The Reactionaries Are Coming!

On American Film and Politics: An Election Primer

As you may have heard, there's an election in America this fall. It seems like it might be an important one. I've let this newsletter lie dormant for a while as my own Hollywood adventures have eaten up my time, but in light of the importance of this event I thought I’d put down some thoughts on the intersection of film and politics in America.

This will be a continuing series, with new entries appearing on a semi-frequent basis until the election. So keep an eye on your inbox!

As always, I welcome thoughts, agreements, and disputations in the comments.

The plot of Ivan Reitman's Dave, released in 1993, revolves around marital infidelity on the part of the President of the United States (Kevin Klein). The action begins when the President has a stroke while in flagrante delicto with a young staffer, leaving him in a vegetative state. Rather than admit what has happened, his nefarious Chief of Staff (Frank Langella) hires a presidential impersonator named Dave (also played by Klein) to take the President's place.

The comedic plot hinges on the fact that while the President was a cad, cynical, and power-driven (like his Chief of Staff, who now wants to pull the strings), Dave is kind, earnest, and a genuinely humane person. He finds himself able to use his continuing impersonation of the President to do good in the world; he outmaneuvers the Chief of Staff, helps people who need it, and presents the audience with a sweet, idealistic vision of what might be possible in American politics.

At the end of the film, Dave gives up the deception, hands over the reins of the presidency to the Vice President – a selfless public servant – and goes back to his old life. The film closes with him running for the D.C. city council, ready to start his own political career.

The conception of politics that animates Dave is rooted in a long-running vision of American civic life. One thinks of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), which, although separated from Dave by half a century, tells a remarkably similar story about a naïf (Jimmy Stewart) ascending the political heap, battling corruption, staying true to his beliefs about the ethics demanded by public service, and emerging victorious in the end not because he wields power but because he believes in democracy.

This is a deeply American narrative pattern. It reflects an ethos so integral to us that we almost don't recognize it as simply one vision of political life among the many that are possible. And it exerts a pull so strong that it tends to shape the way we see our political movements and ourselves: as the possessors of a common-folk moral righteousness, fighting against the corruption of a distant class of power-mad miscreants.

It's also a narrative structure that underlies a vast number of American stories that don't deal directly with politics.

Consider the classic Western movie trope of the gunfighter arriving in town and facing down the powerful, violent cattle barons or outlaws who control it. With slight variations, this is the story told by classics like Shane (1953) and Rio Bravo (1959), or the tale of cleaning up Tombstone that has been told and re-told on the big screen from My Darling Clementine (1946) and Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957) all the way through to Tombstone (1993).

One way to understand these films is as expressing a quintessential and radically romanticized myth that our nation tells itself about itself: that we carved a civilization out of a lawless, state-of-nature wilderness. (Put aside, for the moment, the question of the factualness of this myth and/or the question of the way it relegates the fully-formed civilizations of the Native peoples on this continent to the status of the mysterious denizens of an unpeopled wilderness; my point here isn't to argue about the historical accuracy or moral worth of this legend, but simply to note how deeply it attends our national psyche.)

There's also another way to understand these Westerns.

This is to consider the social revolution they depict: a reluctant man of violence comes to a town ruled by violence and intimidation, defeats the bad guys, and instantiates the rule of law. Wyatt Earp kicks out the Clantons; lawfulness, peace, prosperity, and an orderly march to the future ensue.

Strip away the particulars in this way and it becomes clear how similar these narratives are to the those of Jimmy Stewart or Kevin Klein rooting the corruption out of Washington D.C. The hero arrives on the scene to find a lack of decency and a love of power, and they proceed to restore the world to a state in which decency prevails and the citizens can rule themselves.

In surprising ways, movies and genres that seem initially unrelated also share a similar imagination.

Think about the gangster drama as enacted in things like The Godfather (1972) or Brian De Palma's Scarface (1983). As in many similar American movies, the story these tell is of the small-timer – in both, played by Al Pacino – making it big. In Coppola's film, he's initially a straight arrow; in De Palma's he's a petty criminal. But in both he has a dream, the American dream, of making something of himself. And what does he find when he finally ascends to the top of the heap? That the ascent, and the power that comes with it, has cost him his soul.

The plots run differently, but the American vision of the world remains intact. The protagonist starts out as an innocent, naive in the workings of power. In the Westerns and political films he manages to overcome the corruption of that power; in the gangster film, he succumbs to it.

At base, what these narratives reflect is a vision of civic life.

They see our nation as composed of a sprawling, brawling, but fundamentally trustworthy citizenry: the townspeople of the Westerns, the "people back home" of the political films, the ordinary life out of which the crime film anti-heroes arise. At the same time, however, they offer a remarkably clear-eyed evaluation of the terrible difficulties involved in the attempt of this citizenry to govern itself, because the predilection for freedom inherent in our democratic system also opens it to the depredations of villains and the seductions of immoral power.

A fascinating example of this two-sided understanding of society is provided by the community dance sequences that John Ford works into so many of his Americana films, from The Grapes of Wrath (1940), My Darling Clementine, and Fort Apache (1948) all the way through to The Searchers (1956).

Filled with patriotic iconography, these moments are often the emotional high points of the movies in which they appear. They depict events that are good in an unadulterated, essential way: a band plays, the people gather together to dance, and laugh, and love. The sequences are lighthearted and flirtatious and thrilling. They seem to suggest that at its best, the American vision of life is as a gentle, joy-filled, communal event; they serve as an almost impossible picturing of the society the characters are striving to create.

"Striving" being the key word here. For the creation of this society is, for Ford – and in the American film tradition more broadly – a fight, not a victory, a belief, not a certainty.

Outside these dances, the world is full of tough-minded conflicts and ethically uncertain violence. There are villains to be beaten back. Outlaws and cattle barons, soulless gunslingers who have no moral code and value money and power over all else. Unscrupulous profiteers and scheming politicians who care about nothing more than their own pocketbooks. Men who have given in to the temptation of dominion.

These are the classic American antagonists, and their character traits are just as much a product of the national mythology as are those of our filmic heroes.

In this way, the Clantons or the Burdettes (the bad guys in the OK Corral story and Rio Bravo) as well as Tony Montana and Michael Corleone (Pacino's characters in Scarface and The Godfather) are not simply scoundrels. They are cautionary tales about the difficulties posed by the kind of society of which we are members.

This struggle – to create a society that rises above the the law of tooth and claw (as in the Westerns), to create and maintain a system of laws and beliefs that can resist the ravages of those interested only in power (as in the political films), and to confront the terrible temptations offered by a society in which freedom is so foundational (as in the gangster films) – this struggle is in many senses the struggle, the question, the attempt which popular American art reflects.

It is a social struggle. A civic struggle. It is a continuing attempt to deal with the issues presented by a culture arranged in the way ours is, in which the responsibility for the maintenance of order, as well as the necessity for determining the course of the nation itself, is shared among ordinary people rather than dictated from above.

Seen through this lens, what the stories that constitute our national mythology reveal is that the single strongest component of our shared identity is our form of government.

The primary, unifying element of American culture, in other words, is not race, religion, economic status, geography, or common language.

It is democracy.

Which brings us to Donald Trump.

On the surface, the claims that Trump and his followers make sound as though they follow in the American tradition I've been outlining.

As do many American tales, Trump and his MAGA factionaries spin out a rhetorical vision of a corrupt elite in Washington D.C., a powerful cabal that needs to be swept away. Thus the continuing fever dreams about the rule of "The Biden Crime Family" and the Deep State and the "swamp" that needs to be drained.

They also propound a vision of a beleaguered citizenry suffering under this corrupt regime. Thus the conjured image of "regular" Americans whimpering under the heel of terrifying liberals who, like the cattle baron and his hired guns in some demented post-Rocky Horror Western, are going to force everyone to accept fluid notions of gender and the idea that women might be as capable as men and the maddening concept that your queer Asian neighbor or the guy who mows your yard but doesn't speak much English deserve not just your condescending "acceptance" but also every single bit as much ownership in this society as you do.

And, finally, they obsess over a vision of the heroic politician (or gunslinger, or gangster) who's going to lead us out of this mess: Trump himself.

But here's the rub: despite this faction's adoption of American rhetoric, and American regalia, and the facades of the American mythos – or, rather, what the flailing attempts to co-opt this Americana makes clear, is that Trump's is a deeply anti-American movement.

It does not believe in the necessity of American democracy, nor in the values of the American myth.

The examples of this are legion.

The MAGA movement does not fundamentally believe in the mechanism of popular elections. This is evidenced in everything from the January 6 attack on the Capital to the fake electors scheme to the continuing assaults on poll workers and election officials. It's evidenced in the derogation of voting by mail, the continual insinuations of voter fraud, and the attempts to make voting more difficult in virtually every state they control.

All of this evinces a conviction that the primary instrument of democracy is suspect, that the people themselves (rather than the MAGA cabal) cannot be trusted, and that the system of government that has served us for over two centuries – and which is the single strongest unifying force in our culture – should be replaced by something that produces outcomes more to their liking.

Compare this to the cultural conception of voting and popular democracy in our filmic and literary tradition, and it immediately becomes clear how outlandish the MAGA movement is.

Trump's adulation of the authoritarians of the world, from Orban in Hungary to Putin in Russia, reveals this same bent, as do the lesser-known but similarly-minded movements that have risen in his wake.

The fanatically conservative Catholics (like convert J.D. Vance) who hunger for an totalitarian moral force in the world; the millenarian Evangelicals who see in Trump a figure who will deliver America from democracy and transform it into a nation ruled by Christian law; the terrified culture warriors like Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito who are smart enough to see the writing on the wall that declares which way the nation is heading and willing to use any and every lever of power at their disposal to try to hold it back;– all of these MAGA-aligned forces are fundamentally hostile to the deep and abiding tradition that constitutes so much of our culture.

For the reactionaries in control of the Republican party, the unruly will of the American people is not something to be tolerated. It is, rather, something to be ignored, or broken, or defeated.

Whether by gerrymandering, the replacement of civil servants by partisans, or the instantiation of policy through judicial fiat, Trump and his most ardent servants do not, at base, believe that we should be living in a democracy.

They believe, instead, in power.

Their own power.

All of this is precisely why the Democrats' recent charge that Trump and the MAGA movement are "weird" has resonated so strongly: they feel weird because their beliefs run directly counter to the main course of our culture.

Kevin Klein in Dave renounces his ill-gotten power at the end; Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington does not seek to be in control of the system but to make it fair for all. The gunfighter at the end of the Western moves on or retires his weapons: he has made himself irrelevant, because the violence he has (reluctantly) used has created a society in which violence will no longer be necessary.

The heroes of our action movies, from Glenn Ford in The Big Heat (1953) to Bruce Willis in Die Hard (1988) to Keanu Reeves in the John Wick franchise, are cast in the same mold and perform the same narrative and cultural function. They are violent, yes, but never for the sake of their own advancement, because in the background of their adventures stands, always, an ordinary citizenry whose predominance represents the ideal moral order. Even characters like Tony Montana in Scarface, who chase power for its own sake, inevitably find that this pursuit brings about their own destruction.

Trump's approach, beliefs, and rhetoric fly in the face of these narratives.

Instead of a traditional American forward-oriented mythos that expresses an attempt at progress toward a better, more civilized, and more just society, this movement offers a rhetoric of American carnage, of a country coming to an end, of a country that needs to return to some imaginary state of past "greatness" which is, of course, no more than a cover for minority plutocratic rule.

To achieve its ends, it relies on an approach that keeps its members in ideological lockstep through fear. Fear of immigrants, whom Trump casts as murderers and rapists and escapees from mental asylums. Fear of transgender folks and drag queens and purveyors of an imagined "gay agenda." Fear of the "liberal agenda." Fear of anyone or anything that is different, that is suspect, that might not agree with them.

And fear, most of all, of the future.

All of this is not unheard-of in our history, of course. There is nothing unimpeachable about American culture or the paths it has taken, and dangerous hucksters pitching regressive ideas are one thing our nation excels at producing. On occasion, they've even managed to take control of it.

But in the main, the MAGA movement rejects such a preponderance of the noble, encompassing civic vision put forward by everyone from Walt Whitman to P.T. Anderson that it must necessarily be seen as representing a radical break from that long tradition.

In the essays to follow, I'll examine the particulars of this as it relates to our cinematic history, and will also try to tackle what is perhaps the most important question looming behind it: if it's so anti-American, why does it have such a draw on so many Americans?

I hope you'll continue to read these pieces as they appear.