By Andrej Nikolaidis, CdM columnist
We already knew that Aleksandar Vucic is a Drama Queen. But the fuss surrounding his arrival in Tivat exceeds even the standards of his tireless camp production.
So: he’s coming, then he’s not coming, then they tell him not to come because his life is in danger, then he comes anyway, and he’s going to tell them all a thing or two, then he arrives and says nothing at all. But because some of his henchmen were turned back at Tivat Airport, he responds by banning citizens of Montenegro from entering Serbia, including officials of the URA party. It is impossible not to see the ironic filigree work of history in this and take some pleasure in it—not least because this is the party that has done so much for the BIA, the Serbian Orthodox Church, and the Karadjordjevic dynasty. As well as for ecology and biodiversity. This is the dramaturgy of Hürrem, the slave girl who rises to power in the Turkish soap opera “Magnificent Century”.
Turkish and Latin American soap operas, like Vucic’s own productions, rely heavily on what is known as the “suspension of disbelief.” To believe in these series, we must eliminate doubt. Once we succeed, we can enjoy countless dramatic twists that, in what we call real life, no one in their right mind would swallow.
Vucic’s performances—such as the one in Tivat—are sometimes so bizarre that suspension of disbelief is not enough. What is required is the suspension of the entire brain. Vucic’s whole reign is Macbeth for zombies: Shakespeare for the braindead.
Back in the bad old 1990s, the golden age of pirated VHS tapes, I stumbled upon an episode of a Brazilian soap opera beside which even “Kassandra” possessed the dramatic rigor of a BBC production. It featured an eleven-year-old boy who was an alcoholic and suffered from cirrhosis of the liver. The villains—wearing straw hats and missing their teeth—capture him and kill him by forcing him to drink brandy from a two-liter bottle. That is the level of plausibility found in Vucic’s stories.
Yet the behaviour of Serbia’s president is not without precedent in classic Hollywood.
Enter “Sunset Boulevard”. Besides being the title of Billy Wilder’s film, Sunset Boulevard is also the name of the famous Hollywood street—and an entirely fitting name for the freshly paved but unfinished boulevard that runs from Budva to Tivat Airport.
What is “Sunset Boulevard” about? A silent-film star whose time has passed. Yet her servants maintain her narcissistic illusion. As a result, although she is utterly irrelevant, she behaves as though she were the biggest star in the world. The final scene of Wilder’s film—in which Gloria Swanson descends the staircase to be arrested for murder, while believing she is performing in the movie that will relaunch her career—is the mirror image of Vucic’s narcissistic narrative: “I am the biggest star at the gathering of European leaders; all the cameras and all the spotlights will be focused on me.”
Here you go:
Bravo, bravo, bravo! The audience is on its feet, and the applause echoes to the heavens.
But from a man who turned the Srebrenica killing field into his own stage, and who played the victim at the site of a genocide inspired by the ideology he espoused—as though the whole story were only about him—one could hardly have expected anything less.
There is a fitting song that captures all of the above:
Buddy, you shouldn’t have believed Hollywood.
(Columnists’ opinions and views do not necessarily reflect those of the CdM editorial staff)
