Beware. This documentary begins with prophecy but ends with propaganda

Can You Hear Me Now? opens with some broad, but compelling questions: “Why do you believe what you believe?” as well as “What do you believe about prophets?”

To answer this question, the film recruits a number of figures, some who claim to have the gift of prophecy and others who can talk engagingly on it, most notably, Charlie Kirk, in an interview filmed just two weeks before his assassination.

“It’s very real”, Kirk tells the interviewer. “I’ve seen it work. Not only work, I’ve seen it transform lives. And some people absolutely have the gift of prophecy”.

The gift of prophecy, or extra biblical words from God, holds a key place in evangelical tradition. If you receive a prophecy, it can serve as a word of encouragement for others, and you can absolutely take a prophecy and make it a core belief in your own life; the problem comes when you try to enforce that belief on others.

Hidden agendas

Unfortunately, the film doesn’t seem particularly interested in tackling that problem. For the most part, the first third of the film is quite innocuous and you quickly begin to wonder whether such nebulous subject matter can really sustain 95 minutes. So it’s almost a relief around a third of the way in when the film pivots quite dramatically. 

Rather than make himself invisible, filmmaker Matthew Thayer takes centre stage in his own film. His voiceover tells us, “I was introduced to a few people others have called prophets” before showing us author Andrew Whalen.

Whalen goes on to tell us about having a dream after meeting then senator Obama: “I saw him as the president of the United States for two terms in 2008, 2012 and in the dream it was very concerning because I saw that during the course of his presidency, America began to see that he was someone completely different than who he had led them to believe he was.”

What follows is a montage of misleading clips that strongly imply that Obama is secretly a Muslim and that he is trying to oppress Christianity in America. They never make these accusations outright, instead, just showing a series of out of context sound bites for people to interpret. It’s as if their legal team has shown them how to go right up to the line, but not technically cross it.

In Can You Hear Me Now? Christians are urged to take a man who is not fit to serve in the kids’ ministry, and give him the nuclear launch codes

That’s when it becomes clear that this film is a bait and switch. It says it’s about prophecy, but from this point on, the film quickly devolves into a series of Christian nationalism talking points.

Prophecy and propaganda

Prior to this film, Thayer made the documentary The Trump I Know, and from his subject, he has clearly learned the ‘fire hydrant of falsehoods’ tactic very well, but he seems to have forgotten that we live in a world where your audience can fact check you without leaving the sofa.

Take one innocuous, politically neutral example from Charlie Kirk, where he tells us: “The idea of liberty was so important to God; in Leviticus 25:19, I believe, it not only says; ‘proclaim liberty throughout the land of which you are in’ – the founding fathers loved it so much they put that on the Liberty Bell” [sic].

Here’s the problem – the creation of the Liberty Bell precedes the signing of the Declaration of Independence by nearly 25 years! Alexander Hamilton, one of the most popular founding fathers, was not even born when those words were inscribed on the bell. If you heard someone make this mistake in conversation, you might let it go. The fact that producers must have known they had verifiably false information in this film, yet still, during the months of post-production, chose to keep it in, tells you that truth is not a priority for this film.

Can You Hear Me Now? is nothing more than a slick, glossy insult to your intelligence.

Neither is moral character for that matter. Surely, when you have to turn to alleged sex offender Russell Brand to speak your points, you must know you’ve lost the argument? But this ability to ignore moral failings leads us to the inevitable elephant in the room of this documentary: Trump.

A large number of American evangelicals have had to tie themselves in knots trying to justify their support of Donald J Trump, who, amongst other things, was found liable for sexually abusing writer E Jean Carroll.

The film even asks, how could a man like this “be the man that God anoints?”, at which point, the film detours into an animated history lesson of Cyrus the Great, a sixth-century BC Persian emperor who, despite not being Jewish, freed the Jewish people from their captivity in Babylon. The implication is that Trump, while not being Christian, will do great things for a ‘Christian’ nation.

This is what one assumes is the whole point of this film. All the raging against mask mandates, the strawman arguments about Christians not being allowed to speak in the public square and so forth. The message is: don’t question God’s anointed. Or as Andrew Whalen puts it: “You’re not allowed to disqualify who I say I’m putting my hand on”. In this way, Christians are urged to take a man who is not fit to serve in the kids’ ministry, and give him the nuclear launch codes. This is not a documentary. This is propaganda, at its absolute worst.

In documentary filmmaking, what you leave out can be as telling as what you put in. Throughout the whole film, there is not one reference to Donald Trump having sex with a porn star four months after his wife gave birth. There are no references to his uncomfortably close relationship with deceased convicted paedophile, Jeffrey Epstein. ‘Editorial balance’ is clearly not a phrase in Matthew Thayer’s lexicon.

While it does illustrate some key concepts with some visual panache, Can You Hear Me Now? is nothing more than a slick, glossy insult to your intelligence.

Can you hear me now? is available for pre-order here