In 1992, a young man named Doug Lain decided to run a goldfish for president. Dr. Philip B. Carp, a rubber fish, was the candidate of the Random Surrealist Party, which Lain had also invented. Just old enough to vote in his first presidential election, Lain was outraged by the Gulf War and a political system that seemed to offer up candidates with few discernible differences. The answer to such absurdity was, to him, to become more absurd still. And so he not only wrote the name of his toy goldfish on the ballot line, but also campaigned for it, printing pamphlets at Kinko’s and urging people to vote “surrealist.”
Lain, now in his fifties, reflects on his youthful stunt in the opening of The Last Election, a new documentary from Sublation Media. The idea, he explains, “was to produce a joke so shocking, funny, or strange that it might somehow change everyone’s minds and start a revolution.” Needless to say, the revolution never came, and sifting through newspaper archives of the time it seems not to have made a blip on the historical radar. But it was a sign of things to come. Absurd, jokey rejection of existing institutions has become a familiar mode of political engagement, as has Lain’s youthful disregard for what happens if the rejection succeeds.
The Last Election, centering on the 2024 presidential contest, is equal parts Louis Theroux, Adam Curtis, and ’80s vaporwave. An open-ended exploration of a particular moment in American political culture, it reveals the way political rebellion has become the pervasive style of politics, even as the causes it advances are often unclear. We watch as bored-looking attendees of the Democratic National Convention say things like, “This is Obama-era um, politics now. Well, first African American President, male, now we’re fixing to have the first African American female. So… I’m excited” in unintentionally comedic monotone. Meanwhile, outside the convention, probably the most articulate interviewee delivers a rousing monologue about the uselessness of the Democrats in whiteface, while holding a bloodied baby doll she plans to hang from her genitals. The absurdity that Lain once sought to highlight with surrealist provocation now seems to need no embellishment.