A Constant Visual Feast

There’s not much I can say about Imelda Marcos other than that her very existence makes me question by belief that morality is relative and the universe laughs at the idea of universal good and evil; this is because Marcos is about as close to genuine evil as we see in the world, right up there with Mao, Gaddafi, Nixon, Trump, Hussein, and a whole bunch of other awful people she’s seen associating with in Lauren Greenfield‘s The Kingmaker.

You may remember that time I spoke to Greenfield about her last movie, Generation Wealth, all the way back* in 2018, a much broader movie about wealth culture writ large where her lens falls on undeservedly and overly rich human beings all across the planet. The Kingmaker much more successfully gets at the problems of having Too Much Money by zooming in on Marcos, her family, and the stranglehold they’ve had on the Philippines’ politics for decades. As a result, it’s a much, much scarier movie, particularly the way it outlines how long the idea of “fake news” has been in vogue among people like this, and how hard it is to get around lies backed by astronomical wealth.

You can read my full piece on the movie over at Mic.

*I swear to god this happened two years ago, but it also actually happened last summer, so yeah, time has no meaning for me anymore.