Because they could

Clinton, elves, a gang bang, and The Hunting of the President.

By Edward E. Crouse

I'M NOT SURE I completely understood what that loony Chilean filmmaker Raul Ruiz said to me way back in the spring of 1997:

"The paradigm of many stories exist[s] by conceit. Sometimes concrete stories hide abstract events, abstract situations – like the construction of roots by Charlemagne. It is called – in a literal translation – a 'galley net.' A system of roots, built by Charlemagne and his men, become a woman.... Let's say Clinton tried to build a system to go to a different planet. This system will become the Clinton mistress, in the future. So this is a variation on what could be called the immortal story paradigm."

Jovial, semiopaque, the description can't help but apply to every appearance of Clinton I've seen since then. Ruiz was then completing a beautifully terrible sexy thriller in the United States (alright, Seattle and Jamaica) called Shattered Image, about a woman who is either a willowy rape victim or a sinewy hired assassin, one maybe dreaming the other. That wonderful title should perhaps have been foisted onto the new pulp agit-doc The Hunting of the President. A crack'd mosaic of dozens of conspiring strands, reattached and jolted to life by a friend of Bill (whom we shall meet later), Hunting is also a lashing-out at what Hilary Clinton calls the "vast right-wing conspiracy" and essentially a sour B side to all the My Life book-tour interviews, the rangiest of which was the bubba-to-bubba with Dan Rather (Dan: "My wife would have said, 'How do I load this thing?' ").

Anyone drawling Clinton's story – be they the president or the filmmakers – bounces as usual between the Slick Willy and Comeback Kid monikers, between chaotic randiness and mawkishness. Hunting doesn't have a story so much as a mandate to hit the anti-Clintonites square in the tabloids. The right's fetishistic hatred and its strange-but-true tactics come fast and weird: the New Zealand reporter caught trespassing, shut into some nut's houseboat, accidentally privy to the secret machinations of Alliance for the Rebirth of an Independent America (ARIA); the Elves – a "cabal" of three loons plus leggy, toothy tigress Ann Coulter – who pushed Paula Jones into the arms of attorneys closely connected to Jerry Falwell (shocker!); the fur trapper who fronted the Arkansas Project, a nest of lawyers, journalists, and investigators who poured millions into the Clinton takedown; and the two Little Rock, Ark.-based Larrys, Case and Nichols, a pair of shadies sharing a "taste for dirt" and bragging about reeling in the smart-ass Ivy League reporters with new dope. All are parsed, almost none are explained in a movie that feels like extended footnotes.

Hunting's tabloid approach fits pretty well, a tit-for-tat strategy that reminds one of the muck of living, reporting, and perceiving politics. It's a fitting contrast to the abominably stupid straight camp of something called DC 9/11: Time of Crisis (set for video release in September). It's no surprise that you probably won't remember this movie, which was released with great fanfare on the 9/11 anniversary last year, universally loathed, and never rebroadcast after the first few days. In delineating the official administration version of Bush's actions following the terrorist attacks, one is privy to, among other things, Bush pumping iron, Bush instantly turning around upon hearing of the attacks with the question "Al-Qaeda?," Rummy carrying stretchers and performing CPR on the wounded after the Pentagon is hit, and Condoleeza Rice being lectured by Bush on a "new way of thinking." Between Hunting's fractured shrillness and DC 9/11's dry, comprehensible way with utter bullshit, I guess I'll take the former.

Hunting ends with a list of 137 people (mostly conservatives, including "Newt Gringrich" [sic]) who wouldn't talk on camera, possibly because they were giving unrestricted access to DC 9/11's fluffers. Conspicuously absent from the omissions list is Clinton. He could have very easily hijacked the enterprise since codirector Harry Thomason (producer of Clinton's 1992 campaign film, Man from Hope) is one of his official biographers. But the makers, in the interest of appearing more "fair and balanced" (in the Fox News sense), are content to have images of him zip by and be spun rather than let the man on board.

Whitewater, Troopergate, Zippergate, Paula, Gennifer, Monica. Do you remember your President Clinton? Hunting reminds you of what was at stake (in the lowliest-looking way, incidentally – it's shot like a corporate motivational training video) and how close the man came to losing his job. Whether his adversaries hook up detonators to Clinton's purse or dick doesn't much matter. The botched Whitewater land deal – investigated by Kenneth Starr and company for a reported total of $80 million – flowed back into the immortal story of the haters re-unzipping Clinton's fly with clenched teeth. Despite the fact that Whitewater, in the words of one correspondent, had "no 'there' there," her editors "kept pushing and pushing." By the time attention had shifted from Whitewater to the pornological depositions, it had all morphed into what CNN reporter John Camp calls "this huge gang bang that was going on in the media."

Hunting gives the impression that throughout the Clinton reign, everyone investigating or dishing on the prez was looking for a gang bang. Inevitably, Starr is appointed independent counsel and Torquemada by a panel of Jesse Helms-associated federal judges, and "the keen interest in the sex angle" that accompanied Clinton's campaign and early presidency is restoked. Starr accuses a woman who was a Whitewater partner, Susan McDougal, of being "madly in love with Bill Clinton." (She actually went to jail for not lying to the lawyers; her story would make a smashing women-in-prison miniseries, if those existed.) Claudia Riley, the wife of another former governor of Arkansas and a sexagenarian to boot, recounts how she denied the Starr team avowal that she had, in fact, humped the president: "He never asked me." One of the few things that's clear in all this is that the media never seemed to grow tired of spurt after spurt from Starr – the frenzy only ceased when the Senate finally refused to join the House in impeaching Clinton in 1999.

One man helps the movie get over its own talking-head stock footage-cruddy graphics gang bang: Morgan Freeman, whose lean, august voice-over grounds the overall hysteria in much the same way Donald Sutherland ("Call me 'X' ") mediated JFK. Freeman's voice has this odd way of dilating time, becoming an almost separate entity from the vulgarly literal montage (mention of the Elves cabal – shot of toy-making elves; Paula Jones called a "groupie" – cut to Beatlemaniacs in 1964) while recounting the lies, sidesteps, elisions, and irregular corners of stories. His cadences alternately obscure or underscore the movie's tempo-free formlessness and lack of depth.

One story Hunting dodges is the old tale of liberal insecurity, that toughness gap that plays to accusations of being "soft" on anything: taxes, communism, terrorism, welfare crime, anti-Americans. Democrats to this day still try to meet or exceed the right's belligerence. This pushed Kennedy into Cuba and Vietnam, helped Clinton pull the switch on a retarded inmate and throw welfare mothers into shitty work situations in the name of austerity, and is going to keep John Kerry tar-stuck in Iraq. But that's another time, another movie waiting to be made.

'The Hunting of the President' opens Fri/16 at Bay Area theaters. See Movie Clock, in Film listings, for show times.