The Way I See It (Universal/Comcast, Focus Features, MS-NBC Films, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 7 p.m. MS-NBC ran a documentary feature called The Way I See It about Pete Souza, who was on Ronald Reagain’s official staff of White House photographers during the last two years of the Reagan Presidency and then went to work for the Chicago Tribune newspaper. In 2005 he volunteered to follow the newly elected U.S. Senator Barack Obama around in Chicago and then in Washington, D.C. as he took office. He was only supposed to do this for a year, but Souza managed to get himself assigned to the Tribune’s “Obama detail” for the next four years. When Obama became President after the 2008 election (back when we still could have confidence in the electoral process and the willingness of Presidents to leave office when the Constitution and the U.S. voters told them they had to) he asked Souza to be his official White House photographer, and Souza stayed in that role for the entire two terms of Obama’s Presidency.

After 2017 -- when he shot pictures of Obama and Donald Trump meeting in the White House and Obama working sincerely to brief Trump and make the succession as easy as possible -- Souza became a nature photographer (there’s an interesting glimpse of him pointing his camera straight down and shooting a bush) and also created two books from his photos of the Obama administration. One was a straightforward coffee-table book called Obama presenting his pictures of the 44th President without political commentary. The other was inspired by an Instagram account Souza created, ironically juxtaposing his Obama pics with snippy commentaries of his own comparing the immediate past president with the current one (including one of Obama signing an honorary “wall of freedom” to pay tribute to civil-rights heroes with Souza’s caption, which was something like, “Obama’s idea of a wall”). When he first started posting these entries on Instagram a friend told him he was “dropping shade” on Trump, a phrase he’d never heard before, but he embraced it enough that he put together a book of his Instagram posts and called it Shade.

The documentary wasn’t as blatantly anti-Trump as Souza’s social-media posts and the book he created from them, but it certainly got the message across, albeit in a veiled way. The most blatant anti-Trump commentary was from historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, who listed five qualities she thought a successful President needed, among them empathy, compassion and a willingness to recruit advisers with different points of view so he gets a wide range of options when he (or someday, Goddess willing, she!) needs to make a major decision. She didn’t have to say the name “Trump” or even refer to the current President without using his name to make her point: a man who regards empathy and compassion for others as signs of weakness instead of strength, and who demands sycophantic “loyalty” from all his associates so they always tell him how great he is and never even approach questioning him (and who has systematically purged his staff of everyone who might actually tell him something he needs to hear that doesn’t fit his preconceived notions -- one of Kearns Goodwin’s previous books is called Team of Rivals, about Abraham Lincoln’s Cabinet and how Lincoln, like Franklin Roosevelt later, deliberately surrounded himself with people who disagreed with him, and each other, to make sure he got the best advice possible) is a man who should not be President of the United States.

At the same time people coming to this movie from the current campaign, in which Obama’s vice-president, Joe Biden, is Trump’s major-party opponent and is selling his closeness to Obama and his involvement in Obama’s decision-making as major reasons people should vote for him, are going to be surprised at how few photos of Obama and his top advisers in which Biden actually appears. We get a few Where’s Waldo? glimpses of him off to the side at one meeting or another, but mostly he’s absent from the rooms where Obama’s big decisions were made. This isn’t that different from the usual role of a vice-president, but it doesn’t exactly support Biden’s major selling point as a candidate who as President will restore the “normalcy” (Warren G. Harding’s word from 1920, which began as a malapropism -- the word he meant was “normality” -- but has been used so long and by so many people, including Joe Biden himself this year, it has essentially become a legitimate part of American English) of the Obama years and -- as I’ve joked should be his campaign slogan -- “Make America Boring Again.”

Souza has become an unlikely social-media star in the post-Obama years -- the show includes footage of his book signings (back when authors could still do book signings!) and his interviews (in some of which he’s wearing a T-shirt promoting the modern-day country singer Brandi Carlile -- which had me wonder if he’s done any photographic work for her) along with some fascinating anecdotes from the Obama years. The film juxtaposed Souza’s long-term relationship with his partner Patti Lease, whom he’d lived with for nearly two decades before getting married, with Obama’s late-in-his-term decision to endorse marriage equality for same-sex couples. Souza says Obama frequently asked Souza why he and Patti had never got married -- “he thinks everyone should be married,” Souza said of Obama, and that clearly extended to the young Gay man on the White House staff whom Obama felt for because he couldn’t marry his long-time partner. There was a lot of sadness in the film’s coverage of the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision in which the U.S. Supreme Court, by a 5-4 majority, struck down the so-called “Defense of Marriage Act” passed by the U.S. Congress in 1996 (which declared the federal government would never recognize same-sex couples as married even if their states had allowed them to do so) and declared under the U.S. Constitution and specifically the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment that laws banning same-sex couples from marrying were unconstitutional.

The sadness is that decision is almost certain to be overruled and reversed once Amy Coney Barrett takes her seat on the Supreme Court (which, barring four Republican U.S., Senators having road-to-Damascus moments in the next few days, is a virtual certainty), since two Right-wing justices Trump did not appoint, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, have already filed documents saying the Obergefell decision was a “mistake” and needs to be overturned as soon as possible. A ruling in that direction won’t do much to Charles and I -- about the only change would be that we could no longer file a joint Federal tax return -- but it’s going to create huge amounts of turmoil for any Gay or Lesbian couples who got married after 2015. (Charles and I are grandfathered in because we married during 2008, in the five-month “window” between the California Supreme Court decision invalidating the laws against same-sex marriage on state constitutional grounds and the passage of Proposition 8, which re-imposed the state ban -- and quite frankly it’s unclear whether a U.S. Supreme Court reversal of Obergefell would restore Proposition 8 to effectiveness or not, since it was thrown out by the U.S. Supreme Court on a legal technicality rather than reversed as part of Obergefell.)

The Way I See It barely mentions Ronald Reagan and Souza’s work for him in the later stages of his presidency, though it has a marvelous sequence showing Souza shooting a video of them at the Reagan Ranch either just before or just after Ronald Reagan left office, and it’s amusing to watch the former Warner Bros. contract player essentially take over the direction of the clip. What there is of Reagan here seems designed by the filmmakers (one of whom, director Dawn Porter, was interviewed along with a couple of other guests on MS-NBC after the film was over) to say that Trump is an outlier even among other Right-wing Republican Presidents, and that you can have terrible politics (at least from Charles’ and my point of view) and still not be a terrible human being.