Be Like Fred Flarsky

I love Long Shot, a silly but gratifying movie starring Seth Rogen, Charlize Theron, and Ice Cube’s son (can’t remember his name but I like him).

I first saw it on an international flight in late 2019—my last trip before Covid popped.

It was a crazy time.

I was in the middle of writing Pacific Power Paradox and coming to grips with the unreality of US narratives about itself in Asia. The book that would become Grand Strategies of the Left was already gestating; I was writing chunks of it in parallel with the other one (not advisable stress-wise). And I was busy doing policy ninja shit on behalf of the Democratic presidential campaigns (I can’t even recall which one I was on at that moment, but they all blurred together anyway).

Something about watching movies on planes actually makes me more emotionally invested. Not sure what that’s about.

Anyway, Long Shot—a political romantic comedy—got me. Seth Rogen’s character, Fred Flarsky, is an idealistic bohemian journalist who lives by his political convictions. A loser by conventional standards, but also a liberated soul. Surface-level lazy, but actually just principled.

The Secretary of State, Charlize Theron, is a striving, do-gooder pragmatist and the model of professional success. The twist is that she had been Fred’s babysitter in high school, and when they run into each other decades later, sparks fly after she hires him to write jokes for her political speeches.

Their odd-couple romance is hilarious. And the clashing of their worlds is fun in all the right ways. The whole thing reminded me of navigating the Obama years, where I would show up early to work at the Pentagon in baggy hip-hop clothes, then have to change into a skinny suit for morning meetings. You could say both characters represent different sides of me, but there’s no doubt: Over time, I’ve become aspirationally Fred Flarsky.

The opening scene of the movie establishes Fred as someone willing to sacrifice for his ideals—he infiltrates a neo-Nazi group for a story that would expose them, but he’s forced to jump out a window in the middle of getting a swastika tattoo when they discover he’s a jew. As he narrowly escapes, he limps away shouting, “Jews win this round, mother fuckers!”

Hell yeah.

When Charlize Theron’s character is reviewing Fred’s (Seth Rogen’s) journalism for the Brooklyn Advocate, she’s bemused by the titles of the articles on her iPad: “Fuck You Exxon” and “The Two Party System Can Suck a Dick (Actually Two Dicks).”

Again, hell yeah.

Then there’s a scene where Fred has written some lines for Charlize’s upcoming speech. In the initial draft, Fred’s line for her is:

With every fracking drill thrust, we are literally butt-fucking Mother Earth.

Just imagining a Secretary of State saying that had me rolling. Charlize explains that he needs to tone it down, and that a woman can’t be hyperbolic without being thought of as hysterical. So their dialectic—pathos versus logos, radical versus buttoned up—yields a nice alchemy.

But that line—”With every fracking drill thrust, we are literally butt-fucking Mother Earth”—has stuck with me. So has the Fred Flarsky character.

Since Long Shot, when I write, I sometimes find myself asking whether I’m voicing the same truth as the Fred Flarsky archetype. I can dial back the vulgarity (most of the time), but the analysis must retain emotional truth.

So yeah, the world would be a lot better if we all tried to be a little more like Fred Flarsky. ✌️