Fire and Fury is a tough, brave, accessible piece of work that needs to be seen

Graeme Tuckett is a contributor for Stuff to Watch.

OPINION: Of all of the memes that went around during those weeks the protestors were camped on parliament’s lawn and blocking the streets around the government precinct, my favourite was one that said: “If Russell Coutts supports you, and Tame Iti doesn’t, I reckon you’re smashing the State all wrong.”

It made me laugh, because it captured something of what was so difficult to explain about the protest. How was it that a gang of “wellness” bloggers, a celebrity chef, a millionaire sailor and a random assortment of white supremacists and nationalists had found themselves leading and influencing this group of the disaffected and mistrusting?

The conspiracists and charlatans will tell you, it was because they were “united by the truth”. But that just goes to prove that it is impossible to argue with an eco-system of lies. Everything just becomes a new part of the conspiracy.

There’s been plenty already written about Stuff Circuit‘s new documentary Fire And Fury. And even though my main gig with this company is watching films and trying to say something useful about them, I figured Fire and Fury would be fine without me. And anyway, I’m a contractor for the same company, so maybe I’m compromised?

Well, the hell with that. No one at Stuff has asked me to write this and the makers of the film have no idea it’s coming. I’ve never met or even talked to researcher and presenter Paula Penfold, researcher Louisa Cleave, or director Toby Longbottom. But as a central Wellington resident who went down to the protest several times, to listen to what was being said and to try to understand what was driving this group, I wanted to watch Fire and Fury anyway.

Penfold, Cleave and Longbottom have done something here that is far beyond a “news story” or standard reporting. This is a proper deep-dive, months-in-the-making, on a story that has maybe been unfolding in New Zealand for years.

It is hardwired into our brains to look for patterns and explanations – and it does not take much to make a human brain doubt what it is seeing – and then go looking for another pattern that seems to fit the “facts”.

We all do this, in small ways every day. I’m quite happy that I am one of those people who still wonders why a few grainy frames is all we have ever seen of a plane hitting the Pentagon – and concludes that “nope, we have not been told all the facts yet”.

So I get – I really do – how some well-meaning person can “do their own research” and start to wonder about a vaccine roll-out. For as long as vaccines have existed, there have been sceptics and protests against them. Science, sanity and the truth have always prevailed, even if it has sometimes taken decades.

But what we have seen since 2020 has been a cynical weaponisation of people’s fears and phobias, to bring together a coalition of people who no longer know what they believe – they just know that they are scared and angry.

The makers of Fire and Fury have got to the heart of this story in a brief, enthralling, disturbing and occasionally shocking film. Fire and Fury is barely an hour long – yet it achieves what many filmmakers have tried and failed to do – it explains the mechanism by which people fall into conspiracies and cults. And, crucially, it exposes a few of the cynics, narcissists and sociopaths among us who make their living by preying on those people.

Fire and Fury is a tough, brave and accessible piece of work that needs to be seen. Take an hour to watch it. It might change the way you see this place. And if your respect for the work that New Zealand journalists do has ever faltered, Fire and Fury will restore it immediately. Bravo.