In October 1960, when the novelist Philip Roth was just 27, he shared an unsettling revelation: Reality was outstripping fiction. “The American writer,” he wrote, “has his hands full in trying to understand, and then describe, and then make credible much of the American reality.” He ticked off examples of newsmakers that novelists couldn’t dream up: men like the quiz-show scammer Charles Van Doren; the Eisenhower chief of staff Sherman Adams, who resigned after accepting improper gifts; and, presciently, Roy Cohn, the sinister McCarthyite prosecutor who would become, in later years, mentor to a young Donald Trump.
In the 64 years since Roth first made this observation, it has become an oft-repeated refrain that the novel can do only so much to approximate reality’s madness. Cinema and television, though, haven’t done much better. The spectacle of the screen, in some sense, was supposed to — the edict is entertainment and often entertainment alone. Shouldn’t Hollywood have offered us, at some point, a president like one of our last two, Trump and Joe Biden? Or a plot twist akin to this summer’s, in which an incumbent presidential candidate was effectively toppled and his vice president took his place without winning a single primary vote? But showrunners and moviemakers never really foresaw a presidency quite like either of the last two or a campaign like this one. Their work has underestimated both what the American political system is capable of producing and what voters could ultimately stomach.
Consider the American president on film. Morgan Freeman in “Deep Impact,” stoically guiding the nation through the approach of a civilization-annihilating comet. Michael Douglas in “The American President,” as a popular, introspective widower straining to date again. Or Bill Pullman’s President Thomas Whitmore in “Independence Day”: a swaggering Air Force veteran, leading his makeshift squadron into combat against the alien invaders.
The generic cinema president of the 20th century was informed by politicians of that era and the sensibilities they cultivated. In style and rhetoric, the two parties often bled together. In the 1980s and ’90s, to be “presidential” was to be well coifed, almost glossy — the Kennedyesque ethos adopted by Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton in equal measure. Each, for a certain segment of the populace, was a nigh-heroic figure; even for those who disagreed, there remained a halo of dignity around the office itself. It helped that the parties were converging on policy, with Clinton’s Democrats swerving rightward after the rise of Reaganomics: Hollywood’s presidents, Democrat or Republican, didn’t even need to seem so different from one another.
It is difficult to imagine Trump, or Biden, risking his life in the skies to save humanity or summoning the gravitas to inspire a nation. Biden, of course, is hampered by advanced age, something no well-known Hollywood depictions of the American presidency ever reckoned with — that a president in his 80s might, say, struggle to perform in a single televised debate and find his party in revolt, pressing him to stand down. Prestige-film presidents do not forget the names of world leaders or how their sons actually died; they don’t shout out to politicians at a White House event who aren’t there because they are dead. That stuff is more Shakespearean.
And Trump, of course, is sui generis. What movie fathomed a fading reality-TV star’s running for president, winning, eventually trying to steal the next election, inciting a deadly riot at the Capitol, being indicted for falsifying business records, winning the Republican nomination anyway, almost being assassinated, blathering in another televised debate about the fictional consumption of cats and dogs in Ohio — and still running almost even in the polls? Even in the most surreal comedy, this would seem too absurd. TV presidents don’t lie with so much impunity. They possess a degree of tact and reserve that is utterly alien to Trump. In a film, something like the “Access Hollywood” tape might be the pivotal plot device that decides an election.
The problem isn’t that there are no precedents for the past two administrations.
The 45th and 46th presidents certainly don’t belong to the tradition of “The West Wing.” Nor are they centrists, like the hazily postpartisan accidental president Kiefer Sutherland plays in “Designated Survivor.” Washington politics doesn’t function with the ruthless intrigue of “House of Cards” either — even if some of our skulking operatives and unctuous lobbyists wish, occasionally, that it did. If Harris wins, she may have been anticipated by “Commander in Chief,” the TV series in which Geena Davis plays the first female president: a vice president who replaces a dead male president and whose gendered battles with political opponents loyal to her predecessor foreshadow some of Harris’s own clashes with Biden-aligned officials. Harris could take some comfort in “Veep” too: Profane, petty and even ridiculous comedy tracks better with our current mood. Idealism is out. We can no longer imagine a noble president. We can barely be entertained by a generically well-meaning one.
One persistent challenge for Hollywood is that it remains beholden to what I call the Savvy School of imagination. It dreams up politicians who tend toward the smooth, cutthroat and wholly rational. Their every action is premeditated; there are always grand designs and finely sketched motives for whatever courses through their Washington. This seems true whether they’re white-knight politicians or operating in a much darker register: They know, always, what they are doing.
But their motives are rarely what we’d call “political.” In a bid to appeal to wider audiences, filmmakers and showrunners create politicians who hover, blandly and vaguely, in the middle. The currents that electrify our American duopoly are often ignored; the Trumpian right’s capture of the Republican Party or the Bernie Sanders insurgencies of the left aren’t prefigured; topics like race are rarely, if ever, earnestly reckoned with. Ideology is hard, after all, and potentially alienating. Film and TV are more interested in power itself — what it’s like to possess and exercise it. The details and consequences of that exercise are an unpleasant afterthought.
The problem isn’t that there are no precedents for the past two administrations. There are: The chaos and revanchism of the Trump presidency could be seen as a callback to the Zachary Taylor and Andrew Johnson years, and the escalating questions about Biden’s fitness to serve echoed the monthslong stretch in late 1919 and early 1920 when a stroke incapacitated Woodrow Wilson and his closest aides strained to hide his condition from the public. (Wilson, too, was successfully pressured to forgo running in the 1920 election.)
No, the biggest difference is that the narratives on our screens must be tidily resolved, the status quo returned. Take “Seven Days in May,” from 1964: It’s the height of the Cold War, and President Jordan Lyman wants peace with the Soviets, so he signs a nuclear disarmament treaty. A furious Air Force general, played by Burt Lancaster, has already been fomenting a coup. Lyman, of course, must prevail. Order is restored. The press corps literally applauds the president.
And yet this is the one thing actual politics cannot provide. A Hollywood story focuses on a single arc, a single moment, rising and falling actions that are eventually resolved. Make a movie inspired by the 2008 election, and you would assume your Barack Obama stand-in has ushered in an era of perpetual liberal dominance. Choose the Bush dynasty as your subject, and you might believe the ultimate fate of the G.O.P. would be one dominated by its neoconservative, internationalist wing. But the American political scene is always mutating; the bookends are never crisp, if they exist at all. It is this untidy churn that confounds the screenwriters — and perpetually tests our feebler imaginations.
Ross Barkan is the author of two novels and a nonfiction account of Covid-19’s impact on New York City.
Source photographs for illustration above: ABC/Courtesy Everett Collection, Paramount/Everett Collection, NBC/Alamy, Joe Radle/AFP, via Getty Images; Brendan Smialowski/AFP, via Getty Images; Eric Liebowitz/NBCUniversal, via Getty Images.
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