“Wasilla makes Twin Peaks look like a walk in the park. It’s a devout evangelical community. Sevety-six churches with a population of only six thousand, and the crystal meth capitol of Alaska.”
The movie that I’ve been raving about to everyone since I saw it on Netflix last week, and that I want to recommend to you, too, dear reader, is Nick Broomfield’s mind-blowing documentary Sarah Palin: You Betcha! When the film played festivals last year, it got a lot of attention, but then it was promptly forgotten about before most people ever had a chance to see it. I had forgotten about it myself, but when I saw that it was on Netflix, I couldn’t hit play fast enough.
First off, it’s not that it’s a “good film,” per se, because it’s most certainly not, but man is it entertaining. Nick Broomfield is a canny and yet extremely lazy documentarian, and Sarah Palin: You Betcha! is chock-a-block full of Broomfield falling back (again and again) on his standard Broomfieldian tropes (chasing people with a microphone as they drive away from him; implying that anyone who tells him to fuck off has a hidden agenda; having doors literally slammed in his face; asking “inopportune” questions in public). But Nick Broomfield, a pioneer in the “You get a documentary PLUS ME” school of film-making and his annoying shtick IS NOT THE POINT of Sarah Palin: You Betcha!!
Sarah Palin and her family are the point, of course. And let me tell ya, the fuckin’ Kardashians of Wasilla do not come off like very well-adjusted people here… No, not at all.
We’ve read about many of the things covered in the film and the narrative arc—a dim, but steel-willed former beauty queen becomes the mayor of a small Alaska town and rules over it like a peevish mean girl fascist dictator, then becomes governor of the state and then the GOP’s VP nominee in short order—is a familiar one, but to actually see and hear people talk who have known her for years (or their entire lives, some of them) and who line up tell their fucked-up Sarah Palin war stories with venom dripping from their fangs (or alternately like kicked dogs) is nothing short of breath-taking, riveting as hell and bust-a-gut funny, too.
With his usual pseudo-bungling charm Broomfield even manages to talk his way into an on-camera interview with Sarah Palin’s father (who quickly sours on the British film-maker), her former brother-in-law (who viciously goes to town on her ass. I found him quite credible) as well as various people Palin has fucked over, froze out or back-stabbed over the years, such as her loyal chief of staff and one time campaign manager. Certainly there is no shortage of former friends and colleagues who have been cruelly thrown under a bus by the imperious Queen Sarah, who comes off TEN TIMES MORE CRAZY than you’ve ever dared to suspect in Sarah Palin: You Betcha!
Of course, the notion of how frightening it was that this idiotic ignoramus got as close as she did to accidentally occupying the Oval Office is by now a only an academic—and yet no less nightmarish—consideration, making the in retrospect “what if?” implications of Broomfield’s Sarah Palin: You Betcha! all the more powerful (and yes, fucking funny in a gallows humor kind of way). What we didn’t know at the time, could have really hurt us. Let me conclude here by saying that Sarah Palin: You Betcha! would make a damned good double bill with Stanley Kubrick’s slightly less unnerving Dr. Strangelove.
This trailer gives away precious little of what delirious insanity awaits you in Nick Broomfield’s Sarah Palin: You Betcha!.
