By Danny Flannery

Oh boy.

Watching The Game Is Up in the year of our lord 2026 is often difficult. Originally released in 2022, the documentary spotlights Donald Trump 2016 voters who later regretted their choice, highlighting evangelicals, farmers, college students, veterans, and generally disaffected internet trolls. It has aged quicker than I think the filmmakers intended, with interviews that at time of recording would’ve been considered bluntly honest now coming across as doe-eyed feigned ignorance.

Is there still something to be gleaned? I think so. I hope so. This documentary was shot maybe at the last moment before “the Before Times” didn’t perpetually mean about an hour ago. There’s an element of wanting to reach through the screen and shake the subject. I used the phrase “fucking duh” no less than seven times while watching it. But working through that impulse is important; once I worked through my reflexive dismissal and exhaustion, I was able to accept that there are folks who live in entirely different worlds than me, which shouldn’t be that hard a thing to realize.

And then, the film began to open up. We’ve all made mistakes, right? We’ve all had regrets and maybe decided to double down because we’ve thought there’s no way people will accept an “oops, my bad” now. I squint at these interviews and I can almost make out a unique personal courage – the courage to admit you were wrong. No, I have never spewed hate on a national broadcast as a Fox apparatchik; I have never voted for someone I personally believed was a dangerous moron because the previous president said I couldn’t willfully poison the water supply as much; I haven’t spent months posting that Democrats are planning to enforce a female draft for the lulz. But … where was I going with this again?

Again, this movie is often difficult. I watched it in a pairing with the Coming to America showcase, right at the top of the second year of Trump’s second term, while immigrants and dissidents are being disappeared, protestors and random passerby are beaten and shot, transgender people are being erased from legal existence, and now an unjustified war with Iran feels inevitable, among dozens of other erosions of basic society. Things are not going well, to put it mildly. But just as that showcase shines a much needed spotlight on the humanity of the most dehumanized among us, I think The Game Is Up illuminates the thoughts and regrets of the dumbest among us.

I grew up in a very liberal house in the aughts, my parents cussing out Bush every time that pig-headed Rich Texan genocidaire appeared on their TV and openly starting fights with anyone they even suspected of being conservative. If I have kept anything positive from The Game Is Up, it’s that maybe that isn’t the best approach. Maybe, for some of them, patience and empathy is really all that’s needed. Which is deeply, deeply frustrating.