The Regime Recap: Slush Funds in Belize

The lush palace gardens where kitchen staff dig for soil at the opening of this episode of The Regime look uncannily like the greenery that lines the yard of Rudolf Höss’s estate in Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, and both tease at the grimmer reality outside the grounds. In Glazer’s film, the Hösses’ property abuts the walls of Auschwitz, where Rudolf gets a short commute to his job as an efficient mass murderer while his wife, along with a staff of enslaved Jews, plays the role of impeccable mother and homemaker. That cognitive dissonance is what gives the film its power. Though The Regime doesn’t go nearly as far in suggesting life outside the palace, we can only assume that a peasant class full of miners and sugar-beet farmers doesn’t have it great.

It’s possible that Herbert Zubak’s folk diet — which this night consists of “three distinct soils from three distinct local ecosystems,” along with boiled and salted dishes that might otherwise be sautéed — is a form of revenge, a devious prank on the country’s elite. Or maybe we should take him at his word and believe that it’s all perfectly healthy because dirt is what his people would eat when they’re hungry. Either way, “The Heroes’ Banquet” strongly suggests that Zubak is attempting a revolution from within, exploiting the suggestibility of a weak chancellor to win justice for the people outside the walls. He isn’t a particularly shrewd political thinker, but the satirical thrust of this series makes it clear that he doesn’t have to be. His minders are too busy digging their own graves.

Last week’s episode ended with the culmination of a profoundly stupid plan to put a wedge between Elena and Zubak by elevating Zubak to mythic status. The logic seemed to be that Elena’s ego would lead her to become disenchanted with her new adviser’s elevated status as a descendant of “the Foundling.” While that may have been the case, the country’s oligarchs have unwittingly turned this volatile impostor into a folk hero whose power may not diminish even outside the chancellor’s sphere of influence. Elena has relied on her special relationship with “the people” to keep her in power, along with her special relationship with the United States, which wants access to her cobalt mines. Zubak has already helped sever ties with the Americans, and he could now do likewise with the people, too. The Foundling certainly sounds like a more imposing leader in the long term than the country’s autocrat-of-the-day, right?

The further The Regime has gotten away from its stellar premiere, the harder it’s becoming to see the sum of all this palace intrigue, but the show remains fitfully funny as a clever-for-its-own-sake political satire. And “The Heroes’ Banquet” does add some dimension to the deranged Zubak, who may be a butcher and a thug but seems intent on seeking some form of justice for the common person. It seems highly unlikely that the policy of “land reform” came from Elena herself, but rather it was incepted by Zubak, who declares that “greed and foreign money must be stricken from our national character” and the way to do that is the transference of private property from elite landowners to the working classes. That’s a dramatic agenda item for a regime that exists entirely to exploit the working classes for wealth, but Zubak is a scary guy and seems capable of pushing it through brute force alone.

You know who doesn’t like the transference of private property from elite landowners? The elite landowners. And so Nicky and the oligarchs try a comically pained attempt to deflect the land-reform plan while still showing deference to Zubak, which for one Cabinet member involves wearing traditional garb that makes him look like “an effete goat-herder.” But such gestures are meaningless to Zubak, who only respects power and now feels completely emboldened to use it exclusively. His influence over Elena has lately turned into emotional terrorism, having softened her up on a ruinous diet that has made her punchy from sleep deprivation.

In one scene, Zubak has the nerve to ask where all the money’s gone, and Elena answers him, perhaps not for the first time: “Slush funds in Belize,” she says. “State bank, the holding company. A billion or more in assets. My name, Nicky’s name through our partners. Thousands, thousands of fucking strings of money, purloined from local businesses, farms, pension funds. Just shit I can’t ever unravel.” The Regime is asking a lot of its audience to have us accept that Elena might nod her head at a populist revolution from within her own government, given her role as a fake populist stealing money from the people. At the same time, she throws a birthday party for her father’s year-old corpse, so she’s not always thinking that clearly.

The episode builds to a moment when Zubak finally snaps and takes out his aggression on Elena, who’d been starting to grow tired of his presence. She calls him “big baby ox man,” and he literally goes for her throat before beating the hell out of poor Bartos. And thus, the Foundling’s time at the seat of power comes to an abrupt and ignominious end, but Elena and the oligarchs have all, in their own ways, created a monster who has the Frankenstein-like potential to wreak havoc in the countryside. Perhaps Elena’s erratic move to annex the Faban Corridor, a swath of sovereign mountainous land, will give him strength, too. A revolution from within might not be possible for a charmless brute like Zubak, but he’s a ready-made icon on the outside.

Spores

• Nicky, of all people, has the right take on Elena’s new reforms: “You can’t be Robin Hood and a king at the same time. You can’t give the country back while continuing to stash half of it in your purse.”

• The news that Elena’s isolationist policies have shrunk her profile in American media is devastating for her, just as it is to American politicians who can’t be on TV all the time.

• Pity high-end kitchen staff forced to replace French dishes with folk cuisine: “My condolences to your whisks,” quips Agnes.

• “If one had a summer cottage at Lake Ober, something like that wouldn’t be redistributed, would it?”

• “Did you ask the United States if they thought through the possible risks of their exploits in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Indonesia, Central America, every corner of the world?” Again, Elena’s keen understanding of how the world works, expressed by her annoyance over the reaction to the Fabian annexation, conflicts with the vapidness the show demands of her much of the time.

• “There once was a man so astounding / whose job was so very confounding / He lived at the palace and tugged on his phallus / and shouted ‘My granddad’s the Foundling.’” Zubak does not get through the banquet un-zinged.