“The Regime” is a silly show with a deadly serious point
leader of an unnamed country in central Europe, Elena Vernham is carried around her palace in a mobile oxygen chamber. She chats with her father’s embalmed corpse. In Kate Winslet’s star turn, her lisping petulance recalls Veruca Salt, the spoiled brat in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”. Elena’s antics, amours and annexations are chronicled in “The Regime”, a satiricalshow that makes serious points about autocracy.
Because of his role in a massacre, which nobody lets him forget, his nickname is “the Butcher”. This is the show’s first insight: Herbert is promoted not in spite of his disgrace but because of it. Elena, like other autocrats, knows that compromised people are pliable. Systems like hers rely on mutual blackmail, whereby every courtier has dirt on all the others; an honest person is useless.
The goal is not to make anyone believe in such fantasies and lies: it is to force underlings to swallow them, so underlining the autocrat’s power. You are not meant to believe the Kremlin’s denial that it killed Alexei Navalny in Russia’s gulag. If you did, the murder’s intimidating message would be blunted. The aim is to add intellectual insult to lethal injury.
“They love to see America punched in the mouth,” an apparatchik says of his compatriots. As in many smallish countries, Elena oscillates between courting and resenting American involvement. She tries to play Washington off against Beijing and launches half-baked bids for autarky. Yet even as she denounces America she enjoys its pop culture, watching “Friends” over dinner, rather as Bashar Assad clung to his iTunes account as Syria imploded.
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