How Head of State’s sick humor predicted the worst.
Before comedian Chris Rock participated in last month’s Oprah Winfrey/Kamala Harris rally, he had anticipated black-celebrity political commitment in Head of State, his 2003 directing-writing debut.
In Head of State, Rock gave himself the role of Mays Gilliam, a D.C. alderman chosen to run for president on the Democratic ticket. Gilliam eventually wins the race — and this was five years before Obama.
The premise in which Gilliam’s candidacy happens without the normal process of primary approval seems prophetic of the way Kamala Harris was installed by the DNC, overruling the participation and agreement of its members. But Rock treated this anti-democratic procedure matter-of-factly — as an it-could-never-happen-here fantasy. Although Head of State purports to be wild comedy, it falls short of actual satire. Seen today, it looks like wish fulfillment in retrospect.
Such peculiarity encourages reconsideration of this otherwise unexceptional comedy. Twenty years after the film’s release, America not only accepts cancelling the political rule book, but Rock himself takes part in that negation.
Rock recently joined Oprah Winfrey’s so-called Unite for America broadcast that contributed to the Harris campaign — uniting with millionaires Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Bryan Cranston, Jennifer Lopez, Tracee Ellis Ross, and Ben Stiller. He also abetted Oprah’s ruse of ethnic solidarity. Therein lies the essence of Head of State’s unfortunately still-relevant sick humor.
The political comedy was a box-office flop, yet Rock made up for its non-popularity a couple of decades later during the Covid lockdowns, when he joined forces with the government in its most repressive crackdown on the public.
Rock became a real-life Mays Gilliam in 2020 when he participated in New York governor Andrew Cuomo’s tyrannical Covid-lockdown daily enforcement rituals, bringing his cultural bona fides and social identity to the effort to tyrannize the public. Rock’s shameless political act seemed to confirm the power dream of Head of State.
It was revolting to see at that time, and even now to recall, Rock’s fealty to Cuomo:
I watch you every single day, and you, you bring me calm. You know, you bring me joy. Didn’t Anita Baker sing that? You bring me joy every single day, ’cause I don’t know what’s going on. I thought I lived in the United States. I thought I lived in a country, and now I realize that we have 50 countries essentially. . . . People need to get tested, people need to make it a festive occasion, they need to posse up and get tested. . . . The governor called me up, and I’m here to do whatever is required. I hope to God that when this is over that you’re still a part of the government. . . . I hope this keeps going on.
Those words (spoken as Cuomo chuckled) contain the essence of the black electorate’s mass devotion to Democratic Party pols. It suggests commitment from the days of plantation slavery when Democrats were emboldened to begin the Ku Klux Klan and, later, Jim Crow.
Despite the hip-hop-era savvy that made Rock popular, he still falls for the master/slave routine. That’s the formula Obama evoked when he recently chastened black men for not supporting Harris’s campaign — as if they dared go against their trusting nature. (It was a defining moment of Obama’s true treachery and the gullibility of his black supporters.) Head of State decodes that mysterious, all-forgiving nature as a black American realization of self—such as Gilliam’s basic, streetwise, profane instincts. He goes along with his cynical managers (Dylan Baker, Lynn Whitfield) and their political strategy to hold only one debate, which is now DNC policy.
Rock’s soft-headed cynicism turns out to be coincidental at best. In fact, it is best when he chooses his brother (the great Bernie Mac) as his vice-presidential running mate, and their pugilistic greeting custom evokes the infamous Will Smith Oscar slap. The film’s most perceptive campaign jokes pilfer from Warren Beatty’s Bulworth but without Beatty’s satire of DNC bromides.
Sad fact is: Rock’s stand-up comedy shtick relies on black self-abasement (letting his white audience hear how blacks secretly deprecate themselves). The real message in Head of State comes from Rock’s refusal to question how generations of black voters cling to the Democratic Party that repeatedly fails them. Head of State takes the blacks = Democratic Party equation for granted (the equation that Trump’s campaign might be prying loose).
This American version of Stockholm syndrome gets twisted by Rock’s sarcastic approach to political contempt. Gilliam uses Osama bin Laden’s endorsement of his opponent (played by Nick Searcy) — “I hate America, but I love Brian Lewis” — and it matches Harris’s relentlessly negative, non-issue-based, campaign that uses Trump-hatred as an appeal to black distrust of whites.
Because most Millennial movies betray us, Head of State is more relevant to our current circumstances than films that are part of the regular corporate-media hoax. Recent news that Steven Spielberg will be producing Rock’s biopic of Martin Luther King Jr. ranks just above the possibility that Rock would immortalize Obama.