Movie Spotlight: The Last Election

At the 2024 Republican National Convention, a documentary filmmaker sat in a Milwaukee backyard eating hot dogs with a Marine and his son. Both of them explained American politics in terms that sounded, almost word for word, like a disaffected leftist. He hadn’t expected that. He left rooting for them and worried for everyone.

Douglas Lain directed and wrote The Last Election, a found footage essay film built from street interviews at both the 2024 RNC and DNC. The idea came from his collaborator Chris Cutrone, a Marxist theorist who suggested making a film in the style of The Last Party, the 1992 documentary starring Robert Downey Jr. Lain, a Portland-based publisher who describes himself as a dissident Marxist, had been an anarchist in the nineties. He didn’t want to go to Milwaukee. Cutrone told him seeing Trump supporters up close would change his understanding. It did.

The Last Election

Both parties spent 2024 arguing that the other side was a threat to democracy, that this specific election was the one that would decide everything. Lain and Cutrone arrived at the conventions with roughly a dozen theories about why that might actually be true. A political realignment. The crackup of the neoliberal order. The Democratic Party’s decision to block primaries and swap their nominee at the last moment. “We had a dozen different theories as to why it might be, in some way or another, the last election,” Lain says. None of them could be confirmed by the footage. All of them were somewhere in it.

Two Different Conventions

The DNC was organized and on-message. Nearly everyone they approached in Chicago was sticking to talking points. Milwaukee was different. The RNC was what Lain calls “an amateur production,” with as many opinions in the street as there were YouTubers and Twitch streamers. Cranky, trollish bravado surrounded the Fiserv Forum. The contrast became structural to the film: the professional apparatus of one party against the unruly sprawl of the other, and what each reveals about American politics in 2024.

Generations

The film sorts its subjects by generation and the differences are stark. The Millennials Lain encountered wanted to talk about the affordability crisis, the collapse of the push for universal healthcare, and the various betrayals between socialist politicians and their base. Zoomers were amused by Trump, exhausted by their elders, and anxious about the future. The Boomer on the crew was in a state of shock, alienated from every other generation while utterly confident he understood exactly what was happening. Lain and Cutrone, both Gen X, treated the whole thing as their object of study and everyone else as fascinating specimens.

Adam Curtis in Milwaukee

Lain has spent a decade making found footage essay videos on YouTube, promotional films for books he’s published at Sublation Media. Adam Curtis showed him that the avant-garde approach he’d first encountered in Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle could reach a wider audience. All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace and It Felt Like a Kiss were the models. Treating the convention footage as found material was a natural impulse. His editing process was improvisational, script written alongside footage, each responding to the other. He started with just one thing: the opening paragraphs about running a rubber goldfish for President in 1992.

What to know before you press play

Lain is direct about what the film is not. “This is not a propaganda film for either party,” he says. “Viewers should be prepared for a film that is neither anti-Trump nor pro-Trump.” What it is instead is a film about people: how different generations of Americans understood an election both sides called existential, what the spectacle of American politics looks like up close, and what Lain found in that Milwaukee backyard, where the distance between a Marine veteran and a dissident Marxist turned out to be smaller than either of them had expected.

Documentary

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Streaming now on Relay.