In 1958, 73 percent of the public said they trusted the federal government to do what's right. Last year, that number was 18 percent. Whatever optimism that may have existed in the culture so many years ago, has given way to a significant amount of cynicism and distrust. All of those dreams of tomorrow are too expensive or too hard to even imagine anymore. And it's a cynicism which is pervasive throughout society about both public and private institutions. As a culture, we've always had problems and inequalities, but we built things in hope of a "Great Society," and dreamed of things that may never be. We built roads, we built bridges, we built towers which stretched into the clouds, and rockets that went to the Moon. But now we look at any project with suspicion and wonder how it will unravel and fuck up as an excuse to not even try.
Depictions of government and the people that work for it usually fall into one of three boxes in most films and television shows. At its most idealistic (or propaganda-ish), government is full of earnest men and women, who have foregone wealth and status, serve their country and change the world. In these depictions, America is usually a precious shining city on a hill full of citizens ready to defend freedom and liberty. However, if the story goes more toward the cynical side of things, the government will be filled with inept, uncaring bureaucrats that provide neither efficiency or effectiveness. And if the material is a paranoid political thriller, the very nature of the government will probably be revealed as evil. Almost all of the current fictional TV politicians are either murderers, adulterers or buffoons.
The way politics is reported in most mainstream outlets is now done as entertainment or like a sporting event. The coverage is about process (i.e., what is the strategy or the motivation?) instead of giving the people a detailed description of the ins and outs of different topics. When was the last time, after a policy speech by the president or any major candidate, that the reporter covering it actually discussed the policy (e.g., trade policy, health care, etc.) instead of speculating about what the policy "means" in a political context? Therefore, news coverage is inherently cynical about every institution, diminishes expectations about government, and implies everyone is a self-serving bastard, which plays right into conservative messaging about the evils of government.
So I thought we might look at politics in pop culture. Which movies and TV shows stand out as your favorites? Which ones do you dislike?
Almost every modern depiction of politics is overwhelmingly negative, and the view of government not much better. Government agents in movies and TV are either corrupt, inept, or part of a global conspiracy to take over the world.
The main character might be the one "good" government worker fighting the system. If the lead character is a child fighting the system, government workers will inevitably show up to make his/her life a living hell. Child social workers can never see true love, and will invariably rip kids away from loving parents. If aliens are planning an invasion of Earth, the government will be inept in its response or cover up the truth. If an alien lands to say hello to humanity, the government will try to kill it, experiment on it, or fuck up the alien's plan to help humanity.
And if a kid is trying to help an alien, the government will try to fuck that up too.
- The most memorable line from 1972's The Candidate comes when Bill McKay (Robert Redford), the new senator-elect from California, looks at his campaign manager, Marvin Lucas (Peter Boyle), and asks: "What do we do now?" Written by Jeremy Larner, a former speechwriter for Sen. Eugene McCarthy, and directed by Michael Ritchie, the movie shows an idealistic candidate being slowly corrupted by a desire to win, as his campaign transitions more and more from stark policy choices to worrying about appearances and mealymouthed phrases like "five-point programs" that mean nothing. This film is also an interesting contrast to Ritchie's other best-known film: The Bad News Bears. In both films, the lead characters are not taken seriously at first, but become seduced into becoming what they hate the most by the chance of winning. Buttermaker (Walter Matthau) decides there are things more important than winning, while McKay doesn't.
From Vincent Camby of The New York Times (June 30, 1972):
There is something perverse and puritanical in the way many liberal Americans regard the political system. If a candidate wants to win, he must be suspect. Ambition in itself is bad. Like athlete’s foot, it’s not a sin, but it is unseemly. We put great store by the kind of modesty that insures defeat and that, only then, is revealed to be a form of arrogance. The best man should lose, or he isn’t the best man. This is the Catch-22 of American politics.
We all know that men who run for public office hoping only to improve the tone of the campaign, to raise the real issues, usually fail—and look terrible on television, which may be even worse. We suspect that only winning counts, yet we also fondly believe—since we’ve seen it demonstrated often enough—that the system is so corrupt that no good man can win without either being hopelessly corrupted or turned into a bewildered cipher.
- David Simon's critically acclaimed The Wire took a much darker view of institutions and the people involved in politics. The main issue at the heart of the show is the futility and destructiveness of the War on Drugs. But the show is also deeply cynical about government and its ability to effect change and be changed. Over the course of the show, every institution, whether it be local or state government, labor unions, the public school district, the police department, or even the Baltimore Sun, is in some way corrupt or incompetent, and fails in its stated goals. And the "good" people who come into those institutions, with ideas and hope of changing things for the better, are either corrupted or ultimately crushed by the weight of the system.
David Simon: "I am wholly pessimistic about American society. I believe that The Wire is a show about the end of the American empire. I believe that we all—or our kids—are going to live that event. And how we end up at the end of it and where we end up and whether or not we can survive it on what terms is going to be the only question from now on. The great conceit of The Wire [is that] every single moment on this planet from here on out human beings are worth less, human beings have lost some of their value."
- Both George Clooney's The Ides of March, an adaptation of Beau Willimon's play Farragut North, and Mike Nichols's Primary Colors, based on Joe Klein's novel of the same name, depict the corruption of young political aides as they sacrifice their ideals for career advancement and the lesser of evils. There's a scene in Primary Colors where Jack Stanton's campaign is crashing, but instead of being worried about his political survival, Stanton is across the street in a coffee shop talking to the guy behind the counter, worried about the worker's well-being. Stanton is a very flawed character, but one can see how people would fight for him. There's nothing like that in The Ides of March for George Clooney's Governor Morris. And it's probably my biggest problem with the film, since I just never felt Clooney's character was some sort of "great hope" that people would be willing to go to extraordinary depths to protect.
- Would it be possible to be a single man or woman and president of the United States in this day and age? In The American President, written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by Rob Reiner, Michael Douglas plays a widowed president who starts dating a lobbyist (Annette Bening), which becomes scandal fodder for his Republican opponents. At one point, Senator Bob Rumson (Richard Dreyfuss) says in an interview: "I don't even know what we call her. Is she the First Mistress?"
- Aaron Sorkin's The West Wing proceeds from an idealistic, Capraesque vision of American politics that believes in the positive aspects of government and, more importantly, the positive aspects of people in government. Some years back, Juli Weiner once had an article at Vanity Fair in which she argued Sorkin had been influential in shaping the current generation of public servants. In Sorkin's political universe, most of those in government are good public servants who are trying to do their best to make a difference. Those with principles are victorious over those who spread half-truths and distortions. And all that is necessary for the best political policy to carry the day, no matter how controversial it might be, is the guts to say what you mean and mean what you say.
Aaron Sorkin: "Our leaders, government people are [usually] portrayed either as dolts or as Machiavellian somehow. The characters in this show are neither. They are flawed, to be sure, because you need characters in drama to have flaws. But they, all of them, have set aside probably more lucrative lives for public service. They are dedicated not just to this president, but to doing good, rather than doing well. The show is kind of a valentine to public service. It celebrates our institutions. It celebrates education often. These characters are very well educated, and while sometimes playfully snobby about it, there is, in all of them, a love of learning and appreciation of education."
- Why are demagogues like Donald Trump able to sway public opinion? The combination of celebrity, media, money and politics can be a dangerous mixture, and Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd argues that all it takes is someone with a charismatic personality and the right combination of showmanship and money to make an awful person marketable. Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes (Andy Griffith) is a drunk drifter that gets a chance to sing on a local Arkansas radio station. His humor and good singing voice gains a following that leads to a TV show in Memphis and then even bigger opportunities in New York, with different sponsors realizing Rhodes ability to influence the public in buying their products. However, as Rhodes's fame grows so does his ego and arrogance. Things begin to fray even more when some of those sponsors decide to use him to turn around a faltering presidential campaign. When the campaign takes the lead in national polls, Rhodes begins to plot how he will use his new power as the "Secretary for National Morale."
- When you mention politics to most people, they make a "eww" face and regard it as a concept they neither want to be a part of or believe affects them. But the truth is that politics, whether it be the capital "P" kind of governments or the little "p" type of relationships, permeate throughout society. Almost all interactions are to some degree built around influence and the use of that influence to further an agenda, whether personal or professional. No other show on television explored that dynamic as well as The Good Wife, the creation of husband-wife team Robert and Michelle King. Over the course of the series, the audience watches as the titular character navigates and is corrupted by the influences around her.
The show, at its heart, has always been about politics. Its name comes from the iconic image of protagonist Alicia Florrick standing mute at a press conference next to husband Peter, the powerful state's attorney in Cook County, who has just admitted to having an affair with a prostitute. Shades of Eliot Spitzer.
As the wronged woman who must start her career anew to take care of her family while her husband serves his jail time, Julianna Margulies has created one of the most endearing and profoundly powerful, principled characters in television drama, even as she defends drug dealers and murderers and sleeps with her boss. She is an anti-heroine of Shakespearean stock.
- The 1962 Otto Preminger film Advise & Consent was based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning, best-selling novel of the same name by Allen Drury. The story concerns the nomination of a prominent liberal, Robert Leffingwell (Henry Fonda), to secretary of state during the height of the Cold War, and the problems that creates when he's accused of being a communist appeaser. Even though Drury, the film's trailer and even the United States Senate website denied it, the story is based on actual events and the characters seem to be stand-ins for historical figures. The cross-examination of Leffingwell by the Senate subcommittee is strongly reminiscent of the Alger Hiss hearings. The president is dying but concealing it from the public, and the vice president is largely ignored by the administration, with both seeming to be patterned after Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman. Playboy Senator Lafe Smith is modeled after John F. Kennedy, and it's probably a casting gag that Peter Lawford, Kennedy's brother-in-law, plays Smith in the movie. Senator Fred Van Ackerman (George Grizzard) is based on Joe McCarthy, although Van Ackerman is a left-wing extremist rather than a right-wing extremist. The events that occur with Utah Senator Brig Anderson (Don Murray) in the story is inspired by the very real incident that occurred with Wyoming Sen. Lester C. Hunt, who killed himself in the Capitol after being blackmailed over his son's homosexuality. The film is also interesting for the amount of access they were given in Washington, D.C., to make it. Much of the filming of Advise & Consent was done on location, in the Capitol, and the Russell Senate Office Building.
- Jay Roach’s The Campaign is very broad in its humor, but quite grounded in depicting the threat erosion of regulations regarding campaign financing has wrought. The sex scandal of a four-term North Carolina congressman (Will Ferrell, as a character largely based on John Edwards) opens up an opportunity for a pair of Koch brother-esque businessmen to install their own bought and paid for politician (Zach Galifianakis).
- The depiction of American politics in Shonda Rhimes's Scandal is both soap opera-ish and probably the darkest of any TV series. Scandal exists in a universe where it seems like every conspiracy theory may be true, and every rumor you've ever heard about a politician is probably true or much worse than is believed. Tony Goldwyn's President Fitzgerald "Fitz" Grant is a Republican that bears no resemblance to any Republican that's existed in American politics over the past three decades. He's also a murderer who was installed through a rigged election, his Sarah Palin-esque vice president seems to have murdered her husband, the first lady was raped by her father-in-law, the president's Democratic opponent in the last election killed his wife's lover in cold blood, and a super-secret spy agency that no one knows about and answers to no authority (not even the president) kills and imprisons with impunity. Critics have noted that within the show "no American institution—not governmental or corporate—has your best interests at heart, and human relationships are a kind of beautiful addiction, irresistible in the moment but spiraling outward to infect all they touch."
- Netflix's House of Cards, an adaption of the BBC miniseries of the same name that starred Ian Richardson, depicts politics as a chess game with disposable and usable pieces. Kevin Spacey's Frank Underwood sets out on a quest of vengeance after being slighted, and destroys lives and fortunes as he accumulates power. The politics of House of Cards largely strain credulity. Frank's biggest legislative “achievements” are screwing over unions and raising the retirement age for Social Security, with both being achieved over the objections of the Republicans. So who in the hell is the base of the Democratic party in the House of Cards universe?
- 24 is thought of as a conservative-leaning show and a product of the Bush era because of its depiction of torture. However, it's interesting to note that the only positive depiction of a politician in the show's history was Democratic President David Palmer (Dennis Haysbert), and one of the show's major villains was Republican President Charles Logan (Gregory Itzin). The depiction of the American government though is one that is bureaucratic, corrupt, filled with moles for different interests, and willing to sell out Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) at every chance. But also of note is that the ultimate causes and sources of each season's terrorist attacks were usually based on left-wing concerns, such as corporate influence.
- Arguably, the most positive depiction of a politician in recent years is NBC's Parks and Recreation. Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler) is a neurotic Pollyanna, but she's a dreamer that cares about people and wants to make a difference. And even though the show portrays the public as largely ignorant, the people of Pawnee, Indiana, actually give a shit about their community. They show up to public hearings and city council, even if it's to show up and say crazy shit.
At the Patton Oswalt-hosted PaleyFest panel in 2014, co-creator Michael Schur explained how politics fueled relationships on the show, specifically between two polar opposites like Ron Swanson and Leslie Knope. “In very broad strokes, Republicans and Democrats in this country simply don’t talk to each other and they don’t try to fix problems,” Schur said. “The sort of cynicism of government, I think in my opinion, is worse than it’s ever been. And we just wanted to say one guy could have a set of extremely fervent beliefs that run completely counter to the beliefs of his coworker and they can still just get along and respect each other and admire each other and find things in common and they can sit down and have a glass of whiskey together at the end of a long night.”
Ron and Leslie’s relationship is one built on respect, which makes it easy for them to separate their political beliefs from their personal relationship, even when those beliefs seep into the workplace. Ron is a libertarian. His dream is to privatize the Park Department he works for and have it run entirely for profit by corporations like Chuck E. Cheese — they have an impeccable business model, after all. He believes no government is the best kind of government. A man’s man, he’s more interested in wood carving, hunting, construction work and bacon than he is in actually making a change through governmental programs – ironic considering he works for one. By contrast, his second in command, Leslie, is a fervent believer in the power of government. She created her first campaign ad when she was a 10-year-old, promising better schools, safer streets and a more progressive tax on residential properties. Her office is adorned with photos of strong, experienced female politicians, she has waffle dates with Madeline Albright, her ideal man has the body of Joe Biden, and her optimism when it comes to the ability of government to positively affect the lives of local citizens is both inspiring and often drives the show’s plots.
Their relationship, more than any other, is the foundation for the show and provides one of its most powerful lessons: If a man who hates government to his core and a woman who believes in it with all her being can put their differences aside on a daily basis to work together and have a meaningful, lasting friendship, what does it say about those who can’t even cross the aisle to get things done? Or worse, what does it say about normal citizens who can’t find any common ground during this election year, or refuse to participate in elections all together?
- When we think of films of the past depicting politics, idealistic stories like Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington are usually the standard. However, the political world in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is a rather dark one, since the United States Senate is more or less in the pocket of special interests. But the story is one where good triumphs through virtue and perseverance.
- Armando Iannucci's Veep, like its British sister-show The Thick of It, argues public policy is not borne out of good ideas, but is a product which results from spinning the bad ideas that didn't play well. Veep's Selina comes off as "What if Sarah Palin was a Democrat from Maryland?"
- If one doesn't mind subtitles or speaks Danish, they should probably try out Borgen. The title comes from the nickname for Denmark's seat of power, Christiansborg Palace, and the critically acclaimed series, created and written by producer Adam Price and co-writers Jeppe Gjervig Gram and Tobias Lindholm, follows Birgitte Nyborg (Sidse Babett Knudsen), who unexpectedly becomes Denmark’s first female prime minister. Nyborg is a principled and charismatic politician, and as the series progresses the compromises in policy and tactics affect her psyche and personal relationships.