Napoleon Bonaparte narrates Napoleon Dynamite and finds a kindred spirit in Idaho’s most unlikely conqueror. Same name, wildly different empires — and one unforgettable dance.

The Coffee Chat

THE CINE SAGE: (sliding a demitasse across the table with the precision of a chess move) Ah. There he is. The man who reorganized the entire French legal code before breakfast, conquered half of Europe before lunch, and still found time to be shorter than everyone remembers. Welcome, Emperor, to what I hope is the most comfortable exile you’ve experienced — and given your CV, that is truly saying something. I’ve taken the liberty of ordering you a double espresso, no sugar, no ceremony, maximum impact.

NAPOLEON: (studying the cup with the focused intensity of a general surveying a battlefield) This is not coffee. This is a thimble of very dark ambition. I approve. (drinks without blinking) And you — you are the host of this curious enterprise?

THE CINE SAGE: Guilty as charged, and unlike Waterloo, I intend to win today. Now — the film. Napoleon Dynamite. 2004. Idaho. A gangly teenager, a llama, a skill set best described as “aggressively useless,” and a climactic dance sequence that somehow saves a student council election.

NAPOLEON: (a long, imperial pause) …A dance sequence.

THE CINE SAGE: A decisive dance sequence.

NAPOLEON: (quietly, with terrifying focus) I have opinions.

THE CINE SAGE: (to the reader, leaning in) And I notice, Your Majesty, that the café is playing American pop music through the ceiling. No musicians visible anywhere.

NAPOLEON: (looking upward, deeply unsettled) Yes. We will be discussing that.

THE CINE SAGE: Oh, you’ll be discussing far more than that. (gesturing grandly toward the page) Ladies and gentlemen — the Emperor has had his coffee. The stage is his.

Napoleon Bonaparte Narrates Napoleon Dynamite (2004)

I thought this was about me — moi — Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of the French, architect of the Napoleonic Code, conqueror of Austerlitz, Jena, Wagram — but alas, NON! It is about a boy named Napoleon who cannot throw a football and whose greatest military maneuver involves a tater tot concealed in a trouser pocket. I cannot decide whether I am insulted or profoundly amused. I have settled, provisionally, on both. You are welcome, Idaho.

Let me begin.

The film opens in a vast, flat American wilderness — Preston, Idaho — a landscape of such breathtaking agricultural emptiness that I immediately understood it as a place where ambition goes to be disciplined by boredom. I spent my own youth in Corsica, where the terrain at least had the decency to be dramatic. Here, the drama is the absence of drama, and I confess this unsettled me more than any Russian winter.

Our hero — and I use the term in the classical, not the complimentary, sense — is Napoleon Dynamite: a young man of approximately sixteen years, possessed of a blond mane like an untended wheat field, an expression of permanent sovereign contempt for the world around him, and absolutely no discernible talent. He draws fantastical animals in his notebook. He performs what I can only describe as aggressive lunging in gym class. He rides the school bus with the weary dignity of a deposed monarch. I recognized something in him immediately. I have simply chosen not to name it.

Napoleon inhabits a household alongside his brother Kip — a grown man engaged in something called “chatting online,” which I understand to be a form of correspondence so immediate and yet so meaningless that it has compressed the entire art of letter-writing into a series of grunts — and his grandmother, who departs early in the proceedings, leaving the two brothers in the supervision of their uncle, Rico. Rico is a man of such magnificent, delusional nostalgia for his high school football career that I found him simultaneously pitiful and deeply, philosophically instructive. A leader, I once remarked to my staff, is a dealer in hope. Rico deals in hope entirely on credit, and the debt has been accumulating since 1982.

Now — a word about the music.

Throughout this film, emotional moments are accompanied by invisible musicians. Not a quartet stationed in the corner, not a court ensemble in the gallery — nothing visible at all. The music simply materializes, sourceless, omnipresent, perfectly calibrated to the scene’s emotional requirements. When Napoleon rides his bike, the music knows. When Pedro presents his candidacy, the orchestra — wherever it is hiding, presumably in the walls — responds accordingly. I confess this disturbed me to a degree I had not anticipated. At Austerlitz, I had drummers. I could see my drummers. They were cold, they were muddy, one of them had a facial injury, but they were there, producing visible sound. This film offers no such accountability. I have concluded the music is either supernatural or American, and I am no longer certain these are different things.

There enters Pedro — a soft-spoken, magnificently mustached transfer student of Mexican origin — and here the film begins, at last, to interest me strategically. Pedro decides to run for class president. This is not, on the surface, a military campaign. But observe the structure: a new figure enters a hostile terrain, identifies a symbolic prize, recruits an unlikely ally, and proceeds methodically against a more established enemy — Summer Wheatley, a blonde hegemonic power with cheerleaders and a piñata. I have fought coalitions with more legitimacy than Summer Wheatley, and I respect her organizational competence even as I root, with considerable personal investment, for the outsider.

Napoleon becomes Pedro’s campaign manager. I want to pause on this. Napoleon Dynamite — a young man whose primary documented skill, at this point in the narrative, involves drawing “ligers” (a hybrid beast he describes as “pretty much his favorite animal,” bred, apparently, for its skills in magic) — decides to manage a political campaign. This is either an act of breathtaking strategic miscalculation or genuine instinctive genius. I have known men in my Grand Army who were equally unqualified and equally indispensable. One deploys the tools one has.

There is also the question of Deb — a girl of quiet intensity who sells boondoggle keychains and photographs people for a home-based glamour portrait business. She arrives, she matters, she remains somewhat underutilized by the narrative, and I find myself sympathizing with her in ways I cannot fully articulate without revealing too much about my relationship with Joséphine. We will leave that observation precisely here.

Kip, meanwhile, falls in love with a woman named LaFawnduh — a romance conducted entirely through the invisible-orchestra medium — and I should note that their courtship, conducted via digital correspondence over what appears to be several weeks, somehow produces deep romantic conviction. In my era, a letter from Paris to Vienna took ten days minimum, and one did not declare undying devotion until at least the third dispatch. This compressed emotional calendar strikes me as either very efficient or very French, and the Americans have somehow managed it while being neither.

I must also address the camera.

Throughout this film, some unseen observer follows the characters everywhere — into their bedrooms, their kitchens, their most private moments of failure and longing. Private conversations, overheard. Secrets, witnessed. At one point, Napoleon stands alone in a field, failing to throw a football, and the camera watches him. Who is this witness? A spy? A divine presence? A particularly committed servant? In my campaigns, I employed surveyors, scouts, and an extensive network of informants, but even my most dedicated intelligence apparatus could not be everywhere. This all-seeing eye both fascinates and, I confess, makes me mildly uncomfortable. I know what it is to be watched. I built an empire partly on the principle of being watched. But a man failing to throw a football deserves, at minimum, the dignity of unwatched failure.

The climax arrives. Pedro has given a campaign speech of such gentle, earnest brevity that it constitutes, by my oratorical standards, barely an opening sentence. The race hangs in the balance. And then Napoleon — Napoleon — steps forward, inserts a cassette tape into a machine, and dances.

It is not elegant. It is not trained. It is, by any classical standard of performance, not particularly good. But it is committed with an intensity that I recognize at the cellular level. The boy cannot throw a football. The boy cannot, apparently, do most things. But he has been, it emerges, secretly practicing this dance, in his bedroom, alone, presumably for weeks — driven by some inner compulsion toward excellence that his exterior has never previously betrayed.

I conquered Italy at twenty-six. I was regarded, before that, as an odd, brooding Corsican with a foreign accent and an unfashionable surname. They called me Napoléone di Buonaparte. They mispronounced it constantly. And then I showed them what I had been preparing, in my mind, for years.

Napoleon Dynamite wins the election. Of course he does. The dance is not the point. The preparation is the point. Talent is merely discipline made visible at exactly the right moment. I have been saying this since the Italian Campaign, and the good people of Preston, Idaho, have apparently arrived at the same conclusion via an entirely different route.

The moral is not sentimental. It is operational: the one who controls the decisive moment — however unlikely, however ungainly — controls the outcome. The crowd did not vote for skill. They voted for commitment made visible. I understand this. I built a coronation around precisely this principle. The difference between Napoleon Bonaparte and Napoleon Dynamite is not the name. It is roughly twelve thousand cavalry and several continental armies. The impulse, however, is identical.

I leave you with this: somewhere in Idaho, there is a teenage boy practicing something in his room that the world has not yet seen. History does not care what he looks like while he’s practicing. History only cares what he does when the cassette tape starts.

Vive la pratique.

The Goodbye

THE CINE SAGE:

Emperor — truly — thank you. I particularly appreciated the moment you stopped the entire narration to demand accountability from the invisible orchestra. As someone who has also spent an unreasonable amount of time wondering where the music comes from, I felt deeply seen.

What I noticed, and what no one else quite said aloud, is this: Napoleon Bonaparte — the man who once declared that impossible is a word found only in the dictionary of fools — watched a teenager with zero conventional qualifications win a school election through sheer, unaccountable will, and found it entirely logical. Perhaps the most cutting observation in that narration was the one he didn’t make explicitly: we keep calling Napoleon Dynamite a loser, right up until the moment he isn’t.

And that, dear reader, is what this series keeps revealing — that the films we love most are secretly arguments about power, preparation, and who gets to matter. The Emperor just had the nerve to say it plainly.

The Cine Sage’s Verdict: Napoleon Bonaparte watched Napoleon Dynamite and recognized the only thing that separates a legend from a loner is the moment they choose to start the music.

Next time, someone equally unlikely, an equally mismatched film, and a narration that will make you question everything you thought you understood about both. You cannot afford to miss it.