of picture, of Jesus. Surely he’d know who that was growing up in the deeply Christian south. The boy hesitated and eventual said with the inflection of a question ‘Jesus?’. I tried again with Martin Luther King Jr. He had no idea who that was. Ghandi…no clue. But Trump had already imbedded his mark inside this 4 year old’s mind. Trump has been a phantasm of how people view a wealthy man for many years. Trump has been planting seeds of his own greatness in the cultural psyche for years. Donald Trump is the very best of brand marketing. We remember him from ritzy news peaces, Home Alone 2, he’s made his way into rap music, and comedy bits about wealthy america. When someone says ‘rich american businessman’…tell me who honestly was the first person to come to your mind?

Numerous bankruptcies. He’s a great businessman. Numerous failed businesses. He’s a great businessman. He won’t release his taxes. He’s a great businessman. “Make America Great Again”. “Build that Wall”. “Lock Her Up”. America isn’t about happy content well fed well educated people. America is about making fucking money, capitalism. Make fucking money. Make fucking money. Make fucking money. And that mantra is repeated to which the only savior of the jobs of the dying middle class must come as a messiah almost the exact opposite of the first one washed in gold and proudly proclaiming he can make us all “winners” and “great again” the details of how and why are not important. Just remember you will be great again.

Trump in the calmest and plainest terms in his post election 60 Minutes interview said that he had ‘won the election easily’ but the numbers couldn’t be further from the truth. It was close. Too close to call. Too close I’d be comfortable to bet on, although I still did. But post winning like the faux alpha male he is he keeps repeating the mantra of a large populist win and his entourage does the same. It’s exactly how brainwashing works. Just repeat it as truth until the person you are repeating to believes it. Hilary won the popular vote by around 3 million votes. And no I’m not disputing his win. He won by the rules of this game but he still lost the vote of the people by one of the largest margins in election history. Was his camp humbled by that? Not at all. If your repeat a lie enough with enough confidence people will start to believe it and even if they don’t it makes your side seem stronger. They’ll still repeat it like a pufferfish puffing out his body to scare off predators. It doesn’t matter how empty the words are in the end if it makes you feel more powerful just take your placebo soundbite and repeat it like a winner’s mantra. Even if in the end you miss the entire point of what’s being discussed at least you feel powerful.

Paraphrased: “Twitter, Instagram, and FB are a modern form of communication. It’s where it’s at. I believe that the fact that I have such numbers with Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, helped me win all of these races where they’re spending much more money than I spend. I think that social media has more power than the money they spent and I think maybe to a certain extent I proved that”. This quote is from a 60mins interview with President Elect Donald J. Trump right after winning the 2016 election.

“Lock her up”, “Drain the Swamp”, “Make America Great”, “Build that Wall”. . . a battle cry for people who’ve mostly never seen a battle field yearning for some kind of meaning in their life by drumming up drama. But empty slogans and charismatic leaders are a lot more interesting than the tedious boring minutia of the political mechanisms that make our world and modern cultures tick. One of the main reasons Hilary Clinton lost the 2016 election has almost nothing to do with her politics and everything to do with her. Hilary Clinton is boring and comes across to most people as robotic and void of anything genuine. Donald Trump said he could shoot someone on fifth avenue and not lose one single vote from his base. I think he was right. Hannibal Lector, Ramsey Bolton, Alex De Large, The Joker, and Negan might all be great villains but the tragedy of the human condition is that they are mesmerizing to behold. And while I understand that it’s probably a gross hyperbole to compare Trump to these fictional characters Trump does hold true one deep connection to the human condition. Donald John Trump is fucking interesting. He hijacked mainstream American Media even with all the bad press he got because plain and simple he’s just fun to watch and our apathy to his insidious messages created a place for him to occupy the winner’s chair of the highest office in the entire world. As the great line from Gladiator said “Are you not entertained?” Donald Trump was on the WWE and body slammed Vince McMahon. Hollywood elites to most people come across as pompous and snobbish and despite his wealth Donald Trump appeals to the common man. We’ve elected a wrestling heel as President because here in America raw entertainment is king.

How does the modern proletariat fit in balanced political research in between their cat videos, pornography, pop songs, funny memes, nostalgic media, and that show they just can’t miss? I guess as I was told by many Trump supporters before the election…a gut feeling.

In this modern world of wonder and technology sadly we don't have heroes. We have social justice warriors. And we don't have villains. We have trolls. They are fought not with super suits and ideology but with poorly crafted memes and tweets and half-hearted half-edited soapbox speeches void of any heart or nuanced engaged reality and then we scroll to the next tiny moment of unfulfilling entertainment as the great poet once said, 'looking for an angry fix'. We sign petitions for politicians knowing damn well they won't make any real difference. It's all just showmanship an exhibition of our failure in this system. But do we listen? And we feel like Chaplin in the gears of a great machine being eaten slowly by the teeth, not knowing what any of it means, waiting, hoping, and praying for some relief. But this crazy fucked up world we live in is sometimes beyond belief.

Nothing is more American than the election of Donald Trump a volatile entertainer selling capitalist American exceptionalism to the American middle and working class who mostly could care less about the details. Donald Trump represents what has become of the faded American Dream. Like a great salesman he’d been sowing seeds of doubt in Obama and rubbing elbows with Hilary for years learning the rules of this game and when time came to show his hand he laid down the ace up his sleeve. He’d been keeping in their all these years…The Trump Card.

I've been finding myself trying to figure out weather I'm putting out fires that our burning down villages or putting out fires that are keeping the family warm. In battles of semantics and politics sometimes it's hard to tell.

:My Experience with “The Last Film Festival”, the final film of Dennis Hopper, and my tour of the late great auteur’s mythic compound: (((Goes without saying but a very special thanks to director Linda Yellen.)))

Daniel Louis Krone

Dennis Hopper is without a doubt a cinema legend.

My two favorite performances from the prolific actor are his role in “Apocalypse Now” as the American photographer trapped in a tribal village during the Vietnam conflict and my other favorite performance is Hopper’s larger than life role as Frank Booth in David Lynch’s classic film “Blue Velvet”. Both performances are drastically different and to me showcase the actor’s tremendous range. One thing about Hopper as an actor and a storyteller is he really relished in going there and pushing cinema to the limits as far as he possibly could in both performance and narrative.

My introduction to Dennis’s final film happened immediately after my three and a half year journey as a production assistant on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno”. A friend of mine, whom I will leave out of this essay, called me up and said that one of her boss’s friends, a producer, was looking for a personal assistant for a week. I said yes and the woman I met was director, writer, and producer Linda Yellen whom among several other projects was working on finishing “The Last Film Festival” which was to be the last film of beloved actor Dennis Hopper.

Despite what you may already have heard about Dennis and his reputation as a wild psychonaut, who might be in good company with the likes of Hunter Thompson or Oliver Reed, from what I’ve heard from people that worked with him later in life was that he was a surprisingly gentle, sweet, kind, and jovial man. He seemed from stories, I’ve heard, just the kind of man that deeply enjoyed and relished the nuances of what it means to be alive. And men like that can get a little wild from time to time in my experience.

Let us get one thing strait. Dennis Hopper re-invented cinema. You might think Walt Disney, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, or even men like Louis B. Mayer invented Hollywood, and you might be right, but Dennis re-invented Hollywood and gave birth to the golden age of independent cinema that took place during the 1970’s.

In 1969 Dennis Hopper embarked on a journey with Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda and producers Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson and made “Easy Rider”. There are two ways to look at cinema, in my opinion, everything before “Easy Rider” and everything after “Easy Rider”. Wether or not you like the film has absolutely nothing to do with the impact that film had on cinema as an art form. “Easy Rider” proved unequivocally to old school Hollywood producers that there was defiantly more than just the studio way of making films. I am not saying there weren’t great independent films throughout cinema history but at this point in time, before “Easy Rider” came out, American cinema was dominated by the studio system and this film is the one that brought the whole dam down and allowed the flood of fresh independent visions to emerge in the 1970’s.

Dennis Hopper has 203 credits on the Internet Movie Database for acting along. He was nominated twice for an Academy Award. The first time he was nominated was for writing “Easy Rider” and the second was for his performance in the movie “Hoosiers”. Along with that Dennis had another 23 award wins and 11 other nominations for awards throughout his 55 year career in cinema in which he started out as a ‘goon’ on the film “Rebel Without a Cause”.

I got the pleasure of touring his house via “The Last Film Festival” Kickstarter campaign. The film had been in a kind of post production hell for nearly 5 years since they wrapped principal photography and when the Kickstarter campaign finished Linda finally had the money to complete her film. It had been a pleasure helping her achieve her goal and because of it soon the world will have the chance to see the final film of a truly great talent.

Dennis Hopper’s house is less of a house and more of a compound. When I first walked in my gut reaction was essentially, ‘well this is unimpressive’, because I guess I’d assumed the first room would be something wild and crazy but I was actually just waiting in a kitchen for others to arrive to take the tour. However as the tour progressed I became more and more impressed with Hopper’s compound and its eccentricities.

As I took the tour his compound got stranger and stranger and more unique to me. It has an almost mythic quality to it like anyone who has ever seen Harlan Ellison’s house or been to the Playboy Mansion. There was just a strange quality to the entire estate. During the first part of the tour as I walked up the stairs in his first house it immediately became stranger. There were large wooden beams sticking out of the walls into a beautiful open air lounge area. As we continued the tour the tour guide explained that the ‘house’ was actually three different houses that formed like a compound and despite that one of the houses was clearly bigger Dennis used them all equally.

There was something inherently modern and semi neo-brutalist about the design but with a somewhat more rustic and do it yourself quality about the estate that pulled it into the territory of strange that seemed to make a perfect fit with the late great artist. There was a kitchen ceiling fixture held together by rusted clamps that seemed to have been there for years. He had industrial ac units (designed for studios and warehouses) in his home, glass floors that you could peer down into the garage from, industrial wiring on gates, chain link fences on windows, the main house’s roof was a strange surreal dome and the entire compound is draped in sheet metal. We were told that was for the gangs and their stray bullets who would shoot up Venice back in the day. Despite having a 3 house compound with a pool, hot tub, and croquet course the house still felt homemade like the dream of a grown man, an artist, who never lost his sense of playfulness.

After about an hour and a half tour of explaining the history of when Dennis bought the estate I mostly left, not with the facts in my head, but marveling at the since of awe the compound left me with and I took away one very unique thought. This is the kind of house an artist lived in. This is the kind of house someone who changed the entire shape of cinema lived in. This house wasn’t obviously predictable in the way that most rich people’s houses are. This house was just as unique as the individual who made it his own. There was a definitely link to the wild unhinged free spirit as Dennis was to the wild unhinged architecture that made up his home. Touring Dennis Hopper’s compound and helping Linda complete “The Last Film Festival” was a wonderful experience I won’t forget anytime soon. (CLICK THE PHOTOS FOR A BETTER VIEW OF THE SPACE.)