Watch Richard Linklater’s Anti-Ted Cruz Political Ads: The Texas Director Versus the Texas Senator

If you think of Texas film­mak­ers, Richard Lin­klater sure­ly comes to mind right away. Despite the suc­cess and acclaim he has steadi­ly gar­nered over the past three decades, the direc­tor of Slack­er, Dazed and Con­fused, Boy­hood, and the Before tril­o­gy remains res­olute­ly based in Austin, and even con­tin­ues to set many of his movies in his home state. If you think of Texas politi­cians, can you pos­si­bly keep Ted Cruz from com­ing to mind? The state’s junior sen­a­tor has remained a fix­ture on the high­est-pro­file Amer­i­can polit­i­cal scene since at least his can­di­da­cy in the Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial pri­maries of 2016. Lin­klater and Cruz’s fan bases might not over­lap much, and giv­en Texas’ famous­ly enor­mous size, the men them­selves may nev­er have run into each oth­er before. But now, in the form of polit­i­cal adver­tise­ments, their worlds have col­lid­ed.

Since his rise to promi­nence, Cruz has suf­fered some­thing of an image prob­lem. (“Cruz may be unique among politi­cians any­where in that every men­tion of his name is always accom­pa­nied by remarks on his loathe­some­ness,” as essay­ist Eliot Wein­berg­er puts it.) His cam­paign in the run-up to the 2018 midterm elec­tions has attempt­ed to cor­rect that prob­lem with the slo­gan “Tough as Texas,” but not every Tex­an has accept­ed its por­tray­al of the can­di­date as a macho, no-non­sense son of the Lone Star State.

Cer­tain­ly Lin­klater seems to have had trou­ble swal­low­ing it, see­ing as he’s direct­ed a cou­ple of video ads for the unam­bigu­ous­ly named polit­i­cal action com­mit­tee Fire Ted Cruz. Both fea­ture actor Son­ny Carl Davis, seem­ing­ly stay­ing in the char­ac­ter he played in Bernie, one of Lin­klater’s most thor­ough­ly Tex­an pic­tures. In them he airs the kind of crit­i­cisms of Cruz one might imag­ine com­ing from the mouth of the straight-talk­ing and some­what ornery Texas every­man.

In Lin­klater’s first anti-Cruz spot, Davis ques­tions whether some­one who so pub­licly allies him­self with a pres­i­dent who insult­ed him so vicious­ly dur­ing the last elec­tion has tru­ly demon­strat­ed a Texas-grade tough­ness (not that he puts it quite that way). The sec­ond moves on to a ter­ri­to­ry even more suit­ed to fight­in’ words: cheese­burg­ers. It seems that Cruz recent­ly called his elec­tion rival Beto O’Rourke a “Triple Meat Whataburg­er lib­er­al who is out of touch with Texas val­ues.” But to the mind of Davis’ char­ac­ter, such a tone-deaf insult to as beloved a Texas insti­tu­tion as Whataburg­er — espe­cial­ly from a man who has also praised the “lit­tle burg­ers” of White Cas­tle — can­not stand. Can the pow­er of such ridicule, har­nessed to the pow­er of cin­e­ma, unseat a sen­a­tor? We’ll have to wait until Novem­ber to find out, but if I were Cruz, I would­n’t exact­ly be look­ing for­ward to what Lin­klater comes up with next.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Richard Lin­klater (Slack­er, Dazed and Con­fused, Boy­hood) Tells Sto­ries with Time: Six Video Essays

Scenes from Wak­ing Life, Richard Linklater’s Philo­soph­i­cal, Fea­ture-Length Ani­mat­ed Film (2001)

Archive of 35,000 TV Polit­i­cal Ads Launched, Cre­at­ing a Bad­ly Need­ed Way to Hold Politi­cians Account­able

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.