Abstract
On June 16, 2015, Donald Trump Sr. officially announced his candidacy for president of the United States. Whatever the ultimate outcome of this announcement and his run, his presence in the media flourished as he pulled into an early lead as frontrunner for the Republican Party nomination. While a flurry of attention in the American media has been paid to his controversial immigration stance, his less-than-progressive comments about women, his campaign spending and self-finance, and the viability of translating his position from businessman to politician, the resolution of his controversial golf course effort in Balmedie, Aberdeen, in Scotland still occupied the consciousness of those Scottish citizens impacted by the course. Filmmaker Anthony Baxter follows up on those residents in his film A Dangerous Game, sequel to You’ve Been Trumped (2012).
You’ve Been Trumped (2012), a film chronicling the struggle by some Aberdeen residents, mostly those geographically adjacent to the proposed golf course and represented most prominently by local man Michael Forbes, was reviewed previously in Teaching Sociology (Doughtery 2015). A Dangerous Game opens with a flyover scanning the landscape of those Aberdeen residents, visually showcasing anti-Trump graffiti gracing a local building. The film alerts viewers that just a few days after the golf course opened, You’ve Been Trumped premiered, and this knowledge sets off the narrative of A Dangerous Game. The film provides ample follow-up with the Aberdeen residents post–Trump’s golf course; chronicles Trump’s push for, and eventual abandonment of, a second golf course in Scotland; and reaches a crescendo when Baxter is able to interview Trump face-to-face, something Trump denied him for You’ve Been Trumped. The film also features interview discussions with Donald Trump Jr.
In the narrative attention given to the Trump/Aberdeen story line, viewers find out some important things. Forbes, the most outspoken local Aberdeen fixture from You’ve Been Trumped, is awarded a prestigious Spirit of Scotland Award in 2012. He and his now 90-year-old mother struggle intermittently with the lack of running water, presumably because of the mechanics of the golf course. The film is also able to visually document some piled-up debris and garbage on the Trump golf course properties that resemble very much the backyard possessions of Forbes that Trump so vividly decried in You’ve Been Trumped.
As the film unfolds, it becomes much more than a chronological follow-up to the original story. In this sense, it easily stands as its own film, albeit one an instructor may want to preface with a short description of the struggles surrounding the Aberdeen golf course before showing it in class. Even as the film revolves around the hyperbole of Trump, it takes on a much greater endeavor by showing how golf courses generally challenge ecosystems, especially in terms of the water needed to sustain them. But the film is not adamantly antigolf; its appeal is born of a much more nuanced portrayal of economic and gender disparities found in the game and the question of whether or not land and resources should be used for the common good of most people or to satisfy the pleasures of a privileged elite, and it gives insight into the operations of power elites and notably corrupted political system in and outside of the United States.
Viewers get a sense of the layered nature of the film toward the beginning, when the filmmaker interviews his uncle, Denis Rice, as he is playing golf on a Scottish course 40 miles south of Trump’s Aberdeen course. While we learn that this course used the natural contours of the land (a sharp contrast to the drastic modifications necessary to the once-protected dunes where the Aberdeen course is located), viewers also find that the filmmaker’s grandmother loved to golf and that the course that Rice is playing on has been used for some 450 years. As Rice introduces Baxter to a passerby and boasts that his nephew made “the Trump film,” viewers get the sense of an almost wistful nostalgia for what golf might be outside of the vices of social inequality and capitalist-driven environmental damage. This theme resonates at points throughout the film as viewers learn that Rice collects golf balls and auctions them, with proceeds going to charity. At the end of the film, viewers find out that Rice has collected his 100,000th golf ball.
Baxter attempts to provide an overview of damages wrought by golf courses worldwide by showcasing how rapid economic expansion in China is displayed through a growing Chinese appetite for “illegal” golf courses, how water reservoirs in New Jersey and Nevada are pushed to the limits by golf, and how seemingly nonsensical a Tiger Woods–designed golf course in Dubai would be given the desert landscape and topography of the region. At the end of the film, we learn that the Tiger Woods course has been scrapped, but since this notation in the film, Woods and Trump have teamed up to reclaim the site (Passov 2014; Roberts 2015), with the intent to open in 2017. In discussing these environmental issues, Baxter interviews an impressive array of folks, including environmental lawyer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and environmental activists/actor Alec Baldwin. An especially moving moment in the film takes place when Baxter is touring the golf attractions at Lake Las Vegas in Henderson, Nevada, and the visual and visceral realities of the economic failures of the regional courses are unavoidable. Even Baxter’s tour guide mentions that he dislikes going past the haunted remnants of the unfulfilled economic and tourist successes that the courses had promised, calling to mind the statistic that for almost the past successive 10 years, more golf courses have closed than opened in the United States (Roberts 2015).
Notwithstanding the examples given above, Baxter’s main story of political and social inequality, the power elite, and the successes and failures of a social movement comes from the ample screen time given to the efforts of citizens of the village of Dubrovnik in Croatia, where opposition to a proposed golf course is very high. Developers have identified a spot where the rocky terrain overlooks a beautiful and scenic landscape, but as the mayor of Dubrovnik says, when Baxter interviews him, the land had been used just for “peasants” and “animals,” even going as far as to say this use amounts to “nothing.” The citizens marshal an amazingly successful social movement, garnering enough signatures to bring a referendum vote on the golf course. The mayor subsequently advises people to abstain from voting in the referendum, and even when the course is defeated by a large majority, he ignores the results and proceeds with the planned course anyway. The parallels in the movie are clear between the rise and fall of citizen action in Croatia, Scotland, and the United States and provide an opportunity to flush out several conceptual discussions in class, namely, regarding the power elite and the connection of politics to economic power and social inequality but also the ways in which social movements can simultaneously succeed and fail.
The film also, albeit briefly, raises the issue of gender inequity within golf when Baxter visits the Professional Golfers’ Association of America (PGA) Expo in Las Vegas. The film shows him weaving through vendors, corporate representatives, and entrepreneurs, being shown everything from golf mobile apps to an infant being preened for her future as a golfer through the ownership of her own putter. Finally, Baxter, sitting in a question-and-answer session at a PGA technology symposium, after mentioning that his mother was a big golfer, asks the panelists by observing that the room is 98 percent male if that might be problematic. The panelists uncomfortably defer the answer and, at least as is shown in the film, make no real attempt to address the concern. This inequity within the sport itself can be enlarged through class discussion and supplementation to other issues of access within the sport. Trump’s own controversial comments on economic class and golf present a good starting point. In 2015, Trump said, “Let golf be elitist. When I say ‘aspire,’ that’s a positive word. Let people work hard and aspire to someday be able to play golf. To afford to play it. They’re trying to teach golf to people who will never be able to really play it” (Roberts 2015). And to put some veracity behind these comments, Trump now runs the most expensive public golf course in the United States (18 rounds on the weekend cost New York City adult residents $169): Trump Golf Links at Ferry Point in the Bronx, which opened on May 26, 2015 (French 2015). The very existence of this course, in New York’s poorest borough, is the result of a decades-old proposal by urban planner and renewal enthusiast Robert Moses. The land, formerly a virtual wasteland and dump, was the site of a beleaguered golf course attempt, which skyrocketed in cost and was recently ushered into completion with Trump’s aid (French 2015).
At filming for A Dangerous Game, Trump Golf Links at Ferry Point was not yet opened. Still, the intersections between sources of privilege and disadvantage posited in the film and by the course could create a nice discussion of the sport of golf as an industry and a capitalist institution. In addition, other conversation starters include the role of women in the sport, the economic elitism enshrined in some of the facets of the sport, and the racial context posed in the United States by the operation of a course in a neighborhood with race and class disparities making it difficult for many of the neighborhood’s own residents to play there.
While the film provides material for several topics and courses, as discussed here, perhaps the biggest drawback of the film is also its most notable feature: Trump himself. The film uses effective imagery toward the end when, after pulling out of plans for a second golf course in Scotland, Trump acquires a golf resort on the west coast of Ireland. Using side-by-side panels, Baxter demonstrates how the pomp and circumstance of the Trump family’s arrival in Scotland and Ireland are virtually mirror images. While telling the viewer that the vast majority of promised jobs affiliated with the golf course in Scotland never materialized, Baxter also highlights footage of Irish politicians venerating the Trump promise of economic development. The symbolism is quite powerful. But so is the iconography of Trump. Though the film offers a rich take on the deep environmental, political, social movement, and social inequality narratives, the draw and power of Trump cannot be readily ignored, and this could be increasingly problematic in classes. If and how Trump gains political traction moving forward might dictate the feasibility of using the film in class, as students often have an extremely difficult time recusing their own political views if they feel they are being challenged, even if unintentionally, by the material or instructor.