American Carnage

And FOX News Mocking The Incarcerated

Ooof, great title, right? Because history happens pretty much every night in the Trump era, some of you don’t remember this phrase Donald Trump bandied about during his first State Of The Union address in 2017. Without getting into specifics (because when has he ever?), he used this term to discuss what was happening in America, what would end under his leadership. A couple of years later, a theoretically non-lethal respiratory virus claimed the lives of over one million Americans while he was President. This movie isn’t about that, mostly because real life, unfortunately, is scarier than the movies.

But don’t think this movie didn’t have Donald Trump on the brain. The opening credits play over repeated footage of right wing media demonizing illegal immigrants as a danger to the country despite not nearly committing crime at the same level of everyday Americans. And not actors, and not minor newspeople spreading this message, but faces familiar from Fox News. There’s plenty of exposure given to professional snakewoman Laura Ingraham, which is notable because, in 2024, she is watched by 3.5 million people every night at 10 PM. A recent metric has her program pegged as the 43rd most popular show on television according to those ratings. This is a reminder that this is not a fringe mentality. This movie makes a boogeyman out of hate, but that hate is being normalized every weeknight at 10 PM. Ingraham is also, by those same ratings metrics, only the sixth biggest show on Fox News. The rhetoric isn’t any less racist on those other shows.

“American Carnage” zigs where you’d think it would zag, however. It begins with a likely preview of what’s to come under Trump 2.0. A diverse group of Latinos are captured in an elaborate sting backed by a craven good ol’ boy politician (Brett Cullen, with ease). Before election day, he wants to gather up all immigrants and lock them up, out of the way and into their own custom-made cages. There are fantastical elements at play, but this portion of the story feels as if that’s exactly how these events will occur. Jorge Lendeborg Jr., a fairly likable young Dominican actor who cut his teeth on franchise work within the “Transformers” and MCU landscape, plays J.P., devastated to see his future robbed as he’s put in cuffs and pried from a middle class lifestyle.

I was prepared for a horror film set among racist detention camps, normal kids pegged as enemies of the state. But instead (because movies are, again, ultimately, kinder than real life), the kids are offered amnesty if they are willing to work in a retirement home. What felt as if it would be kids (including Jenna Ortega) fighting the government suddenly becomes immigrant teenagers threatened by haunted, creepy elderly people. What do the old, barely verbal residents of this home want from these young men and women? It’s probably not what you’d think. 

“American Carnage” wants you to think its got plenty on its mind, when in fact it feels easily distracted. Once they settle into this hellish new world order, these young people wrestle with hormones and affections, which still being troubled by the mentally-distant charges in their care. While there are some low-hanging laughs as a result, it bounces up messily against Eric Dane’s sculpted program leader, the kind of red-blooded American male who is fully devoted to enforcing his own worldview onto the world. The scares go from violent to supernatural, and it becomes apparent that this film was at one point operating euphemistically, later emphasizing how you can only stretch certain metaphors so far.

Lendeborg is a charismatic lead, and he’s got an appealing back-and-forth with a fellow teen played by Bella Ortiz (Ortega, by contrast, doesn’t get much to do, which makes it seem as if the filmmakers didn’t have an idea she was the most charismatic performer present). But the movie clunkily shifts towards its social message in the third act, and it doesn’t hit as hard as it should, the movie deciding only on a blunt-force-trauma ending not entirely unfamiliar to audiences. Admittedly, it is a low-key savvy move for this film to have an open-ended conclusion. As silly a movie this is, they were never going to eradicate some deep-seeded biases that will last at least for another couple generations.

“American Carnage” forces you to consider exactly who “deserves” to be seen in custody, who it “makes sense” to watch in cuffs (e.g. Not White Men). The whole thing calls to mind this entirely-unnecessary article from (where else?) Fox News that describes the birthday meal of Sean “Diddy” Combs. When I saw this, I wondered, naively, who is this written for? Because the tone didn’t seem sad, there was no regret that the once-wealthy was now reduced to eating jail food. No, this is an article about rubbing it in how Diddy is now in prison.  This was about pointing out the hardship of a terrible man. Which made me wonder… to what end? In case you were wondering, there was no similar article about Harvey Weinstein’s birthday in prison.

The piece goes on to describe what Combs would eat all day in prison, even though they’re too cowardly to actually say why they’re doing this. This involves actual descriptions of the food in the article, but only from the actual definitions provided by the Federal Bureau Of Prisons. So no, there is no “marinara” sauce on that spaghetti, it’s just a side of tomato-can sauce made for everyone. Here, Fox is following marching orders to write a demoralizing article. And it’s not even accurate. I’ve been to that same detention center. You’re telling me the men in there didn’t make sure to give him a hero’s dinner of whatever he wanted? You’re telling me the guards, all with fond memories of Bad Boy Records, didn’t help out? Horsecrap. I saw how they celebrated Paul Manafort, firsthand.

In other words, Fox News combined their hatred of Black men with a (possibly equal) hatred of actual investigative reporting mixed with a love of institutionalized power to write an article about how Combs was having a bad birthday in prison. Because this is the treatment people in prison receive. Fox News is treating Diddy, a credibly-accused serial abuser, like this. But in detailing the menu so thoroughly (or so they think), they’re diminishing every other man in custody as well. Because no matter how much Washington changes, men and women in prison will always be less-than-nothing, and sometimes fodder for a cheap, mid-afternoon clickbait article on a website for an organization oblivious enough to think they’re reporting news.