Ever since the Greeks, politics and power (the getting of it and losing of it) have been grist for the dramatist’s mill. Oedipus, Antigone, Medea, Hamlet, Macbeth, Richard III, Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, the Pallisers of Trollope, the corrupt Congress in “Democracy” by Henry Adams, the demagogue in Sinclair Lewis’s “It Can’t Happen Here.”
The cast and the plots keep repeating.Few of the stories concern good kings or admirable politicians. Almost all focus on tyrants, usurpers, assassins, and demagogues. In movies and TV depictions, it’s the same. Even when the subject matter is drawn from real life, it’s the corrupt and scandalous subjects that make the cut in “Goodnight and Good Luck,” “All the President’s Men,” “Recount” and “Game Change.”
From the 1930s through the 1950s, the emphasis tended to reflect times preoccupied with Depression, Cold War, and the danger of corrupt manipulation of the political process or the risk of an American autocracy like those abroad.
Frank Capra mined the political for several films. Jefferson Smith in 1939’s “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” is a naif appointed to a vacant seat and expected to do the bidding of a corrupt machine. He rebels. In 1941, “Meet John Doe” a down on his luck man is recruited by the villains to be the face of a populist grassroots movement that is really a vehicle for the political ambitions of a newspaper magnate.
In “State of the Union” a successful businessman is recruited to run for president and slowly agrees to one compromise after another by his handlers. In the nick of time he uses a broadcast to admit his betrayal of his own ideals and to withdraw from the race. In all three films Capra shows the ability of mass media from newspapers and radio to TV to cloud men’s minds.
As in John Doe, 1957’s “A Face in the Crowd” deals with a nobody who becomes somebody, This time Lonesome Rhodes, a folksy, charismatic country singer becomes a popular TV performer who can sell products advertised on his show and even make a dull candidate for office palatable to his audience. When his recklessness and egomania begin to seem danger, he is brought down by the medium that made him when a mike is left open to reveal his true character.
The flip side of the power of media appears in “The Last Hurrah” in which a shrewd, old-fashioned, patronage politician is defeated for re-election for mayor of Boston by an unqualified, youthful, nonentity fronting for monied interests antagonistic to the old guard. The stripling prevails when his handlers’ TV savvy trumps the old press-the-flesh style of the mayor.
If some of these political Frankenstein monsters were constructed by political handlers, Willy Stark the demagogue in “All the King’s Men” (1949) is a self-made creature. Thus begins a long string of films on the theme of politics as a dirty business. If the pols aren”t corrupt, the campaign managers or financial backers are. Often the plot turns on the need to cover up a scandal, to out the perpetrator, or to blackmail him.
Classics in the genre are “Advise and Consent” (1962) and “The Best Man” (1964) followed by films like “The Ides of March,” “State of Play,” and “The Contender.” The scandals include marital affairs, homosexual secrets, abortions, and anything else that might scuttle a career.
It’s a short hop from these to the paranoid thriller, the greatest of which is the Cold War fever dream of “The Manchurian Candidate”(1962) In order to install a useful idiot in the presidency, communist operatives hatch a plot to get a red-baiting pol clearly modeled on McCarthy into the vice presidency and then assassinate the president putting their tool in the White House.
“Manchurian” preceded the Kennedy assassination, but that event spawned a cottage industry in paranoia and soon political assassins were everywhere and were rarely lone loonies but professionals working for dark forces, domestic and foreign. Those who catch on often find themselves in mortal danger in “The Parallax View,” “Blowout,” “Three Days of the Condor,” “The Jackal,” “Vantage Point,” “In the Line of Fire,” “Enemy of the State,” and “Bodyguard.”
In real life, the older films that focused on plain vanilla corruption, ambition and scandal were more realistic. Corrupt candidates buy elections or lie their way to office rather than shoot their way to power. Once there, however, they often produce such horrific consequences that political satire became popular from Nixon to the present.
It all began with Aristophanes, of course, who mocked Athenian democracy and named names in plays like “The Knights,” “Lysistrata,” and “The Birds.” The War years gave us “The Great Dictator,” “Duck Soup,” and “The Great McGinty.” In our time, our flawed leaders and politics have been parodied in “The Candidate,” “Dave,” “Bullworth,” you know who in “The Art of the Deal,” Nixon in “Dick,” Clinton in “Primary Colors,” W in “You’re Welcome, America” and Cheney in “Vice.” The Brits are especially good at mixing satire and paranoia in dramas like “House of Cards,” “In the Loop” on the War in Iraq, and “Brexit: An Uncivil War.”
It remains to be seen what form the drama of the Trump years will take. Already a self-parody, satire seems pointless. The Trump administration includes the big money corruption and the propagandizing of media of the Capra era, the meddling in American politics by foreign enemies of “The Manchurian Candidate’s” paranoid style, the scandals of the “Advise and Consent” era except they are all in plain sight with our tabloid president, and the demagogic populism of “A Face in the Crowd,” with the witness tampering and blackmailing of senators of “Godfather II” thrown in. Each day, Trump seems to find a new way to stage a remake of a “Wag the Dog” in which he distracts from impeachment with a war, or a “Bob Roberts” with its fake assassination. Life is imitating art.