Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein in a remake of The Big Clock

A few times on the blog we’ve referred to the classic noir film, The Big Clock, in which the hero is caught in a compromising position, witnesses a murder, and then is tasked by his boss with tracking down the only witness to the crime–so he’s in the difficult position of hunting himself. This was remade in the 80s with Kevin Costner as No Way Out, and that was good too.

When this came up before, Jessica proposed a setting for a hypothetical re-remake:

Lost in Preregistration: Bill Murray plays a fading figure in the open science movement, who, in the midst of a midlife crisis, must go to Tokyo to track down his lost preregistration. He finds it, but it turns out it’s written in Egyptian cuneiform. He befriends a recently graduated psychology B.A., played by a young Francesca Gino, who helps him reconstruct a version of the preplanned analysis.

Expand it a bit and it could be on a double-bill with Don’t Call Me Shirley, Mr. Feynman!

“An uplifting double-feature matinee celebrating women’s contributions to science.”

Anyway, I was thinking about The Big Clock plot in the context of Jeffrey Epstein, that notorious financier, sex criminal, and patron of junk science. As is well known, Epstein was a good friend of Donald Trump in years past, they shared an interest in young female companionship, and then after Epstein was finally held to account for his crimes, he mysteriously died in a Federal prison cell–during Trump’s earlier term as president.

That’s not the real mystery, though.

The real mystery is why, given all this, Trump and his political allies kept banging on the Epstein story for years, pushing Epstein conspiracy theories, etc. Given Trump’s closeness to the man, along with one of Trump’s appointees having let Epstein off easy in his first prosecution, and other Trump appointees being on the watch when Epstein was allowed to kill himself, you’d think that the Epstein case would be the last thing that Trump supporters would want to talk about. Sure, Epstein also had connections to Democrats such as Bill Clinton and Alan Dershowitz, but Trump was by far the biggest currently active political figure with a close Epstein connection.

And this brings me to the plot of The Big Clock. Given Trump’s closeness to Epstein, and given all the controversies revolving around Epstein’s ability to remain at large as a flamboyant sex trafficker and patron of science for all those years, maybe the reasoning was: somebody’s gonna be sniffing after the Epstein story, so it might as well be us.

I’m not suggesting that there was some sort of master plan here, just that, in a situation where you’re the one being investigated, there’s a logic to wanting to be in charge of the investigation. Related is this article Why didn’t Biden release the Epstein Files?, which argues that under the usual legal rules, “Such testimony is typically only released under exceptional circumstances . . . it’s highly unusual for the FBI to release information unrelated to charging individuals with a crime. . . . even if Democrats wanted to release the Epstein Files in their entirety during Biden’s presidency, it’s not clear that a court would have granted their request.” One difference since then is now a single party is in control of all three branches of government.

Again, though, to me the interesting question is not whether particular files will be redacted, released, or destroyed, but rather the motivation for Trump and his supporters to have kept talking loudly about the Epstein issue for several years, given the connection of Trump of Epstein and the connections of his appointees to Epstein’s controversial death, and before that his avoidance of serious prison time. This is where The Big Clock comes in. The idea would be, not that Trump and the far right kept the Epstein story afloat for years, but rather that the story wasn’t going away, and by talking about it so incessantly, they were able to frame it in their terms. How this will look going forward, I can’t say.

P.S. Speaking of Epstein, this story is kinda funny. A few years ago I almost signed a contract with Jeffrey Epstein’s notorious literary agent . . . if that had happened maybe some vender of Jamaican beef patties would’ve refused to serve me. I’d like to think that, unlike Alan Dershowitz or Steven Pinker, I wouldn’t have given Epstein legal advice, but who knows? I’ve given statistical advice to all sorts of people. On the plus side, if Alan D. gets refused pierogi service another 3514 times, he can save up his money and buy a ticket to this wonderful conference where he can schmooze with Grover Norquist’s rabbi.

In any case, for an ascetic scholar like Dershowitz, the intellectual compensations of hanging out with the talented Mr. Epstein surely outweigh the mere sensual pleasures of a pierogi. After a few minutes the food will be forgotten, but memories of cosmic conversations on the private jet will last forever.