Sorry National Review:
Alexandra Pelosi Nails It in “The Insurrectionist Next Door”
By Jon Friedman, October 31, 2023
Leave it to Elaine Benes, an iconic sit-com character who did not suffer fools gladly or mince her words, to capture how I feel about the right-wing media’s pitiful broadside attacks on HBO and documentarian Alexandra Pelosi.
“Just when I think you’re the shallowest man I’ve ever met, you somehow manage to drain a little more out of the pool,” Elaine said disgustedly to her friend Jerry Seinfeld. That quip pretty much sums up the right-wing belief that HBO is somehow enabling Pelosi, who is, of course, the daughter of Rep. Nancy Pelosi, to spin a liberal yarn devoid of depth or feeling.
The Insurrectionist Next Door, Pelosi’s 75-minute documentary, features interviews with people who were charged with crimes for participating in the Jan. 6, 2021 attacks on the U.S. Capitol. HBO Documentary Films released the film on Oct. 16. Alexandra Pelosi says at the beginning of the documentary: “I just want to get to know the insurrectionist next door.”
The National Review took offense: “Alexandra Pelosi is the second-to-last person you’d trust to do a documentary about the January 6 demonstration and its chilling, weaponized aftereffects — including political prisoners and the misuse of the word ‘insurrection.’ As the daughter of Nancy Pelosi, who was Speaker of the House of Representatives during the J6 turmoil, Alexandra has an obvious conflict of interest in directing the new HBO doc … But she’s done it before, in HBO’s Pelosi in the House last year.”
The National Review is missing the point here by focusing on what it (mistakenly) sees as a conflict of interest. The point is the content of the documentary, not the person who made it. That’s because the movie is so valuable in helping us understand why the insurrectionists did what they did and how they feel now about their actions.
Smart Journalism
Alexandra Pelosi is doing the nation a service with her newest film. She is doing what smart journalists strive to accomplish: She is taking the facts and explaining what happened, giving the news context and applying keen analysis to help us understand what happened on that grim day of Jan. 6, 2021. Further, the implication that Nancy’s Daughter is so filled with liberal passion that she is going to take cheap shots against the insurrectionists is inaccurate.
These folks ruin their reputations in the film with their own words on camera. Pelosi does not push her liberal point of view on them or try to make them look ridiculous with clever editing. Pelosi’s only agenda is to try to understand what happened. She shows us that each insurrectionist has a face and a story. As it turns out, we can deduce that the only thing that unites all of the insurrectionists is that each of them believed the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. That is the key takeaway.
Pelosi is a master storyteller. She helps us understand the back story of each subject in the film. Their stories reek of pitiful political naïveté. They came from broken homes, suffered from drug abuse, were reeling from unemployment, lacked formal education and didn’t comprehend what they were getting into.
Real, Multi-dimensional People
The scene where Pelosi shows two people wearing “his and her ankle monitors” is poignant and tragic. “I don’t want to hate you,” Pelosi says to one of the insurrectionists. The concept of understanding people who disagree with you is vital. When I worked as a beat reporter and encountered a hostile source of information, I found that it helped enormously to tell the individual that I wanted “to understand” what made them tick. You know something? I must’ve been pretty savvy and intuitive, because my strategy worked brilliantly. Once my subjects realized that I wanted to hear their side of the story, we could have a productive conversation.
Pelosi took pains to show her subjects as multi-dimensional people. The scene where she interviews a man and his wife of 12 years and their daughter – and gets them to talk about how they met and why they have stayed together – could be the saga of any modern American family. Pelosi makes the point that the insurrectionists should be considered on a person-to-person basis. Lumping them together under one banner – insurrectionists – is as futile as using words to describe a single voting bloc.
A documentary should have a point of view. Alexandra Pelosi’s point of view couldn’t be clearer, or more important – If we want to understand what happened on January 6, 2021, we must try to understand the people who were there.
Jon Friedman wrote MarketWatch’s media column from 1999 to 2013 and has taught classes in journalism and other subjects at Stony Brook University. He has written three books and has been published in The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times Sunday Business Section, The New York Post, Esquire and Time.
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Alexandra Pelosi provides the nation a service with her newest film about Jan. 6. She is taking the facts and explaining what happened and giving the news context. Further, the implication that Nancy’s Daughter is so filled with liberal passion that she is going to take cheap shots against the insurrectionists is inaccurate. (Image: Wikimedia Commons)
