The Hateful Eight Years: PBS' Documentary About Bibi Was Strange and Surreal
Last night, I watched a movie. It was intense. A handful of characters, very few of them likable, are forced to put up with each other and spend their days discussing lofty things like destiny and justice all while eyeing each other’s backs, looking for a good spot to stick the dagger. I’m not talking about Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight; I’m talking about Frontline’s The Hateful Eight Years. OK, so the movie was really called Netanyahu at War, but don’t let the thin grey mist of public television dullness fool you: last night’s prime time offering was every bit as surreal, titillating, maddening, and wonderful as anything the master of pulp fiction has done in years.
Sadly, that wasn’t the filmmakers’ intention. From its very first lines—an Israeli political spin doctor advisor declares that the prime minister’s aspirations are “messianic”—Netanyahu at War announced itself as that rarest of birds, now largely extinct in the heavens of American journalism, the first draft of history that, while written more or less in real time, is nonetheless neatly contextualized and psychologically astute. To that end, we got Bibi the kid in grainy Super 8 home videos, with the narrator telling us that the young child’s mind was shaped by his father’s grim and slightly paranoid view of the course of human—and Jewish—events.