What Will Hollywood Do If Obama Fails?

What will Hollywood do if President Obama fails? Forget simply preserving the status quo or making marginal improvements for this agency or that constituency, but fails to even remotely square the difference between the promise of his administration and its actual performance. This is not to wish failure upon our – yes, our – new president, since I actually like Barack Obama the person (not Obama, The Messiah™) and have no desire to see the economy worsen or Islamic terror gain additional traction, but should this presidency be a stillborn effort to suspend politics-as-we-know-it and have us wave our ploughshares in an impromptu chorus of “Yes We Can” — don’t expect a single film to even criticize President Obama, or use him as a metaphor for military defeat or political impotence. The future decade will simply vanish, a missing gap far wider than anything Rose Mary Woods could accidentally erase. How do I know? Because there isn’t a single film of any repute, during or after the presidencies of Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton, that addresses the (many) failures of these men.

In the case of Carter, the films of the Seventies – and let it be known that I venerate this fabled period, like any good cinephile – are a smorgasbord of dramas about Vietnam and Watergate, with customary attention paid to the machinations of evil corporations (Pakula, Alan; see films of) or faux populists (Altman, Robert; see ”Nashville”). Content with attacking Richard Nixon, or using him as an all purpose villain who might as well have been Lee Harvey Oswald’s accomplice, Jimmy Carter simply . . . fades away, Hollywood’s forgotten man who nonetheless managed to reap a whirlwind of economic ruin and humiliation in the Middle East. But it is Carter’s facade of honesty – “I will never lie to you” – that insulates him from nothing more biting than a few sketch comedy acts on ”Saturday Night Live,” with Dan Aykroyd as the pious Southern governor who kept George Washington’s honesty and traded the cherry tree for a bag of Georgia peanuts. (more…)