“Lee Atwater destroyed the business of politics by going negative,” said Terry MacAuliffe yesterday, introducing an Impact Film Festival screening of Stefan Forbes’ Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story. “Democrats don’t fight hard enough. They play tougher on the other side. The bottom line is that these guys will do anything to win.”

Forbes’ film, which caused such a ruckus at its premiere in June at the Los Angeles Film Festival, essentially functions as an ideological ink blot––people see what they want in it. It’s possible (and, based on the director’s comments after the film, probably preferred) to see Boogie Man as a vicious indictment of the political operative who mentored Karl Rove and George W. Bush whilst helping the latter’s father overcome the Iran Contra scandal to win the presidency, destroying Michael Dukakis’ political career in the process. But Forbes, to his credit, also clearly explicates Atwater’s appeal. You might need to put blinders on a bit, but it would be possible to walk away from this film cheering McCain to turn Obama into the new Dukakis

In fact, after the screening, Forbes acknowledged that there are lessons the left could learn from the enemy. “When a fight gets dirty, do you have to join? If you just play defense, you end up looking guilty. You have to turn the attacks into a referendum on the other party.”

That is, if you can get beyond emotions. The partisan crowd here at the DNC was loudly demonstrative of their feelings towards the players on screen. They giggled and jeered at slow-moed images of Atwater walking with the Bushes or Reagan, set to the kinds of cheesy blues rock riffs that Atwater himself cranked out to prove how “down” he was with black people. They groaned when W first popped up on screen, and literally hissed and booed for footage of a younger Dick Cheney lying on behalf of Bush the Elder. Maybe the loudest reaction came to footage of George H.W. saying of Dukakis, “I’m not questioning his patriotism, I’m questioning his judgement.” That one produced a number of audible gasps of deja vu. The IFF, according to a statement by co-founder Jody Arlington, was sparked by the “idea that the artistry and urgency reflected in these films could have a real impact on political discourse [and] rally leaders and citizens attending both conventions to engage in nuanced discussions about the domestic and international priorities explored in these exceptional films.” But sometimes a choir is so eager to be preached to that the nuance temporarily gets lost.

That IFF is presenting same basic slate of films to radically different crowds at the DNC and RNC could prove to be a fascinating experiment in knee-jerk partisanism: considering how warmly the Democrats embraced its message, will Boogie Man’s RNC screening on Wednesday incite Republican rage? Forbes says “the other side” is surprisingly receptive to the movie, because Republicans “don’t get why Democrats don’t fight back. They’re like, ‘We’re punching you. If you don’t want to punch back, okay, but we’ll win.’”

It’s hard to imagine, however, that an Atwater fan wouldn’t get a little riled up by the film’s subtext that, as one talking head puts it, “life gets even with you in the end.” It’s said to foreshadow Atwater’s demise and eventual death, and it’s not the only time that Forbes’ subjects suggest that Atwater’s brain cancer came as punishment for his crimes against Democrats. But by the same measure, the idea that the ends we come to is the result of what do or chose not to do could be twisted into a comment on the failure of Democrats. Towards the end of the film, we see a somewhat aged Michael and Kitty Dukakis benignly puttering around their very middle-class looking home, reduced to mediocrity by an inability or unwillingness to fight back. When the images of Atwater at 40 dying of brain cancer, his face puffy from radiation, come on the screen, I heard more than one murmured, “Jesus.” Even if Forbes wants to sell the idea that Atwater got his just deserts (and I’ve not entirely decided that he does), the crowd most primed to walk away with that reaction can’t help but feel the humanity of what that entails.