Directed by Zachary Cotler and Magdalena Zyzak
Written by Zachary Cotler
Starring Addison Timlin, TJ Kayama, Toshiji Takeshima
Runtime: 1 hour 31 minutes
Available to watch digitally August 27

by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

In the new film When I'm A Moth, a character named Hillary deals with the patriarchy on a minor scale and, as we can infer from the things she says, carbon monoxide leaks on a major one. "You shouldn't tease me," Hillary insists to a minority character conjured to teach her a lesson about herself. She speaks like somebody making fun of Jodie Foster in Silence of the Lambs, in a clipped, staggered cadence like she has to look each word up in the dictionary before she's comfortable using it.

We never learn Hillary's last name, but press materials identify her as "Hillary Rodham." Like the woman who would become Hillary Rodham Clinton, this Hillary is sliming fish in an Alaskan salmon factory the summer before law school. This Hillary is also from Chicago, went to a women's college, and has far-reaching plans to become a politician. But! When I'm A Moth opens with a disclaimer that reads "What follows is a work of fiction. So is the United States political situation. Any resemblance, in either fiction, to real persons, living or dead is coincidental."

And I don't want to presume anything about you. Maybe you're in middle school or maybe you experienced a political awakening during a Mind of Mencia marathon 15 years ago, but to me this reads like somebody trying to sound smart and cover up how little they know about anything. The United States political situation is fucked, but it's very real and if you aren't living with a massive cushion, holed up in a luxury condo without windows, you know people are dying out here. If I thought the U.S. political situation was fictional and that its impact on people couldn't hurt anybody, it's possible I, too, would think it was worth the time, money, electricity and default GarageBand ambient string loops necessary to make a film like When I'm A Moth.

Directors Zachary Cotler and Magdalena Zyzak (Cotler also wrote the screenplay) imagine Hillary (Addison Timlin) as looking like Evan Rachel Wood in Kajillionaire. She's ambitious and wants to get to the highest point of power a person can reach, but she's also self-aware enough to know you can't let people catch on to your ambitions. "I'll have to hide it," she says. "Maybe for decades." She's ready to sacrifice her private self for a career in politics, openly admitting her life will soon look like a shell. In some ways, we're watching the last moments of a soon-to-be public person's interior world, before it gets wiped away. And boy, does she let that world go out with a bang have tedious discussions you'd write if you skimmed the Waiting For Godot Wikipedia page.

Most of those discussions are with two older Japanese men. A sample conversation:

Hillary: "Are you fishermen?"

Japanese man: "Was."

Hillary: "Well then what are you now?"

Japanese man: "Nothing."

Hillary: "Nothing?"

Japanese man: "We are waiting."

Hillary: "For what, your next job?"

Japanese man: "For nothing."

These two guys invite Hillary back to the house they share, where she notices the film's main recurring visual motif: a broken mirror, which serves as a metaphor for running out of ideas. At the house, the men act shifty, mock Hillary and seem moments from attacking her. It feels like the Joyce Carol Oates story "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" is about to break out at any moment. The tension there came from how quickly the conclusion became an inevitability. Here, it's a prelude to nothing. By this point in the runtime, you know what kind of movie you're watching. She'll flirt with one of them and ultimately they'll go their separate ways. In her quieter moments, she'll wonder what would have happened had she stayed in Alaska with this guy who seems like he would strangle her.

The film has a built-in out, where I'm not allowed to frame the character as the real Hillary Clinton when I think about what I've watched. I can say it's off-putting, watching a centrist who's always been a centrist say she's going to change the world. And I can say how aggravating it is to hear this Hillary talk about not having a private life when, in the real world, I voted for Hillary and then watched her disappear on hiking trips and snipe at Bernie Sanders (though he campaigned more for her in 2016 than she campaigned for Barack Obama in 2008) while the world burned and the Left needed any kind of focused leadership. And so I can say that I've watched dozens of interviews with Clinton and stayed politically aware and Moth's Hillary is a fundamental misunderstanding of that person, one of the most famous people alive, and you could, perhaps rightly, say that Moth is its own thing, and that any insights it has about its character don't need to be insights about life. But that's also ridiculous. You can't come close to making an observation and then turn away from it. I have to believe that you would only make a movie if you had something to say. This is a real person who was really in this place in the summer of 1969. And if you can't back away from that, then the only point anybody makes in Moth is that Hillary Clinton had the Highlights Magazine version of a Before Sunrise encounter where she fucked a Japanese immigrant and felt sad afterward, and who had the flat affect of a person who could fall asleep skydiving without a parachute.

When Moth Hillary says she has "pretty extreme Marxist thoughts" but slips into talking like a Goldwater conservative, it could be an interesting moment. There's just no evidence the real Hillary ever wanted to upend things this dramatically. Moth Hillary calls Kissinger a war criminal and says she wants to crush him, and this is supposed to mean "look, Hillary sold out." Which, no shit. I heard JFK cheated on his wife, if we're swapping deeply buried political secrets. When I'm A Moth is both too generous to Hillary Clinton's politics and overly simplistic in its view of her as a human being, a total waste of time that doesn't give its own characters any depth, much less explicate the real people it references. Wait a minute. Something's coming to me. Yes, that's it. I just got the broken mirror metaphor. The way it points out fractured identities, the disparity between the way we see ourselves and what we see in the mirror... Maybe this movie is actually brilliant. I retract everything I said.