Will screen storytelling change in Trump era?
Some see ‘wake-up’ call for family fare
Ronald Reagan isn’t the only president with movie credits.
“All the President’s Men” was about Richard Nixon. Bill Clinton was portrayed in “Primary Colors.” And George W. Bush was the subject of both Oliver Stone’s “W.” and Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11.”
Barack Obama has been favored with two adoring dramatic biographies this year, “Southside With You” and “Barry.”
Even President-elect Donald Trump had a walk-on in “Home Alone 2: Lost in New York.”
The less obvious role presidents play at the movies is the way storytelling in general adjusts to whoever is in the White House. If a president represents the national mood, it would be foolish for the business of culture to ignore it.
How will it address Trump and his time in the White House, which begins with his inauguration Jan. 20?
More feel-good stories and escapist fare? A focus on the “heartland”? Less diversity? More provocative pieces that challenge the status quo? Or works promoting unity?
The Hollywood Reporter recently predicted a “working-class, Middle America ethos” will emerge at the television networks, where “Trump’s 60 million supporters are the key to success.”
ABC studio chief Patrick Moran called Trump’s election a “wake-up call,” according to the Reporter, which quoted another ABC executive as saying its shows were “too focused on upper-income brackets,” and that attempts at diversity ignored “the prism of economics of … small towns.”
Any changes at ABC, it was reported, will be “tonal rather than conceptual” with a focus on “hope, optimism and escapism.”
Coming soon to ABC: a Reba McEntire comedy set in the South, and a series about political opponents who fall in love, from the creator of “Black-ish,” which is adding conservatives to its writing staff.
NBC Entertainment President Jennifer Salke told the Reporter the network would seek out more family fare, like the network’s new hit drama “This Is Us.”
TV reacting faster than film
On the other hand, progressive producers such as “American Horror Story” creator Ryan Murphy, Mequon native and “American Crime” creator John Ridley, “Scandal” creator Shonda Rhimes and “Transparent” creator Jill Soloway are sure to maintain edgy, inclusive storytelling.
Carl Bogner, film instructor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, said he was “struck by how responsive” the new season of “Homeland,” premiering Sunday on Showtime,” has been to current events.
“The politics aren’t the same,” but it portrays an “adversarial relationship between the president-elect and the intelligence community,” said Bogner. “I don’t believe in coincidence, but it seemed they were exploiting the transition in that regard.”
The show’s one false step: The presidentelect is a woman. Whoops.
Television is quicker to adapt than the film industry, which “will be slow to react to Trump,” Milwaukee-based film historian Patrick McGilligan said in an email, “… even though we know and are reassured by the fact that, politically at least, and culturally to an extent, Hollywood is basically a liberal bastion within a liberal bastion state.”
A gantlet was thrown at last Sunday’s Golden Globes, if Meryl Streep’s anti-Trump
speech — a scowling Mel Gibson in the audience an apparent dissenter — is any indication.
Still, McGilligan, author of “Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane,” said movie studios “will continue to favor sequels, blockbusters, franchises, brand-name comic-book heroes, and so on. These types of stories are already American parables that Trumpians love as much as anyone else.”
‘Dark Knight’ to ‘Dory’
The George W. Bush presidency saw a rise in pre- and post-apocalyptic film themes and portraits of evil, reflecting a fear of terrorism, and a rise in faith-based works.
The Obama years saw an increase in fantasy and a rise in superhero movies. There was increased diversity on screen, but also an #OscarsSoWhite controversy.
The top film in the last year of the Bush presidency was “The Dark Knight.”
At the end of the Obama years, it was “Finding Dory.”
But “The Walking Dead” also debuted during Obama’s presidency, its zombies posing a problem as unsolvable as the closing of Guantanamo.
Trump, or at least his pop-culture persona, is kin to the rich stereotype — Mr. Potter, Gordon Gekko — that movies over the years taught us to distrust.
And Russia, accused of interfering with the American political system, has produced a Red Army of movie and TV boogeymen ranging from Boris Badenov to Ivan Drago.
Stereotypes of “the other” — Indians, African-Americans, Hispanics, Arabs, people of faith, Southerners — have long served as movie villains. But the only aliens today’s superheroes battle are of the extraterrestrial or extra-dimensional variety, offering less chance to offend global consumers.
Almost 75% of Hollywood’s box office is generated overseas. In 2015, that was $40 billion.
‘An ongoing vigilance’
Yet there is something uniquely American about the comic-book genre. And by pitting good guys against each other in “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” and “Captain America: Civil Wars,” the fantasy genre in 2016 captured a signature moment of an America divided against itself.
Also last year: “Nocturnal Animals” was a tale of randomly violent class warfare told from the perspective of a jaded intellectual, and “Green Room” pitted alt-right extremists against punk anarchists in a duel to the death. And what is the singing and dancing of the feelgood “La La Land” but the recycled, wishful thinking of Depression-era musicals?
That some films seem to capture a political or cultural moment may be in the eye of the beholder, but they also can represent “an ongoing vigilance” on the part of storytellers, said Bogner, director of the Milwaukee LGBT Film/ Video Festival.
Because they have fewer technical obstacles, documentaries can be like a canary in the coal mine for evolving narrative and for adapting to real-world events.
Bogner said last year’s festival entries “expanded the boundaries of subject matter” found in LGBT films by “opening their lens to other concerns,” such as race and immigration.
Yet one festival patron complained about the earnest nature of the films at the 2016 festival, telling Bogner “they were hoping for something to take them out of the current political moment when they went to the movies.”
From matinees to YouTube
How we see things is also shaped by how we consume it.
I grew up with three TV networks and movie matinees, my kids had endless cable channels, and my grandson streams YouTube videos of kids opening presents on his Kindle.
Each generation apparently gets the delivery system it deserves. It shapes how narrative is presented and our habits adapt to it.
Brevity is the soul of Twitter, and Trump is its one-eyed king. His tweets are magnified by a news-cycle echo chamber starving for inexpensive content.
CBS president Les Moonves told the Hollywood Reporter that such quick-and-dirty coverage was bad for the country “but good for CBS.”
And the real-time speed by which it is delivered can travel halfway around the world while alternative narratives, still putting on their shoes, are left in the dust. But the question remains: Once that dust settles, what will we see?