In the 16 months or so since it first became possible to distribute full-length feature films in single viewing windows embedded in a blog post, there’s been a lot of talk as to how a film presented in this matter might function. For Four Eyed Monsters, the first feature film made available legally in a single stream on YouTube, the embed functioned as a meme spreader for the FEM brand (and the page the embed code came from served as a revenue generator for Spout.com). At Telluride last month, Annette Insdorf talked about the embed’s value as reference point within online criticism, which is something we’ve done here on SpoutBlog, most recently with Steven’s post last week on DW Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln.  Also last week, Anne Thompson suggested that Wayne Wang’s Princess of Nebraska, recently made available for streaming in full on YouTube, can serve as a marketing tool for the film Wang made concurrently, A Thousand Years of Good Prayer, which is currently in theaters. In pieces in the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal, John Horn and John Jurgensen both suggested that free streaming solutions for features are performing a kind of public service; Horn commended SnagFilms, the portal for ad-supported embeddable documentaries, for their ability to bring “important movies to audiences that otherwise might never have known the films existed,” while Jurgensen focused on Hulu and YouTube’s potential to help relieve the “glut of movies jockeying for theater screens.”

This is all well and good, but in most cases, up until now an argument could have be made that the “better” place to see the film in question would be on a big screen, and/or with an audience, because the assumption has been that the natural home for cinema is in a cinema, that distribution via embed is an alternative option when theatrical distribution doesn’t work out. The same can not be said for The End of America, Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg’s non-fiction adaptation of Naomi Wolf’s book and ensuing lecture tour, which debuted on SnagFilms today. This is the first film I’ve seen that seems ideally suited to be seen as a blog embed, and not just because a good deal of the footage within was pulled from web video sources. Essentially a Top Ten list followed by a How To, it’s the first film I’ve seen that seems to have internalized the structure of the traffic-baiting blog post.

The 75 minute film is built around a lecture give by Wolf, in which she expounds on the ten hallmarks of a “closed” society as outlined in her book, The End of America: A Letter of Warning To A Young Patriot. The overall thesis of both the book and the film is that by establishing secret prisons, surveilling ordinary citizens, restricting press access during a time of war and engaging in other steps to restrict classic democratic freedoms, the Bush administration essentially currently poses the same threat to the future of America that the Nazi regime posed to Germany circa 1933. It’s an unapologeticly extremist argument, designed to push the viewer from passive concern to active paranoia and — Wolf hopes — urgent action.

Wolf’s rhetoric may be unapologetically far left and her predictions may be a bit hysterical, but her presentation style is anything but. Ironically, though she warns that most regimes that have the restriction of liberty on the agenda do so via an extraordinary telegenic figurehead, Wolf herself couldn’t be more ready for her close-up. Early in the film, there are shots of her having her face made up for her lecture appearance. She then takes the stage in a tight fitting, fire engine red suit and open-toed heels to heavy applause, and calmly proceeds to spend the next hour 15 scaring the shit her audience without ever breaking her easy-on-the-eyes demeanor. Not to insult Wolf’s intelligence, but as an attractive 40-something female vehicle for the combatting of fear with fear, The End of America presents her as the extreme left’s answer to Sarah Palin.

But unlike Palin, Wolf is not just the face of the message, but clearly its architect as well, and she seems to be very much the auteur of this piece. Stern and Sundberg’s contributions are limited to providing the b-roll images of “America” (stars and stripes outside clapboard houses on rural lots, urban centers where masses move zombie-like with heads down, their iPod earbuds rendering them deaf to sound of assaults on liberty), stock footage of “Not America” (pre- and post-WWII Germany, Pinochet’s mass executions, Tiananmen Square), and brief clips from CSPAN edited out of context and molded into grand drama.

Together the filmmakers and Wolf breeze through the greatest hits of Bush administration dissent, encompassing everyone from Valerie Plame to Josh Wolf to the recent arrest of journalist Amy Goodman at the DNC. The only really new revelation in the film is the bit about the deployment of the 1st Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division on US soil, which could essentially lead to martial law (there’s apparently little information available about the Brigade and their whereabouts, but there’s some more background/context here). Wolf actually described this more in depth in her conversation with Alec Baldwin before the Hamptons Film Festival screening, but its inclusion in the film provides the crucial bridge from the listicle — in which the viewer is forcefed the meat of Wolf’s book — to the How To, in which the viewer is given a step-by-step plan should they feel moved to take action.

This structure and tone would be unbearably didactic if The End of America had true pretensions towards cinema, but there are few signs that it does. There’s something fascinating about the way this all comes together: Wolf is compelling and appealing even if you don’t buy half of her claptrap (again, sound familiar?), and the film tailors her material for the easiest possible consumption by young wannabe radicals with attention spans damaged by multimedia multi-tasking. The MILF + listicle equation never fails. The End of America is political propaganda programmed for the Digg generation.