Fiction can’t always offer solutions.
Let's start off with a brief aside on Substack that fits today's blog. And a bit by Robert Reich (America's Gestapo What you can do to stop ICE's mayhem).
But sometimes, when real-world systems feel frozen or compromised, fiction can offer something else: catharsis, clarity, and a sense that accountability is still imaginable. Even if only provisionally. Even if only emotionally.
What if we produced a film for those moments when reality offers no exit?
Not a solution, perhaps—but a catharsis. And don't we need THAT about now? Not justice as spectacle, but accountability as inevitability. A film that imagines America’s return not through force, but through the quiet failure of power to control one last room.
Who would ever produce such a film?
Produced by Adam McKay and Plan B
Distributed by HBO or A24
Directed by someone cold and precise (Soderbergh, or a Chernobyl-type director)
Title? The Room He Couldn't Own
Or just: Jurisdiction
Here's another one on Substack.
At its best, political fiction doesn’t rewrite reality. It interrogates it. It asks what should be possible when what is possible feels intolerably narrow. And occasionally, it provides a kind of hopeful pressure release, not by pretending everything works, but by reminding us that power is not metaphysical. It has limits. It depends on rules, consent, and belief.
That’s the space this film occupies.
The Premise
The story unfolds at the height of a president’s abuses of power. Not after an election. Not following a resignation. Not once the damage has already been absorbed and normalized.
Right in the middle of it.
International outrage is loud but legally stalled. Domestic institutions are compromised or paralyzed. Assassination is unthinkable. Coups are off the table. The question isn’t what people want, but what is still lawful, legitimate, and believable.
The twist is not force.
The twist is hubris.
The Invitation
The president, publicly defiant, demands an international platform to “defend himself.” He frames it as transparency. As courage. As dominance. He mocks the idea that any institution could restrain him.
An international court—one bound by procedure, not theatrics—accepts the demand.
Not to try him.
Not to confront him.
Simply to let him speak.
The invitation is careful, bureaucratic, almost dull. No immunity is offered. No trap is announced. Just a microphone, a room, and a reminder that law does not argue with power—it waits.
Against the advice of aides and lawyers, he goes.
Because he believes the rules bend.
Because they always have.
Jurisdiction, Not Justice Theater
What the film understands—and treats with restraint—is that legitimacy matters more than spectacle.
The arrest does not happen onstage.
There are no weapons drawn.
No dramatic struggle.
After the speech, in a private room, local authorities calmly inform him that he is now subject to the court’s jurisdiction. The warrant existed before he arrived. The law attached the moment he set foot on foreign soil. Due process begins now.
There is no betrayal.
Only consequences.
And for the first time, power encounters a room it does not own.
Why This Works as Fiction (and Why It Matters)
This story doesn’t pretend international law is omnipotent. It doesn’t fantasize about NATO interventions or heroic coups. It doesn’t ask audiences to believe the world suddenly became morally unified.
Instead, it offers a smaller, sharper truth:
Power fails when it overestimates itself.
The catharsis comes not from punishment, but from interruption. From the idea that abuse does not always get to complete its arc uninterrupted. That even at its peak, authority can be halted by process rather than violence.
That’s a hopeful feeling—even if it isn’t a blueprint.
What the Film Leaves Behind
The final image is not a verdict.
It’s paperwork.
A clerk stamping a form.
A motorcade leaving without its principal.
The noise outside continuing, suddenly irrelevant.
The film doesn’t claim this is how reality will work.
It suggests this is how reality could work, if we remembered that power depends on our belief that it is untouchable.
What's the saddest part of this film concept? That it might take an external agent to fix this Trump issue when we should have recognized the problem and fixed it ourselves, long before now.
Fiction can’t fix the world.
But sometimes it can remind us that inevitability is a lie.
And sometimes, that’s enough to breathe again.
Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!
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