Kingsman is a terrible film with a poisonous message — of course Donald Trump is being doctored into it

This is fake liberalism at its worst

The video showed Trump massacring media companies including Politico, the BBC and CNN (TheGeekzTeam)

We hit a new low in culture and politics this week when a doctored video of the President of the United States shooting up his opponents, modeled on a scene from the film Kingsman, was shown to Trump supporters at his Mar-a-Lago residence. The video shows Trump, whose face is doctored onto the character played by Colin Firth in the original film, killing detractors including Hillary Clinton and the Black Lives Matter movement.

The footage was presented in a side-room of a conference held at the ‘American Priority’ festival, which says on its site that it supports “the America First but not alone agenda.” It’s worth reading a primer on the fascist-friendly connotations of the “America First” slogan, which, in the hands of Hitler-supporting tycoon Randolph William Hearst in the 1930s, was used as a rallying cry to crush the left and as an antisemitic dogwhistle against “foreign financiers”.

This is the context in which a scene depicting a massacre of dissidents was screened (AMP said in a statement that the video “was not approved, seen, or sanctioned by them”.) On social media, right and left -wing commentators were quick to draw a parallel with time when the comedian Kathy Griffin was shown on a photo with a mock-up of a decapitated Donald Trump — however, it should be pretty obvious that a comedian’s prerogative is to depict incendiary, over-the-top scenarios, while it is extremely inappropriate for an organisation close to the President of the United States to do the same thing.

It may be instructive to go back to the original scene from Kingsman here. The scene takes place at a point when Harry Hart, one of the film’s two heroes, has been psychologically coerced into shooting up the members of an organization modeled on the Westboro Baptist Church, in order to set him up. It’s a particularly repugnant scene because it allows the movie’s creators to have their cake and eat it — in other words, the film can claim that it supports freedom of expression while simultaneously enjoying the sport of a powerless Harry Hart taking out people whose ideas are abhorrent to most viewers.

Right-wing commentators have been saying today that nobody complained about the scene when Kingsman first came out, because it is enjoyable to the liberal left. I personally called the film’s cartoonish violence “nonsensical, two-faced, cowardly, boorish and stupid” in a review at the time. That’s in part because I see the film as participating in a completely phony display of liberalism while making clear that is in fact deeply reactionary. For instance, Colin Firth is shown opposing the church’s bigoted homophobes, but the producers go to great pains to show that this very elegant man is not gay himself in a scene in which he beats up a bunch of men who have implied that. Similarly, the film presents itself as class-conscious in adopting a working class protagonist, but its actual depiction of working class family life is Dickensian and reprehensible. It casts itself as feminist with its go-getting female character, but then forgets all about her and ends on a scene of extraordinarily coarse innuendo.

In other words, this is exactly the sort of lip-service liberalism that we don’t need in the midst of a so-called culture war. Kingsman hit pay-dirt precisely because it could be everything to everyone: it was a reactionary and grotesque charade dressed up in faux-liberal rags. That it should find its smirking ultra-violence leveraged to the abysmal ends of hateful trolls on the American right wing is entirely appropriate. The nonsense that this skit is fair on grounds of free speech marks another victory of sorts for the right, at a time when churning out retrograde, quietly right-wing content is de rigueur for Hollywood anyway.