There are many unsettling things about Dick Cheney. One of them is how he comes across on camera as so resolutely reasonable. You may remember him—lopsided sneer aside—as a calm, reassuring, even avuncular (if not exactly warm) presence at the vice-presidential debates in 2000 and 2004, or on various Sunday morning talk show appearances during his eight years in office as the world’s most temperate advocate for torture, pre-emptive war, and Soviet-style security measures. He remains all that in the new documentary The World According to Dick Cheney, which will debut on Showtime on March 15. The film doesn’t tell us much about Cheney and the George W. Bush presidency that we didn’t already know—it wasn’t that long ago that we were living in Dick Cheney’s world—but it does serve as a master class in mild-mannered sophistry.

“Tell me what terrorist attacks is it you would have let go forward because you didn’t want to be a mean and nasty fellow,” Cheney responds to an interviewer, presumably director R.J. Cutler (The September Issue), when asked about waterboarding. “Are you going to trade the lives of a number of people because you want to preserve your. . .”—a pause as the former vice-president searches for the right word—“. . . your ‘honor?’ Or are you going to do your job?... Now, given a choice between doing what we did or backing off and saying [to a captured terrorist], ‘We know you know the next attack against the United States, but we’re not going to force you to tell us what it is because it might create a bad image for us,’ that’s not a close call for me.”

Those quotes may read on the page as if they’re dripping with sarcasm, but Cheney delivers them with the matter-of-fact, nearly bored demeanor of someone explaining his preference for Crest over Aquafresh—although he does put disdainful little verbal quotation marks around the word “honor.” You wouldn’t expect a conservative stalwart, of all people, to snark about honor, but Cheney remains a singular figure. It takes genius and chutzpah to dismiss objections to torture, on both moral and tactical grounds, as simply fear of a “bad image”—as political vanity, really. You can imagine Cheney as the snake in the Oval Office tempting George W. Bush into one sin after another with similar feats of rhetorical slight-of-hand and psychological cunning: You don’t want be like your father, do you? Getting your panties in a twist over what some Harvard professor is going to say about the [making air quotes] “Geneva Conventions?”

Then again, when you think about it, the snake thing is a horrible metaphor—it’s not only trite, but also implies Washington could ever be Edenic, or a president innocent.

**The World According to Dick Cheney provides evidence to the contrary. As a teenager and a young man, Cheney was a beer-swilling hell-raiser not unlike the president he would serve, with the D.U.I.’s and fed-up fiancée to prove it. Recounting this part of his life, Cutler’s film is full of snapshots of a handsome, crew-cut Cheney looking like a mid-60s catalogue model, his lop-sided smile suggesting insouciance in those days rather than Strangelovian maleficence. But once Cheney arrives in Washington in 1969, at the age of 28, and settles in as a young staffer in the Nixon administration under the tutelage of rising bureaucrat Donald Rumsfeld, he undergoes a physical change. He loses his hair, gains weight, a takes on a hollow-eyed pallor—he’s middle-aged, seemingly overnight. (He would have his first heart attack at the age of 37.) I know this is a flight of fancy worthy of a sentimental 19th-century novelist, or Oprah, but it’s as if the corruption of governing took root in Cheney as literal, physical corruption. He rotted for our sins, or someone’s sins, anyway.

At least that’s what the pictures imply (the cans of Schlitz we see in his workplace might have helped, too). This, to me, is maybe the most revealing part of the documentary. The rest serves its purpose as a handy, just-under-two-hour précis on the Bush administration’s misadventures in war and anti-terrorism policies; it wouldn’t be a bad thing for American citizens to watch it every other year or so as a reminder of what a combustible mixture ideology and incuriosity can be in a presidency. Masochists will enjoy being reminded of “yellow cake” and “16 words.” Otherwise, we’ve heard Cheney defend himself before and we’ll hear him do it again. Somewhere between his public cool and the behind-the-scenes ferocity lies a psychologically complicated man—but that’s a hard nut that remains to be cracked, I hope by a future biographer. Here we’re left with self-analysis like: “My main fault?” [Long pause.] “Well, I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about my faults, I guess would be the answer.”

Or maybe this—his favorite food is “spaghetti.”