Part 8: Bamboo
If you are new to this series, start here with Part 1.
After I found out about the affair, Olivia started writing a TV show about a third-party presidential candidate who combines California wellness and traditional environmentalism with MAGA-style nationalism. The candidate has a cult-like sway over his supporters and a scandalous past, including accusations of driving his former partner to commit suicide, or perhaps even murdering them.
The show’s main character, based on Olivia, whose middle name is Anne, is a twenty-something blonde Italian-American reporter from New Jersey named Anne Carro.
While the mainstream media treats the fringe presidential candidate and his eco-nationalist party as a joke, Anne is intrigued by him and his movement, and in the final scene of the pilot, she commits herself to something irreversible.
I’ll never forget the first time Olivia asked me to read her initial proposal for the show. Our relationship was, of course, rocky. It was September, a few weeks from Election Day, and we were both supposed to head out for a trip to cover the Trump-Biden presidential debate.
Bamboo had taken over the garden, and I had spent the weekend clearing every last stalk. I was sitting at the desk in our bedroom in Georgetown, looking out over the courtyard, pleased with what I had accomplished with the machete.
I was curious about how Olivia might be milking the drama of our personal lives for a shot at selling something to Hollywood. The lightly fictionalized Olivia character was haunted by an impending sense of doom. The character had watched with dread as some of her colleagues got caught in plagiarism scandals or inappropriate relationships, like the one “who was fucking an intelligence source thirty years her senior” and the magazine phenom “who had fucked, among many other sources, a cabinet secretary and a campaign operative without consequence” but was fired for “incorrectly attributing a Martin Luther King quote to Sonny Bono.”
Olivia’s character couldn’t shake the feeling that she would suffer a similar fate, even though she believed she wasn’t doing anything wrong. “[S]he always felt that she would fall victim to some kind of scandal of her own making, nonetheless,” Olivia wrote, “that her young career would flame out just as those of her predecessors had. She was careful, but she had a feeling that might not matter. She considered the evidence. When she thumbed through the files in her head, she understood that there were virtually no examples of a young female journalist becoming famous before the age of 25 and sustaining that momentum throughout an illustrious career.”
So she came up with a plan to prevent the inevitable implosion, or at least to control it: she would preemptively destroy her career—on her own terms.
“The point was, she knew collapse would come eventually, whether it was cinematic and the stuff of media lore or slow and sad and the stuff of silent acknowledgement,” Olivia wrote. “And more and more, she’d become attracted to the idea of self-immolation.”
Rather than waiting for the mob to tear her apart for whatever mistake she was sure she would one day make, “she could orchestrate the death and the resurrection herself, setting all the terms and playing instead of being played.”
As the idea evolved, Olivia pitched it to networks as a show that would answer the one burning question she always had about the people around Trump: “How do they manage to live with themselves?”
She wrote:
I’ve spent a lot of time wondering how far I could stray from my principles and live with myself, too. What would it take to convince myself that the pursuit of profit and proximity to power was actually righteous? Could I ever come up with a bullshit argument so good that I could bullshit myself most of the time? How many people around me could I bullshit, too? And once I was in the bunker, would I begin to really believe?
She summarized the show in one line: “This is a story about someone who defects from the mainstream media to become a propagandist for an authoritarian politician.”