I honestly don’t know how Alex Gibney pulled this off. The talented documentarian has found his way into some giant intimidating groups to get the story of what goes on to silence whistleblowers in the organization. After destroying the Church of Scientology, Gibney went for Moby Dick itself, the White House. Totally Under Control details the events of the Coronavirus outbreak from Wuhan to the White House, and piece by piece builds its righteous anger into the hearts and minds of every person who watches this documentary, knowing how preventable many of these deaths were.
Covid-19, or the China Virus/Kung Flu, as the Drumpf Administration called it, has forever implanted itself in people’s minds since a sick person left the Wuhan fish market. But virus’s can start anywhere; Gibney’s story focuses on the disease inside the government, showing the series of poor decisions that led to over 200,000 Americans, 25% of the deaths worldwide despite being 4% of the world population.
Gibney’s smartest movie is tracking South Korea’s handling of the virus to the US’s. The US and South Korea got their first documented coronavirus case on the same day. The South Korean government acted swiftly, sending out uniform messages from their political leaders, mobilizing manufacturing of personal protective equipment (PPE), explaining the data/facts to their population, and the population adhering to those policies. Using each of the South Korean decisions as his guide, Gibney then goes step by step with the United States decision making, showing how in most cases, they chose the exact opposite approach. Getting a test running? The CDC botched the roll out of their test verification, setting back the country a few weeks/a month of testing. Masks? Business policies led to the US outsourcing the creation of their PPE to other countries, and the administration was slow in mobilizing production. That’s a few more weeks. Woops, that mobiliziation leaves the states to fend for themselves to get PPE. A few more weeks, and a LOT more money, depending on your state. What makes large chunks of Totally Under Control frustrating is how many relatively small all these decisions seem, and that they can be easily fixed. But bad decision after bad decision took the US from a few inevitable deaths to hundreds of thousands of preventable ones.
If that weren’t infuriating enough. Gibney also starts tying all this peculiar decision making to its Machiavellian origins. Most poor systemic decision making comes from people who make those decisions in hopes to keep their job/stay in power, and Gibney’s story follows that timeless tale beat by beat. Even if the CDC got their testing right first, the Trump administration wouldn’t have cared; Trump made it clear that he thought more cases would hurt his political campaign, after repeatedly promising the virus wasn’t a big deal to his supporters. As fits with his history, when presented with actual data and facts, Trump doubled down on his Covid stance, continually insisting the virus wasn’t a big deal as the cases and hospitalizations rose. Whistleblowers around the President who pleaded for him to change his mind were either silenced by firing, or forced to go public, which in turn, led to their silencing. By insisting on loyalty over honesty, the Trump administration politicized what should be simple, easily followable tasks like wearing a mask in public and getting tested/isolating if you feel sick, ostracizing medical experts in the process. Those tactics, while good for getting votes from his base, inhibits a certain section of the US population from taking proper precautions to help limit the spread of Covid19, exacerbating the virus’s economic and human life effects in the United States.
Totally Under Control ends with the President himself contracting Covid 19 at a super spreader event he insisted on having, maskless. The doc is a sobering reminder of the corrupting influence of power, and how facts, logic and science cure disease, not the will of a politican who wants to stay in office. Because of that hubris, someone’s husband, wife, son, daughter, sister, brother, grandma, grandpa, aunt, uncle, or cousin might be in trouble, or already dead.