Presidential Politics on the Big Screen
With election mania in full swing, we invited film scholar Michael Coyne, author of Hollywood Goes to Washington: American Politics on Screen, to provide some must-see film clips that reveal how politics and the popular media are often entangled:
There's a long history of the interchangeability of the celebrity of politics and the politics of celebrity. The most obvious examples are John Kennedy, the President with the movie-star face, and Ronald Reagan, the ex-movie star who became President.
But films have at times certainly tried to shape political opinion. One famous example of Hollywood's deliberate intervention into the realm of politics was Louis B. Mayer's and Irving Thalberg's filmed contribution to the 1934 campaign for the Governorship of California, in which they successfully depicted Democratic challenger Upton Sinclair as the candidate of malcontents, misfits, radicals and foreigners, and the GOP incumbent Frank Merriam as the stalwart protector of American home and hearth. Similarly, due to a series of devastating TV ads, Lyndon Johnson was able to present himself as the candidate of peace and stability in 1964, in contrast to Barry Goldwater, who was painted as reckless, hellbent on smashing Social Security and apt to provoke nuclear war. Who can forget the effectiveness of the infamous “Daisy Girl” ad, conjuring up the drama and terror of atomic holocaust, and representing LBJ as the world's great hope for peace?:
But it wasn't just advertising executives hired by the Democrats who were pulling for LBJ against Goldwater in '64. Seven Days in May, The Best Man, Dr. Strangelove and Fail-Safe were all implicit cinematic votes for LBJ in that year's election. Seven Days in May is about an attempt by hardline right-wing military officers to seize control of the Federal government. Remember the final confrontation between Burt Lancaster as the sabre-rattling Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and Fredric March as the world-weary President in favour of disarmament? March's character in the film was called Jordan Lyman—the name even sounds akin to Lyndon Johnson!:
But the 1964 films are just one instance of Hollywood “voting” in a Presidential election. There's a TV clip in All the President's Men (1976), which shows Gerald Ford declaring Nixon's renomination at the GOP convention in 1972. Now, even as a teenager watching that film in May of 1976, I realized the inclusion of that little snippet would assuredly do Ford no favours in that year's election. Take Oliver Stone's JFK (1991), which certainly created a nostalgia for the fallen father-leader. Then Bill Clinton came along, posturing as heir to Jack Kennedy's mantle. Stone's film evoked the yearning, and Clinton seemed to fit the bill. I'd suggest this just may have helped him into the White House. It certainly didn't hurt. And there's no doubt that several films of 2004—The Assassination of Richard Nixon, the remake of The Manchurian Candidate, Silver City and, of course, Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11—were without doubt celluloid votes against Bush II.
I don't think there's any “liberal conspiracy” about it. Many of the finest Hollywood films appeal to the best ideals and instincts in the American tradition, and these are by their very nature inclusive: “All men are created equal”; “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses…” These films are about raising people up, both materially and spiritually, not grinding them down. The all-time spiritual hero of the political genre is Abraham Lincoln, and there have been several very good movies featuring Honest Abe. Probably the greatest of them all is John Ford's Young Mr Lincoln (1939) which deservedly made Henry Fonda a star. But Ford's film isn't a celebration of a saint. It's an affectionate, mythic but folksy portrayal of an American archetype, and its hero is humble, humorous and hard-headed—a popular but pragmatic small-town lawyer:
The political genre evolved through the idealism of 1930s movies like Lincoln and Frank Capra's Mr Smith Goes to Washington (also 1939) to tough-minded but liberal professionalism in early 1960s classics like Advise and Consent and The Manchurian Candidate (both 1962) and the 1964 crop I've mentioned, and then to the pessimism and paranoia of the Vietnam/Watergate era. The cynical, sinister Realpolitik that dominates, say, Robert Aldrich's Twilight's Last Gleaming (1977) is light years away from the idealism of Ford's Young Mr Lincoln or Capra's Mr Smith:
Twilight's Last Gleaming has one of the most depressing endings of all American movies—but, like 95+% of Hollywood films, liberal or conservative, even Twilight's Last Gleaming ends with the restoration of order. This takes many forms in movies: taming the frontier in Westerns; a clearing-up of misunderstandings in romantic comedies; the gangster's lonely death in the gutter. Certainly, most political movies follow this template. The power-hungry villains of Frank Capra's films can't stop the good-hearted populism of his Everyman heroes and the Average Joes & Janes who rush to his aid. Conspiracies and other threats to the Republic are derailed in the 1960s films. Even the downbeat endings of some of the 1970s paranoid thrillers feature order (admittedly, of a sinister and dysfunctional kind) being restored. This is certainly true of Twilight's Last Gleaming—and also Alan J. Pakula's The Parallax View (1974), which ends with its reporter hero murdered and framed as an assassin, deflecting blame from the real perpetrators and resulting in a cover-up. But what most moviegoers are apt to remember from The Parallax View is not so much its bleak ending as the powerful montage, the “Parallax test”, which potential employees of the corporation undergo to gauge their psychopathic potential:
Following the controversies of these last few years, in the wake of Florida 2000, 9/11, the Iraq war and the Patriot Act, at least one inventive critic of the Bush administration assembled an updated version of the “Parallax test”, comprising provocative images from our own era:
The Parallax View now looks like an early warning about the dangers of corporate fascism. There could be raucous cyber-debates about how true or how exaggerated it is. I reckon the same may apply for the media manipulation at the heart of Barry Levinson's savagely satirical Wag the Dog (1997). Surely it was deliberate that the rhythm and pacing of “The Ballad of the 303” (the heroic regiment that doesn't actually exist) is so similar to “The Ballad of the Green Berets”?:
So what next for the political genre? I'll hazard a guess. Despite the common assumption that political films are the kiss of death at the box-office the genre has usually been in ascendancy while liberal activist Presidents have been in the White House. In the time of Franklin Roosevelt, you had mythic movies like Gabriel Over the White House, Mr Smith and Young Mr Lincoln. In the JFK-LBJ era you had tough-liberal-pragmatic movies like Advise and Consent, Seven Days in May and The Best Man. Bill Clinton's early years saw roseate, “Happy-Days-Are-Here-Again” movies such as Dave (1993) and The American President (1995).
The genre has been high-profile, but much darker in tone, during the tenure of personally unpopular conservative presidents: WUSA (1970), The Candidate (1972), Executive Action (1973) and The Parallax View (1974) in the age of Nixon, and Three Days of the Condor (1975), All the President's Men (1976) and Twilight's Last Gleaming (1977) shortly thereafter; and again, in the time of Bush II, the batch of 2004 films cited above, to which you can add the implicit 2007 crop of Rendition, Redacted, Lions for Lambs and In the Valley of Elah.
But—during the administrations of personally popular conservative Presidents, notably Eisenhower and Reagan, the political film largely lay dormant, and direct US political narratives all but vanished from the movie screen; and my sense is that McCain's personal appeal in several respects resembles the genial old grandfatherly persona which was such an essential part of both Eisenhower's and Reagan's charm.
So if Barack Obama wins I'd predict a fresh batch of optimistic, idealistic, liberal epics in the tradition of FDR, JFK and Clinton. But if John McCain wins, I expect that, similar to the eras of Eisenhower and Reagan, the political genre just might lie fallow for the duration. Whatever the merits or demerits of the respective candidates—and I'm not about to make either a prediction or an endorsement (though I think I do know who's going to win on the day!)—I don't believe there is anything the least partisan in my prediction that the choice between Obama and McCain is also the choice between more and fewer American political movies in the near future.