Empathy and Pete Souza’s Work in The Way I See It
If the last 4 years have taught us one thing it’s that we, white people of America, didn’t really deserve Barack Obama.
He was too good for us and Trump is our punishment for not appreciating him enough.
At least, that’s my reaction, 1am on a Friday night, watching Obama at work through the lens of Pete Souza’s camera, 4 years after Obama left office.
The Way I See It, distributed by Focus Features and premiering on MSNBC two Fridays before the end of the 2020 election, is the story of Pete Souza’s time as Barack Obama’s photographer, during his first year in the Senate, and then, his two terms as America’s 44th President.
Although the film, directed by Dawn Porter, is booked as a look, “at former presidents Barack Obama and Ronald Reagan through the lens of Pete Souza” due to, I imagine, some misguided attempt at Equal Time, or some overly-precious liberal fear on the part of its marketers, that it might be labeled as “partisan”, The Way I See It spends minimal time on Reagan. The majority of the 100 minute run time is (rightly) focused on Souza’s time with Obama.
Watching The Way I See It after 3 vodka sodas and an uncertain amount of hard seltzer is the emotional equivalent of an EMDR session, catharsis through tears, a soul wringing release of the last 4 years of pain inflicted by Trump and his corrupt hoard, not worthy of their title as an “administration”.
Seeing Barack Obama being a good person in the White House is to gut-remember the horrible, horrible, fire-in-the-children’s-cancer-ward personality of its current squatter.
For the last 4 years we have lived with this build up of plaque, a disease we learned to die with, a callousness we dedicated time to building and maintaining.
Souza’s intimate images of Obama’s presidency wash over the walls we’ve built to survive in the Trump era, becoming waves that leaves us suddenly unburdened, while Souza, as presented by Porter, fades a bit into the background of his own biography (“Pete really wanted to be the guy who disappeared”), sharing time equally with his premier subject.
Living in the Obama era again, however briefly, is a baptism: a reminder of what it was like to have a President who didn’t make weekly attacks on human rights and democratic norms.
It’s heartbreaking. It’s hopeful.
As far as distribution, Focus Features nailed it on the timing.
And as they say in the distribution biz, a slogan they ripped off from the realty biz (two facts I entirely invented), “it’s all about timing, timing, timing!”
We are in a moment where we have either:
- endured as much pain at the hands of Trump as we will ever feel without knowing he will be replaced,
- or,
- are on the precipice of re-running a 4 year nightmare.
It’s the perfect time to be reminded of what a non-Trump world felt like, and to be reminded what another 4 years would truly feel like by putting ourselves in the shoes of ourselves 4 years (but-feels-like-a-generation) ago.
It’s been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America.
– Barack Obama, election night, 2008
It’s not just that Obama is the opposite of Trump as a person, it’s that he’s so much better than we the people.
The Obama administration certainly had its flaws, (the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan, the drone bombing of Pakistan, the water of Flint) and the man, his fuck-ups (for real, what the fuck was that in Flint?) and The Way I See It absolutely glosses over them: its weakness, as Kevin Crust of the LA Times points out, being its hagiographic tendencies.
My bias is that I can forgive a film that fawns over Obama because I need to fawn over Obama right now. Let me have this, 2020.
Bias aside (as aside as bias can be placed) what The Way I See It conveys, like the photographs of its subject(s), is a feeling of truth, a truth that is, in ways, more accurate than the things we commonly – with our Western bent towards the quantitative – regard as accurate: statistics, headlines, roll call vote counts.
The still image sears in your brain in a way that video doesn’t. We can all conjure up iconic images — they’re always there.
– Pete Souza, to Vox
The truth of Souza’s, and now Porter’s, work is that Barack Obama is a preternaturally good person.
He’s better than you, he’s better than me. (Remember what having that in a leader was like?).
Not because of his education, nor his ambition or rank in office, but because of his tireless empathy, his illimitable energy to work in service of others, and his ability, on top of running the world, to be a father and husband.
At one point in The Way I See It Barack knows he’s going to miss Sasha’s annual dance recital, so we see him, as frozen by Souza, parked in the back of an empty auditorium, preparing remarks he was to make in Newton, Conn. where two days earlier 20 children and 6 adults at Sandy Hook elementary were murdered, making every attempt to look up and watch when it’s Sasha’s turn to dance.
We learn that, at one time, the lock screen photo on his Ipad was this picture of him and his daughter’s doing snow angels on the south lawn.
We see him substitute coaching Sasha’s basketball game with a daughter-embarrassing intensity.
The strength of The Way I See It is the strength of both of its subjects’ careers, and its ability to disappear, Souza like, into the celebration of them.
In Conclusion, Vote For Joe Biden
They care about you and they care about Democracy.
Barack Obama, speaking of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, during a speech in Miami, Oct 23rd, 2020
To anyone who’s still reading, I am sorry.
I can’t phone bank, I can’t go door to door.
Calling strangers – or, you know, knocking on the unsuspecting doors of their homes – in order to talk politics with them provides enough social anxiety to keep me from signing up or volunteering the way my father, hero he is, has done his entire life.
But I can write.
(Yes, I should have written more than just this and some snippy Instagram stories)
And if Barack Obama, super human being that he is, worked alongside Joe Biden for 8 years by choice, than I trust Joe Biden.
I trust that he possesses true empathy.
I believe that he and Kamala care about the working people of America.
To naysayers, that may sound a low bar to set: basic human empathy.
But I’m convinced, after 36 years of living in this world, that all of the good things to have ever come from leadership have come, at least in part, from a place of empathy, and all bad things were born, at least in part, from its absence.
We are in a soft-power war with evil, struggling for control of our country against not just a disregard of, but a punitive contempt for, human life.
To make a pop-culture, and otherwise uneducated summation of the entirety of human history that just feels right: Cerseis win more than Neds.
Voting for empathy is not compromising.
It’s starting, again, to win the only war worth winning.