Art in the Age of Trump
“You know what the fellow said,” Harry Lime famously muses toward the end of Carol Reed’s post-war noir The Third Man. “In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace — and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.”
Lime means to say that turbulence tends to have a stimulating effect on creativity. But then he was no doubt thinking of more exalted expressions of life under tyranny than prestige TV in the Age of Trump.
What sort of art might Trumpian tumult yield? I foresee a torrent of cable dramas about big, dunderheaded despots, talking heads in clown shoes who bully their way to power, or maybe a darkly comic Hitler biopic that makes certain parallels all too apparent. We’ll have choleric cautionary tales about overzealous border control, speculative fiction about the influence of intolerance on impressionable youth; we’ll have more spy stories involving Russia than the bibliography of John Le Carre. Network TV might find popular success with something brash and unconscionably reactionary, as it did in the Bush years with 24 (there’s always room on Fox for conservative action fantasies). Mainly, I suspect we’ll endure another round of defiant injustice pictures like In the Valley of Elah or Lions for Lambs.
It takes a long time to make a movie or develop a TV show. And so it’s often with skepticism that one reads of how a particular movie or TV show “responds” to current events – events that frequently occurred months or even years after the movie or TV show was conceived. ( You may remember hearing how explicitly The Dark Knight Rises concerned itself with Occupy Wall Street, despite having been well into production when the Occupy Movement began.)
And so we hear time and again about the ways in which various Hollywood blockbusters, Hulu miniseries and Netflix Originals address the crimes of a presidential administration that has scarcely been in power for half a year. We don’t need to wait for artists to actually confront the matters at hand, it seems. For art in The Age of Trump has long since commenced.
Miguel Arteta’s prickly dramatic comedy Beatriz at Dinner, in which Mexican-American race relations are put under strain at a bourgeois L.A. dinner party, has been dubbed, naturally, “a tale for the Trump era,” “a Trumpera satire,” “an anti-Trump drama,” “an assault on Trump’s America,” and so on, ad infinitum, regardless of the fact that screenwriter Mike White devised the script sometime in the middle of 2015.
The Handmaid’s Tale, based on a novel Margaret Atwood wrote around the time Mike Wallace was interviewing Trump about real estate on 60 Minutes, is constantly praised with reference to its current relevance. Everything from Wonder Woman to War for the Planet of the Apes to The Boss Baby has been declared a message-picture penned in remonstration of a president that was nowhere near being elected when pencil first hit the page.
Of course sooner or later these primetime missives will be intentional. Mitch Hurwitz has hinted that the next season of Arrested Development will draw out the similarities many have jokingly noticed between the Bluth family and the Trumps. Supergirl will return later this year to face a villainous real-estate mogul whose resemblance to Trump one can easily imagine. American Horror Story’s latest iteration will apparently be about the 2016 election – not in some thinly veiled metaphorical way, but literally.
Harder to believe is that any of this could have an appreciable effect on the popular imagination. People still inclined to admire Trump are not likely to be persuaded of his turpitude by a bingewatched indignant season of prestige TV. Those of us with sense meanwhile hardly need the catalogue of horrors reiterated.