Steve Bannon wanted to make a movie about cloning, abortion, and Nazis with Mel Gibson

By Randall Colburn  |  February 9, 2017 | 6:33pm
Aux Features Film

Steve Bannon, the melting bacon fat candle that serves as President Donald Trump’s most trusted advisor, had quite the Hollywood career before getting into politics. A few days ago, we wrote about the unproduced Shakespearean hip-hop musical he wrote about the 1992 Los Angeles riots; today, The Daily Beast is reporting on an 11-page outline it obtained for “an unmade documentary-style film from 2005 about the dangers of futuristic technology.” Bannon wrote it alongside his writing partner, Julie Jones.

Blessed with the very Coheed And Cambrian title of The Singularity: Resistance Is Futile, the sprawling, ambitious story concerns cloning, immortality, Walt Disney, eugenics, and, naturally, Nazis. Here’s the broad scope (gird yourselves):

A heady, incomplete mix of science, history, religion, and politics, it sketches out a story in which mankind’s unquenchable thirst for knowledge and scientific advancement has led to horrific, fascist atrocities and forced sterilization, drawing a direct line between those atrocities and modern bio-technology.

The draft is unfinished, so it is unclear precisely what Bannon’s full message and story arc were intended to be. But the theme that genetic and reproductive sciences has led to Nazi horrors and war crimes is a theme seen in a lot of conservative agitprop.

Essentially, Bannon’s is a Christian right-friendly story of arrogant scientists trying to perfect the human race at the expense of the natural order and God’s vision of humanity.

One ticket, please!

The Daily Beast goes into much, much more detail on the outline’s gobbledygook, but what’s equally interesting is that several sources claim rage-filled conservative Mel Gibson was once attached to the project (for the record, Gibson’s publicist called this claim “fake news”). Bannon apparently loved “name-dropping” Gibson, and was also routinely entertained by Passion Of The Christ star Jim Caviezel at “exclusive parties” at “a mansion in Santa Barbara.”

Gizmodo provides some interesting context as well, elaborating on Bannon’s debt to Leni Riefenstahl, the German film director whose most famous film is a piece of Nazi propaganda.

“People have said I’m like Leni Riefenstahl,” Bannon told the Wall Street Journal in 2011. At the time he was debuting his own piece of propaganda: The Undefeated, a documentary celebrating Sarah Palin.

The Singularity: Resistance Is Futile isn’t Bannon’s only project to never take off. Along with his racist hip-hop musical, his shelf is also stacked a piece about Rwandan genocide (oh, brother), an anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim proposal called The Islamic States Of America, and, hey, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus that would be set on the moon with creatures from outer space and probably still somehow be racist.

[Note: Gizmodo, like The A.V. Club, is owned by Univision Communications.]

 
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