It has been repeated so often since it was coined in the 2004 film Mean Girls that it has perhaps become an overused formulation. But in the case of Donald Trump, his supporters and the New York Post and their efforts to discredit Joe Biden via his son Hunter, it feels especially apt: guys, stop trying to make Hunter Biden conspiracy theories happen.
The most recent salvo in the campaign to make Hunter’s lost laptop the new Hillary’s emails may, at least, bring about a moment of joy for the rest of us. Available for download from 7 September, the movie My Son Hunter is a piece of political porn dedicated to animating the wildest fringes of Trump chat-room banter. To enjoy it, you have only to submit your email address to Breitbart News, the far-right internet platform that is distributing the film. For those unwilling to see their names on that particular list, I can assure you that the trailer, which dropped last week, is more than you need.
The call sheet is an an absolute peach. The film is directed by Robert Davi, who played one of the bad guys in the Goonies and whose previous political work as a director includes “Demon Sheep”, the attack ad featuring satanic livestock that helped Carly Fiorina lose to Barbara Boxer in California’s 2010 Senate race.
The screenplay is by Brian Godawa, who, two years ago, wrote the confusingly capitalised ObamaGate Movie, about a “deep state plot to undermine the Trump candidacy”, and also writes biblical-themed novels with titles such as Psalm 82 and Judgment: Wrath of the Lamb. The actor John James (Dynasty, the Colbys, the ObamaGate Movie) plays Biden, and Gina Carano – former cast member of the Mandalorian, who was fired from that franchise last year for making social media statements denouncing mask wearing and comparing the treatment of present-day Republicans to Jews during the Holocaust – appears as a Secret Service agent trying to save her country from the Bidens.
These gifts are all secondary, however, to the casting of Britain’s own Laurence Fox as Hunter Biden. To enjoy the full impact of this, we need to pause for a moment exclusively to address American readers. It’s hard to explain, to the unacquainted, the unique role played by Fox in British national life: an actor who appeared in a popular detective show for years without troubling the public imagination, Fox has, in recent years, inserted himself into the discourse with a range of eye-catching opinions that can be largely summarised as a defense of our era’s poorest underdog: the straight, white male.
Credit where it’s due: Fox was quite good, 20 years ago, as the fifth lead in Gosford Park. But as the child of the actor James Fox and nephew of the actor Edward Fox, Laurence may be imagined in relation to his family’s acting dynasty as a kind of British Stephen Baldwin, only built like an asparagus and with cheeks as hollow as in any painting by Edvard Munch.
In 2020, he was dropped by his agents after he characterised being described as a “white privileged male” as “racist”, and he has been shown to be fond of the phrase All Lives Matter. Last year, he founded the Reclaim party “to fight against extreme political correctness”, and he stood for mayor of London in 2021, a candidacy as delusional as Marianne “has anyone tried fixing America with crystals and bee pollen?” Williamson’s run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019, if a good deal less charming. Fox lost his £10,000 deposit after gaining just 1.9% of the vote.
You get the idea – chiefly, that in My Son Hunter, Laurence Fox has finally found material equal to his talents. For British readers, meanwhile, there may be some catching up to be done on the subject of Hunter Biden and the internet. There isn’t enough time in the world to fully describe everything that has emerged from this particular screaming hellmouth, but briefly: the source for My Son Biden is what the New York Post calls Hunter Biden’s laptop probe, a series of stories that circle around material found on a laptop at a repair shop in Delaware, which was reported by the Post to show connections between Hunter Biden and various Ukrainian and Chinese energy companies, plus some sex stuff I still can’t figure out. Stories about the laptop were suppressed by tech companies in the lead-up to the election even though some of them were true, which is why Trump has described it on his Truth Social platform as the “Laptop from Hell coverup”. But they have also given rise to a world of conspiracy theories and conjecture, connecting Joe Biden to Hunter’s dealings in ways that have never been proven.
While it’s a constant Republican talking point, the story never got much real-world traction outside the Fox News ecosystem. Hence the need to make My Son Hunter, key search terms for which, on the strength of the trailer, should be “cavorting”, “underpants”, and, to nail that crucial international revenue stream, “Lozza Fox”. We can only raise a glass to them all, wish them the very best of online premieres next week, and fervently hope the movie gets the audience it deserves.
