[ For two decades, Alexandra Pelosi, Nancy’s daughter, has made
award-winning, godawful films about America’s political class.
Pelosi in the House, a dull documentary about her mother and January
6, proves she is the auteur the liberal establishment deserves.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

NANCY PELOSI’S DAUGHTER MAKES AWFUL DOCUMENTARIES FAWNING OVER THE
ESTABLISHMENT  
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Will Sloan
December 16, 2022
Jacobin
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_ For two decades, Alexandra Pelosi, Nancy’s daughter, has made
award-winning, godawful films about America’s political class.
Pelosi in the House, a dull documentary about her mother and January
6, proves she is the auteur the liberal establishment deserves. _

Filmmaker Alexandra Pelosi and Rep. Nancy Pelosi at Radio City Music
Hall on September 15, 2016 in New York City., (Roy Rochlin /
FilmMagic)

 

Did you know that for over twenty years, Nancy Pelosi’s youngest
daughter, Alexandra, has been one of the most successful working
documentary filmmakers?

That statement doesn’t sound quite right, but by some objective
metrics, it is true. Consider: most of Alexandra Pelosi’s films —
recipients of six Primetime Emmy nominations and one win (for editing)
— have been funded and distributed by HBO. Her debut, _Journeys
with George _(2002), which chronicled her time on George W. Bush’s
campaign bus during the 2000 Republican primary, established her
extraordinary level of access to America’s political elite on both
sides of the Democratic/Republican divide.

For _The Words That Built America_ (2017), her fifty-nine-minute
film of readings from the Declaration of Independence, the United
States Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, her on-screen readers
included all the living presidents (including Trump), Hillary Clinton,
Henry Kissinger, Al Gore, John Roberts, John McCain, Sean Hannity,
Meryl Streep, Robert De Niro, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, and more
than a hundred other heavy-hitters from America’s political and
culture spheres. It’s fair to say that no other documentary
filmmaker — not Michael Moore, Errol Morris, or Werner Herzog —
has enjoyed such consistent and prestigious patronage for so long.

So, given that Pelosi is, by some metrics, very successful, why have
you probably never heard of her? One possible reason is that her films
are consistently, stupefyingly awful — boring, self-serving, dealing
only in banalities and received wisdom, and relentlessly fawning over
some of the most boring company imaginable. Her films invariably
proceed no further than their basic premises, and at their worst,
endorse and uphold some of the worst political trends of the last
fifty years. Her work may be close to unwatchable, but watching it
reveals volumes about the limits of the liberal imagination.

An Insider’s Outsider

For several years, Alexandra Pelosi has felt a bit like my little
secret, but this looks poised to change. In October, footage that she
shot of her mother during the Capitol Riot was screened
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the January 6 committee hearings, and this footage will form the basis
for her fifteenth film, _Pelosi in the House_, which will be
broadcast December 13 on HBO. For us longtime observers, the prospect
of the younger Pelosi directing a sober hagiography of her mother
represents the culmination of a long career spent playfully denying
her birthright.

In her early work, she pitches herself as an outsider, living
awkwardly between the political and media spheres but not fully
comfortable in either._ Journeys with George _introduces this
recurring idea, as well as another: that dyed-in-the-wool Democrat —
heck, the daughter of Nancy Pelosi! — can have a civil conversation
with the opposing side, if not necessarily find common ground. She
follows George W. Bush in the waning days of the 2000 primary, and if
nothing else, successfully captures what made him a consummate retail
politician.

Her work may be close to unwatchable, but watching it reveals volumes
about the limits of the liberal imagination.

Bush cultivates a big-brother dynamic with Pelosi, joking about her
love life and occasionally commandeering her mini-DV camera. While we
get a strong sense of Bush’s particular fratty charisma, we hear
virtually nothing about his policy ideas or political ideology, save
for a few anodyne fragments of his stump speech. Unpleasant episodes
from the primary are absent: Karl Rove appears briefly, rattling off
statistics about past primaries, but don’t expect Pelosi to ask if
he orchestrated the whisper campaign around “John McCain’s black
baby.”

Pelosi is less interested in ideology than in the quotidian details of
a political campaign: the handshaking, the bus, the motel rooms, and
especially the Saran-Wrapped ham sandwiches that the press are fed.
The sandwiches aren’t nearly as interesting as Pelosi seems to think
they are, but it’s revealing how often she keeps returning to the
subject. That these sandwiches are indistinguishable from what many
Americans eat every day doesn’t occur to Pelosi, who regards them as
symbolic of all that these candidates and journalists must endure in
pursuit of the prize. Also revealing is the chummy relationship she
captures between the candidate and the press, none of whom seem to
regard themselves as neutral or oppositional forces in relation to the
candidate.

Michael Moore was at the height of his influence during the production
of _Diary of a Political Tourist_ (2004), and his sensibility
pervades Pelosi’s “irreverent” documentary about the 2004
Democratic Party primary. Pelosi is the titular “political
outsider,” and though the film opens with her hobnobbing with the
sitting president at the White House Christmas party, she positions
herself as chaotic force outside of the beltway mainstream.

Much of the films is spent with her ambushing Democratic presidential
candidates at various campaign stops, always with silly questions that
they answer with rictus grins. The one 2004 candidate absent from
Pelosi’s chronicle is Dennis Kucinich, although we do see a Kucinich
button on an activist who harangues Dick Gephardt over his support for
the Iraq War. “If you want to run for president, you have to
confront _this guy_,” says Pelosi in her narration. For her, the
party’s activist base is just another obstacle to be overcome, like
the media or ham sandwiches.

At one point, Pelosi talks to a woman who says that she makes only $7
per hour at her job. Pelosi replies, ‘Is that even _legal_?’

The second half imitates _Roger & Me_, Moore’s 1990 film about his
pursuit of the General Motors chairman and CEO, with Pelosi trying to
land a sit-down interview with John Kerry (by now the presumptive
nominee). In Moore’s film, the difficultly is being able to get the
interview, but Pelosi never realizes she has the exact opposite
problem: it never occurs to her that she is the only member of the
press who is allowed to follow the presidential nominee uninvited
through a hotel lobby and into an elevator. In one accidentally
revealing moment, she “ambushes” Kerry on a sidewalk as he’s on
his way to a car, and Kerry — who just seconds before brushed off a
BBC journalist — pauses to offer her some pleasantries. This
“political outsider” has the last name Pelosi, and Kerry knows
what side his bread is buttered on.

Pelosi’s campaign diaries are more interested in the front-facing
side of campaigns than in the closed-door meetings where power is
really built. She tackles this side of politics in one of her
“issue” films, _Meet the Donors: Does Money Talk?_ (2016), which
stunningly refuses to commit to the idea that big money in politics is
bad (her non-thesis, stated in her narration, is “Politics is a rich
man’s game, and some of the richest families in America are all
in”).

The film is a series of unenlightening interviews with top donors,
including Haim Saban, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Tom Steyer, and grocery
store tycoon John Catsimatidis, a megadonor to both parties whose
office wall is covered with photos of him handshaking various Clintons
and Bushes. Catsimatidis comes across as a political fanboy who enjoys
proximity to power for its own sake, and is a perfect mascot for
Pelosi’s film, which sees big donors not as a network of oligarchs
but as independent actors with vastly differing motives.

Beyond the Political Divide

The campaign diaries and issue films represent two subgenres of
Pelosi’s documentaries. A third is the type of film in which she
travels “outside her bubble” to talk to ordinary voters from
across the aisle. _Right America: Feeling Wronged — Some Voices
from the Campaign Trail_ (2009) was filmed during the last weeks of
the 2008 campaign, and features interviews with John McCain voters who
can see the writing on the wall. Most are Christian conservatives who
fit Obama’s characterization of “clinging to guns and religion.”

No one is on-screen for more than three minutes, so there is little
time for anyone to say anything enlightening, but enough time to
deliver a great deal of sexist and racist rhetoric. The only
interesting moment comes after Pelosi interviews a racist white man at
a Mississippi gas station, when she is challenged by a pair of black
men who chide her for using him as a representative of their
community. “Shame on you, white liberal lady,” says one of them,
who points out that plenty of racism also exists in New York.

It is to Pelosi’s credit that she included this pushback in the
final cut, but unfortunately, she doesn’t seem to have internalized
the lesson. She revisited the same basic premise for the Trump era
in _Outside the Bubble: A Roadtrip with Alexandra Pelosi_ (2018), in
which she again goes on safari to the heartland. Again she frames
America as simplistically divided along red/blue lines (she doesn’t
consider all the Republican voters in blue-state suburbs, or the many
black Democrats in the South). “I’m bursting out of my own bubble
to meet people in communities across this country where the big issues
have erupted to see what we can learn from _listening_ to our fellow
Americans,” she says in her opening narration — but what are we
supposed to do with the knowledge we accumulate? For her, the
listening itself is the point.

At one point, Pelosi talks to a woman who says that she makes only $7
per hour at her job. Pelosi replies, “Is that even _legal_?”
It’s hard to watch this and not shout back at the TV, “Maybe
there’s someone in Washington you could talk to who has a little
sway?” — but of course, the daughter of Nancy Pelosi stops short
of using her platform to advocate for a $15 minimum wage. Though eager
to present herself as culturally liberal, she also strives to be
“fair and balanced.” Even so, like anyone who claims not to be,
she is deeply ideological, and _San Francisco 2.0_ (2015) — which
gets my vote for being her very worst film — is highly revealing
about what she stands for.

Its subject is the Silicon Valley tech industry’s expansion to San
Francisco, which, per Pelosi’s narration, is “being forced to
reinvent itself.” Her camera pans across residential streets where
old houses are being refurbished, and she tells us, “These are the
homes of a new generation who have been transforming this town for a
power city.” Pelosi tours various start-up offices and incubators,
taking the tech industry entirely on its own terms — to her, it
really is “disruptive,” “game-changing,” etc. Nevertheless,
she has a few niggling questions: Is the march of progress leaving
some Bay Area residents behind? And what will happen to the city’s
legendary counterculture?

The second question we can dispense with quickly. To illustrate the
city’s bohemian side, Pelosi shows us a clip of the Village People.
She doesn’t understand or care about counterculture. As for
gentrification, the film opens with former California governor Jerry
Brown quoting Heraclitus: “No man steps in the same river twice.”
When Pelosi asks if the city is changing for the better, he replies,
“That’s like saying, ‘Is getting older for the better?’ It’s
inevitable.” Commodification is an apolitical force, like the
weather. So much the better that San Francisco happens to be changing
in a way that Pelosi is clearly comfortable with. While some token
acknowledgment is made of the affordable housing crisis, displaced
residents, and shuttered community landmarks, the filmmaker’s
unmistakable perspective is that you can’t have an omelet without
breaking a few eggs.

About halfway through, Pelosi visits an art dealership that is being
forced into closure after its landlord tripled the rent. We see
artists dropping by to collect work they can’t afford to store, and
we hear the owner lament how a business that has existed for three
decades can just be pushed out so unceremoniously. Pelosi is sad —
sorta, kinda — that this business has to go, but what’s really
telling is the questions she doesn’t ask. Why are so many incentives
in place for start-ups but so many obstacles for this art dealership?
Who are the people approving the legislation that has made these
conditions possible? Why do they value one thing and not the other?
This is all far too complicated — better to focus on the sandwiches.

CONTRIBUTORS

Will Sloan is a writer from Toronto. He cohosts the Michael &
Us podcast on the Jacobin Radio Network.

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