There’s a scene in “The System,” a thrilling, explosive docudrama about the dawn of modern American white supremacy in the 1980s, that terrifies you in an eye-opening way. Two leaders of the movement meet on a lonely country road in Idaho. One, Richard Butler (Victor Slezak), is the white nationalist who founded the Aryan Nations, a neo-Nazi cult whose compound is located nearby. He’s a racist extremist, but he has the demeanor of a gentleman preacher, and he’s a politically aware man about the growth of his movement.
The other man, Bob Matthews (Nicholas Hoult), is a former follower of Butler's who has broken with him, all because he believes the Aryan Nations movement is not extremist. enoughMatthews wants an armed uprising now, and the rebellious gang of thugs he leads, called “The Order” (named after the white supremacist rebels in “The Turner Diaries”), are essentially a small band of terrorists. They blow up pornographic cinemas and synagogues, and don black ski masks and MAC-10s to rob banks and Brink’s trucks. They want the money for themselves, but they’re also funding an “army” to revolt against the U.S. government. (One of Brink’s heists nets $3.6 million.) In an early scene, we see them murder one of their own in cold blood.
The FBI, led by a tough veteran agent named Terry Hosk (Jude Law), has been spying on the area, so Butler meets with Matthews to warn him that his violent tactics are a terrible mistake. As Butler explains, their movement cannot afford to be involved in crime. If they do it right, he says, within 10 years they will have people in the House and Senate. But Matthews won’t listen. He’s committed to his idea of apocalyptic revolution.
The double whammy of the scene is this: Butler, though a few years late, was absolutely right about how his movement was successfully mainstreamed. In this sense, he represents a more dangerous threat to America than Bob Matthews. Matthews, by contrast, is a reckless psychopath. His murder spree, which culminates, as the film shows, in the murder of Jewish radio host Alan Berg (played by Marc Maron), is nothing short of madness. But what it does mean is that Butler, the angry American Nazi, is the voice of the far right. moderation It's enough to make your head spin and your stomach feel a little nauseous.
Written by Zach Baylin and directed by Justin Kurzel (whose film Netram dealt with the 1996 Port Arthur massacre in Tasmania in horrific fashion), “The Order” is both a brilliantly intelligent docudrama about the rise of white supremacy and a gripping crime story. Kurzel works in classic fashion, capturing the film (cinematography by Adam Arkapaw) with a dynamic sense of the beauty and desolation of the rural mountainous landscape of the Pacific Northwest, and of the moment-to-moment logistics of how amateur criminals move through space. The film is filled with heists, surveillance, shootouts, interrogations and other hallmarks of police procedurals. It’s often suspenseful and exciting.
But the film never builds suspense because Kurzel exaggerates the events. In fact, “The Thing” is too meticulous in its details for its credibility. When the FBI begins its investigation, having been led almost at random to the case (Husk, the first to investigate, is in the throes of a broken marriage and has been assigned to a one-man office in the remote town of Coeur d’Alene), the bureau’s tactics may at first seem sleepy or even inept. But that’s only because the film stays true to what the FBI stands for: a crew of human agents, not superhuman law enforcement officers who, in the days before high technology, had to move step by step.
Jude Law, with a mustache, plays Terry as an honest but broken man (his wife and two daughters have separated, and his job is all that keeps him together), and this may be the most tragic performance of Law’s career. Terry, who teams up with a local cop (Tye Sheridan, looking as dapper as a Boy Scout), is a good cop because he’s brimming with hard-won, bitter knowledge of how criminals operate. He spent time in New York chasing gangsters, and one of the ideas he shares—and it’s part of the film’s vision—is that there’s a continuity between the Mafia, the Ku Klux Klan, and now the Order. As he puts it: They all have a cause, but they’re really looking out for their own interests.
We see this in Nicholas Hoult’s powerful and convincing performance as Bob Matthews. Hoult looks exactly like the real Matthews, and if the trick to playing a man filled with racial hatred is not to make him look ridiculous—it’s to show the humanity of everyday evil—the actor pulls it off in a completely charming way. He shows us that Matthews’ beliefs are universal, and that he lives by them, but they give him an intensity that makes him a fearsome and charismatic gang leader.
Matthews shows up at the congregation for one of Butler’s sermons, and when he stands up to make his own case for the need for a white power revolution now, before it’s too late, Holt shows us how right he is; he draws the crowd into a death cult that amounts to a dangerous one. Matthews is actually a bit of a scumbag. He and his wife, Debbie (Allison Oliver), have adopted children, but because he wants to continue his line, he has also impregnated his mistress, Zillah (Odessa Young). He does so with the same entitlement that ten years later would come to symbolize the excesses of David Koresh. But when Matthews fixes his gaze on an enemy, or on a follower he believes might be disloyal, his eyes flash with a deadly intensity.
In the 1980s, Robert Matthews and the Klan were big news (Hollywood even produced a sloppy drama about him in 1988, Betrayal , starring Tom Berenger and Debra Winger and directed by Costa-Gavras). But as disturbing as the revelations about a secretive neo-Nazi group were at the time, few could have guessed what form the movement would take in the mainstream. While “the Klan” is entirely true to the events of 1983 and 1984, it offers itself as a cautionary symbol for what is happening today: the intertwined rise of the “Make America Great Again” movement, Christian nationalism, and the racist sirens (and sometimes racist sirens) of Donald Trump’s campaign to take over America. The film details the 1978 neo-Nazi novel The Turner Diaries, written by William Luther Pierce, which became the bible of the movement—at once a children's fairy tale, a guide to terrorism (with six instructional steps on how to revolt against the U.S. government), and a piece of hate mythology.
But what The Order does that is most surprising and insightful is that it shows us how white supremacy in America can be two things at once, two sides of the same coin: the legal and “presentable” side, and the latent violent side. You can be a diehard racist without believing that the U.S. government is the enemy. But The Order shows us that white supremacy in America can be two things at once, two sides of the same coin: the legal and “presentable” side, and the latent violent side. Believer The idea that the American government is the enemy—which I argue is the cornerstone of Trumpism in the post-January 6, post-“Stop the Steal” era—is tied in its emotional and historical legacy to white supremacist ideology. As the film shows us in its climax, Bob Matthews ended up in a literal hell for his beliefs. But that doesn’t mean his ideas burned.
