Sarah Palin Makes Movie Featuring Obscenities, Zebras

What do you do when higher-ups in your party have largely dismissed you, and many people have stopped talking about you as a serious presidential contender? If you’re Sarah Palin, the answer is obvious: make a movie.

According to Scott Conroy of Real Clear Politics, Palin approached conservative director Stephen K. Bannon to ask him to undertake a project “extolling Palin’s governorship and laying to rest lingering questions about her controversial decision to resign from office with a year-and-a-half left in her first term.” Bannon enthusiastically agreed, and the result is The Undefeated, a feature-length film that will premier in Iowa next month. Conroy got to see a rough cut of the film, and here are some highlights:

Historical context

Rife with religious metaphor and unmistakable allusions to Palin as a Joan of Arc-like figure, “The Undefeated” echoes Palin’s “Going Rogue” in its tidy division of the world between the heroes who are on her side and the villains who seek to thwart her at every turn.

Palin’s moving reminiscences on the Exxon Valdez spill

“I hadn’t yet envisioned running for elected office,” Palin says in the audio taken from “Going Rogue,” as images of the environmental disaster unfold on the screen. “But looking back, I could see that tragedy planted a seed in me. If I ever had a chance to serve my fellow citizens, I would do so.”

Corporate fat cats

As the documentary transitions to Palin’s ascent to statewide office, it dramatizes the culture of corruption that permeated Alaska, with images of fat men smoking cigars in dark rooms […]

Sophisticated visual metaphors

Bannon dramatizes the theme of Palin’s persecution at the hands of her enemies in the media and both political parties, a notion the former governor has long embraced. Images of lions killing a zebra and a dead medieval soldier with an arrow sticking in his back dramatize the ethics complaints filed by obscure Alaskan citizens, which Palin has cited as the primary reason for her sudden resignation in July of 2009.

A “too hot for TV” version

Bannon intends to release two versions of the film. An unrated edition will contain some obscene anti-Palin language and imagery, while the other is targeted to a general audience and will seek a PG-13 rating from the Motion Picture Association of America.

Will Sarah Palin: The Movie be an effective antidote to Frank Bailey’s anti-Palin tell-all, or the widespread perception that she’s a quitter? It’s too soon to tell, but the film is of a piece with her general strategy of bombarding us with extended campaign ads in a variety of media (TV, books, Facebook) and deriding anything else as “gotcha” journalism. With an upcoming film and her current Fox News gig, Sarah Palin is poised to become more overexposed than the cast of Jersey Shore. Too bad she has just as few ideas.