DESIGNATED SURVIVOR: Reflections
Worse than horror stories like “The Rain” that explore our feelings about the pandemic, are the stories about the attack on the Capital as it might have been but wasn’t. “Designated Survivor” assumes that the Capitol was actually exploded, killing all legislators but the two designated survivors, a technical term meaning that each party names someone to NOT attend something in case of a disaster like this.
Two CGI visualizations bring out what has been in the backs of our minds since January 6. One is the bombed out remains of the Capitol if it had been hit by a planted bomb, a missile, or a predator drone. The image is much informed by the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, the deadliest act of homegrown terrorism. This assumes that the planes that impacted the World Trade Center were not somehow connected to what we now know is a seditious webwork across the US. I wish I could remember the name of the female reporter who said this at the time, but she was quickly silenced.
This acccount is linked in case you’ve forgotten or weren’t born yet. https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/oklahoma-city-bombing The very next day I was at my desk in the Portlandia Building, where only a glass wall separated the office from the street, when a rental truck of the same kind as the one carrying the bomb in Oklahoma City parked at the curb. I was terrified. My boss said it was nothing and forbade me to call the police. “You’re just stirring things up,” he said. I thought of many errands on the other side of the building for an hour. Then the truck was gone.
We only see what we want to see, so this CGI-forced vision assumes we want to see the worst. Part of us does. The second image was not CGI. It was a hangar where the body bags of the legislators were laid out geometrically so as to keep track of identities. There were a LOT of them, shocking even in a time when we use cemetery spacing of symbols to mark Covid deaths or victims of war in other places.
As nearly as I can tell, the rest of the film is about a modern version of Jimmy Stewart — namely Keifer Sutherlin — struggling to reinvent a government from the Constitution and common sense. In the movie he is not burdened with Covid nor Putin, so he can think on principle except for the militaristic conservatives who want to go immediately to war. The characters are invented and speak to the situation in predictable ways, but then turn things over and think about the other side, which is what makes the film valuable.
There are other “takes” on this story, the same as there are more versions of the pandemic stories which are millennia-old, pre-Biblical. Probably there have never been times when one life-form or another was not raked by viruses or microbes or climate change. Some species of hominins succumbed, which make us nervous.
When I go to watch these episodes, I’m struck by the echo of the sound track in it’s muted horns and chords, bringing up “House of Cards” which has become part of our shared memories. It’s almost as though the writers already knew what we are just discovering in hearings now.
Anchoring this story on the actual Capital building reveals how cumulative the structure has become, full of “invisible” offices, skif’s, hidey holes and armored niches, and yet never quite free of mice and bugs (both kinds.) I watch the tourist visits to other countries, particularly Australia and New Zealand, with a certain amount of envy. Their buildings are quite grand. Do they have escape tunnels and safety bunkers? Are there panic buttons under all the desks? Ours is almost a case of self-fulfilling prophecy. Whose decision was it to leave one covert alcove with penetrable windows and doors? And who told the invaders to go directly there? Once it was hard to imagine, but not now.
