The group Tea Party Patriots tried to entice younger conservatives this weekend at CPAC with a fake movie trailer of a science fiction film predicting a future in which the government controls everything. Of course, it totally often seems like they already think this is happening. In the story there is (of course) a small movement of freedom-loving misfits to overthrow the evil government tyranny.
After watching the trailer, if you feel like you've already seen this movie or read this book before, it's because you have... only much better versions. It rips off every dystopian cautionary tale about totalitarian government from George Orwell's "1984" to The Hunger Games. Slate's Dave Weigel talked to Luke Livingston, the Tea Party Patriots filmmaker who put the video together, at CPAC.
"This video's made Tea Party Patriots $1 million in 10 days," said Livingston. It was a good way to introduce the Tea Party to "younger people, people who were in high school when this started." He handed me one of the Development Party cards that TPP had produced as tie-ins. "You should come to our Hunger Games karaoke tomorrow," he said.
Hunger Games karaoke? Who wouldn't want to go to Hunger Games karaoke? And it looks as if Weigel did, tweeting this picture the next day.
The message about Big Government, though, gets complicated when it comes from Tea Party groups' rank and file members. While they seem to have a distrust of any government entity and a hatred of taxes, they have also stated in poll after poll that they love Social Security and Medicare.
As for their movie... there does seem to be potential. For one, it definitely needs better actors. (Phillip Seymour Hoffman as the leader of the Development Party?) But it also needs more than just speeches, government-issued cards/boxes and a secretive resistance group. The writers at Wonkette offered some notes for the script:
... we think this thing could make a pretty decent drive-in movie if they could add in some killer robots and kickboxing, and also some nudity, but only if it’s necessary for the plot, which of course it would be.
Yes!