Crawford, Texas: George Bush on a 50 Foot Inflatable Movie Screen

Living With the Ranch: Crawford, Spectacle, and the Gaslighting Bush Jr.

For generations, people in small towns like Crawford, Texas understood the quiet pleasures of rural life: unlocked doors, light traffic, and a calm broken only by Friday night football or the echo of a distant train horn. Crawford had one stoplight and no movie theater—and for a long time, that was enough.

Then George W. Bush arrived. https://youtu.be/iZBc0zBfb80

With him came tour buses, souvenir shops, bobblehead dolls, and an entire security-and-media ecosystem that swallowed the town whole. A place once defined by anonymity suddenly found itself drafted into a permanent political performance. Documentary filmmaker David Modigliani’s Crawford captures what happens when a community of 700 becomes a backdrop for national power—and learns, over time, what that power actually costs.

Bush purchased a 650-hectare ranch outside Crawford in 1999, early in his presidential campaign. What followed was an initial burst of excitement, curiosity, and even economic optimism. “Generally speaking, there was this enchantment that came with his moving to town,” Modigliani has said. “But by the end of the film there’s a sense of disillusionment—being tired of the attention and feeling like the novelty has worn off.”

That arc—anticipation to exhaustion—is the emotional spine of Crawford.

What the film makes quietly unavoidable, however, is that Bush did not simply arrive in Crawford—he was effectively installed. The ranch was never just a home; it was a stage set. Crawford offered a ready-made visual shorthand: dirt roads, pickup trucks, church steeples, and a population small enough to be framed as “authentic” without ever being allowed to speak back. The town functioned as political ventriloquism—America was encouraged to hear “plainspoken Texas values,” while the voice was carefully scripted elsewhere.

This was not accidental geography. It was narrative engineering. Cameras lingered on brush, boots, and barbed wire, while policy decisions—war, surveillance, deregulation—were rendered abstract or distant. The effect was a soft but persistent form of national gaslighting: a leader presented as folksy and reluctant, even as the machinery of power expanded aggressively beneath the image. Crawford didn’t symbolize authority; it was meant to neutralize it—to make power look modest, inevitable, and harmless.

Already screened at several film festivals, Crawford makes its hometown debut on June 8, projected onto a 50-foot outdoor screen at the high school football field. Tickets are $5 for residents, $10 for everyone else. It’s an appropriately improvised venue for a town that never asked to be on the world stage.

What makes Modigliani’s film effective is that it resists caricature. The story begins with Bush, but it doesn’t end with him. Modigliani originally set out to indict the political theater of using a small town as a prop—especially one Bush didn’t grow up in. Instead, he found something more revealing: the residents themselves, navigating the long aftershocks of proximity to power.

High school teacher Misti Turbeville openly questions whether the ranch was a calculated branding exercise. In one classroom scene, her students debate why Crawford was chosen—to project a heroic cowboy image, or because small-town communities are assumed to embody “good morals.” The discussion lands exactly where the film wants it to: on the gap between image and reality.

Rev. Mike Murphy of First Baptist Church estimates that 99.9 percent of his congregation voted for Bush. The film neither mocks nor romanticizes that loyalty. Instead, it shows how political identity—once abstract—becomes deeply personal when the spotlight turns inward.

That spotlight burned brightest during the summer of 2005, when Cindy Sheehan arrived in Crawford to protest the war that killed her son. Her month-long vigil drew more than 10,000 protesters, many camping along ditches beside the narrow road leading to the ranch. It also provoked counter-protests from locals exhausted by traffic, noise, and national judgment.

One of the film’s most unsettling moments comes when resident Ricky Smith rides a horse through town with “Cindy Go Home” written on its hindquarters. “Fifty years ago,” he says on camera, “she’da been hung for treason.” The line lands hard—not because the film endorses it, but because it refuses to soften it.

There are lighter moments as well. National media crews are shown staging “rustic” stand-ups beside hay bales and barns that turn out to be nowhere near the ranch—props mirroring the larger illusion.

But the darker truth of Crawford is that once a town becomes a symbol, it never quite becomes a town again. Gift shops open and close. Tourists come and go. Residents are quietly sorted by their politics. Norma Nelson Crow, a lifelong Crawford resident and Bush supporter, returns home to open a gift shop during the boom—only to close it when the crowds fade and the economy moves on.

For the town itself, living near power meant living inside a metaphor it did not author. Residents became extras in a story about American virtue—asked to stand in for the nation while being spared any real agency. Over time, the performance collapsed under its own weight. The cameras left. The symbolism faded. What remained was the recognition that the image had always been the point—and that the image had never told the truth.

Modigliani is careful. The people of Crawford are not fools, villains, or saints. They are ordinary citizens who found themselves involuntarily adjacent to decisions whose consequences reached far beyond their county line—and, in many cases, far beyond the country itself.

The film does not argue with slogans. It doesn’t need to. History has already done much of that work.

If there is an indictment in Crawford, it is not shouted. It is observed. A town absorbs the presence of power. It lives with it. It sells souvenirs to it. It argues about it. And then, slowly, it waits for the rest of the world to catch up.

Some figures eventually retire to ranches. Some towns return to quiet. And some questions—about responsibility, accountability, and the human cost of decisions made far from places like Crawford—do not retire at all.

We endured the gaslighting spectacle.

We don’t have to pretend not to know what it was.