Some Thoughts On Where’s My Roy Cohn

‪K:‬

‪Just saw Where's My Roy Cohn and to cut to the chase, I gave it 4.80 out of 5.00 stars. Superbly researched, fascinating structure, skillful intermixing of interviews, various clips from his tv appearances (the inclusion of cage fight btw Cohn and Gore Vidal alone was worth the price of admission) and extrapolations from then to now, both in terms of politics, socio-cultural rot, and the wretched denouement from Cohn to the Degenerate current befouling the Presidency, our nation, and our culture, was well crafted and engaging.‬

‪But, this comes with several caveats:‬

‪1) One has to know who Roy Cohn was, what gave him his start, and why, over the decades, this miserable diseased excrescence was able to manipulate the levers of power, to truly understand the movie. This lops off a huge portion of the potential movie audience.‬

‪2) And, even if the answer to the above caveat is yes, one has to be willing to spend time watching a documentary about Roy Cohn, which was akin to taking a deep dive into a sh*t filled sewer, with rats, disease, and lethal pathogens engulfing you. Again, this lops off another huge slice of the potential movie audience.‬

‪3) Finally, if the answers to #1 and #2 are yes, then go see it but beware: Even going in fully braced and aware that one is exposing oneself to an Earth Bound Satan, one never really knows the after effects of prolonged exposure to such Majestic Satanic Manifestation. I will be checking my limbs, heart, and soul for any Ebola like after effects from my 90 minutes of congress with Roy Cohn and, to make matters even more lethal, at the end, with Donald Trump.‬

‪However, if you can meet the challenge of these 3 caveats, then go see this superb documentary.‬


‪Me:‬

‪K, thanks for your review. We saw the doc Monday night. We thought it was enjoyable and informative. But I’ve had a nagging feeling about it ever since. ‬

‪I’m not familiar with this documentarian. He has apparently done a doc on Studio 54. I think I may have seen it a few years ago but I’m not sure. I have no problem with any such doc as such but documenting Studio 54 suggests to me his attraction to high life, bright lights celebrity even if he’s critical of it.‬

‪ And that’s what’s nagging at me about Where’s My Roy Cohn. The doc, to my mind, except for the continual showing of Cohn’s evil, smirking face, told me about his rotted, soulless wrong doing rather than showing it to me. For example, he gets disbarred, a huge deal based on moral turpitude, for, among other things, breaching his fiduciary obligations to his clients in a massively corrupt way by stealing their money. But there’s no dramatizing how awful that is. Rather we get the grey bespectacled lawyer who prosecuted Cohn telling us about it. What about words from and showing us the actual victims?‬

‪Plus, in the guise of documenting Cohn’s destructiveness, we get a lot of his “bright lights, big city” celebrity life, him on his yacht, him in the company of the ostensibly great and famous, movers and shakers, him hob nobbing at celebrated, expensive, exclusive places, him as loyal to his friends, him constant extolled as a great, smart lawyer, him depicted as someone who railed against and fought against power and the establishment and so on and on with this kind of sub textual, or not even so sub textual, praising him, under the umbrella of documenting his sociopathic rottenness. ‬

‪Which is not to say, there’s any problem with a complicated, rounded portrayal of him in all his fullness. But in this doc, my nagging self tells me, there wasn’t enough nor powerful enough taking him down and there was too much, likely unintended, basking in his ostensible glow. ‬

‪Lastly, my nagging sense is that there was much too much made of his homosexuality. Again, it’s not that that shouldn’t have been documented in the portrayal of him, but the director went overboard with it such that he lost balance. It became a distraction from Cohn’s sheer exploitative, sociopathic evil, the fullness and sharpness of which finally got a little lost amidst the images of his stuffed animals, his loyalty to the Reagans and Trump and the kinds of seemingly glamorous things about him we’re so often shown and that I’ve noted. ‬

‪Any thoughts on this? ‬