Unexpectedly edifying double feature of the week: The Apprentice and Heaven’s Gate

I can fully understand why people would not want to watch a movie about Donald Trump, and I can also understand why people would not want to watch a notoriously panned 4-hour movie about a massacre, but I watched both in a 24-hour period and learned a lot.

The Apprentice is kind of our Young Mr. Lincoln, but instead of Henry Fonda playing a prairie lawyer forming his opinions about injustice in the United States, we have Sebastian Stan playing a born-rich real-estate speculator obsessed with “winning” at all costs. Tired of taking emotional abuse from his father, Donald Trump instead pursues a friendship with Roy Cohn, the lawyer who got the Rosenbergs executed, made McCarthysim mainstream, and, by the early 1970s, was one of the most powerful men in New York and one of the most feared men on the planet for his relentless attacks on anyone he didn’t like.

Both the lead performances are extraordinary, especially Jeremy Strong as Cohn, who is riveting, nauseating and utterly repellent. The world that Young Mr. Trump enters into is one populated by wealthy, powerful men who sincerely, honestly believe that the world belongs to them to do with as they please, and anyone who gets in their way or tries to stop them is “the enemy” and must be utterly destroyed. Attack Attack Attack, never apologize, never explain, and never ever admit defeat. If someone complains that you broke the law, hit them with so many lawsuits that they are forced to retreat or else die broke with their reputations in ruins.

For these men, there are no rules or standards, there’s just “what they want” and “what they can do to get it.” A philanderer preaching family values? A gay man disparaging gay men, while supporting Reagan, while also dying of AIDS? These men see no contradiction, because no rules apply to them, they just absolutely don’t see it. Who cares about contradictions, who cares about truth? They make their own truth.

I’ve read a number of reviews that call The Apprentice a “sympathetic” portrayal of Trump, but I wouldn’t use that word. Trump is presented as a human being, which, I must begrudgingly admit, he is, but the movie isn’t “sympathetic” as much as it is “fair.” It acknowledges that he was never a nice person, was always a shallow, vulgar creep obsessed with status and dominance, but that he became much worse after getting a whiff of the kind of power and wealth that Cohn had.

Anyway, so I was also watching the infamous 4-hour director’s cut of Heaven’s Gate, which is a wonderful movie by the way, and I had completely forgotten that it opens with a very long prologue set during a graduation ceremony at Harvard University in 1870. At this ceremony, Joseph Cotten plays an orator who informs the graduating students that, as Men of Harvard™, they are in a position of privilege that will define their lives, and that their duty is to use that social position to help positively shape the still-new melting-pot nation of the post-Civil-War United States. One student, our protagonist, played by Kris Kristofferson, takes the speech to heart and, after graduation, moves to Wyoming, becomes a landowner, businessman and marshal, and helps keep the peace of a county populated by newly-arrived Slavs, Poles, Germans, Russians and sundry other European immigrants. By 1890, the immigrant farmers are being pushed out, violently, by cattle barons who want the entire state for pastureland. A few immigrants, starving to death, have stolen corporate-owned cattle, which the cattle barons use as an excuse to label the entire immigrant class criminals, anarchists and insurrectionists.

Also at the 1870 Harvard ceremony is Sam Waterston, who does not heed the message of Joseph Cotten’s speech and instead moves to Wyoming and becomes the head of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, a cabal of rich fucks who, like Young Donald Trump, sincerely, honestly believe that the world belongs to them to do with as they please, and anyone who gets in their way or tries to stop them is “the enemy” and must be utterly destroyed. In the blink of an eye, his plan goes from “punishing cattle thieves” to a “death list” of every man in the county, and eventually evolves into all-out war on the entire immigrant class, with the help of the Union Army. As he kills more and more people, the remaining folks, on all sides of the conflict, work together to help him out in the fear of worse recriminations. No one wants to stop him because they’re worried he might do worse to them.

So I couldn’t help but see The Apprentice as the “before” picture of the Trump Era, and Heaven’s Gate as a displaced preview of coming attractions. Things really never change.