At his firm’s annual holiday party, Viktor Petrovich Zadorozhny was gulping down vodka shots, one after another, to build up enough courage to ask his boss for a promotion. He managed to pick what he thought was the right spot and moment, when the boss was walking to the bathroom, and cornered him with a well-rehearsed but casually delivered inquiry.
A peculiar development is on hand. The people in power, the people who make the news and shape history, no longer want to wait for someone to play them, years later, in a movie; they want to play themselves, now, live on TV, with dramatic flair. They imagine how they should be perceived by the audience and they deliver to us that perceived character. Our Defense Secretary imagines what a Defense Secretary should be like and plays that version on TV. Our Attorney General plays her version of Attorney General. Trump, of course, plays Trump. They all decided to cut out the middleman — the historian, the biographer, the screenwriter, the actor — and deliver their own unfiltered biopics straight to the consumer.